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Heat waves have been killing hundreds to thousands annually in India for the last 3 decades - and most likely much longer (but reporting simply wasn't well done much further in the past). This isn't anything new, other than we finally hear about it. Living in extreme conditions, with poor sanitation and polluted and minimal water will kill.

Then there's the issue of toxicity, which apparently is essentially nil

Spectacularly wrong.

When you type "fluoride" into Wikipedia, the second auto-suggest is this "Fluoride_toxicity" page.

Then there is this paragraph on an otherwise pro-fluoridation page: "In India an estimated 60 million people have been poisoned by well water contaminated by excessive fluoride... The effects are particularly evident in the bone deformations of children."

At another pro-fluoridation page, we learn that the natural fluoride levels causing all those poisoned East Indians is 3 to 6 mg/l. Just 6 times the original US national standard forced on two-thirds of the population for the past sixty years.

The normal rule of toxicology is a safety factor of 100. About 100 cups of coffee will kill us, for example. One baby aspirin is 1/200 of the lethal (ld50) dose for an infant. Same as one 200 mg Ibuprofen. But a day's maximum ibuprofen dose is 6% of lethal. One cigarette is 1/80th of lethal. The average US salt consumption of 3.5 g/day is 2% of lethal...and common sense tells us we eat too much salt, on average.

Fluoride's ld50 is 50 mg/Kg. 8 glasses of water is about 2000 grams. Fluoridate at 1 mg/l, we get 2 mg of fluoride just from the water. That is 4% of lethal. And does not include at least 15 other sources of fluoride in our diet.

Stats in the last two paragraphs drawing from "Toxic: How Science Measures Harm"

tldr? Fluoride is more toxic than lead and almost as toxic as arsenic - common knowledge

Saying that something more toxic than lead has "essentially nil" toxicity is my idea of wrong.

Actually paraquat decomposes before it becomes a boils.

http://ces.iisc.ernet.in/energy/HC270799/HDL/ENV/enven/vol355.htm

Thanks for your comments, I really appreciate them. Your mention of experiments was spot on with the use cases I'm trying to learn about. I've worked with many scientists who use commercial software packages for biomedical research where their experimental results may be archived for 10+ years before being reanalyzed. I recently helped a colleague pull a Windows 2000 server out of storage to rerun an experiment. We got it going after some difficulty and that got me thinking about virtualizing the harddrive, which then lead me to wonder about the portability of virtualized machines between hardware hosts (including cloud providers) and the resulting reproducibility issues that could occur. I then read through several interesting papers showing variability of floating point math in commercial hypervisors, which lead to my posting on Slashdot. Thanks again. Some interesting links: http://faculty.cs.gwu.edu/~timwood/papers/im2013_tech.pdf http://www.vmware.com/pdf/hypervisor_performance.pdf http://www.cc.iitd.ernet.in/misc/cloud/XenExpress.pdf

i don't think its feasible collecting rain water straight from the sky though

Sure it is, people have been doing it for millenia: Brief Outline of the History of Rainwater Catchment Technologies

Archaeologists found a sophisticatedrainwatercollection and storage system on the island of Crete while working on the reconstruction of the Palace of Knossos (1700 B.C.). However, with the development of building construction based on new materials such as lime and burnt clay bricks, new construction techniques like arches and domes developed. The ancient Romans became masters inrainwaterharvesting and the construction ofreservoirs. It was this new technique of building closed cisterns, and at the same time the urbanization within the Roman Empire around the Mediterranean, which resulted in the development of arainwatercatchment culture at all those places where water resources were limited. This is why oldrainwatercisterns are to be found on the islands of Capri and Malta and at places of historical interest in Spain and Turkey, in the Lebanon and on the island of Sicily.

Plenty of research is being conducted on modern approaches to rainwater harvesting. In the developed world these often come into conflict with environmental regulations regarding water quality, and in general there's a surfeit of water from other sources that is ran through central filtration facilities so no great press is on to tap rainwater as a major source. It's something popular with people who are interested in green tech and the like.

http://www.iimahd.ernet.in/publications/data/2010-04-03Charyulu.pdf

"The DEA efficiency analysis conducted on different crops indicated that the efficiency levels are lower in organic farming when compared to conventional farming, relative to their production frontiers."

Organic does not mean local! Less than 30% of organic foods in Vermont co-ops comes from regional sources, at the height of the local growing season. If you want to support local farms(at least around here) you should be buying conventional foods.

http://vtdigger.org/2009/12/02/your-organic-food-made-in-china-part-2/

Remember that the sodium is hot (> 750K, and much higher in pool type fast reactors), and that a standard atmosphere is moist.

There have been several ignitions and explosions of sodium reactor coolant, the most well-documented of which is probably Monju 8 Dec 1995 which was caused by a leak of high-temperature sodium coolant leaking through a thermometer sheath and igniting upon contact with the air.

Hot sodium reacts unhelpfully with a number of other elements too.

This:

http://www.igcar.ernet.in/igc2004/cg/knowledge-centre/sodium_coolant_chemistry-GP.htm

goes into some detail, discussing the SRE, SuperPhénix, and so forth.

Except for the minor issue that a reliable, stable power grid can not be formed from Wind Energy due to frequency instabilities caused by having too many wind turbines. Details in this paper http://eprints.iisc.ernet.in/15202/

The hypothesis that the blast was due to a comet/asteroid/etc. has been around for a long time. The problem with this hypothesis is that it does not fit at all well with the observations (e.g. the strange sounds and lights that preceded the blast for days; and so on). An alternative hypothesis was proposed by Wolfgang Kundt, a researcher at the Institut für Astrophysik der Universität Bonn:

Kundt W. (2001),
“The 1908 Tunguska catastrophe: An alternative explanation”,
Current Science, 81: 399–407.

Kundt's paper explains the various problems with the comet/asteroid hypothesis. It also proposes an alternative hypothesis: that Tunguska was a natural gas leak (from the ground), that went on for days, building up, until ignited by a lightning strike.

This explanation seems to fit the observations well. Perhaps the main reason it has not gotten much attention is that it is not very exotic.

Thanks for your comments. I was part of a team that trained some of the college teachers. We found they were enthusiastic though it was initially difficult for them. Check this link http://tel.cedt.iisc.ernet.in/moodle/course/catego ry.php?id=10 where some of the course materials we used for training are available. You can login as guest (use firefox) to see the moodle training materials. See this courses 'Moodle Training for Administrators' and 'Moodle Training for Faculty'.

E-learning' is teaching and learning that are delivered, supported, and enhanced through the use of digital technologies and media. People often conufse with mere downloading of materials to e-learning. Moodle, Sakai are plaforms use to prepare and deliver these materials. But most of the MIT OCW material is mere 'downloadable' materials. It has it's own value, but it's not truly a e-learning. Please see some useful links given below.
http://sashikumar.n.googlepages.com/LearningManage mentSystems.ppt http://tel.cedt.iisc.ernet.in/moodle/mod/resource/ index.php?id=1

Jokes apart, there is considerable research that has gone into Wootz steel produced in India, and its special properties (reported in the Nature story). My colleague, Prof. Ranganathan (in collaboration with archeometallurgy researcher Dr. Sharada Srinivasan) has written a short article as well as a book (a pre-publication version is available for free: text and figures).

Coming back to the story about the German researcher's suggestion (speculation?) that carbon nanotubes might have been present in Damascus steels, count me among the skeptics. The presence of nano-scale microstructures is a puzzle that was solved quite sometime ago: they are created when hot and cold steel is bashed repeatedly for producing swords. The nanoscale structure is also the reason for its ultra high strength. The presence of nanowires of carbon rich cementite is thus not a 'new' finding.

Finally, to my knowledge, carbon nanotubes have been made only under extremely special circumstances (which also explains why their mass production -- for use, for example, in steels for ship-building -- is still a dream). It's extremely unlikely that the 'ordinary' atmosphere under which Wootz was made would have yielded nanotubes.

Bottomline: Do we need carbon nanotubes to really explain why Damascus swords made with Wootz steel are so special? Use Occam's razor (or, for that matter, the Damascus swords themselves).

Jokes apart, there is considerable research that has gone into Wootz steel produced in India, and its special properties (reported in the Nature story). My colleague, Prof. Ranganathan (in collaboration with archeometallurgy researcher Dr. Sharada Srinivasan) has written a short article as well as a book (a pre-publication version is available for free: text and figures).

Coming back to the story about the German researcher's suggestion (speculation?) that carbon nanotubes might have been present in Damascus steels, count me among the skeptics. The presence of nano-scale microstructures is a puzzle that was solved quite sometime ago: they are created when hot and cold steel is bashed repeatedly for producing swords. The nanoscale structure is also the reason for its ultra high strength. The presence of nanowires of carbon rich cementite is thus not a 'new' finding.

Finally, to my knowledge, carbon nanotubes have been made only under extremely special circumstances (which also explains why their mass production -- for use, for example, in steels for ship-building -- is still a dream). It's extremely unlikely that the 'ordinary' atmosphere under which Wootz was made would have yielded nanotubes.

Bottomline: Do we need carbon nanotubes to really explain why Damascus swords made with Wootz steel are so special? Use Occam's razor (or, for that matter, the Damascus swords themselves).

Jokes apart, there is considerable research that has gone into Wootz steel produced in India, and its special properties (reported in the Nature story). My colleague, Prof. Ranganathan (in collaboration with archeometallurgy researcher Dr. Sharada Srinivasan) has written a short article as well as a book (a pre-publication version is available for free: text and figures).

Coming back to the story about the German researcher's suggestion (speculation?) that carbon nanotubes might have been present in Damascus steels, count me among the skeptics. The presence of nano-scale microstructures is a puzzle that was solved quite sometime ago: they are created when hot and cold steel is bashed repeatedly for producing swords. The nanoscale structure is also the reason for its ultra high strength. The presence of nanowires of carbon rich cementite is thus not a 'new' finding.

Finally, to my knowledge, carbon nanotubes have been made only under extremely special circumstances (which also explains why their mass production -- for use, for example, in steels for ship-building -- is still a dream). It's extremely unlikely that the 'ordinary' atmosphere under which Wootz was made would have yielded nanotubes.

Bottomline: Do we need carbon nanotubes to really explain why Damascus swords made with Wootz steel are so special? Use Occam's razor (or, for that matter, the Damascus swords themselves).

What is Indix based on? It would stink if Kerala used a poorly done and poorly supported Linux distro. I hope they go with one of the bigger ones with Unicode support like Ubuntu or Fedora. At least that way there is a very large community that can help to make sure that the roll-out in Kerala is as smooth as possible.

Did you happen to look at some of the screenshot of Indix? Take a look here. They look _really_ bad. It looks like GTK 1.x and Gnome 1.x both of which are _very_ old and outdated. Gtk 1.x is really bad compared to the latest Gtk 2.x. Gtk 1.x has horrible font support, very poor copy and paste and tons of other problems from being such old technology. I really hope Kerala doesn't go with some old and out-dated crap Linux.

Indix, a localized GNU/Linux, is already available in Malayalam, the principal language of Kerala, so they're in good shape on that score.

Sure, the US could push for a multilateral approach to space exploration. Now, stop and think about the current state of affairs in the 'states and you'll see why this isn't likely to happen.

We do cooperate on some things, like the International Virtual Observatory Alliance.

Which amongst others includes contributions from :

• America
• Australia
• China
• Canada
• Europe
• France
• Germany
• Hungary
• India
• Italy
• Japan
• Russia
• Spain
• United Kingdom

Although I generally dislike the French government, I have to give them kudos in this area for being the only government with the balls to continue civilian research in this area, when the US decided to ban it

I guess India India and China were also doing civilian research in fast breeder reactors.

Also i think India is only one which tried Thorium as a fuel. And she has quite a lot of it too...

Niskel

How much do you think it costs to run DNS?

Next, DNS does push control down -- for everything but the TLD. DNS *is* generally run on open source, and *is* open source. In that anyone can add to the DNS hierarchy.

http://people.csa.iisc.ernet.in/gaurav/np/rfcs/dns .html
  should give you a basic idea of what DNS is.

There are already root servers that serve alternate TLDs. Have been for years. Indeed, a lot of us do this privately. As an example, a lot of us use "made-up" TLDs for our LAN, and then kick up stuff we don't know.

Ratboy (posted from neptune.lan).

The prevalence of the red rain along the southwest coast of India is explained in the paper as being the trail of a meteor that happened to follow the coast. I explain it with this June- Sept precipitation map, which shows the coast receiving 150 cm of rain while areas immediately to the east get 30 cm. Red rain fell in areas where rain is likely to fall. No need to invoke a meteor for which there is little evidence.

Since when has it become acceptable to grant patents on recepies? Even the Coca Cola Company does NOT have (and should not have) a patent on cola.

I would tend to agree with you, but certain food processing techniques (NOT recipes) are pretty, well, inventive. I don't know about you, but I don't have the equipment for cryogenic separation of coffee oil in my kitchen. Of course, their patent is useless if the product tastes like shit.

But let's say for the sake of argument that you are right in this case, that the coffee fermentation is just a recipe, and fairly obvious to someone "skilled in the trade," as patents always say. Does that mean all food processing techniques are obvious and non-patentable? Assuming, of course, you believe there is at least some benefit to having patents at all. The first innovative food idea that came to my mind was banana juice. I think making banana juice had been a challenge for years until these folks in India managed to have success, and I think their work certainly deserves a patent.

The american 'IP'-quest is getting more and more rediculous by the day. [sic]

I agree with that sentiment whole-heartedly. Lately I've been more and more sympathetic to the idea of abolishing intellectual property altogether--copyrights, patents, whatever. This is supposed to be a free market, right? Let the market sort it out: whoever has the best implementation, wins. How often does an inventor even get a dime from his or her invention? My grandfather's inventions made millions of dollars--for his employer. On the flip-side, the protection offered by patents allows companies to invest more in R&D, and without that capital expenditure, inventors wouldn't have access to labs and expensive equipment.

It's a good thing he's not pushing it too hard or I might find myself saying crazy things like "I agree with Bush"

At one tyme I was against nuclear power, mostly for two reasons. One is the possibility of accidents and the other is storage of the waste. However new reactor designs, such as the fast breeder reactor designs India uses or those that use pellets or pebbles are safer. There's still the problem with the waste however I heard some of the new designs produce little waste. If they can get rid of the waste then I'd be all for nuclear power. It certainly shouldn't be stored at Yucca Mountain. For one thing it's been shown Water can travel miles from there, and the other thing is that Yucca is an earthquake prone area. Some buildings were damaged there in an earthquake.

Also the government needs to stop subsidizing and shielding the industry. But if they did then nuclear power wouldn't be profitable.

Most people are approaching this from the wrong PoV.

Once there is a standard in place, then implementation occurs. And it's definitely likely to appear - first in Open Office, then maybe spreading - I can see Linux using it as the default document standard.

Microsoft will eventually have to support it - if it reaches 10% of the market, then you are going to start getting complaints from customers. Even if it only implements a read-only function, that's good enough.

I face a major productivity sapper, when I send off a .sxw to someone who can't open it. I have to open, export to .doc, check that it displays ok, and then resend. If I can happily compose in whatever editor I want, and press send without having to bother about whether a client will be able to read or not - so much the better.

As an aside, the Indian government is slowly adopting Open Office - mainly because these can be easily translated into the local language. Useful, especially in rural areas and the smaller towns. The government itself released a Tamil version of Open Office, Firefox and a bunch of other stuff. Check out their efforts here.

Cheers, R.

Not to forget India. With its huge thorium reserves, India is planning big on Fast Breeder Reactors. FBR are considered even more riskier because of sodium used as a reactor coolant. http://www.barc.ernet.in/webpages/about/anu1.htm

:-). But maybe a more appropriate title for this comment would have been "Finer points of living on a diverse planet for ethnocentric Americans". In the rest of the English speaking world, we have no problems with Celsius.

You mean this?

Haven't read it, so I've no idea if Woodfield just made them up or if you just lost a fistful of Quatloos.

See New Scientist archive.

It is Indian Institute of Science Bangalore and not IIT

Actually, more interesting would be perl in Shakespeare.

Correction: there are more...

It is most certainly not the tuition that's sending people to USA. It's the hope that the student visa gets turned into a work visa which gets turned into a green card, which means that some day 17 years from the time of getting your student visa, you may be an American, provided you aren't murdered for being a no-good-foreigner-living-off-the-fat-o-the-land, and that your boss doesn't fire you when the going gets rough. There's that and the fact that in my country at least(India), it's exactly 15,000 times harder to get into a local college, considering the size of our population. The hardest b-school to get into in the entire world is IIM Ahmedabad. Compare that to the Admissions Page for Stanford. The same is true for engineering schools...We're leaving India for a lot of reasons, and one of them is the past few generations' high fornication (and fertility) rate. That's one of the reasons why there are so many non-resident aliens in yer schools

In a perfect world, database vendors would be using the SQL 99 standard rather than sticking with SQL 92...

Bonus points if you answer the question without using the technique described in the article.

P.S I'm not claiming credit for it; it used to be on his website but isn't anymore.

I made a PDF version of the book if anyone's interested.

This would be funny, 'cept that it isn't. There is no Calcutta Tech. You might mean the Indian Institute of Technology, Calcutta/Kharagpur, but then you'd still be a liar. Further, Shiva is part of the Holy Trinity, which consists of Brahma the Creator, Vishnu the Preserver and Shiva the Destroyer. If you praise the Destroyer, u start sounding like George Bush. Now u wouldn't want that, would u?

I am an ex-broadcast engineer and can guarantee that they aren't using the guard bands between TV stations - because there are no guard bands! Each channel butts up next to the last one.

Interference is avoided by not assigning two adjacent channels in the same market.

Television channels are 6Mhz wide. A Wi-Fi signal occupies 30Mhz so I'm guessing they will need 7 channels in a row with nothing broadcast (5 for the spectrum needed with 1 on each side to avoid interference).

Interference avoidance is nothing new to broadcasters. Aside from television channels assigned they also have had to deal with microwave live trucks, satellite transmissions, etc.

Andrew

Article with larger images (the site had the larger images separately in a tarball)...

http://theory.cs.iitm.ernet.in/~arvindn/mirror/lin uxfs/piszcz_large.html

Not a clickable link to avoid hammering my poor server.

This page, from the EE Dept. of IIT Delhi, contains
pictures of two different Micro Hydel projects.

(scroll down a lot)

Not pretty, but that's not the point...

Also, I've now found a reference to the work done by
the young woman that I mentioned in the parent:

[AUTHOR: Prof. S.S. Murthy]
TITLE -A Practical Load Controller for stand Alone Small Hydro Systems Using Self-excited Induction Generator
JOURNAL/CONFERENCE-Proc. of International conference on Power Electronics, Drives and Energy Systems for Industrial Growth(PEDES'98), 1-3Dec., 1998,Perth, Australia, Vol.1,pp.359-364
CO-AUTHOR-Rini Jose,Bhim Singh

I got that reference from this page.

This page, from the EE Dept. of IIT Delhi, contains
pictures of two different Micro Hydel projects.

(scroll down a lot)

Not pretty, but that's not the point...

Also, I've now found a reference to the work done by
the young woman that I mentioned in the parent:

[AUTHOR: Prof. S.S. Murthy]
TITLE -A Practical Load Controller for stand Alone Small Hydro Systems Using Self-excited Induction Generator
JOURNAL/CONFERENCE-Proc. of International conference on Power Electronics, Drives and Energy Systems for Industrial Growth(PEDES'98), 1-3Dec., 1998,Perth, Australia, Vol.1,pp.359-364
CO-AUTHOR-Rini Jose,Bhim Singh

I got that reference from this page.

Important: Note that google is not affiliated with the authors of google.com or responsible for its content.

--
Wanna play some word games?

Possibly, but I'm not sure what that would mean. At the lowest level, if all of your hydrogen atoms are replaced over time by other hydrogen atoms, you still remain exactly what you were.

--
Wanna play some word games?

I'm not going to argue about that, but just point out that it is a very strong statement, and that most people would disagree with you. Anyone who believes in the non-triviality of human consciousness must also believe that there is a notion of identity of humans which is more fundamental than that of a ship. I am myself undecided on the issue, and tend to deemphasize human consciousness, "self-awareness" etc.

This becomes even more obvious when you consider that replacing elementary particles is a no-op.

Nope. This is a logical fallacy called the Paradox of the heap.

--
Wanna play some word games?

The same question could be asked about this baby :)

Of course we can't yet do brain transplants, so I guess one can say its the same person as long as its the same brain.

--
Wanna play some word games?

One activity you can indulge in can simultanesouly improve your memory, make you feel good and allow you to show off in front of your friends so they will think that you are a really intelligent person (which I am not saying you aren't, but people who aren't really into this kind of brainy and "geeky" activity will surely be very impressed) is to memorize 1000 digits of pi. It's funner than you may think, as it's a real challenge and over time will increase your capacity to use the full potential of your memory properly.

feeding a program written in Shakespeare Programming Language to it? Should be real fun!

Well, here's one someone posted here on /. a while back:
http://theory.cs.iitm.ernet.in/~arvindn/pi/

I've tried it, and it probably would increase memorization ability, but I'm actually too lazy and busy to keep it up.

This is more than a cosmetic issue. Mozilla has the OK and cancel buttons in dialog boxes in the "wrong order" compared to the rest of my desktop, and so I frequently find myself hitting the wrong button by reflex. I also run into bugs in the mozilla widgets all the time. Try middle-clicking on the scroll bar of a textarea widget (under X): its supposed to absolute-reposition the scrollbar; it does that, but in addition pastes the clipboard into the textarea! Another benefit of native widgets would be to decrease memory usage, since the widget libs in memory would be shared.

Its nice they've been listening to their users.

--
Wanna play some word games?

Not to be confused with ITT.

Here are a couple schools you may be interested in if you want a future career in that field.