How much do Post Docs make?

How you would wish some mistakes were never rectified!!! :D

Photo Speeding Tickets

That's one of the most beautiful pictures of my car I have! Montgomery county (the county where I live in Maryland) offers this service at a "fee" of $40. In the past 4 months or so I have been forced to take advantage of this "service" 4 times. The image on top is just one of the three images they sent with every letter. The photographs were followed with "You were doing 47 MPH on a 35 MPH zone" Ironically that has been the EXACT same violation on 3 occasions. After that I learned and slowed down. So they went ahead and sent 3 more photographs of my car for doing 42 on a 30 zone.

By the fourth time I was quite upset about the added $40 to my monthly credit card bill. (One of my friends suggested setting up a direct debit from my bank account) So I decided to contest this ticket. I went ahead and sent them a "Not Guilty" plea. I wrote them a nice little letter which basically said I don't believe I was speeding and their "automatic" camera is faulty. They sent me back a letter asking me to appear in court at 9.00 am on 6/29/2009. Unfortunately my mom opened that letter and freaked. Her son was going to go to court to fight a losing battle. Then he will be declared a criminal in an alien country.

On the internet I found numerous websites on how people think this is the most ridiculous way the state can think of making money. The state obviously thinks this is a brilliant idea! Citizens are obviously pissed off. The cops on the other hand are not quite sure what to make of it. They are not very happy about people slamming their brakes when they encounter the camera zone to go 10 mph UNDER the prescribed speed limit forcing a subsequent traffic backup. The obvious question is IF people knew where the cameras are, how does the state make money out of it (they are legally bound to put up signs on the road if there is going to be a speeding camera) Infact one of my friends also forwarded me a link which mapped out all the areas where there were speeding cameras in DC and Montgomery county. Apparently 40% of the county's "speeding ticket" revenue still comes from these photo speeding tickets.

In any case I dressed up in a suit for my June 29th court date. I honestly believed that I was NOT speeding on the said day. So I was pretty confident that the camera was faulty and I would be able to argue my way out of this. I had no other defense. And I had no clue how I was going to proove that I was not speeding. As usual I was planning to wing the whole thing and make stuff up along the way. I reached the court at 8.40 for my 9.00 am court appointment. There was a LONG (probably 50-60 odd) list on the notice board of people who were awaiting trial for the photo speeding ticket. Outside the courtroom people were visibly pissed at the concept of the photo ticket. People had a whole sheet of paper filled with things they were going to say to defend themselves. "They reduced the speed limit from 40 to 35 for a 200 yard zone and put a camera in there!"

At about 8.45 a.m. we are told that there is no power in the building so they will have to delay the proceedings indefinitely. I couldn't believe it! No power?? Seriously?? Hearing this one guy goes, "Will you reimburse my parking?". A little later they open the courtroom (without the power and any recording equipment). Inside the courtroom, I am in for a big surprise. I find my BOSS sitting there in the court trying to defend one of his own photo tickets. I found out that he had the exact same story. He paid three earlier tickets and was tired of the 40$ monthly fee. So he decided to take this up in court.

The "judge" shows up and starts his opening speech. He tells us that in the absence of building power, we could either wait for the power to be restored (and place our trust the city electricity board who said it will happen in an hour) or we could request a continuance (reschedule the court date). In either case, if we decide to fight the case the chances of our getting out of the ticket are as low as 5%. This is because all the classic excuses like the "camera was faulty" or "Someone else was driving the car" don't ever work. So we might as well go back home and pay the $40 fine. If we loose the case, we end up having to pay an additional $22.50 in court fees.

I rescheduled my court date and went to work. They promised to send me a letter with a new court date. Now I am in a big dilemma. Should I pay the $40 and lose out on an oppportunity to be entertained in the court? Afterall $22.50 is just a little more than two movie tickets. And the entertainment this experience promises to provide seems to be worth much more than two movies!

Taller the Richer

Should taller people really be taxed more than their shorter counterparts? I heard this idea for the first time a few days ago on NPR. They were talking about the strong corelation between income and height of people. I thought it is quite a fascinating corelation. To give a heads up on what this post is about, let me give a brief overview on what exactly I'm talking about. So there were a couple of people from Harvard who thought it would be a great idea to research this topic (Mankiw and his "graduate student". Obviously Mankiw did nothing but give his "graduate student" the topic and the graduate student wrote the entire paper which NYTimes wrote an article on.)

On NPR, there was this person who was being interviewed who gave a whole lot of arguments on why tall people make more money (The typical 6-foot American earned $5,525 more than a 5-foot-5-inch worker, after correcting for sex, age and weight) She went on to talk about higher confidence/self esteem. The ability to be a leader since people tend to "listen" to them since their childhoold etc. Most importantly she talked about having a more "attractive" personality which automatically fetched them a higher paying job than an equally qualified shorter guy.

I thought the whole idea of higher taxes for higher people was BRILLIANT. (Obviously my being shorter has a big role to play in my opinion formation :D). But someone really needs to think the whole thing through (i.e. if anyone has the guts to even think about implementing it) First off, couples file taxes together. So what if the husband/wife is really tall and the wife/husband is really short? How do we account for the height tax? An obvious solution is that we should consider the mean height of the household. Or is it really?

I think considering the mean height is a hideous idea. It is not uncommon knowledge that most women fall for the taller dudes! I have heard this so many times from so many of my women friends that I have been this close to adding a few platforms under my own shoes! So how about we introduce an additional variable to the entire "dating" equation! The taller guy comes at a price. Literally!

The next obvious question is, if you tax based on height, you should also be taxing on other "self esteem driving qualities" such as beauty. The argument that many people tend to make with this is that height is a much more "objective" variable as compared to "beauty". Although I agree with them to some extent, I am willing to believe that some amount of objectivity can be brought into "beauty" as well. Maybe the research in the world is just insufficient to properly quantify beauty. Infact, some painter said somewhere that all attractive portraits have the exact same geometric ratios between different features on the face. So maybe we can come up with some tax equation which talks about the angle the nose on your face subtends when a couple of rays pass through it!

The point being that taxation based on height is just another way of looking at non-linear taxation. We already have an established practice of people who make more money being taxed more. So it doesn't seem very far fetched for people who have "a tendency to make more money" to be taxed more as well! This is simply because the "tendency" is something they have acquired genetically. Of course there are youngsters who are encouraged to work out more so they'll end up being taller. Maybe that is just another math equation they should think about solving before going for their next swim!

Back to Blogging

Doompi inspired me to do this after I sent a couple of long emails! She probably thought I would quiz her less if the "email" was not in her "inbox". HA! We'll see!!!

Oh and if you happen to read beyond two posts below please don't forget to remember, i was 4 years younger :D

Before Sunset

I love that movie. I watched that movie for probably the hundredth time today. For the uninitiated, let me begin by giving you a brief overview. You can skip the next two paragraphs without loss of any continuity.

A twenty something American guy (Jesse) is doing what all white guys love doing. Traveling around Europe. During one of his train journeys, he meets a young French woman (Celine) who he starts talking to and hits it off really well with. Jesse and Celine spend a day in Vienna and part without exchanging phone numbers because they want the memories of the night to not fade away. They decide to meet at the same place exactly six months from then to see if they both feel exactly the same way till then. That's where "Before Sunrise" ends. I really liked that movie. It was very romantic and mushy and all of that with a very feel goody character attached to it. This was in spite of (or probably because of) the open/seemingly sad ending the movie had.

Before Sunset starts nine years later. In the interest of this post not becoming a review of before sunrise and before sunset, let me just say that Jesse and Celine meet again in Paris and spend another day together talking about their current lives and how much they remember that night in Vienna.

Like I said before, I have watched this movie several times. Each time I watch it, a different portion of the movie appeals to me. Before Sunset is a lot more cynical than its prequel and it has a very real lifey character attached to it. I really liked Ethan Hawke's Jesse. He seems to be this guy who is at a place in life where he has resigned to fate and has figured out a way to find happiness in whatever he has. He used to be a big cynic where he was trying to find the purpose of life and all that. But now after going through whatever he has gone through, he has realized that there is no point in being cynical. The only way you can actually BE happy is if you WANT to be happy. This sounds very much like all those self help books. I am just agreeing with whatever they are saying. But one of the lines in the movie was really very appealing. Jesse at one moment says, "so many of the men that I admire most, their lives were dedicated to something greater than themselves..." This reminded me of a google status message that a friend of mine had. It said "Many of the great achievements of the world were accomplished by tired and discouraged men who kept on working". At the instant I saw it, I simply dismissed it as one of the many "funny" quotes people like to put up on status messages. But after watching the movie I started to think about that statement. Being "tired and discouraged" has some very interesting connotations here. Could it mean that work is the ONLY thing that is not tiring/discouraging?

Julie Delpy's portrayal of Celine was indeed very interesting. She seems to be a very smart, well informed, independent kind of a woman who thinks she knows exactly what she wants. I found myself being very empathetic and in many ways also attracted to her character. But honestly, I didn't like her at all! She was obviously too cynical. She seemed to be the kind of person who doesn't WANT to be happy in life. She is always complaining about how life is being unfair to her and all that. So however much you want to "help" her she would refuse to be helped. I can not imagine what living with such a person would be like! Maybe my mom was right when she said, god bestows huge responsibilities on great people!

At the end of the movie, you could either be the cynic and agree that "life sucks then you die". Or you can be the optimist and say "there are no failures in life. Just setbacks." I took the political compass test (http://www.politicalcompass.org/test) and it revealed that I am very close to the center of the axis (with a slight inclination to the right side AND the libertarian side). So I think I can justify not wanting to adopt either of the above statements (but still leaning slightly towards the former)

"Happy" Blog!

A friend suggested that I should also have one of these! So here I am back to blogging. Well, it so happens that, I have quite a few friends who have spent an year in the country that has always been under consideration in most of my blogs! Quite a few of them started writing blogs and just stopped in a couple of months. The point I am trying to make here is that everybody gets on with their lives! Blogging is not as much fun when you are NOT so much frustrated with life!

Well I have ALL the reasons to NOT be frustrated today! I am going in an hour's time to have a few beers with 5 other guys all of whom are americans and discuss where to buy guns! Yeah you got it right! I am talking about guns. The reason Gulshan Kumar is no more. The reason Sanjay Dutt spent 11 months in jail. (Yeah, you got it right! I got all these wierd examples from a certain gangster who features quite prominently in most of the leading indian dailies these days!) If you still don't know what I am talking about, I am talking about the object loosely shaped on the lines of an inverted "L" with a trigger in between. (I added the "loosely" for all those perfectionists out there who are going to come back at me saying. No way a gun is like an inverted L)

So coming back to the beer gang! The first time I participated in this small party, I was baffled. How the hell can these guys talk about firing guns leave alone purchasing one! Then I realised the big american dream. "Shooting for the stars". Only they plan to do it literally. One guy was extremely disappointed with himself. "The only thing I have ever shot(\been able to shoot) was a bird." Gotta tell him, "You're getting there buddy! All the stars on Ursa Minor are just a stone's throw away!"

So apparently, you can just go to some store and buy a gun. Ok, so I will have a loaf of bread, milk and hey that's a cool gun you got there! I'll have that too!
No licence required! I am pretty sure there is a way of ordering one online too!

Ever since I got an email id of @umd.edu, I get mails like these everyday!

From: Campus Police
Subject: Crime alert

Incident: Assault
Occured: Today
Reported: Today
Location: Address

Brief Details: A whole bunch of crap followed by "the victim then heard a gun shot fired from a semi automatic/ (or worse still) automatic revolver of" such and such caliber and so and so make!

Then comes the best part!!

Prepared by: Police Major
Officer of the chief

They have actually hired a guy whose job is to send these mails everyday! My friends were once working on a business plan and wanted to give me the job of CMO(chief mailing officer). Well they were a bit too late! They already have such posts here! And they obviously don't have to do too much. Hand every other guy a gun and these people won't be out of job!

I was discussing this gun problem with a roommate of mine yesterday. His immediate reaction was, "we should have a gun each too!" And I am very sorry to say, he is absolutely right!

Ok I am off to the gun! Oops! Beer party now!

Happy Devoli!

Yeah thats how its spelt....... Ask any native here. And if your instincts yell out, "you can't even say it (or for that matter spell it) properly", then you gotta ask yourself, CAN YOU????
Devoli is actually spelt Da choti ee ki maatra, Va aa ki maatra, La badi ee ki maatra and probably not even Diwali as most of us like to spell it as..... Ok i am not here to teach language classes. And specially not hindi language classes. Because as my good old friends point out, I don't really understand these languages..... I started with Tamil in my childhood. Now i struggle at my mother tongue. Then came hindi where I could never really get the maatras right (feel free to point out any spelling error in my devoli!) Somewhere between(or was it after) that time came english. The language which is probably responsible for my survival..... (My roommate is going to kill me for saying this) Finally, as my good old first yr. roommate likes to say, came C++. So thats FOUR languages I know (Oh! And I also learnt french sometime so that makes it 5) and not one of them I can speak well.

A wise man would say, "Be practical. Just make sure you get your thoughts across." But it gets quite difficult at times. Matlab (no thats not the mathematical computational tool I am talking about), how can you possibly converse in just one language..... Just think about it, the average indian is groomed in such a way that he is just not competent to speak in just one language.....
Yeah I know thats a pretty strong statement to make. But try to actually implement this. You'll find it quite difficult to speak in only one language without any inadvertent use of words of a different language. I am quite sure you'll succeed. But you have to make a conscious effort towards that......

Welcome to the machine
This song by Pink Floyd inspired me so much that I decided to take up a career in research very much against the whims and fancies of like minded, peace loving people of my time. No no, this is not another one of my "Life sucks" posts where I am complaining about pretty much everything in life (although that is precisely my state of mind right now). Interestingly the sympathies of the most unexpected of people arose after my previous post. "Hang on Right there man! You are going to start enjoying soon!" Anyway I seem to be digressing from the point as usual.... The intention of this post was originally to share one of the most bewildering aspects of the ambitions of this world and its pupils.

The post is named "welcome to the machine". So you guessed it right, it has everything to do with "the machine". The CNC machine to be precise. For the uninitiated a Computer Numerical Control machine which one of my good friends wisely calls the hole drilling machine. Hole drilling! Seems to be one of the simlest, most innocent things to do! I mean after all what could it possibly involve! Imagine driving a nail into the wall to hang a painting! To a level headed bloke with reasonable amount of sense, having an elaborate machinery for this simple task would sound quite foolish.
The trouble starts when people want to "automate" the process of driving the nail into the wall! Now all those machinery lovers, please don't go overboard and start lamenting about how it simplifies life and makes things faster. I mean for heaven's sake get off your ass and get yourself a hammer!
Inspite of what I may appear to be saying, I am quite ok with the automation as long as it makes me work less. But as you may rightly have guessed, it is never so! That's because automation, more often than not, relies on this most unreliable piece of machinery invented by man called the COMPUTER! Its sometimes quite scary that these things can do things they were never supposed to.
When the ABACUS was invented all it could do was addition and subtraction. I sometimes sincerely wish that things never got more complicated. Because these things went on to control, as my good friend likes to call it, hole drilling.
Well so here is what prompted me to say all these unpleasant things about the one thing that most of us can't imagine a life without! This CNC machine in our lab is controlled by this, yeah you guessed it right, computer! So as it is supposed to do(I have started believing so), it shuts itself down quite unexpectedly quite often. Obviously, once this thing shuts down, it becomes almost impossible for a reasonably well educated person to bring it back to the state it was BEFORE it decided to switch itself off so that it can continue to serve this "hole drilling" machine. So it was decided to connect an "Uninterrupted" Power supply (or the UPS as some would like to call it) to this darned thing! That looked like a pretty simple job to me. Even I could handle that!! But I was terribly mistaken! As soon as this computer started receiving power through the UPS the computer decides to let out an explosion (or as a few moderated people like to call it, a "pop sound") and ironically, shut itself down forever. Quite amusing isn't it? Well trust me, it was not! When I told my advisor about this, his mouth was literally left wide open!!!!! Then he starts frantically running up and down the hallway looking for people who would know how to fix a "computer". As was expected, each and every soul in that building knew how to use a computer! But it took us an hour and a half to find someone who could FIX one! Finally this computer guy says that probably the power supply, the motherboard and the motion cards on the computer conked off. I had to fight my instincts which were yelling out asking what the hell is left if these things conk off! And if all the things that he said DID really conk off, it meant an expenditure of about 25000$ for my advisor. At this point, I had already started wishing that my advisor decides to withdraw his restraining order and yell at me."How the hell do you manage to screw up every single time." or more optimistically, "Its alright! It was probably not your fault." But he decided against both. Finally this guy comes down to the lab and starts inspecting around and realizes that the computer that served that machine was a different one from what he had dealt with earlier. I was left wondering why man decided to go ahead and create MORE than one type of the same machinery that he did not himself understand! After about 3 hrs of deliberation by the end of which I was quite close to a nevous breakdown, it was discovered that the power supply unit had conked off. I knew that!!! That's where the explosion came from! After class XII I had decided to give up chemistry. And rightly so, because you could never reach an answer in that subject. You could only JUSTIFY the answer that you came to know was correct. I really wish I had realised this about computers too back then! Because with each passing day, this notion of mine is being strengthened by unknown external and internal forces.

This one's mine. Lets just begin by saying I don't think I will have enough time to keep posting here every now and then given the amount of work I am gonna be given over the next..... (three years is it??) Been told that i would "hopefully" stick around for 3 yrs here. Which could mean two things a) "You won't be able to tolerate this place for 3 full yrs dude." b) "If you don't wrap up your job within 3 yrs, Phd or not, you're gonna be kicked out....... "
Given the current sequence of events, both scenarios are quite appealing to this fresh out of 5th year Dual Degree graduate, from IIT Bombay. "This country works on networking man! Build your contacts. Talk to people. Tell them about your work. Get to know about theirs" Yeah Right!

Anyway that's just the research here. Living here.... O boy! I wonder why people care to come all the way from multicolored, multivarious(that's probably not even a word) places like india to the monotony of this country. They call it the land of the big apple. (ok ok I know its just New York) But dude, you are in for a big shock! All apples here are of the same size. Wonder how they figured out which apple is bigger. Its as if they measure out each apple by a calliper before plucking it from the tree. Oh no they don't do that! They PREDICT the size of the apple that would grow on the tree before the seeds are planted. And its not just apples, its cabbages, cauliflower, onions, potatoes and truck loads of other crap.
Nothing absolutely NOTHING is left to the imagination! They predict a Hurricane Katrina. And when it hit New Orleans, they are like, hey! That shouldn't have happenned. How the hell did that go wrong. And spend a month and a few billion dollars figuring that "where did the prediction go wrong" No wonder they have very few people unemployed here.

You're not a meat eater? The first thing you gotta do is kick yourself hard. Then time for introspection. Ask yourself, what is meat? I went to one of the fast food outlets here and said, tell me what you have that has NO meat and I don't care what it is, I'll have that. He was kind enough to say. "We have 4 dishes that don't have meat. You can choose from any of these. This is lettuce, onion, chicken. No meat. This is mushroom, potatoes and salmon. No meat. This is mushroom, chicken and mozarella. No meat. This is onion and fish. No meat." I hear him and stare at him. Now you tell me. What the hell do I say? I told him I don't eat meat. He understood perfectly. I promised him that I would eat whatever he gave me that doesn't have meat. He gave me FOUR options! I couldn't possibly ask for more than that. Finally I had to break my promise, say thank you very much and go hungry.
I am trying to come up with a reasonable way of expressing myself now. I learnt in IIT to not be fussy about things. I only wish I had learnt that better. For the next time, I plan to say I wan't something that has no meat, no chicken, no fish. But if this guy comes up with some wierd food item like say pipedbrocolli or something, you could only imagine what I would do......... If you are a vegetarian comitting suicide is very simple. Just stop cooking!!

We used to end 4th year valfi profiles with, "All said and done, he is a very nice guy. Extremely helpful. Very friendly. Golden heart" and all that crap. I am going to take off from that one here and just say, this is a good experience. Makes you want to not come back here ever again!