Goodness, love and hate

Is there anything special about being a living being? Is there anything special about our planet, Earth? I don’t think so. I don’t know how big is this universe. I don’t know how many other earths are there in this universe. The only reason this planet is special because its environment suits a certain kind of chemical reaction, formation of living proteins. Except for this coincident nothing is so special about Earth. Had the Mars supported formation of these proteins it would have been Earth.

Some says God created us. He filled goodness inside us. I don’t believe this either. I think I am just a mass of protein governed by some electric pulses – the source of which is still unknown. There is no such thing as love or hate, good or bad filled inside me. We create these things. Nature is cruel. Every living being is food for its predator. Weaker ones cannot afford to survive- law of nature. Nature is not beautiful.

Things that we desire and we don’t have are beautiful. They are few exceptions like a boy will always see his love beautiful. Otherwise for us mountains covered by snow are beautiful; picture of desert without any greenery is beautiful.

I don’t think:

• I am special,

• God created this world,

• I have love inside me,

• I hate anybody.

I don’t think these things exist in this world. They are just our creation. But I am tricked by them. I feel them inside me. For good or bad reason, I don’t know, but I have to admit I feel happiness, pain and all those adjectives I know about.

Eastern Civilization and the Holy Wars

The level of civilization Hindus were once able to achieve still amaze me. Ramayana, the Hindu epic, suggests technological advancements that Hindus were able to accomplish. Ravana had his own airplane. His kingdom was very rich and made of gold. Rama, with the help of Hanuman and Sugriv, was able to built such a complex bridge over the Indian Ocean.

Then came the time of Mahabharata. During this period Hindus developed the technology of building sophisticated weapons. Some weapons were quite powerful. Brahmaastra, for instance, could destroy the whole earth. In the same period Hindus also advanced in genetic science as well. Kunti conceived a child, Karna, without any physical contact with a man or a god. In addition, Karna was a genetically improved breed, born with a body armor. Sikhandi and Drupati were also born in similar manner, through artificial process.

Mahabharata also describes the architectural developments of the time. Indraprast was the city made for the Pandav brothers. It was architecturally sound and adorned with the help of amazing architectures.

It is amazing that so much knowledge and development had occured so so long ago. As ironic it may seem, but these very developments became curse for the Hindus. They were never used for betterment of the human race. Rawana kidnapped Rama’s wife on his private plane and Rama used the bridge to fight with Rawana. Driven by avarice, Duryodhan deceived Pandavs to 13 years of exile because he wanted Indraprast for himself. In just 18 days of the Mahabharata war, the weapons of mass destruction decimated the population by millions.

After Mahabharata, the Hindus were not able to achieve a significant development in any area. I believe that the war had a lasting impact on the Hindu society. No matter how greedy Duryodhan was, he did not think once of being the emperor of this world. The epic describes one effort from his part to expand his kingdom- a fight with Birat King. Except for which no other Hindu king, no matter how strong he was, attempted for world conquering journey.

But this was not the case with the rest of the world. Many people from the middle Earth (middle east) tried to extend their realms around the world. Few of them even succeeded to rule over the Hindu territory. History shows that Muslims were able to loot and destroy the Pasupati Temple. Thanks to these wars Hindus (Mahabharata and such) had no sophisticated defense system. All the developments in the field of science achieved during the period of Ramayana and Mahabharata were lost. With the death of millions of lives knowledge on weapons and war disappeared into thin air.

Now when I think it rationally, were those fights necessary? Religiously the answer may be yes. These were victories of good over evil. But look at the consequences, not only the legacies of the previous Eastern civilizations were lost, but also there was a huge pause in their development. If all those knowledge could have been saved I believe Hindus’ would have had something to share with rest of the world. May be Asia would have been much developed and prosperous than is now.

A general observation shows that wars across the borders end quicker than the ones within. Such wars take years and millions of innocent lives before they come to an end. They will suck the country until all that is left is misery. War is a disease that takes a long time to heal. A lesson has to be learnt from Ramayana and Mahabharata. Do the achievements from these wars justify the cost Hindus paid for it? The answer is apparent. Whatever I feel, whatever I say, or whatever I write, it does not matter now. Because a war has broken out inside my homeland. Who is the enemy? And why is he the enemy? Are the killings getting any results? I know the answer just like everybody else. And I will do nothing, just like everyone else.

Understanding computers

In this article I have tried to describe my readers how a computer operates and what are the important components that determine its speed. Although the article is presented in very elementary form I still suggest that, those of you who have intermediate understanding of the computers, go through it once.

Before understanding how a computer integrates its parts and provides output lets dig more into some of the important hardware of the computer.

Hard disk
Commonly know as hard drive, hard disk is a permanent storage device. The analogy of the working mechanism of a hard disk can be drawn from the working mechanism of a blackboard – which, I believe, most of us have seen and used in our school days. In blackboard we can easily write and erase, again write and again erase any kind of text or drawing. Hard drive also operates in a similar manner. Instead of chalk there is a head inside a hard disk which writes and erases information from hard disk.

Before an Operating System (OS) writes any data into a hard drive it has to format hard disk accordingly. Formatting not only means deleting the contents of a hard disk but also making it ready to use for writing information over it. An OS has its own type of file system. For instance, Microsoft Windows supports FAT 16, FAT 32, NTFS type of file system, where as Linux supports Ext 2. I am still not sure about what happens when formatting is done but I think when Windows formats a disk it divides the total disk into small rooms just like large number of rooms in a bee hive. Each of the room is called a cluster and data are store into this cluster. Each hard disk has a boot sector which is nothing but only a portion of a hard disk partition that contains information about the disk's file system and a short machine language program that loads the operating system.

Like blackboard, durability of a hard disk declines as we continue to write and erase information in it. However, the reduction in quality of a harddisk is visible only after thousands of times this procedure is continued. Again only, if the procedure is continued in the same particular part of the harddisk i.e. only if a cluster is continuously used for a thousand or more times for writing and erasing information on it, the quality of that cluster will decline and ultimately that cluster will be damaged. We call such clusters bad sector.

Performance of hard disk is measure by two variables. Firstly amount of information it can store (its capacity) and its speed to read and write information (measure by RPM: Rotation Per Minute).

RAM (Random Access Memory)
RAM is a primary but temporary storage device. Information stored in RAM is lost once the supply of electricity to it is stopped. Please note that whenever the term memory is used in computer language it refers of the capacity of RAM and not hard disk. The capacity of RAM is measured in terms of Megabytes (till now) of data it can hold. I don’t know about the capacity of the very first RAM produced but I remember that first RAM I saw was able to store 4 MB of data. Since then capacity of the RAM is doubling every time a new improved RAM in available in the market i.e. 8MB, 16MB, 32MB, 64MB, and so on. Therefore if you want 128 MB of memory in your computer you have to add either two 64MB RAMs or one 128MB RAM in your system.

Processor (CPU)
Central Processing Unit (CPU) is brain of the computer. Mostly speed of a computer is determined by capacity of its CPU.

Functioning of computer
Till now I talked about the important three components of a computer system. Now lets move into how these three parts work together. To understand this more clearly visualize yourself as studying book in a library where hard disk represents bookracks, RAM study table and processor yourself. It is not possible to study books in the form they are stored in the racks. It has to be opened before we study it. And to open it we lay books over study table and study them. Therefore large study table means more space to open up more number of books. And all these actions are performed by us. Thus more active we are, lesser will be time taken to perform these activities.

Similarly, files are stored in the hard drive in a compressed manner. Before using them, they have to be uncompressed. A hard disk with high RPM means less time to compress and uncompress files. RAM acts as a study table to open files and hold them. RAM with large capacity means more space to operate uncompressed files; multiple files can be operate simultaneously. When we open any application in our, CPU first collects the data from the hard disk, uncompresses the data and loads it into RAM.

As computer operates integrating these three components simultaneously faster performance is not just a function of one component. Even though two of these components has a higher capacity a mediocre capacity of the remaining component will bottle neck performance of the computer. Therefore it won’t be very wise to purchase a 3.2 Gigahertz processor for 128 MB memory system.

Me and Him

April 29th, 2005 1:30 am

I woke up suddenly in the middle of the night and felt like not sleeping. As I was wondering why, I heard a familiar noise. Did the noise wake me up or was I already awake when I heard the sound, I could not tell. But like other nights, he was out there, groping around - trying to enter my territory.

I could hear him loud and clear. Darkness had made my ears very receptive. He was at my left and right, trying to reach and attack me. He usually comes in numbers, although I fail to count how many exactly. One thing I am sure is that he can never reach me through the impregnable walls surrounding me. No matter how many of him may come and try, he could never breach my defense. It’s simply too strong for him.

Occasionally, one of him would manage to enter through a loophole – which I would overlook before letting my guards down. In such a case, a bloody battle would ensue.

Tac…tac…..tac….. I would charge at him. But it is futile to aim at someone so nimble in so dark an environment. He would easily dodge me. At times, he would get lucky and manage to stab at me, thanks to my habit of sleeping deeply. However, I would always squash him once I get awake.

Anyway, he was still there, moving about vigorously, trying to lunge at me. At that time, I was forcing myself to sleep, but was not able to. After fifteen minutes I though of listening to the Panasonic Walkman. I was about to put on the earpiece when I heard the noise getting increasingly louder as I felt him coming near me. Oh no! Not again. The trespasser had found himself an entrance through my walls. However he could not find me immediately and went to the other end of my territory. I knew he would come again so I prepared for his next visit. But for the next five minutes nothing happened. I waited for him but met only silence of the night. I began to wonder whether he will return.

Suddenly I heard him again coming towards me. Not sure about my exact location though, he had to gauge where I was. I was ready for him this time. He came so close that I got the whiff of the air from his body. Tac…… I charged. I prepared myself for around round, concentrating hard to listen to his movement. I could hear nothing. There was only a dead silence. After a moment I took a deep breath. I knew I got him this time. I killed him!

The next thing I did was to blindly arrange the mosquito net around my pillow- the weakest breach point. Then I felt secure. I inserted that earpiece and played the Walkman. Enigma was singing: I love you, I'll kill you”. I don’t remember when I fell asleep.