Ever wanted to know how the earth looks from space? Well think no further. Sandra Magnus gives us this wonderful view of the earth passing through a night from the International space station. She observes thunderstorms, night lights and satellites. Her narrative is very interesting giving you a feeling that you are right there aboard the ISS. Read for yourself!

http://spacebook.mst.edu/2009/03/waiting_for_night_to_come_in_a.html

Iphone os 3.0 preview on march 17th

As many guys think this is not the launch of the firmware, just a preview.
The internet is abuzz with all sorts of requests.
Some of the most common ones are:

1. Copy and paste. Apple calls the iphone the most advanced phone but is still cannot do some basic tasks like copy & paste. If they don't release it this version, many people will be genuinely pissed off.
2. Video camera. Again this is another basic function. My 5 year old 6670 with a 1.3 mpx cam could do it without breaking a sweat. Well i guess "Most Advanced" has a different definition in cupertino! Even if they don't release it i wouldn't care because with 2 mpx the video is gonna be crappy.
3. MMS. Same story again. very basic stuff.
4. Bluetooth tethering. This i believe will be a definite component. I want to see AT&T's response. Will the jack the data plan even more? I can do this with my 15$ media net using my n95 8gb whereas iphone customers pay 30$ and still cant do it!
5. Bluetooth stereo. This has been with smarthphones since last 2 years. I guess it wont be in the next firmware also
6. Multi-tasking. This is by far the most important of them all. I am sure apple will not release this yet. If they do release it, i would like to see the performance of the apps after multiple apps are open. In fact this is one of the most important functions of a smart phone. What is the point of having thousands of apps if you cant use them simultaneously?

Well these are only some of the requested features. But i want to point out that all these are already in all of nokia's N series phones.

Should be interesting. Lets watch and see!

Happy Birthday World Wide Web!

Wow what a day to start my blog!

Today is the 20th birthday of the internet founded by Tim Berners-lee a scientist at CERN. Interestingly the world wide web was first used by Tim and the other employees in CERN to be updated with the research going on in different countries.


Anyway going back memory lane, my first tryst with the internet was somewhere in 1998 when i was in junior college. At that time two things were very popular: Internet cafe and Billiards. We use to spend many a weeks chatting and playing billiards. I still remember rediff and yahoo messenger which i don't use anymore after the advent of Google. The internet has been a major part of my life since then.


A special thanks to Tim for this wonderful thing called world wide web!

20 Things you didnt know about TIME

Every month in discover magazine there is a column "20 things you dont know about..."
This time around it is time. I really love the things in there. In fact that is one of the first things i read in the magazine. So here it goes,

1 “Time is an illusion. Lunchtime doubly so,” joked Douglas Adams in The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. Scientists aren’t laughing, though. Some speculative new physics theories suggest that time emerges from a more fundamental—and timeless—reality.

Did any one watch that movie? It is absolute crap. One day i was just browsing through my channels and decided to watch this movie. If you haven't seen this u are lucky. It is somewhat similar to the fifth element, only a little more crappier

2 Try explaining that when you get to work late. The average U.S. city commuter loses 38 hours a year to traffic delays.

Yeah those traffic signals are really frustrating. How many times i have stopped the urge to run over a red light! And many more times i wanted to be in my village without no signals of any sort. Oh sorry i forgot the buffaloes!

3 Wonder why you have to set your clock ahead in March? Daylight Saving Time began as a joke by Benjamin Franklin, who proposed waking people earlier on bright summer mornings so they might work more during the day and thus save candles. It was introduced in the U.K. in 1917 and then spread around the world.

I personally think that DST is a brilliant idea. Although it sounds valid, recent research shows that there is nothing gained in energy consumption even after following DST!

4 Green days. The Department of Energy estimates that electricity demand drops by 0.5 percent during Daylight Saving Time, saving the equivalent of nearly 3 million barrels of oil.

This was proved to be wrong by recent studies. Guess it has something to do with my sleep cycle. I still wake up 1 hour later irrespective of the DST

5 By observing how quickly bank tellers made change, pedestrians walked, and postal clerks spoke, psychologists determined that the three fastest-paced U.S. cities are Boston, Buffalo, and New York.

6 The three slowest? Shreveport, Sacramento, and L.A.

7 One second used to be defined as 1/86,400 the length of a day. However, Earth’s rotation isn’t perfectly reliable. Tidal friction from the sun and moon slows our planet and increases the length of a day by 3 milli­seconds per century.

8 This means that in the time of the dinosaurs, the day was just 23 hours long.

I wonder how many hours each day an average dino slept?

9 Weather also changes the day. During El Niño events, strong winds can slow Earth’s rotation by a fraction of a milli­second every 24 hours.

10 Modern technology can do better. In 1972 a network of atomic clocks in more than 50 countries was made the final authority on time, so accurate that it takes 31.7 million years to lose about one second.

11 To keep this time in sync with Earth’s slowing rotation, a “leap second” must be added every few years, most recently this past New Year’s Eve.

Yeah i remember reading that this new year's Eve!

12 The world’s most accurate clock, at the National Institute of Standards and Technology in Colorado, measures vibrations of a single atom of mercury. In a billion years it will not lose one second.

13 Until the 1800s, every village lived in its own little time zone, with clocks synchronized to the local solar noon.

14 This caused havoc with the advent of trains and timetables. For a while watches were made that could tell both local time and “railway time.”

15 On November 18, 1883, American railway companies forced the national adoption of standardized time zones.

16 Thinking about how railway time required clocks in different places to be synchronized may have inspired Einstein to develop his theory of relativity, which unifies space and time.

17 Einstein showed that gravity makes time run more slowly. Thus airplane passengers, flying where Earth’s pull is weaker, age a few extra nano­seconds each flight.

18 According to quantum theory, the shortest moment of time that can exist is known as Planck time, or 0.0000000000000000000000000000000000000000001 second.

19 Time has not been around forever. Most scientists believe it was created along with the rest of the universe in the Big Bang, 13.7 billion years ago.

I wonder what was there before time and space?Anyone have an explanation feel free to leave it in the comments section. I would love to know!

20 There may be an end of time. Three Spanish scientists posit that the observed acceleration of the expanding cosmos is an illusion caused by the slowing of time. According to their math, time may eventually stop, at which point everything will come to a standstill.

I hope not in the next 3-4 months. I need to give my exam and i would be gutted to know if that happens just before my exam :)

My first post.

Well, last night i was in bed thinking about my evergreen dream to publish a blog and decided that i will do it first thing next morning. Fortunately this has started to be a reality unlike many other things i decided while going off to sleep. A good example of other things i would have thought of but never yet managed to follow is "Study". Of course that i guess is common with everyone.
Anyway, i intend to blog about three of my major passions: science, technology and sports.
I will try to keep my blog as updated as possible, but with my exams and other stuff i may not have the time to update as much as i would like.

So lets get started.........