Intresting non-techinical readup on Gravity etc.

On Gravity, Oreos and a Theory of Everything from NYTimes

Translations of Hindi song lyrics

Not bad translations.... from http://www.bollywhat.com/lyrics/swad_lyr.html


yeh jo des hai tera swades hai tera
this country of yours is your motherland
tujhe hai pukaara
and is calling out to you
yeh woh ba.ndhan hai jo kabhi TuuT nahii.n sakta
this is a bond which can never break
miTTii kii hai jo khushbuu tuu kaise bhulaayega
how can you forget the scent of your earth
tuu chaahe kahii.n jaaye tuu lautke aayega
you can go anywhere but you'll always come back
nayii nayii raaho.n me.n dabii dabii aaho.n me.n
in new paths, in every sigh
khoye khoye dil se tere
to your lost heart
koii yeh kahega
someone will say
yeh jo des hai tera swades hai tera
this land of yours is your motherland
tujhse zi.ndagii hai yeh kah rahii
life is telling you
sab to paa liya ab hai kya kamii
you have achieved everything now what's left
yuu.n to saare sukh hai barse
looks like hapiness has been showered on you
par duur tuu hai apne ghar se
but you're far from your home
haa.n laut chal tuu ab deewane
now come back oh crazy one
jahaa.n koii to tujhe apna maane
where at least someone will call you their own
aawaaz de tujhe bulaaye
and will call out to you
vahii des
that very same country
yeh jo des hai tera....
this land that is yours.....
yeh pal hai vahii jisme.n hai chhupii
this moment has hidden in it
puurii ek sadii saarii zi.ndagii
a whole century of life
tuu na puuchh raaste me.n kahe
don't ask why in the road
aaye hain is tarah do raahe.n
has come a fork with two ways
tuu hi to hai raah sujhaaye
you are the one who should choose the path
tuu hii to hai ab jo yeh bataaye
you should choose
jaaye to kis disha me.n jaaye
which direction to take
vahii des
this very country
yeh jo des hai tera....
this land that is yours....

quotes

Curious things, habits. People themselves never knew they had them.
-- Agatha Christie

It isn't what you have, or who you are, or whereyou are,
or what you are doing that makes you happy or unhappy.
It is what you think about.
-- Dale Carnegie

Happy Diwali

Wishing Everyone A Very Happy Diwali.

Hope the new year brings lots of happiness, love and laughter to you!!!

100 Years of Relativity -- Sir Albert Einstein

Einstein's Legacy -- Where are the "Einsteinians?" from Logos Journal [via ALDaily]
An excellent write up on Einstein. There is another article on him regarding the situtaion of Nazi Germany and him being a Jew. That is a good read too.

"For more than two centuries after Newton published his theories of space, time, and motion in 1687, most physicists were Newtonians. They believed, as Newton did, that space and time are absolute, that force causes acceleration, and that gravity is a force conveyed across a vacuum at a distance. Since Darwin there are few professional biologists who are not Darwinians, and if most psychologists no longer often call themselves Freudians, few doubt that there is an unconscious or that sexuality plays a big role in it. So as we celebrate the 100th anniversary of Einstein’s great discoveries, the question arises: How many professional physicists are Einsteinians?"
...
"After 1930, virtually all of Einstein’s colleagues were certain the revolution was over and that physics was nearly complete. Nearly alone in his stance, Einstein saw the quantum as only a stepping stone to the real thing, which he searched for the rest of his life. Quantum theory was not the only theory that bothered Einstein. Few people have appreciated how dissatisfied he was with his own theories of relativity. Special relativity grew out of Einstein’s insight that the laws of electromagnetism cannot depend on relative motion and that the speed of light therefore must be always the same, no matter how the source or the observer moves. Among the consequences of that theory are that energy and mass are equivalent (the now-legendary relationship E = mc2) and that time and distance are relative, not absolute. Special relativity was the result of 10 years of intellectual struggle, yet Einstein had convinced himself it was wrong within two years of publishing it. He rejected his theory, even before most physicists had come to accept it, for reasons that only he cared about. For another 10 years, as the world of physics slowly absorbed special relativity, Einstein pursued a lonely path away from it. "
...
(It took us hundred years to catch up to him)
"One way to understand this story is to say that theoretical physics has finally caught up to Einstein. While he was shunned in his Princeton years as he pursued the unified field theory, the Institute for Advanced Study where he worked is now filled with theorists who search for new variants of unified field theories. It is indeed a vindication of sorts for Einstein because much of what today’s string theorists do in practice is play with unified theories of the kinds that Einstein and his few colleagues invented."
...
"Let us be frank and admit that most of us have neither the courage nor the patience to emulate Einstein. We should instead honor Einstein by asking whether we can do anything to ensure that in the future those few who do follow Einstein’s path, those who approach science as uncompromisingly as he did, have less risk of unemployment of the sort he suffered at the beginning of his career and less risk of the marginalization he endured at the end. If we can do this, if we can make the path easier for those few who do follow him, we may make possible a revolution in science that even Einstein failed to achieve."

thought

subtle changes that people make in their behavior don't go unnoticed...

What will you name your child?

We get letters (3) from google blog

"Walid Elias Kai, a Ph.D. in search engine marketing, is, it must be said, an avid fan of our company. Dr. Kai, who is Lebanese, and his Swedish wife Carol live in Kalmar, Sweden, where their son was born on September 12. His name? Oliver Google Kai."

And here is the website of Google-Kai