Tuesday, September 25, 2007

Ethics?

Being in final year, there is this evil course that we are being forced to endure, and is aptly titled "Professional Ethics", tought by an evil saddist who claims that we all have to endure 3 hours of physical and emotional torture for a 2 credit pass/fail course that noone would normally care about anyway. So, every tuesday, we are all rammed into a poorly ventilated hall, patrolled by five guard dogs (read TAs), who are keen to punish you for dozing off, reading any book, or for that matter, fooling around with the pen in your hand. The lead saddist is assisted by two other saddists, who constantly try to outperform the lead saddist in paining the students. And then, along came a guest saddist who made a feeble attempt at paining us. His trick to outperform the other three sadists was simple: Do not use a PPT, force them to take notes, which would be the only source of information on what he taught. At least the other saddists were kind enough to make their PPTs available online. He thought that'd make us concentrate better on his lecture, but he totally underestimated me. Here are my notes on the entire class taken by him, reproduced verbatim. I'm sure he will give up in life if he found out how his lecture was summarized.

  • Fart
  • More Fart
  • Science is satyagraha
  • Pain joke on Satyameva Jayate and Satyam computers
  • Quest of science is to find out the truth
  • Assumption: We are all non schizophrenic
  • No priesthood in science
  • Vague PJ on powepoint
  • Teacher - student relationship (?)
  • 11 Jan 1935 : BS Chandrashekhar and King Arthur (?)
  • Presented paper on fate of starts out of fuel
  • 6 June 1901 : JC Bose put paper on elec response in plants
  • Both in Royal Society of England
  • All people are great and noble
  • "God does not play dice" - Einstein
  • "Elliptical orbit looks arbit"
  • "God loves curves"
  • No doctrines in science, Scientist is not dogmatic
  • Constant fight against existential limits
  • Male and female at the same time: with some vague reference to Michael Jackson
  • "MJ is God"
  • More fart on MJ
  • Lord Kelvin in early 19th Century: "Everything in physics has been explored"
  • It started raining outside
  • Quest to find the glory of creation - Rene Descartes
  • Corpus Poetalum - What path will you take in life? - Descartes
  • Role of imagination
  • Tyco Brahe: Geocentric, Kepler: Heliocentric
  • Selfless
  • In the beginning, everything was philosophy
  • Trust, interdependence
  • Dedication to wife
  • No place for dishonesty
  • Everyone forgets
  • Vulgarization of Rubber (!!!)
Maybe it would have benefitted everyone if I had posted it earlier, as the quiz for this course was conducted earlier today. Nevertheless, here it goes.