Chai and Why?

Hello there!

I had been busy the last few months writing a research paper. However, now, May is here, the paper is submitted, the semester has ended, and I have some free time on my hands.

Some news for you

Chai and Why

I, along with Varun, Eeshan, and Ashutosh from the School of Technology and Computer Science in TIFR are organizing a fun outreach session of Chai and Why. Entry is open and free for all! See you tomorrow morning at 11, at Prithvi Café, Juhu. Read more about the Chai and Why series →

New preprint

I have been working on a problem on stochastic games with window mean-payoff objectives with Laurent Doyen and Shibashis Guha for the better part of the past year. We finally finished writing the paper and uploaded a preprint on arXiv.org: Stochastic Window Mean-payoff Games. With this, I now have a page on dblp!

Final Space Ends

When Final Space was unceremoniously cancelled after Season 3 with the biggest cliffhanger ever, it was a very sad day. The good news now is that the creator of the show, Olan Rogers, is getting a chance to complete the story in the form of a graphic novel. I highly recommend that you watch this show. If you are outside the US, you can watch it on Netflix till December 2023. You can pre-order the graphic novel to support Olan for what will undoubtedly be an arduous road ahead. Almost 20,000 copies have already been sold in less than two weeks.

What’s playing

• The Broadway Musical The Sound of Music started playing in Mumbai from May 3. I watched it on the opening night and loved it. The acting, singing, and dancing by the cast is phenomenal. The live music by the orchestra was amazing as well.

  

• For some reason, all eight Harry Potter movies are back in theaters in Mumbai. I missed watching the first four movies in the theaters, so this is a chance to experience them on the big screen.
• Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3 released this week as well. While I am no longer interested in the MCU, the reviews for this film are looking positive, and I might go watch it after all.

Some interesting videos

Here are some videos were uploaded on YouTube in the last week that I liked.

Quirky keyboards

• A video about the history of the arrow keys on keyboards by the 8-bit guy. Almost every keyboard you can find today has arrow keys (or cursor keys) in an “inverted T” shape. However, this has not always been the case.¹

• There’s something wrong with Joel Haver’s friend’s keyboard. It’s not a typical QWERTY keyboard. He uses the Blomfu keyboard!

Marbula One S4

Season 4 of Marble racing begins! It is fun to watch the marbles make laps across the track while listening to the captivating commentary.

AI generated memes

YouTuber demonflyingfox became famous last month for creating AI generated videos on Harry Potter Balenciaga. Now they are back with another AI generated video on Breaking Bad in German. Wandlung zum Bösen!

Epic NPC man

Here’s another epic NPC man video by VLDL. A bug in the programs of two NPC muggers in the town of Honeywood leads to a hilarious outcome.

Elliot is a cool guy

Elliot, a graphic designer, tries out a bunch of graphic design softwares to make posters. The programs that he tries out include Photoshop, Canva, Inkscape, GIMP, and even Excel. My favourite one is of course Inkscape!

Book graphs

In this episode of Numberphile, James Grimes talks about book embeddings of graphs. These are an interesting generalization of planar graphs. The vertices of a graph are placed in a single line that forms the ‘spine’ of a book. No two edges between two vertices allowed to intersect. We can avoid edge intersections by embedding the edges in different ‘pages’. The problem is, given a graph, to find the minimum number of pages required to embed the graph. After watching the video, you can also read the the paper on arXiv. They show that four pages are sufficient to embed any planar graphs.

That’s all for now! See you in the next one. 👋