So what do you do?

I am really starting to fear this questions from acquaintances. Generally you meet or get in touch with someone after a long time or are introduced to someone new and the topic inevitably turns to what you do. While its relatively easy to answer those also in research (who generally don't pursue after the generic questions) it gets difficult to answer those who are not.

This is usually how such a conversation with me would progress...
Person - "So what do you do?"
Me - *thinks oh no* "Umm research..."
Person -" oh "- *pause* - "so you are studying?"
Me - "well both study and work actually"
Person - "oh - what do you do for your work?"
Me - "Umm research..."
Person - "Oh on what area?"
Me - *tries the simple approach but with two possible responses - neither works!* - a) "electrical engineering etc" b) " magnetics etc"
Person in response to b) - " But you are in electrical department?" *description of research has to follow*
Person in response to either - "oh that sounds interesting. What is your research/thesis topic?"
Me - *interesting - really?? - oh no* "long name on thesis topic with unitelligible sounding words"
Person who got response a) at this juncture - "That doesn't sound like electrical engineering"
At this point I would really wish the person was no longer interested but some still persist.
Person - *blank look* "ok ... what do you do for it - can you explain some of it?"
Me - *Must I? I don't understand half of it* - "ummm .... let me see.... " * proceeds to some sort of description of work*
Person - "That sounds interesting" *changes topic*
Me - *sigh - now couldn't we have stopped at the first "interesting"?*

I know its nice to have people interested in what you do...but in this situation it does put me in an awkward position of not being able to state a profession and be instantly understood on what it is I do.

That stupid feeling...

I've never felt more stupid than these days after I started doing my PhD. Some one asks questions about my work and I don't know the answer or I have all this data that just don't make sense and I don't know why. When something goes wrong most of the time I don't know why - I even don't know when it goes right!
Well I'm glad to know I'm not alone and this feeling of stupidity is not necessary a bad thing. Came across this article recently The importance of stupidity in scientific research from here. The last paragraph puts things in perspective:

"Productive stupidity means being ignorant by choice. Focusing on important questions puts us in the awkward position of being ignorant. One of the beautiful things about science is that it allows us to bumble along, getting it wrong time after time, and feel perfectly fine as long as we learn something each time. No doubt, this can be difficult for students who are accustomed to getting the answers right. No doubt, reasonable levels of confidence and emotional resilience help, but I think scientific education might do more to ease what is a very big transition: from learning what other people once discovered to making your own discoveries. The more comfortable we become with being stupid, the deeper we will wade into the unknown and the more likely we are to make big discoveries."

In Memoriam

Writer Arthur C Clarke dies at 90
I'm dedicating this post to one of the greatest science fiction authors of all time and brilliant visionary. He not only wrote some great books he also conceptualized geostationary satellites and predicted space travel. His books bring the wonders of futuristic space travel, communications and other technology to the common man. It is incredible to think that we have now realized some of these things that he wrote about as science "fiction".
On a personal note there is some pride in that he chose to live in Sri Lanka my home country. Sadly I had never personally met him but I know many others including my father who have played table tennis with him. As for his books they were among the first books I graduated to after leaving behind the "enid blytons" and they were the ones who first inspired my love for science fiction and even science as subject. They shall always remain among my favourite.

As he said on his 90th birthday ""I want to be remembered most as a writer. I want to entertain readers and hopefully stretch their imaginations as well. "If I have given you delight in all that I have done, let me lie quiet in that night, which shall be yours anon." ; He has most definetely accomplished that.

A bit of my own medicine

Had a chance to TA for a class when my sup was out of town, and while most of the others do TA regularly this was a first for me. I had an insight (?) into being on the other side of that table in the tutorial room.

First off one of the tutorials was at 9am; from my own habits I knew this wasn't going to be a full class nevertheless I waited till 9.20 before starting and and still had some one waltz in at 9.50!? Same thing happened for the afternoon class. I should have know such a person didn't care much for the tutorial but yet I decided to ask them the answer to one of the questions - and surprise - they didn't do it.

All this didn't bother me until at one of the questions a student worked out the solution on the board and one of the steps was y = 1/x^n, dy/dx = -n/x^n+1. After it was completed some of the students looked a little confused and when asked what the problem was they asked me how the differential came about! Granted this wasn't a maths class but it was a class of engineers!! and its one of the more simpler differentials. Oh well I guess I shouldn't have been surprised later when some couldn't identify that 2 sets of equations with 2 unknowns could be solved simultaneously.
On a positive note there were some gems in the class too who enthusiastically (or at least it seemed compared to the rest) answered the questions and asked some good questions back.

I found myself wondering at the end of it all were me and my friends/classmates like this too? Thinking back in all honesty I'd have to say yes - we did skip classes or walk in late and asked some pretty obvious questions from our tutors. Now I need not imagine how frustrated they must have felt - but if you did this all the time semester after semester do you become slowly unsensitized I wonder.

End of another year

I haven't updated this since July I see, and another movie post is just not right so lets at least have a few words before the year ends.

So this yeah has been pretty eventful for me personally. Started it off in a whole bunch of confusion as to what I wanted to do, and by action or inaction I made a decision and stuck with it. Was it wise? - only time will tell I think but so far I don't regret it.
Was able to go to a conference and present as well. Now that was exciting! There was some sense of accomplishment in doing that. Conferences are a good experience but they are far easier to get accepted for so, New year resolutions - get some papers published.
Completed all my modules this year too which means hopefully no more written exams! - dare I say forever?

One thing is I wish for a nice long rest after all this is over, but that is still a long way to go. Our perception of time seems to vary with how we want things to be, and seems to flow contrary to how we want it to go. If you have had a long tiring day and and you want to go home the hours just stop moving, but if you want more hours to finish something under a deadline everything just zooms by (or at least thats how it seems). Life however always seems to be moving faster and faster. Though it feels to me like just yesterday that I came here, I realize it has really been a very long time. I don't even know who the first and second years are and when introduced they always look at you like they are looking at some ancient tree with some sort of reverence. I don't feel like an old tree yet!

The perception of your age is also very confusing. Working in the lab although stressful and all that, you never feel live you've left school and entered the real working world that you still tend to act and talk like you were an undergraduate. We aren't exactly irresponsible or something but there seems to less real world worries plaguing us. When I compare that to some of my high school friends who are married have kids, buying homes ... it seems like these tasks are so far away from us and the worries they may have still elude us.

Re-reading this bit not a lot of it makes sense to me but I'll leave it as it as a reflection of this blog's title finishing the year on a random note.

Sinking to someones level or rising above it?

There might be certain things that you wouldn't do because you consider them wrong or unacceptable to you - they might not be wrong in the sense of "rules and law" and some of it might even be encouraged, but its still wrong in you book. However you sometimes find yourself on the receiving end of such behaviour and feel wronged or angry and have the power to give the person back some of their own medicine. - Do you stop yourself? After all there might be a lot to gain - you might be seen as standing up for yourself, or be able to erase / create impressions different from those created by others actions towards you. But to get there means having to stoop to the level of behaviour you yourself detest - is that realy worth it? The whole thing of rising above a situation sometimes feels highly overrated! - oh conflicts - how I wish things were much simpler sometimes.

Words

Words can be powerful things - so we've heard time and time again. Very obviously we use our speech and writing to communicate our ideas, feelings, thoughts to others but its much more than that. What we say can leave a person feeling happy, hurt, angry or sad; and sometimes we don't even realize the impact our words have had on another. In certain instances we do indeed say things to comfort someone or if feeling particularly nasty to hurt someone or instigate an argument, but quite often we say something and happily walk often not realizing we may have made someones day or realy dampened their spirits. Sometimes its just the case of not thinking before speaking but at other times it might just be that the other person analysed your words much more than you had given thought to. We can only try to our limit of communication and giving thought to our words to avoid misunderstandings but they are inevitable at some point.
People who have a good command of language seem to do better over others - if you take debate or argument between two people where the command of language is clearly not equal between the two, you will notice than even without many relavant points the person with a better command can convince the other or other people that his point is correct just by communicating his few ideas better or by using more convincing statements and words. In most languages (at least the ones I know) there are many words which can mean the same thing but some carry the meaning across more strongly or leave a more lasting impression (for example if you say someone is uniformed or something - using uniformed or naive would be a nicer way of saying it rather than calling them dense.) If you do get down to accurate vocubulary yes there are differences in the way words that mean the same things are defined but we do tend to use them more depending on the impression we want to create. This vocab also comes in handy when people want to "sugar coat" or say nothing at all. When someone is avoiding an issue they sometimes say a lot of things but if you strip it down you realize they have said nothing at all or made no comitments!
** would it be ironic that my playlist happened to come upon "Words" when I was writing this?