Rinoo Rajesh - about the universe and everything in it...

The Socrates Triple Filter Test!

2010-01-14T13:36:00.000+05:30

In ancient Greece , Socrates was reputed to hold knowledge in high esteem.

One day an acquaintance met the great philosopher and said, 'Do you know what I just heard about your friend?'

'Hold on a minute,' Socrates replied. 'Before telling me anything, I'd like you to pass a little test. It's called the Triple Filter Test.'

'Triple filter?'

'That's right,' Socrates continued. 'Before you talk to me about my friend, it might be a good idea to take a moment and filter what you're going to say. That's why I call it the triple filter test.'

'The first filter is TRUTH. Have you made absolutely sure that what you are about to tell me is true?'

'No,' the man said, 'actually I just heard about it and...'

'All right,' said Socrates. 'So you don't really know if it's true or not. Now let's try the second filter, the filter of GOODNESS. Is what you are about to tell me about my friend something good?'

'No, on the contrary...'

'So,' Socrates continued, 'you want to tell me something bad about him, but you're not certain it's true. You may still pass the test though, because there's one filter left: the filter of USEFULNESS. Is what you want to tell me about my friend going to be useful to me?'

'No, not really.'

'Well,' concluded Socrates, 'if what you want to tell me is neither true nor good nor even useful, why tell it to me at all?'

The mystery of human Mortality

2009-12-06T18:35:00.002+05:30

Living forever is just for Hollywood. But why do humans age? We are born with a robust toolbox full of mechanisms to fight disease and injury, which we might think should arm us against stiff joints and other ailments. But as we age, the body's repair mechanisms get out of shape. In effect, our resilience to physical injury and stress declines. Theories for why people age can be divided into two categories:

1) Like other human characteristics, aging could just be a part of human genetics and is somehow beneficial.

2) In the less optimistic view, aging has no purpose and results from cellular damage that occurs over a person's lifetime.

A handful of researchers, however, think science will ultimately delay aging at least long enough to double life spans.

Wish all of you a very Happy Diwali

2009-10-16T20:27:00.001+05:30

Diwali or Dīpāvali is a significant festival in Hinduism, Buddhism, Sikhism, and Jainism, and an official holiday in India. Adherents of these religions celebrate Diwali as the Festival of Lights. They light diyas—cotton string wicks inserted in small clay pots filled with oil—to signify victory of good over the evil within an individual.

Diwali is the abbreviation of the Sanskrit word "Deepavali" - Deepa meaning light and Avali, meaning a row. It means a row of lights and indeed illumination forms its main attraction. It symbolises that age-old culture of India which teaches us to vanquish ignorance that subdues humanity and to drive away darkness that engulfs the light of knowledge.

Diwali, the festival of lights, even today in this modern world, projects the rich and glorious past and teaches us to uphold the true values of life.

Some pearls of wisdom

2009-10-15T12:52:00.000+05:30

ONE. Give people more than they expect and do it cheerfully.

TWO. Marry a man/woman you love to talk to. As you get older, their conversational skills will be as important as any other.

THREE. Don't believe all you hear, spend all you have or sleep all you want.

FOUR. When you say, 'I love you,' mean it.

FIVE. When you say, 'I'm sorry,' look the person in the eye.

SIX. Be engaged at least six months before you get married.

SEVEN. Believe in love at first sight.

EIGHT. Never laugh at anyone's dreams. People who don't have dreams don't have much.

NINE. Love deeply and passionately.. You might get hurt but it's the only way to live life completely.

TEN.. In disagreements, fight fairly. No name calling.

ELEVEN. Don't judge people by their relatives.

TWELVE. Talk slowly but think quickly.

THIRTEEN! .. When someone asks you a question you don't want to answer, smile and ask, 'Why do you want to know?'

FOURTEEN. Remember that great love and great achievements involve great risk.

FIFTEEN. Say 'bless you' when you hear someone sneeze.

SIXTEEN. When you lose, don't lose the lesson.

SEVENTEEN. Remember the three R's: Respect for self; Respect for others; and Responsibility for all your actions.

EIGHTEEN. Don't let a little dispute injure a great friendship.

NINETEEN. When you realize you've made a mistake, take immediate steps to correct it.

TWENTY. Smile when picking up the phone. The caller will hear it in your voice

TWENTY- ONE. Spend some time alone.

End of an Era – Geocities!

2009-10-11T17:32:00.001+05:30

Last week, Yahoo finally announced the end of Geocities…

Before Twitter, before Facebook, before MySpace – heck, even before Friendster, there was a service known as GeoCities. For those who grew up on the Net in the 90s, it was about as close as you get to what we know today as social networks. It was essentially an organization of like-minded user-created homepages in different topical communities like sports, entertainment, and tech.

Back in the proverbial day, GeoCities was the place where many a modern-day internet nerd cut his or her teeth. After a spectacular dot com purchase of $3.65 billion and an equally spectacular dot com bust, its closure marks the end of one of the earliest ages of the social web.

I remember starting my first page with Geocities. Although, with the Yahoo’s focus elsewhere, it makes sense to shut down what is essentially an internet relic. Still, to those who look back with nostalgia, October 26 could well be a wistful day.

If you don’t know what Geocities is, or rather was, then here’s a wikipedia link for you!

But if you are familiar with it, it’s official end is certainly a bit nostalgic. When every thought that just by making a web page, one would get rich overnight. Was something like the completely misunderstood business of AMWAY :-)

Without a sound business model, people were thinking that just by making some loose web pages sticking together, they could make millions.

Of course there were always those enthusiasts who were doing it for the fun (like me).

GeoCities began in mid-1995 as BHI, which stood for "Beverly Hills Internet," a small Web hosting and development company in Southern California.

The company also created its own Web directory, organized thematically in six "neighborhoods." The neighborhood included "Colosseum," "Hollywood," "RodeoDrive," "SunsetStrip," "WallStreet," and "WestHollywood." In mid-1995, the company decided to offer users (thereafter known as "Homesteaders") the ability to develop free home pages within those neighborhoods. Chat, bulletin boards, and other elements of "community" were added soon after, helping foster rapid growth. On July 5, 1995 Geocities added additional cities, including "CapitolHill," "Paris," "SiliconValley," and "Tokyo." By December 1995, the company, which now had a total of 14 neighborhoods, was signing up thousands of Homesteaders a day and getting over six million monthly page views. The company decided to focus on building membership and community, and on December 15, 1995, BHI became known as GeoCities after having also been called Geopages.

Whatever said, the closure of Geocities marks the end of an era!

The New National ID or Unique Identity Card project!

2009-10-07T20:19:00.002+05:30

There’s been so much talk of the mega project of issuing unique identification number and card to every Indian. UPA Government’s ambitious project to provide every Indian with a unique identity card. In its manifesto, the Congress had said this would be possible after the publication of the national population register in 2011. Besides addressing security concerns, the UID project will overhaul and direct the delivery mechanism for public goods and services to intended beneficiaries.

However, has anybody imagined how life possibly could be under the shadow of this all knowing and super powerful card? On a lighter side, I have come across a great email from one of my friends. Sharing it here… just to give a taste of what’s to come… So Friends, Enjoy your new ID card !

Nandan Nilekani's.. ....Fully integrated ID card system for Indian citizens

Operator : "Thank you for calling Pizza Hut . May I have your..."

Customer: "Heloo, Heloo, can I order.."

Operator : "Can I have your multi purpose ID card number first, Sir?"

Customer: "It's he..., hold........ ..on..... .889861356102049 998-45-54610"

Operator : "OK... You're... Mr Singh and you're calling from 17 Jal Vayu. Your home number is 22678893, your office 25076666 and your mobile is 09869798888. Today morning you landed in India at IG International Airport. Welcome back, Sir. Which number are you calling from now Sir?"

Customer: "Home! How did you get all my phone numbers?

Operator : "We are connected to the system Sir"

Customer: "May I order your Seafood Pizza..."

Operator : "That's not a good idea Sir"

Customer: "How come?"

Operator : "According to your medical records, you have high blood pressure and even higher cholesterol level Sir"

Customer: "What?... What do you recommend then?"

Operator : "Try our Low Fat Pizza. You'll like it"

Customer: "How do you know for sure?"

Operator : "You borrowed a book entitled "Popular Dishes" from the National Library last week Sir"

Customer: "OK I give up... Give me three family size ones then, how much will that cost?"

Operator : "That should be enough for your family of 05, Sir. The total is Rs 500.00"

Customer: "Can I pay by! Credit card?"

Operator : "I'm afraid you have to pay us cash, Sir. Your credit card is over the limit and you owe your bank Rs 23,000.75 since October last year. That's not including the late payment charges on your housing loan, Sir...."

Customer: "I guess I have to run to the neighbourhood ATM and withdraw some cash before your guy arrives"

Operator : "You can't Sir. Based on the records, you've reached your daily limit on machine withdrawal today"

Customer: "Never mind just send the pizzas, I'll have the cash ready. How long is it gonna take anyway?"

Operator : "About 45 minutes Sir, but if you can't wait you can always come and collect it on your Nano Car..."

Customer: " What!" Operator : "According to the details in system, you own a Nano car,...registration number GZ-05-AB-1107. ."

Customer: " ????"

Operator : "Is there anything else Sir?"

Customer: "Nothing... By the way... Aren't you giving me that 3 free bottles of cola as advertised?"

Operator : "We normally would Sir, but based on your records you're also diabetic.... ... "

Customer: #$$^%&$@$% ^

Operator : "Better watch your language Sir.. Remember on 15th July 2009 you were convicted of using abusive language on a policeman... ?"

Customer: [Faints]

Enjoy your new ID card !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

The Lawyer and the Blonde

2009-10-06T22:51:00.000+05:30

A lawyer and a blonde woman are sitting next to each other on a long flight.

The lawyer asks if she would like to play a fun game

The blonde is tired and just wants to take a nap, so she politely declines and tries to catch a few winks. The lawyer persists, that the game is a lot of fun.

I ask you a question, and if you don't know the answer, you pay me only $5; You ask me one, and if I don't know the answer, I will pay you $500.'

This catches the blonde's attention; and, to keep him quiet, she agrees to play the game. The lawyer asks the first question.

What's the distance from the earth to the moon?'

The blonde doesn't say a word, reaches in to her purse, pulls out a five-dollar bill, and hands it to the lawyer.

Now, it's the blonde's turn. She asks the lawyer, 'What goes up a hill with three legs, and comes down with four?'

The lawyer uses his laptop, searches all references.

He uses the airphone; he searches the Net and even the Library of Congress. He sends e-mails to all the smart friends he knows, all to no avail. After one hour of searching he finally gives up. He wakes up the blonde and hands her $500.

The blonde takes the $500 and goes back to sleep.

The lawyer is going nuts not knowing the answer. He wakes her up and asks, 'Well, so what goes up a hill with three legs and comes down with four?'

The blonde reaches into her purse, hands the lawyer $5 and goes back to sleep.

Life Changing Habits!

2009-10-04T11:34:00.000+05:30

Most of the time we do things, say things unconsciously and then regret uttering them…

Here’s a simple method of turning your life around - Make these Breakthrough habits part of your life and positive things will begin rapidly. no warrantees though and you can’t sue since this is free advice! However, it has high degrees of certainties that if followed, in general, provides desirable results… and perhaps bring you what you’ve been missing.

Practice these Habits and watch what happens.

The First Habit

Let go of your negative feelings. Pay attention to what you’re saying, thinking and doing. Watch all the time. Stay awake to what’s happening. Be on the lookout all the time. When you see some negative thought, you stop it. When you see some negative feeling, you stop it. When you see you’re taking some negative action, you stop it.

If what you’re thinking, feeling, saying or doing is negative, end it. Stop it.

If I hand you a red-hot metal rod you drop it in a split second, right? Negative feelings, words, thoughts, actions, all those are hot metal rods. Drop them. Negative, not-liking, disapproval, negativity is burning up your life just like a red-hot fireplace metal rod burns up your hand.

Drop the negative feelings like you would drop a hot red metal rod.

Here’s the test. Is it negative? Then, it’s negative and hurting your life. Drop it.

The Second Habit

Hold in mind what you want. Hold in mind means what you keep in your mind or visualize. Hold in mind means the thoughts and feelings that occupy your mind all the time.

You get what you hold in mind. Whatever is occupying your mind, your thoughts and your feelings, is what you manifest in the material world. It’s the law of attraction.

Positive attracts positive, negative attracts negative. Love attracts love. Negative attracts more negative. Positivity is the same energy as positive, success, abundance, health, money, peace.

If you hold in mind “I can’t,” you’re right, you can’t. If you hold in mind “I don’t have it,” you’re right, you don’t have it and you aren’t going to have it. You’re holding the wrong thing in mind. You’re holding in mind what you don’t want.

Fake it until you make it. Stop thinking you don’t have it. Hold in your mind only what you want. Prove it to yourself. Make a good effort. What do you have to lose? If I’m right you get to have everything.

If I’m wrong, you’re no worse off. Here is a little hint: If it doesn’t work, it’s because your mind talked you out of doing it. Your mind talked you out of making a decision. Your mind talked you out of being determined and persistent. You (like everyone else on the planet) have spent your entire life collecting negative feelings.

Here’s another hint: You can easily see what you’re holding in your mind. Watch what you’re saying all the time. Watch what you’re thinking. And, you can see what you’re holding in your mind by paying attention to your feelings.

Now remember, this is not about affirmations. This is not about hanging signs around your house and car. This is about holding in mind what you want. You do that by dropping thoughts, words or feelings which express what you don’t want.

The Third Habit

Make a commitment to be positive and loving, in spite of what’s happening. Decide: “I’m going to be positive and loving in spite of whatever is happening.” Make that your motto.

Be positive in spite of what happens. You live your life automatically reacting with emotions you learned as small kid.

You’re not a kid anymore (at least I hope so, if you have the patience of reading this!), but you’re still doing the same thing. End the habit of automatically reacting. It’s just a decision. Something happens that seems to be negative. You react. You leave the present moment and you go off. Does that ever solve anything?

Anger, breaking into hysteria, feeling bad because someone gave you a dirty look or disagreed with you? Negative, negative behavior doesn’t do anything for you except make you more negative and non-loving.

It never solves anything. It never helps anything. Perhaps you know that. Perhaps you even agree with me, because you have experienced it yourself many, many times. But we all like to avoid a decision. However, I strongly recommend that you make a decision - I am going to be loving and positive in spite of whatever happens.

Remember the hot metal rod? Begin by letting go of the hot metal rod called negative, non-loving reactions. Try it. Prove it to yourself. Be positive and loving in spite of whatever happens, whatever is going on, whatever they’re doing or saying. Be positive and loving and watch what happens.

When you’re positive and loving in spite of whatever, you’re moving over to the side of love. Love conquers all. Love transforms. Love is the answer.

Try to be positive and loving in spite of whatever happens. Should I be saying that – “Try”? As Yoda once told Skywalker – there is no try… you either do it or don’t.

I bet, you will be one of the happiest and you will have most of the things that you want in life. Of course I am not some crazy nut telling you that be positive and think that you are going to get a million dollars tomorrow and perhaps in a month or two, you would get it. Of course not. The world, the universe does not work that way. One has to direct conscious thought and then follow up with relevant actions to get from point A to point B. what positive thinking helps with is ensuring that we do not get discouraged if the journey from point A to Point B happens to long, tiring and arduous.

Prove it to yourself. I always thought good luck was something mysterious that happened to people for no good reason. Now perhaps I am beginning to understand.

Atlantis… found at last!

2009-10-03T23:54:00.000+05:30

The romance associated with the lost city, island and civilization of Atlantis refuses to die down. During my recent visit to Dubai, I got a unique opportunity to visit the hotel Atlantis famed, among other things, for its “lost chambers” which portray the story of ancient civilization of Atlantis.

The city of Atlantis is one of the most historical mysteries. Around 350 BC, Plato was the first to write about this somewhat magical island in two books. The Greek philosopher and teacher described, in great detail, the advanced technology of this ancient place before it suddenly vanished "in a day and a night" beneath the Atlantic Ocean.

There is no consensus on how to interpret the so called “myth” of Atlantis.

According to Wikipedia – Atlantis (in Greek, Ἀτλαντὶς νῆσος, "island of Atlas") is a legendary island first mentioned in Plato's dialogues Timaeus and Critias.

In Plato's account, Atlantis was a naval power lying "in front of the Pillars of Hercules" that conquered many parts of Western Europe and Africa 9,000 years before the time of Solon, or approximately 9600 BC. After a failed attempt to invade Athens, Atlantis sank into the ocean "in a single day and night of misfortune".

Scholars dispute whether and how much Plato's story or account was inspired by older traditions. Some scholars argue Plato drew upon memories of past events such as the Thera eruption or the Trojan War, while others insist that he took inspiration from contemporary events like the destruction of Helike in 373 BC or the failed Athenian invasion of Sicily in 415–413 BC

According to MythWeb - According to the philosopher Plato, an advanced civilization that sank beneath the waves, a legend based perhaps on Minoan Crete. The fabled island-continent derives its name from the Titan Atlas. It was said to be out beyond the western headland where the immortal giant holds up the heavens by means of a pillar on his back. Plato maintained that Atlantis was a real place, not a myth. He in turn had heard of it from certain wise men of Egypt, whose civilization spanned the era when Atlantis was said to have flourished, whereas earlier civilizations in Greece had been wiped out by natural catastrophes - or so the Egyptians said.

One of the balanced presentation of facts around Atlantis can be found on Atlantis and Paleogeography.

Others attribute Plato with saying that the sea god Poseidon (Neptune) was given Atlantis and on a hill in the middle of the island the god built his mortal wife a large home. This palace was surrounded by five rings of water and land connected only by tunnels large enough for ships to pass through. Atlantians were amazing engineers. They built palaces, temples, harbors, docks and a complicated water system - all about 12,000 years ago. Farmers grew the food on a field not much larger than Oklahoma State. Behind this massive field there where mountains touching the sky where many of the wealthy villagers lived. Plato described spectacular buildings, fountains that had both hot and cold water, stone walls covered with precious metals and huge statues made of gold (somewhat difficult to believe, but hey – anything goes in mythology!)

Another concise version about Atlantis can be found here.

A very interesting description of Plato’s Atlantis is given in - Atlantis: the Myth." Encyclopedia Mythica from Encyclopedia Mythica Online. [Accessed October 04, 2009].

My visit into the very modern version of Atlantis and its lost chambers was very different and expensive (at least from an Indian perspective).

One cannot but be amazed at the sheer audacity of what has gone into building the artificial island where the current Atlantis stand!

Dubai is an amazing marvel in itself and even more so is the series of islands – one of them being the Palm Jumeira on which “Hotel Atlantis” is located. It hasn’t been cheap, but it is definitely one example of the amazing technological advances that humanity has made in a single century!

In my next post, I will be writing more on the details of this modern age Atlantis…

Now that’s what I would call a Challenge in Life or PUNJABI confidence!

2009-10-02T09:18:00.001+05:30

George Bush was sitting in his office wondering whom to invade next when his telephone rang.

'Hello, Mr. Bush!' a heavily accented Punjabi voice said, 'This is Gurmukh from Phagwara, District Kapurthala, Punjab .. I am ringing to inform you that we are officially declaring the war on you!'

'Well, Gurmukh,' Bush replied, 'This is indeed important news! How big is your army'

'Right now,' said Gurmukh, after a moment's calculation, 'there is myself, my cousin Sukhdev, my next door neighbor Bhagat, and the entire kabaddi team from the gurudwara. That makes eight'

Bush paused. 'I must tell you, Gurmukh that I have one million men in my army waiting to move on my command.'

'Arrey O! Main kya..' said Gurmukh. 'I'll have to ring you back!'

Sure enough, the next day, Gurmukh called again.

‘Mr. Bush, it is Gurmukh, I'm calling from Phagwara STD, the war is still on! We have managed to acquire some infantry equipment!'

'And what equipment would that be, Gurmukh' Bush asked.

'Well, we have two combines, a donkey and Amrik's tractor.'

Bush sighed. 'I must tell you, Gurmukh, that I have 16,000 tanks and 14,000 armored personnel carriers. Also, I've increased my army to 1-1/2 million since we last spoke.'

'Oh teri....' said Gurmukh. 'I'll have to get back to you.'

Sure enough, Gurmukh rang again the next day.

'Mr. Bush, the war is still on! We have managed to get ourselves airborne....

.. We've modified Amrik's tractor by adding a couple of shotguns, sticking on some wings and the pind's generator. Four school pass boys from Malpur have joined us as well!'

Bush was silent for a minute and then cleared his throat. 'I must tell you, Gurmukh, that I have 10,000 bombers and 20,000 fighter planes. My military complex is surrounded by laser-guided, surface-to-air missile sites. And since we last spoke, I've increased my army to TWO MILLION!'

'Tera bhala hove....' said Gurmuk, 'I'll have to ring you back.'

Sure enough, Gurmukh called again the next day.

'Kiddan, Mr.Bush! I am sorry to tell you that we have had to call off the war.'

'I'm sorry to hear that,' said Bush. 'Why the sudden change of heart'

'Well,' said Gurmukh, 'we've all had a long chat over a couple of lassi's, and decided there's no way we can feed two million prisoners of wars!'

NOW THAT'S CALLED PUNJABI CONFIDENCE!

THE BEST EQUATION OF MAN & WOMAN

2009-10-01T08:29:00.000+05:30

I sincerely hope that no animal rights or for that matter woman rights groups would take this seriously… this is purely supposed to be on the lighter side of life…and to borrow (and adapt) from Khushwant Singh… with satire towards one and all J

Equation 1

Human = eat + sleep + work + enjoy

Donkey = eat + sleep

Therefore:

Human = Donkey + Work + enjoy

Therefore:

Human-enjoy = Donkey + Work

In other words,

A Human that doesn't know how to enjoy = Donkey that works.

++++++++++++ +++++++++ +++++++++ +++++++++ +++++++++ ++ ++

Equation 2

Man = eat + sleep + earn money

Donkey = eat + sleep

Therefore:

Man = Donkey + earn money

Therefore:

Man-earn money = Donkey

In other words

Man who doesn't earn money = Donkey

++++++++++++ +++++++++ +++++++++ +++++++++ +++++++++ +

Equation 3

Woman= eat + sleep + spend

Donkey = eat + sleep

Therefore:

Woman = Donkey + spend

Woman - spend = Donkey

In other words,

Woman who doesn't spend = Donkey

++++++++++++ +++++++++ +++++++++ +++++++++ +++++++++ +

To Conclude:

From Equation 2 and Equation 3

Man who doesn't earn money = Woman who doesn't spend

Man earns money not to let woman become a donkey!

And a woman spends not to let the man become a donkey!

So, We have:

Man + Woman = Donkey + earn money + Donkey + Spend money

Therefore from postulates 1 and 2, we can

conclude

Man + Woman = 2 Donkeys that live happily together!

Amazing Art…

2009-09-30T00:13:00.009+05:30

I found this amazing form/ expression of art and wanted to share with you all...

This stunning crop art has sprung up across rice fields in Japan. But this is no alien creation - the designs have been cleverly planted.

Farmers creating the huge displays use no ink or dye. Instead, different colors of rice plants have been precisely and strategically arranged and grown in the paddy fields. As summer progresses and the plants shoot up, the detailed artwork begins to emerge.

A Sengoku warrior on horseback has been created from hundreds of thousands of rice plants,
the colours created by using different varieties, in the village of Inakadate in Japan . The largest and finest work is grown in the Aomori village of Inakadate , 600 miles north of Toyko, where the tradition began in 1993. The village has now earned a reputation for its agricultural artistry and this year the enormous pictures of Napoleon and a Sengoku-period warrior, both on horseback, are visible in a pair of fields adjacent to the town hall. More than 150,000 vistors come to Inakadate, where just 8,700 people live, every summer to see the extraordinary murals. Each year hundreds of volunteers and villagers plant four different varieties of rice in late May across huge swathes of paddy fields.

Napolean on horseback can be seen from the skies, created by precision planting and months of planning between villagers and farmers in Inkadate

Fictional warrior Naoe Kanetsugu and his wife Osen appear in fields in the town of Yonezawa , Japan . And over the past few years, other villages have joined in with the plant designs. Various artwork has popped up in other rice-farming areas of Japan this year, including designs of deer dancers.

Smaller works of crop art can be seen in other rice-farming areas of Japan such as this image of Doraemon and deer dancers. The farmers create the murals by planting little purple and yellow-leafed kodaimai rice along with their local green-leafed tsugaru roman variety to create the coloured patterns between planting and harvesting in September. The murals in Inakadate cover 15,000 square metres of paddy fields. From ground level, the designs are invisible, and viewers have to climb the mock castle tower of the village office to get a glimpse of the work. Rice-paddy art was started there in 1993 as a local revitalization project, an idea that grew out of meetings of the village committee.

Closer to the image, the careful placement of thousands of rice plants in the paddy fields can be seen.

The different varieties of rice plant grow alongside each other to create the masterpieces In the first nine years, the village office workers and local farmers grew a simple design of Mount Iwaki every year. But their ideas grew more complicated and attracted more attention. In 2005 agreements between landowners allowed the creation of enormous rice paddy art. A year later, organisers used computers to precisely plot planting of the four differently colored rice varieties that bring the images to life.

On the lighter side - Microsoft Windows in Punjabi?

2009-09-29T08:27:00.000+05:30

Imagine if your computer starts working in Punjabi then what will happen???

-You will have commands like these on your computer:

Send = Sutto
Insert = Wich Paao
Attachement = Naal Laao
Edit = Sidda Karo
View = Waikhee Jaao
Forward = Aggay Sutto
Inbox = Undar Da Daak Khaana
Outbox = Baar Da Daak Khana
Trash = Mitti Paao
Recycle Bin = Koore Daan
Sent Items = Pheji Gayee Dak
Address Book = Patay Wali Kaapy
Reply = Phejan Walay Nu Jawab do
Reply All = Saareyaan Nu Jawab do
Delete = Daffa Karo
Download = Thallay Laao
Download All = Saary Cheezan Noon Thallay La ao
Properties = Jaidaad
Connect = Naal Milaao
Fonts = Likhaai
Accounts = Galla
Drafts = Chitheeyaan
Find = Labbo
Run = Pajjo
Setting = Kuri Nu Patao
Paste = Thook Naal Chipkaao
From = Phejan Walaa Banda
To = Door Betha Hoya Banda
Subject = Khaas Gall
Carbon Copy = Koelay Walee Naqal
Blind Carbon Copy = Anni Koelay Walee Naqal
Stationery = Pensal, Rubburd, Shaapnar
Folders = Thailay
High priority = Waddee Takleef

and finally Ctrl+Alt+Delete = Sara Syapa Mukao..
Enjoy it !

India’s uncouth road warriors and the Civil Disobedience…

2009-09-28T09:58:00.003+05:30

India’s capital city – New Delhi, is trying to gear up towards hosting an international event– the common wealth games in October 2010. the fact that the city is nowhere near the target deadline that it had set for itself to gear up years ago is as much as a testament towards a culture of lack of initiative, corruption and just sheer laziness to live in better environs as much as it is attributable to the fact that this has become an accepted norm that the city will be in a permanent state of disarray and chaos.

The other major problem with the city is that a vast majority of “residents” of Delhi do no associate themselves with the city. There is no sense of belongingness and certainly no pride in being part of the city.

For someone, like me, who on an average spends (whenever in Delhi) up to 4-5 hours on the road per day, the state of the infrastructure, culture on road and the general disposition of “natives” borders towards insolence, impatience and just plain rudeness.

Recently Home Minister P. Chidambaram Tuesday told citizens of Delhi that they needed to change some of their bad habits if visitors to the Commonwealth Games next year are to have a good impression about the host city.

There are vehicles running without registration plates, some are crossing roads where they should not. People are not using over ground or underground passes and all in the name of saving a few steps of walking. I know that the weather is not very favorable at most times of the year in Delhi, but basic civic sense is a requirement and not a virtue. We should encourage people to change their mindset.

People come to Delhi. This is the capital and we cannot stop people. But if they come to Delhi, they themselves will have to adhere to the behavioral requirement. We must behave as a citizen of a big, good international city,’ Chidambaram said.

Easier said than done Mr. Minister!

Delhi Chief Minister Sheila Dikshit, whom I admire for all the work she has done for the city in the past decade, perhaps took the cue and said a campaign will soon be launched to make people in the national capital aware about the need for behavioral changes.

I wonder if this will make a huge impact. The most impressionable years in humans are the early childhood and we seem to have imparted a wrong message or no message at all during those years to people who come or reside in Delhi.

Some of the citizens are not amused, however. According to some newspaper reports - some people have (correctly) said that not just Delhi but the whole country needs a crash course in basic manners and politeness. some opine that the change should start from the government officers and politicians.

As a resident, and although this goes against political correctness, I have to fully agree. And it nowhere more evident than on the roads. The “Delhi culture” and I may be venturing into a political minefield by saying this, reflects upon our actions on the road. Not following the lane discipline, parking 6 feet away from where we want to shop (to avoid walking) and frequently blaring horns to ensure that everybody is aware that our vehicles have it, no matter how disturbing it might be to openly break rules of the road or even mere civility – all are characteristic of the denizens of this area called the NCR.

There is so much evidence of this basic lack of courtesy and manners. The other day, I was in CP with my wife, trying to obtain a seat for a couple in a popular restaurant serving south Indian cuisine. Like polite and cultured couple, we were waiting for our turn, when much to our chagrin, a south Indian family of four rushed past everyone and secured a table which had just been vacated! Everyone who was waiting was surprised and angered by this blatant display of lack of manners. Some of the foreign tourists who were standing in the queue got the wrong impression that this is perhaps the right way to doing things in India or more specifically Delhi and started rushing past everyone into the hotel floor – hunting for tables for themselves. The south Indian family who had just secured a table was grinning as if they had just won an Olympic medal. We left, much in disgust, from the restaurant and headed towards another one in the outer circle – reflecting upon how these rude denizens turn very polite and urbane the moment they step outside India. Perhaps the fines or the fear of a new country turns them “docile”. The fact remains, basic civic sense and a sense of what is proper is singularly lacking in most of the Indians. True, the whole country needs a course in basic manners.

This is the kind of civil disobedience which, I am sure, Gandhi never subscribed to.

Civil disobedience, by the way, is the active refusal to obey certain laws, demands and commands of a government, or of an occupying power, without resorting to physical violence. It is one of the primary tactics of nonviolent resistance. In its most nonviolent form (in India, known as ahimsa or Satyagraha) it could be said that it is compassion in the form of respectful disagreement.

The American author Henry David Thoreau pioneered the modern theory behind this practice in his 1849 essay Civil Disobedience, originally titled "Resistance to Civil Government". The driving idea behind the essay was that of self-reliance, and also how one is in morally good standing as long as one can "get off another man's back"; so one does not necessarily have to physically fight the government, but one must not support it or have it support one (if one is against it). This essay has had a wide influence on many later practitioners of civil disobedience. In the essay, Thoreau explained his reasons for having refused to pay taxes as an act of protest against slavery and against the Mexican-American War.

The intentions and in some cases actions of these “humans” is anything but non-violent. I admire homo-sapiens ability to follow through a good idea to the extreme no matter how much it hurts. Civil disobedience taken to extreme – with every man for himself and the rest be damned.

I use the term very carefully since to be called “people or human”, one has to qualify as at least as evolved as one of the primitive homo sapiens tribe and sometimes I really wonder if these so called “people or humans” are evolved at all. For some have managed to bypass the evolutionary stages and regressed into half-baboon and half-chimpanzee states (no offence to these species and I hope PETA and similar organizations do not take offense to this)

Most of the people in Delhi are indeed disobedient of the laws of the land and amongst the youngsters and a certain profile of people it is considered as an identity symbol. To be able to flout rules is considered as a form of bravery or style statement. Perhaps I am too mild, but I fail to see the connection between machismo and the ability to jump a red light or travel in the opposite lane when the traffic is stuck in the right one.

Delhiites will be given lessons in civic sense and etiquettes ahead of the Commonwealth Games here next year. The Delhi government is preparing to act on Home Minister P. Chidambaram’s advice to the citizens in the capital. The campaign to impart civic sense will be launched in two phases and culminate two months before the start of the Games in October 2010.

We do not react to the pollution of the Yamuna, the dumping of garbage, the scrawling on ancient monuments and the disrespect of women. It is high time to change and think of this city which is very dear to all of us,’ said Dikshit in a statement.

I certainly hope that this campaign succeeds at least for 10% of the population of Delhi. I am reminded of my own blog entry on the bad habits of Delhi - 15 Traffic Rules that Delhi Lives By...

In my next entry, I will be writing about the state of infrastructure in Delhi…

Water on Moon!

2009-09-27T16:52:00.001+05:30

So it’s finally confirmed!

Since man first touched the moon and brought pieces of it back to Earth, scientists have thought that the lunar surface was bone dry. But new observations from three different spacecraft have put this notion to rest with what has been called "unambiguous evidence" of water across the surface of the moon.

Forget that tired old image of the moon as an entirely dry locale, devoid of any moisture. A recent set of discoveries have found that not only is there water on Earth's sole satellite — but the water is everywhere

The Moon is Earth's only natural satellite and the fifth largest satellite in the Solar System. The Moon is in synchronous rotation, which means it rotates about its axis in about the same time it takes to orbit the Earth. This result in it keeping nearly the same face turned towards the Earth at all times. The Moon used to rotate at a faster rate, but early in its history, its rotation slowed and became locked in this orientation as a result of frictional effects associated with tidal deformations caused by the Earth.

The Moon is the only celestial body on which human beings (home sapiens) have made a manned landing. While the erstwhile Soviet Union's Luna programme was the first to reach the Moon with unmanned spacecraft, the NASA Apollo program achieved the only manned missions to date, beginning with the first manned lunar mission by Apollo 8 in 1968, and six manned lunar landings between 1969 and 1972 – the first being Apollo 11 in 1969. Human exploration of the Moon temporarily ceased with the conclusion of the Apollo program, although a few robotic landers and orbiters have been sent to the Moon since that time. The U.S. has committed to return to the Moon by 2018 and I am not much impressed by the conspiracy theories indicating that the Americans never landed on moon in the first place and all these manned spaceflights have been nothing but utter hogwash…

According to Wikipedia…

The continuous bombardment of the Moon by comets and meteoroids has most likely added small amounts of water to the lunar surface. If so, sunlight would split much of this water into its constituent elements of hydrogen and oxygen, both of which would ordinarily escape into space over time, because of the Moon's weak gravity. However, because of the slightness of the axial tilt of the Moon's spin axis to the ecliptic plane—only 1.5°—some deep craters near the poles never receive direct light from the Sun and are thus in permanent shadow. Water molecules that ended up in these craters could be stable for long periods of time.

Clementine has mapped craters at the lunar south pole that are shadowed in this way, and computer simulations suggest that up to 14,000 km² might be in permanent shadow. Results from the Clementine mission bistatic radar experiment are consistent with small, frozen pockets of water close to the surface, and data from the Lunar Prospector neutron spectrometer indicate that anomalously high concentrations of hydrogen are present in the upper meter of the regolith near the Polar Regions. Estimates for the total quantity of water ice are close to one cubic kilometer.

Water ice can be mined and then split into its constituent hydrogen and oxygen atoms by means of nuclear generators or electric power stations equipped with solar panels. The presence of usable quantities of water on the Moon is an important factor in rendering lunar habitation cost-effective, since transporting water from Earth would be prohibitively expensive. However, recent observations made with the Arecibo planetary radar suggest that some of the near-polar Clementine radar data that were previously interpreted as being indicative of water ice might instead be a result of rocks ejected from young impact craters. The question of how much water there is on the Moon has not been resolved conclusively.

Three papers appearing in the upcoming issue of Science Express outline the discovery of pervasive water found clinging to the surface of the moon. Infrared spectroscope measurements from three different space probes have detected absorptions that indicate the presence of water or hydroxyl (which is, itself, a strong indicator for the presence of water) on the lunar surface, with one model suggesting water makes up a few tenths of a percent by weight in the optical surface. This water is apparently clinging to the moon's surface, rather than being absorbed by dust.

India's own Moon Impact Probe (MIP) on board the country's maiden lunar craft had discovered water on the moon, a finding confirmed by US space agency NASA's probe that was also aboard Chandrayaan-1.

India's first moon mission has achieved a historic first by discovering water on the lunar surface. This is being hailed not only as a landmark breakthrough in space science but also as a vindication of the mission itself, since the two year project got terminated after just 10 months.

Predictably - India's first lunar mission had made a "path-breaking and real discovery" by establishing the presence of water on the moon, Indian Space Research Organization (ISRO) chairman Nair said. While expressing pride in the achievement, Nair added: "But the water is not in the form of sea or lake or puddle or drops. It is embedded on the surface in minerals and rocks.” Scientists confirming the presence of water on the moon are doing so on the basis of scientific findings that have been arrived at after a rigorous process of deduction and analysis and not by actually finding lakes, pools or puddles of water that we're familiar with on earth. It's hardly a vast lake, and it won't yet support that lunar agricultural colony you've been dreaming of, but it's far more water than scientists ever expected to find on the moon, and it could prove a valuable resource to future lunar visitors.

The researchers have also found that the concentration of water is higher toward the poles, lending credence to the theory that larger deposits of water exist near the poles, and researchers note that it's possible we'll continue to find wetter lunar regions in the future.

So where did all this water come from? Although meteors or comets may have periodically brought water to the moon, the prevailing theory among the three papers is that solar winds have carried hydrogen to the moon's surface, where it has bonded with the oxygen in the moon's own dust and produced water.

However, according to Mylswamy Annadurai, Chandrayaan-1 project director, the water molecules came from the Moon surface — a major revelation made possible by the Indian mission. This dispels the age-old belief and the current thinking that only other planetary bodies can be the source of water molecules on the Moon. According to ISRO scientists, this mission has changed the thinking. The new theory is that the water molecules are not from an outside source, but are being generated then and there. This is now being analyzed.

According to a space.com article - There are potentially two types of water on the moon: that brought from outside sources, such as water-bearing comets striking the surface, or that that originates on the moon.

It is really one of those moments in human history which can prove as a turning point. Finding water on the moon would be a boon to possible future lunar bases, acting as a potential source of drinking water and fuel.

The clutter in our lives

2009-09-21T22:25:00.000+05:30

As sat quietly in my living room this afternoon, the thought occurred to me - Why would anyone want to carry around needless burdens? That's what clutter is. It drains one's energy, slows one's progress, and eats away at our limited time and space. Left unabated, it spreads all over one's life becoming emotional, mental, and physical clutter.

Have you gone through several iterations of de-cluttering, only to feel like you really didn’t make much progress? The likely reason for this is that our lives are filled with clutter, rather than us just having a few areas of clutter.

Our lives tend to accumulate clutter in every corner – on our desks, in our drawers, on our shelves at home, in our closets, in our computers, even in the activities that we do and our relationships!

We start out in life unfulfilled, with nothing, and we start acquiring stuff. At some point, we peak (the top of the curve) when we have enough. That’s the magic thing that we’re always looking for: enough.

I wonder if this has anything to do with the endowment effect.

The endowment effect (also known as divestiture aversion) is a hypothesis that people value a good or service more once their property right to it has been established. In other words, people place a higher value on objects they own than objects that they do not. In one experiment, people demanded a higher price for a coffee mug that had been given to them but put a lower price on one they did not yet own. The endowment effect was described as inconsistent with standard economic theory which asserts that a person's willingness to pay (WTP) for a good should be equal to their willingness to accept (WTA) compensation to be deprived of the good.

The effect was first theorized by Richard Thaler. It is a specific form, linked to ownership, of status quo bias. Although it differs from loss aversion, a prospect theory concept, those two biases reinforce each other in cases when the asset price has fallen compared to the owner's buying price. This bias has also a few similarities with commitment and attachment.

Loss aversion, by the way, was first proposed as an explanation for the endowment effect - the fact that people place a higher value on a good that they own than on an identical good that they do not own - by Kahneman, Knetsch, and Thaler (1990). Loss aversion and the endowment effect lead to a violation of the Coase theorem - that "the allocation of resources will be independent of the assignment of property rights when costless trades are possible"

Sigh… here I go again, getting too deep into the technicalities of what and why we clutter our lives with stuff we don’t often need or need to hang on to… we start acquiring from the day we are able to and that age is pretty low for humans…

But, of course we don’t stop acquiring. We enter the zone when we begin having more than enough, and therefore begin accumulating clutter. And most of us accumulate it all of our lives. The sad thing is, we don’t just have more stuff than we need, and we now have stuff we don’t need that demands our attention in some way: we have to maintain it, fix it, continue to make payments on it, store it,

So we start becoming less fulfilled instead of more so.

I can give numerous examples, but the most relevant one seems to be the thousands of books, some going back to my college days of over 10 years ago which I still hoard or my wife’s jewelry: enough to start a store. Closets full of clothes I haven’t worn in a long while, and so on.

Clutter is usually thought of as things we acquire or accumulate. And, when you stop and think about, the clutter goes beyond purchases: we also clutter our lives with activities that are of no real value to us – like watching serials which serve no practical purpose except to pass the time. I guess, most of us end up doing it unconsciously. The things we don't do, but should do, clutter our mind with apprehension and stress. Unwritten letters, unpaid bills, unanswered phone calls, and unattended tasks and obligations take their toll on our lives. They create a slow energy drain and are as distracting as an endless humming in our head. We can free ourselves from such needless headaches by taking the time to do whatever needs to be done. We can't do everything, but we should do the essentials

So, what do we do? We can do some de-cluttering. It seems to me, though, that what we most need to work on is our constant desire to fill our lives with more “stuff,” be that unnecessary purchases or activities that are of no value. I only suggest it as something we should be aware of and work on to the extent that we can on avoiding it or getting out of the trap that we lay for ourselves.

I don’t have any advice for you on how to do that, at least not at this time, but I did come across a good article by Chuck Gallozzi – and while there is no mystical answer to anything there, it does offer some practical advice!

Long Term Implications of Longevity on Humanity

2009-08-15T22:30:00.000+05:30

As I sat down after my initial indignation at the callous attitude, rather to be more accurate, retarded and inefficient approach towards solving a real life problem by AMEX travel counselors, my attention drifted towards more abstract thoughts.

The idea of extremely long life has been a fascinating one. Immortality (or eternal life) is the concept of living in a physical or spiritual form for an infinite or inconceivably vast length of time. As immortality is the negation of mortality—not dying or not being subject to death—it has been a subject of fascination to humanity since at least the beginning of history.

To present day science, it is not known whether human physical immortality is an achievable condition. Biological forms have inherent limitations — for example, their fragility and slow adaptability to changing environments, which may or may not be able to be overcome through medical interventions or engineering.

However, as of 2009, we do know that natural selection has developed biological immortality in at least one species, the jellyfish Turritopsis nutricula, one consequence of which is a worldwide population explosion of the organism.

According to Wikipedia - Biological immortality is the absence of a sustained increase in rate of mortality as a function of chronological age. A cell or organism that does not experience, or at some future point will cease, aging, is biologically immortal. However this definition of immortality was challenged in the new "Handbook of the Biology of Aging", because the increase in rate of mortality as a function of chronological age may be negligible at extremely old ages (late-life mortality plateau). But even though the rate of mortality ceases to increase in old age, those rates are very high.

Biologists have chosen the word immortal to designate cells that are not limited by the Hayflick limit (where cells no longer divide because of DNA damage or shortened telomeres). (Prior to the work of Leonard Hayflick there was the erroneous belief fostered by Alexis Carrel that all normal somatic cells are immortal.)

However, there is definite agreement on one fact at least - The immortality of a single cell has never been observed.

That would be the day!

If it were possible to have immortality in a single cell – this would naturally lead to immortality of a being – steady-state – never decaying, never dying – perpetual existence in a locked state.

Not even regeneration would be needed. Now, what would a time lord think of that idea?

The absence of aging would provide humans with biological immortality, but not invulnerability to death by physical trauma: According to 2002 statistical data, the odds of an individual being traumatically killed are once in every one thousand and seven hundred years.

Some life extensionists, such as those who practice cryonics, have the hope that humans may someday become biologically immortal. This would not be the same as literal immortality, since people are still susceptible to death through external circumstances (either deliberate or accidental).

But is immortality really desirable?

Let’s take a look at some arguments in favor of undesirability of immortality.

Physical immortality has also been imagined as a form of eternal torment, as in Mary Shelley's short story "The Mortal Immortal", the protagonist of which witnesses everyone he cares about dying around him. Jorge Luis Borges explored the idea that life gets its meaning from death in the short story "'The Immortal"; an entire society having achieved immortality, they found time becoming infinite, and so found no motivation for any action.

Here, one of the stories written by Jonathan Swift (author of Gulliver’s travels). He too had basically written against immortality. Of course – everyone assumes that to live forever means to live forever in a state of youth. Swift was rather astute to point out that this may not always be the case. Immortality trapped in an old body is worse than a curse!

Humans being social animals - to really live, alone, for a long time – is quite undesirable indeed.

Ethics of immortality

The possibility of clinical immortality raises a host of medical, philosophical, and religious issues and ethical questions. These include persistent vegetative states, the nature of personality over time, technology to mimic or copy the mind or its processes, social and economic disparities created by longevity, and survival of the heat death of the universe.

The social, emotional consequences of achieving extremely long life can very really hard to imagine. We have, in our times, experienced the average human lifespan increase tremendously. Today we do not find it odd to observe and expect that an average human – not subject to disease or trauma would at least live to be beyond 75 terrestrial years. Of course the average lifespan vary by region of earth and type of human gene pool as well.

However, our social customs and society is geared very so much towards the old medieval concept of aging. The so called “middle age” has steadily shifting towards 50s and we have a chance of really observing 80s as being called the middle age factor!

But what of the world population? The social consequences of people continuing to live the way it is done today – with its associated tremendous pressure on the resources of this planet.

There are of course religious viewpoints in this very sensitive subject – but I will deliberately restrict myself from venturing in that direction.

In my view, this planet cannot afford to have extremely long lived humans with their current pattern of consumption at figures of billions. We either need to find a new habitable planet to expand to or vastly change the way we live and consume from the environment.

In my future posts, I will concentrate more on emotional and social consequences of extremely long life spans…

ACTION solves almost all the challenges in life!

2009-06-26T15:12:00.001+05:30

Feeling depressed for some reason? I was, after almost a week "down-time" with a gastro infection which was followed up by a viral… and started searching for how to kick the depression (all those medicine…)

I found a nice set of tricks to kick the depression out… don’t know the origin of these recommendations, but they work… sort of :-)

First trick:
Get out of your head and into your feet

The body craves movement. Exercise really works. Let's not think of it as exercise though. Nothing is gnarlier to the depressed person than imagining him/herself at the gym in ill fitting sweats, panting on the stair master while svelte athletes are bopping around in all directions. As Woody Allen says, 90% of success is showing up. Once we've got our walking shoes on, once we get endorphins cooking, the doldrums have less power to penetrate.

Second trick:
Turn on music! Now!

I recommend that my clients have an arsenal of inspiring and fun music at their fingertips. I have even been known to make CD's for my clients. When we're depressed, the smallest task feels overwhelming. . If I can kick-start someone's joy, then I am thrilled.

Third trick:
Turn on the light and sit in the sun. Many of us work in windowless cubicles or offices, and wonder why we feel blue.

This time of year, if there is no sun in your world, then buy a full-spectrum light. Get one cheap on E-bay.

Fourth trick:
Hang out with 4-leggeds. (Unless of course, you're allergic)

Having an animal companion near can instantly release oxytocin, that magical hormone that we secrete when we fall in love, give birth, or are nursing. It releases a feeling of goodwill, or trust in the world. OK, so not all of all are blessed to be in love all the time, or be breast feeding, so I recommend my clients find other ways to bring on the joy chemical. Read on.

Fifth trick:
Change your thoughts. Right now.

We have around 60,000.00 thoughts per day. 87% of them are negative and are the same thoughts we had yesterday. Experiencing joy is a deliberate choice. Joy takes practice. Joy is hardcore. I use realistic affirmations, which, at times are posted all over my room. Notice I said realistic.

We must remember that affirmations don't make something happen, they make something welcome. People tell me, "I put an affirmation up on my bedroom wall, saying: “I am going to be hugely successful in the stock markets and get rich." It's been 3 months. Where is the money?" I tell them; "You have made yourself more open to making money. But have you tried doing anything in that direction? Sorry."

Sixth Trick:
Follow a joyous lifestyle. Choose joyous entertainment.
Find a class, a workout, anything that gets you in your body, preferably sweating a bit.

Seventh Trick:
Affirm joy with words.

Rudyard Kipling said "I am by calling a dealer in words. And words are by far the most powerful drug in the world". It may seem trite, but changing the way we speak can be extremely influential in changing our moods.

Eighth Trick:
Grab hold of a goal.

Make it a do-able one. Happiness and joy come from goals. We mustn't put off our lives.

Ninth Trick:
Cultivate a relationship with the divine.

We are whom our higher self wanted to experience. There is some truth to the pithy phrase: There’s no atheist in foxholes. Have a smidgens of faith and the world can be a gentler space.

Tenth Trick:
Choose joyous companions.

When we are depressed, we take our bored, sluggish selves wherever we go. We need distractions. We need company. We need intimacy. It is very important to be around authentic people. We need someone who believes in us. No nay-Sayers!

The Foundation – Seldon Plan and Project Planning & Management!

2009-06-18T01:05:00.000+05:30

These days, my interest in readings on literature related to a profession called “project management” is leading me to some weird alleys in literary town.

Project management is the discipline of planning, organizing and managing resources to bring about the successful completion of specific project goals and objectives.

A project is a finite endeavor--having specific start and completion dates--undertaken to meet particular goals and objectives, usually to bring about beneficial change or added value. This finite characteristic of projects stands in contrast to processes, or operations--which are repetitive, permanent or semi-permanent functional work to produce products or services. In practice, the management of these two systems is often found to be quite different, and as such requires the development of distinct technical skills and the adoption of separate management.

The primary challenge of project management is to achieve all of the project goals and objectives while honoring the preconceived project constraints. Typical constraints are scope, time and budget. The secondary—and more ambitious—challenge is to optimize the allocation and integration of inputs necessary to meet pre-defined objectives.

Project management has been practiced since early civilization. Until 1900 projects were generally managed by creative architects and engineers themselves, among those for example Christopher Wren (1632–1723), Thomas Telford (1757-1834) and Isambard Kingdom Brunel (1806–1859)

It has been since the 1950s, which organizations started applying systemic project management tools and techniques to complex projects. The 1950s marked the beginning of the modern Project Management era. Project management was formally recognized as a distinct discipline arising from the management discipline.

At that time, two mathematical project scheduling models were developed. The "Critical Path Method" (CPM) developed in a joint venture by both DuPont Corporation and Remington Rand Corporation for managing plant maintenance projects. And the "Program Evaluation and Review Technique" or PERT, developed by Booz-Allen & Hamilton as part of the United States Navy's (in conjunction with the Lockheed Corporation) Polaris missile submarine program; These mathematical techniques quickly spread into many private enterprises.

As I was reading through such historical notes… my mind connected with a fictional discipline of Psychohistory as expounded in the novels and stories of Isaac Asimov – in the foundation universe. The Seldon Plan is the central theme of Isaac Asimov's Foundation Series of stories and novels, in which – the fictional character - Hari Seldon devised the Seldon Plan using an analytical technique he had mastered called psychohistory. His analysis worked only for large numbers of persons, working as a mob, unaware of their likely future, and gave probable paths for wider historical developments. Using this technique, Seldon deduced that it was certain the Galactic Empire was about to collapse, and usher in 30,000 years of barbarism.

The basic concept behind the plan was initially stated to be to reduce 30,000 years of Galactic barbarism, to under 1,000, and establish a Second Galactic Empire. This appears to have been the original version of the plan. Not because Seldon did not have wider aspirations, but because that was as far as it was originally worked out by Seldon himself.

Seldon obtained permission from the Emperor to start an Encyclopedia project, on a resource-poor planet towards the outer edges of the Galaxy. This project, called the 'Foundation', was to face a series of crises, each of which would force the Foundation to take a particular outcome. For example, a scarcity of metals forced the Foundation to co-operate and trade with neighbors. Each time a major crisis happened, a projection of Seldon would appear, and make comments on the situation that had just passed. After the first crises had passed, Seldon revealed the secret purpose of the Foundation was to re-create the Galactic Empire.

The Seldon Plan is statistical in nature. Future events are described as being probabilities. The variables, as discussed (see above) require a very large number of human beings, literally the population of the Galaxy, in order to reduce the ordinarily random events concerning human affairs to become amenable to statistical modeling.

Seldon's original address at the Decennial Convention on Trantor in 11178 G.E. was his proof, using the irreducibility theorem (or First Seldon Theorem) that the population of the people of the galaxy fell short of being a dynamic system which would be impossible to model adequately mathematically, the definition of 'just' most likely being one order of magnitude, though this is not discussed within the novels. At the time of this discovery, Seldon was not yet sure of either the scope or time constraints required to develop this discovery further.

Initially, Seldon was unable to make any headway on developing the model, as he was attempting to bring knowledge of all Galactic History, as well as considering all of the Galactic Population into modeling. Inadequate history and news reporting in the 12th millennium G.E. hindered his progress during his first year on Trantor, particularly during the period known as 'The Flight'.

After some consideration, at the end of the period of 'The Flight', Seldon realized that Trantor and its attendant worlds constituted an 'Empire in Miniature' on which he might model the past and future course of the Empire. Events in the rest of the Empire could be effectively modeled as second-order effects. Seldon often described this breakthrough as being 'the result of a turn of phrase' he encountered during The Flight.

During Seldon's lifetime, congruent points in the Plan were developed and modeled with enough accuracy to determine the critical points of inflexure that would set the Galaxy on the path of Foundation, and the Second Empire. In order to ensure that the First Foundation would be created, Seldon and the Psychohistorians of Trantor placed the Comissioner Linge Chen (then actual if not crowned Emperor) under intense scrutiny, as well as Mentalic influence in order to achieve their aims. This was a clear but vital breach in the limits of psychohistorical theory, as psychostatistics is meaningful only with planetary numbers, and not with individuals.

To me, the greatest challenge in any age would be to concoct, plan, execute and manage a plan like a Seldon plan!

To think of the challenges where the project execution cycle extends generations beyond the original planner and various disconnected “project managers” must take it to its logical conclusion.

Project Management tries to gain control over variables such as risk. Potential points of failure: Most negative risks (or potential failures) can be overcome or resolved, given enough planning capabilities, time, and resources. According to some definitions risk can also be categorized as "positive--" meaning that there is a potential opportunity, e.g., complete the project faster than expected

To properly control these variables a good project manager has a depth of knowledge and experience in these four areas (time, cost, scope, and risk), and in six other areas as well: integration, communication, human resources, quality assurance, schedule development, and procurement.

The risks to Seldon plan were great indeed. The plan came close to failure in Foundation and Empire because of the mutant called The Mule. Because the Mule had psychic powers of mind control, he did not fit the model of interactions psychohistory was based upon. The Mule could influence men at a distance, unlike Second Foundation agents, who required eye contact. The Mule was eventually lured to a remote planet to destroy the Second Foundation. However, in so doing, he left his main fleet, which was turned against him by Second Foundation agents in his absence, thus ending his rule.

Strange are the parallels that a wandering mind can draw and this one makes me wonder whether this was a vision or random neurons connecting with each in truly random ways…

The Dark Side

2009-06-17T22:26:00.001+05:30

No, I am not going to talk about the “Dark Side” of the mythical “Force” out of Star Wars Saga… what set my mind thinking on the dark side of things is an interesting piece of article which caught my attention.

In 1998, astronomers made an astounding discovery that shook the foundations of modern physics: contrary to expectations, the expansion of our Universe is revving up. We live in a runaway Universe, where the most distant observable galaxies are racing away from us at ever increasing speeds.

But what is causing this cosmic acceleration? No one knows for certain, but whatever dark energy actually is, detailed measurements reveal that it comprises a whopping 74% of our Universe's total mass-energy budget!

As the Universe's dominant form of energy, dark energy plays a crucial role in determining how the cosmos evolves, and it will determine whether our Universe expands forever or collapses upon itself.

According to NASA’s website article on Dark Energy - Dark energy has the cosmologists scratching their heads. Observations taken by NASA's Hubble Space Telescope and future space telescopes will be needed in order to determine the properties of dark energy.

Probing dark energy, the energy in empty space causing the expanding universe to accelerate, calls for accurately measuring how that expansion rate is increasing with time. Dark energy is thought to drive space apart.

In physical cosmology and astronomy, dark energy is a hypothetical form of energy that permeates all of space and tends to increase the rate of expansion of the universe. Dark energy is the most popular way to explain recent observations that the universe appears to be expanding at an accelerating rate. In the standard model of cosmology, dark energy currently accounts for 74% of the total mass-energy of the universe.

NASA has developed the Beyond Einstein Program, a series of missions designed to probe fundamental questions about dark energy, black holes, and the very early Universe.

One of the missions is the Joint Dark Energy Mission (JDEM), which will study dark energy.

Two other Beyond Einstein missions, International X-ray Observatory (IXO, formerly Con-X) and the Laser Interferometer Space Antenna (LISA), will provide crucial independent measurements of dark energy.

The exact nature of this dark energy is a matter of speculation. It is known to be very homogeneous, not very dense and is not known to interact through any of the fundamental forces other than gravity. Since it is not very dense — roughly 10−29 grams per cubic centimeter — it is hard to imagine experiments to detect it in the laboratory. Dark energy can only have such a profound impact on the universe, making up 74% of all energy, because it uniformly fills otherwise empty space. The two leading models are quintessence and the cosmological constant. Both models include the common characteristic that dark energy must have negative pressure.

This accelerating expansion effect is sometimes labeled "gravitational repulsion", which is a colorful but possibly confusing expression. In fact a negative pressure does not influence the gravitational interaction between masses - which remains attractive - but rather alters the overall evolution of the universe at the cosmological scale, typically resulting in the accelerating expansion of the universe despite the attraction among the masses present in the universe.

The simplest explanation for dark energy is that it is simply the "cost of having space": that is, a volume of space has some intrinsic, fundamental energy. This is the cosmological constant.

Since energy and mass are related by E = mc2, Einstein's theory of general relativity predicts that it will have a gravitational effect. It is sometimes called a vacuum energy because it is the energy density of empty vacuum. In fact, most theories of particle physics predict vacuum fluctuations that would give the vacuum this sort of energy.

Some theorists think that dark energy and cosmic acceleration are a failure of general relativity on very large scales, larger than super-clusters. It is a tremendous extrapolation to think that our law of gravity, which works so well in the solar system, should work without correction on the scale of the universe. Most attempts at modifying general relativity, however, have turned out to be either equivalent to theories of quintessence, or inconsistent with observations. It is of interest to note that if the equation for gravity were to approach r instead of r2 at large, intergalactic distances, then the acceleration of the expansion of the universe becomes a mathematical artifact, negating the need for the existence of Dark Energy.

Cosmologists estimate that the acceleration began roughly 5 billion years ago. Before that, it is thought that the expansion was decelerating, due to the attractive influence of dark matter and baryons. The density of dark matter in an expanding universe decreases more quickly than dark energy, and eventually the dark energy dominates. Specifically, when the volume of the universe doubles, the density of dark matter is halved but the density of dark energy is nearly unchanged (it is exactly constant in the case of a cosmological constant).

If the acceleration continues indefinitely, the ultimate result will be that galaxies outside the local super-cluster will move beyond the cosmic horizon: they will no longer be visible, because their line-of-sight velocity becomes greater than the speed of light. This is not a violation of special relativity, and the effect cannot be used to send a signal between them. (Actually there is no way to even define "relative speed" in a curved space-time. Relative speed and velocity can only be meaningfully defined in flat space-time or in sufficiently small (infinitesimal) regions of curved space-time). Rather, it prevents any communication between them as the objects pass out of contact.

The Earth, the Milky Way and the Virgo super cluster, however, would remain virtually undisturbed while the rest of the universe recedes. In this scenario, the local super cluster would ultimately suffer heat death, just as was thought for the flat, matter-dominated universe, before measurements of cosmic acceleration.

There are some very speculative ideas about the future of the universe.

One suggests that phantom energy causes divergent expansion, which would imply that the effective force of dark energy continues growing until it dominates all other forces in the universe. Under this scenario, dark energy would ultimately tear apart all gravitationally bound structures, including galaxies and solar systems, and eventually overcome the electrical and nuclear forces to tear apart atoms themselves, ending the universe in a "Big Rip".

On the other hand, dark energy might dissipate with time, or even become attractive. Such uncertainties leave open the possibility that gravity might yet rule the day and lead to a universe that contracts in on itself in a "Big Crunch".

Some scenarios, such as the cyclic model suggest this could be the case. While these ideas are not supported by observations, they are not ruled out. Measurements of acceleration are crucial to determining the ultimate fate of the universe in big bang theory.

However, we need not get overly worried. The timescales being discussed towards the end of the universe range between 30 billion to 50 billion earth years (at least as we know them in present era).

15 Traffic Rules that Delhi Lives By...

2009-06-12T09:23:00.002+05:30

Driving in Delhi can be a pain... literally!

I have the misfortune of indulging in this activity almost on a daily basis and I have come to recognize some of the rules that our most gracious Delhi-walas live by, especially when on the road...

The Other Side Law: - If my side of the road has a traffic jam, then I can start driving on the wrong side of the road, and all incoming cars will be rerouted via Meerut.
The No Queue Rule: If there is a queue of many people, no one will notice me sneaking into the front as long as I am looking the other way.
The Mind Over Matter Law: If a red light is not working, four cars from different directions can easily pass through one another.
The Auto Axiom: If I indicate which way I am going to turn my vehicle, it is an information security leak.
The In Spit Of Thing: The more I lean out of my car or bus, and the harder I spit, the stronger the roads become.
The Cinema Hall Fact: If I get a call on my mobile phone, the film automatically goes into pause mode.
The Brotherhood Law: If I want to win an argument, I need only to repeatedly suggest that the other person has illicit relations with his sister.
The Baraat/ Marriage Right: When I'm on the road to marriage, all the roads in the city belong to me. To ME.
The Heart Of Things: If I open enough buttons on my shirt, the pretty girl at the bus stop can see through my mal-deformed chest into the depths of my soul.
The Name Game: It is very important for the driver behind me to memorize the nicknames of my children.
Parking Up The Wrong Tree: When I double-park my car, the road automatically widens so that the traffic is not affected.
The Chill Bill Move: When I park and block someone else's car I am giving him a chance to pause, relax, chill and take a few moments off from his rushed day.
The Ogling Stare: If you don't ogle and drool at every hot Chic that passes by, you're gay.
The Bus Law: If I stop my bus at the correct place near the bus stop, the city will explode and blow into 6 million pieces.
The VIP Rule:There are only 3 important persons in this city -Me, I, Myself !

THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN LATERAL AND LOGICAL THINKING

2009-06-11T10:20:00.002+05:30

Here's a story which caught my imagination today and set me thinking about the "seemingly" insoluble problems which we face in everyday life...

Many years ago in a small Indian village,
A farmer had the misfortune Of owing a large sum of money to a village moneylender.

The Moneylender , who was old and ugly, fancied the farmer's beautiful Daughter. So he proposed a bargain.He said he would forgo the farmer's debt if he could marry his Daughter. Naturally, both the farmer and his daughter were horrified by the Proposal.

So the cunning money-lender suggested that they let Providence decide the matter.

He told them that he would put a black Pebble and a white pebble into an empty money bag. Then the girl would Have to pick one pebble from the bag.

If she picked the black pebble, she would become his wife and her father's debt would be forgiven.
If she picked the white pebble she need not marry him and her father's debt would still be forgiven.
But if she refused to pick a pebble, her father would be thrown into Jail.

They were standing on a pebble strewn path in the farmer's field. As They talked, the moneylender bent over to pick up two pebbles. As he Picked them up, the sharp-eyed girl noticed that he had picked up two black pebbles and put them into the bag.

He then asked the girl to pick a pebble from the bag. Careful analysis would produce three possibilities:

The girl should refuse to take a pebble.
The girl should show that there were two black pebbles in the bag And expose the money-lender as a cheat.
The girl should pick a black pebble and sacrifice herself in order To save her father from his debt and imprisonment.

Take a moment to ponder over the story.

The above story is used with the hope that it will make us appreciate the difference between lateral and logical thinking. The girl's dilemma cannot be solved with Traditional logical thinking.

Think of the consequences if she choosesThe above logical answers.What would you recommend to the Girl to do?

Well, here is what she did ....

The girl put her hand into the moneybag and drew out a pebble. Without Looking at it, she fumbled and let it fall onto the pebble-strewn path where it immediately became lost among all the other pebbles.

"Oh, how clumsy of me," she said. "But never mind, if you look into the Bag for the one that is left, you will be able to tell which pebble I picked."

Since the remaining pebble is black, it must be assumed that she had picked the white one. And since the money-lender dare not admit his Dishonesty, the girl changed what seemed an impossible situation into an extremely advantageous one.

MORAL OF THE STORY
Most complex problems do have a solution. It is only that we don't ATTEMPT to think.

Watch out...

2009-05-31T16:22:00.001+05:30

In one of my smallest blogposts till date... i share one of the pearls of wisdom I picked up from somewhere....

Watch your 'Thoughts,' they become words.
Watch your 'Words,' they become actions.
Watch your 'Actions,' they become habits.
Watch your 'Habits,' they become character.
Watch your 'Character,' for it becomes your Destiny.........

The lighter side of financial life!

2009-05-24T19:24:00.001+05:30

The following really sums up in layman’s language the current financial predicament we now find ourselves caught up in; however, it is done in a very comical way.

1. The US has made a new weapon that destroys people but keeps the building standing. It's called the stock market.
2. Do you have any idea how cheap stocks are? Wall Street is now being called Wal Mart Street.
3. The difference between a pigeon and a investment broker... The pigeon can still make a deposit on a BMW
4. What's the difference between a guy who lost everything in Las Vegas and an investment broker? A-tie.
5. The problem with investment bank balance sheet is that on the left side nothing's right and on the right side nothing’s left.
6. I want to warn people from Nigeria who might be reading this, if you get any emails from Washington asking for money, it's a scam. Don't fall for it.
7. What worries me most about the credit crunch, is that if one of my checks is returned stamped 'insufficient funds?' I won't know whether that refers to mine or the banks.

NEW STOCK MARKET TERMS:
§ CEO --Chief Embezzlement Officer.
§ CFO -- Corporate Fraud Officer.
§ BULL MARKET -- A random market movement causing an investor to mistake himself for a financial genius.
§ BEAR MARKET -- A 6 to 18 month period when the kids get no allowance, the wife gets no jewelry.
§ VALUE INVESTING -- The art of buying low and selling lower.
§ P/E RATIO -- The percentage of investors wetting their pants as the market keeps crashing.
§ BROKER -- What my broker has made me.
§ STANDARD & POOR -- Your life in a nutshell.
§ STOCK ANALYST -- Idiot who just downgraded your stock.
§ STOCK SPLIT -- When your ex-wife and her lawyer split your assets equally between themselves.
§ FINANCIAL PLANNER -- A guy whose phone has been disconnected.
§ MARKET CORRECTION -- The day after you buy stocks.
§ CASH FLOW-- The movement your money makes as it disappears down the toilet.
§ YAHOO -- What you yell after selling it to some poor sucker for $240 per share.
§ WINDOWS -- What you jump out of when you're the sucker who bought Yahoo @ $240 per share.
§ INSTITUTIONAL INVESTOR -- Past year investor who's now locked up in a nuthouse.
§ PROFIT -- An archaic word no longer in use.

FTL – Finally a possibility in mainstream science

2009-05-17T18:48:00.000+05:30

Every now and then, a piece of news begs you to stop, rise above the mundane world of everyday life and reach for the stars and this month… it literally made it possible to reach for the stars – well almost, at least in theory!

Finally two physicists at Baylor University, US, have stumbled upon an idea that may turn traveling at the speed of light from science fiction to real science, just like the warp speed at which spacecraft travel in the fictional TV and film series ‘Star Trek’

Dr. Gerald Cleaver, associate professor of physics at Baylor, and Dr. Richard Obousy, a Baylor post-doctoral student, theorize that by manipulating the space-time dimensions around the spaceship with a massive amount of energy, it would create a “bubble” that could push the ship faster than the speed of light.

To create this bubble, the Baylor physicists believe manipulating the 11-dimension would create dark energy. Cleaver said that positive dark energy is responsible for speeding up the universe as time moves on, just like it did after the Big Bang, when the universe expanded faster than the speed of light.

“Think of it like a surfer riding a wave,” said Cleaver, who co-authored a research paper with Obousy about the new method. “The ship would be pushed by the bubble and the bubble would be traveling faster than the speed of light,” he added.

The method is based on the Alcubierre drive, which proposes expanding the fabric of space behind a ship into a bubble and shrinking space-time in front of the ship.

According to Wikipedia - Alcubierre drive - also known as the Alcubierre drive or Warp Drive, is a speculative mathematical model of a space-time exhibiting features reminiscent of the fictional "warp drive" from Star Trek, which can travel "Faster-than-light".

In 1994, the Mexican physicist Miguel Alcubierre proposed a method of stretching space in a wave which would in theory cause the fabric of space ahead of a spacecraft to contract and the space behind it to expand. The ship would ride this wave inside a region known as a warp bubble of flat space. Since the ship is not moving within this bubble, but carried along as the region itself moves, conventional relativistic effects such as time dilation do not apply in the way they would in the case of a ship moving at high velocity through flat space-time. Also, this method of travel does not actually involve moving faster than light in a local sense, since a light beam within the bubble would still always move faster than the ship; it is only "faster than light" in the sense that, thanks to the contraction of the space in front of it, the ship could reach its destination faster than a light beam restricted to travelling outside the warp bubble. Thus, the Alcubierre drive does not contradict the conventional claim that relativity forbids a slower-than-light object to accelerate to faster-than-light speeds. However, there are no known methods to create such a warp bubble in a region that does not already contain one, or to leave the bubble once inside it, so the Alcubierre drive remains a theoretical concept at this time.

The ship would not actually move, rather the ship would sit in between the expanding and shrinking space-time dimensions. Since space would move around the ship, the theory does not violate Einstein’s Theory of Relativity, which states that it would take an infinite amount of energy to accelerate an object faster than the speed of light.

String theory suggests the universe is made up of multiple dimensions. Height, width and length are three dimensions, and time is the fourth dimension. Scientists believe that there are a total of 10 dimensions, with six other dimensions that we cannot yet identify. A new theory, called M-theory, takes string theory one step farther and states that the “strings” actually vibrate in an 11-dimensional space. It is this 11th dimension that the Baylor researchers believe could help propel a ship faster than the speed of light.

Gee – the only thing left to invent now is “inertial dampening” and “shields” J I wonder what Zefram Cochrane would have thought of this…

So…the theory is there. Implementation waits the perception of our current technologies in higher dimension. Accelerating masses generate gravitational radiation in higher dimension. That side of the universe in completely dark for us as we cannot perceive anything beyond the three spatial dimensions and one forward moving time dimension.

The theory of relativity predicts that masses being accelerated should emit ``gravitational radiation’’ in the same way that charged particles (like electrons) emit electromagnetic radiation when they are accelerated.

Simply put use of gravitational wave in higher dimensions easily produce thousand time faster speed than light. The waves and radiations that we can perceive are designed to explicitly manifest themselves in 3-d spatial environments. Gravity radiation is what runs the chilled universe, the Hyperspaces and zillion universes held by the chilled platform universe.

I think this piece of theoretical work has important connotations for humanity and its future and I for one would closely follow any developments – theoretical or experimental in this field…

Great one liners....

2009-05-10T20:10:00.002+05:30

In quite a departure from my usual serious posts, this week I am putting some rather hilarious one liners that I received from the usual spam that everyone gets... only this one was somewhat catchy and relevant to our times... ENJOY!

1. I say no to alcohol, it just doesn't listen.
2. Marriage is one of the chief causes of divorce.
3. Work is fine if it doesn't take too much of your time.
4. When everything comes in your way you're in the wrong lane.
5. The light at the end of the tunnel may be an incoming train..
6. Born free, taxed to death.
7. Everyone has a photographic memory, some just don't have film.
8. Life is unsure; always eat your dessert first.
9. Smile, it makes people wonder what you are thinking.
10. If you keep your feet firmly on the ground, you'll have trouble putting on your pants.
11. It's not hard to meet expenses, they are everywhere.
12. I love being a writer... what I can't stand is the paperwork.
13. A printer consists of 3 main parts: the case, the jammed paper tray and the blinking red light.
14. The guy who invented the first wheel was an idiot. The guy who invented the other three, he was the genius.
15. The trouble with being punctual is that no one is there to appreciate it.
16. In a country of free speech, why are there phone bills?
17. If you cannot change your mind, are you sure you have one?
18. Beat the 5 O'clock rush, leave work at noon!
19. If you can't convince them, confuse them.
20. It's not the fall that kills you. It's the sudden stop at the end.
21. I couldn't repair your brakes, so I made your horn louder.
22. Hot glass looks same as cold glass. - Cunino's Law of Burnt Fingers
23. The cigarette does the smoking you are just the sucker.
24. Someday is not a day of the week
25. Whenever I find the key to success, someone changes the lock.
26. To Err is human, to forgive is not a Company policy.
27. The road to success.... Is always under construction.
28. Alcohol doesn't solve any problems, but if you think again, neither does Milk.
29. In order to get a Loan, you first need to prove that you don't need it.

and here's the best of the lot ....

30. All the desirable things in life are either illegal, expensive, fattening or immoral.

Life!

2009-04-19T15:41:00.002+05:30

These have been the days of days for contemplation and meditation. Days when I found myself drowned in the materialistic pleasures that this civilization can throw onto us and yet I found myself asking some deeper inner questions amidst this state of plenty.

Most of us sleep walk through life.

Now some people may take offense at this statement, but if we look closely, then one does realize that most of our responses to life’s deeper questions have been “automatic”. We plan for business outcomes, projects and even money making schemes. We plan for annual priorities or goals at office, in essence we plan for everything - yet how many of us plan for life?

During younger days, the thirst for newer experiences takes us places and when we get a little older the fascination towards nature decreases in intensity and we turn towards the very real and practical problems of getting by both financially and otherwise – through the quagmire that is life…

I often remember the fascination I held for the celestial bodies (naw… I am not referring to those originating in Bollywood or Hollywood) – often looking at them through home made telescopes and wondering if there is anyone out there. Flights of imagination, fancy produced fantastic creatures which lived in oceans of Venus and of exotic creatures from Mars… Alas the illusion is broken when one gets older. The world of elders is much more practical

There are more practical things to worry about – the EMI for the house, buying things which we don’t need to impress people we don’t know or even if knew – wouldn’t like to be associated with… and the innocence is lost. We no longer question whether anyone lives on the moon or planets or if there is life “elsewhere”. We even stop planning long term.

I remember during my childhood – of dreams of becoming a scientist, an astronaut, explorer, writer – all at the same time. And now that 20 years have gone by… the dreams are no longer so vivid.

But as we age, our focus shifts. Planning for life is a tough thing. Have you ever asked yourself some really deep questions?

For example, I have tried to enumerate some of them…

What is your deepest desire
What would one like to accomplish in one’s life?
What would one like to accomplish this year?
Where would one like to be in 5 years?
Where would one like to be in 20 years?
What is one really good at?

Obviously there are deeper questions still, such as:

What would one do if one had enough money not to work ever again?
What were one’s dreams when one was younger?
What does one think is impossible for one to do?
What would one do if one won a million dollars?
What would one do if this was the last day of one’s life?
What would one do if one couldn't fail?
What are one’s strengths and talents?
Does one has a wish but doesn’t know how to fulfill it?
What does one admire most about others?
What would one’s ideal lifestyle look like?
What does success mean for one?
What makes one really happy?
Is there anything that needs to be invented?
What does a perfect day look like for one?
What would one do if there were no restrictions?
What really excites one?
What would one be honored and recognized for?
Where does one see one’s life in ten years?
If one were immortal, what would one do with one’s life?
What needs to change to make this a better world?
What would one do if one were Superman?
What is one proud of?
What would one do if one were the President?
What would one like to accomplish this year?
What would one do differently if one could start over again?

To be able to answer such questions, one needs to do a lot more than spend an evening with oneself… it is a journey to one’s inner self… of self-discovery…

How many have undertaken it?

Quantum physics and consciousness

2009-04-13T01:01:00.003+05:30

Today was the day of connecting with inner self. So I spent the afternoon going through some books on consciousness and its connection with quantum physics.

For more than two hundred years Newton’s ideas dictated our world view. Newton declared that everything operates mechanically and can be predicted like clockwork. Science in Newton’s view, being nothing more than the act of observing, meant that this world view was easily perpetuated by independent observers all over the world.

In the late 19th century, science entered into the era of subatomic physics, which changed everything. Scientists discovered that the so-called ‘subatomic particles’ were not particles at all. They behaved like particles when they were measured but they traveled like waves. Quantum theory has changed everything, because what was once a mechanical, external universe has now become a web of intelligence. Science finally admits that the simple act of observing changes the result of any experiment and by extension, that the observer and the observed are not separate.

Quantum physics started in the late nineteenth century and is associated with the work of German physicist Max Planck. In the 1890's Planck set out to explain the phenomenon of blackbody radiation; the observation that the color of light emitted from an object did not change in a linear fashion to its temperature. Planck provided an explanation for the phenomenon in 1900 by postulating that light is emitted or absorbed in packets of definite size, which he called a quanta. Thus light, once considered a wave, was now being described as a particle (photon) in order to solve the riddle of blackbody radiation.

Quantum theory is also generally regarded as one of the most successful scientific theories ever formulated. But while the mathematical description of the quantum world allows the probabilities of experimental results to be calculated with a high degree of accuracy, there is no consensus on what it means in conceptual terms. The issues involved with this apparent conceptual conundrum are discussed in this article by David Pratt - Consciousness, Causality, and Quantum Physics.

According to physicist Leon Lederman there are three qualities we know about quantum theory.

1. It is counterintuitive,
2. It works,
3. It has problems.

Lederman goes on to write, "In spite of the great practical and intellectual success of quantum theory, we cannot be sure we know what the theory means." It is this ambiguity within the "hard" science of physics that has helped initiate a crisis unlike science has ever encountered. Once concerned with the motion and trajectory of particles, physics is now considering questions which would have been labeled as blasphemy throughout academic circles a hundred years ago. Now, numerous physicists are speculating about the nature of reality, the existence of consciousness, even the existence of God.

According to Pratt - According to the conventional interpretation of quantum physics not only is it impossible for us to measure a particle's position and momentum simultaneously with equal precision, a particle does not possess well-defined properties when it is not interacting with a measuring instrument. Furthermore, the uncertainty principle implies that a particle can never be at rest, but is subject to constant fluctuations even when no measurement is taking place, and these fluctuations are assumed to have no causes at all.

Simply speaking, the quantum world is believed to be characterized by absolute indeterminism, intrinsic ambiguity, and irreducible lawlessness. Most physicists are content to accept the assumption of absolute chance. This has important implications in connection with free will.

As the late physicist David Bohm (1984, p. 87) put it: "it is assumed that in any particular experiment, the precise result that will be obtained is completely arbitrary in the sense that it has no relationship whatever to anything else that exists in the world or that ever has existed."

It is widely accepted that consciousness or, more generally, mental activity is in some way correlated to the behavior of the material brain. Since quantum theory is the most fundamental theory of matter that is currently available, it is a legitimate question to ask whether quantum theory can help us to understand consciousness. Several approaches answering this question affirmatively, proposed in recent decades, have been surveyed in this excellent article - Quantum Approaches to Consciousness.

According to Mark Bancroft in Quantum Physics & Consciousness - "Quantum physics has directly challenged the meaning of matter for more than fifty years. Being defined as, "Something that occupies space and can be perceived by one or more senses; a physical body, a physical substance, or the universe as a whole.” Thus, matter may also mean the entire universe; including "'not-real' stuff". The atom was considered to be the indivisible building block of the universe up until the discovery of the electron. Now, particle physicists postulate that there are sixty-one elementary particles which make up all matter in the universe."

On a side track - Professor of Mathematical Physics, Frank Tipler, confidently proclaims that physics can and will lead to the immortality of humankind. He shares on page three of his book - The Physics of Immortality.

According to Dream Manifesto - Reality is never experienced on an exclusively personal level. The 21st century has witnessed the introduction of new ideas about how we fundamentally view reality. However, all we can know of the world in an absolute sense comes from our own sensory perceptions and the mental constructions we build around them. Behind these perceptions lies pure consciousness. Quantum physicists have shown that consciousness itself - something you have in infinite supply - is the basic stuff of the entire universe.

Quantum physics is a branch of physics which concerns itself with the study (observation) of the subatomic realm. Physics is defined as, "The science of matter and energy and of interactions between the two. Physical properties, interactions, processes, or laws. The study of the natural or material world and phenomenon." Being a scientific endeavor the above definition appears to fit with the somewhat vague definition of science.

A rather beautiful representation of quantum mechanics and consciousness is given on this website…

And before I close this entry, I must mention Fred Alan Wolf who is a physicist, writer, and lecturer who earned his Ph.D. in theoretical physics at UCLA in 1963. He continues to write, lecture throughout the world, and conduct research on the relationship of quantum physics to consciousness. He is the National Book Award Winning author of taking the Quantum Leap. He is a member of the Martin Luther King, Jr. Collegium of Scholars. More can be found about him on this blog… of course he also has his own blog site J there are a thousand questions which clamor my mind and one day, I intend to ask Dr. Quantum…

Internet and mankind

2009-03-21T23:02:00.001+05:30

Sleeping on something sometimes produces profound thoughts… or so I have heard. During my well earned afternoon siesta today after a rather hectic week at work… the dreams hit on a theme we usually ignore – the internet and its potential impact on our society, culture and civilization.

Over the next several hundred years, as mankind grows in numbers, progresses in technology, and generally, learns how to control its environment with more accuracy and efficiency, the structure of society is likely to change in some very significant ways.

According to Wikipedia –

Prior to the widespread internetworking that led to the Internet, most communication networks were limited by their nature to only allow communications between the stations on the network, and the prevalent computer networking method was based on the central mainframe computer model. Several research programs began to explore and articulate principles of networking between separate physical networks. This led to the development of the packet switching model of digital networking. These research efforts included those of the laboratories of Donald Davies (NPL), Paul Baran (RAND Corporation), and Leonard Kleinrock's MIT and UCLA.

The research led to the development of several packet-switched networking solutions in the late 1960s and 1970s, including ARPANET and the X.25 protocols. Additionally, public access and hobbyist networking systems grew in popularity, including unix-to-unix copy (UUCP) and FidoNet. They were however still disjointed separate networks, served only by limited gateways between networks. This led to the application of packet switching to develop a protocol for inter-networking, where multiple different networks could be joined together into a super-framework of networks. By defining a simple common network system, the Internet protocol suite, the concept of the network could be separated from its physical implementation. This spread of inter-network began to form into the idea of a global inter-network that would be called 'The Internet', and this began to quickly spread as existing networks were converted to become compatible with this. This spread quickly across the advanced telecommunication networks of the western world, and then began to penetrate into the rest of the world as it became the de-facto international standard and global network. However, the disparity of growth led to a digital divide that is still a concern today.

Following commercialization and introduction of privately run Internet Service Providers in the 1980s, and its expansion into popular use in the 1990s, the Internet has had a drastic impact on culture and commerce. This includes the rise of near instant communication by e-mail, text based discussion forums, and the World Wide Web. Investor speculation in new markets provided by these innovations would also lead to the inflation and collapse of the Dot-com bubble, a major market collapse. But despite this, the Internet continues to grow.

Because, of its already noticeable impact on the every day lives of many people, the Internet has attracted attention as something which may well bring about significant changes. The tendency of the Internet to promote connectedness between individuals and its ability to disseminate large and diverse quantities of information has led many theorists to advocate the concepts of the super organism and global brain as descriptions of future human society.

Bill gates, one of the visionaries of our times (and the richest individual for a long time on Forbes Listing) outlines the importance of Internet as –

“The main advantage of any new technology is that it amplifies human potential. In the 20th century, electricity, the telephone, the automobile and the airplane all made the world more accessible to more people, transforming our economy and society in the process. The Internet has the same revolutionary impact--individuals and businesses can overcome geographical, cultural and logistical barriers and improve the way they live and work. Because it amplifies our potential in so many ways, it's possible that the long-term impact of the Internet could equal that of electricity, the automobile and the telephone all rolled together. The Internet brings people closer together. Before the Internet, it was possible to keep in touch with relatives and friends across the country or around the world--but it was also expensive. Today, communicating with a friend in Japan is as easy and cheap as communicating with a friend across town, and families regularly use the Internet to keep in touch with far-flung relatives. Millions of people with shared interests--no matter how obscure--exchange information and build communities through Web sites, email and instant-messaging software. Using innovative accessibility aids, people with disabilities can use the Internet to help overcome barriers that prevent them from leading more productive and fulfilling lives”.

However, the internet is being thought of being much more than just bringing connectedness. What this interaction between individual “cells” represented by individual people and the global mass populations as super organisms has profoundly greater potential than being recognized as such.

Ideas of the human super organism and global brain first appeared in modern form in Herbert Spencer's The Principles of Sociology (1876-96). The super organism idea gained scientific support from the work of the notable Russian biogeochemist Vladimir Vernadsky. He performed groundbreaking studies of the large scale biochemical processes of the earth, and was the first to think of the Earth and all living things as a single biosphere.

While the biosphere concept deals with the Earth as a whole, Vernadsky also coined the term, noosphere, which more specifically denotes "the network of thoughts, information and communication that englobes the planet." This network could only be a phenomenon attributed to humans, and in 1955, Pierre Teilhard de Chardin published his work, The Phenomenon of Man, in which he popularized the term, noosphere, and the concept of the human superorganism and the global brain. Since then, a wide range of thinkers has taken up these concepts and developed them using today's knowledge of the world and humanity.

The most straightforward way of approaching the concept of the human superorganism is through trend. By examining a significant trend throughout the development of living creatures and humanity, in particular, it is possible to extrapolate the development of the human superorganism. This trend has been for systems of single entities acting separately to combine into systems of many entities acting in cooperation. The many-entity system can then be viewed as a single, larger entity, often with significant qualities which cannot be attributed to the individual entities making up the system.

In evolutionary terms, this tendency of individual entities to combine to form larger, more complex entities manifests itself further in the structure of multicelled organisms. The single cell organisms, which existed before the development of multicelled organisms, realized a distinct survival advantage by cooperating with other single cell organisms to satisfy their basic needs. The level of cooperation between single celled organisms evolved until the cooperative units could be viewed as single entities or multicell organisms.

Speculating about the future development of humanity, proponents of the superorganism concept notice this same trend in human societies with modern free market economies. In these societies, individuals acting for their own benefit often find that cooperation with another individual serves to further the individual interests of both parties. Indeed, this concept has been developing for millennia and has reached the point where people spend the majority of their lives specializing in one area of expertise. People provide work in narrow areas that somehow benefit others and contract with others to provide for their needs in all other areas.

The incredible rate at which scientific discoveries and technology advances are made today ensures that the need to specialize will only increase. As humans become even more specialized in narrow fields of expertise, the need for cooperation becomes even greater. In general, the more a person has specialized in one field, the less they know about other fields, and the more they must rely on others to provide knowledge or services in other fields. In this manner, the complexity of societal interactions and cooperation is constantly increasing with developments in science and technology.

Thus, we are reminded of the single cell organisms whose level of cooperation increased to the point where all cooperating cells could be seen as a single, more complex multicell organism. In the same way, if one assumes that the progress of humanity will continue in the manner we have seen throughout history, we can extrapolate the development of a human superorganism. Such a superorganism would result from the highly complex interactions and cooperation of the human individuals as they each act naturally in their own best interests.

The guiding intellect of this human superorganism can be defined as the global brain. This global brain is likely to have qualities which cannot be attributed to individual humans. Just as a cell cannot comprehend the concept of a human or of sentience, we may not be able to fully understand the nature of the superorganism and the global brain. However, one can hope that our sentience and investigative nature might give us more success than the cell.

To understand the influence of the Internet of the global brain it is necessary to understand the current state of the global brain. As witnessed to by all the present strife in the world, it is evident that the global brain, if at all existent, is still in a very primitive form. While there is a reasonable level of cooperation among members of some countries, cooperation among member of different societies is still quite limited by language and cultural differences. We see fighting, terrorism and general strife in many parts of the world in the name of language, religion and culture. Also, at least half of the people in the world are not in political or economic situations in which they can participate in a superorganism and global brain. Clearly, humanity has far to progress and many obstacles to overcome before the global brain can emerge as a coherent entity.

The advent of the Internet in the past decade has caused quite a stir among thinkers sympathetic to the global brain concept. It is thought that the Internet might be the ingredient needed to bring about the emergence of the global brain as a coherent entity. The reason the Internet inspires such optimism is due to its likeness to human brains and to its globalness.

Firstly, the organization of information on the World Wide Web in hypertext format closely resembles the associative connections formed by neurons in the brain.

Secondly, the Internet network encompasses the entire globe, holding the possibility for linking all humans with a means of virtually instant interaction.

Thirdly, it could conceivably store all human knowledge and provide instant access to that knowledge to its users.

This is an unparalleled trend in human evolution. Never have we, as a species, had instant access to such amount of information. Besides simply noticing the trend of today's civilization toward developing a global brain, some thinkers have suggested specific ways in which this might come about through development of the Internet. This is important for the healthy development of the global brain. The global brain must develop as a natural process that benefits individuals and never as an end in itself. This helps to guarantee that human individuals will not find themselves being oppressed for the "good" of the global brain.

Various information gathering mechanisms can be viewed as ways of improving the efficiency of interaction between people who are cooperating to perform various actions. The knowledge provided by a person with a certain specialty is more readily available for use by others who might need it. As such, the Internet, by dramatically increasing the level of cooperation between individuals, could possibly lead to a solidification of the global brain as a coherent entity.

In fact, some thinkers argue that the advent of internet may have even more profound impact on humanity than splitting of the atom!

“The fact that everything is possible on the Internet reveals mankind's true essence, the aspiration towards freedom.” Pierre Lévy, “Collective Intelligence: A Civilization”

The ubiquity of computers and access to the Internet has put the greatest libraries, image databases, and interactive tools at the fingertips of most artists working today. As a result, traditional artistic practice is exploding as artists explore the potential of these new technologies and incorporate them into their working methodologies.

I-Mod talks about the concept of Meta-brain - Mankind and it's Meta Brain, the Internet.

There is however, as usual, a contrary view as well as this article on cracked.com highlights it - 7 Reasons the 21st Century is Making You Miserable… or this one - Internet: Amazing tool of mankind in the 2lst century but…

As Bill Gates puts it - The Internet has already revolutionized the way we live and work, but it is still in its infancy. In the coming years, a combination of cheap and powerful computing devices, fast and convenient Internet access, and software innovations could make the Internet as common and powerful a resource as electricity is today.

Mankind would never be the same again… although that may not always be a good thing all the time. But as history of dinosaurs has shown us… what does not evolve, perishes!

Time shifting - How to Control the Speed of Time

2008-12-21T22:27:00.002+05:30

This afternoon, I was reading about the concept of time and how it’s flow or rather the “perception” of its flow can be manipulated. I came across the concept of time shifting… now don’t get me wrong… I know all those sci-fi fans would be drooling over the concept of time travel. Unfortunately, for them, I am going to talk about something much more mundane…

The concept of Time shifting grew out of the workshops Dr. Rechtschaffen’s leads on the creative use of time. Unlike time-management courses which teach people how to work efficiently at an ever-accelerating pace, Rechtschaffen’s basic premise is that it is crucial to learn how to “timeshift,” to move smoothly from fast to medium to slow and back again. Each speed has its proper place, he believes, but the rhythms of industrialized societies encourage us to live in “fast forward” virtually all the time. He asserts that we pay a heavy price for doing so.

In this interview with Dr. Daniel Redwood, Dr. Rechtschaffen discussed the patterns of overwork endemic to modern culture, and presents practical ways to change these behaviors. In answer to a question about attention deficit disorder, he speaks of the condition as a rhythmic disturbance brought on when children try to entrain to the speedy rhythms around them, and offers advice to parents seeking alternatives to Ritalin.

Staying busy always a positive thing?

RECHTSCHAFFEN does not think so. He goes on to say, “Too often we keep busy in order to avoid feeling our real feelings. When we’re in a crisis, whether it’s a death in the family, the breakup of a relationship, a bankruptcy, or whatever, people tell us, “Stay busy, it will keep your mind off things.” Painful feelings are difficult to face, and mostly we’d rather not feel them.”

So we end up substituting action for contemplation. We get busy, speed up, turn on the television, do the chores, surf the Internet, and go to the gym, anything but feel the painful feelings. We want to experience pleasant emotions, particularly joy and love, but grief and pain are also a very real part of life. It’s essential that we not cut off these feelings or cover them up with ceaseless activity. I found this view on typical avoidance of unpleasant feelings very common amongst humanity.

It is very important to go through and come out from every tunnel of darkness that we encounter. To solve a problem, one has to recognize it. To avoid is not to mitigate and simply pushing the dirt beneath the carpet may make a house look clean without actually achieving cleanliness.

RECHTSCHAFFEN further goes on to clarify – “I want to make it clear that I’m not saying we need to do everything slowly. That’s why I called my book Time shifting rather than Downshifting. Time shifting means constantly changing our rhythm, slowing or accelerating in order to feel present and in the flow of the moment. There is a proper time and place for doing things quickly. It’s just that in our society, we seem to lock in to one particular speed, which is fast-forward. Going full speed ahead all the time creates all sorts of problems. The physical manifestations of a high-speed, high-stress life can include high blood pressure and heart disease. And then, there is the emotional toll. You can’t stop and smell the roses when you’re always going 65 miles an hour.”

This, I believe, is at the heart of the matter for most of corporate workers. We are being goaded into working ever more “efficiently” at an ever more “increasing” pace without a thought for where we are going.

Research has shown that approximately 40 percent of the average American’s “free” time goes straight down the tube or television. And again, it serves to remove us from feeling, from the direct experience of our own lives.

Are there practical ways to re-connect, to shift toward life-affirming rhythms?

According to RECHTSCHAFFEN – “There are many ways to do it. Meditation, relaxation, listening to music, taking a walk in nature. Sometimes the best thing is to just literally sit still in one place for an hour. This sounds simple, but for many people it’s quite difficult. There was a woman in one of my Omega workshops, an environmental scientist who led a workaholic’s life: up at five in the morning, kids fed and off to school, work and research all day, then writing up the results in the evening. As an assignment, I told her to sit–just sit there–for an hour under a tree. Describing it afterwards, she said that at first she was more frightened than she had ever been in her entire life. Having the whole familiar structure of busyness removed was truly terrifying. But at some point she had a breakthrough. She felt transported back to a wonderful childhood experience. By sitting still, she had entrained to a slower rhythm, a natural rhythm. Everyone needs to find ways to do this.”

Believe me, I have tried this personally and found it difficult to sit quietly for one hour. There is always a sense that there is something more important to do and time is running out. A classic behavioral pattern wherein one is always trying to outrun – well himself…

So, has technology made things easy?

One would think with all the technology around, we should be having more time for slowing down, taking life easier. But have you seen anybody with high exposure to technology leading easier life? We all have our smart phones or blackberries. The urge to remain connected, checking emails every 15 minutes, being on the call at hours which a couple of decades ago we would have called unearthly – are all manifestations of increasing pace of life. We take laptops to our vacations, are expected to be available 24 x 7… I wonder whether technology has really helped!

Statistics in Rechtschaffen’s book to the effect that we could reproduce the 1948 U.S. standard of living working half the time it took back in 1948. So the question remains - with all the “labor-saving” devices that have emerged in the past half-century, why are we working longer hours?

RECHTSCHAFFEN has a rather curious and simple answer – “We have made many unwise choices. Basically, we have decided to trade our time for more goods and services. That statistic can be found in Juliet Schor’s book, The Overworked American. It means that if we chose to arrange things differently, we theoretically could work four-hour days or take lots of long vacations. There’s something very appealing about that.”

So why do people continue to work such long hours?

When someone knows that staying longer at work will bring him or her increased income, there is a very strong incentive to stay longer and longer. An internal conflict develops. The person asks, “Do I leave work now and spend some time with my kids before they go to bed, maybe read them a story, or do I keep going on this project here at work?” More and more people are choosing to stay at work. And definitely, this is true for people in government and in social movements, but it’s also true in the healing arts (doctors, surgeons), in social services, and many other places in our society. Seeing the value in the work we do, and recognizing that there is always more to be done, we find ourselves on a treadmill that never stops.

It’s important to remember that productivity is not necessarily related to the amount of time one spends on the job. At one point we had a staff member in my previous organization who was questioned because he wasn’t spending as much time in office as others expected him to, as much as his predecessor had. I knew, however, that he was a superbly productive worker, in large part because he set aside time for thinking and long-range planning. The glorification of “face time,” where workers coming in early or staying on the job late are praised, but others, producing as much or more, are not, is counterproductive in the extreme.

Why do we feel that “time is money” is the most insidious belief in society?

RECHTSCHAFFEN –

“Because this concept severely devalues human interactions. It wasn’t long ago that everyone charged by the job; now we charge by the hour. There are lawyers who charge by the minute. I called up my lawyer not long ago, and he greeted me by asking, “How’s it going?” He charges $5 a minute. I found myself not wanting to “waste time” telling him how I was feeling (which I would of course do in any other situation), because I don’t want to be paying that kind of money to share my feelings with him. When I call him, I make a list of the points to cover, and I try to cover them as quickly as possible. What happens is that what should, hopefully, be a caring human connection, becomes little more than an information transfer. And that is a very high price to pay.”

“Someone who bills by the minute, or the hour, starts to think, “I make $100 an hour. Our baby sitter makes $10 an hour. If I work six more minutes, that pays for the sitter staying another hour. If I work for another hour, I can pay for a sitter, a cleaning lady, and a cook.” This line of thought keeps on going. “If I work another week that will pay for a chauffeur and a limousine. That will get me to work faster, and I can work while I’m being driven to the office, so I’ll be even more efficient and make even more money.”

The problem is, we lose sight of our original goals. The goal is not to make money. The goal is to have the time and enjoyment that money can, in theory, provide. But if we just stay at work, earning more and more money, and seldom taking the time to enjoy it, to read that story to the child, to take that vacation on a secluded island, then what is the point of it all? It’s a question that needs to be asked. In my workshops on the use of time, these are some of the questions we explore.”

So do the rich don’t necessarily get to enjoy all their money?

Some do. Most don’t. There are complex factors that come into play for people who make lots of money. I think it is a fair generalization to say that instead of having more time, most wealthy people have less. It is very time-consuming to manage and watch your money and investments. Also, being rich can become your identity. Vacations start to look like a loss of money-producing time. Money generates its own set of demands. These are not non-negotiable demands, but it takes real strength to resist them.

The question that arises is about Attention deficit disorder as a rhythm disturbance, caused by entraining to society’s speedy pace from birth. How can parents help their children to avoid this pattern?

RECHTSCHAFFEN: This is a real challenge, because there are so many influences in the culture that encourage the child to go faster and faster. The pace and rhythm of society continue to accelerate, and children try to keep up. Some have more difficulty than others. Ironically, in the United States these children are treated with Ritalin, a drug that speeds up the nervous system. Paradoxically, the children slow down. In my view, this apparent contradiction results from a speedup that enables the children, like a racing engine, to shift up, get in gear, and thus be in sync with what’s going on around them.

A better alternative is to just teach them to slow down. It takes real effort, but children can be taught mindfulness practices, dance to slow music, sit still for readings, and accept nap times. Today’s childhood toys–computer games, instructional tapes, television–all entrain children to a rapid rhythm. We need to offer them other activities that counterbalance this.

I think it’s very important for us to view all activities as worthwhile, whether it’s driving to work, washing the dishes, cleaning the bedroom, or anything else.

So how can washing the dishes, cleaning the bedroom, and the other “mundane” chores of life become enjoyable?

That is the quintessential question. It’s a matter of mindfulness, of focusing on where you are rather than constantly imagining the future or reliving the past. It’s about being in the moment. This is a challenge for anyone who seriously undertakes it.

So in the end, the simple mantra is to view life in perspective. Always trying to speed up and do more in less amount of time is not going to yield the desired benefits. Making more time out of 24 hours may not be such a good idea after all…

What is time?

2008-11-23T13:53:00.000+05:30

"The most exciting phrase to hear in science, the one that heralds new discoveries, is not 'Eureka!' (I found it!) But 'That's funny ..." Isaac Asimov

As I sit on a Sunday morning, pondering about fast the weekend went by and how less the time seems to be when you are having fun… a thought struck me – what is time? Often the immediate concept that comes to mind is a clock, watch or a calendar, but what really is time?

According to John Sankey, to physicists, time is defined by quantum mechanics. A photon with energy h (Planck's constant) behaves as though it were oscillating once per second. Modern atomic clocks are based on this. Time direction is something else. It is based on information, which sits uneasily in the world of physics. But, any quantum system must have an arrow of time.

You often hear: “I have no time.”, “Time is money.”, “I need to be on time” and so on.

I have read through some scientific literature and what the scientific community considers as time if even more confusing than our everyday common sense notions about it, for example the Einstein theory of relativity makes the subject for ordinary people just even more confused.

What if time were to stop?

As L. Ron Hubbard (1951) had put it - The illusion called time is composed of altering of the particles position in space” and “Alteration is the basic manifestation of time. Well, he was much more of fantasy novel writer than actual scientist (some may dispute the fact).

Everything moves, all the time. Time is measured from instruments which from beginning come from natural movements such as the sun and the planet as well as the moon. When we think of time we tend to think of the ways in which we measure the passing of time, such as a clock or watch, or perhaps a measured interval of time such as an hour or minute, but not of time itself. So what is time? Exactly what is it that we are measuring?

We can begin to answer the question with the basic description that we are measuring the interval between events, using units that we have chosen for the purpose. We may say, for example, that the next train will be due in 5 minutes. While this information may be very useful for telling us how late the train is when it eventually arrives, it does nothing to describe just what it is that we are measuring. We want to know exactly what the 'interval' is.

Time can seem as solid as a rock. In fact, it's a lot more squishy. Our calendars are imperfect. We need a leap day to keep them in line with the seasons, and even so, time will eventually get away from us. "If you feel there aren't enough hours in a day, just wait," says Max Tegmark, a cosmologist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. "In a few hundred million years, tidal friction will have slowed Earth's rotation to make the day 25 hours long."

If that doesn't make your head spin, consider that in physics, motion alters time; in psychology, different stimuli alter our perception of time; and in philosophy, there's disagreement on whether time is even real. "In terms of our inner lives, no time exists except for what is happening in the present moment," says Joan Halifax Roshi, a Zen Buddhist teacher.

Whew!

And I thought time was such a simple matter to ponder about…

In physics and other sciences, time is considered one of the few fundamental quantities. Time is used to define other quantities – such as velocity – and defining time in terms of such quantities would result in circularity of definition. An operational definition of time, wherein one says that observing a certain number of repetitions of one or another standard cyclical event (such as the passage of a free-swinging pendulum) constitutes one standard unit such as the second, is highly useful in the conduct of both advanced experiments and everyday affairs of life. The operational definition leaves aside the question whether there is something called time, apart from the counting activity just mentioned, that flows and that can be measured. Investigations of a single continuum called space-time brings the nature of time into association with related questions into the nature of space, questions that have their roots in the works of early students of natural philosophy.

Among prominent philosophers, there are two distinct viewpoints on time.

One view is that time is part of the fundamental structure of the universe, a dimension in which events occur in sequence. Time travel, in this view, becomes a possibility as other "times" persist like frames of a film strip, spread out across the time line. Sir Isaac Newton subscribed to this realist view, and hence it is sometimes referred to as Newtonian time.

The opposing view is that time does not refer to any kind of "container" that events and objects "move through", nor to any entity that "flows", but that it is instead part of a fundamental intellectual structure (together with space and number) within which humans sequence and compare events. This second view, in the tradition of Gottfried Leibniz and Immanuel Kant, holds that time is neither an event nor a thing, and thus is not itself measurable nor can it be traveled.

According to Lee Smolin, The debate between absolute and relational time echoes down the history of physics and philosophy, and confronts us now, at the end of the twentieth century, as we try to understand what notion of space and time is to replace Newton's. If there is no absolute time, then Newton's laws of motion don't make sense. What must replace them has to be a different kind of law that can make sense if one measures time by any clock. That is, what is required is a democratic rather than an autocratic law, in which any clock's time, imperfect as it may be, is as good as any other's. Leibniz was never able to invent such a law. But Einstein did, and it is indeed one of the great achievements of his theory of general relativity that a way was found to express the laws of motion so that they make sense whichever clock one uses to embody them with meaning. Paradoxically, this is done by eliminating any reference to time from the basic equations of the theory. The result is that time cannot be spoken about generally or abstractly; we can only describe how the universe changes in time if we first tell the theory exactly which real physical processes are to be used as clocks to measure the passage of time.

The problem is that general relativity is only half of the revolution of twentieth-century physics, for there is also the quantum theory. And quantum theory, which was originally developed to explain the properties of atoms and molecules, took over completely Newton's notion of an absolute ideal time.

So, in theoretical physics, we have at present not one theory of nature but two theories: relativity and quantum mechanics, and they are based on two different notions of time.

“In the theory of relativity, the concept of time begins with the Big Bang the same way as parallels of latitude begin at the North Pole. You cannot go further north than the North Pole,” says Kari Enqvist, Professor of Cosmology.

One of the most peculiar qualities of time is the fact that it is measured by motion and it also becomes evident through motion.

According to the general theory of relativity, the development of space may result in the collapse of the universe. All matter would shrink into a tiny dot again, which would end the concept of time as we know it.

No general agreements here, although the search for the grand unified theory is on the achievement does not appear to be any closer still.

There is of course, like anything else under the purview of human thought, an alternate, more human approach towards time…

Spiritual guide and alternative medicine expert Deepak Chopra, who warned of the dangers of a hectic lifestyle. "People who feel that they are 'running out of time' have speeded up their biological clocks," says Chopra. "They have faster heart rates and jittery platelets with high levels of adrenaline. When they drop dead from a premature heart attack, they have literally 'run out of time.'"

Perhaps the most surprising thing we heard about time came from a scientist and entrepreneur who studies aging. "Time has little impact on biology," says Michael West, a gerontologist who teaches at the University of California, Berkeley, and founded the biotech company Geron. That sounds reassuring at first--but it's only because we're pre-programmed to fall apart anyway. "From a gerontologist's standpoint, biological time is not wear-and-tear, it's a genetic program," says West. "It's sort of like a time bomb. The cells are programmed to last just long enough for us to rear children, and no longer."

If now is both now and forever, as C.S. Lewis suggested, then the religious view may not be so different than the scientific view. Physics tells us that all moments exist equally, at once--it's only our consciousness that distinguishes the present from the past or future.

According to The Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy, “Time has been studied by philosophers and scientists for 2,500 years, and thanks to this attention it is much better understood today. Nevertheless, many issues remain to be resolved. Here is a short list of the most important ones—what time actually is; whether time exists when nothing is changing; what kinds of time travel are possible; why time has an arrow; whether the future and past are real; how to analyze the metaphor of time's flow; whether the future will be infinite; whether there was time before the Big Bang; whether tensed or tenseless concepts are semantically basic; what is the proper formalism or logic for capturing the special role that time plays in reasoning; and what are the neural mechanisms that account for our experience of time”.

There are 3 competing theories:

--> Presentists argue that necessarily only present objects and present experiences are real, and we conscious beings recognize this in the special "vividness" of our present experience

--> According to the growing-universe or growing-block theory, the past and present are both real, but the future is not because the future is indeterminate or merely potential

--> The third and more popular theory is that there are no significant ontological differences among present, past and future because the differences are merely subjective. This view is called "the block universe theory" or "eternalism."

Although there are theories of how to solve a specific problem about time, it is always better to knit together solutions to several problems. Ideally, the goal is to produce a theory of time that will solve in a systematic way the constellation of problems involving time. What are those problems?

--> One is to clarify the relationship between time and the mind. Does time exist for beings that have no minds? It is easy to confuse time itself with the perception of time.

--> Another problem is to decide which of our intuitions about time should be retained. Some of these intuitions may reflect deep insights into the nature of time, and others may be faulty ideas inherited from our predecessors. It is not obvious which is which. For one example, if we have the intuition that time flows, but our science implies otherwise, then which view should get priority? Philosophers of time must solve the problem of how to treat our intuitions

--> A third problem for a philosophical theory of time is to clarify what physical science presupposes and implies about time. Most all philosophers of time claim that philosophical theories should be consistent with physical science, or, if not, then they must accept the heavy burden of proof to justify the inconsistency

A philosophical theory of time should describe the relationship between instants and events. Does the instant that we label as "11:01 A.M." for a certain date exist independently of the events that occur then? In other words, can time exist if no event is happening? This question or problem raises the thorny metaphysical issue of absolute vs. relational theories of time.

The article is profound in its depth and I strongly recommend reading, though not on a Sunday afternoon, when one is more attuned towards a lazy stroll through time rather than an activity which challenges the one’s intellect and imagination both.

Although we understand that Time is a component of a measuring system used to sequence events, to compare the durations of events and the intervals between them, and to quantify the motions of objects, Time has been a major subject of religion, philosophy, and science, but defining time in a non-controversial manner applicable to all fields of study has consistently eluded the greatest scholars. Also, throughout my readings, the concept of time, which we all take for granted, is still far from being agreed upon by most of the branches of human thought from Physics to religion. It is profoundly disturbing and humbling to know that we know how to split an atom, reach the moon and gaze at the depth of cosmos, we are still not quite sure what time is… although we can experience its effects on everything we see around us…

Lemuria!

2008-11-01T21:02:00.000+05:30

The other day, a television channel was showing the discovery of the now underwater palace of an ASUR king dating back to Ramayana period. The so called archeological “find” was in the Indian Ocean.

Lemuria is the name of a hypothetical "lost land" variously located in the Indian and Pacific Oceans. The concept's 19th century origins lie in attempts to account for discontinuities in biogeography. The concept of Lemuria has been rendered obsolete by modern understanding of plate tectonics. Although sunken continents do exist in the Pacific and the Kerguelen Plateau in the Indian Ocean — there is no known geological formation under the Indian or Pacific Oceans that corresponds to the hypothetical Lemuria.

According to a Wikipedia entry - Though Lemuria has passed out of the realm of conventional science, it has been adopted by writers involved in the occult, as well as some Tamil writers of India. Accounts of Lemuria differ, but all share a common belief that a continent existed in ancient times and sank beneath the ocean as a result of a geological, often cataclysmic, change.

The world wouldn’t be the place what it is today without mythology. Every culture has had its own set of mythological beliefs and one of most enduring and long lasting one has been relating to Lemuria and Mu!

I am not going to debate the authenticity of such legends and myths – but they do have a role to play in human culture. Without them, the world would be such a dull place.

And more often than not, every myth has at least a grain of truth behind, however much it has been distorted due to passage of time and with every telling.

Lemuria was an ancient civilization which existed prior to and during the time of Atlantis. Physically, it is believed that Lemuria existed largely in the Southern Pacific, between North America and Asia/Australia. Lemuria is also sometimes referred to as Mu, or the Motherland (of Mu). At its peak of civilization, the Lemurian people were both highly evolved and very spiritual. While concrete physical evidence of this ancient continent may be difficult to find, many people "know" that they have a strong connection to Lemuria.

There is a curious timeline of Lemuria which can be found at this location. It starts at about 35 million BC and shows progress from Etheric – Reptoid/ Dinod through Hybornea and Lemuria around between 900,000 to 25,000 BC. That’s an incredibly long period of time for a civilization. A society has to be incredibly resilient and stable to have survived that long a period. That’s, in some cases, longer than the lifespan of certain species on this planet!

Take the case of our civilization – the modern civilization as we call it and its roots are no more than 2,000 years and there also there are so many gaps!

Throughout history, various authors have attempted to uncover, unravel, understand and remember the civilization we know as Lemuria. This is no easy task. Any kind of Lemurian "factual" information is based on assumed information of which the source could be virtually anything. Not only that, but Lemuria existed so long ago that it is amazing any information at all can be gleaned from history. Books about Lemuira generally fall into two categories: those that try to investigate the existence of Lemuria using some kind of scientific method, and those that try to remember Lemuria through past life recall, channeled information or other metaphysical approach. Both methods have value, and can offer the seeker of truth valuable information.

The methods & information channels described above may be controversial to say the least. However, as readings in mythology, they are a fascinating study.

There is an excellent FAQ about Lemuria at this location.

Now you may be, and rightfully so, wondering why I am “wasting” my time writing about myths and legends. If the truth be told, there is a touch of romance with history that one indulges in while going through such pseudo historical readings. Like I said, the world would be a dull place without such myths and there is some evidence of that. Now that we have “grown” as a civilization and consider the old myths as well – myths – we are inventing new ones – the so called techno-myths – outbursts about aliens, techno wonders, etc are an extension of this collective sense of longing for something beyond the mundane world that we live in…
In my coming posts, I will explore a little bit more about mythology and its origin

Happy Diwali!

2008-10-28T10:08:00.000+05:30

Here’s wishing a very happy Diwali to you and your family!

Deepavali, or Diwali, is a major Indian holiday, and a significant festival in Hinduism, Sikhism, Buddhism, and Jainism. Many legends are associated with Diwali. Today it is celebrated by Hindus, Jains and Sikhs across the globe as the "Festival of Lights," where the lights or lamps signify victory of good over the evil within every human being. Diwali is celebrated on the fifteenth day of the month Kartika.

In many parts of India, it is the homecoming of King Rama of Ayodhya after a 14-year exile in the forest, after he defeated the evil Ravana. The people of Ayodhya (the capital of his kingdom) welcomed Rama by lighting rows (avali) of lamps (deeva), thus its name: Deepavali. This word, in due course, became Diwali in Hindi. But, in South Indian languages, the word did not undergo any change, and hence the festival is called Deepavali in southern India. There are many different observances of the holiday across India.

In India, Diwali is now considered to be a national festival, and the aesthetic aspect of the festival is enjoyed by most Indians regardless of faith.

Virtual worlds and their evolution…

2008-10-27T09:45:00.000+05:30

As humankind progresses, there are different avenues for social interaction which are becoming possible. The basic intrinsic need of human beings – is to interact. Higher from basic food and nourishment needs, arise the need to interact with fellow beings or fellow intelligences…

The need to interact with intelligence or sentient being is progressively seen in our search for intelligences from beyond our own world. Search for extra-terrestrial life is an extension of humankind’s desire to seek intelligence. In a manner, this direct result of our deep seated, is almost base fear of being alone.

Earlier, the speed of communication was as fast as one could run or as far as one could shout and carry his own voice – of course I am not counting telepathy here since majority of human beings are denied this facility. This changed with the technological revolution (not OUR technological revolution) in form of mastery of fire. This afforded, among other things, the ability to send out signals through fire and smoke which could be seen over large distances. Domestication of horses also helped to a large extent. The speed of communication was the speed of the fastest horse!

Things have advanced consideration from that point. Today, we have reached a stage where we have almost instantaneous communication with anyone on the planet is possible. First the telegraph, then the radio and telephone brought about an unprecedented revolution in the way people communicated.

They coupled with email (considerably later), were in fact, the ‘killer applications” of the 19th and 20th century!

Development and literal explosion of computing age coupled with networking capabilities have taken this to the next level. Now we have computers talking to other computers – almost instantaneously and the social consequences could not be far behind.

With the coming of gaming industry onto computer platform, we have witnessed another social revolution, of a sort, in terms of virtual worlds.

A virtual world is a computer-based simulated environment intended for its users to inhabit and interact via avatars. These avatars are usually depicted as textual, two-dimensional, or three-dimensional graphical representations, although other forms are possible (auditory and touch sensations for example). Some, but not all, virtual worlds allow for multiple users.

According to an article on Wikipedia – “The concept of virtual worlds predates computers and could be traced in some sense to Pliny. The mechanical-based 1962 Sensorama machine used the senses of vision, sound, balance, smells and touch (via wind) to simulate its world. Among the earliest virtual worlds to be implemented by computers were not games but generic virtual reality simulators, such as Ivan Sutherland's 1968 virtual reality device. This form of virtual reality is characterized by bulky headsets and other types of sensory input simulation. Contemporary virtual worlds, multi-user online virtual environments, emerged mostly independently of this virtual reality technology research, fueled instead by the gaming industry but drawing on similar inspiration. While classic sensory-imitating virtual reality relies on tricking the perceptual system into experiencing an immersive environment, virtual worlds typically rely on mentally and emotionally engaging content which gives rise to an immersive experience. “

I won’t go much into the detailed history of virtual worlds – there is sufficient literature already available in the article quoted above. But the core philosophy behind virtual worlds is that the computer accesses a computer-simulated world and presents perceptual stimuli to the user, who in turn can manipulate elements of the modeled world and thus experiences telepresence to a certain degree.

As virtual world is a fairly vague and inclusive term, the above can generally be divided along a spectrum ranging from:

- massively multiplayer online role-playing games or MMORPGs where the user playing a specific character is a main feature of the game (World Of Warcraft for example).

- massively multiplayer online real-life/rogue-like games or MMORLGs, the user can edit and alter their avatar at will, allowing them to play a more dynamic role, or multiple roles

Some would argue that the MMO versions of RTS and FPS games are also virtual worlds if the world editors allow for open editing of the terrains if the "source file" for the terrain is shared. Emerging concepts include basing the terrain of such games on real satellite photos, such as those available through the Google Maps API or through a simple virtual geocaching of "easter eggs" on WikiMapia or similar mashups, where permitted.

Such modeled worlds may appear similar to the real world or instead depict fantasy worlds. The model world may simulate rules based on the real world or some hybrid fantasy world. Example rules are gravity, topography, locomotion, real-time actions, and communication. Communication between users has ranged from text, graphical icons, visual gesture, sound, and rarely, forms using touch and balance senses.

There are many different types of virtual worlds; however there are six features all of them have in common:

1. Shared Space: the world allows many users to participate at once.

2. Graphical User Interface: the world depicts space visually, ranging in style from 2D "cartoon" imagery to more immersive 3D environments.

3. Immediacy: interaction takes place in real time.

4. Interactivity: the world allows users to alter, develop, build, or submit customized content.

5. Persistence: the world's existence continues regardless of whether individual users are logged in.

6. Socialization/Community: the world allows and encourages the formation of in-world social groups like teams, guilds, clubs, cliques, housemates, neighborhoods, etc

There is a virtual plethora of information available on virtual worlds at the virtual worlds review.

The use of virtual worlds in training arena is picking up fast, including military training. Simulators for various types of aircrafts are, at the end of the day, a kind of virtual world only.

If we speculate further, the kind of social revolution that has come about due to virtual worlds is tremendous. People can meet over media which is more immersive than ever and I think I have seen the future of virtual worlds as well – for those who are followers of the Star Trek – holodeck is the ultimate expression of virtual world!

Personally, I eagerly await the development of virtual world technology to holodeck level. It would afford those who are infirm or otherwise unable to travel due to certain kind of disability – to visit people, culture and places they would otherwise have never dreamt of…

Back to the moon…

2008-10-26T18:25:00.000+05:30

India, with its launch of the unmanned moon probe entered the race of return to the moon – earth’s only and somewhat abnormally large – natural satellite.

Abnormal? What is so abnormal about our moon – which has inspired different emotions in humankind throughout the ages – from awe, superstition to much more tender emotions such as love, etc. well, as it happens, the Moon happens to quite large as compared to its capital body around which is revolves, in fact it is the fifth largest natural satellite in the entire SOL’s (sun) Solar System. Take for example other large moons of the solar system such as Triton, Titan, IO, Europa, Cheron (what!!! – you didn’t know that Pluto had a moon too?) – They are all huge, but pale when compared to their “parent” body. In fact, Jupiter and Saturn are so big (full of gas) that their moons or satellites are very small indeed when compared to their own mass or size. The earth’s moon, in comparison, is very large indeed – in terms of diameter - a little more than a quarter that of the Earth. This means that the Moon's volume is about 2 percent that of Earth and the pull of gravity at its surface about 17 percent that of the Earth. In fact, in astronomy, it is found quite astonishing to have such a large body orbiting a relatively small core planet. Indeed, sometimes, from galactic perspective, Earth-Moon system is often referred to as the double-planet system.

By the middle of the 17th century, Galileo and other early astronomers made telescopic observations, noting an almost endless overlapping of craters. It has also been known for more than a century that the Moon is less dense than the Earth. Although a certain amount of information was ascertained about the Moon before the space age, this new era has revealed many secrets barely imaginable before that time. Current knowledge of the Moon is greater than for any other solar system object except Earth.

Various facts, especially the NASA photographs of Apollo missions are lucidly presented in this article by Rosanna L. Hamilton.

But really, how much do we know about our own galactic backyard?

The Moon makes a complete orbit around the Earth every 27.3 days (the orbital period), and the periodic variations in the geometry of the Earth–Moon–Sun system are responsible for the lunar phases that repeat every 29.5 days (the synodic period). The Moon is in synchronous rotation, meaning that it keeps nearly the same face turned towards the Earth at all times. Early in the Moon's history, its rotation slowed and became locked in this configuration as a result of frictional effects associated with tidal deformations caused by the Earth. The far side had never been seen by any human until the launch of moon probes in the last 1950’s.

You can see the Virtual Reality Moon Phase Pictures here.

The Moon is the only celestial body to which humans have travelled and upon which humans have landed. The first artificial object to escape Earth's gravity and pass near the Moon was the Soviet Union's Luna 1, the first artificial object to impact the lunar surface was Luna 2, and the first photographs of the normally occluded far side of the Moon were made by Luna 3, all in 1959. The first spacecraft to perform a successful lunar soft landing was Luna 9, and the first unmanned vehicle to orbit the Moon was Luna 10, both in 1966. The United States (U.S.) Apollo program achieved the only manned missions to date, resulting in six landings between 1969 and 1972. Human exploration of the Moon ceased with the conclusion of the Apollo program, although several countries have announced plans to send people or robotic spacecraft to the Moon – well – India and China are amongst the nations now raring to literally reach for the moon!

Okay, back to moon J

One distinguishing feature of the far side is its almost complete lack of maria. The dark and relatively featureless lunar plains which can clearly be seen with the naked eye are called maria (singular mare), Latin for seas, since they were believed by ancient astronomers to be filled with water. These are now known to be vast solidified pools of ancient basaltic lava. The majority of these lavas erupted or flowed into the depressions associated with impact basins that formed by the collisions of meteors and comets with the lunar surface. Maria are found almost exclusively on the near side of the Moon, with the far side having only a few scattered patches covering only about 2% of its surface compared with about 31% on the near side.

The lighter-colored regions of the Moon are called terrae, or more commonly just highlands, since they are higher than most maria. Several prominent mountain ranges on the near side are found along the periphery of the giant impact basins, many of which have been filled by mare basalt. These are believed to be the surviving remnants of the impact basin's outer rims. In contrast to the Earth, no major lunar mountains are believed to have formed as a result of tectonic events.

The Moon's surface shows obvious evidence of having been affected by impact cratering. Impact craters form when asteroids and comets collide with the lunar surface, and globally about half a million craters with diameters greater than 1 km can be found. Since impact craters accumulate at a nearly constant rate, the number of craters per unit area superposed on a geologic unit can be used to estimate the age of the surface (see crater counting). The lack of an atmosphere, weather and recent geological processes ensures that many of these craters have remained relatively well preserved in comparison to those found on Earth. The largest crater on the Moon, which also has the distinction of being one of the largest known craters in the Solar System, is the South Pole-Aitken basin. This impact basin is located on the far side, between the South Pole and equator, and is some 2,240 km in diameter and 13 km in depth.

Blanketed atop the Moon's crust is a highly comminuted (broken into ever smaller particles) and "impact gardened" surface layer called regolith. Since the regolith forms by impact processes, the regolith of older surfaces is generally thicker than for younger surfaces. In particular, it has been estimated that the regolith varies in thickness from about 3–5 m in the maria, and by about 10–20 m in the highlands. In other words, the soil is thick and slick…

But why the rush of back to moon, why now?

India launched Chandrayaan-1 - in a historic feat, on October 22, 2008 from the Satish Dhawan Space Centre in Sriharikota. The successful launch of India's maiden unmanned moon mission Chandrayaan-1 has catapulted the country into the league of a select group of nations. One of the prime reasons is national pride and then the other is the possibilities it affords. With the western economy in decline and ascendency of India and China in this century, it was only a matter of time before these two nations realized the importance of breaking the bounds of earth’s puny gravity well and soar beyond.

But beyond the political hype and all the aspirations of becoming a superpower, there is a much more practical aspect to race towards the moon.

The Moon holds several minerals and elements not found or manufactured easily on earth. Helium-3 for example. Then there are spin-off benefits from the technology that must be developed to reach moon. The sophistication and cost effectiveness of the journey outwards ultimately holds the key to cheap and profitable exploration of outer space.

India's love fest with deep space has only just begun. It could well become a force to reckon with giving the established space agencies a run for their money as the Indian moon mission is the cheapest till date of all moon missions in this century, but one also which creates a world record of carrying the largest suite of scientific instruments ever to be carried to the moon till date.

And frankly, I would want to see a difference from NASA – whose every mission has to cost a billion dollars and then explode either while leaving or entering earth’s gravity well. I’ve got nothing against NASA – bunch of great guys (lot of Indians there in fact if I heard it right), but everything they do - why DOES IT HAVE TO COST SO MUCH?

If the technology wasn’t ready to allow human exploration of space in a safe way, why send humans? Robotic vehicles can also operate with certain amount of efficiency and the money could have been better utilized in developing technologies which would have ultimately resulted in cheaper access to outer space.

And now NASA’s mantra has indeed become – faster, cheaper and better (FCB) – evident in the Mars probes.

In fact, if the price tag wasn’t so high, space exploration would have proceeded at a much quicker pace than what happened in the aftermath of Apollo missions.

We keep on saying that man has landed on the moon and we are not exploring our own cosmic backyard. But, without the intention of belittling our (humankind’s) achievements so far, what we have done till now is slingshot a few missions to moon (with humans in it), put a space station in orbit (with the ever present danger of it falling down on our heads – e.g. MIR) and sent some probes to near by planets. Voyager I & II and the pioneer missions were an exception. They were real value for their money because of the wealth of information that they afforded to humanity about the outer side of our solar system.
I would closely watch India and humanity’s collective progress of back to the moon, mars and then ultimately the solar system.

Extra-terrestrial origins of life?

2008-10-20T00:17:00.000+05:30

The concept of life being a cosmic phenomenon is rapidly gaining support, with new evidence from space science, geology and biology. In this picture life on Earth resulted from the introduction of bacteria from comets, and the subsequent evolution of life required the continuing input of genes from comets.

Fred Hoyle was an important scientist who worked at the frontiers of astronomy and theoretical physics. In 1983 he published a well-illustrated popular book for nonscientists in which he attacked the whole idea that life originated and evolved on Earth and replaced it by 'intelligent cosmic control'.

Although Hoyle has been accused to siding with creationism – I personally disagree with this assessment. He was in favor of cosmic connection and control of origin of life on earth and elsewhere in universe and was not particularly hinting at any divine control.

In an interview, N Chandra Wickramasinghe, one of the foremost authority on the idea of life from outer space a student and collaborator of Sir Fred Hoyle – in the frontline – mentions that two recent experiments in the United States have once again drawn the attention of scientists to the theory of panspermia.

Fred Hoyle and Chandra Wickramasinghe demonstrated correctly that interstellar clouds contain some organic molecules but their subsequent proposal for the extraterrestrial origin of life on earth and for the ability of microbes to survive in space are not substantiated by hardcore evidence. However, with the hard core evidence from other quarters coming in, this theory is gaining ground and acceptance in mainstream scientific thinking.

Panspermia - which literally means seeds everywhere, underlies the hypothesis that the (biological) stuff of life did not have its origins in terrestrial resources but in inter-stellar space.

The theory maintains that life on the earth was seeded from space and that life's evolution to higher forms depends on complex genes (including those of viruses and diseases) that the earth receives from space from time to time.)

The two experiments discussed included:

In one experiment reported in October, environmental biologists Russell H. Vreeland and William D. Rosenzweig claimed that they discovered the longest surviving (250 million years) bacterial spores locked inside a salt crystal formation in Mexico that could be revived. This was considered as evidence that life - even one-celled micro-organisms - could survive in suspended animation for eons and float on comets to far away planets

In another experiment reported, a team of scientists from the California Institute of Technology, Vanderbilt and McGill Universities discovered that small pieces of space rock could be transferred from Mars to earth without its interior get ting excessively heated up, thus enabling living organisms to ride in them

The renewed interest in panspermia also comes in the wake of space-based discoveries that include recent findings of some simple amino acids and sugars in inter-stellar space; the announcement by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) in August 1996 of evidence of fossilized ancient life in a meteorite from Mars; evidence in the same year by geneticists that many genes are much older than what the fossil record would indicate; the discovery by a Russian microbiologist in 1998 of a micro-fossil in a meteorite was a previously unknown bacterium; and the announcement by NASA in April this year of the detection of very large organic molecules in space in its Stardust Mission launched in February and that the non-biological origins of such large molecules are not known

Early history of panspermia

Until the late 19th century panspermia meant the passage of organisms through Earth’s own atmosphere, not an incidence from outside Earth. In this form it seems to have been used first by the Abbee Lazzaro Spallanzoni (1729-99). But almost a century before that, Francesco Redi had carried out what can be seen as a classic experiment in the subject. He had shown that maggots appear in decaying meat only when the meat is exposed to air, inferring that whatever it was that gave rise to the maggots must have travelled to the meat through the air.

A very long wait until the 1860’s then ensued, until Louis Pasteur’s3 experiments on the souring of milk and the fermentation of wine showed that similar results occurred when the air-borne agents were bacteria, replicating as bacteria but not producing a visible organism like maggots. The world then permitted Pasteur to get away with a huge generalization, and honored him greatly both at the time and in history for it. Because by then the world was anxious to be done with the old Aristotelian concept of life emerging from the mixing of warm earth and morning dew. The same old concept was to arise again in the mid-twenties of the past century, however, but with a different name. Instead of Aristotle’s warm earth and morning dew it became “a warm organic soup.”

Pasteur’s far-ranging generalization implied that each generation of every plant or animal is preceded by a generation of the same plant or animal. This view was taken up enthusiastically by others, particularly by physicists, among them John Tyndall, who lectured frequently on the London scene. The editorial columns of the newly established Nature (e.g., issue of January 27, 1870) objected with some passion to Tyndall’s Friday evening discourse at the Royal Institution on January 21, 1870. Behind the objection was the realizations that were Pasteur’s paradigm taken to be strictly true, the origin of life would need to be external to Earth. For if life had no spontaneous origin, it would be possible to follow any animal generation-by-generation back to a time before Earth existed, the origin being therefore required outside Earth.

This was put in remarkably clear terms in 1874 by the German physicist Hermann von Helmholtz4:

“It appears to me to be a fully correct scientific procedure, if all our attempts fail to cause the production of organisms from non-living matter, to raise the question whether life has ever arisen, whether it is not just as old as matter itself, and whether seeds have not been carried from one planet to another and have developed everywhere where they have fallen on fertile soil….”

In his presidential address to the 1881 meeting of the British Association, Lord Kelvin drew a remarkable picture:

“When two great masses come into collision in space, it is certain that a large part of each is melted, but it seems also quite certain that in many cases a large quantity of debris must be shot forth in all directions, much of which may have experienced no greater violence than individual pieces of rock experience in a landslip or in blasting by gunpowder. Should the time when this earth comes into collision with another body, comparable in dimensions to itself, be when it is still clothed as at present with vegetation, many great and small fragments carrying seeds of living plants and animals would undoubtedly be scattered through space. Hence, and because we all confidently believe that there are at present, and have been from time immemorial, many worlds of life besides our own, we must regard it as probable in the highest degree that there are countless seed-bearing meteoric stones moving about through space. If at the present instant no life existed upon Earth, one such stone falling upon it might, by what we blindly call natural causes, lead to its becoming covered with vegetation.”

Essentially, what Kelvin was suggesting at that time was it is possible for seeds of life to be carried between planetary or cosmic bodies. Thus almost 120 years ago the ideas that have recently come to the forefront of scientific discussion were already well known. Unfortunately there was no way at that date, 1881, whereby observation or experiment could be brought seriously to bear on Kelvin’s formulation of panspermia and the world had to wait 120 year before some sort of concrete experimental and observational proof started trickling in.

It has been known for quite some time that bacteria and other microorganism are extremely hardy. Some have been found to be living in the most unlikely places where conventional thinking would attribute life’s survival – such as in the heavy water of nuclear reactors or the highly acidic and hot volcanic areas. These extremophiles, i.e. microbes that live in conditions that would kill other creatures. It was not until the 1970's that such creatures were recognized, but the more researchers look, the more they discover that most archaea; some bacteria and a few protists can survive in the harshest and strangest of environments.

There is scarcely any set of conditions prevailing on Earth, no matter how extreme that is incapable of harboring some type of microbial life. Under space conditions, microorganisms are very easily protected against ultraviolet damage.

One may find it very difficult to believe but there is evidence that some of bacteria actually survived almost 2 years on moon’s harsh environment. What has happened was that during the sealing of a camera which was supposed to be sent to moon, somebody might have sneezed and hence left microbes inside the camera body. The camera in turn was delivered to moon’s surface to find best locations for landing. 2 years later when the Apollo astronauts retrieved this camera and brought it back to earth – this fact was discovered. Moon has almost no atmosphere and the range of temperature is very high indeed. if microbes can survive 2 years of almost vacuum and the harsh differences in temperatures, is it really far fetched to think that it would be possible for them to travel intra-stellar or interstellar distances and seed life on earth as well?

Couple this with the fact that today an impressive array of interstellar molecules has been detected and among the list are a host of hydrocarbons, polyaromatic hydrocarbons, the amino acid glycine, vinegar and the sugar glycoaldehyde14. Such organic molecules that pervade interstellar clouds make up a considerable fraction of the available galactic carbon.

Actually, theories of how interstellar organic molecules might form via non-biological processes are still in their infancy and, in terms of explaining the available facts, they leave much to be desired.

N Chandra Wickramasinghe further speculates – “The overwhelming bulk of organic matter on Earth is indisputably derived from biology, much of it being degradation products of biology. Might not the same processes operate in the case of interstellar organic molecules? The polyaromatic hydrocarbons that are so abundant in the cosmos could have a similar origin to the organic pollutants that choke us in our major cities - products of degradation of biology, biologically generated fossil fuels in the urban case, cosmic microbiology in the interstellar clouds. The theory of cosmic panspermia that we have proposed leads us to argue that interstellar space could be a graveyard of cosmic life as well as its cradle. Only the minutest fraction (less than one part in a trillion) of the interstellar bacteria needs to retain viability, in dense shielded cloudlets of space, for panspermia to hold sway. Common sense dictates that this survival rate is unavoidable.”

So where does this leads us? Actually, to me this is a partial answer at best. While it may be indisputably established that life did not independently evolve here on earth and was in fact seeded from the stars – it still leaves us clueless about the origins of life itself, wherever it might have evolved or originated.

In this sense, we are all aliens on this planet. Something to ponder on…. I will be writing more on this topic in coming days.

Worldwide financial meltdown and what it means for the environment…

2008-10-19T00:28:00.000+05:30

The worldwide financial meltdown is expected to have a dampening effect on demand for energy and goods. As the wallets lighten up, people will go out less, spend less on travel and luxury… at least that’s what the sound economics tells us.

Earlier this July (2008), when the crude oil prices had started heading north and peaked around $147 per barrel, there was a wide hope in the clean energy lobby that, perhaps finally now, the world had a financial justification to vigorously pursue development of clean energy alternatives.

The energy shock has galvanized everyone into finding alternatives, more so from the renewable sources and perhaps at a cheaper price point.

However, the financial meltdown, according to International Science Panel, poses a grave threat to efforts to turn back greenhouse gas emissions -- but it doesn't have to be that way, says the head of the international science panel that has authoritatively outlined the challenge for government policymakers.

It's crucial that carbon dioxide emissions that are on the increase be sent in the other direction by 2015, so the way to go is to use the current economic troubles to launch a recharged effort to rein in climate change, led by the next U.S. president, said R.K. Pachauri, chairman of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. Read more about his comments here.

Ramesh Jaura – also talks about the same theme - Enter the global financial crisis - exit action on climate change? According to him, that lingering apprehension is not shared by Pamela Cox, the World Bank's vice-president for Latin America and the Caribbean.

Adam Stein – discusses the same issue. According to him – “Although it is very difficult to make predictions about the direction of the economy, it appears likely the current downturn will continue for some time. Which is bad for the climate, mainly because of the way that a weak economy interacts with the other items on the list. For example, slow growth saps the political will for dramatic action on climate change”.

A weak economy could at least temporarily bring fossil fuel prices down. We continue to believe that the long-term trend in fossil fuel prices is up, up, up, but, as mentioned, volatility will muddy the investment picture for clean energy.

Margaret Kriz – talks about how financial crisis is dimming the hope for U.S. Climate Legislation. “Environmentalists had been looking to a new president and a new Congress to pass legislation dealing with global warming next year. But with tough economic times looming, the passage of a sweeping climate change bill now appears far less likely”.

However, the jury is still out on this issue.

Clean and green technologies may end up a big winner in the current global financial crisis, say some investment professionals.

Billions of dollars in new investments have been made in clean/green tech such as renewable energy and energy efficiency in recent years. And, despite fears of a major recession in the U.S., nearly all investment professionals and institutions reported plans to introduce new investment opportunities before the end of 2009, according a new survey of the 500-member Social Investment Forum (SIF), an association for socially and environmentally responsible investment firms.

"In the last two years the growth in the green economy has been tremendous," said Jack Robinson, president of Winslow Management Company in Boston.

"But the huge win for the green economy is the U.S. bank bailout programme," Robinson, a green investment expert, told IPS.

It turns out the near collapse of the U.S. financial system has a silver lining for the long-cash-starved alternative energy sector.

Another reason for green investor optimism is the virtual certainty that the U.S. will have a carbon cap and trade system by 2010 at the latest.

"The new Congress will regulate carbon emissions. The costs of fossil fuel will finally begin to reflect the costs of climate change," said Adam Seitchik, lead portfolio manager of Green Century Balanced Fund, and chief investment officer of Trillium Asset Management, Boston.

"Despite the credit crisis, the fundamentals of clean energy are so strong, they will find financing," Steitchik said in an interview.

Companies producing solar products have seen their revenues grow 60 to 140 percent this year and expect to reach 45 to 200 percent in 2009. One company, SunPower Corp., will see 2 billion dollars in sales in 2009, he said.

Although solidly profitable, the stock prices for these companies have plummeted just like all the others on Wall St. However that means they are terrific investment opportunities even if their earnings decline due to slowing economies and the credit crisis, he said.

"As energy prices continue to fluctuate and the need to address climate change becomes ever more urgent, many investors want to blaze a trail for clean energy solutions that meet demand and respond to the impacts of climate change," said Lisa Woll, chief executive officer of the Washington, D.C.-based SIF.

But if every dark cloud has a silver lining there's one over here as well...albeit it looks like a green one.

Tighter purse strings could (and already is) forcing the world to save energy and look at alternative options to stretch the dollar. Bjorn Lomborg, Danish author of 'The Skeptical Environmentalist' echoes, "Hopefully the crisis will make us smarter in spending our money."

There could be a perceptible shift in investments towards energy efficiency. More low scale and down to earth projects may reap the benefits. Consultants McKinsey & Co. opine that emissions-cutting measures such as better building insulation, fuel efficiency in vehicles, more efficient lighting and air conditioning end up paying for themselves via lower energy bills. More optimistically, if a bad economy fuels a grassroots green movement then that itself would be a big shift towards greener attitudes.

Some are still on the path of continuous investments. Sven Teske, renewable energy director for environmental group Greenpeace, said investments still made sense. He said that the wind energy market totaled $37 billion in 2007 and added more than 19 gigawatts to the grid.

The U.N. Climate Panel has estimated the costs of slowing climate change at only 0.12 percent of world gross domestic product to 2030, with vast benefits in avoiding human suffering. That is small change but the world is feeling an instant economic pinch right now. Are we losing sight of the forest by looking at the trees? Hopefully not, otherwise the battle to save the planet could turn into a war...too late

The Web, then and now and beyond… Web 2.0!

2008-10-18T19:51:00.000+05:30

Following commercialization and introduction of privately run Internet Service Providers in the 1980s, and its expansion into popular use in the 1990s, the Internet has had a drastic impact on culture and commerce. The Internet has touched lives profoundly all over the world. It has led to an almost revolution in the way world operates. And it has brought humanity closer.

In the 1950s and early 1960s, prior to the widespread inter-networking that led to the Internet, most communication networks were limited by their nature to only allow communications between the stations on the network. Some networks had gateways or bridges between them, but these bridges were often limited or built specifically for a single use. One prevalent computer networking method was based on the central mainframe method, simply allowing its terminals to be connected via long leased lines. This method was used in the 1950s by Project RAND to support researchers such as Herbert Simon, in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, when collaborating across the continent with researchers in Sullivan, Illinois, on automated theorem proving and artificial intelligence.

I am not going to rant about the history of internet here. This is covered in a very comprehensive and lucid way in this excellent article at Wikipedia. Another great article, starting a little earlier than the 1950s… Roads and Crossroads of Internet History.

Walt Howe’s discourse about the history of internet is also very interesting to read.

Another interesting aspect is Al Gore’s contribution to the growth of internet.

The commercialization of the Internet brought extraordinary, almost to the point of being irrational, wealth to a few individuals. The euphoria created by sudden connectivity, unleashing the power of individual creativity and bringing it onto a world stage with very little cost was also paralleled in an irrational exuberance in the stock markets. This is also commonly known as the Dot Com Bubble.

It all started during the mid 1990’s. The Stock Market soared on technology and Internet stocks, IPOs were all the rage, and the sky was the limit for stock prices. The masses believed there was a new world upon us, and the internet was to become the future of business. Then reality set in when the hype didn’t live up to its promises and the stock market crashed. If you take all of this for only its face value, all you see is what happens when a stock market gets overvalued and crashes, but if you look deeper you can find plenty of timeless lessons that every investor should learn.

Ian Peter’s History of the Internet - the Dotcom bubble nicely summarizes the Internet and Dot Com Bubble.

Web 2.0 is a buzzword that exploded in popularity sometime in 2005. In 2004, software guru Tim O'Reilly founded the Web 2.0 Conference, held annually in San Francisco. It has since expanded from a conference into a way of thinking, a new approach to doing business on the Internet. There is no standard definition for web 2.0, as it is a cluster of ideas rather than anything clear-cut. However, O'Reilly's comments on the topic are seen as having special authority, and rank among the top Google search results for the term.

According to Tim O’Reilly – “Web 2.0 is the term used, in the technology field, to refer to some exciting developments that promise to bring us to a new and improved internet experience. For developers this means learning new technologies and frameworks to provide better, faster and more sophisticated features”.

The concept of "Web 2.0" began with a conference brainstorming session between O'Reilly and MediaLive International. Dale Dougherty, web pioneer and O'Reilly VP, noted that far from having "crashed", the web was more important than ever, with exciting new applications and sites popping up with surprising regularity. What's more, the companies that had survived the collapse seemed to have some things in common. Could it be that the dot-com collapse marked some kind of turning point for the web, such that a call to action such as "Web 2.0" might make sense? We agreed that it did, and so the Web 2.0 Conference was born.

Paul Graham describes Web 2.0 as an idea that was meaningless when started, but has acquired a meaning during the intervening period. He then goes on to describe the various components that contribute to the new revolution.

According to Wikipedia - Web 2.0 is a term describing changing trends in the use of World Wide Web technology and web design that aims to enhance creativity, secure information sharing, collaboration and functionality of the web. Web 2.0 concepts have led to the development and evolution of web-based communities and its hosted services, such as social-networking sites, video sharing sites, wikis, blogs, and folksonomies. Although the term suggests a new version of the World Wide Web, it does not refer to an update to any technical specifications, but to changes in the ways software developers and end-users utilize the Web.

The first premise of web 2.0 is leveraging the power of the user. For example, fluid user tagging of content would be used instead of a centralized taxonomy. Web 2.0 entrepreneurs often consider the Long Tail, which is basically an observation that the vast majority of the attention market is based on niche content. Web 2.0 is radically decentralized, as in the case of BitTorrent, a collaborative downloading co-op that consumes a serious portion of all Internet traffic.

Blogs are considered web 2.0. Instead of centralized "personal home pages", blogs let people easily post as much or as little as they want as rarely or as frequently as they want. Feed aggregators ensure that people only need to visit a single site to see all the feeds they subscribe to. Comments are enabled everywhere, allowing people to participate rather than passively consume content.

Web 2.0 technology encourages lightweight business models enabled by syndication of content and of service and by ease of picking-up by early adopters.

O'Reilly provided examples of companies or products that embody these principles in his description of his four levels in the hierarchy of Web 2.0 sites:

- Level-3 applications, the most "Web 2.0"-oriented, exist only on the Internet, deriving their effectiveness from the inter-human connections and from the network effects that Web 2.0 makes possible and growing in effectiveness in proportion as people make more use of them. O'Reilly gave eBay, Craigslist, Wikipedia, del.icio.us, Skype, dodgeball, and AdSense as examples.

- Level-2 applications can operate offline but gain advantages from going online. O'Reilly cited Flickr, which benefits from its shared photo-database and from its community-generated tag database.

- Level-1 applications operate offline but gain features online. O'Reilly pointed to Writely (now Google Docs & Spreadsheets) and iTunes (because of its music-store portion).

- Level-0 applications work as well offline as online. O'Reilly gave the examples of MapQuest, Yahoo! Local, and Google Maps (mapping-applications using contributions from users to advantage could rank as "level 2").

Non-web applications like email, instant-messaging clients, and the telephone fall outside the above hierarchy

Web 2.0 websites allow users to do more than just retrieve information. They can build on the interactive facilities of "Web 1.0" to provide "Network as platform" computing, allowing users to run software-applications entirely through a browser. Users can own the data on a Web 2.0 site and exercise control over that data. These sites may have an "Architecture of participation" that encourages users to add value to the application as they use it. This stands in contrast to very old traditional websites, the sort which limited visitors to viewing and whose content only the site's owner could modify. Web 2.0 sites often feature a rich, user-friendly interface based on Ajax, OpenLaszlo, Flex or similar rich media.

Second life and similar platforms provide an immersive environment where users can interact with each other in a father richer way than was possible through the web 1.0 tools such as chats, emails, etc.

In my next post, I’ll be talking more on how this new revolution is touching lives and what may be in store for humanity with this medium… almost bordering on the science fiction!

Grid computing…

2008-10-08T20:09:00.000+05:30

In my previous post, I had mentioned how grid computing is helping in processing of petabytes of data generated by LHC. Today, let’s explore the concept of grid computing in a little more depth.

According to Wikipedia - Grid computing is a form of distributed computing whereby a "super and virtual computer" is composed of a cluster of networked, loosely-coupled computers, acting in concert to perform very large tasks. This technology has been applied to computationally-intensive scientific, mathematical, and academic problems through volunteer computing, and it is used in commercial enterprises for such diverse applications as drug discovery, economic forecasting, seismic analysis, and back-office data processing in support of e-commerce and web services.

The term Grid computing originated in the early 1990s as a metaphor for making computer power as easy to access as an electric power grid in Ian Foster and Carl Kesselmans seminal work, "The Grid: Blueprint for a new computing infrastructure".

An excellent resource on grid computing is available at - http://www.gridcomputing.com/

Later on, CPU scavenging and volunteer computing were popularized beginning in 1997 by distributed.net and later in 1999 by SETI@home to harness the power of networked PCs worldwide, in order to solve CPU-intensive research problems.

One of the most famous cycle-scavenging networks is SETI@home, which was using more than 3 million computers to achieve 23.37 sustained teraflops (979 lifetime teraflops) as of September 2001. Being deeply interested in the question of extra-terrestrial life, I myself participated in the SETI@home project with my old x486!

Grid computing requires the use of software that can divide and farm out pieces of a program to as many as several thousand computers. Grid computing can be thought of as distributed and large-scale cluster computing and as a form of network-distributed parallel processing. It can be confined to the network of computer workstations within a corporation or it can be a public collaboration (in which case it is also sometimes known as a form of peer-to-peer computing).

A number of corporations, professional groups, university consortiums, and other groups have developed or are developing frameworks and software for managing grid computing projects. The European Community (EU) is sponsoring a project for a grid for high-energy physics, earth observation, and biology applications. In the United States, the National Technology Grid is prototyping a computational grid for infrastructure and an access grid for people. Sun Microsystems offers Grid Engine software. Described as a distributed resource management (DRM) tool, Grid Engine allows engineers at companies like Sony and Synopsys to pool the computer cycles on up to 80 workstations at a time. (At this scale, grid computing can be seen as a more extreme case of load balancing.)

What distinguishes grid computing from typical cluster computing systems is that grids tend to be more loosely coupled, heterogeneous, and geographically dispersed. Also, while a computing grid may be dedicated to a specialized application, it is often constructed with the aid of general purpose grid software libraries and middleware.

"Distributed" or "grid" computing in general is a special type of parallel computing which relies on complete computers (with onboard CPU, storage, power supply, network interface, etc.) connected to a network (private, public or the Internet) by a conventional network interface, such as Ethernet. This is in contrast to the traditional notion of a supercomputer, which has many processors connected by a local high-speed computer bus.

The primary advantage of distributed computing is that each node can be purchased as commodity hardware, which when combined can produce similar computing resources to a multiprocessor supercomputer, but at lower cost. This is due to the economies of scale of producing commodity hardware, compared to the lower efficiency of designing and constructing a small number of custom supercomputers. The primary performance disadvantage is that the various processors and local storage areas do not have high-speed connections. This arrangement is thus well-suited to applications in which multiple parallel computations can take place independently, without the need to communicate intermediate results between processors.

The high-end scalability of geographically dispersed grids is generally favorable, due to the low need for connectivity between nodes relative to the capacity of the public Internet.

There are also some differences in programming and deployment. It can be costly and difficult to write programs so that they can be run in the environment of a supercomputer, which may have a custom operating system, or require the program to address concurrency issues. If a problem can be adequately parallelized, a "thin" layer of "grid" infrastructure can allow conventional, standalone programs to run on multiple machines (but each given a different part of the same problem). This makes it possible to write and debug on a single conventional machine, and eliminates complications due to multiple instances of the same program running in the same shared memory and storage space at the same time.

By the way, Nortel had also joined the Global Grid Forum (GCF) as far back as April, 2004. The charter of the GHPN group is to establish a rich two-way communication between the community of Grid application developers and the networking communities (in both academia and industry).

Another well-known project is the World Community Grid. The World Community Grid's mission is to create the largest public computing grid benefiting humanity. This work is built on the belief that technological innovation combined with visionary scientific research and large-scale volunteerism can change our world for the better. IBM Corporation has donated the hardware, software, technical services and expertise to build the infrastructure for World Community Grid and provides free hosting, maintenance and support.

During 2007 the term cloud computing came into popularity, which is conceptually similar to the canonical Foster definition of grid computing (in terms of computing resources being consumed as electricity is from the power grid). Indeed grid computing is often (but not always) associated with the delivery of cloud computing systems.

All the major corporations of the world involved with computing industry in one way or the other are working towards this area. Microsoft is joining the cloud-computing trend, with CEO Steve Ballmer saying a "Windows Cloud" OS will be launched at Microsoft's Professional Developers Conference. Ballmer said Microsoft's "Windows Cloud" is aimed at developers creating cloud-computing apps. Microsoft, IBM, Intel and Oracle are all getting involved in cloud computing.

For example, Oracle is shifting its Grid Focus to the Application. "Think of WebLogic Application Grid as similar to a service-oriented architecture," said Mike Piech, an Oracle senior director of product marketing, during a recent briefing. "It's not a single product, not a single technology, but an infrastructure with a certain set of characteristics to provide on-demand behavior. Our approach is to have all the foundation-level middleware technologies play into that basic idea of the grid: pooling and sharing resources, using them more efficiently, but also providing a higher quality of service."

IBM is also not being. Relevant resources from IBM can be located from this link.

Grid computing appears to be a promising trend for three reasons:

(1) Its ability to make more cost-effective use of a given amount of computer resources,

(2) As a way to solve problems that can't be approached without an enormous amount of computing power, and

(3) Because it suggests that the resources of many computers can be cooperatively and perhaps synergistically harnessed and managed as collaboration toward a common objective.

In some grid computing systems, the computers may collaborate rather than being directed by one managing computer. One likely area for the use of grid computing will be pervasive computing applications - those in which computers pervade our environment without our necessary awareness

Climate Change and civilizations…

2008-10-07T18:31:00.000+05:30

In my previous post on the topic of global warming and its impact on planet’s climate, I had delved into the causes behind global warming and varying opinions of different authority figures. This time, I would like to trace the effects of climate change on the evolution of humanity.

I came across an interesting article by Dr Nachiketa Das – where he discusses the topic of climate change and its effect on river Ganges.

He is of the opinion – “Global warming, now in 2008, is real, and upon us. How will global warming affect the rivers in India; will they all dry up? Can the holy Ganges, the river that has shaped and sustained Indian civilization through the ages, who we Indians revere as the life-giving mother, run dry! Many climate experts and environmentalists, in the last ten years, have been making dire predictions of the Ganges becoming seasonal. Some doomsayers have even gone to the extent of boldly predicting the river to be ephemeral by the year 2035, which is barely a generation away! Is it really possible that the Ganges will run dry by 2035! Is this calamity an inevitability that should be accepted as fait accompli, or is there anything we, the people of India, collectively can do to save the holy Mother Ganges from extinction”.

The concerns are valid. The Ganges originates from Gangotri glacier, which is one of the largest valley glaciers located in western Himalayas. 30.2 km long and 0.5 to 2.5 km wide Gangotri lies recumbent at the altitudes between 4,120 and 7,000 m above sea level. The total area occupied by the glacier complex (in 2001) that feeds Ganges, is 260 square km, which contains 40 cubic km of ice (in 1999). During a 60 year period between 1936 and 1996, Gangotri has receded by as much as 1,147 m, 850 m of which happened during a 25 year period between 1971 and 1996. In a three year period between 1996 and 1999 Gangotri retreated by 76 m. When this result is contrasted with the 2,000 m retreat over the last 200 years, the significantly accelerated rate of retreat has become obvious.

Also, Global warming does not mean uniform amount of warming at each and every place on the globe. Although vast majority of the places on this earth will become hotter due to global warming, however strange it may seem, certain parts will in fact become cooler.

Why? Well, it has to with how the weather and heat transfer systems work on our planet. Unlike the frozen wastes of Mars or lead melting surface of Venus, our planet is blessed with a very complex, yet delicate ecosystem.

The Gulf Stream is a vast oceanic current that carries warm waters from the tropics to the temperate regions of northern Europe and North America. This ocean current originates in the Gulf of Mexico, flows past the east coast of the USA and Newfoundland in Canada, and then crosses the Atlantic Ocean. It then branches into two, with the northern stream moving to northern Europe. The Gulf Stream is about 80 to 150 km wide and a 1,000 m deep river of sea that transports 1.4 petawatts (1 petawatt is 1,000 million megawatts) of heat, which is equivalent to almost 100 times the current energy demand of the entire world. Around Cape Hatteras on the coast of North Carolina in the US, the Gulf Stream transports water at the rate of 80 million cubic meter per second, and is much bigger than any river system of the world; in fact the combined release of all the waters from all the rivers flowing into the Atlantic is only 0.6 million cubic meter per second.

The Gulf Stream has significant localized effects on the climate of the east coast of Florida and Massachusetts in the US; and the west coast of Britain, which is a good few degrees warmer than the east coast. The warming effect of the Gulf Stream is most dramatic in the western islands of Scotland, so much so that the small township of Plockton (latitude 57.33oN) that is located east of the Isle of Skye, has a mild climate that allows sub-tropical cabbage-palm-trees to grow. The local climate in Plockton in the absence of the Gulf Stream would be freezing cold as latitudinal it lies further north of Moscow (latitude 55.45oN) by almost two degrees.

Due to global warming, there is every possibility that the Gulf Stream may change course or it may lose its strength. In fact in November 2004, it completely stopped for full ten days, and there are reports saying that in the last 50 years (since 1957) its deep return flow has weakened by as much as 30%. Any change in the characteristics of the Gulf Stream, would cause significant localized cooling in Scandinavia and Britain. At a time of global warming, the western islands of Scotland will experience substantial cooling.

The effects on human population and civilization can be imagined.

This, however, is the not the first time that climate change has affected humanity on such a scale.

The river Sarasvati for example, is widely considered to have supported the Harappan culture. Movement and ultimate decline of the Harappan culture are often attributed to climate change and its ultimate effect on river Sarasvati. Some Rigvedic verses (6.61.2-13) indicate that the Sarasvati River originated in the hills or mountains (giri), where she "burst with her strong waves the ridges of the hills (giri)". It is a matter of interpretation whether this refers not merely to the Himalayan foothills like the present-day Sarasvati (Sarsuti) river. The Sarasvati is described as a river swollen (pinvamānā) by other rivers (sindhubhih). Another reference to the Sarasvati is in the geographical enumeration of the rivers in the late Rigvedic Nadistuti sukta (10.75.5, this verse enumerates all important rivers from the Ganges in the east up to the Indus in the west in a strict geographical order), as "Ganga, Yamuna, Sarasvati, Shutudri", the Sarasvati is placed between the Yamuna and the Sutlej, consistent with the Ghaggar identification. It is clear, therefore, that even if she has unmistakably lost much of her former prominence, Sarasvati remains characterized as a river goddess throughout the Rigveda, being the home river of the Puru and later on, the Kuru tribe.

While Sarasvati River might still be remembered, its influence on Indian history cannot be discounted. Nor can its decline be overlooked.

However, climate change need not always be so bad for human culture. After all, our present day humans ascended to our current position in evolutionary terms due to ending of an ICE AGE.

Sahara desert, the largest one on our planet, used to be a very lush and green place before the change in climate led to its present state and forced a lot of human tribes into the valley of the Nile, leading up to its fabulous civilization and myriad dynasties.

Sustenance played a crucial role in the founding of Egyptian civilization. The Nile is an unending source of sustenance. The Nile made the land surrounding it extremely fertile when it flooded or was inundated annually. The Egyptians were able to cultivate wheat and crops around the Nile, providing food for the general population. Also, the Nile’s water attracted game such as water buffalo; and after the Persians introduced them in the 7th century BC, camels. These animals could be killed for meat, or could be captured, tamed and used for ploughing — or in the camels' case, travelling. Water was vital to both people and livestock. The Nile was also a convenient and efficient way of transportation for people and goods. The Nile played a major role in politics and social life.

But at the end of the day, it was climate change which led to rise and fall of these civilizations….

So what are we worried about?

It’s just that we humans are much more numerous now and spread of more area of the planet than at any time in our history. So climate change this time, turns out to be very inconvenient indeed and because it might lead to decline of our current global civilization and ultimately bring misery to untold billions, that we are so concerned.

We humans seem to be standing too much in the way of nature to be left unscathed by the fury that will be unleashed by the current spell climate change, arguably induced by our actions only…

LHC and grid computing…

2008-10-06T20:03:00.000+05:30

Hello Folks! We are back to my favorite theme of LHC!

The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN near Geneva is the largest scientific instrument on the planet. When it begins operations, it will produce roughly 15 Petabytes (15 million Gigabytes) of data annually, which thousands of scientists around the world will access and analyze. The first phase of the grid actually went online on 29th Sept, 2003

The world's largest computing grid is all set to tackle the biggest ever data challenge from the most powerful accelerator, the Large Hadron Collider (LHC). Three weeks after the first particle beams were injected into the LHC, the Worldwide LHC Computing Grid combines the power of more than 140 computer centers from 33 countries to analyze and manage more than 15 million gigabytes of LHC data every year. The mission of the Worldwide LHC Computing Grid (LCG) project is to build and maintain data storage and analysis infrastructure for the entire high energy physics community that will use the LHC.

Just to refresh your knowledge on CERN and LHC - CERN is the European Laboratory for Particle Physics, one of the world's most prestigious centres for fundamental research. The laboratory is currently building the Large Hadron Collider. The most ambitious scientific undertaking the world has yet seen, the LHC will collide tiny fragments of matter head on to unravel the fundamental laws of nature. It is due to switch on in 2007 and will be used to answer some of the most fundamental questions of science by some 7,000 scientists from universities and laboratories all around the world.

"Particle physics projects such as the LHC have been a driving force for the development of worldwide computing grids," said Ed Seidel, director of the NSF Office of Cyber infrastructure. "The benefits from these grids are now being reaped in areas as diverse as mathematical modeling and drug discovery."

"Open Science Grid members have put an incredible amount of time and effort in developing a nationwide (US) computing system that is already at work supporting America's 1,200 LHC physicists and their colleagues from other sciences," said OSG executive director Ruth Pordes from DOE's Fermi National Accelerator Lab.

The data from the LHC experiments will be distributed around the globe, according to a four-tiered model. A primary backup will be recorded on tape at CERN, the “Tier-0” centre of LCG. After initial processing, this data will be distributed to a series of Tier-1 centres, large computer centres with sufficient storage capacity and with round-the-clock support for the Grid. The Tier-1 centres will make data available to Tier-2 centres, each consisting of one or several collaborating computing facilities, which can store sufficient data and provide adequate computing power for specific analysis tasks. Dedicated optical fiber networks distribute LHC data from CERN in Geneva, Switzerland to 11 major 'Tier-1' computer centers in Europe, North America and Asia, including those at DOE's Brookhaven National Lab in New York and Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory in Illinois. From these, data is dispatched to more than 140 "Tier-2" centers around the world, including 12 in the US. Individual scientists will access these facilities through Tier-3 computing resources, which can consist of local clusters in a University Department or even individual PCs, and which may be allocated to LCG on a regular basis.

"Our ability to manage data at this scale is the product of several years of intense testing," said Ian Bird, leader of the Worldwide LHC Computing Grid project.

"Today's result demonstrates the excellent and successful collaboration we have enjoyed with countries all over the world. Without these international partnerships, such an achievement would be impossible," he said.

"When the LHC starts running at full speed, it will produce enough data to fill about six CDs per second," said Michael Ernst, director of Brookhaven National Laboratory's Tier-1 Computing Centre.

"As the first point of contact for LHC data in the US, the computing centres at Brookhaven and Fermilab are responsible for storing and distributing a great amount of this data for use by scientists around the country. We've spent years ramping up to this point, and now, we're excited to help uncover some of the numerous secrets nature is still hiding from us," informed Ernst.

Physicists in the US and around the world will sift through the LHC data torrent in search of tiny signals that will lead to discoveries about the nature of the physical universe. Through their distributed computing infrastructures, these physicists also help other scientific researchers increase their use of computing and storage for broader discovery.

"Grid computing allows university research groups at home and abroad to fully participate in the LHC project while fostering positive collaboration across different scientific departments on many campuses," said Ken Bloom from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, manager for seven Tier-2 sites in the US.

US Financial Earthquake; bailout rejected, what’s next?

2008-10-04T22:11:00.000+05:30

Stocks suffered their worst decline ever on a point basis Monday afternoon, as the failure of the House of Representative to pass Wall Street bailout legislation led to widespread selling of stocks.

If you haven’t noticed already the US politicians are now claiming their decisions are not considered a “bailout” rather an “insurance program” aimed at protecting the consumer from taking on close to a trillion dollars of new debt. The reason for the change in terminology is the politicians don’t want to be associated with a “bailout” rather the term “insurance” appears to be more dignified and safe. Plus it creates great spin for the media and the average consumer will simply equate this legislation to “safety in the markets” which the politicians will take credit for and stand proud for protecting American consumers and the global financial markets in general.

I think we are watching economic history unfold.

No, not the kind that most analysts are whining about: the excess debt that will make the prophecy of US meltdown. a reality sooner, rather than later.

Everyone takes some risk. Some take more risk than others. Gambling in Las Vegas has risk. Starting a business has risk. Those that take risk hope to receive the reward of their risk. Calculating and providing protection from risk is the business of insurance companies.

As Ajit Dayal puts it - Hank Paulson may go down in history as the man who took the world from its path of greed and destruction to a more “socialist” path. And he may help reduce the US debt by selling the companies he is buying at a huge profit.

Hundreds of billions of dollars of profit.

Enough money to stay another 436 days in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Enough profit to cover - for 269 days – the oil required to fill all those 50 million cars driving across USA.

Hank’s deals may not save the USA but it will postpone the inevitable.

The Secretary of the Treasury, Hank Paulson, is not a typical government bureaucrat and a “do-gooder”. Nor is he an academic that made it to the top job because of some theoretical paper on “inflation targeting” or “interest rates and cost of money” or “public ownership of private goods”.

Oh, no.
No, no.

Remember: Mr. Paulson has worked with Goldman, Sachs. He was a key member responsible for the firm’s global success. This man is a walking power-point on building businesses – successfully. He is a turn-around artist.

I think he knows what he is doing: there is method in this madness. Or is there?

AIG, one of the world’s largest insurers, took risk and did not calculate the potential impact of the risk they took. Subsequently the US Government decided to bail AIG out at the tune of $85 Billion in addition to the roughly $600 billion of other financial risk gone bad by banks and Wall Street firms.

The current U.S. Government Bailout program represents a significant shift for financial markets, and for individuals and businesses alike, in that US government has now become the largest insurer in the world. However the government insurance program is unlike any other insurance offered by the private sector. The U.S. Government Insurance Program basically says to business markets, don’t worry if you fail we’ll back you up. What a deal for big business but what about small business and individuals? If a small business or a family fails financially will the government come to our rescue as well?

The problem with the proposed plan and the attitude from US politicians, indeed any politician for that matter, is that both are fundamentally flawed in their assumptions. The basis of risk management is founded on a set of choices about risk. Individually and institutionally there are five choices one makes relative to managing risk.

- Avoid the risk: Don’t participate in activities or endeavors that increase risk
- Spread (share) the risk: In the insurance world this is known as reinsurance
- Transfer the risk: Move the consequences of related risk for others to assume
- Mitigate the risk: The Wall Street firms, banks and AIG first choose to assume the risk they took which then fueled failure. By declaring bankruptcy they in essence transferred the risk for someone else to assume. The U.S. Government, and our beloved politicians, looked at the situation that their own previous legislation had created and decided the risk of a global economic meltdown needed to be mitigated by the US government assuming the risk of those that had failed to manage the risk to begin with.

The problem with this thinking and the related decisions is that by assuming the risk the US government is actually increasing rather than mitigating the risk. How many other banks, insurance companies and Wall Street firms will fail and expect the government to bail them out. How many “big businesses”, the auto industry has already begun, will ask the government to help them mitigate the risk of their own decisions.

The proposed “bailout” is nothing more than a band aid on a damn of rising expectations actually created and enhanced by those who think their past and current decisions can be covered up or protected from risk. The truth is their decisions are fueling the risk and related cost which will eventually fall onto the back of every consumer.

The government, any government, is funded by the people and any assumption of risk falls onto “we the people”. Ultimately we the people have to provide the economics of any bailout or insurance program created by those “we the people” elect to make these decisions for us?

Our Fragile Global Economy…

2008-09-28T23:05:00.000+05:30

“Greed is good,” insisted Gordon Gekko in the 1987 film Wall Street. Most of us disagree. Recent events in the mortgage lending industry prove us right.

The “subprime loan crisis” has been making headlines since it began in August. It refers to the fact that a relatively high percentage of mortgages offered to people with significant probability of default have gone sour.

The moniker is a bit misleading, though. The crisis we are witnessing starts from risky loan deals but will extend to all varieties of credit and risk: consumer loans, credit cards, businesses, and so on. It is just about to heat up but the roots of this crisis were laid years ago.

It’s a credit crisis, but credit per se is not the problem. The problem lies in how credit was traded from one hand to another on an unprecedented scale. This was done through financial innovations called derivatives.

In recent memory – translated as in the last few weeks of media glare – we have noticed and witnessed a US and to some extent global financial meltdown of historic proportions. Most of media and the people quoted (as experts by media) are calling it the greatest threat to “world” economy since the Great Depression of 1930s.

Addison Wiggin and Bill Bonner wrote the classic, must-read, “The Empire of Debt”. The US Empire, the book surmised, had grown economically weak and unsustainable. It has burdened itself with too much debt. Its collapse is imminent. From the roots of this book has emerged one of the most talked about documentaries: “I. O. U.S.A.” (the “O” as in “owe”) which highlights the extraordinary debt levels of the US government. A debt that is estimated at USD 410,000 per full-time worker in America – about 9x the average annual per capita income in USA.

So here we are yet again in the midst of another "global economic crisis." From the hilltops of Davos, Switzerland, Morgan Stanley's permabear Stephen Roach has shouted warnings of potential economic "Armageddon." Superinvestor George Soros designated the current state of the global economy "the worst market crisis in 60 years." Bill Clinton labeled it "the biggest financial crisis since the Great Depression" -- even as global stocks responded by slumping 7.7% in January -- the worst start to an investing year since Morgan Stanley began publishing data in the 1970s.

It seems that certain quarters had been warning of this for a long time. In it’s public pronouncement – “Global systemic crisis / September 2008 - Phase of collapse of US real economy” - LEAP/E2020 – had predicted – “the end of the third quarter of 2008 will be marked by a new tipping point in the unfolding of the global systemic crisis. At that time indeed, the cumulated impact of the various sequences of the crisis (see table below) will reach its maximum strength and affect decisively the very heart of the systems concerned, on the frontline of which the United States, epicentre of the current crisis. In the United States, this new tipping point will translate into a collapse of the real economy, final socio-economic stage of the serial bursting of the housing and financial bubbles and of the pursuance of the US dollar fall. The collapse of US real economy means the virtual freeze of the American economic machinery: private and public bankruptcies in large numbers, companies and public services closing down massively,...”

It has a dire warning – “On the occasion of the second anniversary of the publication of our famous “Global systemic crisis Alert” which toured the world in February 2006 (4), LEAP/E2020 wishes to remind that we are now resolutely stepping into an era with no historical precedent. Our researchers insisted on that many times in the last two years: any comparison with the previous crises of our modern economy would be fallacious. It is neither a “remake” of the 1929 crisis nor a repetition of the 1970s oil crises or 1987 stock market crisis. It is truly a global systemic crisis, that is to say a crisis affecting the entire planet and questioning the very foundations of the international system upon which the world was organised in the last decades”

So wasn’t anybody paying attention?

Looks like it. Although some institutions/ people did see…

As far back as April, 2008 – IMF warned – “Credit Crisis Is Broadening”. The widening and deepening fallout from the U.S. subprime mortgage crisis could have profound financial system and macroeconomic implications, according to the IMF's latest Global Financial Stability Report (GFSR).

"Financial markets remain under considerable stress because of a combination of three factors," said Jaime Caruana, head of the IMF's Monetary and Capital Markets Department. "First, the balance sheets of financial institutions are weakening; second, the deleveraging process continues and also that asset prices continue to fall; and, finally, the macroeconomic environment is more challenging because of the weakening global growth," he added.

The most profound aspect of this meltdown is that the crisis has weakened the capital and funding of large systemically important financial institutions, raising systemic risks.

So how did it begin?

According to an article on Wikipedia - The subprime mortgage crisis is an ongoing economic problem which became more apparent during 2007 and 2008, and is characterized by contracted liquidity in the global credit markets and banking system. The downturn in the U.S. housing market, risky lending and borrowing practices, and excessive individual and corporate debt levels have caused multiple adverse effects on the world economy. The crisis has passed through various stages, exposing pervasive weaknesses in the global financial system and regulatory framework

The crisis began with the bursting of the United States housing bubble and high default rates on "subprime" and adjustable rate mortgages (ARM), beginning in approximately 2005-2006. For several years prior to that, an increase in loan incentives such as easy initial terms and a long-term trend of rising housing prices had encouraged borrowers to assume difficult mortgages in the belief they would be able to quickly refinance at more favorable terms. However, once housing prices started to drop moderately in 2006–2007 in many parts of the U.S., refinancing became more difficult. Defaults and foreclosure activity increased dramatically, as easy initial terms expired, home prices failed to go up as anticipated, and ARM interest rates reset higher. Foreclosures accelerated in the United States in late 2006 and triggered a global financial crisis through 2007 and 2008. During 2007, nearly 1.3 million U.S. housing properties were subject to foreclosure activity, up 79% from 2006.

Major banks and other financial institutions around the world have reported losses of approximately US$435 billion as of 17 July 2008. In addition, the ability of corporations to obtain funds through the issuance of commercial paper was affected. This aspect of the crisis is consistent with a credit crunch. The liquidity concerns drove central banks around the world to take action to provide funds to member banks to encourage lending to worthy borrowers and to restore faith in the commercial paper markets.

Who is to blame?

According to LEAP/E2020 - It is always a repeated astonishment for our team to see the degree of incapacity of these same experts and managers in understanding the specific nature of the phenomenon currently unfolding. According to them, this crisis would only be a usual crisis but bigger. As a matter of fact that's how the financial media reflect the dominant interpretations of the ongoing crisis. According to our team, this approach is not only intellectually lazy; it is also morally guilty, because it has for a main consequence to prevent their readers (whether they are simple citizens, private investors or public or private organization managers) from preparing for the upcoming shocks.

They continue their forecast of doom - For this reason, in opposition to all what can be read in the mainstream media always eager to conceal the truth and serve the interests of those who rule them, LEAP/E2020 wishes to remind that it is first and foremost in the United States that the systemic crisis is taking an unprecedented shape (the « Very Great US Depression » as our team decided to call it in January 2007) because it is around this country, and this country alone, that the world got progressively organized after the second World War. The various issues of the GEAB extensively described this situation. In short, it appears to be useful to make clear that neither Europe nor Asia have a negative saving rate, a full-scale housing crisis throwing millions of citizens out of their homes, a free-falling currency, abysmal public and trade deficits, an economic recession and, on top of all this, a number of costly wars to finance.

So is there a silver lining for Asia and Europe?

Time will tell… for now, we, as individuals, can do little except watch this unprecedented systemic crisis unfold and reshape the financial landscape of this planet. The tectonic shifts in balance of financial power due to collapse of pillars of US economy (such as Lehman) is definitely reshaping the world order – but not with war this time, but with economics… Asia’s rise was anyway foretold… :-)

Global Warming and its effects on Planetary Climate

2008-09-27T21:34:00.000+05:30

There is a lot of buzz on the planet about global warming and its adverse effects on planet’s ecology, our society and civilization at large. But what is all this debate about?

Thanks to the media attention, many people are concerned about global warming, but they do not know what to do about it. The first thing is to understand the problem and its apparent root cause: increase in the amount of Carbon Dioxide in planet’s atmosphere or is it?

According to Victor Miguel Ponce – “The concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere determines to a large extent the present world climate, with temperature being an important component. Through geologic time, carbon dioxide entering the atmosphere from natural sources such as volcanic eruptions and weathering of rocks, has been gradually used by vegetation, through the process of photosynthesis. In the past two-and-a-half billion years, carbon has been temporarily stored above the Earth's surface as standing biomass and litter. During this time, excess quantities of carbon were permanently stored below the surface as fossil deposits of coal, petroleum, and natural gas”.

However, it is an opinion which although backed with some facts, is not unanimous.

There is a somewhat informational site from Environmental Defense Fund which provides arguments against the common misunderstandings that people (in general) have about global warming. It can be accessed here à Global Warming Myths and Facts. There even a climate atlas available on this site.

Even the National Geographic has covered this topic of literally global concern. So it is happening? The answer is emphatic yes. There is more and more energy being pumped into global weather/ climate system causing ever more violent weather – hurricanes, stronger monsoons, etc. An upsurge in the amount of extreme weather events, such as wildfires, heat waves, and strong tropical storms, is also attributed in part to climate change by some experts. Tragedy on human life is increasing since humanity is more spread and numerous on the planet now than it ever was in the entire history of our species or the planet.

T J Nelson provides an insight into cold facts (contrary to mass hysteria) about global warming in this illuminating article. I strongly recommend a reading. In this article, Nelson attempts to provide a balanced and scientific view of facts related to global warming. His assertion is essentially this – current hysteria about global warming is largely a hype created by media and certain so called scientific papers.

According to him – “Although carbon dioxide is capable of raising the Earth's overall temperature, the IPCC's predictions of catastrophic temperature increases produced by carbon dioxide have been challenged by many scientists. In particular, the importance of water vapor is frequently overlooked by environmental activists and by the media. The above discussion shows that the large temperature increases predicted by many computer models are unphysical and inconsistent with results obtained by basic measurements. Skepticism is warranted when considering computer-generated projections of global warming that cannot even predict existing observations”.

http://www.junkscience.com/Greenhouse/ tries to debunk the entire mythology around global warming. This article (or set of it) actually tries to delink the “greenhouse effect” and global warming and the entire concept of climate change. It is very reassuring to the skeptic in me that there are people out there who are actually questioning blind following and mass hysteria being created by certain circles.

So is there no cause for worry? Have humans caused this global warming? The opinion though not unanimous, is overwhelmingly in favor of human causality. To know in a more coherent manner, one has to understand a few facts first:

There is general agreement amongst scientists of this planet that our planet was “The Earth” was formed about 4,540,000,000 years ago – that’s 4.54 billion years.
At the time of beginning and for quite sometime after that, the Earth's atmosphere contained very little oxygen (less than 1% oxygen pressure).
Popular belief among the scientific community has it that early plants started to develop more than 2 billion years ago, probably about 2,700,000,000.
It is an established fact that through photosynthesis, plants uptake carbon dioxide into the biosphere as organic matter, and release oxygen as a byproduct.
Through geological ages, oxygen accumulated gradually in the atmosphere, reaching a value of about 21% of atmospheric gases at the present time. So our planet and its current atmosphere were terra-formed slowly over millions of years and concerted action of biological agents. It is not a “natural” occurrence, rather it would be safe to put it in these terms – life shaped earth’s climate and atmosphere to suit itself and brought about the present distribution of gases which we breathe.
It is also believed that through geological ages, surplus organic matter has been sequestered in the lithosphere as fossil organic materials (coal, petroleum, and natural gas).
Early animals (the first organisms with external shells) started to develop around 600,000,000 years ago
Animals operate in the opposite way than plants: they take up oxygen, burn organic matter (food), and release carbon dioxide as a byproduct
Early humans (Australopithecus anamensis) began to develop about 4,100,000 years ago
Cool climatic conditions have prevailed during the past 1,000,000 years. The species Homo sapiens evolved under these climatic conditions
Homo sapiens, that’s us, dates back to no more than 400,000 years.
Estimates for the variety Homo sapiens sapiens, to which all humans belong, range from 130,000 to 195,000 years old
The concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere was as low as 190 ppm during the last Ice Age, about 21,000 years ago.
The last Ice Age began to recede about 20,000 years ago
The agricultural revolution, where humans converted forests and rangelands into farms, began to develop about 10,000 years ago.
The agricultural revolution caused a reduction in standing biomass in the biosphere and reduced the uptake of carbon dioxide in midlatitudinal regions, indirectly contributing, however so slightly, to global warming.
The concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere increased gradually from a low of 190 ppm 21,000 year ago, to about 290 ppm in the year 1900, i.e., at an average rate of 0.00478 ppm per year
The industrial revolution, where humans developed machines (artificial animals, since they consume fuels, which are mostly organic matter), began in England about 240 years ago (1767).
In October 1999, the world's population reached 6,000,000,000, which is double that of the year 1959 (the doubling occurred in 40 years)
The global fleet of motor vehicles is estimated at 830,000,000 (2006).
The global fleet of motor vehicles has been recently growing at the rate of 16,000,000 per year.
Motor vehicles (cars, trucks, buses, and scooters) account for 80% of all transport-related energy use
The concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, which was at 290 ppm in the year 1900, rose to 316 ppm in 1959, or at an average 0.44 ppm per year
Measurements of the concentration of carbon dioxide since 1959 (316 ppm) have revealed an increase to 378 ppm in 2004, or at an average 1.38 ppm per year
The concentration of carbon dioxide has increased an average of about 1.8 ppm per year over the past two decades
The year 1998 was the warmest of record. The year 2002 was the second warmest (to that date). The year 2003 was the third warmest (to that date). The year 2004 was the fourth warmest (to that date). The year 2005 equaled 1998 as the warmest of record. The year 2007 equaled 1998 as the second warmest of record.
About 75% of the annual increase in atmospheric carbon dioxide is due to the burning of fossil fuels
The remaining 25% is attributed to anthropogenic changes in land use, which have the effect of reducing the net uptake of carbon dioxide. Anthropogenic changes in land use occur when forests are converted to rangelands, rangelands to agriculture, and agriculture to urban areas.
Other patterns of land degradation--deforestation, overgrazing, over-cultivation, desertification, and salinization--reduce the net uptake of carbon dioxide, indirectly contributing, however slightly, to global warming.

What's could Happen?

A follow-up report by the IPCC released in April 2007 warned that global warming could lead to large-scale food and water shortages and have catastrophic effects on wildlife.

Sea level could rise between 7 and 23 inches (18 to 59 centimeters) by century's end, the IPCC's February 2007 report projects. Rises of just 4 inches (10 centimeters) could flood many South Seas islands and swamp large parts of Southeast Asia.
Some hundred million people live within 3 feet (1 meter) of mean sea level, and much of the world's population is concentrated in vulnerable coastal cities. In the U.S., Louisiana and Florida are especially at risk.
Glaciers around the world could melt, causing sea levels to rise while creating water shortages in regions dependent on runoff for fresh water.
Strong hurricanes, droughts, heat waves, wildfires, and other natural disasters may become commonplace in many parts of the world. The growth of deserts may also cause food shortages in many places.
More than a million species face extinction from disappearing habitat, changing ecosystems, and acidifying oceans.
The ocean's circulation system, known as the ocean conveyor belt, could be permanently altered, causing a mini-ice age in Western Europe and other rapid changes.
At some point in the future, warming could become uncontrollable by creating a so-called positive feedback effect. Rising temperatures could release additional greenhouse gases by unlocking methane in permafrost and undersea deposits, freeing carbon trapped in sea ice, and causing increased evaporation of water.

We need to remember, Dinosaurs died out 65 million years ago – primarily due to climate change. It wasn’t only the asteroid which struck the earth and wiped out 99% species on land and oceans. It wasn’t just the impact – but the climate change induced by that impact which killed the species.

Can we do anything to stem this rising tide?

Sure! Just follow the tips on this wonderful blog. The Grinning planet provides some clues – which I would have anyway recommended even if our planet wasn’t threatened with global warming and so called catastrophic climate change!

Other resources:

global-warming myths and facts at Undo-It.org
climate change science at RealClimate.org

Problem solving. Keep it simple and move on

2008-09-22T23:03:00.000+05:30

This is really simple and interesting. Very often we get carried away in problem solving. The general idea should be to keep it simple and move on.

For example, when NASA began the launch of astronauts into space, they found out that the pens wouldn't work at zero gravity.

In order to solve this problem, they hired Andersen Consulting (Accenture - today).

It took them one decade and 12 million dollars. They developed a pen that worked at zero gravity, upside down, Under water, on practically any surface including crystal and in a temperature range from below freezing to over 300 degrees C.

The Russians used a pencil.

Moral of the story: Complex and elaborate solution are not always the best fit, reality can be simple and it should be our Endeavour to keep it simple!

"Yog" - not Yoga

2008-09-21T19:50:00.001+05:30

What is Yoga?

The word yoga, in Hindi pronounced as Yog, is derived from Sanskrit word yuj which means to join or unite. Yoga is an ancient Indian science and art. The practice of yoga integrates the body, mind and soul. Yoga can be practiced by all irrespective of religion, colour, caste, creed, sex and race. A practitioner of Yoga is called a Yogi (unisex term) or Yogini (for female).

According to Wikipedia – Major branches of a yoga include Raja Yoga, Karma Yoga, Jnana Yoga, Bhakti Yoga, and Hatha Yoga. Raja Yoga, compiled in the Yoga Sutras of Patanjali, and known simply as yoga in the context of Hindu philosophy, is part of the Samkhya tradition. Many other Hindu texts discuss aspects of yoga, including the Vedas, Upanishads, the Bhagavad Gita, the Hatha Yoga Pradipika, the Shiva Samhita and various Tantras

What we know as yoga are the Asana-s or body postures. They are only a part of the yogic science. Yoga is the science of managing our mind. Managing our mind means that we can do the task of our choice, for the time we want, without mental or physical strain. Maintaining a happy disposition despite the world around us and the difficulties we face.

Asanas balance the energies of body and mind helping us to regain and maintain health and wellbeing. The body postures are very gentle and will not cause exhaustion or fatigue, but they will help to release the stiffness and exertion of hours of office work sitting in front of the computer etc. they will make the body flexible and strong. After the practice one should feel refreshed, energetic and peaceful.

Pranayama or breathing techniques have a profound effect on body and mind. Correct breathing nourishes every cell with oxygen. Breathing is directly linked to the mind, the pattern of breath changes with different states of mind, emotions and stress-levels. Using this we can calm the mind with breathing techniques. Only a relaxed mind can be attentive and creative.

Some good resources on Yoga can be found on the about.com site. A more westernized view of Yoga can be found at the Yoga Journal.

But the best resource that I found on Yoga is this site ABC of Yoga.com! Although it too has a somewhat westernized outlook on Yoga, the compilation of information in one place along with the real world benefits for humdrum mortals like us instead of the wisdom of ancients is what attracted me.

Speaking of ancients - the ancient seers laid down four ways by which the practitioner can attain Samadhi or spiritual salvation, the goal of yoga. These are:

Jnana Marg: The path of knowledge.

Karma Marg: The path of action.

Bhakti Marg: The path of selfless devotion.

Dhyan Marg: The path of introspection whereby pupil learns to cleanse the body, control the senses and restrains fluctuations of the mind. Dhyan Marg is clearly explained by Sage Patanjali.

History of Yoga

While the most ancient mystic practices are vaguely hinted at in the Vedas, the ascetic practices (tapas) are referenced in the Brāhmaṇas (900 BCE and 500 BCE), early commentaries on the Vedas. The Rig Veda, earliest of the Hindu scripture mentions the practice. Robert Schneider and Jeremy Fields write, "Yoga asanas were first prescribed by the ancient Vedic texts thousands of years ago and are said to directly enliven the body's inner intelligence." Certainly breath control and curbing the mind was practiced since the Vedic times. It is believed that yoga was fundamental to Vedic ritual, especially to chanting the sacred hymns.

In the Upanishads, an early reference to meditation is made in Brihadaranyaka Upanishad, one of the earliest Upanishads (approx. 900 BCE). The main textual sources for the evolving concept of Yoga are the middle Upanishads, (ca. 400 BCE), the Mahabharata (5th c. BCE) including the Bhagavad Gita (ca. 200 BCE), and the Yoga Sutras of Patanjali (200 BCE-300 CE).

Several seals discovered at Indus Valley Civilization (c. 3300–1700 BC) sites depict figures in a yoga- or meditation-like posture, "a form of ritual discipline, suggesting a precursor of yoga" that point to Harappan devotion to "ritual discipline and concentration", according to Archaeologist Gregory Possehl. According to prof. Egbert Richter Ushanas, concerning the IVC seals he has said, "All the seals are based on Vedas -- Rig Veda and Atharva Veda

Sage Patanjali

Sage Patanjali was the first person to present the ancient tradition of yoga in a systematic way. Thus he is considered the father of yoga. In his most important work- The Yog Sutras of Patanjali, he presented an eight fold path for attaining salvation. The path is called Ashtang Yog i.e. it is eight part yoga.

Ashtanga Yoga

The eight limbs of Ashtanga Yoga are-

1. Yam - Social Disciplines
a. Ahimsa - (Non Violence)
b. Satya - (Truth)
c. Asteya - (Non Stealing)
d. Brahmacharya - (Self control)
e. Aparigraha - (Non Hoarding)
2. Niyam - Personal Disciplines
a. Sauch - (Cleanliness)
b. Santosh - (Contentment)
c. Tapas - (Great Effort)
d. Svadhyay - (Introspection)
e. Ishwar Pranidhan - (Faith in God)
3. Asan - (Postures)
4. Pranayam - (Breath Control)
5. Pratyahar - (Withdrawal of Senses)
6. Dharana - (Concentration)
7. Dhyan - (Meditation)
8. Samadhi - (Union)

Large Hadron Collider turned on – the world didn’t end…

2008-09-13T17:12:00.000+05:30

So… the LHC or the Large Hadron Collider was completed and turned ON last Wednesday and yet the world didn’t end… of course there is always the funny side to anything monumental. Check out this website which purports to have two live webcams at CERN LHC site…. http://www.cyriak.co.uk/lhc/lhc-webcams.html

News that a group of Greek hackers had managed to “momentary” access to computer systems of CERN has been making rounds. As one insider put it – “it is hard enough to make these things work if no one is messing with it” – I totally sympathize the “poor” scientists – they take years to build a system which is hard enough to get up and running and there are people who want to bring it down – just for the kicks?

The whole idea goes way back. The first key experiment was conducted in 1909, under the direction of Ernest Rutherford. When Rutherford shot alpha particles at a wafer-thin sheet of gold foil, a small proportion of the particles bounced right back, a phenomenon that he described as “almost as incredible as if you fired a fifteen-inch shell at a piece of tissue paper and it came back to hit you.” Rutherford’s work led to the realization that most of an atom’s mass was concentrated in a tiny area, the nucleus. “All science is either physics or stamp-collecting,” he is supposed to have said.

Since Rutherford’s discovery, particle physics has provided one extraordinary—if increasingly implausible-sounding—revelation after another: first protons and neutrons, then antimatter, gluons, neutrinos, and quarks. In 1967, the existence of particles to mediate the weak force, which is responsible for radioactive decay, was theorized; in 1983, at CERN, these particles—the W and the Z—were observed and their properties measured. In 1977, the existence of what became known as the “top” quark was predicted; in 1995, at Fermilab, in Illinois, it, too, was found.

And yet, for all its triumphs, the field has been haunted by failure. The more physicists have learned about the way matter behaves at its most fundamental level, the more acutely they have become aware that something—a big something—is missing from their accounts. Among the many possibilities proposed for what’s often called “new physics” is that the universe actually consists of tiny strands (or strings) of energy; that it contains several dimensions beyond those that we perceive; that it is full of mysterious particles—“sparticles”—that have yet to be detected; that it is not a universe at all but a multiverse; and that it began not with a bang but with a splat.

LHC is considered the best hope for finding some answers. Sean has a take on what the LHC will find and some percentages of probability to back it up… take a look!

And just in case you are the home enthusiast – here is the site for DO-IT-AT-HOME and contribute your computer’s idle time (which must be really huge since you are reading this stuff :-)) – on a similar note as that of the hugely successful SETI@Home project…

The GOD Particle!

2008-09-08T23:18:00.000+05:30

In my last entry, I talked about the LHC or Large Hadron collider. One of the mission parameters of building the LHC was to find clues to or discover outright the Higgs Boson – also popularly titled the God Particle.

According to Wikipedia article – “The Higgs boson or BEH Mechanism, popularized as the "God Particle", is a hypothetical massive scalar elementary particle predicted to exist by the Standard Model of particle physics; it is the only Standard Model particle not yet observed. Experimental observation would elucidate how otherwise massless elementary particles nevertheless manage to construct mass in matter. More specifically, the Higgs boson would explain the difference between the massless photon and the relatively massive W and Z bosons. Elementary particle masses, and the differences between electromagnetism (caused by the photon) and the weak force (caused by the W and Z bosons), are critical to many aspects of the structure of microscopic (and hence macroscopic) matter; thus, if it exists, the Higgs boson is an integral and pervasive component of the material world. “

As of yet, no experiment has directly detected the existence of the Higgs boson, but this may change as the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN produces results.

Did all the information given above make any sense to you? Okay, you are not alone in having a significant challenge in understanding what elementary particle physics to scientists is literally these days J. Alright, let’s go back to the basics here.

Get physicists and cosmologists talking about their work and they will tell you that there are elegant theories and messy ones. Almost all of them believe the universe conforms to an elegant one. A central goal of today's physics, in fact, is to show that at its very beginning, the universe was ordered and unified. But this unity didn't last for long. Just instants after the Big Bang, as the explosion cooled and its contents scattered, the cosmos' forces and matter differentiated. The universe fell from a state of perfect grace into its current complexity, in a cosmic parallel to Adam and Eve.

Many great minds — Democritus, Isaac Newton, James Clerk Maxwell, and Albert Einstein — took giant steps toward bringing the universe's lost unity out of hiding. In 1964, Peter Higgs, a shy scientist in Edinburgh, added his name to that list by coming up with an ingenious theory that gave scientists the tools to explain how two classes of particles, which now appear to be different, were once one and the same. His theory proposes the existence of a single particle responsible for imparting mass to all things — a speck so precious it has comes to be known as the "God particle." The scientific term for it is the Higgs boson, and to find it physicists are counting on the most powerful particle accelerator ever constructed: the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at the CERN laboratory in Geneva, a 17-mile underground circuit that took 25 years to plan and $6 billion to build

Basically, all the known forces in the universe are manifestations of four fundamental forces, the strong, electromagnetic, weak, and gravitational forces. But why four? Why not just one master force? Those who joined the quest for a single unified master force declared that the first step toward unification had been achieved with the discovery of the discovery of the W and Z particles, the intermediate vector bosons, in 1983. This brought experimental verification of particles whose prediction had already contributed to the Nobel Prize awarded to Weinberg, Salam, and Glashow in 1979. Combining the weak and electromagnetic forces into a unified "electroweak" force, these great advances in both theory and experiment provide encouragement for moving on to the next step, the "grand unification" necessary to include the strong interaction.

One rather comic and more understandable (at least to the masses) explanation of what Higgs Boson is all about are given here. In 1993, the UK Science Minister, William Waldegrave, challenged physicists to produce an answer that would fit on one page to the question 'What is the Higgs boson, and why do we want to find it?' The winning entries can be found here.

As usual in all things related to human discoveries, there is a rumor flying around that the so called God Particle may have already been found at the Tevatron, an accelerator located outside of Chicago. This isn't the first time a story like this has circulated. Until the LHC opens, the Tevatron remains the largest accelerator in the world. Among its most significant past discoveries is another standard-model particle, the top quark. And in 2009, it will shut its doors forever. Like the LHC, the Tevatron was built with the Higgs in mind, and as time runs out for America's biggest atom smasher, some nervy experimentalists have jumped the gun. The full text of this article can be found here.

For those who like to have a little more technical details on the whole matter (pun intendedJ) can access the articles at Hyperphysics. And like everything else, human capacity for trivializing the profound and thus making it less frightening to masses has been equally at work for Higgs Boson as well. You can find “music” inspired by the god particle at the so called edge of science at the official site of Higgs Boson!

The Higgs boson has appeared in several works of fiction in popular culture. These references rarely reflect the expected properties of the hypothetical elementary particle, or do so only vaguely and often imbue it with fantastic properties. The curious and long list of such fiction works can be accessed via this article!

There is more serious stuff at the scientific American on the questions related to Higgs Boson.

All the theories apart, to me the search for this ultimate particle is part of the overall quest of humankind to understand itself and its origins. We are, after all, made of star stuff. All that constitutes us was once manufactured in the nuclear furnaces of old and giant stars scattered throughout the cosmos. I find this quest irresistible.

Next, I’ll be talking about the wave-particle duality… watch out for this space :-)

Doomsday Machine –Large Hadron Collider (LHC): Is end of the world near?

2008-09-07T14:00:00.001+05:30

As the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) nears completion and commissioning, there are wild talks and even protests about its potential impact on the world and the universe in general.

But what is LHC and what is the reason behind the human Endeavour to build a machine such as this or monstrosity as it is being called by some.

As put in science daily – “Particle colliders creating black holes that could devour the Earth. Sounds like a great Hollywood script. But, according to UC Santa Barbara Physics Professor Steve Giddings, it's pure fiction”.

So come, explore with me the conundrum behind arguably perhaps the greatest scientific effort by humankind and I really say human kind and not an individual since this work is being conducted by an international team – making it a truly human Endeavour rather than a work of a single intellectual giant like Einstein, Newton, etc… The LHC is the world's largest and the highest-energy particle accelerator. It is funded and built in collaboration with over eight thousand physicists from over eighty-five countries as well as hundreds of universities and laboratories.

What is Large Hadron Collider or LHC?

The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) is a gigantic scientific instrument near Geneva, where it spans the border between Switzerland and France about 100 m underground and is being built in a circular tunnel 27 km in circumference. The tunnel is buried around 50 to 175 m. underground. It straddles the Swiss and French borders on the outskirts of Geneva. It is a particle accelerator used by physicists to study the smallest known particles – the fundamental building blocks of all things. It will revolutionize our understanding, from the minuscule world deep within atoms to the vastness of the Universe.

The idea of the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) began in the early 1980s. The first approval of the project by the CERN Council occurred in December 1994 and the first civil engineering construction work began in April 1998.

You can take a photo tour of LHC by clicking here

There is another very good collection of LHC related photographs at the Big Picture.

A graphical display of all components of LHC can be found here.

Complete workings of LHC can be found at CERN Site.

Why is LHC needed?

If we are to believe the scientists – this is all related to unfinished business of Newton and perhaps Einstein as well. Newton told us what the effects of gravitation are and how to calculate the effects. But told nothing about the nature of gravity – what is it after all and what causes it?

Einstein went a step further and combined Space and time. And then went on to explain gravity as the after effect of large mass curving space-time. This is all fine, but it still doesn’t tell us what gives us mass at all?

And it is here that we ask the crucial question - What is the origin of mass? Why do tiny particles weigh the amount they do? Why do some particles have no mass at all? At present, there are no established answers to these questions. The most likely explanation may be found in the Higgs boson, a key undiscovered particle that is essential for the Standard Model to work. First hypothesized in 1964, it has yet to be observed. The ATLAS and CMS experiments will be actively searching for signs of this elusive particle.

Everything we see in the Universe, from an ant to a galaxy, is made up of ordinary particles. These are collectively referred to as matter, forming 4% of the Universe. Dark matter and dark energy are believed to make up the remaining proportion, but they are incredibly difficult to detect and study, other than through the gravitational forces they exert. Investigating the nature of dark matter and dark energy is one of the biggest challenges today in the fields of particle physics and cosmology.

What does this machine do? Well, in LHC, two beams of subatomic particles called 'hadrons' – either protons or lead ions – will travel in opposite directions inside the circular accelerator, gaining energy with every lap. Physicists will use the LHC to recreate the conditions just after the Big Bang, by colliding the two beams head-on at very high energy. Teams of physicists from around the world will analyze the particles created in the collisions using special detectors in a number of experiments dedicated to the LHC

When activated, it is theorized that the LHC - collider will produce the elusive Higgs boson, the observation of which could confirm the predictions and missing links in the Standard Model of physics and could explain, as I mentioned earlier, how other elementary particles acquire properties such as mass. The verification of the existence of the Higgs boson would be a significant step in the search for a Grand Unified Theory, which seeks to unify three of the four known fundamental forces: electromagnetism, the strong nuclear force and the weak nuclear force, leaving out only gravity.

The Higgs boson may also help to explain why gravitation is so weak compared to the other three forces. In addition to the Higgs boson, other theorized particles, models and states might be produced, and for some searches are planned, including super symmetric particles, compositeness (Technicolor), extra dimensions, strangelets, micro black holes and magnetic monopoles.

The ATLAS and CMS experiments will look for super symmetric particles to test a likely hypothesis for the make-up of dark matter.

It will also help us in explaining the bias found in nature of matter over anti-matter. More specifically, it will help us in answering as to why there is no anti-matter. We live in a world of matter – everything in the Universe, including ourselves, is made of matter. Antimatter is like a twin version of matter, but with opposite electric charge. At the birth of the Universe, equal amounts of matter and antimatter should have been produced in the Big Bang. But when matter and antimatter particles meet, they annihilate each other, transforming into energy. Somehow, a tiny fraction of matter must have survived to form the Universe we live in today, with hardly any antimatter left. Why does Nature appear to have this bias for matter over antimatter?

The LHCb experiment will be looking for differences between matter and antimatter to help answer this question. Previous experiments have already observed a tiny behavioral difference, but what has been seen so far is not nearly enough to account for the apparent matter–antimatter imbalance in the Universe.

I’ll be writing more about the Higgs Boson or the “GOD PARTICLE” in my next entry. But if you are interested in reading more about it – follow this link.

It will also help us in answering whether there are other hidden dimensions. We are able to sense the common 3-dimensions and now with the help of Einstein also – time. Einstein showed that the three dimensions of space are related to time. Subsequent theories propose that further hidden dimensions of space may exist; for example, string theory implies that there are additional spatial dimensions yet to be observed. These may become detectable at very high energies, so data from all the detectors will be carefully analyzed to look for signs of extra dimensions.

So what’s the problem?

Okay, it sounds pretty fancy stuff, but hardly the case for paranoia being displayed by some groups of scientists and merrily being covered by our usual sensationalist media :-)

The main problem with the whole project is - Nobody knows for sure what is going to happen (off course there are several theories that are being tested).

Of course there is wide agreement that one of the sub products could be small black holes (tiny, mini, and minuscule). after that, most scientists (by most here I mean almost everyone in the planet) believe that, if these black holes happen to exist, they would “disappear” due to a series of very complicated reasons or, if they stay, it would take them several billion years before they grow to “eat” the earth.

A quite small number of scientists (allegedly 1 or 2 or the groups surrounding them), believes that this black holes would grow and fast, so they would end eating the earth in 50 months and, although the probability is not easily quantified, does the gravity of the potential result deserves to put the experiment on hold until a proper discussion takes places within the scientific community?

The concerns of this group were understood and addressed by CERN and dismissed. CERN actually used the research of Professor Steve Giddings, of UC Santa Barbara. Giddings has co-authored a paper documenting his study of the safety of microscopic black holes that might possibly be produced by the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), which is nearing completion in Europe. The paper, co-authored by Michelangelo Mangano of the European Center for Nuclear Research (CERN), which is building the world's largest particle collider, investigates hypothesized behavior of tiny black holes that might be created by high-energy collisions in the CERN particle accelerator.

As quoted in Science daily - The Giddings/Mangano study concludes that such microscopic black holes would be harmless. In fact, he added, nature is continuously creating LHC-like collisions when much higher-energy cosmic rays collide with the Earth's atmosphere, with the Sun, and with other objects such as white dwarfs and neutron stars. If such collisions posed a danger, the consequences for Earth or these astronomical objects would have become evident already, Giddings said.

Two major lawsuits have been initiated and quashed as far as I can understand (remember, I am not a lawyer either). One in the European Court of Human Rights and other in the US Federal District Court in Honolulu. The first sought an emergency injunction based on the experiment violating the right to life of European citizens and pose a threat to the rule of law, and the second tried to force the U.S. government to withdraw its participation in the experiment. It is important to note that the European Court of Human Rights rejected the request for the injunction but will hear the case (after the experiment has started). The status of US case is unknown at this moment.

Personally, I do not think that LHC is a threat to universe and humanity. Personally, I think it is a great conceit on humanity’s part if we think collectively that building a 27 km long tunnel and smashing a few atoms can trigger a universal collapse back to the state which existed prior to Big Bang. Although I am not a qualified high energy physicist, I do recall a similar scare during the time of the Manhattan Project – or the A-Bomb project of USA during 1940’s. At that time also, nobody was sure of what would happen when an atomic bomb went off. There were wild theories – mostly in public media and imagination and the most fanciful one that I recall is related to whole of earth’s atmosphere being burned off due to chain reaction set off by the exploding bomb.

Of course it never happened that way – our presence here is a testimony to that.

I do, however, acknowledge this hullaballoo as a classic case of failure of science to communicate to the masses. The media is doing what it does usually – sensationalizing the issue beyond reason.

Let’s look forward to a new era in scientific break through and new understandings of our reality as well new technologies. Remember – there wouldn’t TV if not for quantum mechanics, No GPS if not for Einstein and Newton!

The Human Brain!

2008-08-23T11:49:00.007+05:30

Human Brain!

You have been entrusted with the care and feeding of the most extraordinary and complex creation in the universe. Home to your mind and personality, your brain houses your cherished memories and future hopes. It orchestrates the symphony of consciousness that gives you purpose and passion, motion and emotion.

But what do you really know about it?

Your brain and spinal cord make up your central nervous system. Together, they control your body -- but it's the brain which is Commander-in-chief.

Here, in this article, explore with me, the creation that your brain is!

Okay, so your brain is wrinkled, soft and a little wet. It doesn't look like much. But it's made of more than 10 billion nerve cells and over 50 billion other cells and weighs less than 3 pounds! And it's the most extraordinary thing that you could possibly imagine! It monitors and regulates unconscious bodily processes like breathing and heart rate, and coordinates most voluntary movement. It's the site of consciousness, thought and creativity!

Different parts of your brain do different things. Some areas receive messages from sense organs, others control balance and muscle coordination, and still others handle speech, or emotion, memories, or basic motor skills, or complex calculations. You may think your heart is where you feel emotion, but it's really your brain. You may think your legs take you down the street, but it's your brain instructing the muscles in your legs to move. Your eyes may take in light and an image may be projected onto the pupil, but it's your brain that interprets what you see...you get the picture.

The brain contains a staggering one hundred billion nerve cells, or neurons. As Helen Phillips in her new scientist article on brain puts it – “The complexity of the connectivity between these cells is mind-boggling. Each neuron can make contact with thousands or even tens of thousands of others, via tiny structures called synapses. Our brains form a million new connections for every second of our lives. The pattern and strength of the connections is constantly changing and no two brains are alike. It is in these changing connections that memories are stored, habits learned and personalities shaped, by reinforcing certain patterns of brain activity, and losing others “.

The Human Brain Atlas

Let’s start first with the atlas of human brain. There is a very good resource for those who are somewhat more medically inclined from the Michigan State University – Brain Biodiversity Bank. There’s even a human brain screensaver there, though I can’t imagine your average Joe downloading this, but still here it is.

How the Human Brain Developed

Manfred Davidmann talks about the development of human brain through its evolutionary stages. The brain has been evolving into a more complex organ throughout the evolution of humanity, indeed throughout the evolution of life itself.

Davidmann puts it as – “We slowly ascended from lower life forms to what we are today, by a process of natural selection from randomly occurring changes. Each change had to prove its worth by surviving the continual battle for existence, being against being, species against species and this process has gone on for many millions of years”.

Basically the current understanding of science has it that we really have 3 different kinds of brains (or layers) which evolved during the course of our rise from the slime… Basically, these are categorized as:

Reptilian Brain: this is the innermost part or layer and it’s the oldest and the most primitive part and is sometimes also known as hindbrain. The reptilian brain appears to be largely unchanged by evolution and we share it with all other animals which have a backbone. This brain layer controls body functions required for sustaining life such as breathing and body temperature.

Mammalian Brain: Also know as the mid-brain, this was next layer to evolve. This was an enormous evolution over the primitive reptilian layer. The mammalian brain contains organs for automatic control of body functions such as digestion, the fluid balance, body temperature and blood pressure as well as for filing new experiences as they happen and so creating a store of experience-based memories and most importantly (in my opinion) for experience-based recognition of danger and for responding to this according to past experience. And for some conscious feelings about events.

Human Brain: And the mammalian brain became the human brain by adding the massive grey matter (neocortex) which envelopes most of the earlier brain and amounts to about 85 per cent of the human brain mass. This massive addition consists mostly of two hemispheres which are covered by an outer layer and interconnected by a string of nerve fibres. It is also called the forebrain.

For those who would like to delve deeper, here is a good resource on the net for unfolding history of brain through the ages.

Comparison of the brain and a computer

Most interest has been focused on comparing the brain with computers. We have seen enough science fiction movies or novels or articles, comparing human brain to a variety of computers. A variety of obvious analogies exist: for example, individual neurons can be compared with a transistor (although a neuron's computing power is probably closer to a simple calculator than a transistor, and the specialized parts of the brain can be compared with graphics cards and other system components. However, such comparisons are fraught with difficulties.

Perhaps the most fundamental difference between brains and computers is that today's computers operate by performing often sequential instructions from an input program, while no clear analogy of a program appears in human brains.

In addition to the technical differences, other key differences exist. The brain is massively parallel and interwoven; whereas programming of this kind is extremely difficult for computer software writers (most parallel systems run semi-independently, for example each working on a small separate 'chunk' of a problem).

The closest to the equivalent would be the idea of a logical process, but the nature and existence of such entities are subjects of philosophical debate. Given Turing's model of computation, the Turing machine, this may be a functional, not fundamental, distinction. However, Maass and Markram have recently argued that "in contrast to Turing machines, generic computations by neural circuits are not digital, and are not carried out on static inputs, but rather on functions of time" (the Turing machine computes computable functions). Ultimately, computers were not designed to be models of the brain, though constructs like neural networks attempt to abstract the behavior of the brain in a way that can be simulated computationally.

The human brain is able to interpret and solve problems that are not formalized (strong AI), whereas the computer with current software and current hardware is only able to solve formalized problems (weak AI), a human can understand context in an arbitrary text, something even the most powerful and best software is not able to discern (as of 2008).

The computational power of the human brain is difficult to ascertain, as the human brain is not easily paralleled to the binary number processing of today's computers. For instance, multiplying two large numbers can be accomplished in a fraction of a second with a typical calculator or desktop computer, while the average human may require a pen-and-paper approach to keep track of each stage of the calculation over a period of five or more seconds. Yet, while the human brain is calculating a math problem in an attentive state, it is subconsciously processing data from millions of nerve cells that handle the visual input of the paper and surrounding area, the aural input from both ears, and the sensory input of millions of cells throughout the body.

Wikipedia has a great section on this approach and can be accessed here.

Oh, by the way, have you ever tried this trick? (note you might need to click on the image)

If your eyes follow the movement of the rotating pink dot, you will only see one color, pink.

If you stare at the black + in the center, the moving dot turns to green.

Now, concentrate on the black + in the center of the picture. After a short period of time, all the pink dots will slowly disappear, and you will only see a green dot rotating.

It's amazing how our brain works. *

Was this Interesting? Watch out for my entry on human dreams and their exploration!

Consciousness, Meditation & Connection to the cosmos – both inner and outer!

2008-08-15T20:26:00.002+05:30

In our search for the wonders of cosmos, it is often that we forget that there is an inner cosmos or universe within ourselves also. I do not, in a strict sense, refer to the biological universe that a human body is, rather what our consciousness allows us to experience of the universe. But in the daily clutter of our lives, especially those competing in the so called “Rat Race” of the corporate world – we often find ourselves disconnected with the nature and universe at large. The chase for deadlines, the ever increasing demands for material comfort, or leisure or somewhat more esoteric conquests of nature, the ever increasing need for more gadgets, all are leading us away from the fundamentals of existence – the purpose of being here or the so called corporeal existence.

While I am a great fan of materialistic or physical methods of discovery of nature and universe, especially since they present, at least currently, the best way towards understanding of the true nature of physical universe that surrounds us – I cannot, but help thinking about the inner universe and other more outré methods of understanding the reality.

To understand this reality, one needs to calm one’s mind down to a level where the clutter of daily mundane thoughts is swept away and instead one’s consciousness is able to concentrate on higher things and contemplation of the whole rather than parts. I found that throughout human history, before the advent of our “technological society”, there have been attempts to understand the reality of universe through powers of the mind alone. Meditation is one such technique which allows human mind to achieve level of consciousness which is way beyond the regular everyday requirements and may possibly allow us to tap into a hitherto unknown aspect of the universe, of which we are usually unaware.

According to Wikipedia - Meditation is a mental discipline by which one attempts to get beyond the conditioned, "thinking" mind into a deeper state of relaxation or awareness. It often involves turning attention to a single point of reference. Meditation is recognized as a component of almost all religions, and has been practiced for over 5,000 years. It is also practiced outside religious traditions. Different meditative disciplines encompass a wide range of spiritual and/or psychophysical practices which may emphasize different goals -- from achievement of a higher state of consciousness, to greater focus, creativity or self-awareness, or simply a more relaxed and peaceful frame of mind.

Meditation has been central to almost all religions in the world. Usually we find that Concentration meditation is used in many religions and spiritual practices.

Buzzle Staff and Agencies talk at length over the - The Long History of Meditation Is Evidence of Its Benefits.

“Meditation is both an ancient spiritual practice and a contemporary mind-body technique for relaxing the body and calming the mind. Although there is not a lot of recorded information dealing with the history of meditation, its roots can be traced back to ancient times. Researchers speculate that even primitive societies may have discovered altered states of consciousness and meditative states while staring into the flames of their campfires”

Meditation has been defined as: "self regulation of attention, in the service of self-inquiry, in the here and now." The various techniques of meditation can be classified according to their focus. Some focus on the field or background perception and experience, also called "mindfulness"; others focus on a preselected specific object, and are called "concentrative" meditation. There are also techniques that shift between the field and the object.

Tracing meditation to its beginning is like tracing the controlled use of fire to its beginning: In all probability the controlled use of fire emerged in many different places at approximately the same time, being instinctual and intrinsic to human development. It is speculated, in fact, that meditation may have been stumbled upon by early men falling into a state of relaxation by staring for long periods of time into the flames of man made fires. It is similarly argued that the experience of spending time in dark caves could lead the mind to enter a trance like state - accounting for the profusion of simple abstract symbols drawn on cave walls in the Paleolithic period.

We can also define 'meditation' as the art of consciousness becoming aware of itself on the grand and cosmic scale. Meditation cannot be called a science as yet, because science requires objective testing with objectively proven methods and results. Meditation is on the road to becoming a real science, however, and not just an intuitive art veiled in mystery.

For those who might be interested in learning meditation “Learning Meditation” might be a good starting point. A further resource in this direction can be found at - http://www.how-to-meditate.org/ I also strongly recommend a further reading with transcendental meditation.

Okay, I always digress into the side topicsJ. The fundamental point we are discussing here is the way to understanding this universe, and not restricting oneself to one path alone. However, the lure of meditation as a path to aid the understanding of universe is irresistible indeed.

Christopher Calder describes meditation as inner astronomy. “You discover the stars, the moon, and the sun are all inside you”.

The TES Hypothesis, by Calder, is rather more interesting. “It is a mind that is unprejudiced by religion, philosophy, and cultural conditioning. It is going naked in the stars”

The TES hypothesis is inherently obvious, fundamental, and in harmony with a state of mind that values both science and super consciousness. It declares that the universe and all of its manifestations are created by time-energy-space, the TES. Nothing in the universe is truly supernatural and beyond the laws of nature. Everything that exists is created through cycles of the TES, both on the large physical scale involving the formation of stars, galaxies, and planets, and on the subtler inner dimensions involving the evolution of the human brain and consciousness. The vast majority of the TES exists unconsciously, without feeling or life. This portion is made up of empty space, stars, and the bulk of planets. No human being has ever known the unconscious part of the TES directly because all that we know is within the world of consciousness. We become aware of the unconscious realm of the TES only through inference. When you look at a tree, you are not seeing the tree directly, but rather a representation of the tree created by your own brain. Our experience of colors, smells, tastes, and sounds, are all subjective creations of our mammalian neurological evolution.

Christopher Calder also talks of The Realms of Consciousness. According to him, ancient Hindu yogis and Tibetan Buddhist monks categorized seven stages of human consciousness, and referred to them as the "seven bodies." He would like to describe these "bodies" as realms of consciousness, because he feels the evidence strongly suggests that they are all layers of awareness in the purely physical human brain. In his articles and teachings, he is trying to bring science and the Eastern traditions into harmony in order to express the actual facts, rather than just restating ancient myths. This marriage of science and meditative states of consciousness may be a bit awkward at first, as the combination is so very new.

Personally, I don’t think I know enough about these schools of thought to become either a follower or a critic. However, they are stepping stones to our understanding of the universe through multiple channels.

I found a distinctly different, though not unique, view on symbolic or spiritual cosmology by M. Salim McCarron - Cosmos as meditation: Sufi and Shi’a Muslim Reflections on the Spiritual Cosmology.

However, to date, in my personal experience, I have come across the most moving discussion is from Dalai Lama - From Meditation to the Atom in the Universe. He talks of consciousness, the experiences of human mind, the natural boundaries of introspection, Buddhism’s long history of investigation into the nature of the mind and its various aspects and his call for modern science and Buddhism to conduct collaborative research on the understanding of consciousness while leaving aside the philosophical question of whether consciousness is ultimately physical. I definitely recommend reading of The Universe in a Single Atom: The Convergence of Science and Spirituality.

And if you are looking for wonderful inspirations into the area of science related to consciousness, take a look at Edgar Mitchell’s foundation - the Institute of Noetic Science. The institute of Noetic Science is a nonprofit membership organization located in Northern California that conducts and sponsors leading-edge research into the potentials and powers of consciousness - including perceptions, beliefs, attention, intention, and intuition. The institute explores phenomena that do not necessarily fit conventional scientific models, while maintaining a commitment to scientific rigor. The vision for creating the Institute of Noetic Sciences came in 1971. Nations throughout the world had galvanized around the exciting frontier of space exploration. The potential for scientific understanding of our world seemed unlimited to a naval air captain named Edgar Mitchell. He was a pragmatic young test pilot, engineer and scientist; a mission to the moon on Apollo 14 was his “dream come true.” Space exploration symbolized for Dr Mitchell what it did for his nation as a whole - technological triumph of historical proportions, unprecedented mastery of the world in which we live, and extraordinary potentials for new discoveries. But it was the trip home that Mitchell recalls most. Sitting in the cramped cabin of the space capsule, he saw planet Earth floating freely in the vastness of space. He was engulfed by a profound sense of universal connectedness - an epiphany. In Mitchell’s own words: “The presence of divinity became almost palpable, and I knew that life in the universe was not just an accident based on random processes. . . . The knowledge came to me directly.”Mitchell faced a critical challenge. As a physical scientist, he had grown accustomed to directing his attention to the objective world “out there.” But the experience that came to him in space led him to a startling hypothesis: Perhaps reality is more complex, subtle, and inexorably mysterious than conventional science had led him to believe. Perhaps a deeper understanding of consciousness (inner space) could lead to a new and expanded view of reality in which objective and subjective, outer and inner, are understood as co-equal aspects of the miracle and mystery of being.

Sounds interesting? – I’ll explain more in my next post… watch out this space for more…

Origin of universe and beginnings of life

2008-08-02T19:33:00.004+05:30

Origin of the Universe - What's the Latest Theory?
When it comes to the origin of the universe, the "Big Bang Theory" and its related Inflation Universe Theories (IUTs) are today's dominant scientific school of thought. According to these interrelated notions, the universe was created between 13 and 20 billion years ago from the random, cosmic explosion (or expansion) of a subatomic ball that hurled space, time, matter and energy in all directions. Everything - the whole universe -- came from an initial speck of infinite density (also known as a "singularity"). This speck (existing outside of space and time) appeared from no where, for no reason, only to explode (start expanding) all of a sudden. Although this sounds contrary to our common sense everyday notions of what is possible or not, however, as has been frequently noted by men of science over centuries, the universe need not be in line with human expectations of common sense. Ok, I digress a little bit. Back to the original theme… over a period of billions of years, this newly created space, time, matter and energy evolved into remarkably-designed and fully-functional stars, galaxies and planets, including our earth.

Here's what the experts are saying about the origin of the universe:

NASA: "In the more than 70 years since the discovery that that the Universe is expanding, we have made some significant steps in understanding how the Universe began and how it must have evolved to be what it is today. We know this: galaxies and clusters of galaxies formed from tiny fluctuations in the early Universe. We can measure these fluctuations by mapping the cosmic background radiation and relate them to the structures which we observe today. However, many challenges remain…"
(http://imagine.gsfc.nasa.gov/docs/science/mysteries_l1/origin_destiny.html)

UC Berkeley: "The big bang theory states that at some time in the distant past there was nothing. A process known as vacuum fluctuation created what astrophysicists call a singularity. From that singularity, which was about the size of a dime, our Universe was born."
(http://cosmology.berkeley.edu/Education/IUP/Big_Bang_Primer.html)

University of Michigan: "About 15 billion years ago a tremendous explosion started the expansion of the universe. This explosion is known as the Big Bang. At the point of this event all of the matter and energy of space was contained at one point. What existed prior to this event is completely unknown and is a matter of pure speculation. This occurrence was not a conventional explosion but rather an event filling all of space with all of the particles of the embryonic universe rushing away from each other."
(http://www.umich.edu/~gs265/bigbang.htm)

PBS: There was an "initial explosion" of a "primordial atom which had contained all the matter in the universe."
(http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/aso/databank/entries/dp27bi.html)

Origin of Life - What's the latest theory?

When it comes to the origin of life, "evolutionary theory" is still the foundation of today's scientific worldview. The conventional school text books teach that organic life sprung from non-organic matter exclusively through a natural mechanistic process on a pre-biotic earth. There is another school of thought that comets brought the necessary elements of life to earth and kick-started this whole process. To my mind, this is just skirting the issue. Even if comets did bring elements of life from extra-terrestrial, indeed extra-solar sources, life, in the end, had to originate somewhere. If not on earth, then somewhere else… in that sense, we are all, everything on earth, aliens in a manner of speaking… I digress again and apologies for that.

Back to the main theme of origins. That original life form then evolved into more complex life forms through a natural process of random mutations and natural selection. In a nutshell, the majority scientific hypothesis is that matter randomly acting on matter for a long period of time created everything we see. Although there are several holes in this theory as well.

Consider the highly evolved sense of echo location in bats. According to the theory, it would imply that that in response to the necessity of finding food during the dead of night, bats evolved this capability. However, if one looks closely, then there are several serious problems… how did the bats evolve both ultrasonic equipment to generate the sound waves and the ears to catch them back along with necessary brain capacity to process all of the information. Even today, doing that requires high level technology in form of radars and ultrasonic capabilities by humans and it wasn’t developed until Second World War… evolutionary theory does not adequately explain simultaneous evolution of higher order features in animals, let alone the origin of life itself. But that’s the best we’ve got…

However, there are serious questions… How can nothing explode? Where did all that matter and energy come from? What caused its release? How did this explosion of everything (from nothing) order itself? How can simplicity become complexity? Where did the chemical elements come from? Where did the mathematical laws and physical properties come from? How do we explain the design, complexity and fine-tuning inherent in spiral galaxies, solar systems, and stars? Questions such as these are pushed into the realm of meta-physics and avoided at best by the current scientific establishments. Religions, of course, have the simple answer – GOD or some other being answering to that description created this entire out of nothing, or his thigh or some other part. I do not wish to be irreverent or blasphemous but find all this just a plain way of saying – folks – although we seem to have microwaves, television, seem to be able to send out spacecrafts to other planets – we are still largely ignorant about the reality around us and how it came about.

The mad dash to find ever more number of elementary particles – does not seem to have an end. With ever more powerful colliders, we seem to find more and more elementary particles… we are getting besides the point again… habit of mine – opens up multiple threads of thought and execution simultaneously.

How did life come from an inorganic soup? How did the bacteria come about? How did a bird come from a lizard? Why don't we see birds come from lizards today? Why are there no transitional fossils in our museums today, the so called missing links? Why have we never observed beneficial mutations? Where did the information code in DNA come from? Where did the language convention that interprets DNA come from? How can we explain the random development of the human eye, reproductive system, digestive tract, brain, heart and lungs? What about the subconscious mind? What about love, morality, ethics, and emotions? Can these things really evolve gradually and randomly over time? By the way, I am in no way affiliated with or subscribe to – intelligent design philosophy. Never have, never will. Imagine if the question relating to terrestrial biology can be so difficult and mind boggling, what about extra-terrestrial biology, and beings? But first I wanted to get my head cleared up on terrestrial biology and open up the website – Google! This is one thing about the internet that I love. Google has turned the internet as it was supposed to be. Near instantaneous searchable repository of world information.

I opened the site on tree of life. The Tree of Life Web Project (ToL) is a collaborative effort of biologists from around the world. On more than 9000 World Wide Web pages, the project provides information about the diversity of organisms on Earth, their evolutionary history (phylogeny), and characteristics. I opened one on life on earth, and was stunned by the first page I saw. They say and I quote - “The rooting of the Tree of Life, and the relationships of the major lineages, are controversial. The monophyly of Archaea is uncertain, and recent evidence for ancient lateral transfers of genes indicates that a highly complex model is needed to adequately represent the phylogenetic relationships among the major lineages of Life.”

Behind a lot of poppycock and scientific jargon hides the fact that they don’t know it yet! Regardless of any theoretical problems with the tree itself, what about all the evolutionary processes required to get to the first simple life forms at the bottom of the chart in the first place? This seems to be a big mystery and while there are debates, they mostly border on the Meta part of it rather than actual solid physics or biology. We seem to understand a lot of rules which shape the nature as we understand it today, but nothing about how these rules came about and more importantly why…

Watch out for this space... i'll be back with some more thoughts - profound and profane, both :-)

Is there anybody out there?

2008-08-02T19:18:00.005+05:30

Now that the “mars craft”, created by humans, has landed on the 4th planet – MARS and sampled water in the planet’s frigid and frozen soil, the question of “life elsewhere” has gained further momentum. NASA scientists said that they had definitive proof that water exists on Mars after further tests on ice found on the planet in June by the Phoenix Mars Lander. Phoenix is the latest NASA’s bid to discover whether water - a crucial ingredient for life - ever flowed on Mars and whether life, even in the form of mere microbes, exists or ever existed there. While a full story of what exactly has been achieved can be found here, to my mind however, the question of whether there is life out there is much more deeper and has profound relationship with the mother of all questions – the origin of this universe.

Sounds familiar? – I’ll explain more in my next post… watch out this space for more…

This is a start!

2005-04-03T10:38:00.000+05:30

This is a start!