Home-made beads necklace and earrings set

Here's another pretty creation, looks fantastic with a dress! (goes without saying I am thrilled to have been able to make something like this) :D

Another burst of craftiness ... Making earrings!

I am Obsessed with them, I Own loads of 'em... and there are few other things that cheer me up like buying/owning/wearing interesting Earrings... On a day of sudden burst of creativity, here's something I made... :)... 

'A Slice of Pi' - A wonderful read!

Maths and me... hmm... I refuse to agree that I was bad at it in school, coz I was not (most of the times) - but the 12th grade maths exam was definitely a low point - I was jaded with teachers who didn't know what they were talking about (having themselves mugged every bit of every line perhaps, and their vain attempts at teaching concepts they themselves didn't have a grasp of).... I won't say that for the particular Maths teacher in my 12th grade, coz she was a splendid woman ( she is!) but the trickery of getting the subject of Maths beyond just the usual drag .. and into the "interest" part of ones subconscious?!... umm, I donno whether she did that to me. 

So here I picked up a book that looked quite interesting... and the author has done a simply superb job of explaining soooo many doubts of mine (which I am sure perked up in my head when I was learning them, but dare you question silly usual "given assumptions" - don't ask why - that's how we learned... or I learned). So she details out fractions, irrational numbers, Fibonacci series, magic numbers, multipliers, short-cuts and what not's. There is an abundance of interesting detail on well known mathematicians ( none of my teachers ever told me any of That!) - Gauss, Newton, Einstein, Fermat, Napier, Archimedes, Pascal, Eratosthenes, Goldbach etc. .. about their personalities, how they became Mathematicians and what made them tick - also what paranoia each one had etc. - that info makes them so much more comprehensible!

Ahh.... also as the name of the book goes - there are SUCH interesting details about Pi  i.e. the value 3.14 and how it is part of soooooo many things in nature even, symbols and signs - things we normally wouldn't know. 

There is also an interesting bit on Pythagoras, Pythagorean's and  algebra- Ooh what a treasure trove of a book!!

"Airframe" by Michael Crichton

Ah yeah! I have mentioned before that the topic of  'Aircraft' warms my heart, lungs, kidneys etc. like nothing else... So, found "Airframe" on sale at some local discount shop... I forget where... but well yea, saw it and pounced on it! :D ... Also, read it like there was no tomorrow. It IS a compulsive page-turner.... and I often caught myself second-guessing what might happen next and ran ahead 2-3 pages just to quench my curiosity! After all 'Jurassic Park' and 'Lost World' did exactly that as movies (also authored by Michael Crichton)... It is definitely well recommended - you can finish it in 2 days flat! - seriously.

So well, you have a TransPacific flight going from Hong Kong to California and it undergoes a curious accident which is reported as turbulence by the pilot, killing 4 and injuring about 58 odd people (which a turbulence never does really). So it turns out, nobody understand what happened on the flight, and the blame lands on the manufacturers of the aircraft, a company called Norton.

Norton have an impending bulk order to China and hence have to race against time, to investigate and find the actual cause of the accident, lest their deal fails - resulting in immense damage to their brand name and subsequent closure of the company itself. So their Quality Assurance personnel, a lady called Katherine is assigned the task of solving the issue .... the story takes you with her rationale and intensive sleuthing (not only about the components that form the Aircraft - i.e. the Airframe itself) but also against her own co-workers and bosses and the story spins an intensive spell of skulduggery and mismanagement - even though the people on the floor are dedicated specialists who have immense knowledge of how much strain an aircraft can and will take! They build Airframes to take strain in multiple of more than 12 times or so what an aircraft claims on paper!!

It takes you into how union-workers bully management, and also (my favourite parts include...) on how Katherine handles Media 'Superstar' Hard-Talkers - who do not know anything about any technical information, nor do they care a damn about it. Sensational sells and that's all they really care about. A normal person, I can imagine, would undergo a nervous break-down under such immense pressure - and reading the novel makes you feel really good about the lead character; her practical mind really does handle all the shit really well!

Gym 1.37 and more from 15th Feb to 5th March 2012

Oh yea, I had too many things on my mind to update gym sessions here... which was fun when I was doing non-stop and became repetitive and kind o boring after a while ....to write online i.e.. But the sessions in all practicality continue ... and so it shall be... but I am not very sure of regular updates. Maybe/ Maybe not! :)