Rama's Happy Thoughts

Check out this excellent visual: You start at 10^23 meters out on the galaxy and travel through 'powers of ten' and end up at quark size inside of an atom of the leaf.

As an additional exercise, reflect on the this song from Monty Python's Meaning of Life:

Whenever life gets you down, Mrs Brown
And things seem hard or tough
And people are stupid obnoxious or daft
And you feel that you've had quite enough...

Just remember that you're standing on a planet that's evolving
And revolving at nine hundred miles per hour
It's orbiting at nineteen miles per second, so it's reckoned
The Sun that is the source of all our power
The Sun, and you, and me, and all the stars that we can see
Are travelling at a million miles per day
In an outer spiral arm at forty thousand miles per hour
In the galaxy we call the Milky Way

The galaxy itself contains a hundred billion stars
It's a hundred thousand light years side to side
It bulges in the middle, sixteen thousand light years thick
But out by us it's just three thousand light years wide
We're thirty thousand light years from Galactic Central Point
We go 'round every two hundred million years
And our galaxy is only one of millions and billions
In this amazing and expanding universe

The universe itself keeps on expanding and expanding
In all of the directions it can whiz
The fastest it can go
The speed of light, you know
Twelve million miles a minute, and that's the fastest speed there is
So, remember when you're feeling down and insecure
How amazingly unlikely is your birth
And hope that there's intelligent life somewhere out in space
'Cause it's bugger all down here on Earth

lyrics courtesy of astro

For your aural pleasure, listen to the above galaxy song as you watch the visual.

Though I was born in Chennai (Madras), I spent my entire life till my highschool in a town called Erode, some 400km southwest of Chennai. I did my schooling till grade 3 at Kalaimagal Kalvi Nilayam (KKN) and from grade 4 to 12 at Sengunthar Matriculation Hr. Sec. School (SMHSS). It had it's cool times, good times and some bad times, lousy times and weird moments. I recently went to Erode after some 7 year hiatus. I got to meet my school friends and my childhood friends and it was blast and a touching moment of my recent trip to India. And it was cool. And so here I am, presenting you with maps of Erode.

If you are not that familiar with Erode, might I suggest you to get the general scheme of things from my post on Maps of Tamilnadu and Southern India. Erode is like in the center of Tamilnadu, the southern most state of the Indian subcontinent.


[Click on the maps for bigger maps]


More Info on Erode:

1. Official website of Erode District; Erode Profile
2. Wikipedia article on Erode
3. Portals on Erode 1, 2, 3
4. Picture gallery from a traveller to Erode, an article

I had a purple Sphero combination lock from Masterlock to secure my storage area in my apartment and guess what, I had lost the code for it. Ooops !! And I had been running around all over the apartment to get it in vain. And then I tried Masterlock website and they tell me to do a bunch of stuff to get the code back. And then Google came to my rescue. And so did digg's post on how to pick a combination lock. And finally, this wonderful source came to my rescue. Armed with a combination lock spreadsheet and my friend's help, in a few minutes try, Bingo !! The code was cracked.

In this method, you would have to try only a maximum of 100 combinations, and if you had some sense of what numbers you might have had on your original lock, it is even easier. The most suprising thing is that all the codes are either odd or even digits (from 0 to 39).

All Master lock have the same pattern of the codes:

The lock has a dial with 40 calibration marks numbered 0 to 39. A combination consists of 3 of these numbers, for example: 15-25-7. To open the lock, the following steps are taken:

• turn the dial clockwise 2 full turns
• stop at the first number of the combination
• turn the dial counter-clockwise 1 full turn
• continue turning counter-clockwise until the 2nd number is reached
• turn the dial clockwise again until the 3rd number is reached
• pull the shank and the lock will open

Source