An Astronomy club in Kolkata!

Name : Sky Watchers' Association

Address: 47/1 Beni Banerjee Avenue, Kolkata , 700 031 India

Contact: Bhaskar Majumdar E-mail: skywatchercal@softhome.net
Website: http://www.swakolkata.org

Before The Da Vinci Code was broken, the world lay at the mercy of Angels & Demons

YESS. I am posting in my holiday!!!! Actually I am posting from my Uncle's house. I have some news. I finished another Dan Brown book, Angels & Demons , the precursor to The Da Vinci Code . Its about Particle Physics, an ancient brotherhood called the Illuminati or 'the enlightened', God, Ambigrams and disproving Einstein's theories using tuna fish. Strange? Yes it is. I can't tell much, but I can tell you that the assassin comes from an ancient arabic word.
During the Crusades the Muslims made a stealthy brotherhood who could kill effectively, and after each kill they used to er... consume a drug called Hashish . So they were called Hassassin or 'followers of Hashish'.
In modern English, its just called assassin.

P.S. I am neither a Muslim, nor am I addicted to Hashish But if Hashish was the computer, I am a Hassassin!!!!

Here is an ambigram
http://public.web.cern.ch/Public/Objects/Chapters/Spotlight/ad_ambigram.gif

Hello, and Goodbye

I am sorry, but I am leaving for Chennai {No, Don't look like "in-the-summer-are-you-mad" kind of way, but i-am-going-to-chennai-in-the-summer-and-I-am-mad} So, I may not be able to post. See you in a month, when my sanity returns, and I am back in Kolkata

500 GB hard-drive?

Hitachi's new Deskstar 7K500 is the first HD to reach the 500 gig. limit, and the one of the first to use the new super-fast SATA II interface.
Hitachi's 500 GB drive will come in 2 versions. A $500 drive featuring the parallel ATA interface and an 8 MB data buffer, and a $520 model with a 16 MB buffer that uses the 3 Gbps Serial ATA II interface, backward compatible with 1.5 Gbps SATA interface.

According to Hitachi estimates, this behemoth can store upto 56 hours of HDTV.

A9 - Customer-Care

A9 the search tool developed by Amazon.com, is proving to be a popular choice among early users, says Werener Vogels, Chief Tech Officer of teh online retail giant. Vogels was recently inIndia and travelled to Hyderabad, Mumbai, Pune and the Amazon Development Centre in Bangalore.
"The Web and search engines are run by talent, and collaboration will be the key to success of A9. We have alarge group of developers working on a9 and this is happening here in Bangalore"

Intro of the Gitanjali

By W.B Yeats

A few days ago I said to a distinguished Bengali doctor of
medicine, 'I know no German, yet if a translation of a German
poet had moved me, I would go to the British Museum and find
books in English that would tell me something of his life, and of
the history of his thought. But though these prose translations
from Rabindranath Tagore have stirred my blood as nothing has for
years, I shall not know anything of his life, and of the
movements of thought that have made them possible, if some Indian
traveller will not tell me.' It seemed to him natural that I
should be moved, for he said, 'I read Rabindranath every day, to
read one line of his is to forget all the troubles of the world.'
I said, 'An Englishman living in London in the reign of Richard
the Second had he been shown translations from Petrarch or from
Dante, would have found no books to answer his questions, but
would have questioned some Florentine banker or Lombard merchant
as I question you. For all I know, so abundant and simple is
this poetry, the new renaissance has been born in your country
and I shall never know of it except by hearsay.' He answered,
'We have other poets, but none that are his equal; we call this
the epoch of Rabindranath. No poet seems to me as famous in
Europe as he is among us. He is as great in music as in poetry,
and his songs are sung from the west of India into Burma wherever
Bengali is spoken. He was already famous at nineteen when he
wrote his first novel; and plays when he was but little older,
are still played in Calcutta. I so much admire the completeness
of his life; when he was very young he wrote much of natural
objects, he would sit all day in his garden; from his twenty-fifth
year or so to his thirty-fifth perhaps, when he had a great
sorrow, he wrote the most beautiful love poetry in our language';
and then he said with deep emotion, 'words can never express what
I owed at seventeen to his love poetry. After that his art grew
deeper, it became religious and philosophical; all the
inspiration of mankind are in his hymns. He is the first among
our saints who has not refused to live, but has spoken out of
Life itself, and that is why we give him our love.' I may have
changed his well-chosen words in my memory but not his thought.
'A little while ago he was to read divine service in one of our
churches--we of the Brahma Samaj use your word 'church' in
English--it was the largest in Calcutta and not only was it
crowded, but the streets were all but impassable because of the
people.'

Other Indians came to see me and their reverence for this man
sounded strange in our world, where we hide great and little
things under the same veil of obvious comedy and half-serious
depreciation. When we were making the cathedrals had we a like
reverence for our great men? 'Every morning at three--I know,
for I have seen it'--one said to me, 'he sits immovable in
contemplation, and for two hours does not awake from his reverie
upon the nature of God. His father, the Maha Rishi, would
sometimes sit there all through the next day; once, upon a river,
he fell into contemplation because of the beauty of the
landscape, and the rowers waited for eight hours before they
could continue their journey.' He then told me of Mr. Tagore's
family and how for generations great men have come out of its
cradles. 'Today,' he said, 'there are Gogonendranath and
Abanindranath Tagore, who are artists; and Dwijendranath,
Rabindranath's brother, who is a great philosopher. The
squirrels come from the boughs and climb on to his knees and the
birds alight upon his hands.' I notice in these men's thought a
sense of visible beauty and meaning as though they held that
doctrine of Nietzsche that we must not believe in the moral or
intellectual beauty which does not sooner or later impress itself
upon physical things. I said, 'In the East you know how to keep
a family illustrious. The other day the curator of a museum
pointed out to me a little dark-skinned man who was arranging
their Chinese prints and said, ''That is the hereditary
connoisseur of the Mikado, he is the fourteenth of his family to
hold the post.'' 'He answered, 'When Rabindranath was a boy he
had all round him in his home literature and music.' I thought
of the abundance, of the simplicity of the poems, and said, 'In
your country is there much propagandist writing, much criticism?
We have to do so much, especially in my own country, that our
minds gradually cease to be creative, and yet we cannot help it.
If our life was not a continual warfare, we would not have taste,
we would not know what is good, we would not find hearers and
readers. Four-fifths of our energy is spent in the quarrel with
bad taste, whether in our own minds or in the minds of others.'
'I understand,' he replied, 'we too have our propagandist
writing. In the villages they recite long mythological poems
adapted from the Sanskrit in the Middle Ages, and they often
insert passages telling the people that they must do their
duties.'

I have carried the manuscript of these translations about with me
for days, reading it in railway trains, or on the top of
omnibuses and in restaurants, and I have often had to close it
lest some stranger would see how much it moved me. These lyrics--
which are in the original, my Indians tell me, full of subtlety
of rhythm, of untranslatable delicacies of colour, of metrical
invention--display in their thought a world I have dreamed of all
my live long. The work of a supreme culture, they yet appear as
much the growth of the common soil as the grass and the rushes.
A tradition, where poetry and religion are the same thing, has
passed through the centuries, gathering from learned and
unlearned metaphor and emotion, and carried back again to the
multitude the thought of the scholar and of the noble. If the
civilization of Bengal remains unbroken, if that common mind
which--as one divines--runs through all, is not, as with us,
broken into a dozen minds that know nothing of each other,
something even of what is most subtle in these verses will have
come, in a few generations, to the beggar on the roads. When
there was but one mind in England, Chaucer wrote his _Troilus
and Cressida_, and thought he had written to be read, or to be
read out--for our time was coming on apace--he was sung by
minstrels for a while. Rabindranath Tagore, like Chaucer's
forerunners, writes music for his words, and one understands at
every moment that he is so abundant, so spontaneous, so daring in
his passion, so full of surprise, because he is doing something
which has never seemed strange, unnatural, or in need of defence.
These verses will not lie in little well-printed books upon
ladies' tables, who turn the pages with indolent hands that they
may sigh over a life without meaning, which is yet all they can
know of life, or be carried by students at the university to be
laid aside when the work of life begins, but, as the generations
pass, travellers will hum them on the highway and men rowing upon
the rivers. Lovers, while they await one another, shall find, in
murmuring them, this love of God a magic gulf wherein their own
more bitter passion may bathe and renew its youth. At every
moment the heart of this poet flows outward to these without
derogation or condescension, for it has known that they will
understand; and it has filled itself with the circumstance of
their lives. The traveller in the read-brown clothes that he
wears that dust may not show upon him, the girl searching in her
bed for the petals fallen from the wreath of her royal lover, the
servant or the bride awaiting the master's home-coming in the
empty house, are images of the heart turning to God. Flowers and
rivers, the blowing of conch shells, the heavy rain of the Indian
July, or the moods of that heart in union or in separation; and a
man sitting in a boat upon a river playing lute, like one of
those figures full of mysterious meaning in a Chinese picture, is
God Himself. A whole people, a whole civilization, immeasurably
strange to us, seems to have been taken up into this imagination;
and yet we are not moved because of its strangeness, but because
we have met our own image, as though we had walked in Rossetti's
willow wood, or heard, perhaps for the first time in literature,
our voice as in a dream.

Since the Renaissance the writing of European saints--however
familiar their metaphor and the general structure of their
thought--has ceased to hold our attention. We know that we must
at last forsake the world, and we are accustomed in moments of
weariness or exaltation to consider a voluntary forsaking; but
how can we, who have read so much poetry, seen so many paintings,
listened to so much music, where the cry of the flesh and the cry
of the soul seems one, forsake it harshly and rudely? What have
we in common with St. Bernard covering his eyes that they may
not dwell upon the beauty of the lakes of Switzerland, or with
the violent rhetoric of the Book of Revelations? We would, if we
might, find, as in this book, words full of courtesy. 'I have
got my leave. Bid me farewell, my brothers! I bow to you all
and take my departure. Here I give back the keys of my door--and
I give up all claims to my house. I only ask for last kind words
from you. We were neighbours for long, but I received more than
I could give. Now the day has dawned and the lamp that lit my
dark corner is out. A summons has come and I am ready for my
journey.' And it is our own mood, when it is furthest from 'a
Kempis or John of the Cross, that cries, 'And because I love this
life, I know I shall love death as well.' Yet it is not only in
our thoughts of the parting that this book fathoms all. We had
not known that we loved God, hardly it may be that we believed in
Him; yet looking backward upon our life we discover, in our
exploration of the pathways of woods, in our delight in the
lonely places of hills, in that mysterious claim that we have
made, unavailingly on the woman that we have loved, the emotion
that created this insidious sweetness. 'Entering my heart
unbidden even as one of the common crowd, unknown to me, my king,
thou didst press the signet of eternity upon many a fleeting
moment.' This is no longer the sanctity of the cell and of the
scourge; being but a lifting up, as it were, into a greater
intensity of the mood of the painter, painting the dust and the
sunlight, and we go for a like voice to St. Francis and to
William Blake who have seemed so alien in our violent history.

We write long books where no page perhaps has any quality to make
writing a pleasure, being confident in some general design, just
as we fight and make money and fill our heads with politics--all
dull things in the doing--while Mr. Tagore, like the Indian
civilization itself, has been content to discover the soul and
surrender himself to its spontaneity. He often seems to contrast
life with that of those who have loved more after our fashion,
and have more seeming weight in the world, and always humbly as
though he were only sure his way is best for him: 'Men going home
glance at me and smile and fill me with shame. I sit like a
beggar maid, drawing my skirt over my face, and when they ask me,
what it is I want, I drop my eyes and answer them not.' At
another time, remembering how his life had once a different
shape, he will say, 'Many an hour I have spent in the strife of
the good and the evil, but now it is the pleasure of my playmate
of the empty days to draw my heart on to him; and I know not why
this sudden call to what useless inconsequence.' An innocence, a
simplicity that one does not find elsewhere in literature makes
the birds and the leaves seem as near to him as they are near to
children, and the changes of the seasons great events as before
our thoughts had arisen between them and us. At times I wonder
if he has it from the literature of Bengal or from religion, and
at other times, remembering the birds alighting on his brother's
hands, I find pleasure in thinking it hereditary, a mystery that
was growing through the centuries like the courtesy of a Tristan
or a Pelanore. Indeed, when he is speaking of children, so much
a part of himself this quality seems, one is not certain that he
is not also speaking of the saints, 'They build their houses with
sand and they play with empty shells. With withered leaves they
weave their boats and smilingly float them on the vast deep.
Children have their play on the seashore of worlds. They know
not how to swim, they know not how to cast nets. Pearl fishers
dive for pearls, merchants sail in their ships, while children
gather pebbles and scatter them again. They seek not for hidden
treasures, they know not how to cast nets.'

W.B. YEATS September 1912

Batman: Dead End

I saw this weird short movie called Batman: Dead End
It was weird completely.
It starts off with Batman strapping up, in the background: news of the Joker's escape from the mental asylum. There are some really cool scenes of old Batty going in search of Jokey. When he finds out the Joker, there is a swift change of dialogue, and suddenly, a weird kind of biological organism snatches the Joker away. When the biological organsm lands in front of Batty, there is no mistaking it-- it is an alien. But what kind of alien? I first thought it was a Hydralisk with legs {Starcraft}, but no! it looked too familiar. Then it struck me it was an Alien! No not an alien, but an Alien of "Aliens" fame!
Batty struggles with the alien for sometime, and then suddenly there is a strange but familiar "kut-kut-kut" sound, and a familiar 3 dotted laser sight----- A Predator! Yes a Predator of "Predator" fame. Now this thingus kills off the Alien, and goes for dear old Batty, and a supercool battle ensues in which Batman is almost killed, but in the end Truth and Justice and Batman prevails! Or does it?

Behind Batman, 4 more Predators look on and Batty gets ready to fight 'em too, but he doesn't know that behind him, loads of Aliens are also present.....

Eerie right? Thats how this short flick ends!

Kingdom of Heaven

Well, I saw the Kingdom of Heaven today, and i liked it.
It was about a French Blacksmith- Balian [of Ibelin]{Orlando Bloom}, whose father is Sir... something of Ibelin {Leam Nielson}, and is called to safeguard the Kingdom of Heaven {Jerusalem etc.} from the 'infidels' i.e. Salah-uddin {Saladin}. The Story is nice and there were many known faces --- Leam Nielson, or more famously Qui Gon Jin {or is it Jinn hahaha}, the guy who acted as Obi Wan Kenobi's master. There was also a guy, who acted as the villain in the movie - Die Hard 3. I liked the actor who acted as Saladin, he was very powerful.

There were some great dialogues in the movie, a part of it is :
The Hospitaller : Will that {making them knights} make them fight better?
Balian: Yes, it will...

A "Knight": Who are you?
Balian: A blacksmith.
"Knight" : And I am the King of England...
Balian : I am a blacksmith.

Sybilla {Eva Green} was very very beautiful during the first stages of the movie, but she just goes back into the shadow in the later stages, and stays on just to say "Salah-uddin" when Saladin intros.

The battle scenes were amazing. especially the last battle, in which Balian handsomely handles the defences of Jerusalem, and all the ballistae completely crush and pull down the belfries {or is it belfrys?}

The only drawback in the movie was that it was toooooooooooooo fast! Things happen in a whirr, and before you know it Balian is a knight, and has laready fought his first battle etc. The overall rating i'd give to this movie is 4.5/5 the 0.5 cut was only because of the speed. Otherwise it is Ridley Scott's {and 'Scott Free''s} best movie, even better than gladiator.

The "Star Wars Kid"

"Put the Star Wars kid in Star Wars III"
This had been adressed to George Lucas. Q arises Who is this mysterious 'Star Wars Kid'
He is a 15 yr old from Quebec. In Nov 2002, he recorded himself fighting a battle with a light er... broomstick making his own sound Fx (read: voom >voom<) His friends uploaded the 2 min video on KaZaA as a joke. Within a few weeks, someone added Star Wars special Fx so that it appears as if he really owns a lightsaber.
Now the petition is up on www.petitiononline.com Chck it out

My experiences of Summer

As all of the people who live in Earth (meaning no alien svuuumm) know, that it is summer here (Not meant for people in the Southern Hemi-Geoid) and Caclutta manages to be hot even after a shower in the afternoon. In short an equation sums up my sentence.

IT IS HOT

And sitting before the comp. is not very cooling {even if you Do kill a lot of your enemies' units, to kill your burning anger)
And sitting in a car with no a.c in the traffic jams that Calcutta is so famous for is NOT cooling either.
Here is my hypothesis on going in a white ambassador at 1200 hours without a hand-fan, and a wet hand-kerchief.

1.) All cars' glasses WILL reflect the sun's image, and subtend an angle which directly meets the eye anywhere, and everywhere.
2.) The amount of heat is directly proportional to the amount of traffic-jam density.
3.) The amount of traffic-jam density is directly proportional to the intensity of your anger.
4.) An unseen force acts upon the traffic light, which when your car comes near the light, changes the colour from green to red.
5.) You forget your house-key.

Glory

Yes of course, the glory shall spread far and wide.

In any case i got a small army to kill a VLA { NO NOT THE VERY LONG ARRAY, BUT A VERY LARGE ARMY}

Check it out in the Gaming blog