Sachin's 200 a conspiracy??

Many wouldn't like to admit it , but FACTS as they stand out , seem to shed light on the pathetic state of indian cricket and the cancer that's slowly, but surely killing it. A pathetic batting pitch in which one side takes 350+ but the other struggling to reach 250 ? In which one side breaks all the records , but the other trying hard to hold on to the willow? , oh yeah , I've seen it before -
During the Cronje, Azharuddin era..

No one can dispute the batting prowess of sachin , but you gotto check the mental soundness of the South African bowlers and the batsmen who chased these scores.. The same ones chased down the Australian behemoth , with its seemingly insurmountable 400+ scores..

Think...
things aren't always what they seem; nor are they otherwise ? Blows your mind , doesn't it!!!

Google's holiday wishes

This is the mail I got from Google wishing me happy holidays. Its more focused on google.org , Google's philanthropy arm. Check out the greetings here - http://www.google.com/advertising/holiday2009/. Nice one.

Chapter one - The end game

Finally after 3 yrs and still with no plot in hand , I managed to take the story to a logical conclusion. You can read it here. I got this idea to break up the entire thing into chapters from one of the comments posted in the site.So, Read on...

Why a job is bad for you!

Consider a watchman. How much does he earn in a city like Bangalore ?, where each and every mud hut needs a security/caretaker. Contrast it with the pay of the very people he is guarding/caretaking. What will be his sense of achievement and what are his career prospects say like after 10 years of service? He shall become the respected Head watchman,if he's not already died of boredom.

Now consider a software engineer. How much does he earn? The same case holds true for him also. Every other fellow walking on the streets of Bangalore works for a software company. What are his career prospects,again take a ten year time frame. He shall become the veritable team lead after 5 and maybe if he's not fired or dead , a project manager. Contrast this with his employer's.

Can't you see the analogy ? Hard to miss I'd say. Spending a lifetime guarding someone else's property is hardly appealing but that's what people do for a living.

The employed works for a life,the employer lives the life.

Find (And Watch) Your Favorite TV Shows On The Internet

A good one from the Netted. This new site Clicker offers a precise way to locate and watch 400,000 episodes from about 7,000 TV shows. Clicker brings you only broadcast-quality TV shows and web originals .It makes it insanely easy to locate the studio-produced versions of the TV shows you want to see with none of the junk that comes up when you’re doing a broader search. (They also have movies and music videos).When you find something you want to watch Clicker either plays it on the site or takes you to one of the hubs where this content is shown, such as Hulu, CBS.com or Amazon Video on Demand.

One of the more useful features is the ability to make playlists, which essentially allows you to “subscribe” to a particular show. Clicker will send you an email notification when new episodes are available.

I haven't tried it out yet.

The story of the 'unfinished'

The valley of fear - ii was inspired from a character 'Birdy Edwards', in one of the Sherlock Holmes' novel titled 'The valley of fear'.The story inside the story, is of a detective from the famous Pimberton detective agency going deep under cover to break up an illegal organisation in the old, wild west of the U.S of A.
Thus I started my feeble attempt at writing, but without a plot in hand it was destined to fail from the start. Now after some three years ,as I look upon to revive the story, I still have no solid plot and I don't even know what to do with the characters; whether to place them in the pre-internet era or to give them a crime of sherlockian standards.

With the kind of reviews that are coming in, urging me to complete the story, I fear to tweak the original text to suite the new plot, for I'm sure I won't be able to keep upto the quality of the original.

Back to the past - Chemistry

Long back, when i was in my 11th and 12th, preparing for IITs,NITs and all other Ts, my dream was to become a chemical engineer. Chemistry was home turf for me , especially the organic part. My dreams revolved around the Benzene rings , the H2O2 and the likes of HexaMethylene Tri-Acetides (Does it exist??). All I could see were elements and compounds around me waiting for me to tinker with. And some of the most horribly gone wrong experiments in my life involved chemistry(there are others involving physics and magnetism too, but all about that later).Once

• when I tried creating hydrogen from water ( was pretty dangerous and dumb too)
• and when for the sake of human kind , I ventured into home based Methane production.It was a failure on a grand scale.

The lessons learnt ? - That water is a good conductor of electricity and that trash kept for a long time stinks.

So when i saw this article in sciencenews.org about Nitrogen-Nitrogen bonds all that terrible memories came flooding in.
The article talks about a new method of breaking N-N bonds to create carbon-nitrogen bond.
Facts that I learnt in school about N2.

Nitrogen is the element that makes up the largest percentage of the atmosphere, about 80%.But still we need nitrogen fixing bacteria to bring it to soil. For fertilizer production the N2 has to be bonded with Hydrogen and converted to ammonia to form a carbon-nitrogen bond,because N-N bonds are one of the toughest bonds found.

Why don't you just read the rest here - article