Changes

After a weekend which can only be described as the perfect getaway at home, I found myself awaiting a new week, with fresh deadlines and mundane details of grad life. It only seemed prudent to prepare myself and work a little, to rub away that guilt of wiling time. It was at this point that I was distracted by the ever so interesting concept of youtube and ran across the video by Them clones. Very few of few would know about this band from Delhi which has been maturing into quite an act. Good music is one thing but to have a music video, in my opinion is quite unprecedented.



The video as you might be able to see is not much of a technical breakthrough but at least it qualifies as one. This got me thinking about the recent developments I had witnessed in the Indian independent music scene. I remember writing about the pretentious rock culture of Delhi in the fledgling rock circuit of India. I think I stand corrected. I am sure the pretension is still laid on thick but the number of outlets amazes me no end. My claims being backed by the discovery of the Indian Rock Radio Station "RadioVerve". It is online of course, for God only knows, how many people would care for the death riffs to air over our FM waves. It is start nevertheless. A start which makes me rather hopeful because here I find a bunch of the stereotyped Indian software pros, quitting their jobs and working on popularizing the Indian music scene. The Indian bands still claim the lack of production values however I find that to be not that big a deal. But then I am no expert.

All in all, I believe things are definitely looking up and the quality of music is as good as always. I do dream of playing some of the stuff from back home on WRPI, the local radio station, but then that is just a dream. All I can hope for now is that I catch all the good stuff coming out of the Indian music scene.

Who is Kevin Bacon ?

One of my professors is fond of academic genealogy. He talks about his academic father (his PhD adviser) , his academic grandfather (who by simple logic would be his PhD adviser's PhD adviser), and all other possible relations, brothers, uncles, nephews etc. Two things intrigued me immediately. First, the absence of any aunts or sisters or mothers. Talk about a patriarchal society. And second, the tremendous geek pride palpable in every syllable. Of course, if I were to say that Einstein is my academic father, ok, grandfather or great grandfather come to that, I would stow away that nugget of information and take it to my deathbed. But in no case would I publicize this 'fact'. There are some things that a man can just not be proud of. But I thank God that such responsibility has not befallen me.

So after this class I set off on my own little hunt, trying to learn more about this curious hobby among the 'doctor kind'. I was surprised to learn about another form of this genealogy in the so called Erdős number. Paul Erdős was the quintessential and perhaps the only itinerant researcher. Extremley brilliant and eccentric to an equal degree. Erdős number of an author is a way of describing the collaborative distance between an author an Erdős. The following is an excerpt from wikipedia about the same.

"Erdős wrote around 1500 mathematical articles in his lifetime, mostly co-written. He had 509 direct collaborators[1]; these are the people with Erdős number 1. The people who have collaborated with them (but not with Erdős himself) have an Erdős number of 2 (6,984 people), those who have collaborated with people who have an Erdős number of 2 (but not with Erdős or anyone with an Erdős number of 1) have an Erdős number of 3, and so forth..."

I understand the concept, but in the process I also came across several variants of the Erdős number, the most hilarious of which was the Erdős-Bacon number. When I came across this page I was laughing to the point of stomach cramps. The reason being that the individual's Erdős–Bacon number is the sum of one's Erdős number—which measures the "collaborative distance" in authoring mathematical papers between that individual and Hungarian mathematician Paul Erdős—and one's Bacon number—which represents the number of links, through roles in films, by which the individual is separated from actor Kevin Bacon.

Now who the fuck chose Kevin Bacon !!! As far as I know the guy was a star. Not a big star. Starred in a number of B grade movies and personally irritates me because he doesn't have any lips. If you don't believe me, look up some of his movies. As even a small bit of common sense would suggest, there would be very few number of people who would have a finite Erdős Bacon number. I get the impression that this is the mind work of a really bored set of indviduals. Anyway, who gives a damn.