Gene & Environment

The graph here is trying to explain the four quadrants of gene & environment combinations at play in our life. Needless to less any one with possession of good genes & living in a favorable or good environment of learning and excellence will be successful in life. That's the green quadrant.

The other extreme is the red quadrant. The yellow quadrants depict situations where only one of the factors out of gene or environment is good. The arrows point the transition of one state to another. One can physically move from a bad environment to a good one by choice. Regarding genes too, as the latest research on epigenetics show, one can by food habit , lifestyle choices and medication bring about mutation in genes in a human life time allowing us to transition from bad to good genes. This is still somewhat fuzzy and will take more research to pin point and develop as a strategy. The state transitions could be bi-directional as well, because, again by lifestyle choices and making environmental change, one can land from green to yellow or even to red quadrant.

Note on 08/20/2011: I came across this article today, which explains epigenetics very nicely and also probably adds a correction to my diagram above to say 'epigene' instead of 'gene'. It's because the epigenetic markers are switches for the genes to be expressed or not. One cannot change gene in a lifetime but trigger the epigenes, which in effect turns on or off the genetic expressions.

http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1952313-1,00.html

Life's A - B

So, it turns out that many things in life can be equated as A - B. You have to increase something and reduce something else at the same time to have a net positive effect. It's just not enough to look at A & B separately.

Here are some examples that come to my mind.

Savings = Income - Expense

Profit = Revenue - Cost

Personal Health related:

To loose weight = Exercise - Food

To gain weight = Food - Exercise

Economy's Health = Value of Goods & Services produced - Debt

First two are straight from the books. It seems like a pretty simple equation but we have such a hard time following it at private & public level.

The case for higher gasoline prices

With the ever increasing budget deficit the buzz in the blogosphere seems to be a case for higher gasoline prices at the pump. Some economists at academic level and politicians on both sides seem to agree that it's the right thing to do. But, it's also a very unpleasant thing to do as well.

In this blog, I will also rattle about the same and try to rationalize that decision.

First of all, regarding the debt, people of the US should be very happy that they enjoy the reserve status of their currency, had it been any other nation it will be on it's knee by now with so much borrowing and accumulating deficit and would have faced a currency devaluation.

Secondly, as one of my friends reminded me yesterday that people who seem to have an agenda or vested interest are the loudest. They may not have any clue as to how things work but they are the most vocal in expressing their special interest. Ever so confident and cocky that general public fails to doubt that they may be wrong.

So, here are the points to ponder for higher gasoline prices at the pump:

• A large portion of the money will go towards paying off the debt and the cost of quantitative easing

• Pinch at the pump will force people to start considering carpooling and using the public transports, however unpleasant it may seem, that's what the rest of the world does. You get to talk to the strangers and share a joke or two :)

• It will reduce the heavy traffic congestion in the bigger cities and surrounding neighborhoods to some extent and the time spent behind the wheels could be used more productively!

• Paying for higher gas price is more egalitarian measure than the income tax cuts or increases. Both rich and poor will be happy or unhappy to the same extent

• Right now a lot of renewable energy sources are not profitable enough to be commercially viable because of the low gas prices and many of them, say, solar industry enjoys a tax break as well. Higher gas prices will make these renewable energies more profitable and gradually start to replace some demands of conventional energy sources. Among the renewable sources, algal oil is my favorite. It follows the physical principles of hydrocarbon fuel generation but reduces the time taken to produce them(thanks to the algae) through natural processes.

• Not to mention but it will also reduce the dependency on foreign oil and the need to support despots and dictators around the globe sitting on a pile of natural oil abundance and making money out of insatiable demand from US consumerism and probably using that money to buy arms and ammunitions(probably from US companies) and training terrorists and mis-informing and brainwashing the local population and fueling anger against the United States!!

• People will start considering working closer to home and thus demand of those housing will increase and house prices closer to offices will appreciate in price and those farther away will go down in demand and lower the prices, bringing it back to the natural state of stability. Building of high rises will also increase as a result, wherever possible.

• If any consolation, high gas prices is what other developed countries are paying as well, and for a while, including the nations where they have oil reserves, case in point, Norway.

I remember speaking to a top level executive at a consulting firm in Germany and he mentioned that he prefers to travel with his colleagues in train rather than driving and he said he is not an exception and people do have a sense of awareness about not to drive unless absolutely necessary.

Lastly, the 'selfish' side of me can start boasting of owning a hybrid vehicle that I purchased back in 2007. Whoever has seen the documentary 'Who Killed the Electric Car' knows that it was not about technology but about politics that electric cars did not make it sooner.

Now, this is a mind shift and change of strategy because a lot of money was invested in the past to develop the freeway system and public policies encouraged urban sprawl and owning big houses in the suburbs and the car companies & oil companies lobbied enough to drive the public policies accordingly. It was a win-win for people who were winning!!

People will need to get used to living in comparatively smaller places if they want to live closer to office. If you read this article where an average house size is compared among the developed nations you won't feel bad. Also, historically speaking US is no exception either, because, according to this link, the average home size in the United States was 2,330 square feet in 2004, up from 1,400 square feet in 1970. One would wonder why! I have some thoughts which I need to write up some other day.

Rockbands

I have always wondered about the history behind naming of a rockband particularly of the ones which reads like "A and the B"; e.g Hootie and the Blowfish or Huey Lewis and the News. In this post, I will try to document as many of them as possible.

But why?

Just because!

I just love reading these names(loudly when I am by myself) and hope that someone else out there will also get some amusement and no-one will get hurt, hopefully! Obviously, I have googled to find many(read most) of them and have no idea which genre they belong to and which songs they have sang. But, I will try to listen to them over time, if time permits. Enjoy...

Hootie and the Blowfish

Huey Lewis and the News

Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers

Marky Mark and the Funky Bunch(more like Hunky Mark and the Funky Bunch)

Big Brother and the Holding Company

Derek and the Dominos

Echo and the Bunnymen

Eddie and the Hotrods

Gerry and the Pacemakers

Tommy James and the Shondells

The Mamas and the Papas

Paul Revere and the Raiders

Siouxsie and the Banshees

Country Joe and the Fish

Jason and the Scorchers

? and the Mysterians (my favorite so far, this exists, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Question_Mark_%26_the_Mysterians)

That's all so far. I will add more as I come across...

Added on 02/27:

Thanks to the Oscars, I now have one more: Florence and the machine

A walk in the street

During my last visit to India after 2 years, I realized all over again that a walk in an Indian metropolis is either a treat or a mis-treat for your senses.

• one moment you taste the sumptuous dishes from a streetside vendor during lunch break at office and the very next moment you inhale the smoke and polluted air while walking back to your office

• One moment you hear the soothing music of sitar playing at a music shop and the next moment you hear a loud ear-piercing honk of a passer-by car

• One moment when you hold a silk saree or check out the intricate design of a kashmiri shawl and you appreciate it's beauty and craftsmanship, next moment you jostle to get in a busy train and rubbed by the sweaty and hairy hand of a co-passenger.

• One moment you smell beautiful 'jui' and other aromatic flowers at a street side flower shop and within five minutes you smell the ammonia of someone pissing by the street or even the paid toilets

• One moment you see a bevy of young girls beautifully dressed for a special occassion and your heart start racing and the next moment you see a few homeless & hungry kids begging for a few bucks and your heart starts crying

It is what it is, an enigma and paradox of an Indian metropolis...

Random thoughts - again

Most powerful positive emotion - Love

Most powerful negative emotion - Jealousy

When we do something out of feeling of duty or responsibility, over time we get emotionally tired. However, if you do something out of feeling of love, you are never tired.

Love, Sex & Marriage

Our existence inside this triangle. As the power of Sex & Marriage pulls you down, the strength of love lifts you up. If marriage & sex was taken out of the equation, love would be a truly wonderful thing!

How to google...

The other day I was typing "How to..." in the google page and it showed me the top 10 lists of "how tos" based on the latest stats, I guess. I was a little disappointed to see that "How to tie a tie" made it to the top even though I also don't know how to tie a tie!

It was so surprising to see that activities that should come to us naturally, like how to kiss or how to get pregnant, needs a google search ultimately. Even though I am a big fan of google, but, I do think that the Bing ad brings up a very good point about our mindless search of data!

Stretching my imagination, how stupid it maybe, I came up with the following storyline where the same person does all of the above searches. A little overweight single guy being lonely for a while decides to "lose weight fast". He likes a girl at work, but never talked to her. He wonders how does he "make her like him". Being innovative, he decides to learn "solving rubix cubes" while reading out an article loudly in a record time and uploads a video of that in youtube. He sends that link to the girl and she asks him back "how to dowload the youtube video" as she wants to copy it to her phone and show it to her friend who does not have internet connection(hahaha, possible, right?). Now, they start dating and one evening they plan to go to a fancy dinner and he decides to wear a tie, but not knowing how to tie a tie he resorts to google search. A few weeks pass by and they start liking each other and one night (lets give him a name now, say, Chris) after dinner, randomly searches a few things like how to kiss and how to become pregnant. Chris gets very excited that night by the thought of making her pregnant(lets give her a name too, say, Christina) and could not sleep. After a few months and having spent "quality" time with Christina, Chris decides to make his own website to write journals and publish pictures(lets assume he does not use facebook, blogs and such :))

Now, that he is kind of settled with Christina, Chris needs to find a better job(I dont know what he does now) and searches how to write resumes which catch employer's attention. After a few months, he lands up with a good job and proposes to Christina, which she accepts.

Even though he still sometimes sleeps alone but he is not lonely anymore, he often feels that he is in cloud nine. In one of those nights, when he is in cloud nice, he wonders how do other people make it in america...he gets up to do a google search on the same.

PS: Google did show an ad during superbowl which had some common concepts outlined in the storyline above

An idea of solving traffic congestion

Thats quite a bold claim is n't it? everywhere in the world, be it developed or developing nations people spend zillions of hour stuck in traffic. It's an omnipresent problem. Better city planning, more public transportation is definitely some way of solving the problem.

I have a totally different approach, which relies on randomness of events. Suppose, you generally leave home to go to office around 815AM every morning. You catch a train or drive your car or whatever. Similarly, every other person generally has a fixed time of leaving home for work or school unless they have a different appointment at a different time.

What I suggest you to do is to leave randomly at a time interval say, between 8:05AM and 8:25AM(8:15AM being the mid point of them). The idea is if everyone follows the same principle it will smooth out the traffic congestion. For example, look at the difference between a traffic signal and a stop sign. For a stop sign, a distance is created between two consecutive cars. The problem with this approach is everyone has to follow the same principle for it to work. One can get a random number generator to generate one between two intervals.

Thoughts on evolution

It is so surprising to find people who still does not believe in the theory of evolution but instead talk about intelligent design. I think the biggest problem is to perceive the time span of a evolutionary process. Most of our discussions around innovation, creativity, religion, civilization etc etc spans up to may be 10,000 BCE. But, human beings lived even beyond that. Borrowing the following from a website to get a sense of time (http://csep10.phys.utk.edu/astr161/lect/sense/sense.html):

If we were to compress the time since the Big Bang into one year, and make the time of the Big Bang January 1,

• The Earth was formed in mid-September.
• The mammals appeared on December 26.
• All human prehistory (from the first known stone tools) and history have occurred in the last 1/2 hour of New Year's Eve.

Thus, all of human history is but a fleeting instant on the cosmic timescale.

Another commonly argued point is if humans evolved from chimpanzees, we should be able to find somewhere in this world, an animal which is in the middle of evolution from chimpanzee to humans. My argument to that is the following:

Crudely speaking calculators can be considered as a primitive form of computers, right? Scientists over time improved upon and invented ways to build better and powerful computers. At some point in their laboratories, they must have stumbled upon something which is not a calculator but as powerful as today's computer. The point is, when you make something better why would you ever go back which is half of what it is now. So, we still make calculators and modern computers. We dont make primitive computers, right? It is exactly the same for natural selection of evolution. Once, a better species is evolved why would nature support making a primitive form of it, it will be wiped out from the face of earth. Also, the evolution is always on. Like, today's computer will be obsolete tomorrow as we make better computers.

Another example, you are baking cake at home and found an optimal oven temperature which makes the cake best. But, you found this optimal temperature by a series of experimental baking of cakes over time and sometimes the cakes did not come out that good. Once, you have perfected the art of baking cake, why would you ever go back to make a half-baked cake?

Is it not exactly same as that in evolution?

Rational Behavior

I was thinking of a situation where there are 5 people and $100 needs to be divided. There are two strategies, in one everyone divides it equally, getting $20 per person.In the other, one of the 5 is randomly picked to get $80 and the rest gets $20 divided equally among them, getting $5 each.
If there was a voting among those 5 people to decide which strategy to be adopted, which one do you think would be adopted? What are the factors contributing to that decision making process?
By pure statistical game of chance and assuming everyone wants to maximize their money, in the first case, the expected amount is $20 and in the second case also, it is (1/5)*$80 + (4/5)*$5 = $20 because there is a 20% chance of getting $80 & 80% chance of getting $5. The expected amounts being same, in the second case there is a remote chance of getting $80 and so based on rational behavior probably people will pick the second strategy.

However, to get into more statistical measures to help making a rational decision, it is good to note that in the first case, standard deviation is zero and the in the second it is 30 meaning higher risk or higher uncertainty associated with it.

By borrowing the following line from wikipedia, "The overall concept of risk is that as it increases, the expected return on the asset will increase as a result of the risk premium earned – in other words, investors should expect a higher return on an investment when said investment carries a higher level of risk, or uncertainty of that return."

One can argue in this example that the expected return did not increase then why should one take the risk of taking the second strategy? Rather if someone is rational they should adhere to the first strategy where there is no risk and fixed return. So, as behavioral economists assume that individuals behave rationally to maximize their utility function may not be a very sound assumption.

Can it be generalized to say, the first strategy is boring and it is socialism(in some form) and the second one is capitalism with it's inherent excitement of making big or losing big, I believe the latter being more prevalent these days of economic turbulence.

Balancing Act

No other word is more subtle in it's meaning than balance. We try to balance our private & public life, joy & sorrow, love & hatred, and so on and so forth, yet it seems to be so difficult sometimes.

Success feeds success, failure feeds failure, the examples of positive feedback loops abound. However, we need a negative feedback loop in our life to keep it balanced. If things go in the wrong direction beyond a threshold it will bring us back to normal, like a thermostat. Yes, that's what we need, a thermostat for our private and public life!!

Thoughts on the stock market...or economy's health

If a stock is a reflection of a company's health, and stock market is a reflection of an economy's health, why can't we close the stock market for a while until economy's health improves. As an individual, don't we look better in the mirror when we are in good shape(physically & emotionally).
There have been instances in the past when the stock market was shut down...why can't we do it now? Why take the pain of looking at(or speculating) a few numbers going up and down every few seconds, minutes, hours, days and months....!!!!

Follow Up - Housing Bubble

In response to all the feedbacks received in the previous post, I am adding some more graphs on this topic. First of all, since this Case Shiller index is only maintained for a handful of cities we are definitely missing out on "Lone Rock"s of US. As the name suggests they are the lone rocks... I go to Milwaukee for work and can tell you that it is nice to have four seasons and if you have a decent job and dont mind shovelling snow from your driveway or car lone rocks of US are the places to be in 3 Bedroom/ 3 bathroom houses available for $150K. Call it a piece of dream or peace of mind.

In response to Joe and my friend Bill's suggestion I have done some moving average analysis on the data that I had. To keep it simple, I have compared only Charlotte(where I would like to move) and San Francisco(where I currently live). The graphs have 4 months, 12 months, 24 months & 48 months moving averages. The flattening of the San Francisco 48 month graph towards the end is again an interesting fact however, the Charlotte graphs do not show any downward trend whatsover.





Now, coming to the income aspect(based on the data in http://www.census.gov/hhes/www/income/histinc/h06ar.html ) ,even though it is true that home prices do increase 3-4% yoy to keep up with the inflation the same is not true here. Looking at the median income by region till the year 2006(thats all the data I had in my possesion, I will look for more refined data soon, I know for housing I am comparing city specific data but for income I am comparing region specific data), you see that the absolute values have increased for all the regions.



Interesting thing here is to note the widening income gap between the regions where North-East & West lead the pack. However, by looking at the parallel nature of the lines in the last part of the graph(or the slope of the lines depicting the rate of increase of income), it does not seem that there is any discrepancy between regions in terms of rate of increase of income from 2003 onwards. In the same time frame however, the housing bubble has been busted in most of the cities and it still does not show me any indication that Charlotte, NC will have any major decline in home prices in the coming years and it is completely out of whack with income. But, I am not sure if there is a declining trend in NC economy(I need to do some analysis on that front) which will definitely have an impact on the house prices...

Housing Crash - Bubble Graph vs Trend Line

By now, there are hundreds of articles available in the net which explains the current financial mess across the globe. Given that one of the root causes is housing depreciation , I was going through some data from Case-Shiller index on housing and did some simple plotting excercise.

Surprisingly enough I found that from January 2000 onwards almost all of the cities for which this index is maintained started spiking up. Look at the graph for Los Angeles, San Francisco, Washington DC & Chicago and see their spikes. It continued going up erratically till maybe January 2006.

Interestingly, note that for Charlottle, North Carolina there was no spike and
looking at the graph you can tell that pretty much till January 2000 it represented
what is called a "Trend Line" in statistical terms for all the city indices. It continued to move up steadily from January 2000 till now. From January 2006 onwards all the other city indices seem to have fallen off the cliff and trying to reach the Charlotte line, which seems to me a very interesting fact.

So, can we conclude that the data for Charlotte truly represents the US City trend for the years for which Case-Shiller index has been maintained? When the rest of the country picked up the housing boom what happened in Charlotte which kept it as a trend line and not to catch up with the rest of the country? Charlotte was also home to Wachovia which ultimately got bought over by WellsFargo and they had a mounting mortgage loss. This seems contradictory to me since the Case-Shiller index does not show the spike & ultimate drop of housing prices in Charlotte. So, does it mean that Wachovia's big mortgages were all outside of Charlotte or even the state of North Carolina? On the contrary, San Francisco based WellsFargo did not leverage themselves too much and is able to stay steady in this financial storm even though San Francisco and greater bay area have been impacted by the housing crisis.
These two cases show us that in one of them a bank is affected but not housing market and in the other bank is not affected but only the housing market is affected.

Also, given the nature of the graphs can we say that the rest of the cities will now try to reach the trend line which is represented by Charlotte data and which means the house prices will continue to go down in most of the cities....

All of this just hypotheses based on the information at hand and who knows what is actually going to happen in the next 1-2 years.

Salute to American Democracy

My salute to American democratic system given the election of President Obama. I cannot see this happening in any other country in the whole world.

Random Thoughts - Religion

Religion played an important role in transforming a tribal society to a civil society. It is not playing a constructive role any more and given the transformation we are going through in urban societies across the world it will become increasingly irrelevant.

As Karl Marx said more than 100 years ago that the religion is the opium of the people could not be truer...

What time is it?

I am in Germany for 2 weeks due to work commitment in central european time zone, going though my jetlag. It is 10PM and I just came to my room after dinner. I am calling my wife who is in Memphis for her work commitment and I calculate the time to be 3PM central standard time in US.

I go to bed and try to sleep. After a few round trips to the bathroom I wake up at 5AM and decide to call my parents in India to give them some updates about my upcoming trip to India. I calculate the time to be 9:30AM Indian standard time in India.

I am in office now and it is 2:30PM. My manager wants me to call him in Ohio. I calculate the time to be 8:30AM eastern standard time in US.

I should call my travel agent in Sunnyvale, California to discuss some issues with my ticket.It is 5PM now, I calculate the time to be 8:00AM pacific standard time in US. I decide to hold off until 10:00AM pacific but then it will be 7PM here and I have a team meeting at 7PM. My colleagues are in US in eastern, mountain and pacific time zones so I have to remember whether to say good morning, good afternoon or good evening. Does not matter.

It is 6PM now and it is quite dark already here. One of my close friends is in Japan now and I was supposed to call her. What time is it now in Japan? Let me check ...

Compromiser, rebel or lost ?

There are so many weblogs out there that I feel what's the point of writing as hardly anyone will see what I am writing or thinking about. Then I thought, I get these ideas or sudden things on my mind which I would like to ponder over later on. So, why not just use the blog as a scribble page. May be when I will visit myself after a few months it might give me some better ideas or just nostalgic feelings.

That's why I am digressing from my usual travelogue type writings to just scribbles. I dont have to plan much and it can be completed in a much shorter timeline. So, here it is for today:

To start with a little bit about the background why I came up with this thought. I read about the genographic project and found that they can do a DNA analysis based on your cheek swab to tell you about your ancestral history and as the out of africa theory suggests you can figure out how your ancestors had travelled the globe to reach where you are now. Very interesting. Read more about it here:
www.nationalgeographic.com/genographic

At the same time I am apalled by the effect of global warming, concerned about the conflicts/war among religions, groups and communities across the world.

I came to the conclusion that there are three kinds of people in this world. People who compromise, people who rebel and the people who become lost. I also theorized that the percentage of them are as follows:

Compromiser: 90%
Rebel:5%
Lost: 5%

Everyone will have one of these as their primary traits and the rest could be present but will have recessive effect on their social/personal life.

This is totally heuristics, but again that's why I am scribbling here for, may be I will be able to revise it later.

Yellowstone Trip - Part II

west yellowstone is a small town but have some very good gift stores selling authentic items at reasonable prices. more than 90% of the yellowstone national park is within wyoming, however the states of idaho & montana also share the rest. all the gift stores had something special from each of these states. i had “idaho trout” in the office cafeteria just a few weeks before my trip and felt the call of yellowstone and trout. however, i was not lucky to have trout in idaho. montana is famous for it’s fly-fishing and there were stores selling gears for that through out the town of west yellowstone.
rivers and streams in montana are strangely not very deep and you go into the knee deep or waist deep water to catch the river fishes. read more about it here
http://www.flyfishinghistory.com/

90% of the tourists travel through an eight-shaped road within the park and stop at different spots to take photos and enjoy the beauty of yellowstone. i regularly watch the travel channel and am quite inspired by their motto “be a traveler, not a tourist”. the only thing out of the ordinary that i did in this trip was to drive to beartooth highway. i will talk about that in the coming parts.

day 2
among the must see attractions of yellowstone, “old faithful” geyser ranks number one. currently, it erupts at a 90-minute interval. the predictability of this geyser has given its well-deserved name. people flock that area and check out the next eruption time at a nearby visitor center and gets ready with their camera and camcorder around the big sitting deck created around this geyser.
i read that new zealand and finland is also famous for it’s geysers but yellowstone can boast of the number of geysers it has in such a small area. the first thing of second day was to see Old faithful erupt (eruption lasted for about a minute) and have brunch at old faithful inn. one option of staying within the park is to stay at this lodge.

after lunch, i started driving north and stopped by at the midway-geyser basin & black sand basin areas. one of the most colorful hot springs “grand prismatic spring” is in this area. it is amazing to see a bluish-green & orange smoke coming out of it from a distance. i saw an aerial view of this hot spring in the Internet before my visit. it was simply awesome. i was disappointed by the fact that the park authorities did not create any elevated platform to see this spring and enjoy its aerial view. see this picture :
http://www.skyimagelab.com/granprisspri.html
but still the colors from a close distance was breath-taking and i spent some time in doing some photographic experiment to capture the best angles and colors of this spring. it is unbelievable that the colors of this spring and all others in yellowstone are attributed to “thermophile” bacteria living in them. it is said that if life at all exists in other planets it exists in the form of “extremophile” bacteria. read about them here:
http://serc.carleton.edu/microbelife/extreme/extremophiles.html

there are so many geysers and hot springs present in this area that if you poke a hole in the ground you can create a geyser which you can name after yourself. i continued driving north towards Norris geyser basin and then towards canyon village. my next destination is grand canyon of the yellowstone. did i tell you why the yellowstone is so named? it is because of the yellow colors of the stones in the grand canyon area. the lower falls of the yellostone river is more than 300 feet high and you can reach up to the brink of this falls through a small hike. it is a nice feeling to be able to see the water falling 300 feet down into the canyon and i was wondering about the people who first saw this beautiful image. they did not capture it in camera but saved it for future generations unlike us !

you can continue driving towards the upper falls or there is a strenuous hike from the lower falls to the upper falls. i preferred the first option. it was kind of pleasant even though it was middle of summer and crowd was just beginning to pour into the park. it was late afternoon by the time i finished seeing the falls and the canyon area. i started driving back towards my hotel but this time southwards making the loop of lower ‘circle” of eight in reverse direction. i had dinner in grant village and by the time i reached the madison junction it started raining with hailstorm and lightning. living in california, i miss the summer rain with lightning, which i was used to in india. after a long time i saw so much lightning. it was continuous and i wish i could capture those “fractal” lines in my camera. the “inventor” of fractal geometry benoit mandelbrot once said that “clouds are not spheres, mountains are not cones and lightning does not travel in a straight line”. i guess a car is the safest place to be in a lightning storm and that was the only comfort by which i continued driving towards my hotel. strangely enough by the time i reached the park entrance the lightning almost vanished magically. for the last half an hour it was a feeling of desperateness to reach safely back to the hotel even though i was enjoying the “dangerously beautiful” images created by nature.

after a tiring day, it was nice to be back to the comfort ness of my cabin and started dreaming about the places i saw and did not realize when i felt asleep( without dreaming).
to be continued ...