:-)

From the internet when I was trying to gather some Perls of wisdom.

http://www.comp.leeds.ac.uk/Perl/Misc/electricity.txt

It was originally posted by David O'Brien in in Leed's University's CS Dept's local news system. (at least, that's what I gathered from the page that had this link!)

ps: In case there are non-computer geeks reading this, that misspelling of 'Perl' was deliberate. :-)



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Here is a dissertation on physical science for your enlightenment.
I don't know where it came from so it must be true!

[ Update: This appears to have come from Dave Barry, and the same text
can be found as:

http://www.uk.research.att.com/~fms/electricity.html
http://rachel.albany.edu/~jc9334/barry1.html

and many other places on the web. I'd check with Dave, but he
doesn't respond to email any more (and life's too short for snail
mail) ]
.....................................................................


Today's scientific question is: What in the world is electricity and
where does it go after it leaves the toaster?

Here is a simple experiment that will teach you an important
electrical lesson: On a cool dry day, scuff your feet along a carpet,
then reach your hand into a friend's mouth and touch one of his dental
fillings. Did you notice how your friend twitched violently and cried
out in pain? This teaches one that electricity can be a very powerful
force, but we must never use it to hurt others unless we need to learn
an important lesson about electricity.

It also illustrates how an electrical circuit works. When you scuffed
your feet, you picked up batches of "electrons", which are very small
objects that carpet manufacturers weave into carpet so that they will
attract dirt. The electrons travel through your bloodstream and
collect in your finger, where they form a spark that leaps to your
friend's filling, then travel down to his feet and back into the
carpet, thus completing the circuit.

AMAZING ELECTRONIC FACT: If you scuffed your feet long enough without
touching anything, you would build up so many electrons that your
finger would explode! But this is nothing to worry about unless you
have carpeting.

Although we modern persons tend to take our electric lights, radios,
mixers, etc. for granted, hundreds of years ago people did not have
any of these things, which is just as well because there was no place
to plug them in. Then along came the first Electrical Pioneer,
Benjamin Franklin, who flew a kite in a lightning storm and received a
serious electrical shock. This proved that lightning was powered by
the same force as carpets, but it also damaged Franklin's brain so
severely that he started speaking only in incomprehensible maxims,
such as, "A penny saved is a penny earned." Eventually he had to be
given a job running the post office.

After Franklin came a herd of Electrical Pioneers whose names have
become part of our electrical terminology: Myron Volt, Mary Louise
Amp, James Watt, Bob Transformer, etc. These pioneers conducted many
important electrical experiments. Among them, Galvani discovered
(this is the truth) that when he attached two different kinds of metal
to the leg of a frog, an electrical current developed and the frog's
leg kicked, even though it was no longer attached to the frog, which
was dead anyway. Galvani's discovery led to enormous advances in the
field of amphibian medicine. Today, skilled veterinary surgeons can
take a frog that has been seriously injured or killed, implant pieces
of metal in its muscles, and watch it hop back into the pond --
almost.

But the greatest Electrical Pioneer of them all was Thomas Edison, who
was a brilliant inventor despite the fact that he had little formal
education and lived in New Jersey. Edison's first major invention in
1877 was the phonograph, which could soon be found in thousands of
American homes, where it basically sat until 1923, when the record was
invented. But Edison's greatest achievement came in 1879 when he
invented the electric company. Edison's design was a brilliant
adaptation of the simple electrical circuit: the electric company
sends electricity through a wire to a customer, then immediately gets
the electricity back through another wire, then (this is the brilliant
part) sends it right back to the customer again.

This means that an electric company can sell a customer the same batch
of electricity thousands of times a day and never get caught, since
very few customers take the time to examine their electricity closely.
In fact, the last year any new electricity was generated was 1937.

Today, thanks to men like Edison and Franklin, and frogs like
Galvani's, we receive almost unlimited benefits from electricity. For
example, in the past decade scientists have developed the laser, an
electronic appliance so powerful that it can vaporize a bulldozer 2000
yards away, yet so precise that doctors can use it to perform delicate
operations to the human eyeball, provided they remember to change the
power setting from "Bulldozer" to "Eyeball."

Weak example.

That is how I found Rang De Basanti! The concept to somehow merge two events in different times as one may be the first of its kind, but a good deed done in vain is worse than a bad deed.

WARNING: The plot is partly revealed below

There are a few things that did not convince me in the movie:

1. The reason - Yes, death of a loved one is very painful, but that leading them to justify killing of another man was not entirely convincing. In this respect, it was like any other Hindi movie of late 80s and early 90s when the HERO only needed a reason to take up and machine gun and go tat-tat-tat-tatting into the Villain's lair.

2. The method - Killing! Taking life of another person is a very extreme step; one that is taken as a last resort. The characters, and indeed the character of Flt Lt. Rathore whose death caused them to resort to the extreme step, exhort the youth to take up positions in IAS, IPS, politics to fight the system. Yet, they seem to conveniently forget this and take the easy way out.

3. The comparison - Likening a few disillusioned young boys to great freedom fighters like Bhagat Singh and co. was a little hard to swallow. They had a dream, had a passion, had a spirit which was solely channelled towards the freedom of their motherland and not to settle petty scores with individuals. The film ended up glorifying and equating disillusioned killing to patriotism and might influence the young to think that going about knocking out people/politicians/leaders/administrators who, I emphasize, 'they think are evil' is the right way to fight the system. The very idea is frightening!

All in all, it was way below mark when compared to movies like Swades and Yuva that had a very positive and constructive message to convey and were equally inspirational. I had goose-bumps for the entire duration while watching Yuva. Such was the impact of the movie.

In RDB, the only moments when I felt a surge of adrenaline was when Atul Kulkarni sang 'Sarfaroshi ki Tamanna' and when 'Jallianwala Bagh Massacre' was depicted.

Auspicious day coming

Feb 2, Vasant Panchami, is one of the most auspicious days in Hindu Calendar. It is so auspicious that a boy and a girl can get married on this day without any need to look for a muhurtham (an auspicious time). This is a day when there is no need to match Kundalis, Gotrams etc. Just the boy and the girl are enough to complete the marriage requirements.

Why am I publicising this information here? Well, one never knows how important such information may turn out to be for some people! :-)