Unexplained experiences in Pune

It has been more than a decade but the moment is still fresh in memory. Don't remember the exact time now, but it was sometimes between 1996-1999 during hot months of May-June. One day when going towards Kothi Gate from department (Pune University Computer Science Department) around 2:00pm, when it is quite hot during the day, at the crossroads near the department it seemed as if something touched my hand or my hand touched something, and it felt as if I touched cold ice. Rest of the body except that part of the hand was hot in sun and that part of the hand was quite cold.

Perhaps some kind of invisible thing - could it be convection current? could it be some invisibility experiment at university?

Phishers targeting Indian Income Tax Payers

Recently I got an email (claiming to be) from refund@incometaxindia.gov.in that went like

Dear Taxpayer,

After the last annual calculations of your fiscal activity we have determined that you are eligible to receive a tax refund of (INR) 13963.00 .

Please submit the tax refund request and allow us 6-9 days in order to process it.

A refund can be delayed for a variety of reasons.
For example submitting invalid records or applying after the deadline.

To access your tax refund, use the form attached to this email.


Regards,
Department of Revenue,Ministry of Finance,Government of India

It also had an attachment 

Content-Type: application/octet-stream; name=income tax refund request.html
Content-Transfer-Encoding: base64
Content-Disposition: attachment; filename=income tax refund request.html

Size of attachment was 4 lines, 5 words and 26037 bytes, with newlines being CRLF. The content of this html file was a small Javascript  doing a document.write(unescape('.... a large escaped string ....')), and it showed like attached image, except the following missing line at the bottom of the page in the image.

Note: For security reasons, we recommend that you close your browser after you have finished the refund process.

Here are the headers of the mail.

From: "refund@incometaxindia.gov.in" <refund@incometaxindia.gov.in>
To: undisclosed-recipients:;
Cc:
Subject: Refund income tax department
Date: Wed, 24 Feb 2010 11:48:07 -0500
Return-Path: <refund@incometaxindia.gov.in>
Delivered-To: email-id-blocked
Received: (qmail 16162 invoked by uid 0); 24 Feb 2010 17:00:24 -0000
X-Ob-Received: from unknown (192.168.9.134) by mta45-1.us4.outblaze.com; 24 Feb 2010 17:00:24 -0000
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Received: from User ([67.227.173.160]) by wernerusa.com with Microsoft SMTPSVC(6.0.3790.3959); Wed, 24 Feb 2010 11:48:10 -0500
Reply-To: <refund@incometaxindia.gov.in>
Mime-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: multipart/mixed; boundary="----=_NextPart_000_0105_01C2A9A6.2ADAE3C4"
X-Priority: 3
X-Msmail-Priority: Normal
X-Mailer: Microsoft Outlook Express 6.00.2600.0000
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Now spams on mobile too

Have been getting telemarketing category of spam SMSes for quite some time and getting used to those. However spam category of spam SMSes have started giving competition to telemarketers these days, like the following SMS that I got few minutes back. It goes like

Number: TM-SPDC UK
Content: 
Congratulations! You have won $3,000,000 in this year's Shell Mobile Draw with pin SPDC-IN. To claim, e-mail your pin to Rev. Williams on: wmark1529@yahoo.com

Registering in NDNC (National Do Not Call) registery or DND (Do Not Disturb) lists of service providers has resulted in lesser number of advertisement calls, and at times when you tell the telemarketeer lady about your NDNC/DND registration, they are prompt to end the call and often take care to update their database(hopefully) about whom to call and not call.

What about the Junk/Unwanted SMSes? High time that technology upgrades are made to detect SMSes sent in bulk at service provider end (and in handset?) and marking those as spam in mobile inbox. May be, we need to add some new header bits/bytes in SMS protocol for this and move on to SMS v3.0, sooner the better.

Is colour of halo around moon a warning sign?

Last night I was startled by the colour of halo around moon. I have seen brownish and greyish halo around moon many times since childhood, especially during winters, that is taken as an indication of dewfall. But this was greenish in colour.

Later around midnight, there was storm with rains.

Expansion of GOD

Well... well... it is not about omnipresence of GOD is, but whether can it be a short form indicating something about the forces that run this Shristi. Till few weeks back I also did not know it, even I had never dreamed that the word GOD could also be an acronym.

Few months back I had attended a monthly meeting at R.I.M.Y.I.  where for past few months Geeta Jee (daughter of Yog Guru B.K.S. Iyengar) is attempting to explain meaning of Bhagwat Gita adhyaay by adhyaay, each adhyaay (chapter) normally taking couple of meetings even when touching at the surface. It is where I first heard of Trinity in GOD.

Generator (Karta Brahma)

Organiser (Bharta Vishnu)

Destroyer (Harta Mahesh)

Our ancestors hid lot of knowledge, atleast mystical, in easy to remember words and verses so that it could easily be carried forward unaltered, and hoping that someday someone could(would) decipher it and know what all they had learned then. Still there could be much more than what meets the eye.

When will we wake up to the risks of living nearer to power lines?

Read an article in Amar Ujala on 22nd December 2008, that briefly discussed about the risk of blood cancer/lukemia in people, especially young kids, living in homes under/near high voltage electricity lines.

As per the article, British government has prohibited construction of homes and schools within 200 feet from these lines. When will we wake up to this risk in India, where I have seen housing complexes within 20 feet from these lines and still newer projects coming up within 100 feet from power lines.

MSN Live Search: Same query different number of results

May be what I have happened to chance upon at MSN Live Search (search.live.com), is a characteristic of other search engines like yahoo, google as well. Any expert out there, who can explain the whys of this seemingly discrepancy (feature)?

I tried 3 expressions of same example query in succession at search.live.com and got 3 different number of search results.

1. (site:.ke OR site:.tn) AND mogadishu
resulted in a page mentioning "Web 1-10 of 497 results"·

2. mogadishu AND (site:.ke OR site:.tn)
resulted in a page mentioning "Web 1-10 of 777 results".

3. (mogadishu AND site:.ke) OR (mogadishu AND site:.tn)
resulted in a page mentioning "Web 1-10 of 610 results".

In this example, number differences are not that great, but I had noticed a significant difference in these numbers, with a different search initially.

What are your expectations as a user in above example?