Have you seen a college-bus like this?

If you notice rash driving and if you make up your mind to report, what is your preferred mode of communication?

a) No reporting! I do not wish to spend money for phone call, I prefer email, but, email-contact is not displayed on the bus

b) By phone, as the phone number is displayed on the bus

c) By fax, if the phone number displayed on the bus has fax facility

d) Will go physically to the said college and report personally

e) Will check the college website for email-contact, and report

f) Some other mode, not listed here

Go to the right-side bar to vote! Voting will be closed in due course of time!

Copied and pasted from my GTalk chat (about mathematical models).....

Me: I have a new model!

It appears that Pan IIT has been taken over by Joomla!! A whois lookup shows that the domain has been existing since June 7, 2006.

BTW Pan IIT 2009 site is here.

Here is a cartoon I made some time ago using toondoo.com:

By now you might be aware that EMRI is a Satyam backed Emergency Management and Research Institute.
     It is surprising that the emergency management institute is yet to design a favicon of its own. The EMRI website continues to use the favicon of Joomla!! (by the way, the first '!' is a part of the name of Joomla! and the second '!' is added by me.
     I just reproduce the objectives of research center, as listed on this page:

• To analyze the data and publish the research papers for prevention and better management of emergencies
• To partner with consultants and work in the area of Emergency Medicine
• To understand the current status of Research in Emergency Management in other countries
• To disseminate the results internally and externally
• To maintain a Knowledge Management Portal

Among the listed objectives, can you consider at least one point as a genuine objective (of a research center)? I don't think so. The very first objective is "to publish research papers". Any research paper should, in reality, be a byproduct of quality research. Even if the aim is (only?) to publish research papers, it need not be explicitly mentioned, so sincerely! Before you take up any research, it is obvious that you should go through the national as well as international state-of-the-art. So the third objective need not be explicitly mentioned. Yet another novel (!) objective of EMRI is to "maintain a Knowledge Management Portal"!
     I think this is how IT people in India understand the concept of research!
     In the same mold, I am giving my imaginary list of objectives for ISRO:

• To analyze the telecommunications requirement data and publish research papers for prevention and better management of natural calamities and man-made disasters
• To partner with academic institutes and work in the area of aerospace
• To understand the current status of Research in aerospace in other countries, especially NASA and ESA
• To disseminate the results internally and externally
• To maintain a Knowledge Management website

Howazit?

     EMRI claims to handle more than 6,500 emergency calls a day, of which 96.5% of the calls pertain to medical emergencies. However, it appears that, they save [only] over 108 lives a day! What do you think will happen to the (6500*0.965 - 108) number of emergency cases? What if each emergency call is associated with more than one life?
     It appears that EMRI is obsessed with number 108! Here are my observations, based on what EMRI has to say:
     "1-0-8 is a primordial number resonating accross countries, cultures, religions and is also a prime number to astrologers, astronomers, linguists and mathematicians".
Whether the primordial number 108 resonates across sciences also? Why club astrologers with astronomers and the likes?
     "1-0-8 beads of a rosary for 108 incantations is a namajapa of a Personal God".
If you are under emergency, do not call 108. Take a 108 beads rosary and chant namajapa of a Personal God.
     "Krishna is said to have danced with 108 Gopis the ecstatic Raasa Leela on moon lit nights in Brindavan".
If Krishna were not to dance with Gopis, would EMRI have adopted number 0 as an emergency call number?
     "Cosmic Dancer Lord Natraja danced the 108 karanas or momentory freezes".
If Lord Nataraja were to dance 159 karanas, would EMRI have adopted number 159 as an emergency call number?
     "The ancient Indians were excellent mathematicians and 108 may be the product of a precise mathematical operation (eg. 1 power * 2 power 2 * 3 power 3 = 1080 which was thought to have special numerological significance".
Is 1080 equal to 108? Why didn't EMRI adopt 1080 as an emergency call number then?
     "Sanskrit alphabet: There are 54 letters in the Sanskrit alphabet. Each has a masculine and feminine, shiva and shakti, 54 times 2 is 108".
Then why not adopt 54 as emergency call number, why 54*2? Why not 54*3 or 54*4 or 54*108? Further, the number of alphabets in any language is not fixed. To overcome the dificiencies in a language, the scholars may include / remove a few alphabets, anytime.
     "Heart Chakra : The chakras are the intersection of  energy lines and there are said to be a total of 108 energy lines converging to form the heart chakra. One of them sushuma leads to the crown chakra, and is said to be the path of self realisation".
So, in the case of a cardiac arrest, one need not call 108. The person suffering from the cardiac arrest may try to repair the Heart Chakra through some form of Yoga! Perhaps, Mr. Ramalinga Raju was a practitioner of sushuma yoga, and only after the self-realization, he decided to go public with his tiger riding skills!
     "The diameter of the sun is 108 times the diameter of the earth".
It need not be 108. It could be 109 also. Further, in the said ratio, which diameter was considered (as the earth is not completely spherical)?
     "The number 108 is used in Islam to refer to God".
In some other religion, if some other number is used to refer to God, would EMRI have adopted that number for emergency calls?
     "In the Jain religion, 108 are the combined virtues of five categories of  holy ones, including 12, 8, 36, 25 and 27 virtues respectively".
So, 12+8+36+25+27 = 108. Why did EMRI add the numbers? Why not multiply or raise to the power, and adopt the resultant number as emergency call number?
     "It is said that the human soul goes through 108 stages on a journey".
Logically, the death should be one of the 108 stages. So, to hasten the 108 stages of journey, one should not postpone the death by calling 108 during a medical emergency!
     "In Japan, at the end of the year, a bell is chimed 108 times to finish the old year and welcome the new one. Each ring represents one of 108 earthly temptations a person must overcome to achieve nirvana".
So, there are only 108 earthly temptations according to Japanese or EMRI (or both)! Can they list all the 108 temptations? I just want to check the list. Is the temptation to undergo one of the 108 temptations counted in it (rather than nirvana)?  I suppose, the very moment I happen th see a mouth-watering temptation in the said list, I may be tempted to undergo it! Anyway, my understanding is that nirvana can come only after death. So, to achieve nirvana at the earliest, one should not postpone the death by calling 108 during a medical emergency!

Caution: Follow these SEO tips at your own risk. Do not hold me responsible for the consequences, if they go haywire.

1. Submit your blog to Technorati, and learn to add Technorati tags to your blog posts.
2. Subscribe to Google Adsense and place maximum permissible number of ads in your Blog.
3. Subscribe to Google Analytics to track the traffic to your Blog.
4. Subscribe to Google webmaster tools.
5. Write a blog post criticizing Barkha Dutt and NDTV. Give Technorati tags of Barkha Dutt, NDTV, and 'shoddy journalism' to the said blog post (like this). The post should be written in such a way that it should qualify to be considered as "total rubbish" by Barkha Dutt. Even if you are a "random bloke" and you yourself know that you can not "hope that she will respond to your 'rubbish post', as the post is not worthy of engagement", still there is a good chance that Barkha Dutt may indeed respond. To be specific, she may respond to your blog post with a legal notice for libel (see this)!
6. Once you receive the legal notice, withdraw the original "rubbish post" from your Blog, and replace it with an unconditional apology to Barkha Dutt and NDTV (like this). However, you should delete the "rubbish post" only after Google bot crawls your web site, so that a Google cache of your "rubbish post" remains on the net, permanently! Use Google webmaster tools to submit a sitemap of your blog in order to hasten the said crawl.
7. Hopefully, the blogosphere would pick your story up, express anguish at your "suffering", and show solidarity with a fellow blogger (that is you) by the way of giving wide publicity to your story (like this, this, and many more links not cited here). If your blog is unnoticeable by the blogosphere, send mails to your friends narrating the entire story, and ask them to blog about your "suffering". For this step to work, your friends' blogs should have better page ranks.
8. Just watch what happens to your web traffic using Goolge Analytics. The traffic to your site may rise astronomically!
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10. For the second month, repeat the suggested tactic with some other agency (like this), again at your own risk. This time you are likely to make even higher amount (may be $12), as your page rank would improve after the first exercise with NDTV.

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  Report: Proposed fee on smelly cows, hogs angers farmers

  By BOB JOHNSON – Dec 5, 2008

  MONTGOMERY, Ala. (AP) — For farmers, this stinks: Belching and gaseous cows and hogs could start costing them money if a federal proposal to charge fees for air-polluting animals becomes law.

  Farmers so far are turning their noses up at the notion, which is one of several put forward by the Environmental Protection Agency after the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in 2007 that greenhouse gases emitted by belching and flatulence amounts to air pollution.....

What next? Fart tax on American citizens?