Author: Pradeep

  • Lotsa work

    Note: I wrote this on my earlier blog hosted as https://pradx.wordpress.com. I recovered the text from the WayBack Machine. This post appeared on December 3, 2006 as per the permalink. I’m trying to collect here again all my old writings spread on various blogs.

    I dunno if you’ve experienced this yourself but you tend to finish a lot more when you’re having your exams as compared to when you’re not having one. I did the SEDS India website, reset my blog, deleted my rolls, contributed to the mailing lists, removed myself from Orkut and Facebook (darned things took a lot of my time – they’re time eaters) and read through 23 blogs (not blog posts everyday, which might be a greater no. ~50-60 posts everyday). All this besides studying..

  • songs…

    Note: I wrote this on my earlier blog hosted as https://pradx.wordpress.com. I recovered the text from the WayBack Machine. This post appeared on December 3, 2006 as per the permalink. I’m trying to collect here again all my old writings spread on various blogs.

    Some songs have an uncanny resemblance to either your life or your personality. I was listening to The Corrs (again??) and found that this song had this for me. I’ll search the net to see if I can find the song and put it up a later.

    But here are the lyrics in question:

    “Do you feel you’re someone else inside,
    And no one understands (who) you are..”

    Trust me. No one in the world, not even me understands me completely and I always feel that I’m someone else inside.

    “Then you stumble on tomorrow,
    And trip over today”

    Well, not exactly..but this makes more sense:

    “You’re racing for tomorrow,
    Not finished with today”

    Jumping from one thing to another between my interests. When I’m studying, I’m thinking of project ideas…When I should be thinking project ideas..”Darn! Haven’t finished that chapter”.

    “Would the sun shine brighter,
    If you played a bigger part”

    I wonder..

    “So you promise that tomorrow
    [will] be different than today..”

    Always.

    The song? ‘Would you be happier?’ – The Corrs. That’s a double whammy on the occassion tof 4 down 2 to go..

  • India Together: SSA Review

    Since the introduction of the central government’s Sarva Shiksha Abhiyan (SSA) programme, enrolment numbers in schools have gone up. But how reliable and meaningful are the enrolment figures? Deepa A uncovers major indications of things having gone wrong in SSA’s quest for targets.

    India Together: New indicators needed to track SSA

  • Problems in India?

    India may be doing well economically. But, what’s happening to the social structure?

    1. Trouble in parts of Maharashtra.
    2. MLAs trashing the WB assembly.
    3. Union Minsister convicted of murder.

    Where are we headed?

  • Welcome to the all-new Parallel Spirals

    I deleted all the previous posts since they’re basically not the best of my writing. I will remain offline till 2nd December, 2006. But, you will see on the timestamp that the date is: 25-11-2006. This is thanks to WordPress.com’s timestamp edit feature.

    I plan to limit myself seriously in this all-new blog. This is an attempt to make blogging a more productive experience. Feedback and comments are always welcome.

  • November/December issue of The Planetary Report out

    The November/December issue of The Planetary Report, magazine from The Planetary Society is out. While we’re at the Planetary Society’s blog, Emily Lakdawalla,  has a wonderful set of images of the posters that Doug Ellison put together for the Mars Exploration Rover team at Cornell and NASA-JPL.

  • SEDS-USA National Conference

    Tim of “Where in the universe are Tim and Jen?” has written couple of posts on his experience of the SEDS-USA National Conference at the University of Central Florida. Hope you guys had a rocking time.

    If anyone of you have blogged about this, send me your urls. Has anyone blogged about the SEDS-UK National Conference. More on that later.

  • First Radio Telescope in the Middle East

    Maryam, who’s quite active in both SEDS and SGAC has a post about the first radio telescope in the middle east. The Kuwait National Radio Observatory Project was approved by the Kuwait Science Club.

    Congratulations. More on their official website.

  • Early Life and Star Formation?

    The Danish National Space Centre [DNSC] did a study that proves the connection between early life on Earth and star formation in our Milky Way.

    For the simple minded, scientists used some technique to see the relation between the amount of cosmic material coming from space from a period of intense supernovae explosions and star formation coincided with a period of intense growth and decline of bacteria. They then realised: This can’t be a coincidence. Cosmic material increases, bacteria growth-decline cycle increases. There has to be a connection. Atleast, that’s what I understood.

    Centauri Dreams explains it more scientifically.

    Read the abstract of original paper by Henrik Svensmark here.

  • Dark Energy

    I first posted this on my space blog at http://blog.seds.org/pradeep. I recovered the post using the Wayback Machine here.

    NASA had a big press release on dark energy. If you’re new to the concept of dark energy or have only heard about it and don’t know what it exactly is (like me), go to this wikipedia article for starters.  For those of you guys who understand high-tech space language, go here. Er, you guys can read the comments too.

    Phil Plait over at Bad Astronomy assures us that the language in the press release is more people-friendly.

    [via Bad Astronomy]