Blog@GraceJunction

Three weeks before Christmas 1993, Wolfgang Dircks died while watching television. Neighbors in his Berlin apartment complex hardly noticed the absence of the 43-year-old. His rent continued to be paid automatically out of his bank account.

Five years later, 1998 the money ran out, and the landlord entered Dircks’ apartment to inquire. He found Dircks’s remains still in front of the tube. The TV guide on his lap was open to December 3, the presumed day of his death. Although the television set had burned out, the lights on Dircks’s Christmas tree were still twinkling away.

It’s a bizarre story, but it shouldn’t surprise us. Each year thousands of people are found accidentally days or weeks after their solitary deaths in the affluent cities and suburbs of the world. If a person can die in such isolation that his neighbors never notice, how lonely was he when alive? (more…)

Today morning’s newspaper declared with great awe about the achievement of one man, whose glamorous life and inheritance is anybody’s envy. Modern India’s greatest entrepreneur, son of Mr. Dhirubhai Ambani, Mukesh is all set to complete his flashy 27 storey house, costing $2b, world’s largest and costliest home! When this house gets completed it will be 550 feet high, with 400000 square feet of interior space. The Forbes report titled ‘Inside the World’s first billion dollar home’ says “The only remotely comparable high-rise property currently on the market is the 70 million dollar triplex penthouse at the Pierre Hotel in New York, designed to resemble a French chateau, and climbing 525 feet in the air.”

Reading further, the report says that the house will be unlike any other livable hotel or home where the layout, measurements and material used will be custom made and not replicated on any floor. (more…)

Now, I am writing this in continuation with the article that I wrote earlier- Creating Artificial Life.

When Craig Venter announced that he was going to unravel the human genome, it sparked one of the most bitterly contested races in the history of science and compelling me to pen down a article. Now, the same Craig Venter who had once contended with the United States government and led the private effort to map the human genome, is back again hitting the headlines and savouring the attention given to his pursuit in the genetic field. Here, in an extract from his new memoir, he describes the acrimonious sprint to the finish. (more…)

The latest buzz in the field of science, technology and particularly robotics is: Will machines overpower man?

Recently while watching NDTV, I saw about robots possessing human emotions of “love” being created! The highlighted question was: Now that the robots are being advanced to the extent of being capable of expressing human emotions, along with superpower, strength and intellect, will robots replace humans?

So man does seem a bit bothered about whether machines will overpower and replace him. Ironic as it is, the existence of man is under question, and that too by his own creation! (Can I take the liberty to imagine God saying, “Now man will know how it feels.”) (more…)

And God created man in his own image; male and female he created them and blessed them saying,” Be fruitful and multiply, and fill the earth and subdue it”….

Well, that is exactly what man has been implementing till date – multiply (so much such that there arises a need to develop organizations which are worried about controlling the ever increasing population) and at the same time exercise dominion over all the earth. Nevertheless, the human race is pretty adaptive and has managed to accommodate one and all.

Apart from doing what man was asked to do, he realized the need to expand his intellectual initiatives and designs. One of them was woman’s advancement!! They also gave it a beautiful synonym – Feminism!! (more…)

The Hadron Collider is not just bent on changing the basic laws of Physics, it is already paved the way for dismissing the current worldwide web and its outdated components such as routers and cables as jurassic.

When the ‘red button’ of the collider will be pressed this summer, this particle accelerator will not just give a preview of the origins of the universe but will also generate annual data that would require 56million CDs. That is a stack almost 50miles high!

The only option before them was the internet but then, the speed was crippling and therefore necessity forced another child to be invented, ‘The Grid’. The Grid uses state of the art fibre optic cables and some 2,00,000 servers interconnected to form a parallel internetwork connecting various nations. And the fascinating thing is that, it is almost 10,000 times faster than the internet! (more…)

How did the whole creation come in to being? This is the question which still divides the American people, which was also the subject of a court room dialogue back in 1925.

The story goes like this, a famous American defense lawyer Clarence Darrow, while defending a school teacher charged for teaching evolution, called William Jennings Brian, the prosecuting attorney and an avowed Biblical scholar, as a defence witness! Then began a series of questions designed to undermine a literalist interpretation of the Bible. From Noah to Jonah, from Moses to Adam …. After initially contending that everything in the Bible should be accepted as it is given there, Brian finally conceded that the words of the Bible should not always be taken literally. In fact, in response to some relentless questioning on the number of days taken for creation, Brian replied that “My impression is that they were periods and not 24 hour days.” This clinched the day for Darrow, as it was assumed that one such ‘period’ could be infact a few hundred million years and it is plausible to assume that a Biblical day could be the same as a huge geological epoch or era , big enough to accommodate all the evolutionary changes required by Darwinism.

(more…)