- Two guys sneaked into Sharavati (girls’ hostel) on the evening of the Classical Night. They were chased by the security who locked the main entrance. They ran to the balcony on the first floor, jumped off it and made their escape.
- On the same evening, one guy was standing in front of Tifanys lawns wearing a lungi and smoking a cigarette. This became a favorite hotspot for cigarette smoking during the next few days. The area outside central library was usually filled with the stench of cigarette smoke, particularly after the pro-shows.
- A queue from the entrance of ICSR main auditorium to the car parking outside MSB (about 150 m) was seen for the lecture by Kamal Hasan at 09.00 A.M. on the second day. Compare this to the crowd that usually turns up for a Video Conference by a Nobel Laureate during Shaastra.
- Last year, I noticed (being a part of the Core team), that the narcotics and cigarettes that were confiscated before the pro-shows were not accounted for and came into the possession of the security coordinators (students). This year was no different. I saw a guy stuffing the items he confiscated into his bag before Choreo Night.
- Anil Srinivasan, when announcing Tarang results, “Poriyal and Thayir Vadai have together become our Aviyal.”
- General arrangements were pathetic. The host team’s performance in Dramatics was unpleasantly interrupted by a power cut. What were those generator-vehicles for?
- Most girls, in an attempt to evoke awe with their dressing sense, managed to evoke a lot of laughter. One girl who was wearing a short skirt and sitting on Tifanys lawns was unexpectedly embarrassed when a puppy tried to crawl in between her legs. Another girl who weighed 200 kg was wearing a white-something that made her look like a laundry bag.
- For a change, the lead guitarist from the Blacklisted band had his hair cropped short. And he was very good at playing the guitar.
- Shankar Mahadevan was simply ruthless. I emptied my Iodex bottle and ran out of Volini after the show. How did he managed to stand for 3 hours singing non-stop and finish with Breathless? That being said, who was he singing to when he sang IIT mein rehni waali… Kanchivaram saree pehenne waali… Pretty Woman?
- Hurricane Bells was a welcome change from the usual death metal in previous rock concerts at Saarang. Two of the guitar solos were really good. Hammerfall vocalist was a proper entertainer.
GNOME Panel Alarm Clock Applet
The command I use is “gnome-screensaver-command –lock” which locks my screen. A better option is to enable the popup notification and use “sleep 2 && gnome-screensaver-command”. I can’t play alarm sounds as I sit in a lab. My eyes are on the screen almost always, so locking the screen is very effective.
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Here are 8 of my favorite truetype fonts in alphabetical order. Some of them are proprietary. The pangram is one of the shortest (click here for more). Fonts are commonly classified into serif and sans-serif (or simply sans) categories. A serif font has finishing strokes for some letters such as T, R etc. Serif fonts are considered better for reading. Long pieces of text or paragraphs are usually written in serif (e.g. newspapers) whereas titles are commonly written in sans-serif. In a monospace font, the letters occupy fixed width. Monospace fonts are used for coding and ASCII documents. There are serif (Courier) and sans-serif (Bitstream Vera) monospace fonts.
Fontin is an excellent serif font and I use it frequently. Times New Roman is the most commonly used serif font. Most of Elsevier’s journals use Times New Roman. Helvetica is considered to be the best sans font. Arial is very similar to Helvetica. I use Liberation Mono for my terminal. Lavi and Talk to the hand are two excellent hand-writing fonts. I’ve provided download links to all free fonts listed below.
I have been riding a TVS Victor GLX on the roads of Chennai for over a year now. I take the road from my house at West Mambalam (near station road) to my campus at IIT Madras quite frequently. On this route, there are about 10-15 speed breakers (also called speed bumps or speed humps). The speed breakers outside the campus are far worse than the ones inside. My evaluation of how “good” a speed breaker is based on my answers to the following questions. How comfortable am I crossing the speed breaker? What maximum speed can I cross the speed breaker at without a significant jerk that would throw me off my seat? Should I step down one gear or two gears or no gears at all when crossing the speed breaker?
I used to be a terrible judge of what speed I can cross a speed breaker at. Previously, I assumed that this depends only on the “size” of the speed breaker – the relevant dimensions here are the height and the length (along the direction of motion). If the speed breaker were high and short (small length), I would slow down. If it was low and long, I could comfortably cross it at 40 km/h. What if it was low but not long? Take the example of the one near CIT Nagar – on the road that MTC buses take from T.Nagar B.S. to Saidapet. I’ve found that I must usually slow down on my bike, but buses which have bigger tires (and perhaps a better suspension) can swerve past at 40 km/h.
My assumption that the only relevant factors are the height and the length failed when I realized that I could cross the speed breakers inside the campus comfortably but not the ones on East Coast Road which were of the same dimensions. There was only one identifiable difference between the shapes of these two speed breakers. It involved the slope of the shape at the end points. Whereas the speed breakers on the campus were shaped more like a Gaussian bell, the ones on East Coast Road were between sinusoidal and parabolic. When I meet a speed breaker whose slope at the end-points is nearly zero, I find that I do not have to step down from the fourth gear. On the other hand, to cross a speed breaker with a higher slope at the near and far ends is much more difficult. Although I cannot figure the “how”, the “why” lies in the fact that the torque on the wheels is higher in the latter case. This is also the reason why you step down to the third gear while climbing a flyover. Roughly, I figure that the transfer of some of the horizontal momentum to the vertical direction produces a torque in a direction opposite to the rotation of the wheels.
In my opinion, a speed breaker shaped like a Gaussian bell (with a low slope at end points) does its job. Although it does allow the rider to continue in fourth gear, it can definitely make someone going at 60 km/h slow down to 30 km/h. But some may argue that a speed breaker is meant to step you down from the fourth to the third gear. So I decided to look at how the shapes of these speed breakers are decided. It turns out that the shape of speed breakers are aimed at minimizing the vertical acceleration experienced by the rider. For such an objective function, a sinusoidal profile works out best. Even in the commonly used Seminole profile which is shaped like the arc of a circle, the slopes at the end points do not appear to be important. I wish these design engineers would also include an objective function that maximized the comfort of riders. Maybe they can maximize user comfort when the vehicle speed is below the speed limit and minimize it otherwise!
References
- Ardeh, H. A., Shariatpanahi, M., Bahrami, M. N., Multiobjective shape optimization of speed humps, Struct. Multidisc. Optim., 37, 203 – 214, 2008.
- Weber, P. A., Braaksma, J. P., Towards a North American geometric design standard for speed humps, ITE Journal, Januray 2008.
