The geek in me - Part 2 :-P

Someone recently suggested that I try a Google search on my own name. I never thought much about it, until I tried it this morning.
Lo and behold, I found that one of my research papers back from NC State days actually was presented and published at a conference. I was pleasantly surprised when one of the links took me to the page of my research guide Dr. Ram from NC State. This was 2 years of hard work as a Research Assistant during my Masters. It was during the dot com bust days, and I had to leave NC in a hurry when I found a job in Colorado. I got caught up with settling down there, and focusing on my new job, and completely lost track of all that I did at NC State. I actually dug up this paper from somewhere in my archives this morning and read it! :-). I don't know if they ever productized the Lignin sensor!

“Mechatronic Design and Control of a Waste Paper Sorting System for Efficient Recycling”, M. K. Ramasubramanian, Richard Venditti, Manukaran Karunakaran, Tappi Fall Technical Conference, Chicago, IL, Oct 27-29, 2003

http://legacy.mae.ncsu.edu/homepages/ram/pub/conference.html

Ripped out heart? It's still alive!

My alma mater North Carolina State University has done some amazing work. The Mechanical Department (yes.. the same place I used to be a research assistant) has recreated a tiny bit of God's magic, by keeping a heart beating outside the body! Pretty awesome stuff. Take a look at the video below..



More info at
http://www.engadget.com/2009/06/03/nc-state-gurus-keep-hearts-beating-outside-of-the-body/

NC State & Maitri

Recently, SepiaMutiny carried an article on NC State and Maitri and a question on American hospitality towards International Students.

Well, I'm back in India now, and I am studying in an institution which has a few international students. I think about our hospitality to them, and I would say that we as Indians as a community are far far behind the Americans in terms of hospitality and foreign-friendly practices towards International Students.

All this talk about NC State, Maitri and 9/11 puts me in a nostalgic mood now! Good old days at NC State! No money, no job, but we all had a great time there. Each one of us were our own support system in a foreign land!

Remembering 9/11

Wow. Time does fly! It's already been 5 years now since it happened!

I sit back now and think about it, I can still remember that day very vividly. It had been about a month and a half since I landed in the US. College had started on Aug 20th and so I was about 2 weeks into the semester.

September 11th, 2001 started late for me. It was about 10.30am when I was rudely woken up by loud banging on my front door. Groggy and irritated, I ran downstairs. (Yes, we were students and we were living in a town house! Ah! The pleasures of living in North Carolina). I opened the door to find my neighbour Deepak almost slamming his feet into my chest. He exclaims loudly "Machan.. apparantly there's been some bombings up north in Washington, NY and a lot of other areas. Everyone is in a state of panic, so just call home and tell them you're fine."
Okay.. now what do I do? I don't have a calling card. I don't have TV to find out what the heck is going on. I don't have a computer to mail my parents. So, I take my sweet time to get ready.. and then I walk to the AFC (Avent Ferry Complex, the nearest computer lab, which is about a mile away). I still am no wiser when I walk into the lab. I leave an offline message with my parents telling them not to worry and that I'm safe n sound (from what?? I still don't know!). Then, I start reading the news on CNN and they have a developing story on what the heck is happening. It's only then I understand the full magnitude of what happened. I catch a few 5 second clips on the dust and smoke, but thats about it.
The next few days in America were hell I think for most non-Americans. There was a lot of hostility in general towards foreigners in America. We got a few reports of Indian students (mainly Sardhars) being the brunt of some violence all across America. It was the work of a few misguided souls who couldn't tell the difference between a Sikh and a Taliban turban! I remember one of my Surdi classmates was shit scared of walking back alone in the nights from the AFC. Understandably so.
The days passed by, and then almost 5 years later, I move back to India. I was watching the Discovery Channel on evening, and there they had a recap of the whole incident. It was then that I realized, that I had never actually seen the actual clip of the planes flying into the Twin Towers! None of us back at NC State had a TV at that point of time and caught up with the whole rat-race to find a part-time job/assistantship on campus! Blame it on the PIGS (Poor Indian Graduate Student) syndrome!

Anyway, what happened after this incident is history. The economy which was already reeling from the dot.com bust, was just pummelled further to the ground by 9/11. It is one of those economy shocks we read about in our Global Economics course. Heavy security restrictions was imposed on all foreign nationals. They put in a new tracking system (SEVIS) to keep track of foreign students. NC State came up with some wierd ass interpretation of the new rules for international-students to maintain their F1 status. What a pain it was!

Today, I read about a bunch of US professors from all across the country claiming that the entire 9/11 incident was an inside job.

Professor Jones said it was impossible for the Twin Towers to have collapsed in the way they did from the collision of two planes.

He says jet fuel does not burn at temperatures high enough to melt steel beams and claims horizontal puffs of smoke seen during the collapse of the towers are indicative of controlled explosions used to bring down the towers.

W T F ?

Ofcourse, I read the article on Times of India (yeah.. that tabloid :-P), so I really don't know how true this is! It might just be one of those conspiracy theories.