blog@Yantrajaal

While India celebrates the success of Chandrayaan-3 in safely delivering the Vikram lander and the Pragyan rover to the surface of the Moon, it should not view this exercise as an end by itself but merely a means to an end. But what is that end goal that India should be looking for?  A lunar base of course, but first, why? History tells us that the famous Chinese mariner Zheng He carried out seven maritime missions (1405 - 1433) on behalf of the Ming emperor to different parts of East and South-East Asia right up to the Horn of Africa. The goal was to increase trade by 'showing the flag' and impressing the natives of distant lands with the maritime prowess of the Chinese navy and the wealth of products that were available in China. But the fatal flaw in this strategy was that he never established a Chinese colony anywhere. On the other hand, the European mariners who came a century later not only visited the same ports but immediately set up 'factories' or trading posts...

The stunning success of the Chandrayaan / Vikram / Pragyan mission opens up a world of possibilities for India on the Moon. The next logical step would be to set up a permanent base station - similar to Dakshin Gangotri in Antartica -- that would serve as a locus for the mining, manufacturing and other operations. The Indian engineering industry has extensive experience in these areas, but their expertise would have to be fine-tuned and optimised for the lunar environment. The single most significant difference from Earth bound operations would be the use of autonomous machines, or robots, to do most, if not all of the work. This is because supporting a human workforce in such a harsh environment would increase the cost of doing business to the point of becoming economically non-sustainable. But irrespective of what we mine, manufacture or otherwise process on an industrial scale on the Moon, what we would need first is a source of energy - abundant energy. While solar panels that trap...

Unlike Abrahamic religions, Sanatan Dharma is mature enough to handle both heresy and blasphemy, and this gives us the right and liberty to question certain perspectives that lie at the core of what is referred to as Hinduism. Of late, a certain minor operative of ISKCON has been very critical of Vivekananda and Ramakrishna but on enquiring further I realised the ISKCON boss himself, Prabhupada, had referred to both Vivekananda and Aurobindo as rascals. To understand this behaviour, I delved further and realised that what I was reading today was in fact bending back to what a school friend of mine had once told me: that the Bhagavad Gita reads like a marketing pitch -- believe in me or you are doomed. An image of a woman seen in the reflection on  the pupil of one eye of another woman. digital art. Many well-known and supposedly erudite people have sung paeans to the glory of the Gita that was delivered 'directly by God' on the battlefield of the Mahabharat. But it has some obv...

 

Nearly 100,000 years before the present era, when hominins (modern humans) were diverging away from hominids (the great apes) on the evolutionary graph, we come across multiple species of humans like neanderthal, cro magnon and denisovan sharing space on earth. But with the passage of time and changing circumstances,  all human species except cro magnon were eventually eliminated leaving only one species, now identified as  homo sapiens (latin : wise man) to inherit the planet. Closer in time, or just about 500 years ago, we observed how the arrival of European Christians in America eliminated the social and cultural constructs of the Inca / Maya civilisations that had existed there since the dawn of history.  In both cases, the coexistence of two competing societies resulted in either the extinction or a significant transformation of one and the eventual growth and dominance of the other. Where both have survived, one has become the dominant, as in the case of humans, wh...

 This year, there has been an explosive flowering of the Palash flower all across the Bengal-Jharkhand border. Starting right from Raniganj and Asansol and following the railway line through Dhanbad, Bokaro and Chandrapura we saw an incredible number of Palash trees in full bloom.  But the best was reserved for us at Muruguma near the Purulia Ranchi district border. Here we stayed at the Bon Polashi Eco Hut and the place really lived up to its name. Shukraburu Mountain Sagorjhora Irrigation Scheme Lake

  Trams in Vienna Trams of Budapest Trams in Warsaw Trams in Prague Trams in Brno , Czech  Tram in Berlin Trams in Krakow Tram at Poznan and tram at Rashbehari Avenue , Calcutta all images from 2016 sorry, you may not be able to see these pictures unless you are a friend of mine on Facebook!

Modern science is sceptical of astrology because it cannot be explained in terms of any physical phenomenon. This fear of inexplicability of this ancient body of knowledge has metamorphosed into derision and hostility by those who claim to be rational and of a scientific temper. This behaviour follows a trajectory best described as “First they ignore you. Then they ridicule you. And then they attack you and want to burn you. And then they build monuments to you.” [ Nicholas Klein, 1914 , wrongly attributed to  MK Gandhi ]   In this article, I argue that astrology is no more inexplicable than quantum mechanics, one of the two crown jewels of 20th century science, and hence should not  be excluded from scholarly discussion and research. In an earlier article I have argued astrology is the science of correlations. We do not care about how and why a particular planetary pattern affects a person’s life. Instead, we look for correlations between patterns of positions of a...

 Learnt about a new video-editing software, ffmpeg , and used it enhance the output of the Transit Tracker module of my Parashar21 suite of free, python based astrology utilities. Check out the Parashar21 github page of simply enjoy this video.

 Significant updates made to the Parashar21 software. See the Github repository for the latest.

  Van Gogh style Unreal Engine

 

 

More Digital Art from Generative Adversarial Networks  First, the "Unreal Engine" Version Then, the "Watercolour" Version

  My first attempt at original, digital art using the magic of Generative Adversarial Networks. Using the Colab notebook built by Hillel Wayne.

Whether it is really true or not, Twitter has often been accused, often in anecdotal terms, as being biased towards the “Left-Liberal” edge of the political spectrum. This point of view got a boost when Elon Musk launched a hostile take-over bid of the company under the banner of free-speech and a whole bunch of self declared Left-Libs claimed that they would leave Twitter and move to Instagram if and when Elon Musk takes over. Now that the Board of Twitter has capitulated and accepted Musk’s offer, it is time to explore how this issue of censorship and free-speech will be addressed. Musk has of course tweeted that even his most severe critics will be allowed on the platform but opinion is divided on his real commitment. Will he be fair? The answer to that question lies in the womb of futurity but in the meanwhile, let us explore an alternative approach to ensure free speech. We are looking for something that eliminates or reduces the discretionary power of human beings, the so-called ...

 Introduction Astrology is based on the analysis and detection of correlated patterns. Causation and correlation are two different ways of studying related phenomena. Switching on an oven is the obvious cause for a cake to be baked but the consumption of flour, sugar, eggs, butter and electricity in the kitchen is strongly correlated to the appearance of a cake. These six events are part of a pattern and the presence of the first five will be correlated to or lead to a prediction of the presence of the sixth.  Viewed from this perspective of pure correlation, astrology is no different from data science where a pattern of data - in this case the positions of planets at birth – is used to calculate the possibility of certain outcomes. The astronomical observations that were made with the naked eye and recorded in a vast database by Tycho Brahe and his sister Sophia were the basis for the formulation of Kepler's Laws of Planetary motion, that in turn led to Newton's laws of gravi...