Nature's Symphony

It is the loud clatter makes me romantic, nostalgic, thrilled and ecstatic. How amazing! Clatter? To say that its clatter would be blasphemic. It's symphony - nature's loud symphony to all of us mere mortals saying " here I'm.. Show me something more beautiful than when I am taking a shower". I always thank God for giving me eyes so that I could experience this soul-stirring symphony of nature.

Every time I went home from Chennai, I hoped it would rain. My Kerala is so beautiful when it rains, the coconut tree leaves look dazzling green and the backwaters are a glorious sight with a million ripples created by the tiny raindrops. The sky would be ashen and there would be no trace of the sun.

It was so much fun going to school in the rain. The clatter of rain on my umbrella was in perfect resonance with the sound of water hitting the ground. And then there was the ad-lib of flowing water on either side of the road. I would pause for a moment to look at that tiny stream and create a giant ripple by throwing a stone into that tiny furious-flowing stream. All the paper-boats would form a mini-fleet around my stone.

I wanted to break free and throw my umbrella onto the wind and see it being carried away along the deserted village road and get myself drenched, so that I could also drown myself in the harmony. I am totally incapacitated , searching desperately for words when i try to describe what I visualise about the rain..It goes on and on..building up slowly and then becoming a steady downpour..

And when it is over, its saddening. The silence returns-painfully reminding me that its all over. Then I turn back and look at the last drops of water dripping off the hibiscus leaves. The air is so fresh, so cool and how can i forget the smell of soil.. aaah... The Sun breaks free from the prison of clouds that had it concealed. AS if it wanted to say "No more music now.. Silence!"

And on how many such rainy days has he come with an umbrella, after his lunch for our next session of study - which would be at the balcony. It was on another rainy day that I went (with them of course) on a train journey across my state to see her. Kannur, Bekkal Fort and the best bus journey of my life - from Kannur to Kasaragode when it was pouring down. Rain symbolizes Nature's poise and grace as a poetic symphony - simple and beautiful, yet arcane and full of a myriad meanings and interpretations.

Here's the sky - once again tinged with that lovely ashen and this time I want to make up for all that I could not do when I was a kid - I want to be out in the rain, running on the road with my umbrella and then throwing it wildly onto the road and watching the wind carrying it down the road as far as it can ...The coconut trees have started swaying wildly in the wind and the spooky feel is all round. It has gone dark.. I know its coming... and my heart is racing...

Mr Simpleton

Yes he is Mr Simpleton and Mr Frank. His ways of life are simple and he, like me, loves the simple pleasures of life - chatting of all nonsensical things. His world of nonsensical thought is horizonless. When i talk to him, i feel as if I'm looking at the mirror and seeing myself.

Every single person in the world is blessed with some ability to excel in something. And life is a discovery of that ability and making a career out of it. Though I'm no Knuth or Ritchie, i am a natural at programming and though i find "programmers" all around me, grumbling and cribbing about how boring their work is, i thoroughly enjoy programming and want to do it all my life. But Mr Simpleton, though blessed with ample brains to be another programmer has his interests firmly rooted in writing. It all started with the story of coach Kennedy- which was a perennial source of joke and joy for us. He memorized Readers Digest stories and used to reproduce them verbatim for his English essay writing exams and ace them out (by stunning the teacher with his "writing style"). But, how he has developed into a well-rounded writer, and how he writes interesting vignettes - intriguing to the core. And every time I finish reading his anecdotes, I crave for more. So, even with the limited word-prowess at my disposal, I must write this short whatever-you-may-call-it about the man himself.

All around me, I see americans who must do and will do only what interests them. It is their privilege with the lifestyle and facilites that they have - to pursue whatever they like. But we Indians, are not that lucky. Else, how on earth would a man like MR Simpleton be programming for his career?? What a crying shame!! As is his wont, mr simpleton becomes mr frustration when i ask him this. Now, for a biography, this one is not a listing of events in chronological order, its just the various facets of the man, as I remember them.

At first I too found him wierd, specially because he was utterly dismissive of what i passionately liked - music. He said he never listened to music. I surely thought he was stone-hearted. How could someone not love music,. I cannot do anything without having my headphones on. Everything in my life has changed dramatically even before i knew it, but music still is the constant. And he said he hated music.

But, all of that changed one day when I forced him to listen to "Silent Night". None of you would understand which song it is except the man himself. Slowly, he started listening to music, now music is his passion too. How could he not like what I like.. after all, all our tastes were the same.. Thats why we were best friends..

His advice was different. He never cared to be caring nor did he pretend to be understanding. He just blurted out what was in in his mind in a brash and unfriendly manner. One of my friends got frustrated with his "Advice" and opinions. HE just said that the man had no soul or sentiment. But I knew he had them. Maybe I knew him better. NO. I Knew him better - than everyone else around him. So I always listened to what he said. None of his creative imagination played a part in a real-life crisis. He is as practical as they come with his outlook on life. No wonder he ditched his passion and took up software.

He is a lover of everything which is elegant . He loves the wristy Azharuddin and has his select category of writers - whose books he devours by the dozen. But where there is a rule there is an exception - and he is an utter pervert when it comes to women - his tastes are the wierdest ever! Not inclined towards the fair and the beautiful women, he loves the slightly dark and plump ones. I generally struggle to find any grace in the women he points out to me and says "Nokkeda.. charakk.. charakk.". Makes me feel I'm the pervert.

Now its time to throw light on another interesting facet of his personality. Ones close to him know this as the "bemgcasrbara" or the "balgaintl" effect . If you are wondering what on earth are these strange coinages, thats how he frames strange words to memorize stuff. "BE Mg Ca Sr Ba Ra" are the group 2 elements of the periodic table. I remember having a tough time memorizing his phone number which was - 550972. And one day, having frustrated with myself , I asked him.. how on earth do you remmber your number?? And he said " 5-5 =0 , 9- 7 = 2". How many of you would have found a relationship between those numbers in this fashion??

Sadly, in the indian scheme of things, anyone who is a doctor or engineer gets a fat paycheck. And to trust one's creative ability and to make a career out of it would be too much of a risk. So he too was forced to take the safer route and end up as a software engineer. Thanks to blogging, he still pursues his passion and describes himself in his blogs as a " misfit in the ever-expanding software quagmire".

Maybe it is that nothing in life is too late. Sidney Sheldon started writing when he was 50+. Maybe his real career would begin when he retires as a programmer. Everything said and done, maybe it is time for me to catch hold of all his blog entries and publish them as a collection of short stories.

I miss being with mr simpleton. Those days were full of anxiety and tension about our future. But the endless hours of chat and laughs.. the evening chat on my balcony ...the "cyberhunt" for girls .. the endless "combined study" sessions... the 10 minute power-naps he used to take in between study sessions.. the rainy day when we bunked school and studied inorganic chemistry.. how he helped me with orgainc chemistry... how he took the entirely wrong route and still ended up with the right answer countless number of times...his tryst with physics...how he fought for mammootty ... how he flicks off his legs and has a crouched stance with a lifted-up shirt collar ....

Both of us are miles apart now. All those moments are never ever going to come back.. they have been swept by the tide of time into the vast ocean of memories.. but can God give me a time machine for a single day so that i could once again go stand on my balcony with a cup of tea and then be a student of organic chemistry once again ??

Amma mazhakkarinu..

The best of A R Rahman

Tamil hits

Mr Butler

yesudas_tamil_hits

Songs include:
Nenje Nenje (Ratchakan , ARR)
Vellai Pura (PuthuKavithai, IR)
Kalyana Thenila (Mounam Sammadham, IR)
Amma Endrazhaikkadha (Mannan, IR)
Thoongatha Vizhihal(Agni Natchathiram, IR)
Anbe Vaa Arikile ( Kilippetchu kelkavaa, IR)
Putham Puthu (Dalapathy, IR)

all my songs

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Another malayalam playlist

This is abhy's malayalam mp3 palylist :)

Vaalittezhuthiya neelakkadakkanil...Guess the composer

Listen with headphones!!

Insomniac Escapar

Malayalam classics

Oru Rajamalli

19 All Time great songs

Malyalam Playlist at WidgetBox

Interesting stuff.. how to approximately calculate 11^8 quickly without a calculator

You guessed it.. Taylor series...

HEre's the taylor series for f(x+ ) .
It is a simple expansion series of any function around a small increment .

Where are higher order terms (greater than the power of three). If we ignore
the higher order terms as well as the third order term then we can write:

And in the limiting case when we have

If you carefully look at the above equation then we will see a striking resemblance
to the famous Ito's stochastic equation, which is the basis of Black-Scholes option
pricing partial differential equation (PDE). The only difference is that in Ito's
equation we have the term instead of , that is in an Ito process we have

The above equivalence has a great intuitive meaning with respect of geometric Brownian motion and asset price movement, but that is not the purpose of this article. What we wanted to show was that even without any knowledge of stochastic calculus and the corresponding Ito process one can approach the Black-Scholes option pricing PDE if one were to make the accommodation shown above. It also shows that any asset price movement, such as the movement of a bond, can be approximated by the Taylor series expansion and regardless of whether we know the exact closed form solution for the pricing of that asset, it is possible,

using first principles of differential calculus to approximate the movement of the asset over small increments of state space and time.

In keeping with our arguments above let us show you that the Taylor series expansion can be used to calculate the value of any variable with a great degree of precision and speed, which may not be possible numerically.

Say, you wanted to calculate the value of , that is eleven raised to the power of eight. Doing this manually could take you forever. Of course, you can do it in less than a second using a scientific calculator or an Excel spreadsheet. But suppose you don't have an Excel spreadsheet (or a calculator near you) and you wanted a quick approximation of this number.

You can say that and that a small increment of is one and therefore,
and . First we calculate the value of which is very
straightforward and simple: 100,000,000. We need to use the Taylor series to
calculate the change in value of this number around the point . (Remember
by making x = 10, we have made all our calculations very simple and that is where
the usefulness of Taylor series lies)

Now using Taylor series for calculation we get:

Thus the change in the value of the function f which is given by is:

And the value of the function is approximated as:

This is quite good an approximation given the fact that if you were to use your Excel spreadsheet then for 11^8 (eleven raised to the power of eight) you would get 214,358,881.

Math stuf is tuff to remember..

How many of you know what is a closed form expression? Here's what wikipedia tells me ( i'd have wasted a lot of time finding out math books if not for wikipedia..)..

"In mathematics, an equation or system of equations is said to have a closed-form solution if, and only if, at least one solution can be expressed analytically in terms of a bounded number of certain "well-known" functions. Typically, these well-known functions are defined to be elementary functions; so infinite series, limits, and continued fractions are not permitted.

For example, the roots of any quadratic equation with complex coefficients can be expressed in closed form in terms of addition, subtraction, multiplication, division, and square root extraction, all elementary functions. However, there are quintic equations without closed-form solutions using elementary functions — see Galois theory."

So, I'm reading up the steerable filter design for feature detection using canny-like criteria which claims to have a closed form solution to its filter design and not a fully computational approach . Got stumped by the first sentence itself and decided to look up on whats the closed form solution. Ok. now lemme proceed.

Here's another one. Whats the Taylor series expansion of an expression? ( deja vu???).. If you wanna approximate a function with the sum of the values of its derivatives at a point, you need the Taylor series . And if that point is x=0, then its called a McLauren series. Here's wiki to the rescue , yet again...

"The Taylor series is a representation of a function as an infinite sum of terms calculated from the values of its derivatives at a single point. It may be regarded as the limit of the Taylor polynomials. Taylor series are named in honour of English mathematician Brook Taylor. If the series uses the derivatives at zero, the series is also called a Maclaurin series, named after Scottish mathematician Colin Maclaurin."

• Have questions? Find out how to ask questions and get answers. •

As the degree of the Taylor series rises, it approaches the correct function. This image shows sinx and Taylor approximations,polynomialsof degree 1, 3, 5, 7, 9, 11 and 13.

complex function f that is infinitely differentiable in a neighbourhood of a real or complex number a, is the power series

which in a more compact form can be written

where n! is the factorial of n and f ⁽ⁿ⁾(a) denotes the nth derivative of f at the point a; the zeroth derivative of f is defined to be f itself and (x − a)⁰ and 0! are both defined to be 1.

THIS COULD BE USEFUL

The Maclaurin series for the exponential function e^x at a = 0 is

Yuvraj..six sixes in an over..

Yuvraj!!!!!

Unsurprisingly, that's also the fastest Twenty20 fifty - it came up from 12 balls. Three fours, six sixes. More to the point, he's the first batsman to hit six sixes in Twenty20, and the fourth in senior cricket. Garry Sobers and Ravi Shastri did it in first-class matches, Herschelle Gibbs in the World Cup and now Yuvraj.
18.6
Broad to Yuvraj Singh, SIX, and he has, Yuvraj leans back and smacks that over wide mid-on ... it was the maximum from the moment it left that bat and the crowd were roaring as it flew
Broad looks quizzical ... and miserable. Can he ... can Yuvraj do it ... he looks like a man who knows he is about to be mauled again ...
18.5
Broad to Yuvraj Singh, SIX, down on one knee and larruped over midwicket, that one was more nine iron, it went into the night sky and dropped with a thud in the jubilant crowd ...
England have a team meeting. Shuffling deckchairs on the Jolly Roger though ...
18.4
Broad to Yuvraj Singh, SIX, Shiver me timbers!: Broad goes round the wicket, bowls a filthy wide full toss and Yuvraj steers it over backward point and it clears the rope again
18.3
Broad to Yuvraj Singh, SIX, he's hitting them everywhere, he steps to leg and smashes the ball over extra cover and it keeps on travelling ... the fireworks start on top of the scoreboard ... they've been going off in the middle for some time
18.2
Broad to Yuvraj Singh, SIX, now that really is sweet, no more than a dismissive flick off his legs, swatting a fly, and the ball arcs deep into the crowd beyond backward square leg
The dodgy TV measurement says that's 111 yards ... but as it landed outside the ground how the whatsists do they know? They guess, that's how.
18.1
Broad to Yuvraj Singh, SIX, that's out the ground, super shot over cow corner and it just kept going up