Google transliteration in Google search!

It is beautiful!
Now google search supports google transliteration. Apart from being amazing innovation, it is a great service to people in countries like India speaking Tamil, Malayalam, Hindi etc.
e.g. if you type a it shows அம்மா etc.
You have to change your locale to Tamil or appropriate language for this to work.
Great job, Google - hats off!

கூகிள் தேடலில் இப்பொழுது ஆங்கில மொழியில் டைப்பிங் செய்தால் தமிழ் வார்த்தைகள் வரும்!
கூகிள் நல்ல வேலை செய்துள்ளது!

ഗൂഗിള്‍ സീര്ച്ചില്‍ ഇംഗ്ലീഷില്‍ ടൈപ്പ് ചെയ്താല്‍ തമിള്‍ വാക്കുകള്‍ സജ്ജെശന്‍ വരും!
മലയാളത്തില്‍ ഇന്നും തുടങ്ങിയിട്ട് ഇല്ല! വേഗം തുടങ്ങും എന്നും കരുതാം.
ഗൂഗിള്‍ എക്ഷ്സെല്ലെന്ട് പണി ചെയ്ദിട്ടുണ്ട്!

Most irrational number

Yes - there is such a thing as most irrational number.
Here is a nice article from american mathematical society:
http://www.ams.org/featurecolumn/archive/irrational1.html
You will be even more surprised to know it is none other than golden ratio. As you may already know it has relations to fibonacci numbers.

Jefferson and Sally

http://polaris.icmb.utexas.edu/CH391L/Handouts/Jeff2.pdf

Interesting story about the love affair between the president and His african american slave and its proof 2 centuries later.

Amazing power of DNA!

Also a lesson on human frailities of even Great leaders,

Isn't it obvious all races are equal? [That is a man of different race could make Sally a mother!]

Emphatic proof, Human races are not sub species or anything!

That doesn't mean there are no cultural differences, though - there are enough differences between even South and North india, or even Kerala and Tamil Nadu.

So it could be very hard for an African or European [or descendants - like in America] girl to live for life with me or for me to live with an European or African girl! It is because culture shapes us much more than for other animals. Given that either side has a lot of choice, I wouldn't be willing to risk an experiment [Even leaving aside the fact I am in love with my cousin].

Add to that nutritional differences! With 1.75 m I am not in serious danger of being followed by African or European Girls!

For human height, With 1.65 m average in India and 1.78 m in US! For females it is even worse, with 1.52 m and 1.64 m respectively.

In fact my cousin is only 1.55 m and I am already too tall for her:)

Dr.Watson's recent comment about Africans not being as Intelligent and similar views are totally BS! Aren't we all Africans in a way?

Is he saying we are not that intelligent, then? Maybe there is some truth in it, given world wars, hitler, religious fanticism, spiritualism etc.!

That said, His views on something doesn't take away anything from his Greatness - He discovered DNA.

But I don't like him the way I like say Newton.

But I would still respect him. He is entitled to his opinion. But his organisation [Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory] did the right thing in removing him from a position, where he would be expected to make an impartial, race neutral decisions and given his views it would be impossible for him to do that.

[I am reminded of many Indian brahmin scientists who still cling to brahmin supremacy in intelligence!]

Dirac equation for electron in layman terms!

What Great Dirac simply did was to take the square root of

He did this simply by assuming this to be equal to square of this

which could only be solved if A, B etc. are matrices because AB= -BA and so on!

more over we can get 4 such matrices only if we go to 4 dimension. There are not enough matrices to go in lesser dimensions.
that's it - it is just a matter of finding these 4 matrices of size 4x4.

But implications are amazing - we get electron spin as well as anti - electron!

Pure beauty of mathematics!

Why we see in visible light?

I was wondering why we see in visible light?

By that I didn't mean why we see in "visible" light instead of "invisible" light! Whatever we see is visible light, by definition.

What I mean is why we see in the range 380 to 750 nm?

for example, our eye could have been sensitive to another portion of Electro magnetic spectrum For example, infra red could have been red, red could have been orange etc. and we don't see violet at all or the other way around.

That is the spectrum could have been 450 to 820 nm.

so what is special about visible part?
it is something special for we earth dwellers.
1. Sun's temperature being close to 6000K its blackbody radiation peaks at this range.
2. Earth's atmosphere has some set of Electromagnetic radiation windows with optical window with this same range being one of them.
This link explains more:
http://www.iop.org/EJ/article/0031-9120/42/1/002/pe7_1_002.pdf?request-id=274078a3-1121-4070-893f-5aabf8d9e489

A cute little fact is rattlesnakes have "eye" to see in infrared - to catch animals like us who radiate in infrared.
So if our sun were to peak in different wavelength range and our earth were to be atmosphere-less [or of different composition] we would be seeing different visible light!
Of course we would be seeing only visible light, by definition!

A beautiful equation

e^i pi + 1 = 0
What a beauty of an equation is this - connects so many fundamental mathematical constants - 0, 1, pi , i and e.
It says all profound concepts in mathematics is fundamentally interconnected.
But I don't like Euler because of his God's existence "proof".

Tragic Logarithmic spiral

Path of an insect flying to a candle is a logarithmic spiral.
It's defining property is angle to the line from centre [candle] and tangent of insect path [instantenous direction of velocity] is constant.
r = ae^bt
t - is an angle.
The reason is they are used to doing this from old times when only sun and moon was there, in which case it led to straight line path.
Unfortunately not anymore, after this species called homo sapiens usurped the planet.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Logarithmic_spiral