Epics of India

This week, I looked more into configuring my canvas profile. I have a very active discussion board in another course, so this may be useful for that since I added a new picture of myself. The picture I chose is me posing next to one of the jet engines in Felgar Hall, as they are some of the coolest things around here.  I didn't really want to flatter myself with a title, although I could have put one of my officer positions. I also elected not to put a bio, since I don't believe anyone except my professors can see that and I like to keep a pretty professional relationship in place.

I wanted to learn more about Shiva this week, so that was my starting point. I found out that among his countless fearsome and brutal depictions, he is also known as the god of yoga. Learning about Shiva led me to wonder about other Hindu deities , so I followed a link for principal deities. What I found here is that Hinduism has a very large number of deities. I also followed a link for Devi , since I had no idea what it was. Turns out, that is is just the Sanskrit word for goddess. In this new page I found reference to a goddess named Mahatmya, who is the inspiration of Shaktism . This is a really interesting ideology within Hinduism in which the supreme being is female. This has a lot to do with entities such as Kali, and is a really interesting read. Shaktism

F ailure I s S uccess' H erald I just thought about how failure is the first step towards a success, and rolled with it until I found a word that let me say what I wanted. That just happened to be fish, and the words ' just keep swimming' come to mind. Dory

I had the chance to see someone practicing empathy this week. One of friends is also a close friend of my girlfriend, and they were having a pretty rough go of it this week. My girlfriend took the extra time out of her busy schedule to sit down and just talk with him and validate the problems he has been facing. She wasn't offering suggestions or ways to fix his problems, because that isn't what he needed. Right then, he just needed someone to listen to him and reassure him that what was bothering him wasn't something trivial. I think that is really important to know what people need at any given time and knowing what you should and should not try to do for them. Link

With the end of my college career rapidly approaching, I have been feeling the pressure of not having a definite job even more than normal this week. On the bright side, I've been talking with some friends who recently graduated and they said they will poke around at the places they work and see if they can't get me an in somewhere. Here's to hoping! In other news, my capstone project is finally progressing again, and it looks like the worst of a sudden bureaucracy storm is past now. With that in the rear view mirror, I have been busying myself with soldering and wiring diagrams, trying to get our circuit work done as quick as possible so we can start testing these rocket nozzles. Here is a plot we generated of the predicted Mach numbers from one of our nozzles when we run air through it. Mach Number (Half View of Nozzle: Personal Photo) I also got to add my favorite story to my portfolio this week. It is the one I wrote about Hanuman crossing the land bridge to Lan...

Procrastination The image above really got me this week. I have been fighting procrastination quite hard recently and it is time to get motivated again. Along this same kind of self improvement ideology, I found this video in the announcements on positive mindsets, and it is nice reminder to be positive and what benefits that can have on a person.

The afternoon sun glanced lazily off the serene surface of the pond. Yudhistira stopped nearby, gazing into the depths; thoroughly entranced by the pureness and clarity of the water. For a foot or so from the bank, he could see a delicate sandy bottom. Here and there a large loach swam lethargically, unperturbed by the presence of Yudhistira. Farther out, the blue intensified to a deep sapphire color and the bottom dropped out into a seemingly bottomless abyss. The Depths The pond itself was nestled deep in the jungle, with dense foliage completely obscuring it from view. Yudhistira and his brothers had stumbled upon it after sweating for hours through the humid forest of vines and fallen teak trees. Upon seeing the water, his brothers had run forward greedily and splashed their faces. The moment their hands broke the surface, the water had cracked with the noise of a splitting glacier. Small tendrils of water began to pull up from the pond. The only ripples in the pond ...

There were so many different aspects of battle in this portion of the Mahabharata. The one piece that stood out more than others was when Yudhistira fought Salya. This happened very briefly in the story, but I feel that it has great potential. Basically, everyone watched the two square up, and Yudhistira is this mild mannered guy and Salya is very much portrayed as a big brawny guy, but Yudhistira beats him with apparent ease. I think this could be quite the nice place to add a bunch of detail, and make a much better spectacle of it. Great Battle Bibliography: Title: The Mahabharata: A Shortened Modern Prose Version of the Indian Epic Author: R. K. Narayan Year: 1978 Link

So the story that most intrigued me this week was the one with 4 of the Pandavas dying and Yudhistira answering riddles to revive them. Basically what happened, was that a large deer scooped up some prayer items from a monk in the woods and the brothers gave chase. Eventually they got really tired and thirsty. Thusly, they decided to look for water and one by one came upon the same pond. When each of them got there, they were issued a warning not to touch the water, but promptly ignored it and died. When Yudhistira finally came around, he headed the warning and ended up answering a large number of riddles from a god that turned out to be his father. His father then granted him a boon of being unrecognizable. This would make a pretty good story involving a vivid description of the pond and the game of wit. Yudhistira Bibliography: Title: The Mahabharata: A Shortened Modern Prose Version of the Indian Epic Author: R. K. Narayan Year: 1978 Link