Wednesday, June 03, 2009
Patenting the Suicide Idea
"A philosopher is the one who has solutions to all the problems but his/her own". - Aparna/Shreevathsa
One philosopher got fed up by so many problems that she decided to commit suicide. She told her friend about her decision.
He did not object, instead asked, "So, which one are you going to use? Jumping off the cliff? Taking the sleeping pills? cutting the blood vessels? Cyanide?..."
This lady thought for sometime and replied, "No, I am not going to use any of these. I am going to innovate even during my death."
He asked, "What is the use?"
"I am going to patent that particular suicide idea!".
"What is the use?"-the friend asked again.
"So that I'll be of some use to my relatives after my death too".
Her mother asked, "But, if they use your idea to commit suicide without paying us, whom can we sue?"
With that, the useless discussion came to an end.
By now, the dumbest reader would've easily guessed that the philosopher in the above paragraph is me! By the way, the word "dumb" does not mock the literally dumb people. It has a secondary meaning "dull", moronic. Just remembered: if you haven't watched "Dumb and Dumber"-a 1994 movie on the cross-country adventures of two good-hearted but incredibly stupid friends-you must watch it. Last time I watched it in 2003. Should watch once again.
OK, I know I am jumping from one topic to another in an ad hoc way; I know that. Many a times I talk like this only. The real culprit is my unusually strong associative memory. The moment I say "associative", I just remembered that artificial neural networks store the information in the same way as human brain does, i.e., in an "associative" way. This I learnt in my 7th sem B.E.. We had a subject called Fuzzy logic and Neural Networks. Really good. My B.E. project also involved neural networks. Funny topic. We had an excellent teacher by name Dr.P.Subbanna Bhat. He used to teach this one. He was my project guide too. You see, this is what happens if one uses "associative memory". One tends to jump from philosopher to Subbanna Bhat and back to philosopher too, just because this Subbanna Bhat Sir used to talk lot of good philosophy. I think I inherit a part of it and often use it in the classroom.
Remembered one more thing. This Subbanna Bhat Sir happens to be my students' grandteacher. We invented this idea of grandteacher-grandstudent relationship in IISc. We did it when we came to know that one of our professors, Dr.Utpal Mukherjee was a student of Prof.Gallager of MIT (not Manipal or Madras) who was the pioneer of LDPC codes. We used to take pride in telling, "We are the grandstudents of Prof.Gallager". We used to work out an entire lineage like this. In IISc, it did not lead to any complications. But in undergrad colleges, one can get into a whole lot of mess. For example, after some years, if my student joins as a teacher in RVCE EC Dept, and both of us take class for the same set of students, then I become a grandteacher of my own students. I might even become great grandteacher of my own students, if I wait for long enough.
Got bored? Do I sound a bit like J.D.Salinger in his controversial work, "The Catcher in the Rye"? This is a must read book for those who have crossed twenty. Reading before that age is a bit dangerous. A bit disturbing/ philosophical book actually.
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