Saturday, August 30, 2008

Tactics of the leaves

While watering the plants, a cool insight of the plants came upon. The leaves starts from the stem and raises up in a slanting manner. They form v shaped pattern through out the stem. Having a flat structure, instead of v shape, might be more efficient to capture sun light. The advantage of v shape showed up while watering the plant. Water falling on the leaves rushed towards the stem and finally close to the root. Had it been a flat arrangement, water from the leaves might have splashed away from the root to the ground instead of towards the stem.

May be the plants have to form a strategic positioning for maximizing sunlight as well as rain water.

Wednesday, August 27, 2008

Freedom to mind

While going through the strange world, I got a light all of a sudden. What a freedom and relief we get once we are out of an issue. The issue may be minor, but we feel our mind relaxed and calm.

The problems and issues we face need not be a real challenge. They can be just a lack of knowledge about that particular system or situation. If we put some effort to understand the functionality of the system and behaviour, we may be through the difficult moments.

Tuesday, August 26, 2008

Strange world

When we reach an ideal point in life, we settle down happily. And then creeps bunch of issues here and there. That leads to the yearning of cleaning off such negative factors. We want those issues to vanish so that we can relish in our imaginative conditions we fantasized on the first place. Slowly the goodness of this experience drops off and only the bad thingy stick to our mind. If more and more such issues pile up, the particular point reached will itself be a burden. We start fantasizing for something else. Back to square one.

Friday, August 22, 2008

transparent editor

What if the text editors we use are transparent? Or transparentable? This occurred to be when I had to switch between different window, refer info at various source and come back to the editor to continue composing. Instead, if I have transparency, I will have focus on very few lines close to the current line I am editing. This patch of visible lines should be draggable/movable. Remaining area of the screen will be displaying the windows that are at the background. I can refer or even cut n paste from any of the available screen. With a snap of key or click, I should switch from transparent mode to opaque. Would be cool.

Monday, August 18, 2008

Follow British or American

While interacting with American colleagues, one of the confusing factor is the date format. Desis are used with dd/mm/yy and Americans insist on mm/dd/yy. Upon pondering on this conflict, interesting things surfaced. It is not only date format, there are many things Americans wanted to move off from British traditions. Here is a short list.


road side

Brits ride to the left side. Anyone following that convention will find it tough on American roads that drive on the right hand side. Car steering is also position in appropriate side of the car.


switch on/off

Simple light bulb switch. Do we pull the knob bottom to top or top to bottom for turning it on? Depends on the country.


Culture

Britons and I guess most of the European countries adhered strict hierarchical order in the society. The working place too followed such bureaucratic structure. Americans bent such rigid model and practice somewhat loose hierarchy.


Language

The formal British English had to give way to American slangish language.

Considering these factors, looks like such drastic change were taken upon themselves to symbolize their freedom from a former colony. They want to show their difference.
May be top to bottom writings of Chinese, right to left of Arabs could have originated out of similar identity establishment.

Monday, August 11, 2008

The power game

Recently Manipal University was derecognized as a quality medical college. The reason given by the government inspecting body is that the univ is lacking resources. Considering the recent past, where the institute is considered one among the best (to be precise, fourth best medical college in the country), such a lack of resource is a surprising findings. Are our institute adhere such a low standard?

Clearly the corrupt hands of the inspecting body wants to tamper into a resourceful setup.

A thought occurred to me. The state government is somewhat friendly towards MU. If a state government inspecting body could be floated, that would ease out the issue for now. Slowly the authenticity of such inspecting board can be popularized among other states.

This will bring down the power of the Central inspectors. However, the new setup will introduce few more flangs of its own.

Wednesday, August 06, 2008

Travel updater

Recently I happen to be on road and rails for four days. Just kept on moving from one city after another. Apart from the hackers, beggars, loud video player .. a new annoyer had joined .. it is the co passenger yelling at his/her mobile. Observed a pattern in this mobile usage. These people HAVE TO inform the other party about their exact longitude, latitude coordinates. Even if they don't know, they would wake the co passenger from sleep and question them with, "where r we now?" .. followed by ... "Aaang, I have crossed so-n-so place." As thou the listener is going to open up their GPS box and start monitoring the movement of this guy.

Wondering if we can have a personal mobile phone jammer.