Thursday, January 17, 2019

Quick notes: HAL on the brink, Citizens’ data...

  • Is Modi govt weakening HAL? With no payments coming in, HAL for the first time ever takes a bank loan of Rs 7.81 billion. . . . Air force holds back Rs 20,000 crore from HAL, as foreign vendors get paid. . . . Govt’s apathy is pushing HAL to the brink.


  • Preventing the next terror attack: WhatsApp is facing pressure in India to let authorities trace and read encrypted messages. Indian policy makers have been examining methods China has used to protect domestic startups and take control of citizens’ data.


  • Taking on the mighty: Govt’s tough stand on Ecommerce FDI may put a stop to Amazon’s food sales in India


  • Ganga, the wonder river: In the late 19th century, British scientists and hydrologists became intrigued by the fact that Ganga water did not go bad, even after long periods of storage, contrary to the water of other rivers in which a mounting lack of oxygen quickly promoted the growth of anaerobic bacteria. In 1896 the British physician E. Hanbury Hankin wrote in the French journal Annales de l’Institut Pasteur that cholera microbes that had a life of forty-eight hours in distilled water died within three hours in Ganga water. Dr. Hankin was able to secure corpses of cholera victims in the river and isolated samples of Ganga water with a large concentration of the bacillus E. coli. Much to his astonishment, he found that after six hours the microbes had completely disappeared.


  • Sri Ramana Maharshi's teachings:



  • Insect Collapse: Tropical insects, having evolved in a very stable climate, would be much more sensitive to climate warming. “If you go a little bit past the thermal optimum for tropical insects, their fitness just plummets”.



2 comments:

san said...

HAL did a decent job in fabricating our Crew Capsule for our Human Spaceflight program. Why don't we pay them to develop/build a larger space Hab module to allow longer duration stays in orbit? We can then use such longer duration missions to evaluate orbital construction techniques. In this way, we could assemble multiple such modules together to make a larger orbital structure. If you're going to travel to space, then you want to have someplace to travel to. China's building its own copy of the International Space Station, after being barred from the actual one due to its rampant technology theft antics. They'll be flying Pakistani astronauts to their new station after it's built.

If HAL could be contracted to mass-produce such modules, then perhaps this could enable cost savings. It would also help to keep HAL busy and well-funded, while doing something more useful than churning out aircraft like Tejas which keep failing their evaluation tests.

Pagan said...

HAL’s light combat helicopter completes air-to-air missile firing

Indian private sector will never get into these.. this is one area where 'state capitalism' works better.. for this, we need people like R Venkataraman.