A MUST READ

This is a must-read ---

The Death of Nehru's India

ITER on way...

ITER is a joint international research and development project that aims to demonstrate the scientific and technical feasibility of fusion power. The partners in the project - the ITER Parties - are the European Union (represented by EURATOM), Japan, the People´s Republic of China, India, the Republic of Korea, the Russian Federation and the USA. ITER will be constructed in Europe, at Cadarache in the South of France.

The US has just signed the ITER agreement -- Read Here

Its time we started doing something about alternative energy sources. Otherwise, forget the stars, we might not even survive Earth!

Happy B'day Sir Doyle...

The Sherlock Holmes books remain among my all-time favourites.....

Quoting....

Renewing America's Commitment to Research in High-Energy Physics

By VERLYN KLINKENBORG
Published: May 18, 2006
From the NY Times....

In October 2003, I gave an evening talk at the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory in Batavia, Illinois. The subject was nature on the familiar scale, the kind embodied in the restored prairie on the Fermilab campus — some 1,200 acres of compass plant and rattlesnake master and other species. But it's impossible to visit a place like Fermilab without thinking about nature on another dimension, the subatomic one being studied in the Tevatron collider, which looks from the sky like an enormous, moated ring.

In the Tevatron, subatomic particles are accelerated to extremely high speeds and crashed into each other within a detector chamber. That afternoon, I clambered through the scaffolding around the detector chamber as scientists tried to explain to me what it all meant. To me it looked like an incomprehensible array of electronics several stories high. The detector's purpose is to capture a computerized image of the debris of each antiproton-proton collision. The particles that emerge — varieties of quarks and mesons, for instance — seem at first to have nothing to do with nature as we know it on the human scale.

Except, of course, that they have everything to do with how the universe itself was formed.

There is a basic rule about colliders. The smaller or more evanescent the particle you are trying to observe, the more energy it takes. Studying particle collisions at ever higher and higher energies is the only way to directly investigate the conditions that prevailed during the earliest microfractions of a second after the Big Bang. Moving further back in time — closer to the Big Bang — will mean bigger machines.

At Fermilab, many people were looking almost wistfully over the horizon to 2007, when the Large Hadron Collider outside Geneva comes on line. That is where the coming generation of groundbreaking experiments will take place.

The planning for the next particle accelerator after the Large Hadron Collider — the International Linear Collider, some 20 miles long — has already begun, and there is serious debate about where to build it. Recently, a National Research Council panel recommended that the United States should make a determined effort to build the International Linear Collider in this country as part of an international consortium.

There's no globalization like the globalization of science. A single major experiment at Fermilab often involves dozens, if not hundreds, of physicists and technicians from all over the world. The same will be true at the Large Hadron Collider, which is run by a 20-nation coalition. The research in Illinois has shaped the research planned for Switzerland, and those experiments will in turn shape the experiments planned for the International Linear Collider. But that doesn't mean there aren't significant advantages to being the project's host. If it isn't built here, American scientists will go wherever it is built to do their research. The overwhelming risk, the panel concluded, is that without this project, the thrust of high-energy physics in this country will simply die away.

This country desperately needs to recommit itself to basic research. In the 21st century, a particle collider 20 miles long happens to be one version of what basic research looks like. High-energy physics is hard to explain to the public. It cannot be justified in simple, pragmatic payoffs for American consumers, or simple, pragmatic payoffs for politicians.

But the justification is simple. Do we continue to ask fundamental questions about the universe we live in, or do we not? To me, there is only one answer. The very soul of who we are as a species, at our very best, is expressed in our undying curiosity. And in many ways, the very best of who we are as Americans was expressed in the commitment we made to basic research in the 20th century. That commitment needs renewing.

Mary Mary.. quite contrary

Yesterday as I awaited "Commander in Chief" to come on, ABC decided instead to regale us with an interview of Miss Mary Cheney.
You see Ms. Mary Cheney is a lesbian, and hence my stress on the Miss part. Thanks in part to Dubya and of course Mary's father Richard (or Dick!) Cheney Ms Mary Cheney can never become Missus.

Now the question of gay marriage is not my point today.

But the question of integrity sure is. Mary Cheney has consistently campaigned for the Republican party and for her father. I think thats swell, she puts family before principals and thats her prerogative. However, it becomes very annoying when asked a direct question, Ms Mary Cheney dodges it, not deftly, but very clumsily.

Diane Sawyer asked her, "If Dick Cheney were not vice-president, would you still campaign for the Republican party?"
Mary, "I dont like hypothetical questions."

very smart indeed.

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The great Naushad is dead. You can listen to Naushad on Ragaa.

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I saw ice-age with Shraddha this tuesday. At 8.30 at night, we were the only people in the movie hall. That was pretty odd. We've been to movies when there have been very few people there, but never just the two of us.
Well, thats one more thing I can cross out of my things to do list.

Check out this blog

These paragraphs make me recommend this blog : French Scum

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What Bush is still saying over and over amounts to this:
“Iraq posed a threat to us (opinion), because we thought it very likely that, sooner or later, Saddam's goons would cause us harm (opinion).
Then we were attacked by al-Qaeda (unrelated fact).
So we attacked Iraq—better to kill hundreds of thousands now than to risk losing hundreds later like we had just done because we had underestimated a threat (opinion). I will never apologize for protecting America.”

Changing names and making slight contextual adaptations, the same logic could lead to something like this:
“Mr. Bush has a history of excessive drinking (fact). Studies show that children of alcoholics have greater chances of abusing alcohol themselves (fact). Mr. Bush’s daughters already like to party (fact): we think it very likely that, sooner or later, they might drink too much, drive, and provoke an accident (opinion).
Every day children are killed on the road by drunk drivers (unrelated fact).
So let’s execute Mr. Bush’s daughters—better to kill two people now than to risk losing more later, like we do every day because we let alcoholics drive (opinion). We will never apologize for protecting innocent children.”

Rutgers on Apprentice

MONDAY

8^th May 2006, At 8 PM Central beloved Rutgers University will be featured on The Apprentice.

The task it seems will have something to do with the RU Football team (which is pretty bad). You can read all about the RU team here - LINK

phi err faux..

Or Firefox!

So I downloaded firefox today. I had had a hearty argument with a friend last month, and I wanted nothing to do with Firefox. But then, there's no sense in opposing it unless I use it right?

Verdict I dont get what the big deal is? I mean I use Netscape Navigator (v7 or something) which is based on the same mozilla engine that Firefox is based on. I can see that if someone is using IE, then perhaps moving to Firefox is a great idea, but otherwise, its a lot of hooey.

I've been using Netscape (and the Mozilla browser) for a long time and for me, shifting to Firefox is actually a pain. It does have the absolutely essential tabbed browsing - but unlike Netscape there is no button for opening new tabs directly. One has to R-click and then open a new tab (Two clicks instead of one).

It does have the benefit of being lightweight, but once I install it, that really doesn't factor in. I didn't notice any appreciable change in speed of browsing. It took as much time as my Netscape to wake up from hibernation - which is really my processor's fault.

And finally the big selling point - Firefox blocks advertisements: Thats actually fodder for another post, but I will say this now; blocking ads might not be such a good idea. If one considers the revenue streams that Yahoo generates from ads, then those help to keep yahoo safe. Once there are no ads, who pays to keep Yahoo free?