Blog@GraceJunction

(Re-post from March 26th, 2008)

The papers today reveal a quest of science that started several decades ago. Physicists from all over the world are getting together in Europe and are racing to prove the existence of a particle that’s surmised to be at the heart of the matter!

Dubbed the “God particle“, the Higgs Boson, which “it” is otherwise called, is a controversial particle believed to bestow mass on all other particles. Scientists are hoping to discover traces of its presence in Fermilab’s Tevatron, a 17-mile-long circumference particle accelerator (also called the Hadron’s Collider) that smashes opposing beams of protons and antiprotons around a circular track, sifting through the debris with two immense detectors. This experiment is supposedly expected to bring back Europe as the leaders in Physics and not the USA! (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…)

Denied his daily staple of porn and horror films on his personal computer, a youth from an affluent family in Kolhapur, Maharashtra decided to get rid of what he thought was the root cause of his misery. Abhishek Patil (21) confessed that he had murdered his grandmother Shantabai Patil (67) in cold blood on April 3. The youth was apparently angry that he had been asked to vacate his room to accommodate his grandmother after she had moved to their house recently.

Shantabai had recently shifted to the home of her elder son and Abhishek’s father, Shirish Patil, who is a doctor. Abhishek was upset with his grandmother using his room as he could not get his dose of horror and porn clips which he used to watch on his computer, he said. Abhishek was told by his parents to share a room with his brother, Viren. (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…)

Many of you would never have heard the name ‘Tim Berners-Lee’. No, its not the full-form of ‘TB’.

About two decades ago Tim Berners-Lee had thought up a project based on the concept of hypertext to facilitate information sharing among researchers at the Europen Organization for Nuclear Research, the world’s largest particle physics laboratory. He never realized the potential and scale of his invention.

Yes, he is the ‘Father of the Internet’. But a very worried Father!
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As we walked down the road to the café, the young man with me started revealing more facts about his life. His father was an elder in the church and was a man of outstanding testimony. While he grew up, he always looked up to his father and proudly said to himself that one day he would become like his father.

This is the experience of most boys while they are still growing. Somehow I feel that most fathers have let down their kids. I mean, they have not kept up to their children’s expectations and should I frankly say, they have not kept up to God’s expectations in what they teach, in the way they live, in their love, their faith, and their purity. I am not being judgmental. I include myself in this ineffective league of fathers, who have not kept up to the standards as God expects all fathers to keep. The result: a generation of renegade and drifting youngsters, who lack proper role models to look up to or emulate.

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