Drishtikone
Phew what an exchange!! This lady is one heck of a spirited gal... and most of what she says is very right... if someone was to do some soul searching... but thats a wishful thinking in any way! Read more
Phew what an exchange!! This lady is one heck of a spirited gal... and most of what she says is very right... if someone was to do some soul searching... but thats a wishful thinking in any way! Read more
The Historians are a breed of their own! They would do anything to protect their nice little story lines! Egytologists are no different from Indologists who insist even in the face of mounting scientific evidence as to some of the basic facts of History.. but then who cares.. folk lores can last only so long! The ancient Egyptians built their great Pyramids by pouring concrete into blocks high on the site rather than hauling up giant stones, according to a new Franco-American study, The Times, London reported. The research, by materials scientists, adds fuel to a theory that the pharaohs' craftsmen had enough skill and materials at hand to cast the two-tonne limestone blocks that dress the Cheops and other Pyramids. Despite mounting support from scientists, Egyptologists have rejected the concrete claim, first made in the late 1970s by Joseph Davidovits, a French chemist. Read more
.flickr-photo { border: solid 2px #000000; } .flickr-yourcomment { } .flickr-frame { text-align: left; padding: 3px; } .flickr-caption { font-size: 0.8em; margin-top: 0px; } HMV, originally uploaded by Very Good with Computers. It is always interesting to go over old pictures.. they provide a sense of nostalgia! Read more
Interesting to see how naive Governments were .. then! Read more
So life on Earth was a quirk of fate? Had the meteorite not hit the earth.. it would have been as lifeless as any other corner of the Universe... its like the entire Universe was conspiring for Earth to have life.. right temperature.. right size of sun.. correct material here.. and then just the right size of meteorite carrying the right minerals and correct amounts hits us.. and voila.. life emerges! Man.. are we lucky.. or what? Hope those loser Martians are listenin' - heck they didnt get the right hits when it mattered.. no wonder they are so wonky and green with envy in our movies! Meteorites rich in carbon and water fall to Earth once or twice every few decades. But when a truck-size meteorite crashed on frozen Tagish Lake in western Canada in 2000, researchers received a specimen speckled with stardust that promised to offer clues about the chemistry of our early solar system. Now NASA space scientists have isolated organic matter from the Tagish Lake meteorite that is at least as old as the solar system. Such ancient bodies may have delivered the raw materials for life on Earth. Read more
Inconveniencing the public because of your own religious beliefs can be very annoying.. here is an example of one such incident on how the Muslims want to push their religious beliefs wherever they are.. even to the extent that they would not take passengers who bought liquor from duty-free in their cabs!! That is extreme.. but then this is America! But it is in that quintessential nation of immigrants, the United States, that the debate over Muslim separatism will resound most loudly. I don't know if the incident was covered in Indian newspapers but a minor issue at the Minneapolis-St Paul International Airport became a darling of conservative talk-shows in the United States. Read more
This is interesting! Here is a strange news of a 2000 year old device that may have been a computing device.. Imagine tossing a top-notch laptop into the sea, leaving scientists from a foreign culture to scratch their heads over its corroded remains centuries later. A Roman shipmaster inadvertently did something just like it 2,000 years ago off southern Greece, experts said late Thursday. They claim to have identified a handful of puzzling metal scraps found in the wreck as the earliest known mechanical computing device that pinpointed astronomical events. Known as the Antikythera Mechanism — from the island off which the Roman ship sank — the assemblage of cogs and wheels looks like the innards of a very badly maintained grandfather clock. Only the first clockwork devices appeared more than a thousand years later in western Europe. "It was a pocket calculator of the time," said astronomer John Seiradakis. Seiradakis, a professor of astronomy at the University of Thessaloniki, was among an international team including British, Greek and U.S. scientists who used specially developed x-ray scanning and imaging technology to analyze the corroded bronze, revealing hidden machinery and a form of written user's manual. Read more
This is a rather interesting article on Decision Making skills. Useem makes some great points in this one as to the imperatives of the different things while making decisions! I am bringing this article for all the readers of this site through a special arrangement with the publisher of the book.. Enjoy. By Michael Useem Author of The Go Point All in all, our decision-making equipment is pretty sound. We don't follow the lead lemming over a cliff. We can't be fooled into thinking that a 99-cent lure is a meal. We don't try to catch car fenders with our teeth. Then again, it wasn't a dog who launched New Coke. So there are a few bugs - little design flaws of the mind - that can have big consequences. People are clinically overoptimistic, for instance, assigning zero probability to events that are merely unlikely (such as a massive iceberg in the path of a really big ship). We see "patterns" in the random movements of stocks the way our ancestors saw bears and hunters in the scatterplot of the night sky. We make choices that justify our past choices and then look for data to support them. Not only do we make these errors; we make them reliably. That's the good news. Predictable errors are preventable errors. And a few simple techniques, like those below, can help you steer clear of the most common wrong turns. They can get you to your go point, that decisive moment when the essential information has been gathered, the pros and cons weighed, and the time has come to get off the fence. Read more
.flickr-photo { border: solid 2px #000000; } .flickr-yourcomment { } .flickr-frame { text-align: left; padding: 3px; } .flickr-caption { font-size: 0.8em; margin-top: 0px; } the looking is a beginning, originally uploaded by unrest. Great shot for the morning! Observing is looking.... Read more
Pakistan can never get over their 'destroy India" syndrome! Their ISI would join anyone to get stuff cooking. Unfortunately Indian politicians dont get it.. but here is the Indian PM finally saying things bluntly! Outlining his concern over Pakistan's role in fomenting terror in India, PM Manmohan Singh told a 12-party delegation from Assam that he was ready to re-start talks with Ulfa but the group would first have to shake off the ISI yoke guiding its actions. Read more
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