20 Qs

Top three questions
"is it Appa?"
"is it Michael Phelps ?"
"did he win the election ?"
So I happened to engage in a game of 20 questions with two kiddo kin of mine - & I gotto to say this , I've never had this much fun playing the game ! :D
Ground rules -
1 there is a clear distinction between man , boy , girl & woman
2 when talking about things , they need not essentially be on earth - they could be anything , thankfully ,confined to the solar system
3 if the person happens to be man the first guess would be "Appa !"
The general awareness of the kiddos impressed me . They knew about Barack Obama , John McCain ,Joe Biden , Sarah Palin , Michael Phleps , Alexander Grahambell , Edisson , the list Goes on !

random stuff ...

I make it sound like the rest of the things i write about is meticulously thought out ! heres a thought .. "there is a thin line b/w abstract and nonsense , & i'm on it :P " (but of course , this is inspired from the quote on my class t shirt .. there is a thin line b/w madness and genius and we are on it !) ..
Despite being random , I'll try to put it in an organized fashion , after all chaos is only organization that has not been understood :P .
The first thing is about the newest resident in my apt complex , who traces his roots back to Canada (or so I hear) . Meet Mr Goose . to give u a better a idea , check out the pic ...
I saw him walk into our complex form one of the side lanes . Now, it turns out pets are actually not allowed in the complex (except fish, though for some reason i never think of fish as pet) , so this guy must have walked from out of nowhere ! He gazes in my direction and start "walking" towards me. Here is an aside , I find it freakish to see a bird walk , especially when it can fly ! If i could fly , I would , why would I walk ! So I'm not sure what I am to do , except for fish out the camera . Thankfully, My Goose takes a deviation and decides to instead go for our backyard . I trailed him out of simple curiosity (and take some more pics :P) . I figured he would find his way out just the way he found his way in .
Cut to evening : After a long day of work (ya right !) I come back home and as I look out of the window , whom do I see ? Mr Goose got himself into a caged area (a rather large cage surrounding the dumpster) and is trying desperately to get out the cage . Of course , he can very easily fly out , but either something is wrong with his wings , or he's too bored of flying ! The funny thing is that u can actually just walk out of the cage , but Mr Goose was just not thinking straight ! I wasn;t sure (& am still not sure ) if a goose can peck , or in any other way attack somebody , so as I approached him I just naturally picked up a small stick (just in case ! I can't seem to picture the scene of a goose pecking me !) . I called my Roomie to see if he had any brilliant ideas .. which he did .. just call campus police ! ..
"Hello.. Campus Police , can I help u " ..
"hi .. I'm calling from ...blah blah ... u see the problem is that there is goose in the apt " (I could almost hear her giggling) .
" Is it in ur house ? "
"no .. in the complex " ..
" Is it attacking u ? "
" no .. "
" Is it aggressive ? "
" could be .. i dont know if it is .. " pause .."ok .. look .. this bird is obviously troubled , can;t u call animal control or something ? maybe we could get the bird to the lake ? "
" no sir .. let me know if it attacks u or gets aggressive ! "
" what ?? .. k ... "
Eventually , my Roomie n me manage get the goose out of the cage , with the assumption that he would be able to help himself from that point on .. (remember those things they would write on the black board before the exams " God helps those who help themselves" .. now how is this related to this .. i dont know :P ) .
It's been a week now , the goose is still in the complex . In fact he seems pretty happy to be here .
The second thing is abt some thing my advisor said . Well .. My advisor is an extremely witty person (seriously , I mean it ) .. I need to be on my "wit"s end to see when he drop in one of witty comments ! We were talking about a tool I;m wokring on, which I very naively call "myTool" , for my thesis. We were talking about renaming it to something more interesting . I got a little mixed up with the name of another tool (which was called bound-t ) I called it S tool; S being stack . he seemed fascinated by my confusion . said I should renmae my tool to S tool . and then when some one asks me what I did for my thesis , I would say " Stool analysis " :D ... (this was not the wittiest of his comments but sure was funny to me ! )
NOw u probably think I;m extremely jobless ! dont u ? just to prove that I'm not I;m going to ask u a question ... how can u find the recursion depth of a recursive function statically? All the brilliant papers that I have read on this boil down to (in the end) some sort of heuristic/ assumption .. is there a solution without base assumptions ?

a->b , b->c ,c->a => (a,b,c) ??

Math is far less complicated than human psychology. If you've ever followed Seinfeld , you will notice that there is an eerie silence between them (the four friends ) when it's not all four together (except for Jerry and George , they've known each other for too long ... ). In fact the episode is fun only when all four are in their "nothingness" together. so (a,b,c,d) work well , but , usually any other combination sucks! The opposite is more glaringly seen, a->b , b->c & a->c , but (a,b,c) doesn;t seem to work !! (now how strange is that!!!).

Krakozhia!

So, I got to meet Viktor Navorski :P .. well , obviously I'm kidding ! There is no real Viktor Navorski, no real Krakozhia (I did check that ! ) & I didn't even meet Tom Hanks !
But, the person I did meet reminded me so much of Viktor Navorski :) .. I almost blurted out "Krakozhia" when he started talking !!
Now that I have this lucky streak of meeting characters from movies that I like (terminal happens to be among the top in the list) I really hope I'll meet some specific ones. To do justice to all languages I'll try to name characters from every other "wood" . Shalini from Dil Chahta Hain (thats Priety Zinta , in case u forgot ) , Kalpana from Ghajini (thats Asin) , Mona Lisa Vito from My Cousin Vinny . I don't really follow any of the other "woods" , but thats just some of them ! Anybody else who wants to join the party is welcome ;) ..
Before U say "Ya , but U've only mentioned all the female characters .. " , I gotto point out that I did start this post with Viktor :P . I would also want to meet Luis Vargas from Original Sin (thats Antonio Banderas) (& not Angelina .. I;m not fond of her! ) , George Clooney (U can come from any of the Oceans ! ) , Vito Corleone from ... (I dont need to tell u that !) ... thats Marlon Brando , Neo from Matrix (only Matrix 1 .. not 2 , not 3 , only 1 ) .
Pixar's characters are on the top of my list too .. since there are so many of them , I'm not going take the trouble of telling you all of them ! As of now , I'm just going to keep my fingers (& toes) crossed :P