It's blogroll rebuilding time! How better to start than with a clean slate. To begin, all the book podcasts I listen to regularly have now been placed in Google Reader. You'll also find it shared on the side bar to the left. Subscribe to the share, if you would like to keep a tab on my recommendations. At the moment, unfortunately, the shared items are listed in the order I marked them and so you may have to paginate a bit to get through them. It's still worth a look, if I may say so. Below are some I highly recommend:
I welcome your recommendations of writers/books podcast you think I should listen to.
How would you explain digital computation and binary math/logic to someone who does not have a mathematics or computer science background? I had about two minutes to think when my brother-in-law asked how computers work. I went with the first useful thought that came to my mind.
Explain what's counting, since counting is where all mathematics begins. Then explain positional representation of numerical values. (As an aside, I should mention this: Until zero and positional representation of values reached Europe through Arabs, clerks in Venice were sullen and bitter as they had to write shitty numbers like XMVXXXIII, instead of nice compact ones like 12829.)
After introducing arithmetic, get him to work out how arithmetic operations would work with just two numbers - 0 and 1. Supply some binary arithmetic problems. 1 + 1 = 100. 1 + 1 = 10. Whoa! Explain why this should not be a surprise. Then go on to how all computation is implemented as binary logic circuits. Finally, wear the expression of the Learned and say "that's how computers work".
I think I conveyed the basic idea of computational devices that use binary logic. Still, am sure there are more refined and better ways to do this, even if you have only a few minutes.
Let the writer take up surgery or bricklaying if he is interested in technique. There is no mechanical way to get the writing done, no shortcut. The young writer would be a fool to follow a theory. Teach yourself by your own mistakes; people learn only by error. The good artist believes that nobody is good enough to give him advice. He has supreme vanity.
How refreshing! That was from The Paris Reviews, the finest set of interviews with writers in all the world. You can read more about The Paris Reviews from an article Orhan Pamuk wrote for The Guardian last year. (see)
I started to post a reminder about the Scifi Story Contest and went on a tangent. How is your story coming along? Are you laboring with your neck yoked to technique? Break free. That said, I admit I don't have any suggestions on how you may get to the end of your story. I'll quote Faulkner's again and leave you to your wits:
A writer needs three things, experience, observation, and imagination--any two of which, at times any one of which--can supply the lack of the others. With me, a story usually begins with a single idea or memory or mental picture. The writing of the story is simply a matter of working up to that moment, to explain why it happened or what it caused to follow.
Suvrat Kher, a geologist, has given answers to questions from a muddled engineer and wannabe astrologer. Suvrat Kher is a patient bloke. Instead of hitting the questioner on the head repeatedly with Sagan's Baloney Detection Kit, he has done the nicer thing.
Why do so many seemingly educated people - people who have been trained in the scientific method - have a soft spot for astrology in India.
How does one deal with those who do not understand the rational way of living, those who follow unreasonable dogma like religion and give in to superstitions?
There are two different approaches marked by the diametric positions that they take. One is to shame the irrational person so that they are persuaded or forced to go into hiding. They other is to engage with them in conversations about agreements and disagreements and try to win them over to the side of rationality. There are other approaches besides these two, most are usually a varying mix of these two contrasting approaches. (We will ignore the non-approach called 'ignore them'. )
There are merits to the shaming someone into submission (needless to say, you can never win someone over by shaming them). Shame is a universally detested experience for all. It is built into our biology to cringe and hide away when in shame. When using shame one has a fair chance of being effective in controlling irrationality. Indeed, it is necessary to reduce and remove some of the venomous kinds of irrationality like astrology. But, what gives efficacy to shame contains the seeds for its own eventual ineffectiveness. Shame drives people underground. Contrary to what we may expect, when things go underground they get more sinister. Exploitation of the vulnerable by quacks and charlatans is one of the consequences. Shaming is the 'hammer' solution. It's drives the nail in, however, not everything is a nail.
'Try and win them over' needs none of my amateur philosophies to stand its ground. Ultimately, after all points and counterpoints have been made, this is the only enlightened choice left. Like all such choices, this is hard to make and harder to live with, for it requires love and compassion, besides enormous personal effort. Nevertheless, in the long run - if one is lucky, in the short run as well-, compassion trumps all other approaches.
To my regret, I have most often gone the 'shame them' way. Still, one goes on in the hope that reason would see us through and prepare us to be more compassionate.
Compassion and Science: this thought is at its infancy in my mind. I have just begun to explore it. What would you do, what have you done, when faced with irrationality?
Leaping Shampoo Fascinating effect. Even more fascinating is how the experimenters are able to produce a cascade effect (towards the end of the video).
LiveScience has a nifty list. From an artificial hippocampus - the part of the brain that helps with short-term memory-, to Retinal Prosthesis or bionic eyes - electrodes implanted in the eye that help people who've lost some of their retinal function see again.
An article in NY Times about an immigrant who has lived half his life in the US dies in custody due to systemic negligence and apathy. This is not a one off case, if you are tempted to dismiss it.
Mr. Ng's death follows a succession of cases that have drawn Congressional scrutiny to complaints of inadequate medical care, human rights violations and a lack of oversight in immigration detention, a rapidly growing network of publicly and privately run jails where the government held more than 300,000 people in the last year while deciding whether to deport them.
Edwidge Danticat's Brother, I'm dying is a memoir you want to read, if you are unaware of immigrant's issues after 911. Edwidge Danticat is a Haitian-born American author, a National Book Critics Circle Award winner. She testified last year before the U.S. Congress on Immigration. It is a powerful testimony that I hope you would read.
I write today not in my own name, but in the name--and stead--of a loved one who died while in the custody of Department of Homeland Security and Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials, and the Krome Detention Center in Miami. His name was Joseph Nosius Dantica and he was 81 years old.
He was the patriarch, the head, of our family. He was a father of two and grandfather of fifteen, an uncle to nearly two dozen of us, a brother, a friend, and even, after having survived throat cancer, which took away his voice, a minister to a small flock in Port-au-Prince, Haiti.
I am deeply saddened. This is a country I left in 2006 with a heavy heart, with the heart of one who has to leave a good friend. America was for me a companion who showed possibilities I never dreamt of.
Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tossed, to me:
I lift my lamp beside the golden door.
-Emma Lazarus, The New Colossus.
Has America forgotten that it is still the land that Emma sang about....
many of the people who are making the new India new - from the stockbrokers to the bedecked socialites - are responsible for preserving a certain gloomy element of the Indian past: a tendency to treat the hired help like chattel, to taunt and humiliate and condescend to them, to behave as though some humans were born to serve and others to be served.
"Indians are perhaps the world's most undemocratic people, living in the world's largest and most plural democracy," as Sudhir Kakar and Katharina Kakar, two well-known scholars of Indian culture, put it in a recent book, "The Indians: Portrait of a People."
It is possible to argue that this will be case with any society with steep economic disparity and a colossal population problem. But, in India the culture of servility - nurtured and supported by the caste system and the ruling class: petty fiefdoms, British, and now bureaucratic Babus - play a big part in how we treat our fellow men and women.
If I like what I see, I'll receive 5 more issues (6 in all) for just $14.95. That's 50% off the cover price! If I'm not completely satisfied, I'll simply write "cancel" on the invoice and owe nothing. The free issue is mine to keep.
I am working on some very smart things to say here. Really. Meanwhile, there's 
