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srbachchan · 7 years ago

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DAY 3546

PuriPai, Thailand Dec 9, 2017 Sat 9:30 pm local time

Birthday - EF Ankur R Churiwal ... Sonia Ef Sunday, Dec 10, 2017 .. and our wishes for this birthday of theirs and our greetings to them for a wonderful and blessed year .. love from us all .. the Ef ..

The forests and the wild invite us again .. the winding roads, misty and fogged .. the rising sun desperately trying to sneak its rays about the horizon, in vain .. the make up routine .. the deliberations of a very dedicated team of locals and locals from across the sea, or rather the Bay .. a sincere host country .. the absence of any kind of crowd disturbance .. and the luxury of continued repetitions of a shot till there is absolute conformity and agreement to the creative and authenticity of the scene ..

Digital Camera .. that wonder in today’s times allows us this liberty .. there is now no film .. as in celluloid film, like in the past, and I often wonder why we are still called the film Industry .. a chip runs endlessly inside the digital camera, specially designed and that is the norm .. no wastage of celluloid film, a most expensive and rare ingredient in the films made in my times .. all gone .. KODAK has shut down .. and that tension of expending excessive film for a production is now all the past and irrelevant ..

As artists in those times, worried whether the shot has come out right or not, we would ask and request for another ‘take’ .. and the reprimand from the director, mostly Hrishi Da, used to be .. “ you pay for it “ and we would resign ourselves to the instincts of the master the captain of the ship, the director .. !

Now of course there are multiple monitors and gadgetry which enable us to see each and every frame in high speed to check faults .. and be allowed multiple retakes, to improve ..

Directors of our times stood by the camera while the shot was on, to start and cut the shot, to observe the artist as he or she performed .. now they all sit behind a monitor, distant from where the scene is being done, watching the artist not live, but through the projection they get on the screen of the monitor .. and better still .. thanks to the various proficient Apps., available, each scene is edited on location, within minutes and can be seen in its rough entirety to gauge its value, almost immediately ..

As opposed to those early days, when the reel containing the footage of film would be taken off the camera, put inside black clothed enclosures for fear of exposure to sun and thereby ruining the content, packed inside tin boxes specially designed in circular fashion, for that was how they were loaded on to the camera for shooting and play .. sent off to the Laboratory for processing, generally involving days, delivered to special editing rooms of the editor of the film, cut through a long arduous process - where each frame of celluloid was run on an editing machine, a Moviola and then later on a modernised version brand named Steinbeck .. intricate decision making by the editor without any technical help or assistance, sending it off to be seen in a regular mini theatre through projector, to be able to see .. to see the scene shot .. taking months at times ..

NOW ..

All that process wiped out in time, by computerisation .. much like the prediction in times to come, of the computer wiping out civilisation .. that is if we survive the other more recent and alarming discovery of the largest Black Hole in the galaxy .. 800 million times the mass of the Sun .. !!

The Hole having the ability to suck in and devour the entire hemisphere and our world about us .. fortunately we are safe for now, .. ‘for NOW’ .. as the scientist analysing its effect confided to anxious enquiries .. since .. that phenomena, was still some billions of light years away from us mere mortals .. !!

“OK everyone breathe normally” .. ! As the voice inside that MRI tube comes, from the medical team, drafting and compiling the imagery of the insides of your body ..

‘None of us shall be around when that happens .. !!’

Stars, the galaxy, the astronomical adventures and discoveries each coming year, bringing us closer to the very existence of us all .. the hemisphere, the world we live in, the planets and so much more .. so so intriguing !

When elders pass away, the questions asked by the grandchildren of young age, on the sudden absence of their Dada or Nana .. the response from parents has always been, ‘they went away to become a star .. up in the sky, in the Heavens’ .. and the look of belief in the innocent eyes of the child are enough to seek another living for ourselves ..

Seems odd .. but as my Father aged, on one fine day, he asked me whether it would be possible to get him a powerful telescope in the house .. I readily agreed and got him one .. he would spend time trying to learn its functioning ; they are a little complicated in its operation, and spend a lot of time as night came about, to look into the skies ..

Looking into the skies .. ?

Perhaps to seek a reserved destination for them, after their passing .. perhaps .. I never did ask my Father why ..?

And in time, when I shall be asked similar question, I too would not have reasonable answer ..

AND .. just an after thought ..

.. is it normal for the ones that age to wish to connect with those that time has kept away from us .. old school friends, relatives ignored till now and wanting to reconnect .. matters of the past ; incidents, locations, people ..

Is it .. ?

Amitabh Bachchan

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ask-de-writer · 8 years ago

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MAD - IRRITATED SCIENCE! : Bizarre Borderland : (1 Part)

MAD IRRITATED SCIENCE!

De Writer (Glen Ten-Eyck)

2488 words

written 2008

TUMBLR EXEMPTION

Blog holding members of Tumblr.com may freely reblog this story provided that the title, author and copyright information remain intact, unaltered, and are displayed at the head of the story.

Fan art, stories, music, cosplay and other fan activity is actively encouraged.

~~ ~~ ~~ ~~

I read an item in the SCI-NEWS that I personally found amusing. A lot of people, especially the other Desert Rats like me, would have said, “So?” For them, they'd be right. Me, I'm the odd one, the duck that swims in the desert.

The item? Somebody found and totally documented that the human brain's neurons use electrons to transmit information, which everybody already knew. The new bit was that the neurons and the so-called white matter, the glial cells, also used protons to carry information. The positive charge wasn't there just for balancing potentials.

Like I said, odd man out. I already had a working headset that used passive electrical pickups to read brain activity. In the past, and the reason that I built it, I used it to locate the speech processing center. My plan for riches was simply to use the headset to read subvocal thought for controlling a computer or word processor. Like many great notions, this one ran aground on the reef of reality. It barely worked at all and was prone to massive errors. Apparently it couldn't read the necessary brain center finely enough.

I looked over the equipment and began to rewrite my software to take into account the positive charges as information along with the negative ones. Wow. Dullsville, according to my few friends out here. I shut up about my experiments.

Al Martin was a particular thorn all the way through the paw. After I caught him cutting my gate lock chain to come up “for a friendly visit”, I got a Protective Order put on him to keep him away. He took to calling me Dr. Freakenstein and making 'hilarious' jokes about creating monsters and EVIL SCIENCE.

Al Martin aside, I kinda like it out here. The natural silence of wind, bird, coyote howl and such like, combined with the sheer joy of waking to the desert sunrise and watching the day unfold, lets me have both the time and the peace to think. Sometimes I tinker with the things that I think about. Unless Al finds a way to be a nuisance.

The last few months, he's been running a “neighborhood watch” scam. He got a telescope and started trying to charge folks for keeping an eye on their places. By a pure coincidence I'm sure (NOT), the places on his watch list get robbed by burglars more often than the ones that he doesn't watch. He even watches my place, which isn't on his watch list. Caught him in the act several times. I have a telescope, too.

Sorry about the digression. Back to my idea of fun stuff. The result of looking at both sides of the charge equation was a complete surprise. Much of the mystery of brain intercommunication simply fell apart. Most, if not all, of thought was processed as fractal interfaces between “clouds” of positrons clustered about various brain centers. Still sounds dull, I guess.

Point, set and match occurred when a rat wandered near, under my house. The sensor setup on my head spotted the interference of ratty's little “mind clouds” at once. I personally hadn't noticed. The computer showed me why, too. My mind was automatically blocking the signal.

It took both concentration and help from the computer to open up to it. As the little critter moved about, I started to get a feel for it. If I could feel it, could it respond to me?

That took quite a few tries and failures. After somewhat over an hour, I got the rat to come out from under the house and sit up on my porch in full view. He was a dusty gray with lines of white spots down his back. His tail was long but fluffy. Some sort of ground squirrel perhaps. Not really a rat after all.

Now that I had him in sight, I experimented more freely because I could see how Ratty responded. I needed the computer for the first few hours while I was learning to use my 'clouds' to influence his 'clouds'. I kept blocking the signal by old habit. With some work, I finally got Ratty to stand up and do a little rat-dance on his hind legs.

When I realized that Ratty was hungry from all of my experiments, I gave him a chunk of a peanut butter sandwich. A few curious little birds landed on my porch rail while Ratty and I were munching. I tried reaching out with my 'cloud' and encouraged them to hop up close. More of my sandwich disappeared into little birdie craws.

By the end of several days of practice, I knew that my maximum range was about fifteen feet. Inside that distance, I could simply execute small vermin like fleas, mites, lice, ticks and flying bugs. Larger critters were harder but not much. I didn't harm many of them though, it was more fun to control them and simply send them away. Ratty was the exception, of course. He was both a kick as a pet and a great little test subject.

Had to wonder, you know, if folks learning to do this sort of thing wasn't the basis of the tales about witchcraft. Thinking it through a bit more, after destroying a few persistent vermin in my garden, I realized that if this was the foundation of witchcraft, those fears in the general population could be well founded. It took almost no imagination at all to see how someone with this sort knowledge could be a very real danger to the community at large. Especially if the general population treated the “witch” badly. I didn't intend to find out what would happen in a case like that.

I'd just got a pair of deer up close and doing a bit of a step-dance for a big flake of hay when I noticed the dust cloud of a truck barreling along the road from Al's place. I sent the deer away, cursing Al under my breath. Bad news only got worse when Al's pickup roared up my drive, scattering gravel as he skidded to a stop. Al bailed out with a rifle in hand, starting to aim at the retreating deer.

I glared at him. Al's rifle fell to the dirt from hands gone nerveless. Wide eyed with anger, he demanded, “Damn you, Art! What did you do to me?”

Not bothering to get up from my seat on the porch steps I replied tartly, “Me? I'm here on my porch. You are ten feet away. From here, it looked like you managed to drop your gun just in time to avoid poaching charges on top of the Felony Trespass and Protective Order violation.”

Frowning in a black faced rage, he flexed his now almost functioning fingers and retorted, “Poaching? No way! This is private land so its legal. No hunting without permission your signs says. Wasn't no time to ask first, so's I was gonna ask after I blasted 'em. Would'a given me a whole Winter's meat.”

Lips pulled into a tight line I snapped, “Only problem, Al, is I would have said NO. Those signs allow me to get game from my land. Desert game is spread thin and I don't share mine. At least not with you. I heard from Joe Sanderson how well you share yours.”

Al was looking down at his hands and flexing them. Still pissed off, he spit out, “Joe had it coming! Bastard wouldn't pay me for Neighbor Watch.”

I raised one eyebrow and pointed out, “Neither will I. Looks like your hands are better. Get into your truck and shove off. Don't come back, either.”

Al stared to bend over to get his rifle and just kept on going down. He landed in a heap on the scattered gravel of my drive. “Don't try to take that gun, Al, unless you want to leave here in a hearse.”

Twitching on the ground, Al yelled, “I knew it, you asshole! You've used some sort of evil witchcraft on me. I'll have the law on you for this!”

I smiled down at him from my vantage point on the steps. A sensible wolf would have stepped away from that smile. “One: Killing Felony Trespassers is legal, and that's what you became when you hauled out that rifle. Two: You have a Protective Order that requires you to stay at least a hundred fifty feet from my property line and do nothing to compromise my property, including discharge firearms on or across it. I can legally kill you for that violation, too. Three: Witchcraft IS legal. Four: I just sat here and watched you apparently have some sort of seizures. Five: I am calling the Sheriff's Office on your Trespass and and Order violations.”

I got on my phone and called the situation in to the County Police. I fixed a sandwich and went back out on the porch to watch Al. He was staying down. I knew that he would.

As I started to eat, Ratty popped up from his nest under the house. He did his little rat dance and got his chunk of sandwich. He settled down by my feet and happily nibbled his bread and cheese.

Al looked on in what I believe was genuine fear. Trying to point, he exclaimed, “There's the proof! You are a witch-man! That's your familiar!”

Amused, I replied, “Ratty? A familiar? The worst he could do is nip your nuts while you're down.”

Ratty squeaked firmly.

I laughed, “Right Ratty! Why should you risk lice and other crawling vermin just to bite Al's privates?”

Ratty expressed his opinion of Al by taking his part of the sandwich and retreating back under the house. With his tail up to show Al his ass.

Not too much later a deputy arrived. I greeted him, “Hi, Deputy Mustic. 'Fraid your cousin Al's in a spot of trouble. Seems to have not only broken the Protective Order, he brought a firearm onto my place. Trouble is, unless he's faking it, he seems to have some sort of paralytic neurological event. He's even trying to blame me for it. Witchcraft, no less. Can you believe it?”

Deputy Mustic closed his eyes and took a deep breath. “Of Al? I'd believe near anything. I gotta call for a backup and let him do this one to be sure that everything's done right. If I try to do the arrest, Al's lawyer is sure to try for a conflict of interest or some such because we're related.” The deputy got on his radio and I overheard him giving dispatch a piece of his mind for sending him out to deal with a relative.

Soon both the backup, Deputy Jorgen, and an ambulance were on the scene. Al was duly informed of his rights and placed under arrest while the ambulance crew verified with a pin that Al really was paralyzed. Deputy Mustic took me aside, day book out and asked, “Art, why didn't you call the ambulance? Even if he is my family, we both know that Al is slime. Still, you should'a called.”

I nodded, while watching Al being loaded into the ambulance to be hauled away, “I would have, Deputy. Thing is, he pulled that stunt on Sadie Halloway where he faked an injury on her place. Since she called the ambulance, she wound up getting stuck for near enough a grand. Al did it because she wouldn't pay into his neighbor watch scam. I won't pay him either and just figured he was doing the same to me as he did to her.”

Writing in his day book and flipping a page to finish, Deputy Mustic nodded, “I heard about that. Thought it might be the reason. Needed it clear for the record is all.”

More anxiously, now that he was done being official, he asked, “Any idea what is wrong? I mean, scum or not, he is family and I'm worried for him. Believe it or not, the kids like him at reunions. He does slight of hand coin tricks and card stunts really professional.”

I shrugged, “The slight of hand for entertainment is something I'd not have guessed. Slick as he is at lifting small tools and such, I should have known something like that was behind it. As for this, no idea at all. I am sure that it's not sunstroke. The AC in his truck was on and it works. I would guess that it might be an oddball stroke of some kind. Maybe an aneurysm or bleed in the upper spine could do it. Just a guess, though.

“Al appears to be sure what it is. I heard him telling both Deputy Jorgen and the paramedics that it's witchcraft. If it is, I don't think that I'm the one. Frankly, I hope he's right. Witchcraft is legal.”

Three days later, Deputy Mustic was back. It was an unofficial visit. Looking sad, he said, “Al died in the hospital, last night, 'bout midnight, Art. The doctors did find what it was but there was nothing that they could do. Doctor Collins said that it was the fastest growing neurological tumor that she's ever heard of. It was just near to the top of his spine. Inoperable. Al died swearing to everyone there that you cursed him.”

I watched a hawk soar overhead for a moment before I replied, “Not to speak ill, but if I could have, I would have. Didn't like him at all.

“You, on the other hand are one of the best. Never heard a single bad word about you, even from folks you've arrested.”

Deputy Mustic smiled but only slightly, “Thanks for that, Art. I didn't expect any sympathy for Al but I figured that you'd want to know.”

“Indeed, Deputy. My condolences to your family.”

As Deputy Mustic drove away, My mind was in high gear. I liked it out here, but it did get pretty lonely on occasion. The ease with which I influenced animals and settled Al's hash led to an interesting line of thought.

The next time that I was in town, I spotted a pretty young lady. Checking her out by 'feel' I found that she was not only available, she didn't like being tied to one guy. She enjoyed having a variety of lovers.

All that I planted was the urge to drive out my way. The weekend was fun for both of us. Besides bed, Sally hiked around the hills with me and even liked watching a hawk or buzzard fly. We took a bunch of pictures of her around my house and up in the rocks and hills. Nice cheesecake, barely risque. Good memories.

It turned out that Sally knew a fair number of other like minded friends. After she introduced me to her buddies, neither my days or nights stayed lonely.

---The End---

#MAD - IRRITATED SCIENCE!#Bizarre Border #Modern Science/Fantasy #written by De Writer

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kristablogs · 4 years ago

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A night in the life of a professional stargazer

A fascination with the stars is part of our human nature, but studying them is a complex task. (Pexels/)

The following is an excerpt adapted from The Last Stargazers: The Enduring Story of Astronomy’s Vanishing Explorers by Emily Levesque.

“Have you tried turning it off and back on again?”

This phrase, repeated by weary IT specialists the world over, had possibly never prompted such horror. First of all, it was one in the morning, and I was sitting in a chilly control room on top of the highest mountain in Hawaii. I was nearly fourteen thousand feet above sea level, twenty-four years old, and desperately fighting through sleep and oxygen deprivation to salvage several hard-won hours of PhD thesis research time on a piece of broken equipment.

Second, the equipment in question was the Subaru Telescope, a 630-ton beast housed one floor above my head in a fourteen-story dome. It cost $47,000 per night to operate, and after submitting a twelve-page science proposal to the professors in my department, I had been granted one of these valuable nights—tonight, the only night allotted to me in the entire year—to point this telescope at a handful of galaxies five billion light-years away.

No, I had not tried turning it off and back on again.

The evening had been going excellently until one of the control room computers had produced an unsettling bloonk sound and prompted the telescope operator—the only other person with me on the mountain—to freeze in her seat. When I asked what was up, she cautiously informed me that one of the mechanized supports holding up a mirror had just failed, but “it’s okay. I think the mirror is still on the telescope.”

“You think?”

“Yeah. If it wasn’t, we would have heard a crash.” Solid reasoning, if not exactly reassuring.

We put in a nervous call to the Subaru members of the day crew. The Japanese crew member we reached cheerfully informed us that he had, in fact, seen this happen earlier in the day, that the mechanized supports were probably fine and it was probably just a false alarm, and that turning the power off and then on again would probably fix the problem. It seemed impolite to point out that we were talking about a multimillion-dollar telescope and not a modem.

I didn’t know what four hundred pounds of glass hitting the concrete floor above my head would sound like, but I knew I didn’t want to find out. I was also quite sure I didn’t want to be forever known as “the grad student who killed Subaru.” The cautious thing for me to do would be to call it a night, drive back down to the observatory’s sleeping quarters, and have the day crew carefully check things over the next morning.

On the other hand, this was my only night on the telescope. Tomorrow, it wouldn’t matter whether I’d experienced a mechanical failure, a false alarm, or even just some poorly timed clouds; telescope time is strictly scheduled months in advance, and another astronomer would be arriving with a completely different science program. I would have to submit a whole new proposal, hope for another hard-to-get yes from the telescope committee, wait an entire year—a full trip of the earth around the sun—until the galaxies were back up in the night sky to try again, and hope that night wouldn’t have any clouds or telescope problems.

Of course, having the largest piece of glass in the world sitting in pieces on the dome floor wouldn’t help matters either.

I looked at the operator, and she looked back at me. I was the astronomer, so with all of my twenty-four-year-old, third-year-grad-student, still-had-to-pay-the-young-driver-fee-to-rent-a-car wisdom, this was my call.

I turned the power off and back on again.

The Last Stargazers is out this week. (Sourcebooks/)

The simple act of stargazing is an experience shared by almost every human on the planet.

Whether we’re peering through the stifling light pollution of a bustling city, struck motionless by the riot of stars arcing over our heads in a remote corner of the globe, or simply standing still and feeling the enormity of space waiting just outside our planet’s atmosphere, the beauty and mystery of the night sky has always entranced us. You’d also be hard-pressed to find someone who hasn’t admired the dramatic astronomical photographs produced by the world’s best telescopes: the sweeping vistas of stars, galaxy pinwheels, and rainbow-hued gas clouds that supposedly hold the secrets of the cosmos.

What’s less well-known is the story behind where these photos come from, how and why we’re taking them, and who exactly is extracting those secrets of the universe. Astronomer sounds like a romantic and dewy-eyed sort of job, and its practitioners are a unicorn-esque rarity: of the 7.5 billion people on our planet, fewer than fifty thousand are professional astronomers. Most people have never even met a professional astronomer, let alone contemplated the details of such a strange career. When thinking about what an astronomer does (on the rare occasion that it’s thought of at all), people tend to imagine their own experiences with stargazing taken to an obsessive level: a nocturnal geek peering through a really big telescope in a really dark place. The handful of astronomers in movies also become a go-to reference: Jodie Foster hunkering down with headphones to listen for aliens in “Contact” or Elijah Wood peering through a suspiciously powerful backyard telescope to discover a planet-destroying asteroid in “Deep Impact”.

This was certainly the mental image of astronomy that I had in mind when I claimed it as my future career. I’d come to astronomy in the same way as countless other amateur and professional space enthusiasts, through a childhood of backyard stargazing in a New England factory town, Carl Sagan’s writing on my parents’ bookshelf, and those jaw-dropping photographs of nebulae and star fields that seemed to always show up as the backdrops of TV specials and science magazine covers. Even when I arrived at MIT as a freshman and blithely declared myself a physics major in my first step toward an astronomy career, I had only a vague sense of what I’d be doing all day in my chosen profession. My daydreams were about contacting aliens, unraveling the mysteries of black holes, and discovering a new type of star. (So far, only one of these has come true.)

I did not daydream about being the final decision point for keeping one of the world’s largest telescopes intact. I never imagined that one day, I’d be shimmying up the support struts of a different telescope to duct-tape a piece of foam across its mirror in the name of science, researching whether my employer carried experimental aircraft insurance, or willing myself to somehow fall asleep next to a tarantula the size of my head.

I also had no idea that the field I was entering was changing as rapidly as the rest of the world. The astronomers I read about and imagined—swathed in fleece, perched behind an impossibly large telescope on a cold mountaintop and squinting into an eyepiece while the stars wheeled above them—were already an endangered and evolving species. In joining their ranks, I would fall even deeper in love with the beauty of space, but to my surprise, I would also wind up exploring my own planet and learning the stories of an incredible, rare, and rapidly changing—even vanishing—field.

Excerpted from The Last Stargazers by Emily Levesque, published by Sourcebooks. Reprinted with permission. All other rights reserved.

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scootoaster · 4 years ago

Text

A night in the life of a professional stargazer

A fascination with the stars is part of our human nature, but studying them is a complex task. (Pexels/)

The following is an excerpt adapted from The Last Stargazers: The Enduring Story of Astronomy’s Vanishing Explorers by Emily Levesque.

“Have you tried turning it off and back on again?”

No, I had not tried turning it off and back on again.

“You think?”

“Yeah. If it wasn’t, we would have heard a crash.” Solid reasoning, if not exactly reassuring.

Of course, having the largest piece of glass in the world sitting in pieces on the dome floor wouldn’t help matters either.

I turned the power off and back on again.

The Last Stargazers is out this week. (Sourcebooks/)

The simple act of stargazing is an experience shared by almost every human on the planet.

Excerpted from The Last Stargazers by Emily Levesque, published by Sourcebooks. Reprinted with permission. All other rights reserved.

0 notes