Gandhi’s Fav Bhajan goes viral

On the occasion of 150th birth anniversary of Mahatma Gandhi artist from 124 countries collaborate to recreate to sing his favorite Bhajan “Vaishnav Jan to tene re Kahiye je..”

Bhajan means a simple poetic words who shows a deep message of the life in simple words. This Bhajan was written by Lord Krishna’s devotee Narsinh Mehta, who is considered as first notable poet of Gujarati Language.

Videos from different regions of the world have also been put together in a fusion video of about five minutes to give flavour to the bhajan. Amongst the star performers is President of Nauru Baron Divavesi Waqa. Waqa’s gesture was not just a tribute to Gandhi but was also a personal gift from him to Prime Minister Modi.

I am sharing the meaning of lyrics below. It is a beautiful song with profound meaning. Vaishnav is lover of God…..and a true lover of God has to have the following mentioned qualities.

Vaishnav jan to tene kahiye je

[One who is a Vaishnav]

PeeD paraayi jaaNe re

[Knows the pain of others]

Par-dukhkhe upkaar kare toye

[Does good to others, esp. to those ones who are in misery]

Man abhimaan na aaNe re

[Does not let pride enter his mind]

Vaishnav…
SakaL lok maan sahune vande

[A Vaishnav, Tolerates and praises the the entire world]

Nindaa na kare keni re

[Does not say bad things about anyone]

Vaach kaachh man nishchaL raakhe

[Keeps his/her words, actions and thoughts pure]

Dhan-dhan janani teni re

[O Vaishnav, your mother is blessed (dhanya-dhanya)]

Vaishnav…
Sam-drishti ne trishna tyaagi

[A Vaishnav sees everything equally, rejects greed and

avarice]

Par-stree jene maat re

[Considers some one else’s wife/daughter as his mother]

Jivha thaki asatya na bole

[The toungue may get tired, but will never speak lies]

Par-dhan nav jhaalee haath re

[Does not even touch someone else’s property]

Vaishnav…
Moh-maaya vyaape nahi jene

[A Vaishnav does not succumb to worldly attachments]

DriDh vairaagya jena man maan re

[Who has devoted himself to stauch detachment to worldly

pleasures]

Ram naam shoon taaLi laagi

[Who has been edicted to the elixir coming be the name of

Ram]

SakaL tirath tena tan maan re

[For whom all the religious sites are in the mind]

Vaishnav…
VaN-lobhi ne kapaT-rahit chhe

[Who has no greed and deciet]

Kaam-krodh nivaarya re

[Who has renounced lust of all types and anger]

BhaNe Narsaiyyo tenun darshan karta

[The poet Narsi will like to see such a person]

KuL ekoter taarya re

[By who’s virtue, the entire family gets salvation]

Vaishnav…

Fourier Transform – An Astronomical interpretation

 

Before Copernicus and Heliocentricity, the ancient Greeks believed that the sun and the planets moved around the Earth in giant circles. But upon closer observation, they could see that was not always the case. Sometimes, the planets appeared to move backwards in the sky. So Greco-Roman mathematician, astronomer, geographer, and all round G, Ptolemy (pictured above looking knowledgeable), came up with a clever solution. He theorized that the planets must then not only go around the earth in big circles, but also in an additional little circle, called an epicycle, at the same time.

Pretty soon, observational data disproved them once again. So they just added some more circles. And some more. They kept adding circles until the resultant map of our solar system looked like a kaleidoscope.

The Ptolemaic model looked good. So good, that it stuck around for 1,300 years unchallenged. But it turned out to be wildly incorrect, and not just because we now know that the Earth and planets move around the sun. The problem with the epicycle theory is that it contains no information about the actual orbits themselves. Yes – for many years the model could provide accurate predictions, but that is only by nature of the relationship of the circles. By adding up enough circles, you can approximate any orbit to some degree of accuracy. In fact you can make any signal – a radio signal, a piece of music, data from your computer etc. – from just adding up enough circular paths. How is this possible? Well Euler allows us to represent these circular paths using complex numbers.

So each point moving in a plane can be thought of as a complex function of time. If you take a planet, or whatever, moving on a circle with the radius R and the angular frequency ω, then the equation describing the position of our planet as a function of time would be:

z(t)=Reiωt

Let’s say you’re moving around two epicyclic circles now, the equation would become:

z(t)=R1eiω1t+R2eiω2t

Now picture adding infinite many circles together. We end up with the equation:

z(t)=∫∞−∞R(ω)eiωtdω

The function R(ω) is the Fourier Transform of z(t)! And not just for planets, if you have any time-dependent path or signal, it can be replicated exactly by infinitely many circles of varying frequencies added together. And the radii of these circles is the fourier transform of the path.

Let’s look closer at the idea of representing a signal as circular or sinusoidal waves. Check out a square wave (in 1D), for example.

If I wanted a square wave, but only had a source that produced sine waves, could I do that?

In the image below, both columns begin with the same sine wave. The left column contains harmonics of the sine wave. In the right column, you can see the effect of adding those harmonics to the sequence. Surprise! Our squiggly sine waves are combining to look more and more like a square wave.

This concept is the basis of the Fourier Series, which shows that you can represent a periodic function as a discrete sum of complex exponentials…. or in digestible terms, as a bunch of circular functions, not continuous, added together (see above).

The Fourier Transform also breaks stuff apart into its simple trigonometric components… however, it deals with messier, nonperiodic signals, which can’t reduce to a clean sum of discrete sine waves. Instead, the FT represents nonperiodic signals as a continuous superposition or integral of complex exponentials. Both the FT and FS are part of Fourier Analysis, which looks at how general functions can be approximated by sums of simpler trigonometric functions.

When we apply the FT, our data hasn’t changed. Were just looking at it from a different domain.

The most common example of this is looking at data in the frequency domain. If you were to put all those waves in the frequency domain back together, you would get the original signal.

So why go through all this trouble and do this at all? One advantage of being able to switch between multiple domains, is that linear operations in one domain have a corresponding operation in the other. For example, differentiation in the time domain corresponds to multiplication by the frequency for most values… making differential equations easier to work through in the frequency domain. There are endless uses, applications, and representations of the FT, making it a crucial tool in signal analysis, image processing, optics, etc.

Sources:

Wikipedia

Hot Questions – Stack Exchange

An Interactive Guide To The Fourier Transform

www.polaris.iastate.edu

The Antecedent

 

A question that was thought to be STUPID lead to Profound Discovery

A teenager in an African high school asked a physics lecturer “Why is it that when I put hot water and cold water in the freezer together, the hot liquid freezes first?”

His classmates laughed at him; even his teacher laughed at him; but the physics lecturer, intrigued, decided to try it out; and sure enough, the kid was right. The two of them studied the problem and published their results; the phenomenon is now known as the Mpemba effect, named after the young student, Erasto Mpemba.

There’s a link to the original paper here – it’s well worth a read, both for Mpemba’s laconic narrative and Dr Osborne’s lucid open-mindedness. “No question should be ridiculed ….. for everyday events are seldom as simple as they seem, and it is dangerous to pass a superficial judgment on what can and cannot be.”

 

Wanna Wish your friends on Birthday at 12 AM? Python Helps…

Sometimes It’s hard to stay awake till 12am to wish your loved one’s and close friends and end up sleeping.

So I’ve written a script to solve this problem and let my script does rest of work on behalf of me.

This is how it looks after completion , this work is automated by my script( watsapp pic below).

You can write script to remember future birthdays and wishing them aswell and schedule them.

Let’s start with code

Pre-requisite

First you must install these:-

1) Python Bindings for Selenium ( Browser Automation software )

1. pip install selenium

2) Chrome webdriver
Download Chrome driver from here: Chromedriver download page( choose your specific version )
Extract it in a known location , as we need the location later

3) Chromium Web Browser( Open source version of chrome browser )

1. sudo apt–get install chromium–browser

That’s it! You are all set.

Lets dive in right away-

from selenium import webdriver

from selenium.webdriver.support.ui import WebDriverWait

from selenium.webdriver.support import expected_conditions as EC

from selenium.webdriver.common.keys import Keys

from selenium.webdriver.common.by import By

import time

# Replace below path with the absolute path

# to chromedriver in your computer

driver = webdriver.Chrome('/home/ads/Downloads/chromedriver')

driver.get("https://web.whatsapp.com/")

wait = WebDriverWait(driver, 600)

# Replace 'Friend's Name' with the name of your friend

# or the name of a group

target = '"Friend\'s Name"'

# Replace the below string with your own message

string = " happy birthday boi"

x_arg = '//span[contains(@title,' + target + ')]'

group_title = wait.until(EC.presence_of_element_located((

By.XPATH, x_arg)))

group_title.click()

inp_xpath = '//div[@class="input"][@dir="auto"][@data-tab="1"]'

input_box = wait.until(EC.presence_of_element_located((

By.XPATH, inp_xpath)))

for i in range(100):

input_box.send_keys(string + Keys.ENTER)

time.sleep(1)

 

Keep your mobile phone with you. Choose whatsapp web from the top bar in whatsapp(3 dots)

Then Run the script ( make sure that you have added the absolute path for chromedriver and have replaced target variable with your friends name ). Scan the QR code that appears on the screen and enjoy.

You can make it responsive as well like kik bots just let your script read the input message of recipient and write command for further response… but it will be little lengthy.

Pro tip: You may get blocked by watsapp if you make it responsive like bots …. Be safe!!!

 

PLC and Raspberry Pi

Hello Friends!,

Recently, Prof Vijay Savani, Mr. Praful Joshi and Mr. Aanand Christian from Nirma University, Ahmedabad came to my house for a formal meet and suddenly there was a question popped in discussion. Also, during my carrier working as Robotics and Automation engineer, I am always frequently exposed to this question that what is better PLC or Raspberri Pi? This question makes me think about the similarities as there are a few.

A PLC or Programmable Logic Controller is a very complicated piece of hardware which is designed to be robust and follows very specific design guidelines. PLCs usually have special parts like an IO board that is capable of digital and analog input and output control. The driving circuitry is inbuilt along with surge protection and reverse polarity protection. They usually have FPGAs installed to help the processor handle real time tasks extremely efficiently. They also designed to handle high and low temperatures and are designed to work at maximum capacity with no forced air cooling most of the time. They can also handle vibrations and have a long life cycle of 10 to 20 years, sometimes even more. Apart from that they can be programmed in many languages like Ladder logic, Instruction list, Structured text, C, Cpp etc. (IEC 61131–3).

Raspberry PI and Arduino boards are the most famous devices for rapid electronic prototyping and DIY home applications. However, their capabilities and flexibility are still largely under estimated in the industrial environment.

Raspberry PI and Arduino flexible programming, customizable signal types and easy adaptation to the existing installations can offer many benefits to the industrial world.

For instance, they could be great low cost and flexible alternatives to the usual industrial devices for adding remote control and monitoring functionality to small legacy industrial systems.

The 3 most common concerns about the use of such development boards in the industrial environment are:

• Robustness in industrial environments
• Safety
• Industrial standard communication protocols

1. Robustness in industrial environments

There are already several ruggedized versions of Arduino and Raspberry available in the markets.

Hardware like the

Industrial Shields Arduino based PLCs and Raspberry based panel PC provide already include the extra robustness needed to meet industrial needs.

 

Alternatively, there are various industrial standard enclosure specifically developed to accommodate the two boards.

2. Case study – Video – Blasting Robot 

Blasting robot fully automated and remotely controlled with Industrial Shields, Arduino based, PLCs.

>

3. Case study –  Multisensory Retail management system with Raspberry PI

Multisensory Retail management system for audio, video, lighting and fragrances synchronization developed by TairolRadio for the San Siro football stadium in Milan (A.C. Milan and Internationale football clubs)

Safety

This is probably the most controvert and discussed topic in Internet: Are Raspberry and Arduino boards, and related based hardware, safe solutions for the industrial applications? There is not a simple answer, it depends by many factors and require for sure a change in the mind-set of the engineers.

The safety of an industrial application does not only depend by the PLC; It always matter of the integrity of the full project, how the systems and software are implemented and how the safety have been considered when designing the project.

Here an interesting debate between engineers that approach this topic for different angles

Case study – Fortaps automated their production plant with Industrial Shields, Arduino based, PLC

Industrial standard communication protocols

This is where the flexibility of Arduino and Raspberry PI comes over.  Modbus foundation has developed specific libraries to allow the two boards to communicate via their protocol.

Modbus is a serial communications protocol developed by Modicon (acquired by Schneider Electric) for its programmable logic controllers (PLCs); it has become the most common and adopted by many automation manufacturers such as Omron, Opto 22, Schneider and Mitsubishi.

The main reasons for the wide adoptions of Modbus in the industrial environment are:

• developed for industrial use
• royalty-free and open published
• easy to use, install and maintain
• few restrictions on vendors

Modbus allows many different devices, connected to the same network, to communicate together regardless the OEMs. The needs of putting in communication different devices from different manufacturers has become even highly important with the arrival of  4^th industrial revolution; The Industry 4.0 and the Industrial IoT have given a second childhood to Modbus.

Hereafter to example of Arduino and raspberry PI applications running Modbus

Video – Raspberry PI and Modbus

Video – Arduino and Modbus

The following articles show how to remotely control HVAC systems by using Arduino based hardware and SCADA.

SCADA (Supervisory Control And Data Acquisition) is another industrial system for remote monitoring and control that operates with coded signals over communication channels (using typically one communication channel per remote station). The SCADA library for Arduino are openly published as well.

Remote control of a HVAC system via Arduino based PLC

Conclusions

Arduino and Raspberry PI, in their ruggedized version, can be valuable and reliable alternatives to the well-established industrial devices (especially to connect to the internet of things small legacy industrial systems) pending an ad-hoc design of project to ensure safety.

Just Do this 16 line Code

1. #include “stdio.h”
2. int main()
3. {
4. int a, b, c;
5. for (b=c=10; a=“Hello!Welcome to ad’s world.\
6. TFy!QJu ROo TNn(ROo)SLq SLq ULo+\
7. UHs UJq TNn*RPn/QPbEWS_JSWQAIJO^\
8. NBELPeHBFHT}TnALVlBLOFAkHFOuFETp\
9. HCStHAUFAgcEAelclcn^r^r\\tZvYxXy\
10. T|S~Pn SPm SOn TNn ULo0ULo#ULo-W\
11. Hq!WFs XDt!” [b+++21]; )
13. for (; a— > 64 ; )
14. putchar ( ++c==‘Z’ ? c = c/ 9:33^b&1);
15. return 0;
16. }

This is an example of obfuscated code, or, in simpler terms, a mess of characters that are virtually impossible for humans to understand!

Essentially, this string is an encoding for a map of India. The characters used alternate, with one character telling the programme how many times to place a space, and the next telling it how many exclamation marks are needed.

I don’t want to get too technical, but the mess of characters corresponds to ASCII numbers, or just numbers, if you prefer, and each number gives the programme an instruction, for example to start a new line, or print an exclamation mark.

You can also get less obfuscated versions of this code for various languages, but this code is much longer, and a lot more complicated.

Here’s the finished product:

 

Let me know in comment, what do you think?

Two appealing Application of Fourier Transform

The applications of the Fourier transform is enormous, be it any field of science or engineering. However, I would like to pick two applications that I found very appealing, one in the field of Quantum Computing in breaking the RSA encryption and another in Radio Astronomical imaging.

RSA encryption is used in the internet for secure data transmission. The RSA encryption is highly secure due to the fact that the factorization of very large number is computationally hard for a classical computer. However, Peter Shor, who is a Professor at MIT Applied Mathematics, showed in 1994, that the factorization problem can be solved in polynomial time (please refer to P (complexity) – Wikipedia to know more about, polynomial time complexity) by a quantum computer, thereby effectively decrypting the RSA. Henceforth, the algorithm devised by him is known as Shor’s algorithm. The main catch of Shor’s algorithm is the conversion of factorization problem into a period finding problem, by invoking a property that was discovered by Euler. There are several intricacies in the algorithm which you can find in the link Shor’s Algorithm – Breaking RSA Encryption. Now, the period finding is the bottleneck for classical computers, which is speeded up by the Quantum Computers, by using what is known as the Quantum Fourier Transform (QFT – Quantum Fourier transform – Wikipedia). Here, the concept of Fourier transform and its fast implementation version FFT shows its ‘mightiness’.

Now, coming to Astronomy, the theorem known as Van Cittert-Zernike theorem (Van Cittert–Zernike theorem – Wikipedia) is used in astronomical imaging. According to this theorem, under certain conditions the Fourier transform of the mutual coherence function of a distant, incoherent source is equal to its complex visibility. Now, the terminology here might not give a direct insight of what is going on, but, all that we need to know is mutual coherence function represents the intensity or brightness of the source under observation, and visibility is the observable, that which we can directly get from a telescope. Conversion of these observables to an intensity distribution or an image is what Fourier transform does. All this comes under Interferometry and Aperture Synthesis in Radio Astronomy, which is a separate area of study by itself.

 

Mathematical Modelling to Calculate The time of photo taken from Shadow of Object in Photo

Hello World,

Yesterday on my Instagram, i tried to explain that How one could determine whether the Pic taken is Sunrise or Sunset in still Pic. The following article is based on mathematical modeling of the shadow length.

A quick recap to instagram stories there!

• You can’t with 100% accuracy determine that whether the pic is surise or sunse in a still frame, without knowing the landscape the photo was taken and thus it’s direction.
• There are however some tricks to distinguish the two. One major trick I’d like to point out is the difference in light. Sunsets are generally more colorful.
• The sun’s light consists of a spectrum of colors, the same spectrum as in a rainbow (plus some radiation humans can’t see, but that’s not important here). Blue light gets scattered the most, that’s why the sky is all round blue on a sunny day. Yellow light is harder to scatter, while orange and red are least susceptible to scattering.

• The sun’s light consists of a spectrum of colors, the same spectrum as in a rainbow (plus some radiation humans can’t see, but that’s not important here). Blue light gets scattered the most, that’s why the sky is all round blue on a sunny day. Yellow light is harder to scatter, while orange and red are least susceptible to scattering.

• The extent to which colors get scattered depends on how much air the light has to pass through and also on the air quality. In the morning and evening, the sun’s rays have to go through a much larger column of air, which explains why the sky at these moments is more colorful than in the middle of the day.

• In the morning and evening there is no difference between the amount of air between ground level and the sun, but in general the air quality is much better in the morning than the evening. Here, air quality refers to pollution (soot particles from diesel engines) but also to water vapor and dust particles kicked up by farming. Overnight, air pollution dissipates, there is less vaporization and dust settles.

• Hence in a sunset, sunlight will be scattered more. The colors yellow, orange and red will occupy larger sections of the sky.

Optics to differentiate photos is simple. This can be applied not only to the situation posted in the question, but to find out the time at which any photo was taken (under certain conditions) . First, assume these conditions:

• scene is flat (plane, inclination zero)
• naturally illuminated
• climatic conditions do not change between photos
• the subject in both photographs is the same
• the position of the camera is the same

Given a photograph of a known object and the place where it was taken, it is possible to determine the time it was taken and vice versa (time to position calculation). I could not find any good time lapse photos examples online or wait all day and snap pictures, so a few computer generated images from Blender should do the trick. I am simplifying the calculations with simple relationships so that it is easily understood, there is a lot more to this technique than what I am explaining here to predict the results with accuracy.

So here goes:
The length of the shadow changes during the day is inversely related to the elevation of the sun. Ie, the higher the elevation, shorter the shadow, and lower the elevation, the longer the shadow. Now consider this setup:

In this setup, as the sun moves from east to west, the shadow length varies, as shown from sunrise…

….to sunset when it gets dark. (Sun moves east to west, so shadows point in the opposite direction)
The shadow length variation with respect to time is a parabola, like this:

For the math, it is something like this:

Length of shadow ∝Cot(θ)

So shadow length is near infinity when the sun is rising or setting, and close to zero when the sun is highest, ie noon. Moving on to the next part of the puzzle.

All this is simple, so how does the sunset and sunrise fit into the same part of the horizon? There is one key change here – the position of the camera. To capture the sunrise and sunset as near same position near the horizon, the photographer has to face east during the sunrise ans west during the sunset. Turning to illustrations again to visualize this, we get the pictures as:
For the case when the sun is rising, the position of the observer has to be:

When the sun is setting, the position of the observer has to be:

The shadow length will be the same, but the directions of the shadows wont be. For visualising the difference, it would be like the difference between picture 1 and picture 8 in the sequence of eight pictures above, adjusted for the angle of the viewer.

How does location of the user play a part in this?
Eratosthenes figured this out in a rudimentary fashion back in 300BC, there is nothing fancy to this as well. The concept is simple – he measured shadow lengths in Swenet (present day Aswan) and Alexandria and concluded that the two cities were separated by an arc of 7 degrees or 1/50 of the earths curvature. So by measuring the angle, we can equate it to the curvature of the earth. Expanding this to the illustrations above, it can be explained as below:
In the pictures, you can measure the length of the shadow by counting the number of grid lines. So length of the shadow is known. Next, the direction of the shadow can be calculated by drawing a line from the object and the end of the shadow. So direction of the shadow is known as well. Taking just one case:

So now H,S, L, WLong and θ are known. There are many things that can be determined using this data, but for simplicity, consider:

S=Htan(L−((tilt)∗Sin(360∗t365))
Where,
S is the shadow  length
H is the height of the pole
tilt is the inclination of Earth’s  axis with respect to its orbit around the sun (23.5 degrees)
t is  the number of days from the vernal equinox and
L is the  latitude.

Longitude=15∗(X−12)
Where,
X is the time when the sun is at its peak
Longitude is the west longitude in degrees

It is possible to compensate for all the assumptions I made above using computing techniques and still maintain a reasonable level of accuracy to predict the geolocation from a timestamp or timestamp from geolocation. These techniques for shadow estimation, correction for slope in landscapes and filtering remain major topics of research and development as they have application in computer vision and robotics.

So using these factors and multiple shadows for more accuracy, the time when a picture was taken can be found – sunrise vs sunset can be determined from the time.

Disclaimer:
The graphics explaining the sun and the shadow lengths in these illustrations are not to scale with what will be generated naturally. They are for explaining the concepts and not to be taken as representing real life shadows, which are tedious to replicate and have multiple factors.

Further reading/references:

• How an observer’s latitude affects visible sky
• http://mvhs.shodor.org/mvhsproj/…
• An explanation of the method used by Eratosthenes to determine the circumference of the Earth
• Astronomical Applications Department of the U.S. Naval Observatory – click on Data Services
• Noon Observation Project at the University of Illinois

Why should I use DuckDuckGo instead of Google?

Have you heard the following saying:

“Don’t bite the hand that feeds you!”

As I understand DuckDuckGo is not competing against the content, product and service providers that make it useful and it is not taking away the privacy of it’s users that use the service. While it’s growth may be seen to be slow, it has a very loyal following

Here, is what the CEO and Founder of DuckDuckGo has to Say:

#1 — Google tracks you. We don’t.

You share your most intimate secrets with your search engine without even thinking: medical, financial and personal issues, along with all the day to day things that make you, well, you. All of that personal information should be private, but on Google it’s not. On Google, your searches are tracked, mined, and packaged up into a data profile for advertisers to follow you around the Internet through those intrusive and annoying ever-present banner ads, using Google’s massive ad networks, embedded across millions of sites and apps.

So-called incognito mode won’t protect you either. That’s a myth. “Incognito” mode isn’t really incognito at all. It’s an extremely misleading name and in my opinion should be changed. All it does is delete your local browsing history after your session on your device, but does nothing from stopping any website you visit, including Google, from tracking you via your IP address and other tracking mechanisms like browser fingerprinting.

To keep your searches private and out of data profiles, the government, and other legal requests, you need to use DuckDuckGo. We don’t track you at all, regardless what browsing mode you are in.

Each time you search on DuckDuckGo, it’s as if you’ve never been there before. We simply don’t store anything that can tie your searches to you personally, or even tie them together into a search history that could later be tied back to you. For more details, check out our privacy policy.

#2 — Block Google trackers lurking everywhere.

Google tracks you on more than just their search engine. You may realize they also track you on YouTube, Gmail, Chrome, Android, Gmaps, and all the other services they run. For those, we recommend using private alternatives like DuckDuckGo for search. Yes, you can live Google-free. I’ve been doing it for many years.

What you may not realize, though, is Google trackers are actually lurking behind the scenes on 75% of the top million websites. To give you a sense of how large that is, Facebook is the next closest with 25%. It’s a good bet that any random site you land on the Internet will have a Google tracker hiding on it. Between the two of them, they are truly dominating online advertising, by some measures literally making up 74%+ of all its growth. A key component of how they have managed to do that is through all these hidden trackers.

Google Analytics is installed on most sites, tracking you behind the scenes, letting website owners know who is visiting their sites, but also feeding that information back to Google. Same for the ads themselves, with Google running three of the largest non-search ad networks installed on millions of sites and apps: Adsense, Admob, and DoubleClick.

At DuckDuckGo, we’ve expanded beyond our roots in search, to protect you no matter where you go on the Internet. Our DuckDuckGo browser extension and mobile app is available for all major browsers and devices, and blocks these Google trackers, along with the ones from Facebook and countless other data brokers. It does even more to protect you as well like providing smarter encryption.

#3 — Get unbiased results, outside the Filter Bubble.

When you search, you expect unbiased results, but that’s not what you get on Google. On Google, you get results tailored to what they think you’re likely to click on, based on the data profile they’ve built on you over time from all that tracking I described above.

That may appear at first blush to be a good thing, but when most people say they want personalization in a search context they actually want localization. They want local weather and restaurants, which can actually be provided without tracking, like we do at DuckDuckGo. That’s because approximate location info is automatically embedded by your computer in the search request, which we can use to serve you local results and immediately throw away without tracking you.

Beyond localization, personalized results are dangerous because to show you results they think you’ll click on, they must filter results they think you’ll skip. That’s why it’s called the Filter Bubble.

So if you have political leanings one way or another, you’re more likely to get results you already agree with, and less likely to ever see opposing viewpoints. In the aggregate this leads to increased echo chambers that are significantly contributing to our increasingly polarized society.

This Filter Bubble is especially pernicious in a search context because you have the expectation that you’re seeing what others are seeing, that you’re seeing the “results.” We’ve done studies over the years where we have people search for the same topics on Google at the same time and in “Incognito” mode, and found they are significantly tailored.

On DuckDuckGo, we are committed to not putting you in the Filter Bubble. We don’t even force people into a local country index unless they explicitly opt-in.

#4 — We listen.

Google is notoriously hard to get a hold of. Locked out of your Gmail account? Sorry, we can’t help you. The Knowledge Graph says you’re dead? That’s unfortunate. Unless you’re a journalist or influencer of some kind, good luck getting anyone at Google to listen.

Meanwhile at DuckDuckGo we read every piece of feedback we get. We respond on social media. In short, we listen. My DMs are open and I read all the email sent to me personally. Feel free to reach out.

#5 — We don’t try to trap you in our “ecosystem.”

It used to be that you search on Google and then you click off to the top result. Over time, Google bought more and more companies and launched more and more of their own competing services, favoring them over others in their search results. Google Places instead of Yelp, TripAdvisor, etc. Google Products instead of Amazon, Target, etc. They’re in travel, health, and soon jobs. Anywhere there is money to be made, you can expect them to get into it eventually.

Even when you do click off, Google AMP tries to still trap you you in Google. And these tactics are not just on the search engine.

On Android there is immovable Google search widget and you can’t even change its search engine if you want to. This behavior is a direct analogue to Microsoft putting IE on Windows in the 1990s, but worse since you can’t remove it, can’t replace it, and it takes up more of the smaller screen. The same is true for other Google services on Android as well, forcing carriers to bundle and promote them. We personally have similar issues with Chrome search engine integration.

At DuckDuckGo, we aren’t trying to take over the world. We don’t have an “ecosystem” to trap you in. We just want to help you get to where you want to go as fast as possible, and protect you as much as we can in that process.

#6 — We have !bangs.

To further this point, we have a built-in feature called bangs that enables you to search other sites directly, completely skipping DuckDuckGo if you like. Here’s how it works. Let’s say you know you want to go to the Wikipedia article for ducks. You can just search for “!w duck” and we will take you right there.

The ! tells DuckDuckGo you want to use a bang shortcut, and the w is an abbreviation for Wikipedia. You can use the full name, though we have a lot of shortcuts such as !a for Amazon, !r for Reddit, etc. There are literally thousands of sites that this feature works with, and so most sites you think of will probably work. It also works with our autocomplete so you can see what’s there easily.

If you routinely search a particular site, like Stack Overflow for coding answers or Baseball Reference for stats or All Recipes for something to make, you can just go right there.

If DuckDuckGo is your default search engine, you can just type this right into your browser’s address bar, and skip loading our search engine altogether. We will just route you to the right place, without tracking you of course!

#7 — We strive for a world where you have control over your personal information.

Our vision is to raise the standard of trust online. If you share this vision, supporting DuckDuckGo helps us make progress towards it. For the past seven years, we’ve been donating a substantial portion of our profits to organizations that also work towards the Internet we want — an open Internet where you can take control of your personal information.

We believe that privacy policies shouldn’t be default “collect it all,” but instead offer a clear and compelling case as to what benefits you get by giving up your personal information. If you share this view for the future of data privacy, you can vote with your feet.

#8 — Our search results aren’t loaded up with ads.

For many Google searches, the entire first page is ads. On mobile it can be even worse, multiple pages of ads. Not so on DuckDuckGo. We keep ads to a minimum, and naturally they’re non-tracking ads, based only on search keywords and not on a personal profile or search history.

#9 — Search without fear.

When people know they are being watched, they change their behavior. It’s a well-documented behavior called the chilling effect, and it happens on Google. For example, an MIT study showed that people started doing fewer health searches on Google after the Snowden revelations, fearing that their personal ailments might get out.

“Suppressing health information searches potentially harms the health of search engine users and… In general, our results suggest that there is a chilling effect on search behavior from government surveillance on the Internet.”

Your searches are your business, and you should feel free to search whatever you want, whenever you want. You can easily escape this chilling effect on DuckDuckGo where you are anonymous.

#10 — Google is simply too big, and too powerful.

Google is GIANT, the epitome of Silicon Valley big tech, with a market cap of around 750 Billion dollars (at the time of writing), 75,000 employees, dominating search, browsing, online advertising, and more, with tentacles in everything tech, online and offline. Last year they outspent every other company on lobbying Washington.

By comparison, DuckDuckGo is tiny. We’re currently a team of about 45 people, scattered across the globe; I’m in Pennsylvania. We have a very narrow focus: helping you take control of your personal information online.

The world could use more competition, less focus on ad tracking, fewer eggs in one basket

Reference:

1.  Answer on Quora by Gabriel Weinberg, CEO and Founder of DuckDuckGo.
   

    

Something Special About Bhagvad Gita

I have always wonder why there is a special (shown below) Pic of Arjuna and Krisna being portrayed at many place.. Is there any significance behind it?

Have a look at this image.

It roughly shows the plot under which the Bhagawad Gita was explained. In this image, you can see the following thing,

• A chariot : It represents the human body.
• A charioteer ~ Lord Krishna : He represents बुद्धि (intelligence).
• The fighter ~ Arjuna : represents the जीव आत्मा (the induvidual self).
• Four horses : representing basic human emotions – Fear, Anger, Sadness and Joy.
• Reigns : representing the mind.
• Flag– representing Victory.

The induvidual self i.e Arjuna resides in the human body i.e Chariot which moves forward with four basic emotions- fear, joy, anger and sadness i.e the horses.

The emotions don’t have the right to move freely, if they did the intelligence fails. They are controlled by the mind i.e Reigns which in turn is controlled by the intelligence i.e Krishna.

The flag of victory flies only when these conditions are satisfied.

If you could grasp this much of knowledge from a mere image representing the plot of the Bhagawat Gita, imagine what could you learn from the 700 verses inside this book.

For the new reader Bhaagwat Gita is just another religious book in which a man representing God persuades a human to fight a war and win against the enemies.

But soon upon getting deep inside the book one realize it a source of eternal knowledge for the mankind.

So, what’s so special about BHAGaWAT GEETA,

It’s pure Philosophy.

No superstition, no magic.