Nervous?
So more than two of my friends are definitely married. whatthehellisgoingonwithmylife!!!ingeneralimean.
Ohgodohgodohgodohgod.whattodowhattodowhattodo.
Ohgodohgodohgodohgod.whattodowhattodowhattodo.
Diary entry number ran#
I finished work this morning at 1, and then talked to ZZ for a very long timee. I got up several times in the morning, but then went back to bed and finally got out of the bed way after noon.
Then I went for the duck tour with the IO group. Our tour driver was the DiscoDuck guy who claimed that going to college to NorthEastern had worked out really well from him. Met all the freshies from SouthAsia, and had a fun day. The tour was quite different from last year's but fun indeed. We took a 45-minute walk to the 'Eid dinner, and got JPLicks while returning back. Returned with Mk, Sm, and Sd--it was the first time I'd met Sm and Sd, and they're both supercool! Sm has a blog, which was creeped upon, and promises were made to hang out soon and often. Mk is curious about And, and we'll see how things develop.
Worked for 5 hours for the CompSci after getting back, and got the third part almost certainly working. Excited about tomorrow and the future. The future is yet to see. Kayseraaseraa.
Then I went for the duck tour with the IO group. Our tour driver was the DiscoDuck guy who claimed that going to college to NorthEastern had worked out really well from him. Met all the freshies from SouthAsia, and had a fun day. The tour was quite different from last year's but fun indeed. We took a 45-minute walk to the 'Eid dinner, and got JPLicks while returning back. Returned with Mk, Sm, and Sd--it was the first time I'd met Sm and Sd, and they're both supercool! Sm has a blog, which was creeped upon, and promises were made to hang out soon and often. Mk is curious about And, and we'll see how things develop.
Worked for 5 hours for the CompSci after getting back, and got the third part almost certainly working. Excited about tomorrow and the future. The future is yet to see. Kayseraaseraa.
How many momos do Nepalis eat in a year?
There are many things I wonder about (why're they giggling in my direction? is my zip open? how did i get all this blood on my hands?), and the question of how many momos are eaten in a year comes amongst the most-wondered things (right along with, did she smile at me, or the other guy?).
I've been looking at fermi problems lately, and decided to tackle the problem by myself. There's some excellent stuff on fermi problem available on the net-- wonderful collection here , and wiki article here but check this out before anything else. After trying out a few of the problems, I figured I'd be doing humankind a favor with my momo-calculations. Here's the math:
We start with the momo-eating population. I want only the Nepali momos eaten, so I'll ignore that people unrelated to Nepal may like momos too. The Nepali population is a good place to start from-- there are about 3 crore Nepalis, a fourth of whom eat momo regularly. That gives us ~ 80 lakh momo-eating people.
How many momos does one of these momo eaters eat over a year? One plate of momo is 10 momos, and momo's eaten about once every two weeks or so, thus every person has 25 plates of momo over a year, and we get 250 momos a year per person. Multiply that by the number of momo eaters, and we have 2 arab momos a year. Remember, a fermi problem's about getting the magnitude right, so it's close enough if we're off by less than a factor of 10-- meaning it can go over 10 arab, or well below an arab, and we'd still be guessing correctly.
So there it is then-- Nepalis eat 2 billion momos in a year. I don't want to end there though. I want to calculate how many goats and buffaloes and chicken that would be, and other fun things we can do with momos. So we'll keep rounding that number up and down to make calculations easier.
To begin with, I want to calculate the volume of the momos. A momo's usually about 5-6 cm wide, so I'll assume it to be a perfect sphere of 3 cm radius, and I come up with a volume of around 30 cm^3. So there's around 30 of them in a litre. An olympic-sized swimming pool is 2.5 million liters in volume, so it can hold 75 million momos. I'll average around 1.5 billion momos a year for convenience sake. So if you put all the momos Nepalis eat in a year, you'd fill about 20 olympic-sized swimming pools. To be sure, they're all be packed tight so that they end up as a huge-ass olympic-sized momo, like when you bring them back home and they all fuse together into a mega-momo. For your convenience, this is what an olympic swimming pool looks like [wikipedia]:
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Now lets calculate the toll that momo consumption takes on Animals. We'll begin by dividing the momos by their types. I know most people prefer buff momos, then chicken momos, then vegetables momos. Lets assume that 40 percent of all momos are buff momos, and another 40 percent are chicken. 15 percent are vegetable momos, and the remaining five percent could be mutton and all the other weird types that sound so-wrong, like paneer, and cheese and egg and so on.
How many momos can you make for a kilo of meat? There's ten momos per plate, and every momo has 30 cm^3 volume, so assuming water-density and that about a third of a momo is meat, you get 10 plate of momos per kilo of meat. I don't even want to think about the profits there.
Now, I don't know how much a raanga weighs, but I'd guess it to be around 150 Kilos(I looked it up online and they probably weigh more, but this is for fun so go along). And a raanga of that size probably gives 60 kilo of usable meat. Assuming ten percent wastage, you get 54*10 = 540 plates of momos per raanga. Lets make that 500 for calculation's sake.
40 percent of 2 billion is 800 million momos. 800 million momos are 80 million plates. 80 million plates divided by 500 plates per raangaa gives us 160,000 raangas. Since momo consumption varies by days of year, we'll just assume that there are 400 days in a year. That means, 400 Raangas are turned to momo every day in Nepal(mostly Kathmandu).
Lets go for the chickens now. I'll assume 70 percent of a chicken is usable for momos. A chicken weighs 2.5 kilos, so we get 1.75 kilos of usable meat. I'll make that 2 kilos, so now we have 20 plates of momo per chicken. Again, there are 80 million plates of chicken momo, and 20 plate per chicken, so that gets us four million chickens a year. That may sound like a lot, but keep in mind that the annual chicken production of Nepal is around 60 million heads a year, and that is nowhere near the demand, and thus the imports from India. Anyway, to take things back momos, Ten thousand chickens are turned to momo every day in Nepal(mostly Kathmandu).
I don't want to go into goats and vegetables because that's not very interesting, and the numbers are not very big. So there you are, the number of momos eaten in a year!
I've been looking at fermi problems lately, and decided to tackle the problem by myself. There's some excellent stuff on fermi problem available on the net-- wonderful collection here , and wiki article here but check this out before anything else. After trying out a few of the problems, I figured I'd be doing humankind a favor with my momo-calculations. Here's the math:
We start with the momo-eating population. I want only the Nepali momos eaten, so I'll ignore that people unrelated to Nepal may like momos too. The Nepali population is a good place to start from-- there are about 3 crore Nepalis, a fourth of whom eat momo regularly. That gives us ~ 80 lakh momo-eating people.
How many momos does one of these momo eaters eat over a year? One plate of momo is 10 momos, and momo's eaten about once every two weeks or so, thus every person has 25 plates of momo over a year, and we get 250 momos a year per person. Multiply that by the number of momo eaters, and we have 2 arab momos a year. Remember, a fermi problem's about getting the magnitude right, so it's close enough if we're off by less than a factor of 10-- meaning it can go over 10 arab, or well below an arab, and we'd still be guessing correctly.
So there it is then-- Nepalis eat 2 billion momos in a year. I don't want to end there though. I want to calculate how many goats and buffaloes and chicken that would be, and other fun things we can do with momos. So we'll keep rounding that number up and down to make calculations easier.
To begin with, I want to calculate the volume of the momos. A momo's usually about 5-6 cm wide, so I'll assume it to be a perfect sphere of 3 cm radius, and I come up with a volume of around 30 cm^3. So there's around 30 of them in a litre. An olympic-sized swimming pool is 2.5 million liters in volume, so it can hold 75 million momos. I'll average around 1.5 billion momos a year for convenience sake. So if you put all the momos Nepalis eat in a year, you'd fill about 20 olympic-sized swimming pools. To be sure, they're all be packed tight so that they end up as a huge-ass olympic-sized momo, like when you bring them back home and they all fuse together into a mega-momo. For your convenience, this is what an olympic swimming pool looks like [wikipedia]:
Now lets calculate the toll that momo consumption takes on Animals. We'll begin by dividing the momos by their types. I know most people prefer buff momos, then chicken momos, then vegetables momos. Lets assume that 40 percent of all momos are buff momos, and another 40 percent are chicken. 15 percent are vegetable momos, and the remaining five percent could be mutton and all the other weird types that sound so-wrong, like paneer, and cheese and egg and so on.
How many momos can you make for a kilo of meat? There's ten momos per plate, and every momo has 30 cm^3 volume, so assuming water-density and that about a third of a momo is meat, you get 10 plate of momos per kilo of meat. I don't even want to think about the profits there.
Now, I don't know how much a raanga weighs, but I'd guess it to be around 150 Kilos(I looked it up online and they probably weigh more, but this is for fun so go along). And a raanga of that size probably gives 60 kilo of usable meat. Assuming ten percent wastage, you get 54*10 = 540 plates of momos per raanga. Lets make that 500 for calculation's sake.
40 percent of 2 billion is 800 million momos. 800 million momos are 80 million plates. 80 million plates divided by 500 plates per raangaa gives us 160,000 raangas. Since momo consumption varies by days of year, we'll just assume that there are 400 days in a year. That means, 400 Raangas are turned to momo every day in Nepal(mostly Kathmandu).
Lets go for the chickens now. I'll assume 70 percent of a chicken is usable for momos. A chicken weighs 2.5 kilos, so we get 1.75 kilos of usable meat. I'll make that 2 kilos, so now we have 20 plates of momo per chicken. Again, there are 80 million plates of chicken momo, and 20 plate per chicken, so that gets us four million chickens a year. That may sound like a lot, but keep in mind that the annual chicken production of Nepal is around 60 million heads a year, and that is nowhere near the demand, and thus the imports from India. Anyway, to take things back momos, Ten thousand chickens are turned to momo every day in Nepal(mostly Kathmandu).
I don't want to go into goats and vegetables because that's not very interesting, and the numbers are not very big. So there you are, the number of momos eaten in a year!
Things that mess me up
Amongst the many things that mess me up, the two top ones are always:
smell, and
music.
Always. You can fight anything but them. They will beat you, nayy, pound you into submission, and you wont have a fighting change. They will melt you to the ground.
smell, and
music.
Always. You can fight anything but them. They will beat you, nayy, pound you into submission, and you wont have a fighting change. They will melt you to the ground.
Upturning perceptions
Plastic-y. Fake. Glamorized.
The name of the photobook is forgotten. I found it last week in the library when I was looking to procrastinate work with anything that I could get my hands on. I flipped through the pages, and hurried to my class upstairs. I've searched for it several times since, and never found. The name was common-but-catchy enough that it aroused one's interest, but not helpful enough to be found on the internet.
It was on women. It had women from ages four to eighty-six (the New York Socialite who noone told that partying is for only young people lady). It had captions like The popular clique of girls in highschool in xxx; Candy, who's a stripper in Vegas strip bleaches her skirt [in the bathroom] after a spill [she is naked, and so positioned in front of the mirror that you only know that she's not wearing anything]; fashion models touch-up their makeup in a party hosted by [insert big NYC fashion name]. I've rarely seen a book that was so genuine and candid in its portrayal of its subject.
And then it struck me. Fakeness is the portrayal. The tidied-up images from Kathmandu and the North for all those coffee books are all lies, and it's unfair to compare them to something that's not tidied up. Compare oranges to oranges, and fake apples and grapes to fake apples grapes. Then you see that the difference doesn't exist. It's not them, it's you-- you're the one doing all the fakery-jiggery and convincing yourself of things.
The name of the photobook is forgotten. I found it last week in the library when I was looking to procrastinate work with anything that I could get my hands on. I flipped through the pages, and hurried to my class upstairs. I've searched for it several times since, and never found. The name was common-but-catchy enough that it aroused one's interest, but not helpful enough to be found on the internet.
It was on women. It had women from ages four to eighty-six (the New York Socialite who noone told that partying is for only young people lady). It had captions like The popular clique of girls in highschool in xxx; Candy, who's a stripper in Vegas strip bleaches her skirt [in the bathroom] after a spill [she is naked, and so positioned in front of the mirror that you only know that she's not wearing anything]; fashion models touch-up their makeup in a party hosted by [insert big NYC fashion name]. I've rarely seen a book that was so genuine and candid in its portrayal of its subject.
And then it struck me. Fakeness is the portrayal. The tidied-up images from Kathmandu and the North for all those coffee books are all lies, and it's unfair to compare them to something that's not tidied up. Compare oranges to oranges, and fake apples and grapes to fake apples grapes. Then you see that the difference doesn't exist. It's not them, it's you-- you're the one doing all the fakery-jiggery and convincing yourself of things.
Aftermaths
So the asshole artist is dead, and she is dead too. It's all his fault.
His friend has apparently written a book on them. Cristina emailed me about that-- she told me she'd read the story, the story of Palpasa and the asshole artist, and that Palpasa was actually, really, very much dead. Her parents were still hoping to find her -- maybe wandering around in the forests-- after all this time.
We went to college together. I had emailed her before the freshman fall and she had not replied. I assumed then it was our differences-- I was a nepali Nepali, and she was a notverynepali American. She was out in Latin America, Guatemala I think, on some service trip, without computers. Which was why she never received my emails on time. By the end, she was a lot more Nepali than I ever was.
You know me. You have read the story. I am an unnamed character in the story. I am the friend who pulls Palpasa away from the asshole artist the first time they met. I don't claim I knew where this was going and how it would end, but I never liked the likes of him.
His friend has apparently written a book on them. Cristina emailed me about that-- she told me she'd read the story, the story of Palpasa and the asshole artist, and that Palpasa was actually, really, very much dead. Her parents were still hoping to find her -- maybe wandering around in the forests-- after all this time.
We went to college together. I had emailed her before the freshman fall and she had not replied. I assumed then it was our differences-- I was a nepali Nepali, and she was a notverynepali American. She was out in Latin America, Guatemala I think, on some service trip, without computers. Which was why she never received my emails on time. By the end, she was a lot more Nepali than I ever was.
You know me. You have read the story. I am an unnamed character in the story. I am the friend who pulls Palpasa away from the asshole artist the first time they met. I don't claim I knew where this was going and how it would end, but I never liked the likes of him.
Girls be bitchin' cool
Watched the first five episodes of Girls. For some, it may not be what it's supposed to be-- a comedy-- but it is what it is. It's an honest, some might add brutally so, outlook on women's lives in the metropolis. As a friend said, it's like Sex and the City, except it's real. So there's wimmin, and there's the City, and there's sex (oh yeah, lots of very graphic scenes), but it's not glamorous. It's like peeking into the lives of five of your female college roommates three years after they've graduated, and barely employed. There's is-this-or-is-this-not-harrassment, pregnancy scares, meaningless sex ( and not hookups), and relationships that are neither here nor there.
The first question I asked about America to Pra dai back in 2007(8?) when he had just returned from the west coast was if America was like FRIENDS. His reply made a lot of sense-- have you ever wondered how they make money, and sustain their NYC lifestyle? They would not have the lifestyle with their employment etc. And while this was happening, here in the States, the girls of Girls were partying hard at Oberlin-- trying to get published, getting into steady relationships, making sense of what was to come after college. Five years later, I'm safely into college, almost able to identify with them; Pra dai is writer-ing (with the lifestyle the comes along with it) and the girls are barely making it in NYC.
Things were supposed to be improving for women. They were supposed to be able to reach for their dreams by now-- getting equal pay and treatment, greater safety, greater independence and freedom. Things are better, yes, but as Girls portrays so accurately, things haven't really changed in the essentials. The dynamics seem to have remain unchanged, and women are still have to play the defense. Don't harass me, I'm as good as him/her, Sex favors?, shitshitshit amipregnant. Perhaps it's a sign of change that at least women can say that without being judged. But it's nowhere near where things should be, and until then, things will just be... sad. And where there's sadness, there's humor. Once you get past the gloomy cynicism of Girls and accept it as an uncontested reality, you begin realizing that they're quite funny after all. And since the gloominess of the show is the reality, the show's more real and funnier than it's given credit for.
The first question I asked about America to Pra dai back in 2007(8?) when he had just returned from the west coast was if America was like FRIENDS. His reply made a lot of sense-- have you ever wondered how they make money, and sustain their NYC lifestyle? They would not have the lifestyle with their employment etc. And while this was happening, here in the States, the girls of Girls were partying hard at Oberlin-- trying to get published, getting into steady relationships, making sense of what was to come after college. Five years later, I'm safely into college, almost able to identify with them; Pra dai is writer-ing (with the lifestyle the comes along with it) and the girls are barely making it in NYC.
Things were supposed to be improving for women. They were supposed to be able to reach for their dreams by now-- getting equal pay and treatment, greater safety, greater independence and freedom. Things are better, yes, but as Girls portrays so accurately, things haven't really changed in the essentials. The dynamics seem to have remain unchanged, and women are still have to play the defense. Don't harass me, I'm as good as him/her, Sex favors?, shitshitshit amipregnant. Perhaps it's a sign of change that at least women can say that without being judged. But it's nowhere near where things should be, and until then, things will just be... sad. And where there's sadness, there's humor. Once you get past the gloomy cynicism of Girls and accept it as an uncontested reality, you begin realizing that they're quite funny after all. And since the gloominess of the show is the reality, the show's more real and funnier than it's given credit for.
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