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Date: Time: Welcome to Cognitive Diet! Your regular blog on scientific know-hows for laymen.

Archiving your memories before the goodbye to Orkut

Goodbye to Orkut
The 90's kids are all nostalgic again. Guess why now? After Cartoon Network turned CN, Dragon BallZ got replaced with Chota Bheem, Maruti800 productions stopped and Microsoft took away suppport from Windows XP, this mature generation has to say adieu to yet another close friend. Yes Orkut is finally leaving us all on 30th September, 2014 as Google finally shuts it down.


The #1 solution to access blocked websites and increase your internet speed at the same time

The Problem Scenario

Banned Websites
Internet as we know it, is perhaps the best thing that could ever happen to mankind. It is one of the best applications of mathematics, physics and engineering disciplines for a conjoint purpose that in itself gives an impulse to the growth of every other field including the very ones named above; and the only reason its possible is because it has given a new dimension to information sharing. This new epoch in the field of information sharing is broadly because of two factors:


  1. The mere presence of features of data hosting and sharing by organisations and individuals alike which has developed a data pool like no other in both quantitative and qualitative aspects. We can find almost every variety of information we need in more than one flavor and version today.
  2. The fast access and retrieval of such requisite information at momentous speeds compared to a decade ago.

Magnetohydrodynamic Propulsion

YAMATO 1 - First Magnetohydrodynamic propulsion based boatMHD propulsion is a revolutionary type of propulsion system that doesn't use propellers to power ships and submarines but instead uses a magnetic force on the current. The method eliminates motors, drive shafts, gears as well as propellers, so it proposes to be a low-noise system with great reliability at low cost. 


YAMATO1 was the first such boat ever made to make use of this revolutionary technology. It was built in the early 1990s by Mitsubishi heavy industries Ltd. and was driven by liquid helium-cooled superconductors and could travel at 15 km/h or 8 knots.

Blondes vs. Brunettes - Psychological or Neurological War?

Blondes vs. Brunettes
Throughout the world, west and east alike, a large chunk of the males have a distinctive preference for females with fair complexion, what we now call as the fair skin obsession. This has thus influenced females too to do everything they can within their power to get a shade lighter. For example, India has a flourishing $4oo million fairness based cosmetic industry.  According to Alley and Hildebrandt, 1998, in western cultures it is quite prominent that males have clear sexual and aesthetic preference for blondes over brunettes. That’s not uncommon in non-western cultures too as confirmed by scientific surveys like Van der Berge and Frost, 1986.

This has been subject to a lot of criticism and has been treated at par with racism and discrimination. However, from a technical point of view we can’t help but question why such discrimination anyway? What makes males drool over white cheeked girls than their dusky counterparts? And from the male perspective where do brunettes rule over blondes in a guy’s mind?

Almost all answers to these questions handle the matter from a psychological point of view, on how people have been conditioned because of past circumstances to develop these preferences; the primary causative factor being slavery and how western countries have been heavily dominant as a ruling country in the past. While all this might be true, few scientists also argue that the root of this issue has delved deep into our consciousness and has turned into more of a neurological condition that just a psychological behavior and they present their ideas on how evolution has an important role in it. Therefore we shall consider both these schools of reasoning for a better understanding.

Numerical Coincidences of the Universe

Einstein on coincidence
Science is an experimental, factual, measurement driven endeavor incorporating high degree of precision. There are  wide ranges of constants that form the crux of our physical theories and in many a cases translate them from theoretical assumptions to practical measuring mechanisms of numerical data in observations. So physical constants have deep implications on the strength of different phenomena we observe and experience and their values have been established with extreme precision and accuracy. 

For example, the age old Newtonian theory on gravity tells us that gravitational force between two point masses is directly proportional to the product of the masses and inversely proportional to the square of the distance separating them. However this simple statement is not enough to get the actual value of the force between them. There comes in the Universal Gravitational Constant(G) without which measurement of the actual magnitude of force was quite impossible. Some other such constants are Planck's Constant(h), speed of light(c), Boltzmann's Constant(k) etc.

However, these numerical constants have been observed to be subject to certain strange coincidences and relations. Some of such coincidences even implicate that our so called constants perhaps aren't even constant. So in this article we have a look at such ideas. There are mainly two main divisions of such coincidences and we will take them up one by one.