It's like a warzone, and I couldn't be happier
Diwali is freaking awesome
Today was spent mostly visiting relatives and wishing them well. We spent a bunch of time trying to be quick about visiting people, but eventually being coaxed first into coming inside, then into sitting, then tea and conversation, next thing the whole day is gone.
One of the big topics of the day was corruption. Good or bad? Discuss. (I ended up not really understanding whether corruption was a solvable problem or not).
A bunch of time was spent talking about my relatives. A lot of them are pretty awesome. Some of them are just plain witty, or nice, or really smart. My cousin's wife is a statistician (either getting or has a PhD) who has done work on ballistics, reliability, and cryptanalysis. If I heard this correctly she's built a FSM to create keys.
I will be talking more to her later.
To be honest, I wasn't really paying attention most of the day. The night would go off with a bang. It really sounded like it could've been a war. During the height of people lighting firecrackers, you didn't have a time where you didn't hear a pop or a squeal or a boom. Various bright lights going off and neighbours all giggling and laughing as things went very right, or wrong.
Newer and larger rockets have their own casing, so they look like big cylinders with a fuse. Smaller rockets are kinda dangerous. Sometimes they don't go off, and sometimes when they do they change trajectory to point across rather than up. One of my rather naughty nephews lit a rocket and threw it on the ground, laughing greefully. What followed was a slow-motion "oh shit" and I moved him out of the way and his dad threw the rocket across the street. It flew down the road at a bunch of kids lighting other firecrackers freaked the fuck out.
Much apologies later, the fun resumed.
The left-over cylinders from the big rockets were used to demonstrate the power of some of the bungers. You didn't really need to demonstrate the power. Even when blowing them up from across the street, not only were they hilariously loud, but you could actually feel the shockwaves. They blew out the candles we lit around our home.
Anyway, we thought a demonstration would be useful, so we put a cylinder around the bunger and set it off. We never saw that cylinder again, so we tried again with a _bigger cylinder_. It flew in the air about 10m, then fell back down again.
Apparently there were even bigger bungers which have since been made illegal.
To be honest, I wasn't really paying attention most of the day. The night would go off with a bang. It really sounded like it could've been a war. During the height of people lighting firecrackers, you didn't have a time where you didn't hear a pop or a squeal or a boom. Various bright lights going off and neighbours all giggling and laughing as things went very right, or wrong.
Newer and larger rockets have their own casing, so they look like big cylinders with a fuse. Smaller rockets are kinda dangerous. Sometimes they don't go off, and sometimes when they do they change trajectory to point across rather than up. One of my rather naughty nephews lit a rocket and threw it on the ground, laughing greefully. What followed was a slow-motion "oh shit" and I moved him out of the way and his dad threw the rocket across the street. It flew down the road at a bunch of kids lighting other firecrackers freaked the fuck out.
Much apologies later, the fun resumed.
The left-over cylinders from the big rockets were used to demonstrate the power of some of the bungers. You didn't really need to demonstrate the power. Even when blowing them up from across the street, not only were they hilariously loud, but you could actually feel the shockwaves. They blew out the candles we lit around our home.
Anyway, we thought a demonstration would be useful, so we put a cylinder around the bunger and set it off. We never saw that cylinder again, so we tried again with a _bigger cylinder_. It flew in the air about 10m, then fell back down again.
Apparently there were even bigger bungers which have since been made illegal.