Seek and Solve

Seek and Solve

Welcome to Seek and Solve — a place where I collect interesting questions and work through them, one answer at a time.

Every post here starts as a question I was genuinely curious about. I then research it, think it through, and write up what I learned in plain language. No fluff, no ads, no trackers — just questions and honest attempts at answers.

Browse all posts, or learn more about the project.

Recent Questions

Q. Why we are going to the South Pole of the Moon?

Answer

Artemis II in Eclipse (NASA)
Short answer is South Pole is far more interesting than the north pole. South pole of the moon has big craters, centers of which are always remain in shadow. In these always shadow areas, temperature can fall far below freezing, thus allowing existence of water ice. India’s Chandrayaan I (2008) first found that traces of water molecules are present in these craters using NASA’s Moon Mineralogical Mapper equipment onboard. This started the current obsession of space agencies world over to land near South Pole of the moon.

Q. How does a static website differ from a dynamic one?

Answer

A static site sends the same pre-built HTML to every visitor, while a dynamic site generates pages on the fly — usually per request, per user.

Static

With a static site:

  • HTML, CSS, and JS files are generated once (either by hand or by a generator like Hugo).
  • A web server simply hands those files to visitors.
  • There’s no database, no server-side processing per request.

This makes static sites fast, cheap to host, and very secure (there’s almost nothing to hack).

Dynamic

A dynamic site:

  • Runs code on the server (e.g. Node.js, Python, PHP) every time someone visits.
  • Often queries a database to assemble the page.
  • Can personalize content per user (think logged-in dashboards).

This flexibility comes with cost: you need a running server, and each request uses CPU and memory.

Which should you pick?

For a blog — especially one that’s mostly writing — a static site is almost always the right call. You get great performance, near-zero hosting cost, and you can focus on content rather than infrastructure.

That’s exactly why this blog is built with Hugo.

Q. Why is the sky blue?

Answer

Because of a phenomenon called Rayleigh scattering.

Blue sky with scattered white clouds
Photo by ElooKoN, CC BY-SA 4.0

Sunlight looks white, but it’s actually a mix of all visible colors — each with a different wavelength. Blue and violet light have the shortest wavelengths, while red and orange have the longest.

When sunlight enters Earth’s atmosphere, it bumps into nitrogen and oxygen molecules. These molecules scatter light in all directions, but they scatter shorter wavelengths (blue) much more strongly than longer ones (red). The effect scales roughly with the inverse fourth power of wavelength — meaning blue is scattered about ten times more than red.

So when you look at the sky, you’re seeing sunlight that has been scattered off molecules above you. Most of what reaches your eyes from “empty” patches of sky is that scattered blue light.

So why not violet?

Violet has an even shorter wavelength than blue, so shouldn’t the sky look violet? Two reasons:

  1. The sun emits less violet light to begin with.
  2. Our eyes are more sensitive to blue than to violet.

Combined, the sky settles on that familiar blue.

And sunsets?

At sunset, sunlight travels through much more atmosphere to reach you. By the time it arrives, most of the blue has been scattered away — leaving the reds and oranges to paint the horizon.