Monthly Archives: September 2008

Plants In Forest Create Their Own Aspirin!

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I was pretty surprised when I read this, “Plants In Forest Emit Aspirin Chemical To Deal With Stress; Discovery May Help Agriculture” Like us, they don’t have to rush to a chemist’s shop and then swallow those pills.

Unlike humans, who are advised to take aspirin as a fever suppressant, plants have the ability to produce their own mix of aspirin-like chemicals, triggering the formation of proteins that boost their biochemical defenses and reduce injury,” says NCAR (National Center for Atmospheric Research) scientist Thomas Karl, who led the study. “Our measurements show that significant amounts of the chemical can be detected in the atmosphere as plants respond to drought, unseasonable temperatures, or other stresses.

This discovery can be helpful to the farmers.

The discovery raises the possibility that farmers, forest managers, and others may eventually be able to start monitoring plants for early signs of a disease, an insect infestation, or other types of stress. At present, they often do not know if an ecosystem is unhealthy until there are visible indicators, such as dead leaves.

News Channels Being Stupid?

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This guy/ Guys/ gal/gals is /are simply amazing. I admire the way he/she/they really makes/make an effort to write and before writing, does/do some actual research. After reading his/her/their post, it seems that news channels are still living in some fools paradise. They still have to feel the impact of internet how they can’t fool the common public (netzians) now.
Here is what, Padma Vidushak, Rajdeep Sardesai’s channel, CNN-IBN, felt about Madame President’s birthday celebration:

It was the first Presidential birthday in many years to be celebrated outside the grandeur of the Raisina Hill. First Lady Pratibha Patil celebrated her 73rd birthday with the destitute and the mentally challenged in their homes, in complete contrast to her predecessor Kalam, whose birthday celebrations looked more like Children’s Day celebrations inside Raisina Hill.[link]

Now what barbarindians did? He/she/they posted five links. Each links describes where and how ex-president Kalam celebrated his birthday. And surprisingly none of his birthday was celebrated in Raisina Hill!
I am just copying and pasting his work.

2006: New Delhi, Oct. 15 (PTI): The President, A P J Abdul Kalam, today celebrated his 75th birthday with spastic children in Bangalore. [link]

2005: Governor Sushil Kumar Shinde greeting President A.P.J. Abdul Kalam on his 74th birthday at Raj Bhavan in Hyderabad on Saturday. [link]

2004: BANGALORE: President of India, Dr Avul Pakir Jainulabdeen Abdul Kalam today turned 73, celebrating his birthday outside the Rashtrapati Bhavan. [link]

2003: SURAT OCT. 15. The president, A.P.J. Abdul Kalam, today celebrated his 73rd birthday among religious heads and children at Surat in south Gujarat. [link]

2002: CHENNAI Oct. 15 . The Governor and the Chief Minister have conveyed their greetings to the President, A.P.J. Abdul Kalam, on the occasion of his 72nd birthday. [link] [Oops! Finally it looks like he is on Raisina Hill! We found one!]

If you try posting all these links on CNN-IBN’s site they will “moderate” it. :-)

Cold and Lonely: Does Social Exclusion Literally Feel Cold?

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I come across this interesting article. Here the Psychologists (Chen-Bo Zhong and Geoffrey Leonardelli from the University of Toronto’s Rotman School of Management) arrive on the conclusion that social isolation really make you feel that room is colder than actually it is!

They divided a group of volunteers into two. One group is asked to recall the experience when they were expelled from certain group or club. Another group was told to evoke experiences when they have gained a membership of certain club or group. Later on they were asked to guess the room temperature on the pretense that the building’s maintenance staff wanted that information. And the findings were really surprising.

Those who were told to think about a socially isolating experience gave lower estimates of the temperature. In other words, the recalled memories of being ostracized actually made people experience the ambient temperature as colder.

In another experiment, instead of relying on volunteers’ memories, the researchers triggered feelings of exclusion by having the volunteers play a computer-simulated ball tossing game. The game was designed so that some of the volunteers had the ball tossed to them many times, but others were left out.” Afterwards, all the volunteers rated the desirability of certain foods and beverages: hot coffee, crackers, an ice-cold Coke, an apple, and hot soup. (source:Science Daily)

Read about the findings :-)

“It’s striking that people preferred hot coffee and soup more when socially excluded,” Leonardelli said. “Our research suggests that warm chicken soup may be a literal coping mechanism for social isolation.”

Can we take this metaphor literally and not descriptively? Watch your behavior next time, when you go out alone. :-)

Delhi Bomb Blasts and Ramp Modeling

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Shivraj Patil changing clothes in 3 hours

Source: Star News

Serial bomb blasts were happening in Delhi. People were looking for their near and dear ones. Mobiles were jammed and it was difficult talking to anyone. Doctors of Lady Harding Medical College were making appeal to general public to come forward and donate blood for Delhi bomb victims. Common people were trying to help in their own way.
But danger was still lurking somewhere. After serial bomb blasts Delhi was still unsafe. An e-mail claimed that they planned nine serial blasts for Delhi. So bomb squad were still searching for live bombs.
Here the million dollar question is, “what the Honorable Home Minister Of India Mr. Shivraj Patil was doing? Oh! He was busy playing the role of a ramp model. Today starnews showed that he was changing clothes for different occasion. First starnews claimed that he changed clothes three times in three hours while serial blasts were taking place in Delhi! But when they were showing the program they received a call from Home Ministry that the honorable minister has not changed three times in three hours but three times in five hours. We as public should really be relieved after this clarification or damage control. They should have informed the newsroom that MAJOR TV CREWS FROM INTERNATIONAL MEDIA will be covering this Delhi blasts and how come he turn out shabbily dressed and in the same suit? WHAT WILL HAPPEN TO THE REPUTATION OF INDIA IN FRONT OF WHOLE WORLD? So he has to behave as a ramp model first and as a Home Minister later.

Serial Blasts in Delhi

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Today I was just planning to go to Karol Bagh to purchase a bicycle. But somehow my plan got altered and I returned back from Friends colony only. While I was returning home, the driver received a call from his anxious wife if he is still in Delhi ? He broke the news to me that there were serial bomb blasts in New Delhi. Till now 18 are reported killed, 70 injured in Delhi serial blasts. I got the following news about Delhi blasts from The Hindu;

New Delhi (PTI): At least 18 people were killed and 70 injured in five serial blasts in a span of 45 minutes when terrorists targeted three crowded market areas in the heart of the Capital this evening.

Bringing back memories of the pre-Diwali terror strike in Sarojini market in 2005 that left 68 dead, the blasts rocked Connaught place, about a km from Parliament, Ghaffar market in Karol Bagh in Central Delhi and the M Block market in posh Greater Kailash in South Delhi.

It seems that serial bomb blasts are fast becoming usual news unless someone’s near and dear ones are involved. We will hear the usual statements from our PPM (Puppet Prime Minister) that these acts will not be tolerated. Terrorists will not be spared and blah! blah! blah! till some other city face the same bomb blasts and the game will start again. I was just curious why terrorists can’t fight against illness, illiteracy, poverty, hunger or for a clean environment? Would the effort require will be more if they try to find a cure against AIDS? I know its a foolish romantic thinking on my part.

Rain Water Harvesting

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I wish to thank Destination Infinity for this post. I find his blog post quite interesting and practical.

Every year Mumbai rains make news and for all the wrong reasons. When I keep on watching images of Mumbai flooded with rain I wonder why such an abundance and why an equal amount of waste? Of course, current mai baap of Mumbai, Mr. Raj Thackray doesn’t have time for such stupid things for Marathis and Maharashtra. I was reading about rain water harvesting at Wikipedia.

Rainwater harvesting in urban areas can have manifold reasons. To provide supplemental water for the city’s requirement,it increase soil moisture levels for urban greenery, to increase the ground water table through artificial recharge, to mitigate urban flooding and to improve the quality of groundwater are some of the reasons why rainwater harvesting can be adopted in cities. In urban areas of the developed world, at a household level, harvested rainwater can be used for flushing toilets and washing laundry. Indeed in hard water areas it is superior to mains water for this. It can also be used for showering or bathing. It may require treatment prior to use for drinking.
In New Zealand, many houses away from the larger towns and cities routinely rely on rainwater collected from roofs as the only source of water for all household activities. This is almost inevitably the case for many holiday homes.

Here is what Destination Infinity thinks:
Sometimes, we do not need to develop wisdom by re-inventing the wheel. For centuries, rain water harvesting has been a dominant activity in our country. Be it for irrigation systems, be it in temples, be it in the backyard of ones own house. This is something that we have always been doing. But, after the concrete jungles have taken over the cities, Rainwater Harvesting has not been in the fore front of demands of any purchaser or builder of home/ apartment in urban landscapes. Do we wake up only after a large scale disaster hits us, like Los Angeles – whose case is explained in the video below?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EHi4IU7JQ5Q&feature=related

Rain water harvesting in an urban landscape could be as simple as collecting the water flowing from the terraces out into the road (and causing local street flooding) into an underground tank/ sump or a cachement area which could later used for washing clothes, Cars, cooking, flushing toilets etc. (OR) Letting the rainwater flow into the ground from the terrace through multiple layers of natural filtering like broken bricks etc. which would contribute to the rise of the water tables in the area.

The following two websites have all the resources, case studies, links, community projects and all the necessary information on rainwater harvesting – particularly in India.

www.rainwaterharvesting.org

http://akash-ganga-rwh.com/RWH/WaterHarvesting.html

The following video is actually an advertisement for the rain water harvesting systems but has a lot of information on practical implementation of rain water harvesting. As they say, some times the advertisements are more informative and useful than the programs/serials in our television.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gsV_JgLzW4w&feature=related

And if you have watched all the videos till now, do watch this one also. A nice way of putting across the message. Just to end.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4xtMnE9Bo6s

Do let know if you know of any interesting implementations of the rain water harvesting methods in your area.

CERN search to solve Big Bang mystery!

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Largest particle collider conducts successful test!

GENEVA (AP) — The world’s largest particle collider successfully completed its first major test by firing a beam of protons around a 17-mile underground ring Wednesday in what scientists hope is the next great step to understanding the makeup of the universe.

After a series of trial runs, two white dots flashed on a computer screen at 10:36 a.m. indicating that the protons had traveled the full length of the $3.8 billion Large Hadron Collider.

“There it is,” project leader Lyn Evans said when the beam completed its lap.

Another headline is: “India shines at CERN experiment”

The entire Large Hadron Collider or LHC will be sitting on India made jacks, these objects weigh 32 tonnes and have to be located to the precision of a few tens of micron.

All of us are concerned about The safety of the LHC

The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) can achieve an energy that no other particle accelerators have reached before, but Nature routinely produces higher energies in cosmic-ray collisions.The LHC Safety Assessment Group (LSAG) and extends the conclusions of the 2003 report that LHC collisions present no danger and that there are no reasons for concern. Whatever the LHC will do, Nature has already done many times over during the lifetime of the Earth and other astronomical bodies. The LSAG report has been reviewed and endorsed by CERN’s Scientific Policy Committee, a group of external scientists that advises CERN’s governing body, its Council.

I was busy finding out the number of Indian scientists involved in this LHC experiment. But what to say about Hindi broadcast media? My maid and her children watch those channels and gathered some facts about big bang. Today she issued an ultimatum that she would leave early to be with her children on their last day on this earth! She also narrated that yesterday they had refused to have their dinner out of fear. I was trying to explain to the maid that everything is OK about this big bang experiment while watching TV at the same time. And VIOLA!!! On TV they were showing a designer family ( family having all the right external attributes, be it drawing room or personal appearances) and their kids too DIDN’T EAT AND SLEEP IN THE NIGHT!! Long live BIG BANG and media! Hindi broadcast media was out with full force these days, even consulting astrologers and all those dandy looking Babas about impending annihilation of this planet and whole universe! Hats of to media for making Indians basically behaving as one irrespective of class, caste, creed or literacy level.

Indulgence vs. Regret: Investing in Future Memories

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I was reading a paper published by Anat Keinan who is an assistant professor in the Marketing unit at Harvard Business School. I find the following results interesting:

Good news for makers of $20,000 watches and other luxury goods and services. Recent
research from Harvard Business School professor Anat Keinan and a colleague suggest that we
often regret not indulging ourselves earlier in life. Key concepts include:
• People can be too farsighted, or hyperopic, leaving wistful regrets of missing out on life’s
pleasures when they look back at how they spent their time.
• It’s possible to motivate consumers to indulge themselves by simply asking them what they
think they will regret in 10 years.
• Marketers can convince consumers that buying their product is actually a farsighted behavior,
an investment in future memories.

The findings seem to suggest that we should give in to our buying impulses and they in turn will create good memories for us in future. Maybe we can tell our children and grandchildren about them.
But the million dollar question is, do any of us remember where we shopped 10 years ago and what caught our fancy but we didn’t buy?

If we follow Ms. Anat Keinan logic then it seems that Paris Hiltons, Victoria Beckhams, Lindsay Lohans all are creating big time pleasant memories for the future. That will seem strange to any logical thinking person. It means that Abhinav Bindra who has spent the last ten years of his life in a shooting range and did nothing except shooting, won’t have pleasant memories to reminiscence about? Or I know some persons who slogged like anything to pull out their families from lower middle class strata to upper middle class strata. Would they regret that in future?