Rahul gives unsolicited advice

So, it was just another weekend and i was abusing the 24 hour net connection we have on the weekend and surfing through the web, reading random articles from io9, engadget and arstechnica when i came upon this awesome collection. this is the list of all the movies that the authors took as case studies in writing the booj "Make It So : Design Lessons From SciFi".  2001: A Space Odyssey  Adaptive Path Charmr Aeon Flux Aesthedes AI - seen it Alien - seen it Alien Resurrection  Alien vs. Predator - seen it Apple Project 2000 Armageddon Avatar - obviously, seen it.  Back to the Future - watch all 3 every month!  Barbarella Batman - seen all of them and dream about being batman.  Battlestar Gallactica  Big Bang Theory - see every new episode and waiting for the new season  Blade Runner  Brainstorm Brazil Buck Rogers (1939) Children of Men Chronicles Of Riddick - seen it  Chrysalis Cisco Telepresence City of Lost ...

As i mentioned in the past , i was learning HTML and CSS3 to be able to write code for my own website and partially to see how hard it is to learn coding in HTML. And it's been an awesome experience!  I've put in hardly 15 Hrs into the whole thing and i now have a fairly good-looking webpage v1.2 , a fairly good looking update from v1.1 of the page which doesnt have the CSS3 styling hints to it. Though i havent mastered the language yet, i am getting good at it. who knows, maybe one day i might want to be a Web-Ops co-ordinator for my college's technical festival.  but right now, the only thing on my mind is to get a place on my department's or my college's server to host this webpage on it. as i've mentioned, linking a webpage about yourselves would be an easier way to contact profs than writing huge mails and resumes.  There's one other thing that i dont understand.  There are a lot of web operations coordinators who are free for the whole of the y...

As i mentioned, i am part of the amateur astronomy club at IIT Madras called Astro IITM and almost 6 weeks into the semester, we finally had our first freshers introduction session. this time around, as we are part of CFI (center for innovation), we were able to book CLT (central lecture theater). The session happened from 8-10:30 on the saturday, 15th September. Though we intended to have a theory session from 8-9 and move on to the roof top of the building to show them out telescopes and woo them, it started to rain 30 mins into the presentation and all our hopes for the rest of the night were swept away in the rain. but, we did continue the theory session till 10PM, continued further talking about observations, black holes and what not till 10:30, at which point, the guard asked us to wrap it up as it was getting too late :D... the session was based on the scale of the universe flash website, we introduced them to the different yard sticks when it comes to sizes, the small and e...

Well, as I written before here and here , I am currently working on radio astronomy. I had been putting off working on it for almost 2 years until last summer when things finally picked up some pace. Well, atleast in one sense. The first thing any amateur astronomer interested in pursuing radio astronomy and building a radio telescope should know about is The Radio Jove project. It is an amateur radio astronomy project backed by NASA based on a dipole antenna capable enough to observe radio emissions from jupiter and the sun. As for why this particular frequency was chosen instead of others, i have no answer. The sun is a black body and emits a continuum radio spectrum and jupiter has an emission peak at 20.1MHz. You can read up more about the emissions processes on wiki or google for the, that is not the topic for this blog post.  Now, looking at the material from the project  site , I estimate that the original team stopped updating the manuals after version 1.2,...

Information. In the right hands it can cure diseases. It can bring down dictators. It can help save millions of lives in the nick of time. It can be used to explore unknown territories. It can be used for the good of mankind. And in this age and time, when information about everything and anything in the world is at our finger tips in an instant thanks to the world wide web, are we capable enough to handle this constant flow of information? Are we mature enough to use this knowledge for the better? Are we educated enough to be able to use this information for the good of mankind? Are we aware at all of this mountain of knowledge at our finger tips?! Thanks to the internet, students can watch lectures of courses offered by reputed universities online for free; the layman can watch news, listen to radio and read international news which he wouldn’t have known about if not for the internet; entrepreneurs and engineers discuss ideas which might one day change the world and work with peo...

A telescope. What do you think it is?! The common perception is that a telescope is a device which is used to look at the stars! Telescopes have mirrors oriented in a a particular fashion which helps us look at stars! Well, this is just part of the story and the tip of an ice berg. A telescope can be described as any device which has the following parts A reflecting surface, to reflect the incoming electromagnetic radiation A receiver which can decipher this electromagnetic signal into a digital signal which we can understand and analyze! So, in the common perception, the reflecting surface is a mirror, one which has been ground to a micrometer finish and one which has been coated to be a (perfect) reflecting surface. And this setup is for observations in the visible part of the electromagnetic (EM) spectrum.  Note :   In the context of this blog post, light will refer to EM radiation of any frequency and not just the visible frequencies ...