Light again!

I am sharing something which is very very precious to me. They are a few lines that I once read in Reader's Digest many years back. I do not remember as to which section it was in - probably, Points to Ponder. Ever since then, this piece has been etched into my memory. For a few years now, I have been trying to look around in different places searching for this valuable piece. Guess what - I found it today! Thanks, Google.

Last year, somewhere on the leaves of a forgotten sugar-cane plant,

a bit of sunlight ended its eight-minute dash to earth.

Somehow, the plant turned that sunlight into sugar.

Somehow that sugar got into my morning tea.

I sipped last year's sunshine at breakfast.

Now it starts to feed these old muscles.

It's dark now, and I start for home on my bicycle.

The muscled sunlight suddenly becomes pedal-power, then chain-pull, wheel-spin,

generator-whine, filament-heat, and finally--from the headlamp--light again!

Author: Malcolm Wells, "Environmental Action Bulletin"

It is from this little piece of literature I had learnt, that it takes eight minutes for the light of Sun to reach earth.

Notes...

Feels terrible to see this 10 day gap in updating my blogs. But it has been one hell of two weeks at work. Its been unimaginably busy. For instance, I slept at 3:45 am today and woke back up at 7:30 am (.... same day!). And then again, Gauri being in NY doesnt help much. In terms of numbers, I have a utensil load of probably 65 small and big to attend to. I am heading out for NY tonight so I have to get my stuff packed and finish up with the todo list. We are getting together in NY for Kedu's birthday which is on the 27th of August.

What else! Wanted to pen down something to overcome that sense of not being able to give enough time to myself and, the blog. Still pending is updating the photoblog with pictures of the visit to Mt. Rainier when Kedu, Bhana and Bapu were here.

I wish I had been following the Olympics but havent been able to do so. Well, I had rather update blogs first in that case. There is lots of stuff that came to mind which I wanted to write up for, but then, probably someday! Let me mention here so that I dont forget it altogether. One of them was about why should I be celebrating each day. The other was about how does the framework in India help maintain your religiousness and faith in God.

Just look forward to getting back to being regular again! Remember Sept. 8th - Genesis's return to earth with samples of Solar wind. For more details on Genesis, check out My Favorites on the right.

Milky Way and more...

Courtsey: Space.com

As soon as darkness falls, the Milky Way becomes evident from many locations as a wide glowing arch of variety and beauty, stretching across the sky from the northeast to southwest.

Sweep up with binoculars from the Scorpion’s tail, through the Summer Triangle, and down to Cassiopeia and Perseus. You’ll find concentrations of stars, clusters, large apparent gaps such as the Great Rift in Cygnus -- actually a vast cloud of light-blocking space dust -- and more stars than you thought existed.

No longer a mystery

Never visible from large cities with their bright lights, smoke and haze, the Milky Way can still be readily viewed from distant suburbs and rural locations. Before the invention of the telescope, the true nature of the Milky Way Galaxy ("Gala" is Greek for milk) was a mystery.

A lot is known, now.

Our galaxy’s center is about 30,000 light years away toward the Sagittarius star cloud; its outer edge is about 20,000 light years in the opposite direction (toward Auriga and Taurus). The Sun and all the outer stars of the galaxy revolve around it at the rate of some 155 miles per second (250 kps). It apparently requires about 200 million of our Earthly years to make one complete revolution, or one "cosmic year," around the center of our galaxy.

At the center of the Milky Way is a massive black hole, containing as much material as about 3 million or 4 million Suns.

When astronomers began to realize that there were other such vast congeries of stars, they called them "island universes," but this was an obvious misnomer; since universe means everything there is, it can hardly have a plural. So they settled on galaxies, which is a compromise as a new meaning for an old word.

Most never know

Unfortunately, because of the tremendous increase in light pollution over the past quarter century, the majority of our current generation have never seen the night sky in all its grandeur.

In his book "Nightwatch," Canadian astronomer Terrence Dickinson comments that in the aftermath of the predawn 1994 Northridge, California earthquake, electrical power was knocked out over a wide area. Tens of thousands of people in southern California rushed out of their homes, looked up and perhaps for the first time in their lives saw a dark, starry sky.
In the days and weeks that followed, radio stations and observatories in the Los Angeles area received countless phone calls from concerned people who wondered whether the sudden brightening of the stars and the appearance of an eerie silvery cloud (the Milky Way) might have caused the quake.

"Such reaction," notes Dickinson, "can come only from people who have never seen the night sky away from city lights.

On Capital Punishment - Dhananjoy Chatterjee case

It just maybe the call of this moment, but I am against the life sentence. This does not undermine the fact that a criminal be brought to justice for a crime committed that is so henious and inhuman in nature. I do agree as well that a death penalty may bring closure to the victim and her family. But the way I see it, it is equally henious on part of social justice to deprive someone of something as valuable as life. The essence of justice for a crime is to deter any further attempts to breach justice, to provide a social framework where people can enjoy the most beautiful gift of life - freedom. But you cant teach freedom by taking it away. For ages now, crimes have taken place and there is no doubt that the society needs a framework for peaceful and progressive life. But, I still do no agree to the fact that putting the criminal to death penalty shall deter future criminals from committing such crimes. Do you think a would-be criminal contemplates the outcome before committing a crime? I dont think so. The person in my opinion is so mentally perverse about doing so that he does not possess the faculty of discrimination between the right and wrong. And think about it. In the history of crime, have we come across anyone who have given up their dispositions out of the fear of outcome. Maybe they think they can get away with it. But from a different perspective, do you think a sick mind as that of a criminal like Dhananjoy can ever possess that ability to contemplate his act before committing one? Do we really think that after this, the wannabe criminals would think twice before committing such a crime. There are people born with criminal tendencies (read screwed up chromosomes), genetic disorders and what not. Do we really think that these kind of criminals have the virtue of compassion? I really dont think so. If the intent of this hanging is to send out a message to the wannabe criminals so that it is a deterrant, I beg to disagree. But I dont deny that justice should be done. The criminal should pay heavily for the rest of his life in the severest form of punishment which does not take way what we humans cannot give - life. A life for a life is not justice, it is revenge.

Molecular Expressions: Science, Optics and You - Secret Worlds: The Universe Within - Interactive Java Tutorial

Click the link on the Title for a spell-binding tour from the Earth to the Milky Way galaxy we are in and then back to Earth again. It is a must see. Will not take more than 3 minutes of your time. However, as soon as the tutorial starts, set the "Delay" between the frames to the maximum. Once you are done with the tutorial, play it again setting the "Delay" to the minimum. Have fun learning!
Thanks Bapu (Devang Jariwala), for sharing this link!

Units of Solar & stellar distances, Saturn

Reviewing a friend's blog and the mention of Saturn inspired curiosity. Here are information tidbits I dug up about Solar & stellar distance units in general and Saturn in particular.

A light year is about 6 trillion miles (5,850,000,000,000 miles). For more information on a light year, check out my post dated yesterday.

Distance of Saturn from Earth is 821,190,000 miles (821 million miles, approx)

Saturn is an average of 10 times farther from the sun than Earth. We see Saturn as it was about 80 minutes ago. So, its about 80 light minutes away. Similarly, as the Sun's light takes 8 minutes to reach Earth, the Sun is 8 light minutes away from our earth.

Light year usually is a term that is used to measure relatively large distances in the universe.
For the distances within the solar system, which are comparitively lesser (yes!) to the distances measured across the universe (for example distance between earth and andromeda is 2.5 million light years), the unit used is Astronomical unit. A Astronomical unit is the average distance between the sun and the earth - about 93 million miles (150 million kilometers). Given that, in Astronomical units, the distance between Earth and Saturn is 8.833 A.U.

The Annual Perseid meteor shower

Yes, its tonight - peaking at 1:50 am into Thursday. Should expect to see about 1 a minute. The key is to be in a dark location. Check out your local astronomical societies to find gathering places. Last year, when we went to view the closest approach of Mars to Earth, the Eastside astronomical society had done a good job about choosing a dark location - somewhere in a park where the traffic on road is minimal. Yes, even the headlights from cars passing by can mess around with your fun; needless to mention the city lights attributing to light pollution. To learn more about light pollution, visit International Dark-Sky Association (IDA).

To know more about the Perseids and where they come from, check out the link on the title. Below are some additional references. Have fun meteor-gazing!

1. http://science.nasa.gov/headlines/y2004/25jun_perseids2004.htm
2. Sky & Telescope magazine

Speaking about light pollution earlier in this blog reminds me of my visit to the Morrison planetaurim at the California Academy of Sciences. An excerpt from the academy's website - A planetarium is a domed theater in which a realistic and scientifically-accurate simulation of the night sky is created, using a highly-specialized "star projector.". To help explain the effect of light pollution, the presenter projected the view of the night sky above San Francisco devoid of any effects of light pollution. After reviewing the dark night sky, he then, switched to a view of the night sky with the San Fran lights turned on. And lo!, half of the stars vanished from the view.

Back to basics

Courtsey, http://starchild.gsfc.nasa.gov/docs/StarChild/questions/question19.html

A light-year is a unit of distance. It is the distance that light can travel in one year. Light moves at a velocity of about 300,000 kilometers (km) each second. So in one year, it can travel about 10 trillion km. More precisely, one light-year is equal to 9,500,000,000,000 kilometers.

Why would you want such a big unit of distance? Well, on Earth, a kilometer may be just fine. It is a few hundred kilometers from New York City to Washington, DC; it is a few thousand kilometers from California to Maine. In the Universe, the kilometer is just too small to be useful. For example, the distance to the next nearest big galaxy, the Andromeda Galaxy, is 21 quintillion km. That's 21,000,000,000,000,000,000 km. This is a number so large that it becomes hard to write and hard to interpret. So astronomers use other units of distance.

In our solar system, we tend to describe distances in terms of the Astronomical Unit (AU). The AU is defined as the average distance between the Earth and the Sun. It is approximately 150 million km (93 million miles). Mercury can be said to be about 1/3 of an AU from the Sun and Pluto averages about 40 AU from the Sun. The AU, however, is not big enough of a unit when we start talking about distances to objects outside our solar system.

For distances to other parts of the Milky Way Galaxy (or even further), astronomers use units of the light-year or the parsec . The light-year we have already defined. The parsec is equal to 3.3 light-years. Using the light-year, we can say that :

The Crab supernova remnant is about 4,000 light-years away.
The Milky Way Galaxy is about 150,000 light-years across.
The Andromeda Galaxy is 2.3 million light-years away.

India a mixture of old ways and new technology

Seattle Times presents an article series on India giving a view of the new technology and the old ways.

The Desiderata

Go placidly amid the noise and haste,and remember what peace there may be in silence.

As far as possible, without surrender, be on good terms with all persons.

Speak your truth quietly and clearly; and listen to others,even to the dull and ignorant; they too have their story.

Avoid loud and aggressive persons; they are vexations to the spirit.

If you compare yourself with others, you may become vain or bitter,for always there will be greater and lesser persons than yourself.

Enjoy your achievements as well as your plans.

Keep interested in your own career, however humble,it's a real possession in the changing fortunes of time.

Exercise caution in your business affairs, for the world is full of trickery.

But let this not blind you to what virtue there is; many persons strive for high ideals, and everywhere life is full of heroism.

Be yourself.

Especially do not feign affection. Neither be cynical about love; for in the face of all aridity and
disenchantment,it is as perennial as the grass.

Take kindly the counsel of the years, gracefully surrendering the things of youth.

Nurture strength of spirit to shield you in sudden misfortune.

But do not distress yourself with dark imaginings.

Many fears are born of fatigue and loneliness.

Beyond a wholesome discipline, be gentle with yourself.

You are a child of the universe no less than the trees and the stars; you have a right to be here.

And whether or not it is clear to you, no doubt the universe is unfolding as it should.

Therefore be at peace with God, whatever you conceive him to be.

And whatever your labors and aspirations, in the noisy confusion of life, keep peace in your soul.

With all its sham, drudgery and broken dreams, it is still a beautiful world.

Be cheerful. Strive to be happy.

Max Ehrmann was an attorney turned philosopher-poet
who live in Terre Haute, Ind. He spent his life
wrestling with the realities of making a living and
following his personal calling to a life of poetry,
literature, and thought. He wrote A Prayer, which
became a message of hope for thousands, but he is best
known for Desiderata, which he wrote for himself,
"because it counsels those virtues I felt myself most
in need of." Max included this work as part of a
personal Christmas greeting in 1933, and Desiderata's
power and appeal have continued to reach out to and
significantly affect readers ever since. He died in 1945.

Here is an informative article talking about the basics of Price Indexes and Inflation in India.

What a motivating thought!

Many of the things you now take for granted were once considered impossible. Many of the things now considered impossible you'll one day take for granted.

Better late than even later. Here is the launch video of Messenger. I guess you would need RealPlayer unless your player supports .ram files. Have fun!

And while we are in the space zone, mark you calendar for September 8, 2004. That is when NASA's Genesis mission returns solar wind samples to Earth. Check it out!

Curiosity, I guess, is something without which the human race would have been dead long back. Barely past the jubiliation of Cassinni's Saturn orbit insertion on June 30, 2004 and while still celebrating today the successful launch of Messenger's mission to Mercury, we stand awaiting yet another countdown - of New Horizons' mission to Pluto and the Kuiper Belt slated for January, 2006. Hail mankind!