The Bet

Recently placed a bet with Arnold about the outcome of the F1 world championship of this year. I have bet that, Kimi Raikonnen wins the drivers championship. Arnold wins if any other driver wins it (The only other driver who has a chance is Alonso). We are playing for a hundred rupees. I placed this bet when Raikonnen had just won the Monaco GP. I thought my chances were gone when Raikonnen failed to finish at Nurburgring and Alonso won that race. The tables were turned the last weekend at Canada when Raikonnen won and Alonso failed to finish. Theoretically (engine and aerodynamics wise) Mc Laren have the fastest car on the grid. It is in the reliability aspect that Renault are one up. Remember San Marino, where Raikonnen had blasted off the start line just to retire after a few laps? I hope Mc Laren work on this (they will surely. Mc Laren is one team who takes losing to heart. Their history shows it.), which will almost guarantee good finishes at almost every race. It is race wins that they need badly though to close the 22 pt gap to Alonso; which is even more difficult because of the second placed driver getting 8 pts instead of the older version of 6 pts. Hope they do it; my 100 bucks are at stake. Check out the new Mc laren policy for this season here.

Post Exam Idealistic Rantings

Posting after a long time. I am just plain lazy. Have a lot to say about a load of things but just don't feel like devoting time to sitting down and writing a post. Anyway, finished off with exams. As is with every semester, the Pl just does not seem to end. Also subscribed for a BSNL dataone connection just before the Pl which has unlimited download till the 30th of June. So basically spent the whole of the Pl downloading stuff; and did just one chapter from a total of 5 huge subjects in the Pl. I had really stretched it a bit too far this time and was really worried about my survival in the exam. Though I noted that this seemed to be a common phenomenon among some of the TE students. It is probably because all of us have done five semesters in the same stupid way and the more intelligent amongst us are pretty bored with the system.(though don't want to speak to early; will wait for the results).
Kunal and Arnold were some of the others who happened to go my way this time. Arnold has this whole theory about geniuses and workhorses. Check it out on his blog. Reminds me of a story from Stephen Hawking's book:"Black Holes and Baby Universes" where he tells us about his days in Oxford, where studying was considered to be a sign of being dumb. So people who studied were thrashed in peer groups, and hence nobody studied at all. Hawking says this is a really bad way to go about it and that he himself suffered in terms of exam performance during his days there. I agree with him on this. What is wrong though in our engineering education system is that it takes very little to pass particular subject. All you need to do is see the past exam papers and look up those answers from a text book. It’s the same formula to score in the exam. I think this is total crap and that the system needs serious revision in the exam pattern. We should have exams that will make us study the subject from an understanding point of view and not just mug it up. It’s the only way we are going to learn something, and become real engineers who can hope to compete with those from the IITs.

Jupiter. Again no camera attachment used. The pic has come out decent though.  

Tried some astro photography with my new digital camera a few months back. Do not have a camera attachment for my telescope and hence the camera moved a lot. Had to hold the camera steady for quite some time (1.5-2 secs). will get much better results and will also be able to shoot fainter objects with a proper camera attachment.