Neo-Sagredo

Is "Google Print" the way to go??

There is probably no equal to Google when it comes to making life easier for netizens. Its epochal search engine,scholar,orkut,blogger,gmail, Google Talk, Google Earth are some of the services that i have used. Google Print is yet another gem in Google's crown! It aims to make most of the information that is available in the form of books available online and make it searchable. A very ambitious project indeed..and Google is already well on its way to doing this on a truly large scale. Google will have the electronic version of the books (may be parts) in its cache and the database is searched based on your query. It then shows books whose pages have stuff related to your query. Ofcourse, you get to see only 1/2 pages around the relevant part of the text. Now, does it help??.. Hell Yes!.. How many times have you chosen a book after you read a wonderful preface or a lucid discussion of a particular topic? I have ended up buying many books after very brief (extremely brief in some cases) encounters with them. Google Print would be the idea place to lurk around and make such "light bulb"(taken from sowmya) decisions to buy a book. To add to all this, you can search for the book in the libraries near you! (I guess only US libraries are searchable, as of now)

By now, You must be wondering whether the publishers would agree to all this. From whatever I see, some top publishers are certainlty co-operating with Google. But legal issues continue to hamper Google Print. It is indeed a tricky thing for a publisher. The entire book is going to be available in another company's servers!! All that you need is a leak from some employer of Google.. the whole of internet would be filled with electronic copies of the latest books! This is indeed dangerous. I just hope that Google and the publishers thrash out the details and put necessary safegaurds in place. A fully functional Google Print would certainly be a great luxury to have!

SDSC, SHAR -- Wow!!

My goodness.. Used to seeing satellite launches on the idiot box with a DD commentator singing lullabies, I was dumbstruck to see the entire infrastructure in person. I had this wonderful opportunity when my Dept organised a visit to the Satish Dawan Space Center at Sriharikota, the prime space port in India. It is very difficult to convey my excitement entirely, but I will try...

The SDSC is located on an island along the Bay-of-Bengal coast, near Sullurpeta (Nellore Dist, AP). It spans about 40k acres and houses extensive facilities apart from the launchpads themselves. You could probably spend a day at each of these facilities and still remain extremely puzzled about the way things work. (If you are a student of engineering, chances are that you will feel even more puzzled than a layman!) Propellant preparation, Propellant Storage, Rocket Motor assemblies, Static testing facilities, Vehicle Assembling, Launch Pads, Contol Rooms, Tracking & Telemetry Stations.. they are all there . And we saw most of them. SDSC is all about size/scale.. size of the vehicle (50 mts), size of the tower (70mts) that supports the vehicle, size of Vehicle Assembly buliding (80 mts) , scale of manpower involved (~800 per mission), sheer scale of engineering problems faced (ex. launch pad should stand a cyclone!.. this is like holding a pencil inverted on your palm with a blower near you), impossible to imagine accuracy and precision in execution of almost every aspect of the mission.

The above image shows the PSLV ready for launch from the first launch pad. The building that you see in the background is the Vehicle Assembly building for the first launch pad. It is ~80 mts tall (which is like a 7/8 storey building) tall.. and that thing actually moves. Here, you see it retracted to abt 200 mts away from the launch pad. Before the launch, this bulding would be right at the pad and will be used extensively to assemble the vehicle on the pad. If you are wondered as to how such a massive building can be moved .. here is a better one:

Here, U r seeing the PSLV (fully assembled in a bulding that is stationary) being moved to the "launch slot"(the second launch pad in this case). This is a 50 mts monster and it is moved for about a km .. No.. I am not joking..It is really moved a kilometer. The whole process takes about 2 days. Note that it is supported only at the bottom. And all this with the delicate satellite on top of the assembly, requiring temperature control inside the satellite bay etc etc. This is just a sample. There are few things abt these missions that u can't be fascinated about.

And ya.. the mission control room did look the way it does on TV. Also, we got a look at the microphone into which the "ten.. nine.. eight.." goes. I got the seat of some technical officer in the VIP gallery while one of my friends got to be Dr.Kalam (They still had stickers with names of dignitaries on the chairs). We were given a short demo of a typical flight. They ran the data from a real flight and we saw the graphs that pop up in our TV sets. One of our department mates is an engineer at VSSC. He is part of the launch vehicle team and has seen 6 launches. It was an entertaining experience to hear him talk enthusiastically about his work. In particular, he singled out period between the failure of the gslv launch and the subsequent relaunch(a month or so later) as being particularly stressful. They had put their heart and soul into the mission .. only to see a liquid booster under-perform. Ofcourse, everyone was relieved that the software detected this and stopped the launch countdown,with no manual intervention. In the next one month, engineers at SHAR had poured their heads over replacing the faulty stage without disturbing the rest of the assembly. After many sleepless nights, GSLV did fly!

Apart from the occasional govt award and credit in peer-circles, these people get very little recognition. They don't get paraded before the TV like the NASA engs, nor do they have a "ISRO TV" to keep talking to the public. When a scientist gets a Padma award.. who cares?? Rahul Dravid got it.. that is what matters. SRK's filmfare award would be even more popular. In a country that cares very little about science and scientists, ISRO's success story is an astounding achievement. Hail ISRO and its engineers!

A Warning to Physicists...

from Prof. Pavel Etingof from the Math dept of MIT.
I came across this interesting "warning" while browsing thro MIT 's wonderful Open Course Ware site. He advises physicists not to take his course titled " Geometry and Quantum Field Theory" , as he thinks that it would be of little use to them. He even comments that

"It is important to note that the instructor knows less QFT than a graduate student specializing in QFT or string theory."

:))

Apologies..

to every one who came around to my blog, only to see it empty. Many things (laziness uppermost ) contributed to this period of slumber(~2 months). Though I was still reading many of may fav blogs.. my commenting and posting came to a standstill. I am back!.. not in full force though. I still have a few things breathing down my neck. Will blog more frequently after these troubles leave me...

Update : I have also updated my blogroll. Still, there are many blogs in my Akregator that don't find a place on my blogroll here. I am pained by the speed with which blogger is responding.. I will have to update it another day :-?

Desipundit

Desipundit is a wonderful site dedicated to Indic blogs. A one-stop shop for all desi blogs. I had not come across this in the first few days of my scanning of the blogosphere. Initially, I was using the global voices blog at harvard for having a 'review' of the blog activity in the Indian Blogosphere. I got to desipundit , thanks to Anand. This is a blog run along the lines of instapundit and aims at integrating blogs with an Indian connection. A bunch of 5/6 hyper-active bloggers scan the landscape and present the interesting articles. Kudos to the team behind this effort!

On Jinnah , Partition and related issues - 1

After the Advani episode, there has been a lot of writing on these issues in many Indian newspapers and magazines. Some of these articles changed my understanding of the whole problem quite drastically. I may be wrong in this.. but I felt that this was one issue in which the print media gave importance to both schools of thought. Advani's political game did bring about a debate..atleast in the Indian Media. And I thank Advani for that!
I will present excerpts from a particular series run by AG Noorani(a noted SC lawyer and constitutional expert) in the Frontline. These are longish, well written articles that even laymen can make sense of. The first one titled "Jinnah's secularism" was in the issue that carried Advani's Pak trip as a cover story. This article focussed on analysing the particular speech and questions pertaining to Jinnah's secular credentials. The author contends that

" The speech has been quoted in bits and pieces; never analysed as a whole"

and goes on to give us more quotes from the speech.

J:"Now, if we want to make this great state of Pakistan happy and prosperous we should wholly and solely concentrate on the well-being of the people, and especially of the masses and the poor. If you will work in cooperation, forgetting the past, burying the hatchet, you are bound to succeed. If you change your past and work together in a spirit that everyone of you, no matter to what community he belongs, no matter what relations he had with you in the past, no matter what is his colour, caste or creed, is first, second and last a citizen of this state with equal rights, privileges and obligations, there will be no end to the progress you will make."

is the part that Advani talked/wrote about.
Jinnah was pretty categoric about his views about intra-hindu and intra-mulsim conflicts..

J:"...We should begin to work in that spirit and in course of time all these angularities of the majority and minority communities -.... - will vanish....."

Jinnah was clearly reaching out to those who did not wish for partition and was painting a secular future for Pakistan. The fact that this speech is often condemned in muslim fundamentalist circle is probably testimony to this fact. The author even feels that Advani's actions gave Pakistan's secularists a major boost.As regards Jinnah's secular credentials, these lines from his pronouncement in the legislature makes things further clear...

J: "I Sir, stand here with a clear conscience and I say that I am a nationalist first, a nationalist second and nationalist last... I once more appeal to this House. Whether you are a Mussalman or a Hindu, for God's sake do not import the discussion of communal matters into this House, and degrade this Assembly, which we desire should become a real National Parliament. Set an example to the outside world and our people."

But the question ofcourse is why did he lead the two-nation theory faction and sought a division of British India on communal lines?? AG Noorani uses these phrases to summarise the attitude of the Congress in the 1930s, the prime reason for this change in Jinnah's attittude..

" Congress leaders demonised him systematically. So did Indian academics and the press."

"His political record from 1906 to 1939 reveals a spirit of conciliation and statesmanship, which Congress leaders did not reciprocate. Indians must begin to acknowledge his greatness and the grave injustice the Congress leaders did to him."

But he also comments that

"But he went overboard and did much harm by his miscalculations"

The driving point of the article is that

"Jinnah yet awaits a fair assessment, warts and all......... Indians and Pakistanis must reflect on all aspects of his life, not selectively as they do"

Being in India, you rarely get to hear arguments for Jinnah. School text books will do "two nation theory" bashing and just mention that Jinnah lead the two nation theory movement in the late years. This forces a particular image of Jinnah in most minds. I hope this article moves people from such a state. Not everything(both the pro-Jinnah and anti-Jinnah comments) that the author claims needs to be true.. but it presents the arguments in a much more complete manner than usual. It certainly helped in breaking a few notions that I had, though I am still far from taking concrete positions. Does anybody of an equivalent analysis in the Pak media??.. that would really help me in understanding things better.

Science and Art

liked that?.. that is M51 in Canes Venatici. This is taken from the entries for Princeton's Art of Science competetion. The entire display is here. (link via badastronomy)

Wikipedia needs help!

How many times have you landed up at a wiki after googling?? Free, good quality information is the hallmark of wikipedia... the thing that started it all. For me, the wikipedia and its off-shoots have been of immense use as a ready,quick reference. The wikipedia concept (anybody can contribute!) has been a true revolution and must be one of the greatest successes of the internet era. For more on this ..go to the wiki for wikipedia !
The Media-wiki software could be used by anybody to create a wiki for themselves. There are numerous wikis out there..each serving netizens in their own small way. And now the parent body needs some help! The entire thing is run free of cost and they need donations to keep it that way.
Ho here to help them.