Rock On !!

THEN:


Sameer: Sid, kya soch raha hai?
Sid: Dekh raha hu woh jahaj, jo jara der bad dikhai nahi dega...
Sameer: Hum sab dost hai Sid, zindagi bhar ke liye..
Sid: Of course hai, par kisaki zindagi kisako kaha le jati hai kya pata...


NOW:

Rock On..
Hai ye waqt ka ishara,
Rock On..
Har lamha pukara,
Rock On..
Yuhi dekhata hai kya tu,
Rock On..
Zindagi na milegi dobaraaaa....

~

Budding SciFi writers, pay attention...

Aliens sending messages by altering cepheids...
Sounds like a good SF plot to me..

Truly Random Post...

I'll be honest. I am not that big on music. Yeah, I listen a song here and there, but let's just say, I am a bit conservative. So generally, the latest and greatest in music is unknown to me. But that's a digression. More to the point, I was listening to "Socha hai" from the movie "Rock On", when I noted that the lyrics is kinda interesting. Here's how it goes..

Kabhi socha hai,
Aasama hai neela kyo,
Paani hai geela kyo,
Bahati kyo hai har nadi,
Barf girati hai kyo,
Tare kyo hai tutate,
Chand kyo do nahi,
Baadalo me bijali hai kyo,
Teen hai mausam kyo,
Socha nahi to socho abhi !!!

(not exact, but close)

The guy is posing some questions, and asking us to think. Very commendable. But AFAIK, we've good answers to all of these. They might not be easy, but they are there. My advice: Learn a little bit of science, if you really want to know.

But again, this quote might be in order ;-)

In science one tries to tell people, in such a way as to be understood by everyone, something that no one ever knew before. But in poetry, it's the exact opposite.
-Paul Dirac

Enjoy!!

What went wrong?

A little explanatory text might help in this particular case (seen during FC9 installation).

The Large Lepton Collider

Yeah, yeah, they switched on the Large Hadron Collider, and the world did not end, much to the disappointment of news channels who were hyping the whole thing. I don't know from where they get these ideas (not that I really want to know). But this might be a huge step forward for particle physics. While they are busy finding the Higgs Boson, enjoy this, this and this. And, anybody wants to see the large lepton collider..

(OK, I admit, other things are colliding too ;-)

Update: A few interesting numbers about LHC, here. So you will need a stack of DVDs 6.9 km, yes km, in height to hold the data generated by LHC. Maybe it's time to move on to Holographic storage ;-)

A quantum of solace

Ok, not related to the upcoming Bond flick, this quantum of solace is offered to fellow firefox lovers. So Google launched Chrome, along with a comic (it's quite readable), and it quickly became the rage. It uses this new VM thingy, V8. And looking at this, the speed difference is quite notable. More correctly, Chrome is insanely faster than the current crop of browsers. But where will that leave our beloved FF? So here I present to you this, a blog entry by Mozilla CTO Brendan Eich. (side note: he created javascript). So FF is also getting JIT in the form of Tracemonkey. And, and, it surpasses Chrome (though junta is debating this). One thing for sure, our beloved FF won't be left behind in the speed race (it would not have been anyway, as V8 also is Open Source). It would be quite interesting to watch.

Singh is King (of lucid explanations)

Recently I finished reading 'Big Bang' by Simon Singh. And it reinforced my opinion that Mr. Singh is one of the very best science writers we have. The book is amazing and amusing, just like Mr. Singh's other books. It traces the history of our attempts to understand the universe, beginning with the first mythological explanations through the emergence of the scientific method to the current theory of big bang. Now there is no dearth of books covering these topics. What makes 'Big Bang' special is its breadth and its logical flow.

To take one trivial example, many books will tell you about the emergence of Sun centered model in sixteenth century and how it was accepted over a period of time in the scientific mainstream. But why it was accepted? We know that Ptolemy's model, ugly as it was, was pretty accurate. Then why replace one model with another? Just for the aesthetic reason that the new model was simpler? That seemed unlikely. But Mr.Singh notes the crucial observation by Galileo of the phases of Venus that agreed only with the Sun centered hypothesis. And that was the crucial point where scientific thinking changed its course. To take another trivial example, while explaining special relativity, he explores its connection with Gallien relativity and also describes Einstein's thought experiment that led him to SR. Without these details, other popular accounts are quite hard to understand. To take another trivial example.., Ohk, I can go on and on, but I think you got the point.

It seems very hard to describe science in an easy to understand language without watering it down. No wonder, Mr. Singh has done it. I'll urge you to read it, even if you are not a fan of science books. And I'll urge Mr. Singh to keep writing..