An idea can change your life!

Recently, the IEEE student branch had arranged for a guest lecture by Prof. Lynn R. Kirlin. The lecture was quasi technical in nature and was mostly targeted at under-graduate electrical engineers. But he said something in his lecture that stuck with me - 

"

None of my good ideas are new, none of my new ideas are any good!

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He said, he thought about on these lines in his early research career. Of course, now he is a "Life Fellow" of IEEE and an expert on statistical signal processing. He is also teaching at UW now, grad course on "Estimation and Detection Theory" - a beautiful course, for once a lot of statistics makes sense!

But where is my new and good idea - an idea that can change my life? I wonder about that, I write down all my ideas, the crappy ones, the ones that somebody has already done! And the other ideas fail miserably in the first try! To make matters worse, I am not even sure if there is something in my programs that are screwing things up!

That brings me to the idea that I have to be publishing papers, more than what I have managed to do so far! It doesn't look promising now, not with 2 courses an 5 PhD preliminary exams (2 more to go :( ). Working in mission mode gets things done, but doesn't bring new ideas, ideas that are worthy of my time, my advisers time and, perhaps all the more important, time of the people (read journal reviewers) who would read it.

How am I going to get through this, if I ever would? I guess as my friend SGS said, "nothing less than 100%", nothing less than perfection will get me over the waves!

Reminds me of Bryan Adams' song - "If you can't catch a wave, you're never gonna ride it", so bring it on!

Now, about the 'samskrith slokA' of the day(week, fortnight) - I pick up one from one of my books (written in Kannada) and about which I have no freaking idea!

"

ननॊऽनुनुन्नॊ नुन्नॊनॊ नानानाना नना ननु ।

नुन्नॊऽनुन्नॊ ननुन्नॊनॊ नानॆना नुन्न नुन्न नुत् ॥

"

"

nanO&nununnO nunnOnO nAnAnAnA nanA nanu |

nunnO&nunnO nanunnOnO nAnEnA nunna nunna nut ||

"

The above is called a 'EkAkshara chithra shloka' - a "single character chithra shloka". But that is all I know about it, did some (re)search on the internet, but with no results to share! But it is cool, isn't it! A two line shloka with a single consonant (except the last character, of course), impressive! I wonder - why the hell I am studying electrical engineering when there are way cooler things like this (closer to home)! I stop everything and wonder .... and then I get back to Facebook.