There are a few instances of weird coincidences that I vividly remember which I wanted to record in the blog for past few months. Following are two such instances:
Catalytic Converter
It was during my school days when we started studying organic chemistry and about catalysts. Few of the reactions involved, conversion of hydrocarbons into carbon monoxide carbon dioxide and water etc.
At the same time we were introduced pollutants, carbon monoxide, NOx etc. I used to correlate and think that if we could convert CO to CO2 and NOx to N2 and water, we could reduce pollution. If they could be done in the exhaust of the cars we could eliminate air pollution in vehicles. Applying what we read, this may need catalysts.
I discussed this at length with my cousin during a week end.
The Hindu used to carry a supplement on Thurdays for Science and Technology. The Thursday after that weekend, there was an article in that about catalytic converters. It discussed about beehive shaped compartments which would have catalysts to convert CO to CO2 etc. to reduce pollution.
I did not realize it then, but, it is such a weird coincidence looking back now.
Vertical Farming
This is more recent and happened in the last year or so. I kept thinking about the reducing agricultural lands in India and thought that if we could do farming in multi-stories, then potentially we could produce more in limited space. Each locality could have one such building. This would supply a part of the needs for the locality. It should not be a glass house so that it could be maintained easily, but instead lighting could be through mirrors sending the sunlight into the building or optical fibers running from the terrace. Neither of these might be economically feasible, but just a thought. I thought this could be called vertical farming.
The day after that there was an article in The Times of India, that discussed about an expert who was working on agriculture in increasingly urban set up and he mentioned about multi-storey agriculture and called it Vertical Farming. This is second weird coincidence and made me think about recording these in a blog.
