Viswanathan K's Thoughts

Until a certain age, the usual meal time “conversation” with a kid will revolve around the fact that the kid doesn’t like/want to eat that dish. The problem’s never about the way the dish has been prepared on that day. At least that’s the way it seems to me so far (my daughter’s now 6). Except when it comes to sandwiches. That’s the one “dish” on which kids are connoisseurs and authorities on. I learnt it the hard way when my wife travelled to Amsterdam and the kid decided to fall sick a day before she left. So I was left holding the (sick) baby… I’d been told not to force her to eat while she was sick, except if it was necessary that she have something before she could be given medicines. So around breakfast time, I asked if she wanted to eat something? Bread, she replied. Ok, I said breathing a sigh of relief. Toasted, she added. No problem. And then she had a look at the toast I got her. It’s not brown all over, she declared. Yes, it is. Not the right shade of brown. W...

My 3 year old daughter loves dinosaurs. All of them. The “good” ones like Barney and the “bad” ones from Jurassic Park and Godzilla . On that topic, she’s in the exalted company of Calvin and other, regular kids world-over who too are “caught up in the raging, teeth-baring grip of full-on dinomania”, as this article by Richard Conniff calls it. Soon after Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species was published, in 1861, the paleontologist, Hermann von Meyer, discovered a dinner plate-size fossil: “It seemed as if the proof of evolutionary theory had arrived, like the Ten Commandments, engraved in stone.” Von Meyer’s description of the fossil was that of a type of flying reptile. In 1964, John H. Ostrom, a Yale paleontologist discovered Deinonychus, a primitive bird that he said “must have been a fleet-footed, highly predaceous, extremely agile, and very active animal”. A couple of years later, when Ostrom was looking at the limestone slabs of von Meyer closely, he c...

Ever since our daughter came into our lives, I started taking a lot of photos of her. Pretty soon, I got bored of them and started playing around with photo editing tools on the phone. Like applying all those Instagram filters. When I tired of them, I found other free phone apps like Be Funky, PicsArt, AfterFocus and ColorSplash that provided other features/effects. Soon enough I began to feel that the phone is too inconvenient to do serious (aka realistic) editing because of its small size. And so I found equivalent PC based tools, like GIMP. The PC tools offer a lot finer control compared to the phone: that in turn allows for a lot better special effects. Like this colour with black & white pic: Recently, one of my friends showed me a tool (Photoscape) that makes it easier than ever before to clone parts of one photo onto another (Of course, even then you need practice and patience, but still, this tool allowed me to do a whole lot of things not possible before).  Like tak...