Monday, March 3, 2008

Hypocondriac

the following is an extract from a book called "three men in a boat" by Jerome K. Jerome, the book is amazing, this is from the first 2 pages

THERE were four of us - George, and William Samuel Harris, and myself, and Montmorency. We were
sitting in my room, smoking, and talking about how bad we were - bad from a medical point of view I mean,
of course.
We were all feeling seedy, and we were getting quite nervous about it. Harris said he felt such extraordinary
fits of giddiness come over him at times, that he hardly knew what he was doing; and then George said that
HE had fits of giddiness too, and hardly knew what HE was doing. With me, it was my liver that was out of
order. I knew it was my liver that was out of order, because I had just been reading a patent liver-pill circular,
in which were detailed the various symptoms by which a man could tell when his liver was out of order. I had
them all.
It is a most extraordinary thing, but I never read a patent medicine advertisement without being impelled to
the conclusion that I am suffering from the particular disease therein dealt with in its most virulent form. The
diagnosis seems in every case to correspond exactly with all the sensations that I have ever felt.
I remember going to the British Museum one day to read up the treatment for some slight ailment of which I
had a touch - hay fever, I fancy it was. I got down the book, and read all I came to read; and then, in an
unthinking moment, I idly turned the leaves, and began to indolently study diseases, generally. I forget which
was the first distemper I plunged into - some fearful, devastating scourge, I know - and, before I had glanced
half down the list of "premonitory symptoms," it was borne in upon me that I had fairly got it.
I sat for awhile, frozen with horror; and then, in the listlessness of despair, I again turned over the pages. I
came to typhoid fever - read the symptoms - discovered that I had typhoid fever, must have had it for months
without knowing it - wondered what else I had got; turned up St. Vitus's Dance - found, as I expected, that I
had that too, - began to get interested in my case, and determined to sift it to the bottom, and so started
alphabetically - read up ague, and learnt that I was sickening for it, and that the acute stage would commence
in about another fortnight. Bright's disease, I was relieved to find, I had only in a modified form, and, so far as
that was concerned, I might live for years. Cholera I had, with severe complications; and diphtheria I seemed
to have been born with. I plodded conscientiously through the twenty-six letters, and the only malady I could
conclude I had not got was housemaid's knee.
I felt rather hurt about this at first; it seemed somehow to be a sort of slight. Why hadn't I got housemaid's
knee? Why this invidious reservation? After a while, however, less grasping feelings prevailed. I reflected that
I had every other known malady in the pharmacology, and I grew less selfish, and determined to do without
housemaid's knee. Gout, in its most malignant stage, it would appear, had seized me without my being aware
of it; and zymosis I had evidently been suffering with from boyhood. There were no more diseases after
zymosis, so I concluded there was nothing else the matter with me.

I sat and pondered. I thought what an interesting case I must be from a medical point of view, what an
acquisition I should be to a class! Students would have no need to "walk the hospitals," if they had me. I was a
hospital in myself. All they need do would be to walk round me, and, after that, take their diploma.
Then I wondered how long I had to live. I tried to examine myself. I felt my pulse. I could not at first feel any
pulse at all. Then, all of a sudden, it seemed to start off. I pulled out my watch and timed it. I made it a
hundred and forty-seven to the minute. I tried to feel my heart. I could not feel my heart. It had stopped
beating. I have since been induced to come to the opinion that it must have been there all the time, and must
have been beating, but I cannot account for it. I patted myself all over my front, from what I call my waist up
to my head, and I went a bit round each side, and a little way up the back. But I could not feel or hear
anything. I tried to look at my tongue. I stuck it out as far as ever it would go, and I shut one eye, and tried to
examine it with the other. I could only see the tip, and the only thing that I could gain from that was to feel
more certain than before that I had scarlet fever.
I had walked into that reading-room a happy, healthy man. I crawled out a decrepit wreck.
I went to my medical man. He is an old chum of mine, and feels my pulse, and looks at my tongue, and talks
about the weather, all for nothing, when I fancy I'm ill; so I thought I would do him a good turn by going to
him now. "What a doctor wants," I said, "is practice. He shall have me. He will get more practice out of me
than out of seventeen hundred of your ordinary, commonplace patients, with only one or two diseases each."
So I went straight up and saw him, and he said:
"Well, what's the matter with you?"
I said:
"I will not take up your time, dear boy, with telling you what is the matter with me. Life is brief, and you
might pass away before I had finished. But I will tell you what is NOT the matter with me. I have not got
housemaid's knee. Why I have not got housemaid's knee, I cannot tell you; but the fact remains that I have not
got it. Everything else, however, I HAVE got."
.........

Confession

Ok Ok ya those very few of you that've read my blog before must be wondering why i've started a new blog n put up the same ol' articles that i had like 2 yrs ago. Well there's a simple explanation to that, n that is - i forgot my login id n password to the ol' account.
Yup i know that's really professorial of me (absent minded), but it's true. So the articles below this are my old ones copied from the old blog, n the ones above this (hopefully there are a few) are the ones that i've put up directly on the new one.
Of course considering not a lot of you read my old blog, i don't expect anybody to read this one either, however considering my computer now remembers my id n password for me (it refused to do that when i used to write before) i promise all my faithful readers that i wont keep them waiting for a yr n a half by forgetting my password again.
Cheers

hell

This one is absolutely fabulous. Such exquisite logic with a profound
knowledge of science!!

And garnished with a hint of sarcasm

Enjoy.

Is Hell Exothermic Or Endothermic?

The following is supposedly an actual question given
on a University of Washington chemistry mid-term. The
answer by one student was so "profound" that the
professor shared it with colleagues, via the Internet,
which is, of course, why we now have the pleasure of
enjoying it as well.

Bonus Question: Is Hell exothermic (gives off heat) or
endothermic (absorbs heat)?

Most of the students wrote proofs of their beliefs
using Boyle's Law (gas cools when it expands and heats
when it is compressed) or some variant. One student,
however, wrote the following:

First, we need to know how the mass of Hell is
changing in time. So we need to know the rate at which
souls are moving into Hell and the rate at which they
are leaving. I think that we can safely assume that
once a soul gets to Hell, it will not leave.
Therefore, no souls are leaving. As for how many souls
are entering Hell, let's look at the different
religions that exist in the world today. Most of these
religions state that if you are not a member of their
religion, you will go to Hell. Since there is more
than one of these religions and since people do not
belong to more than one religion, we can project that
all souls go to Hell. With birth and death rates as
they are, we can expect the number of souls in Hell to
increase exponentially.

Now, we look at the rate of change of the volume in
Hell because Boyle's Law states that in order for the
temperature and pressure in Hell to stay the same, the
volume of Hell has to expand proportionately as souls
are added.

This gives two possibilities:

1. If Hell is expanding at a slower rate than the rate
at which souls enter Hell, then the temperature and
pressure in Hell will increase until all Hell breaks
loose.

2. If Hell is expanding at a rate faster than the
increase of souls in Hell, then the temperature and
pressure will drop until Hell freezes over.

So which is it?

If we accept the postulate given to me by Teresa
during my Freshman year that, "it will be a cold day
in Hell before I sleep with you", and take into
account the fact that I slept with her last night,
then number 2 must be true, and thus I am sure that
Hell is exothermic and has already frozen over.

The corollary of this theory is that since Hell has
frozen over, it follows that it is not accepting any
more souls and is therefore, extinct .. leaving only
Heaven thereby proving the existence of a divine being
which explains why, last night, Teresa kept shouting
"Oh my God!"

JUDGMENT DAY ---- ARE WE THERE YET??

“JUDGMENT DAY!! ARE WE THERE YET?”

Every semester all engineering students of the VTU, or most other universities too, write a set of absolutely demoralizing, disgusting, senseless, and totally screwing papers, most of them on subjects they do not want to study in the first place. When lecturers in the class ask students whether they have any clue as to the objective of studying any particular topic, the prototypical and unanimous answer is because it is included in the syllabus, it is time the people in charge realized that we don’t like doing this, our exams DO NOT give us a high, we are not the sort of people who take exams as the next challenge and strive passionately towards the next victory, as soon as we finish one exam, we DO NOT look forward to writing the next one.
Yes I know most companies claim something as cheesy as the above mentioned statements to be their aims or goals or philosophies, or whatever; I picked it up from a few company brochures.
Exams never have, and never will be fun, they are universally NOT seen as challenges, nor as obstacles we have to get across, neither I am sure will they ever be.
It is against the principles of a true student to follow such absurd, insane and in some cases damaging philosophies; it ruins the fun of college life, the devastating impact it has on the minds of the few unfortunate victims of this tragic and extremely traumatic condition is sometimes irreversible, and the poor soul will have to suffer the pains of a pure unadulterated life.
Spare your thoughts for this extreme misery of a few, the ongoing battles of whom quite often affect the lives of those few normal unaffected people they happen to cross, in their presence, socially necessary character enhancing activities like MASS BUNKING, (for further details with regards to this topic, kindly wait for my next piece) become very hard to do without making the biggest ruckus and somehow hustling them out of class. (Again for further details kindly wait for a more detailed work on the aforesaid topic)
This piece of work however is not about those unfortunate few, nor is it on the drudgery the other normal people around them have to face, mmmmmmm, well it is in a way a drudgery everyone else faces, these few people (also known in some forms of lingo as nerds or geeks) do not really feel the pangs of pain as much as the others do, they are very strangely immune to it, or at least feel the effects of this lesser then others do.
This article was started with a fact concerning exams; this article however deals with something much graver, and something everyone (else) speaks of, as a rule in a very grim, sober, unsmiling, ominous manner, I am sure that everybody in life at some time or the other would have done some exam bad, (yes even them geeks) and the stretch of time, they really come out twitchy as a ferret, is when it nears judgment day.
No no no, I don’t mean the end of the world or something (well frankly sometimes, I’d rather have the end of the world) but I am talking about the all unimportant, inauspicious day the results inevitably come out.
Yes that ugly day, the day you want to say fundoo hindi dialogues like “he bhagwan!, mai ye din dekhne ke pehle mar kyu nahi gaya”
The ungainly day that keeps fun at bay for quite sometime indeed.
However the day does not come unannounced, it does not elude pomp, it follows a string of events that are quite a laugh for most people, (at least sadistic bastards like me really get a kick, cheap fun of course, but don’t tell me you wouldn’t enjoy it once a semester)

With close proximity to judgment day, people change, more like their fears finally manifest upon them this gives pranksters like me a lot of prospects to purvey jests to the rest of the world, hehehehehe hhhhhmmmmmmmmmm…… (Sadistic grin)
How does one have fun with close proximity to judgment day you ask me, here’s what you do -
(a) First make sure you are sitting behind a row of girls in class (when it comes to girls for anything, always pretty ones are the preferred choice of the experts)
(b)Make sure that there’s relative silence in the class, not pin drop silence, but silence of maybe a few decibels above that (p.s. – if this is unattainable as sometimes is, you could still proceed with the next steps, but you might not get effective results)
© Wait till roughly half the class is over
(d) Now gently call the girl nearest to you (or the prettiest one) and in a low voice, tell her that you just got a message on your mobile, proclaiming that results are out
(e) Also to spice it up garnish it with instantly made up tidbits of information like “apparently only 22% have passed CO” or something else to that order
(f) Sit back and enjoy the show, ideal add-ons would be useless bits of information like I got just 59% (with an extremely grave face)
The looks of horror on the faces of those poor little chicks would be totally worth it.

Some people would be of the opinion that girls, having spent most of their time studying, would not really react as aforementioned, but let me assure you gents that contrary to your popular opinion, one must understand that most girls are freaked by the occurrence of something which can go horribly wrong, and we all know that results fall bang in the middle of that category.
Trust me with this one; I’m a PhD in human psychology.
WHAT??!! I really am.
..
………….

Oh ok alright I’m not,
Humph ……….
But please don’t tell the chicks, coz most of them think I am, and it’s kinda cool to be a PhD in human psychology for a while.

Oh! Ah yes, after having given you clear cut instructions that a five year old can follow (please do not ask me from where you can get a five year old, given the right materials, it would take me roughly 6 years to provide you with one, oh! Alright just for you 5 and three fourth’s a year, maybe a day more) I feel it incumbent on me to warn you of the futility of trying this plot over and over again, once maximally capitalized upon, the results are not quite the same upon retracing the steps
Unfortunately yes that’s true, I’m trying to find a way around it, but please don’t pressurize me.
The reason for the catch mentioned above becomes evident after reading the following story


There once was this dude called peter, or wait I think it was david, no no that’s the goliath guy, hmmmmmmm……… I think it was joseph, no might be roger, m not really sure, well pardon me for the slip in memory, but temporarily, let’s call him Balveera reddy (name inspired from the current vice chancellor of VTU, the very prestigious university I study in, I think it stands for Very Though to Understand, or is it Very Tight Underwear, well must be one of the two, might be something else too m not really sure)
So this dude, this balveera reddy guy, has a job of taking care of a lot of dogs, or was it cats, dunno, lets just call them engineering student’s for the present, he thought that his job was very boring, he wanted to do something extremely crazy, so he took to tormenting all his students by announcing results at all the wrong times, I very distinctly remember a good Friday not being so good for many, he had a fetish of shouting out “results are out! Results are out!!” on every festive occasion possible, the whole staging was accompanied by a tribal insanity jig, usually in the nude, this used to cause quite a scare initially and many people used to come rushing out to see (no people never came rushing to see him do his jig in the nude, it was considered to be a bad omen) they came rushing out to see if the results are out (much like all the villagers who used to run to the aid of the Shepard who used to shout “wolf! Wolf!!” for no reason)
People initially were concerned, but as time went by, they stopped rushing to see the results, (much like the villagers stopped going to the aid of the Shepard dude eventually) they all took a very lethargic attitude and started asking “Are we there yet?” referring to the instant of time the results would be out, in other words judgment day.

The above mentioned story or narrative if you please, would definitely be highly illuminating to many, if however you did not gain any knowledge, and still don’t understand why the trick can’t be done more then once, it’s still ok, I said “The reason for the catch mentioned above becomes evident after reading the following story” kindly notice the Italicized word.

So now that you’ve read the story, the reason you can’t do it again and again is because people get bored, and much like the “engineering student’s” mentioned in the story, people feel really pissed upon, they feel messed up by the extremely frugal scheme of distributing marks among the student folk (it’s like all the evaluators are keeping it for themselves), they do not like to be forced to listen either to cheap dumb tricks or to cheap dumb classes.
So it would be my sincere advice to all who want to follow in my footsteps to not try this more then 2-3 times, and to instead keep your head completely idle, and hope the lazy devil in your mind, takes to working in his workshop, and try doing something else.

All this however leads to the crucial moment when you see your results; the real crux however arrives when you have to show your results at home.
And yes you might play all the tricks you like, but the bottom-line, is that all results will be announced, it’s unavoidable.

On the eve of judgment day, let me give all my friends and foes some advice

Results are never good, if they’re good, then someone is playing a prank on you, but that’s okay, life is more then just the marks you get, it’s all about the effort u put (yeah I know that’s cheesy, and forgive me if you are offended by such profanities)
None of the people you ask as to when the results will be out actually know when they will be out, but just want to say something to scare you, if they say stuff like it’s put up on the website, go and conform it before you believe it, or if you are too lazy to do that, just pass the word on to some pretty girl, watch the color drain out of her, and then wait till she confirms, also wait till she thanks you for telling her, strangely enough they thank you for that
It’s time I signed off now; my results are expected to be out soon

“JUDGMENT DAY!! ARE WE THERE YET?”






p.s. – if you are among the few who get good marks, and if none of the above mentioned events make any sense to you, if all these concepts are alien to you ………
PLZ GET YOURSELF A LIFE !!!
N STAY OUT OF MINE!!!!!U @@$*^#**&*&*(@&#


ya you know it's me