One of the most successful bands of our time, Coldplay, released their fifth studio album Mylo Xyloto today. The album has already surpassed Adele’s 21 and is now the most pre-ordered album of this year. Critics, some of them, are calling this their best album ever and some say that Coldplay is losing grip on who they are and what they want to be. Regardless of these opinions, I am hooked to the album with over 100 plays in less than a day.

Coldplay lead vocalist, Chris Martin said in 2002 that all he wants to do is make the best music with his best friends. 9 years down the line, Coldplay is one of the biggest hits of the century and Martin, prior to release of MX said – at the very least, the part about friends is still true. He’s being modest here when you see the success they’ve had over the years.

This album, according to him, is an attempt to sway the audience from their belief. A lot of people have made their mind, he said, about us and we would like to start from scratch. That’s exactly what they have done. They call it the clean slate. The album is full of surprises, songs with a woo-hooo instead of lyrics, their most electronic album to date also features ballads, slow sad songs and those end up being the hilights of the album. It’s irresistible.

Martin told MTV,

“It’s definitely a schizophrenic album … it keeps changing sounds,” he said. “That’s why we called it such a strange thing, Mylo Xyloto. Because we felt like so many people have already made up their minds about us, both good and bad, that we can sort of start again from scratch and try and reflect all the music we listen to and we love.”

Track List

The US version of the album features 14 songs with three of them being instrumental and less than a minute long.

When asked about the album tour, Martin apparently said something one the lines of – you cannot take these things for granted. If the album turns out to be a bomb, we may have to open a cake shop. Mylo Xyloto is a love story with a happy ending. The single Paradise was released last month and is available on youtube on Coldplay channel.

When you consider that the last album Coldplay released was in 2008, almost 3 years ago, this enormous response is the true complement the fans can give this band. With their emotional songs, themes of love and the willingness to push all the boundaries to keep producing different things, Coldplay remains my favorite band. My favorite song? Almost all of them but currently I am hooked to ‘Hurts like heaven’.

The Hobbit

It’s amazing how many people don’t know about this book and yet they are really big fans of the Lord of the Rings. The Hobbit serves as the precursor to the Lord of the Rings (LOTR from here on) yet there is no direct relation between them that requires the reader to read Hobbit before LOTR. That probably is one of the biggest reasons this book hasn’t picked up that well.

Hobbit is the story of Bilbo Baggins, a young hobbit (read the book, it starts with an explanation of what a hobbit is – in short they are short, fun loving, food lovers who want to live in peace) who was recruited by a Wizard and 13 dwarves to steal the treasure (which is rightfully theirs) back from a Dragon, Smaug. The book is an adventure of these 15 people through middle earth overcoming many hurdles. The book is full of excitement and there are no boring patches as in LOTR. The book was intended for children but even adults will find it an interesting read. There are giant spiders, trolls, goblins, a creature that can turn into anyone or anything, wood elves, dragons, normal humans (dull), wine and songs and sonnets and ale - pipe-weed and smoke rings. It’s all there, the formula for a great book.

When I say it hasn’t picked up that well I mean it when compared with LOTR. Hobbit, according to estimations, has sold over 100 million copies worldwide and has been translated in over 25 languages. That’s a huge figure when you compare that the last Harry Potter book sold less than 50 million copies. LOTR sits above the combined figures of these 2 at around 150 million copies sold. Even with these figures, I see around and I see people I know – most of them haven’t even heard of the Hobbit. They haven’t read the book and have no clue what it is about. It’s a book you must read if you are interested in Tolkien’s work in general. It’s also a very goof starting point for anyone new to his works and also the fantasy fiction genre in general.

The Lord of the Rings

It’s the Lord of the Rings. Go kill yourself if you don’t already know about this.

The Children of Húrin

If there is a book I would like to see in action on the big screen, it’s this one. Another gem from Tolkien mostly overlooked by many, Children of Hurin is a tragic story of Túrin Turambar, and his sister Niënor Níniel. The timeline of the story is 6500 years before the war of the ring after which comes LOTR. You know who Sauron (the badass guy from LOTR who’s just an eye) was in this time? A mere servant of the then dark lord Morgoth.

The story revolves around the life of Túrin and Niënor. There’s a war brewing between Morgoth and the elves. Hurin is swept into the war and captured by Morgoth and forced to see all evil that happens around him. His wife is unaware of the whereabouts of Túrin who, with help of others like him, has been living in exile. Morgoth has sent a dragon, Glaurung to take care of Túrin. Túrin’s sister, Niënor doesn’t know about all this. Their paths clash and they weave together. The sibling duo is now fighting Glaurung. This is a story of brutal conquest and flight, of forest hiding-places and pursuit, of resistance with lessening hope, of tragic love with shocking consequences. The Dark Lord and the Dragon enter in direly articulate form. Glaurung almost succeeds in doing his master’s bidding.

If you have read the Unfinished Tales, another good book by Mr. Tolkien, then you already know the abstract of this story but don’t let that fool you. This book is much more than what is explored in the limited novella in Unfinished Tales. Christopher Tolkien has edited the original manuscripts of JRR and published this book. He’s a bit weird at times but it’s still a brilliant piece of work. The book starts off with a plethora of names that are impossible to keep track of and most readers will turn away from the book in the first 50 pages. That’s just a little hardship that you need to go through before the cream comes out. The rest of the book is easy on the number of characters and grows better like an old wine. The ending of the book is what really excited me. I was imagining it being shown on a big screen. I could almost see something as magnificent as the shower of arrows from 300. We’ll just have to wait and see of Peter Jackson feels the same way or not.

The Second Part

I am cutting the article short at this point. I can go on about this for a long time but then I realized that these short summaries don’t really do justice to any books. I would, when I get time, be writing full length reviews (without spoilers). Until them, please pick up a copy of Hobbit if you haven’t already and start reading.

The relativistic motion of clocks on board GPS satellites exactly accounts for the superluminal effect in the OPERA experiment, says  physicist Ronald van Elburg at the University of Groningen in the Netherlands, The Physics arXiv Blog reports.

“From the perspective of the clock, the detector is moving towards the source and consequently the distance travelled by the particles as observed from the clock is shorter,” says van Elburg. By this he means shorter than the distance measured in the reference frame on the ground. The OPERA team overlooks this because it assumes the clocks are on the ground not in orbit.

Van Elburg calculates that it should cause the neutrinos to arrive 32 nanoseconds early. But this must be doubled because the same error occurs at each end of the experiment. So the total correction is 64 nanoseconds, almost exactly what the OPERA team observed.

– http://www.kurzweilai.net/faster-than-light-neutrino-puzzle-claimed-solved-by-special-relativity

You know what that means? It means Einstein proved right, again.

Where to Begin

I am focusing on Linux related topics and Linux based magazines in this article. To begin, you should target specific magazines. A plausible list of magazines is,

1. Linux for You
2. Linux Magazine
3. Ubuntu User
4. Linux Format
5. Linux Journal
6. LWN

Once you target a magazine, you should know what you want to write about. Ideas usually come to mind if you are passionate about a subject. There are a number of ways to inspire yourselves with ideas to write about. One of the frequent tools I use is StumbleUpon. Stumbling through Linux/Unix topic throws a bunch of ideas at you and you can, hopefully, get hang of the situation.

This approach may not work well with some magazines since they have a theme they follow for the months to come. Linux Journal, for example, has a list of topics they intend to cover in the upcoming issues for a year. Similar lists are available on websites of other magazines also. If you have no idea, or if you want to improve your chances or approval, you should probably start here and find something that interests you and think on that.

The Proposal – Initial Draft

Even though technical, these magazines require strong writing skills on your (author’s) part. They have editorial teams which edit your submissions but it’s always a good idea to improve your written communication and make the drafts as perfect as you possibly can.

If you have an idea of what you want to write about, it’s time to draft the initial proposal. Usually all the magazines require you to introduce yourself in a few lines. You should write your qualifications as a writer here and something that sets you apart from the average Linux user. Any experience you might have had with Linux, writing (technical writing experience would help), what makes you a unique person to write on the subject. This is a place to market yourself and sell yourself to the editors of the magazine.

After that, describe the topic you would like to write about. The general overview of the subject. Introduce the topic to the editors. Assume they know nothing about the topic and in a couple of lines, describe it to them. Then conclude the section with the target audience. What sells the idea? Why would people be interested in it?

Then you should clearly state what you wish to achieve from this article. Is it a review? Is it a case study? What would be the outcome of the article? Is it just an informative article or a do it yourself type of article? What should the readers expect from it?

These 2 paragraphs about the article should not be longer than a couple of lines each. After these 2 paragraphs, optionally introduce the topic at an abstract level and then write an outline of your article. Right from introduction to a conclusion. All the main points and sub-points included. Elaborate on each sub-point in a line or two.

Conclude the proposal with possible changes, improvements or additions, keep the topic open for discussion (from the editors). Make sure there are no spelling mistakes or typographical errors in the proposal. Make sure you format the proposal clearly. Different magazines may have different proposal formats which you should look into before submitting it. Clearly state the subject as ‘Article Proposal’ or the subject format that the magazine uses (you can find this information on the websites of the magazines).

Oh, you. You just couldn’t let me go, could you? This is what happens when an unstoppable force meets an immovable object. You are truly incorruptible, aren’t you? Huh? You won’t kill me out of some misplaced sense of self-righteousness. And I won’t kill you because you’re just too much fun. I think you and I are destined to do this forever.

- The Joker

From a logical standpoint, considering the logic as we know it, if there exists an infinite force, an unstoppable force, then it stands to reason that there cannot exist an immovable object. The definition of the immovable object similarly eliminates the possibility of having an unstoppable force because if we have an unstoppable force even the immovable object won’t be able to stop it thereby making itself movable and voiding the existence of itself or by stopping the unstoppable force and putting a rest to it once in for all.

This has been discussed over the years in a lot of different places among a lot of different people and contexts and this is one of the well known logical paradoxes of the human world. Let’s consider for a moment that an immovable object did exist. Now, according to Newton’s first law of motion,

 Every body persists in its state of being at rest or of moving uniformly straight forward, except insofar as it is compelled to change its state by force impressed.

Now, consider the force mentioned in the equation above is the unstoppable force. If the object still fails to move then the force is not really unstoppable. Let’s extend this, even if the force is not unstoppable, the object is still immovable. Meaning it would have infinite mass (in order to have infinite inertia). Because, unless the object has infinite inertia, it cannot be immovable. Is infinite mass even possible?

Einstein proved that an object gains mass as it moves closer to the speed of light and his equations suggest that if an object is accelerated at the speed of light then the mass of that object will become infinite. Out Universe is not infinite. It only stands to reason if the mass of an object is infinite then it would have infinite density due to lack of infinite volume.

A gravitational singularity or spacetime singularity is a location where the quantities that are used to measure the gravitational field become infinite in a way that does not depend on the coordinate system. These quantities are the scalar invariant curvatures of spacetime, which includes a measure of the density of matter.

Congratulations people, the object moving at the speed of light has just stopped and is now the gravitational singularity. It has so much gravity that it now is the center of the universe as we know it. It’s no longer moving at the speed of light. Does the singularity collapse at this point? I don’t know. It might, I know of no studies in regards to this matter. The reason might be because infinite mass itself is not possible.

What if, however, we could accelerate a mass-less quantity to the speed of light? CERN thinks they have done that. So, was Einstein wrong? I hope yes. That would be exciting. And if it were really possible to accelerate a particle faster than the speed of light and not have the universe collapse on it – can we finally have an unstoppable force? I wonder…

The movie starts off with a scene that can lead to some people puking right where they sit and can make others lose their appetite. If you are like me, you would just enjoy it and expect more from the movie. It will live up to your expectations. The film opens with a middle aged man sharpening his razor later calmly testing it out on his own thumb. He opens the balcony door, gazes at the moon and proceeds to…

The lesser you know the better. The movie then revolves around the girl (Simone Mareuil) and the boy (Pierre Batcheff). It’s weird – dead donkeys, hands with holes in them, pianos and car accidents. It’s erratic without any underlying story as such and it’s confusing with the non chronological timeline that recently got famous with Christopher Nolan’s Following followed by Memento. This movie has it all. Here’s the link I promised in the first paragraph. Enjoy!