Dr Rajiv Desai
An Educational Blog
Cloud Seeding
Cloud Seeding: _ _ Section-1 Prologue: In the 1956 movie The Rainmaker, Burt Lancaster plays a con man catering to the dreams of spinster Katharine Hepburn. And while both stars triumph in the end — the rain does fall, and she comes out of her shell. In Hindu tradition, mortals prayed and performed elaborate rituals to please Indra, the god of rain. Legend has it that musician Tansen’s melodious voice could summon showers from cloudless skies. Humans have long sought to purposefully alter such atmospheric phenomena as clouds, rain, snow, hail, lightning, thunderstorms, tornadoes, hurricanes, and cyclones. The modern era of scientific weather modification began in 1946 with work by Vincent J. Schaefer and Irving Langmuir at the General Electric Research Laboratories in Schenectady, N.Y. Schaefer discovered that when dry ice (frozen carbon dioxide) pellets were dropped into a cloud composed of water droplets in a deep-freeze box, the […]
Junk Food
Junk Food: _ _ Section-1 Prologue: There are few things in this world more delicious than a candy bar. Notice how your tongue begins to tingle and mouth fills with saliva while you’re still unwrapping the darn thing. Then that first bite, an intoxicating tsunami of sweet, salty, rich and creamy, lighting up the pleasure centers in your brain. And there’s only one way to keep the thrill alive − another bite. Junk food is a miracle of edible engineering. It has no equal in the natural world − or else we’d all have a candy bar tree in the backyard − and has been fine-tuned to deliver pure pleasure through generous combinations of fat, sugar and salt. Not only does junk food taste amazing, but it’s also cheap, convenient, long shelf life and available in every fast-food restaurant, grocery store, gas station, truck stop, movie theater and […]
Spying
Spying: _ Clockwise from top left: Orlin Roussev, Katrin Ivanova, Ivan Stoyanov, Biser Dzhambazov, Vanya Gaberova and Tihomir Ivanchev. These six Bulgarians have been sentenced to lengthy prison terms for spying for the Kremlin in the UK and across Europe. ___ Section-1 Prologue: The old phrase ‘gentlemen don’t read each other’s mail’ was unfortunately the dominant U.S. attitude before the Second World War — with catastrophic consequences at Pearl Harbor. … America learned the hard way: In reality, that was what everyone else was doing, and America was being not only naïve, but putting itself at risk by not doing so. Throughout history, espionage has shaped the dynamics of power, politics, and security. Throughout history, adversaries have routinely taken their competitive efforts beyond the battlefield. Nazi spies during World War II tried to penetrate the secrets behind American aviation technology, just as Soviet spies in the Cold War targeted […]
Hate
Hate: _ Figure above shows Klansman (member of the Ku Klux Klan) raises his left arm during a “white power” chant at a Ku Klux Klan rally in the Chicago suburb of Skokie, Illinois, on December 16, 2000. _____ Section-1 Prologue: Human beings are biologically predisposed to divide humanity into ingroups and outgroups, and this comes with a great social cost – the capacity for hate. While we may view ourselves and our communities as benevolent and egalitarian, we often view outsiders as inhuman, unworthy, or alien, allowing us to victimize them in conscious and unconscious ways. Hate is among the most powerful of human emotions—it has caused great sorrow and suffering. All over the world, researchers are studying hate from disciplines like education, history, law, leadership, psychology, sociology and many others. After the genocide perpetrated by the Nazis in World War II, the expression “Never Again” became a familiar […]
Nuclear Holocaust
Nuclear Holocaust: No one person can be credited with producing the world’s first atomic bomb but two men (figure above) had outsize achievements in that effort: physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer and Army Lt. Gen. Leslie Groves. _ The movement of survivors of the atomic bombs in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, known as hibakusha, receives the 2024 Nobel Peace Prize for its efforts to achieve a world without nuclear weapons and for demonstrating through personal testimony that nuclear weapons must never be used again. “So long as any state has nuclear weapons, others will want them. So long as any such weapons remain, there is a risk that they will one day be used, by design or accident. And any such use would be catastrophic.” —Weapons of Mass Destruction Commission _____ Section-1 Prologue: Hiram Maxim, the inventor of the machine gun, declared, “Only a general who was a barbarian would send […]
