TriNetre - Archive for October 10, 2003
(no longer updated)
Of all the places you know, why is that you choose the front of an escalator with at least 10 people behind you, to decide where to have your lunch? Why don't you hop on to the escalator, rid it up/down and on the way make your decision. If you can't make up your mind by the time the ride finishes, you always have the choice of riding the opposite direction.
Or why do you have to decide whether to go out or stay in, front of the narrow door, that happens to be the only exit from a crowded place.
Be warned, somebody might just poke you in the rear. Don't say I did not warn you!I guess it will come out as news to anyone but those living around Eloor - it is one of the most toxic place on earth, according to Greenpeace. Having lived there for over 10 years, I would be surprised if the findings were anything but this. Given the kind of industries in that belt, it is all but natural - The Fertilisers and Chemicals Travancore Limited (FACT), Travancore Cochin Chemicals (TCC), Hindustan Insecticides Limited (HIL), Indian Rare Earth (IRE).
Although I had written earlier about the rumors of SARS immune Indian in jest, the incident mentioned in it is an almost daily occurrence.
What is perplexing is that the article states:
This is so not true. More than a year ago, The Hindu had reported the protest organised by residents of Eloor at the meeting of Indian People's Tribunal on Environment and Human Rights. I wonder what happened to all those tribunal findings?
- Linus Torvalds in a interview with The New York Times
Presenting PFIR's The Versign Song:
We wondered why the Inter-net was failing,
It seemed that everything had gone insane!
Both Dot-COM and Dot-NET were derailing,
Then we realized where laid the true blame.
... Two three four, tell the people what's in store!
(boomp)
It was an itsy bitsy teenie weenie change to DNS machinery,
That's what dear VeriSign seemed willing to say.
An itsy bitsy teenie weenie change to DNS machinery,
Then they implied we should just go away.
For the full song, please head to the PFIR page.
One of the most frequently searched string on my blog is "third eye". Up till now, you would have ended up with only two hits. So, this post is to answer the questions that people searching for "third eye" might have had.
Why the name TriNetre - The Third Eye?: Doesn't "The Third Eye" have a cool ring to it? Combine that with the Hindu word "TriNetre" you get a sure-to-be-noticed page. The name is inspired by the Hindu mythology. It, as the inscription on top says, is the frontal eye of Lord Shiva, the destroyer. It is the eye of fire, the eye of higher perception. It usually looks inwards, but whenever directed outwards, it burns all that appears before it.
You mean it has nothing to do with the band Third Eye Blind?: Nope, it does not.
Tell me more about Lord Shiva's Third Eye: Now we are talking. According to legends, one day his beautiful consort Parvati, daughter of the King of Mountains, stealthily went behind Shiva and playfully placed her hands over his eyes. Suddenly darkness engulfed the whole world and all beings trembled in great fear as the Lord of the universe had closed his eyes. Chaos reigned supreme. Suddenly a massive tongue of flame shot from the forehead of Shiva; a third eye had appeared there and this gave back light to the world. However, the fierce light from his third eye is so powerful and destructive that henceforth Lord Shiva only opens it to destroy all that is unconscious, dark, and dualistic in this universe. Shiva's third eye opens to end all illusion.
Now isn't that just a great name to give to a blog?!Some new observations are throwing light on a theory that our universe might infact be finite after all.
At the centre of the debate are observations by NASA's Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe (WMAP), which was launched in 2001. The probe measures temperature ripples in the "cosmic microwave background", the afterglow radiation from the big bang fireball.
...Many astronomers suspect that the Universe is infinite. In that case, the microwave background ripples should have an unlimited range of sizes. But while WMAP's observations of small-scale ripples have matched predictions for an infinite Universe almost perfectly, the large-scale measurements have not. On the largest scales, WMAP has shown that the ripples almost disappear
What is more weird is that even though the universe might be finite, don't expect to walk over the ede of the space fabric either.
Despite being finite, the Universe would not have any kind of edge. If a spacecraft blasted off in what we'd perceive to be a straight line - the line a beam of light would follow - it would eventually end up back where it started.
Because of this odd wraparound effect, the light from one galaxy could follow two different routes to the Earth, so the same galaxy would appear in two different parts of the sky. Effectively, the Universe would be like a hall of mirrors, with the wraparound effect producing multiple images of everything inside.
