Dhruv Apte

Dhruv Apte

Ph.D. Student at Virginia Tech

The one with Dr Feynman s birthday

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Long time, eh? Well, I enevr said this was going to be a damn diary. You have irregular entries with mispellings; that’s how a blog post is written. This is not a blog post detailing how quarks work or how droplets remain the same volume but decreas ein decrease in surface area when falling in a stream(rayleigh instabilty): lthough I would have still kept the spelling different. Would have made a spelling constest with students and giving an A if you get that right. Graduate students love these freebies.

Today is the 102nd birthday of the great professor and teacher, Dr. Richard Feynman- the person who not just inspired the blog title but also the person who stays awake at 12 am to write this blog post.As the world tries to emerge from this pandemic which has proved a big pain and we try to pretend we have a normal working lifestyle, it can be good to talk a little more about a great man but not his biography- that sure would help the reader and probably the man himself to sleep.

I recently connected with some friends in school as I mentioned previously. we had a nice videocall that lasted three hours on a weekday impairing my research capability for some time. Now, I saw these fellas after 2013 (If you remember, it is 2013,2014,2015,2016,2017,2018,2019 and 2020- seven years). I tried to catch them up as to where I am and all. I expected them to change a lot since school but I was bewildered at how they have remained the same and infact, introduced their college friends to each other. The same ‘infighting’, ‘annoying each other’ was present. And I confess, back in school, I was a ringleader myself and I enjoyed doing it. But it’s been 7 freaking years- Sherlock ran for 7 years with the first season absolutely brilliant and the final one tanking off. This time at the best, I could say I was slightly amused and at the worst, I was pissed off. That is not dopey anymore! It’s plain stupid!

I talked about this to my mom and how, unlike the others in the group, did not keep enough contact with these people who I feel were my best friends at school. I simply lost contact after I went to college and I never bothered to restart it. This is not a love of math that could be restarted in a new form, you know..it’s just different. And I now feel I am different than all of them- maybe a little more serious, maybe a little less childlike and I could reflect where I was in 2013 and otherwise. And I feel if I could have been guided more, to read more, to study more, to study not for grades, but for fun, for the pleasure of finding things out. And I never did that- all I did was grades, exams and now I feel they don’t matter as much as I know how something can be enjoyed by doing it. As Dr. Feynman would quote,

“There is pleasure in recognising old things from a new viewpoint.”

And I feel pleasure as to how I changed, how my mindset changed, how I thought I was done with studying, I was saturated and I just want to be an engineer at a big IT company in India with no knowledge growth and how I am a grad student today, at a great school learning something new everyday as I work and widen a small part of the horizon. I still want to know more, there is no saturation, I still want to learn something, not just fluids but anything. There might be some people who are satisfied with their knowledge, who don’t want to learn anything new. For those people, I have another Dr. Feynman quote,

“Don’t you have time to think?”

Happy birthday Dr. Richard Feynman!!

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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.