Dhruv Apte

Dhruv Apte

Ph.D. Student at Virginia Tech

Hello down there!

3 minute read

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Last week after a lot less of thought , I decided to get on SnapChat. I made an avatar and connected on some friends and my brother. The idea of SnapChat is to send pictues, sort of stories that Instagram started and all social media appliations followed suit. But the thing that is a bit different is you can send a story to only a particula rperson and the person will do the same. And, you can create a story for each different person. You and your contact can keep sending photos everyday to maintain a ‘streak’. That’s the gist.

In case you are a common person like me who does not have anything special everydy, you can just send the time to maintain the streak. I don’t exactly understand the purpose yet and its full mechanism. I use Instagram to see what my former classmates and friends are upto and Whatsapp to chat with friends whom I commmunicate with a daily basis but I don’t exactly get the purpose. I understand I had a secret intent of using Snapchat for dating but that ship is not going to sail at all and I am getting a bit bored of keeping the streak thing up. I also get annoyed with the yellow notification light my phone displays when someone sends me a snap…it’s a weird thing and I don’t like it.

So, TL:Dr, there is a high probability of the app just lying on my phone dormant or just uninstalled like the previous time it wa son my phone (freshman year of undergrad, it consumed so much data that I uninstalled it in a couple of days missing out the drama). I have been trying to keep on with my book-reading though it is bit difficult as other than my daily stuff, I spend my time watching NetFlix and Amazon Prime which I think I should reduce more. I am currently reading Perfectly Reasonable Deviations from the Beaten Track by Michelle Feynman (spelled FINE-man, not FEN-man) when I run my simulations run and I have nothing else to do. It is not exactly a book, rather a ollection of letters written by Prof. Feynman to various people through his life. I am currently in the section where he writes to his mom during his years at PRinceton (Princeton, yes!!) and his wife at Los Alamos and those letters display his love and affection for them (He used to call his wife, “Putzie”).

Life at Princeton for Feynman was pretty exciting, it seemed. From his previous booooks, he had one hell’o time there but these letters show a more serious aspect of his life there: sending money to parents, telling parents not to worry about his stipend and requesting his dad to take care of his health. I feel these letters introduce a human-side to the magician he was often regarded as.

Simulations are runing great; I am getting a knack of things now in a better way and we are almost done with the first model in 2D. Hoping to implement the next model (I am struggling with that sinc ethe past couple of weeks), then 3D and then the big things. But, we have lot of time so not worrying about it much for now.

Thats’ it for today; this is the first blog post where people introduce themselves, their life and all but I haven’t and I won’t : you have the damn ‘About Me’ for that.

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La conte des colombes foncees

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Rebonjour ! Ça fait environ quatre mois que j’écris quelque nouveau. Mais, j’était occupé avec beaucoup de choses à faire et j’ai pas l’inspiration à écrire quelque chose intéressant. En plus, cette fois, j’ai trouvé écrire quelque truc très difficile (vous connaîtrez bientôt !) L’été pour moi, c’était époustouflant. Je suis allé en France pour la première fois et j’étais complètement surpris que je parle français sans difficulté. J’ai souvent fait des conversations banales à l’arrêt du bus ou des restos ou des gares et beaucoup de gens m’ont apprécié. Ça me fait très encourageant et motivant. Quand j’aurais dit que je viens des États-Unis, on m’a souvent demandé si j’ai grandi en France car mon français était génial. Mais moi, vous connaissez si vous coupez ma main, à place de sang, vous allez voir le merlot qui vient de Bordeaux :P


Aujourd’hui j’apporte un poème qui je n’ai pas écrit. Le poème était originalement en espagnol par M. Federico García Lorca au nom de « Casida de las palomas oscuras ». C’était un très beau poème avec beaucoup de sens caché surtout sa sexualité. Pour moi, il représente l’idée du secret et comment on cache notre identité à s’intégrer dans un groupe ou car on ne semble pas comme faible ou sensible. Puisque le poème est écrit en espagnol, j’ai dû comprendre sa traduction, son sens et essaie à traduire en français mais pas perdre sa signification. Donc, pour les mecs qui comprennent tous les deux ou seulement espagnol, voici le poème original :

Casidade las palomas oscuras

Por las ramas del laurel
vi dos palomas oscuras.
La una era el sol,
la otra la luna.
«Vecinita», les dije,
«¿dónde está mi sepultura?»
«En mi cola», dijo el sol.
«En mi garganta», dijo la luna.
Y yo que estaba caminando
con la tierra por la cintura
vi dos águilas de nieve
y una muchacha desnuda.
La una era la otra
y la muchacha era ninguna.
«Aguilitas», les dije,
«¿dónde está mi sepultura?»
«En mi cola», dijo el sol.
«En mi garganta», dijo la luna.
Por las ramas del laurel
vi dos palomas desnudas.
La una era la otra
y las dos eran ninguna.

Les Amoureux

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Bonjour encore ! Ça fait longtemps que je viens ici mais vous me connaissiez : j’ai souvent l’air d’humeur changeante ou, comment est qu’on dit, peut-être lunatique ? Comme je m’ennuie et j’essaye de trouver quelques bons passe-temps, j’ai commencé à lire et, bien-sûr, à écrire de nouveau des poèmes. L’anglais, c’est une langue pour les insipides et j’ai trouvé la poésie de langues romans sont très belle- de quoi m’inspirer ! Ce n’est pas facile mais on trouve de faire quelque chose qui représente un défi, n’est-ce pas ? Et ce n’est pas mon premier poème en français (je vous dirai plus tard). J’espère que vous le trouvez satirique, comme je l’ai fait. Le rythme est inspiré par un poème du M. Georges Brassens, au nom de *Les Copains d’abord *. Il a pu l’air de sophistication mais si vous ne comprenez pas, ne vous inquiétez pas !

Les Amoureux de l’année

Supposedly six months later

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Hello there, how are you doing? Well as the title suggests, I was planning to wite a post six months later but what the hell, you were not expecting me to fulfill that ‘commitment’ on the 4th of july, right? Well, we can just assume it is six months in the pandemic time; that’s a pretty good scale. But yeah,a lot of things have happened since we visited this rusty old blog which somehow still comes up on like the 5th site when you google my name (Goddamnit, Google): 1) I completed my spring semester with retaining almost perfect sanity 2) Decided to become more social- can’t stay in the shell anymore. 3) Went on two trips- one to this country place called Duffield on the Virginia-Tennesse border in April and later to Cape Canaveral,FL for two days. Now, I have laos later visited DC and my family in the Tri-State area but the Cape Canaveral visit is somehow one of the best trips of my life. The reason itself was so interesting- to see a launch at 3 am on a lakeside and it was magical. Of course, it’s Florida, so we hit the beach too. And the company was great. Imagine just some crazy people driving down south just to see a launch we could have seen on television: but it was fun and worth it: we could not have seen it that cool on the damn TV and could n’t have been that interesting.

New Year

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Hello, down there! Happy new year 2021! Well January 1 is just a date to start a new Gregorian calender but looking from the events of last year, it seemed 31st Dec 2020 11:59:59 would turn into 31st Dec 2020 11:60:00. That would have been insanely scary. But 2020 has vanished and off we are to a new year with new things on the bucket list piled upon the old things we have had and new ‘resolutions’ This resolution thingy seems not dopey for an undisciplined person like me- I don’t remember the last time I had made any resolution. Maybe it was because I decided to start on a resolution immediately when I thought of it and not wait for it on the 1st of January. And all over you see people being glad as if this Covid-19 virus will leave on 1st Jan 2021. We have had some variants of the virus now but thankfully science and the hard work of thouands of researchers and healthcare workers has won with some vaccines in the market and vaccination programs beginnning to happen and we might see some sort of the normalcy later.