An awesome idea for Earth Day !!

Malvika got a gift from her company as part of Earth Day. It is a shopping bag that easily packs into a small size and can be fitted to your key chain, your belt or back pack. This solves a major problem I have been having with avoiding plastic bags i.e. remembering to take my own shopping bag. Great example of what you can achieve when you apply your mind to a certain problem.
You can check out the bags at http://www.chicobags.com

I for one have attached the bag to my car keys. A couple of weeks from now, I should know how useful this concept really is.

Bandipur Jungle song - now with a video

A while back I had posted our original song inspired from the trip to Bandipur National Forest.
Now I have a video to go along with it. All the video clips are from the trip we made to Bandipur. Most of the stills at the end are from awesome paintings in the rooms at Jungle Lodges and Resorts.

I made the video with Cinerella. I used the version that came with a dynebolic distribution of linux. It has a huge learning curve, but once you get the hang of it, it is quite powerful. This is my first attempt at doing a full video with Cinerella. In hindsight, I do wish I had a tripod or a much more steady hand with the camcorder.

What will you be doing on September 9th, 2040 at 7:00 PM?

I will have just enjoyed a beautiful sunset with Malvika and will be looking up at the Western sky with a telescope, admiring a relatively rare celestial show. At around this time, I will be able to see a lovely crescent moon and 5 planets in close proximity in the sky (Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter and Saturn).

Click on the picture to see a larger resolution version and to be able to read the labels.




I learnt about the solar system in school like everyone else, but I never "really" got a feel for it. I never connected that knowledge to what I would see when I would look up at the night sky. I vaguely remember visitng a planetarium (Nehru Planetarium in Mumbai), but do not remember any astronomical insights I gained from the visit. My wife, Malvika, is an astronomy enthusiast. She volunteers during the summer programs at the Lick Observatory. Thanks to her, I have seen Jupiter and other sky objects through a couple of large telescopes. (a 36-inch refractor and a 40-inch reflector) That experience definitely awed me, but more for the awesomeness of the telescopes than that of the sky.
Until recently, I have never been able to look up at the sky and "feel" my place in the solar system and the galaxy.

What finally gave me that feel is this interactive sky chart at Sky and Telescope. The chart allows you to see the sky as it looks from any place on earth at any given time. That alone would not have done much for me. What was cool is that I figured out a way to quickly change the time and see a kind of a time-lapse. See notes at the end of the article about how to do this. The most meaningful time-lapse I was able to see was the state of the sky at the same time every night. i.e. Imagine making a movie with each frame being the state of the sky at the same time every night and then extending this over multiple years. The resulting movie gave me more insight into the sky and the planets than anything I have encountered so far. Here is a youtube upload of the screen capture. It does not do justice in terms of resolution or frame rate, so you should definitely try this out for yourself.



Insights I gained:

• If you look at the sky each day at the same time, the view shifts ever so slowly. This is a direct result of the earth moving around the sun and thus pointing to a slightly different direction in relation to the sun every day. It completes this cycle once every year. Hence, based on which constellation you are seeing at a particular point in the sky at a particular time, you could tell with precision which day of the year it is.
• I had always heard that the planets move through the constellations. Think about it and it is obvious that as the planets move around the sun, they will appear to move in the cosmic backdrop of stars. However, I never had a feel for exactly how that "looked" in the sky. You see Jupiter and Saturn move more slowly against this backdrop than Mars, Venus and Mercury. (hinting at their relative distances and orbit times).
• You could deduce that Mercury and Venus were in an inner orbit because of the fact that they never cross the sky from east to west in this time lapse like Mars, Jupiter and Saturn do.
• Jupiter and Saturn seem to come really close to each other from earth's perspective every 20 years. The next time this will happen for us is in 2020. Being able to see all 5 planets at the same time in relative close proximity in the sky is pretty rare and the moment in 2040 that is the title of this post is very rare indeed.

and finally...

• The plane of the planetary orbits is not the same plane as the galaxy. You can see this in the movie by seeing the planets cut across the milky way. Had these planes been more aligned, we would have seen the planets move "through" the milky way. For some reason, my internal mental image had always aligned these planes.

This chart turned out to be an awesome tool to let me really "feel" my position in the solar system and the galaxy. I wish this was available to me when I was first learning about the solar system.

How to create this timelapse using the interactive chart:
There are small controls on the left side which allow you to change any component of the time (i.e. year, month, date, hours, minutes, seconds, etc.). There is a "+" and a "-" button which increments any of those selected components. If you press the "+" button and just move your mouse around, the value keeps incrementing.

The "Saahas" to eliminate plastic bag use

Note: This post is targeted at people living in residential complexes in Bangalore. Most of it might apply to you regardless of which city or country you live in.

We had Ms Hema Ramana from Saahas visit our apartment complex today to talk about our waste management.
A few people attended the session. I have uploaded an edited version of the session that I videotaped. Its about 10 minutes and captures the main points that were communicated.



Saahas works in the solid waste management space. While there are a lot of things that can be done, for now Saahas is asking us to actively participate in their Less Plastic for me initiative.
We are being asked to eliminate our use of plastic bags. If you wonder why plastic bags are bad, a quick look at this website will tell you why.
I did take a look today and it is a very short website (wont take more than 10 minutes, but communicates the problem very clearly). There is also an accompanying blog if you want more information and news about this issue.

What can we all do immediately:

1. Start carrying our own bags to grocery stores and other shops. Refuse plastic bags at shops wherever possible. Hema has left a few bags with Gowda (our apartment manager). Small ones for Rs. 30 each and large ones for Rs. 150 each.
2. Stop giving our garbage in plastic bags. Use two dustbins. Empty one and immediately wash it and dry it. Use the other one for the day while the first one dries up.

These arent easy things and will require a change in our habits. This evening I was out and while returning I decided to stop and get some groceries. Then I realized, I didnt have any of my own bags and would be forced to accept plastic bags at the store.
I could have driven back home, carried my own shopping bag and gone back to the store. But I was short on time and ended up making the compromise. I felt guilty and the least I could do was combine all my shopping in a single plastic bag.
What I am going to do now is just keep a couple of cloth bags in the trunk of my car, so I'll always have them handy if I do happen to just stop by at the store. I am sure you all can do the same.

The second item of not using plastic bags to dispose off garbage is even tougher and I am not even sure I want to do it from a hygiene perspective. What do you think? There have to be better alternatives than washing and drying dustbins daily. Hema was talking about some company selling bio-degradable garbage bags, but I do not have information about availability or cost.

What we can do in the medium term in other areas of solid waste management:

1. If everyone in the apartment complex agrees, then we can segregate waste right at home. We will just be asked to separate dry and wet waste. Saahas will train our housekeeping staff in the building to collect it separate and keep it separate. They will then further train our housekeeping staff to segregate dry waste further.
   Saahas will help us collect dry and wet waste separately and ensure it is properly handled and not mixed up after it is picked up from our apartment. This will need some space in our apartment complex to do the secondary segregation.
2. If we do have plastic bags and we will inevitably have some even if we reduce our usage, someone in the apartment will need to collect them and drop all the plastic bags in the facility that Saahas has in Jayanagar. (This will need one of us to volunteer)

What we can do in the long term and potentially earn revenue through our waste:

1. A compost facility or waste processing machine located within our apartment complex or feed our wet waste into other compost facilities in HSR. (whenever they are setup).
   

Vote for the term "cloudworker"

Venkatesh Rao, a blogger at ribbonfarm.com who I read regularly, coined the term "cloudworker" and entered it in a contest, run by Plantronics, to update the obsolete term "telecommuter." The term is one of the 10 finalists out of over 500, and I really think it deserves to win, since it captures how remote workers today use cloud-based technology to work anywhere/anytime.

The winner will be selected by popular vote, so please go towww.plantronics.com/telewho and vote for "cloudworker". You can vote once a day between Oct 30 and Nov 7, so it'd be great if you could bookmark the link and remember to vote multiple times.

You might like Venkat's ongoing series of posts on cloudworkers:

http://www.ribbonfarm.com/2008/10/23/the-cloudworkers-creed/

Please forward this to any of your friends who are interested in 'future of work' stuff.

Ode to Bandipur Jungle

We recorded a song inspired by the sights and sounds of Bandipur Jungle


Ode to Bandipur Jungle
- By Lakshmi Javadekar and Jayesh Kapoor

Bandipur Jungle
Where the peacocks have fun
And the spotted deer run
If you wanna see
The land in harmony
This is where you come

Sambar,
Cheetal, Langoor, Bison
Drinking to their freedom
Little do they see
The tiger by the tree
Thinking Aaah !! There's lunch!

Roaaaaaaar !!

(Western style music depicting scene of desolation after the tiger has had its meal !!)

San Bruno Mountain Wildfire from up close

This evening we drove out to get some groceries from Trader Joe's and then just decided to drive around a little bit. I wanted to see the Bay side of South San Francisco and we just drove up on Oyster Point Blvd. till we reached the Genentech campus and related areas. While driving up, we noticed a small cloud of what looked like fog, but that is not too uncommon on the San Bruno Mountain. It just appeared a little pinkish and we thought that was just some kind of sunset effect.



Just 15 minutes later and it became clear that this was indeed some kind of fire. It was clearly originating from the mountain, although it seemed to come from the Brisbane side of it.



A little while later the smoke had started drifting over the Bay and it looked like it was almost reaching San Mateo Bridge. We decided to get back home soon in case the air quality got bad. While driving up on Sister Cities Blvd, we were able to actually see the flames from relatively up close.





We were able to see helicopters trying to douse the hills with water scooped up from the Bay. It really hits you how fast these fires can spread. It looked like the Brisbane side of the Mountain would have been hit worse, but as you can see from the photos, the fire had started advancing downhill on the South San Francisco side.

Last we saw in the news, they were lighting up control burns from the downside of the hill to try and starve the fires advancing from above.

Fog in Bangalore these days

This is unusual. I do not remember having seen fog this heavy in Bangalore in the past few years. I could barely see the road from my balcony

Malvika's blog

Malvika decided to enter the blogosphere.
All !! Raise your glasses and lets toast to this new kid on the blogshire block !!

Time lapse video of San Francisco evening

Taken through one full hour with photographs taken every 30 seconds, this was from the hill next to Randall museum in San Francisco.

Pramod's Chairman's Award Treat

Pramod, my close friend and colleague, recently received the Chairman's Award at MindTree. The songs and masti were during a treat given by him at Tiger Trail.

Indigo Acoustic - Acoustic college band competition

http://www.radioindigo.fm/indigo_events/Acousticcampus.htm

Will check this out today. This will be a respite from the general college rock scene (which is mostly just death metal) that I have seen around.

My own sketch (from a photograph on Nandi hills)

The faces are difficult to do even if you are tracing on a real photograph!

Malvika's sketch (from a photograph)

The sketch was done using GIMP and is a trace on a real photograph :)

Dinner, Stories and Games with Prashant Mehra

December 16th, 2005
We had a very nice get-together of Elance junta with Prashant at my residence. We had lots of gyaan from Prashant, some cool DumCs and over-ordering of food. Also memorable were Pramod's introductions :)
Seen in the photo standing from left to right:
Smita, Priya, Shubha, Manjiri, Murali, Pramod, Pallavi, Rajiv, Goudhaman (half standing)
Seen in the photo at the next level starting from left:
Saurabh Gupta, JP, Prashant, Shivarudrupa
Sitting at the lowest level starting from left:
Myself focused on Saurabh's cake :D, Vamsi (between Prashant and Shiva), Payal and Prashant K

My first painting using ArtRage

Created using ArtRage, a wonderful painting program that is built for painting. The most fun is using oil paints, but it also has crayons, sketch pencils, felt pens, etc. For beginners, there is a feature where you can trace over any image and it automatically chooses the brush color based on where you start your stroke. Perfect for people like me, who like coloring, but cant really get the right proportions and ratios in their images :)

Swaminomics (Evolution or Dilution)

Scary article on politics and religion in the Swaminomics section of The Times Of India -

 

"People define themselves in terms of group identities, including religion. People think of themselves in terms of religion, ethnicity, region, caste, class, and other such group characteristics. Politicians cannot ignore this. So secularists find they have to appeal to identity politics of some sort, and communal parties find they have to appeal to secularism of some sort."

 

This is scary, but you cannot argue against it. It is just idealistic to say that religion and politics cannot mix. The sad fact is that as long as people identify themselves as part of a group, politicians will use that group identity as a political lever. The only way to separate religion and politics is when people no longer care about their religious identities. Sure....like that is ever going to happen!!

My sister is visiting.

My sister, Bhavna Narula, is visiting me these days. I am having a gala time with her.

Self-Replicating Robots!!

LinuxInsider carried an article about self-replicating robots. Haven't these guys seen The Matrix? Just kidding!

 

The article says that this self-replication is pretty simplistic compared to biological self-replication. In my opinion, it may be simplistic in terms of scale, but conceptually it carries a lot of the properties of biological self-replication.

• "These robots are made up of a series of modular cubes called " molecules," each containing identical machinery and the complete computer program for replication. " That is analogous to each of our cells carrying our entire genetic code.
• "The new robots in Lipson's lab are very dependent on their environment. They draw power through contacts on the surface of the table" We too are very dependent on our environment. We need a very specific environment to draw our power. We need the right temperature. We need the energy of the sun that gets converted through complex mechanisms to glucose burning in our cells. One could imagine if these individual cells could take solar energy and go smaller in size (if laptops and cell phones and mp3 players can, so can these cubes), we wouldn't be too far from replicating simple biological structures.
• "They cannot replicate unless the experimenters "feed" them by supplying additional modules." Even we need a very protected environment when we replicate (or are in the early phases of replication).

In short, if these "molecules" get smaller, can derive their energy from their environment (solar?, heat?), and if one mega structure has the master-print for each of these molecules and can manufacture it from say (sand), a Matrix-like scenario isn't too far off. Half a century, what say!!

Article on Fundamentalism in The Times of India

The Times Of India carried an interview of Salman Akhtar on Fundamentalism. His views on religion resonated a lot with my own views. It was interesting to read about the six problems to cope with for being sane. Here is my take on each of these problems.

1. Factual Uncertainty: Accepting that we cannot know what will happen in the future.
   I guess I follow a different religion here ;) called determinism. I somehow believe that given the current state of the universe, it is possible to know the future. I know about Heisenberg's uncertainty principle. I also know that the human will may not be bound to the universal calculator. As a good friend of mine, Gaurav Bhajpai, tells me "Mother Nature does not owe it to us to be explicable". However, in my most inner gut I still hold this belief that we can calculate the future. We just dont know how to today. Since this is blind faith, I call it my religion :)
2. Conceptual Complexity: All feelings, thoughts and acts are determined by many factors
   If it were really very simple, wouldnt life be boring? I, for one, am thankful for having this problem.
3. Moral Ambiguity: Morality changes with time and context
   If only more people accepted this, we wouldnt have so much conflict. Morality has a purpose. That purpose is to make sure that we humans lead a secure, blissful existence. Any moral law is valid as long as it fulfills this purpose. When external context changes such that a moral law no longer serves this purpose, it is obsolete and needs to be discarded.
4. Cultural Impurity: Reality is always hybrid and there is no such thing as purity
   Purity may not exist in reality, but I do believe it is a conceptual state that one can strive towards. Purity in music, purity of emotion, pure unadulterated water, etc. etc. Nature maximizes entropy. Human efforts for organization go against this natural law. Purity in anything requires the utmost of human efforts against this natural law.
5. Accepting personal responsibility for one's actions
   No excuses. This is a tough one. It is very easy to give excuses or cite circumstances. Even tougher to accept all of one's natural instincts as natural.
6. Total Mortality: You are born as parental fantasies and die as your grand-children's memories.
   Not if you have a blog and google stays around for some time :) There is always a desire to leave behind something timeless. I hope this blog is fulfilling some of that atleast. But yaa.....I dont buy reincarnation or after-life.

I guess I am not a fundamentalist because I dont have too much of a problem with the problems of being sane. Good for me!!

 

But I do believe that religion has brought about a lot of "moral" behaviour in this world and I cant think of a better alternative to enforce "morality" across the masses.