On Birdwatching

An overheard conversation between a Steppe Eagle and a Black Eagle. The Steppe Eagle is an amateur humaner and the Black Eagle is the experienced humaner.

Steppe Eagle: "Is that an European Blondcrown?!"
Black Eagle: "Where? At this time of the year, it is highly unlikely. They are normally winter migrants. Rarely seen here in summer. It could be an Aryan Flightcatcher; pale morph."
"But the blond crown is evident and moreover the call is not like the Aryan Flightcatcher, which has a call that mimics the American Bald Eater."
"You are right. It is an European Blondcrown. Also, the Asian Brown Moneyaskers approaching it is the typical behavior pattern i have noticed several times earlier. This must be a new record for this time of the year. Bonelli should have been here; he would have loved this!"

Black Eagle: "Ah! A bunch of Japanese Flashers."
Steppe Eagle: "Where?"
"Do you see that clump of colorful ceramics? Look to the right and follow the street. You will see them."
"Unh... where?"
"Do you see that red pillar and the green car parked opposite it?"
"Yes..."
"Now, look to the right of the red pillar, up the brown road in the direction that the green car is now heading until the pink monument. There you'll see a bunch of humans moving together; that is the Japanese Flashers."
"Ah, i see them now! I can never differentiate between a Japanese Flasher and the Oriental Closedmouth."
"It is fairly obvious. The Oriental Closedmouth has a wider range of calls and it generally has a higher pitch call than the Japanese Flasher. Also, the Japanese Flashers tend to flock together more than the Orientals."
"Are those males or females we are looking at?"
"I can see 3 of each. You can tell the female by looking at its rump. Slightly rounder than the male."

Black Eagle: "Black-Whiskered Rusty Dravidian doing a courtship display for the female!"
Steppe Eagle: "Wow! This is so amazing!"
"Yes, notice the drink that the male will offer the female, then they attach the forelimbs to one another and finally the mouths."
"Wow! This is so amazing!"
"Ah, the female is spurning his advances. Bonelli would have loved this; he could have shot a documentary."
"Wow! This is so amazing!"
"And the female walks away with Aryan Flightcatcher! This behavior has been recorded extensively by Montagu, et al in 2004."
"Wow! This is so amazing! I love nature and wildlife!"

[Bonelli's Eagle flies in]
Bonelli's Eagle: "Guys, you will never believe what you missed. I just spotted an Orange Holyspeaker mating with two Long Haired Heartstealers (dark morph)! Got amazing shots!"

-------

At the same time, an young birder and an experienced birder are out in the field.

Young Birder: "Wow! A Steppe Eagle, A Black Eagle and a Bonelli's Eagle all soaring together!"
Experienced Birder: "Don't be silly. That's impossible. They are just three Black Kites."
Young Birder: "Okay."

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Cubbon Park Coolness

There was a vintage bike owners' meet-up at Cubbon Park that i stumbled upon this morning.

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Om Ashram

The last thing i remember him telling me was, "Go to the udupi mess and tell them I'd sent you." He loves eating; he spent half an hour describing the lunch he used to have at the udupi mess every afternoon. On thursdays, they make heavenly chiroti. He is 86 years old, his wife died in a boat mishap 60 years back and he's still in love with her. He used to work for the Karnataka State Transport and Rajnikanth worked for him - "He's a nice boy and is doing well. God bless him."

The sun rises with trepidation here for it knows it can't match her fury. She joined the freedom movement very early in her life and  fought alongside the names we read in our history books. She was a brave soldier and a close aide of Indira Gandhi. Everyone clamors to hear her sing and she readily obliges by singing her favorite song - 'Vande Mantaram'. She stopped counting how old she was a long time back because it doesn't really matter. She looks into the distance and her empty eyes reveal the sorrow that's seeped into her life.

Many people at the twilight of their lives stay at Om Ashram, off Bannerghatta Road.


They are as diverse as any other group would be. There are singers, freedom fighters and homemakers. Some can't see properly whereas some cannot walk without help. But it is the commonalities that bind them so closely. They know they have been abandoned by their families, they realize that they are unwanted by the ones they unconditionally loved and they know all they have for the rest of their lives are others like them. 

It is easy to spread a little joy in their lives; all they want you to do is listen to them. They look at you with curious child-like eyes and tell you stories like we were all stuck in a time bubble in the 1960s. They regale you with stories from their youth and not once do they complain about their families - "they must have had some difficulty with me. Anyway, i am not dependent on them." Sometimes they ask you if you are treating your grandparents well.

As i was leaving, she who could barely hear, held my hands, came close to my face and whispered, "I'll never forget you."

[Photos from one of my visits]

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On The Plethora Of Communication Media

I have been thinking, over the last couple of days, about various means of internet-enabled communication that are pervasive today. Mostly about why they exist and what value they add to our lives. I decided on a few criteria that i would judge them by:
  • Engagement: The extent to which a particular medium allows for community participation, allows for people to voice their views and is inclusive of the world. Social networks like Facebook are designed to be very engaging starting from their 'pokes' to their social games. On the other hand, blogs are more about commentary than equal participation.
  • Bandwidth: How much effort is it to voice your opinion. Twitter is the easiest - you don't have to think beyond 140 characters and you can do it by simply sending a text message. Creation of a wikipedia article, at the other end of the spectrum, is a lot more effort.
  • Signal To Noise Ratio: How easy is it to find the exact information that one is looking for. Wikis and blogs are great at this where as social networks are pretty abysmal.
  • Synchronicity: How 'real-time' is the mode of communication. Chatting is as close to real-time as we can get with all the people involved online at the same time.
  • Trust: Almost all communication media are a means of providing information. How trustworthy are these sources. Now, i separate trust from reliability. You can trust that a friend of facebook gives you a honest opinion of a product you are looking to buy, but you might not necessarily rely on his opinion. My scale of trust is based on a two factors: Is something provided by a group of experts and validated over time (like wikipedia / groups) or is it coming from close friends (like social networks); both of these are fairly trustworthy.
  • Serendipity: What is communication without a little fun. A lot of the joy in social networking is derived from chancing upon a video or photograph that you liked.
I rated the various media (on a scale of 1-5) and here they are. The bigger the size of the bar (each individual bar too), the better it is.

A few observations:
  • The standard deviation of email and groups is the least. They do a decent job at most things and are not the best way to communicate at any. It is also why they are still so prevalent - you can get by.
  • The highest standard deviation is for Twitter and chat. They are great a few things and completely terrible at a few others. If you have ever been part of a live chat with more than 5 people or if you have had to navigate through a river of ridiculous tweets, you know the pain.
  • As one can tell, there is still a lot of scope for improvement in the way we communicate and exchange information online (the highest score is only 2/3rd of the maximum possible).

I, then, decided to categorize the different types into 'old' and 'new'. I considered blogs, wikis, email, groups and chat as 'old media' and twitter, facebook and buzz as 'new media'. Here's what i found by taking averages (the larger the number, the better):

As you can tell, new social media solve some of the problems that traditional internet media had, but they introduce completely different problems; one of the reasons i am not too fond of them. Also, the cleave between what new media does well and what it completely fails at is quite large (the standard deviation, again).

The most desirable communication medium will be easy to use and provide a high level of interaction with low noise and high quality from sources i can trust. And it'll pleasantly surprise me occasionally. Will it be a combination of the existing media or will it be something completely different? Or maybe the different types of media will always exist and serve different purposes.

Footnote: was Google Wave trying take the leap and be the 'ideal' communication medium? Is that why it failed to take off? We might never know.

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Photographing The Moon

The human eye is incredible because it can discern ranges in exposure that are beyond the capability of today's cameras. You look at the moon and at once, you can see the details within the moon (the rabbit on the moon) and the glow around it. Cameras fare miserably at this. At normal exposure, all you get is a washed out moon with a little glow around it. Underexpose it and you get great details within the moon, but all the glow around it is lost. Overexpose it and the glow is radiant, but there are no details at all. A simple image search will show you what i am talking about.

Yesterday, apart from being a blue moon, the moon was also at its biggest and brightest for the year. I wanted to photograph it as close as possible to how the human eye sees it. Knowing this was impossible with one shot, i set up my tripod and captured multiple shots of the moon at different exposures. My assumption was that once i was done, i could simply use a HDR creation software (like qtpfsgui), combine the images and get the perfect exposure. It was only after i got the images on the computer that a fairly obvious thing struck me. The earth moves. And fast. All the images had the moon at slightly different positions; these differed by mere pixels, but that was sufficient to completely confuse the software.

To save me time and accommodate for my lack of patience, I settled in on two images. One was made at -5EV exposure and the other at +4EV, with all other settings the same. The first image got the details within the moon and the second one got the glow fairly well. I used GIMP to create two separate layers with these images and lined them one on top of the other. Finally, i adjusted the exposure of this composite image the best i could, in aperture.

Here it is:

Next stop, photographing the moon with the stars!

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The iDream

This isn't a post reviewing the iPad. Quite frankly, all i have seen are screenshots of the device. This isn't a post ridiculing the obnoxious name or lamenting the non-existence of multitasking, a camera or two, support of flash or your favorite proprietary protocol. It isn't about how pretty it is, the plethora of applications or the upcoming ebook store and its comparison to the Kindle. This isn't about its comparison with netbooks or other handheld computing devices. This isn't about the price and this isn't about how you cannot use it on an airplane (really. see 'environmental requirements').

This is about the iPad dream.

Imagine a computer where you don't have to navigate deep into a file structure hierarchy to find something you want. You don't have to worry about creating a folder (and a folder inside a folder) and then think about how to best name it so that you can find it again. You don't have to care about creating shortcuts just to reach somewhere faster. Hell, you don't even have to search for something you want to find on your own computer. Imagine a computer where you don't have to care about installing anti-virus software and firewalls, a computer where getting rid of something does not mean launching an uninstaller or going to 'Add or Remove Programs'. Imagine having just the one place to go to find exactly the software you were looking for instead of scouring the entire internet for it and then filling out a million forms just to try it. Imagine a computer for which software is built and hence, doesn't expect you to upgrade your hardware.

Imagine a computer where you are not scared of losing data because everything gets backed up without you having to think about it.  Imagine not having to bother about drives and partitions, formatting and defragmentation, mounting drives and choosing boot sequences, configuring IP settings and installing drivers. Imagine a computer without clutter, without an unintelligible registry and without having to assign virtual memory from your hard drive. Imagine not having to think about whether to single click, double click or right click at something, not having to learn the differences among hibernate, sleep, shutdown and lock and not having to remember to clear the recycle bin. 

Imagine a computer that does everything you want it to do and nothing that you don't. Imagine a computer that doesn't scare your mother. Imagine a computer that starts at the press of a button and just works.

Imagine a computer for the rest of us.

The iPad isn't just an overgrown iPhone (though, i see nothing wrong with that). It is a prototype for what computing will mean for the majority of the world in the coming years. The personal computer, though revolutionary, still placed computers in the hands of geeks and continues to be built for them. The iPad (and undoubtedly similar devices that come along) brings the power and joy of technology to the other 95%. In that regard, the idea of the iPad will create a bigger sociological impact in our world than anything else that we have seen.

Of course, it doesn't hurt that it's pretty.

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Up Above The World So High


Let me get it out of the way - this is a terrible photo of the night sky. The aperture setting was disastrous and resulted in far fewer stars than were visible to the naked eye in the beautiful jungle sky.

This is also a very interesting photograph. Star gazing is fascinating but the human eye only sees stars in white. The long exposure of a camera not only captures star trails that show the revolution of earth, but also shows the colors of the various stars. In the scientific community, this was a pretty recent discovery since the equipment earlier was never good enough to capture color. 

The colors of the stars, as we now all know, provide a gauge to measure relative temperatures. The sun, as seen from space, is white in color. Any stars cooler than the sun are towards the red spectrum and stars hotter than the sun are towards the violet spectrum. Some of the hottest stars are over a million times hotter than the sun. Also, interestingly (albeit mere co-incidently) the hottest stars are generally the biggest ones. This classification of stars based on their spectral type is one of the most widely used types of classifications.

When i shot this, the Orion constellation was directly overhead. So, the blue star trail at the bottom right of the image could very well be Bellatrix, which is about 5 times as hot as the sun.

A much better image is what i am hoping for the next time around. However, star gazing is completely worthwhile even without images from a camera.

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BR Hills

The first time i had gone to BR Hills (sometime in April 2007, i think), here's what i had written:

Trees of various hues, swaying to the summer songs of the birds, stand in a guard of honour as you enter. Turn your gaze upwards and little streaks of joyous colour whiz past, linger long enough to earn your gasp and become a blur of vividness yet again. Heaven? maybe not, but it certainly comes close. 

Take a walk in the woods and the sea of green is punctuated with the effulgent colours of the elusive butterflies that captivate you the moment you set your eyes on them. Trek to the top of the hill in the early morning and witness the halo of mist around the other hills, which descends as rapidly as the sun rises in the sky. In the night, the innumerable stars beaming down on you like diamonds carelessly strewn on a velvet carpet will take your breath away.You feel so insignificant when you are in the company of such unbearable beauty. 

Trek through the jungle. If you are lucky, you will notice the fleeting glimpse of the spotted deer or the glaring stare of the extremely curious sambar deer. If you are not, you will hear only the hoofbeats or perhaps encounter the great indian gaur boring down on you. Any short trip will be incomplete without a glimpse of the several exotic birds - from the scary crested hawk-eagle to the incredibly attractive black headed oriole, from the magnificent racket-tailed drongo to the innocent looking brown hawk owl. 

My advice to everyone planning a weekend trip - Don't come here. Its an addiction which will leave you with severe withdrawal symptoms when you quit.

This is still every bit true. A few photos from my trip this week:
           
I promise to get over my black & white mania soon.

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Butterflies In Monochrome

Shooting butterflies is always fun. Shooting butterflies in black and white is even more fun. You get the opportunity to explore the shape of the perch, the texture of the wings, the contrasts and the camouflage. When you don't have the crutch of the mesmerizing colors of the creature, it forces you to be a little more creative. The shape of the butterfly becomes more noticeable and the the body patterns jump at you. You realize that nature is glorious even if you strip it of all its colors.

                         

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At The End Of The Next Decade

The earth mover sputters to a halt just short of the tree under which the last remaining tiger is meditating in a bid to attain salvation, because it runs out of the final drop of diesel on the planet. The irony makes some people smile, some weep gently while the rest of us continue to honk in the piling traffic jam.

Technology, the Beacon of Hope, the Ultimate Savior, the Guide to the New World, quivered because of a lack of blankets in a refugee camp in southern Botswana. Yesterday's hero is laughed at today because molestation has recently taken over as the largest social networking medium leaving Facebook far behind. More people died of electric shock by placing their tongue on a usb drive last year than the population of Australia. The final straw was when Nadal, completely frustrated with a foot fault caught by hawkeye, decided to not chase down every single ball that came his way. And still won.

Science, of course, had discreetly stolen Technology's blankets. And its toothpaste. Science was confined to no man's land after the religious fanatics used Heisenberg's uncertainty principle to prove that Science cannot find a person's soul. The last few staunch scientists decided to disprove the uncertainty principle and ran to Einstein for help - only to find him playing dice with God. All was finally lost when Science failed to answer the most fundamental question in all of life: do i look fat in this?

Religion, even though it won its little battles with Science, lost the war when God was shot dead by a evolutionist last Sunday during His midday siesta. At least that's what the Times reported. Much regret ensued. The fakir decided to finally shave his beard much to the relief of his wife. The joy was short-lived, however, when she realized that she had married the wrong man. The pontiff decided to get rid of his mitre but soon found out that there were six more of decreasing sizes one inside the other. Nobody has been able to figure out why. The religious fanatics, having no cause to fight over, took over the hip-hop scene. They even shot dead Kanye West when he interrupted one of their performances. It was a rare period of collective joy in the world.

The driver blows into the diesel tank of the earth mover, gives it a shake, tilts it a little bit and finally manages to start it. Then, the earth mover takes down the tree.

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