obhiee

Sunday, March 24, 2013

Shadow Boxing: The right to life ...

su·i·cide
/'so?oi?sid/
Noun
The action of killing oneself intentionally: "he committed suicide at the age of forty".

Nothing new, I'm sure. Almost every day the newspaper reports one self-discorporation, or the other. In fact, according to the internet nearly ten thousand indians attempt suicide annually. Nearly 300 per day, and the majority are in the prime of life - around 40 years old! Fortunately there is a strong deterrent against suicide in the form of Section 309 of the Indian Penal Code. This section enforces Article 21 of the Indian Constitution - "Protection of Life and personal liberty".

Historically suicide was deemed a crime in many cultures, and nations. The logic being that killing oneself was contrary to the laws established by God & Nature; some more references are available at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suicide#History

To paraphrase John Donne, "No man is an island" - which may be interpreted to mean that an individual is a part of the society that forms the civilisation of the period in which he lives. Suicide, when successful, leaves a society with a gap which may be difficult to fill; particularly when the individual happened to possess specialised knowledge. Understandably therefore, suicide, was deemed a crime against society & civilisation by the individual - and therefore punishable as such.Yet the sceptical mind wonders about the rationale historically put forth to justify opposition to this step.

Society is in a state of continuous flux. Towns and cities were few and far between perhaps until the industrial revolution. Prior to the industrial revolution most communities were relatively small, clustered in the vicinity of and administered by a liege lord.It is difficult to imagine a despotical medieval warlord being concerned about the welfare of the community around him to the extent of a fiat to deter suicide. In an agrarian society one could easily miss a peasant ; a feudal mindset would simply write-off the peasant. The same despotic feudal mindset would, perhaps, find it a little more difficult to write-off losses in the form of material assistance given to, and taxes owed by the same peasant. He would be in a sorry state if the entire community were to decide to discopororate! Hence the despot would probably also attempt to recoup losses caused by suicide through higher taxes and levy on the living. As a corollary the decree that made suicide illegal would punish even more clearly the individual who failed the attempt. To the simple souls that formed the majority of the rural community yet another obstacle to the so-called easy way out would be any edict that touted suicide as an irredeemable crime against God.

It is easy to imagine the law being applied in the Colonies ; after all the peasants in the colonies were in the worst state. The executive told them what to sow, the law told them what taxes were owed, and the law also held out varying degrees of punishment if the peasant were to be lax in his farming, or payment of his dues, as also in attempting to take the easy way out!

These thoughts came to mind after I watched 'Guzaarish' earlier this month; the topic is owed deeper thought than perhaps it gets.

Saturday, February 23, 2013

The world seems to be going crazy about Mars. If one is to believe news reports now India too has joined the bandwagon! Since the 1960s there have been over 30 missions focussed on Mars. Admittedly this span of 50 years has seen technology change, and therefore improved our knowledge as also perhaps our path-finding skills.

The question is this - Do we, as nations, duplicate, ... and duplicate redundantly, each other's efforts by building independently?

Apart from incomplete understanding, and one-upmanship between space agencies - what stands in the way of an international consortium to chalk out, develop, and execute missions to bodies in the solar system?

Monday, February 18, 2013

Doomsday: A Phoenix

Continuing from my last blog on the subject of using DNA as a repository I find my thoughts venturing into the realm of hard extrapolation. This post therefore qualifies as pure synapse action.
Chromosome pairs in the DNA are closely bound to hormone action. Keep this point in mind, and move onward. Although theology is not really my forte I would venture to state that almost all belief/support systems tell the individual something along the lines of "Believe in yourself", or "The Kingdom of God resides within you", or even succinctly "Man, know thyself". Such statements are also echoed in the age old "Mens sana in corpore sano".

Hindu mythology is replete with examples of ordinary men acquiring and applying abilities far beyond that of their fellows. How did they do so? Myth & Legend tell us such achievement had one fundamental requirement - call upon a member of the hindu pantheon until she/he would open the gateway to desired knowledge. For such meditation a necessary precondition was knowledge of Yoga as it would provide the necessary control of one's physiology - to the extent of being in meditation for years on end!

Even today an accomplished Yoga instructor may tell his disciples that the secret to Yoga is that the individual develops the ability to use/control muscles that would otherwise atrophy unnoticed in 'modern' life. Such fine musclular action could serve to trigger some glands or suppress others such that specific hormones may appear in the bloodstream. Hormones that may serve as the 'unlock code' for specific base pairs.

Could our ancestors/predecessors have left us a message that will only be available when we pursue a certain life-style/dharma/karma? That is to say such knowledge will not be available until we are ready for it ... which serves to paraphrase yet another idiom "... in the fullness of time"

Wednesday, January 23, 2013

Doomsday: Through the valley of the shadow

So all the brouhaha about the 'doomsday' recorded in the Mayan Calendar for the month of December 2012 got me thinking.

To the best of our knowledge we do not go back much more than a few millenia - not even a score of them. The thinking goes that if there had been an older civilization there would be signs of it - as there is proof of the ancient Egyptian, Sumerian, Mesopotamian, and Eblan civilizations. Ergo, we are the first modern scientifically advanced civilization since Homo Sapiens evolved 4.5 million years ago or so.

Assume now our civilization were to be utterly destroyed - with a few thousands of survivors out of the present population of more than 6 billion. In the absence of the ability to communicate, these survivors might (within a few generations) return to living off the land. In a pinch, even the many libraries may not survive the new savage.

The knowledge of several millenia of nearly uninterrupted progress might be lost!!

One solution would be to store this knowledge - perhaps the equivalent of the Encylopedia Brittanica in a 'stasis'. This stasis field would preserve until such time as the survivors would again acquire the minimum scientific knowledge to reach into the stasis field. But what kind of stasis field could possibly maintain power for an unforeseeable duration? Sooner or later even a plutonium power-supply would wind down.

The question had me flummoxed until it occurred to me that there is atleast one means to make knowledge available to future generations after maintaining it in stasis for an indefinite period.

Although organic we are creatures of electricity. Our nervous system, our bodies are susceptible to electricity & magnetism - which makes it possible to perform EKG, EEG, etc. From the amoeba up this applies to other animals too. Of course, our bodies use electricity in the microvolt range -
perhaps even a lower order of magnitude. But a human body wouldn't last even if provided with nutrition. Yet there are additional paths on this track of thought. So - why not store the information in such a manner that it would last as long as life itself did? This way, whatever the life-form, any information would be stored and maintained as long as the life-form continued to exist.

Use the genome of several species to record data and act as your repository. Choose lower animals rather than higher for they are more likely to survive - the trade-off being that they may have a shorter life-span, and faster mutation rate.

Now as long as the species ; your repository, survives - your data may be retrieved; subject to the ability of that later new civilization to follow your train of thought.

Saturday, December 22, 2012

Doomsday: Peering over the edge

The Mayan Civilization calendar is similar to the Calendar of other ancient cultures (Hinduism, Judaism ... to name a couple) in that it attempts to identify the end-time, and prepare it's people for it. According to the Gregorian equivalent of the Mayan Calendar, this end-time would occur either on Dec. 21 2012 AD (Gregorian), or Dec. 23 2012 AD (Gregorian).

Such an apocalypse is no new event ... albeit it may have a different description across cultures. We, Earthlings, have sprung to existence on a planet which every few years (well, every few million years anyway) is utterly destroyed - and life then begins anew. Geology identifies several distinct time-periods A similar theme reverberates in religion. So many religions mention humanity coming to an end - and then starting anew.

An apocalypse for our civilization is similar to a person losing memory to trauma, and having to learn from scratch how to crawl, walk, run, read, and write. Whatever we learn is scarcely ever totally unique. The fundamental rules - physics, chemistry, biology, math remain the same. Yet every time a civilization comes to a screeching halt it must work it's way up through the gears learning and losing that knowledge until it develops the cultural defect known as 'writing'.

Earth came into existence around 4.5 billion years ago. Subsequently, according to fossil/genetic record, the humans emerged from the ape family around 5 million years ago. Our present culture is highly advanced compared to our ancestors of a few millenia ago. But ... is it really advanced? Knowledge is lost easily - 3 or 4 generations are probably all that seperate us from the states/empires of old that squabbled amongst themselves. If our civilization were to begin to end today... and if it were then to take a millennium for civilization to recover to the stage when our descendants started to wonder about us, their ancestors, what would they find? Unlike our ancestors who constructed the 7 wonders, our greatest works are in cement, concrete, iron, paper, silicon and most recently glass (read CD/DVD/Blu-ray). These works would hardly be accessible if buried under volcanic lava, volcanic ash, or if inundated by the oceans/snows. If not volcanoes, earthquakes, or oceans it still wouldn't take very long for paper to decompose; Sooner or later nature, and vegetation would reclaim their domain and bury any artifacts beneath humus, or silt, or ash, or rock, or sand.

How would one go about preparing a repository of our civilization's knowledge? A repository that would be highly likely to survive an apocalypse, be virtually indestructible, and also be available to our descendants - with reasonable minimum scientific development, and effort.

Wednesday, July 18, 2012

First there was ASCII ...

Most people who use a computer are usually well-versed with English. Sufficiently so to be able to use the necessary command/response sequences ... even if it is by rote.

i18n is still very new. Although i18n, or internationalization/localization as it is known has grown to include more and more locales each year - it appears to be restricted to applications. To write an application the developer is limited either a GUI drag/drop interface, or to the roman alphabet. Along the same lines I am yet to see an Operating System that allows a command input any language other than english commands! The same applies to the address-bar in a browser window.

With the growth of services such as Google's Translate, would one expect the foreseeable future to see the layman able to type the URI 'www.google.com' in the vernacular (devnagari, japanese, urdu, hindi, bengali ... whatever) and for the DNS Server to recognize it and return the same page?

Sunday, June 17, 2012

Physics of psychology

Every once in a while I let water out from the well to soak the grounds. This is a traditional process known in physics as 'Evaporative Cooling'. The heat in the soil is taken up by the water to evaporate, and leaves the soil itself cooler than before. It is necessary to avoid an excess of water here - hence usually requires half-an-eye as frequently as possible.

So I had half an eye my attention was drawn to motes being carried along by the current. Every time the water flowed through a dip the mote 'fell' into the depression and swirled in the eddy for a while before eventually finding their way.

I'm tempted to compare what I observed here with the way most of us humans appear to 'think'. Our thoughts usually tread a defined path - one constructed by our social environment, education, and the circumstances we find ourselves in. Now and then we encounter a scenario alien to us - one where we are out of our depth (pardon the pun), one that demands we draw upon all our previous experience for comprehension ... just like the mote encountering an eddy in it's path that it must travel before moving on.

The rules of physics govern not only our physical perception of the world, but also how we comprehend the world around us.

Monday, June 11, 2012

Are there such things as high-altitude air-currents the way there are sea/ocean currents? Does the meteorology department maintain such a map? What is the average velocity of such an air-current? What is the depth of such a high altitude air-current?

Let's assume for a moment the answers to the questions raised above are favourable. Laugh a moment if you will at my naivete, it may be possible to use balloons (See? I told you to laugh at my naivete already) to lift such an airship working with the currents. The questions to answer here are

How would one control altitude and attitude here?

How much payload could such balloons take?

How close to GEO can this idea take us?

Venting the gas to atmosphere would be wasteful. Perhaps the volume of gas to be vented could be collected in a container. Any discardables (such as soiled clothes/uniform/consumables) would then be used as ballast to to return the excess volume to the surface. A low-power beacon could be used to home in on the returned balloon to reuse the gas for the next trip.
An alternative would be carry on board apparatus to filter/extract lift gas (hydrogen/helium) ; but would the volumes be feasible here? The alternative would be to carry apparatus to condense (such as water) fluid into empty containers.

Both mechanisms above restrict us to the limits of atmosphere. The perishability of the container used also comes into play because temperatures may vary from 1500C to -100C.

Using a balloon, How does one rise higher once outside Earth's atmosphere? One mechanism is to vent the contents within the balloon to provide thrust in the desired direction ... hmm. I'm not satisfied with this - will have to think more.

Saturday, June 09, 2012

One giant step ... done using baby-steps.

Since the Mars One programme appeared in the news a couple of days ago, I find myself letting my thoughts freewheel. The idea of dispatching a team to live permanently on the Red Planet and earn their living from the people who choose to watch them live on the media here on the Third Planet seems extremely unusual to me. For instance, what happens when more people want to watch the team in delayed video rather than live? How long before the audience are sated?

Somehow the concept of providing serviceables from Earth on a regular schedule (every two years) too makes one pause for thought. Not that it's unachievable - the Apollo teams were on the moon for 2-3 Earth Days at a time. Two years is just a few orders of magnitude larger. But I digress - I wanted to make this post about launching off-earth, instead of off Earth's surface. Because it is easy to talk and throw ideas around instead of learn from experience, throw ideas around is what I'm going to do.

When we talk of space flight we begin with escape velocity. Escape Velocity is the velocity necessary to escape the gravitation pull of a body to it's surface. Here this is atleast the velocity necessary to escape from Earth's gravitational pull. This value is calculated using the formula

Here, v = escape velocity
g = gravitational acceleration
r = radius of Earth

Solved using the MKS system, this value is 11200 metres per second.

That is, 11.2km/second. It doesn't seem much, until one thinks about it. Just to give an idea of the scale involved the longest public runway on Earth at present is 5.5kilometres. Therefore to be able to escape from Earth's gravitational pull, one would have run up-and-down the runway in less than 1 second! Even the famed SR-71, the fastest aircraft on record with a velocity of approximately 3.6 Mach (4410km/hr), can't do that! Hence the need for rocket technology.

The tricky thing here is that escape velocity is not necessary! Once up at the geostationary earth orbit (GEO), it is quite possible to change the shape of the orbit. The Apollo moon programme called this technique 'Trans Lunar Injection' (TLI). The trouble is getting up to GEO altitude 35786 km ! Well now, most programmes try to reach that altitude in hurry - but I say, 'Wait'.

Why not up to 35786 km in stages?

Let the first stage be high altitude aircraft - carrying food, provisions, and capable of independent movement ... say capable of moving upto 100km above Earth. But this still leaves us with 35686 km to travel. Traditional aircraft encounter loss of lift at such high altitudes. But materials - carbon nanotubes, and such that are extremely strong, and lightweight. Perhaps a lift surface constructed of such material may be used to marry several engines to lift upwards? I'll post more later when the idea is a little more mature in me mind. What say you?

Thursday, June 07, 2012

The Warlord of Barsoom beckons

All our eggs lie in a single basket. No matter how distant they may be placed - they're still on Earth, still subject to the caprices of Nature. We, Humans, have only inhabited Earth for a few million years at most. Compared to the Earth's age of nearly 4 billion years, the miniscule duration for which we have been around makes us fragile humans vulnerable as a species.

We need to spread out a bit - except that particular option is limited by prohibitive costs, and imagination, and a touch of laziness. Going by popular science fiction of the heady years when the 'move to space' ruled people's imagination - by 2001 there should have been a permanent colony on the moon. 2001 - 11 years ago! Of course, Science fiction being fiction the timeline may be a little behind the times. George Orwell's classic '1984' technology of high end communications networks only began to become available globally in the early 2000s. By this yardstick we are still on track - except that the global financial crisis, and the restive behaviour of various peoples makes it very unlikely to establish a base on the moon in the next decade.

In all this though, we have forgotten a bit of history. The last age of exploration - although initiated by the Imperials, was consummated only by private enterprise. Perhaps the Moon, and Mars too shall follow the same model. The age of sea exploration was undertaken first by various Princely States even before the Industrial Revolution. As soon as new lands, and markets were discovered they were followed by private enterprise.

Perhaps private enterprise, and individuals should consider investing in resources off Terra. Escaping gravity is prohibitively expensive, ergo - it is necessary for private enterprise to justify the expenditure on their balance sheets here on Earth. The Mars One project may, or may not succeed. Regardless, it will kindle imaginations for a while. It's already giving me ideas... ideas to marry with various science fiction 'concepts'.

Thursday, May 24, 2012

To each his own SCM

Everybody offers a scheme. Retail shops, malls, online marketplaces ... nobody misses an opportunity to bundle goodies (3 for the price of 2, and a 1 year warranty instead of 6 months) and make a killing. By-and-large, I opt-in when such a scheme fits my plans.

But why say it here on this blog? The reason is, I am primarily a programmer. Retail, and 2-for-the-price-of-1 sale of end-user goods is one thing; the same applied to software applications of reasonable complexity can be a recipe for disaster. A software program is rarely ever totally standalone; there may be the odd application which may run off a CD/USB drive but such are few and far inbetween. A typical application relies upon API provided by the operating system, support libraries locally and online, thrown together in the right configuration for it to work. It only takes one small casual change for the whole house of cards to come crashing down. A support DLL updated online, a different JAR deployed, the PATH variable modified to change which directory appears last to an application ... these are a few changes that invite trouble.

Glassfish + jdk, or Eclipse + Borland compiler, XYZ assembly + Microsoft Office are a couple of examples in point. Applications that bundle software together use internal variables to reference the bundled library. When some such bundled library is also used by other applications the user may decide to reference the library across applications. This is fine ... until some such application executes an update for the bundled library which the original application can not use. Depending upon the boot sequence for the original application; not only will the original application now fail to start, but the user may probably see an error-free log too. Disaster!

To prevent such an error happening both application users, and developers must be educated. First, the latter must learn not to bundle a referenced library; instead use the installer to tell the user to install the library ... or fail installation. The latter must learn to use their internal variables to reference system variables. Too the former must learn to maintain a restore-point, or it's equivalent when an application is installed/uninstalled. Whilst this may not serve as a catch-all, it will probably serve to reduce user/support developer frustration ... a little and those who tinker continue to have fun!!

Wednesday, December 28, 2011

Take it easy ...

Almost everything is more expensive now than it was a couple of decades ago. More expensive, and more affordable. Thanks to liberalization and the gumption of the common man he can now afford that new model car, the wide-screen plasma TV, the home theatre, the washing machine, the vacuum cleaner ... the list is long. In a nutshell, life is a lot easier these days.

This new found affluence is most visible on the streets . Cities that grow taller, denser, and (paradoxically) sprawl ever wider. New vehicles pour out of the factory by the thousands onto roads easily older than the age of the average indian. Even 20 years ago, the engineers who designed these roads could not have anticipated the spike in vehicle population. Whilst I do not have figures, I'm quite certain the average speed of vehicles on the road within a city today is slower than it was earlier. And yet the vehicles themselves are powered by more powerful engines, driven often by people with less patience. Driven by educated persons who fail to realize that catching the signal will gain them at best a few minutes, or so.

Seated in a cab in a snarl-up, I'm almost thrown against my baggage when the cabbie accelerates wildly to cover the gap in the bumper-to-bumper traffic before another vehicle sneaks in from the left! Good for me the driver was alert; I could have injured my back. The driver in the car that almost sneaked in, a young couple with their small baby looks at me and grins ruefully. Most people drive like this these days. Looking around it is common to see infants and toddlers in the passenger seat of a car. Cherubic infants and babies can be seen enjoying the rush of wind against their faces seated in front of a motored cycle with their little legs astride of the fuel tank. Still others stand on the floorboard in front of a scooter, or even stand between the scooterist and his/her pillion rider as it zips through narrow passages and squeezes through seemingly impossible gaps in near-stationary traffic.

Equipped with an air-bag, crumple zones, monocoque frame, seat-belts ... a car is so much more safe now that the driver often chooses to take risk. The risk of injury is scarcely there any more. Even if he is in an accident he'll probably survive to walk away from the crash ... and perhaps regret it.

Babies, and children are delicate creatures. An acceleration that would not budge an adult from the seat can catapult a baby out of the protective arms of it's parent head-first into the windscreen, or into the dash-board. The phone placed on the dash-board can rocket into the head of a baby. An impact against the back of the vehicle can throw a baby against the shift-stick, or on it's head against the floor. The air-bag that protects an adult can smother an infant. The seat-belt that helps protect an adult from being thrown into the dash-board, can crush a baby against the body of it's parent. With a motored cycle the injuries can be worse. A baby seated happily on the fuel-tank of a motor-cycle can slip and, by way of the hot engine and exhaust pipe be dragged beneath the vehicle ...

Sooner or later (hopefully), in India too, a legislation will make it mandatory for babies/children to be seated at the back of the vehicle with a parent. But why wait for legislation, and subsequent enforcement? Be careful, young parent, when you drive with your family. Let your precious one sit in the back... and let prudence take the front-seat.

Saturday, September 03, 2011

For the hypochondriac

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