Network connection

I have a super interesting story to share: In my new lab I have one network connection for my Desktop. Since I always bring my laptop, I asked for one more connection. The new lab has every facilities for that and even we have two extra connection port in the room; all cabling and everything already done and it turn out that all the department has to do is to activate those connections! cool!

Now guess what they did! they ask 300$ for the activation! I have never heard of so much amount of money just to activate one connection and unfortunately I never thought it can even be charged. Then I thought probably those extra connections are just-for-show they really don't have any cabling inside them but guess what, they do have cabling and everything but where does that amount of money coming from?

Here is the explanation, in our previous building, if a new connection had to be established, they had to buy the cables and connect the new port to the switch and so and so... and all those things cost 300 bucks! So in the new building even though everything is already done they just charge that much amount of money to activate the connection! Wow! what a lovely elegant idea! Since I don't have money what I did was buy a 10$ switch which comes with two cables. I connect the switch to the network port and connect my machines to my new switch. Obviously that solves my problem but I am thinking what will I do if one fine morning they asked me for million dollar because that the cost of a 3GHz computer when the department was established!

'STUFF' NO-ONE TOLD ME

I went to my feed reader and found google has posted a new "blog of note". I used to follow them regularly but now I don't. Today they posted an excellent blog as a blog of note. I am not a big fan of cartoon but this blog is so good. I have copied one from that blog, I hope you would enjoy it as much as I did.

It's true, no one keeps count of my failure; more precisely no one even cares.

String theory!

I had a very little idea about modern physics; I new the name of modern theories; well may be what they 'state' as well. But hardly any idea about String theory. I tried several times to understand what it is but in most cases I was demotivated by complicated description of String theory. I had an idea that it is not easy to explain String theory in plain english, or even if it is described it is impossible for me to visualize what it is. In a nutshell, somehow I got the idea that String theory is not for me and don't try this way.

Then one complain is pretty common among non-physicist, what have the physicist done during last fifty years? Some of them were even more aggressive to claim that age of physics has finished. Well, even though I have no idea what they are doing, I had a great respect for the physicist and I used to argue them by saying what they are doing is far reaching for the engineers; probably that is the reason why we are not seeing any breakthrough from experimental perspective! By knowing little bit about String theory I have to say that I am partially true unfortunately not entirely. It seems like String theory is based on something that is not doable now not even in foreseeable future; then what the theory is all about?

The theory is all about an eleven/ten dimensional thing and that is the cause of everything is this earth, it has very well formed set of constants those make everything different from one another; and we human being can see only three (four) dimensions and rest are somehow vanished (either they curl up or they are just beyond our universe) and we cannot perform any experiment to neither falsify nor justify the theory. Wow! what a beautifully stated elegant idea of modern physics! After reading carefully, I believe I come up with another theory that might have more implications, "God made the universe and he made two different things called energy and particle, he live in a holy place where no human being can ever enter or imagine." Doesn't it sound right?

It is elegant because, it will solve not only the problems of physics but also the social problems as well. Why it doesn't sound good? Because we cannot prove the existence of God and neither falsify his existence, the same thing is true for String theory (at least right now). This is interesting, when I was a kid I memorize the definition of science, where there was significance for experiment and analysis but without that part I am now confused what I should call it?

আবল-তাবল

অনেকদিন পর লিখতে বসছি, কি জানি লিখব ভাবছিলাম ভুলে গেছি। আজকাল মাথা ঠিকমত কাজ করে না। মাথারই বা দোষ দেই কি করে, কমতো আর ধকল যায় না ওর উপর দিয়ে। মাথাটারে মাঝেমধ্যে খুলে রাখতে পারলে খারাপ হইত না, আমি আর মাথা দুইজনেই ক্ষানিকটা শান্তি পাইতাম। যন্ত্রনা! মানুষ কেন লেগো দিয়ে তৈরীনা :( যাইহোক কিছুত আর করা যাবে না, বরং কিছুক্ষন আবোল তাবোল কথা লিখি।

আজকাল মনে হচ্ছে আবল তাবল কথা লিখার জন্যেও চিন্তা করা লাগতেছে, হমমম... অনেকদিন রাজা উজির মারা হয় না, আগে কত ভীষন ভীষন চিন্তা করতাম, রাজা উজির মারতাম, আজকাল আর কিছু করা হয় না। আমি কি মারা গেলাম নাকি! তপু ভাই বলত আমার যখন খোজার ইচ্ছা শেষ হয়ে যাবে, তখনই নাকি আমি মারা যাব! আমি মনে হয় আগের চেয়ে ভীত হয়ে গেছি, এখন আমি অনেক কিছু বিশ্বাস করা শুরু করছি :( খোজ করতে ভয় লাগে। আমি মনে হয় মারা যাচ্ছি, এরপর হয়ত একটা ভ্যদামাছ হয়ে বেচে থাকব, না! আমি তা চাই না!

ভাল একটা খবর আছে! আমি বাড়ি যাবার টিকেট কাটছি! ডিসেম্বরে বাড়ি যাব, গিয়ে কি করব জানি না তবে যাব। অনেকদিন পর বাড়ি যাব! আমার অবশ্য বিশেষ আগ্রহ ছিল না, কিন্তু আব্বুর শরীর ভাল না; আমাকে বাড়ি যেতেই হবে। যাই, গিয়েই দেখি নতুন কি আছে।

ভাল লাগে না, ঝড় থেমে যাচ্ছে! ঝড় থেমে যাচ্ছে! ভবঘুরে ঝড়টা থেমে যাচ্ছে একটু একটু করে, প্রতি নিয়ত মনে করিয়ে দিচ্ছে, আমার সময় শেষ হয়ে আসছে। আমি আমার মত করে বাচতে চাই, বাচতে চাই!

Art of writing

So, now I am learning 'Art of writing', it is not about misleading the people, it is about presenting something positively. It is writing something several times but still each version looks like entirely new one. They called it art of writing :) Interestingly this art is everywhere in academia. This art is so emerging that NSF has to offer a workshop for scientific ethics and they are trying to enforce it by making a prerequisite for research assistants.

The motivation for the conference organizers is money and the motivations for the researchers is more funding. Organizing more and more conferences and publishing more and more papers is like win-win situation. Researchers are happy because they can publish more and get more funding and organizers are happy because they can earn more money. It's an interesting industry; by the grace of this industry we have got few bunch of politicians and lobbyist claiming themselves as scholars!

Here are some interesting posts from Daniel Lemire's blog, "How reliable is science?", "Manifesto for Half-Arsed Academic Research", "How to get everyone talking about your research!"... Anyway, this what we called research and we are proudly proud of our research :D

Microsoft Academic Search

I came to know about Microsoft Academic Search couple days ago. It gives a very fancy visual view of researchers, conferences, journal etc. Probably they are competing with Google Scholar. Google scholar doesn't have any fancy view. In my opinion what a student/professor needs is the results not the views. Very few of their targeted people care about view, how fancy the results look like and so, what they care about is results. Isn't it wrong effort for wrong group of people.

Even if I accept the view, the search is essentially slow. Probably the reason is their fancy view; the speed bothers me a lot. What I care about is first correct results not slow fancy view. On the top of that the results are not updated. I tried with different people and most of the time, it missed the very recent papers and articles.


And most interesting part is some results are even wrong!!! I have no clue how they do it but some results are wrong. See in the figure, according to Microsoft Academic Search the first author is a guy from University of Cairo!!! wow!!! Particularly I know the first author of this paper and he has never been in Cairo in his entire life :( Another typical Microsoft product. huh! another bad product!

Norman revisited: Game day

Junks: Motion blur

Norman revisited: Duck pond

What's new?

Not very many things,

I have completed my long cherished Masters and now thinking of PhD. Probably, starting my PhD from this Fall. Not very sure whether I am ready for such a long commitment(!) I am truly afraid of my flickering mind and now even dare of small commitments. At this point I am not very sure how good it would be to consider such a long commitment. Anyway I moving forward who cares what next.

My parents are really insisting me on going back home but I don't feel like. I never enjoyed my life here but the homesickness I had is missing right now. Right now, I am in no man's land. I don't feel like going back home rather I think would love to go somewhere else. Moving to a small town and living a tranquil live is my ever lasting dream. So I am not considering going back home at this point.

I am deliberately looking for the reclusion I had before and hardly manage some. I need some time for myself. Somehow I become very popular which I really don't want to be. I need to find a way.

Just got back from a trip to Vegas. It was okay but really missed Hasib and Rassel. Planning a trip to Colorado sometime this month. I think that's it. I am really trying hard to make my life little less boring.