A lonely Christmas

So, how do you celebrate a cold Christmas when you're all alone for the winter break and your flatmates are gone to sunny California?

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Eat a lot of pie and watch F.R.I.E.N.D.S.

This french pecan silk pie was killer. Had a ton of whipped cream on it. Also, as you may already know that I live in the land of obesity. That reminds me I gotta do some ab crunches next morning. 

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Current Book: "The Hobbit" by J.R.R. Tolkein
Current Music: "I'm sexy and I know it" by LMFAO





What makes a genius?

My education has rendered me no choice but to seek out and characterize everything. To put labels to things, to set patterns and logic behind every existing phenomena, and to find rationale behind every happening. No matter how far my science may be from the truth, it's hard for me to not to give out personal and biased judgments.

There, there you have your disclaimer.

                                 

I've often tried to explain to myself and my friends the definition of a genius and what separates him/her from an average person like me or anyone who is modestly willing to accept himself/herself as average. Thus I'm attempting to make some theoretical claims based on the graph above. The graph belongs to spectra collected from a Raman spectrometer, which I just got from google.

Now imagine the X axis is a span of all possible fields of art/science and Y axis be the magnitude of input in arbitrary units (a.u./intensity). While an average person would try and fool around different fields in life being able to put only limited effort in each due to constraints of a lifetime, his spectrum would be like a noisy spectra. Just pure noise, wobbling, shaking line along the X axis (see 700-800 cm-1).

But a genius would spend a life which would result in a spectra with sharp peaks at 1-2 points, spending his/her 40 years of life in a single, very specific field and making the most out of it (eg 950 cm-1 and other selected peaks). That's what separates an average person from a genius. An average person, at least me, is often afraid to put too much energy into one thing, so I'll try to do 2 things at a time, and then 3 and then 4 things, ending up as well-rounded human being who is perfect at nothing. But mark that I'm not saying, that a person by birth is a genius or average, it's simply a matter of motivation at a given point of time. If someone gets highly motivated in one specific area at some point, he/she may do well in that field, but then the question is will she/he stay motivated long enough? You could argue that geniuses stay motivated all the time, working on a problem unflinchingly, long enough till they solve it. I leave that open for interpretation.

If you want to make something out of your life, reduce the noise, and get some peaks. Focus.

                                         


Trivia#1: By the way, I know a bit about crystallography and I can tell you that in the results of most spectroscopic techniques and X-ray/neutron diffraction methods, sharp peaks denote crystalline material and wide humps denote amorphous material. Noise is simply subtracted or removed from the figures for convenience of knowledge dissemination. And most researchers try to study crystals because they are so precious and so rare.  (oh and of course some people study amorphous materials like Glass too, well good for them, not so thrilling as crystals)

Trivia#2: There's a reason why all women like gems and diamonds. Now you know why. (because they are crystalline and give sharp peaks in their spectral features, just like geniuses!)

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Current Book: "The Time Machine" by H.G. Wells
Current Music: "My December" by Linkin Park



Why everyone is competing?

As I hurried down the corridor, Tom, an undergraduate student from the class in which I serve as the teaching assistant, smiled at my gloved hands. 


"So, ready for the competition today?" I asked in passing by. 

"Oh yeah, its heating up. Everyone is putting their projects together. But I guess ours is going to be the best," replied Tom, nodding his head in quick succession. 
The competition ran for the class duration and everyone's project was judged carefully with an unsaid prejudice. Professor X, as usual oblivious of human emotion, was busy judging too, not just the projects but also the capability of young students. And they were only young humans, to me, who were all equal in the end. I tried my best to be the best host, and kept the excitement up by constant cheering and encouragement as per the proceedings. 

Then the results were announced, and of course not everyone can get the first rank. Students in teams ranking the last weren't particularly happy. Tom and his friend, as a team, ranked last in the competition. 

"So the winners! The winners come here! Take pictures for the winners Tanja! A picture of the judges with the winners! The winners! One picture of the entire team of winners! Let's take a group photo with winners at the front!" These were some of the sentences that Professor X uttered after the results were announced. Every time she mentioned winner, a hot nail pierced my heart. I wonder how would the teams that didn't win must have felt. 

"It's not about winning, we all learned something today. We all learned why things work and why they don't and I hope you learned that from this course. And don't worry about the final scores, they will be scaled down by a magnitude of 10, so there won't be a great difference between the scores of various teams, okay? Have fun, good job!

But by the time I announced this, the most depressed team was already leaving the room, with their project. 

"Hey wait, leave your projects on the table! We want to show other sections what you guys did! Everyone, leave their projects here for two weeks! Especially the winners, the winners' projects must stay with me! The projects must stay on the table, please listen everyone!" Professor X continued to ramble amidst the leaving, half depressed crowd. 

Tom and his friend, muttered something under their breath, and approached towards the exit door. I rushed past the crowd of students to meet the lost team. Just before they could leave, I asked them to stop, and I put a hand on Tom's shoulder,

"I know your name. You are Tom and you, you are Jim, right? I'm the one who's going to do the final grading, so I'll take care of you, okay? Don't worry, I will take care of you.

"Thanks, Tanya, thanks a lot...umm, do you want me to put my project back on the table? I can put it there now.

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Current Book: "When the Sleeper Wakes" by H.G. Wells
Current Music: "Dhinka Chika" by Mika Singh 


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