My Perspective

All of us heard about the recent super moon phenomenon that took place on March 19 2011. Yes, I too witnessed the event late in the might and here is one of my pic.

Ever wondered where have those little sparrows that warble outside your home gone? The once ubiquitous House Sparrows (Passer Domesticus) are now rarely seen in the cities. However, they are still a part of the pleasant rustic residence. I was lucky to spot a bunch of them but in a hill station (not in the city). Here are couple of my pics..

Sudoku, the puzzle of this decade ,  is quite a fun to solve.! But if you find it boring and think it is fun only as long as one can solve it.. then do take my word.. "Sudoku is lot more fun to solve when it gets harder , but only if you have the right tactics and solving strategies." Over the next few weeks we will discuss solving tactics of varying levels and difficulties starting from the easiest to the difficult ones. We will only discuss the tactics for 3x3 sudoku ppuzzle..But before we start on that, I have a few points to make:

Do you want to know How to calculate the day of any given date off hand? Then read on.. For any given date, there is a simple workable formula to calculate the corresponding day. Since for most of the times we would work with dates in 20th and 21st century, So let me just limit myself to explain a simple formula that would work for these 200 years! Method : Given any date between 1900 to 2099, to calculate the corresponding day off the hand, we need to extract the following numbers. Legend: DD - day in the month MM - month CC - century YY - year in the century LY - no. of leap years past since beginning of century Given Date: DD MM CCYY LY - YY / 4 (last 2 digits of the year divided by 4) -> Quotient only Y - YY mod 7 (last 2 digits of the year's remainder with 7) L - LY mod 7 (no. of leap years in this century -> remainder with 7) M - value in the string ( 033 614 625 035 ) corresponding to month D - DD mod 7 (day in the month remainder with 7) C - 0 if CC = 20th century;

I am happy to have suggested Mr Sundar rajan GS to interview Dr. Sitaram Ramachandrula, Senior Research Scientist, HP Labs, Bangalore. Here is an interesting interview with him on the topic "Research in the Industry". Q: Please give a brief introduction about you. SR: My name is Sitaram Ramachandrula, and I am a Senior Research Scientist in HP Labs India in Bangalore for last 5years. I have done my BE in ECE from Osmania university campus and M.Tech in Digital electronics from Cochin university campus and Ph.D in ECE from Indian institute of Science Bangalore with a specialization in speech recognition. Prior to working with HP Labs, I worked with Philips semiconductors and Philips consumer electronics divisions for nearly 5 years. Before that I had brief stints in Encore software and Ammanna technologies.

How are Days of the week named? Continuing with the last post of why there are 7 days in a week, here I will try to elucidate the idea behind the naming and the order of the days in a week. This was the method used in the olden times (Babylonian civilization) to arrive at the names for the days and their order.

Everyone of us at some point or the other has resented the state of our nation. More so in the recent years, with all the scams that are exposed and coming to the public domain...! (thanks to RTI in part) Starting with the 2G spectrum scam (1.76 lakh crore) .. thanks to former Telecom minister A.Raja (now a resident of Tihar jail.. not for long); many more culprits are yet to come to book.. and all we are doing is to hope that they will..! Then the latest ISRO-Antrix-Devas deal (presumptive losses of 2 lakh crore).. All of these have highlighted just one issue.. How Corrupt our Legislative really is?

I am happy to have suggested Mr. Sundarrajan G S to interview Dr. Chandra Murthy, Professor , Electrical and Communication Engineering, Indian Institute of Science (IISc) Bangalore on the topic "How to pursue research" Here is the interview with  Chandra Murthy [CM] reproduced verbatim. The result is an wonderful insights into the thought process and view points of an academic. Q: A student has decided to do research – how do you suggest that he does a self analysis to really find out whether he is really interested in research? (peer pressure is common in colleges, so one might have resorted to research since his/her friends are into it.)

Many civilizations and religions have the concept of 7 days making a week. Is there any astronomical significance for this (7 days in a week)? How come all civilizations chose exactly to have 7 days in a week? I had asked the very same question to