Thoughts And Trivia

Flame of an oil lamp, flares up, one last moment, before it runs out of oil and it just starts spewing black soot.
Evolution of societies also follow this route to oblivion. The dying society flares into megalomaniac creations just before being snuffed out. Is the present 21st Century also the last for the Human Race? From the megalomaniac creations - it just looks to be the case of burst of the dying flame.
There is a web-game about what it would be like for the human race to die in year 2100, if do not wake-up.
But look at the megalomania. We have created a Large Hadron Collider (LHC) in Europe to just smash two protons (travelling at almost the speed of light) together, just to prove whether two mathematically elegant theories could actually govern the sub-particle universe.

LHC has been built in a circular tunnel 27 km in circumference. The tunnel is buried around 50 to 175 m. underground. It straddles the Swiss and French borders on the outskirts of Geneva.
The statistics and Money spent is nothing Human Race has ever seen. For example:

1. The combined strands of the superconducting cable being produced for the LHC would go around the equator 6.8 times. If you added all the filaments of the strands together they would stretch to the sun and back 5 times with enough left over for a few trips to the moon.


2. Part of the LHC will be the world's largest fridge. It could hold 150 000 fridge full of sausages at a temperature colder than deep outer space.
3. The cost of the accelerator only (without experiments and computing) but including manpower and material is 4.7 Billion CHF (that's around 3.03 billion euros)

There is more on the web, officially.
...and unofficially
I think there could be a simpler way to do science.
This is not all. The type of buildings that we are now making in the Middle East is super-megalomania.
Mahatma Gandhi used to say: "There is enough on earth for our needs, but not enough for our greed."
We are going to kill the Human Race if we do not temper our use of Earth's resources.
What Do You think? Please leave comments!!!

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During screening of a Film on Chengiz Khan in our college's (IIT Delhi) open Air Theatre in 1969, the scene of the heroine giving birth to child was shown before the scene of her rape that resulted in the pregnancy - due to erroneous shuffling of film cartridge by a sozzled projectionist.
But film making is like that. First scene may actually be shot in the end. Or the scene in Vienna may actually be shot in a studio in Mumbai. Even the Hero fighting the villain may not actually be the Hero - but only his substitute. Thus film breaks down boundaries of time, geography and personalities.
So does Information Technology (IT).
Apart from the mere increased efficiency, the sociological effects of IT on an organization are also similar (in a subtle way). It breaks down the debilitating departmental and geographical divisions in the organization. Its tones down the hierarchical rigidities. It makes a mockery of office-hours and allows 24X7 support to the customer. It de-individualises the personality behind a job - your call may be answered by a Bangalorean with a false accent!
It shifts the power balance away from megalith organizations towards the customer. It thus makes the organization more cohesively oriented towards its customers.
All these effects are sorely required in government to shift focus to citizens. Hence thorough implementation of IT in all Govt processes are a must.
Perhaps some more research on this may be needed.
Bertrand Russel also discussed the impact of Science on Society - in particular shift of power balance between the individual and the society.
Please do come back again, I will blog about that later!!

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At the end of 19th century, the growing number of horse drawn carriages in London, lead one mathematicians to calculate the horse shit that will be generated 100 years hence, if the horse drawn carriages kept on increasing at the same rate. He predicted that by the year 1992, London would be under 16 feet of horse dung.

These things should be taken with a pinch of salt - the forecast, I mean, not the horse shit. A change of technology to Internal Combustion Carriages (Automobiles) could not have been envisaged then.
I strongly suspect that the environmental prophets of doom are committing that same mistake. They are creating s similar picture of doom due to pollution by the cars.
In any case a single volcanic eruption or a Tsunami can cause much more environmental pollution than a decade of pollution by cars.
I am confident that humanity will be able to discover the next source of energy sooner than later - which would make internal combustion engines a museum piece.
In any case the recent spate of natural disasters has refuted our belief that nature, if left to it, is benign to Human civilization. Nothing of that sort. Nature could wipe out the Human civilization, as suddenly,as unpredictably, as quickly, as remorselessly as it had wiped the dinosaurs.
Step on the gas man, till you you have time!!!

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Information Technology has epochally transformed our Society. This tranformation is as seminal as the transformation of Society from Stone-age to Bronze-age. I am lucky to have been Witness to this transformation from the 2nd generation (discrete transistor circuits) Main Frames to present Web-enabled systems. I dirtied my hands with Machine Code, Assembly Level Language, FORTRAN, Cobol, RDBMS and now Web-enabled systems - paralleling India's journey from being 30 years behind to a front-line runner. What was it Like??

• 1969 - there were a handful of Main-Frames in India. A new one ICL-1909 came to IIT-Delhi. I learnt FORTRAN-IV and Programmed for my Graduation Project on "Simulation of Diesel Engines"


• Computers consisted of Large Cabinets with panels containing blinking lights and switches . These were housed in Large air-conditioned halls with cables running underneath false floor.


• Memory used be made-up of ferrite rings strung on cross wires - solid-state memory came in next generations. Being physical, these used be housed in huge cabinets. 12 KB memory was all that we had.


• Tape drives were huge things, about six-feet tall. I being only 5ft 3in tall, had to stand on tip-toes to load the tapes. Being sensitive about my height, I used to make sure there is no one around, before I did that. Vacuum columns kept the tension on tape constant.


• Line printer was huge and shaped like a Dodo-Bird. It made a racket while working and threw out printed paper like a demented demon.


• Fresh Input was thru Cards, but in IIT we used Paper Tapes. We were taught to read the hole patterns on the tape and the cards for corrections. Wrong portions of tapes were substituted with correct portions by manually splicing the tape. Tapes were punched on a teleprinter like machine.Later IIT acquired card reader and Card Punching machines. This looked like a major improvement


• We sincerely followed the steps of flowcharting, coding etc.


• Computers operated on 6 bit BCD Byte. Mostly computers had fixed word length of 8 bytes, but the computer , I worked on in Railway (IBM-1401) had variable length word, end being marked by a word-mark byte. Blocks of words were marked by Group-Mark byte.
  
• There were no Operating System or firm-ware in these computers. Only one Programme could work at a time. Multi-threading and Multi-tasking came in later generations of computers.

(To be editted)

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