The Personal Narrative

Afterthoughts

2007-08-07T00:38:00.001+05:30

With images gathered over the past few months fast fading from whatever bit of my noggin it is that stores them, I'm compelled to pen down everything I can reconstruct based on blocky, disjointed chunks of memory I can still access. This, in effect, is the swan song on the internship blog.

First, the Leftovers: (Each of these would have been a detailed blog post if I had the time)

Europe has it easy

It does. It is, I believe, safe to conclude that of all locales on the planet, Europe, with its comfortable temperate zone placing and coniferous vegetation, has the pleasantest summers, most moving golden autumns, festive springs and slightly chilly winters. To top it, there is no dust in Europe. I kid you not- in the seventy five days I spent at Erlangen, not once did I notice that otherwise omnipresent layer of sneeze inducing sludge on any horizontal surface. The humidity is always bearable, and food aplenty- it feels nearly unfair, for several reasons.

German Classes

Yes, I did take German classes.*
Yes, they were immensely fun, and my instructor was the best ever.
No, I don't remember much of it.
(Das ist nicht meine shuld.)

The entire seventy six day stay was punctuated by my attempts at speaking German having gone horribly wrong- and in retrospect- horribly funny. Only a couple of instances may be quoted here while allowing me to retain the remaining vestiges of self-respect; translated into English to obviate further mis-translations:

I. At the door to the professor's office

Me: "Entshuldigung, darf ich einkommen?"

Translates to (apparently) "Excuse me, may I income?"

In the office kitchen:

M: Ah, ist das Indischer imbiss?
Me: Manchmal.

Translates to:
M: Ah, is that Indian food?
Me: Sometimes.

M: Wieder kommst du auf FMP?
Me: Oh, Ich hore musik gern.

Translates to:
M: Will you be coming to Germany again?
Me: Oh, I like music.

Well, you get the drift.

German Engineering, Redux

I never appended to the original post on German Engineering, attributable wholly to awesomeness overload- Every day threw up a dozen examples of engineering design done right, from the delightful colour pencils to the computer mice to the trash cans to the sewage system to the road cleaning bots (yes, bots) to the office window blinds to the cable cars to the sidewalks to the traffic signal switching to the squealing CNG driven insane suspension equipped buses to the mind-blowing space constricted (and optimized) amusement rides to the Inter City Expresses to the automated street lights to the expensive washing machines to the three mode shower heads to the garbage pickup to the do-it-yourself furniture assembly to the assembly line mimicking bakery conveyor belts to the cars to- well this can go on forever- but the window and the sixteen wheeler deserved a special mention and I have posted accordingly.

The Cycling Story

How this eluded description until now is beyond me- Erlangen is a cyclists paradise. There are special paths by the sidewalk for cycles throughout the city, and if you fancy long rides, a cyclist path by most highways for trans-town bike hikes. Come Sunday, and more people can be seen on bikes than you can count with your twenty wiggly digits- Couples out for hikes, young mothers with babies in prams attached to the rear of the cycles, siblings attempting to leave the inline skater crowd biting dust, old men in shorts chatting and sunbathing- with their machines in the lowest gear- they're not in a hurry, the occasional serious cyclist who zips past in full racing gear (product endorsements on racing wear included), the luge-cyclists leaning back in their contraptions- and several vague images that I can no longer recall well enough to articulate.

Counting from the Thumb

Hold up your palm at arms length, and position your fingers such that you're signaling one (1).

Chances are, your forefinger is up, and the lesser privileged digits are folded down into your palm.

Why the forefinger?

Afterthoughts

(1) On the trip.

What did I end up doing, besides making a fool of myself?

The expected roller design, a deeper look at the Navier Stokes Equations, a little Statistical Mechanics, a not-so-startling rediscovery of the Einstein Refrigerator, an analysis of the thermal characteristics of rubber bands, a visit to Munich that the street music justified, hikes to lakes, a few experiments in the kitchen- among other adventures. It was, evidently, fun.

(2) On the blog.

Why did I do it?
So I could remember this stuff an year from now. Besides, it was fun while it lasted.

Who read it?
Two people, apparently. I was one of them.
The Stat_counter shows an average of 1.8 views per week, with a high and low of 2.2 and 0.

What have I not mentioned here?
Several things, most of which I don't want 1.8 people to be reading. :P

(Why not?
Yeah, right. Like I'd spill it.)

Will I be continuing this blog?
Nope. The Personal Narrative ends here. Older, obscurer, instances of crazed typing can be found here. Might have a thing or two to add from time to time there.

That's about it.

Oh, except for the apology-

The day before I was supposed to leave, I went hunting for a set of coffee mugs for the 42nd, bread samples for mom, a wall hanging for home, chocolates for whoever needed them (the list is hurtfully long), and the Deathly Hallows to keep me company in the Airplane. Halfway through the shopping, however, I encountered these chaps doing their thing:

Their 'thing' being a rendition of the most heavenly violin score that had ever befallen my ears. After dropping several low-denomination coins into their box and straining to identify the music as Mozart, I came to the conclusion (after about fifty minutes of bliss) that it was Bach. Irrelevant, of course- the point being that by the time they were done playing, shops everywhere had closed, and most items on the shopping list remained un-bought.

So, well, if you're one of the people on the list who were left empty-handed- I'm sorry.
(Bach should be held responsible.)

*(So, Karthik, if you're reading this in 2008, shame on you for forgetting every word of Deutsch you had painstakingly accumulated over three months of eavesdropping, google translating, and several two hour Deutsch lesson sessions.)

The Ride Home

2007-07-25T17:50:00.000+05:30

Premonition

Reports were submitted, to-do lists composed, goodbyes bade, farewell meals cooked (and consumed), bread purchased, chocolates stuffed into impossible suitcase crevices, clandestine discussions carried out, sleep foregone, batteries recharged, to-do lists misplaced, buses boarded at ungodly hours- and I found myself on the same train as I had seventy six days ago. Admittedly, I was too preoccupied with the Deathly Hallows to soak in the sights this time, but Frankfurt airport brought me back to the muggle world with a resounding thud that must have sounded similar to an egg cracked too hard on the edge of a pan.

Why, you ask?

Yes, the airport was mind bogglingly monstrous (more easily navigated by segways, I would think) and bustling with people scampering in all directions except towards where the signs point to. What really made me put down the book, though, was my boarding pass, and the smattering of forty twos on it- the gate I was supposed to board from, the seat I was alloted, and the number on a baggage identification tag.

42.

Forty two.

Something was up- and I was determined to keep my eyes open for something unusual.

Revelation

About two hours into the leg-space-less flight, it struck. What struck is irrelevant- Something that hadn't made sense in a long time- happened (and made less sense than ever), and I realized that had the conspicuous forty twos not preceded the incident, I might have missed it completely.

The rest of the flight was spent in trying to make sense of what had happened, and in trying to find a way to put it up here without being explicit.

Homecoming

The roads seemed tiny, the traffic crazy, the smoke stinging, the weather damp and foul, the time lead disconcerting- but these quibbles disappeared in the elation of reaching my destination- home.

And so it ended.

The Right Pinky of God

2007-07-25T02:05:00.000+05:30

Digression: An excerpt from Neal Stephenson's "In the Beginning was the Command Line" :

In his book The Life of the Cosmos, which everyone should read, Lee Smolin gives the best description I've ever read of how our universe emerged from an uncannily precise balancing of different fundamental constants. The mass of the proton, the strength of gravity, the range of the weak nuclear force, and a few dozen other fundamental constants completely determine what sort of universe will emerge from a Big Bang. If these values had been even slightly different, the universe would have been a vast ocean of tepid gas or a hot knot of plasma or some other basically uninteresting thing--a dud, in other words. The only way to get a universe that's not a dud--that has stars, heavy elements, planets, and life--is to get the basic numbers just right. If there were some machine, somewhere, that could spit out universes with randomly chosen values for their fundamental constants, then for every universe like ours it would produce 10^229 duds.

Though I haven't sat down and run the numbers on it, to me this seems comparable to the probability of making a Unix computer do something useful by logging into a tty and typing in command lines when you have forgotten all of the little options and keywords. Every time your right pinky slams that ENTER key, you are making another try. In some cases the operating system does nothing. In other cases it wipes out all of your files. In most cases it just gives you an error message. In other words, you get many duds. But sometimes, if you have it all just right, the computer grinds away for a while and then produces something like emacs. It actually generates complexity, which is Smolin's criterion for interestingness.

Not only that, but it's beginning to look as if, once you get below a certain size--way below the level of quarks, down into the realm of string theory--the universe can't be described very well by physics as it has been practiced since the days of Newton. If you look at a small enough scale, you see processes that look almost computational in nature.

I think that the message is very clear here: somewhere outside of and beyond our universe is an operating system, coded up over incalculable spans of time by some kind of hacker-demiurge. The cosmic operating system uses a command-line interface. It runs on something like a teletype, with lots of noise and heat; punched-out bits flutter down into its hopper like drifting stars. The demiurge sits at his teletype, pounding out one command line after another, specifying the values of fundamental constants of physics:

universe -G 6.672e-11 -e 1.602e-19 -h 6.626e-34 -protonmass 1.673e-27....

and when he's finished typing out the command line, his right pinky hesitates above the ENTER key for an aeon or two, wondering what's going to happen; then down it comes--and the WHACK you hear is another Big Bang.

Now THAT is a cool operating system, and if such a thing were actually made available on the Internet (for free, of course) every hacker in the world would download it right away and then stay up all night long messing with it, spitting out universes right and left. Most of them would be pretty dull universes but some of them would be simply amazing. Because what those hackers would be aiming for would be much more ambitious than a universe that had a few stars and galaxies in it. Any run-of-the-mill hacker would be able to do that. No, the way to gain a towering reputation on the Internet would be to get so good at tweaking your command line that your universes would spontaneously develop life. And once the way to do that became common knowledge, those hackers would move on, trying to make their universes develop the right kind of life, trying to find the one change in the Nth decimal place of some physical constant that would give us an Earth in which, say, Hitler had been accepted into art school after all, and had ended up his days as a street artist with cranky political opinions.

It's all cracked up to be- and worth a read. In one giant text file, Neal Stephenson goes from the war of the OS's to Milwaukee drills, the Egyptian taxi culture, arcane abbreviations, the Morlocks and the Eloi (Read Wells!), the virtues of indigence, and contemplates taking a menu driven GUI enabled car out for a ride. Allusions to media steepage, metaphor shear, geek fatigue, the importance of wanton fecklessness, the Disneyland experience, and the wisdom of maintaining bug reports all tie in to explain why people abdicate their will to learn, and why everyone is willing to be taken for a ride.

2007-07-22T18:47:00.000+05:30

The art of mental math is fast disappearing. Today, the sight of a double-Fourier-integral sends shivers up the spines of many, and the unfortunate few who must live with it scamper to the nearest terminal loaded with Mathematica/Matlab. Master computers like Fermi, Bethe and the no-adjective-suffices Feynman-

Never mind.

At this point of the composition, I googled to find an excerpt from 'Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman', one where he describes how he computed e to the {something} in his head faster than his mates could on paper, and one from 'Genius', where Gleick details Feynman's unconventional methods of summing sequences.

Neither of these excerpts turned up. Instead, I spent two and a half hours re-reading (now) familiar trivia about him, which was the time I had allowed myself for this post- and must now move on to other things. I no longer remember what I intended to write, or why I had planned to mention Bessel functions.

{Shrug} I give up. (And Feynman is God. No, really, Murray Gell-Mann said something of the sort.)

Looking for the light switch

2007-07-19T14:13:00.000+05:30

The roller I was supposed to work on has been dispensed with, for the most part, and owing to an over-abundance of free time, I have turned my attention towards dilettantish attempts at resolving fundamental inconsistencies in fluid mechanics- or at least, to seek a compromise as only an inexperienced, intuition deprived tyro can.

This post is not about these inconsistencies.

Instead, I intend to remember what two weeks of intense brainstorming and (slight) sleep deprivation (read: work) felt like, and will attempt a vivid, voluble description/recollection of this period of time here.

Working on an unsolved problem that is so deceptively simple in its statement that it conjures an image of a jigsaw puzzle with a pivotal element missing seemed like an award in itself- but as I soon discovered, things change when you stoop down to the equations and get your hands dirty. (If you must know, it's #3 here.)
To put it simply, it feels like groping in the dark, looking for a light switch, and bumping into walls, table edges and bed posts every now and then. You never quite know if what you're doing is leading somewhere, or whether you will be starting over in a short while. Intuition fails miserably, and you realize the jigsaw puzzle is missing its defining piece- I've lost count of the number of times I recalled Thomas Kuhn's words- and the number of times I've vowed to read through his magnum opus again.

Collaboration, I realized, is good. Five heads are better than one, as long as they're all thinking along different lines. It also becomes evident why much of today's science rests heavily on collaboration; deplorable one-upmanship and egoistic concerns lose all meaning in the face of the problem at hand.
I really couldn't care less about who solves the problem- that the problem is resolved will imply a small, but firm step ahead in our understanding of nature- an understanding that I will share- no matter who stumbles upon the missing piece. (It is with this reassurance that I go back to my banal, platitudinous life at college.)

This post will, in all likelihood, appear to have made a mountain of a proverbial molehill once the issue is resolved, (quite obviously, not by me!) but with Kuhn's words ringing in my ears, that's a chance I'm willing to take. It is unlikely, perhaps impossible, that I will look any sillier than I already do.

So what is it like figuring out the Galilean invariance of Momentum Transport Equations?
Two parts enervating, two parts humbling, and one part inspiring, but mostly scary. If this is what fundamental research feels like, though, sign me up any day. I'm game.

2007-07-14T18:32:00.001+05:30

You notice the strangest things about fluid motion if you're paying attention to nature. This, for instance:

No prize for guessing what's happening (or why), of course, but I would sure like to simulate this on my box once I get back to college. As of now, I'm trying to compute the frequency of oscillation based purely on order of magnitudes of the flow parameters. (The Rayleigh, Reynolds, and Strouhal numbers, to be precise. Perhaps the Froude number as well- I don't know yet.)

And then this, which doesn't look like much here, but was mesmerizing when I saw it happen:

Reflected and incident waves interfering to create slinky like seemingly transverse waves. A deception, of course- I know there's a considerable longitudinal component to surface waves in water, and I think there's a considerable longitudinal component to the resultant here, as well. This was, by the way, at the lake here.

Weird, eh?

Levity (and persiflage) on demand

2007-07-12T22:49:00.000+05:30

"Mr. Chik-mal..."
"Mr. C"
"Mr. Ka..."

By the gods, I'm yet to meet someone who can pronounce my name right. I don't blame them though, I get it wrong myself half the time.

Like the penurious gentleman who dons tattered apparel because he couldn't care less about what people who don't know him think about his attire, and because people who know him couldn't care less about his attire, I'm stuck with a name that I can make as much sense of as my hosts here. People who just don't get it don't care anyway, and people who do get it think its a private joke.

I'm not sure what requirement my name serves, save for sending both kinds of people into fits of laughter. Including me.

Private joke, indeed.

On mind-numbing inconsistencies in momentum transfer, and Galilean invariance

2007-07-12T22:11:00.000+05:30

1. Imagine a layer of air moving across a water surface. If we observe the situation sufficiently "downstream", the water surface is moving too. It follows that the velocity of the air and the water at the interface is the same. Air molecules move into the interface with a certain momentum, but emerge, several collisions later, with the velocity of the water at the surface- its the same with the water- so both move at the same velocity.
Now, let's look at the momentum(s). The velocities are the same, but the momentum of the air and the water at the interface are not- Water convects about a thousand times more momentum than the air. (This is the ratio of their densities.) And yet, the net momentum transfer through diffusion is from the air to the water- the air set the water in motion, remember?

2. A fluid flows over a flat plate- and you get to see a boundary layer form. A nice velocity profile develops, and the net result is the transfer of momentum from the water to the plate. This vague expression manifests itself in the gradient of the velocity component perpendicular to the plate. In particular, towards the edge of the boundary layer, the gradient of the perpendicular component of the velocity is greater than zero. (Think continuity, and the fact that the parallel component of the velocity at the edge of the boundary layer decreases along the length of the plate as the boundary layer grows.)
Now drag the plate instead. At the edge of the boundary layer, the parallel component increases along the length as the boundary layer grows. The result, therefore, is that the gradient of the perpendicular component (along the perpendicular direction) decreases.
The reason for the emphasis? The aforementioned situations are, at the face of it, the same, save for a change in frame of reference.
And yet, the gradient of the perpendicular component, which is unaffected by the coordinate transformation, is simultaneously positive and negative!

3. The Navier Stokes Equations are not Galilean invariant. Beats me, but its true. There's a hint of broken symmetry here- and a flaw that is as elusive as it is enigmatic.

I'm being peppered with paradoxes all day long- I'm not surprised I can't get any real work done nowadays.

EDIT: (1) is now resolved. There is no inconsistency. Both thumbs up to Mr. Sambashivam and his penetrating insight into the issue. On the off chance that the garbled, obfuscating, voluble description of the apparent inconsistency made sense to you, and that you're curious to know what the resolution is, comment, and ye shall find the elucidation you seek.

On notice boards

2007-07-07T01:30:00.000+05:30

The local university has an Institute of Fluid Mechanics, and an Institute of Computational Engineering. (I do not work at either of these places.) Not surprisingly, these two buildings are neighbours- one of them frames problems for the other to solve.

What really tickles me, though, is what the computational engineers have on their walls. At the entrance to the local supercomputer room:

(If you knew German, you'd be cracking up about now.)

Their notice boards are a crack!

(Humorous Sysadmins?)

I know- its blurred- but I've read the original, and I have no clue either. Blurting "Neumann!" a few times didn't work.

Here's how you write "Hello World" in every programming language known to man:

I don't know what this is about, but hey, Homer-

Vollwaschmittel translates roughly to "whole washing powder"- but whether its an actual product or an obscure, elaborate practical joke is anybody's guess.

UPDATE: Their sense of humour goes beyond notice boards- gaze at the door to the washroom:

And finally, a painting that is simultaneously anachronistic and incongruent. If it serves any purpose in the computational engineering department other than to puzzle the viewer, I am unaware of it.

The dilemma

2007-07-02T21:00:00.000+05:30

How does one design an experiment?

'll be darned if I know.

{Shrug}

Food Update V

2007-07-02T20:54:00.000+05:30

Noodles. You can't mess this up. Even I can't.

As for the following exhibit, I'm not sure if it was intended to be pulav, rice bhat or khichdi. It tasted like none/all of the above and still managed to taste good.

I got it right the second time, though. I think the powers that be willed for it to be khichdi. I would have settled for less.

I know- it looks nice.

9

2007-06-27T22:58:00.000+05:30

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

2007-06-25T23:03:00.000+05:30

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

2007-06-25T01:08:00.000+05:30

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

2007-06-25T00:20:00.000+05:30

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

2007-06-23T01:40:00.001+05:30

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

2007-06-23T01:23:00.001+05:30

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

2007-06-22T23:07:00.001+05:30

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

2007-06-16T01:45:00.000+05:30

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

2007-06-12T20:35:00.000+05:30

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

2007-06-03T22:39:00.001+05:30

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.

The Autobahn and Banana juice

2007-06-03T22:14:00.000+05:30

What do you do when you're in a reasonably powerful car on a German highway that has no speed limits?

You go fast. Real fast.

I thought we were going ridiculously fast, but Martin decided it was the last straw when a BMW overtook us like it was a joy riding two-wheeler overtaking autorickshaws back home; so he pressed harder on the accelerator.

(I swear I will never drive on an Autobahn. On a side note, I intend to get into the professor's BMW the next time he takes his ride out onto the highway. :D)

A hundred kmph has now registers as a koalaesque pace to be going at. Sixty - now that's for cyclists.

We maxed out here, only because Martin was adamant on proving that Banana juice exists.
When you've seen a reasonable amount of Germany, you learn to raise/lower the bar for what you would deem ridiculous. But Banana juice, I reasoned, was absurd. Banana Milkshake- I get, but Banana juice?

So Martin drove off the Autobahn (Phew!), and into a gas station, and asked for it!
Obviously, there wasn't any, and Martin was only pulling my leg with the Banana juice idea. ("You squeeze a banana, add some water, some filtration... tada!"- he said.)

Yesterday morning, however, the bars have been lowered to extents I didn't know existed:

I now believe anything Martin says.
(And the Banana juice was delicious!)

The Adventures of Martin and Me

2007-06-03T21:56:00.000+05:30

I will refrain from setting the context and jump right into the scene.

Martin, a fellow intern and me find ourselves in an Italian restaurant, and I'm the only sober person there. 'It would be funny,' reasons Martin, 'if each of us had his own pizza.'

I concur.

What I didn't account for, though, was this:

Look at the size of that thing!

I did not have a pair of calipers at hand, but I managed, nevertheless, to measure the outside diameter of the pizza. It came to 45 +- 2 cm. (Why panic, when you have 11 1/2" A4 at hand? )
Pause for a moment and think of how big that is.

I was licking my lips at the sight.

I was groaning in pain at the end, though.
(The paper you see in my pocket was used to measure the diameter. Sadly, a perfectly good copy of this was ruined, but you do need to make choices in life, ya? )

What do you do with an espresso that, should you attempt to drink it, threatens your sanity?
Why, you convert it into this:

That was one crazy night, foodwise.

Food Update II

2007-06-03T20:46:00.001+05:30

I officially declare myself an accomplished virtuoso in the art of cooking ready to eat meal packets.

I present to you, in chronological order, pictures of self-made multi-quisine grub that has served as lunch over the past couple of days:

1. Exhibit #1: Pasta in 4-käse sauce ( Quattro Formaggi ?)

2. Exhibit #2: Tarkari uppittu, with potatoes, onions, cauliflower, carrots, lettuce, cabbage, and other vegetables whose names I cannot recall or spell.

Both were munched/swallowed down with relish.

The Bergkirchweih

2007-06-03T00:22:00.001+05:30

(Post Updated: New pictures added.)

Yesterday, the first of June (I think) was spent at the Bergkirchweih , the Beer festival of Erlangen.

Originally, the beer festival was a celebration of the christening of the local church (about 250 years ago), but all religious relevance has long since been foregone, and it remains a place/time for people to gather in the thousands, drink and rejoice.

This post should, for clarity, be preceded by a long post detailing the beer brewing history of Bavaria, and an estimate of how fond people are of beer, but time constraints prevent this; I will try and illustrate this, instead, with an account narrated to me by a fellow hosteler:

There are no water dispensers in Germany. These machines are neither made nor imported- because they are not needed. Bottled soda water is available, but why, reasons the average German, would you want to drink bottled water? Seeing my fellow hosteler drink water from a faucet, he queried: "Does that taste just like beer?"

I was dragged by the professor, and the company I work for, on an official visit to the beer festival.

To capture the atmosphere of the place in words is far beyond me. I'll try, instead, with imagery:

This is the entrance:

This is Martin, a very nice chap who works at the office,(The adventures of Martin & Me is a tale for a later time) in traditional Bavarian attire:

This was most of the gang:

So what do you do at a green table at a beer festival? Why, you drink beer, of course.
I drank orangeade :)

(Dominik thought it looked funny.)

(And you drink them in one liter mugs!)

I've now seen more kinds of cheese than I can care to remember:

Including, as the 42nd calls it, the Tom & Jerry variety:

The professor finally found a parking slot, (private joke: He parked where the pessimists park, despite claims to the contrary!) and showed up at the party. This is all of the gang:

(Except me, of course.)

One round of beer later, most of the gang was still sober, which is when the food showed up. I have never seen so many cooked animals together on one tray:

The interesting thing to note, though, are the yellow potato balls in the plates- they're actually edible, although, I was told, they are equally useful in a game of football.

And then my food arrived:

You know you're having a strange day when you have one of these for lunch:

Fresh bread, and unprocessed cheese; a lunch unlike any before (and hopefully, unlike any after)

Lunch was followed by, you guessed it, more beer:

The professor gathered us around and explained the history of the beer fest; apparently, they have a beer pipeline running into a cellar in the mountain- I didn't believe it until he showed it to us.

This was followed by a discussion on, among other things, combustion and candle flames, instability in fluid flow and the Ohr-Sommerfield equation:

Martin, the eternal prankster, thought it fit to shove us (three Indian students) onto one of the amusement rides- the craziest one at that.
I tried, I really did, to squirm my way out of this, but to no avail. The expression I wear before boarding the ride says it all:

(Martin promised to meet me in the afterlife, and I assured him that I'd return the favour then.)

I'm somewhere in there:

I survived, much to the amusement of others (See? Amusement ride), and even managed to get a gingerbread souvenir around my neck.

The Rime of the Ancient Mariner echoed in my ears as I wore the albatross- I mean, the gingerbread, and managed a vacant stare:

This picture sums up my Bergkirchweih.

Burnin'

2007-05-30T22:31:00.001+05:30

"How do you burn, when you don't know how to burn?"

I've forgotten the number of times the professor has told me this, but the outcome of asking a (more or less) fundamental question like this, he tells me, is this: (Taken today, at the workshop)

That's how it starts. You should see where it goes from there, though:

That is what it looks like. You're probably thinking that's the ceramic glowing red hot.
It's not:

The reddish tinge at the boundary in the above picture- now that's thermal radiation from the ceramic/surrounding steel. The interior is a mystery for now.

Notice, among other things, that the background seems progressively darker in the above photos. (Check the first one again.) That happened because I was trying to get the best out of my low dynamic range camera- and had to change the settings for each shot to keep the burner region from appearing saturated. In short, that thing is bright. It hurts to look at it.

But what is it?

It gets hotter/better.

And better!

And that's not even at full power.
At full power, the photographs I took were ruined and failed to capture the high dynamic range.

Again, what is it?

That's a story for another time. (If, that is, the reader is even marginally interested in knowing about critical Peclet numbers and volumetric combustion)

For now, though, feast your eyes on this: (A small layman-ish explanation included.)

Document 1 on porous burners

Document 2 on porous burners

Work, or something like it

2007-05-25T19:35:00.000+05:30

So, what do I do at Promeos?

There are several things I do here that I'm not allowed to be doing, such as blogging, but officially, I work all day on a nice little problem.

First, a little something about the place. Promeos is a company that designs and manufactures porous combustion burners. These creatures are industrial burners that burn fuel inside the pores of a ceramic material. This leads to, among other things, spectacular lighting and fireworks displays every time one of these things is booted. (Will add photo soon)
It has a single office with about twenty five employees, and about sixty fiv- because I find these details as inconsequential as you(I) do, I will skip them.

An interesting tidbit of information, though. The first floor is occupied entirely by the accountants, salesmen and distribution managers. This is what their offices look like:

Ledgers and stationary abound. (Unfortunately, this (the corner) is where I sit nowadays, :( )

The ground floor is taken by the engineers and the workshop people. 'Hands on' is quite an understatement when it comes to describing their approach- these guys are real engineers, ask very relevant questions, and are always trying to find better ways to build stuff. This is what their offices look like. (This one is Mr. Dietmar Tanke's):

W00t!

All the accountants run Windows XP, all the engineers run (Take a look at the above photos) SUSE (Linux).

Now, here's what I do: Paper makers need giant rollers to roll paper on and across. In fact, just about any process that creates sheet like materials needs rollers. With paper, its a bit more complicated because you want to heat freshly coated paper as it rolls across, that is, you need a heated roller.

Right now, they have a ridiculous way of doing this. They fill their roller/drum with oil at high pressure, heat it, and then run the paper across. The rollers are about a metre in diameter, and a metre and a half in length. A little calculation shows that they need about three hundred kilograms of oil to fill the drum. Heating three hundred kilograms of pressurized oil to two hundred degrees celcius is a nightmare- it takes three hours to start up the machine!

Enter Promeos. Get rid of the oil, place a porous burner along the length of the cylinder, and run the flue (exhaust) around the perimeter of the cylinder, all the while moving the paper in the opposite direction. Tada.

Well, not yet. They don't know how the fluid flows (all resident engineers are chemists/metallurgists and the like, people with an elementary idea of fluid motion), especially when the paper is running in the opposite direction. That's for me to find out.

My problem, thus, is merely a computation of heat transfer, but depending on how the flow is driven and several other parameters, the heat transferred, the temperatures, mass flow rates and pressure gradients vary by upto three orders of magnitude! Its a strongly entwined problem that requires a considerable amount of intuitive guessing at the start- and I've just started.
The good part, though, is that my work does not end when the heat transfer has been worked out- if that is indeed possible. I have to make the roller!
If things work out reasonably, I will have engaged myself in heat transfer computation, metallurgy, anemometry, elementary chemistry, electronics, hydraulics, materials science, and associated activities that are too numerous to list out. (Real engineering?)

This is what work looked like last Sunday:

This is what work looked like today:

My concerns appear to have grown more realistic in the past week. (No double integrals over non-dimensionalized quantities anymore! The boundary conditions in the real problem are completely unknown, rendering brute force solving useless)

This is what I hope work looks like a month from now:

Fingers crossed.

(UPDATE: I got my first paycheck today. It's the single largest sum of money I've ever handled, and I'm thinking: "I get paid for this ?!")

Food Update I

2007-05-25T19:17:00.000+05:30

A considerable chunk of my evening yesterday (24th May, 07) was spent in cooking a delicacy known as Kartoffelspinatcurry.
This is what it looks like:

That was the best meal I've had in Germany until now.

If you still haven't caught the pun, split the name of the dish appropriately and translate the words to English. :)

The Mundane Monday

2007-05-24T17:54:00.000+05:30

On Monday, the 21st of May, 07, I reported in for work at my actual company, Promeos. (Details of what transpired in the previous week will be added later.)

The company, however, had no idea who I was, or what I was supposed to be doing there. This was a precursor of what was to follow that day. I sat in the visitor's lounge for about two hours staring at out of date coffee table books while they sorted out the matter, when the CEO dropped by, introduced himself, talked for two minutes, shook my hand, and walked away. (No one, including me, had any idea what I was supposed to do now.) I wandered around for a bit until I found my desk, (which was one floor and eight rooms away) and realized I had been allotted a temporary desk in the accounting section. I sat opposite the resident accountant, who let loose a barrage of German as soon as he saw me. This, I found later, included a greeting, an inquiry, some advice on sitting in push-back chairs, and a comment on how juicy polish apples are.

And that was it.

Neither of us spoke during the next two hours; he was hammering away at his keyboard, and I was busy (i)whining to myself about not being given a computer and (ii)contemplating calling Prof. Durst and explaining that I might have walked into the wrong building that morning.

No such luck.

Boredom has a nasty way of seeking you out even in the most interesting places, and this was not one of them to begin with. In an hour, I had finished playing with the magnets on the wall, the sketch pens on the table, and staring at the pictures in the German text on steel manufacturing that I found lying on my table.

To sum up, I had nothing to do, nowhere to go, no lunch to eat, nobody to talk to, and not surprisingly, I was feeling a tad bit unhappy about the entire situation. (I learned later that I was supposed to be given material to read on porous combustion, but they forgot to.)

And then I saw it.

I present to you, the lost relic that countless men (might) have searched for in vain, the proof for the existance of an improbability field (Of the Douglas Adams' kind), and most importantly, the icebreaker of that forgettable Monday, a map in ultra high-res glory:

I was about as perplexed as I will ever be when I saw this hanging off the wall, framed and (apparently) well preserved.

Why is this perplexing?

(i) It's a map of British India.

(ii) It's in German.

(iii) It's hanging off the wall of a German company that designs burners.

(iv) It is dated 1855.

'Ceilon!', I cried. (That was marked on the map.)

Mr. Schmidt at his desk looked up and said (in the tone of one correcting an errant child):

'Sri Lanka!'

This was followed by a conversation that is absurd on so many levels, I am yet to comprehend how it could have taken place.

Starting from the beginning:

Me: Ceilon!

Mr.S: Sri Lanka!

Me: Now.

Mr.S: Ten Yearz.

Me: Eh?

Mr.S: Srilanka, Ten Yearz.

Me: Oh, no, no. Thirty.

Mr.S: Wikipedia!

Me: Yes!

(Mr.S hammers away some more on his keyboard.)

Mr.S: 1972!

Me: 35 years!

Mr.S: Nein.

Me: Eh?

Mr.S: Tomorrow!

Me: Eh?

Mr.S: Tomorrow, Ceilon, Sri lanka!

Me: Oh!

Mr.S:34 Yearz, 11 monat, 30 tage, ya?

Me: Ah, okay.

Mr. Markus Shmidt is Polish, speaks Polish and German (no English, duh), loves (juicy) Polish apples and reclining chairs. Apparently. This is him, and the orange chair is where I spent one of the most boring days of my life. (The laptops were not there that day.)

I spent the rest of the day staring at the map, then went home.

Here are a few more shots of the bizarre oddity. If my camera was capable of capturing at high enough resoutions, Maissur, Birma and other comic respellings would be in the offing for the patient viewer.

Things got better, though. Now the whole incident seems amusing.

Another oddity in the same office:

I wonder what this is about.

Mr.S teaches me German, and I try to teach him English.
Mr. Schmidt and I are good friends now.

Kitchen (Mis)adventures

2007-05-23T20:48:00.000+05:30

One can only live for so long on bread, milk and cereal. On the 19th of May, '07, I decide to try my luck with cooking staple food.

Cooking is a fairly non-trivial exercise. I was aware of this for quite some time now, but I appear to have underestimated the extent of non-triviality grossly.

I gather the pressure cooker, rice (I paid an outrageous amount to get my hands on this), and water on the heating pad and stare hopefully for ten minutes. This is what it looked like when I opened it up:
(It is a good thing the photograph came out blurred, for horrors such as these are not meant to be seen in stark clarity)
Rice:

So do I give up? No, I don't. Fortunately, I had the foresight to cook little when trying for the first time, so I munch down the half baked monstrosity you see above, and try again: (This time, I pray.)

Rice, redux:
There. Improving already. This lot is slightly better cooked, and is almost edible. I munch this down and decided to call it a night.

A couple of days (and about three tries and three hundred more grams of inedible rice) later, I manage to catch hold of the resident rice experts. Under their watchful eye and helpful guidance, I manage to create something that is actually edible, and tasty enough for my mentors to dig in.

To summarize, here is food done wrong: (First day)

(The eggs are not for me. That creature is the result of the enterprise of an amateur whose skills were lower than mine.)

And here is food done right:
Awesome. (Don't miss the reflection of me, the camera, my mentors and the surroundings on the ladle kept atop the yoghurt box.)

Since that fateful day, my mentors and I have struck a deal: We cook for all of us. No points for guessing in whose favour that turns out.

Cooking gets repititive after you get it right- the fun's not there anymore if you're not experimenting, which explains why I still consume bread, cereal, milk and the like through most of the day. One well cooked meal a day is enough, I reckon. (For now)

The food issue has barely had its surface scratched; the bread story, yoghurt story, Vegetable story, juice story and vegetarianism stories are for later, as is the treasure hunt I engaged myself in in the supermarket while looking for cheese.
(In my defence, butter was called butter, how was I to know that cheese was called käse? Tut tut...)

I wrap up this post with snaps of me cooking. (Don't laugh, unless you've BTDT.)

Aw, what the heck, ROFL if you wish.

Konigssee!

2007-05-19T20:33:00.001+05:30

Thursday is a holiday. No one seems to know why, but apparently, the 17th of May is of religious importance here.
I've agreed to go on a trip to a nearby lake (with my intern mates and a couple of other hostel mates) on this day, so I get ready by 6 am.

Its raining, and freezing. Some summer, this.

'Nearby', I realize, is misleading. It takes about eight hours to get there by train- but those were very eventful hours.
Train travel is completely hassle free. To get to any station you want to, enter the destination names in a ticketing machine at the railway station, and it prints out the entire itinerary, including train codes, times and platform numbers, and the smallest possible wait times between two connections. Of course, it also issues tickets. I realize that I overpaid on the first trip here. For €5, you get an all day pass valid on most trains in Germany- I traveled about 700 km on that pass!

The trip to Konigssee, I realize, involves four train changes, each with gaps of about five minutes. Amazing. I spend a few minutes contemplating on the genius of the graph theorist who programmed the machine to optimize travel time for the passenger.
This is the first of several things I noticed that involved considerable ingenuity to set up. One of the others, was the dustbin design.
Nah, I'm not talking about fancy lid opening devices with automated crushers, et al, although those exist, too. The dustbin on the train, I realize, is a can fixed to a wall that rotates outwards, and is stable in two positions, fully open and fully closed. How is that? The center of mass of the can is located a critical location with respect to the pivot, and filling the can makes no difference to the action of the dustbin, even though it moves with added mass at the bottom.
Amazing! (Will add photo later)

Three out of five people in our group form a noisy bunch, and wild swearing ensues as we almost miss one of the connecting trains. Most unpleasant business.
To complicate matters, both my fellow interns are heavy smokers, and don't seem to mind the fact that a box of cigarettes costs €4. They waste no time at all at stations, and puff away to glory- which, of course, means that I spend most of the time on the other end of the platform.
In addition, its raining, and I don't have an umbrella.
Fortunately, all this unpleasantness fades when I get to Konigssee.

Several connecting rides later, we get there, and I realize I'm at the Austrian border!
I'm also at the Alps foothills, but I reckon it feels cold enough already. ('Pleasant weather, expected to get warmer', remember?)

Here's what the lake at Konigssee looks like:

The Alps, and the way to the alps:

A few unexpected encounters:

The rain forced me to buy an (expensive!) umbrella:

Two hours later, it was time to head back. The return journey took nine hours, four train changes, and we made it back to Erlangen by 2 am! The temperature registered five degrees then, but at least it wasn't raining anymore. ('Pleasant weather...')

More shots, taken from the railway stations on the way, and in trains. One of the snaps has the well designed dustbin I mentioned earlier.

Train station on the way back. Pronounce that:

Self Portrait: Took this to see how my arm narrows down with distance. This was supposed to help me draw with perspective. Jacket ruined the entire business.

Notice the über dustbin in the center.
At Nuremberg railway station, 1 am. This is what happens to people who have traveled for sixteen hours in eight trains in one day, especially when they need to wait thirty minutes for the last one:

I sign off with a few random pics:

Railway station cafe: (very inviting!)

Make your own coffee:

Typical German Railway station (I've seen about twelve now):

This is Second Class!

A couple of pictures of me (I am very vain, eh?)
Were taken early in the morning, hence the un-tired expressions on my face.

Concluding note: It seems ironic that some one like me, who does not enjoy sight-seeing one bit, finds himself at one of the most picturesque places on the planet. (Perhaps it is wiser to say that I enjoy several things more than I enjoy touring.) The journey was a bore, the lake was cold and wet, as were my shoes at the end of the day (eww....). The ingenious dustbin and the ticketing machine more than made up for it, though.

The first day of work

2007-05-19T20:17:00.000+05:30

Home, 15th May
I eat the remains of the chapattis from home, and decide to take a short nap. (Its 3:00 pm)
I sleep away the effects of the tortuous sleepless night before, and wake up at 6.

6 am.

16th May
The first day of work beckons, so I get ready. I'm ready by 7, and I decide to go wake up a fellow intern in the same hostel whose room number I happen to remember. A quick breakfast of home food, and I'm off. Work is two buses away, and the schedule reads:

Leave home at 8:14 am.
Reach bus stop (about a kilometer away) by 8:19.
Get on the 8:21 bus to Bahnofplatz. (Allowance of an extra forty seconds to accommodate for a red light at a cross road along the way)
Reach the city center by 8:27.
Get the 8:28 to Am Weichselgarten.
It reaches at 8:51. Walk two office blocks, reach the office by 8:57.
The schedule works like a charm, and a buffer has seemed entirely unnecessary until now.

And the office door is locked. I try pulling, pushing, sliding- nothing works. So I wait. (I found the bell by the door three days later)

Fortunately, a BMW slides next to me and Prof. Durst gets out. He is, apparently, overjoyed to see me. For different reasons, the feeling is reciprocated!

Everyone else at the office is already here, and I decide to await further instructions.
Prof. Durst calls all the interns for a briefing, and we oblige. (There are three of us)

He explains to us why he's called us here.
"Karthik", he says in his characteristic drawl, with considerable emphasis on , "You're a very theoretical person. You do theory, for the sake of theory. And you're very good at it."

'Oh, dear...' I'm thinking. Two reasons. One, I'm not good at it at all, and two, I won't like the sound of what comes next!

"You don't get paid... for your hobbies", the professor says. I'm worried now.
"If you spend a hundred thousand dollars on research, and the outcome is a publication,"- he holds up one of those- and you hand it in-

... TO BE CONTINUED LATER ...

Home

2007-05-19T20:02:00.000+05:30

Home is actually a hostel, with a common kitchen, and bathroom.
It is, by any standard, a luxurious outfit, and is centrally heated. Phew.

Here's what my hostel corridor looks like. (Taken today, long after settling down and unpacking):

And this is my room:

This is my hostel, seen from the outside:

To round up this post, here are photos of the view from from the bus stop that I go to work:

(i) Barley, lots of barley. (The beer story is for another day- by the gods, its the cheapest thing here.)

(ii) Building that serves as a landmark. This thing is seen for miles around.

Next: The first day of work!

Arrival

2007-05-19T19:01:00.001+05:30

Bangalore-Frankfurt, LH

I was supposed to reach Frankfurt by about 8 am. I did.

Economy class travel is, I believe, wrongly termed. The first, and über class passengers get to board the plane first, and are greeted by spacious, plush, leather upholstered seats with armrests that can actually accommodate human sized arms.
Then they call for the cattle- us, I mean. We were herded together into seats that only people with a few additional joints along the femur can fit in. Since I don't belong to that category, I was forced to seek the diagonal dimension between the edge of my seat, and the cramped knees of my co-passenger to obtain leg space for my own. A few hours of sleepless torture later, the food arrives, and I manage to gulp down the reheated vadas and the nearly stale uppittu in time.

Cattle class does have its advantages. Getting off the plane at Frankfurt was the most liberating feeling in recent times that I've had, despite the fact that I had no idea of what to do next.
Frankfurt airport is big. I did not explore much myself, but I guessed from the number of electric carts that were being driven around that getting around on foot was not to be fancied.

I wandered aimlessly until I hit upon the customs counter, and then the baggage claim area. Some more random walking took me to a gift shop, a ticketing counter, a scary restaurant, and landed me in the midst of a bunch of English tourists before I managed to find the railway station. A little more wandering, and I managed to purchase a ticket to Erlangen. Buying the insanely expensive ticket did not sting until later, but in retrospect, the journey was well worth it.

Frankfurt-Nuremberg, ICE

I got to the platform at about 9 am, and realized that the 9:36 train arrives at 9:35. It always does.

'City 17's got nothing on Frankfurt', I remember muttering when the train reached the outskirts. The barns, roads, bridges and tunnels would have made for an ideal set for a live action HL2 movie. The Combine logo seemed oddly lacking. (If you don't understand any of this, you don't need to.)

A picture postcard slide show at 200 kmph. That pretty much sums up the train ride. I've never found picturesque countrysides aesthetically pleasing, but for two hours (and three hundred kilometers), I was taken in. Fields, pastures, clock towers and factories flashed past until I was politely asked by the ticket checker to go to the second class compartment. I was sitting in first class!

Everything in the scenery was pretty and intricate. Especially the graffiti. There was tonnes of detail spray painted on to the walls, and the vandal (artist?) had even added perspective to the drawings. The messages (atleast the ones in English) were mostly obscure references to freedom and liberty. I wonder...

Awesome thing: There were huge chimneys at one point that released white smoke in large volumes. Large is too small a word. The smoke coalesced with a low hanging humongous cloud, and it looked like the chimneys were sucking in the cloud! Wait, perhaps they were...
If I wasn't glancing at my watch every few minutes (wouldn't want to miss the connecting train, would I?), I might have remembered to snap pictures.

Awesomer thing: Imagine an acre of timber, about twenty feet high. Now imagine four giant sprays tenderizing the wood at four corners of the plot, spraying water over a hundred and fifty feet high. The water jet goes so high (and far), most of it atomizes before the spray begins to fall towards the timber! Surreal. Yup, I saw that.

Nuremberg-Erlangen, RB

I manage to get off at Nuremberg, and see the first of many railway stations in Germany.
This is first time (many to come later, I fear) that I feel that the chap who wrote "Pleasant, expected to get warmer in the coming months" as a weather description for Germany on the internet should have been in my position. It's freezing.

I realize that there's nothing to train travel in Germany. For the 11:59 to Erlangen, reach the platform by 11:58. The train arrives by 11:58, and the automatic train doors stay open for about a minute. Get on, grab an empty seat (all of them are empty, most of the time), and glance at your watch occasionally. Get off at 12:36.

I call up the company from the Erlangen railway station, but the professor's out of town. Take a bus, they tell me. I do.
The railway station opens out to the city square. Its the same in all small towns, apparently. The city square is a picturesque paved area with benches and a bus stop, for people to get together and chat (which they never do), and for pigeons to hoot and holler (which they never do). This is a portion of the Erlangen city square, and DB is die bahn, or 'the railway':

At a corner, the temperature display reads 9 degrees celcius. It begins to rain.

Its the same with buses. The 1:12 always arrives at 1:12, and leaves a few seconds later.

The buses, I realize, actually tilt by a few degrees so as to lower the door on the passenger's side. Here's a bus in the tilted position (taken at the bus stop, Erlangen city square, Hugenottenplatz)

The door is two inches off the road!

I find the right bus, and reach the company. I am supposed to buy a ticket to Am Weichselgarten, and I'll be darned if I can ever pronounce that correctly. So I write it down, show it to the driver, and get a ticket. Expensive, that.

I reach the company by about 2 pm, and I'm hungry, cold, and almost wet. I lug my luggage down two office blocks, reading the signposts on the way, and finally reach the office. I'm greeted with smiles and handshakes, and a coffee and some chocolate later, I'm not shivering anymore (The photos were taken on a warm, sunny day, and do not quite reflect the mood of the hour, or the weather of that day), and Adnan, an intern from Sarajevo, generously agrees to drop me to the hostel in his car.
He does.

I'm home.

The Preliminaries

2007-05-19T17:10:00.000+05:30

In December 2006, I attended a week long symposium on Fluid Mechanics and Energy transfer at Digha (West Bengal, India), where I met Prof. Franz Durst, a German professor of Fluid Mechanics.
We talked (briefly) about Fluid Mechanics, the Navier-Stokes Equations, and conflict between the practices of theoretical modeling and actual verification.

About two months later, in February 2007, Prof. Durst wrote to me asking if I would like to carry out an internship under him at a German company called Promeos. I was fairly unsure at the time about whether I could manage an internship and survive at a (back then) seemingly alien city. More importantly, I had already secured a summer internship at the Indian Institute of Science under Prof. J. Srinivasan- both projects seemed equally intriguing, and I was equally eager to work under either of the professors. (Both of them are behemoths in their fields, and very experienced people- It is hard to explain how delighted I was at the prospect of learning from them, and how hard the choice was)

At Germany, I was expected to work on porous combustion technology, which is a process of burning fuel without allowing it to form a flame. (For various reasons, a few of which I now realize, this is better than normal combustion) This would involve using basic momentum and energy transfer equations to model heat transfer in porous materials- fundamental (and hence fascinating) stuff.
At IISc, I was expected to handle climate modeling, which would involve a lot of thermodynamics (always a plus where I'm concerned) and fluid mechanics. I will leave out the details, because I am not entirely sure of them- but rest assured that this seemed at the time to be an equally fascinating field.

I did what I could- I talked to people I whose opinions I thought sensible, and whose advice I value (this is a very short list!), and made a list of pros and cons of either choice.

As an example, some pros on the German Internship scenario were
(i) Basic Fluid Mechanics and Heat Transfer
(ii)Working under Prof. Durst,
(iii)Insight into the way German companies work, etc.

The cons included
(i)Virtually no vegetarian food
(ii)Looong distance travel (and its associated hassles) involved
(iii)Zero knowledge of German,
(iv)No local cure for homesickness available, etc.

To save myself from the mental anguish of having to choose, I let a coin make the decision for me. Heads it was, and I boarded the flight to Frankfurt on 15th May, 2007. (This was preceded by considerable anxiousness and finger-crossing as the visa issues were being sorted out, but with help from the 42nd, uncle RC, home, and Prof. JS, this was sorted out- no reason to explain that in here.)

What is this blog about ?

2007-05-19T16:47:00.000+05:30

Hello.

My name is Karthik, and I'm an undergraduate student studying in Guwahati, India. This blog is a first hand narrative of events that are transpiring during a three month stay at Erlangen, Germany.

This blog is not likely to be an interesting read for the average person (Not even remotely).
I write this for two reasons:
1. The number of things I find interesting or worth taking note of here are too many to keep track of without a log- I'm writing because I'm compelled to. I intend to delete this blog after my internship is done and I have returned to India.
2. I can avoid having to repeat myself several times over by directing people to this website if (and when) they ask what the trip is/was like.

It is likely to be a fairly personal account, with extracts from conversations and my interpretations. Please feel free to comment, ask questions or to ask for information. I will reply when I find time.