9

Limericks are good,
but limericks are scarce.
For flaws in my grammar,
a limerick bares.

A limerick this is not,
for limericks have lines five.
And humour that is shot,
and rythm that feels alive.

A limerick is nonsense verse,
not a self referential song.
A limerick is always terse,
and this is far too long.

Spontaneous is this flow,
in case you think otherwise.
Spontaneous, but slow,
and easy due to size.

To create one, it takes minutes,
mistakes and backspaces abound.
It stretches to the limit,
my frugal will to astound.

This hobby is dilettantish,
and superficial, as hobbies go.
so ideas you may squish,
of writing, the world to show.

How does one make a rhyme?
Why, find words that chime.
Around them the lines climb,
but beware- it takes time.

The limerick skill,
I wish to hone.
Ah, to wield my quill,
and wave like a drone.

Writing limericks was fun,
but now its gotten boring.
Get back I shall to prose,
before you start ignoring.

Because a little non sequitur never hurts. :)

(Oh, and here are a few real limericks.)

The Vegetarianism Story

Staying at a place where there are more names for meat than letters in the average length Deutsch word can be slightly discomforting at first. In situations where you're the only abstemious chap in a group of about twenty, sitting at the same table as the rest of the crowd and watching them munch down what used to be the femoral section of some ill-fated well-disposed little pig at a barn a few miles away can make you queasy- if you're the queasy type.

I'm not.

However, alien situations such as this do make you reconsider your reasons for not participating in a grander version of the food chain. But first, a few qualifiers:

1. Vegetarians can survive, flourish, and grow obscenely fat in Germany.

2. Rice, wheat, pulses, vegetables, spices, fruits and vegetables, and their derivatives are all easily available in Germany. They're expensive, yes- but I get paid, and everything is expensive here.

3. Cook. If you can't, learn.

Getting back to the issue at hand, societal factors are no longer an issue when it comes to consuming meat- its the rule. (Its the same with beer, but that's for later.)
Which makes you wonder why you're going through the trouble of getting someone to read out the ingredients list on packets at the supermarket before you buy them.

I thought of it once, and realized that I'm doing it so I can leave the well-disposed little pigs alone.
That's all there is to it.

Getting to the real issue at hand, though, this post intends to attempt to dissect an innocent comment made by one of the guests at the twenty strong femur chomping table the other day when I was singled out as the only vegetarian.

"Imagine what would happen if everyone turned vegetarian. The food chain would collapse! "

I chose to keep quiet at the time, partly because I was not sure of what would indeed happen, and partly because my mouth was full of cauliflower cheese soup. But this dispatched a train of thought that went on to a mathematical model- a problem in which I'm now stuck because of insufficient data.

To put up the model here would require LaTeX formatting, and besides, I don't expect to understand a bit of it myself some time later; but the idea was this:

The food chain is very inefficient. At every step where energy/mass transfer occurs along the food chain, you lose plenty. If what I hear is to be believed, you gain in taste what you lose in exergy, but that's hardly the point. A statistic ripped off the net (will link to source later) claims that the food needed to raise one unit of cattle for beef can feed three times as many people as the cattle can. (Soil wise- not that we would want to eat hay.)

Sure, it makes intuitive sense, but after accommodating for the credibility of the fishy sounding statistic, there still are questions remaining- such as- What of the animals?

Taking a cue from the discrete predator prey models of the Chaos era, I chose variables representing the number of plants, animals and us, with Lotka-Volterra relations between the plants and the animals, and a linear relation between the animals/plants and us. (Constant consumption / unit time, with different slopes for plant-human and animal-human curves - the dynamics of human population is neglected.)

What came out, was err... nonsense.
In any event, I'd like to know if it actually makes sense for the world to go veggie, purely as a matter of feasibility. Suggestions/links/references are welcome. I will update this post after I look this up on science-direct.

You eat what you want, of course.

Dechsendorf, and the glorious hike

I set out, on a rain interrupted Saturday, to visit a nearby lake. I was partly dragged, party pushed, but mostly worried about finishing work on time- but I daresay the lake at Dechsendorf is a nice place to sit by and learn about Gaussian distributions.

Nearby, of course, has its meaning subject to the mode of travel. A hostel-mate and I missed the bus, and decided to walk. And boy, was I glad I did.
Nothing says the story better than pictures, of course, and I have plenty of them.

The off-highway road, about a hundred yards off where I live looked inviting enough when I set off- as long as you don't mind slugs and grasshoppers littering your path.















We walked by, into and subsequently past the woods, and I saw sights I'm not likely to forget soon.

This completely desolate field, for instance, with the dreary silence punctured only by chirping grasshoppers.





























If you've ever wondered where those fancy wallpapers you see floating on the internet are from, rest your worries. I know.


I avoid appearing in photos as a general rule- why spoil the background with my bulky, ungainly self? This time, though, I will make an exception. I was there, ungainly self and all.





















Some more walking past wheat fields, woods, and the occasional timber yard (highly reminiscent of Caesar III) brought us to a place that was - not - the lake.






























And that's when the rain broke out.
Earlier experience has revealed that trips to lakes are always accompanied by rain. This time, I won the battle against Murphy's law. I don't suppose this bonfire will ever see the light of flame, though. (This was at Dechsendorf.)















Besides, there are a few advantages to days that are simultaneously sunny and pouring.
A fully featured rainbow is one of them.















More wallpaper material:
It was suggested to me that I should label this picture "Solitude".
I hereby christen it "Sawed_off_Tree_stump_by_lake". (I like to stay objective while I can.)

A considerable amount of time that could have been spent in taking photographs was spent in examining standing waves in the lake and determining whether neutrally buoyant objects would tend to move to the nodes. (I claim that this is possible only in principle- far too many perturbations.) I did manage to take a couple of videos of quasi periodic waves at the shore that kept beating, but I'm unaware of any way of putting them on this website. (EDIT: Video added here. Go feast your eyes.)

Moving on, though, the lake was pretty enough for me to punctuate photographs by appearing in them.















As with all visits to lakes, a few unexpected encounters are mandatory:
















The clouds parted, and there was much rejoicing (Narrative Interlude 3). Indeed, the celebrations were cut short when the mysterious absence of any buses on the timings list for Saturdays was discovered. So we hiked our way back. More snails, grasshoppers, fields, trees and power lines later, I reached home. Not much was accomplished as far as the Gaussian distributions are concerned, but the standing waves were a sight to behold. :)

I sign off with another punctuation. (I trust the pun is not lost on the reader.)

Food Update IV

Cooking is an elusive art.

Its elusive because you're often mislead into thinking you're no longer a mere tyro at preparing grub.

Its an art because, well, try it for yourself.

Case in point:
The supposedly appetizing Knödeln that aggregated themselves into rock hard, half baked little balls of dental, abdominal, and intestinal torture. How/Why I munched it down escapes me at the moment. These Knödeln have made a previous appearence here, where they earned a football reference- suggesting that the dental torture is part of even the correctly baked version.


Most of the time, however, experiments pay off.
For instance, Smashed potatoes and onion paste make a great combination that can be cooked in a microwave/normal oven, heating pan or even in a candle flame, provided you can muster the patience. (Prospective software designers take note: This is what cross platform portability is about.)

I present to you, the new pride of my cuisine photo collection: The Kartoffel Puffer.
(The previous holders of this title may be seen here, and here.)















Aww. I know.

More random photographs

This post is intended to make up for the lack of pictures in this description.
Of course, they're not related- but hey, pictures.
This is where I could be going jogging everyday morning if I wasn't lazy.




Random shot from the Erlangen town area:


And fields right next to the highway- and to my office (The other picture is at the beginning):


I almost bought this sweet piece of hardware at the Mediamarkt.

Good thing I checked the price tag in time.

Some normal weeknight dinner:


And finally, three cherry pips. Make what you want of it.


Well, that's it on the photos front for now. Next time, will put up photos of the most marble-worthy impellers I inadvertently designed the other day.
Tschüs!

Food Update III

Random photographs of what I've been eating of late:

1. Coffee cream. I have more desserts than meals nowadays.



2. More pasta- this time, with spinach:



3. And the new pride of my cuisine photo collection, Butter Naan and Chole.



Most of the above dishes are self cooked, I assure you. :)

The cheese/tomato/cucumber/butter/erdbeer roulade pics come next.

The various haunts of Men/Women

The roller design had to be changed. Again.

I mentioned in an earlier post that one of the reasons I opted to come here was to try my hand at real engineering. If anything, I would be in a position to decide whether to continue, or to pursue more esoteric interests.

So do I like engineering?

Heh. I'm not writing the answer on a blog. Atleast, not explicitly.

Despite the fact that I've picked up a surprisingly small amount of engineering methodology and parlance over the past month, I've surprised myself with how much I've learnt about people. Enough, indeed, to forgive myself for not being better at the former.

Let's start from the beginning.

I never liked engineering.
More precisely, I never liked what I believed was engineering. When the option arose a few years ago to choose between engineering and science as a field of study, I chose engineering only because I was assured by people (plenty of them) that that was where the challenging problems lay, that was where intellectual stimulation could be found, and that the joy of making things work was unparalleled.

Because let's face it, I don't live for anything other than intellectual stimulation. Well, that- and a perpetually cool non-humid breeze, and perhaps my new found hobby- sampling various flavours of frucht-joghurt. Not that I'm bright- or good at stimulating the gray stuff, mind you- just that I like doing it. That's it. \emph{No} other reasons. Not money, reputation, success (or whatever it implies.) or for standing in society, or for the people I love, or for the colour cyan. Not for the joy of having discovered a ground-breaking fact of nature, but for the joy of trying to.

Well, I didn't like engineering! I didn't like it at college because (I thought) I wasn't taught well.
As I discovered here, those weren't the reasons. I didn't like it because the engineering philosophy doesn't sync with me. The joy of using science to create something for the good of society (excuse the cliché, I'm suffering from a mild case of blogger's block) pales in comparison to the satisfaction of understanding science, of being able to comprehend its profoundness.

These things are, obviously, not mutually exclusive- and that's why I don't have a wrapped up objective answer to the engineering question. Unfortunately, though, you don't have to understand science too deeply to do engineering, (Honest! I've seen this here.) and most engineering work appears to be accompanied by time constrains that militate against the way I would want to try my hand at it.

What moves people, I've come to realize, is usually one or more of the factors listed in my !-a-motivation list. That's completely fine, of course. (Most of the people I'm talking about are much smarter than me- the average primate is much smarter than me, just so you know- and will probably lead far more luxurious, fulfilling lives than I hope to. (The people, I mean- I don't know about the primates.) ) Its amazing that all kinds of people I've met of late- people brought up in completely contrasting social environments, people who speak wildly different languages (each with an emphasis on different aspects of speech - fascinating story for some other day) and spend their time in seemingly disparate ways are driven by the same set of motivators, and share the same goals in their stay on the planet.

If you're not me, and you've managed to read this far, I'm sorry you had to- I composed this rant so I would know what was going on in my presently hair-overrun noggin a few years later.

This is the reason why, I believe, I wouldn't mind finding myself anywhere on the planet- this is the reason why I don't understand, or comprehend the idea of competition and peer pressure, and this is why I like learning more than anything else. (Perhaps even more than Frucht-Joghurt.)
This is also the reason why I wouldn't be surprised if I register for a few advanced math courses and pay the afore mentioned esoteric fields a long visit after my graduation. Don't get me wrong, I would love to be able to rig up an air conditioner with a styrofoam box, and aquarium pump and some copper tubing (And intend to try in the near future)- but its not all I'd want to be doing.

In the unlikely event that everything fails, I'm sure enough of my capabilities to acquire the job of a librarian somewhere- and spend all day reading what I want to and all night rigging up air conditioners. :)

EDIT: In keeping with the completely random nature of this post, I am compelled to end this in the vein of a hilarious series of quotes I stumbled upon today.

"In Soviet Russia, Life engineers you!"

(Cheers to Mr. Smirnoff and his digs at Orwellian Dystopias for the Russian reversals.)

Work, widescreen and wicked walkers

A few weeks ago, I posted a picture of what work looks like. More specifically, work looked like this, and this, on consecutive weeks.

Work has, since then, taken to playing second fiddle to other err... interests.

Here's what 'work' looked like today:


And this:


This is the weirdest, most skewed aspect ratio I've ever seen on a wide screen monitor. My neck hurts when I try to read a line of text across it:



And this is my present office. I have to change offices every week, because I manage to get on the nerves of whoever sits in the same office I do:


And on a completely unrelated note, I chanced upon this abomination when coming in to work today. What's it for? Your guess is as good as mine.


I'm clueless:


Once I figure out what this thing does, I'll add it to the post on German Engineering. :)

What Tuesdays are like

No pictures today.



Good. You're still here.
There have been no updates in the past few days because there's been nothing to blog about.
Work's been growing on me steadily, and life has settled into a complacent rythm that leaves me with nothing to write about.

Until today, that is. Today was a scream.

I have, in one day, managed to turn up late to work, browse the internet and stumble onto (wha..?)this, this and this, get caught surfing the internet by my professor who then read the first of the linked articles with me, sweat in the summer heat even under a downpour of raindrops so large it hurt when they hit, realize (the hard way) that air is lousy at convecting and conducting heat, modify the roller design to an extent that rendered the last two week's work obsolete, meet the CEO of the company I work for and, together with the professor, convince him that their patent is useless and building upon it is an exercise in futility, try and explain why I can define Reynolds numbers with any relevant (length) scale to the resident engineers, hunt for perforated rollers on the web, try and explain to the locals that I need aluminium foil to bake my lunch, give up on the foil(ed) hunt(& look for porcelain instead), give up on baking my lunch, engage in a long discussion about the Galilean invariance of the Navier Stokes equations with the professor, realize that there's a fundamental anisotropy in Fick and Soret diffusion, and that the Navier Stokes equations are not (!) Galilean invariant, worry about all this for a while and argue with the professor, realize the professor is right, decide to bake lunch anyway, explode and char my pizza in the microwave (and break cutlery while at it), cause the entire ground floor to evacuate the building, smile sheepishly about the issue, hide the broken cutlery in my bag, soil my bag compartment and a copy of this with broken cutlery and charred pizza, throw the cutlery away and bake another pizza, eat half baked pizza and burn my gums, read a German book on PERL to try and learn German, learn neither PERL nor German, grab a free pc while the incidents of the day are still fresh in my head, and compose this impossibly long, circumlocutory report of the insanity that was today.

Only, the day's not over yet.

The engineering story

German Engineering.

I could write for hours on those two words, but put them together, and I'll be writing for all eternity.

I will refrain from exhausting my sparse vocabulary of superlative adjectives of praise, and illustrate the don-ness with examples instead. (This post will be updated regularly)

1. Look:

So, what's novel about a sixteen wheeler parked by a roadside lamp? Nothing, until you see it turning. (Will add pics.)
This monster has, at about 40 kmph, the turning radius of a two wheeler at the same speed.
A few of the wheels (and corresponding axles) are actually lifted off the ground when the steering wheel is turned. Insane.

2. Look:

That's my room window.
Look again:

Its the same window.
It rotates about two perpendicular axes!
(But not independently. Duh.)

An engineering marvel if I ever saw one.
This is how the trick is accomplished:


The lever you see above has two configurations (and probably a cam/spur inside). It pushes one of two perpendicular rods into slots in the frame (that act as hinges) in either configuration.
Go figure.