Persnickety, Perdurable, Superannuated, Hailing Distance

Dear Sumant,

I just finished my 9^th day of Yoga from the Richard Hittleman’s book. Yesterday’s session was the longest. It was day 8^th , the review day. I did all 14 asanas and it took me over 1 and half hr to finish but again the surprising aspect was that I didn’t feel the time passing, as said before while doing yoga your concentration is fixed on your body so one doesn’t need distraction while doing yoga. I am feeling great after doing my Yoga today. It also means that I have finished 1/3^rd of the book so far. One of my favorite is scalp asana. Where you pull on your hair and massage your scalp. It’s funny when you are doing it but it is so very relaxing. The book is very well written with all the pictures and the commentary to help you know exactly how one can perform a particular asana. Today I woke up late but I did manage to utilize my time. I read several chapters from different books including “The Artist’s way”, Og Mandino’s book and a chapter from Covey’s book. I did some thinking on Combinatorics problem. I made up one problem and I tried to solve it with the ordinary generating function but I keep getting the wrong answer. I tried using Maple and it matched individual cases when you do by hand but when I was using Generating Function I was getting the wrong value of the coefficient. The problem was pretty basic “If there are two people and the first one eats only even number of sweet meats and the 2^nd one eats only odd number of sweets. How many different ways the two can eat n number of sweets”. You will readily discover that we should have only odd number of sweets (since even plus odd is odd). So the resulting generating function or the power series should have 0 as the coefficient for all even powers of x. It’s easy to see that the function will be (1+x^2+x^4+x^6+..)*(x+x^3+x^5+x^7+..) and the product of these two will give 1/(1-x^2)*x/(1-x^2) which leads to partial fraction of 1/(4(1-x)^2)-1/(4(1+x)^2) and the coefficient of x^n in this case will be 1/4*nCr(n+2-1,n)-1/4*(-1)^n*nCr(n+2-1,n). I was calculating the coefficient of x^n in a wrong way. The correct formula for x^n when you have something like 1/(1-x)^r is nCr(n+r-1,n) and I was doing nCr(r+n-1,r). So I went back to Tuker’s book on combinatorics and realized my mistake. The correct generating function once inputted gives the expected result when for any even number of sweets we get zero and for odd number it’s the right value and if you are wondering what’s that final value is, its (n+1)/2 when n is odd and zero when n is evern with my earlier approach I was getting the wrong result of n(n+1)/4.when n is odd and zero when n is even. So I learned a valuable lesson. My plan now is to study some 501 stuff. I have already written down the questions. There are 6 this time including question on Agroff’s Theorem etc.

Around 15hr I went to Tom to get my belt tensionner fixed. So I will get my car back tomorrow. I met there Mohsin and one another guy. Mohsin had a great news to share. He is blessed with a wonderful daughter and both the mother and child are doing great. I met Mohsin while I was in southern hill for a while. He was my next door neighbor. A very soft spoken person and he is doing his master’s in Economics.

Few new words that I recently learned includes superannuated, persnickety, hailing distance, Apoplexy and Perdurable.

Apoplexy : a fit of extreme anger or rage: “Alex had wrung himself dry over his paper for Professor Lopex, and his poor grade sent him into apoplexy”

Other meaning for apoplexy is “A sudden loss of consciousness resulting when the rupture of occlusion of a blood vessel leads to oxygen lack in the brain”. The word is nearest in meaning to stroke, another sentence “The adversary, a stock man in a checkered shirt, sprang to life. Arms spread, veins popping, he launched an oral bombardment that looked likely to end in fisticuffs or apoplexy. Communism versus Capitalism ? Is there a God ? The chainsaw buzz of their Spanish made it impossible for me to tell the stakes. “I turned to a sturdy youth who was also watching the debate .. “What are they arguing about ?” “Baseball”. By Christopher Hunt

Persnickety

“Walk on it” is good advice, whether the problem is a persnickety plotline or a persistent personality clash. Native Americans pursue vision quests, Aborigines do walkabout. Both of these cultures know that walking clears the head.

1． Used colloquially of one who is overly conceited or arrogant “they’re snobs-stuck-up and uppity and persnickety”

2． Characterized by excessive precision and attention to trivial details “a persnickety job”, “ a persnickety school teacher”

Perdurable

1. Very durable; lasting; continuing long: “The perdurable statues in the town square have remained virtually unchanged, even as the buildings around them have been renovated, rebuilt, and refaced”

It is an indictment of the hubris of our politically correct age that a film asserting this perdurable truth about mankind’s affair will strike many as offensive. But truth it is, and conservatives should be grateful to Maxwell, and Ted Turner, the film’s financier for daring to tell it”. National Review March 10,2003

The current installation at the Field Museum in Chicago- after previous appearances at venues in Rome and London- of a large-scale exhibition of ancient art centered upon the personality and historical role of the last Macedonian queen of Egypt testifies to the perdurable hold of Cleopatra upon the public imagination more than 20 centuries after her death”. Sheldon Nodelman

“I have professed me thy friend, and I confess me knit to thy deserving with cables of perdurable toughness; I could never better stead thee than now”.

Superannuated

1. discharged as too old for use or work, especially with a pension: “a superannuated civil servant”

2. no longer in use or valid or fashionable; obsolete: “Shelly collects superannuated computers and adds their processing power to a growing supercomputer in her garage”. “superannuated laws”.

Hailing distance:

At the time I owned a 1965 Chevy pickup named Louise. Every afternoon I would load Louise with a half-dozen dogs and point the truck down a dirt road into the sagebrush. A mile into “nowhere”. I would park the truck on the roadside and signal to the dogs that they were free to roam- as long as they stayed within hailing distance.

That’s for now

Sumant Sumant