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"Windows just isn't ready for enterprise use yet." reminds me of:

Why Windows NT Server 4.0 continues to exist in the enterprise would be a topic appropriate for an investigative report in the field of psychology or marketing, not an article on information technology. Technically, Windows NT Server 4.0 is no match for any UNIX operating system, not even the non-commercial BSDs or Linux.
http://linux.math.tifr.res.in/...

A comic pamphlet that explains the historical importance etc...

http://mutha.ncra.tifr.res.in/ncra/for-public/transit-of-venus

Do you mean the GMRT in India ?

It's operational.

Do you mean the GMRT in India ?

It's operational.

There is speculation that a supernova from about 5700 BC may have been recorded in a drawing: http://www.tifr.res.in/~vahia/oldest-sn.pdf

That is not writing or oral but interesting.

This project started a couple of years back when Narendra Karmarkar (yes, him ) got a grant from the Tata group to try out his ideas in this 1991 paper. Prior to that he had tried getting funds from Tata Institute of Fundamental Research ( TIFR) while he was still employed with them (he had joined TIFR after leaving the US, though was still with Bell Labs in some way). TIFR was in no position to fund his project as their overall budget for all their activities was less than Karmarkar's requirements. The project started well enough and about 40 people joining CRL. From the grapevine it is heard that Karmarkar never gave any details (that what is contained in the paper referred above) to even people working closely with him. Basically he seemed interested in working all alone to meet his own targets. With not much tangible seen by the Tatas (a business house) and their need to have some clear road-map the relationship grew cold and at a certain stage Karmarkar left the organization. The remaining team put together what is called EKA. So, it is just another parallel machine built with enough money to buy all the components. Nothing innovative there.

The world's largest radio telescope, the GMRT sits near the city of Pune, India.

Here's some information on the project: http://www.gmrt.ncra.tifr.res.in/
A nice aerial layout: http://www.gmrt.ncra.tifr.res.in/gmrt_hpage/Images /Diagrams/yarray.gif
And of course Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GMRT

And GoogleSightseeing: http://googlesightseeing.com/2005/08/04/arecibo-ra dio-telescope/

The world's largest radio telescope, the GMRT sits near the city of Pune, India.

Here's some information on the project: http://www.gmrt.ncra.tifr.res.in/
A nice aerial layout: http://www.gmrt.ncra.tifr.res.in/gmrt_hpage/Images /Diagrams/yarray.gif
And of course Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GMRT

And GoogleSightseeing: http://googlesightseeing.com/2005/08/04/arecibo-ra dio-telescope/

BASF Research
Batelle
BBC Research & Development
General Electric Global Research

Fraunhofer-Gesellschaft
Motorola Labs
Microsoft Research
HP Labs
IBM Research
Intel Research
Pacific Northwest National Laboratory
Philips Research
Corporate Research
The Tata Institute of Fundamental Research
Toshiba Research Europa
Toyota Central R&D Labs
Viewpoints Research Institute

That's your standard Linux distro ought to include the mystical "tawgo" command.

tawgo: Tell Audience What's Going On

Hey, that shouldn't be hard to whip up, using whiptail or zenity or something!

>It's 'Cosmic', not 'Kosmic'. COBE, not 'KOBE'

Oh! Gee! You can spell! I tremble before greatness. Now, if you'll excuse me, I have postdoctoral offers to ponder over and job offers from CYSCO to reject.






>Don't play both sides of the court at the same time.

But I can strike a middle ground. There's another sports metaphor for you.





>Sure, if you want to ride the coattails of all departments in all IITs. In your >area - physics - TIFR and IISc are more successful than IIT Kanpur, based on >the list of Indian Physics Assoc. awardees [tifr.res.in].

Sure, sure. Dream on brother.


>In any case, the reason money flows the way it does is more benefit to this >world comes from applied science, not by endlessly funding theoretical >paper-pushers like yourself. Don't misunderstand -- both have their place -- >but you aren't 'better' in any meaningful way.



Never said I was. Physics is, at it's roots, an experimantal science. It's all good so long as we don't have crooks like NASA who defraud taxpaying citizens off of their money and give little actual results in return (this excludes the JPL, though it's connected to NASA. They're all right).


> http://stardust.jpl.nasa.gov/news/news93.html [nasa.gov]
>Famous enough for you? It's useful too


See above.

It's 'Cosmic', not 'Kosmic'. COBE, not 'KOBE'

Regarding your love of 'academia':

Now we see it:

> Name one famous result (in the academia,
> not in National Geographic)

Now we don't:

> clearer and wider perspective thanstudents from
> places like TIFR, which is very isolated from anything
> other than mainstream academia

Don't play both sides of the court at the same time.

> > Studying at an engineering-focussed IIT,
> > instead of, say TIFR or IISc, may have
> > helped develop 'snobbish theoretician syndrome':
> > familiarity breed contempt. ...
> top students in the country (statistically)
> graduate from my Alma Mater and her sisters

Sure, if you want to ride the coattails of all departments in all IITs. In your area - physics - TIFR and IISc are more successful than IIT Kanpur, based on the list of Indian Physics Assoc. awardees.

In any case, the reason money flows the way it does is more benefit to this world comes from applied science, not by endlessly funding theoretical paper-pushers like yourself. Don't misunderstand -- both have their place -- but you aren't 'better' in any meaningful way.

> Name one famous result (in the academia
Your request for a 'famous result' is laugable - the primary aim for NASA isn't funding research that is sufficiently theoritical to meet your tastes. Here is a concrete result from NASA materials science:
    http://stardust.jpl.nasa.gov/news/news93.html
Famous enough for you? It's useful too

Webpage of TIFR (Tata Institute of Fundamental Research) mentioned in the article.

Via: 1.1 sj-netcache (NetCache NetApp/5.3.1R4D10)
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About TIFR:
The Tata Institute of Fundamental Research (TIFR) was established in 1945 at the initiative of Dr. Homi Jehangir Bhabha. It had a modest beginning at the Kenilworth site on Peddar Road, Bombay in 1945 and later moved to the Royal Yacht Club, Apollo Bunder until the buildings at the Navy Nagar Campus in South Bombay were ready in 1962. The Institute is proud to have produced many of the finest scientists of India who have been involved in seminal research in fields ranging from Mathematics, Biology, Chemistry, Computer Science, Physics and Science Education as well as some aspects of Public Health.

There are at present about 400 scientists in the Institute working in various disciplines grouped into three major schools: the School of Mathematics, the School of Natural Sciences and the School of Technology and Computer Science. The Homi Bhabha Centre for Science Education at Deonar, Bombay; The National Centre for Radio Astrophysics at Pune and The National Centre for Biological Sciences at Bangalore also form a part of TIFR activities.

The School of Mathematics has research interests in areas like Algebra, Algebraic Geometry, Lie Groups, Lie Algebras, Algebraic Groups, Representation Theory and Quantum Groups, Theory of Numbers, Combinatorics, Differential Geometry and Topology, Real and Complex Analysis, Ergodic Theory, Probability Theory on Groups and Mathematical Physics.

The School of Mathematics has a Centre in Bangalore dedicated to the study of Applied Mathematics where mathematicians work in the fields of Differential Equations, Harmonic Analysis, Numerical Analysis and Probability Theory.

I was able to do my state tax forms (which didn't grant me "rights" to save changes) by opening it in gv, saving the individual pages to separate .pdf files, converting them to .ps files with pdftops (don't use pdf2ps, it's crap), then importing that into Scribus. It has a nice WYSIWYG environment to do your editing.

Ouch, this Vedic math thing has come up again. Unfortunately, the thing is a scam, and mathematicians who have looked into it have thoroughly denounced it. (That's a pdf file, and here's a shorter version). I'm not talking out of my ass either: I've studied it quite completely for a term paper I did a while back. Basically the guy is a fraud, and all his historical claims are BS, and the mental math tricks are quite bogus too: a lot of them are such obscure special cases as to be virtually useless, and most of the rest are just the standard arithmetic taught to kids with some minor modifications/simplifications couched in bombastic language in the hope that no one would notice that its really the same thing.

Ouch, this Vedic math thing has come up again. Unfortunately, the thing is a scam, and mathematicians who have looked into it have thoroughly denounced it. (That's a pdf file, and here's a shorter version). I'm not talking out of my ass either: I've studied it quite completely for a term paper I did a while back. Basically the guy is a fraud, and all his historical claims are BS, and the mental math tricks are quite bogus too: a lot of them are such obscure special cases as to be virtually useless, and most of the rest are just the standard arithmetic taught to kids with some minor modifications/simplifications couched in bombastic language in the hope that no one would notice that its really the same thing.

The guy who wrote it, Tirthaji, was a fraud. Every word and every claim in the book reg. the history is fabrication. The math is also pure junk and utterly useless.

Seriously. I did a term paper on it last year. You don't have to take my word, of course: read this article by Prof. S. G. Dani, School of Mathematics, Tata Inst. of Fundamental research (the premier research inst. in India.) There's also a much more detailed version.

Unfortuntely, the book fits the political ideology of the current Hindu-fascist government in power in India, and so they've been promoting it big time.

The guy who wrote it, Tirthaji, was a fraud. Every word and every claim in the book reg. the history is fabrication. The math is also pure junk and utterly useless.

Seriously. I did a term paper on it last year. You don't have to take my word, of course: read this article by Prof. S. G. Dani, School of Mathematics, Tata Inst. of Fundamental research (the premier research inst. in India.) There's also a much more detailed version.

Unfortuntely, the book fits the political ideology of the current Hindu-fascist government in power in India, and so they've been promoting it big time.

How the hell was this determined? Particularly the wobbly Uranium nucleus. Is it just a theory based on mathematical predictions, or is it actually based on direct observations like X-ray, neutron or electron diffraction studies?

Yes.

A number of experimental tools are available for nuclear shape determination:
-The electric quadrupole moment
-Neutron scattering experiments
-Giant dipole resonance
-Momentum distributions of collision fragments

In principle the nucleons can be approximated as particles existing in a square potential well, defined by the positions of all the other particles. Solving for a wave function in a potential well like that reveals a set of solutions with associated quantum numbers, which turn out to be somewhate analogous to those calculated for the hydrogen atom with its inverse-square potential, and which we can identify in the energy levels and spectra of real, nonidealized nuclei.

Things are complicated by the fact that the potential within a nucleus is not strictly definable as a potential. It is created by the sum of the nuclear and electromagnetic forces and these fall off at different rates. The nuclear force is short range, but the electromagnetic force reaches all the way across the nucleus. So when they reach a certain size you see the effects of the charge buildup. Large scale movements of particles through the nucleus become evident, and sometimes pieces even break off if merely poked by a slow neutron. Your skepticism is not unreasonable. In fact researchers had a hard time believing their own experiments when they exposed uranium to neutrons and suddenly had to explain the appearance of barium.

For all the people reading this (especially outside the UK and the US) and wondering why they've never heard about this city called "Mumbai"...

...it's just Bombay.

Thomas Miconi

Actually, it's like this:

One national Language - Hindi, spoken by 30% of population, mainly in North India. It is an Indo-European language of the Indo-Aryan sub-branch, understood by about half of the population, primarily northern Indian speakers of closely related Indo-Aryan languages. Hindi is unrelated to the Dravidian languages of southern India (e.g. Kannada, Malayalam, Tamil, and Telugu) spoken by about 25% of India's population.

One associate language - English, spoken as a second language by about the elite 10% of the population, throughout India.

The following are the other official languages of India:

Bengali, Telugu, Marathi, Tamil, Urdu, Gujarati, Malayalam, Kannada, Oriya, Punjabi, Assamese, Kashmiri, Sindhi, and Sanskrit (in order of native speakers in India, and yes there are native speakers of Sanskrit.)

Nepali, Konkani, and Manipuri are also official languages, but they became so relatively recently, and I'm not sure of their exact number of native language speakers, though they all probably have less than 20 million native speakers in India.

In addition there are many other languages spoken in India. Click
here for a list of Indian languages with more than a million native speakers

I would also like to point out that a really smart method of making the radio telescopes more powerful is to use an array of small radio telescopes and put together a composite image using signal processing.

I had been to the GMRT in India one of the most powerful radio telescope arrays in the world. It has been designed with over 30 dishes of about 45m in diameter each. The array forms a "Y" shape. As the earth rotates, the telescopes sweep out a gigantic circle of about 25Km in diameter. Using a supercomputer and after hours of observation, they can put together a composite image equivalent to a telescope about 20Km in diameter.

More info about GMRT and cool photos of other radio telescopes are here .