Hobbies

Lately I have picked up some old hobbies. “What’s an old hobby?” I hear you ask. Well they were my hobbies once upon a time then I left it as I was too lazy to do them. The break was good as it gave me some time to think (not about the hobby) and then when I came back to it I had new ideas to work with. So here are the hobbies in some new light.

Cooking: The most aromatic, tasty and fulfilling chemistry ever minus the bad smell that is typical of the chemistry lab. This concept was introduced to me by my mom. 

Think about it. Take flour, butter, eggs, sugar, baking powder, some essence. Mix them up in proper ratio and bake it. What we get is a beautiful cake and that smell just makes you want to dig into the cake as soon as you get it. Want to make it even better and you start adding chocolate, fruits etc. Now the proper ratio is very important. If it’s not proper then you won’t get the cake proper. Almost like titration. You put too little solution from the burette to the solution in the conical flask you really haven’t done your experiment correctly and its like uncooked food. You add too much and you will never find out when the endpoint of the reaction came and you again fail in your experiment. In kitchen its burnt food, food with more salt or massala, cake that swelled so much that it cracked and then collapsed. It’s also about which compounds (read flavors, ingredients etc) go well with each other to give that great taste and aroma.

So cooking is as tricky as chemistry just that if you do everything right then you get a tasty output.

Next up is :

Music: (Especially Guitar): It’s nothing but melodious concoction of Maths and Physics of the simple harmonic motion in a string fixed at 2 ends, tuned to a particular frequency.

Well you can have other media vibrating and creating that particular frequency we are looking for like air(any wind instrument), water(glass partially filled with water). And the type of sound that is emitted is dependent on other things also like the material used for generating the vibration, the material and dimensions of the sound box that captures that vibration and amplifies it and the list goes on. Now these frequencies are what we call as a note. Taking an example: a standard (middle) C note is nothing but the frequency 261.626 Hz. When these notes are played independently its not music, and many times they constitute to what we call as noise. Remember the Vuvuzela used in FIFA 2010. !!It produces a frequency of approximately 235 Hz and its first partial at 465 Hz. Both these frequency correspond very near to the b♭ (B-Flat) note. But still it is noise. But you get all the note set them up one after another in carefully timed way (beats) and ensure that they are harmonically linked and you get music. Add various instruments and you get a symphony.  (ps. It’s not that easy as it seems)

So wish me luck on these hobbies. And pray to god that my neighbors don’t go to my landlord and get him to kick me out because of all the burnt food smell and noise  of guitar :)