The lady at the toll plaza

I just returned from an unbelievably bad Hindi movie show at an equally bad (to a good approximation) movie theater in Virginia. For those who might want to learn from our mistake, it was 'Kismat Konnection'. Except for a very few isolated comedy scenes my poor senses found nothing interesting to see or hear.
It was a late night show and our plan was to have food from a well known Indian restaurant on the way and then go to the movie hall. We were keeping a tight schedule and my friend driving his new Camry was bitching about Virginia roads for not-very-clear directions and frequent toll plazas.
We feared that we missed our desired Exit and decided to ask somebody in the next toll plaza about the correct directions. Fortunately the next toll station was not very far ahead and moreover it was not an all-automated one, we found a probably-Indian lady to help us!
My friend asked: "Excuse me, did we miss the Exit no. 10?".
The lady looked at my friend, started a word or two in English and then continued in Hindi: "Aap Exit 10 miss kar chuke ho, saamne Exit 8-se right le lijiye." It seemed she was feeling happy to find a few Desi people and speak in Hindi.
My friend continued but looked so puzzled. He asked me: "Did you understand what she said? Was that Hindi?" My poor Tamil friend!

Space between two molecules

I have been thinking about what I should write in my first blog for last few hours. Some of the topics I started writing about were too serious for a first write-up and hence I aborted them. I was trying to remember back old days when I used to write random incidents in my diary. Here I start with the following.
Two years back, when I was at TIFR, Mumbai I attended a seminar on Physics education by Prof. Jyotsna Bijapurkar of HBCSE. She was talking about a study conducted by HBCSE on a class of around 35 students who were taught school level Physical sciences. After each session they would often get a quiz set. It was quite amazing to learn about all sorts of different answers from them. In fact the purpose of the study was to learn about the difficulties in understanding certain concepts of Sciences. On one occasion, the students were taught about the concept of constituents of matter like atoms and molecules. The question was: what is in between the gas molecules in a jar of gas (say Carbon di-oxide)? There was an accompanying diagram showing few Carbon di-oxide molecules in the jar.
The answer of the majority: 'Air' !!