thescian
Posts by this author
July 21, 2008
How well Benjamin Cohen Rachel Carr captures the sentiment! If I could write half as well....
July 21, 2008
Last Saturday, we went to see WALL-E with our 4 year old niece. It's the story of an ordinary cleaning robot (WALL-E stands for Waste Allocation Load Lifter Earth-Class) that, well, keeps cleaning a city on earth long after humans have left earth. Humans left earth because they had turned it into a…
July 18, 2008
Driving: It's half a ton of steel strapped under your bum and barreling down the road at breakneck speed. This is as crazy as it gets. Driving is, of course, a religious experience. What else could it be! It's nuts and people love it. A reasoning head would not place itself inside a steel cage and…
July 17, 2008
Priya Shetty writes at New Scientist.Why? For a start, research published in international journals might not be relevant to the needs of individual countries. For example, academics specialising in mental health, such as Vikram Patel at the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine, have…
July 16, 2008
Our eyes prefer to suppose
That a habitable place
Has a geocentric view,
That architects enclose
A quiet Euclidian space:
Exploded myths - but who
Could feel at home astraddle
An ever expanding saddle?
-From W. H. Auden's After Reading a Child's Guide to Modern Physics
Very cool. The saddle, if…
July 15, 2008
Mark Twain sez,It is surmised by the biographers that the young Shakespeare got his vast knowledge of the law and his familiar and accurate acquaintance with the manners and customs and shop-talk of lawyers through being for a time the CLERK OF A STRATFORD COURT: just as a bright lad like me,…
July 14, 2008
From an old bookmark. Still fresh. Some of my picks:
6) Long plot explanations aren't going to get it. Like, when something neat (horrible?) happened to one of the characters a real long time ago, and you really really want to tell us about it, you know? Don't.
12) We can't care about sand mutants…
July 10, 2008
From New Scientist... rings are often a sign of being chronically worn out, stressed and run-down - tiredness rather than sleepiness. Tired people don't just need more sleep, but a better and more agreeable lifestyle. This is easier said than done, of course. They may even find that they have…
July 10, 2008
Someone known to me in India recently had an interview with a large mobile company in the UK. He was offered a job (via email) and he accepted. He then received an email from what appeared to be the UK Visa Office (thoroughly bogus). The email is below (with personal info masked). If you visit immi…
July 10, 2008
Humans - they don't like errant Silverfish, dear;
Oh, they snap the page shut, when you read Shakespeare!
-Published at TheScian.com
July 7, 2008
There are numerous occasions when one has to consider the lifetime of the software one is using or developing (or maintaining, that awful dark side of software). Fortunately or unfortunately, business considerations (budget, in other words) dictate what problems get solved and what's left ugly or…
July 4, 2008
A gathering of Nobel Laureates in Germany. Read more at the Sb editors blog. There's also a event blog called Lindau Bangladesh run by three young researchers from Bangladesh who are participating.
July 4, 2008
Thomas Bertie, 34, male, has given birth to his child normally. Many men with imagination might wonder at times (like me, not admitting to anyone, perhaps, but wonder) about how it would be like to be pregnant - just as an imaginative woman might wonder how men manage with erections in public and…
July 4, 2008
I was watching David Byrne + Daniel Levitin at The Seed Salon yesterday evening and heard Daniel Levitin (the professor dude) talk about how ironic that the brain, which receives sensory inputs from all over the body, does not itself have sensory nerves. He further added helpfully that you would…
July 1, 2008
What happens when you split your brain in the middle? By splitting I mean the surgical kind where the corpus callosum (the connecting neural tissue between right and left hemispheres) is severed. Why would anyone do that, I hear you scream. Well, there are instances when this may be the only…
June 30, 2008
Watching Federer's match with Hewitt. Here's an old rally to regale your spirits. [Warning! Video has loud music]
An old tribute to Federer, still eloquent.Beauty is not the goal of competitive sports, but high-level sports are a prime venue for the expression of human beauty. The relation is…
June 26, 2008
Over the long run income is more powerful than any ideology or religion in shaping lives. No God has commanded worshippers to their pious duties more forcefully than income as it subtly directs the fabric of our lives. -Gregory Clark in A Brief Economic History of the World.
June 26, 2008
Statistics page at Gov. of India Directory website. I should not have dared to check the treasures that the NIC (Government's IT arm) has hidden away at the government websites. I dared and my brain just exploded.
If you are fearless, I offer you this: check the footer at the website with the NIC…
June 26, 2008
I never play cricket. It requires one to assume such indecent postures. - Oscar Wilde.
June 25, 2008
"I remember once going to see him when he was lying ill at Putney. I had ridden in taxi cab number 1729 and remarked that the number seemed to me rather a dull one, and that I hoped it was not an unfavorable omen. "No," he replied, "it is a very interesting number; it is the smallest number…
June 24, 2008
At the Beebs:A group of Indians are planning to present a statue of the revered Indian monkey God, Hanuman, to Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama. The group decided to order the idol after they read a magazine report saying that Mr Obama carried a good luck 'monkey king' charm.
Let me…
June 20, 2008
I was looking for some information on the intertubes and google dropped me onto a website that it thought would help. I found a large block of ad content on the site that said "Add emoticons to your emails!" with a collection of the ever-stupid animated gif images that wink, grin, clap, and do all…
June 20, 2008
Modern day living is now a highly competitive sport. The field events are well established: catching a bus driven by a cynical driver, getting a promotion at job, getting good grades in college, getting a grant for research, getting your research paper published, etc. Where there is extreme…
June 18, 2008
reddit open-sourced!
Firefox 3. Get it. Then go check the counter!
iPlayer for UK. Zattoo for Europe. For US? Try Hulu. (to watch outside US, you want this).
June 18, 2008
Time hath, my lord, a wallet at his back,
Wherein he puts alms for oblivion.
-Shakespeare
June 14, 2008
A BBC report:More than 500 people have been killed in Assam - and half as many in neighbouring West Bengal - in the past few years because their neighbours thought they were witches.
A study on these killings by a Bengal police officer, Asit Baran Choudhury, suggests that most of those accused of…