Bits from weekend

Made a trip to the British library after a long time. Usual interesting finds, about which you might see more in the future. On my way back, bought a copy of Mrityunjay. It's a gem of Marathi literature (also a winner of Dnyanpeeth award), but there is more to it. The year I was in 8th standard was filled with this book. Day and night I used to read and think about it. I may not read it cover to cover this time, but many pleasant hours of browsing surely lay ahead.

We all are eagerly waiting for Dark Knight Rises, but that is no reason for others in bollywood and hollywood to lose all hope and produce utter crap. But apparently that is what they are doing for a couple of months. Thankfully, the third iteration of MIB provides a welcome break. But first things first. This movie had 5 pre movie trailers, along with a sneak preview even longer. I welcomed this change. There was this new bond movie, Skyfall; the new spiderman movie (Trivia note: the guy who played Saverin in Social Network is the new spidey), and a new version of Total Recall (probably closer in storyline to the Philip K Dick novel on which it is based than the earlier version featuring Arnold S). All were bookmarked of course. Coming back to the movie, MIB3 retains some of the freshness of the original, which is a hard thing to do. The new villian is cool too, and the story is nicely integrated. Barring a couple of glitches, this is surely the tonic you will need to survive till July 20th.

Finished reading 'Quantum theory cannot hurt you' by Marcus Chown. The title is a little incomplete btw, about half of the book talks about relativity. And despite this, it's a small book, only 158 pages. It explains some things well, but handwaves others (ratio might be about 70/30). That is unavoidable for popular treatments; but I have read others and it was more apparent with this one. Interesting bits of trivia are aplenty though, they keep you reading even when you are familiar with the ideas. For example, the sun is getting lighter by 4 million tons per second (mass equivalent of its energy output). Or that if all the space were squeezed out of matter, the entire human race would fit in the volume of a sugar cube (because atoms are mostly empty space). But the best one probably is this quote,
"Black holes are where God divided by zero".

Enjoy!