Mirkwood

It has been difficult to access Mirkwood over the last week because WordPress.com blogs are blocked here in China. The WP.com homepage and forums are accessible, and so are the self-hosted blogs, but I couldn’t read any of the WP.com blogs. Google seems to have brokered a deal with China; I could access quite a few sites on Blogger. The only way to access Mirkwood was to log on remotely to the machine in my university lab, and use the text browser Lynx to view the pages. I wanted to write a post, but logging in was impossible with the limited functionality that Lynx provides. Finally, I managed to use an X-window manager to open the blog on Firefox. The connection is agonizingly slow, but reliable enough to post this blog entry.

I have received a few comments and I haven’t been able to approve them for the reasons cited above. I will go through all of them when I return to the US on Sunday.

Continue reading ‘Blogless in Hangzhou’

There was an old shelf and a stout table placed out in the third floor corridor of my department last Tuesday. They carried, in various stages of disarray, about a hundred books, most of them user-manuals for outdated software packages and programming languages. As messy as our labs are on the inside, the corridors and public areas are almost surgically clean, so I felt a moment’s irritation at the grads who had hauled out their old stuff. On the shelf was a note “Free”. And then “The shelf too. Take it!”. As is probably well known, all graduate students have one thing in common. They invariably gravitate towards free stuff - and so I looked. That was how I found two very faded blue hard bound books: Isaac Asimov’s The Intelligent Man’s Guide to Science. Vol.1: The Physical Sciences, and Vol. 2: The Biological Sciences. I had never heard of the books before (Obvious conclusion - I am not an intelligent man :-)) , but given Asimov’s popularity, my guess is that many people might have read them in their high-school days.

I do not think I will read the work in its entirety - at any rate, not at one stretch - but will probably return often to consume isolated chapters in an arbitrary way. Two nights ago, before reading two lines of the introduction by George Beadle, I succumbed to a bout of sneezing. It didn’t look very dusty and I am usually immune to dust allergies, but that was the end of that. Last night, the experiment was found to be repeatable, i.e., more sneezing ;). This means that, before I can begin to read the volumes, I will have to thoroughly rid them of all the invisible dust they have accumulated over goodness knows how many years. Vigorously shaking and patting them for a few minutes does not do the trick.