bored.. bored.. bored..

I mean aai shappath!!

2nd April 2011, Saturday

Thank You Team India for this great joy!!

Jeet ka Ahsaas
Ab aur bhi khaas!!!

Now Playing..

Oooh.. Dilkashi ke jo rang hai, hain tere..
Ooh ooh oooh.. Dosti ke jo rang hai, hain mere..
Tanwdanwadanw.. Tanw.. Tanwdanwadanw..
Inhi rango me chhupe, saare khushi ke rang hai..
Dekho na, dekho na..
Ye gahre halke, halke gahre, zindagi ke rang hai..
La la la laaaaaa..
kuch ghadiya.. lambi khamoshi..
kuch ghadiya.. poori madhoshi..
Life is Crazy..

Have a nice weekend.

@rooftop

Chai on a Sunday evening after a good, long nap, and followed by a stroll is one of those things that makes a Sunday, well, Sunday (and the following week bearable :) . I skipped the stroll, and went to our rooftop today. The building I live in is quite tall (eight stories) and naturally, terrace affords a good view. Once there, I located a short stump of a pillar and made myself comfortable.

The view is obstructed by a number of buildings in every direction, but mercifully a fair amount of vegetation is still seen. I located three or four kites in the sky, which rather amused me. Birds were returning to their homes, and as they were travelling at right angles to my spot, and due to the distance, the up-down motion of their wings was not visible; they appeared like a bunch of black marbles gliding across the sky. The sun was setting steadily, going behind one cloud after another in its course and illuminating their edges in ever more beautiful patterns, to reemerge a moment or two later, only bigger and redder. Now this happens every day, but it is also new every day. Did you know that the Deccan plateau (on which most of you are standing right now, just like me) was created by the volcanism ensued by the asteroid strike which also ended the age of dinosaurs 65 million years ago? That was what came to mind when I cast my eye towards the distant mountain ranges. But forget distant things, even the road in front of the building, on which I travel every day, looked different. Maybe I never noticed the suru trees by its side before. There is a mangal karyalaya nearby, and I would not have missed the band had it been absent, but curiously, all the songs being played were at least 20 years old, say from Don or Ashi hi banwabanawi. The patch of highway had started glowing against the backdrop of the nearby hill. Sat there till the sun was invisible, strolled for a few more minutes, and came down.

Now Playing

Jeevan ke safar me raahi..
Milte hai bichad jane ko...
Aur de jate hai yaadein..
Tanhayee me tadpane ko...

[A sad song (if you look at the lyrics) but sung in a cheerful voice. Was it this attitude towards life that Kishorda hinting at?]

Fred Hoyle's universe

I was fortunate to get my hands on Jayant Narlikar's science fiction books as a schoolboy. Narlikar, as you might know is a cosmologist of international repute, and also a well known popularizer of science (he has won the Kalinga prize given by UNESCO for popularization of science). In preface of one of his books (Yakshanchi Denagi I think) he expounds his views about science fiction, what it should be, and how he came to it. He tells us that his idol in this field is his mentor, who is also a well known astrophysicist and science popularizer. That's how I came to know Fred Hoyle.

Fred Hoyle was one of 20th century's great astrophysicists. He is remembered today for the B²FH paper (named after the initials of its authors, Geoffrey and Margaret Burbidge, William Fowler and Fred Hoyle) which explained how heavier (than helium) elements get formed inside stars. He was also a co-founder of steady state cosmology, which was a chief rival of big bang theory in its earliest days. According to this theory, universe is expanding, and the intervening space gets continiously filled with new matter, so universe always looks the same (so called 'perfect cosmological principle'). Interestingly, it was Hoyle who gave the name 'big bang' to what was then known as 'evolutionary cosmology'. Critics later claimed this to be an attempt at ridicule, but Hoyle said he was just trying to be vivid. And the name stuck. He did for science popularization on Radio what Sagan later did on Television. But in later life, Hoyle came to champion a host of unpopular, and deemed by many to be unscientific, ideas. I will quote just one, that disease causing bacteria are being bombarded on earth from space, and these are the main source of mutations. He went as far as to claim that interstellar clouds are swarms of bacteria. He was ridiculed and criticised but he never compromised on things that he considered right.

But why this post today? Well, because I recently finished reading a biography of Hoyle (Fred Hoyle's Universe, by Jane Gregory). Good points first, the book is well researched, and quite extensive. It is light on technical points (too light I think), but that may be considered a plus by some. My main complain is that the author spends a disproportionate amount of time on the beurocratic details of things in Hoyle's life, e.g. details like the names of all the people who formed a comittee when Hoyle was leading an effort for building a large telescope. Such details might be important from a scholarly point of view, but too much of it wearied me down. Reducing this coverage might have shortened the book by 1/4th, and made it much more readable. This is the first biography of Hoyle that I read, so I am not sure if this is the best one. Hoyle's life itself remains worth knowing about at any rate.

Meri Kahani, tags ki Jubaani..

I will keep this one short. When I added tags to my blog, I said something like 'the number of tags, number of posts in each category, and such are insights to you about yourself'. Taking that to be true, the tags that I use (and miss if any) these days will reflect the changes that have occured in the meantime. So here we go. 'WeekendPosts' and 'TVShows' are totally out of use. 'WeekendPosts' was my way of using some of the ample time available over weekends to make a record of that ample time. Not anymore. 'TVshows', I don't watch any. Not even TBBT. 'GudLink' has mostly moved to buzz, and 'Movies' to the movie blog. 'ApparentlyTechnical' has gone into shadows, but I sincerely wish it returns. 'MyOwnRantAKAPersonal' sees an occasional post here and there, and 'Books' is thriving. 'GhumnaFirna' - nil. The posts here were mostly a product of the office group, and not surprisingly, it has dispersed somewhat in this year or two. That leaves us with 'AboutBloggersAndBlogging', and I was going to put a 'nil' there too, but then I realized this post itself will come under it.

So we come to the big conclusion, 'variety' has gone down. Probably it's high time to start looking for some new tags.