इन्फ्रारे्ड मी

रात्रीच्या अंधारात पहाण्यासाठी सैनिक आणि गुप्तहेर इन्फ्रारेड दुर्बीण वापरता असे मी कादंबर्‍यांत वाचले होते आणि इंग्रजी सिनेमांत पाहिलेही होते. हल्लीच इन्फ्ररेड कॅमेर्‍यावर मला फोटो काढून मिळाला. त्याने मी इतका प्रभावीत झालो, की तो येथे टाकल्याशिवाय मला चैन पडेना. म्हणजे मी त्यांत जास्त देखणा वगैरे दिसतोय अशातली गोष्ट नाही. पण काहीतरी वेगळे म्हणून तो नक्कीच गमतीदार वाटतोय.

इन्फ्रारे्ड मी

डॉक्टरांसाठी नवा युनिफॉर्म

Microsoft Powerpoint For Making Cartoons And Animations

I used to draw cartoons on paper with pencil, ink them in and then scan them to obtain digital images. As I started getting old, I realized it was too much work. I needed software to make cartoons. There are a few software programs on the net, which use javascript to make cartoons, by assembling different parts of the human body. They have different parts ready, and the user has to select those he wants. I tried to do something different.

I used the drawing program in Microsoft Powerpoint. I made different face shapes, different sets of eyes, eyebrows, ears, noses, mouths, hair of boys and girls. I placed them along the margins of a single slide. It looked as follows.

When I have make a new cartoon face, I select the required face shape, and drag its copy to the center of the slide (drag while holding the Ctrl key down). Then I drag eyebrows, eyes, nose, and mouth in a similar manner. Each part can be positioned wherever I want it. It can be rotated to a desired angle using Powerpoint's rotate image feature. Once a face is made as I want it, I select all of its components, copy and paste them in a new blank slide, group all the components, and I have a face I want. Individual components can be enlarged or reduced in size by selecting them and dragging their corners out or in before grouping them together. If I want colored parts, I fill desired colors before grouping them together. Then I save the slide as a PNG image. An example is shown below, at the stage before pasting the face to a new slide.

I plan to make torso, upper limbs, lower limbs, and dresses too. Then I can have cartoons with different poses. If I make a series of slides with the limbs moved a little bit, and the figures moved in position a little bit in successive slides, I will get an animation when I run the slideshow with time set for each slide. I will need 16 slides per second to have a good animation, and that will be too much work. So I will probably not make any animations myself. But I have put the idea down here, so that school children can make such animations for their school projects without spending time and money on expensive animation programs. I know there are free animations programs too, but they have their own learning curve, and school children may not have the time to learn those. Powerpoint is easy and present on most PCs which run Windows as operating system. Children are used to using Powerpoint to make slides. This will be just a little more to learn over what they already know.

I could have kept my sample slides for download. I have not done so, because I am sure talented children will do a much better job that I have managed.

Update: 29-05-2015

I have made all the clip arts which will be required to make cartoons. They look as follows.

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Solving EXIF Metadata Problem

Images captured on smart phones and tablets have a special type of metadata called EXIF metadata. It was actually a minor part of TIFF files. But with the advent of these imaging devices, this metadata has gained importance. A user tends to rotate the camera to obtain the best shot of a given field. The EXIF metadata decides how the image will be displayed. When such an image is uploaded on the net, it may be seen sideways or upside down, depending on how the camera was held when the image was captured.

I faced this problem when I uploaded images for our online journal JPGO. I had to use images sent by the authors of the articles. Asking them to correct the orientation was no good. If they knew how to address the problem, they would have been careful and not let it crop up in the first place. So I had to find the solution myself. Google search did not help. It told me about the cause of the problem, but did not offer any solution. I tried the following.

1. I rotated such an image in Windows image viewer. Then I uploaded it. It was still seen sideways. So I realized that rotating it sideways was only for display at that time, not forever.
2. I opened the image in Microsoft Paint, rotated it through 90 degrees, and saved it. Then I uploaded it. It was still seen sideways. So I realized that rotating it sideways and saving it saved the EXIF metadata as it was before, and that resulted in the image still being seen sideways.
3. I opened the image in Microsoft Paint, rotated it through 90 degrees, selected it, copied it, and pasted in a new Paint image. I saved the new image and uploaded it. This one was seen properly. So I knew this method worked. 

I encountered this problem day before yesterday, while uploading images of our balcony garden on my blog in this post. I took screenshots to explain what I have written above, so that you can understand it.

This image shows the images to be uploaded in my Windows Explorer. They are upright.

This image shows the files on image uploader of Blogger. They are seen sideways. I did not add them to the blog post, because there was no point in making people turn their heads sideways. Most people would move on without doing that.

This image shows the newly created images after the older images in image uploader of Blogger. The older ones are still seen sideways, while the newer ones are upright. They looked upright in the blog post too, after I added them.

Black-and-White To Color Trick

Sometimes you have a black-and-white image that you want to be colored. There are actually two types of images - vector and raster. The vector images are easier to fill with color. You just have to use the fill or flood tool of a Paint program. You select a color with a color picker tool, click on the fill tool button, and click in the middle of the area you want to fill. It gets filled instantly. At least, that is the theory. In case of raster graphics, there are no such well defined boundaries around areas you want to fill. You need a more powerful graphics program like Gimp. It puts a transparent later over the original, and you paint in it using a brush tool. It is easier with a specialized tool like 'Black Magic', which does the same thing, but without you having to actually insert a transparent layer.
A problem with the Paint programs is that if you open a black-and-white image, the software recognizes it as a black-and-white graphic, and replaces the colors you choose with shades of gray. Gimp and Photoshop do the same thing. You can actually see the color palette, select a color of your choice, and then you end up watching a shade of grey where you wanted color. The only way to beat the software is to open a new blank image, which is a color image by default. Then you paste your black-and-white image in it. Now the color palette is enabled and you can put whichever colors you want in it. This works with both the Paint programs and more advanced ones like Gimp and Photoshop.

(Note: this one is applicable for those who run Windows XP like me. It is OK on Windows Vista and higher. I am unwilling to upgrade because Windows XP is otherwise working fine for me, and I don't want to throw away good money.)

Compulsory Attendance Woes

The health university makes 80% attendance for practical training sessions compulsory for medical students. It goes without saying that 100% attendance is expected of the teachers. The students often attend because of the compulsion rather than out of a burning desire to acquire knowledge. Since attendance is marked based on their physical presence, irrespective of the time of arrival on the scene, they arrive as shown in the following animation I made specially for this post. Green clothes indicate the students are being taught in the operation theater, in between two operations, so that they can understand what they see during performance of the operations after the teaching session.
(Note: I had placed a GIF animation here, but it does not loop as required, because of image resizing issue of Google. Finally I settled for posting individual images instead, to be viewed in sequence.)

Please note the time, correlate it with the number of students, and the total number reached towards the end of the teaching session, never exceeding 7 or 8 out of 10. The word 'woes' in the title is about the woes of the students for having to attend the teaching sessions, and woes of teachers resulting from the disinterest shown by the students.

Image Resolution

I am not sure if image resolution is all that important when images are to be used as web graphics. I think it is important when one wants to print the image on paper. But if one has to look at it on the web, then it probably does not matter. I also feel Google compresses images to make them suitable for web display. For resolving this issue, I am putting two images in this post.

The images are actually the same photograph, but differ in that one is a screen capture image of the other one seen in Windows image viewer. They seem identical. If anyone can make out any differences, please email me. Thanks if you do, and no hard feelings if you don't.

T-Shirt Design to Reduce Maternal Mortality

Our people were so charged by the pep talk and valuable suggestions to reduce maternal mortality given in the maternal mortality reduction meeting (see my previous post), that they were rearing to go. They had a lot of suggestions on how to carry the message far and wide.
"Let us have bumper stickers made. They could read - Zero Maternal Mortality" one of them said.
"We could get BEST and State Transport to carry the message on the back of the buses - Drive Safely, Prevent Maternal Deaths" another one said. "And like they put next to the driver - Today is the Day of Zero Maternal Deaths."
"They write that in buses?" someone asked incredulously.
"Of course not, silly" came the answer. "They write 'Today is the Day of Zero accidents' next to the driver."

"That message for gynecologists about putting stethoscope in the ears seems important" a third person said. "Perhaps we could have T-shirts made to carry that message."
"We could help" one of the students said. "We have this annual college festival going on. There is a T-shirt design competition. If we give this theme, we could have a few good designs to choose from. I could do one right now."
"Please do" a lot of us said. Here is what he made on the fly. It shows the front and the back of the proposed T-shirts.

"Cool" the third person said.
"If we wear it to the maternal death audit meeting of the quality assurance committee, they will know we mean business, and will not harass us unduly" an optimist said.

Public Transport Upside: Fun

I chose public transport after using a car for fifteen years. There were many reasons - traffic jams, lines at petrol pumps, parking space crunch, damage to my car by rash drivers and children playing cricket in the parking lot, traffic police needing money, and wisdom. The wisdom came with age. I understood that I should not help use up oil for commuting to and from work alone every day, if the future generations were to have any oil. You must have noticed that none of the reasons is having fun. Well, it was a bonus.
Never before in my life had I had the right of the way when it came to me versus a bus or a truck (come to think of it, any vehicle; no other driver was as gentlemanly or timid as I). Now all vehicles give me the right of the way when I am riding a bus. I do not have to inhale the exhaust of buses and trucks any more. I ride at a higher altitude, breathing pure (!) air.
There are some fun things too. I remember once a biker was following my bus quite close behind. Suddenly the bus driver stepped on the brake and came to a sudden halt. The biker must have braked too, but not fast enough. His front wheel went under the back edge of the bus' body. I was sitting on the last seat and could watch the biker. The expressions on his face were as much as his antics to get the wheel out. The wheel came off only when the bus started moving again, its driver oblivious of the drama at his back end.

I remember another occasion when a smart guy had a tiff with the conductor. He was still talking, proving his smartness, when his destination drew near. He started down the steps, still looking at the conductor and talking.
'What if he does not count the steps and wait on the last step until the bus stops' I thought. I did not want to say anything to him, lest he diverted his attention from the conductor to me.
Just as I was thinking this, he stepped off the last step, did not find any foothold, looked down, found ground rushing back under the foot, hurriedly climbed up the steps and shut up. Studying his face and watching antics were equally rewarding.

Get Even

Hey,
Guys. This one is a stress buster. Here you are looking at a picture of
the department's bigwigs in a meeting. Imagine you are angry with
someone in that group, and want to get even. It will not do if you
shout at that person or slap or kick him/her. He/she can make a police
complaint and get you in trouble. If your future is in the hands of
that person, such behavior is a sure way of ruining your future. But
you have to get that anger out of your system. Well, this stress buster
is just what the doctor prescribed. Get hold of the shoe or the boxing
glove with your mouse, and hit the person to your heart's content. I
wish I could add sound effects, like 'take that, and that, and that,
you #$&%$@#'. Too much programming would be required to do
that. However I could make it more realistic by putting that person's
face in place of one of the blurred faces in the picture. Just send me
that picture. :-)

Facial Expressions in Faculty and Resident Doctors

Some people watch other people's facial expressions during interactions, others don't. I do, because expressions tell a lot of things that mere words don't or sometimes things that are different from those implied by the words uttered. What follows is the graphical expression of various facial expressions I find in the people who work with me. Just sit back and watch.

Please write to me if you think of any expressions that I may have not included either out of oversight or because I have not encountered them yet. I will try and draw those too, to be put in the next version of this animation.

Happy Diwali

Happy Diwali


Let us be Happy this Festive Season
If we can remain so for the rest of the year...
Nothing like it
If we cannot...
At least the memories of this happiness should last
Until the next year.

Doctors and Strikes

It is a tradition that Resident Doctors go on strike every few years. They used to strike work every fourth year like clockwork, when the issue used to be raise in stipend. Now there are many issues and the strikes occur more often. Usually the strikes begin on Tuesday. My theory is that it takes them that long to get out of Monday morning blues. Or perhaps they believe the administrators should not be in Monday morning blues when they strike work, so that their demands will be met. Another good time to begin a strike is when the Faculty proceed on vacation. All leave including vacation gets cancelled when the strike begins. Faculty have to do their own work plus the striking doctors' work. The strikers probably believe that pressurizing the Faculty will result in Faculty pressurizing the administrators to settle matters to the satisfaction of the Resident doctors. Poor dears do not realize that no one listens to the faculty on any issue. Today they went on a token strike. It is a Thursday, not Tuesday. But it is the second day of vacation for the Faculty. So they proved my theory. What follows is graphic representation of what used to happen when I was a Resident doctor and later an Assistant Professor. I believe little has changed since.
Day -1

Collection of union membership dues prior to the strike. These days stipends get credited to bank accounts. So the dues are probably collected one time when new Residents join.
Day 0: Eve of Strike

The main activity is packing bags for going home on a fully paid long holiday.
Day 1 of Strike: Warning potential strike-breakers

I am warning you, you @#$$%&%^. If you break the strike, we will lock you up in your room when you go to sleep.
Day 2 of the strike: The stage of negotiations with the health minister.

Day 5 of the strike

It is Saturday today. Let us enjoy this Sunday and call the strike off on Monday.

Every day of the strike

Ring up the mortuary in the morning to find out if the strike is having the desired impact on the patients' health.
Day 6 of the strike

A humble request to chemists for a generous donation to the strike ... or else...
Day 6 of the strike

An appeal to the professors to donate generously for the strike, so that their ordeal ends quickly too.
Day 8 of the strike

An outpatient clinic is set up outside the hospital for the convenience of the poor patients.
Day 12 of the strike

March at 12 noon in candlelight. The purpose is to be noticed by people, not to show them light.
Day 14 of the strike: Opinions of professors on the strike

"Why do I say the strike is ethically, morally and legally justified? Because by daughter is one of the striking doctors."
Day 28 of the strike

Finding the professor doing ward-work and getting him to check and sign one's dissertation for MD examination.
Day 31 of the strike

Relay hunger strike: Location? Near the canteen, where the hunger striking doctors can rush into the canteen as soon as their 2 hour turns get over.
Day 51 of the strike

Strike breakers: "we can take those ad hoc lecturers' posts. That will not amount to breaking the strike, because we will not be resident doctors, we will be full-timers.
Day 56 of the strike

Stage of negotiations for at least granting of term and pay for the period of absence from duty during the strike.
Day 57 of the strike

Face of Victory!: "We are very proud of our struggle for justice. And we even managed to get a promise that they will not mention the strike on our post-holding certificates.
Day 1 after the strike

"God knows what the objectives of the strike were. But it gave me time to get engaged and finish my dissertation too."