Time shifting - How to Control the Speed of Time

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?

"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!

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!

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…

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…

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?

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…

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!

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…

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…

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…

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.