Que Sera Sera

This video of the famous song [from Alfred Hitchcock's "The Man Who Knew Too Much" (1956)] by Doris Day presents a stylized version, but we get some more details in this 8-minute clip from the movie, and it is far more moving. Here it is:

A blog post by my colleague, Prof. Arunan, took me on a joy ride of sorts into the world of this song which has some seriously great cover versions. Here's Pink Martini:

And, here's another, from Marcus Miller:

There's an interesting Indian angle here: the tune of this song was used in a Tamil movie in a song whose lyrics start with a similar storyline ("I asked my mother, "what will I be? will I be pretty? will I be rich""). However, (and as Arunan points out), the song proceeds to present an unambiguously optimistic view ("yes, dear, everything will be great"), which runs so completely against the iffy message ("que sera sera, the future is not ours to see...") packaged in a nice, rousing tune.

The last stop (for now) is the Telugu version [hat tip to Madras Musings] which features the legendary Bhanumathy singing the original lyrics in a strange fusion of ... well, I'll let you figure it out:

QoTD

I am not a fan [of flag burning]. I agree that the American flag should not be disrespected. It's a sacred symbol that should be honored, whether it be on paper plates, or napkins, or banana hammocks.
-- Stephen Colbert [The Late Show (30 November 2016); the clip is also embedded below -- the relevant part starts at the 7th minute.]

"Trump Begins: The Dawn of the Donald"

Turbulent events demand an origin story. To make sense of "Just What Happened?"

Here's one from the land of Stephen Colbert [Update (24 November 2016): It looks like the embed doesn't work, but this link works, at least for now: The Dawn of the Donald].

Laura Benanti, the Awesome

In these grim times, there's nothing better as a cheerer upper than Laura Benanti's impersonation of Melania Trump. Here are the three "Late Night with Stephen Colbert" shows she has appeared in so far:

In Memory of Ramesh Mahadevan

I am grateful for this break -- just because it allows me to say a silent "thank you" to my dear friend who is no more. I have lost count of the things he opened my mind to, my eyes to, my ears to. Here's one of them, in a different avatar. He would have enjoyed it too.

Links

1. Math with Bad Drawings: What Does Probability Mean in Your Profession? (cartoon)

2. Tim Harford: Multi-tasking: how to survive in the 21st century.

3. Sociological Images: Sociologist Michael Kimmel on why everyone needs feminism (video, 15 min)

4. Brad Plumer at Vox: A new study finds there are too many scientific studies.

"Beautiful Chemistry"

Wonderful stuff [Hat tip: Cocktail Party Physics]. Here's the website with lots of interactive graphics.

Links

1. On this the World Elephant Day, you should enjoy this cute overload video shared by Sanjeeta in our Institute's Ecological Students Society blog. Institute.

2. Andy Thomason in CHE: How Did the Federal Government Rate Your College a Century Ago?

3. Another bit of historical curiosity: Did Srinivasa Ramanujan fail in math? A. Venkatachalapathy clarifies with some documentary evidence.

4. Amir Alexander in SciAm: The Glory of Math Is to Matter.

   ... [M]ost fields of higher mathematics remain as they were conceived, with no practical application in sight. So is higher mathematics just an intellectual game played by exquisitely trained professionals for no purpose? And if so, why should we care about it?

Science in Tamil - My Talk

Sometime back I had mentioned about my popular science books in Tamil language.

Few days back, without much warning, the IIT Madras Muthamil Mandram invited me for a felicitation on this 'precocious punditry', I presume. They also honored the publisher for his derring-do act of investing on such geek-horn verbal gymnastics in vernacular.

They demanded a speech from me as comeuppance, I presume, which I gave -- promising for ten minutes and delivering for forty minutes.

Here is the talk (mostly in 'spoken' Tamil) in two parts, which touches upon the why and how of Science in Tamil -- i.e., my  take of it -- and the contents of two of the books.

part 1 (23 minutes)

part 2 (20 minutes)

 
If the videos don't work here, check them in the related post in Tamil.

What the 2014 Elections must have been like for Congress

this video (trigger warning: graphic, but stylized, violence) sums it up. Especially the stuff starting at 5:05:

Mental Health Break

With Text-Mex bluetooth enabled burrito, "communication and mastication don't need to be mutually exclusive!"

)

Hat tip: Orgtheory.net.

Mathematical Baking

Vi Hart goes to a baking party, and we get a a mathematically delicious video filled with rhombic dodecahedrons, aperiodic tilings and bucky-cookies! Watch:

Links

1. Wildlife photographer, author of Secret Lives, and IISc alumna Natasha Mhatre writes about the hard work that went into the wonderful potter wasp pic that won the first prize in the National Wildlife Federation photo contest. Key quote: " I didn't click it, I didn't snap it, no, no, I stalked it and I made it."

2. Mathematical eye-candy: John Baez has an animated picture of the Enneper Surface drawn by Greg Egan.

3. Vi Hart: How I Feel About Logarithms: "I like the number 8. I like the way it smells like 2 and 4 with a hint of 3 in a cubic sort of way ..."

Links

1. Megan Garber in The Atlantic: Computing Power Used to Be Measured in 'Kilo-Girls'. "The earliest computers were human. And, more often than not, female."

2. Nick Rowe: What will really old, stupid and uneducated people do?

3. East Meets West: An Infographic Portrait. Brain Pickings channels a set of infographics from a Chinese-German artist. All are stereotypes, but some are funny.

4. Beautiful science, Zen art, or both? [hat tip to FYFD]

Tanishq

An ad that promotes ostentation with a positive social message. When I saw it yesterday, the view count was at 33,000; now it's over 164,000.

How do people react when someone says, "I'm a math major"?

On his G+ stream, +John Baez posted this video, and said this in his commentary:

I can't honestly say "math is hard" for me - at least, not compared to other things. For me it's always been one of the easier things to do well. However, that just meant I got far enough that I met people who were a lot better at math than me: actual geniuses. So her advice that you should give yourself some slack - that applies to me too. Trying to gain a sense of self-worth from doing something better than other people is self-defeating. I'm happiest when I forget that baloney and focus on the beauty of the task at hand. [Bold emphasis added]

Here's the video:

"You Complete Me"

What started as a romantic quote, got parodied in several films (e.g. this brilliant scene in The Dark Knight)before graffiti artist Banksy gave it his treatment.

* * *

Banksy is involved in this replication (of sorts) of the Joshua Bell experiment [Hat tip to Michael Nielsen]:

Convocation Speeches

It has been a loooong while since one of these posts appeared here. Here are some classics (one of them is pretty old, and the other two are from this year).

1. Tim Minchin at the University of Western Australia (2013): video (also embedded below), text.

2. George Saunders at Syracuse University (2013): text, noisy video.

3. David Foster Wallace at Kenyon College (2013): audio at YouTube, text.

The real nano-emoticon

Yesterday, Arunn posted a schematic diagram that used emoticons to explain something in the paper.

But a real nano-emoticon was made and imaged way back in 20006 2006 by Paul W. K. Rothemund; here's the the paper [pdf]. It was featured on the cover of Nature:

As gimmicks go, it was way more cool than the corporate logo produced in 1990 by lining up individual atoms ("Artists have almost always needed the support of patrons (scientists too!)."). Twenty-two years later, researchers from the same firm produced this gem: A Boy and His Atom:

Woody Allen: "I shot a moose once"

Direct link
in case the embed doesn't work.