Archives October 2013

Violence-the very word describes terror and the use of threat or aggression against an individual or society as a whole. Indeed violence is the most terrible and dominating of all social evils in today's word. Making use of violence to achieve one's end means departing from all the morals and virtues that humanity has bestowed upon us. But, unfortunately, violence has been so frequently used that we have begun to take it for granted-the sight of a sick or dying person doesn't move us in the least. Evidently we are becoming the slaves of violence. But why do people resort to violence? The answer is quite simple. In a country like India, with a population of more than a billion, poverty, unemployment and starvation have become common problems for the people. How is a family expected to survive without food, money and shelter? Does it not torment them to watch more...

Child Abuse, intentional acts that result in physical or emotional harm to children. The term child abuse covers a wide range of behaviour, from actual physical assault by parents or other adult caretakers to neglect of a child's basic needs. Child abuse is also sometimes called child maltreatment. Although the extent of child abuse is difficult to measure, it is recognized as a major social problem, especially in industrialized nations. It occurs in all income, racial, religious and ethnic groups and in urban and rural communities.  is, however, more common in some groups, especially those below the poverty line. Cultures around the world have different standards in deciding what constitutes child abuse. In Sweden, for example, the law prohibits any physical punishment of children, including spanking. By contrast, in some countries of Asia, Africa and the Caribbean, parents are expected to punish their children by hitting them. There are several more...

Charles Darwin was born on February 12,1809 in the city of Shrewsbbury, England and was raised as a fifth child by a wealthy family. His father was a physician and son of Erasmus Darwin, a poet, philosopher and naturalist. His mother Susannah Wedgewood died when Charles was eight. In 1825, Darwin graduated from the elite school at Shrewsbury. He then attended the University of Edinburgh to study medicine. In 1927 he dropped out and entered the University of Cambridge in order to become a clergyman for the Church of England. There he met Adam Sedgwick and John Stevens Henslow. The two figures taught Darwin to become an observer of natural phenomenon and a collector of specimens. After graduating from Cambridge in 1831, he was brought aboard the English survey ship HMS Beagle as an unpaid naturalist on a scientific expedition around the world. At the time, most geologists believed in more...

For some years I have been afflicted with the belief that flight is possible to man." Wilbur Wright in 1900 On the morning of December 17,1903, amid the sand dunes of Kill Devil Hills, North Carolina, Orville Wright (1871-1948) took off into a gale-force wind aboard the gasoline-powered biplane, Wright Flyer. Orville flew for only twelve seconds, but later, in the fourth flight attempt of the day, his brother Wilbur (1867-1912) stayed aloft for. fifty-nine seconds, traveling a distance of 852 feet (260 m). It was enough to constitute the holy grail of flight experimenters—sustained, controlled, powered, heavier-than-air flight. Bicycle manufacturers from Dayton, Ohio, the Wright brothers had approached the problem of flight with a combination of practical hands-on experimentation and scientific rigor. After absorbing all published information on previous flight experiments, in 1900 they built the first of a series of gliders that they tested each summer in North more...

"Television has proved that people will look at anything rather than each other." Ann Landers, journalist Color television is possible because the human brain can convert a grid of differently colored dots (usually known as pixels, short for picture elements) into a complete color image. Color television cathode ray tubes have three electron beams, as opposed to the single electron beam in a black and white TV. The screen is coated with red, green, and blue phosphor dots placed behind the holes of the tube's shadow mask. All the observed colors are combinations of the red, green, and blue signals (that is, if all dots are firing, the image appears white). The fact that color television is essentially only three times more complicated than black and white television means that the basic invention processes for the two devices almost took place simultaneously. John Logie Baird (1888-1946) is recognized as a more...

In summer the heat is intense. Hot winds blow. A dark cloud or a shower of rain is always welcome. If the rain does not fall people pray for it. In summer a rainy day is a day of enjoyment. When dark clouds cover the sky, we begin to dance with joy. When breeze blows and rain falls, every heart is filled with delight. People go out to the canal or the river to hold picnic. Some people go out to enjoy sight of nature. Young girls gather under some big tree to enjoy swing. They enjoy going up and down on the swing. They sing sweet songs. These songs give us great pleasure. Thus they make merry. Little children come out with loin clothes. They bathe in the rain water. Some of them roll in dirty rain water. They float paper boats in the running water. How they shout more...

“... for printing hundreds or thousands of copies, it was marvelously quick" Shen Kuo, Dream Pool Essays (1088) In 1041, in the best traditions of China's inventive and technologically vibrant Song Dynasty (960-1280 C.E.), an alchemist named Bi Sheng shaped a series of reusable, moistened clay tablets, inscribed an individual Chinese character upon the surface of each one, fired them to harden and make them permanent, and in the process invented movable type. Printers then took the characters and laid them within an iron frame coated with a mix of resin, turpentine, wax, and paper ash, arranging the characters to reflect what was to become the printed page. Unlike the Western alphabet that requires the generation and arrangement of only twenty-six characters, Bi Sheng worked in a language with over 5,000 distinct characters. Many of these needed several pieces of type to complete, and all of them required the making more...

Before kitchens were ventilated, cooking was a smelly and smoky experience. The kitchen would quickly fill with smoke and nasty gases, stinky odors would spread throughout the house, and grease would stick to and damage the walls. However, in 1933, Vent-a- Hood set about making cooking in the home a more enjoyable and safe experience and invented the first kitchen extractor. Also known as an extractor hood, it was able to capture all the by-products of cooking, except grease. Early kitchen extractors were considered, quite correctly, to be fire hazards because the grease they could not catch could easily ignite with the high temperatures generated by cookers. Later extractor designs, using wire mesh to catch grease, were incredibly inefficient and could only capture about 25 percent of the product. In 1937, Vent-a-Hood improved their original design and incorporated a special blower into their kitchen extractor, known as the Magic Lung®, more...

"You guys have really come up with somethin'..." Dr. Flood, 200: A Space Odyssey (1968) The first wrist-worn timepiece to tell the time digitally was the Hamilton Watch Company's "Pulsar." This 18-carat gold-cased device used a red LED display to tell the user what time it was in clean, crisp, twentieth- century digits at the push of a simple button, and retailed for a cool $2,100. Teething problems meant the Pulsar did not become commercially available until 1972, but when it was released, it caused many to think that the end had come for conventional dial face watches with mechanical movements. Hamilton claimed that their inspiration for developing a digital watch was the futuristic digital clock that they had created for the 1968 film 2001: A Space Odyssey. The only problem with the Pulsar was the hefty accompanying price tag—although many would argue that $2,100 was cheap for the opportunity more...

For millennia, humankind has kept track of the progress of time by observing natural bodies, most notably the sun and the stars. In cloudy periods, however, these cannot be seen. The water clock, or clepsydra in Greek, is a timekeeper that works by measuring a regulated, uniform flow of water out of, or into, a vessel. With sufficient water, and a large enough vessel, this timekeeper can "run" for a day or two without needing to be refilled, or emptied. Imagine a cylindrical water container with a hole in the bottom. The rate at which water drips out of the container is a function of the pressure exerted by the water that it contains; so the more water in the vessel (that is, the greater the "head" of water) the faster is the flow rate. When the container is full, the water level goes down quickly, but the flow is more...