Miscellaneous notes to self

Stuff to do, sometime in the near future:

Read Jon Ingram’s post on Euclid’s Elements, and then The Book itself. I haven’t read Euclid yet, but I did spend some time doing Geometry of the kind Jon describes when I was at school. I most emphatically did not understand a whole lot of what I was doing, then. An extremely enjoyable book that deals with Euclidean geometry, among other things, is The Challenge and Thrill of Pre-College Mathematics by V. Krishnamurthy, et al. I wish this book had come out when I was younger.

Complete the Z_m is a finite field if and only if m is prime proof. Drat.

Scour Krish Ashok’s work on Bollywood’s fine tradition of Unplayable Guitar Chords to find more gems like mango-people. Out of the 58 (till date) commenters on that post, nobody’s cottoned on to the connection between mango-people and the hapless targets of free power, free rice, free clothes, free TVs and other surefire vote-winning strategies of successive governments. Ha!

Watch Tahalka. It would be bad form on my part to not mention that it was Greatbong’s review that inspired me to try and watch the movie again. Before reading Greatbong, I remembered the movie for one thing and one thing alone – Dharmendra trying to rip off Clint Eastwood in Il Buono, il Brutto, il Cattivo, but coming out with something that sounded like If you vaant to shit, shit – don’t taalk. I kid you not!

Get hold of House on DVD. Every single episode till date.

The traditional “last but not the least” item: Make my peace with the little Devil. His diarrhoea got worse, and I took him to the hospital. He had to be restrained while the nurse pricked his left arm for the IV, and I held him and tried to pacify him as the needle approached. Despite that, he managed to lash out and bend the needle the first time around. Ever since, my entrance into his room provokes from him a look that combines suspicion, hostility, disappointment and other like emotions. My many apologies to him have had little success, and his forehead sports a crease that goes away only when I leave his sight. An attempt to kiss his forehead results in an emphatic waaanh of dismissal. Damn, I didn’t know infants were as picky as this. Hopefully this shouldn’t take too long to do.