Ryanair Humour

Nearly everyone hates Ryanair.

I have flown with them several times, and if you think that means I am an exception, you couldn't be more wrong: it means I dislike them even more – not just because of all the times I have been subjected to their frustrating booking process and annoying recorded in-flight promos, but because choosing Ryanair is a peculiar form of self-abasement – a reminder that purely because of their low prices, I sometimes fly with an unpleasant company which is synonymous with obsessive cost-cutting, hidden charges, appalling customer service and an obnoxious CEO.

Ryanair are completely unabashed about their business model and public image, and in a perverse way, I can't help appreciate how they sometimes poke fun at themselves. On a Ryanair flight I took this month, the in-flight menu advertised, among other things:

•	"Free printed receipt with every purchase!"
•	"Sweet snacks (great for sharingscoffing if you've been separated from your friend!)" (a reference to their no-allocated-seating policy)
•	"Soft drinks & juices (because the toilets are still free!)" (a reference to the proposed pay-per-pee fee)

In 2012, flying back to London with Ryanair, I fell asleep when the landing cards were being handed out. When I woke up, I asked a flight attendant if I could have a landing card. "That will be one pound," she said.

It is a mark of Ryanair's reputation (and her perfect poker face) that before I caught on to the joke, I actually believed her for a second.

Oslo, 5:38 am

Norway is a great place for camping, not just because of all the hiking trails and dramatic scenery, but because of allemansretten (literally, every man's right) – the legal right to roam on foot or skis anywhere in open country, to swim or row in rivers, to sleep in a tent or under the stars, and to pick berries, mushrooms or flowers.

On our second day of camping, we pitched our tent on the shores of Sognsvann, a lake in the Nordmarka (north forest). Sognsvann is easily reachable from Oslo, so in the daytime it attracts joggers and picnickers. But after sunset, we had the lake all to ourselves.

It was a cold, clear night. When I awoke, hoarfrost covered our tent and the grass around it, and as I stood shivering in my boots and wishing I had remained cocooned in my sleeping-bag, I was reminded why wild camping is special to me: the stillness, the frisson of adventure, the vastness of the sky, and the waning gibbous moon setting over the spruce trees.

Sheep, Crows and Certainty

Overheard at Mudchute Farm – a boy (about four years old) thoughtfully surveying the sheepfold:

I am ninety-nine percent sure I like sheep.

My childhood views about sheep are not recorded, but today my mother discovered, in the pages of an old diary, this unambiguous statement scrawled when I was two or three years old:

It says (in Bangla) We do not love crows. 'Crow' is misspelt and the letterforms are far from perfect, but as you can see from this example, I was a kid who was seldom < 100% sure about things.

The Ex-God

This post is the second in a short series about religion and my grandmother(s).

When my brother and I were kids, if our mother scolded us, our grandmother (our mother's mother) would tell her to go easy because – so our grandmother said – children younger than five were like gods, in the sense that they could not (knowingly) do any wrong.

Here is an old photo of my brother on his fifth birthday.

He is crying because he is no longer a god, and he is worried that his sins will now catch up with him.

2 + 2 = 5

When I was in first year of college, a senior who was preparing for a competitive exam asked me to help him with his maths. For each hour of tuition he would treat me to biryani, which I considered an excellent deal.

In our second lesson, I explained how to solve quadratic equations by factoring by inspection.

Then I derived for him the general solution for ax² + bx + c = 0, the quadratic formula which in Indian textbooks is often called Sridhar Acharya's formula after the 9th century Indian mathematician who described a general method for solving quadratic equations:

I advised my friend that if a and c are integers with relatively few factors, factoring by inspection is quicker, so he should try it first before using the quadratic formula. He rejected this suggestion with an argument of such staggering irrationality and misplaced patriotic pride, that I could think of nothing to say in reply: "When there is a perfectly good method discovered by an Indian, why should I use another method?"

The incident came to mind because I noticed an amusing photo on the Guardian (online edition) front page today:

The teacher(?) is factoring a quadratic polynomial 2x² + 5x + 2, but the expression in the second line is incorrect: (2x + 2)(x + 1) actually equals 2x² + 4x + 2. The second line should read (2x + 1)(x + 2).

And yeah, there also should be a full-stop after 'charts'.

Shunbun no Hi: Llamas

Elsewhere on this blog I have extolled the virtues of the Isle of Dogs. But that list had one glaring omission: it made no mention of the llamas of Mudchute Farm. For this must surely be one of the top reasons for wanting to live in the area: when you're on the Isle of Dogs, no matter how bad things are, you can always take comfort from the fact that you are never more than 2 km from a llama.

* * *

Llamapaedia's Common Llama Terminology page has a wonderful entry:

Overconditioned
The polite way of saying in the showring that a llama is overweight or fat.

* * *

Last year I wrote:

If, as is not unlikely, Web 3.0 is created to allow people to share pictures of llamas, my llama photo will get its place in the sun.

Web 3.0 is still in the works, but while we wait, here is a llama photo taken by Sujaan at Mudchute Farm:

Clouds

My first attempt at a timelapse video of natural phenomena: clouds over my patio on Saturday morning. Click on the photo below for the video (0:18).

The video is composed of stills taken at 15-second intervals played at 15 fps, for an effective speed of 225×. Next time, I'll pick a shorter interval (and hopefully, more interesting clouds and scenery).

Several aircraft appear in the video, some only for the space of a single frame (less than 67 milliseconds). Still you can spot them if you look real carefully, e.g. near the end there are two specks in the 1st quadrant and a white streak in the 3rd quadrant.

Earthquake Memories

Today is the third anniversary of the Tōhoku earthquake and tsunami.

Tuesday, 8 March 2011, was the first day of my six-month secondment to my law firm's office in Tokyo. Upon arrival, I got a health-and-safety briefing which, among other things, introduced me to the earthquake pack under my desk. It had a hard hat, fire-blanket, rope, torch, whistle, bottled water, tinned food and biscuits. The biscuits interested me particularly. They were not very tasty, but when I ate a few and then drank some water, I felt as full as if I had eaten a big meal.

On Wednesday morning, there was a 7.2-magnitude quake off the coast of Japan, and the high-rise building I was in swayed noticeably. I was thrilled to be in my first real earthquake, but after that I left the biscuits alone.

Later that day I had a Japanese lesson. Among the first words my teacher taught me were emergency words, "just in case": 地震 (jishin: earthquake), 火 (hi: fire) and 火山 (kazan: volcano). "And of course, tsunami is already a word in English," she said.

On Friday afternoon there was a 9.0: one of the most powerful earthquakes in recorded history.

The alerts began to sound seconds before the tremors began. The recorded announcements were in Japanese, followed by English. My supervisor translated the Japanese announcements as they sounded, giving me a few seconds' advantage. The first one told us to put on our hard hats. The second one told us to get under our desks. It was not yet necessary to evacuate; we were actually safer in the earthquake-resistant building than in the street outside, where we might be endangered by falling objects.

When the tremors subsided, we were told to keep our hard hats on because there might be aftershocks. The Japanese people seemed composed; they went around switching off the air-conditioners because they said after an earthquake that size, some power stations had probably switched off. Some of the expats were freaking out, but I remember feeling excited rather than fearful or panicky (news from Fukushima was yet to filter through, so we had not realised the scale of the disaster). Rather than adding to the uproar, I went back to work. My supervisor was so amused that she took a photo on her phone.

Out of the whole episode, what impressed me most was Japan's disaster preparedness and recovery (at least so far as the earthquake is concerned; the Japan government's reaction to the Fukushima meltdown has perhaps not been beyond reproach). The earthquake registered an upper five in Tokyo, but there was little damage to property because the buildings, like in the parable of the Oak and the Reed, are designed to sway with the tremors rather than stiffly resist. In my flat, picture frames were askew and a few books fell off the shelves. The Tōkaidō Shinkansen resumed limited service late in the day, and the next day it was back to its normal schedule. By next week, my hotel was issuing notices about bicycle parking.