A few random things

Blogger has introduced a better preview option. Cool. If nothing else, it at least shows Google is still polishing Blogger and has not abandoned it.

I learnt that German is quite a beautiful language, at least in its pronunciations, while hearing to Quantum: Einstein, Bohr, and the Great Debate about the Nature of Reality in audiobook format. Names like Physikalisch-Technische Reichsanstal have a beautiful ring to them that I'd heard so far only in French. The book itself is wonderful too, written for a layman interested in the history of the development of quantum physics. We can feel how the physicists themselves were bewildered by the bizarreness of it all, and only reluctantly accepted the theory. I'm now a little more than halfway through the book, where Heisenberg and Schrödinger have just given out their two formulations of quantum mechanics.
As a side note, it's interesting to note that Pauli shared my nocturnal habits, while Dirac too studied electrical sciences due to the urging of his father while his calling lay elsewhere.

Duck Duck Go is proving to be a great search engine to set as the default, with most other searches I need available at a bang's distance. The "bang" is simply the exclamation mark, which within this search engine can take you to most of the common lands on the internet. Search Wikipedia with !wiki, Amazon with !amazon, Wolfram Alpha with !alpha, torrents with !torrent, or resort to trusty old Google with a !g added to the query. In my experience, it's the best search engine when it comes to broad searches on a topic such as "rottweiler" or "diablo 2". There are about 25% of my searches that DDG does not understand and gives nonsense results, and I add "!g" to the query to go to Google's results instead; recently, this has been only needed for filtering out old results with Google's "Past year" tool. For the remaining 75% however, DDG is leaps ahead of Google.

Talking of Diablo 2, I hated that game. As a result of trying it, I've found that:
A. I probably hate the "hack and slash" genre itself, and games should involve some thought and strategy for me to like them
B. For me to enjoy a game, it should be either 2D like most flash games or The Battle for Wesnoth, or very realistic 3D like Batman: Arkham Asylum or Assassin's Creed II. The latter two are the most immersive and enjoyable games I've ever played.
Also, factor A seems to be more important than factor B, since Dead Rising too has a realistic 3D, but has failed to impress me at all so far.
I completed Batman a few weeks ago and am now into Assassin's Creed. It's difficult to describe progress in this completely non-linear game, but so far I've unvealed "Il Duomo's Secret" and "Torre Grossa's Secret", and have killed 4 of the major enemies (including at least 2 of de Pazzi family).

I felt compelled to write this post after more than a week of complete lack of communication with anyone I knew, friends or relatives. More and more, I'm coming back to my old ways of hating cell phones and electronic media of communication, and much prefer personal conversations. I keep thinking of visiting my friends at Marathahalli more often, but my laziness and nocturnal habits make that a difficult task.

I said "lack of communication with anyone I knew" because I've been communicating with random strangers at Omegle a lot. Amidst the various  "asl?" (asking for age, sex and location, mostly as a prelude to a cybering episode), or "Jesus can save you" stuff, there are a lot of interesting people there with profound ideas.
I chatted with an agnostic guy from the US who knew a surprising amount about Hinduism and Buddhism, and I had the opportunity to clear some things up and show that Hindu Vedanta philosophy was at least an internally consistent and beautiful theory, if not a true explanation of the universe. We agreed that while religion itself was unnecessary and often harmful, the practices discovered by Hindu and Buddhist monks were very helpful to cleanse and improve the mind, and should be adopted purely for their utilitarian value.
I talked with a Chinese woman who found India's arranged marriage system strange, felt all Indian guys she had met were wonderful gentlemen, and recommended two chinese movies to me (one was called "Aftershock" in English, the other translated to "Hawthorn"; I've not been able to find subtitled versions of either).
I also talked with a European guy (was it Sweden? or Switzerland? I forget.) who shared a lot of my interests, was living my dream life with having studied psychology as his major and now going on to neuro-psychology in higher studies. He was also exactly my age and shared my interest in books too. Unfortunately the conversation got disconnected due to a server error and I never got his contact details.
I'm learning a lot through these conversations and they're expanding the limits of my morals, thoughts, knowledge and imagination.

Thank you Tim Berners-Lee, for this wonderful thing called the Internet.