Alternative to vehicle horns

We had been given an assignment to suggest methods to reduce pollution. (It was in my 10th grade) The easier (easier to write) ones such as air, water etc.. were already taken. So we ended up with sound pollution.

As Wikipedia will tell you

Roadway noise is the most widespread environmental component of noise pollution worldwide.

Among the various suggestions our group came up with, was an alternative to vehicle horns (which is a major part of roadway noise in India). Rather than using loud horns, a radio horn was to be used. The radio horn was rather simple in design. The horn emitted a signal with the exact location of the vehicle (obtained by GPS-Global Positioning System) along with the exact time with an accuracy of a Milli-second.

All the vehicles will have to carry a radio receiver which will catch these radio waves, and after comparing it with the location of the vehicle and the time , it would decide if that horn was meant for it. (A computer program or still better a IC will do it in real time) As soon as the radio set learn t that it was being honked, it would produce some kind of warning which either involved a blinking light on the dashboard or a horn of much lower magnitude to be heard only within the vehicle that received the honk.

And this became a rather controversial suggestion in the report, the main arguments against it were-

1. What about human beings and stray cattle on the road-they cant have radio receivers! we are talking about INDIA
2. The economic viability of having all this high tech stuff installed. (A legislation ought to solve this problem and the cost should come down drastically when mass produced)

We never thought of implementing it, so we never discovered its practicality. However, it would be great to see it tested.

The red whiskered bulbul eggs hatch

The red whiskered bulbul that had laid eggs in the garden has now given birth to 3 young bulbuls. The three beaks can be seen as orange colored streaks.

The parent bird keeps guard on the nest as the eggs are about to hatch. Even after the eggs hatch, the nest is protected.



The next picture shows the red whiskered bulbul bringing food for the young birds. The food is generally small insects like grass hoppers and other worms that are found in the surrounding garden.

Generally one of the bird keeps watch on the nest, but sometimes both birds fly off in search of food.







The birds have become rather accustomed to humans and are easy to photograph. The birds have grown in size within a few days. I have to wait and see when they will learn to fly and fly away.

The power of Camouflage

The use of protective coloration to ward of enemies is known as camouflaging. This is used by the modern day armies.

The technique is inspired by nature. In this picture if you look more closely, at the middle, a green circle can be seen. This is the place where a bird is sitting. You can make out the bird clearly by magnifying the image. The color is the same as the surrounding terrain of stones and earth.

I would not have spotted the bird if it were not flying or rather hopping.

Is our head strong enough?

This is a good helmet awareness advertisement. The Rhino head followed by "Unfortunately, Your head is not strong enough. Wear a helmet"

But still we argue about the merits and demerits of wearing a helmet.And since blogger team has started a Poll feature on blogger, i just added a poll to see what U think?

Its indeed wonderful that the blogger team is coming up with such useful features. It would be great if we could customise the polling feature to our hearts content, they could allow access similar to Lazybase. But again, they may have spamming concerns.

Bramhakamla or night queen in the garden

The Bramha kamala or night queen blooms at night. It is a fragrant flower that generally fades by the morning.

It was my first attempt at night photography, so i should say it is rather ok.

This time only two of these flowers bloomed in the garden. Generally the Bramhakamala is found in larger groups.

Rolls Royce at SJCE

As part of its advertising strategy the mobile store was visiting SJCE Mysore. However, we did not get a ride as was suggested when the 'Rock with the Rolls' campaign was launched.
Its not that a Rolls Royce rolls into SJCE. So the marketing ruse of the mobile store seems to have worked at least enough to be mentioned on this blog.The Rolls Royce was once the symbol of wealth, but it also makes good advertising sense.

The Dash board

The rolls royce emblem

The rear of the rolls royce with the mobile store advertisement.

With attention to detail-the wheel

Getting unlucky after being too lucky

After feeling lucky and lcukier its time to be unlucky. So the present version of feeling lucky gives an option to unlucckify the queries that have been made lucky. Since, the lucky queries cant be seen on google,you will have to goto the unluckify page after installing the latest feel lucky greasymonkey.

The unlcukify page will remove the query from the lucky list. As soon as the query is removed it is displayed as an alert msg. Although this method works satisfactorily, their should be a more sensible method that does not require going to the unluckify page.

Feel luckier with google

This is an update to the previous post-Get lucky with google with input from Gautham pai. The new feel luckier script provides redirects to the suggested result.

For example if you were to search for nagarjunv you would get the suggestion of seeing results for nagarjuna.The script directly takes you to the suggested result page as in Yahoo. And a link to the original result is shown at the top as You actually typed:nagarjunv.

If you feel the word is correct on its own merit, that word can be added to the dictionary(on ur system only). Later it can be removed from the dictionary as well. The remove from dictionary link appears when the query is tried the next time, the redirect does not happen as the word is in the dictionary although Google suggests another result.

However, these scripts will be just as useful as bookmarks in their present form. They would be useful only if the redirects and made lucky queries are stored online. So the queries made lucky by other users of the script will also be lucky for us even if we are typing in the query for the first time. Google will have to do more than this simple script as it would have to take into consideration the language and other criteria as well.

Get lucky with google

Gauthampai said "Sometimes, 'we want to feel lucky' in the search result page as well. ;)" and here we are.

The greasymonkey feellucky makes it possible for us to bookmark search results as lucky. If you have made a particular query lucky by clicking on the make lucky link, the next time you put the same query you get lucky.

To install this greasemokey the firefox browser with greasemonkey is needed. To install just click on Install feellucky. The feel lucky script makes use of GM_setvalue and GM_getvalue to store the queries that need to be lucky. So the lucky feeling is limited to the system on which the gresymonkey is installed.

To make it useful for a wider audience, the lucky queries need to be stored on a server.

Deer eating leaves

A deer cannot be considered wild life as it is domesticated. These domesticated deer are easy to capture with your camera.
Its brown with white spots all over it. This deer is from the Bandipur forest reserve. It was chewing on the leaves of a fallen branch along the road side.

Daswala, zerbera (gerbera) and ooty flower

The yellow zerbera or gerbera has a light yellow shade. A ant can be seen on the flower at he lower right end of the flower.
The next flower is a purple colored daswala or daffodil. The Daswala or dasvala comes in numerous colours.


The flower which we have been calling as ooty flower, whose name (either common name or botanical name is not known to me--let me know if anybody is aware of it.)
Flowers of all colors.

A bubul in the garden

A Bulbul is in the garden. And the nest was visible enough to be photographed.

This is the Red-whiskered Bulbul as far identification is concerned.
But the greatest threat to these eggs is from cats and other rodents prowling the garden. It has three eggs in the nest, they are chocolate colored with white spots.

It has built the nest in the "Neelambra" a plant that gives blue flowers. As it is not flowering season now, the nest is safe.

Flowers in the garden

The following pictures are from the garden. These are the flowers that were got from potted plants.

Red Zerbera
A pink Zerbera

Blue buttons