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by · December 31, 2014

Murali

Murali did his undergraduate degree in molecular biology with a minor in biophysics from the National University of Singapore (NUS). He then changed direction and did his Masters in Philosophy also at NUS. Now, he is currently pursuing a PhD in Philosophy at the University of Warwick.

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32 Responses

  1. Chris says:
    December 31, 2014 at 11:21 am

    Happy New Year to you as well, way on over there.Report

  2. Roger says:
    December 31, 2014 at 11:59 am

    2014 looks like the best year ever for humanity. Here’s to helping to make 2015 even better.Report

  3. zic says:
    December 31, 2014 at 2:21 pm

    We end the old year with a good people doing good things. Yesterday, my sweetie and I went to Portland, East for the day. On the way home, we stopped to stretch on a back road we frequently take.

    This morning, a man called and said he’d found my sweetie’s wallet on this road. It has two hundred in cash plus all the obligatory cards. His wife works nearby, and she just dropped it off — everything still in it. My sweetie gave her a hundred bucks in thanks; worth it to him for the hassle he was saved.

    What a sweet way to end the year and start the new.

    My resolution is to remember this — that there are good people who do the right thing, including returning loads of cash they find by the side of the road despite their need. (I saw her car; believe me, they have need.)Report

  4. Jaybird says:
    December 31, 2014 at 2:36 pm

    Heck, we don’t need a weekend post anymore, I reckon.

    For me and mine, we are going out to a little Italian place (no, not Olive Garden, thank you very much… which isn’t to say that their potentially infinite breadsticks and salad isn’t a wonderful way to spend a New Year’s Eve) and then I will be greeting the new year by going to bed by 10.

    Maribou and I have hammered out that Wednesday Night/Thurdsay will contain *ZERO CHORES*. No Laundry! No CISSP studying! No Nothing!

    We did get a handful of invites for us to spend with friends/loved ones on New Year’s Eve and our answer was a resounding “erm… I’d kinda feel obliged to wear pants.”

    So we aren’t doin’ *NOTHIN*.

    My resolutions include writing that children’s book I was talking about 2 years ago and, finally, getting that CISSP (my co-worker who has one found out that I was going for one and she said “you’re going to have a huge hurdle to overcome… you have experience.”)

    All in all, 2014 was pretty good… but I’m hoping 2015 will be even better.

    From us and ours to you and yours: we hope your 2015 will be a corker.Report

  5. Mike Dwyer says:
    December 31, 2014 at 4:25 pm

    I got up at 6am this morning for the last hunt of the year. Absolutely glorious winter morning here in KY. It was a chilly 18 degrees but with a cloudless sky. We’re finally getting some new geese in the area and I mostly just watched big flocks of them buzz around the farm. Great way to end the year.

    Not much on the agenda tonight. Kids will be out with friends. We’ll struggle to stay up until midnight. Lots to look forward to in 2015, starting with enjoying the rest of our vacation and getting some much-needed things done around the house (we like to start the year with our feet on the gas pedal).

    Happy New Year to all.Report

  6. Tod Kelly says:
    December 31, 2014 at 7:21 pm

    We had plans for this evening but had to break them because of a cold/flu that has been smacking around both knittingniki and myself. But I guess that just means I will be here to watch our kids like a hawk, since they both have friends coming over to ring in the new year.Report

  7. Kazzy says:
    December 31, 2014 at 7:26 pm

    [Looks up from teaching 20-month-old how to feed his new baby doll in anticipation of the second bundle of joy’s arrival in just over two months]
    “It’s New Year’s Eve?”
    [Realizes in brief time he looked up to make note of the date, 20-month-old has put new baby doll into headlock.]
    (Muttering to self) “Maybe I should just get drunk after all.”Report

    • Michael Cain in reply to Kazzy says:
      December 31, 2014 at 8:20 pm

      This past Saturday we went up to visit the 16-month-old granddaughter. My daughter asks, “Have you shown Grandpa your dolly?” Granddaughter charges off to her room, pausing only long enough to be sure that Grandpa was indeed following. Pulls toy box part-way out of shelf, removes doll, puts toy box back in shelf (where did that come from?)… kisses dolly, hugs dolly, grabs dolly by leg and flails it around like a mace.

      Okay, not that different from granddaughter’s day that includes her mom kissing her, hugging her, holding her upside down and shaking (gently) while demanding “Give me all your lunch money!” Granddaughter appears to love hanging upside down. I have visions of sixth-grade bully trying to shake down second-grade granddaughter for lunch money by holding her upside down, and granddaughter is giggling uncontrollably…Report

  8. Burt Likko says:
    December 31, 2014 at 7:33 pm

    Off to game night with friends and their out-of-town siblings. Some of them have an early morning to go down to Pasadena for the Rose Bowl, and the rest of us couldn’t stay up to midnight if we wanted to. So we will have an east coast TV station on and ring in the new year, live, at midnight in another time zone.Report

  9. Michael Cain says:
    December 31, 2014 at 8:40 pm

    Two priorities in a year for addressing unfinished projects. First, finish rewriting novel to the point that it’s not embarrassing. “Small” fantasy, as opposed to epic fantasy. With any luck, at some point I’ll bleg for a reader. Second, the book scanner project will make progress. The Raspberry Pi B+ computer and five mega-pixel camera module that’s going to be at the heart of the hardware arrived this afternoon — the only adjective suitable for the Pi is “cute”. Of course, plug a keyboard and mouse into the USB, put it on the Ethernet and connect to HDMI monitor and it’s more than capable of writing novels on…

    Hey, Prof. Hanley! Where’s the summary of the post-Zombie constitutional convention class?Report

    • Michael Cain in reply to Michael Cain says:
      January 1, 2015 at 10:20 am

      It’s been almost 22 years since the little girl in Jurassic Park announced, “It’s a UNIX system! I know this!” Very odd feeling to take a board only a little bigger than a business card, half of that to hold the connectors of different sorts, plug in a keyboard, mouse, Ethernet, and HDMI, apply power and “It’s a UNIX system! I know this!” A programmer’s UNIX at that, with C, Perl, and Python properly installed out of the box.Report

      • Mike Schilling in reply to Michael Cain says:
        January 1, 2015 at 10:43 am

        A real programmer’s Unix system would come with a PDP-11 assembler.Report

      • Michael Cain in reply to Michael Cain says:
        January 1, 2015 at 11:34 am

        Not out of the box, perhaps, but available. The Pi runs at least one PDP-11 emulator (probably faster than some of the original hardware), and ancient Unix images are available for it. Building a contemporary GCC cross-compiler that runs on the Pi and handles PDP-11 assembler is straightforward.

        This is not as silly a demand as it might initially seem. Around mid-2013, GE Canada was advertising for a PDP-11 assembler programmer. Some of their old nuclear reactors licensed to continue operation through 2050 depend on PDP-11s (probably running an RT-11 or RSX-11 variant, rather than Unix). Recertifying the control systems with different hardware and software is apparently too expensive to consider.Report

      • Mike Schilling in reply to Michael Cain says:
        January 1, 2015 at 11:56 am

        I’d guess RT. RSX wasn’t suitable for that kind of critical control system because system pool exhaustion/fragmentation could render it useless at unpredictable times. I also recall one of the DECUS experts saying that RSX wasn’t strictly real-time because there was no guarantee of how quickly hardware interrupts were handled (because of the single-threaded executive) but I’m not sure that would matter.Report

      • Michael Cain in reply to Michael Cain says:
        January 2, 2015 at 5:24 pm

        By this AM, have removed the keyboard, mouse, and monitor, and just “ssh -X” in from my Mac. Running over 100 Mbps switched Ethernet, X applications running on the Pi and displaying on my Mac are fine except when very large amounts of data are involved (eg, uncompressed images). One of my test cases, a scribble-like program written in Python, doesn’t feel laggy at all.Report

      • Mike Schilling in reply to Michael Cain says:
        January 2, 2015 at 6:51 pm

        Are you running XQuartz, or is there (please, God) a decent X server for the Mac? Say, one that supports window resizing and doesn’t intermittently decide that it can only use the lower third of the screen.Report

      • Michael Cain in reply to Michael Cain says:
        January 2, 2015 at 9:54 pm

        Caution: ancient geek rant ahead. I may prefer English to programming languages these days, but by the IT gods, I have a five-digit Slashdot UID, my karma is “excellent”, and that counts.

        Calmly… a Mac Mini (still hard to find any better hardware in that form factor) with the latest versions of Yosemite and Xquartz (no longer under Apple’s thumb). I’ve had no problems, although I admit that I don’t stress the X server that hard.

        My big gripe with Apple these days is that they used to take some pride in the fact that if you wanted to write UNIX-style tools, it was all available under the eye candy. Over the last several years, that’s gone bye-bye. Sh*t’s in funny places. It’s an adventure to find the right set of command-line flags that translate to “C the way it’s always been”. Perl/Tk as distributed simply doesn’t work, and Apple hasn’t hinted about when they might fix that. One of the things that has pushed me towards Python is that the assorted licensing things put Apple in the position that they can’t call it Python if tkinter — the default X-based GUI — doesn’t work.

        The MacPorts project has done a lot to pick up the slack. I started with a clean install after I upgraded to Yosemite, and it’s been a godsend. The 25+ year old C program that I use every single day builds and works. The 10+ year old Perl program that acts as the front-end to a huge array of notes and files works.

        I admit it — I’m one of those guys that says that not only does the computer has to work, but unless it works my way it’s just a badly-designed door stop :^)Report

    • zic in reply to Michael Cain says:
      January 1, 2015 at 10:46 am

      Volunteer reader here.Report

  10. Jaybird says:
    January 1, 2015 at 12:39 am

    And here’s 1921 by The Who. As close to a “New Year’s Eve” song as I can find before I tipsily go to bed.

    I’ve got a feeling that next year will be a good year, especially if we all see it in together.Report

  11. Gabriel Conry says:
    January 1, 2015 at 11:54 am

    Burt’s resolution in his off-the-cuff piece is one of them for me, but as with most of my resolutions, the trick will be in finding a way to make myself measure progress. (Maybe I’ll try to impose a 5-minute rule on myself. Or maybe a 10-minute rule.)

    Other resolutions:

    1. Walk 30 miles each week.
    2. Prepare for the (very real) possibility that I’ll lose my job soon: save money, write up sample syllabi in case I have to adjunct, etc.
    3. Try to call my mom once a week.Report

  12. Maribou says:
    January 2, 2015 at 1:44 am

    My mom called to wish me Happy New Year today.

    Me: Yeah, so we are doing pretty much nothing today.
    Her: Better watch out, they say the whole year patterns itself after what you do on New Year’s Day.
    Me: …
    Me: …
    Me: THAT WOULD BE SO AWESOME.

    So, yes, may all of us have years that are no more exciting than we can enjoy.Report

  13. Gabriel Conroy says:
    January 2, 2015 at 2:40 pm

    This isn’t really a resolution, but I’d like to announce it: A few days before new years, my sister and her partner of 34 years were legally married in Colorado. It was a privilege to be able to be there to witness it.Report

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