You're on camera!

CCTV cameras are all around. They've installed about 12 of them in and around my office. And the security guard and the administration manager can watch what's happening around the office and in some select areas in the office. I must say our office is a reasonably closed space with not much scope for break-ins. And above all, there seems to be no real motive to break-in. I've always thought that the CCTV cameras are a waste of money and time. What can you detect or find on such camera output?

The total amount of data or footage generated by all the cameras put together cannot be fathomed by all the security guards, assuming that's the only thing they do. They simply don't have the capacity or bandwidth to review all of it. And to tell you the truth, its pretty boring and uninteresting to watch the footage beyond the first few minutes, leave alone a whole day. Most of the time, nothing happens. But it is the job of the security guards to review it, all the time; well, at least most of the time. And it has to be real-time!

BriefCam, an Israeli company, has come up with this brand new idea in CCTV cameras. It works by separating the times when there is movement and times when there is no movement at all. And it senses those times when there is no movement, and excludes such footage. It uses motion detection algorithm and separates the static background, creates a fixed database and focusses only on the moving images. These moving images are summarised and bunched together for the security and surveillance staff to review as and when convenient.

The process still requires the surveillance staff to go throught the footage manually. But it gives them the option of making better use of the time by editing out the non-moving boring footage. Now that's something! Its amazing how people come up with such small improvements to ease life.

Astronomers have announced that they have found a massive star that has been flung out of the cluster in which it was born. The star is huge — 90 times the mass of the Sun — and is screaming away at 400,000 kilometers per hour.

This incredible image is from the ESO’s 2.2 meter telescope in Chile. It shows an overview of the sprawling 30 Doradus star-forming cloud, located about 180,000 light years away in the satellite galaxy to the Milky Way called the Large Magellanic Cloud.

In the center of 30 Dor sits a vast cluster of stars called R136. The total combined mass of all the stars in R136 is unclear, but it has several that tip the cosmic scale at 100 times the mass of the Sun, which is the upper limit of how big a star can get without tearing itself apart.

The inset image is from Hubble, and shows the runaway star, named 30 Dor 016.

If you don’t think that’s a big deal, I’ll note that this equals 180 octillion tons — that’s 180,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 tons.


The UV observations also confirm that the star is plowing through the gas that lies in interstellar space in the LMC. Here is a closeup of the star:

The new observations, using Hubble’s new ultraviolet camera called the Cosmic Origins Spectrograph, confirm that this is a single star (and not, say, a binary with two members each with 45 solar masses), making it one of the most massive stars ever seen. This kind of star is extremely rare!

Amazingly, the star is 375 light years from the cluster! A star this massive can’t live very long, a few million years at most. At 400,000 kph, it takes about a million years to travel that distance.


How small we are! I'm reminded of what Carl Sagan once said. I found a visual on the net which I'm reproducing below:

See this link for the complete story - http://www.spacetelescope.org/images/heic1008a/


Image credit: Hubble: NASA, ESA, J. Walsh (ST-ECF) Acknowledgment: Z. Levay (STScI). ESO image: ESO Acknowledgments: J. Alves (Calar Alto, Spain), B. Vandame, and Y. Beletski (ESO), processing by B. Fosbury (ST-ECF).

The essential and the unnecessary

The NASA probe on the Chandrayaan-1 found water on the moon. The discovery has been hailed as pathbreaking, and it is said to open a whole new avenue in lunar research, and the greatest example of international collaboration in space. Let us keep any speculation on the truth of this declaration aside and consider only what we hear.

I'm not the usual activist-blogger to say that the amount spent on moon research is a waste and that it could be used better to improve our lot here (The project, incidentally cost Rs. 386 crore). Such expenditure may be necessary, as scientific advancement is also required; and there is very little anyone can do to stop it.

Can we look at this entire thing from a different angle altogether. We found water on the moon, which I would certainly call an achievement. But we haven't found enough water to drink on earth, where we need it more. After the discovery, there is talk of using the moon as a place where humans could settle in the future. And they could use the water there. With all the place on the earth, why would we want to go to the moon?

Are we preparing for the future, for the time when the earth would have no water or vegetation to sustain human life, which would've multiplied many times over by then. Why should we get into something more complicated and unnecessary, when we are unable to manage the simple things. I think this is true of life, in general. Man is appreciated not for doing the simple, basic things, but for more complex things.

If you consider an organisation, there are the toilers, the workers who strive to keep the organisation going, the system running, without whom the system would stop. But, invariably, they are not the ones appreciated and compensated. Instead, the brash consultant-management graduate is getting all the attention, for pursuing the new path. He would be specifically employed to do this, against the existing employee who knows more and is in a better position to take the organisation forward. Again, I'm not saying that all such persons are useless. But when you encourage an outsider manager and ignore the insider worker, you are setting up the scene for a cold-war.

And this fact is true in all walks of life. An organisation was just an example. The media likes the person going to the moon. But the person who is out there in the villages, doing his bit to improve the lives of the poor, goes unnoticed.