Strange with Christmas just over and the holidays going on I have nothing interesting to share this week, but hey! I'm a normal person living in a normal city. Extra ordinary things happen only once in a while. Anyway I thought I'd share something related to seafood. Once while watching the telly, I happened to come across a documentary that happened to show the process of manufacture of Smoked Salmon. So here it is.

Very often a Salmon and a Trout are misinterpreted as the same. The main difference that separates the two is the former is a migratory fish while the latter is a resident fish. Typically, salmon are anadromous, they are born in fresh water, migrate to the ocean, then return to fresh water to reproduce. However, there are rare species that can only survive in fresh water. Folklore has it that the fish return to the exact spot where they were born to spawn; tracking studies have shown this to be true but the nature of how this memory works has long been debated.

Salmon is a popular food and the meat is generally orange to red, although there are some examples of white fleshed wild salmon. Canned salmon in the U.S. is usually wild Pacific catch, though some farmed salmon is available in canned form. Smoked Salmon is another popular preparation method, and can either be hot or cold smoked. Traditional canned salmon includes some skin (which is harmless) and bone (which adds calcium). Skinless and boneless canned salmon is also available.

Salmon is smoked to mainly enhance its flavor. The smoke houses defrosts the fish for 15 hours in running water that's just 2 degrees above freezing. This cold water thaw prevents bacteria from forming.

The next process is called filleting. Here they slice off the collar, the fish version of the neck. Then the fish is cut in two halves called fillets from what's called a control bone, the fish equivalent of the spinal column. The fillets are then trimmed using a razor sharp knife slicing off the fins and any excess fat. After this the fish will be ready for Curing, a preservation process that also enhances taste. Workers coat the fillets with salt and a mixture of 26 spices, then they let them sit for roughly an hour. This short cure time will limit the salmon's salt content to just 1%. To stop the curing process they rinse it off with cold water and then glaze it with maple syrup to neutralize any remaining salt residue.

The fillets are then fed into a huge smoke oven. Workers then load its combustion chamber with saw dust. Maple tree saw dust for the first 8 hours, Cherry tree sawdust for the next 8 hours and Apple tree saw dust for the last 8 hours. This sequence is a major factor is flavoring the fish. They then douse the fire with water to generate smoke, this process is called cold smoking, because the oven temperature is 10 degrees Celsius, much lower than the industry norm of 25 degrees. Smoking at 10 degrees Celsius takes about 24 hours, 3 times as longer than any regular method, but some say that it makes the fillet more moist. When the fillets are taken out of the oven they are thoroughly cooked, but still have the consistency of raw fish.

The fillets then go into a skinning machine which neatly removes the skin without removing any excess flesh, then its into a freezer at minus 3 degrees Celsius, this firms up the fillets, making them easy to slice. They are then manually cut into pieces about 2 mm thick. The fillets are then placed in a tray made of aluminum coated cardboard, aluminum blocks the fat from seeping through. To kill off any remaining bacteria they vacuum pack the wrappers, then deep freeze them for about an hour at about minus 35 degrees Celsius. They store and ship it at a milder minus 18 degrees Celsius where this preservative free salmon stays fresh for a complete year.

Brown coat, crowd traveller:

Tired of jogging in my University Campus, I decided to do my One and a half hour jogging outside Campus; my campus is decently large (about 256 acres). But I’ve exhausted its roads by regularly jogging on them for the last Three and a half years.

The idea hit me that by jogging outside campus I could get to know more places in my city, what’s more, I could look around and witness the bustling city and thereby get to know more places. What I thought would be a great run turned out to be a slow, calculated and risk filled walk. The roads here, as anywhere else in India is crowded and every road turns out to be a maze with everybody going in every possible direction.

I don’t think I’d be writing this post if I had my headphones on, one has to be alert in every possible sense. While I was navigating through the crowd, I noticed him. He looked smart and his eyes sparkled as he looked into the evening traffic, waiting to cross. He had a brown coat and he was panting, like he had just returned from a wild adventure.

From what I observed, he looked like he knew the place well, whilst I was struggling to make it through the evening crowd, and very nearly avoiding a Biker who was oblivious to his erratic driving. I was totally lost by now, having walked quite far away from my University’s seemingly familiar gate. But I trudged along.

There is never a fear of getting lost as there are so many people in India that no place will ever appear empty; and most people are friendly enough to help you out. Suddenly I began thinking how nice it would be to sip a hot cup of tea instead of risking my life on the road; I was rudely interrupted by a plethora of horns coming from the young evening crowd; one of the sound sources was a Bus that appeared to be controlled by two persons; one of course, the Driver and the other was the conductor who was madly waving his hands to other motorists to indicate that the behemoth of a bus wants to turn left.

Among the entire racket, I searched for him, the brown coat guy. He was now walking ahead of me, but more briskly as he darted into the crowd. I decided to follow his footsteps like a car following an ambulance in an emergency.

I was happy to see that I was making progress and very nearly jogging, finally! He was now approaching an intersection, but I was lost in my own thought and also busy in following the small space created by him as he swam through what seemed like millions of people.

Suddenly, he stopped. I didn’t.

I wouldn’t say I ran into him; I merely stepped on his foot. Fearing a hue, I readied to embrace an uproar. But he merely looked at me innocently and without a ruckus he waved his tail, barked at me and ran off, maybe in the search of another adventure.

We do hear or read astronomical news that Jupiter and Venus will be bright tonight! Immediatly there is a beeline to observe such rare events worldover.

Astronomy events awe scientist and backyard skywatching enthusiasts including me. No!, I don't own expensive telescopes nor binoculars. I live in a small city and have little chance of being able to see anything other than the sun and moon (because of the light from the city and the smog).

However, I did go to the plantarium in UK and observed the red planet Mars at its closest to earth in 50000 years in 2002.

Scientists seem to know a lot about astronomy. Today the weatherman can predict exact sunrise, sunset time and predict meteor shower will occur when and where. Thats really facinating.

As we all have noticed, astronomy books are large in size with beautiful photographs showing planets and stars along with charts showing their diameter, mass and has so many moons, and revolve around in exactly so many earth days etc etc. They even mention what gases are in their atmosphere. Astronomy has gone a long way with much research in this area.

Today, people are studying hard from the dust spectrum of Mars... This planet seems to facinate mankind and today it is the final frontier. We may have a man on mars within the next fifty years.

I think every one of us should take an intro to astronomy class in our college (if that could be arranged). I don't really know how this could be arranged. but anyone reading this blog can help out.

Astronomy is intriguing too. How does one know that certain bright objects are planets and not stars, millions of light-years away?

The sad part is, unless a huge meteorite is predicted to earth, not many people will look up. We are like a bunch of working ants... (many of them in suit-and-tie talking about the stock market). Could there be some other beings watching us like people watching ants?

Watch OUT..!!!! There is a good possibility

"Who wants the Ferrari.........so who has to work for it?"

The above was something that was written blatantly on my Friend's dorm room wall.

I admire the guy's foresight in assuming that he will one day own a Ferrari. In my view it was just the sheer delight of owning such a beautiful car that made him write such a statement on his wall & motivate himself. But if it seems to get him a Ferrari someday, you will see me with a marker-pen dashing to the nearest clean wall.

Its amazing to see what people do to motivate themselves. I for one motivate myself by just being positive. Trying to look at things the positive way makes me feel like failure is just a minor setback that one temporarily faces on his way to success. I know for sure that this is one of the best motto's because if you don't always practice looking at the sky, you won't ever reach there.

Deciding what really motivates you is another simple yet challenging task, motivation can come from anywhere and anything, it could be from your parents, colleagues or even your own children. But motivation goes hand in hand with dedication too. What the aforementioned guy surely knows is hard work will surely get him a Ferrari, but so will luck. Many may think that these are two separate ways in getting things, but its not. Just like motivation and dedication, hard work and luck are the two sides of the same coin.

Numerous examples can be given about how Hard work and Luck separately helped someone, but they really go hand in hand together. The phrase "To be in the right place at the right time" is the Luck part of Hard work.

I cannot know for sure what may be the case of this particular guy in Five years, maybe he finally owns the Italian beauty or maybe he just fixes it for someone. But I do honestly pray that he achieves what he deemed important enough for him to work extra hard.

Soichiro Honda of Honda Motor Company was not just a School drop out but an under accomplished race car driver. Need I say more about what he has achieved.

Keeping your target locked and mind focused will definitely bear fruit. Now all that is left is for you to decide what fruit you like best.

Modern Inventions and their perils...

Pour yourself a fresh glass of Orange juice from your juice maker, ready your plate for some warm toast from your high tech toaster and enjoy it with some Butter or Marmalade that you discover in your refrigerator.

Then enjoy some eggs made on a poacher, and then pour yourself a nice cup of black coffee from state of the art electronic coffee maker and you have a healthy breakfast, after which you are all set for the long day.

This seems like less than a normal routine for some and it is, but what we ignore is the technology that was invented to make such nutritious breakfast. We invented these gadgets to make our life easy, but these very inventions are now an indispensable part of our lives without which, our whole day would go haywire. We research new technology and these gadgets are hence in our grasp.

Today we can create anything humanly possible, but, who ever thought that we are actually slaves to our own creations. I personally don't go out without my phone, and sometimes oddly my laptop. If I don't have these items with me I feel restless, almost like I am programmed to only operate with such gadgets.

Of course one would argue that these gadgets are a must in our fast paced modern lives, but we are making ourselves more prone to being tech-savvy. Its amazes all of us how man has made so many wonderful creations like the internet for example.

The weird and the best thing about the human race is that we are never satisfied with what we have, we yearn for more and in due course we own it and then when its usage seems over, we discard it.

Einstein said that the world of creations we live in today can be compared to a grain of sand on a beach. Power & imagination of man is endless, and thus so, is his desire to create new things.I can thus be amazed to see the world around me with so many technological marvels.

The most trivial of questions arise in my mind, like how my keyboard's keys bounce back up after I've typed on them or how a ball point pen works or how a two flavor gel toothpaste retains the two layers even if you squeeze it in the most awkward way possible.

All I know is some person made these things to make our life easy and he may himself be living today in abject poverty. Be as it may, we have to sometimes pat ourselves, we have achieved things that we claimed impossible few years back.

The most phenomenal thing on our planet earth today is man. He has proved that impossible is just a non existent word. Collectively, mankind has made life so comfortable to live that all earthlings have taken it for granted. Today the things made by man are endless and will continue to grow in bounds.

My only hope is that we don't get so caught up in creating new things that we forget the true essence of life.

We may land up doing nothing at all. Thus making mankind ultimately useless.

Case of mere suggestion.....

My friends say I am very suggestible. I think they're right. As evidence of this, they bring up a little incident that I was involved in last tuesday.

That morning I was reading a horror novel and, although it was broad daylight, I fell victim to the power of suggestion. This suggestion implanted in me the idea that there was a bloodthirsty murderer in the kitchen; and this bloodthirsty murderer, brandishing an enormous dagger, was waiting for me to enter the kitchen so he could leap upon me and plunge the knife into my back.

So, in spite of my being seated directly across from the kitchen door, in spite of the fact that no one could have gone into the kitchen without my having seen him, and that there was no other access to the kitchen but that door; in spite of all these facts, I, nonetheless, was fully convinced that the murderer lurked behind the closed door.

So I fell victim to the power of suggestion and did not have the courage to enter the kitchen. This worried me, because lunch time was approaching and it would be indispensable for me to go into the kitchen.

Then the doorbell rang.

"Come in!" I yelled without standing up.

"It's not locked."

The building caretaker came in, with two or three letters.

"My leg fell asleep," I said. "Could you go to the kitchen and bring me a glass of water?"

The caretaker said, "Of course," opened the kitchen door and went in.

I heard a cry of pain and the sound of a body that, in collapsing, dragged with it dishes or bottles. Then I leaped from my chair and ran to the kitchen. The caretaker, half his body on the table and an enormous dagger plunged into his back, lay dead.

Now, calmed down, I was able to determine that, of course, there was no murderer in the kitchen.

As is logical, it was a case of mere suggestion.

Compliments of the Season....

Christmas is fast approaching and each one of us is in a festive mood. But friends, there are few people who are battling for life even during this joyous season.




“Please Sir, spare some money for this begging soul,” my hired auto halted at a signal, and outside stood a ragged girl. Christmas season had set in, and the streets were covered with mild shower. Festiveness had enlightened everyone’s mind, but here was a girl, who had no means of satisfying even her basic needs.

Shivering in the bitter cold, her eyes displayed hunger due to starvation for an unknown period. Her wretched condition signaled mental and physical treachery. She stood with untidy, dirty, thin, worn-out clothes. She was constantly rubbing her body to keep herself warm. She extended her small hands, which was trembling due to pain, and partially numbed by the freezing cold air.

I reached for my wallet, but before I could display any sign of humanity, the auto driver barked, “Go! No use begging here. Make a move!” I tried to soothe her dejection by offering some money. She did not notice my aid for help, and when the signal turned green, it was a futile effort.


She walked away, rubbing her body to warm herself in the chilling cold. I kept gazing at her as she strode disheartened towards the pavement, only to be tortured by her ‘father’ for failing to retrieve any alms.

“Chota Sahib, don’t look at her,” consoled the auto driver after noticing my disappointment, “These are their means to earn quick money, this is a business, and the more we support it, the more it’ll grow.”

I strongly disbelieved this claim of my driver. I could not register this information into my mind. “Tricks? How can these be tricks? How can one suffer so much only to trick us into giving money? These people don’t have a home, nor do they have proper food. No, these are not tricks. These are only the ignorance of us common well bodied people,” I thought while remembering her atrocious condition.

Her disastrous condition haunted me the entire night. I envisioned the dearth existing in our country, imagining the hunger, unemployment, illiteracy, and more diabolically, the poverty.

The following day, I was walking near the same signal which was responsible for my discomfort. I watched helplessly when people ignored the desperate cries for help from the underprivileged section.

The street was famous for its luxurious shops and hotels, and, for these infamous dwellers. The shops were illuminated immensely to support the festive season. People walked gleefully with heaps of gifts, while, on the pavement, the poor staggered to brace for the cold winter ahead.

The sight weakened my mind. “Wasn’t there anything I could do to help?”

I continued down the road, and was startled upon an encounter. Here was the girl, who returned to her duty of begging, in order to survive. "Please sahib, give me alms,” she cried. When the words emerged from her craving mouth, I immediately reached into my pocket to bring out a one-hundred rupee note. I dropped it onto her dirty hand. She was too astounded by the amount to utter any note of thanks. She simply looked at the huge amount of money and stood stumbled. Her jaws had dropped, and she constantly rubbed her eyes, as if it was an unbelievable dream for her.

I slowly walked away, thinking that at least this one Christmas, she will fulfill her needs.

So, in this festive season, let us all extend our hands, to help the needy, and, to make this season a special one for all the somewhat weaker sections of our society.

Please do go out there and give an extending hand to these under privileged. It definitely will give you the pleasure of enjoying this festive season as you have never done before.....

Here's wishing each one of you reading my blog the best festive season ever….

Now why did I start my blog...?

"My friends blog, So I too started blogging”

“Since childhood I used to scribble, so why not do it online?”

“Started as time pass”

“I always wanted to voice my opinion – blogging gave me a platform”

“One day I just woke up and created one”

“Err… I forgot how but now ‘am blogging”

“It was free… so tried”

“I always wanted to be a writer"…

”These and many more reasons led me to blogging and my Blog mantra today is:

“Every Blog has its Own Day"

Yes! Every blog owner has his own day and has to prepare himself for that day.

So…. If you have any one of the above reasons in your mind, do join me and lets all blog together…..

VROOM!!

I am a proud owner of a recently acquired state of the art RC model F1 car. It’s about 1/6th the size of a real F1 grand prix car. The model is reasonably priced, its available here for about 50 USD. The first thing one would notice about this car is its sheer length; it’s about 78 cms in length & 33 cms across. It weighs bout 1.2 Kgs.

The transmitter for the RC car transmits a 40 MHz PWM (pulse width modulated) signal. The receiver circuit within the vehicle picks this PWM signal and then carries out the assigned task. The transmitter has a ‘Forward, Reverse’ and a precision steering capability of ‘Left and Right’.
The working for these four tasks is simple; the transmitter produces different PWMs for each of the four tasks while the receiver decodes the same to guide the model car to zoom at an incredible speed while you maneuver it on its assigned track. The battery is a heavy duty rechargeable 1.2V x 10 nickel-cadmium pack.

The car resembles a real F1 car, but to prevent copyright violations, the adverts on the car are miss-spelled, for example yahoo is written as yoo-hoo, elf is alf, and shell is shield & so on. The car looks perfect except for its Driver who looks rather too plastic. The manufacturers should have paid more attention to this.

The wheels are quite nice & have a rubbery feel to it. Its hold on to the floor is not really good as it creates too much traction & hence slows the vehicle down, the best surface has proven to be tiles, and these tires glide on them quite smoothly. Initially the Ni-Cd battery pack required a charge of about 12 hours. After that a 2 hour recharge suffices. The only drawback is that once recharged the battery drains quite fast. One can enjoy a thorough 15 minutes of intense racing with the car after which it starts to slow down & then gradually coming to a halt.

The real F1 car however is an Engineering marvel, with about 200 moving parts. The low centre of gravity ensures that the vehicle does not flip. The wings at the front & rear of the car act like an aero plane’s wings but they are upside down, thus creating a down force. This down force is of the magnitude of 2.5, in simple words this means that the down force created by an F1 car is about 2.5 times its own body weight. Theoretically at about 120 mph (192 kmph) an F1 car can be driven upside down in a tunnel. More the down force subjected on these cars more is their grip on the road & thus the car can turn better at tight corners.

As I earlier mentioned that my F1 car is creating a drag on the carpet (but works perfect on tiles), the real drag on an F1 car is about the same as an 18 wheeler’s drag.

An F1 car runs very close to the tarmac, its ground clearance is just about 1 inch or even less. To ensure that the car produces maximum down force, the suspension is made quite tensile, about ten times as tensile as a passenger car.

Being the most expensive sport in the world, it’s no wonder that a great amount of time & money is spent on ensuring the safety of the driver. If a crash occurs, the F1 car is designed to destruct around the driver, the car has been engineered to take in as much impact as possible. However to be able to drive such a vehicle itself is an art. The driver’s ability to be able to focus & be absolutely fit is a key criterion in the effective handling of such vehicles.

The engineering aspect of these vehicles is very interesting & makes a good read. Many new technologies have been invented due to this sport. Mc-Laren for example invented a braking system that would bring to rest an F1 car in about 2.2 seconds; however this has been banned by the sporting federation.

When an F1 car travels at high speeds it creates a vacuum behind it, this phenomenon is called the ‘Bernoulli effect’. When a high speed object cuts through the air, a low pressure region is created behind it & thus the surrounding air rushes in to fill this void of air. It is for this reason that fallen leaves on the road follow the vehicle when it moves over them. This vacuum created by an F1 car is somewhat dangerous for the cars that follow it. But the unique shape of the frontal end of an F1 car compensates for this. The tires are a special mix of rubber & nylon. This is such a superior mix that the tires on an F1 car virtually grip the road.

Important electronic data is collected from sensors that are attached to almost every component of the car. As the car races around the track the data is transmitted around the pits in the form of radio signals. Amazingly the F1 teams can actually electronically control the car but this is naturally forbidden, but the team can give verbal advice to the driver.

I’m going to put up the video of my F1 RC car soon; I’ve driven it around a tiled track. But good riding skill is needed as this RC model goes quite fast & a simple crash will result in colossal damage to its front wings. The famous red color was not available, so I had to pick out the next best.

My eye is now on a gasoline powered RC car. It’s about 9cc & cost about five times my present model.

I also have a ‘Ford’ RC pickup truck named ‘Midnight Pumpkin’. Its a rough rider too.

To sum it all up, an F1 car s one of the most superior machines on this earth. The next time you see an F1/ Indy car think about the tremendous engineering that goes into making them perform, and sometimes even over-perform. Comments are welcome.

NOTE: The carbon footprint of a F1 car is terribly bad.... thats something the budding auto Engineers have to look into.

Let’s compare an F1 car to a typical car in the UK which produces about 160 g/km, and over a year (10,000 miles) will produce about 2.56 tonnes of CO2.
According to Wikipedia a typical F1 burns 75 litres of fuel per 100km raced. Based on figures for petrol (which is a reasonable proxy of race fuel), 0.75 litres of fuel burnt per km equates to a CO2 output of 1737 g/km. And over a race season using approx 100,000 litres of the stuff, that’s 231 tonnes of CO2. Per car. And each team has 2. So for fuel alone, before the costs of flying to races, support vehicles and the number of cows required to furnish Max Mosley’s “special” wardrobe, that’s about 463 tonnes per team. I wonder if they carbon offset? At least they’re becoming hybrids for the 2009 season…

What’s your Idea about Beauty?

To answer this term, we need to define the term beauty. Beauty is defined as “a quality that gives pleasure to all the senses”.

So we see here that beauty is not just something that is pleasing to the eyes, beauty is something that should invigorate all the senses of our body.

In my Blog, I will be comparing the beauties created by two supreme entities i.e. Mother nature & Human-beings & who has the right to claim to have made more beautiful things in this world.

Let me start with a short but true story. Once in the court of the great Mughal Emperor Akbar (Indian Ruler from 1556-1605 during the Mughal dynasty) a question arose in the mind of the Great King, he asked his ministers whom they thought could create more beautiful objects. In the opinion of the King, nobody could beat nature, he thus asked his ministers to prove him wrong.

All the ministers answered but were not able to give the King satisfactory answers. That’s when the court’s wisest minister, Birbal, answered. He requested the king to give him two days to answer the question.

The very next day he asked the court’s royal Gardener to get the palace’s most exquisite Rose. The rose chosen by the Gardener was not just the biggest, it was also the one which had the brightest petals & had an aroma that left any of it’s admirers with a sense of possessing that rose.

The gardener was then asked by Birbal to present the fresh rose to the King. When the gardener gave the rose to the King he told him (as advised by Birbal) that here was a rose that pleased the senses in all respects. It was pleasing to the eyes; nose & it left the admirer with a sense of well being. He thus convinced the King that it was nature that produced this wonderful object that the whole world could look at & derive pleasure from.

The King, quite satisfied with his answer gave him two Gold coins.

Three days later, a goldsmith came to the court & with him was a gift he claimed was fit only for a King. The King on hearing this was excited to know what it was. The goldsmith then patiently opened the gift for him. In it was a Red ruby cut in the shape of a rose, the stem was made from pure gold & the whole rose was encased in a Silver casket. The King was so pleased with the gift that he gave the Goldsmith two hundred Gold coins.

Birbal, who observed all the happenings from a distance, asked the King as to why he gave the goldsmith 200 coins while he gave the Royal gardener just two Gold coins. The King innocently replied that the Goldsmith had obviously put in more effort into creating such a beautiful rose. To which Birbal reminded the King that earlier he thought nature was a better designer. The King then wisely admitted that beauty can be made by both nature & humans alike.

But this is as far as the story of the King goes. How would you as the reader of this blog rate beauty? I’ve always heard that beauty is relative. But how do you rate any beautiful object. What is your reference bench-mark? How can we say that ‘The Mona-Lisa’ is a Jaw dropping beauty while we would say some other paintings are just beautiful? Can anybody give marks to beauty & if so, on what basis?

So, to conclude, the term Beauty can never really be rated. Probably Engineers can come up with a calculation for Beauty, Economists come up with a theory and analysts maybe come up with a detailed analysis. But however hard we try or imagine we cannot really assign a specific number or value to beauty.

The adage ‘beauty lies in the eyes of the beholder’ has now put me in a dilemma. Can anyone enlighten me on this one?