Midweek home-grown jokes

Chandulal was a young man who owned a small shop selling stockings. He was a good man, but a lousy businessman. Soon enough, the business went bankrupt, and one day Chandulal was found sitting outside his now-closed store singing "Sab kuch seekha hamne , na seekhi hosiery.."

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Behruz's friend : Hey Behruz, what're you upto today?
Behruz : "Nothing much, just hanging with my Homi"

A hero by any other name?

The Wired blog reports today that Activision is expanding the Guitar Hero brand to include other instruments. I'm not sure thats such a great idea. One huge reason for Guitar Hero's success is that there is a generation of people who wanted to strum a guitar and look cool, but never could, until Guitar Hero came along.

Now how many people do you know who could say that about French Horns?

I can has blog!

Political sloganeering

Just heard Hillary C. saying in her Pennslyvania primary victory speech that (roughly quoting): "the American people don't quit and they deserve a president that won't quit". Umm, What of her declared desire to quit Iraq? Not that there is anything wrong with that!

Tallest free standing structure -- update

The problem with shared blogs (especially with your better half that also happens to be a better writer) is that you can't be lazy about it. My hurried posts the other day invited hands-on-hip-take-it-seriously looks. So here I am atoning for my sins. Grumbling aside, here's my take on the tallest mountain part.

Assuming the mountain isn't a single giant rigid body, its being held in place by friction between the rocks. That puts a limit on the maximum angle that the side of the mountain can have. The co-efficient of friction, u, is related to the angle of the slope (call it s) by tan(s) = u. That means the ratio of the height of the mountain to half its base is also u.

As the mountain gets taller, its base has to become wider and at some point, the curvature of the earth will kick in, thereby limiting the maximum width of the base. Beyond that the mountain "falls off the sides of the earth".

In the picture above, we see that the angle formed at the center of the earth is the same as the angle of the slope (s). r is the radius of earth, h the height of the mountain. Now cos(u) is r/(r+h). Also, u = tan(u) = sin(u)/cos(u).

We know (1 + tan^2(u)) = 1/(cos^2(u). That gives us (1 + u^2) = (1 + h/r)^2. The average r for earth is 6378.1 km. Lets say u is 0.28, that gives max h ~= 245km. Thats quite large and twice over what is considered the edge of space (100km).

Above is of course a rough calculation and there might be aspects I have ignored that limit the maximum height to a lower value (let me know if you know of any)!

Misleading advertising

I was always a bit of a cynic and the daily barrage of advertisements from various sources has stamped out whatever little non-cynisim that remained. I often turn on the radio during my short commute to work.

One ad that caught my attention was from pacific west capital group promising "total fixed return of 15%". I listened to its wording carefully the next time round: it only promises *total* return of 15%, with not a word about how long it takes to get there. It also touted the invariance of the investment to any market changes. To be fair, I decided to check their website on what it is: It is what they call “life settlement”: you buy today someone's life insurance that will mature when he/she dies. The money you get (from the insurance company) then will be more than what you pay today hence earning you money. Even if you can get over the distaste of waiting for someone to die in order to collect, this is by no means as safe or guranteed as they make it out to be.

All in all, they score high on misleading information. Tread with caution!

Tallest free standing structure

I got into a geeky discussion the other day at work. Wandering through various topics, someone mentioned a venture which is trying to build a "space elevator" (I think he was referring to http://www.liftport.com/). I thought it couldn't be done due to mistakenly equating it with something I had read a while ago in a book: A calcution of the tallest possible mountain.

I don't remember the details but the main assumption was on the mountain not being a single rigid structure. I can't seem to find it anywhere online, so if someone knows where to find it, please send it my way. On another note, I been wondering what is the tallest possible building that can be made before physical limits come into play?