Seeing more of this world

I landed in Cambridge, United Kingdom on Wednesday. I was in the car for about a couple of hours from London Heathrow to the office in Cambridge. On the ride here, as I was looking at at the beautiful countryside, I started realising how lucky I am.

I call it luck. Some might call it blessed. Others might call it privilege. I'm just going to call it luck.
I have been lucky enough to visit a number of places around the world. As I was telling a friend of mine about my impending move, they mentioned how this would be the fourth continent I'd be moving to and I had to stop for a second and take that in.

I've traveled around India. I'm not even going to count the trips that me and my family made around the country. After I started college, I got to go to Trivandrum, a beach city in the southern end of the country, to Nainital which sits in the Himalayas in the north. I got the chance to intern in Melbourne, Australia and I got to celebrate New Year's there. I got to visit Ooty, which is a hill station in the south.

After graduating, I moved to Pune for work. I moved came to Chennai after an year and stayed for two years. I got to visit Austin, Texas, US for work and I traveled to Las Vegas.

And now, I am in Cambridge, United Kingdom. And over the next couple of years, I hope to see more of Europe.

I don't think I have fully digested my move to the UK yet. Maybe in a week or in two it will really hit me. The last couple of days have mostly been running around setting up various things I need here. Next week might be better but I guess there will some more of the same.

There's one more thing I am unable to digest. I got to see more of the world than a lot of people will. Maybe in their entire lifetimes. I'm not talking about the people who have the means but choose to not travel. I'm talking about those who just don't have the means.

I'm not sure how to end this post.

Popular posts from this blog

Animation using GNUPlot

Image
Animation using GNUPlot I've been trying to create an animation depicting a quasar spectrum moving across the 5 SDSS pass bands with respect to redshift. It is important to visualise what emission lines are moving in and out of bands to be able to understand the color-redshift plots and the changes in it. I've tried doing this using the animate function in matplotlib, python but i wasn't able to make it work - meaning i worked on it for a couple of days and then i gave up, not having found solutions for my problems on the internet. And then i came across this site, where the gunn-peterson trough and the lyman alpha forest have been depicted - in a beautiful manner. And this got me interested in using js and d3 to do the animations and make it dynamic - using sliders etc. In the meanwhile, i thought i'd look up and see if there was a way to create animations in gnuplot and whoopdedoo, what do i find but nirvana! In the image, you see 5 static curv
Read more

Arxiv author affiliations using Python

So, I wanted to get author affiliation information from papers on arXiv. arXiv provides with an API to bulk query their database and get information. Following that, I look for the attribute 'arxiv:affiliation' in the html data. Here's the code - import urllib from BeautifulSoup import BeautifulStoneSoup   url = 'http://export.arxiv.org/api/query?search_query=all:astro&start=0&max_results=1000'   data = urllib.urlopen(url).read() soup = BeautifulStoneSoup(data) #print(soup.prettify()) #list = soup.findAll('arxiv:affiliation') #for i in range(len(list)): #        print list[i].contents   test = [tag.string for tag in soup.findAll('arxiv:aiffiliation')] Now, the problem I'm having is that I'm getting affiliation of all authors which I want to split into sets of affiliations of authors of a paper, which I'm stuck on at the moment. Once I get that part, I can move on to the next part of this pet project, displaying these
Read more

Thoughts on the National Deep Tech Startup Policy

The Principal Scientific Advisor to the Government of India published a draft policy to support and nurtue the unique requirements of Deep Tech startups in India. I just finished reading it and put together a few comments in a FOSS United forum thread . I will probably read it again a week or so later and try to update my comments on the thread with any new insights/thoughts I have.
Read more