Thoughts during coffee

I am thinking these thoughts as I have my coffee in the office canteen on an evening. Incomplete thoughts that stay but a moment (and give me enough reason to post) :

(1) The news declares that inflation is down at 5.06%. I start thinking of things that have usually been known (or are expected) to show an upward trend. Inflation? No. Population... hmm..probably in India. Entropy/chaos - yes. Entropy seems such an intangible concept. I wonder whether it can be correlated to a "materialistic" quantity. Say, if I land upon earth 500 years hence, would I be able to remark that the entropy of the universe has increased by
k.(p)^α , where p = population of the SomeCountry ??

We know that entropy increases. Does the rate of its increase increase? How about the rate of rate of rate its increase? Does the universe have a limit to the number of times you can say "rate of " before the final "rate" becomes a constant?

Interesting question thats pops up in my mind - suppose I had 'x' number of men and 'x' number of women to start with. And I mandate that every couple has one child. I also assume that the society is monoandrous and monogamous. So the next generation has x/2 people, the next has x/4 ... and the population dies out eventually? Why would some governments want that - ha!

(2) The last few days have been easy for me (at office)

(3) The furniture, the lighting around, the various counters in the canteen are not unlike other canteens/joints that I see these days. Things have become so impersonally utilatirian that it is difficult to note the "personality" of something expressed in its existence. Like the Irani coffeehouses in Mumbai. One CCD (cafe Coffee Day) outlet is same as others. Good or bad?

(4) The canteen used to have an interesting arrangement of water coolers previously. By a wall, they had a table on which fresh glasses were placed. A water cooler sat to its right. Another water cooler sat to the right of the first one. And finally, we had another table with fresh glasses placed on it. The arrangement may be pictured as below:

1st table with glasses -- water cooler -- water cooler -- 2nd table with glasses

I had often wondered whther I could roughly estimate the no. of left handed people in the office by counting the glasses used from the first table. But, then there would be so much 'noise' in the (hypothetical) experiment:
(a) Used glasses are replaced with fresh ones periodically
(b) During peak hours people choose to drink from a particular cooler based on the queue in
front of it.
(c) I dont know whether everyone comes to the canteen for food

(5) Mamihlapinatapai- beautiful Yaghan word, meaning

"a look shared by two people with each wishing that the other will initiate something that both desire but which neither one wants to start "

I wonder how they missed out on it in English - a commonplace phenomenon (and a practical example of deadlocks).
Interesting the Yaghan language is considered to be a 'language isolate' i.e. a language which hasn't been proved to have descended from any other.

(6) Amruth and I were chatting the other day. I told him that 'Mamihlapinatapai', 'chathuringmes', 'Jabberwocky' were 3 unusual words that I had come across in the most unexpected of sources.

(7) Read the following lines:

You are the fairest of your sex,
Let me be your hero;
I love you as much as 1 over x,
As x tends to zero.
Positively.

The last word postively takes the cake...


End of coffee.