শুভ নববর্ষ ১৪১৭ (২-টি কবিতা)

Today is the starting of the Bengali New Year 1417. This is according to the Bengali Calendar which is totally separate from the Gregorian Calendar that is being used by most people around the world.

I got a few poems/couplets on sms/email today wishing me "শুভ নববর্ষ ১৪১৭", which in Bengali is "happy new year 1417". Usually these poems have a very short life-span. They stay in the phone/mailbox and are very soon forgotten. So I decide to share two of them with everybody, in an attempt to increase their life-span a bit.

Both the poems are naturally in Bengali, although I got them in the English font. I decided to put them up in their original fonts.

First poem (sent to me by my friend Arijit):

ভুলে যাও পুরোনো গ্লানি,
সম্পর্কের টানাটানি,
নতুন আশা, নতুন গান,
নতুন করে মনের টান,
আমার সুভেচ্ছা সাথে রেখো,
নতুন বছর ভালো থেকো
শুভ নববর্ষ ১৪১৭

Second poem (from my uncle Dr. Tamal Deb) :

রোদ-বৃষ্টি মাখামাখি
পুরোনোকে দিয়ে ফাকি,
নতুন ভোরের আলোর সাথে
নতুন সাজে উঠবে মেতে.
শুভ নববর্ষ ১৪১৭

I do not know the original sources of these lines. It would be interesting if anybody can find out something about it.

Google's April Fool Tricks 2010

From the year 2000 onwards Google has been upto some tricks or the other in April 1st. It started with Mentalplex in 2000 and since then Google has come up with a series of hoaxes for April 1st. Personally I came to know of this in 2002 when they put up their Pigeon Rank technology.

So this year also Googlers have gone out of their way to put up some April Fool jokes. Being a fan of Google, I tried to collect the set for 2010. Initially it was in the form of a April Fool buzz, with only the links. Then I thought of putting up this article.

Chrome with 3D

We all know about Chrome, a browser from Google that claims to renders "web pages and applications with lightning speed". This year Google put up a page for a 3D version of Chrome, dubbed as Crome 3D, there was a official post in the Chrome blog about this release . Users had to run the application on their normal screens and they would need a special set of glasses to enjoy the 3D effect.

Chrome 3D

The next day they have put up another post to indicate that it was just another hoax. In this post the engineer who coded Chrome 3D explained the kind of trouble that Googlers go through to put up these.

Googlers testing out Chrome 3D

Vowel Outage

The official GMail Blog reported a vowel outage at 0649 hrs on April 1st. The post says:

... during routine maintenance at one of our datacenters, the frontend web servers in that particular datacenter started failing to render the letter 'a' for a subset of users.

... we're experiencing Gmail’s first temporary vowel outage.

This was very funny. Some of my friends upon receiving this link from me me even replied that they kind of felt something wrong with the interface ! Two of them replied whether this was technically feasible !

Google changes its name to Topeka

This was not as elaborate in execution as the Chrome 3D joke which involved someone actually coding and testing the whole thing and then putting it up. This was limited to just a simple blog post titled "A different kind of company name" in the official Google blog. Apparently Google was changing its name to "Topeka", for some weird reason.

New Company Name

They even published a guide to the proper usage of the word Topeka.

Proper usage of the new name Topeka

Capability to Store Physical Objects in Google

Google is offering to store any physical items with them for a charge of $0.10 per kg. This was put up in the main Google site as a coming soon stuff. The page also includes a few user testimonials. This is one of those things that would be great if it happened in real life. This hoax was also put up in Google Docs blog on March 31st.

Translate Animal Speech

Google UK put up this awesome joke as a web page for a futuristic application that could Translate Animal Speech. This was complete with tours and video demos of the application.

Conclusion

This year Google seems to have gone out of their ways to create so many of these jokes for April Fool's day. I am sure there were a few more which I might just have missed. Personally the Chrome 3D was the most gullible one. I managed to convince one of my friends to install Chrome 3D and take a print out of the glasses.

If you come across some of the other things that I might have missed, do drop me a line.

Equations of words

I came across this blog recently. The author has managed to generate equations of words:
http://www.xamuel.com/inverse-graphing-calculator.php

Basically it generates equations which when plotted will generate the word that someone has typed. Unfortunately there is no way to verify it. The equation is by default in image format. On checking the "Raw Text" check-box, one can get the actual equation in text format that can be copy-pasted.  Unfortunately I could not copy-paste it to some plotter to plot it directly. Maybe I will try it out in Matlab someday and post the results here.

Here are some other articles that caught my attention in that blog:

• Be a self-teacher
  
• Swapping + and - signs
  
• Are you living inside a computer simulation?
  
• Experience with computer programming
  

Look up the website. The author is a Math teacher. His ideas seem to be quite interesting. Some of them matched with me quite a lot and created some sort of a resonance and made me like this person. Some other ideas got me thinking. The self-teacher piece is something that I find similarity with a lot. The swapping of signs was an interesting idea, it kind of reflects the consequence of standardization and protocols.

The computer simulation article was like straight out of Matrix trilogy. I have thought about this a lot, and its kind of weird. The mind says its impossible, but logically this could be a possibility. In 2001 Prof. Nick Bostrom published a paper with same title. You could read the paper and look into the website that the Prof has created.

SI Prefixes

Here is a list of SI Prefixes that I jotted down from the web today:

10^x	Prefix
1	deca
2	hecto
3	kilo
6	mega
9	giga
12	tera
15	peta
18	exa
21	zetta
24	yotta

I was looking for the name of 10^15 and stumbled upon this list.

Leap Year checking

What is Leap Year?

The standard Gregorian Calendar that we follow in our daily life, has a leap year every four years. In such a year the month of February contains one extra day in order to keep the calendar year synchronized with the Astronomical Year. So the number of days in the month of February becomes 29 and the number of days in the leap year becomes 366.

The Rule

The full rule for checking a leap year is not very well known, and I often find many of my juniors and fellow pupils lacking the exact knowledge of the full rule. What most people know is that if the year is divisible by 4 then it is a leap year. But although this rule is good for nearly all practical purposes, it is not the full rule. The exact rule for finding out whether a year is leap year or not, is best described by a flowchart:

It was of course designed keeping the programmers in mind. But non programmers too, should not have much of a problem to understand the logic. Just to aid them, a%b denotes a mod b, which in simple terms mean the remainder obtained when a is divided by b. The numbers a and b are positive numbers only. The above diagram is technically called a flowchart.

Programming Language Construct

We can of course translate this to a programming language with the use of three if-then-else constructs. But there is an easier way of doing this as I will demonstrate:

Let us denote the three condition checks by three boolean variables, A, B and C (as shown beside flowchart). So the condition for leap year is:

AB’ + ABC
= A ( B’ + BC )
= A ( B’ + C )

The reduced boolean expression when expressed in C-like constructs become:

year%4==0 && (year%100!=0 || year%400==0)

Conclusion

What prompted me to write the article was the popular misconception to the rule and the ability to demonstrate the boolean reduction technique. The article took shape while I was trying to explain the rule to my brother Bikkhan for the the n-th time and decided to draw the flowchart to make matters easy for him. Lastly, I also figured out that this could be an excellent way of showing him the practical usage of boolean reductions that he has learnt in his Std XI curriculum, but never grasped the true significance of.

References

1. To know more about Leap Year, Gregorian Calendar and Astronomical Year, just follow the links. You will also get an insight on the exact scientific reasons behind the rule.

2. For a similar discussion and actual program in C language, consult the book “The C Programming Language”, 2nd Ed., by Brian Kernighan and Dennis Ritchie. They have given a similar construct along with a full program on date computation.

3. For non-programmers reading this blog, here are some links on Boolean Algebra and Flowcharts.