Blog@GraceJunction

Learning never stops in a lifetime. A few days back I was teaching an engineering student basics of engineering drawing. While teaching concepts on three-dimensional drawings and designs, both of us observed a concept repeated time and again - “draw the reference lines first”.

We noted that it was very important, to first draw the reference lines before we commence drawing any other lines of the drawing, no matter how much important they seemingly appear. Every other line in the drawing had to be drawn keeping the reference line in perspective. If the reference lines were skewed, you would never be able to get the results right.

We also found a very intriguing fact, guess what ? Normally, every one draws the reference lines first, as if this is something common inscribed in everyone’s heart. A true reflection of something more solidly drawn on the heart of every human – Our Conscience. (more…)

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…)