Romance by numbers ...

Yeah baby, it's time to get excited. Australian statisticians at University of NSW School of Mathematics and Statistics have given birth to this new formula which would probably give relief to the deprived young people (like me) and heart-pounding worries to the 'marriage-age' people! Yes, they have developed a sequence of calculations which would predict your optimal proposal age.

The claim is of a success rate of 40 percent which looks pretty optimistic to a poor desperate chap like me! Here the link to the news article in The Times of India: http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/life/relationships/man-woman/Formula-to-predict-time-for-love-marriage/articleshow/5560031.cms. It was published on 11th February, 2010 just few days before lovers' day.

So, the formula goes like this.

1. Choose the oldest age by which you would like to get married. Call it 'n'. My case was 32 years. Hmm! :)
2. Decide the minimum age at which you'll start to consider a potential spouse. Assign it 'p'. I am kinda desperate; so I was ready by 18. :P
3. Subtract 'p' from 'n' and multiply by 0.368. My result came (32-18) * 0.368 = 5.152.
4. Add this to your minimum age 'p'. So my lucky age came as 23 years and 55 days!

So, whatever you say; you all are the genius minds. I'll be waiting for my day. It's surely time to fall in love with maths now!

In love with maths, huh???

Okay, this ain't my own creation but isn't this the funda of every 'not another random blog' to do blah blah about random stuffs! I surely cannot manage to keep my blog running without this external help. I also just have to talk shit about things once in a while.

Okay, this one here is one of my favorites from the xkcd web-comics collection. I am new to the concept of web-comics and sometimes end up clueless about what some of the nerd one-liners mean. But, it's sure fun and a great time pass to go from one random strip to another.

Okay, so here's the deal. This one has been titled 'Useless' and has the permanent link: http://www.xkcd.com/55/. The tag-line on the comic reads as, "Even the identity matrix doesn't work normally". Now here we are left to ponder what this could possibly mean. Obviously, nobody wants you to go and read the chapter on Matrices and Determinants. Yeah, right, these tags are meant to be funny and sarcastic. :P

Oh well, love is a strange thing. Yeah, now you come to the point bitch! It is a beautiful thing and blah blah what all; no doubts. Okay, this reminds me of a dialouge which a got hold of from an episode of the TV series, Californication (Well, I would recommend every kiddo out there to watch it ... but I'll leave this discussion to some other blog entry perhaps :P).

Person 1: "When will this heart stop hurting?"

Person 2: (sarcastically) "Well, if you are lucky, then never!"

Being in love with someone teaches you life-time of things (can't think of a better word for now :D). Even listening to others' love stories gives you those sweet feelings of togetherness. Can't tell about you, but I sure am a newbie in this experience, so everything looks all stupid and serious to me at the same time.

Hope, you all got to this end part to see what the post was all about! :)

P.S.: I would suggest people with enthusiasm to blog and read blogs to get into web-comics. Just follow a site on a daily basis. First step would be to just open it and start by clicking on Random and voila there you go!

I'm looking through you ...

So, this would be my second photo- blog entry. This was clicked by me at a random clicking session of our Photog Club @ BITS, Pilani.

This picture is actually the result of cropping of the original capture, which is now giving this beautiful macro look. The thing that came to my rescue in the cropping process was that the fly was actually in quite good focus. Plus, the depth of field was also very less which is showing in form of the apparent out-of-focus background.

The technical specifications of the original composition were as follows:

Camera model: Nikon D80

F-stop: f/5.6

Exposure time: 1/50 sec.

ISO: 100

Focal length: 135 mm

This much would be all for this blog entry. Here, I would like to give random suggestions for newbies like me interested in photography, especially the technique used here of macro photography.

• Almost never use flash for your compositions. Flash should be only used in case you are clicking gen pictures of your family etc. Flash is basically of any use to you in case of studio photography.
• Keep a low F-stop number for macro pictures. This would give you the less depth of field as in case of the above photo.
• Can't think of much suggestions for now (:D). So I would just give you the last advise for now. START CLICKING IN MANUAL MODE WITH MANUAL FOCUS. That will make you grow as a photographer. :)

And then, there you flew away into the dark ...

For a long time, I was having this idea of converting my so-called 'blog' (with no new creations :D) into a photo-blog so that at least I can keep some posts ticking on. So, in this series, this is my first and the latest capture.

Clearly (I hope so :P) it's a parrot's silhouette, taken in one of the few quiet streets of our college campus BITS, Pilani. I was on a clicking spree with my mate on a dead-in-the-heat evening. The picture has obviously gone under the cruel tools of my Adobe Photoshop CS3. :)

So, let me give some technical specifications of the picture. The camera used was Nikon D80 with Nikkor telephoto lens. F-stop number was f/5.6 with exposure time 1/640 sec. suited for the sunny evening. ISO number was 125, focal length was 300mm. and I clicked the picture in raw(.NEF) format. For editing, I used basic levels, curves and exposure and mainly, adjusting the background sky to sooth your beautiful eyes!

I guess this much would be enough to describe because I guess most of you did not reach to even this part before dozing off in your own world. :D

Goodbye for now and I wish nobody of us suffers from writer's block or perhaps photographer's block if there's even a term like this! :)

Everyone's comments are sincerely most welcome because I am clearly a noob at this stuff and want to grow into something substantial. So, please feel free to express anything about this post.

P.S.: Those of you interested in photography, who would like to see more of and about silhouettes, should check out the following links.

http://digital-photography-school.com/how-to-photograph-silhouettes

http://www.flickr.com/search/?q=silhouette