17.06.2007

• Today it is Father’s Day
• Father's Day is inaugurated in the early 20th century to complement Mother's Day in celebrating fatherhood and parenting by males, and to honor and commemorate fathers and forefathers. Father's Day is celebrated on a variety of dates worldwide, and typically involves gift-giving to fathers and family-oriented activities. In India it is celebrated on third Sunday of June every year.
• India, Japan in currency swap deal?
• Once the agreement is signed both the countries will be able to swap foreign exchange reserves to counter speculative moves on their currencies.
• What this means is that Japan will accept rupees in exchange for dollars and India will receive yen in exchange for dollars, as and when the need arises.
• Such a measure is a safeguard against an onslaught on their currencies. Speculative attacks on their currencies can be thwarted with this kind of an arrangement.
• If the deal is struck, for India it will be a first of its kind. But Japan already has such agreements with China, South Korea, Malaysia, Indonesia and Thailand.
• What is a Botnet?
• In the Internet parlance, automated crime networks are called botnets. Hackers can create such networks.
• Robert Zoellick
• He is the candidate announced by US for the World Bank Chief’s post.
• What is a commodity balance sheet?
• The one which shows the relationship between price and supply/demand factors in the past and helps predict the future price levels.
• About woman pilots in India
• 1932: Urmila Parikh became the first to get a pilot’s licence from the Aero Club of India and Burma.
• 1951: Prem Mathur was the first commercial pilot for Deccan Airways.
• 1995: Nivedita Bhasin (26) is the youngest pilot in civil aviation history to command a jet.
• 1999: Gunjan Saxena at 24 is the first to fly in a combat zone during the Kargil war.
• What is Hutchison effect?
• It is a collection of phenomena discovered accidentally by John Hutchison during a study of longitudinal waves of Tesla in 1979.
• These phenomena include:
• Levitation of heavy objects
• Fusion of dissimilar materials such as metal and wood
• Anomalous heating of metals without burning adjacent material
• Spontaneous fracturing of metals
• Changes in the crystalline structure and disappearance of metal samples
• Hutchison and his supporters surmise that these phenomena arise from zero-point energy or the Casimir Effect.
• Biggest desert or earth?
• Antarctic desert. 55,00,000 sq miles.
• Sahara desert with 33,20,000 sq miles is the biggest non-polar desert.
• When do you call something a desert?
• When it receives less than 10 inches of precipitation (both snow and rain fall) per year.
• Knighthood for Salman Rushdie
• His noted works:
• “Midnight’s Children” (1981)
• It won the Booker Prize for Fiction, the James Tait Black Memorial Prize, an Arts Council Writers’ Award and English-Speaking Union Award. In 1993, it was judged to have been the “Booker of Bookers”, the best novel to have won the Booker Prize for Fiction in the award’s 25 year history.
• “Satanic Verses”
• Can you answer the Open Space queries?
• In today’s Open Space column in Times of India there are two questions that are posed for readers. If you had been following our blogs religiously, you would be in a position to answer them. Are you game for answering them? Take a look:
• What are NSG countries?
• In Pulse Polio Abhiyan, what does Pulse mean?