It's been some quite some time since I posted something .
Yesterday I wwent to see the malayalam movie ,Pachamarathanalil. and starredby Srinivasan .
The story tells of the kidnap of a cartoonist's little girl . The movie is dotted with flashbacks which tend to get a little too stretched . The storyline is quite twisted with communal violence also being pulled in . Overall it's a movie worth watching and in a scale of 0 to 10 , I would give it a 6.5 .(Not many movies will go past 8 in my rating). See it if you like to do some serious thinking . Cheers :)
PS: Dunno why but I like posting a "PS" . Even if you keenly follow the movie,you would have to be a Sherlock Holmes to predict the storyline in the given time .

Speed of Light

The Speed of Light
Most people usually think of the speed of light as being really fast. It's 671 million miles per hour. That seems tantalizingly zippy if you're caught in traffic.
However, once you think about the speed of light within the context of our solar system, it starts to seem unimpressive.
It takes about 1.3 seconds for light or radio waves to reach us from the Moon, which really isn't all that far away (it's only 20 times farther away than Australia is to the United States). This was an issue during the Apollo space program, because due to the round trip time of the radio signals, NASA had to wait about three seconds to hear the answer to every question they asked the astronauts.
When Mars is closest to the Earth, it takes light three minutes to travel between the two planets. If you asked a question to an astronaut on Mars, you'd have to wait at least six minutes for an answer, and Mars is usually a lot farther away than that. At its greatest distance, you'd have to wait 42 minutes, or even longer if the astronaut is watching Gilmore Girls. In the future, there will be no such thing as sending an "instant message" to your friends on the Mars base. There also won't be any day trading or free pizza delivery.
The Voyager 1 spacecraft was launched only 29 years ago. It's currently the farthest away from the Earth of any man-made object. In just a short amount of time, this spacecraft, designed by primitive 1970's-era engineers, many of whom were wearing corduroy bell bottoms, has managed to travel so far away from the Earth that it takes radio signals travelling at the speed of light 14 hours to reach it.
I am not making this up. An object that was recently built by people is now far enough away that if you could travel to it at the speed of light, for the in-flight movie you could watch the original director's cut of Water World four times, break for a dinner, and then watch Ishtar before having to put your tray in its upright position.
Light takes four and half years to travel to the nearest star (other than the Sun), 100,000 years to travel across the width of the galaxy, and 100 billion years to travel across the observable Universe.
The speed of light isn't all that fast. Get over it.

I just may have missed one teeny weeny thing...

I forgot to take into account time dilation.

Thankfully, you actually wouldn't have to wait through all those boring movies. In the crazy world of Einstein's theory of relativity, if you travelled close to the speed of light, very little time would appear to pass from your point of view, even though time would pass normally for everyone else, and they would have to do all the waiting around. The upshot of this is that if you travelled at near-light speeds to the nearest star and back, only a few seconds would seem to pass, but when you returned to the spaceport on Earth, you would still be responsible for nine years of parking fees.

Sleep

Sleep

If you were to live deep inside a cave, with no exposure to the outside world, eventually you would start sleeping roughly every 24 hours and 18 minutes, instead of exactly every 24 hours.
Under normal circumstances, our eyes sense light from the Sun, and our brains adjust to the standard 24 hour day, but we'd really always like to sleep that extra 18 minutes. Why is that? Scientists don't really know, but maybe it explains why everyone is so crabby all the time.
Some completely blind people, who sense no light at all, naturally live on a 24 hour, 18 minute day, and slowly march their schedule around the clock, out of phase with everybody else. I'm speaking from personal experience when I say that it's pretty annoying when you have a blind neighbor who mows his lawn in the middle of the night.
Our built-in tendency to live on a 24 hour, 18 minute day might seem to make sense if that was how long days were in the distant past, and the length of each day has been slowly speeding up. However, exactly the opposite is occurring. The length of each day has been gradually increasing, as the rotation of the Earth slows down because of the Moon's tidal forces. Half a billion years ago, days were 22 hours long. Four and a half billion years ago, they were six hours long. This didn't allow for a lot of variety in the television programming schedule.
A need for a longer day might also make sense if we were all from Mars. (We're not. Most of us are not. Let's just say that all the important people you know are not. If you don't already know that you are, you're not. It's best if you don't bring this up with your parents. Forget I mentioned any of this.) On Mars, each day is 24 hours and 39 minutes long. Scientists working on the Spirit and Opportunity Mars rover projects initially lived on a schedule based on Mars days, because the solar-powered rovers could only operate during daytime on Mars. The scientists wore special Mars watches so they'd know what time it was there. After a few months of this, and always sleeping weird hours, they were all pretty grumpy. Eventually they switched to a more practical, Earth-based schedule.
Sleeping in one continuous block during the night is an extremely recent development. Humans only started doing this when artificial lighting become readily available, and it was easier for everybody to stay up late. Before that, people tended to sleep in multiple chunks throughout the night, separated by periods of activity. Presumably, they would use this time to make trips to the ice box or watch crude infomercials performed by nocturnal travelling minstrels, which were quite popular during the Renaissance.