Anti"Karma" : What goes around, continues to go round and round ..

Gravity … well, we all know it is the tendency of objects to fall towards the ground. Even before Columbus sailed, people knew that the earth was round. The only dispute was how big it was. So we knew that gravity was the tendency for objects to fall towards the centre of the earth and then Newton came along and sat under an apple tree and rest is all history. Hi5 to those who still wonder why he did not find a seat under a coconut tree, it would’ve made our lives a lot better at school.

Jokes apart; we all know that he saw apples falling and locked himself in a room for a couple of years, did some calculations and came out with the Universal Gravitational Constant. But what was Einstein wondering about when he saw the apple fall? He saw an apple fall, he saw another apple fall, then he saw some leaves fall as he kept looking above, but the moon stayed right there. The moon never fell. Well as we discussed above if gravity is the tendency of objects to fall towards the centre, then why isn’t the moon falling? Consider it analogous to a bird flying. The bird stays in air successfully by pushing air downwards. Or you could refine it by saying that it gives a forces equal and opposite to the gravitational force and hence does not fall. The moon does the same. Just that it pushes in a different way. 

Let’s break for a while and analyze some missiles. You know what a projectile means, don’t you?.  The picture below helps u understand what a projectile is. It is basically the path adopted by something launched in air or dropped from air. All missiles launched take the shape of a projectile. Now I’d like to visualize something.  

 

Let’s think about a situation. There is a war and country A wants to bomb the other country B. How would the projectile of the bomb look? Something like what is shown below.

 Okay now what if the countries are pretty far apart? It’s simple; you just throw your bomb with more force. But you got to calculate the missiles' path and destination precisely. Any miscalculation would put you in a very bad position.

Okay what happens if someone fires a missile and miscalculates its projectile? Say he gave it some extra force that is misses the earth on the other side. Something that looks like this.

What happens to the bomb? Where does it go? Say you’ve programmed it to go "KABOOM" once it touches the ground. Now when does this bomb blast?  Think ..

The inertia (or the tendency for something to keep moving unless stopped by an external agent) keeps it going. Going on and on. But till where ???

What would eventually happen would look like this. The missile would carry on along its path and continue to miss he earth on the other side as well. This would happen for a couple of cycles and would eventually stabilize at a particular distance. Let us not get into too much physics as to why the distance would stop growing. The distance at which it would stop is dependent on the velocity with which it travels. The faster it travels, the further is the distance of stabilization. As simple as that ! Now you would know what the title of this blog really means.

This distance at which the missile stabilizes, my friend, is called the “orbital”. Yes even I wish physics was taught to me with such simplicity.  

Now take the missile out of the picture and put a satellite in it. This stupid mistake of giving extra force to the missile by some war chief suddenly looks like an accomplished feat by a NASA Scientist. 

And now, going back to the moon. The moon is just a projectile which travels around the earth missing the earth every time it goes around. Fortunately there is no air resistance in outer space so it would continue with to spin around the earth forever without crashing in.  

This post is dedicated to educate my fellow Indian citizens on the basics of space technology as my country launches its Mars Mission today. I hope it helped. Vande Mataram !!! 

Do share your valuable thoughts in the comments section .. Thank you.

Zig, Zog and the fair priced Indian economy...!!!

               What is price? It is not the reflection of any intrinsic value something may have, nor is it the sum of what is cost to produce it and profits fetched. It is instead what the owner will demand in order to part with it. I hope you get this straight into your head as this happens to be the main reason as to why prices rise during scarcity and do not drop to the same levels when demand meets supply. The term “Inflation” is merely a cover up to justify this act. Of course I am not ridiculing inflation here, I’m just pointing out misconceptions.

                I’d like to take you through a cautionary tale here. Two cities Zig and Zog prevailed long ago. Both had around the same population, same terrain and people who ate the same kind of food, similar cultural practises but different rulers. One was a benevolent king and the other was a good Economist.

In Zig, food produced was always in surplus and every grain reached the palace doors and they were equally distributed to all. The king set fair prices and food reached everyone, and so all praised the king. But when famine hit, the benevolent king under priced the food articles to help his people live at the cost of his reserves diminishing. And as the famine persisted, the dying people continued to praise the dying king. And once the king was dead, so did Zig. There was theft and chaos and the remaining people fled.

In far away Zog, the government never intervened in pricing commodities. It left the responsibility to its merchants, trusted them and supported them. During times of surplus these merchants stealthily built warehouses to store excess food. And when famine hit, they sold the food at double the price stripping people even of their watches n jewels. These traders even gave some of these jewels and watches to the peasants to coax more food. News spread and this attracted people from nearby areas surrounding Zog. The longer the famine, the higher the prices went, until the people restricted themselves to a minimal diet. Or you can say that the markets rationed them to such a a state. This made them more competitive survivors than mere dependant slaves to the government as in the case of Zig. By the time the famine ended, the whole city was indebted to the merchants, but was alive: and each merchant was resentful that competition from his colleagues restricted him to raise his fortune twenty fold, rather than only four fold.

In Zig, when fair prices were paid for food, the supply dried up and people starved and died along with their fair-minded ruler. Farmers were not prepared to supply food at the fixed low prices set by the government. Whereas in Zog, when no fair prices were legislated, there were large price rises, big enough to attract farmers, not only from nearby regions but even as far as Zig (remember the people who fled from Zig). The people of Zog grumbled, but lived and adapted.

                  This is just a tale, but it emphasises the fact that as prices rise, competition increases, quality increases, new techniques evolve and people become more adaptable. Moreover it portraits that prices have an existence and influence people beyond the intentions of the ruler/government.

             Yes, the entire article was referring to subsidies. 27 years ago, Indians unintentionally miscalculated the back firings that the country would face by introducing subsidies. They never had a time frame. Subsidies are generally given at the time of an emergency in order to sustain a dying population and in that particular time frame; the government should empower its people to alleviate themselves from existing misery. Take world history and you’ll find food and fuel subsidies being the most popular form, and all of them came with a well defined time frame. Once the country revives, the subsidies vanish. Unfortunately here in India, subsidy is a way of life. And we did follow the trail left by Zig. We are desperately working towards reviving ourselves to avoid an economic breakdown. The country dies with its dying king. Should we allow it?

           By creating a cheaper country to live in, we create a less competitive environment for us to survive. This is not to be confused with creating 'Security', rather this is merely inculcating 'Stupidity'. On a concluding note, evaluate politicians who help the country and its people grow progressively, rather than the ones who make your life easier.

Arithmetic, Population Energy and Money

Arithmetic, Population Energy and Money

This Is my second blog and I would like to take you through some math and the importance of numbers in life especially percentages and doubling time with some psychology and news reading skills. As many of you know, I’m a math and Science enthusiast but now I’m inclined towards psychology too. First of all, we must understand that math is more than just numbers and it should be rightfully defined as the science of computing. When math is represented with discrete values it is called arithmetic and algebra when we use alphabets or symbols when you represent something broader, say a law or a theorem. We were all taught basic of mathematics in our schools and colleges, but we merely study them as subjects which are a part of our curriculum. We sometimes fail to recognize or acknowledge some simple relations we come across in our daily life that are governed by the same mathematics that we learnt, which if seen from the right perspective, is easier than you thought it was. I would like to inform you that All Global Problems are connected by Arithmetic. The article would also touch upon today’s speculative news market and how to read news article, though not in detail. The way I write will be very direct and I use only simple English, albeit, you may have to read a few sentences twice to understand what I mean to say.

Do not understand what you want to, but, what I want you to. I hope you like it.

The greatest short coming of the human race is our inability to understand the arithmetic exponential function. Yes..!!! Logarithmic and Exponential functions, by far the best means available in mathematics used to forecast or predict future trends and values are not understood by most of us. When an information passed from one person to another  the quality of information is maintained only when all the necessary data in the message is understood and interpreted by the listener. Most of our information that we depict today, are in terms of percentages. I hope everyone is well aware of percentages. Percentage merely describes anything that grows with time, increase by a fixed fraction for a fixed period of time. Even though the information travels in a very crisp manner, the listener/reader should still compute as to how much increase or decrease it actually is.

And then there is doubling time. Doubling time is the time taken for a particular quantity to become twice its magnitude.   Lets take 3 examples 

1. “A baby grows to twice its height if 2 – 3 years”.

2. “You will have twice the amount of homework to do if you spend the weekend watching movies and playing video games”.

3. “The world oil consumption doubled in the sixties”.

Now these are just mere examples which depict what a Doubling time is …. Or wait..!! Are they …???

NO. !!!

 Doubling time needs to be specific. It’s a measure of time. You need to quantize the time period for a quantity to double in its magnitude. The first statement somewhat tentatively conveys the message regarding the starting and the ending period. Start when the baby is born and end somewhere between 2-3 years.

The second example however does not talk about time period at all. You have to assume a lot of things to understand this. Firstly, you should be given home work on weekends and you should be given homework after the weekend. Third, you should be given the same amount of homework after the weekend. The third example is even more disastrous. It only has the word doubling time. It does not compare the consumption pattern to a previous time scale. It did not speak about what oil. It did not specify a particular time period as to when it actually doubled.

Now re-consider your thought process if you happened to be convinced with those three examples when you read it for the first time. Most of the news you see on TV or read on the papers today are baseless as the examples stated above. Now why do people fall for these news anyway?

Express it in percent, no one cares. Represent it as doubling time, and everyone is awestruck. Yes ..!!!!!

Invest in BANK A and your money will double in 6 and a half years.
Invest in BANK B and you will get 11.50% interest per annum. 

Which statement catches your eye ??  Well, for all the effort I’ve put in, I hope it is the first one.

However, the truth is that Bank B gives you slightly more than double the amount you invest in the same time period. All said and done, how do  you calculate doubling time ? You do not want to sit with a calculator when you read the news, do you? It is easier than you thought. Just divide 70 by the interest rate.  7% interest takes 10 yrs to double (70/7 =10).

So if you have Rs 100 today growing at 7%, it grows by another Rs 100 in 7 years and you end up having Rs 200 at the end of 10 years. The average world economy for the past 400 years has been steadily growing at something under 7%. I’m pretty much sure about this as I’ve read it somewhere sometime ago. Anyways, let us assume it to be so and let us go back 300 years. The Indian princely states had to pay an amount equivalent to Rs 100 at that time, as a yearly tax to the British.

 Rs 100 at 6.8%, doubles 30 times in 300 yrs,

 2 ^ 30 x 100 . It is something more than 100 Crore Rs or something less than $20 million. Now there was more than one princely state falling under the British rule in 1713 and the British made a lot of money. And $20 million per annum per state is sumptuous. Another piece of information Manhattan was purchased in 1626 fr 24$. Assuming a steady growth of 6.8%, Do the math.

Legend has it that the game of chess was invented by a mathematician who worked for a king. The king was very pleased with the invention of the game that he wanted to reward him. The mathematician said, “Well my king, my needs are modest. If you just take my chess board and on the first square place one grain of wheat. On the next square double the one to make two and on the next, double the two to make four. Just keep doubling till you reach the 64^th square and that would pretty much suffice my needs and my family’s”. The king thought he was a fool and said “You fool, I was going to give you a real reward and you resort to some grains of wheat? “. Well let’s work it out and find whether the mathematician was actually a fool or not.

The table below is pretty simple to understand. The first column numbers the squares, the second column tells you how many grains are in the square and the third column shows the total number of grains in the chess board.

Square # Number	Grains on Square	Total Grains on the Board
1	1	1
2	2	3
3	4	7
4	8	15  (24 – 1)
5	16	31  (25 – 1)
.	.	.
.	.	.
63	262	263 – 1
64	263	264 – 1

Again I hope you don’t have any difficulties in understanding the table above. Let us identify a pattern here. Every new square has one grain more than the total number of grains on the entire chess board. The 2^nd square has 2 grains which is one more than the total number of grains which were there, which was one. The 5^th square has 16 grains which is one more than 15 which happens to be the sum of all grains till the previous square. And so the relation is obtained where n happens to be the Square# number and “ 2ⁿ – 1 “ is the number of grains n the square. So every time a quantity doubles it takes more than all that you’ve used before

So you have to understand that the whenever something doubles, it means that the production/consumption of that particular item is going to be more than what existed till date. Going back to the news which said, “The world oil consumption doubled in the sixties”, which actually meant crude oil, this statement says that the amount of oil consumed in the 1960s was more than what was consumed in the entire history of the earth till 1959.

The word population today is around over 7 billion. The population was 3.5 billion in 1968. So, in just 45 years, human beings have produced more off springs than the total number of off springs ever produced in the history of mankind which runs to 10s and 1000s of years. The frightening fact is that, we still continue to grow at close to 2% p.a. This means that we have also produce more food than what we have produced in the history of mankind. And also the space available per person on land has shrunken by slightly more than half and all of this has happened in just 45 years.  The picture depicts a rough timeline just for the sake of understanding it is not perfect to scale.

          Consider the black patch to be the timeline from 10000BC to today, it is to be noted that the first billion was achieved only in the starting of the 19^th century and now we have a whopping 7 billion people in our planet. The thin blue line in the end depicts the last 45 years in which our population doubled.

Now, going back to the king and his chess master, exactly how much was the total amount of wheat grains on the chess board. “ 2⁶⁴ – 1” is just a little more than  400 times the 1990 world harvest of wheat. Oooooohhhh yeaahhh … !!!! IT IS .

Well this should feed his family till eternity.

Well, I think, this is precisely the reason why people are AWESTRUCK when something is depicted in terms of doubling time.

I’d like to finish this off with one more explanation. Bacterium multiplies by dividing into two. The two become four and the four become eight, sixteen and so on. Suppose you put them in a jar and the bacteria doubles every minute, the jar gets filled up in one hour.  Say, you place one bacterium inside a jar at 11 a.m in the morning, the jar gets filled at 12 noon. Easy to understand and I hope you are clear. The growth is constant and occurs in a finite environment. 

Now I’d like to ask you 3 questions:

1. When is the jar half full?

          Some of you may be surprised by the answer. It is exactly at 11:59 a.m. Just one minute before 12 noon, because, they double in number every minute and so, if you reduce a minute you’ll arrive at exactly half of what you had.

2. If you were the bacterium in it, at what time would you have realized that you’re running out of space?

           Well coming to think of this, a minute before 12 noon, the bottle is half full. Two minutes before, it’s a quarter full. Three minutes, 12.5% full. Well, jus 5 minutes before 12 noon, there is tremendous scope of growth as there is approximately 97% free space in the jar and how many of you are going to predict that you are going to be choked up in the next five minutes .????

Well then, let us consider that there are a few brainy bacteria inside the jar who predict this short coming and set to launch a search mission for new bottles. They are successful enough to find 3 new bottles. Now question 3.

3. How long do you think the bacteria can sustain after these bottles have been identified?

Well, at 12 noon you will have one bottle filled. At 12:01 p.m. the other bottle gets filled and at 12:02 p.m. all the four are filled. 

Well then Folks..!!! I know you have already figured out the moral behind this article. Keep an eye on percentages. Always look for specific details, just the percentage without time scale is just speculation. Doubling means not only increase in production or extraction, but also depletion. And at the rate in which our population is rising, we are already in the last minutes like those of the bacteria. Looking at the timeline diagram again I wonder whether we are in the last minutes or last seconds...!!!

Keep thinking until I get back to you, hopefully, on something more interesting.

NOTE:

The “easy to understand”, “ I hope you understood” are all psychological impact statements that I have experimented with you. These statements are supposedly used to ease your head and help you convince yourself that the data is easy to comprehend. I hope it worked. 

Solar Power Technologies

Solar energy, as everyone knows, is the energy derived from the sun. Solar energy has gained popularity in recent years and a lot of new methodologies and gadgets have been developed to harness it. The boom in the solar industry that is expected in the recent future, is driven by the high increase in oil prices and the search for cleaner, cheaper and a more reliable source of energy. But, the prevalence of solar energy has been there since the time the earth was formed or, as rightly said, since minutes after the big bang. Solar power is nothing but the heat, which in the form of radiation, reaches the earths’ surface. In a broader sense, solar energy is the heat energy exchange between any star and its planets.

At first, we need to understand the first law of thermodynamics, popularly known as ‘law of conservation of energy’. It states that, “Energy can neither be created nor destroyed, but, merely converted from one form to another or carried (transported) from one place to another”.  As a science enthusiast, ones understanding shall stretch far beyond this. When oil is burnt, chemical energy in the oil is converted to thermal energy as heat and when a ceiling fan spins, electrical energy is converted to mechanical energy. Considering both the cases, the energy before the energy conversion and after are the same. This means that the quantum of energy contained in the electricity is the same as that of the spinning fan. It also means that the energy of the universe during the big bang equals the energy it will have during dooms day.

 So, at what expense does this conversion occurs …???

 There is no physical/measurable sacrifice that happens. Sacrifice here means consumption. Something has to be consumed to produce another. Fuel is consumed to run a vehicle. Food is consumed to gain energy. But in the case of an energy transfer, there is no consumption but mere conservation. But this does happen in nature every day in front of us. How does this happen ??? and What is consumed ???

This thought gives rise to a another physical quantity named “Quality”. Energy has two forms, quantity and quality. Law of conservation of energy is a quantitative representation of energy balance and does not take quality into account. Quality is not measurable. It is only felt. Something analogous to smell, you know something smells, but you can’t quantify the amount of smell that travels along the air you breathe. With every energy conservation, there is reduction in quality of energy. Thus, quality plays a very major role in deciding the usability of the energy source.

On analyzing the formation of our fossil fuels, we know that, coal and petroleum are formed due to the prolonged action of high temperature and pressure on vegetable and animal matter buried under the earths’ crust. Now where does vegetation get its energy from ??? Due to photosynthesis, and photosynthesis occurs due to absorption of solar energy. So, we can clearly conclude that, fossil energy is basically solar energy after three conversion processes or after three quality reductions.

Apply the same to hydro power plants. Why does the dam get filled???- Due to flow of water. How does water flow???- Due to melting of ice, which is aided by the sun. How does ice get formed???- Due to snow fall. How does snow fall occur??? – a result of precipitation. Why does precipitation occur??? – Due to evaporation. And why does evaporation occur??? – Due to solar irradiation.

One should understand that addition of water to air does not make it heavier; rather, it makes it lighter. If you consider a particular volume of dry air and the same volume of moist air, the density of moist air will be lesser. This can be easily understood by the empirical deduction that when water evaporates from the oceans, it raises rather falling back into the oceans. Again, hydro energy is nothing but solar energy after three conversion processes. With this we know that solar power is superior to all other energy sources in the earth.

Is there any other source of energy superior to solar? YES – nuclear energy. The very reason why sun light is being produced is because of the nuclear fusion reaction that occurs in the core of the sun. And is there any other form of energy far superior than atomic energy? YES – antimatter. I will probably get back to this later. Let’s get back to where we were heading.

Thus proving that solar energy is the chief form of energy, due to its higher quality, it is wise to extract energy from that chief form. But unfortunately the technology to extract this chief form at a cheap rate does not exist. Time and need will surely create the technology in the future.

Now let us analyze some numbers. The average solar irradiation on the earth varies from 1600 – 2500 KWh/m² per year. This means that an average house  approx. 20m², receives around 35,000 KWh/year i.e 35,000 units of energy. The average Indian household requires 10,000 – 15,000  units of electricity a year. We now know that high quality energy is available to sustain an entire household for a full year. But it is not practically viable or this is too farfetched an idea in the early space age that we live in.

So what is the problem with the solar energy.?
When people can understand its potential, why aren’t we using it.?

Keep thinking … will get back soon on this.