Comfortably Geek

After moving to Europe for my masters, I’ve been accustomed to finding my way around cities using the subway trains. They’re convenient, relatively cheap (unless you’re in Stockholm, where using the word cheap throws an exception), and usually fast enough as well. The only problem I have with metros is that they’re boring as shit to travel in, especially when you’re alone. Sure you can carry a book with you or invest in a tab/pad/slate/smartphone/whatever, but we definitely need to do something about the view from the windows.

Given that there’s hardly anything interesting about rocks and the occasional flash of light in a metro tunnel, I think there’s a lot that can be done to make the metro experience better. Here’s one idea I have to solve this international crisis which is oh-so-more-important than anything else on this planet. I call it, metro cartoons (the animated ones).

The basic idea is to insert cartoon panels between the tunnel walls and the tracks. Since we know the approximate speed at which the trains move, you can estimate the minimum spacing between the panels that would be required to provide a reasonable frame rate required for the animation. I’m sure artists understand these aspects better (thus, I don’t), and can come up with the right kind of drawings for this setting.

What say? I’m pretty sure someone must have tried this already, so let me know if you’ve heard of any such attempt.

Lagom (pronounced [ˈlɑ̀ːɡɔm]) is a Swedish word with no direct English equivalent, meaning “just the right amount”. – Wikipedia

If you’re in Sweden and there’s one word you should know, it would be ‘lagom’, a word that defines the essence of everything that is Swedish.

More than two months into Stockholm and I must say it’s been pretty lagom so far. The city itself is beautiful, with the only downside being that everything is at least twice as expensive as in Lisbon. Maybe that’s what you get for everything around here being so perfect and systematic. And unlike Lisbon, you actually have easy access to a *large* collection of beers, which is definitely a plus.

It’s autumn here right now, and the scenery outside is fabulous. Sadly though, the weather in Sweden is not-so-lagom. Temperatures are already hovering around 5 degrees celsius, and for an Indian like me, this is pretty cold in itself (heck, it never gets lower than 20 in my town back home). The funny thing is, this weather is cute for the Swedes. Let’s see how winter ends up looking like.

Meanwhile, here are some pictures I took from Stockholm over the last two months.

Say you’re a Masters student studying distributed systems, and you just completed 3 major project checkpoints, and wrapped up some work with a research project. So what do you do during the Easter break that immediately follows the deadlines? You go on vacation of course!

So I just got back from a wonderful four day holiday split across the dreamy fields of Schwangau and the Bavarian captial, Munich. Schwangau is a must see for anyone who wants to swim in a sea of breathtaking views and experience the European countryside. It is the home to the famous Neuschwanstein castle, which was the main inspiration for Disney’s Sleeping Beauty’s castle. The village of Schwangau itself lies under the protective watch of the Alps, running through the border between Germany and Austria. I stayed with a good friend of mine, and had a wonderful Bavarian Easter with her family, sharing stories of our cultures and lifestyles. On Easter Sunday itself, we went hiking up the Alps, and I’m still surprised that I made it alive at the end of a 3 hour ordeal. After years of not having any physical exercise of any form, this was indeed rather taxing, but I guess all the muscle strain was definitely worth the experience, the views, and most importantly, the satisfaction that followed taking a hard path up a 1.708km high mountain for your first ever hike.

The latter half of the holiday involved a visit to old city of Munich. Culturally rich and with a Bavarian feel all over, it was a fun experience to walk through the city streets. One thing I found particularly funny was that the Maximilianeum building, which houses the Bavarian parliament, had no gates nor security guards on the outside, which is in absolute contrast to equivalent buildings back home in India, which can be aptly labelled mini fortresses. The last day of the visit was reserved for a trip around the Munich marketplace and of course, the one and only Allianz Arena, which I finally got the opportunity to visit as a long time Bayern Munich fan.

As is always the case with my travels, cuisine formed an important component of the visit too. Thanks to Eva’s help, I was able to compile a list of dishes/drinks I had: Apfelstrudel, Neuernberger Rostbratwuerste mit sauerkraut, Kaesspatzen, Leberkaes mit Kartoffelsalat und Spiegelei, Weisswuerst mit Suessem senf, Schweinsbraten mit Kartoffelknoedel, Schweinshaxen, Brezeln, Radler, Weissbier and Weizen. I particularly loved the German variety as far as beers are concerned. Radler from an altitude of 1.708km tastes heavenly by the way.

I would have loved to stay a little longer, but as the saying goes, all good things must come to an end. Now back in Lisbon, I’m finding it a little hard to shake off the vacation mood and get back to my projects, but I think I’ll pull that off sooner or later.

Last week’s Barcelona trip was the perfect weekend getaway from a hectic masters programme. After a not-so-enjoyable stint with changing hostels on Thursday, I met my colleagues from UPC, Barcelona for a nice round of drinks and tapas. I left for the Melia Barcelona early next day for WNS3 2011, and I was obviously excited about meeting the rest of the ns-3 developers for the first time. It’s been more than a year of my involvement with the project, and so far it’s been an amazing experience to work with the really awesome people that comprise of the ns-3 community. So meeting the faces behind the names from the mailing list was something I was looking forward to, and I did. A lot of hand shakes and introductions later, we got started with the programme. My talk went pretty well too.

After the talks, we  had a pre-meeting for next day’s ns-3 developers meeting in order to decide the agenda, the priorities, and the action items we planned to walk away with (note that beer is part of the schedule ). The day ended with an amazing dinner at a rather classy restaurant in the city.

The developers meeting took place at the CTTC demo center on Saturday and lasted around 7 hours in total including lunch, during which we discussed and planned ahead as far as solving a number of issues was concerned. We also came to a consensus on organising an NS-3 Summer of Code programme, for which I’ll be handling the reigns. All in all, it was an awesome experience to meet these guys, from whom I’ve been learning a lot over the past year.

So in short, life is good.

Political speeches, advertisements, newspaper articles, sales people; they’re all the same. Each of these scenarios involve one or more people trying to convince you about something. Politicians, who’re often good orators, have the ability to make anything seem like rainbows and sunshine with a cherry on top, and lead the emotions of their listeners (remember Obama?). The most hollow of advertisements lead to drones of poorly informed people queuing up in groves to spend money on a product that may not be of much use. Newspapers do a great job of directing the thoughts of those who rely on them excessively for being aware. This highlights a rather disturbing aspect of our society.

Why aren’t we skeptical about the information we’re being fed?

Interestingly enough, the dissemination of scientific knowledge in the form of publications also revolves around a similar scenario. To get a paper published, authors must manage to convince a set of reviewers that the authors’ work takes a step forward in expanding the horizon of human knowledge. But in the world of peer-review, a reviewer tries his very best to reject the work being presented with a thorough dissection of each and every sentence in the paper. From technical quality, to originality, to mere presentation, every little detail often matters when trying to publish a paper in a reasonably good conference or journal. When a reviewer feels that he/she couldn’t unearth enough flaws in the paper, the paper gets a green.

Why does this difference exist? Why do we let politicians hypnotise us with their words and lure us into a judgement we really shouldn’t make? One important factor I can attribute this to is education itself, but strangely enough, we are often am more skeptical about the papers we review than the news articles we read. Luckily, for the easily deceived, Web 2.0 has been the greatest blessing of them all. Every time we read a blog post or a news article online, all we need to do is scroll down to see what comments the article has received. This lets us see how different people perceive the same piece of writing, giving us different perspectives of the same content. Twitter and other social networks allow us to hear of voices from far and wide, further helping in this direction. Read the same articles from different news sources. Having a sense of different viewpoints puts us in the rather powerful position of being able to formulate an opinion. An opinion is something we hold dear to ourselves, it allows us to make a stand. It protects us from being puppets in the drama of deception. It protects us from being mislead. It allows us to convince ourselves of something, rather than letting someone else do that for us. This simple yet powerful ability to think, is what makes us stand apart from other species on the planet.

Don’t relegate yourself to an existence that merely accepts what you’re told. A big flaw in the educational system (at least in India), is where students are taught something in class, they nod their heads to what they’re told, and they write exactly that in an examination to get ‘marks’. Any deviance from what was explained in the lecture, even if it is a brilliant flash of creativity, is considered ‘incorrect’. This, rather preposterous incentive, is what makes students dumber. Students are thus discouraged from thinking and lead away from having an opinion and questioning the facts. Will this ever change? I don’t know.

So please; Think. Ponder. Question. Challenge. Not convinced? Reject.