[Placeholder: I lost the images in this post. Post skeleton found here. 7 pictures]
Tag: Mumbai
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Chai and Why: Origami and Mathematics
Chai and Why? is a public outreach effort of the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research (TIFR). Today I went to the session on “Origami and Mathematics”. This begins a series of Chai and Why? concentrated on children during the vacation season.
Today’s talk was by Vijay Arolkar and Mimansa Vahia. Before the talk, Sanjana Kapoor turned up and announced the Prithvi Theater’s Summer Workshop and the idea of having Prithvi Theater and its partners do special activities for kids during the summer. She even hung around till a few minutes into the talk.
Vijay Arolkar began the talk. He introduced his guru Prof. Natarajan who then introduced this group – Origami Mitra which met twice a month at Dadar. Few of its members were also present in the audience. Arolkar is a member of the TIFR’s Low Temperature Facility. His talk was filled with demonstrations that vowed the audience by some innovative techniques of forming basic shapes and models.
Mimansa Vahia, a PhD student in the Maths department at TIFR, took over and spoke about the axioms of origami and providing a strong theoretical basis for origami which enabled its application in mathematics. The example that stood and that got repeated throughout the day was the trisection of an angle which was made possible by origami.
The areas of application held more interest for me. Origami has formed the basis for several interesting applications like packing airbags, crumple zones in cars, camera lens, self folding sheets, folding of solar panels on a spacecraft, fitting space telescopes into compact launch vehicles etc. Origami has made available ways of packing airbags once certain parameters about its usage is known. It has been used to determine crumple zones in cars, places where the cars can fail on impact while causing minimum injury to its passengers. Its application has also enabled multiple camera lens to be replaced by a single lens having diamond shaped crystals arranged in a fashion that enables multiple reflections of the light passing through giving it the same effect that multiple optical lens do. This arrangement was arrived at using origami though the original one uses crystals. This enables camera lens miniaturisation and has been found in 2010. Self folding sheets are sheets which fold in certain ways on the passage of electric currents. The Miura fold is what has been used in the solar panels of spacecrafts.
This was followed by a hands-on paper folding experience in which we made a paper box, a fan, a speaking penguin and a toppling toy. We got to bring these home (although they didn’t let us keep the TIFR folder on which we built these models) and I even showed my brother how to make a toppling toy for himself.
This was my first experience in a hands-on workshop at Chai and Why? and I must say that it was fun. I was folding paper after a very very long time and unlike my school experience of crafts, I had a lot of fun. I hope I can attend a few meetings with Origami Mitra and re-ignite my dead crafty characteristics.
I will unfortunately miss the next two sessions of Chai and Why? called Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star since I’ll be in Kerala.
[While looking for links, I found that the Origami article on Wikipedia has some fun links to explore and also the webpage of Robert Lang whose name continuously popped up along with a picture of him with a 5m telescope. Also many of the spacecrafts have a page where you can get instructions of how to build their paper models. HobbySpace is a good place to start in this regard.]
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Swimming Pool in Chembur
I have been around in Chembur since 1992 or so. Since then, the town has changed a lot. The municipal swimming facility in Chembur, now called General Arun Kumar Vaidya Swimming Pool. This was part of the overall naming and renaming exercise undertaken by the right-wing Shiv Sena which swept into power in 1994 in the state of Maharashtra. I do not recollect what this pool was called before being named so.
My experience in this swimming pool has not been great. When I tried to learn swimming here as a kid my skin got discolored and as a result I lost interest in swimming. From then on, I have passed in front of the pool several times without caring to learn its proper name (something I am interested in but not of importance since people just call it Swimming Pool). Hence for a very long time, this pool and its activities didn’t have my interest.
Recently, there was a news report in the local newspaper, Mumbai Mirror reported that there was a danger that the pool may be handed over to private parties through improper channels. The pool has apparently not been used for the past two years and the municipal corporation is spending approximately Rs. 16 lakhs. The picture is murky and RTI activists are digging for information.
This revived an interest in swimming and also revived an urge to spread the word about what was happening to this public space. The first thing to do was to find out what it is called. The above report swaps the names of the two pools at Chembur and Kandivali. The one at Chembur is called the General Arunkumar Vaidya taran talav. An interest arose in learning more about the General and I reached the Bharat Rakshak website and found the information I was looking for.
The General has served India during the Indo-Pakistan Wars of 1965 and 1971 and as Chief of Army Staff he planned Operation Bluestar. Like Indira Gandhi who ordered the Operation, the General was also assassinated for his role in the Operation in Pune in 1986. The General was awarded the Maha Vir Chakra and the Padma Vibhushan.
Interestingly, in the early 2000s, a Sikh businessman operated his hotel out of the premises when the swimming pool was in the name of the General. I am not sure if he knew about the General or his role in the Operation. The hotel did not have good food and so even that didn’t provide me a reason to go there. It inevitably closed operations. Now, the fore ground of the swimming pool is being used for parking vehicles.
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Changing Mumbai in places where I walk
Note: I wrote this on my earlier blog hosted as https://parallelspirals.blogspot.com. I recovered the text from the WayBack Machine. This post appeared on March 14, 2011 as per the permalink. I’m trying to collect here again all my old writings spread on various blogs.
I have made it a practice of going on early morning walks (if my father wakes me up). It used to painful in the early days which surprised me given the amount of walking I already did. Dad set a new understanding of what it means to walk quickly. I took my time getting accustomed to faster walking. Friends have always complained that I walk fast. In the mornings, I walk faster. Those early days of pain made me not want to walk again in the evening. Habit set in and I slowly lost my evening walking fun.
In the last two days, I have started the evening walk routine again. This slower walking is for me to notice the changes around my suburb of Chembur. Hit by projects like the Monorail and the Chembur-Santacruz Link Road projects, the places that I walk in is transforming at a very fast pace. Now, I feel that I have lost something of the memories by not photographing it.
The construction work in these lanes has transformed the once sleepy lanes into a very different experience. Walking down these roads is less fun now. I don’t know how it would be after the roads and monorail are built. Some one has to chronicle this history of a metamorphosing metropolis. Once sleepy lanes that I used to haunt could in the near future become crowded monorail stations or metro stops. Nostalgia is slowly walking in and I am looking for other sleepy lanes to haunt.
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Liam Wyatt and the Mumbai Wikipedia GLAM Meetup
Note: I wrote this on my earlier blog hosted as http://parallelspirals.blogspot.com. I recovered the text from the WayBack Machine. This post appeared on February 14, 2011 as per the time stamp. I’m trying to collect here again all my old writings spread on various blogs.
For the past few days, Liam Wyatt has been going around cultural institutions in Mumbai. We had a meetup yesterday at the Pinstorm offices in Santacruz. Our thanks to Netra there who offered and allowed us use of space on such short notice. We had a nice turn up today of around 20-25 people.
We started off with directly with Liam’s talk on his work with the British Museum. His work/documentation of his work here can be found here. He then talked about his idea behind doing a project with the British Museum after a controversy the year before with the British National Archives. He said that the relationship was mutually beneficial to both and did not compromise on the principles of either Wikipedia or the British Museum. He talked about the series of conferences called GLAMWIKI that have already happened in London and Paris and are planned in Washington DC and Barcelona.
He then went on to talk about five of the events that he conducted during his 5 month stint as the Wikipedian-in-Residence at the British Museum. These included the Backstage Pass, One on One Collaborations/Photos Requested, Feature Article Prize, the Hoxne Challenge and the School Translations.
Backstage Pass involves a free tour of Museum objects in display and out of display by curators of the Museum for Wikipedians working on an article. The One-on-One Collaborations was an exchange of requests between Curators and Wikipedians who needed each others help – curators to improve articles on Wikipedia and Wikipedians for expert advice on articles in Wikipedia. Photos Requested requested for photos in different parts of the museum. Feature Article Prize was an interesting if controversial experiment. The British Museum offered 100 pounds for the 5 articles in Featured Article in Wikipedia related to an item in the British Museum. This became similar to the pay-for-edit idea. However, the rationale was that since the prize money was not for an article on the British Museum and was for an object/topic related article, it was okay. The Hoxne Challenge was an effort to see how Wikipedians could improve an article on one subject given access to subject experts etc.The subject given was that of the Hoxne Hoard discovered in England in 1992. I think it goes without saying that the article reached Featured Article rating pretty quickly. The last was the School Translations project where a group of French school children that Liam knew translated the articles on certain items in the British Museum from English into French as part of their English class homework. The students later visited London (like they regularly apparently did) and visited the Museum to see the objects they had written about as part of class.
These were some of the implementations possible in the 5 week period whilst Liam was with British Museum.
Bishaka and Liam reported on their visits to The Museum (Chhatrapati Shivaji Maharaj Vastu Sangrahalay) and Jnanapravaha. I accompanied Liam and Bishaka to The Museum. I am pleasantly surprised by the way they have transformed it! We’ve reported on positive responses from these cultural institutions. Liam and Bishaka will be visiting one more institution tomorrow.
In the discussion that followed, we had a discussion about GLAM applications in Indian libraries and archives. Ashwin Baindur asked about how to work with institutions like Maharashtra Archives which are facing a brunt of the budget cuts (they get the money after the song and dance shows, museums etc all get their cut) and have trouble with up-keep of their archives. Liam replied that this would mainly be in helping them digitise records. The trouble, Liam said, was on where to begin and how to priorotise work. Stating the example of the National Library, Kolkata he said that some books were not even catalogued. We agreed that Libraries and Archives also suffered because there was no good Optical Character Recognition (OCR) software for Indic languages. Liam suggested a French example of how an old French cursive text made it un-OCR-able (new word – mine!) and got help from Wikipedians to manually type in text onto WikiSource.
Bishaka raised the point that all of the GLAM activities could also be simultaneously done in various languages in-parallel. So, during a Backstage Pass event in Mumbai, we could improve the English, Hindi and Marathi (as an example) articles at once.
We then had a brief introduction to pad.ma (I have written about this in detail earlier). The part that relates to Wikimedia Commons was a demo on how a plugin for Firefox developed by the same team helped in uploading files in the .ogg format to Wikimedia Commons.
We had a small reference to the Workshop for Women on Wikipedia (WWW) and we suggested the idea to two students who had come from SNDT Women’s University to the meetup. We’ve requested them to check on the possibility of using their labs to conduct the Workshop in Mumbai on or around March 8, 2011 (to re-iterate: the centenary celebrations of Women’s Day.
All-in-all it was a fun 7th meetup of Wikipedians in Mumbai.
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Foursquare Day #4sqday
Foursquare day is called so because in the American calendaring
system, the format used is mm-dd-yyyy. In this scheme of things, this
date reads, 4.16 or four and its square – shortened by the twitter
world to foursquare.The experience of getting to Candies (a sweets place, I thought!) was
terrible. Getting down at Pad. Mohd Rafi Chowk, every time I asked
directions, I was told the place was only 5 mins away. I asked this 4
times and got the same reply. After the last ‘it’s just 5 mins away’
remark, I had given up hope when I saw the nameplate (?). This wasn’t
the end of things. I then had an equivalent of the ascent of Mount
Everest climbing up stairs. Finally summited to a round of applause!We discussed important questions like what was foursquare, what the
people’s twitter handles, what to eat, what a corporate hack did,
kisko mala pehnaya jaye etc. Enjoyed it totally.I took leave, took a strangers suggestion and got into a bus, got off
at Bandra Stn, stood in the wrong bus stop for 15 mins, got into a
cliff hanger bus, got into an auto at Sion where it had to stop
because of a traffic jam and then returned home. -
Getting off Twitter
Since June I’ve been reviewing my usage of the Internet and it’s
impact on my offline life. I’ve been collecting raw numbers. In the
past week I crunched the data.I spend nearly Rs. 300 per week on accessing the Net. Most of this is
used on Twitter and Gmail. I saw that I was spending 6 hrs/day despite
reducing my usage on Twitter. Doing it less often is an option but I
generally miss out on the fun. I specifically took a higher cost Net
connection to force me to use it less.Even if I can absorb the cost I spend the time I spend here was coming
from time alloted for reading, listening to songs, working on
projects, thinking new project ideas etc.I’ll keep my friendfeed a/c up and update all the various services. I
think I’ll be more useful that way. -
Lunar Analog Research Station – India
My first knowledge of an analog research station was Arctic Mars
Analog Station Expedition or AMASE. A thought process carried forward
with Flashline Mars Analog Research station or FMARS. The Moon Miners
Manifesto’s India Quarterly expanded on the theme and brought the
subject of a similar station for the Moon in India at the backdrop of
the Chandrayaan series of missions to the Moon.I became a member of the Moon Society this summer and have begun
planing on what can eventually be a lunar research station in India.I am still reading through papers and worrying about geting people
on-board before begining the actual effort. I’m also working out a
simultaneous outreach and education effort that will focus on the
Chandrayaan series and serve the project’s basis. -
Water
My fascination for water started with the lines in my science text
book urging me to drink 8 to 13 glasses of water everyday. I follow
this naturally because I do get thirsty alot.Fast forward to my under graduate years and it amazes me that we still
use the same 100 odd year old system to bring water from catchment
areas to meet requirements of the city. Innovation has worked only in
bringing water more efficiently in the old system.Today, we face a water shortage. Would not people staying closer to
the water source claim ownership and sell water to her neighbours than
allow its citizens to die?An analogy is supplying water to a colony on the Moon.
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Hello World!
I find that I blog little and little and so this sounded something worth looking at. This is my first test post. You can follow the updates on http://pradx.posterous.com. Thanks.
Parallel Spirals 
