shock

Mom told me to help her with the curtains. They were synthetic. I was in constant touch with them, pulled the rings off of them, took them down. Then as I put my hands under the tap to wash them....
ZAPP!!!!

Electrostatic Shock.

The body lost electrons and attained an unstable negative charge state. It got attrated to the slightly negatively charged Oxygen atoms of water and produced static electricity.
ZAP...hahahahaha

Indo-US Nuclear Deal.

It is a landmark nuclear deal between the United States and India.

India and USA decided to turn a new leaf in the bilateral relationship. Bush administration declared its ambition to achieve full civil nuclear energy cooperation with India. This would require agreement from the U.S. Congress to adjust U.S. laws and policies. Also required is work with friends and allies to adjust international regimes to enable full civil nuclear energy cooperation and trade with India, including but not limited to expeditious consideration of fuel supplies for safeguarded nuclear reactors.

India will have the same responsibilities and practices and acquire the same benefits and advantages of other leading countries with advanced nuclear technologies.

This new treaty would recognize india as a nuclear weapon state, officially. The deal requires the separation of civil and military facilities in a phased manner and the filing of a declaration about its civilian facilities to the International Atomic Energy Agency (I.A.E.A.).

I'd say that th Secretart of State Condollezza Rice would have to do some serious home work convincing the Congressional members to ammend the US law.
Similar negative approaches have been observed in our home also. BJP has criticised the pact. Ironically, it was the B.J.P. that laid the foundations of the emerging U.S.-India strategic partnership.

Vajpayee argued that the Indian govt had surrendered its right to determine what kind of nuclear deterrent it should have in the future based on its own threat perception. He said that it would require huge costs to separate the civil and military nuclear installations. Aslo it would put restrictions on the Indian nuclear research program.

What I feel about this deal is that it would surely put India amonst the globally ordered nuclear states and would make some allies, also it would make sure not to look at India through the prism of non-proliferation.

Mind..

Its a bit ironic that sometimes its really hard to explain certain things that we claim to possess.
What is Mind?
I don't think there's a single answer that explains the phenomenon of mind.
Is Mind an object? If one day the electrical and chemical processes in the brain are understood completely, would it explain Mind? Would this understanding account for all faculties including intelligence, consciousness, emotion? I think it is a fascinating phenomenon. And its illusive.

There's a question...what do we learn? Its really simple to answer. Just say something in relation to the things we absorbed and contextually explain it in jargons and certain technical terms to convince that we really learnt it.

But....How do we learn?
Its different from how do we retain memory..retention is an elecrical phenomenon resulting from deposition of calcium in brain cells and capacitating the static within.

Why is it true that "practice makes a man perfect"...how is it possible that our thinking, our intelligence, and our way of percieving instantaneous activities evolves. And...why does it evolve?

What is there that is called the mind....that very phenomenon which makes all this possible.

I'd say that mind is a collection of conscious and unconscious processesthat influence our mental and physcal behaviour.
Mind is where things like ego, love, arrogance, care, hatered, hollowness, pain, laughter, sorrow....all generate..

What the hell is it...........not at all physical atleast...

Sensex: 11,746

Dalal Street climbed to a new closing high.
The unbridled bull run is continuing without any break.

With the Sensex hitting 11,746, the Index soared with a gain of 467 points in 3 goddamned days. Investors may now shrug of concerns about stretched valuations and I believe that now the focus would be on robust fund inflows and expectations for strong fiscal during the fourth-quarter earnings.

Cement, drug and software were major gainers. The peak was at 11,755 points.

Money is pouring in from the FIIs (Foreign Institutional Investors), and mutual funds.
This year foreign funds allowed a gain of 25% to the index with whoping $4 billion inflow.

The price-earning ratio (P/E) has hit 21.62. A high P/E indicates the high earning potential of the corporate sector. It means that the market is getting overvalued..the market has put a much more optimistic and more expensive value on the shares.

Age of Altruism

Babies as young as 18 months old can tell when adults need help and will
often do their best to assist.

Lifting things, opening doors, picking up objects.

These early signs of helpfulness is a sign of humsns' altruism.. This is
rare in the animals. Chimps also display such kind of helpfulness. This
suggests that the evolutionary roots of altruism go back to common
ancestors shared beteen humans and chimpanzees.

Tests also show that if an adult struggles to pick up a dropped
clothespin in front of an infant, it quickly crawls over picks up the
clothespin and hands it over to the adult. Chimpanzees performed a
similar task. But human babies were found to perform better at opening
up doors and stacking books in case the adult had his ands full.

Motion - Gravity - Geometry

Gravity is not due to force, but it is a manifestation of curved space
and time, the curvature being produced by mass-energy content of the
spacetime.

One of the defining features of general relativity is the idea that
gravitational force is replaced by gravitational geometry. The
phenomenon in classical mechanics which were ascribed to the actions of
force of gravity are taken in general relativity to represent inertial
motion in curved spacetime.

Inertial observers, that is the observers in inertial motion, for
example freefalling objects, can accelereate w.r.t each other. For
instance, if we take the case of two freely falling balls, same mass,
same shape, on the opposite sides of the earth, they'd accelerate w.r.t
each other as they approach other.

So their acceleration, or more precisely their motion, would be a
manifestation of the geometry of spacetime in which they exist.

Protect the Civilization

Some day, scientists have been telling us for some years now, we'll have to deal with an incoming asteroid or comet that would destroy civilization at worst or wipe out a city at least.

Big impacts have occurred before, and there will be more. But we don't know enough about space rocks and their composition to plan properly for deflecting or destroying such a menace. Turnabout proved to be fair play when NASA's mission - Deep Impact, slammed a probe into Comet Tempel 1 on the 4th of July.

The upshot..... This comet was fluffy, unlike others that have been studied up close.

Meanwhile, a group of scientists and astronauts prodded NASA to visit asteroid Apophis, which has a slight chance of hitting us a few decades hence. NASA's responsive: A purely scientific mission might be considered, but we have plenty of time to mount a diversion if further observations show this thing would really hit.

Life on Mars

It extends back to last year and looks like the sort of mystery that'll keep scientists scratching their heads for years to come.

The air of Mars seems to contain pockets of methane in doses that should not exist. Perhaps it's the belchings of subsurface microbes. They support that view with new evidence for blocks of underground ice in the same region as the methane, based on observations by ESA's Mars Express.

The ice could be supplying the precious liquid water needed to support the biology, they figure. Other astronomers think the reasoning is very speculative, however.

Reason

I fear naught but the state of ignorance--
 Death comes; for all the end is inevitable;
 But only one who's dumb will, in nonchalance
 From folly make the rest thus miserable.

 Yet with knowledge, a light shines in cognition--
 Not trivia-- knowledge of self, world, and all;
 Fathoming, with age, brings wisdom's inception...
 Fearlessly learning, answering Reason's call.

 Awareness begins with cortical abstraction;
 Broad connection allows integrated thought;
 The high view of cognition, thinkers call "Reason";
 Thus, "light", metaphorically, is Reason wrought.

 I shrink not but from Ignorance's foolish vision--
 Life comes; for all, beginning's universal;
 Only the light of Reason can illumine
 From start to finish, the wise and beneficial.

New processor computes at light speed

A superfast computing processor that uses light, not electrons, to perform calculations has gone on sale for the first time. Lenslet, the Israeli company that developed the processor, say its light speed calculations deliver the power of a supercomputer in a single device.

The device is called Enlight and can perform 8000 billion arithmetic operations per second, about 1000 times faster than a standard processor. Previously this type of processor was only available to highly financed government laboratories.

EnLight will be useful across a broad range of applications, from military projects to compressing high definition video images. Enlight is not a general purpose processor like a Pentium. Instead, each processor will be custom-built to perform a specific set of tasks, and will not be programmable.

Much research has been done to try to exploit the much faster speed at which light travels compared to electronic signals, but most commercial work in this area has focused mainly on optical interfaces. These devices allow fibre optic and related systems to communicate with traditional electronic systems.

Strictly speaking, EnLight is a hybrid device, housing both electronic and optical circuits, but it is the optical processing that make it so fast. It allows you to do a massive level of operations in parallel.

The processing in the Enlight device is carried out using a process called vector matrix-multiplication, which allows calculations to be performed on 256 optical inputs.

The beams from 256 lasers are added or multiplied together when shone on a matrix device called a spatial light modulator. The outputs are then read by an array of light detectors.

Lenslet would not put a precise price on how much an EnLight processor would cost, because each will be made to order.