Meditation – Then and Now ….

Posted on August 26, 2010 by Iceman

The US volunteers come up with very fundoo stuff … Three cheers to them …. Njoi

HOME ..

Posted on August 13, 2010 by Iceman

Its a visually stunning piece of art . A must watch ……

In 200,000 years on Earth, humanity has upset the balance of the planet, established by nearly four billion years of evolution. The price to pay is high, but it’s too late to be a pessimist: humanity has barely ten years to reverse the trend, become aware of the full extent of its spoliation of the Earth’s riches and change its patterns of consumption.

http://www.home-2009.com/

My Math Clock

Posted on May 25, 2009 by Iceman

Absolutely arbit post ….. I am doing an intern in Zeus Numerix in Pune again this summer and am working on some really interesting stuff . All throughout the day I am generally in front of the PC studying ebooks and writing in C/C++. A change would have been kinda nice … I decided to make a clock except that all the numbers would be represented by their mathematical significance …..(Just to get some experience on woodwork ,etc. ….. 😛 ) I got the mechanism for the clock from a local watch maker . For the base I decided to use wood from an old unwanted cupboard . A hacksaw , hammer were good enough to cut a piece approximately 18cm x 14cm x 1cm . To drill a hole so that the mechanism could be put in place I visited our electrician . To smoothen the surfaces I used a sand paper lying around my house .For the layout of the clock i.e. the numbers etc. I used Scribus along with $\LaTeX$ .

Finally the layout or background looked like this ….. I did also add a $t$ denoting for the time variable …. 😉

I referred to Wikipedia for the significance of the numbers …..

$\sqrt[3]{1728} = 12$ —- I choose 1728 coz its 1 less than 1729 . The smallest number to represented as a sum of 2 cubes .

$0! = 1$ —- Coz 0! = 1 ….

$\left ( 0010\right )_{10}$ —- 0010 in base 10 is 2 .

$FermatPrime\left[ 0\right ] = 3$ —- 3 is the first Fermat Prime . All numbers satisfying $F_{n} = 2^{2^{ \overset{n} {}}} + 1$

$2 \uparrow\uparrow\uparrow 2 = 4$ —- thats the way 4 represented in Knuth’s Up Arrow Notation .

$\left ( 2\varphi - 1 \right )^2 = 5$ —- where $\varphi$ is the golden ratio $\varphi = \frac{1+\sqrt{5}}{2}$

$\mid S_{3} \mid = 6$ —- 6 is the cardinality of the smallest non-abelian group .

$M_{3} = 7$ —- 7 is the 3 Mersenne Prime .

$F_{6} = 8$ —- 8 is the 6th Fibonacci Number .

$3^{2^{1}} = 9$ —- 9 is an exponential factorial .

$\left ( 1010\right )_2 = 10$ —- 1010 in binary is 10 in decimal (base 10)

$\frac{\Phi_2(10)}{\gcd(\Phi_2(10),2)} = 11^{c} , {c} \in \mathbb{N}$ —- 11 is the second unique prime….

Finally, after the assembly it looked like this ……

a better pic sometime sooner …..

braille browser

Posted on April 7, 2009 by Iceman

Long time since I wrote anything on my blog. Its been a hectic schedule here , although things have eased out after subscribing to an internet connection in the room. Elections are coming , so please vote. Its really very crucial that the youth have a say in the immediate future of our country.

Parithi n me were thinking of something for the ECell Ideas Challenge. Its a competition wherein you present a techy and sellable idea.

One of the ideas we submitted was a braille browser. Essentially a browser for the blind.

The Government is putting in a lot of effort in converting texts to braille. It is time consuming and costly too. We thought of designing a interface over which the blind could access the information on the internet.It provides them with endless opportunities in exploring the World Wide Web.

The display would be in braille.

Is it really practical ????

What we need is a touch screen interface that would dynamically change the indentations on the surface.The next part is about decoding the information on any website. Consider Wikipedia. Removing the unnecessary images like its logo and background the necessary information can be easily decoded by using a suitable standard and further sending the appropriate signals to the microcontrollers on the tablet . It would just be like live feed or feeds that we get in say Google Reader.

The touch screen interface is the tough part. What we need is a material that changes its characteristics dynamically thus enabling us to feel the indentations on its surface. Also , its characteristics should be modifiable by applying suitable electric or magnetic fields .

We have thought of using ferro-magnetic materials for the same. But the idea isnt tried or tested . Neither do we have any clue on how ferromagnetic materials would feel like .

If you have any material in sight which would do such a thing or if you have any other way of approaching this problem leave a comment on this blog or write to me at balkrishnanitt [at] gmail.com .

Bye,

Jai Gurudev.