Atma's Blog

iWatch and a ripe market

2014-08-02T12:45:00.001-07:00

Apple under Tim Cook is making all the right marketing decisions for launching its iWatch product. Shrouding their products in secrecy until the release has been a very successful strategy. The templates and dummies that leak through its suppliers act as an effective advertisement kindling the curiosity among its consumers, youth and the gadget savvy. Typical of the android ecosystem, a lot

Why Kochadaiiyaan is not an anachronism

2014-06-22T18:46:00.000-07:00

My wife and I, along with a couple of friends managed to watch the last screening of Kochadaiiyaan near Los Angeles. We were the only occupants in the theatre and it felt like we had an exclusive screening of the movie. As I left the movie, I had the feeling that Kochadaiiyaan has left an eternal sensation in my heart. I grew fond of the movie when we watched the director, Aishwarya's speech

How to buy a new car in the US

2013-02-23T12:48:00.000-08:00

Deciding to buy a car is a big decision in most people’s life. In this article I am going to outline some tips that will help make the process easier. If you are in the market for a used car, please read this article I wrote a couple of years back ‘Buying a used car in the US’. I would not consider myself a car expert, but I am a savvy buyer and a car enthusiast who wants to spend his earnings

Remote Sensing at the Consumer End

2012-04-17T17:28:00.000-07:00

The day has come when every university, mapping agency could collect their own remote sensing imagery.. No, I am not talking about purchasing high resolution imagery, I am talking about collecting such images using their own sensors! UAV RS has arrived. Deciding which UAV system to use can be just as confusing as deciding which cell phone to buy. There are so many of them. Recently I

Correct until proved otherwise

2012-03-06T19:48:00.000-08:00

I remember reading a quote in my childhood which goes like this.. "The best scientific theories of today are only to be proved wrong in future". Sadly this is just true; to explain this better, consider this situation.. Do you play your favorite playlist on phone while at shower? How many times have you tried to guess the song that's playing amidst all the noise? You come up with a guess, it

Buying a used car in the US

2011-09-20T19:21:00.000-07:00

Buying a used car can be a daunting task. In this blog (a rather lengthy one) I write about my experience and the knowledge that I gathered during this process. Reason Other alternatives exist - renting when necessary, using public transit or leasing a car. Yet the sheer comfort and the time saved in owning a car overcomes all of these, further the comfort of a car during the winter snow is

New age tools for the Researcher - Part 1

2011-02-15T18:17:00.001-08:00

You wake up late in the morning only to gather that you awfully overslept the morning class; you cannot remember for the presentation that you worked on all night the previous day; the slow and outdated Windows XP in your lab terminal vexes you; you have loads of information but unable to organize it and pull it out when needed; at the end of the day you feel defunct!.. Relax there is a way out

Cat on the wall -1

2009-06-22T21:58:00.000-07:00

Blogs and comments are the best way to get people talking. I like to listen to people discussing on a few murky aspects in remote sensing.The first debate is on "Will contrast enhancement improve supervised classification accuracy?"Preamble:Analysts perform contrast enhancement to better visualize their objects of interest. So would this enhancement improve the between-class separability?Scenario

Above the abode of clouds

2009-01-04T11:33:00.000-08:00

My two-month long training programme came to an jolting halt. After the good byes and contact exchanges, I was left stranded in the Ahmedabad airport. I was the lone person from the group leaving to Bangalore. I patiently waited for two long hours for my much coveted window seat. It certainly seemed childish for the co-passengers to watch a grown up fellow peeping only through the window all

Are you the Martian the world is looking for?

2008-08-07T12:56:00.000-07:00

“Martian water has been touched and tasted” quotes a triumphant report from NASA. The Phoenix lander has been doing phenomenal research on the Martian soils. The MRO (Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter) has been beaming radar images of the surface and subsurface of Mars for over 4 years. Huge teams of scientists, ET (extra terrestrial) geologists, from across the world regularly analyze these data

A Bangalore fly-by

2008-04-12T11:37:00.000-07:00

It was a beautiful sunset and a busy evening; I packed my back-pack as I had to leave to Hyderabad from Coimbatore after a long vacation. Those long years in college and the grooming as a corporate professional could remotely change my attitude from a whining school boy reluctant to leave home for school. I found hard to push myself to leave for work the next day. As I waited in the

Solar Spheres

2007-12-31T09:24:00.001-08:00

On a busy and darkening evening, I strolled down the streets of Hitec city, Hyderabad. Mammoth buildings, edifices, dazzling office spaces, lounges, non-stop air conditioning machines, ever running computers and servers, and on the whole the entire new city was a giant energy guzzler. As I reached the 13th floor of the service apartment in which I lived then, the entire Hitec city looked like Las

What if great ideas were CHERISHED?

2007-12-13T03:23:00.000-08:00

It was a jobless Thursday afternoon and I sat in my office cubicle going through old hastily read emails. I found this one from my sister which had a URL and a line saying “hit this link”. I knew she was serious about it as she was not the one for silly fun. As I hit the link, what I saw, left an irrevocable change in me, forever in my life. It inspired. It transpired courage. And I aspired.Tell

Sillunu Oru Kaadal…..

2006-09-10T12:41:00.000-07:00

Early on a Sunday morning I woke up hearing my mobile shouting the reminder. It was 7 AM and 7 of us at 70 kmph roared on mount road. Our destination: Satyam theater. I am neither writing a review of the movie or explaining the story for I feel the best way to experience the masterpiece is to watch it for oneself. The movie is so complete, perfect at all angles like a sphere, that

My first air travel

2006-09-03T10:52:00.000-07:00

It should be 5:30 AM on Thursday; mom was waking me up frantically, I was about to encounter the most fantastic experience in my life.. Gd was going to fly! How great, right from my puerile days, till today as a Geo-technologist, I had always yearned for a chance to fly. I made my best efforts to be on time for the check in. Nevertheless it had become my modus operandi. I was the last

The Colour of Sound

2006-05-21T04:46:00.000-07:00

Sounds and music are quite unique when compared to pictures and movies. The fact being that, whenever we listen to a song or music, we cannot have a wholesome view of it. But in the case of a picture we can instantaneously look at the entire picture. And if it’s a movie, we can instantaneously view the images of all frames to get this wholesome view. We can keep on looking at the

INTERLINKING OF RIVERS

2006-01-08T23:16:00.000-08:00

A holistic approachPROS & CONS AND ALTERNATIVESAbstractSince 1970 till today, the objective, methodology and feasibility of Interlinking Indian Rivers remains to be a controversial subject. Albeit the Indian Government claims this multi million project to be a panacea to incessant floods in North India and eternal drought in the southern parts of the country, several critics argue relentlessly

Was Nature Partial?

2005-12-08T20:56:00.000-08:00

Back home for the winter vacation, I delve into my bag finding this paper cutting dated 18th of November. It was not just another article on global warming, the author was trying to say something, yet he was too careful in choosing his words. I read it twice and the whole plot unfolded to this. A recent report form the Journal Nature says that “the least polluting countries

Whether to Wither Weather

2005-11-26T05:29:00.000-08:00

Water an elixir of life... Really? Hastily said? I guess so..Floods everywhere in South India. Reading this I could recall the last summer when the peninsula was sore without water. Farmlands literally sun baked without water but now, swept clean by floods. Why this extreme variation in climatic conditions? Shall not this excess water be tapped in the right way and made use of during the needy

FEAR THE FLU

2005-10-19T06:00:00.000-07:00

FEAR THE FLUSome where in a nameless village of Vietnam, a girl dies off and suddenly there is world wide alarms, similar deaths being accounted, scientists settle down full fledged in research trying to crack down the traffic of diseases between man and animals. Why - Because, the girl died of flu. How Deadly? While one in every ten just shrug off the disease, we should believe that about 30 to

Perhaps it's their Alma Mater

2005-10-07T11:34:00.000-07:00

After a really long time, I was walking into the IIT Madras campus. Albeit claimed to be a deer reserve, I couldn’t spot one; must be study time then. Walking through that isolated town always recalled those images of Coimbatore Forest College where some of my mother’s colleagues used to work. I was almost panicked when I found my clock ticking 3:00 PM, scared that I

The Loss = Gain Business

2005-10-07T11:21:00.000-07:00

One good thing in missing dinner at the mess is that I am getting a chance to walk out, out this cramped college. Many-a-times I’ve found a lot of ideas, solutions, reasons flow out whenever I walked in solitude. And today I had to walk to RK Foods for munching and I ended up with this.I am a profuse thinker, I accept that. But for so long, I’ve been only a thinker,

Billion Dollar Toy

2005-09-03T04:09:00.000-07:00

“NASA has made a billion dollar toy just to make it hit and burst.” Perplexed? Well, read on. ‘Deep Impact’ is a billion dollar mission to answer the billion dollar question of how Earth was formed a billion years ago. Engineers designed two vehicles for this mission, a SUV sized flyby spacecraft (which acts as the mother ship) equipped with telescopes, cameras, spectrometer and 820 pound impact

Shifts in the Magnetic Poles…

2005-08-29T00:15:00.000-07:00

As many of us know, there are two kinds of poles for the Earth, the Magnetic poles and the Geographical poles. Although the location of the geographical poles remains constant, those of the magnetic poles do not.Scientists believe that they have discovered the possible reason for these shifts, being, that the Earth’s core rotates faster than its surface, by about 0.3 to 0.5 degree per

Well, I give up..

2005-08-28T23:33:00.000-07:00

Few years ago, when NASA published their new discovery, that women are more suitable for space travel than men, reasoning that they have greater strengths in terms of stamina with respect to sustainability to intense gyroscopic motion, obviously my reaction was that, it was “CRAP”. But now, my opinion has reached its obsolescence, and there is no point in me being tenacious, I give