Caesarean Rhapsody

It's 11th September. A date that's an absolute tear-jerker for every American, irrespective of his/her color or country of origin. But Bangalore is not mourning. I don't expect it to, either. But what hurts me, is a news I read in today's paper.

Instead of having peaceful candlelit vigils or memorial services (at least for the Indians who lost their lives in the tragic incidence), there are some boneheads in this God forsaken piece of land (which they affectionately call a city), who want to celebrate the event with an all night bash. They are going to have re-enactments of the tragic incident in the form of scale models. And not to forget the paraphernalia. There will be a DJ playing the raciest trance music, loud and colorful firecrackers, exotic cuisine……..all the bells and whistles.

How hopelessly demented! A city whose economy breathes in-&-out in rhytm with the price of the US dollar, has no sentiments for it's benefactor. Not even for compatriots who lost their lives for no fault of theirs. Instead it is so thick-skulled that it is allowing a handful of people, turn the solemn occasion into a crass, insensitive demonstration.

Bad……….really bad!!!!

A few notable words from "the" man himself.

Not everything that can be counted counts, and not everything that counts can be counted.
-Albert Einstein.

Got a Gmail account last week. God bless Sudhir, the noble soul who sent me an invit. Although I do appreciate the simplistic, lightweight interface of Gmail, I simply couldn't make the happy feeling of owning one, stay much longer. Was it the space provided and novelty of the service that made it delectable or was simply the inability to obtain it through normal sign-up procedure, that made it so prized a possession. I'll never know, 'cos I ain't putting too much thought into this one, for I am waiting that someone will invite me to Orkut, a community which follows a registration policy similar to Gmail.

P.S : If anyone needs an account at Gmail, please write me at anup.mankar@gmail.com. I have 6 invitations to be given away as of today. First-come-first-served.

In one of my training sessions here at Tata Elxsi, there was a session on encoding and decoding. When the sound recording slide came up, I had to ask a lingering doubt of mine. Why 44.1 khz for sound recording? According to Nyquist rate, anything near-about 40 khz should be enough. Why such an odd number? The trainer, a retired Director of DRDO (Bangalore) and a pretty good teacher, instead of shoo-ing me away without an answer (the expected behavior in COEP), said he'd answer me the next day. Here's what he dug out of an electronics journal and read out the next day.

In the early days of digital audio research, the necessary bandwidth of about 1 Mbps per audio channel was difficult to store. Disk drives had the bandwidth but not the capacity for long recording time, so attention turned to video recorders. These were adapted to store audio samples by creating a pseudo-video waveform which would convey binary as black and white levels. The sampling rate of such a system is constrained to relate simply to the field rate and field structure of the television standard used, so that an integer number of samples can be stored on each usable TV line in the field. Such a recording can be made on a monochrome recorder, and these recording are made in two standards, 525 lines at 60 Hz and 625 lines at 50 Hz. Thus it is possible to find a frequency which is a common multiple of the two and is also suitable for use as a sampling rate.

The allowable sampling rates in a pseudo-video system can be deduced by multiplying the field rate by the number of active lines in a field (blanking lines cannot be used) and again by the number of samples in a line. By careful choice of parameters it is possible to use either 525/60 or 625/50 video with a sampling rate of 44.1KHz.

In 60 Hz video, there are 35 blanked lines, leaving 490 lines per frame or 245 lines per field, so the sampling rate is given by :

60 X 245 X 3 = 44.1 KHz

In 50 Hz video, there are 37 lines of blanking, leaving 588 active lines per frame, or 294 per field, so the same sampling rate is given by

50 X 294 X3 = 44.1 Khz.

The sampling rate of 44.1 KHz came to be that of the Compact Disc. Even though CD has no video circuitry, the equipment used to make CD masters is video based and determines the sampling rate.

Now that's what I call an amazing hack, an electronic one at that.