Sunday, February 25, 2007

Industry

An industry is normally any grouping of businesses that share a common method of generating profits, such as the music industry, the automobile industry, or the cattle industry. It is also used particularly to refer to an area of economic production focused on manufacturing which involves large amounts of capital investment before any profit can be realized, also called "heavy industry.As-of 2004, Financial services is the major industry or category of industries in the world in terms of earnings.
Industry in the second sense became a key sector of manufacture in European and North American countries during the Industrial Revolution, which upset previous mercantile and feudal economies through many successive rapid advances in technology, such as the growth of steam engines, power looms, and advances in large scale steel and coal production. Industrial countries then assumed a capitalist economic policy. Railroads and steam-powered ships began quickly integrating previously impossibly-distant world markets, enabling private companies to develop to then-unheard of size and wealth. Manufacturing is a wealth-producing sector of an economy. Other sectors such as the service sector tend to be wealth consuming sectors. Following the Industrial Revolution, perhaps a third of the world's financial output is derived from manufacturing industries—more than agriculture's share.

Wednesday, February 14, 2007

Origins of river water

A river may have its source in a spring, lake, from damp, boggy places where the mud is waterlogged, from glacial meltwater, or simply from rain flow off impermeable rock or man-made surfaces. Almost all rivers are coupled by other rivers and streams termed tributaries the highest of which are known as headwaters. Water may also be recruited to a river from ground-water sources. Right through the course of the river, the total volume transported downstream will often be a combination of the free water flow together with a substantial part flowing through sub-surface rocks and gravels that underly the river and its floodplain. For many rivers in large valleys, this unseen part of flow may greatly exceed the visible flow.From their source, all rivers flow downhill, naturally terminating in the sea or in a lake. In arid areas rivers sometimes end by losing water to disappearance. River flow may also be lost by percolation into dry, porous substance such as sand, soil, or into pervious rock.
Excessive abstraction of water for use in industry, irrigation etc can also cause a river to dry before getting a lake or the sea.The mouth, or lower end, of a river is recognized by hydrologists as its base level.The area drained by a river and its tributaries is called catchment, catchment basin, drainage basin or watershed. The term "watershed" is also used to mean a boundary between catchments, which is also called a water divide.

Thursday, February 08, 2007

The computer

A computer is a machine for manipulate data according to a list of commands known as a program. Computers are tremendously adaptable. In fact, they are universal information-processing machines. According to the Church–Turing theory, a computer with a positive minimum entrance capability is in principle capable of performing the responsibilities of any other computer. Therefore, computers with capability ranging from those of a personal digital supporter to a supercomputer may all achieve the same tasks, as long as time and memory capacity are not consideration. Therefore, the same computer design may be modified for tasks ranging from doling out company payrolls to controlling unmanned spaceflights. Due to technical progression, modern electronic computers are exponentially more capable than those of preceding generations. Computers take plentiful physical forms. Early electronic computers were the size of a large room, while whole modern embedded computers may be lesser than a deck of playing cards. Even today, huge computing conveniences still exist for focused scientific computation and for the transaction processing necessities of large organizations. Smaller computers designed for personage use are called personal computers. Along with its convenient equivalent, the laptop computer, the personal computer is the ubiquitous in order processing and communication tool, and is typically what is meant by "a computer". However, the most general form of computer in use today is the embedded computer. Embedded computers are usually comparatively simple and physically small computers used to control one more device. They may control equipment from fighter aircraft to industrial robots to digital cameras. in the beginning, the term "computer" referred to a person who performed numerical calculations, frequently with the aid of a mechanical calculating device or analog computer. In 1801, Joseph Marie Jacquard made an improvement to the presented loom designs that used a series of punched paper cards as a program to weave involved patterns. The resulting Jacquard loom is not considered a true computer but it was an essential step in the growth of modern digital computers.
Charles Babbage was the first to conceptualize and design a completely programmable computer as early as 1820, In 1801, Joseph Marie Jacquard made an improvement to the presented loom designs that used a series of punched paper cards as a program to weave involved patterns. The resulting Jacquard loom is not considered a true computer but it was an essential step in the growth of modern digital computers.
but due to a combination of the restrictions of the technology of the time, limited finance, and an incapability to resist tinkering with his design, the device was never really constructed in his lifetime. By the end of the 19th century a number of technologies that would later prove helpful in computing had appeared, out such as the punch card and the vacuum tube, and large-scale automated data giving using punch cards was performed by tabulating equipment designed by Hermann Hollerith.During the first half of the 20th century, many technical computing wants were met by increasingly difficult special-purpose analog computers, which used a direct mechanical or electrical model of the problem as a base for subtraction (they became ever more rare after the development of the programmable digital computer). Sequence of gradually more powerful and stretchy computing devices were construct in the 1930s and 1940s.

Sunday, February 04, 2007

The Real Miracle

As far as Miracles is concern, turning salty seawater in to sweet water is quite amazing. Regardless of the scientific clarification being doled out—surplus freshwater flowing from the Mahim River into the sea—the thousand mass to Mahim Creek near the beachfront in Mumbai will pretty see the ‘transubstantiation’ as the deed of the late Haji Maqdoom Baba, whose shrine is in the area. Mass hysteria, of course, is only a term to clarify the hordes of believers filling plastic bottles and drinking the water. But the real miracle would be if those glugging the ‘miraculous’ water manages to flee succumbing to serious gastric illness.
The water of Mahim Creek, sweetened or otherwise, is dirty and would scandalize not only the likes of Sunita Narain of the Centre for Science and Environment. Maharashtra Chief Minister Vilasrao Deshmukh and officials of the Municipal Corporation of Greater Mumbai have already request to people not to drink the water. Industrial waste is not the finest ingredient for a miracle. But telling this to goggle-eyed people facing even more goggle-eyed TV cameras is as worthwhile as persuasive people that a Ganesh idol sipping milk is caused by suction and not godly lactose tolerance.
Fortunately, rumors of the sweetened water turning back to its original brackish form might stop a future surge. Now we only wait for the real miracle of no one complaining of sickness.