pH balanced is worth it

Getting bored of watching all the cosmetic commercials for ages I'm not a big fan of skin care and cosmetics. Personally don't believe in these adds which claim to do 'that and this..'. But out of curiosity the other day I wanted to try a shower gel which I have never tried before. And after weeks of using it I started liking it more than the usual soap. Because I felt that the shower gel was not too hard on skin unlike the soap which leaves the skin dry. And some shower gels are pH balanced i.e when used in hard water they will lather more neutralize hard minerals and leave your skin soft. Hence in any water you use the skin is always soft like it will be when you use soft water. I got myself the Harvard shower gel from marks and spencers which I really liked. Soon will let you know about my other experiments :)

The Deception

The Deception with Keith Barry is one nice program on discovery channel. Its all about psychology and hypnotism. There is a belief that in hypnotism it is possible to make a person go sleep and make them talk in their subconscious state. In the deception there are few cases where Barry reads peoples mind and tells the persons ATM pin figures exactly one by one just by looking at the persons face, which appears to be little overlooked and makes us think is it possible ?
Based on my knowledge.. for interrogating criminals and terrorists Intelligent Agencies use drugs to make them unstable and then try to get answers they want though it is not 100% accurate. But in Barry's case he seems to make people fall in their subconscious state so instantly just by telling few words.
The sleeping agent is another case where he makes a person go sleep and then transform that person into a sleeping agent who does what ever Barry asks him and its also demonstrated in a coffee shop.
If this is true why doesn't governments use these mentalists to negotiate with all the terrorist and avoid all the catastrophes they have done :)

Simple way of finding Image height and width

Ok here is a simple way to find the length and width of an image in java dynamically , just in case if you have stored your image in the db in the form of byte array. In our application we had an option of uploading images where we saved only the image size but not the dimensions. I found this way more easy for getting image height and width.

All you have to do is import the "ImageIcon" package from javax.swing package and simply add the byte array from the db and pass it as a parameter.

 ImageIcon imageIcon = new ImageIcon(img.getYourImageByteArray());
int width = imageIcon.getIconWidth();
int height = imageIcon.getIconHeight();
 System.out.println("Image Height : "+height +"  Image Width : "+width);

This worked for me , Cheers !

Lake Vostok..my thoughts

It was such a thrilling moment when I read the news about the Lake Vostok that has been discovered in Antarctica. It is going to give us an insight on how the world existed before 15 million years ago. The vastok station base was established in Antarctica by Russia to study the ice composition and conduct experiments on atmosphere in arounds 1970s. And what makes it soo special is that the vastok station is the coldest place on earth about minus 89 degree Celsius. It takes about 1000 kilometer tractor journey to reach the vastok station from the edge of antarctic. Initially question arises how can a lake exist in such a coldest place ? If the surface temperature is around  minus 80 degrees at the bottom at least half of it  minus 40 or worst case 0 is enough to make the water freeze.. The fact is that the lake exists under the massive ice sheet  about 4 km thick and stretching for about 150 km under the massive ice. Even though the temperature at the bottom should also be proportional as the temperature of the ice.. the pressure of tons of ice is soo intense and the earths geothermal heat makes the lake in liquid state for over a millions of years and in fact untouched by human. Scientists predict that the water should be twice as pure as a double distilled  water. And the organisms existing in that ecosystem can throw light on evolution of living things on earth.
Studying the vastok also gives scientists an opportunity to study similar climate conditions in other planets especially jupiter and saturns moons which have a icy surface. One aspect that I'm not happy about was the way the drilling of the 4km ice happened. Since the climate is too cold in antarctic, there are chances that the drilling hole will freeze again and the hole might get closed by the drilling water hence the engineers used kerosene and some other solutions for keeping the hole from freezing. But only recently they have come up with a hot water drilling method using which the hole is drilled. Whatever be the method the lake must not be spoiled as that is the only evidence that there was some thing existed in our earth millions of years ago and which can still be seen !