An office manager was given the task of hiring an individual to fill a job opening. After sorting through a stack of resumes he found four people who were equally qualified. He decided to call the four in and ask them one question and their answer would determine who would get the job.

The day came and as the four sat around the conference room table the interviewer asked “What is the fastest thing you know of?” pointing to the man on his right.

The first man replied “A thought. It pops into your head. There’s no forewarning that it’s on the way, it’s just there. A thought is the fastest thing I know of.”

“That’s very good!” replied the interviewer. And now you sir?

He asked the second man. “Hmm…. let me see, A blink! It comes and goes and you don’t know ever happened. A blink is the fastest thing I know of.”

“Excellent!” said the interviewer “The blink of an eye. That’s a very popular cliché for speed.” as he turned to the third man who was contemplating his reply.

“Well, out at my dad’s ranch, you step out of the house and on the wall there’s a light switch, when you flip that switch, way out across the pasture the light at the barn comes on in an instant.” Turning on a light is the fastest thing I can think of.”

The interviewer was very impressed with the third answer and thought he had found his man. “It’s hard to beat the speed of light.” he said. Turning to the fourth man, he posed the question.

“After hearing the three previous answers, it’s obvious to me that the fastest thing known is diarrhea.”

“WHAT!?” said the interviewer, stunned by the response.

“Oh I can explain.” said the fourth man. “You see the other day wasn’t feeling so good and I ran for the bathroom. But, before I could think, blink, or turn on the light, I’d crapped in my pants!”

He got the job.

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Oh crap ! You don’t, you guys are so-not-cool. Jus kidding ! Go ahead. Watch  it by yourself, but only the part I loved in that episode.

Before you do that lemme jus share the background story. Now the thing is that Ted Moseby, the lead character of the show has got a tenure as a professor of Architecture in University of Columbia. And, he’s kinda having a rough time getting laid. His friend Barney (my fav character in the show)says it is due to the fact that he is a professor and chics hate the professor stuff. But Ted manages to pick up a girl, yet sad story she says she’s too tired to “do it” and sleeps over at his home and leaves the next morning. Now, go ahead and watch the show’s best part for yourself:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NUot1w9t_0g

And for the texty text types, here’s something from the FB:

The Sexless Innkeeper

Barney’s Poem About The Sexless Innkeeper

’twas the night before new year’s,
and the weather grew mean.
it was 3:00 in the morning,
and i was stranded in queens.

the tavern grew empty,
the gas lights grew dim.
the horse-drawn carriages
were all but snowed in.

last call was approaching,
and my fortunes looked bleak.
then i turned to my left
and stifled a shriek.

she had a peach fuzz beard
and weighed 16 stone.
she gobbled up hot wings
and swallowed the bones.

i muffled a scream
and threw up in my mouth.
i asked, “where do you live?”
and she said, “one block south.”

i swallowed my pride
and six shots of whiskey.
and prayed to the gods
that she wasn’t too frisky.

back in her cave,
she prepared us a snack.
beneath her mighty hooves,
the floorboards did crack.

but when she returned,
she found a sound sleeper.
and thus she became
the sexless innkeeper.

But my friend what I am here to share is not the excerpts from the episode, but what even the creators of the episode forgot to highlight is Ted’s reply to Barney in the end of the episode, when he gets laid. And, here you go:

Twas the night before this one, I had hours to kill.
I sat in the tavern grading parchments with quill.
A busty young lassie flashed me a grin.
Her garb said classy, but her eyes whispered sin.
She said, “You’re a teacher?”  I said, “yes, indeed.”
“I must have you,” she moaned. “I’m turned on by tweed.”
With haste we did scamper, to my chamber anon.
We fell to the couch, and bro, it was on.
I unlaced her bodice; our passions grew deeper.
And thus ends the tale, of the sexless innkeeper.

LOLZ….You see that’s an awesome piece of creativity, and this show promises you this over and over again. I really miss the days from the undergraduate colege days of mine, wehre I and my frined Manchit, used to drool over this show’s makers and super-creativity all day long.

Really miss you all, while watching such episodes…! Love to hear all ya comment on this…

New optical materials that bend light in unusual ways could lead to much tinier transistors, microscopes that are able to peer at smaller cellular structures, and—with a good deal of engineering—even invisibility cloaks.

Two new types of metamaterials, as the light-bending stuff is known, were developed by researchers at the Nano-Scale Science and Engineering Center at the University of California, Berkeley, and described in separate papers in Nature and Science. One is the first three-dimensional material to have a negative index of refraction, which allows it to bend light in the opposite direction of what you would expect from any other material. The other, also 3-D, doesn’t have a negative index but still provides some negative refraction, and unlike previous metamaterials, it does so in the visible part of the spectrum.

Natural materials have a positive index of refraction, which is a measure of how much they can bend a beam of light passing through them. Stick a pole into a swimming pool, and the portion below the surface appears to jut off at an angle, because of the difference between the indices of refraction of air and water. If the water had a negative index of refraction, the part of the pole below the surface would appear to be above the water.

An index of refraction has an electrical component (permittivity) and a magnetic component (permeability). Building a metamaterial with a structure having features substantially smaller than the wavelengths of light it’s meant to refract causes resonance between the atoms in the material and the photons. This reverses the permittivity and the permeability, making the refractive index negative.

This property of metamaterials opens the door to whole new ways of manipulating light. For instance, in cases when a normal lens cannot resolve anything smaller than half a wavelength of light, metamaterials could make a superlens that could resolve below this so-called diffraction limit. That could open up new possibilities in biomedical imaging, allowing scientists to look at the proteins inside cells. It would also allow the photolithography equipment used to make computer chips to build even smaller features than are currently possible without having to find new sources of smaller wavelengths.

Illustration: UC Berkeley

Fish Out of Water: A fish swimming in water appears slightly closer to the surface than it really is, because of the difference between the refractive index of air and that of water. If the fish were swimming in water with a negative index of refraction it would appear to be swimming above the water.

One of the new metamaterials, described in Nature, consists of 21 alternating 30-nanometer-thick layers of silver and 50-nm-thick layers of magnesium fluoride, a dielectric. Each layer is laid out like a fishnet, with lines 565 nm wide crosshatched by lines 265 nm wide. The material produced a negative index of refraction for infrared light with wavelengths between 1.5 and 1.8 micrometers. That broadband response is more useful than the single frequencies other metamaterials can handle, says Xiang Zhang, the professor at the Berkeley center who directs the research teams and is coauthor of the two papers. More important, the loss of light passing through the material was very low. That’s because the light essentially hopped from one dielectric to the next, with little of the absorbing resonance taking place in the metal. “It’s like crossing a river,” says Zhang. “You keep your feet on the stones and you don’t get wet.” The figure of merit used to measure light loss in a structure was 3.5 in this case, a great improvement over previous materials, most of which have been less than 1.0, Zhang says.

The second metamaterial consisted of a thin slice of alumina with pores etched into it and silver nanowires deposited into the pores. The nanowires were 60 nm in diameter and spaced 50 nm apart. Although the permeability didn’t differ from a normal material’s, the permittivity was reversed if the light entered the material at just the right angle. The researchers used the nanowire structure to negatively refract red light. Getting further into the visible or even the ultraviolet part of the spectrum, where wavelengths are even shorter, is an engineering challenge the group is working on, Zhang says.

David Smith, director of the Center for Metamaterials and Integrated Plasmonics at Duke University, in Durham, N.C., called the work “a very significant milestone.” The fishnet structure, he says, is not yet practical because it has the negative index in only one direction. “Still, I’m just really knocked out by how clean a result they were able to achieve at optical wavelengths using this structure,” he says. “The Zhang group experiment should really prove to the skeptics that negative refraction at optical wavelengths is a reality.”

David Schurig, an assistant professor of electrical and computer engineering at North Carolina State University, in Raleigh, says the fishnet material could quickly lead to smaller waveguides and other devices for telecommunications because it’s already operating at telecom wavelengths.

The prospect that really captures the imagination—using these materials to cloak a person or an aircraft in a shield of invisibility—is much farther off, though Schurig says he’s optimistic about it. There’s no physical reason why you shouldn’t be able to direct light around an object and send it on in its original direction, rendering the object invisible. But one big challenge would be overcoming the loss of light as it travels through several centimeters or more of material. “If you want to cloak something the size of a person, you need a figure of merit of something like 1 million instead of 3.5,” Schurig says

I saw this movie called ‘Across the Universe’ starring Jim Sturgess (u can see his pic on my orkut profile cover, currently my fav actor ) and another movie called ’21′, starring Jim, Kate Bosworth and Kevin Spacey. Across the Universe is mainly a musical, an attempt to revive the Beatles legacy. The Beatles songs are re-sung and remixed to some extent and are used by the director very efficiently to portray the emotions, including special feature being the song I am the Walrus by U2 lead Bono, in which he himself is acting. Jim plays a small town boy who goes to Princeton University to find his dad and ends up finding lifelong friends along with the love of his life. The US is fighting a war against Vietnam and the group of friends come out in an Anti-War protests against US authorities. The protests turn violent and police arrests them. The feel of the movie is very good but at times 1 does get bored during watching it. These thoughts of revolution are expressed from behind while the relationship of friends takes the centerstage during the screenplay.

And now comes a comment about my fav movie of the week, 21. It’s jus too awesome when we see Jim running his bicycle in the campus of MIT. The whole movie portrays nothing but the use of intelligence. Kevin Spacey, a prof at MIT teaches a secret group of students the game of Blackjack, where u have to count cards to a nearest no. of 21. Their team goes to Vegas every weekend and gets bags full of cash. Jim works on dis to get money for Harvard Medical School when suddenly gambling turns his life upside down. He is on the verge of losing his MIT degree when he relaizes a whole new meaning of life. A must watch for all the MS aspirants (only to get a feel) . I love that scene when d Harvard prof tells Jim to dazzle him with a life experience so that he can prove himself worthy of a scholarship. I mean that is why these American Universities are alwaz 100 steps ahead than those in India to say the least. They always look for merit thru determination n diligence rather than marks. Don’t you think that this is a right criteria to judge a person’s right to get educated ?..Plz leave ur comments in the box given below….

Till my next post, keep ur fingers crossed and remember to name your dog “Amir” in case u get 1. (I know tis a PJ)…Love…Nipun