Photo Adventures with Curiosity and Learning

Leaving Charleston at 9am - I went to Washington Dulles and waited until about 5 when the Frankfurt flight departed. With trusty GPS in the window, I managed to record the flights in both directions as shown here.

Click for GPS tracks from Charleston to Chennai and the return flights

Flying from Frankfurt to Chennai (I still want to say Madras) was a new experience for me, since usually I fly to Bombay and then hang around until morning to fly to Chennai. Here is the path to Chennai - almost a continuation of the great circle route we started in Washington.

What follows are photos of mostly humorous things - staring with a possibility to learn the abacus and improve your math skills:

The Indian Institue of Technology - Madras - where I taught from 1993-1994

My friend and colleague, R. Kalyana Krishnan, always opens his lab to me. We share ideas, we share frustrations and for 11 years now we have found ways to help each other. When I first came to IIT in 1993, Krishnan was developing tools for building multilingual web sites. Visit his site - and you'll learn something of Sanskrit, Telegu, Tamil and will enjoy reading the "Gita" in Sanskrit. Below are a few photos of Krishnan and his lab - always filled with students. Krishnan is a Student's professor!!!

Here is VHS (Volunteer Health Services) Hospital and Clinics. Wendy, a Medical Student at MUSC is rotating through their village health clinics and their Ob-Gyn program. The photo on the left illustrates effective use of shade on a day when the temperature is 40 C - just outside the VHS gate - a small fast food cafe.

An interesting use of technology is in the design of scaffolding within which one grows a building or some such structure. Here you see a very modern design based on non-rectangular gridding. The design augments the traditional compressive stress with lateral stresses resulting from the bowing of the individual support members. A rather interesting design.

C. Frank Starmer

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