Deepwater Horizon Oil spill - The biggest ever made Chocolate fudge !!!

Its an year over today, since the biggest chocolate fudge was started preparing. On April 20,2010, the British Petroleum's Chocolate fudge preparation in the Gulf of Mexico was initiated by a buildup of abnormal pressure in their oil drilling platform - Deep horizon followed by a jet of methane gas under high pressure getting ignited when trying to escape through the drilling columns. This methane gas explosion started the ignition of the entire platform - which acted as the stove for the fudge preparation.

This oil leak which lasted for 5 months leaked almost 5 million barrels of oil in to the sea and USA got the proud certification of the world's best polluter of the environment. The effects of this chocolate fudge in sea couldn't be explained in words!!! What more cruel can man do to nature!!

British Petroleum was blamed for not having followed adequate safety norms before explosion and for not able to control the leak after it started. The job that they had to do is to put a cap on the pipe where the leak was happening. But its not as simple as putting on a condom!!
It required strenuous scientific efforts by the entire team and US government. The leak part before and after the sealing of the cap is shown below:

The leak had so many lessons to teach to the mankind! And one year after one of the worst accidents, the Food and Drug Administration has found only 13 out of 1735 tissue samples from sea food show traces of oil residues. And that the sea food is safe to consume. Other than teaching us lessons, and giving huge losses to BP, this incident atleast helped some small scale industries to grow by printing t-shirts on this theme. Some hit t-shirt designs were:

This chocolate fudge is not only the biggest but also the most expensive one to mankind and nature!!!

Let's pray that we don't face such a disaster atleast in our lifetime.

How to KISS???

Now I am not teaching you how to kiss but to KISS.
KISS stands for Keep it simple, Stupid!!!

Let me follow this KISS principle. Let me "Keep it Simple and Sweet". Let me "Keep it simple and straightforward."

Use Occam's razor always. By the way, this razor doesn't shave your beard. But it shaves off the beard-like-unwanted-stuff from the problem you are looking at. Meaning, it is just a complicated explanation of KISS principle instead. Stupid Occam (actually Ockham) didn't keep it simple here.

Some big times comedies that failed to follow KISS principle are here:

PizzaHut introduced new sizes for their Pizzas to attract more customers. Those sizes were - large and big. Now here the confusion starts that whether the large one is bigger than the big one or the big one is larger than the large one. They just complicated it and confused their customers.

RJ Reynold's smokeless cigarettes were a terrible flop in 1988. How do you expect to sell a cigarette without

smoke in the market? Why cant they just "KISS"?

A 2009 survey by British Telecom Home IT support reveals that 71% of Britons have upto 10 electronic gadgets that are unused because of their complicated  features and so called "user-friendliness".

So the simple message is that always keep KISSing. Another small pick from my favorite novel- "Deception point" (Dan Brown) says - "When multiple explanations exist, the simplest is usually correct." Very true!!!

Mother earth has started spinning faster!!!

Check out the wiki-page for list of earthquakes in Japan here - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_earthquakes_in_Japan.

It shows the foreshocks on March 9th 2011 and the Sendai earthquake on March 11th with an 8.9 magnitude. Of course, followed by plenty of aftershocks.  This earthquake is the fifth largest ever since man knew how to measure earthquake. Probably, if Noah had this Ritcher scale with him, he might have recorded more earthquakes with higher magnitudes. So what exactly did this earthquake do to our Mother earth other than creating a huge Tsunami and killing thousands of people?? Here is a little bit of academic review.

According to experts, this earthquake has moved the main island of Japan by 8 feet (2.4 meters) and shifted the Earth on its axis. This shift in the axis is 10 centimeters according to National Institute of Geophysics and Valcanology. This shift is so small for a ball of 6370 km radius which is spinning at 30 km per second. But it has some impact which only experts claim to understand. There is one major impact. Mother earth has started spinning faster, now!!! Yeah, which makes our everyday shortened by 1.6 microseconds. (A microsecond is the equivalent of 1/1,000,000 of a second).

Imagine a girl, coming out of a shopping mall with loads of shopped items in her hands, asked to spin about her own centre in an ice skating pond. She will spin at a speed slower than she could spin before entering the mall. It is not because she is tired shopping, it is because of the bags she is carrying in her hands. Those bags increase her momentum during spinning and it decreases the speed of spinning or rotation, technically. Holding a bag of 3 kgs in each hand keeping it stretched to the maximum and then slowly bringing it close to the body will increase the speed of spinning. This is because the moment of inertia falls as she brings the bags close to her body and so her angular velocity increases. This is why ice skating dresses are designed taking care of this angular momentum. The more they are close to the body, they can spin faster and faster, when they do ice skates. In fact, if she was spinning nude in the ice pond, she will be spinning the fastest for sure but making the entire world literally slower for the men audience.

This exactly happened here in Sendai earthquake. The quake has pulled in some of the tectonic plates close to its centre and pushing others outside(lets not bother the names now). So now its like, earth is spinning with her  shopping bags close to her body. And she started spinning faster - thereby reducing our day by 1.6 microseconds. Previously, 2004 Indian Ocean quake reduced our day by 6.8 microseconds and
2010 Chilean earthquake reduced our day by 1.3 microseconds. There is no direct impact to a common man because of these negligible changes, which is like a sparrow hitting a flying Boeing Airbus 380 both at their maximum speeds.

So therefore there is not much to hype on this topic as many news channels claim. Even the experts are not sure what long term impacts they may cause. But media makes the common man feel that the world is towards its end. One of the news channels claimed that this earthquake was a result of global warming and related shit. I expect them to telecast how dinosaurs gone mad using cars and refrigerators millions of years ago to cause global warming and earthquakes. Or even how manufacturing industries in Atlantis caused global warming making the continent disappear into the ocean.

Finally, on a lighter note, if the earth keeps increasing its speed of rotation and reaches 30 times its present speed, one good thing is that we can get the paycheck everyday!!!

India Googled !@!

When there is a continuous change happening around you, which one do you would you notice first? I would notice the one that is rapidly changing! When I made a search to know what other people google in the google, I came to understand more that is getting changed!

Here is the most popular searches in India for the year 2010 on "how to" (http://www.google.com/intl/en/press/zeit
geist2010/regions/in.html)

Just take another look at the list before proceeding. So, lets derive our inferences from the bottom of the list.

#10 - How to meditate - People have started getting tensed more with work pressure or personal life imbalance and are trying to seek a way out. Or, it could be because, people don't want to pay for meditation, as it goes, at least peace of mind should be free of cost! 

#9 - How to make money - People are trying to make shortcuts to earn a second income. Or, many entrepreneurs are growing up. Or people are short of ideas and their creativity quotient is going down to make or innovate business. Or the inflation level of the country is so high that they want to make more money. 

Reasons could be many more too!!!

#8 - How to Create a website - Many entrepreneurs, many companies, many businesses, many forums... all go online!!! and they want to create a website by themselves before outsourcing to someone else. And nothing much interesting here, in fact!!!

#7 - How to Tie a tie. This shows that plenty of Indians now move to white collared job or get them first shot. Or even blue collared jobs deserve a tie nowadays here. Or people weren't taught how to tie a tie in schools. But whatever the reason may be, what we can infer is that, we are getting aligned to the so called "western culture" more and more. People wear tie even in hot sun here!

#6 & #5 - How to gain weight & how to reduce weight - Both these results have had quite close hits. So the number of people obese and thin are quite close. People are more worried about their bodily features. May be if Google can release results gender wise, ideally, hits on reduce weight would be more from women and to gain weight would be more from men. But without proper evidence, they don't stand concrete. And its quite obvious that unhealthy and junk food is more prevalent in the country. Or unhealthy eating habits is prevalent. Or poor awareness on healthy eating habits is in place. All the same, it implies that people are atleast more concerned on themselves at one point of life and trying to find a shortcut.

#4 - How to improve spoken English - People want to learn and speak better English. Reasons - More jobs demand people speaking English. Or people want to impress someone by their hi-fi English. Or the culture around them is getting changed to a common language called English. Or the regional languages are no more considered as barriers to communicate with this still emerging language in India. Or atleast, it is considered as a sort of status to speak good English. Or people travel more to foreign countries. And many more inferences can be derived.

Now, that we saw some healthy and unhealthy changing cultures being inferred from the list, what is more changing is inferred from the top 3 hits:

#3 - How to impress a girl - How can a google search help on this is topic is unclear to me. But reasons may be that girls demand something extraordinary from guys (what guy's believe). May be there are lot many competitions for a girl and many men are trying to impress and googling to find the best way. Or may be men are getting more dates with women, implying the increased dating culture in India. Or men who had had dates might have had bad experiences and don't want them to be repeated. Or more men are planning to propose women and want them to be impressed during their proposals. Or men have become dumb that they have to google such topics. Really the state of those girls with boyfriends who had googled this topic is pathetic.

#2 - How to kiss - This is getting more interesting. People want to know how to kiss someone properly and passionately. Or they really want to know the art of kissing. Ideally, we can infer that all those who hit the "hot to impress a girl" should have tried this also. And this hit gives results with video, and apparently, people would have chosen videos for better illustration on kissing. 

#1 - How to get pregnant - Now this is totally unclear, because it is not "how to make pregnant". Reasons may be, people are still unclear of the whole "hole in that wall" story. Or people are having many complicated medical problems that they don't get conceived. Or guys are very cautious that they understand the "game" fully so that they don't become fathers too early. Or people are still feeling shy to ask such questions to others and they prefer googling to discussing with someone. My overall inference is that Sex education is bad in India.

From the above set of results, one can very easily capture the change happening around us. The change that happens in our culture. Whether such a change is welcome or not is not being discussed right now, but let it be an eye - opener towards the path we are drifting.