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...