Travel­ling by an AC Chair Car compart­ment for seven-and-a-half-hours brings back old and forgotten thoughts. My journey by the Shatabdi express reminded me of those classic He-Man and Jetsons cartoons in which everyone had a quick and easy form of trans­port — a personal flying car.

Now wouldn’t that be a useful thing? Unlike an airplane, it wouldn’t need a pair of wings to keep it high, so that would save us a lot of space. The problem is to keep a lump of metal up in the sky at a constant height. I was thinking of something on the lines of a car with rockets attached to the base, providing a calcu­lated accel­er­a­tion precisely cancelling out that of the Earth. Yes, it would take a great deal of effort to maintain stability, and a great deal of money to pay for the fuel, but since it is possible in principle, somebody ought to come up with a working prototype.

Or has someone already devel­oped something like this?

The Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy is one of those books that’ll have you rolling on the floor with laughter all day. Composed primarily of narra­tions and dialogues, the work was origi­nally broad­cast on radio, and subse­quently converted into a book.

It’s not really a story that attempts to get somewhere; it meanders into unknown terri­tory like Alice in Wonder­land, and occasion­ally forgets its desti­na­tion, but at the end of the day, the desti­na­tion doesn’t really matter — the jokes along the way do.

Like many other sci-fi books, the Hitchhiker’s Guide intro­duces a lot of jargon, but here, it’s not essen­tial to remember the terms in order to compre­hend the plot, so it makes things easier for the reader.

One aspect of the book that I’m thankful about is that there’s no waking-up-from-the-dream kind of ending, which would have been a terrible disaster. Something like that happened in Josh Kirby: Time Warrior, in which it turns out that the whole story was part of a dream. It happened in Alice In Wonder­land too, of course, but that didn’t seem very disappointing.

Last.FM is a site where you can use an AmaroK plugin to upload the titles of all the songs that you listen to, and create a personal ‘profile’. It seems plausible that someone could create a real-world profile of the person’s behav­iour and person­ality based on the music that he or she listens to. Adver­tisers would probably pay loads of cash to avail of that kind of infor­ma­tion, if it could be put to good use. Scary, isn’t it?

There was an earth­quake in Gujarat a few minutes before midnight, on the 7^th of March. It seemed quite strong, judging by the fact that my table and computer were shaking a lot — and I wasn’t even in a tall building.

Predicting earth­quakes is obviously a very hot topic amongst researchers today. Still, if we did learn enough about seismic activity to predict earth­quakes, what could be done to minimize the damage? I don’t think it is practical to evacuate cities and towns when the alarm sounds. I suppose the ideal thing to do would be to build houses and other struc­tures with some degree of resis­tance to earthquakes.

Maybe we could think of the earth below us as something similar to the ocean, that permits ships to float on it without any need for a founda­tion. Perhaps we could build struc­tures without founda­tions? A pyramid, for instance, could probably remain stable without much external assis­tance. What’s more, reloca­tion of a pyramid house would probably be quite simple — pick it up and put it somewhere else.

Folks who have their birth­days on the 29^th of February may have a hard-time deciding the timing of their birthday party. They could celebrate every four years, of course, but I guess that would depend on the kind of celebra­tion involved. If the quantity of presents received exceeds the quantity of treats given, then frequent birth­days are a better option, other­wise it may be wiser to stick to the four-year plan.

What do you think?

Appy is an Apple Juice Drink manufac­tured by Parle Inter­na­tional. This is what the 200ml pack says -

Appy is an elegant drink made from juicy, rich apples grown on cool scenic hills. Sophis­ti­cated and delicious, it tastes best when chilled.

Elegant and sophis­ti­cated? Cool, scenic hills? I’m reminded of adver­tise­ments for whisky and cigarettes, where it’s only towards the end of the commer­cial that you discover what they actually want you to buy.

Are we headed towards an age of comput­er­i­za­tion? Are the children of the future going to be taught by robots that take the place of the teacher in the class­room? The Computer Delusion is an article by Todd Oppen­heimer (The Atlantic Online, July ’97) that argues that bringing computers into the class­room is not too good an idea.

I guess the bottom­line is that even if we are heading towards such an age, there is no need to hasten the process based on presump­tions. Novel method­olo­gies should be intro­duced in gradual phases, and only after being thoroughly reviewed should they form a part of the mainstream process.

Many polls conducted over the Internet have options like “Yes”, “No” and “Can’t Say”. It’s the latter option that’s really fasci­nating. If you can’t or won’t give an answer, then why vote at all? These polls aren’t manda­tory. They don’t give away free gifts to people answering the question. Why go to the trouble of voting, if all you’re going to say is “Can’t Say”?

Richard Chappell posted an article on his blog: Is Longevity Good For You? Here, I repro­duce a comment that I had posted in response.

In my opinion, welfare is additive to the extent that it is consum­able. The first step towards rational analysis of longevity is to realize that no matter how long an individual manages to prolong life, he/she is subject to eventual death. Personal welfare does not come into the picture after death, so from a purely first-person perspec­tive, death is accept­able at any point of time. What really consti­tutes a measure of personal happi­ness is debat­able, but this measure is something that cannot be defined beyond death.

As far as the social aspect of longevity is concerned, the stake­holders are both close relatives who are emotion­ally affected, as well as the rest of society that is cultur­ally affected by the death of the individual, in terms of his/her poten­tial contri­bu­tions to society. Person­ally, I would prefer longer lives for my fellow humans, irrespec­tive of the ‘shapes’ of their lives. My argument for this is two-fold. A longer life, with the excep­tion of partic­ular cases, raises the sum total of happi­ness amongst close relations. Secondly, the individ­uals contri­bu­tion to society is propor­tional to the extent of his/her life. This is assuming that we provide the ‘elixir’ to everyone impar­tially. There may be anti-social elements whose longevity negatively impacts society, but they are in a minority. The same applies to ‘non-contributors’ to society.

In summary, life-extension research is neces­sary, because longevity is immate­rial from a personal stand­point and benefi­cial from a social one.

I had an anxiety-driven dream last night.

It didn’t have any logical story or anything like that. What I remember of it begins with me going down the stairs looking for someone. I’m on the first floor origi­nally; I go down a floor and then back up to the second floor where I find the person I am looking for, who, for some reason, seems quite melancholy…a few scenes later, Lisa Kudrow (Phoebe Buffay in Friends) is giving some kind of weird presen­ta­tion to a class, but she turns into some else.

A little while after­ward, I notice that the time is slightly more than 14:15. I realise that I have to catch the train to Mumbai, since it is the 4^th of March and I’m supposed to leave for home on the same day. Strangely, I’m talking to my parents, who are in Ahmed­abad. Anyway, I have this sudden doubt about the sched­uled depar­ture time of my train, so I check the ticket, which says that my train will leave at 15:09. So I get really worried that I’m going to miss the train; how am I going to find trans­port and get to the station in less than forty-five minutes? I haven’t even packed yet. I’m rushing to get ready as soon as possible; but then funny things start happening — like I wear the wrong shoes and socks, so I have to take them off again, and every­thing seems to be getting delayed.

Then I woke up. You would imagine that I’d have heaved a sigh of relief, but I didn’t. I noticed that the time was almost 08:00 and I would have to rush to get ready to attend a class. You see, real life isn’t very different from dreams.

Update 2006-03-01 15:35: Now I recall that I also saw a couple of people slide down a tube (like one of the rides in a water-park). They were chased by a ghost when they reached the other end. The ghost seemed as if it was made of dense white vapour.