Sun TV and Vaasthu

Whereever you may live in the world, if you want to receive TV signals from a communications satellite, you have to point your dish towards the equator. If you live in the Northern Hemisphere, you have to point your dish to a direction in the south. Why is this ?

This is because all the communication satellites have to be 'geostationary' so that you do NOT have to keep adjusting your dish to point to the satellite. All the geostationary satellites will be located 36,000 km above the equator called as the 'Clarke belt'. At this height, the centrifugal force and the gravitational force cancel out each other and helps to keep the satellite stationary relative to earth.

So if you want to keep your dish in your backyard, per 'modern vaasthu' you better buy a North facing house/apartment (in North Hemisphere).

Now, let us get specific to SUN TV reception in North America. Dish Network, which is owned by Echostar communications, provides Sun TV channel.

Sun TV is available from 2 satellites, Echostar-1 and Echostar-3. The position of a satellite in this belt can be uniquely defined just by the longitude alone. This is because the other 2 coordinates are fixed for the 'Clarke belt', the height has to be 36000 km and the latitude has to be equator !

The longitude for Echostar-3 is 61.5 degrees and Echostar-1 is 148 degrees. The Echostar-3 serves the Eastern US and the Echostar-1 serves the Western-US.

You may wonder all this is fine, but what about the co-ordinates for my dish ! The elevation and azimuth for your dish can be easily calculated at this site http://www.sat-sales.com/calculator.php.

There is one more site http://www.n2yo.com/ which provides real time tracking of most of the satellites. I was amazed to see the information in this site !

Edwin Hubble

Hubble found the red shift to be proportional to the distance of the star, which led to the conclusion that the universe is expanding. He said that there is a linear relationship between the rate of expansion and the distance. There were disputes on the constant that defines the linear relationship and I read that recently scientists have agreed it to be about 71 km/sec/Mpc.

I have several questions/concerns related to the Hubble's law.

1. WMAP results mention that the expansion of the universe is accelerating. (In fact, I could not find anywhere as to how they have arrived at this conclusion. If any of you are aware of this, please let me know. )If the expansion of the universe is accelerating, the ratio of the expansion to the distance should have a second degree relationship and NOT a linear relationship as defined by Hubble. Either WMAP results are wrong or Hubbles law is wrong. Which one is ?

2. Let us take a Cephoid that is 1 Mpc away from the earth. When we observe the light from this star now, we are looking at the light that left 3.2 million years ago. Basically, when you measure the red shift, you get the 'cumulative' result of the changes in the 3.2 million light years. When it is a cumulative result. .how can it be said that the universe is expanding uniformly in a homogenous manner ?

3. All the red shifts are observed only in the stars in the universe that is 'visible' to us. We have no clue of what is happening beyond the 'visible area' of the universe. Probably, only the area that is visible to us is expanding and the universe beyond that is in contraction !!

I agree with the concept of cosmological red shift, however the above mentioned discrepancies need to be looked into.

WMAP - non-euclidean

There is a project called WMAP carried out by NASA. The results of the project were published in Mar 2006. The results that they have come up with are amazing. They have identified that the universe is flat, in the sense that 2 parallel lines will never meet in our universe.

When I was in high school, my father was studying Masters in mathematics and I used to take some of his books and read. There I found this concept of non-euclidean geometry very fascinating. I used to wonder whether our universe is hyperbolic ! But WMAP has conclusively determined that our universe is flat and euclidean as a whole.

This is a very significant discovery and am surprised that there is very little publicity on this.

Tom Friedman at Yale

I love Tom Friedman's ideas. I do not read the NY Times columns that he writes. But I read his book 'World is Flat' which is very well written. He takes the events in the recent past and tries to connect the dots. When I told a friend about this book, he said ' what flat !? it is round !'. I told him that Firedman does not say 'earth' is flat, he says 'world' is flat. There is difference between world and earth.

Tom's ideas appear to be very thorough at the first impression, but he does not provide hard evidence for the causes and effects that he links. But still the book is a very compelling read. He finds patterns where normally others don't.

Recently I watched his speech at Yale university via the following link.
Yale web site

The duration is for 1 hour. I started watching it late Friday night and could not stop it in between and watched the complete 1 hour.