Being Judgemental

 You need to be an asshole. It is just cool. You need to be very judgemental, that is funny, even if people disagree with you. Almost every single epic thing is dumb. Take paragliders or skydivers for example. Such idiots. Bungee jumpers are uncommitted. There is absolutely no need to do all these things, just take a walk, that is adventure enough and actually an extreme sport in India. 

Let us take another example. Space travel. Going to space is dumb, there is literally nothing humans can do in space that robots cannot. If you really want to 3D print organs or produce the cure for cancer at scale, then you probably need a robotic factory to do it, and not a bunch of orbital blue collar workers. Nobody needs to go to space. Period. If you want to explore space, physics, the past, time, then we need to send instruments out there, and we should prioritise and focus on this to achieve our science goals! 

Im going to keep judging a different popular thing in every paragraph. Musicians. People who sit around and jam and make noise. They feel some kind of energy in collaborating and feeding off each other. Vampires are like that. This is a force fit, an orchestra where everyone is compromising and no one is really exploring their instincts. When you jam, you remain in the same place instead of going somewhere, or doing anything. Convinces you that the hivemind is a cacophonous place, and that it is better to cultivate your brainwaves in isolation. 

Let us see. Cars, vehicles, these are dumb, nobody needs personal transport. The true cost of having these abominations is not being paid by anybody. The environmental cost is tremendous, and even electric vehicles do not justify this. We are deferring the cost, and accelerating towards doomsday. Anyone who drives a personal vehicle should not. 

Book readers, omg such pretentious jerks. Walking around with inflated heads. 

Lol I will try harder next time, maybe not. 

The last day of Vikram Sarabhai

 I was piecing together a story on the death anniversary of Vikram Sarabhai, and noticed some discrepancies in the various accounts, because the itinerary that emerged after reconciling the sources was very jumbled. Note that the SSTC here is the Space Science & Technology Centre, which was later changed to Vikram Sarabhai Space Centre after his death. First of all what was the name of Sarabhai's secretary? Was it NVG Warrier or KV Warrier. Guess V Warrier is the safest option here. Anyway, here is the timeline, the best I could make it. 

On 29 December, Sarabhai visits SSTC for grueling meeting sessions and then attends the foundation laying ceremony of the Kazhakkuttam railway station with the then Minister of State for Railways, Kengal Hanumanthaiya. He is staying at the Halcyon Castle hotel, a colonial-style retreat for the Travancore royal family, that is now the Leela Kovalam. Sarabhai has dinner with AE Muthunayagam and Warrier. Muthunayagam was invited to breakfast the next day. 

Sarabhai was to be presented with a report on the Control Power Plant the next morning. Kalam called Sarabhai in the night from the airport lounge in Delhi, where he had gone to attend a Missile Panel meeting. Sarabhai instructed Kalam to wait at the Trivandrum airport after disembarking, and meet him at the airport itself. Warrier also told Kalam to meet Sarabhai at the airport the next morning. Sarabhai planned to fly to Bombay the next day. 

The meetings, breakfast and flight never took place. Sarabhai died of cardiac arrest, his body was airlifted to Ahmedabad for last rites. Now the discrepancy is in the movements of Kalam here... In Rocketing through the Skies, G Madhavan Nair writes, "His last discussion was supposed to have been with Dr Kalam. Dr Sarabhai's private secretary, KV Warrier, told Dr Kalam to meet Dr sarabhai the next morning on the way to the airport, as he had planned to go back to Delhi by the morning flight on 30 December 1971." 

According to Kalam's autobiography, Wings of Fire, "It was my usual practice to brief Prof. Sarabhai after every Missile Panel Meeting. After attending one such meeting in Delhi on 30 December 1971, I was returning to Trivandrum. Prof. Sarabhai was visiting Thumba that very day to review the SLV design. I spoke to him on the telephone from the airport lounge about the salient points that had emerged at the panel meeting. He instructed me to wait at Trivandrum Airport after disembarking from the Delhi flight, and to meet him there before his departure for Bombay the same night."

So let us say he flew on 29th, attended the meeting, and flew back on 30th, he could not have possibly spoke to Sarabhai from Delhi before boarding the flight back! In My Odyssey K Radhakrishnan has just made a mistake by shifting the dates by a day, with Sarabhai dying on 31 December, and saying everything that happened on 29 December actually took place on 30 December. 

Update:

So in Vikram Sarabhai: A Life by Amrita Shah where on 29 December, Sarabhai had lunch with RD John, the head of TERLS and HGS Murthy, then met the chemicals group in the afternoon, that went on for a few hours. UR Rao was at this meeting. This was followed by a meeting with Vasant Gowarikar, Suresh Thakur, Y Janardhan Rao, AE Muthunayagam, MK Mukherjee and EV Chitnis. 

Gowarikar noticed Sarabhai reclining on the floor with his hands under his head. Thakur and Sarabhai were travelling to Ahmedabad together. Thakur was the PRL Director. Warrier went up to Vikram's room, a little after ten, and this is when Kalam called from Delhi, and Sarabhai instructed Kalam to wait at the airport the next morning. 

The next morning, the staff entered the room, and found Sarabhai apparently sleeping, with a book open on his chest. 

Now I want to know the name of the book! 

 

Missed a couple of dreams

Missed a few dreams because I had not logged in with my personal id on the laptop I am reviewing right now. These were quite immersive and colourful ones. Urban exploration has reached deep into my subconsciousness, where I explore decaying cities with interesting constructions, and document them with photos on my smartphone. Now this mental model of both the phone and the camera and the UI has all been sharpened, so things like photos not being saved, the device being an odd shape or the UI being off no longer occur, and I do not get lucid. I remember exploring a temple city with a tank yesterday. 

Today morning I saw some beautiful sights. One was of solitary glowing trees of bright bejewelled colours and textures like rubies and sapphires in fields of light or clouds. Another was lots of tiny blinking small glowing particles filling the sky and making different patterns like the murmurations of swarming starlings. Woke up feeling pretty elated. 

Newbie journos are the worst

 What I hate is idiot reporters not looking up the phrases of what they mean. If you are a writer, there are two things that you need to do before writing 1. Read and 2. Consult a dictionary. If you are not in the habit of 1 and 2 then you should not be writing, you are better off opening up a momo stall or a beauty parlour. 

X breaks silence on Y... there was no silence if X is just talking about it. Stop using. Use single quotes not double quotes. If you use 'Exclusive' in your headline, that just means the rest of the content on your site is copied and shitty. Even worse is quoting the exclusive story of another site, that's just a shitty site copying from another shitty site making a biofilm of shit. (Note: This is not the same as a biopic). Stop using AI especially if the adjectives and descriptions are wonky. A sequel with a gap of 20 years from the predecessor does not continue right where the previous movie left off. Fuck it Im going home. 

I need to get back to my website

 I got all excited and made a website, but I am not getting inspired enough to add new stories. When I initially started it I was deeply interested in space without spaceflight, but my work requires me to dwell into spaceflight all the time. Anyway, I have decided on a new approach, which will hopefully work. 

Have also been watching all the Star Trek episodes back to back, and now only the original series is left, after having gone through The Next Generation, Voyager, Deep Space 9 and Enterprise. I guess among all of these Voyager is my favorite, and I like DS9 and Enterprise more than The Next Generation, so I am not sure how much I will like the original series. Might just pick up Prime for a couple of months to watch Picard. In the middle of the second season of Enterprise right now. 

I also enjoyed vibe coding for a while, but not anymore. The AI kept messing up perfectly fine code. 

Swiggy delivery boy just gave me dieting advice

 Swiggy really needs to train its uneducated workforce of idiot delivery boys better. North India is full of retards who are very willing to give out of domain, unasked for advice. This asshole is giving me paani puri and telling me that I should not eat gol gappe in winter season for some health reason. I pretended to not listen to the idiot. I wanted to yell 'Who the fuck asked you?', but I ignored him and concentrated on my other order. 

The problem is not just this one idiot, everyone in Delhi is very willing and ready to give their advice and talk about the most inane, personal details. For example in office cab the driver was telling all the workers how he does not like to sleep with the bedsheet over his head. The remaining idiots in the cab were also very willing to engage in this conversation. 

Another time a taxi driver advised my colleague that 'your beauty is your biggest enemy, and you don't understand it yet.' I mean who the fuck asked you? Another time some young 16 year old kid at a tapri looked at my long hair and said 'Sir ladies jaise dikhte ho', I smiled, flashed the V sign and went home, and he was utterly confused by my simple reaction. This long hair attracts a ton of comments, one uniformed dog in metro checkin made me go through ladies queue. Another uniformed dog told me that it makes my neck weak. 

I mean all of these uneducated idiots have stuffed dust in their brains, and that makes them going around spreading that nonsense to everyone. I feel they get stomach ulcers if they do not perpetuate their ignorance to others. Turning wheat into useless noise is a hate crime against the fertile Earth. Living in Delhi is making me increasingly racist against everyone in North India. 

Immense hatred against Karnataka cops

I just have immense hatred against the corrupt dogs that wear uniform in Bengaluru. I curse them and hope that their families will wither and die because of the way they have destroyed society. All I can do is curse them. I hope some day they have their comeuppance, made to apologise to all the people they harassed and troubled, and the fined monies are returned. Bastards dishonour their ancestors. 

It is a Sunday, have finished with my work, but have to stay on for two hours and twiddle my thumbs. The progress on the laptop repair is not going well. There is a phillips screw that is stubbornly stuck and not dislodging. The base of the laptop has also warped and twisted because of the heat. The thermoplastic polymer used for construction is not great. This was supposed to be a reliable, long-lasting machine! 

I also have to open up my other laptop to see what is the problem with that. Need to update my astrophysics blog, but there is just no new info or papers that is exciting me any more. Time to dig deeper into the new publications. 

Will go to play the game now.