Life @ Edinburgh

This blog will be resurrected soon... from London.

Images from within and out
Shimmer in the glass,
You're lost in reflections

Weary traveller
Look out the window
Rediscover and rejoice.

The last time you were here
You missed something for sure,
There's so much to see!

I'm back on the road again, and as my Facebook status says, "in places where people drive on the wrong side of the road". This blog will probably hibernate for the next three weeks, but you can jump here - http://ndmpostcards.blog.co.uk - and follow my journey in pictures.

Continued from here (part 1) and here (part 2).

This one started quite innocuously. We started getting hot water from the cold water taps in the kitchen and the bathrooms. Now this happens regularly in Mumbai during the summers; but this being April, and irrespective of the month, this being Edinburgh, this was definitely not a case of the sun heating up the water tank. At first we ignored it, but the water was scalding hot, and it became impossible to take a shower without running out of the stream of water every two seconds. It was happening in most of the flats.

We complained. Plumbers came and investigated. They were joined by the electrician. They talked about valves and high water pressure. They inspected all flats. They decided that it was a problem with the water pressure, and that additional valves would need to be fitted. They went about their work, opening up ceiling panels and putting additional valves. At the end of the day they announced that the problem had been fixed. The next day, we duly got scalding hot water from the cold water taps. We debated our next steps, unaware that this was soon to be the least of our worries.

On the 19th of May, our Indonesian flatmate came out of his room and announced that water was leaking out of the ceiling in his room. We went and had a look. This was not a moist patch on the ceiling. This was a leak of titanic proportions, no pun intended. The ceiling in one corner was completely drenched. Water was actually flowing down in a steady stream. As we looked at it and tried to comprehend what was happening, it reached the fire alarm, and started flowing down through it. It would soon reach the other electric stuff. I quickly rushed out and switched off the electric mains. Inside, there was more mayhem. The leakage was not restricted to one room, it had spread to the two bathrooms and the kitchen. In one of the bathrooms, water filled up the electric bulb casing, which dropped down from the unexpected load and dangled from the ceiling on the wire. I suppressed the temptation to measure the time period of this pendulum and thence calculate the value of 'g' in our flat. The time was for action, and we had to get out pots, pans and buckets and place them under the streams of water descending from the ceiling to save the carpets.

Click to enlarge

Meanwhile, the dripping fire alarm pondered over the unfamiliar situation. How it sensed the presence of dihydrogen monoxide when it was built to detect carbon monoxide is anybody's guess. It decided that fire or no fire, something was wrong and started wailing merrily. At this point there was nothing to do but summon our university and fire department overlords. They came by in a while. The flow of water had slowed down to a trickle by then. They inspected the flat above and discovered a leaking pipe in the bathroom. They fixed it, came back down and took a screwdriver and poked holes in the ceiling so that all the remaining water would fall down.

At this point the guy from the flat below us came up and told us that the ceiling in his room looked like it was a bit moist, that he was tired of the problems in the apartment, that he was going to complain and whether we would like to join him in doing so. We invited him in and after a short while, he left with a bit of perspective.

Really, that's more than I want to talk about the poltergeist now. Here's a nice short video to keep you amused:

Continued from here

With the writer's block out of the way, I think I can now go on and write without the need for graphs.

The story starts off in dark and medieval Edinburgh. Times were harsh, the weather was harsh. Men battled disease and sometimes they won, they battled each other and sometimes they won, and they battled fear, but they never won. There were ghosts and demons, and witches who summoned them; and in the fight against fear there were witch-hunts all over the land. On one fateful clear but moon-less night, a mob - pitchforks, torches and all - rounded up three witches, and marched them out to be burned at the stake. Rumour has it that these witches never left behind any ashes, for they never burned at all. They died, but they lived. They haunted every person in the mob until he died a slow death - death from fear. The witches still haunt the site of the stakes. This part is now known in the Burgh as Ratcliffe Terrace.

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It was the night of the 12th of April. We were in the flat (61/8 Ratcliffe Terrace, yes *the* Ratcliffe Terrace), watching a movie. It was a movie that had recently won a bagful of Oscars. It was absolute crap. About halfway through the movie, there was a big explosion. The explosion was not in the movie. It was in our kitchen. The oven had exploded. My Polish flat-mate had put some potatoes to bake in it. For no reason, the inside glass completely shattered - like the windshield of a car in a nasty accident. It was like an implosion; the outer glass was completely intact.

After a minute of absolutely no panic, we ventured towards it and switched it off. Before touching anything of course, we got out the cameras and recorded everything in detail: the first thought was about insurance. Then we opened the oven, and slowly cleared the shattered glass. It was all over the potatoes. The Polish flat-mate was not very impressed; that was supposed to have been his dinner. We took some more photographs, and then had a lively discussion about what to do. At least I was happy to have got a break from the movie. I think the movie was called "There will be no blood for old men" or something like that. Absolutely hopeless it was. In the end we cleared up the mess, and decided that the best course of action was to fire off a nice and polite email to our accommodation manager requesting her to see if she could do anything about this. The Polish guy decided that a few shards of glass were not going to ruin his dinner, and proceeded to clean the potatoes and eat them.

After a day or two, somebody came to look at the broken oven. He told us that the inner glass of the oven was missing. We told him that we were aware of the situation and reminded him how it came to be so. He said that he would get a new glass and left. He did not return. But after another two or three days, we received a strange looking package through Royal Mail. We opened it and it was the oven glass. I am not sure how accustomed the postmen are to delivering large glass panes in their daily rounds. We placed it in a corner in the kitchen with the cardboard wrapping around it, and waited for the oven man to show up, but he didn't. After another day or two, the Polish guy was overcome by the urge to eat baked potatoes, and fixed the glass himself.

So far, it has stayed in place, and nothing wrong has happened to the oven. The microwave oven - that is another story entirely. It stopped working one fine day in June. This time they took it away, and we were worried that they would send a replacement through Royal Mail which would really piss off the postman. But common sense prevailed and the repairmen brought in a new microwave oven themselves.

More to come...

I am afflicted with a strange kind of writer's block. Over the past nine months or so, I have been continuously writing assignments, papers, exams, and my thesis. After all this, I find myself completely unable to write anything non-technical. So despite having plenty to write about, this blog has been seeing nothing of it.

The time has come to rectify this situation. The solution to my problem lies in graphs. That is how I overcame writer's blocks while I was writing the thesis: produce a graph and then write about it. This is exactly what I will do. The plenty of things that I wanted to blog about all revolve around a central theme - the haunting of our university accommodation by a poltergeist.

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Abstract

In this article, I describe the haunting of the Ratcliffe Terrace university accommodation by a poltergeist. The poltergeist activities are described in detail, with photographs and videos wherever available. I try to trace its origins, and end with a note on the final exorcism.

Introduction

I moved into the Ratcliffe Terrace accommodation in November 2007 [1]. Various aspects of this university residence are described in earlier posts [1], [2]. The first manifestations of unnatural activities were reported by residents in the form of frequent and spurious ringing of the fire-alarm all over the building [1]. Although this resulted in cordial relations with the local fire department personnel, residents were understandably unhappy about having to bump into each other in pyjamas and various degrees of sleepiness whenever the fire-alarm necessitated the evacuation of the rooms. Initially, these incidents were attributed to burnt toast and over-sensitive equipment. However, over the next few months, other incidents occurred which unquestionably pointed to poltergeist activity. Extensive research and the abundance of unexplained phenomena originating in the author's flat, number eight, have confirmed that this flat was the hub of the poltergeist activity.

The Progression of Supernatural Activity

As soon as it was suspected that a supernatural agency was at play, the author started scientific measurements of the activity. Over the period March 2008 to July 2008, the author tracked all supernatural phenomena using equipment he assembled from parts bought over ebay and at yard sales in churches all over Edinburgh, and some spare cricket equipment. Complete details are provided in Appendix A. The residents would react to the incidents in various ways: these included sleeping through everything with ear-plugs on, but the ultimate result was that an email would be shot off to the property manager complaining about the inconvenience. Figure 1* shows a plot of poltergeist activity over this period, with a plot of email activity. The X-axis corresponds to time, and Y-axis corresponds to activity. Poltergeist activity is plotted in the standard SI unit of BogoPolts. Email activity is plotted in the standard SI unit of MegaFwds. As can be seen from the two curves, there is a strong correlation between the two activities. It is of course the most basic maxim that correlation does not imply causation, but in this case it does. Through personal communication with the residents, the author has established that they are not in the habit of casually communicating with the property manager through email. Any email activity therefore corresponds to a spurt of complaints and expressions of concern following major incidents.

Next, we turn our attention to the spikes in the activity curve - these are the actual incidents which I will go on to describe in the next few sections. These include but are not limited to the oven explosion in Flat 8; the major water leakage, again in Flat 8; and the untimely death of the computer mouse of the author.

- to be continued.

Bibliography

[1] N. Manerikar, "The Ratcliffe Terrace accommodation and the first fire-alarm incident". Blog. (link)

[2] N. Manerikar, "On the quality of internet access in 61 Ratcliffe Terrace". Blog. (Part1) and (Part2)

(*) Graph generated using gnuplot. Sadly, I have to use to the png/jpeg terminal type for producing graphics suitable for the internet. This means I cannot get the beautiful anti-aliased curves you can get with the eps-terminal/latex/pdf combination.

On Monday the 11th of August 2008, I finished writing my MSc thesis. I had already incorporated changes according to feedback from my supervisor. That night, as I crept into bed, I went over my plans for the 12th of August: print a draft of the thesis; read through it; correct the one or two small typos that might have crept in; submit the corrected thesis and then enjoy! The next day I duly went to Appleton Tower (that's where our labs are), printed out my thesis, sat down and read through it, and did not find a single typo. What I did find was about seventy nine instances of small changes to be made - restructure a sentence, add an epithet, modify some punctuation, change the labelling style for the figures and so on. Undeterred, I went through with all of that. That took most of the rest of the day. At night I had a brain wave and added an entire new section. Now it looked complete. Then I slept over it. The next morning, I printed it out. I was happy. I went through it lovingly. Then I spotted a sentence that would have been better with a comma stuck in. I decided to ignore it. Then I realised resistance was futile. The comma would haunt me. It really would. So I plunged into the files and modified it. I inserted a few jokes at places. I changed two diagrams so that the keys would not overlap the curves. It was done. On the 14th, I went to Appleton tower again. Nothing was amiss now. I made two versions - one for one-sided printing, and one for two-sided printing. Then I printed the two-sided version, and went through it from cover to cover, apprehensive about finding another missing or unwarranted comma. I did not.

Was this it? Surely not? I waited, as if for something to creep into the copy. In the afternoon I looked through it again. It looked beautiful! I went ahead and submitted it. It was the 14th of August - a full five days before deadline. It was a bit of a shock for me. I had worked on two papers earlier in the year. I had submitted the first one about two hours before deadline. The second one is one of my proud moments. We had a base draft submitted about thirty minutes before deadline, and then kept making small refinements, until the final submission was done exactly ninety seconds before deadline. Keeping all this in mind, four days was completely uncharted territory.

And then ever since, I have been a bit confused. There is nothing to do now. I mean nothing academic. Since November 2007, I haven't had a day like this. I think I'll get used to it in a week or so, and let the feeling slowly sink in.