Friday, January 24, 2014

My response to the UK's criticism on India's Mars Orbiter mission by ISRO

If you think that everyone is proud of India for being ambitious and sending the Mangalyaan - Mars Orbiter Mission(MOM) into the space in Nov 2013, then you better read the following articles first filled with racism and egoism.

The Economist How can poor countries afford space programme?
The CS Monitor India's Mars Mission - worth the cost?
CNNIs India's Mars mission the latest escalation in Asia's space race?

India's Mars Orbiter Mission, something that not only India but the whole mankind should be happy and excited about has sadly faced some illogical views from questionable intellectuals across the world. But I'm happy to observe that none of them belongs to any scientific community of any country.

Let's get some facts together.
 

The aid of US$343 million from UK is peanuts. 

India is a $1.5 trillion economy. The aid of US$343 million from UK is peanuts. The profit one single UK company Unilever makes from its India business is $3.4 billion that is 10 times that aid. (Source: Wikipedia Hindustan Unilever )  I suspect the inter-country aid business can be related to business contracts one country gets from another, a lot goes into politics that the common man, including the poor UK taxpayers don't know about. I mean seriously, do you think $343 million, a meager INR 450 crore is a big amount for India?

Chief Minister of Uttar Pradesh spends more than INR 7000 crores on her statues and nobody gives a fuck, India sends a space mission for less than 10% of that amount and everybody is making a fuss!! By the way, 2G scam in India was INR 1,70,000 crore, making some math we can send more than 300 such Mars missions by that money!

In fact, India had rejected the British aid in June, 2012 saying it's peanuts. Don't believe me? Source: Read this article from the famous UK news media : India tells Britain: We don't want your aid - Telegraph. How about this - India itself has allocated donation of US $1.3 billion in 2013-14 to Bhutan, Afghanistan, Bangladesh and various other poor countries for reestablishing and restructuring them thereby strengthening our Asian ties and influence. This is growing by around 10% every year.

All this to make you realize that you are talking about a paltry amount of money even by Indian standards.
 

Why space missions are important?

In 1970, a Zambia-based nun named Sister Mary Jucunda wrote to Dr. Ernst Stuhlinger, then-associate director of science at NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center, in response to his ongoing research into a piloted mission to Mars. Specifically, she asked how he could suggest spending billions of dollars on such a project at a time when so many children were starving on Earth.

He replies back with a response letter (If you want to read his full response letter, you can read it here: Why Explore Space? ). To keep it short, the point he made was, science is an investment that takes time to bear fruits, but when it does, it's a big leap towards the better future of mankind.

He also sends a photograph of Earth taken from the Apollo-8 mission. This photograph is also my personal favourite. This is a real pic guys, this is our beautiful mother Earth. In this photo I see my dear home in the wild darkness of space. This photo tells me who has gifted me this life. Who I am indebted to the most?
 

Who I am indebted to the most ?

You have seen a sunrise, now look at the Earthrise above :)


What people misunderstand? 

Here's another thing that is important to mention. People forget that ISRO is in the business of launching satellites. And it's a boon to many developing countries because ISRO launches satellites at 10% of the cost that of NASA or Europe. A successful mars mission will deepen the trust in ISRO & it's command over the space technologies.


How space science has helped India to save lives?

In 1999, when India was struck by the Odisha cyclone (also called Paradip cyclone) more than 10,000 people died, homes and livelihood of more than 45,000 were destroyed. Source: Wikipedia: 1999 Odisha cycloneIndia didn't had enough number of satellites in 1999 to detect this cyclone. Fast forward this by 14 years. On Oct 13th 2013, yes last month, a cyclone hit Indian east coast again with equal speed and vigour (Source: http://www.cnn.com/2013/10/14/wo... )  We had enough information about this and more than 90,000 people were moved and only around 21 people died. Morons, do you have a price tag for this too?

Real Reason why India is sending the Mars Orbiter Mission

So if all this doesn't convince you & you don't care about the Indian lives saved, we are doing this Mars mission for the following reasons..
  1. India needs more land for more slums and drains. We deeply believe Mars is going to be useful for that.
  2. We want to invade and colonize for a change. We didn't invade any country in our history of 2000 years, because our aims are high. We don't bother about paltry things like invading a country. We believe in invading planets. 
  3. We almost have all the religions and castes in the world. We are looking for new minority (Martians) to treat badly.
  4. We deeply believe in "Astrology-applied-to-marriage" science and especially how Mangal (Mars) sitting in the Kundli affects the marriage prospects of young Indians. We want to see whether there are some Martians too having problems in their marriage because of the positioning of the Earth.     

Peace! :)

Sunday, January 19, 2014

How to set up Git and GitHub on Mac in 10 minutes

Git is one of the fastest and pretty good SCM (software configuration management) tool that has been used extensively by everyone since a couple of years. There are fundamental differences in the way Git as a SCM operates but that's not in the scope of this article. Click Here for an awesome crash course in Git if you are interested to learn more about it. 

This tutorial will tell you how you can use GitHub. The steps are:

1. Install Git on your computer, in this case Mac. 
2. Create an account on GitHub.com. If you are a developer and serious about giving your GitHub link to the recruiters then coin a sober name. Rest of the process is straight forward.
3. Create a repository.
4. Open your terminal. Connect the folder on your Mac where you store/will store your code to a reporsitory in your GitHub account. 
5. Commit/Push the code to your GitHub account! 
Voila! It's done! Okay, not yet. 

Let's take a detailed look at each of the steps.. 


1. Install Git on your computer

Rush to http://git-scm.com/downloads with the speed of light. Download Git for whatever OS you are using. In case of Mac it would be a *.dmg file. Double click - > Install it. Done!

2. Create an account on GitHub.com
Well, this is pretty easy guys. Remember to give a proper name to your account. If your name is common one, most probably the easy to remember combinations of name & surname would be taken, use your imagination to create a good one. - is allowed so you can try firstname-lastname. Once done it will look something like this.. 



3. Create a GitHub repository
Think of a repository as a top level package for your code. You can have multiple repositories with a single GitHub account. You commit your code into one of your repositories in your GitHub account. Click Repositories tab on the profile page of your's and just follow the instructions. Select the public repo option as the private repositories cost money. Once done the screen will look like this.. I have erased my personal details from the screenshots..



Here, helloworld is the name of the repository. It tells you how to set up the repository through the command line and that's what we are going to do now..


 4. Connect the folder on your Mac where you store/will store your code to a repository in your GitHub account.

Just follow the following screenshots that I did. In my case my code is in the folder github/repositories/helloworld

I have scrambled my personal details.. 

Goto the folder where you have your code/files to store on GitHub. And run command git init as shown below


You can see that we have added the files that we need to push to out GitHub repo using command git add *.txt

Once GIT is set up properly, you will get to see .git file created. This is a hidden file so you need to use ls -a . Then you can commit the files you want. I have only once file for demo purpose.  -m is for message and my message is "first commit ever :)" 


 And then once we commit the files, we can push the files to the GitHub. Remember that when you do commit the files are still on your local machine. Hey but wait, what's that error it shows.. it says No configured Push destination. ! Yes, we have not yet connected out GitHub account & repo to this folder. Time to do just that..  use the command given in the repo screen shown in step 3.

Once that happens, you can do the next step that is to finally push the files to remote location.



That's all!  Simple, ain't it? :)