Against Daylight Saving!

How can you save the daylight? Wise people say, advance your clocks by one hour and the daylight will be saved!

Daylight-saving time (DST) has started here from this Sunday, and still I am not able to convince myself if it is really useful. Why is it observed at all? I asked many and two of the responses were:

• This is for the farmers. They need more sunlight! If clocks are shifted by an hour, farmers will get up early and will do more work in their farms! But bhaiya, why should farmers look at the clock at all to decide if they should work or not?

• This is to save energy. How? Benjamin Franklin told us. Hmmm... good, could you please explain, how it works? Well, I heard that people sleep one hour early and do not consume much electricity in the night. Wow! what an ingenious idea to force an early sleep on them by making them fool and by playing with their biological clocks. All that too "save" (I don't know if it really does) energy.
  

So, many countries save energy by changing their clocks. But I am sure, there are much better ways to save energy. Belgium boasts of its highly illuminated highways in the nights, and as is claimed, The Great Wall of China and Belgian highways are the only two man-made structures visible from moon! (see here). Is it really worth doing that? I am sure, they can save the energy by spending less for this purpose and reducing lights to what is practically required (so as not to be visible from moon!)

Observing DST, not only violets a correspondence between the "God made real" time and the clock time, but also gives rise to some funny incidents. Two of them are mention here in Wikipedia. It says:

"Supposing some unfortunate lady was confined with twins and the first child was born 10 minutes before 3 o'clock British Summer Time. ... the time of birth of the two children would be reversed. ... Such an alteration might conceivably affect the property and titles in that House."

This is rare, but then there are not so rare and inevitable situations too. When the clocks are changed, what is its effect on flight and train schedules? Here is a funny but true stuff I found on this site. They mention:

"To keep to their published timetables, trains cannot leave a station before the scheduled time. So, when the clocks fall back one hour in October, all Amtrak trains in the U.S. that are running on time stop at 2:00 a.m. and wait one hour before resuming. Overnight passengers are often surprised to find their train at a dead stop and their travel time an hour longer than expected. At the spring Daylight Saving Time change, trains instantaneously become an hour behind schedule at 2:00 a.m., but they just keep going and do their best to make up the time."

I wonder how do they stop flights in the middle of the sky for one hour? I strongly criticize the idea of "Daylight Saving". Standard scales should not be tampered. I am sure I can not teach people running fast by adding a few more centimeters in the meter scale.

Looking at the podium

There are moments in life when you feel you have got much more than what you had prayed for. More frequently you come across these moments more egoless are you, more humble are you when others pat on your back for your accomplishment.

These days, I often see this when I watch Commonwealth Games' athletes on the podium who get Gold just by a very narrow margin. A mixture of humbleness and pride can be seen simultaneously on their face.

A poem of Agyeya

... on his birthday.


See how beautifully he used words to create the magic. No predefined structure is followed, but still so rhythmic! Why did people call his writings akavita?

What exactly is this?

I was surfing yesterday and found this article on BBC web-site. Through this article, I came to know about a tradition in United States during Thanksgiving dinner. They have a big celebration in the White House and turkey is the major attraction on dinner table. Roughly 300 million turkeys are raised annually, and around one-sixth of them are destined to Thanksgiving dinner plate. Two "lucky" turkeys among 2500 others specially raised for the White House dinner are selected by the President and are "pardoned". They are not cooked and are released. They are usually sent to a park called Frying Pan Park. I do not understand what exactly does it symbolise? In fact, I have some questions regarding this.

Birds are raised, not as someone who is supposed to enjoy life, but as the food. So the food scientists try to make sure that the product is as bulky as possible. Heart and lungs of birds raised this way do not support their body. They often die of heart attacks too! According to this link, "if a seven-pound human baby grew at the same rate that today's turkeys grow, when the baby reached 18 weeks of age it would weigh 1,500 pounds"! Now my point is, why not kill turkeys who have already been made so handicapped that they can not even bear their own weight, and why at the last moment change the mind and leave their life in the name of mercy, so as to let them die very soon, even a more painful death on their own!. In deed, most of the "pardoned" turkeys do not live long enough. They do not even remain to see next Thanksgiving day! Even for humans there is a provision of Euthanasia!

Another think which I can not understand is the terminology - "pardoning" birds. Have they already committed some crime from which, you being nice, are exempting them?

Titanic in 30 seconds!

A wonderful example of summarising things. Watch Titanic just in 30 seconds without loosing any essential content! Click here and enjoy!
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