signs

cat M.I.A.

our cat (pus pus, aka poosa), is mia
it has not communicated with us since the its last recon mission (12 dec 2006)

merry christmas

today we celebrate a highly commercialized birthday… the birthday of christ…
a friend of mine even wrote play about it…

so i thought i’d give myself and all around me non-commercialized christmas…

except for the food…
its christmas…
christmas is about food… christmas food!!!
so merry christmas!!!
science be praised!!!

solar tsunami!

"The prototype of a new solar patrol telescope in New Mexico recorded a tsunami-like shock wave rolling across the visible face of the Sun following a major flare even on Wednesday, Dec. 6, 2006, at 18:28 Universal Time (11:28 MST). The shock wave, known as a Moreton wave, also destroyed or compressed two filaments of cool gas at opposite sides of the solar hemisphere."
read more...

STS-116 Launch

"What makes this one singularly unique is the fact that we’re going to rewire the space station,” Mark Polansky, Discovery’s commander.

Photos

Photographer: Mike Theiss



Photographer: Merlon D. Mayrand


Photographer: Jose Suro


Photographer: Mark A. Brown

Links

STS-116 Mission Page
Mission Overview
More Photos

Harvest Moon

The Harvest Moon of 2006 rises on October 6th, and if you pay attention, you may notice a few puzzling things:
1. Moonlight steals color from whatever it touches. It’s a bit like seeing the world through an old black and white TV set.

2. If you stare at the gray landscape long enough, it turns blue. The best place to see this effect, called the “blueshift” or “Purkinje shift” after the 19th century scientist Johannes Purkinje who first described it, is in the countryside far from artificial lights.

3. Moonlight won’t let you read. Open a book beneath the full moon. At first glance, the page seems bright enough. Yet when you try to make out the words, you can’t.

So what do we make of it all? The answer lies in the eye of the beholder. The human retina is responsible.



The retina is like an organic digital camera with two kinds of pixels: rods and cones. Cones allow us to see colors (red roses) and fine details (words in a book), but they only work in bright light. After sunset, the rods take over.

Rods are marvelously sensitive (1000 times more so than cones) and are responsible for our night vision. According to some reports, rods can detect as little as a single photon of light! There’s only one drawback: rods are colorblind. Roses at night thus appear gray.

If rods are so sensitive, why can’t we use them to read by moonlight? The problem is, rods are almost completely absent from a central patch of retina called the fovea, which the brain uses for reading. The fovea is densely packed with cones, so we can read during the day. At night, however, the fovea becomes a blind spot. The remaining peripheral vision isn’t sharp enough to make out individual letters and words.

Click here for more info....

a misaligned movement ??

Nehru didn’t want to call his misaligned movement “The Misaligned Movement” so he came up with: “The Non-Aligned Movement”…

"The term Non-Alignment itself was coined by Indian Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru during his speech in 1954 in Colombo, Sri Lanka."

the influence of the US in international affairs… okay thats nice… Indian can poke their nose on sri lankan issues… but its wrong for the US to poke their nose… personally i’d prefer a US nose than an Indian one… and i would def prefer an aligned nose… dont want any misaligned noses poking in… they are all a bunch of misaligned cigar smoking comi hypocrites

and i def dont want a misaligned comi cigar as my nose poker…
quote: Fidel Castro was also elected President of the Movement.

"The 2006 meeting in Havana has leaders discussing a strategy on dealing with the increasing influence of the United States on international affairs."

" The Non-Aligned Movement, or NAM, is an international organization of over 100 states which consider themselves not formally aligned with or against any major power bloc. The purpose of the organization as stated in the Havana Declaration of 1979 is to ensure the national independence, sovereignty, territorial integrity and security of non-aligned countries in their struggle against imperialism, colonialism, neo-colonialism, apartheid, racism, Zionism, and all forms of foreign aggression, occupation, domination, interference or hegemony as well as against great power and bloc politics. They represent nearly two-thirds of the United Nations’s members and comprise 55% of the world population."

Read more...

pope makes a boo boo

quote: In the speech, the Pope referred to criticism of the Prophet Mohammad by 14th century Byzantine Emperor Manuel II Palaeologus, who said everything Mohammad brought was evil “such as his command to spread by the sword the faith he preached”.

hmmmm… lemme get this right… the church has a “convert or die” policy in during the 16th and 17th century… but thats all fine ‘cos they had guns then so the sword was kinda obsolete…

--------
VATICAN CITY (Reuters) - The Vatican said on Saturday the Pope was sorry Muslims had been offended by a speech whose meaning had been misconstrued, but Morocco withdrew its ambassador as anger at his words flared on.

“The Holy Father thus sincerely regrets that certain passages of his address could have sounded offensive to the sensitivities of the Muslim faithful,” Vatican Secretary of State Cardinal Tarcisio Bertone said in a statement.

The New York Times said in an editorial the Pope must issue a “deep and persuasive” apology for quotes used in his speech.

“The world listens carefully to the words of any pope. And it is tragic and dangerous when one sows pain, either deliberately or carelessly,” it said.

In the speech, the Pope referred to criticism of the Prophet Mohammad by 14th century Byzantine Emperor Manuel II Palaeologus, who said everything Mohammad brought was evil “such as his command to spread by the sword the faith he preached”.

Using the terms “jihad” and “holy war”, the Pope said violence was “incompatible with the nature of God”.

But Bertone said the Pontiff “had absolutely no intention” of presenting Emperor Manuel’s opinions on Islam as his own.

Traditional Brass Foundry - Pilimathalawa (Kandy)

Brass Foundary

STS-115

"Space Shuttle Atlantis lifted off from Kennedy Space Center and charged into the midday Florida sky on a mission to boost power on the International Space Station. The launch was on time, with liftoff at 11:15 a.m. EDT. Over the 11-day mission, the six-member crew will perform three spacewalks to install the P3/P4 integrated truss and solar arrays on the station, doubling the current power generating capability of the orbiting outpost."

Mission Summary
Mission Blog
Launch Videos

Pluto Petition

pluto was demoted demoted as categorized as a plant a few days back!!!

please sign the Pluto Petition

pluto is not a planet according to the IAU… pluto is demoted to a “pluto-class object”
so there are only eight planets now: Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune.

comfort eating

"It is not uncommon for people to eat when they feel sad, angry, hopeless, bored or lonely."

well not me!!! - i feel sad, angry, hopeless, bored etc when i dont eat!

marissa
4 August 2006 @ 12:26 am
exactly…
“i feel sad, angry, hopeless, bored etc when i dont eat!”
…
you don’t eat
that makes you feel sad angry hopeless bored etc
so you eat! (so you don’t feel that way)
that is, you eat when you feel sad, angry, hopeless, bored or lonely, to stop yourself feeling that way!

summber of '69

"The first moon landing by a human was that of American Neil Armstrong, commander of the Apollo 11 mission, accompanied by Buzz Aldrin. On July 20, 1969, while their teammate Michael Collins controlled the command module Columbia, Armstrong landed the lunar module Eagle on the surface of the moon at 4:17:42 p.m. Eastern Daylight Time."
.... read more

On August 27th Mars will look as large as the full moon

Above: Painted green by a flashlight, astronomer Dennis Mammana of California points out Mars to onlookers on Aug. 26, 2003, the last time Mars was so close to Earth. Photo credit: Thad V'Soske.
this is a hoax!!!! read the nasa article
no wait... let me quote:
There's a rumor about Mars going around the internet. Here are some snippets from a widely-circulated email message:
"The Red Planet is about to be spectacular."
"Earth is catching up with Mars [for] the closest approach between the two planets in recorded history."
"On August 27th Mars will look as large as the full moon."
And finally, "NO ONE ALIVE TODAY WILL EVER SEE THIS AGAIN."

Only the first sentence is true. The Red Planet is about to be spectacular. The rest is a hoax.
Here are the facts: Earth and Mars are converging for a close encounter this year on October 30th at 0319 Universal Time. Distance: 69 million kilometers. To the unaided eye, Mars will look like a bright red star, a pinprick of light, certainly not as wide as the full Moon.
Disappointed? Don't be. If Mars did come close enough to rival the Moon, its gravity would alter Earth's orbit and raise terrible tides.
Sixty-nine million km is good. At that distance, Mars shines brighter than anything else in the sky except the Sun, the Moon and Venus. The visual magnitude of Mars on Oct. 30, 2005, will be -2.3. Even inattentive sky watchers will notice it, rising at sundown and soaring overhead at midnight.
You might remember another encounter with Mars, about two years ago, on August 27, 2003. That was the closest in recorded history, by a whisker, and millions of people watched as the distance between Mars and Earth shrunk to 56 million km. This October's encounter, at 69 million km, is similar. To casual observers, Mars will seem about as bright and beautiful in 2005 as it was in 2003.
Although closest approach is still months away, Mars is already conspicuous in the early morning. Before the sun comes up, it's the brightest object in the eastern sky, really eye-catching. If you have a telescope, even a small one, point it at Mars. You can see the bright icy South Polar Cap and strange dark markings on the planet's surface.
One day people will walk among those dark markings, exploring and prospecting, possibly mining ice from the polar caps to supply their settlements. It's a key goal of NASA's Vision for Space Exploration: to return to the Moon, to visit Mars and to go beyond.
Every day the view improves. Mars is coming--and that's no hoax.

m$ fined!

The European Commission is ready to impose a fine of 2m euros ($2.5m) a day on Microsoft.

the force...

the force… i’m losing it… my midi-chlorian count is dropping i guess….

Mac vs PC

Processors
O/S

Cat vs Bear

On June 4 a black bear wandered into a West Milford, New Jersey, back yard, was confronted by a 15-pound (7-kilogram) tabby cat and fled up a neighbor's tree. Hissing at the base of the tree, Jack the clawless cat kept the bear at bay for about 15 minutes, then ran him up another tree after an attempted escape.

Pollen Coronas

"Specks of pollen are very small, and when they float through the air they diffract sunlight, forming the softly-colored rings of light in Tough's photo. Tiny crystals of ice or droplets of water in the air can do the same thing--but unlike pollen they do not cause sternutation."
Source: SpaceWeather.com: 13 June 2006 Report

Vegetarian diet linked to genital defects

"A vegetarian diet could be responsible for genital defects in baby boys, according to BBC-funded research carried out by scientists in Bristol."
Read the BBC News Article

temperature of space

i saw this "fact of the day" thing at www.coolquiz.com and it reads:
If an object has no molecules, the concept of temperature is meaningless. That's why it's technically incorrect to speak of the "cold of outer space" space has no temperature, and is known as a "temperature sink," meaning it drains heat out of things.

well this is what i have to say:

• temperature is a property of matter - there is no dispute there


• left over from the big bang, space contains matter (like stars and planets) distributed across over billions of light years


• space has a blackbody radiation (CMBR) equivalent to a temperature of 2.7 K, that is -270 degrees C


• that is, if you leave something (say soup) in space that is hotter than -270 deg C, heat energy will be transfered in the form of radiation (according to Stefan-Boltzmann law)


• so my soup will cool down and the temperature of space will increase


• the heat capacity of space is so enormous that the rise in temperature will be very small


• but there is a theory saying that... the entire universe will reach a constant temperature and all forms of energy will be converted to entropy

here are some other articles related to temperature of space

• Eddington's Temperature of Space


• History of 2.7 K Temperature Prior to Penzias and Wilson


• AstronomyCafe.net


• cosmic microwave background radiation (CMBR)


• Is Space Hot or Cold?


• Wikipedia article on CMBR

Smug Alert!

after watching the southpark episode about hybrid cars i realized that biomass promoters also feel smug about what they do at the end of that episode kyle says something like use hybrid cars but don't be so smug about it and people of southpark goes "the technology is not there yet" :)
so yeah... i guess we have to say the same about biomass as well... we can't promote biomass and not be smug!!!

smug
|sməg|
adjective (smugger, smuggest)
having or showing an excessive pride in oneself or one's achievements : he was feeling smug after his win.

he was feeling smug after his win self-satisfied, self-congratulatory, complacent, superior, pleased with oneself, self-approving.

A.L.I.C.E

A.L.I.C.E. - Artificial Linguistic Internet Computer Entity
Wikipedia article on ALICE
alicebot
Talk to Alice

here is a small conversation i had with alice ;)

Human: i caught the flu
ALICE: I hope it is not contagious. Also I hope you get well soon.
Human: you wanna get high
ALICE: OK, I will get high.
Human: apple or pc?
ALICE: apple.
Human: do you like microsoft
ALICE: I want to replace Windows with Artificial Intelligence.
Human: do you like bill gates
ALICE: I would like to replace Microsoft.
Human: do you like steve jobs
ALICE: Yeah that guy is pretty cool.
Human: what languages do you speak
ALICE: C, Java, Lisp, SETL and English.
Human: do you watch southpark
ALICE: My favorite show is STAR TREK VOYAGER.

An Alignment of Stars and Planets

"Something remarkable is about to happen in the evening sky. Three planets and a star cluster are converging for a close encounter you won't want to miss.
The action begins at sundown on Wednesday, May 31st, when the crescent Moon glides by Saturn: sky map. You can see them side-by-side about halfway up the western sky, shining through the glow of sunset--very pretty."
more details....

Ozone layer - recovering!

• The ozone layer is that part of the atmosphere which contains relatively high concentrations of ozone (O₃)


• The ozone layer was discovered in 1913 by the French physicists Charles Fabry and Henri Buisson


• Ozone in the earth's stratosphere is created by ultraviolet light striking oxygen molecules


• The ozone layer can be depleted by free radical catalysts (such as nitric oxide (NO), hydroxyl (OH), and atomic chlorine and bromine)


• There are natural sources (such as sulfurous gases emitted by some volcanoes) for all of these compounds


• Concentrations of Cl and Br have increased in past 30 years due to organohalogen compounds (such as CFCs)


• Ozone levels, over the northern hemisphere, have been dropping by 4% per decade and over 5% over the polar regions


• In 1976, based on a report by the U.S. National Academy of Sciences which showed scientific evidence on the ozone depletion hypothesis, a few countries, including the United States, Canada, Sweden, and Norway, moved to eliminate the use of CFC's in aerosol spray cans


• In 1985 20 nations, including most of the major CFC producers, signed the Vienna Convention which established a framework for negotiating international regulations on ozone-depleting substances


• Later that year, a reduction of about 70% in the ozone layer (the ozone hole) was discovery over Antarctica


• Governments quickly enacted an international treaty, called the Montreal Protocol, to ban ozone-destroying gases such as CFCs then found in aerosol cans and air conditioners.


• In 1987, 43 nations signed the Montreal Protocol - agreeing to freeze production of CFCs at 1986 levels and to reduce production by 50% by 1999


• Sri Lanka has signed all these protocols


• The ozone hole over Antarctica has not improved


• Ozone layer around the rest of the planet has stopped depleting


• Wikipedia Article about Ozone Depletion


• Wikipedia Article about the Ozone Layer


• Wikipedia Article about the Montreal Protocol


• List of countries who signed the Montreal Protocol and subsequent protocols


• NASA Article about the Ozone layer recovering


• UNDP Sri Lanka Web Site: Montreal Protocol


• National compliance action plan for Sri Lanka

m$ introduces an alternative to jpeg

http://www.microsoft.com/whdc/xps/wmphoto.mspx

m$ claims it’ll be have better compression than jpeg

sick

been sick the last week
not good at all!
twisted my ankle - its still swollen
and i caught the flu

this weekend - ate like $h1+!!

IE7 - M$ vs Google

Few extracts from the itwire article:

Google has complained to both the US Justice Department and the European Commission (EC) over Microsoft making MSN Search the default search engine in the new version of its dominant Internet Explorer browser, IE7.

Representatives from both Microsoft and Yahoo have publicly said that Google is being hypocritical. They say Google has deals with companies like Mozilla, which makes the second most popular browser Firefox and PC maker Dell, where Google is the default search window in the browsers.

In the case of Google, it pays hard cash to Mozilla and Dell to get the right to have its search engine placed as the default in the browsers. This is fair use of marketing capital. In addition, neither the Mozilla Firefox browser, which has 11% market share, nor Dell PCs have a near monopoly of the market.

By contrast, Microsoft has a browser, Internet Explorer, with 85% market share and it also owns a search engine with 11% market share. Microsoft does not need to pay one cent to place its search engine in the lead position on its browser, which sits on the vast majority of PCs in the world. What that amounts to is using a near monopoly position to stifle competition.

Today, about 95% of computer owners are locked into using expensive proprietary software running on an expensive operating system that is so insecure it has spawned an entire industry devoted to protecting users from hackers.

I'm a Mac user. And life is so much better.

Hubble Telescope - 16th birthday

hubblesite.org's hubble telescope 16th anniversary page

Links

HubbleSite
HubbleSite is the home of NASA's Hubble Space Telescope, the renowned orbiting telescope whose discoveries have forever altered our knowledge of the ...
The Hubble Space Telescope Project
This web site describes the Hubble Space Telescope and its oerations, images, and results.
Hubble Space Telescope - Wikipedia

750 GB HDD by Seagate

Seagate Spec Sheet (PDF)

the hard disk has been reviewed… it uses a new technology - perpendicular recording... read more...

Chernobyl disaster - 20 years back

yeah major fuckup by the russians!

"On Saturday April 26, 1986, at 1:23:58 a.m. local time, unit 4 reactor, known as Chernobyl-4, suffered a catastrophic steam explosion that resulted in a fire, a series of additional explosions, and a nuclear meltdown."



The World Health Organisation (WHO) has estimated that the total radioactivity from Chernobyl was 200 times that of the combined releases from the atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

Fallout Pattern

Bush: government research developed iPod

"
During a speech at Tuskegee University, President (and iPod user) George W. Bush told his audience, “the government funded research in microdrive storage, electrochemistry and signal compression. They did so for one reason: It turned out that those were the key ingredients for the development of the iPod.”

if the us govt contracted microsoft….
- there would be a new copy-cat version of a sony or apple mp3 player every year…
- with service packs every three month…
- a pseudo fire-wall…
- a beta-version of windows media player!
- copied and relabeled open standard media types which would run only on their mp3 player
- every time you add a song to it… it’ll run a virus scan…
"
read the engadget article

Microsoft Mac Lab

Microsoft Reseach Lab at Redmond

"Do not believe,
in what you have heard,
in tradition,
because it is handed down to you from generations past,
in that which is spoken and rumoured of by many,
or simply because it is found in your religious scripture
or has been told unto you on the authority of your teachers and elders.

only when you yourselves know after watchful thought,
that these things are pure, blameless, agree with reason
and leads to benefit, and happiness of one and all,
enter on and abide in them."

Gauthama Buddha, The Kalama Sutta, Anguttara Nikaya, Vol 1, 188-193

---

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

The Kalama Sutta (Sanskrit: Kalama Sutra) is a Buddhist sutta in the Anguttara Nikaya of the Tipitaka. In this sutta, Gautama Buddha instructs the people of Kesaputta the Kalamas on which basis one should decide which religious teaching to accept as true. The Buddha tells the Kalamas to not just believe religious teachings because they are claimed to be true by various sources or through the application of various methods and techniques. Even Buddha's own teachings are not to be accepted at face value.

The Buddha provides ten specific sources which should not be used to accept a certain teaching as true, without further verification:
1. Oral history
2. Traditional practices
3. News sources
4. Scriptures or other official texts
5. Logical reasoning
6. Philosophical reasoning
7. Common sense
8. One's own opinions
9. Authorities or experts
10. One's own teacher

Instead, he says, only when one has personally verified that a certain teaching is skillful, blameless, praiseworthy, and conducive to happiness, then one should accept it as true and practise it.

However, it should be stressed that the Buddha instructed the Kalamas to pay attention to the teachings of the wise; he did not advocate that individuals can or should decide truth purely by and for themselves. Nevertheless, the emphasis remains on one's personal verification of any teaching, and in particular whether a particular teaching reduces or eliminates the mental defilements of greed, hate and ignorance, or vice versa (in which case it should be rejected).

time (to) change?

this has nothing to do with lorentz transformation or time dilation... you know the whole "time is relative" thing....

sri lanka is back to +0530 UTC time zone - which sux....

and... dont be surprised... there will be a few random power cuts in the evening...

the official government press release

another govt press release
The Director General of Meteorology gets a say in this... his dept has all the meters and gauges so he gets a say in this
(Meteorology is the scientific study of the atmosphere that focuses on weather processes and forecasting)

the rationale behind the time shift in 1996 was to save power... 'cos it saves a considerable amount off the peak electrical power demand....

have a look at this CEB report done on a commercial building in colombo... according to that... lighting amounts to 15% of the peak electrical demand

work ends around 5pm... and according to the old +0600 UTC time zone - solar time would be around 1630... sunset would be around 1800... there is 90 min of valuable sunlight available...

with the +0530 UTC time zone - there will be just 60 min of sunlight from from 5pm till sunset! which means that there would be an additional 30 min of increased lighting... which amounts to a massive amount of electrical energy utilized for lighting during that 30 min... hmmm... and sri lanka has like a power crisis... 15% rate of electrification with a maximum demand close to 2 GW... so we need to add like 300MW to the grid every year... well at least 150MW without exaggeration!!!

read this bbc article
" Some of the country's Buddhist clergy are rejoicing at the prospect of a change because they say Sri Lanka's "old" time fitted better with their rituals."

wow... rituals... i'm sure that generates light...

arthur clarke's scifi perspective! pffft!

Y! mail.... pfft!

i've stopped using yahoo mail (Y! mail)... why... 'cos to read a few lines of email message content... i am presented with a whole bunch of irrelevant advertisements... the ads should be relevant - like in gmail... why would i be interested in some "save the jordan" thing

PFFT!!!!

but thats besides the point... Y! mail servers have delivery issues.... read this article...
Why Yahoo Can't Deliver Email

BBC Reports: Search users 'stop at page three'

" Most people using a search engine expect to find what they are looking for on the first page of results, says a US study. "

read more

well i go up to about 8 sometimes.... yeah thats like 80 listings!

Reunion - UoM Batch of 1997

UoM Batch of 1997 - 2006 Reunion

solar eclipse

Vernal Equinox

Today is Vernal Equinox



You know how we say that Earth is 23.5 degrees tilted. Well that is with reference to the Sun. The Earth's orbit plane about the Sun (called the Ecliptic ) is tilted by about 23.5 degrees.

The Earth's tilt angle with respect to the Sun (Declination Angle) changes depending on the day of the year.
Here is the equation to calculate the declination angle:
23.45 * sin((DayNumber+284) * 360/365)

Today's Day Number is 31 (January) + 28 (February) + 22 (March) = 81
Declination Angle is zero!

So today, at Noon, Solar Time which ever part of the world you are at, the Sun will be directly above you!

Earth Day also happens to fall on Vernal Equinox!

Here are some useful links:

• Here is a small program I wrote to calculate the position of the Sun for Sri Lanka


• Sun Path Chart for Sri Lanka


• Solar Concepts


• Nasa: The Path of the Sun