Global Warming - Climate Change

Avatar Movie

Avatar Movie : A visual treat





References
1. Technology behind Avatar
2. Avatar 3D - to new level
3. Official Avatar Movie

President Obama's Nobel Peace Prize Acceptance Speech from Oslo, Norway

Self, the Origin - Identity

The Story of the ‘Self’  - Who am I?

Why do we all look different? What happens if we all look alike? Will the concept of you and me will be there? To elaborate that concept - how do you explain the concept of color to a person born blind? The answer is you cannot. So, if we all started to look same the identity of 'self' will be not be created which is required to understand the nature to even enjoy the beauty of the nature.

The state of Being

Being is a state of connectedness with something immeasurable – almost paradoxically, is essentially you and yet its beyond or greater than you.  The inability to feel this connectedness gives rise to the illusion of separation from yourself and from the world around you.

Being is deep within you but you can’t grasp it with your logical mind. Logical mind is full of thoughts and restless. When the mind is free of thoughts you are in the present – In the Now.

Rene Descartes made his famous statement Cogito Ergo Sum – I think, therefore I am. The basic error in this philosophy is equating thinking with Being.  I feel the Descartes statement needs to be redefined as follows

 ‘I think, therefore I created my Self’

 Thinking creates the self which traps us in our mind’s prison. This makes us believe that we are nothing but our ‘Self’ which is in our mind.

Read more in the 2nd part of this series.. The Conscious Mind / Self, The Origin - Identity

Pazhassi Raja – The movie review

The movie Pazhassi Raja brought the old team of Oru Vadakkan Veeragadha back. National Award winners – Mammootty, Director Hariharan and Script Writer MT Vasudevan Nair and the expectations were sky high – and the end result – they didn’t disappoint us. They created a well crafted movie at par with Hollywood movies. Now let us get into the movie details.

Mammootty plays the role of Pazhassi Raja while Sarath Kumar plays Edachena Kangan and Manoj K Jayan plays the role of Thalakkal Chanthu. Mammootty does a controlled act and plays the role of Raja to the perfection while Sarath and Manoj, Padmapriya (Neeli) and Suresh Krishna (Kaitheri Ambu) brings in a different dimension to the movie with their excellent acting and action scenes. Director needs to be commended for the excellent star cast and using the stars in their right strength. The movie runs in for 3 ½ hours, however with MT (Vasudevan Nair) at the helm of the script it flows smoothly.

Read more The Land of the Vedas / Pazhassi Raja - The Movie Review

Malabar Days By Nick Balmer - Thomas Baber was Nick's great great great great uncle.

The new beginning - President Obama in Cairo

Self, the Origin

The Self, the conscious mind (the soul from a spiritual outlook) - How did we get this? or what are the fundamental prerequisites for the birth of 'self'? Before I get deep into that, let me share some of the questions, which bothered me since my high school days.

1.     Why is our vision tuned to the light spectrum (and not radio waves, x-rays, or infrareds) of the electro-magnetic wave?

2.     Why do we think in a rational way?

3.     Why do we (humans) all look different (except the identical twins)?

4.     Why do we have just 5 senses and not 3 or 7?

5.     Why do we have our own identity? Why cannot I see/know what others think?

To find out more about this, read more in my blog The Conscious Mind / Self, The Origin

The hope

Today is a historic day not just for America but also for the whole world. Hope and the expectations from the new President elect Barack Obama will be enormous. We all hope he will make the CHANGE happen by rescuing the American economy (along with the Global economy) and change the global political landscape by bringing in peace and stability instead of blind aggression and wars.

Three years (in 2005) back I was sitting with one of my close friend in starbucks (Edison, NJ) sipping a hot  cappuccino and discussing about political landscape of two great democracies - USA the oldest democracy and India the largest democracy. India was ruled by Dr. Manmohan Singh, a Sikh Prime Minister, Dr APJ Abdul Kalam a Muslim President, a Christian (Sonia Gandhi) ruling party leader and L K Advani a Hindu opposition leader. Where can you expect something like that? Will America ever elect a woman or an African American as president? And we thought its going to take another 50 years for something like that to happen. How wrong we were.

To find out more about this, read more in my blog The Land of Vedas / The Hope 

Virgin birth - Its a shark this time.

RICHMOND, Virginia (AP) -- Scientists have confirmed the second case of a "virgin birth" in a shark. A blacktip shark in the wild patrols the vast expanse of the Indian Ocean. In a study reported Friday in the Journal of Fish Biology, scientists said DNA testing proved that a pup carried by a female blacktip shark in a Virginia aquarium contained no genetic material from a male.

The first documented case of asexual reproduction, or parthenogenesis, among sharks involved a pup born to a hammerhead at an Omaha, Nebraska, zoo. "This first case was no fluke," Demian Chapman, a shark scientist and lead author of the second study, said in a statement. "It is quite possible that this is something female sharks of many species can do on occasion."

The scientists cautioned that the rare asexual births should not be viewed as a possible solution to declining global shark populations. The aquarium sharks that reproduced without mates each carried only one pup, while some species can produce litters of a dozen or more.
"It is very unlikely that a small number of female survivors could build their numbers up very quickly by undergoing virgin birth," Chapman said.     read more ....

Related news

1. National Geographic - http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2002/09/0925_020925_virginshark.html
2. BBC - http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/6681793.stm
3. CNN - http://edition.cnn.com/2008/US/10/10/shark.virgin.birth.ap/index.html
4. Sunday Morning Herald, Australia - http://www.smh.com.au/news/world/scientific-jaws-drop-at-virgin-shark-birth/2008/10/10/1223145635961.html
5. New Scientist - http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn11908-shark-pup-result-of-virgin-birth.html
6. Nova - http://www.nova.edu/ocean/ghri/cnn_virginshark.html

CERN reiterates safety of LHC on eve of first beam

Geneva, 5 September 2008. A report published today in the peer reviewedJournal of Physics G: Nuclear and Particle Physics provides comprehensive evidence that safety fears about the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) are unfounded. The LHC is CERN’s new flagship research facility. As the world’s highest energy particle accelerator, it is poised to provide new insights into the mysteries of our universe.

Read more about the following

• Cosmic Rays
• Microscopic Black holes
• Strangelets
• Vaccum Bubbles
• Magnetic Monopoles

Read more in my blog .. Particle and Astro Physics 

The ultimate expirement

Ultimate experiment by the mankind - Spending more than 6 billion dollars, in search of answers on mysteries of the universe.

1. Origin of the Universe
2. God Particle (the particle that gives 'mass' to all other particles)
3. Finding Graviton the force particle for Gravity - The mysterious force among the four
4. Testing String Theory (M-Theory as its known now a days.
   

watch the video in my blog Particle and Astro Physics

Wholeness - From Advaita Vedanta to Quantum Physics

Wholeness – From Advaita Vedanta to Quantum Physics

The concept of ‘Wholeness’ or ‘Oneness’ is more than 2000 years old, from Greek philosophers in the western civilization to the Vedic scholars in the eastern civilization. So, the debate over mind (Consciousness) and matter is not new. These concepts were broadly classified under Monism (in Greek ‘monos’ means single) and Dualism.

Monism and Dualism from Ancient Greek Philosophers

The term monism was first used by a German philosopher Christian Wolff (1679-1754) even though the philosophies dates back to Ancient Greek philosophers, and notable among them is Parmenides, who viewed matter and mind as a single entity. According to Monism the ultimate reality is made up of matter or mind (Consciousness) or a third substance or a combination of all.

In Hinduism Advaita Vedanta subscribes to Substantival Monism emphasizing the atomicity of the mind and the matter while in Buddhism all things are part of a connected world. Creationist philosophy supported the belief where God (Consciousness) and the creature (matter) is considered as two separate entities and God is the supreme and ‘Idealism’ is the only monism which is theologically acceptable.

To find out more about this, read more in my blog The Land of Vedas / Wholeness - From Advaita Vedanta to Quantum Physics

The Art of Digital War - [Part 3] Abstract Data Types in the Security Domain

Abstract Data Types in the Security Domain

The objective of this section is to identify the key abstract data types required to handle any type of security related data to identify the Digital Intrusions / Extrusions and take necessary remediation process to mitigate those attacks.



Handling of millions of network events (generated by Routers, Firewalls, IDS/IPS etc) per day is one of the key elements of all the Security Management solutions. Other set of information collected for processing and mining the attack pattern involves OS logs, vulnerability information of an asset, network topology, Asset Database, Identity Management systems and Application Logs. So you end up having lot of different data types. One of the biggest challenges is to normalize this information across the vendors. However, before the normalization process the key element is to identify and classify the data types.

So, let me start with two fundamental data types and let us see how these data fits into all the data sources available from different vendors and creates Digital ‘Conversations’. 

To find out more about this, read more in my blog

 Security Data Mining / Art of Digital War - Part 3

Found Dark Matter

Dark Matter which makes up 25% of the Universe finally detected. Dark matter eluded scientists for years as it doesn’t emit or reflect light. Scientists found proof of dark matter in the galaxy cluster 1E0657-556. The evidence provided by a cosmic collision between two huge clusters of galaxies. As per Maxim Markevitch of the Harvard Smithsonian Center in Cambridge, Massachusetts, it is the “most energetic cosmic show, besides the Big Bang” that we are aware of.

To find out more about this, read more in my blog Particle Physics / Found Dark Matter

Solar System with 12 Planets

IAU’s executive committee submitted (which only submits recommendations likely to get two thirds approval from the group of 2500 astronomers from 75 nations meeting in Prague to decide a universal definition of a planet) a draft proposal to expand the Solar System to 12 planets. They will have two brain storming sessions before they vote on the resolution next week (August 21-25, 2006).

The change will force the schools across the world to change their text books and the elementary school solar system models. More interestingly astrologers need to tweak their formulas to make predictions as their model of classic nine planets is not valid anymore! :-)

To find out more about this, read more in my blog Particle Physics / Solar System with 12 Planets