Interesting Facts

This picture is an ambigram, an image which can be viewed in more than one way depending on how you perceive it. The thing about this sort of image, in particular, is that it manages to convince you visually that you're looking at two completely contradictory views at the exact same time. What does this tell you about perception, and the way our brain processes conflicting stimuli? Can you see it as both images simultaneously, or merely as one, then the other, alternating based on how you squint or tip your head?

Today is the birthday of Mahathma Gandhiji, on this day I would like to recall the partition of India and Pakistan.



Millions left for their promised new homeland with smiles on their faces as trains left both India and Pakistan.



The massive exchange of population that took place in the summer of 1947 was unprecedented.



This is a train to Pakistan being given a warm send-off.
In 1947, the border between India and its new neighbour Pakistan became a river of blood, as the exodus erupted into rioting.



These pictures are by Margaret Bourke-White from Khushwant Singh's book Train to Pakistan, Roli Books.Over 10 million people were uprooted from their homeland and travelled on foot, bullock carts and trains to their promised new home.



An aged and abandoned Muslim couple and their grand children sitting by the the roadside on this arduous journey. "The old man is dying of exhaustion. The caravan has gone on," wrote Bourke-White.



It left behind a trail of death and destruction. The Indian map was slashed to make way for a new country - Pakistan.



In a couple of months in the summer of 1947, a million people were slaughtered on both sides in the religious rioting.



The street was short and narrow. Lying like the garbage across the street and in its open gutters were bodies of the dead. Here, bodies of the victims of rioting are picked up from a city street.



With the tragic legacy of an uncertain future, a young refugee sits on the walls of Purana Qila, transformed into a vast refugee camp in Delhi.



Men, women and children who died in the rioting were cremated on a mass scale.
Villagers even used oil and kerosene when wood was scarce.



The migration

This is an expression that is normally used to caution someone. When you say that one swallow does not make a summer, what you mean is that just because something good has happened, it doesn't mean good things will continue to happen. Chances are things may go bad, instead of improving. You are requesting the individual to err on the side of caution, and not to carried away.

Just because you've won the first round doesn't mean you are going to win the championship. Remember one swallow does not make a summer.



The expression comes from the world of Aesop's Fairy tales. In the story, a young man sees a swallow on a warm winter day. As you know, a swallow is a bird which usually appears in the spring. Thinking that the winter season is over, the young man sells off his woollen coat, and with the money he has made, he goes to the bar and drinks. unfortunately, in the days that follow, the temperature drops. The young man, shivering in the cold realises that one swallow does not make a summer.

Article idea: The Hindu dated on September 30, 2008

Larry and Sergey decide that the BackRub search engine needs a new name. After some brainstorming, they go with Google – a play on the word “googol,” a mathematical term for the number represented by the numeral 1 followed by 100 zeros. The use of the term reflects their mission to organize a seemingly infinite amount of information on the web.



Today is the tenth anniversary of google.
And hence the post is special!

Zeller's rule is used to calculate the day on which any date falls for any year. With this technique you will have the calendar for any given year available to you.

The rule is as follows

f = k + [(13*m - 1)/5] + d + [d/4] + [c/4] - 2*c

where,

k = day of month
m = month number, taking Mar=1, ..., Dec=10, Jan=11, Feb=12
d = last two digits of year, using the previous year for Jan and Feb
c = first two digits of year

Rules:

1.In Zeller's rule the year begins in March and ends in February. Hence, the month number from March is 1, April is 2, May is 3 and so on up to January, which is 11, and February is 12.

2.January and February are counted as the 11th and 12th months of the previous year. Hence, if you are calculating the day of any date on January 2026, the notation will be (month=11 and year= 2025) instead of (month=1 and year=2026).

3.While calculating, we drop off every number after the decimal point.

4.Once we have found the answer we divide it by 7 and take the remainder. Remainder 0 corresponds to Sunday; Remainder 1 corresponds to Monday ; Remainder 2 corresponds to Tuesday and so on....

Example:

Find the day on 26th June 1983

f = k + [(13*m - 1)/5] + d + [d/4] + [c/4] - 2*c

Here k=26, m=4, d=83, c =19

f= 26+(13*4-1/5)+83+83/4+19/4-2*19
= 105

105 divided by 7 leaves a remainder 0. Hence the day is a Sunday!


Derivation of the formula:

Here we're defining

k = day of month
m = month number, taking Mar=1, ..., Dec=10, Jan=11, Feb=12
d = last two digits of year, using the previous year for Jan and Feb
c = first two digits of year

The formula is then

f = k + [(13*m - 1)/5] + d + [d/4] + [c/4] - 2*c

and we use the remainder after dividing f by 7 to find the day of the
week.

Where does this come from? Let's first note the reason for the odd
handling of months: we want leap day not to affect the formula, so we
move it to the end of the 'year', and act as if the year began on
March 1.

Now note that in defining f, all we care about is the remainder after
dividing, so it will be enough to make sure that f increases by 1
whenever the day of the week advances by one day; we don't care about
the actual value of f.

Now let's build the formula piece by piece.

How does the year affect the day? Well, since 365 = 7*52+1, each
normal year advances the day by 1, so our formula can start with the
year number:

f = d

Whenever the year advances by 1, so does the day of the week.

But we have to adjust this to account for leap years. Every four years
we have an extra day, so we'll want to add 1 to f. This is done by
adding [d/4], since this increases by 1 only when d becomes a multiple
of 4, which is a leap year. So now we have

f = d + [d/4]

Now how do centuries affect the day? A century contains 100 years, 24
of which normally are leap years (since century days, like 1900, are
NOT leap years). So each century the day advances by 124 days, which
is 7*18-2, and therefore the day of the week goes BACK 2 days. So we
have

f = d + [d/4] - 2*c

But every fourth century year IS a leap year (as 2000 was), so we
have to adjust just as we did for leap years:

f = d + [d/4] - 2*c + [c/4]

Now we come to the months, and this is the cute part. Consider, for
each month, how many days it has BEYOND 28, and then add that up to
see the effect the months have on the day of the week:

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12
Month Mar Apr May Jun Jul Aug Sep Oct Nov Dec Jan Feb
Days 31 30 31 30 31 31 30 31 30 31 31 (28)
Excess 3 2 3 2 3 3 2 3 2 3 3 0
Accum 0 3 5 8 10 13 16 18 21 23 26 29
\_________________/\__________________/\_______

The number of accumulated days is counted at the start of the month,
so if we divide it by 7, the remainder shows how many weekdays the
start of the month is from the starting day for the 'year'.

Notice the pattern in the excess: 3,2,3,2,3 repeats every five months,
and the accumulation reaches 13 in that time. So every 5 months, we
want to add 13 days. That suggests that we want to add a term like
[13m/5]. That doesn't quite give us what we want:

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12
Month Mar Apr May Jun Jul Aug Sep Oct Nov Dec Jan Feb
Days 31 30 31 30 31 31 30 31 30 31 31 (28)
Excess 3 2 3 2 3 3 2 3 2 3 3 0
Accum 0 3 5 8 10 13 16 18 21 23 26 29
13m 13 26 39 52 65 78 ...
[13m/5] 2 5 7 10 13 15 ...

If we subtract 2 from this, it isn't quite right; we have to shift it
a bit. So after playing with it a bit, we find

13m-1 12 25 38 51 64 77 ...
[(13m-1)/5] 2 5 7 10 12 15 ...
[(13m-1)/5]-2 0 3 5 8 10 13 ...

That's just what we want. So we'll use

f = d + [d/4] - 2*c + [c/4] + [(13m-1)/5] - 2

Finally, we have to add the day, since each day obviously adds one to
the day of the week; and adjust to get the right day of the week for,
say, Mar 1, 2000, since nothing we've done so far actually determined
WHICH day we start the whole pattern on. It turns out that we can just
remove the -2, and we get

f = d + [d/4] - 2*c + [c/4] + [(13m-1)/5] + k

And there's the formula!

It comes from Central America and is found from Mexico to Panama. It is quite common in its zone, but it not easy to find because of its transparent wings, which is a natural camouflage mechanism.

A butterfly with transparent wings is rare and beautiful. As delicate as finely blown glass, the presence of this rare tropical gem is used by rain forest ecologists as an indication of high habitat quality and its demise alerts them of ecological change. Rivaling the refined beauty of a stained glass window, the translucent wings of the Glasswing butterfly shimmer in the sunlight like polished panes of turquoise, orange, green, and red.

The above picture is not an ms paint or photoshop work. It's a real picture. And just observe the pattern formed by the birds. Amazing! It justifies the title, one in a million shot!

Today I got a mail from google team about google chrome!

Google has launched a new browser called google chrome. The interface of the browser is pretty simple. But it's damn fast.

Descrpition by google:
Google Chrome is a browser that combines a minimal design with sophisticated technology to make the web faster, safer, and easier.

Download link: http://www.google.com/chrome



Screenshot of google chrome

An article about google chrome from the google blog:

At Google, we have a saying: “launch early and iterate.” While this approach is usually limited to our engineers, it apparently applies to our mailroom as well! As you may have read in the blogosphere, we hit "send" a bit early on a comic book introducing our new open source browser, Google Chrome. As we believe in access to information for everyone, we've now made the comic publicly available -- you can find it here. We will be launching the beta version of Google Chrome tomorrow in more than 100 countries.

So why are we launching Google Chrome? Because we believe we can add value for users and, at the same time, help drive innovation on the web.

All of us at Google spend much of our time working inside a browser. We search, chat, email and collaborate in a browser. And in our spare time, we shop, bank, read news and keep in touch with friends -- all using a browser. Because we spend so much time online, we began seriously thinking about what kind of browser could exist if we started from scratch and built on the best elements out there. We realized that the web had evolved from mainly simple text pages to rich, interactive applications and that we needed to completely rethink the browser. What we really needed was not just a browser, but also a modern platform for web pages and applications, and that's what we set out to build.

On the surface, we designed a browser window that is streamlined and simple. To most people, it isn't the browser that matters. It's only a tool to run the important stuff -- the pages, sites and applications that make up the web. Like the classic Google homepage, Google Chrome is clean and fast. It gets out of your way and gets you where you want to go.

Under the hood, we were able to build the foundation of a browser that runs today's complex web applications much better. By keeping each tab in an isolated "sandbox", we were able to prevent one tab from crashing another and provide improved protection from rogue sites. We improved speed and responsiveness across the board. We also built a more powerful JavaScript engine, V8, to power the next generation of web applications that aren't even possible in today's browsers.

This is just the beginning -- Google Chrome is far from done. We're releasing this beta for Windows to start the broader discussion and hear from you as quickly as possible. We're hard at work building versions for Mac and Linux too, and will continue to make it even faster and more robust.

We owe a great debt to many open source projects, and we're committed to continuing on their path. We've used components from Apple's WebKit and Mozilla's Firefox, among others -- and in that spirit, we are making all of our code open source as well. We hope to collaborate with the entire community to help drive the web forward.

The web gets better with more options and innovation. Google Chrome is another option, and we hope it contributes to making the web even better.

So check in again tomorrow to try Google Chrome for yourself. We'll post an update here as soon as it's ready.

Posted by Sundar Pichai, VP Product Management, and Linus Upson, Engineering Director

Article source: http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2008/09/fresh-take-on-browser.html

Atlast google has entered the browser war, instead of supporting Mozilla it's good that google has started it's own browser.

I have already started using this browser. I feel the difference instantly (it gives high speed browsing). You too can try!