It has been sixty-five years since the Allies dropped atomic bombs on the unsuspecting populace of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. A couple of weeks back the world remembered the thousands and thousands of people who lost their lives, either on that day or for years afterwards from diseases caused by their exposure to radiation – people whose only fault was being born into one country and not another. No one asked for their opinion when their country went to war – they did not matter. And yet it was they who paid for it. With their lives.

And all the children who died… Imagine the magnitude of human potential lost in Hiroshima and Nagasaki (or for that matter, in the gas chambers of Germany, or on the bloodied roads of Nanking). One such child was Sadako Sasaki.

Sadako was only two years old at the time of the first bomb and about 1.7 km away from ground zero. She survived. Only to die ten years later from leukaemia – the atom bomb disease. The story goes that when Sadako was slowly wasting away in the hospital she was paid a visit by her best friend, who made an origami paper crane for her and told her about the Japanese saying that one is granted a wish if one folds a thousand paper cranes. Inspired by this, Sadako started making paper cranes – her wish, to live. There are two versions of whether Sadako managed to finish a thousand. According to one she completed 644, and according to another she completed a thousand and kept folding more. But she died any way, on the morning of October 25, 1955, at the age of 12.

The Children’s Peace Monument in the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Park has immortalized Sadako where she is placed on top, holding a crane. The base of the monument reads,

“This is our cry. This is our prayer. Peace on Earth”

Sixty-five years have passed and the prayer has yet to be answered.

Further reading:

1. Wikipedia – Sadako Sasaki
2. Virtual Museum on Sadako with photos etc.
3. Come Back to Me Again, Sadako (A Letter from Sadako’s Mother)

Sitting in the shade of a tree in an empty lot, the congregants raised their hymn books and, in response, the police, lined up in a ragged cordon, raised their riot shields. Sunday service was starting for the local Batak Christian Protestant Church… Across the barricade, enraged young Muslim men in white skullcaps surged forward as the first song in praise of Jesus Christ chimed out. Using their own speakers, they tried to drown out the hymn with their own Arabic chant, “la ilaha ilallah” — there is no god but Allah.

For Indonesian Christians, Gatherings Bring Tension, The New York Times

© Kemal Jufri for The International Herald Tribune

The root of the problem is the fact that in Indonesia, by the Joint Ministerial Decree 1/2006 of the Ministry of Religion, to build any place of worship in a particular area, it is necessary to have a minimum of 90 members and to obtain the support of 60 local residents who are non-members. Now how easy is that in a nearly 90% Muslim majority nation? So minority groups gather in private homes or hotels or shops etc. to conduct their business and are open to allegations of violating the law and in some cases attack from Muslim vigilante groups.

[Dictatorship of the Majority - I is here.]

What happens when a group of particle physicists, composers, software developers and artists get together? This!

You must have heard about the LHC experiment – the Large Hadron Collider. If not its scientific aspects, at least the doomsday theories surrounding it! LHC is a particle accelerator on the Switzerland-France border, 100m below the earth. The experiment consists of two beams of hadrons(either protons or lead ions) colliding head to head, after gaining high levels of energy, with each successive lap inside the circular accelerator. This is an attempt to recreate the conditions just after the Big Bang and will be used by physicists to study the smallest known, fundamental particles, the ‘brick and mortar’ of our Universe, that is expected to be created in the collisions. A number of detectors will assist the physicists in this job and one such detector is called ATLAS.

So what is LHCsound?

LHCsound: the sonification of the ATLAS detector data output.

LHCsound is funded by the STFC as a public outreach project, but also has potential as a physics analysis/ detector monitoring tool and as a resource for musical composition and performance.

(Source:LHCsound Blog)

In other words, the results of the ATLAS detector has been turned in to sounds! The benefit for physicists is that, since the ear is more tuned to detect changes in patterns than the eye, it is likely that anomalies in expected patterns(new particles), if any, can be detected far more easily if the results were presented as sounds. This project is the brainchild of Lily Asquith, a high energy physicist working on the ATLAS and Richard Dobson, a musician and a software developer. And the results are über cool!

Listen to the Decay of a God Particle!

For a detailed explanation on this sound file, please click here. For the complete set of sounds, here.

Image Courtesy of Toya Walker

(Thanks to Rishi, my physicist friend who works at CERN – his link to this BBC article on Facebook led to this post.)

If you read the About section of this blog you will know that Eliot is my favourite poet and reading his poetry has been one of those life-changing experiences of mine!

I have these tapes of Eliot reading his own poems which I bought from Amazon a few years back. Finally, fighting all my procrastinating habits I have started to convert them to digital format. So I though I would share them here. This is the first instalment where he reads the entire ‘The Waste Land’.

I. The Burial of the Dead

II. A Game of Chess

III. The Fire Sermon

IV. Death by Water

V. What the Thunder said

The Priest King - Mohenjo-daro

Two invaluable resources for anyone interested in following all the recent discoveries and updates about the world’s most enigmatic and tantalizing ancient civilization. They also have some great photos. These rank high among places I want to go before I die.

Harappa

Mohenjo-daro

Welcome to Trailblazing, an interactive timeline for everybody with an interest in science. Compiled by scientists, science communicators and historians – and co-ordinated by Professor Michael Thompson FRS – it celebrates three and a half centuries of scientific endeavour and has been launched to commemorate the Royal Society’s 350th anniversary in 2010.

Trailblazing is a user-friendly, ‘explore-at-your-own-pace’, virtual journey through science. It showcases sixty fascinating and inspiring articles selected from an archive of more than 60,000 published by the Royal Society between 1665 and 2010.

Trailblazing – Three and a half centuries of Royal Society publishing

The formula!

This video is brought to us by BriTANicK – Two Guys Wasting Their Degrees!

“BriTANicK screamed into existence in early 2008 when Brian McElhaney and Nick Kocher decided that they didn’t want to use the knowledge and experience they garnered in college for anything but creating short stupid videos that would make them laugh.”

A funny read – might leave you nostalgic too!

Giving up my iPod for a Walkman – BBC

When the Sony Walkman was launched, 30 years ago this week, it started a revolution in portable music. But how does it compare with its digital successors? The Magazine invited 13-year-old Scott Campbell to swap his iPod for a Walkman for a week.

Samuel Beckett‘s Waiting for Godot needs no introduction. It has earned its place as a classic of modern literature and got Beckett a well-deserved Nobel. I discovered the complete Waiting for Godot in the form of a film on YouTube. The film belongs to a unique project called Beckett on Film, under which all 19 of Beckett’s plays were filmed.

Just wanted to share this special discovery of mine with you guys. The only nag is that the whole play is divided into 12 parts due to YouTube’s 10 minute restriction. To make things easier I have collected all the parts in a playlist. See below.

Beckett On Film: Waiting for Godot

Political prisoners’ wives harassed in Havana – BBC

“On leaving the church they were surrounded by an angry mob and shoved off the street and into a park. They were surrounded for about seven hours, with pro-government supporters shouting insults. The women responded by staying on their feet, silently staring their opponents in the face.”

The Damas de Blanco (Ladies in White) of Havana, Cuba go to mass every Sunday wearing white dresses and then silently walk through the streets. This is their silent protest, not for or against any government or ideology or ruler, but simply to express their desire to be reunited with their husbands, sons, fathers, brothers, who were arrested and summarily tried and sentenced in 2003 by the Cuban government for their work with the Varela Project, a grassroots initiative to institute constitutional reforms and promote human rights in Cuba.

Varela Project organizer Oswaldo Paya:

None of those convicted in April 2003 was charged with using or having weapons, inciting violence or disorder, espionage, or any other crime. They were convicted for expressing their opinion, exercising free journalism, and promoting civic initiatives.

Cuba’s Black Spring and the Ladies in White – The Huffington Post

Their strategy and method of protest appear to be adopted from the famous Madres de Plaza de Mayo in Argentina who were demanding information on their missing sons from the military dictatorship that ruled the country. They have been immortalized in popular culture through songs such as Sting’s They Dance Alone and U2′s Mothers of the Disappeared.