Yantrakaal

When I was a child, we used to spend Durga Puja at the foot of the Ayodhya Hills, Purulia where one of the fascinations was to spot artificial satellites, with our naked eyes, as they darted through the stars across the night sky. This Deepawali, parked in the pristine gardens of the Tumsong Tea Retreat near the dreamy town of Ghoom, Darjeeling, I was looking forward to a similar sky show when a thought struck me. Chinese fireworks may be out of favour this year, but right above me in the sky, was Tiangong 2, the Chinese permanent space station where two Chinese taikonauts had just arrived for their month long tour of duty. Living in space is tough and the technology necessary to make space habitable and safe for humans is very difficult and expensive to develop. Hence China’s Taikonauts@Tiangong is an impressive feat, but is it really necessary? Should India try to catch up? Or is there an alternate, inexpensive approach? The sci-fi stories of Isaac Asimov’s famous “positronic” ro...

I just read in the newspapers that Donald Trump has been sworn in as 45th President of the United States and so the world is about to come to an end. It is the end of globalisation and the beginning of new protectionist order where the new mantra is buy American and hire American. It is the end of liberal democracy and the beginning of a new Putin-style illiberal autocracy. Francis Fukuyama and his thesis of "end of history" is now history -- "communist" USSR, in its new avatar of plutocratic Russia has eventually triumphed over the Anglo American vision of a new world order. image footwearnews But should all this matter to me? Obviously it does, as otherwise why am I commenting on Trump's inauguration? Trump is now the key person in the world's richest and most powerful nation and he certainly has the capacity to both help and hurt me -- or rather my interests. My interests are of course related to Calcutta, India and of late, and still rather tangen...

If not on Earth, where else can humans beings be? Not as a traveller in a spacecraft or as a one-off tourist on the Moon but as an immigrant, or a colonizer who sets up a permanent residency for multiple generations. Given our current knowledge of physics and the state of propulsion technology, we really do not have the ability to travel to other stars in a reasonable amount of time, so our search for that second home for humanity is restricted to our own solar system. Where do we start? photo credit  Tittat427 There are two divergent points of view on where to locate such an extraterrestrial colony. Some believe that the colony should be located on a natural body like a planet, satellite or an asteroid while others think that the best bet would be an artificial structure in orbit around a planet or in space. There are pros and cons for both. What is common to both approaches is the realisation that any environment outside the terrestrial biosphere that we currently inh...

One of the finest expositions of the Indic School of Thought. Shivoham (शिवोऽहं ) by Adishankara - performed by John Scottus Students from Rutger Kortenhorst on Vimeo .

Elon Musk may have suddenly become the glamourous mascot of a new, post Apollo, space age but the fact remains that the destiny of mankind is among the stars. While many people will keep on trying to salvage what remains of spaceship Earth from the environmental, social and political scourges that threaten it, it is but inevitable that a significant, space faring community will emerge that will seek to live and work outside the planet -- like European emigrants going to America. Are we in India ready for this? Will we just watch and cheer while others depart? -- as it was in 1969 when man went to the Moon? Or should we as nation participate in these great voyages? credit : gwydion1982 Astronomers tell us that there must be, thousands of habitable, earthlike planets in orbit around various stars in our galaxy. Unfortunately, the distance between stars is so great that we have no means yet, not even theoretical ideas, on how to build spacecraft that will be fast enough to travel...

The demon of demonetisation has scared the living daylights out of India’s cash-based economy. Whether the aam-aadmi is indeed suffering or whether the quantity of black money unearthed justifies the collateral discomfort is best debated on the sterile but bloody timelines of social media, but what we need right now is a way to facilitate payments -- small, ad-hoc payments -- that keep the engines of commerce running. Can technology play a role here? It certainly can. Let us see how. First we need to popularise software, app-based wallets like SBI Buddy and PayTM with which people can transfer money to each other merely on the basis of their phone numbers. While prima facie these are good options there are some drawbacks. First these are closed-systems, which means that one can only transfer money to someone who already has an identical wallet software. This means, for example, that a person can transfer money from his SBI buddy to someone who has SBI Buddy but not to someon...

Ever since I started my career in software and IT as a database administrator, I have had a great fascination, if not love, for the SQL language. I also know that there are many in the software fraternity (and sorority) who share my comfort with using SQL. Even after moving into the current enthusiasm, or should I call it a fad, with data analytics, I see that there exists many who prefer the ease and convenience of SQL even in big data. For example, Hadoop had to hide the complexity of its Map-Reduce magic behind HIVE. Spark offers SparkSQL. In an earlier post, I had shown how SQL can be used for scoring Data Mining models developed with R through the PMML route. In this post, we show how K-means clustering, a very common and widely used data mining activity can be done with SQL, using a technique adopted from Joni Salonen's blog post . The following codes were executed in MySQL. First we create the tables : drop table if exists km_data; -- contains initial data, on...