The h Bar

6:15 AM

MC Hawking - Entropy

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Yeah! You know me.

user228700

6:35 AM

@JohnR: Hi :-)

Morning/afternoon

user228700

I'm so sorry about yesterday! :-o

Academic bureaucracy safely dealt with? :-)

user228700

^ Yes :-) I had been waiting in line, you see, and they called us while I was talking to you.

I guessed that's what had happened.

user228700

6:37 AM

After that, there were many more things to do and then some more.

Well, it was kind of obvious :-)

user228700

:-) Ah. We even had a look at the hostel and all. Wait, I'll show you a picture of my room-to be:

Ah, I was going to ask if you'd seen the hostel.

Well, what do you think of it?

user228700

Looks nice. Obviously rather bare at the moment ...

user228700

6:41 AM

On the left side, there are two tables and a small door leading to a tiny bathroom.

user228700

@JohnRennie Nice?! It looks a little like a prison cell :-(

Having your own bathroom en suite is great. For three years I had to walk down two stories on a cold stone staircase to get to the bathroom.

@Kaumudi.H Well you haven't put up any posters, pictures and whatever other clutter teenage girls are prone to :-)

user228700

@JohnRennie Yes, yes, I agree.

The room has no personality yet. It's probably lonely :-)

user228700

@JohnRennie I don't have any posters or pictures or other clutter to take with me!

6:44 AM

The beds are quite close together. I hope your room mate doesn't snore :-)

user228700

:-o I hope so too!

The room is pretty basic, but for students the room is just somewhere you sleep. You work in the library and socialise in, well, I'm not sure where MEC students socialise.

user228700

And the subordinate warden, with whom we met first, is a little...out of it. She kept complaining about the superior warden to us and kept on mumbling.

That adds character :-)

user228700

What, lunacy? Oh, sure, but it was a little scary. The whole thing was scary.

6:46 AM

She's a water buffalo reincarnated as a hostel warden. Behaving that way is natural.

user228700

@JohnRennie Neither am I, actually :-/ And I dunno if we're allowed to stay back at the library till late hours in the night.

user228700

@JohnRennie Well, yes, but I don't know how I will be able to spruce things up. I have clothes, books and a few electronic gadgets to take with me, that's all.

I wouldn't be too downcast about the room. Once you've had a chance to get to know the town you can start looking around for a nicer place to stay.

user228700

I am thinking about buying a corkboard to put up pictures of my family or something but I don't have any more than two pictures with me.

user228700

@JohnRennie No, I don't think so; I'm stuck there for a year at the very least.

6:49 AM

The first year is going to go pretty quickly. Or at least it did for me.

user228700

@JohnRennie *City. It's a beautiful city and it is even (somewhat) connected by the metro.

You should see the place my brother had to stay when he was at college. It was so bad even the rats had left.

user228700

Oh, geez!

I think a lot of the undergrads move to somewhere else after their first year

a prison cell is a perfectly nice place to live in though

He was at Imperial College in London and accomodation was ridiculously expensive in London even in those days.

user228700

6:50 AM

@JohnRennie Ah, yes, I remember.

user228700

@BalarkaSen Not if you must share it!

All he could afford was a room in what was basically a slum, and he had to share it with two other students.

Kill the roommates. Kill them. Kill them and give us Channel 83.

Kill them, hide the body then eat them. Saves on buying food

Ah, I forgot you're a vegetarian. OK, don't eat them then.

Are there nicer rooms in the hostel or are they all basically cells? I ask because you might be able to reserve a better room for next year if you book early.

David Cronenberg VIDEODROME clip - McLuhan extended

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6:53 AM

... you and your weird films.

^

:D

mornin

Good afternoon folks!

@Kaumudi.H That seems like a pretty good room for a hostel.

I mean, you don't expect to get 5-star rooms in dorm right?

@Kaumudi.H how much is the room costing you?

user228700

6:57 AM

Sorry about that, I was eating a bunch of chocolate.

Also, if you have a bathroom with you too, that is an added bonus. Most Govt.colleges have rooms such as that but without bathroom.

@Kaumudi.H got to get your priorities right :-)

user228700

@BalarkaSen Hmm. My parents might move to the city next year so I might even move back in with them.

user228700

@JohnRennie No, all rooms are similar, I think. And not all of them have the added bonus of an attached bathroom so I really did get quite lucky.

user228700

@JohnRennie YES :-P I hadn't eaten anything in over 16 hours, sorry.

6:59 AM

You've just eaten chocolate for breakfast????

Actually, I think I approve :-)

user228700

@JohnRennie That's the spirit! :-P I had feared that u'd changed!

@BalarkaSen what's channel 83 about?

user228700

@JohnRennie No, but I did have two tiny dosas as well. Chocolate, dosas and some aloo bhujia for breakfast/lunch!

@Danu Happy Brithday!

Chocolate dosa. Better than chocolate pizza I guess.

7:02 AM

Thanks

user228700

@Sid Well, yes, but it looks...none of it looks homely. This is to be expected, of course, but it adds to the homesickness that I have begun to feel already!

user228700

@JohnRennie Rs. 5,500 every month, including food.

That is slightly greater than 80 US dollars (In case anyone doesn't know about rupees)

In the UK that would be extraordinarily cheap. How it compares in Kerala I don't know.

@Danu are you going to have a party?

user228700

7:03 AM

@JohnRennie It's quite reasonable.

and should be around 60 Pounds(I think)

user228700

@JohnRennie NO!! Dear God, no! I had dosa with podi and then I ate some chocolate.

@Kaumudi.H Be prepared that food will be terrible.

@Danu Congrats, officially.

user228700

Chocolate dosa would be the greatest abomination of all.

7:04 AM

@Kaumudi.H the room is pretty bleak, though I was avoiding saying so in case you were feeling bad about it. But honestly college is such an exciting place the room isn't going to matter.

@LasVegasRaiders We're all invited right?

@Sid if he wants.

And to be fair, if you're going to a strange town that you don't know it's good to have somewhere safe and secure arranged for you.

@LasVegasRaiders no

College can be scary enough without worrying about the room as well.

user228700

7:06 AM

@JohnRennie Thanks, I appreciate that :-( It is the strangest city and I don't know very many people there.

Yet ...

Light a candle and blow it out at least, the one for good luck pal @Danu :-)

user228700

@JohnRennie Yes. Hmm. Are u terribly busy at the moment?

No, in fact I finished the first stage of the mornings work early so I'm currently sitting around drinking coffee

Each particle also has a password which allows its properties to be changed, but the cosmic censorship hypothesis suggests we can never observe the password itselfâonly its secure hash.

3

Daily XKCD plug in

user228700

7:08 AM

@JohnRennie Ah :-) How's the coffee?

LOL for the last one...

Coffee is always good

except when it is bad

Even bad coffee is good. It's like ... erm ... never mind :-)

@Sid did you listen to mc hawking on entropy?

7:10 AM

@Kaumudi.H anyhow, have you sorted out what the hostel supplies and what you need to bring?

@LasVegasRaiders No.

Today's Breaking News on Twitter. White House has spelt "inaccurately" inaccurately during a video attacking CBO for being inaccurate.

7

Just replaced the motherboard in this, and it actually works :-)

user228700

@JohnRennie Huh?

user228700

@JohnRennie Nice! :-)

user228700

@JohnRennie I think so. We're still buying; mum's looking for a first aid box for me rn.

7:15 AM

@LasVegasRaiders We'll see :P

@Kaumudi.H It's a Nexus 9 tablet I bought cheap on eBay because it was broken. I've managed to replace the motherboard and now it's working perfectly again. I could sell it and make a profit, or I could add it to the pile of electronic stuff I can't bear to part with. Guess which I'm going to do :-)

user228700

:-)

@JohnRennie Send it out to another lucky h bar user? ;)

I would take it.

and then sell it and make a profit

user228700

@JohnRennie No, you will wait till you find someone in need of it and generously ship it to them for free :-)

7:17 AM

@Kaumudi.H I've already given away four of these tablets and I'm running out of people to give them to.

Actually @JohnRennie maybe, sometime in the coming months, I will ask you a bit about advice regarding tablets... I'm considering buying one...

And I am thinking about buying a new Mobile Phone

user228700

Mar 21 at 7:36, by John Rennie

It's got to the point where people run away when they see me approaching carrying a laptop :-)

user228700

:-)

@Danu Tablets are basically toys. They fit uneasily between laptops and phones. I only use mine for reading books and occasional forays onto the web when I'm sat in my armchair and can't be bothered to walk over to the laptop.

7:19 AM

dammit bourgeoisie

you technological cyberpunks

user228700

@BalarkaSen You Russian existentialist.

@Danu They're also good for streaming video to your TV if you have a Chromecast enabled TV or an adaptor. Otherwise I'm honestly not sure why people buy tablets.

@BalarkaSen go find out what's on channel 83 :P

Actually people don't buy tablets any more. The tablet market is dying - even iPads are no longer selling.

@LasVegas channel 83 is like hardcore pornography watching which gives you brain tumor

7:22 AM

@Sid there are loads of really good cheap phones available in India at the moment.

Really?

ye

@JohnRennie Any recommendations?

that's what the movie is about

-_-

7:22 AM

@Sid what sort of price? Entry level, mid range or high end?

user228700

@JohnR: Ah, now you're engrossed in this discussion about gadgets! I was going to ask if you could pop over to gchat for a bit.

Anything around Rupees 10,000 should do.

I'm just killing time. I'll head over to gchat now ...

Also, more importantly it should be 4G and have a good battery life

user228700

@BalarkaSen So exactly how would I give you Channel 83?

user228700

7:24 AM

Context:

user228700

32 mins ago, by Balarka Sen

Kill the roommates. Kill them. Kill them and give us Channel 83.

it's a dialogue from the movie

Hopefully dual sim too(but nowadays all phones are dual sim). I don't care about anything else

Yeah, but it doesn't make sense now @BalarkaSen

user228700

@BalarkaSen Ah.

7:25 AM

Give us a porn channel?

@JohnRennie Those are the specifications

It's not just a porn channel; watching it gives you brain cancer and you die. Totalitarian fascists buy off the channel to show it to the public in North America to ideologically purge and make it pure

Slereah

Is there a porn stack exchange

It's a very political movie, mixed in with techno surrealism

Try to start one on Area 51. The effects of Internet porn on society.

7:30 AM

@Sid I don't know enough about the Indian market to make a recommendation, but most of the Chinese phones are dual sim and they are mostly pretty good.

The chat room could be called Channel 83.

another fantastic political horror film I watched recently is Enemy

brilliant

I doubt Christianity.SE, etc would approve

@JohnRennie So really, the reason I'm thinking about it is because some people here have tablets that they use as note books. This seems really handy to me.

Basically, I was thinking that if I get one with a big screen I could use it as a note book (by note book I mean the paper thing, not the new word for laptop). At the same time, I could use it as a light-weight replacement of a laptop for TeXing (using some kind of keyboard thing) and internet.

I don't typically do very "heavy" stuff on my laptop.

That's what I use my mini ipad for.

7:37 AM

Modern laptops are little larger or heavier than tablets, and they're faster and have a decent keyboard. Given the choice of a tablet or a (probably cheaper) Chromebook there's no competition. I'd go for the Chromebook every time.

@LasVegasRaiders Mini ipad seems too small

@JohnRennie OK

yeah, well.. I have like less than a fortnight for college and I need to buy a phone soon..

@JohnRennie I don't like the idea of having to do everything online though.

Don't chrome books rely on being online or something?

Chromebooks can work offline just like tablets.

A'ight

7:41 AM

I value my tablet and wouldn't be without it, but its uses are somewhat niche.

I like the mini pad because it fits in my pocket.

Barely.

Which is the ultimate in portability, for me.

@LasVegasRaiders large phones have taken over from small tablets. That's why iPad minis aren't selling these days.

@LasVegasRaiders Which is why you can't write on it properly...

Yeah, I'm a dinosaur.

By write I mean write by hand, on the screen.

7:47 AM

@Danu Good point

Slereah

I want to write examples before properties, to use the examples to illustrate the properties

But I want to write the properties before the examples, to give the properties of the examples

The pain

The dilemma

@Slereah Do the examples first.

Or perhaps even better, give examples picked specifically to expose the properties clearly

then list them explicitly as general properties afterwards

(with proofs, of course ;D)

don't write anything at all [disclaimer: not helpful]

Go back to watching channel 83

7:51 AM

I agree that one should do examples first though

^me too

Unless the examples are "trivial."

Slereah

One of the example is the complete feather

A homogeneous non-Hausdorff manifold

Is it trivial