Thoughts provoked

Ah.. thats something nice :) Amongst the bevy of tablets and phones being launched, someone thought of a solar powered one and that too for the rural... great :) Computers are now an integral part of a child’s education, and talking of a million Indian children who attend rural schools that don’t have electricity. No electricity implies no computers!! Recently, an appreciable endeavour of a group of organizations from several different countries put their heads together to create the I-slate, a low-cost, low-energy tablet PC designed for use in these schools that runs on solar power. As per the news, in recent surveys, it appears to be a hit with the kids. P rototypes were tested with  10-13 year old  students of a rural school in Hyderabad , and it was liked. They liked  scratch pad app and perhaps did not like the button-placement of this gizmo priced at Rs. 1500. Almost 40 percent of the country's population is without electricity. Only four of our metros get steady powe

Oh! I was downloading eclipse , and I remembered mom watching TV an listening to the news channels buzzing around with the news of the first lunar hide n seek.... and with the astrologers telling the do's n dont's on the day of the eclipse - I remember one - not to eat during the peak time of the eclipse. Well, I looked for the time of the eclipse n came across this "delicious" pic.... err... well I was hungry na! Damn! who's gonna wait till 10 pm! I could already hear the bhangra music :P of the rehearsals the mice in my stomach were planning....! Ah! its the first lunar eclipse of 2009.. approximately 11 days after the first solar eclipse. Here's a pretty cool site I found about the celestial events in 2009 and more years. Moving from the "hunger-panged-world" to some astronomy: This illustration shows the penumbral lunar eclipse on February 9, 2009. It is fairly close to scale and illustrates how th e moon passes through the penumbral portion of