a new look! finally

Finally our institute paid attention towards our web page. A new IISc web page is up. I dont know whether i am late to notice it but just now i noticed it. The facade is good! Lots of infos which were hidden inside the old page are now one click away. I liked the limk for ejournals appearing in the front page. More or less its good. I will dig up some more stuffs soon, but did you notice something; in the top corner of the page some games pic appearing. In the cricket pic some lefty batsman is hitting the ball to somewhere, guess who can it be.......... :-D

Problems in Data Acquisition

Digital data acquisition systems have changed the world a bit! Simulated flight training, cars controlled by automatic systems are reality now. Present day research also exercises a great deal of importance on data acquisition systems. When I look around the characterization tools we use, I found most of the machines are computer controlled and I witnessed analogue to digital transition for quite a few equipment. We have our old Scanning Electron Microscope which has all the controls as buttons or knobs. Whereas, the new SEM we got has all these controls but it’s a mouse click away. One of our distinguished faculties had one mentioned that a trained Chimpanzee can operate these machines with its little finger. Surely data acquisition systems has became integral part of characterization, we no longer sit in front of DTA machine and note down the data for hours, it’s a software which does this, but here is the hitch: Data acquisition system (DAS) can easily put you in trouble if you aren’t careful. For sensitive systems which deal with high pressure or high temperature DAS needs to extremely good otherwise it may lead to catastrophe. Let’s first know where we go wrong most of the time. DAS includes four components: transducer, signal conditioner, data acquisition cards and of course the beautiful softwares. Many of us think that transducers are not a part of it and our control will be better if we have a better DAS, but in practice, the whole DAS is as good or as bad as the transducer is hence the first thing that comes into picture

1. Transducers and actuator are integral part of the DAS and a better control is possible only when a good transducer controls the machine.

2. After transducer it is the turn for the signal conditioning unit. One important feature is where to put the signal conditioner? It needs to be near the transducer as the noise is low at this point. In this regard second important point is the cable. The DA board uses similar connector as the some other ports/boards, but the design will be completely different. We have a tendency to use same connector for all application which may at times become very risky. A system should have a shielded cable in order to reduce the noise level. Wiring is important, its better to check the connection twice before starting the acquisition.

3. I will discuss ignorance here. We do data acquisition from both grounded and ungrounded sources. In case grounded source we assume our ground is at zero potential, which may not the case. Moreover, if you use transducers grounded using different ground with different potential, the data which we are acquiring will be highly erroneous. In case of low voltage measurement its quite a problem, your machine may stop working for such small problem. The punch line is use same ground for all the transducers and make sure it’s a zero potential.

4. Aliasing was one of the problems with DAS. According to Nyqist theory if signal has no frequency component above ½ the sampling rate then the signal can be completely reconstructed, and if there are frequencies above that the data will be corrupted. In practice the complete set of frequencies aren’t free from higher frequencies but there are ways to handle it, but if it goes beyond a limit it’s a problem. Suppose you are using a sampling rate of 300, and reconstructing a signal with frequency of 10 Hz, the system is absolutely fine but is its 280 Hz, well it can not show anything, that’s good but you will get a wrong result when its shows a value of 20 Hz. You have a completely wrong info. The soulution is not difficult and most of good DAS systems have this protection, a low pass filter before digitization is enough to reduce the Nyquist frequency effect, and present day most of the companies take care of it

5. Softwares! They are beautiful with all kind of flexibility to analyze the data acquired and present them in beautiful plots. The problems are in disguise, be very careful in using them and don’t belive the information you are getting without verifying it. These programs are good, but many a times they won’t consider the complexity that is hidden in your system, hence analyze the data in a wrong fashion. Its sound very general and more like software haters speak, but it is really important. Now-a-days DAS companies come up with very good softwares, still there are always ifs and buts.

I could remember few of the issues related to DAS, but there may be more and comments regarding this are really welcomed, as far i am concerned, I felt like putdown this issues.

Some interesting old articles are here:

Mistakes in DA

Article by Strether Smith

A day out to Muthati

Last october when Kotts was leaving for Germany, we had decided to go for a trek while he is here in March, the plan was almost spoiled but somehow we pulled out a trek to Mutthatti. We found this place through Karanataka forest dept. trekking web page. This is one of the trek places which are being explored after the death of Sandel wood smuggler Veerappan. Though it was a two day trek, we wanted to cut it short by one day. In order to save the time we went by bike. Four musketeers: Kiran, Me, Kotts and Jackie (santanu) were there for the trek, Galavalli was the only one missing (he is enjoying in US) from the group went to Narasimha Parvata last April. We sorted out our plans the previous day; reaching Muthatti was not much of a concern, only concern was biking back to Bangalore and hence we had decided to come back before Dusk that left us a trekking time of 6 hr.

We started our journey from Metallurgy dept. at IISc at around 5:30 a.m. Me and Jackie in one bike while Kiran was Kotts behind him. We went via Jayanagar and left the city via the Kanakpura road. The roads became better once we left the city! Bangalore to Kanakpura is 55 km by road and that was our first destination. We reached Kanakpura at 7: 00 a.m. and had our breakfast in a small restaurant. Kanakpura is quite big place. Our second destination was Sathnur, which is around 16 km. away from Kanakpura, and the satisfying fact was that road was really good in this stretch too. We reached there at around 8:15 a.m. Sathnur has three diversions at a circle, if you take the straight one you will reach Muthati, Left will take you to Bhimeswari and the right will take you to Cauvery fishing camp. We took the straight road. Muthati is 18 km away from Sathnur. The road was newly polished and you start experiencing bits of hills from here. It is onset of the summer and the traces of leaves on the foreground of clear blue sky appeared really beautiful. Our bikes gave a good service including one skid on the road side, except that our journey to Muthati was quite smooth. Muthati is a picnic spot like, Bhimeswari on the banks of cauvery, and like other picnic spot it was noisy, dirty with bottles and papers and chips packets. We avoided going to the river in Muthati. Instead we went to the forest office and fixed our trek route. The entry fees per head to the hills was Rs. 100/- and guide fee was Rs. 50/- per head. Mystery trails has all these details. Our guide was Mutthuraj, a young chap with cool nature. He trekked all along with us in bare feet. We started our trek at 9:30 a.m. The trails began with a thorny uphill climb. Our first trek destination was Devanamundi hills. The day was quite hot, though not unbearable. It wasn’t a very steep climbing up too. This place has quite a few specimens of wild animals we saw some signs of bear and Elephant while climbing up, but alas we couldn’t see them physically! We had to put few breaks before we reached the top of the hills. It is a typical ghats hill top: rocky and bare, no signs of shade. We took almost 2 hr to reach there. The Cauvary river valley was visible from the hill top. The river flowing by tearing apart the hills was a spectacular landscape to cherish. The complete valley was visible from there. If you have a strong eye you can identify the Chnichi water falls at extremely far away, the falls is like a white streak on the green background. I am sure sunset from that point will be a treat to watch. The peak was almost 4 km from Muthati. Our next destination was Bhimeswary, which is a place on the banks of Cauvary, hence we started descending. Almost complete trail was covered by leaf less trees! We stopped in the middle near a pond which appeared to be the main source of water for the animals; we saw a wild hare too. It was the first water body we had seen in the whole stretch. We traveled almost 3 km and there came a watch tower. We could see the basin and Bhimeswari from there. It was another 3 km before we reached the river. We found a bunch of spotted deer on the way. Mutthuraj took us to a place which was really beautiful, on the riverside. It was already 1:30 p.m. and we had to take our lunch. Kotts and Kiran prepared nice Cucumber, Pickle, Jam Sandwiches, with fruit juice, lunch became quite heavy, and so we decided to trek back to Muthati through the banks of Cauvery. I liked this stretch the most. We traveled almost 2.5 km through this trail. Both sides of the river had hills or forest and the landscape was very nice. We reached the picnic spots soon and our fun also disappeared, it was again a noisy, boozing people who were spoiling the environment. The last 3-4 km. we had to walk on asphalt road which was quite painstaking and took all our energy out by the time we reached Muthati forest office. We bade good bye to Mutthuraj and started our journey back to Bangalore. It was almost 3:30 p.m. Thanks to Kiran and Jackie we had a trouble free journey back to Bangalore. It was a nice one day trek, and a desirable break from droning campus life.


Trek route: Muthati –Devanamundi-Bhimeswary-Muthati
Distance: 15 km, approximate time: 6hr.
From Bangalore –Kanakpura (55 km)-Sathnur (16 km)-Muthati(18 km)
Approximate expenditure: per head Rs.500-600/-
Orgnized by: Kanakpura forest office ( Ph No.080-7522537)

The small and the large colony

Sometimes back i wrote about them. I wrote about the tiny one and told the story about a big one. I did not have evidences for the big ones that is seen in my balcony. I was expecting them to come back and they certainly did! couple of days back the bees came back to my balcony for the third consecutive year. Like the migratory birds these bees somehow find my balcony! I wish there was a chance for me to build a tourist spot, i could have earned some money. It is really interesting how they come back to the same place and during same time of the year. Although the traces of their hives are wiped out each time, they build it at the same place. Mr. Ponnana from echological studies comes to remove them, he is an amazing guy, fearlessly he removes them. He has developed a technique which is an unique one, it kills less than 5% of the bees while breaking the hives. He showed me how the bees make their next destination. Once the house is under attack the few of the bees, always on their toes, run to find the next place , others find a temporary place to stay which may be a nearby tree or something that sort, once the search bees find the place the all fly to the new place. There are people who does serius resarch on this and can put much more interesting vews than this. For me, they (the bees!) are little bit of nuisance but no complains, i will peacefully share my balcony with millions of bees for next few days.

"Rail India"

Last couple of weeks I had roamed around a large part of India. I enjoyed Guru’s marriage in Trichy, presented a poster at MRSI-AGM in Lucknow. It was nice to go around few places within such short span of time. I was tempted to write about many things but thought about writing the strong impression I was carrying in mind for quite some time: Indian railways. Ram Guha in one of his famous talk series at CCS in IISc talked about how India as a country is in surviving, her binding and disintegrating forces working inside. One such binding force he mentioned is Indian Rail. The 150 yrs. old transport system has tremendous impact on the Indian society as a whole. One of the longest rail networks in the world is having maximum no. of stations too on her way. I would rather discuss about rail as a mode of conveyance than its commercial impacts. I frequently wonder, in practice what is similar in a life of a guy from Mangalore and one from Manipur. If he is not so cricket lover, which is not uncommon, he or she must identify themselves with railways systems. It is quite amazing how railways maintain similar system working in all corners of the country. The same bell rings with same frequency both in Guntur in AP and Tamna in West Bengal.
Indian rail began its journey in the year 1853 from Mumbai to Thane and within 10 yr. north, South east and West zone had rail tracks in different lengths. Today the total length of the railway track reaches upto 1.1 lakh km. Amazing isn’t it. We have broad gauge, meter gauge and narrow gauge tracks cumulatively making this length. Our rail runs from 20 meter under ground level to nearly 2500 m above mean sea level, which is the highest track after Quinghai- Tibet rail. Locomotives from electric to Disel and Steam can be seen running through track, though the steam locomotives are seen mostly out side the rail station now. Indian rail carries around 13 million people a day. Literally it is an unimaginable task; in order to ensure smooth functioning of this rail road system, Indian railways has become one of the largest recruiter in India. The employment is generated on national basis and people from all over the India travel from one corner to another.
Railway cities all over India have a very different culture as well as people. They are cosmopolitan in nature and the extent of cultural mix is quite significant. Whichever language you speak or whatever you eat, railway station is the safest place in the city (not always in terms of security). My trip from Chennai to Lucknow was quite an experience. Here I met one young couple who went for Honeymoon in Kanyakumar! That too from Lucknow, I asked him why Kanyakumari?, he said “..Because there is a direct train which takes us from Lucknow to Kanyakumari” Now here is a guy who probably would not have seen the tip of our country if there wasn’t this train. Like westerners we also develop some wrong notion about people of some places in our own country, just because we don’t know them haven’t seen them and didn’t know their culture, railways brought these cultures together more often than anybody. I came from Lucknow to Bhopal and from Bhopal I took Smapark kranti express to reach Bangalore. Here my fellow travelers were businessmen from Bangalore. One guy was from AP and another from Mangalore, they have business running from Delhi and both were mentioning how business prospects were different in north India compared to south India and they were pretty happy because of the prospects that were unfolded because of improvement in railway communication.
I was tempted to write more about it and one may find the write up pretty uninteresting since it doesn’t contain information. Well that because I found this group called Indian Railways Fan Club Association (IRFCA) who has already done a splendid job and their home page is really very informative, you can go and look at it, it is much interesting than this blog.
Cricket is almost a religion in India which brings all Indians on same platform, and we call our Indian cricket team as “team India”, probably for similar reason we can call Indian railways as “rail India”.

Few links

IRFCA

Indian Railways

light of life

This photo, was hiding in some corner in my PC. When i took it, didn't have much impact but now i could see the life inside the light :-)

Pass it through nanotube, it'll be quick

When I started working on ceramic membrane I was fascinated by the science. Especially working with the unsupported alumina membrane where you control the pore size at the nanometer level. Its quite tricky playing with these membranes. The problem is associated with filtering. It can filter out very small molecules easily but as the channels becomes smaller the wall friction affects the flow (Hagen-Poisullie equation), thus quite high pressure is required to pass the fluid through filter. Duration of the filtering process due to low fluid velocity also becomes extremely long; certainly from application point of view this is disadvantageous. There is a brighter side of the story! Recently my undergrad seniour, Mainak has published a paper in Nature couple of months back on carbon nanotube membranes, this paper addressed very similar problems. This group from University of Kentucky has made multi walled carbon nanotubes with graphite as the inner core; the average channel diameter is around 7 nm. When water is filtered through these membranes, the fluid velocity was observed to be few orders of magnitude higher compared to the theoretical prediction. The experiment was carried out on few other fluids and the results were very similar, they also observed that the flow rate does not decrease with velocity of the fluid, that’s really an interesting observation. The reason cited for this enhanced flow is the hydrophobic nature of graphite which makes the wall almost friction less to flow. There is also a possibility of forming ordered hydrogen bonds inside the tube. This behaviour is analogous to the biological cells where water passes through the protein wall at considerable pace. Following this claim carbon nanotube will have a huge application coming in, mostly as sensors and filters against corrosive gases. The important part of the question which I felt quite interesting is: if the conventional concept fluid flow in a tube breaks in case of MWCNT, will it hold for other systems? Does nano has any effect here? I f you remember I wrote something about nanomechanics by John Pethica, where he mentioned an increase in viscosity of water molecule when put between very thinly spaced walls. Although these distances are smaller compared to nanochannels, the flow rate must get affected when the pore size is reduced more. That technology is yet to come; we will probably witness subnano effects influencing flow.

Its not a "Bat", its Materials Engineering

They say cricket is ruled by batsmen. Unfortunately people get more entertainment for watching boundaries and overboundaries not by waiting for a wicket to fall. All these fun comes from couple of pieces rather few pieces of wood, called bat. International Cicket Council has a poor definition of this piece. A bat looks like this
can not be longer than 96.5 cm including the handle and maximum width shouldn’t exceed 10.8 cm. must be made of wood. There is no restrictions on the weight of the bat (typically 3 lb), the shape: well its understood, there is no definition by ICC. The blade of the bat can be covered with some material for protection and repair, should not strengthen the bat and the thickness of this cover should not exceed 1.56 mm. Recently a committee headed by Sunil Gavaskar, recommended some more criteria, the important one for this case is that you can not infiltrate anything in the blade moreover it should be made of one solid piece of wood.
Where is the scope for improvement? Material scientists and engineers step in here, before addressing this issue let us know where we need improvement. Of course ball should travel faster than what they do now. When a ball hits the bat at a very high speed, there are lots of vibrations and minimizing this has been challenge for sometimes. Striking the ball hard is easy when its hits at the “sweet spot”. This region is almost 12 cm above the bottom of the bat, the thickest part, we define this place as the place where minimum vibration is felt and the ball travels much faster. The sound we say heavenly when it hit this sweet spot. So extending the sweet spot region is also an important issue.
How to go about it? There are few research institute and Universities in Australia and in England are really doing quite a bit of research in these field. The departments associated with this are Material Science and Design, so its science and engineering combination. Lets see a bat, it has go 2 parts, one is solid part the one piece wood one and the other is the handle. The handle is a composite material its made up of canes put together with rubber and adhesive in between. This actually dampens the vibration which comes after the ball hits the bat. In RMIT university in Australia researchers are trying to make the handle with a composite material containing carbon fiber and polymer, this dampens the vibration more compared to conventional handle. This is the bat which probably Rickey Ponting wanted to use last year, under ICC supervision. In case of base ball bat the vibration control system is a piezoelectric device, which generates voltage to nullify the effect of vibration, it’s a software controlled process and these software were developed after a rigorous study on vibration, soon in cricket too we will see such modification setting in. Due to the rules we can not progress much with the blade part from the material science point of view, this is a pure problem for designers, design aspect only can extend the sweet spot. Tennis and Golf has progressed a lot in these regards. They are using the best possible materials for such application, reinforced graphite of bulk metallic glass are few should be named. Lets hope ICC will overcome its conservative resistance and make cricket more exciting.

Some links:

ICC home page

Bat size specification

This one is really tiny

Phani noticed this hive yesterday; intially we did not know whether that is a bee hive or not, we thought it may be a flower but later i could see a bee flying. now it is almost clear that it is a bee hive. In our campus we are habituated in seeing the big hives with a diameter sometimes more than 2 feet. and the bee sizes are of few cm. For example the bee hives that is forming in my balcony for last two years in Feb, will be huge enough to scare any giant! first time i didnot open my balcony for 15 days, but when mr. ponnana came from CES to remove them, i got the courage and next year i did not feel troubled at all, it was my neighbours turn to get scared :), but this one is really tiny. Life cycle of bees has been roughed throughly in the literature, even text books in school contain detail about them. There are faculties in the Institute who are working on them, i hope to get some info about these bees and write and update.

"Stardust" is coming back

Just couple of years back the image came in front page of thousands of magazines and news papers around the world. An aircraft colliding with a comet! Analogies were drawn with the movies like “deep impact” and “Armageddon” and details of the impact was getting significant attention of media when compared to politics and sports. The process was really accurate; the way it has been executed was amazing.
The reason I am discussing all these is: on Jan. 15, 2006. Stardust is coming back to earth after seven years of its launch and two years after it had hit the comet, gathered information and dust particles. This was one of NASA’s first endeavour towards the research on origin of life. The 25 kg spacecraft has already shifted its penultimate step towards journey to the earth and NASA says it was perfect. This comet is suppose to carry dust particles which is as old as life on earth and may contain some real evidence for it, but that is future, now the scientist are holding their nerves so that every thing goes smooth. There are reasons for concern, stardust is going to be the fastest return aircraft from space and it will hit the earth with a speed similar to a bullet. Although scientist have predicted that it will be visible from some places in USA in naked eye, but real challenge is tracking the spacecraft, and its place for impact. Wish everything goes well
My interest is in the materials part. Normally these spacecrafts have a shielding of carbon based refractory material, which can withstand temperature more than 5000 K, but here it will be tested. Due to very high friction the material will evaporate and the chemistry of the surface will change. It will be also interesting to see how it reacts to the impact. Heat shielding will really be a very important material for research. Stardust is coming back as an experimental result, which can not be carried out anywhere near earth.
Best of luck guys!

“Startdsust”

A place named Purulya

I grew up in Purulia. One of the most peaceful places I have ever seen. Irony is that whenever I mentioned to someone that I hail from Purulia, they immediately recognize the place, “oh! Where the arms dropping took place?” I am sure soon people will identify the place again, for wrong reaons: “Oh! Where there is lot of unrest because of Naxalites?” No. This is not Purulia, and the people who did or doing all these are also not from Purulia. I was born in a place where, nobody was aware of peace because they had never seen violence, but it was quite an isolated district in Bengal more because its late inclusion in the state. Although the district was lagging behind in terms of economy, education, food crop production, yet culturally is much ahead of the other districts in the state, and fortunately, partition couldn’t touch it. “Chhau” the dance is considered as one of the cultural symbol of not only of west Bengal but also in some cases India, but then like “kathakali” we did not have money to protect it, and it is difficult to practice culture when you earn a meager meal once a day! then there was “Tusu and Bhadu”. “Sankrnati” is celebrated as the harvesting festival in major part of India, Purulia is also not an exception, but there is “Tusu and Bhadu”. Crop harvest is very small in the district and that’s being one of the major causes for economic fall in this part. “Bhadu” is a festival of woman and they make nice structures like temples with colourfull papers. You will see a procession of woman singing songs, they are not written anywhere! People memorize it. I heard recently that there is an effort to have them in written form. So this is Purulia. In our childhood we knew more about “Pataliputra” than Calcutta.
Purulia is extremely politically impassive and religiously indifferent district. It has more than one third of villages staying below poverty line. Industries were opened and shutdown came sooner than expected, thanks to the unions which were very active in these cases. A perfect situation for exploited by the Maoist groups. The recent killings in Bundwan can not really justify any cause. Its good if someone comes ahead and fight for the people’s right, but violence can take it anywhere. I remember a place called Duarsini, near Bundwan we went for picnic when I was in school, now that place even armed men wont venture to go. Its valid for Kuilapal another beautiful landscape was developing as a tourist spot no longer a destination for tourists. A little more attention would have changed lot of things, still I believe people don’t like violence but at the same time their affinity towards government probably is not mention worthy.

Changes that took place certainly were late; development is taking place from the middle of nineties. Town wise Purulia has advanced quite a bit, you can get mobile phones servies from atleast four to five service providers. The huge pump storage power project in collaboration with Japan in Ayodhya hills has really changed the roads, economy of this region. Even 15 years back it was a nightmare to go to the hills in rainy season, it has improved now. Government although not new is trying to boost up the economy. Its almost 8 years since I last visited Purulia, wish when I go there next time it will be the same cool and hot "Purulya".

Candle lit vigil

Today the students in the campus have decided to have a candle lit vigil in front of the main building. It is a geture we carry out to pay homage to the souls who are no longer around us and for spreading the message of peace. It was a very peaceful gathering of 150 students. The director, prof. Balram was as usual very inspiring but appeared really weary, of course because of the unusual circumstances he faced. We condoled the sudden demise of Prof. Puri, and hoped for a faster recovery of those who are recovering in the hospital. After the vigil we had put the candles at the steps wher J. N. Tata is standing tall. The glowing light carried a promise to walk ahead and and remeber the Prof. Puri. At the end the gathering was asked to speak a few words but the silence was talking; We all despised this heinous act.

Attack inside IISc !!!?

This is the same J. N. Tata Auditorium where the peace ambassador Desmond Tutu talked about peace in this part of the world. This is the place where we saw “Keepers of the flame”, the life documentary on Tatas and we were shown future path of our country, and yesterday we encountered the path which we are traveling through. Few cowards with automatic Kalashnikov has fired indiscriminately on delegates of an international conference in front of J. N. Tata auditorium. When I heard the shooting sound from the lab it was like firecrackers which lasted for 30 sec. In my worst nightmare i haven’t seen such act. Though jolted by the news, frantic calls and ambulances really perturbed the campus, life became normal in the night It was really shocking, we all mourned at the demise of prof. M. C. Puri, and we wish a fast recovery of the others injured in the shootout. Prof. Vijay chandru is a quite known figure in the campus and we hope he’ll be back on his feet very soon.
Inside the campus we always get bugged when a byke’s accelerator crosses some limit, no doubt this incident perturbed the campus but within one and half hours only TV channels were busy discussing it, most of the student had gone back to work. It’s a busy life in the campus; the spirit always carries through day and night in silence. It a shame on the guys who attacked un-armed delegates and researchers. I don’t know their purpose, whatever it is we believe there is no novel cause which can justify such acts. If they have strong will they should come forward and fight not with arms, it is cowardly and if they had thought they will hit a weak zone, certainly they have chosen the wrong place. They should come to the campus and see that nothing has changed except some physical marks they left here yesterday evening. I don’t know whether this/these guy(s) will be caught or not, but it is sure, in India we have learnt to live with it. So if someone wants to create an impact, they better find some new tricks!

The big controversy in cricket

Probably the biggest controversy in the recent times in cricket has hit the media. Nup! not Saurav or Greig, its with the greatest spinner Murlitharan and Shane Warne. After the controversial stament by Shane where he indiacted to a famous bowler (presumably Murli) in the world cricket captured lot of wicktes playing against minnows like bangladesh an Zimbabwe. Well Arjuna Ranatunga the fighter fought back saying that Shane's most of the wicketes came from the teams like South Africa and England and Westindies, who doesn't play spin well, not against India the masters against spin (thank god they didn;t forget it). Most of his wickets came as tail enderes and he is an overrated bowler. i am sure there going to be huge discussions about it statistics has been already popping up, but seeing the statistics i was wondering both the partys should keep quite if their performence is kept agains Kapils performence, who never played against Zimbabwe or bangladesh, and he was a Fast bowler from India! if we take out 150 wickets from both of these bowlers, Statistics from Kapils career would look certainly brighter. May be they should stop at this because both of these spinners are really greats and their bowling it is always a treat to watch, perhaps its a time they along with their friends keep quite because we can put Kapil ahead of them :D

nanomechanics and Prof. John Pethica

Mechanics although sounds mechanical but its starts from the chemistry of atoms and you have mechanics when two atoms comes close to each other. This is how Prof. John Pethica looked at mechanics. Prof. Pethica is a big name in the field of contact mechanics and became quite popular in the campus. His cv is all over the web and I don’t want to write it here.
When two bodies come close to each other there are attractions and repulsion which act on them, and probably this is the first time I saw somebody really, experimentally showing the typical energy plot that we find in all basic material science book Prof Pethica and his group has done it using AFM. He explained the mechanism which drives an atomic force microscope to read the atoms. The striking technology is in the resolution. A laser goes through the tip and reflects back and by detecting the multiple reflections that is coming back, through which it was possible to achieve atomic level resolution in AFM. The probe for AFM can be used as a tool for striking the antom and calculating bond strength between the atoms. So you can literally feel the chemistry of the atoms. It’s really fascinating. So Prof. Pethica’s group in Dublin is working with some technique, developed most probably by them, which is called modulated amplitude AFM technique, this is very effective in measuring the single tip surface bond, the mechanism is bit complicated but it has responses coming in femto seconds and there are advantages over the other tips used for this purpose. After mesmerizing the audience with his measurements in the atomic scale he shifted to some interesting studies on molecules. No, it’s not the big organic molecule, it is water molecule. When the water molecules are kept in between two plates with sufficiently closer (less than nanometer) you start seeing some changes such as viscosity and those change are because of the contacts between the water molecule and the surface. It’s an interesting study from the point of view of biologist as inside a cell the length scale in which water molecules sits is almost similar in order. Prof. Pethica, at the end of his lecture showed few slides of the nano science building at the heart of the town in Dublin. He really wanted to convey the importance of the nano science and technology, but I had a feeling that he has reached beyond that!

Space Research

Discovery of vacuum was a revolution, its helping someway or other the poor souls like ours, but life moves on. Once we have vacuum we can do lots of model experiments, that will gives us a clue of what can happen in the space above us, but, hold on, you can not get rid of the gravity so easily until you cross the field and go in to space. The amount of effort that goes in behind the space research is huge but now research in space invoked a great deal of interests among the researchers. Presently NASA and ESA has carried out quite a few experiments in space and believe me they are really fascinating.
Experiments in space were started probably through sputnik-3 in 1969, which sent mostly some geophysical information. Until very recently, experiments were concentrated mostly on the atmospheric or geophysical studies but the scenario has changed quite rapidly. Experimental research had leap when Mir was placed in space in the year 1986, and from year 1989 till it was abandoned in 1999, there was always a human being in space. The Venture, International Space Station, took the lead there after. Scientists from all over the world including Russia are participating in this program.
The idea of carrying out experiments in a space station appears bizarre to many people, mostly because of the cost and the futuristic nature as we can not see the application. The fact is someway different; these experiments are mostly carried out for advanced technology. I found one nice example; an experiment on flame. The flames coming out of some nozzle appears like a fluid drop due to the gravitational force resulting in an air flow. Now if these experiments are carried out in space under microgravity atmosphere the flame breaks in to balls, the experiment is known as Lwis SOFTBALL experiments. For this combustion the fuel required is extremely low, which is a process all automotive engine companies will look for, as the hydrogen or hydrocarbon based combustion engines requires these informations. This was an example for a direct application to technology. However, the fundamentals for the basic science are getting major benefits from the zero gravity experiments. Imagine a human brain, which has been modeled to function under gravity, when it is exposed to the microgravity condition, the systems response to this change. It is therefore an interesting area for study. Again we know the plants grows in the direction of light, its roots also grows in the direction of gravitational force, hence it is interesting to know how the plants grow in such conditions.
Materials research did achieve much scope to carry out experiment although levitation experiments for solidification of metals have drawn interest. The constraints are mostly forming the experimental module and control over the experiments, the results is unknown till the specimens come back to earth. Among the other materials research semiconductor crystal growth has been quite a revelation. Near perfect crystals can be grown under microgravity, under surface tension driven flow in the melt. A control in the defect concentration in the crystal is also possible, but its is not so straight forward as the density driven flow and surface tension driven flow complicates the process. The container free melt will have hardly a site for defect nucleation hence these processes are really useful.
Every scientific advance comes with a price tag and we had to pay it through the lives of astronauts who were killed the Columbia explosions. These were the part of NASA’s STS -107 program, more than 70 experiments were carried out in space. We have lost Kalpana Chawla, the only Indian female astronaut.
Efforts are on as many other countries are coming up with ideas and launch vehicles for carrying out experiments. Indian space research also as an individual progressed a lot and one day we will also be able to carry out our own experiments in space.

I found infornation from the following places

Future Materials Science Research on the International Space Station (1997), National Academy publishers

NASA

European Space Agency

Russian spaceweb

News about ISRO

spread your wings and fly eagle.. Desmond Tutu

The notice on a pink colour A4 paper remained un-noticed in the campus, and it gave some of us an opportunity to listen to Desmond Tutu the Nobel Peace prize winner for the year 1984. I miss most of the Nobel laureate lecture in the Institute because I reach late and the halls will be completely filled, this time it was in J. N. Tata auditorium and because of mentioned reason I could hear this piece of lecture. The presence of sniffer dog/bitches from the police near the stage gave really a wrong introduction to right event.
The speaker of the 7th and the last J.R.D Tata memorial lecture, organized by NIAS was Arch Bishop Desmond Tutu from South Africa. He was really humble at the beginning of the talk. He spent almost 10 min. in thanking us, the Indians. I rarely hear someone talking about Mahatma Gandhi with such emotions. If I am hurting someone, then let me confess I heard very few of them. He sounded more like a Global Spokesman of peace than an arch bishop from Capetown, who fought apartheid and the man behind the reconciliation mission. Of course, South Africa has moved ahead from the apartheid era, but still I wonder how this reconciliation is done; atrocity must be at a level where punishment is the solution. His talk was a reminder of the last century’s blood bath all over the world, and the born of so called super powers who carried that legacy to the next century in the name of west vs. Islamic terrorism. He criticized the America and Britain for their unwanted and unnecessary invasion in Iraq where thousands of people were still getting killed. If the description of the talk is becoming serious then let me put down that he also had a humorous touch in his talk and he mixed them really well. He described the incidents, one about the women who came to the reconciliation court and was requested for forgiveness, and the other of the hotel manager in Washington who mistook him as a chauffer, with equal intensity! There were parts of the lecture where he talked about the oppression, quite depressing but when I read his Nobel lecture, I found he actually didn’t talk about oppression much. Surely, he followed his talk titled “is there hope for humanity?”. Arch Bishop Tutu, is in a UN committee called alliance of civilization and he is carrying out the job for getting together the civilizations around the world, according to him, we can prosper only when we are together. Human being lives in the world of Gandhi, Mother Teresa, and Martin Luthar King (junior), and they are like eagles that fly towards the rising sun and disappears. It was a quite unusual lecture for us but hats off to the man from Capetown!

Few links!

His Nobel lecture

His peace centre

memory under freeze

...Saswata has kept a hard disk inside a freeze to retrive data from it :D, First time i had laughed like this. Although he is famous for humourus activities but this time i was fooled as i found people have found it as a good technique for retriveing data from the "failed" hard disk. So just take the HD and keep it inside a freeze for couple of hr. and fix it back, if you are lucky then you'll get your data back. Sounds like a cool trick. May be Semiconductor guys can put some light on it, and from materials scienctist point of view its really interesting.

You want to succeed ?

You want to succeed? You need to be a good leader; you have to learn how to “manage” people. We hear these line so many times from our childhood that at some point it really becomes a fact. There is nothing which is absolute, from my childhood this is the one thing I have learnt. If you say when, well there is always plus and minus. If you say this is the end, then there is nothing call end, an end marks a beginning. I used to wonder and now always feel something that eludes me is an understanding of these facts. I always knew if I buy a chocolate I have to give the price the shopkeeper asked, but never realized why there was a bargain when I wanted to buy a T-shirt. I can not remember how many times I was directly and indirectly told that there is no fixed price for something, we can always “adjust”, this is an understanding and a balance. Then comes the big institutes, if you see the instructions booklet, you as a student will find the class room as the safest place on earth and if your actions are put under microscope you will break numerous rules each day, if you think they are strict rules then you always live under guilt, but there are guys, who know there is no rule, you can break them to any extent and get away with it, of course if you are a good “manager”. There is a third way become indifferent about the happenings around you. Once my friend Pratap in an argument pointed out that if one always go straight without any diversions, then all lives will be parallel, no interaction and hence no society, its the society who kept you alive not the individual. He has a point and any discussion in this matter boils down to one fact, small adjustments which don’t make much difference are ok, after all you are in a society. So take help from individuals don’t even bother to thank him, because you are going to return it to the society, the return need not be in the same magnitude as nobody can compare potato and apple. Everyone adjusts, compromises; human beings are small creatures even the earth has compromised her shape, its not completely spherical, sphere has been slightly tapered at the poles: a small adjustment but enough to keep us alive, but I am rigid M who will never understand this simple logic.
It’s a pleasure of not being argued in the middle of cribbing so that I could put down quite a few lines of my own here. Disclaimer: this post is not pointing towards any individual or organization :)

Cricketing memories

.....Its a quite old event, i mean its 3 months old event, before i broke my finger and before we faced all kind of problems. This was our first match in league and we won it as we had won the last one. These are the big stars of IISc cricket team, and the small stars are at the bottom. partha got 6 wickets and I scored 75 in that match. Most of the team performed in similar fashion in other matches but unfortunately Sandeep's camera couldn't catch them. Kapil the caps is not here. ViveK, Mahesh are also missing.

Srini, Sachin, Partha, Atul, Kumar, Venu (star faculty), Jackie (Santanu)
Sandeep, Uncle (Surinder), OP, Saru(Sarendra) and me

Me and Partha