dead or alive? dead after all

-
the missing airplane shows that whatever futuristic things we might develop, its important to be in the present(+3 seconds to avoid maybe a dangerous cat to attack you).

we propose technologies that 'would touch lives' 50 years ahead, and forget to live in/for the present. either we're too much altruistic or just too busy the rat race of inventing a future that we don't know what will be good for. after all these inventions and industries, has world become a happier place? Not sure. Yes, we definitely have gotten many superhuman powers now, but the fact everyone has those powers keeps us pushing for inventing even more.

--- pause---

for a moment, lets be in the moment, and thank nature at times for it has conspired till this very moment-that we are.

I can't even begin to count the number of sensors/technologies, that plane had one in all, so many lives, so many stories. All have become one with the nature now. In split second.

At times have you wondered, that outside that .5 feet plastic wall is pure destruction- juxtaposed to our belief/realisation- as the beautiful airhostness asks us which wine we'd fancy and we're complaining how low resolution the LCDs are.

Right beyond that half a feet of platic/metal lies a dance of death, that'll freeze your blood, in 5 seconds. Realize?

I dont want to scare you, or myself, so I'll stop. I'll drink some green-tea now and leave for my lab. I have those inventions to do.

RIP all victims of Flight 370.  

Popular posts from this blog

NZM-SEC Superfast express that took my '35 hours'

-
Image
I usually cover my long distance travels by air- for it saves time, and is less tiring (and was affordable in the past).  Call it naivety or my callous attitude, but I completely forgot the fact that its hard to fetch a cheap ticket when your travel plans are made just a day in advance. Owing to recent price inflations and my last minute plans I decided to cover my return journey from Delhi to Hyderabad via train. The decision was taken a day before I wanted to return, i.e. 19th May, high time when there are summer holidays in India. The night before I stood in the train line, with my father and brother, to fetch tatkal tickets. The process is hard- the HTTP fetch request by IRCTC works like a lucky draw). Hence, my attempt ended up futile.  So I decided I'll jump on the train, painful decision-no tickets, no seats, just that. The beginning. I left my home at 7PM. Reached Kshitij's place. Had dinner there- met Surbhi, Sonia aunty and uncle there. Kshitij's mom
Read more

Analysing an autorickshaw ride in Bangalore

-
Image
The bumpy ride on the Bangalore streets triggered a thought the other day, why not log the data and analyse it later(whackily purposeless initially).  The desire to log is esp. a fallout of my recent stint with user studies dealing with data cleaning/analysis and deriving statistical results from it: formally two-way ANOVA tests, T-tests etc. and who doesn't love clean graphs telling a story :-) Without giving much thought, I tied my Macbook Pro equipped with SuddenMotionSensor(SMS) to the auto-rickshaw seat and used http://www.shiffman.net/p5/sms/ to log the X/Y/Z axis data in CSV format. I manually kept a record through a stopwatch about the potholes/pit occurrence during the 25 minute rick-ride. It was interesting to the see the outliers due to the sudden relative motion triggered jerks. Ankit and I plotted a few qualitative graphs out of the sampled CSV data(6731 datalogs). I matched the spikes with the manually recorded pothole/sudden-jerk data to see the obv
Read more

Done ! the FTIR acrylic frame

-
Image
After much haggling and bargaining we got our 6 mm thick plexi-glass sheet, after manual polishing and shining the task at hand was to fit in the LED's inside so as to facilitate the FTIR ( Frustrated Total Internal Reflection) , this principle behind the project. Since Sudhanshu and Rahul were most affluent in Electronics and Architecture, we moved to R.S. Electronics, owned by Rahul's father "Mr. ... " so as to get our LED's fixed in the acrylic frame. After putting in 15 hours we could get the IR LEDs fixed into the wooden frame. Here are some images of Infrared glowing acrylic frame from a night-vision camera. Along that, I modified the Microsoft Lifecam VX1000 ( removing the Infrared Filter, putting up a IR bandpass filter). That's how it looked before and after Coming up's how we obtained our neat and sweet blobs :-)
Read more