Sowing the seeds for Rain!

The shortage of rainfall is supposed to be a major problem in India. Now to be honest, from what I have seen of these monsoons in Bombay, I ended up believing that because of excess and un-manageable rainfall Bombay had water logging. But, shortage is the problem that the municipal corporation of Bombay (BMC)  is worried about.

I just read in the paper today that the BMC was planning to go to a "RAIN MAN" to make rain. Now, to a lot of people this might imply that the Rain man was going to perform some kind of dance or sacrifice to please the rain gods! But think again, the scientific method this Rain man will use is called Cloud seeding!

Now, I had heard of CLOUD OS, but Cloud seeding was news to me. So I did what any person of our generation with questions would do... I went online to find the answer. And to my surprise it wasn't just hog wash. Wikipedia had an article on it! 

It is a method that is used to increase precipitation. It uses hygroscopic agents that cause the water to come together, and therefore cause precipitation. The science behind it seems alright, if water molecules come together, they become heavy, and eventually fall to the earth as rain/snow or some form of precipitation. Of course, if it does work one can never really say if it was the effect of the cloud seeding or mother nature. What if it was going to rain anyway?! The rain will certainly bring down the agents that were sent up! 

 However from what I read, people have used this method at times to reduce precipitation rather than increase it. The case in point is China, where they used this method in the hope that there would be no rain during the opening ceremony of the Beijing Olympics. Also Vladimir Putin had used this method to try to make sure it didn't rain during a G8 Summit...but it ended up pouring!

I guess you can't play around with nature. I just hope that in our attempt to increase precipitation, we don't end up reducing it! Instead maybe find a way to perform Rainwater tapping, it will be the stone that takes out two birds.  

 

Powered by Qumana

The Data Space Equivalency

I am sure many of you are familiar with Parkinson's Law:

Work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion.

This is rather self explanatory, and therefore some computer guy came up with one more...the Corollary:

Data expands to fill the space available for storage.

This single line is so heavily valid in today's context! I have worked with computer when the HDD was 2 GB. That time this law didn't apply... maybe because there was nothing to put in a computer except small files, or that i just didnt know what existed. In the past few years however, having had a desktop with 40 GB wasn't enough. So we added an extra 80 GB for the data. Then when i went on to get my first Laptop, it had 120 GB in it. It felt like all the space in the world. Then soon enough, the internet Broadband became unlimited, so downloads happened. Friends with a LAN came over with oodles of binary data. Which is when I went and bought myself an external HDD of 80GB! Dearth of space continued and i upgraded my lappy to 160 GB of HD space.In the hope that that would solve my problems.

Before my recent trip to Singapore, where i went to visit a friend, i learnt that he had an 8 Mbps connection. Now that meant 1 MB per sec!!! Do you see what thought raced around my head!  Amazing Download speed. Take that one step further...SO MANY DOWNLOADS!

To accomodate these downloads i had to have space. I took with me a fresh set of blank DVDs. My external HDD was almost full with data, so i copied only what i needed and put it on my desktops old HDD. I picked up all the Pen drive i could see at home and didn't push off until i was sure i packed them all!

I am back home now, and not finding sufficient space on my HDD to put in new data, i removed my music library(30 GB). Now i have upgraded my Bandwidth, and to because i can download faster, i download more. I now find myself dealing with OS warning messages of low disk space :( . 

Powered by Qumana

As always, today too my curiosity and want to find new software and fiddle around with it overcame all other desires. Ascending Maslow's hierarchy i find that pretty low is a "want for knowledge" ;) 

Now downloaded a tool called blogger widget for Mac OS X. My first post from it. I hope it works right. For now short is sweet :)