Posted in December 2014
A walk about Paris…
“A walk about Paris will provide lessons in history, beauty, and in the point of Life.”
-Thomas Jefferson
During my initial days in Delft, I decided to explore the city and trace its history. I found that on the second weekend of September every year, most tourist places in the Netherlands are open for free. This is called Monumentendag and this year it was on 13th and 14th September.
During Monumentendag, I visited all the places (except Museum Princenhof and Vanmeer Museum) that I could think of. I took a boat ride on the canals of Delft, visited Molen de Roos and also got a chance to go inside Stadhuis (City Hall). The most treasured visit was to a house where paintings made 500 years ago (estimated) on the ceiling were discovered recently. The weekend was wrapped up by a ride on an old bus which used to ply on the roads more than 30 years ago. I had visited Museum Princenhof in August and felt it is a wonderful museum. The story of Willem Orange was presented in chronological order in a very interactive manner.
In early November, after my quarter 1 exams, I had one week before quarter 2 began. I visited a friend of mine in Paris. I stayed 3 days at his place and went around Paris. Though Tour Eiffel and Musee Louvre are the most famous places in Paris, Musee Rodin and Musee d’Orsay stood out for me. The works of August Rodin, especially the Gate of Hell and the Thinker (which is a part of the Gate of Hell), are marvelous. One could observe them for hours and still miss out on details. Van Gogh’s Starry Night over the Rhone was the highlight of the visit to Musee d’Orsay. The manner in which Van Gogh captured the colours of the night is amazing.
Musee Curie was a small and informative museum about the Curie family and their works. Notre Dame Cathedral with its impressive yet asymmetric architecture was worth a visit. I wrapped my Paris trip with a sumptuous French dinner. I must say that the best thing about Paris is that all places of interest can be visited by foot. The beauty of the city lies in observing the small things that remind you of the good and the bad of the past. Not many talk about the Algiers memorial which is very close to the Tour Eiffel. It is not by accident that there are no modern skyscrapers within the city limits of Paris. Finally a visit to Paris cannot end without a mention of Art Nouveau architecture.
Fallen leaves lying on the grass…
“Fallen leaves lying on the grass in the November sun bring more happiness than the daffodils”
– Cyril Connolly
In November, quarter 2 began and I enrolled in two courses in addition to the two (Pattern Recognition and Seminar Advanced Digital Image Processing) that I am continuing. The first is Filtering and system Identification. This course is compulsory for me as well as many tracks in the Mechanical department. The second is Information Theory. Information theory is such a vast area of study and there are still many concepts which are hard to understand.
Filtering and Identification course is the largest course (in terms of the number of students enrolled) that I have taken. During the initial lectures, there were more than 150 students (rough estimate) attending the lectures. This was also the first course I attended that had its lecture videos recorded and made available on collegerama. This is probably the reason that as we entered into December the population shrunk to one-third. The course structure certainly is interesting and engaging. The final grade is split up into different tasks. 6% of the grade depends on the 4 homework assignments, 4% on the 2 Matlab exercises, 20% on the project and 70% on the written exam (open book). With 6 ECTS, this course certainly requires a lot of time on my part to understand the concepts well.
Information Theory course is theoretical (as the name says) and most of the concepts cannot be applied to real life situation without alteration. It is a 4 ECTS course and students are allowed to carry a double-sided A4 sheet with formulas to the exam. In the Pattern Recognition course, we began our handwritten digits recognition project in which we made an educated guess of selecting 13 classifiers and testing them for the conditions given before deciding on one classifier which satisfied the requirements of the project. In the Image processing course, I was given Image Segmentation project which requires me to implement a segmentation algorithm based on the paper http://www.cs.berkeley.edu/~malik/papers/arbelaezMFM-pami2010.pdf.
3D-Print Expo is taking place in the hall of the library from November 24 till January 19. The exhibition was created for the 3D print week which lasted till November 28. You can find photos in the following link. https://www.flickr.com/photos/tudelftlibrary/sets/72157649055609748/