News...To The

Today, in order to comment, debate or even opinionate, one needs to dig deep and know the A TO Z of news. Startingwith letter A, TIMES NIE takes you on a news-ical journey,explaining every name, place and context associated with it

In the news for: Greta hitches a low-carbon ride to Europe

Swedish teen climate activist GretaThunberg has hitched a renewable energyride back to Europe, sailing into the

Atlantic on a trip she hopes will get her toMadrid in time for another climate conference,and then home for the holidays.

Thunberg tweeted on Wednesday as she tookto the sea on the 48-foot catamaran of anAustralian family that answered her urgentappeal for a low-carbon wayback home after theUnited Nations climate meeting she had plannedto attend in Chile was moved due to politicalunrest there. She encouraged followers to tracktheir journey online.

GRETA THUNBERG

GREAT GRETA, THEGAMECHANGER

THE TEENAGER: whose fame canbe measured by the fact that sheis almost always referred to by herfirst name only — has become alightning rod for criticism. Thisdoes not deter her spirit. FOCUSED: Greta’s arguing point isthat humanity must reduce green-house gas emissions that haveunrelentingly increased since thestart of the industrial revolution,resulting in global warming.

GOAL-CENTRIC: Her current role inthe spotlight marks a drastic shiftfrom the crippling depression shefell into around the age of 11 whichleft in a state where she couldn’teat much or speak, as reported byThe Guardian and the New YorkTimes. Turning her worries —including climate change, whichshe's recalled learning aboutaround eight — has given her anewfound purpose.

Google buysFitbit for $2.1 billion

Google, the company thathelped make it fun to just sitaround surfing the web, has

bought fitness-tracker Fitbit forabout $2.1 billion. The deal could putGoogle in direct competition withApple and Samsung in the highlycompetitive market for smartwatch-es and other wearable electronics.

Did you know?SERGEY BRIN AND LARRY(LAWRENCE) PAGE MET BY CHANCE

1 Larry Page, 22 yrs at the time, hav-ing earned a computer engineer-ing degree from the University of

Michigan, considers attending StanfordUniversity for his PhD Sergey Brin, then21, already a PhD candidate at the pres-tigious institution, is assigned to showPage around the campus. That was backin 1995 and, as fate would have it, quitethe momentous meeting of the minds.

GOOGLE WAS ORIGINALLY NAMEDBACKRUB

2 In 1996, Page and Brin collabo-rated on a pioneering “webcrawler” concept curiously called

BackRub. Some speculate that the ear-ly search engine’s nomenclature wasa nod to retrieving backlinks. Back-Rub, which linked to Brin’sand Page’s ‘90s-tasticoriginal homepages,lived on Stanford'sservers for morethan a year, but eventuallygrabbed too muchbandwidth.

GOOGLE IS A PLAYON THE WORD"GOOGOL"

3 On Sept 15, 1997, over the Back-Rub title, Page and Brin registeredthe domain name of their mush-

rooming project as Google, a twist on“googol”, a mathematical term repre-sented by the numeral one followed by100 zeros. The name hinted at the seem-ingly infinite amount of data. A googolis the large number: in decimal nota-tion, it is written as the digit 1 foll-owed by 100 zeroes. Many wondered

WHY GOOGLE BOUGHT FITBIT➤ Google makes software for use in other manufac-turers' wearable devices, but those products haven'tgained much traction in the face of competitionfrom Fitbit, Apple,Samsung and others.And Google doesn't sella device of its own.➤ The deal to buyFitbit could give Googlea needed boost.➤ “Google doesn't want to be left out of the

party,” said analyst Daniel Ives of WedbushSecurities. “If you look at what Apple has

done with wearables, it's a missing piece ofthe puzzle for Google.”

Green crackers didn’t help Delhi ingetting less polluted

Despite only two kinds of green crackersbeing sold during Diwali, Delhi faced thebrunt post the festival, when people burst

fireworks wantonly, resulting in AQI levels reach-ing a peak of nearly 500. Subsequently, Delhi hadto face a 'public health emergency warning.'

GREEN CRACKERS

GREEN CRACKERS➤ In October 2018, theSupreme Court allowed thebursting of low-emission crack-ers, relaxing the 'com-plete ban' issued in2017. Such 'green'crackers were devel-oped by CSIR-NEERI.

➤ 'Green' crackers don'tcontain banned chemicalssuch as lithium, arsenic, barium

and lead. They are called SafeWater Releaser (SWAS), SafeThermite Cracker (STAR) and

Safe Minimal Aluminium(SAFAL) crackers.

➤ Green crackers,which release watervapour, don't allow

dust particles to rise.They are designed to

have 30% less particulatematter pollution.

‘I learnt to create own expectations’

He is someonewho createshis own

expectations and isnever governed byothers. There isalways a lot ridingon Sourav Ganguly from the time he becamecaptain of the Indian team, and now, thenewly-elected Board of Control for Cricket inIndia (BCCI) President.

UNCONVENTIONAL DECISIONS…➤ Ganguly sent VVS Laxman to replaceDravid at No 3 in the 2001 Kolkata Test vsAustralia. Laxman scored 281* and therest is history. ➤ Ganguly was the one tomake Virender Sehwag open the innings.➤ Players like Sehwag, Yuvraj Singh,Zaheer Khan, Mohd Kaif, Harbhajan Singh,Irfan Pathan and MS Dhoni made theirdebut under Ganguly.

Justice Gogoi to retire in Nov

It has almost become a tradition now for a retiring Chief Justice of India to save some important

judgments for the last few days of histenure. And now, ahead of his retirementon November 17, Justice Gogoi had to deliver four major verdicts — onreview petitions against the SC verdictson Kerala’s Sabarimala Temple, Rafale

fighter jet deal, bringing the court and the CJI's

office under RTI, and the Ayodhya dispute.

The new CJISharad ArvindBobde will take

charge onNovember 18.

WHY CJI GOGOI'SLAST DAYS INOFFICE ARECRITICAL FORJUSTICE

➤ The 'pile-up' ofimportant cases in theCJI's court, daysbefore retirementisn't new. The previ-ous CJI Dipak Misra-led benches weresupposed to deliver judg-

ments on at least eight important issues in thelast six working days before his retirement.

➤ DOES IT MATTER? Apart from increas-ing the workload of the judges to finishwriting their judgment before a fellowjudge on the bench retires, the rush may

have an impact on the quality of discus-sions the judges have about the case.

Photo: Getty images

Photo: Getty images

LESS POLLUTING?NOT REALLY….➤ Green cracker manu-facturers claim particu-late matter pollution willbe reduced by 30% ifthese crackers are used.However, these numbershave been computed in alab setting and have notbeen verified in realworld conditions.➤ Also to be noted isthat green crackers arenot available in sufficientnumbers, and can’t betermed a “non-polluter”.

GANGULY

GOOGLE

if Google is a misspelling of

Googol.

GOOGLE'S FIRSTDOODLE WAS A

BURNING MAN FIGURE

4The inaugural doodle wasan out-of-the-office mes-sage that Page and Brin

created in August 1998 to letpeople know they'd shipped offto the Burning Man festival (abonfire ritual that started onthe summer solstice in 1986when friends met on BakerBeach in San Francisco and

burned an 8-foot-tall woodenman as a spontaneous act of“radical self-expression”). Thefuture billionaires positionedthe iconic Man behind the sec-ond “o” in Google's logo.

GOOGLE'S FIRST OFFICEWAS A RENTED GARAGE

5 So stereotypical of aSilicon Valley startup,right? Starting in Sep-

tember 1998, the company'sfirst workspace was SusanWojcicki's garage on SantaMargarita Ave. in MenloPark, California.

GOGOI

The47th CJI-des-ignate Sharad

Arvind Bobde willbe sworn in on

Nov 17.

"As a captain, I had my own ideas — which Iwanted to achieve — they may be good tosomeone and not good to someone. Ibelieve in not hurting anyone. But when youtake decisions somebody will be happy andsomebody unhappy. That's life." – Ganguly

03A TO Z OF NEWS“If you can't understand it without an explanation,you can't understand it with an explanation.”

Haruki Murakami