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Douglas Noel Adams’ Bday

Douglas Noel AdamsYup. It’s Douglas Noel Adams’ birthday today. Rather, we Hitchhiker fanatics (fan is to modest for h2g2 lovers), and he himself, liked the name ‘DNA’.

Sounds insane and fun for a person like him. Too sad then, that he’s no longer around to celebrate. Nor did he live to see his biggest dream, the Hitchhiker’s movie, blossom.

My greatest regret in life is that I didn’t know about h2g2 in the year 1994, when it was his 42nd birthday. And my biggest desire is to create a collection of h2g2 articles (not the written type, dodo, although I wouldn’t mind). The one thing I really want to lay my hands on though is the complete set of h2g2 radio shows. Throw in the TV shows too.

Douglas Adams is one helluva writer, and I like him for the fact that he took something as geeky as science fiction, and turned into something that you can laugh with. It IS still sort of geeky, because his jokes are all sarcasm and no slapstick, but anybody would love this, because it’s not hardcore science fiction, in fact, there’s hardly any science in it. It’s just that the title keeps the rest of the public away (and they lose a LOT in life), and attracts geeks (and horror of horrors, nerds too!) like flies on a carcass.

So goodbye, thanks for all the paneer (I’m vegetarian), and remember, the Answer is 42.

I bet not many got the joke in the above sentence, but if you did, you’re an h2g2 fan.

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Math ain’t the Brit way of saying it

For the record, I’m saying this for Rach. Math ain’t the Brit version of mathematics. That happens to be maths. That buffoon actually emails me and admonishes me saying that math is Brit version. When I point out that it ISN’T, then he changes tack and says that “I thought math was Brit ’cause it sounded better’. Dumbo. Of course, now for him maths is the ‘better version’. We all do know though that math sounds better, right?

Today’s math exam was ok, not really cheery since I ended up making quite a few silly errors. And conceptual errors. And…

Come to think of it, I only attended these chapters in school:

  1. Sequences and Series – Deleted from syllabus.
  2. Mathematical Reasoning – Already knew this; after all it’s basically the logic behind conditional testing in C++, also used in logic gates, and of course, Boolean algebra is used in search strings. AND it came for just 3 marks.
  3. Er…the third one was…

To top that off, I missed quite a bit at Career Launcher too. Most of the biggie chapters like trigonometry, limits & differentiation, straight lines et al. Poor me had to read and prepare from scratch. I expect, um, only 80-85 in today’s exam. Compare that to the general reaction in our section, and I’m oh-so-bad.