Jack-o'-lanterns

Today's interactive Google doodle for Halloween. Akshay would have loved it, especially the skeleton at the door and the blue one eyed octopus. As a child he never liked soft toys but preferred the spooky stuff. Suchit had a small skeleton key chain that glows in the dark and Akshay would love playing with it.

Egyptian Hieratic script

This is Akshay's date of birth using Egyptian numbers - 25 March 2001. Ancient Egyptians used this interesting numbering system. Symbols were simply repeated to represent a value. Two single strokes make 2 and five strokes are 5. The pacman plant like symbol is for 1000, and two of these make 2000. Add one to that and you get 2001.

This numeral system uses the Hieratic script.

Akshay had visited Egypt and worked on a pyramids project for school.

Dinotopia

Kotasaurus Yamanpalliensis

On his last visit to Hyderabad in July 2011, we took Akshay to the Birla Science Museum. He was thrilled to see the dinosaureum and enjoyed the other interactive exhibits.

In the picture above is the restructured body of the Kotasaurus at the museum. They  lived nearly 208 to 188 million years ago ( in the early Jurassic period)  in and around central and south India. This dinosaur was a herbivore, nearly 30 feet long. Its remains were found in India in 1988.

Below is the front elevation of the science museum

Intergalactic hunters and evil aliens

As an eight year old Akshay identified himself with Ben 10,  the solo superhero who vanquished intergalactic bounty hunters and evil aliens. He had a good collection Ben 10 games and would sketch the logo in his free time.