Yahoo! Widgets

Ever heard of the term ‘widgets’? Well, if you haven’t then its time you did. Till recently it was called ‘Konfabulator’ and was paid service; Yahoo! recently bought Konfabulator and now its FREE!

Widgets are small graphical applications that reside on your desktop, much like icons, but they look a helluva lot better. Widgets can be anything, search bars, weather info, clocks, werewolf monitors, waste bins, stock tickers, and thousands more. You can even create your own widgets, if you’re in a mood to do so.

So go ahead and EXPLORE.

The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

So, you haven’t been initiated into the Hitchhiker’s fold yet and have absolutely no clue to what it is? Don’t worry, here’s the link (given above) that has all the information you will ever require on it. Specifically, it is my favorite book because of its sarcastic take on life. It is really, really humorous and it will force you to read it from cover-to-cover. Hitchhiker’s is not a ‘geeky’ thing; even other mere mortals will enjoy the books. Too bad you did not view my blog earlier; till recently BBC Radio 4 was webcasting the series. Well, let us hope that they resume it soon. And not a good time to catch it on TV too.

It is generally referred to as “HHG”, “HHGG”, “HHGTTG”, “HG2G”, or “H2G2″; so if you come across any of these terms on my blog, don’t start scratching your head wondering what I’m referring to.

H2G2 revolves basically around earthman Arthur Dent and his (somewhat unsuccessful) efforts to ‘enjoy the marvels of the universe on less than thirty Altarian dollars a day. The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy is (you guessed it right) a book (an electronic one at that!), with the friendly words Don’t Panic written in large letters on it cover. H2G2 sells more copies than Encyclopedia Galactica. I have spoken enough, for more information, please refer to the book.

You can also check out the H2G2 movie released a few months ago. After all, the Answer To Life, The Universe And Everything is 42.

So long and thanks for all the fish. (And for reading my blog)

P.S. - This entry is meant to tempt you to read the books or the Wikipedia link. Don’t fall for it, lest Vogon Constructor Spaceships come in to demolish Earth to construct a bypass or even worse, to read out their poetry. Also check out this link:

BBC Radio 4 - The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy (where you will find episode synopses [Note - The radio series DOES NOT completely match the books, but the radio series came first], cool downloads, games and lots more!)

The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

So, you haven’t been initiated into the Hitchhiker’s fold yet and have absolutely no clue to what it is? Don’t worry, here’s the link (given above) that has all the information you will ever require on it. Specifically, it is my favorite book because of its sarcastic take on life. It is really, really humorous and it will force you to read it from cover-to-cover. Hitchhiker’s is not a ‘geeky’ thing; even other mere mortals will enjoy the books. Too bad you did not view my blog earlier; till recently BBC Radio 4 was webcasting the series. Well, let us hope that they resume it soon. And not a good time to catch it on TV too.

It is generally referred to as “HHG”, “HHGG”, “HHGTTG”, “HG2G”, or “H2G2″; so if you come across any of these terms on my blog, don’t start scratching your head wondering what I’m referring to.

H2G2 revolves basically around earthman Arthur Dent and his (somewhat unsuccessful) efforts to ‘enjoy the marvels of the universe on less than thirty Altarian dollars a day. The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy is (you guessed it right) a book (an electronic one at that!), with the friendly words Don’t Panic written in large letters on it cover. H2G2 sells more copies than Encyclopedia Galactica. I have spoken enough, for more information, please refer to the book.

You can also check out the H2G2 movie released a few months ago. After all, the Answer To Life, The Universe And Everything is 42.

So long and thanks for all the fish. (And for reading my blog)

P.S. - This entry is meant to tempt you to read the books or the Wikipedia link. Don’t fall for it, lest Vogon Constructor Spaceships come in to demolish Earth to construct a bypass or even worse, to read out their poetry. Also check out this link:

BBC Radio 4 - The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy (where you will find episode synopses [Note - The radio series DOES NOT completely match the books, but the radio series came first], cool downloads, games and lots more!)

I just came across this incident in the Rationalist Discussion group. It is about a particular incident in India that happened in 1995. In that year, on September 21, supposedly idols of the Hindu god Ganesha ‘drank’ milk offered to it by devotees. I decided to investigate into this incident, and came up with some surprising findings.

Hindus worship their gods in the form of idols. Their god Ganesha is depicted as a human being with the head of an elephant.


The incident

Here is a report from the Indian newspaper, the Times of India, on this incident:

`Milk-drinking’ idol creates countrywide
frenzy
Bombay, like several other parts of the country, was today swept by rumors that idols of the god Ganesha were accepting offerings of milk. Thousands of devotees of the elephant god who visited temples for the morning pooja (prayers) claimed that the deity actually drank the milk offered to it.
However, not all idols were said to have obliged. The word spread like wildfire as excited people thronged temples to witness the miracle. Some were overwhelmed with emotion, others dismissed it as a hoax.
Prominent astrologer and Ganesha devotee Jayant Salgaonkar said: “I myself witnessed it. I went early this morning to the Siddhivinayak temple at Prabhadevi, Ganeshji drank the milk.”
Scientists at the Indian Institute of Technology and the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research refused to comment on “such religious matters.” On the other hand, a leading rationalist in Calcutta, Prabir Ghosh, called it absurd. “I can prove that it is no miracle”.
Miracle or not, there were long serpentine queues outside temples in Calcutta, Delhi, Madras and Ahmedabad, leading to traffic bottlenecks at several places. Said a senior government official of West Bengal: “I have been trying to get through to Writer’s Building (the government office) for three hours. But the mass frenzy over Ganesha remains unabated.”
Chaos prevailed in Delhi’s temples and out on the streets as devotees jostled one another to offer milk to Ganesha, Parvati and Shiva. Some even claimed that the idols drank a bucketful of milk. In Madras, devotees who patiently held sweetened milk in silver spoons at the trunk of the god, said that the milk disappeared within minutes. Ms Shalini Binani, 16, who said that she had heard about the incidents from an aunt in Calcutta, tried about the incidents from an aunt in Calcutta, tried offering milk in a stainless steel spoon, but the idol did not respond. However, she claimed, when the milk was offered in a silver spoon, it was accepted. By noon, newspaper offices in Bombay were flooded with calls inquiring about the veracity of the claims. Other callers narrated their “experiences” in temples or at home.
“I was performing a Ganesha pooja early this morning,” said Mr Ravindra Mahadeo Rahate, an employee of the Bank of India. “Suddenly I realized that the milk I had offered was disappearing slowly.” Surprised by this development, Mr Rahate offered the deity some more milk. “That too disappeared,” he claimed.
Rukmini Patil, an elderly woman from Girgaum, who offered milk to the Ganesha
idol in her home, said, “When I placed a spoonful of milk below the trunk of our
glass idol, which we have had for years, the milk just vanished.”
The city police went around in vans denying the reports, but many office employees left work to rush to the nearest Ganesha temple. Some suburban schools even closed early.
Said young Shilpa Salvi: “This is confusing. One does not know what
exactly is happening.” said Shankar Kambekar, a taxi driver, “The end of the
world is near. The lord has come to save us.”
Miracle fever helped some persons to make a fast buck. Private milkmen had a field day. In Bandra, milk was reportedly sold at Rs 40 (approximately $1) a liter.
Roadside hawkers selling audio-cassettes changed their tunes. Instead of the usual bawdy Hindi songs, they played Ganesha aartis (chants) in keeping with the spirit of the day. Cable operators too suspended transmission of their popular programs to telecast temple scenes.
Police headquarters received numerous calls requesting bandobasts. At some places, the police had to intervene to rein in frenzied crowds. Telephone lines at the police control room were jammed with calls.
The mass hysteria did not leave the stock market untouched. Brokers said that there was brisk trading some companies with a small floating stock on the Bombay stock exchange. This was presumably because their names started with lord or Ganesha.
Market sources joked that a company — named after the deity — whose
promoters had concealed material information about their forthcoming public
issue, may well escape unscathed, thanks to the “lord’s blessings.”
Sociologists and psychiatrists, however, refused to accept the phenomenon as
a miracle. “One needs to explore this with the help of eye-witnesses. It is mob
mentality to accept such incidents as a miracle,” said Janaki Andharia, lecturer
at the Tata Institute of Social Sciences. “It is possible that a political
party is behind this. A similar strategy was used to propagate religion in the
past. People are swayed, but only for a while. This will not last,” said Edwin
Masihi, former professor of sociology at Gujarat University.
The Shrimant Dagduseth Halwai Ganesha Mandal at Pune, the richest and biggest mandal in the city, put up a board using devotees not to believe in the strange occurrence. It also closed the temple to avoid traffic jams in the heart of the city.
University of Pune vice-chancellor and former scientific advisor to the
Union government Vasant Gowarikar has appealed to the state government to
scientifically evaluate the issue before drawing any conclusions.
Maharashtra’s Andhashradha Nirmulan Samiti president Narendra Dabholkar said in Satara that his organization would pay Rs 5 lakhs to anyone who could prove that the idols were actually drinking milk.
In Ahmedabad, word started spreading first about four famous Ganapati and Mahadev temples in the Shahibaug, Navrangpura, Nehru Nagar and Bhadral localities.
While the Rajasthan deputy chief minister Harishankar Bhabhra claimed he had offered milk to a Ganesha idol in the Udyog Bhavan temple complex, the Jaipur district administration contradicted such claims.
The office of the Times of India here received
calls from Argentina, Thailand and Indonesia inquiring about the incident.

So the thing that we come to know from this article is that there was a state of near total chaos during this time. The incident itself is intriguing; why should any idol ‘drink’ milk in the first place? There was more - a ‘godman’ named Chandraswami from New Delhi (India’s capital), claimed that it was due to him that this was happening. Apparently, he had ‘invoked his childhood god’ to come and stay on earth for a day, and accept offerings of milk. That does not match with the accounts of milk drinking continuing for a week in some places, if it was really happening.

Definitions in brackets by Great Quizzard.

The Scientists Cometh

The incident widely aroused interest among the scientific community. Some dismissed it as a hoax, others said they ‘did not investigate religious matters’. But there were some who thought it worth investigating. Here
is another report, again from an edition of the Times of India, a few days later:

Experiments conducted to unravel the `mystery’(By
Ravi Bhatia and N. Suresh, The Times of India News Service)
Baffled by reports of clay and stone, idols of god Ganesha drinking milk offered by devotees in temples all over the country, we tried to replicate the process in our office to try and find a plausible explanation. While we do not want to question what happened in the various temples, this is what took place in our office.
Our staff photographer K.K. Laskar held a spoonful of milk to the mouth of a clay
statue of Ganesha. Sure enough, within a minute or so, the spoon emptied. He then repeated the experiment, this time with a spoonful of water held against the spout of an ordinary plastic jug. The water too disappeared, although a few seconds slower than the milk.
Laskar, a student of physics, explained the phenomenon as being a combination of surface tension, capillary action and siphoning. It can be easily replicated, he said, with clay or stone images or even plastic and metal jugs with a snout.
When the surface of the liquid touches the protruding tip of any surface, capillary action lifts the liquid, with the surface of the idol or any other object acting as the larger end of siphon. The surface tension allows the liquid to flow freely in a particular direction. This explanation was confirmed by the various scientists we spoke to. In fact, two teams of scientists visited various temples in New Delhi and
found no evidence to support the widespread belief about some idols sudden love
for milk.
“It is a hoax,” said Biman Basu, a scientist at the Publication
and Information Directorate of the Council of Scientific and Industrial Research
(CSIR). Mr Basu and a team from the laboratory visited three temples in central
Delhi. “When the spoonful of milk is offered horizontally, nothing happens,”
Mr Basu said. “Only when the spoon is tilted does it empty.”‘
On the other hand, stone idols were not found to drink milk. In the case of clay idols, milk is either soaked up by the porous material or it flows into the hollow inner surface.
It was also noticed that the idols did not retain the milk they were supposed to have drunk. Behind some of the temples, our photographers took pictures of buckets being filled by the milk flowing imperceptibly down the idols and emptying out through channels traveling to the backyards.
The reason for this, according to one scientist, is that most Ganesha idols in north
Indian cities are made of white marble. Due to milk’s low surface tension, it
flows down the idol in such a thin film that it is not easily visible against
the marble.
In fact, scientists from the National Council of Science and Technology Communication — the government’s wing to popularize science — colored the milk and saw it flow down the side of an idol. Mr Jagdesh Chandra and Mr Manoj Patariya of the Council also called the reports about miracles a
“hoax”.
Said another scientist who requested anonymity: “There is something
in the Indian psyche which makes people believe such miracles. Also, when
someone reports it, mob psychology takes over and everyone adds their own bits
to the story.”
But not all scientists dismissed the milk-drinking episode. A Delhi University science professor, A.M. Gangadharan Nair, said he offered milk to a Ganesha idol in central Delhi very carefully. He claimed that the offering disappeared. “I checked whether the idol was new or whether there was any vacuum device attached to it, but there was none. How can we rationally explain this phenomenon?” he asked.

So we observe that the general atmosphere among the scientists was disbelief, and rightly so. I tried the thing out myself and found it was true; any such surface with a snout could take away any water, or milk on a spoon. All this almost ten years after the idols stopped drinking milk. What was being reported as a ‘miracle’ was really a hoax.

Analysis

It is pretty obvious from this whole episode that most Indians are highly superstitious. When confronted with this situation, instead of thinking clearly and rationally, most took the easy way out and blindly believed rumors. Firstly, the news of the ‘miracle’ spread in a manner that would have certainly put any email chain letter scheme to shame; people told each other to pass on the information, lest something evil happen to them. Also worth noticing is how ‘educated’ Indians, like bankers, lawyers, doctors, professors, etc. - people who around the world are thought to be more rational - behaved in this matter. They were no better than others and were actively involved in spreading these rumors.

I must commend the way the Indian scientists and rationalists handled this matter, especially in a country where you could be dead before you could say ‘dead’ if you said anything against Hindu beliefs. Our Indian rationalist brethren did a commendable job, going on in national television within hours of the incident and publicizing to everyone the way ‘godmen’ were conning them. I do have objections to what some of them said about ‘not indulging in petty religious matters’ - if rationalism is to gain popularity in a country like India, scientists certainly should guide the citizens to the truth.

Again, another thing to be noted is the stubborn way in which the Indians refuse to believe the scientific explanation. Reports say that still people believe in that ‘miracle’. In fact, nobody of these people, when interviewed, said that they had tried it out again any time later. They thought it ‘unnecessary’ and believed it was ‘heresy to question such things’. A point to be noted is the reaction of the Delhi university professor to the incident - even after knowing that it was due to capillary action, siphoning and surface tension, he was apparently looking for ‘vacuum devices’ in the idol. That is the kind of response, even ‘educated’ ones give.

Investigate yourself, and you will find that the scientists were right. Ganesha idols drinking milk was a hoax.

CLICK HERE TO VIEW A VIDEO ON THIS TOPIC (EXTERNAL LINK)

Times of India articles published with permission from Times of India.