Mystery Spot

Imagine a hilly-region about 50 metres in diameter. Also imagine that it's spooky enough to defy some basic laws of physics, that gravity behaves anomalously; a billiard ball placed on an inclined wedge rolls up the slant, two people standing on opposite sides of a level surface appear to change height. Mysterious, huh? Well, that's Mystery Spot and it exists for real in Santa Cruz, CA. No one has been able to explain the phenomenon observed.

A free pendulum makes an angle (about 17 degrees) with the normal, as does this guy hanging from the door. There's a small story about this place. More spooky pics here.

Renouncing my Religion

Convinced that religion of all forms is primarily BS, a mistake in the making for centuries now, and having dragged it along unconsciously for 23 years myself, I've decided to let go. I've decided to abandon my religion. I have no religion anymore. If there are any "religious" rites that my religion ordains before such acts of renunciation, I'm unaware of it. And I couldn't care less.

My apartment-mate at where I stay currently is a Chinese, and he doesn't have any religion. Neither do most other people in China and I didn't even know. That's 1.5 bn people, straight. One of my T-shirt reads "Come to India.. 1bn people cannot be wrong"; if this is true, 1.5 bn people are almost correct in not having a religion. My earlier apartment-mate, a Japanese, had told me that most people in Japan don't have any religion either.

A lot of bloodbath has taken place in the name of religion. Most don't understand why God was invented and yet would go any lengths to water his palettes, as if he's a sick sadist hungry for pomps of drums and incense sticks. A sizable population breathes with the hope of being able to please god as means to salvation, whatever manna that is. I refuse to comply with this insanity. I refuse to recognize an illogical stream with justification no greater than age-long adherence by the multitude. I refuse the madness. I refuse my religion. I refuse all religions.

My First Journal Paper: TVCG

I received confirmation yesterday that our Display Wall paper titled "Garuda: A Scalable, Geometry-Managed Display Wall using Commodity PCs" has been accepted to IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics (TVCG). (Co-authors: Nirnimesh, Pawan Harish, Dr P J Narayanan). The paper underwent a series of correspondences, as is normal for a journal, before it was finally accepted. Thanks to Pawan for carrying out the numerous iterations after I left IIIT. The paper will appear in a forthcoming issue of the journal.

I tend to believe that this is the first TVCG submission from India, as far as I know of (Jagmohan confirms me this, and I know he can be counted on his meta-researching abilities).

So, yay!