Information flow in future

While hearing about molecular computing and nano memory cards, one would wonder how the future would be. Definitely different. Here is a preview.

You return home and settle at home. Want to know how organic is the tomato you bought. Pick one of them and use your TV remote as a scanner. Immediately picks of the universal identification number of the tomato and starts pumping data after data about the tomato. The shop it is been purchased, the date it is been stocked, the vehicle it came in .. You could use the remote to drill down the pouring info. The farm of the tomato is show live. The fertilizers used in the past, the chemical composition, the Dept of Agriculture's stance with respect to that fertilizer, What not ..

It is amazing to know the interconnected and data relatedness we can end up in.

Thou this kind of info access is technically feasible, I guess the legality over personal space, business confidentiality etc will hide these info.

The beast

Never came across this one before .. the cell surrounded by 8 mines!!! (circled in the image)

Got it correct and finished off the game too. Felt slight nervousness after unveiling the big shot. There was a pressure to complete the game successfully.

That was quite an experience after playing for years.

The land shark

The revenge of the nomad
Chapter 2. The land shark

Cacophony Rao is the villain of the story. He got his title for his loud and shrill voice. People are fearful to face his screaming shout more than his violent behavior. His family owns enormous wealth. In fact, most of Vijapura city belongs to them. Among multiple business they do, they are famous for real estate. Mr Rao make profit out of layouting land and selling for a margin. He also pockets out of forgery and threatening people to transfer their land. Our hero, Ramaraj, had bought a site from Mr Rao. After five years, this particular layout had appreciated a lot. Mr Rao couldn't digest the fact that his layout is no more with him and it is valued high. He started with usual way of bringing muscle power and trying to retrieve the land back from the purchasers. He was willing to pay them back the money they had given 5 years back.

Obviously site owners were unhappy. They protested, without much use. Many gave off the site fearing the consequences. Few people like Ramdas were trying to save their valuable. They can never acquire a site as the land price had raised up beyond reach. Their only chance is to hold on to what they have.

In order to clear off the problem, Mr Rao applied the ultimate weapon. He choose one of the protesters and made a hit. Alas, it happened to be Ramraj. Ten or fifteen gundaas came to Ramraj house in the mid night. They smashed opened the house and hit the couples with heavy iron and sticks. The attack went on for 30 minutes and both suffered a major injury. Neighbours dare not to intervene, they called for the police after the tough guys left the place.
Seethalakshmi couldnt bear the beatings and she breath her last on the way to hospital. Ramraj had to be administered in the hospital for months and slowly his body parts recovered.

Did police took action? Nope, Mr Rao took care of the matter through money. Beyond that his brother, Karan Rao, is an influential politician. None of the government bodies function beyond Karan's power, atleast in the Vijayapura vicinity.

continued.

First sale

(Pepper climber as shown in the above image. Pepper grows as a bunch of tiny tots. Seen in the right hand side of the image)

After we moved into the farm, we were doing lots of work .. one thing after another. Farm related, house maintenance, government paper work etc. Amidst all those things, we were able to pluck out some pepper and dry it up. My job was to sell it to some merchant.

I hopped from shop to shop, trying to learn the buying price. I had to put an act, as thou I am a seasoned farmer and trying to sell off a load. Had a fear, what if he asks some technicalities about the goods? I know that pepper is used in pongal, beyond that my knowledge is nill. Luckily a shop near the city center bought the stuff with less questioning.

I will have to research more to know about the best price. Less planning to pack it and sell them off.

Joyful life

The revenge of the nomad
Chapter 1. Joyful life

Ramaraj, our hero, has an ideal life. He is employed as a manager in a paper mill. His wife, Seethalakshmi, works as a clerk in a central government department. They lead a happy life; in fact they are expecting a baby in few months. Financially they are sound. Out of their small income, they purchased a piece of land away from the city. After five years of purchase, now that the city had grown and the area is developing good. Ram and Seetha are slowly thinking about constructing a dream house there.

All seem to be going good. Peace before the storm? Let us see.

continued.

The spider web

Usually when we clean the cob web, the spiders used to reconstruct within few days. This time it is a long due and still the house is clean. Upon reflecting, the truth unearthed. My wife had gone to her mom's home on a long vacation. So, no cooking, no food spillage, nothing in the waste bin. The house flies and other small insects should have migrated to better food source. And hence the spider had also wound its silk carpet to elsewhere.

Quiet interesting to note how these small creature observe the environment, adapt to the changes and base themselves to the food source.

Sales pitch

Selling goods seem to depend on two factors. The need of human and fear of something. The basic needs like food and shelter always keeps certain market thrive and healthy. Beyond this is the market where greedy people purchase. Samples: Invest in land purchase and it will double in three years. Drink saffron powdered milk while one is pregnant, and the new born will be fair skinned (if this is true, we shouldn't have any dark skin by now). I checked the price of the saffron and decided to have a baby with my skin tone. Another classic sample is the precious gem that is decided by one's zodiac sign. These specially designed gems can solve almost anything in the world, right from finding a spouse, promoting you in the place of your boss, healing chronic cancer, and a free pass to space travel.

Most of the above ingredients can be used with a threatening mode. If you dont alter your house as per vaastu, 1000 bad things will happen in the coming year and so on. All parents bought this vitamin tablets to boost memory of their kids, if you dont buy, your kid will fail miserably. Another classic sample of fear factor is the insurance policy.

Guess we will save lots of money when we shop without greed and fear.

Time convertor

How easy to convert a pacific std time to your local time? What if you need to deal with the london time too. Adding the 'day light saving' factor will increase the fun in the conversion.

I wish we have a simple plugin (mainly attached to the email client), that would scan through the document and highlight timestamp in different time zones.

Color synchronizer

Opposite to our house is quite an interesting house. It is occupied by five mallu girls. Quite a time pass to watch them together on their terrace or strolling in the front yard with their mobile and occasionally meeting in the streets.

Apart from the mundane task of watching these college girls, I made another observation. Their dress. Not only when they are wearing, but also when they are dried up in the cloth line. The dress colors are similar on most of the days. Indicating that the girls have been wearing same color on the previous day or so. It is as thou they decide earlier on what to wear. Or it could be subconsciously the roommates synced up in some ways and picked the dress with same color shade. I would equate this concept to "menstrual cycle synchronization" when girls stay together.

Whatever it is, definitely worth doing a research on this topic. If anyone is on it, I can volunteer to provide vital data for the project.

yErTram

yErTram is a method/tool for retrieving water from well. While writing the post "Chain of thoughts", I googled for this word and failed to find a description. Even a picture was not available. So, I asked my art master to help with providing a sketch.

A huge stone path is placed upon the center of the well. It would form a narrow path for a person to walk over the well. At one side of the path is a fulcrum setup which holds a hefty wooden beam. The extreme end of the beam is tied with rocks for balancing purpose. The other end is connected to a stick with a bucket. The stick and the bucket go into the well for collecting water. The person has to hold the empty bucket, keep pulling down the stick so that the wooden beam comes down towards the well. Once the bucket reaches the water level, the bucket is filled with water and the stick is drawn upwards. During this process, the person would have to walk from the outer edge of the well towards the center (walk on the stone path) and walk back after collecting the water.

The slow child

When an animal gives birth to smaller ones, immediatly the junior would move, spot the mom and starts sucking milk. In few days, the puppies or other offspring would run around, understand the world around, pick a fight with its sibling, try to chew anything that is available. What a fast track life.

Compared to that human child is very slow. After three months of looking after it, we are very happy to hear some noise out of it. With few more months, it starts pushing itself around - making us immense proud. Another six month to stand, try to walk, play with words. Would have to wait for four to five years to reliably be on its own and cross the mid-teen to be productive and able to lead a life.
This difference between animal growth and human always puzzled me. Reading Bill Bryson's book clarified the doubt. Giving a passage from his book:

Bipedalism is a demanding and risky strategy. It means refashioning the pelvis into a full load-bearing instrument. To preserve the required strength, the birth canal in the female must be comparatively narrow. This has two very significant immediate consequences and one longer-term one. First, it means a lot of pain for any birthing mother and a greatly increased danger of fatality to mother and baby both. Moreover, to get the baby's head through such a tight space it must be born while its brain is still small - and while the baby, therefore, is still helpless. This means long-term infant care, which in turn implies solid male-female bonding.

May be the smaller brain allow us to learn the stuff after birth. Wheareas animals comes with almost pre-moulded brain and the scope for them to learn is limited. So, our hardwork in terms of taking risk and going thru immense trouble paid off well.

A Short History of Nearly Everything

As the title says, almost all corners of Science is touched upon. Right from the formation of universe, rocks, volcanoes of the earth, ancient creatures, DNA structures, and more are discussed in a laymanistic simplicity. The flow of these topics are also wonderful. Had thrown lots of light upon life of the Scientists who worked in different eras. Amazing to peek into their personal life too, like who the 19th century chemist foolishly inhaled poisones gases, the enemity between different researchers etc.
A very good read for anyone curious to know our origin, stuff we are made up of, where we are and other Scientific inquiries. The book is by Bill Bryson.

Ellu juice

While being in a village, thought of having a cool drink. While checking the availability, I was puzzled by the menu item 'ellu juice'. There was a language barrier too, and the server couldn't explain more than that ('ellu juice' is something made out of 'ellu'). Out of curiosity, I asked for the same. What I got is sesame milk juice! Never had or heard about this before. It was quite tasty.

In the wild

Got the possession of the farm. On the first day evening, I moved in with my wife. The sun was setting slowly and so we were settling down. The electrical work ought to be worked out. Hence we had to pour kerosene in the newly bought kerosene lamp and lit it before the sunset. With the lights up, we found a clean spot (as clean as possible) for making our bed. It was inside a small room. We closed the window so that creatures from outside dont join us. As we didnt have anything to do around 6.30pm, we had our dinner. It was a nice candle light dinner, tasted like bread with jam. We promised to have lots of singing, playing jokes and talking everything under the sun (beyond as well). After talking about everything, at 7.30pm we felt sleepy. After putting off the lights, the room was pitch dark. It was so dark that closing the eyes or opening them didnt matter. Once in a while my wife switched on the torch and scanned the walls, roof to check any unwanted visitors.

Insurance policy and the functionings

ok, after chasing for the real Insurance policy benefitors , I found a clue. When we have some work to be done and we reach out a government employee or a distant relative or anyone, they help us out of the request. After that, they start with, "sir, my wife is a policy agent, why dont you buy an insurance policy". It is quite difficult to out right refuse the offer as we just got a free service through them. We will have to find an escape route like saying that we got policy previous month or so.

Anyway, I think these kind of social pressures are making the policy industry to thrive. And obviously the immediate benefitors are the agents.

The old bachelor

A friend of mine is in his late thirties. Had been going through all channels to find a life partner. Still no luck in settling with someone. The initial criteria were too many and beyond market supply. His family fancied getting a girl half his age and from a rich background. Slowly they kept relaxing their requirements. The recent one relaxed is the origin of the desired family. Earlier condition was to choose someone from the same community and also their family should have originated from the same town as theirs. The origination has been dropped for now.

I used to wonder why they are finding it difficult in the bride hunt, in spite of dropping many criteria. May be the rate at which they drop particular criteria is very slow compared to the brides moving out of the market for that age group. Wish he access the situation properly and moves fast.

Thunder, wind and rain

It was a quite afternoon, calm and bright. All of a sudden heavy wind was flowing in the area. Followed were thunder, lighting and rain. The rain was thrashing around with fury and wind fueled the beatings. It was a dramatic scene to watch from the balcony. It was as though waves of water was cleansing the landscape.

Chain of thoughts

When my wife was about to enter the house, I thought of playing a childish prank - to hold the door tightly from inside that she will be puzzled with the door not opening in spite of unlocking. When such thought came in, suddenly something flashed from my young age. Of someone holding my bicycle from behind and I was surprised that my pedaling was vain. Now I tried recollecting the face of that person. Oh, I remembered. I used to go to a public garden at early morning. In those days, gents went to different gardens on a daily basis. That were our bath points. We had well in the center of the garden. Drawing water from well require good muscle and stamina. Bigger men can do themselves and fill their tub with water they need. A boy like me would have to depend on a gardener. He would fill the tub, which would need 3 buckets of drawings from the well. For a day, I will have to give 10paise, on a monthly basis to was decided to be Rs 2.

Ok, that is the man who found be on the road, someday and held my bicycle.
Interesting to note the thoughts we keep jumping from somewhere to anywhere. To think about the money value, the good old social life style, the equipments we used, etc etc.

Oh, I didn't trick my wife by jamming the door; partially got lost in my own world and other partial was due to the insight into after effects when my wife successfully opens the doors and find me the culprit.

Green peas masala

Couple of days before, we finally made up of our mind to prepare green peas masala at home. Here are the steps we followed.

• Peel and chop onions, small one are tastier. I assume the onion amount should be as much as the vegetable we add.
• Fry onion in oil. Make it to golden yellow.
• Add ginger garlic paste, garam masala, pepper or chilli powder. Keep stirring.
• With the brownish paste in the pan, add green peas.
  Let the peas be fried in oil first.
• For richness, grind some cashews in water. Add this paste to the peas mixture. Add some more water.
• Instead of cashew paste, tomato or coconut milk will also be good. None of the above is also an alternate option.
• With added water, close the pan for few minutues. Make sure all ingridents mix up well.
• Serve hot with chappathi or parota or dosa or lemon rice etc.
  
  

Handling old laptop battery

If I disconnect the power from my laptop, the laptop shuts abruptly in 5 to 10 seconds. Looks like the battery is gone. However, I suspect some kind of firmware involvement also in this problem. When windows desktop is put under some prompt, then the laptop doesn't die even after removing the plug. So, if I wanted to move the laptop around while still working, I click on shutdown and leave the shutdown prompt as it is. After shifting, I cancel the prompt. So for this method helped in retaining for power for 15 minutes. Let to try beyond.