Cynic's Blog

Internet is filled with people in either volley trying to persuade the common-er about merits and demerits of nuclear energy at large. Most of these discussion are mainly very ideological and filled with fervour and passion. I will, in this blog try to give you a balanced view in this regard. Well, if you ask me to answer in one line, for or against. My answer would be for it, but there's more to it. For those who have the patience and time read on... Nuclear energy in its present form is mainly fission based i.e. a single atomic nucleus is smashed by a neutron into two smaller nuclei. The bombardment of this nucleus with neutron makes it unstable which eventually results in its splitting into fragments also called as fission fragment. Since this process makes the atom split into two, nuclear scientist call it fission reaction. There's another kind of nuclear reaction wherein atomic nucleus are fused together and quite appropriately it's called fusion reaction. ...

I purchased an Android Phone in the early days of it coming to Indian market and I able to afford it ( just got a job), during mid 2010. The recent and popular version was Éclairs. I just went up to the shop and bought a nice and shiny Motorola Quench XT3 (XT502). When in other places XT502 was having Andriod Donut, I got as a special offer Éclairs. I was happy as hell. The Droid A couple of year passes, and newer versions of Android came from Éclairs to Froyo to Gingerbread then to the bigger version upgrades like Honeycomb, Ice Cream Sandwich and then Jelly Bean. By the end of 2012, I was literally surviving on my Motorola with Éclairs. I had to upgrade, anyhow. Now more that Motorola denied any upgrades for Quench XT3 . A trivia, Android version names are taken from sugary desserts with lexicographic sequencing. So, I did up-gradation from Éclairs to Gingerbread using a custom ROM from Cyanogenmod . An excellent community of enthusiast who develop their own custom ROMs oft...

What are you? Are you the physical body? Or are you the collection of neuronal synapses which gives your brain a specific topography? Or are you the thoughts present inside your mind? We are neither of the above. Why, you wonder? Here's why, because, Every human eats food, which replaces the biomass already present in the cells, which in-turn make up our body. It has been established that over a period of 8-10 years, every body cell gets replaced with a brand new cell. Every cell/atom in our body is younger than 10 years. So, it means that body can be ruled out as the candidate for 'what' we are! Scientist claim that the memory in our mind comes from the synaptic junctions in our brain. There is a phenomenon which occur in our brain called synaptic plasticity , which makes the synapse strengthen or loosen up depending upon the use or dis-use of that neuronal pathway. So, it means that over a time, our sypanses change and modify depending on what we expe...

LaTeX is a tool for typesetting virtually anything, be it book, article, letters or journal papers. LaTeX can even be used to take class notes, when your professor uses lots of complex mathematical formulae. My association with LaTeX stated a few months ago when I was troubled with the irreproducibility of my articles. Microsoft Word or even Open Office have trouble with keeping up with the formatting of article. Then I encountered LaTeX. It is such an amazing tool, you can produce camera-ready copies of your paper and thesis in minutes. LaTeX has a few advantages over traditional WYSIWYG typesetters LaTeX gives you complete freedom with what to do with your document LaTeX, as I said provides you with camera ready quality prints. LaTeX is extensible, means you can create you own template to format documents. Once you have designed that, you don't have to do anything to typeset any other document. LaTeX will take care of it! But there are a few problems too- To learn LaT...

I n this blog, I will try to illustrate beautiful natural wonders, which are the way because nature wanted us to see them that way...no other reason long or short.... Let's call our roll list, Solar Eclipse We all know that solar eclipse are occur because moon obstructs sun's light or in a more layman's term, moon casts it's shadow on earth when it transits between earth and sun. But few might have pondered upon the fact that the mystic diamond ring and total solar eclipse (when it virtually becomes dark, in a small part of earth) have a more subtle origin. These happen because from earth surface, lunar and solar discs looks of same size, and that's the reason why moon exactly covers the solar disc during eclipse. The exactness is more crucial in the formation of diamond ring during eclipse. In case, somebody is wondering, this is Diamond Ring. But isn't sun and moon incomparable in sizes? Then how come they have similar sized discs? Yes,...

I f you have a HP printer at your office or at your home and if you are a vivid user of Ubuntu, then you definitely might have tried to install the printer driver for the same. I have been trying to do that for a couple of years! Alas but things didn't worked for me, mainly because of the fact that hp doesn't provide drivers for the printer in the cds, but rather asks to use a utility called hplip (an abbreviation for HP Linux Imaging and Printing). For one thing in Ubuntu one can install hplip using the package manager apt . You can install hplip using this command in an Ubuntu Box. sudo apt-get install hplip-gui After successful installation of hplip, one can run the program hplip form command line by the command hp-setup . The first window looks like this, where-in one have to select the type of connection with the printer. I have a network printer attached, hence I optionally selected to input the IP address of the printer. After hplip has obtained the i...

I n part II of my blog Human Mind and Computers (An Uncanny Resemblance) , we will be looking into the war and post war era (1940 - till date) . This was the era which changed the days after, forever. The change so enormous that it changed the way we human think, and quite appropriately gave a name to the "age" that came, The Information Age . We the Homo Sapiens Sapiens has walked a long way from being hunter-gathers , in Stone Age   to farmers , in Bronze and Iron Age , to producer-consumers , in Industrial Age , and now to Information Seekers , in Information Age . We no longer needed God for explaining things that we couldn't understand a few hundreds of year ago. The changes were sudden and shocking for many. But the few who could grasp the change dared to think beyond the horizon. They questioned their own existence, which is considered as the the epitome of self consciousness. Even though this question was asked millennia ago by philosophers in Greece, our...

H uman Mind, the single organ in Human body which consumes as much as 20% of the total energy consumed by the whole body combined together. Now, that's a feat for a small organ which constitutes only 2% of the net body mass. Every thought one have in their brain, every neuron which fires in your nervous system consumes energy. Our Brain; the wonder machine Since ages philosophers have pondered upon the mysterious capabilities of human brain and its abilities. We all might have heard the rumor in our childhood days that a grown adult uses only 20% of the total human brain; which I can tell you is a total bullshit, since a neurosurgeon would tell you that people with a small injury in brain cripples the functioning of specific parts of body partly or completely. It we were using just 20%, then there wouldn't have been much functional difference in our behavior even if a small part of our brain was damaged. Human brain is unique from other animal brain in function...

I am sort of a perfectionist and when it comes to keeping things cleaned up, I can bet no one can beat me!! My Android phone, Motorola Quench XT3(never heard of it! Yeah, it's an Asia specific product from Motorola) has a nice feature of showing album art for songs, as is there in VLC , the epic product from VideoLAN , WMP , the shitty product from Microsoft Corp (which MS has made less shitty in Windows 7 and more) and the lesser known (among mainstream PC and MAC users Rhythmbox , the default music player featured in Ubuntu , the blue eyed kid of Canonical Inc .). But for me the turning point was when I can view album arts in my phone while listening to music and it became an absolute necessity that every song I play on my Android must have an apt album art, not the stupid, moronic default album art which Android features, The default album art of Android Anyways, I search on the internet for a suitable program which would do this thing for me on my computer that i...

My first job was at an IT company where they used to have a company policy wherein they lock your PC after every 3 minute. The usual excuse was Information Security. Just imagine, every-time you have to take a leak, the PC would just lock itself up. The situation was exasperated because of another thing, the password policy, which demanded every password to be  At least 8 character long. At least one number. At least one lower-case alphabet and one upper-case alphabet. and at least one special character. Now, all thing rules made the remembering of password a bit of a hell and on top of it was the 3 minute locking rule. That was the time when I decided to do a bit of mischief and code a software which will do the task of moving the mouse, which would effectively prevent the desktop from locking itself. I started to look for things which would enable me to do this. That's when I encountered Robot , a class Java provides since J2SE 1.3. This class acts like a simul...

In the recent past, my interest for python grew to insurmountable proportion; mainly because of the ease and pseudo-code style syntax. I was actively using python for my Project Euler codes. I am an avid downloader mainly from torrents. Then one day i thought, wouldn't it be nicer if my PC could shutdown automatically when-ever my internet connection breaks up!!! My first choice was a DOS bat script. But then, who uses bat now a days.. :P So, I hooked on to python. It was a matter of a few hours before I could fix it! Here's my script - The same thing in DOS batch file - Feel free to post any improvements in this code of mine...