Wandering Soul

For scientists around the world, and mortals like me who are interested in learning about the universe and how it works, today is an iconic day. Because 300 feet under the sleepy French village of Crozet has begun man’s most ambitious project yet - The Search for the God Particle.

The God Particle, more specifically known as the Higgs Boson is a hypothetical scalar elementary particle that’s predicted by the standard model of particle physics, but has not yet been discovered. For the uninitiated, an elementary particle is a particle that does not have a sub-structure. It is the basic building block of all matter. Other examples of elementary particles are Quarks and Leptons.

The search for Higgs Boson will throw more light on how massless particles give rise to matter that has mass, and how energy and matter are interconvertible. This experiment is going live at CERN’s Large Hadron Collider (LHC), the most powerful particle accelerator that is 27 kms in circumference, and is buried under the ground.

Large Hadron Collider

In the LHC, two beams of particles (mostly protons) will race in opposite directions around the underground tunnel. The particles will be guided by more than a thousand cylindrical, supercooled magnets, linked like sausages. At four locations the beams will converge, sending the particles crashing into each other at 99.99% the speed of light. The matter will be transformed by the violent collisions into wads of energy, which will in turn condense back into various intriguing types of particles. This experiment recreates the conditions existing just micro-seconds after the Big Bang. And through this experiment, phycisists hope to learn more about the origins of mass, gravity and the mysterious dark matter. The Higgs Boson is one such particle of matter that is being hunted here. Interestingly, Stephen Hawking has taken a $100 bet that the LHC won’t find the Higgs Boson:

I think it will be much more exciting if we don’t find the Higgs. That will show something is wrong, and we need to think again.

If this experiment goes as planned, we will be one step closer to unraveling the mystery of the birth of our Universe, and it’s constitution. On the other hand, concerns have been raised around the world that the LHC could create black holes, which can potentially eat the planet from within. Well, I don’t see how that’s possible, because the LHC is less than miniscule when compared to the goings-on in the Universe. Let’s wait and see what we find!

National Geographic has a great representation of how the LHC works.

If you want to find out more, check out the sources from where I compiled this information: The Telegraph, Nat Geo and LHC Outreach.

I write this post as I get ready to pursue my MBA studies at the Indian School of Business. A lot has happened over the past few months. Here’s a run-up to the present.

Rewind to June 07. I take the GMAT and then apply to three schools (The Indian School of Business, Tuck at Dartmouth and Ross at Michigan) for MBA. It’s a long application process for each one, and once the applications are done, the long wait begins. First comes the reply from ISB: Sorry, your application has been rejected. Then the reply from Tuck: Congratulations, you’ve been shortlisted for a phone interview. The phone interview happens. Then comes a reply from Tuck: Our representative would like to meet you in person on Nov 15 in Mumbai. Cool, I say.

Then comes the shocker. ISB calls me to say they have re-evaluated my application, and would like to interview me!!! On Nov 15!

Thankfully, both interview venues are near to each other, with a couple of hours difference between the interview times. Phew…

Both interviews go well. Again the wait begins. Then on Dec 12, just two days before I set off for my vacation to Cambodia and Thailand, I hear from ISB: Congratulations, we are happy to make you an offer for admission. This was one offer I couldn’t refuse What a start to my trip!

The next week I hear from Tuck: Sorry to inform you that we have not been able to offer you admission. Similar reply from Ross, a month later. Too bad, but it didn’t matter after the ISB news.

I got relieved from work in mid-Feb and since then, have been completing the various formalities of the admissions process - documents, medical forms, loan application, the works. I took out some time last month to go tiger-spotting to the Bandhavgarh Tiger Reserve in central India. It was an awesome experience.

These days I am bonding with my future classmates through the forum we have created on Orkut. They are a pretty interesting bunch of people, and am certainly looking forward to the year at the ISB. It begins in eight days…

It was a case of miscommunication with my server admin. A minor oversight in my mail that wiped out my entire website! There was nothing left on the server, nothing at all. No blog, no photoblog, no website.

I was in a state of shock when I checked my website. I could see months of work going down the drain. It was a disaster. I did not know where to start. There was no way I could get my blogs back… Or was there?

I started thinking. And then I got a brainwave. Google should have most of the blog in its cache. That was the key. I promptly checked Google Cache by typing cache:blog.kedarsule.com in the searchbox. Lo and behold, there it was. I started checking the cache for each of my category. I could not get posts which were deeper than third page for each category, but whatever, I could get most of them back. One thing I could not get back completely were the comments, but then I couldn’t help it. I decided to make the most of whatever I could retrieve, and copied it into a word file.

Now that I had to put my blog back together, I decided to spend some time on the design front. So what you are seeing is the new version of my old blog. I have also created new categories for writing my travelogues. I have treated my photoblog to some design treatment as well. I also went on a naming spree. My blog is now called Wandering Soul and the photoblog is called Shades of Light.

So here I am, recovered from a major disaster. There are two main learnings here:

1. Be very, very careful while communicating with your Server Admin. Don’t take things for granted.
2. If you are stupid like me and manage to get your website erased, use Google Cache to recover as much data as you can. But please keep in mind that this method will work only for a short time after your site goes down. Because, once the Google spider crawls your website, and finds nothing there, it will erase your website’s data from its database.