farms and automation

i just finished watching a dirty jobs episode on harvesting walnuts in california. and one of the things that always strikes me when watching dirty jobs is how automated and efficient a lot of it seems to be. i mean, take the walnuts episode for example. the company used shakers to shake down the walnuts from the grid of hundreds of trees. these were vehicles with a clamp that could shake a tree till all the walnuts were down. then a little vehicle called a sweeper, this one from 1972 apparently, was used to sweep the walnuts into neat lines. these were then picked up by another vehicle to take to the processing plant, where the process upto shipping was all taken care of by machines. the humans only had to scrub, clean up the mess created and keep the plant running smoothly.

i can't say i have been to many farms in nepal, but i believe most farms here still rely on manual labor for the majority of tasks. with all sorts of specialized farm equipment available, i wonder by how much we could increase the productivity of nepali farms if these were utilized. and the machines don't necessarily replace humans, but instead provide them with the dirty job of cleaning up after them.

also there was this other episode on a californian egg farm. i had no idea how automated and mechanical even the process of egg production had become. about 1.4 million hens were simply laid out in little cramped spaces. chicken feed was supplied individually to each bird automatically via a system of pipes. and when an egg was laid, it rolled down a half-pipe into a processing plant that would take care of it until it was packaged and ready to ship. the farm shipped a whole lot of eggs everyday but something about the method makes me uneasy. the hens spent their lives in these little cages where they could barely spread their wings, their sole purpose in their pitiful lives to produce eggs for us. this is one area where i would rather have numerous smaller farms handled by people than a big automated one, even if it means limited productivity and profit.

alright, i'm off. have a great weekend!

my weekend in the alps

i'm still feeling a bit under the weather. i didn't get enough sleep tuesday night studying for the test on wednesday. the lack of sleep must have toyed with my immune system because i came down with a bad cold wednesday. i'm feeling much better, thank you.

anyway, yea, about the ski-trip. was a lot of fun!

friday: miserable morning, had to leave the house at 4am wearing our ski outfits because we were told we would be taken straight to the ski area. what made it worse was that there was no public bus at that hour, so we had to walk the 20 minutes wearing the uncomfortable clothes, heavy rucksacks on our backs, and the heavy skis and boots on our arms. then a 5-hour bus ride. the bus ride was uneventful but nice because we had an excellent view of the colorful sunrise against the light mist and pine trees. we hardly noticed passing the border into austria. we could see the abandoned border posts, and a lonely sign read "Austria". we didn't even have to slow down.

once we got off the bus at the ski area in mellau, freezing rain welcomed us. but we decided to go up anyway. the weather was getting worse all the time, the wind howling around us as we were pelleted by icy rain. we beginners braved it all to learn some skiing. walking uphill was a BIG pain, but the graduate student acting as our instructor said we weren't ready to take the ski-lift yet. anyway, after about an hour and a half, it was announced that the ski area was closing due to bad weather. Scheiße! so we went back to our lodge and did what the germans do... drink! a lot of glühwein this time. it's german hot wine and gets to you really fast. i love it! the lodge was a nice place, all wooden and warm... with a ping-pong table, a foosball table and a fire going.

saturday: today we left for the ski-area in damüls. it was a much bigger one. but with yesterday's lesson, i felt confident. i took the ski-lift and got up to the beginners piste. with the 'instructor' by my side, i started down the hill. i was picking up speed really quick! i tried using the slowing-down technique i had learned yesterday, but it didn't seem to help. so i just let go and crashed into the orange plastic barrier that they had on the beginning section of the piste. a little embarrassed, i picked myself up... though not without some help because one of my skis got entangled in the fence thingy.

i made sure to go slow from the very start this time and did better. but the next downhill was even steeper. i was actually scared to even start going down this one. but after much persuasion, i let myself slide into position. and soon i was skiing faster than i could control and just let myself fall. in fact, that became my new technique. everytime i felt myself going out of control, i would just fall into the soft snow. it worked great. this gave me confidence to go down steeper slopes. and as the day wore on, i was falling less. i had sort of mastered the slow skiing technique with the skiis in a V-pattern.

that night was another night of drinking. there were lots of drinks, glühwein, vodka, beer, chocolate milk with rum (or sth like that), but nothing for the non-drinkers. suffice to say, it was a crazy night.

sunday: i went up on the ski-lift with much more confidence on sunday. my last run on saturday had been very promising. but i soon found out i had gotten much worse! i was falling more than ever again! maybe i was taking it too fast. a slow run, and things began looking up. in fact, i started to get the hang of it. by the end of the day, i could do runs without falling once! and then, while i was enjoying it most, it was time to go! :(

the weekend was the most fun i've had in a while. so although it's left me almost broke, it was well worth it. and it's always nice to be able to say i learned to ski in the alps!

back in one piece

i know i should have posted earlier, but i have been procrastinating. i got back sunday night but i was too tired to do anything. i slept most of monday. and this evening i'm studying for my test tomorrow. there's a lot of material i need to cover so i'll skip writing a long post today. but i'll try and do a long one tomorrow.
so until tomorrow, then. enjoy whatever you're doing while i slave away into the night studying for the stupid test.

a busy day

it's been a day abuzz with activity! was up really early to pay a visit to the laundromat. i hate the one in my dorm because the dryer seems pathetically incapable of drying my clothes within 2 hours. my german flatmates don't mind because they would rather hang their clothes to dry, energy conscious as they seem to be (or short on change). anyway, at the laundromat at around 7 in the morning, there was only one other lady. she seemed nice and friendly at first, but then she started singing out loud! i didn't think much of it. and then she started talking, i turned, but no, she was talking to herself! she did this the entire time and since we were the only ones in the huge place, it was starting to freak me out! thankfully i got done quick and sprinted out of there.

i took the bus and tram this morning because i had my laundry with me. german public transportation doesn't cease to amaze me in its efficiency and punctuality. i had the entire timing worked out on the transportation website, from leaving my dorm to getting back, everything to the minute. but on the return journey, the bus dropped me a stop further from mine! ahhh... i had been used to the bus stopping at my stop since there are always people getting off there. so i just stood in front of the door and forgot to press the 'stop' button. most of the time, the driver notices you and stops, but not today. and as i found out, the next stop was a lot further than the normal distance between two stops. i had never really ventured into this part of the city, not least because there is nothing but trees there! i checked the schedule for the next bus going in the opposite direction, 20 minutes. so i decided to walk. and, got lost! took me a lot of wrong turns and help from strangers to get me back. the only good thing to come out of this is i found a wonderful bike path through the woods that i definitely plan on using.

then i spent the next hour with a friend shopping for food for the trip tomorrow. then we went to get the rental ski equipment that we had reserved. i was dreading having to carry all that on the tram with us and getting weird looks from people. but thankfully, we didn't attract much attention.

then, i had to get a rucksack that i had been meaning to get for a while. and this trip seemed like the perfect opportunity to get one. and after selecting a decent one, i discovered that i had left my EC card at home. the EC card is like the european debit card. germany isn't big on credit cards. even though this was a relatively big store, they didn't accept credit cards. so i had to get money off an ATM and incur a some extra charge. :(

that brings me to now, i'm taking a break from packing to write this post. planning on going to bed early since the bus leaves at 5 am tomorrow and i'm supposed to be there by 4.30!

i'm gone for the weekend so i won't be able to post until monday! have a great weekend! bis dann!

obama, and the usual

obama! yep, he's the reason i skipped writing my blog yesterday. excited for him, and for the end of the bush regime. i wish there was as much enthusiasm for the nepali leaders. but in our country we have a who leader threatens to wage a war against his own people! i definitely hope there will come a day when we can be proud of our leader, a leader who actually represents the people rather than the interests of the various parties.

moving on. today i finally worked out the postponement of my test on friday! only after i produced a letter convincing my professor that it was not simply an attempt to get extra time for the test that he agreed to let me take it next week instead. which means, i am going skiing after all this weekend! i'm excited. but did i mention i've never skied before? i'll worry about that later.

i have also been working on the kathmandu wiki. the link is http://ktmwiki.murkha.com. I put up a few, very roughly written, articles. but i'm hoping we'll eventually have an enormous depository on everything kathmandu. i can only hope it won't be one of my many failed projects. so, if you are reading this, please help the wiki by adding something to it! anything! oh, and while working on the some server files this morning, i somehow ended up mislinking the logo! so please don't mind the blank area on the top left. i am working on fixing it.

ciao, leute! bis morgen!

uneventful sunday

lazy sunday for me. it was really cold and windy outside, which meant no football. and in germany, sunday is the day off for everybody. all stores (groceries included) are closed, save for a few bakeries in the morning and some turkish kebab places. the kebab places are much like the chinese places in the US. they open everyday till very late at night, the food is cheap and they are everywhere!

anyway, after sleeping in till 12, i spent the day working on the kathmandu citywiki i talked about in my last post. it is shaping up pretty well, although nowhere near where it needs to be. i still have a few kinks to smooth out with relation to formatting and such. citing references is a mess at the moment, and that is an integral part of a wiki! it is still possible to do so manually however.

i won't be able to devote much time to the wiki this week though. ich habe eine prüfung am freitag. the german reminds me, i am thinking of writing part of my blog in german. it would be good practice for my upcoming german final in two and a half weeks. i'll give it some more thought though. it would be a pain breaking out my huge monster of a dictionary every time i forget the gender of a word!

alright then, auf wiedersehen!

transliteration and the kathmandu wiki

while trying to customize my blog today, i found this interesting tool called Google Indic Transliteration. it may not be new to you, but to me, this was a feature i had previously not cared to know about. today i decided to check it out, and i sure am glad i did! although, it says it transliterates to Hindi, it is for any Devnagari script.

here is why it's awesome: you don't have to know the nepali keyboard layout to type in the devnagari script! use the tool to type nepali in roman characters, and it transliterates it to Devnagari. if it transliterates wrong, you get to choose the right word from a list too. it worked pretty well except for words like "sarkari", where it went with "sarakari" instead. try it out for yourself. i was impressed.

also today, i was looking through the wiki of the city i am in, and began wondering, wouldn't it be great to have a wiki for kathmandu! i could look up the most trivial facts on kathmandu, or learn about some obscure street in the capital, or find a hidden gem of a restaurant off the busy streets. it's unfortunate we don't have a wiki for our awesome kathmandu.

but wait, is it right for me to always leave it to someone else to do something? maybe i should make a start and see if people will join in on the effort to create a vast repository of information on kathmandu. so i revived my old website that never really got off its feet, and added a wiki section to it. my website may not have worked, but let's see how the wiki fares. will it grow or wither and die prematurely? time, and the effort i put in will tell.

in any case, i would appreciate thoughts on the wiki and any help. i have barely configured the wiki at this point, but i'm working on it. hopefully it won't be one of those projects that i enthusiastically work on tirelessly at first, and then give up as the novelty wears off. i hope not. this is something i want to see fruition into something big!

pig milk and entropy

my professor for thermodynamics has a knack for somehow introducing random but interesting facts into his lectures. like today, while we were trying to figure out the entropy produced in a heat exchanger used to cool milk, he asked us if we knew why we didn't drink pig-milk! when none of our haphazard guesses seemed to hit the mark, he proceeded to explain. Apparently piglets need all the milk they can get. So if the pig farmer wants the piglets to survive, he has to let them suckle all they need. And piglets grow up to be pork and bacon, so it is in the pig-farmer's interest that they thrive. There is little or no milk left for commercial purposes after the little ones are done suckling. Interesting.

then a while ago, i sat and started googling to see how much truth there is to it. and i found many people puzzled by the same question. i found a good response in a "collection of letters - industry". i'll post an extract from the letter:

Pigs will on average produce 13 lbs of milk in a day as compared to cows that produce 65 lbs of milk on average per day. Pigs unlike cows cannot become pregnant while lactating and therefore possess a severe economic problem to producers. while pigs consume less feed per day, economics does not allow pigs to be a viable source of dairy products.

The biggest challenge facing the porcine dairy industry is collecting the product. Pigs on average have fourteen teats as opposed to cows that have four teats. Pigs also differ from cows in their milk ejection time, a cows milk ejection is stimulated by the hoimone oxytocin and can last ten minutes, where as a pig's milk ejection time only last fifteen seconds as the suckling pigs stimulate the release of oxytocin. The technology of a 14 cupped mechanized milking machine that can milk a pig in 15 seconds is not available to pork producers.

so it seems like my professor was somewhat right in his explanation. pigs do not produce enough milk to be a viable economic option and the piglets' suckling only simulates milk production for 15 extra seconds. but apparently it has also do with the difficulty of actually obtaining the milk.

good to know! order has finally been restored. take that, entropy! :)

birds and planes

I have been following the news on the 'crashed' US Airways Airbus A320 in the Hudson River hours earlier, and it's great to know that everyone made it out alive. Props to the pilots for landing a huge jet safely on water!

Apparently, the situation transpired due to the plane's engines losing power after hitting a flock of birds. It would be interesting to know how many birds it took to bring down the engines. Engines are very thoroughly tested, and are generally capable of surviving a bird strike. It is in fact a certification requirement of the FAA that an engine should still be able to function if a medium-sized bird is sucked into the jet during takeoff. (link). We were in fact shown a video in class by one of the Pratt & Whitney people of the bird test, and it was pretty spectacular. upon impact, the blades of the engine changed shape and wobbled spinelessly in slo-mo. sorry i couldn't find a youtube video to go with this.

and, just a few days ago there was this headline on cnn " U.S. airlines fly 2 years without fatality". I am glad this incident today didn't dash hopes for a 3rd year without fatality!

now, getting back to me. today, i made an effort to work out the scheduling conflict i mentioned yesterday. and as expected, the professor was firm with his date. but i still haven't given up. i'll try again tomorrow in person.

alright, i'm off then. i've a class at 8 in the morning! i've missed quite a few of these, i can sleep through alarms if i haven't got enough sleep.

bis morgen!

snow flakes and flickr

it has been snowing all day. it was fun riding my bicycle to class in the snow along the bike path that no one bothers to shovel. everything looked so beautiful so i decided to take some photos of the path, but none came out very nice. the photo on the right does not even come close, and that was my best shot. the snow flakes barely showed up, and the lighting was poor.

once i got home and downloaded the photos onto my computer, i decided to look through other photos as well. and ended up spending the afternoon looking for the better photos and uploading them to Flickr. i used up my monthly quota pretty quickly. click here to check out my Flickr page.

oh and i almost forgot to mention the thing that's bothering me. this morning my professor announced that we would be having a test next friday. no problem with that, except, hours later i get an email from the exchange office saying we will be leaving for the weekend ski trip on friday at 5 am! o_O just great!! now i've got to work this scheduling conflict out with my professor or i'll be forced to miss out on this huge trip i had been looking forward to. the test is mandatory if i want to pass the course. :( i will talk to my professor, but the german professors are a different breed from the american ones... flexibility is almost unheard of. worth a try though.

i'll end here for today. as for the philosophy discussion i mentioned in yesterday's post, i don't feel like continuing it anymore! hehe

gnite!

philosophy, or not to philosophy

today, since i'm feeling uninspired, i will dip my bloggity fingers into a little philosophy. now you might ask, "how can you delve into philosophy on a day you claim to feel uninspired?"
"valid question, my good sir," i say. how i plan on discussing philosophy without the help of my brilliant mind is, by reusing the work it has already helped produce. in other words, i will be using one of my old philosophy papers to help me.

and before you turn away from reading at the very mention of "philosophy", think. give your brain a little treat. philosophy is good food for the brain.

my discussion is based on "meditations on first philosophy" by rené descartes.

here i'll discuss only the second of his 6 meditations in the book. this one concerns the nature of the human mind. reader beware, thinking too deep into the text below might boggle your mind!

-- i am, i exist --

[first, a short intro]
In ‘Meditations on First Philosophy’, Descartes attempts to reconstruct philosophy from the bottom up. To accomplish his quest for absolute certainty, Descartes believes he must begin from scratch. He must deny all his beliefs until he believes in absolutely nothing. Then he can begin to carefully examine everything and establish its definite verity before accepting it as fact. With this selected knowledge that he knows is the absolute truth, he can build a solid foundation upon which to base his philosophy.

In the second meditation, Descartes delves into one of his more discussed ‘cogito’ or ‘I am, I exist’. If Descartes wants to believe that he is living in a world created by a deceiver and wants to reject any and everything as trickery, he can. But who is it then that is making this decision to deny everything? Is it possible to deny the existence of the one who is denying it? So it must be certain that the thinker exists, hence ‘I am, I exist’, for without the thinker there is no thought. And without thought, the ‘I’ cannot exist. The ‘I’ does not refer to the body or anything material, for Descartes has established that nothing is honest. He might be deceived, but the to be deceived or to doubt, the existence of an entity is required. One cannot deceive a non-existent entity. This entity that has no form or shape and yet is aware can only be the thinking. So the ‘I’ possibly refers to the self-conscious being, to the awareness of existence.

Imagination is not the same, and can be incomplete or deceiving. The mind is aware that a piece of wax, when heated can take immeasurable forms, but the imagination cannot possibly run through each one. The mind is capable of understanding that regardless of what the wax is subject to and the form and shape it adopts, it is still in the end, wax. Descartes proceeds with another example to illustrate how our mind makes judgments. When one sees a group of men walking outside, despite being concealed in hats and coats, one can still tell that they are men, and not robots posing as men. ‘And so something which I thought I was seeing with my eyes in is fact grasped solely by the faculty of judgment which is in my mind’ .

The understanding takes place in the mind. What the mind makes of what the sensory perceptions is upto the ‘I’, for it is the thinker. The fact remains, however, that the wax might be false, the men might not exist, but it is certain that the senses seemed to perceive them. And it is the mind that attempts to make sense of it and understand it. So the existence of the mind is certain. Descartes says that he will have an easier time mulling on the perception of the mind for the mind understands whereas the senses are easily deceiving.

---

that's it for today. comment and lemme know what you think. perhaps tomorrow i will post more about descartes' thoughts on the existence of God. or simply a post about my own mundane existence!

namaste!

Europe

europe has been pretty amazing so far. what i especially love about this place is the fact that, when you feel like, you can just hop onto a train and go traveling. i bring it up because i just put together a few collages from the photos from my weekend trips. a collage, because uploading every single photo would just clog my post. click on the collage for larger size.

so, first paris. what struck me most about paris was the grandeur of the place. the buildings, the squares, the statues, gardens, everything seemed so grand. but it's also a city of tourists. the lines were painfully long, whether at the eiffel tower or at the louvre. thankfully though, the public restrooms here, unlike in most of europe, were free of charge!

this next collage is München, or Munich. i chose to not go there during oktoberfest because of everyone telling me about how crowded and rowdy it would be. i would apparently have to wait in long lines without any certainty of ever being able to get into the beer tents. so i attended the oktoberfest organized by the city i'm in instead. was a lof of fun! germans love their fests. oktoberfest is one of many fests here. unlike oktoberfest, which is attended by more americans than germans, other fests are less touristy, and with more of the local flavor. here's the photos i took in munich when i visited it a little later. it was a lovely place. i loved the train ride through bavarian meadows and typical little picturesque villages to get there.

i would post more collages, but there seems to be a glitch in Picasa, the software I'm using to make these. my external storage drive keeps vanishing from picasa, making this a frustrating experience. not to mention blogger not allowing me to upload the photos for some unknown reason. i'm glad to be finally done with the hassle. i will post more photos in upcoming posts.

ciao!

2009!

so i checked and it seems i gave up on blogging halfway through 2007 and skipped 2008 entirely, but here i am back again in 2009! that sajha.com discussion about nepali bloggers seems to have been just the push i needed.

anyway, a lot has happened between my last post and this one. the major one being that i am now in germany, studying abroad. ich habe mehr als fünf monaten hier schon geblieben, aber habe ich sechs monaten noch zu studieren. came here with no knowledge of german, but i think i'm getting along fine now.

i'm thinking about making this blog less intrusive into my personal life. but i don't know... i guess i'll just write my thoughts down and see what happens. when i make my posts about myself, it's fun to read them months or years down the line and see how life was faring for me back then. but i risk losing readers this way. haha... who am i kidding. i lost all my readers way back already!

anyway, i'll leave it at that for today. by the way, reading my old posts, i couldn't help but notice my style of minimizing the use of capital letters... and i actually edited this post to conform with the style. i kinda like it!