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Then those teachers, books and maps are wrong. I don't have time to write a long explanation now, so I'll write a short one: About 20 years ago, the Secretary of Education asked me to evaluate the contents of a catalog presented to him by an Indian publisher of school textbooks. (I've never...

Thanks for your continued interest, guys. But my needs are very specific. Aluminium and plastic scales in various colours are easily available in local shops here. I have some of those as well as several bare steel ones. What I need is a steel ruler painted white, preferably with the scale...

That's not the same thing. The vast majority of Indians and foreigners call it Mumbai in both writing and speech. I bet you'll feel very differently if everyone outside MH calls it Bambai or Mubmia and insist that these are correct or that it doesn't matter. My people are not so narrow-minded...

To those of you who are interested in taking pictures of the moon, today is your chance to take the biggest image of the moon you can take. That's because the full moon coincides with one of the closest approaches the moon makes to the earth (perigee). Today the moon is slightly more than...

Yep, going on 71 :) Not much computing to do in the old days - microprocessors hadn't been invented yet and programming was for mainframe computers and the like. I dabbled in programming while attending special classes at IIT, Kanpur. A team of us plotted the course for Armstrong & Co.'s trip...

I may eclipse you in age ;) I don't do much programming as it's not my specialty. Taught myself electronics while in college, designed and built my first vacuum tube amplifier in 1969. Took part in medical electronics research in the early '70s (artificial pacemaker, patient monitoring system...

I've done that too, but I don't participate much in social media. Besides, a large majority of people on social media pay shallow attention to matters like this unless it affects them personally.

Thanks for your interest, guys. Let me expand a bit. My language is unusual in that there are no alternate spellings or pronunciations for any word or name. The phonetics have no 'in-between' sounds like that represented by a schwa or something between e and i, b and v, etc. Our alphabet is...

The name of my city is Aizawl and it is pronounced 'eye-zawl' with the 'awl' sounding as in crawl, shawl, trawl, scrawl, etc. It is a common sound in English. But many Indians, especially plains people, write and pronounce it Aizwal or Aizawal. It's not a typo; apparently they mentally convert...

Thanks for your interest. I should have made it clear that I need one made of steel. I have a 20-inch anodized aluminium ruler and white plastic ones are not hard to find. These are useful but too delicate for many applications.

I have a 1-foot steel ruler that's painted white (not steel coloured) with black markings. My daughter bought it for me from a local shop more than 10 years ago and I've ben using it every day ever since. It was priced about the same as a common steel ruler but the white colour makes a big...

Yes, I want analog for this application. My remark about making a purely binary clock was just idle theoretical speculation. It's not practical as it would involve changing the universal time system. One of the clocks I mentioned earlier is a Casio digital wall clock with 2.25-inch-high digits...

Theoretically, it would be easier to make a digital clock system with 64 seconds per minute, 64 minutes per hour and 16 or 32 hours a day because these are all binary numbers. But then the units - second, minute and hour - will have different lengths from what they are now.

:) Yeah, I can see how it could have been misconstrued that way.

That's true. Advanced countries have had such systems for a long time and I've often wished we had the same. But then the clocks would have to be compatible with the system. You can't use it with just any old clock. It would be like trying to use Facebook or WhatsApp from a Nokia 1100. :)

Thanks for taking the time to reply. But most of the points you made are off the mark. Perhaps you didn't read my posts carefully. Partly yes, but it's not just a matter of timekeeping accuracy. This clock is behaving in a way no conventional clock should behave. What level of accuracy? I...

I considered that and had almost decided to go that route. In fact, I had mentally chosen the Rs.165 wall clock mentioned above. Then it occurred to me that since one is an alarm clock and the other is a simple wall clock, there might be mechanical differences. Sure enough, the location of the...

Update: At around 10:30 am today, I sent images of the product to the address provided by the agent last night. The reply came almost exactly one hour later. It said that since the item is non-returnable, a return and replacement is not possible. Instead, they are giving me a full refund. They...

:D I'm all too familiar with how easy it is to lose track of time in the bathroom, especially when I have a good novel in my hands. To each his own. Neither my wife nor I am bothered by the tick-tock at all.