The Last Few Seconds...

 If you have watched the video of Air India flight 171 taking off from Ahmedabad, India and then crashing into a building less than a minute later, you will notice that the plane and it's wings have been turned white in the video? Why? The plane had other colors on it. This video was taken by a young man from the roof of his house. 

(It reminded me of a pure white crane that had shown up on the road just below the balcony of my apartment at around 4.30 a.m. a few days earlier. The date, however, says April 24th on the file info of the pictures. I tried to take pics of the crane but these are grainy. A SUV loaded with people slowed down as it approached the crane. I was surprised to see the crane very suddenly spread it’s wings wide open and fly away. The wings made the crane look so big and wide; much bigger than it looked while standing. It flew low, parallel to the road towards the left.)

The panel on my television started misbehaving about a week back. If I use the volume button it changes the video input option instead of the volume.  Almost every button on the panel is doing what it is not supposed to do. The volume is now stuck at high. I found a work around by connecting a Bluetooth headphones to the TV so only I can hear the sound.)

Back to the plane crash….there are a few videos made by people inside the plane with their cell phones - on YouTube. Some are pleasant- selfies of kids ; one passenger was filming the outside from the window of the plane when all of a sudden the screen turns red and you can see fire and hear a loud thud. There are saddening videos of charred remains of a child inside a wooden box …There are other depressing videos but it is difficult to know whether all of these are authentic. 

Interstellar revisited

 Towards the end of the movie INTERSTELLAR, while recovering in a hospital on Cooper Station, Cooper walks over to the window and sees a curved habitat with houses and children playing baseball. That was very confusing for me - had the entire town moved to space with Cooper station or is Cooper able to see his home town on earth using special parabolic mirrors ?

The first guess is correct!! A scientist named O’Neill came up with the idea of two cylinders 20 miles long and 5 miles in diameter each, that could house an entire town. Artificial Gravity is produced by centrifugal force caused by rotation of the cylinders at a fixed speed similar to the rotation of earth about its axis. It is a theoretical idea only but because the movie is set in the future, we have to assume that the generation from the time of Cooper managed to make it practical/real..

Water, water everywhere.....

 Weather continues to wreak havoc not only within  USA but other parts of the world as well. Monsoon arrived in Mumbai,India couple of weeks àhead of schedule and so we see office goers and automobiles wading thru streets flooded with water, while some surrounding areas in the state of Maharashtra are completely submerged 

Videos on YouTube show northeast India is faring far worse - villages and towns have turned into rivers because of monsoon floods !

At a snail's pace.....

by,

Ravindra Loomba

I found a snail slowly moving near my feet as I waited for a bus couple of days back. It became still as I pointed my phone camera at it. I might not have noticed the snail if the geometric pattern on it's shell had not caught my attention ! The spiral formation on the shell seems like a miracle of nature. It maybe a hint at the answer to the question of creation itself ! The shell is made of calcium carbonate.