Monday, December 14, 2009

Bird Watching

yes, my latest preoccupation! Bird Watching.
I never knew my hometown, more known for its draught conditions, had so much of 'Bird Watching' to offer! A little more reading about it and i came to know that deserts are one of the worlds most richest bird treasures. India has got a national bird reserve in, Jaisalmer (located in the central thar desert region) No wonder the ever so arid climate of the poor Anantapur too attracts varied bird species.

Friday, September 18, 2009

Flower Shower


Inspired by the mood lifting , heart warming flower carpets adoring the huge conopies, elaborately decorated  with  labyrinthine branches of  trees on the Bangalore's congested  roads ( giving an increased feeling of congestion if you happen to be claustrophobic)  iam taking home a Jacaranda sapling to plant at my home in Anantapur . Hope it survives the hardy drought climate.

more about Bangalore's avenue tree varieties : http://www.thehindu.com/mp/2009/06/08/stories/2009060851080300.htm

July 2010: It is still going strong :) Successfully surviving one summer and one long vacation, left completely to my maids care!

Wednesday, September 16, 2009

Inexplicable

Did you ever feel that what just happened had happened before too, but somehow in different time or in somekind of a parallel universe, somebody said the same thing they said before to the same situation you experienced before ? iam sure most of us have come across this feeling and most of know this as dejavu( with a tilde ; ) )

Compare this with,
Did you ever feel while writing a word and contemplating on the spelling so long that it actually appears that such a word never existed. And this happens with even the most commonplace spellings such as "word" itself?
Do you feel as if something that your reason says cannot be true, but you feel as if you have never seen it before, like it came out of a total oblivion.

Try this and iam sure you will feel it to. But you must be free of any selfmanipulation while doing it and do it with open mind.

Take a piece of paper, start writing "word" continuously for 10 to 15 times.
Now at the end of writing the last time, you would feel that the spelling isnt correct and that it cant be "word" as you perceive it.

They have a word for it like Dejavu , see the wiki entry for this .
Often described as the opposite of déjà vu, jamais vu involves a sense of eeriness and the observer's impression of seeing the situation for the first time, despite rationally knowing that he or she has been in the situation before Jamais vu is more commonly explained as when a person momentarily does not recognize a word, person, or place that they already know.

Chris Moulin, of the University of Leeds, asked 92 volunteers to write out "door" 30 times in 60 seconds. At the International Conference on Memory in Sydney last week he reported that 68 per cent of the volunteers showed symptoms of jamais vu, such as beginning to doubt that "door" was a real word. It has also been said that a similar brain fatigue underlies a phenomenon observed in some schizophrenia patients: that a familiar person has been replaced by an impostor, they could be suffering from chronic jamais vu.

see this below explanation for this. ( wiki excerpt)

From a linguistic perspective, the phenomenon that a word after frequent repetition seems to lose its meaning is connected with the very nature of words. A word as a unit of language has three characteristics:

  • It has form, i.e. it is shaped out of sounds or, in the case of written language, out of letters (characters).
  • It has function, which (among other things) means that it operates in a meaningful sentence.
  • It has meaning, which implies that it refers to a certain unit of thought (a concept or an idea) within a context.

However, when a word is repeated over and over again, it is in fact only the form which is repeated. There is no sentence, so the function of the word is eliminated. Its meaning, too, is effectively eliminated, because there is no context. A few repetitions will leave the language user's memory and expectation intact: he remembers the meaning and expects a meaningful reference. Continued repetition, however, will more and more foreground the word form to the exclusion of function and meaning, until the word literally "makes no sense". It is not the word that is being repeated, but only one of its aspects: the word form.

Interesting isnt it ?


Tuesday, September 15, 2009

Witty

pic: The Hindu 'cartoonscape'
Labour union doing social work , saving AI ;)
No wonder jet is so anti to creating a NAG (National Aviators Guild) :)