Pragyan’06/Day 2
Chris Gill
Bismay woke me up today. The Video Conference talk by Chris Gill of SVASE was scheduled at 8:00AM. I reached Barn half an hour late. We tried recording the videos of the Video Conference using TV Tuner cards. Since I have never been into recording-editing stuffs, we couldn’t record the audio of the conference.
The lecture went on fine. He talked about entrepreneurship and a few questions were also posed to the audience.
I spent the rest of the morning session watching the robots in the Robovigyan contest. Students tried out their line followers. The systems that they employed were really impressive. A Sastra student won the first prize. We later moved on the ground where Unesco Club had organized a mini science exhibition for school students. Avishkar, functional modeling contest was simultaneously going on. After sometime the Aero-modelling company demonstrated one of the models which was simply amazing. He flew the model just above the stalls.
The highlight lecture of the day was Prof. Yash Pal. Director came down to receive him from the car. Yash Pal looked a sort of really old scientist. Though aged above 80, he started walking over the stage.His lecture was a very casual and interesting one. He talked about the importance of questioning. Some of his thoughts:
- Children are the best resource for questions
- Believing astrology is safe, unless it does not pamper with your progress
His lecture was not prepared, but was well organized.He gave good explanations of some basic natural activities which impressed me. After Prof.Pal’s lecture, we had a movie by IGCAR, Kalpakkam and later on after dinner, we started setting up for testing the video conference with Dr. Wolfram tomorrow morning. We got a mail from his Secretary saying that they will be ready only tomorrow. We’re meeting Dr.Wolfram tomorrow morning 7:00AM.