Edit: Hmm....may be it wasn't that funny, anyway, I have taken some of the text (that was supposed to be funny, but most people did not get and left a few in...)

For our project, one of the tasks was to come up with an OR story. Me and Vikas we came up with this: :) ... in a light note (hope you find it funny...2 tough critics have said its ok...lol...it has some implied Systems references)

A Utopian vehicle manufacturing company realized that the electricity bill for the year was really high. After a study, they found out that one of the areas of concern was the lighting in the parking space. The parking space required lighting at night since the plant operated 24 hrs a day for weekdays and sometimes weekends. Therefore, the head of the finance consulted the head engineer, also known as the "Big C", about this problem, in the "meeting of the heads" (which shall be remembered for generations to come). After consulting, the Engineer inspected the parking lot at night to check how much flux was being generated by the lights at night. After inspecting, the Engineer, who is a Systems Design Engineer (from the legendary class of '77), remembered that he learnt about a method of Optimization in his third year of Engineering (which unknown to him he will teach in 31 years). The Engineer thinks that if he can minimize the lighting flux while maintaining levels of visibility (you got to be able to see you know!) for the three parking lights, then he can probably apply that to the entire parking lot to minimize the bill.

Labels: funny, random

I have always believed that the potential of the human mind is vast and remains very much under-utilized. I find it interesting (and enjoyable? :) ) when I can draw analogies of such thoughts to science.

Analaogy 1

When we learnt about drift velocity in "Electricity, Magnetism and Optics", this is the analogy I drew:

First, let me explain the concept. In a wire, the electrons move at very high speeds in all directions - they move at a high speed randomly. This type of random movement is useless to us. We want them to flow in 1 direction in a controlled manner to make use of it, as current. When we apply a potential difference across 2 ends in a circuit, we induce a magnetic field in 1 direction, this causes the electrons to slowly move in 1 direction. The random movement is still present, but overall the electrons are starting to move in 1 direction - the velocity with which they move is called the drift velocity. This velocity is much much slower.

The analogy I drew was, the human mind is like electrons in the wire. There is a lot of chaos present. But when we think of something and "will" to do it. We cause the mind to move in that direction with some drift velocity. If we had very good control of our mind - to be able to control all the electrons, if the speed of random motion was used towards achieving an objective. The power would be truly amazing.

I guess the reason I started thinking of this, relates to something I read in Sanskrit a long time ago, which meant something like "The human mind is like a monkey, it keeps jumping all over the place. It is hard to keep it steady on something. To control the mind, is like controlling the wind".

I kid you not, try this and you'll realize - try to NOT think anything for sometime. Its really hard. Even if you try to think of just 1 thing for sometime, its hard. You will notice that there is always some other thoughts that come up, or something running in the background...

Analogy 2

Well, this is not really an analogy, but something supportive, I guess, lol. In the thermodynamics class today, the professor was talking about entropy (which is basically a measure of the disorderness of a system).

One thing he said was to maximize the performance of a system, we want to minimize entropy. Haha...I feel the same way about the human mind, to maximize performance, we need to minimize entropy.

Let me end this post with that. :)

Thinking about it, I could have organized the flow of the post (in terms of content) better... but oh well, this is not English class and these are just thoughts as I had them (somewhat...)

lol.

Labels: philosophy, science

Yesterday, when traveling in the subway I had this thought (haha...this falls under my interest of meaning of life :D):

To show weakness is true strength, but a show of strength is true weakness

Of course this depends on the context, but I find it rather interesting :)

And I took a stab at writing my first poem (I think this is my first...not sure) motivated by the cloudy and rainy climate:

Happiness in Perfect Sunshine
Pleasantness in a clear and starry night
But the prolonged battle of light and cover
giving a struggling light and
a downpour of tears is truly fearful

Haha...I know it does not rhyme, but I don't think poems have to :P

I like strong rain where it showers heavily for a short time and then there is bright sunshine following it. Yesterday's rain was slow and prolonged.

Labels: philosophy