What is the similarity between Mahatma
Gandhi, Rabindranath Tagore and Steve Jobs ,three men who brought
great changes in their respective fields.
Mahatma Gandhi
was a barrister he could have lived a life of comfort made millions
but he choose to follow his heart and give up everything and work for
the sake of Indians in South Africa and then against the oppressive
foreign rule in India and thereby playing a vital role in achieving
India's independence his thoughts and his work had tremendous impact
across the people of the world , Albert Einstein on Gandhi's death
said “The future generations would find it hard to believe that
such a man existed in flesh and bones”.The journey of Mahatma
Gandhi from an ordinary barrister to one of the greatest man in the
history of the world comes from the fact that he was deeply spiritual
and that he dedicated his life to selfless service of the people of
the country without worrying about personal wealth which most people
would think is a foolish thing to do.
Rabindranath Tagore
also known a kaviguru which means the teacher of all the poets had a
total dislike for formal school education and that he was a nature
lover and loved being close to nature. He followed his heart into
becoming the greatest poet,music composer, short story writer of Bengali language, his works are so powerful and
profound that the songs composed by him are still extremely popular
among Bengalis , he received his Nobel Prize for his work geetanjali
infact the english translation of geetanjali one can just understand
this fact that the difference between his translated and original
work is like the difference between kissing a girls photo and kissing
the girl herself. Now he is another person who chose to follow his
heart and do what he loved to rather than go the beaten path.
Steve Jobs dropped out of his
collage as he did not see any value in the course that he was pursuing.With his friend Steve Wozniack started APPLE COMPUTERS the
worlds first microcomputer company together they came out with Apple
1 and Apple 2 computers and later on after a visit to Xerox he saw
the first rough example of a GUI taking a cue from that he designed
the first GUI of the Macintosh Computer now the GUI made it much
more possible for the lay user to use the computer. The GUI made
computing accessible to ordinary people who did not find it
comfortable to type commands and get things done by the computer and
not only that the GUI added a new dimension to computing that is
elegance everyone wanted to work on a screen with a beautiful
Graphical User Interface , also it so happened that Jobs himself was
fired from the company he started. After that he started two new companies one
was Nexxt and the other one was Pixar, NexT developed the computer
which was used by Tim Berners Lee as the first World Wide Web server
at CERN. Pixar ended up being the most succesful animation company in
the world. When the Operating System of Apple was getting outdated it
acquired NexT and Steve Jobs came back to APPLE as the CEO, Steve
Jobs put the company back in profit with the iMac computer. It was
then followed by iPod ( a digital music player), iPhone and iPad thus Apple become one of the most successful technology products company in the world that changed and improved the way people used technology in their day to day lives.
The one thing common among
all three of them is that they are the ones who did not follow the
beaten track but followed their own heart and intuition all of them
were free thinkers and innovated in their own way , they showed us
that there is something called innervoice that one needs to listen to
. There is something more in conciousness than just mere logical
thinking.
Ever since Raspberry Pi was made the board computers have become a rage with many such board computers coming into the market the latest being Parallela the $99 supercomputer that promises to change the way computing is done the single board computers are much cheaper powerful and will get more powerful in course of time as the processing power increases The cheapest of them being Raspberry PI priced only at $35 and $25 is an open source hardware that runs on Linux operating system the aim of designing the Raspberry Pi was to teach programming to kids however enthusiasts are coming out with new uses of the pi its as powerful as a full fledged computer 10 years ago and does all the things of a that a full fledged computer does for an ordinary user. Thus this little computer can be an excellent computer for kids across the world especially in developing nations its an opensource hardware so can be copied and improved on . The two RPis consume 3.5 and 2.5 watts of electricity.
Raspberry PI
A Korean company HardKernal has come out with this little board computer Odroid U3 . It is quite powerful and runs on a quadcore 1.7 Ghz Exynos processor and has 2 Gb of RAM the great plus point is it cost $59 and consumes very little electricity. Its quite powerful and small.
Odroid U3
The real power of computing when it comes to SOCs is brought by the Parallella board
Parallella has two Zynq-7000 series Dual core ARM A-9 CPU along with 16 or a 64 core Epiphany Multicore Accelarator with 1Gb of RAM the most amazing thing about the small single board computer is that the 66 core version can actually deliver a processing power of 90GigaFLOPS consuming around 5 Watts of power . Now that's the performance of a very powerful computer that would cost someone thousands of dollars. So the above three are the examples of things that are going to come in the world of technology computers will be cheaper much faster and more affordable to everyone . This being Free Hardware would help engineers study, copy , modify and build better single board computers anywhere in the world. Also in all three computers the processors that are used are ARM RISC processors which consume far lesser electricity and are much cheaper than x86 processors made by Intel or AMD. These computers being cheaper will make computing a reality in many parts of world like South Asia,Africa and parts of South America.
Tidal energy using underwater kites to harness the energy of the ocean tides can be great solution to world energy problems when the issues of cost and effect of salty water on underground kites are effectively addressed. The video link below shows an example of how tidal energy works. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1qCDRj8TE9Y
Water being far more denser than air the tides in sea and ocean would produce lot more energy per square meter as compared to wind . Also the scope of the utilization of this energy source can be huge as most of the earth is all ocean ,however this energy would be generated only upto a few hundread kilometer distance from land and going too far away from the land would add to costs. Looking at this it makes us think why in hell we are burning coal, natural gases etc when there is immense energy available from the sun, wind,hydel and tidal energy why didn't we tap these sources of energy first.
Here in this video you will find another example of how tidal power can be used for producing energy and mind you 100% clean energy.
The unique feature of tidal energy is that it is the only source of energy that does not depend on the solar radiation for producing electricity. The tides in the ocean are produced by the gravitational effects of the sun and moon. This energy is enough to produce billions of watts of energy across the world.
India would be highly benifitted by this source of energy since it has a very long costline and when we do have an honest and transparent govenrment in place we can focus on R&D in this field and be totally free from using fossil fuels for energy needs, This would also save us from the pollution that may be produced when we use natural gas or coal for fuel.
We say we are intelligent living beings the highest living organisms in the world and indeed that is true. From 0 knowledge a few thousand years ago man has come up today and the knowledge of humankind is virtually infinite as compared to other animals we send rockets to space ,send probes that go to study various planets,the sun and comets of our solar system. We keep an eye of what's happening in the universe with powerful telescopes and study the objects that existed thousands of years ago since the light from these objects has taken thousands of years to reach us here on earth. We know how our bodies are formed how we were concieved our bodies developed in the womb of our mothers. From making one or two claculations per minute we built computers to do billions and trillions of calculations per second.
And inspite of such high advances we are still fighting with each other there are wars and we use our highly intelligent brains to manufacture weapons that can efficiently kill millions at one go ,we make machines that does the work of thousands of men so inspite of us saying that there is development there is hunger poverty economic inequality hatred and violence in the world. The two world wars saw the best minds in the world building weapons to kill lots of people at one go the reasult deaths of millions total destruction of many nations.
Knowledge and technology when it leads to economic inequality is useless technology should be such that it erases the economic boundaries , it should make poverty history and more importantly brings peace ,happiness and wisdom in the world.
Although 3D printing has been around for quite a long time it is now becoming a buzzword the social networking sites and Internet are abuzz of stuff being 3D printed. Here is an example of what 3D printing can lead to.
The video above shows a 3D printed prefabricated house ,we can print mementos,sculptures ,plates ,dishes using a 3D printer.
There are 3D printers that are being developed that are printing metal objects so we will have some or many of our kitchen utensils made out of 3d printers.
The real exiting stuff about 3d printing is that scientists are now planning to make human tissue cells out of 3d printers and NASA is now embarking on a project to 3D print food for astronauts in space and make the technology cost effective enough to 3D print food for people where there is scarcity of food. If successful this will change the way we live imagine having a 3D printer where as raw materials you put in the basic ingredients put the choice of your dish and the flavour ,calorie content and nutritional value and the 3D printer will print the dish as per order .
The advantages of 3D printing will be many fold first of all people would be able to print out whatever they want at their homes rather that go shopping for that product. In time 3D printers will get cheaper and will be affordable to more and more people.
One can visit Youtube and see videos of various kinds of 3D printing done there are people who want to 3d print homes also shoes are being 3d printed.
3D printing is process in which a computer model of a desired object is printed layer by layer in many cases the raw materials is plastic or fine steel powder.
This is one technology about which we will hear and see more and more as time rolls on and it is very much possible that it may have a considerable impact in the way we live and do things.
Do check the video below.
There are events in nature that are very fast
,there are events that are very slow while there are others that can
be perceived as neither too fast or too slow what we call in common
terms normal pace.
While we have 5
senses to perceive things and events around us viz. touch,
see,hear,taste and smell there is also one more sense known as the
sixth sense that let us know things that may happen it is used highly
but in scientific terms very little is known about it. However this
post will focus on visual perception.
For our eye to
see some event in continuous motion on a video screen it has to have
at least 24 frames displayed one after another at continuous time
intervals ,now there are events that are too fast to see like in
sports a ball hitting a bat or what happens when a boxer lands a
punch on his opponents face. With the help of high speed cameras this
problem is solved however the term high speed may confuse people.
Actually High Speed cameras are nothing but cameras that can record a
very high number of frames per second in order of 2000 fps. Once this
recording is done the video can be played back at normal 24 fps thus
a one second video would now be played in 83.33 seconds so an event
that occurred at 1/100th of a second can be seen easily and this has
lead to many new findings in the field of sport.
In cricket it can be
seen that when a ball hits the bat at high velocity the bat moves at
the point of impact for a very short span of time this fact was
totally unknown to everyone before the advent of high speed cameras.
In the same sport there was a rule that if at the point of delivery a
bowler's hand straightens by a certain angle that particular
delivery would be considered illegal and the bowler would be warned
for chucking. It was 5 degrees for spinners,10 degrees for medium
pacers and 15 degrees for fast bowlers. When biomechanics study was
done with the help of modern high speed cameras it was found that
almost every bowler subconsciously ends up straightening his
arm at the point of delivery there was a famous chucking incident
involving ace Sri Lankan spinner Muttaiah Muralidharan where he was
called by the umpire for chucking. Thankfully his team-mates,his
captain and board backed him and when video analysis were done
on all bowlers it showed that Murali straightened the arm as much as
other bowlers did although at normal pace the videos tell a different
story even a bowler with copybook action like Glenn McGrath was found
to be straightening his arm by more than 15 degrees at times. Had it
not been for high speed cameras the racist umpire could have ended up
ending Murali's carrear right there and after that Muralidharan went
on to become a great bowler picking up 800 wickets in his entire
carrear.
Also high
speed cameras are used to by various authorities to ascertain whether
a person is speaking the truth or not while questioning him/her
taking the high speed images of their subconscious facial reactions
and then watching it at normal speed.
Now talking
about events that are slow in nature like the growth of a tree in
that case a normal camera may be used and programmed and installed in
such a way that it would take 1 photograph an hour and stay in the
very same position focused on a plant now after a certain point of
time when the plant has grown to a certain extent the images and then
taken and played at normal 24 fps the view of the video one would get
is that as if he is able to see the plant grow slowly in a matter of
minutes. Such cameras are also installed at construction site the
rate of taking photographs maybe varied as per necessity but again
when the video is played one can see how the construction of a
building or stadium is done in a matter of minutes without any focus
on unnecessary parts. Rakesh
