Ramanisblog

Tag: Time

  • TIME-image of the week.

  • MY own private India-and US.

    I used to see pristine India in its glory with its beautiful way of living where parents were parents;no single parent,no drugs,no orphanages,no gays,no lesbians,no worship of $ and Bacchus.
    Neither were there crass materialism nor interference in other countries’ affairs, no kicks from every country in the world.
    Till US came in to influence.
    Indians ,ponder, this is what lies at the heart of the so called liberals of US.
    Why do you seek apology?
    Things are what they are.
    Now know what lies beneath the skin.
    Decide.
    Xenophobic gentleman,
    Indians came to US, truly because you could not switch on your routers.
    Gujaratis came for you do not know honest business.
    True we have Gods with many faces and arms.
    At least we do not worship +,nor do we Deify an unwed mother.
    How does this sound?
    **I am sorry i did not know that my feeling were too harsh and I have expressed myself thus and in the process have hurt many.
    I sincerely tender my apologies.
    *** How is this as an apology?

    The above piece is meant for Mr.Xenophobic and not for normal decent Americans.
    I would like him to know two can play a ball game.
    People such as this mar relation between human beings, least of among countries.

    Story:
    Statement Appended; July 2, 2010

    I am very much in favor of immigration everywhere in the U.S. except Edison, N.J. The mostly white suburban town I left when I graduated from high school in 1989 — the town that was called Menlo Park when Thomas Alva Edison set up shop there and was later renamed in his honor — has become home to one of the biggest Indian communities in the U.S., as familiar to people in India as how to instruct stupid Americans to reboot their Internet routers.

    My town is totally unfamiliar to me. The Pizza Hut where my busboy friends stole pies for our drunken parties is now an Indian sweets shop with a completely inappropriate roof. The A&P I shoplifted from is now an Indian grocery. The multiplex where we snuck into R-rated movies now shows only Bollywood films and serves samosas. The Italian restaurant that my friends stole cash from as waiters is now Moghul, one of the most famous Indian restaurants in the country. There is an entire generation of white children in Edison who have nowhere to learn crime. (See pictures of Thomas Edison’s Menlo Park.)

    I never knew how a bunch of people half a world away chose a random town in New Jersey to populate. Were they from some Indian state that got made fun of by all the other Indian states and didn’t want to give up that feeling? Are the malls in India that bad? Did we accidentally keep numbering our parkway exits all the way to Mumbai?

    I called James W. Hughes, policy-school dean at Rutgers University, who explained that Lyndon Johnson’s 1965 immigration law raised immigration caps for non-European countries. LBJ apparently had some weird relationship with Asians in which he liked both inviting them over and going over to Asia to kill them.

    After the law passed, when I was a kid, a few engineers and doctors from Gujarat moved to Edison because of its proximity to AT&T, good schools and reasonably priced, if slightly deteriorating, post–WW II housing. For a while, we assumed all Indians were geniuses. Then, in the 1980s, the doctors and engineers brought over their merchant cousins, and we were no longer so sure about the genius thing. In the 1990s, the not-as-brilliant merchants brought their even-less-bright cousins, and we started to understand why India is so damn poor.

    Eventually, there were enough Indians in Edison to change the culture. At which point my townsfolk started calling the new Edisonians “dot heads.” One kid I knew in high school drove down an Indian-dense street yelling for its residents to “go home to India.” In retrospect, I question just how good our schools were if “dot heads” was the best racist insult we could come up with for a group of people whose gods have multiple arms and an elephant nose. (See TIME’s special report “The Making of America: Thomas Edison.”)

    Unlike some of my friends in the 1980s, I liked a lot of things about the way my town changed: far better restaurants, friends dorky enough to play Dungeons & Dragons with me, restaurant owners who didn’t card us because all white people look old. But sometime after I left, the town became a maze of charmless Indian strip malls and housing developments. Whenever I go back, I feel what people in Arizona talk about: a sense of loss and anomie and disbelief that anyone can eat food that spicy.

    To figure out why it bothered me so much, I talked to a friend of mine from high school, Jun Choi, who just finished a term as mayor of Edison. Choi said that part of what I don’t like about the new Edison is the reduction of wealth, which probably would have been worse without the arrival of so many Indians, many of whom, fittingly for a town called Edison, are inventors and engineers. And no place is immune to change. In the 11 years I lived in Manhattan’s Chelsea district, that area transformed from a place with gangs and hookers to a place with gays and transvestite hookers to a place with artists and no hookers to a place with rich families and, I’m guessing, mistresses who live a lot like hookers. As Choi pointed out, I was a participant in at least one of those changes. We left it at that.

    Unlike previous waves of immigrants, who couldn’t fly home or Skype with relatives, Edison’s first Indian generation didn’t quickly assimilate (and give their kids Western names). But if you look at the current Facebook photos of students at my old high school, J.P. Stevens, which would be very creepy of you, you’ll see that, while the population seems at least half Indian, a lot of them look like the Italian Guidos I grew up with in the 1980s: gold chains, gelled hair, unbuttoned shirts. In fact, they are called Guindians. Their assimilation is so wonderfully American that if the Statue of Liberty could shed a tear, she would. Because of the amount of cologne they wear.

    TIME responds: We sincerely regret that any of our readers were upset by Joel Stein’s recent humor column “My Own Private India.” It was in no way intended to cause offense.

    Joel Stein responds: I truly feel stomach-sick that I hurt so many people. I was trying to explain how, as someone who believes that immigration has enriched American life and my hometown in particular, I was shocked that I could feel a tiny bit uncomfortable with my changing town when I went to visit it. If we could understand that reaction, we’d be better equipped to debate people on the other side of the immigration issue.
    http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1999416,00.html

  • Physicist Says Warp Speed Will Kill You.


    If we have to observe speeds >speed of Light the Observer has to be at the same speed or coordinates of the Observed,and Time factor being identical with space, the observer has to move to another dimension, probably that of the Observed. Please read my Blog Time -A Non linear Theory, under Astrophysics.
    Story.
    Last year, a group of physicists figured out that achieving warp speed had the potential–depending on how we did it, at least–to create a black hole that would suck up Earth and destroy us all.

    Putting aside that cheery bit of news for a moment, another physicist recently said that even if that particular scenario didn’t come to pass, the simple matter of traveling warp speed could kill you–all because of some stray hydrogen atoms.

    Johns Hopkins physicist William Edelstein said at the American Physical Society conference in Washington, D.C. the two hydrogen atoms per cubic centimeter in space pose no threat to regular space travel, but would transform into “deadly galactic space mines” at near-light speed, Space.com reports.

    Edelstein went on to say that it would feel like getting struck by the high-energy proton beam from the Large Hadron Collider particle accelerator at CERN in Geneva, Switzerland. The audience at the talk wasn’t thrilled with this, apparently, as it caused a minor stir and some good back and forth, the report said.

    “Getting between stars is a huge problem unless we think of something really, really different,” Edelstein said. “I’m not saying that we know everything and that it’s impossible. I’m saying it’s kind of impossible based on what we know right now.
    http://digg.com/d31Kzbk

  • OH WHAT A COSMIC WEB WE WEAVE-Story and Video.

    Please read my blog on Time-a Non -Linear Theory filed under AstroPhysics for Indian philosophy’s great insight.
    Space fans are no doubt familiar with     the classic short educational film, “Powers of 10,” that provides an eye-popping tour of our universe from the very big to the very small — and ends up right back on the picnic blanket in the park from whence we started. But the original is pretty dated now that we’re wrapping up the “Oughts,” and I’m not just talking about the hairstyles and 1970s togs. We know so much more about our universe since this film was made.

    In fact, it’s really just in the last decade that our technology for exploring the cosmos has improved to the point where astronomers could see that vast galaxies actually clump together and form larger structures. Our universe is a vast tangled web of interconnected galaxy clusters linked by wispy filaments surrounding areas that can only be described as voids. And that’s what scientists have taken to calling it: the Cosmic Web.

    It’s incredibly difficult to model this vast web of galaxies, however, since all the components that make it up vary greatly by orders of magnitude. “Powers of 10” made good use of zooming out and zooming in for its limited cinematic purposes, but when it comes to computer simulations, that approach doesn’t work so well. KFC of the arXiv blog explains:

    “As the small scale structures become too small to resolve, most computer models apply some sort of statistical smoothing process to make the large scale calculations easier. But if you zoom back in again, there is no way to retrieve the information that is lost by the smoothing process other than to rebuild the picture again from the original data. …

    “[I]t’s a problem if you want to simulate how the large scale structures form from smaller structures and how, in turn, the shape of the large structures influences the way smaller structures evolve. This kind of feedback process is impossible to model when the smoothing process between different scales essentially destroys any meaningful links between them.”
    A pair of scientists at the University of Gronengen in the Netherlands think they might have the answer: the Delauney Tessellation Field Estimator. “Delauney tesselation” sounds like something vaguely unpleasant from Madeleine L’Engle’s A Wrinkle in Time, but it’s actually an approach to computer simulation in which galaxies are treated as points in 3D space. The space between them is filled in with tetrahedra governed by very strict rules about how they combine as scales get larger.

    What makes the technique developed by Rien can de Weygaert and Willem Schaap so intriguing to astronomers is that its rules or reversible. That means you can zoom out and zoom back in your simulation, and the critical information in the original structure is recreated instead of lost. And that means we could soon have an even better model of our great Cosmic Web — and maybe even an updated version of “Powers of Ten.”
    http://news.discovery.com/space/oh-what-a-cosmic-web-we-weave.html

  • Theory of Relativity visualized.

    Please visit the linked site.
    Also read my blog on this’Time-non-linear Theory’

    http://www.spacetimetravel.org/Story:
    Relativity visualized
    The theory of relativity holds a certain fascination for many people. At the same time it is often regarded as very abstract and difficult to understand.

    Part of the difficulties in understanding relativity are due to the fact that relativistic effects contradict everyday experience. Motion, for example, is a familiar process and everybody “knows from experience” that it entails neither time dilation nor length contraction. A flight with half the speed of light could correct this misjudgement but is not on offer.

    A possible alternative are simulations. Images, films and virtual reality let us in a sense experience relativistic flights, gravitational collapse, compact objects and other extreme conditions