Posts


Featured Post

Florence

Image
FLORENCE     Florence –  the capital of the Tuscany region and the cradle of Renaissance   We opted for Flix Bus while traveling from Venice to Florence. The road journey takes about three and a half-hour. In Florence, it terminates at the rear end of Santa Maria Novella (SMN) train station. One of Italy’s busiest stations, it got its name from Santa Maria Novella Church just across the plaza from the main entrance. We debarked at the station and refreshed ourselves at McDonald's before hiring a cab for our hotel. Florence, popularly known as ‘Firenze’ by the Italians, is located in central Italy. This dreamy city with a romantic name is the regional capital of the lovely Tuscany region.   Columbus Hotel, where we stayed, is located in Lugarno District. We always prefer to book our hotels through Booking.com as we always land up getting good hotels at good locations. Despite being a little away from the heart of the city and Santa Maria Novella station

ALONG THE RIVER VLTAVA

Image
ALONG THE VLTAVA RIVER – A Photo Essay on journey to Praha   The Berlin Central train station or Berlin Hauptbahnhof. It looks more like an international airport than a railway terminus. There are several tiers of platforms both above and below the main concourse, everything is shiny and spotlessly clean, large shafts send in streams of sunlight, and there’s the smell of coffee in the air. From here, the express train to Prague. The coupes are cozy and comfortable, and we had only one co-passenger—an immaculately dressed elderly person who seemed to have emerged out of the sketches found in nineteenth-century novels like Charles Dickens’s ‘The Pickwick Papers’. He sat quietly like a statue throughout the journey (perhaps because he did not speak English, and we did not speak German) and got off at Dresden, a picturesque border town in Germany famous for farmers’ carnivals, like the melas at Pushkar in Rajasthan and Santiniketan in West Bengal. After Dresden, the journey took

LED in general lighting ? Not quite yet

Image
LED in general lighting - an update   Biswajit Sengupta Despite rapid developments in LED as an efficient source of light it has not been able to capture even 5% of the market share in general lighting application which still is being dominated by the conventional light sources. It is true that apart from high power LED chips there has been great progress in enhancing reliability of drivers and heat sinks. At least the chip manufacturers can safely claim that their products are not going to betray the useful lives declared by them. LEDs do have some unique properties which no other light source can ever have. They are highly efficient, converts almost the entire electrical energy input into light energy; requires very little power to operate ( a green energy ) as it is seen in India almost 18% of the power generated is consumed by artificial lighting ( rest of the world, particularly the developed nations, may be even higher ); smaller solar panels can be used to provide po

Journey to the formidable Antarctica plateau

Image
Indian Expedition to South Pole  One hundred years ago, on December 14 1911 a Norwegian explorer Amundsen and his team achieved a historical feat by becoming the first humans to set foot on the formidable South Pole. After about a month Robert Scott the famous British explorer also made it to the dreaded Pole, after having failed in his earlier attempts from 1901 to 1909. But tragedy struck Scott and his four companions during their return journey. They perished after getting trapped in a fearsome blizzard. This typical Antarctica phenomenon strikes without warning and is so blinding that even objects at a distance of three feet become invisible. Unlike any other storm, a severe blizzard may last for a week at a time with winds blasting at over 100 miles per hour. Antarctica is the coldest, highest, windiest, driest and iciest continent on earth. South Pole is a table top at a height of 2500 M on this icy continent of Antarctica. The continent remains dark, without sunlight for alm