Yantrakaal

 

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.