1.618, holidays and account projections...

I can't believe I am in office today - started Dan Brown's The Da Vinci Code yesterday evening and must confess that it's been gripping so far - never read anything as compelling as this since Forsyth. (Gee, thanks Mansur!) Besides the fact that I am a crossy aficionado and the anagrams were delightful, what’s impressed me so far is the way Brown has mixed fast paced fiction with loads of details about art.

And of course, there was this incredible thing about PHI..Lemme explain..PHI (pronounced like in fie), as the more mathematically inclined amongst us would know, is the numeric constant 1.618. However 1.618/1 which is also called the Divine Proportion is a very important number, almost ubiquitous in nature. Would you believe if I told you that

# the quotients of adjacent terms in the Fibonacci series has the astonishing property of approaching PHI

# you divide the number of female bees by the number of male bees in any beehive, the result is PHI

# sunflower seeds, which grow in opposing spirals, have the ratio of each rotations diameter to the next as PHI

# the next time you are in a shower, measure yourself from the tip of your head to the floor and then divide it by the distance from your belly button to the floor and the result is PHI

# the ratio of distance from your shoulder to fingertips / elbows to fingertips = PHI

PHI is present everywhere - in the architectural dimensions of the Greek Parthenon, the Egyptian Pyramids, the United Nations Building in New York, in the organizational structures of Mozart's sonatas, Beethoven's Fifth Symphony and was even used by Stradivarius to calculate the exact placement of the f-holes in the construction of his famous violins (think Sherlock Holmes)

Exhilarating, isn’t it ?

164 pages done and 320 odd more to go, I called it quits at 2:40 today morning.. If only I didn’t have my appraisal due for discussion today, I would have been on my way to Chennai to attend Ramakrishnan's engagement (my roomie at SP), reading The Da Vinci code in train ! (sigh) Alas - things don’t always fall in place.. Wouldn't it be so nice if we could have Book leave to add to Casual, Sick leave etc..Wotsay old hag ?

The lappie is still not working - My office PC is still shutting down for every 15+ mts of inactivity and I don’t have the time to reformat it..Life sucks !! And the first mail I check after logging in is one from the big boss with a "big wish list" as to what he needs of me pronto. Fair enough but when most of it is work like calling up people to get the latest business projections and then sieving through loads and loads of data in XL, you can imagine how I feel..Neway havta rush now..Will keep you all posted on The Da Vinci Code..Till then, ciao !!