thescian

The real crisis behind climate crisis. A NY Times article: Thirty years ago, Wendell Berry, the Kentucky farmer and writer, put forward a blunt analysis of precisely this mentality. He argued that the environmental crisis of the 1970s -- an era innocent of climate change; what we would give to have…

Yesterday evening our three year old niece was playing with our four month old daughter Nidhi. She (niece) would leap towards Nidhi and shout. At first, Nidhi seemed slightly fearful of this leaping figure. At around the third try, Nidhi started laughing loudly to everyone's surprise. Our niece,…

Big whorls have little whorls, Which feed on their velocity, And little whorls have lesser whorls, And so on to viscosity --Lewis Richardson Poem quoted at Arunn's post on turbulence (in Tamil). Your southside smooth ride into turbulence.

Consider a pebble in space. Assume it is very lucky in that it never gets hit by anything in space, neither does it fall into a star, planet or meet with any such physically violent end. How long will it last as a pebble (i.e. retain it's shape)? In other words, how long would atoms stick together…

A very personal tribute at Cosmic Variance by Daniel Holz.

A few blogging folks in and around London met on Wednesday on Bora's visit for a tour of the Darwin Center. It was great fun, especially the later part when I started shaking all over (only partly aided by two mugs of beer. I forgot to take my coat and we stood out of the pub on the cold cold…

We read blogs to read why we read blogs. Checkout an Ars post on a HCI (Human Computer Interface) study on blog reading.

A few lines from the poem by Louis MacNeice. It's no go the Government grants, it's no go the elections, Sit on your arse for fifty years and hang your hat on a pension. It's no go my honey love, it's no go my poppet; Work your hands from day to day, the winds will blow the profit. The glass is…

2300 cotton farmers have committed suicide in India since 2000 due to crop failure. Profound gloom as Amelia Gentleman says in a IHT story.

Bloody hell! Pseudo-scientific nonsense at a school near you. More at Bad Science. It seems the well-meaning but scientifically-challenged people would go to great lengths to mess-up our children's brains.

First, this beebs report on why coffee is your partner in health, your muse and your burden (financially, if you're the coffee-to-go kinda person). Coffee may cut the risk of dementia by blocking the damage cholesterol can inflict on the body, research suggests. The drink has already been linked to…

This type of brain drain happens when physicists get carried away by the ingenuity of their own brains. Lawrence Krauss is reminded of Thomas Aquinas' supposed theological argument about dancing angels (and their poop in the heavens). Read his column String theory's latest folly in New Scientist.…

Tommy did as his mother told him Till his soul had split: One half thought of angels And the other half of shit. One of his short poems from 'As I walked Out One Evening'. Beautifully rhymed, talking of shit and uplifting all the same. Another poem I'd like to share: Miss Gee. Deftly…

Former NASSCOM president Kiran Karnik writes in Economic Times: ...cost-efficient technologies that fit the socio-cultural milieu are yet awaited. These examples point to a pressing need and an exciting challenge, representing a unique three dimensional convergence of technological capability,…

Press the 'F11' key to toggle to fullscreen mode. Works for IE too. [More]

She is one of the writers I admire for her uncompromising and thoroughly researched exploration of possibilities - especially of race, gender and political philosophies. Ursula Le Guin's novel The Dispossessed has in many ways clarified my personal questions on anarchism and gave a vocabulary to…

Was a poet ever kept in house arrest? Taslima Nasreen Was a poet ever kept in house arrest? May be she has been a subject of politicking True she caused clashes once in a while May be an arson, too. But no, a poet was never taken to safe custody. This India, this civilization, this 21st century…

Arthur C Clarke is no more. What a life he has lived! Like the many millions who have read him, I was inspired by his visions of future in my young years. If you have not read him, I recommend the novel that I devoured many times in my early years: The City and the Stars.

The Tiger is the poem where the immortal line 'fearful symmetry' appears. It is a wonderful and famous poem by William Blake ( 1757-1827) from Songs of Innocence and of Experience that talks about Evolution without talking about Evolution. Blake expresses subtle thoughts on Creation and God through…

Boston Dynamics' DARPA funded robot. Watch how it regains balance after being kicked and on slippery ice patches. Stunning! Via Gizmodo

Tata's are paving the way for WiMax networks in India (WiMax is an alternative to cable and DSL. See). Like the televison and mobile phone networks, India is poised to leapfrog over old technologies and land right into the future of high speed wireless networks. It is fantastic. India's…

Professor WALTER H. G. LEWIN. He is da man! Such joy! [via reddit] More

It's Pi day, everyone. Go do something irrational. If a circle doesn't bother to make sense, why should we. Sciencebloggers on PI. An old post by yours truly on the distribution of digits in PI.

Here it is!

Checkout the In Our Time discussion about Ada Lovelace, the enchantress of numbers who envisioned the advent of modern computers. What a cool woman!

Religion and Reason are sitting on a bench facing an ocean. What a pretty sight! They both acknowledge human fallibility, acknowledge each other and share a laugh. After a bit of chat about the weather, affairs of mutual interest, culture, ethics, society, daughter's marriage, etc, they fall silent…

Writer Shoba Narayan was born in India and came to the U.S. as a student. She settled down in the U.S., became a citizen, wrote for publications such as Time, Newsweek, Gourmet, The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal, and authored a book, while her husband Ram had a successful career on…

It's not very far off. From MIT TR: Scientists can accurately predict which of a thousand pictures a person is looking at by analyzing brain activity using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). The approach should shed light on how the brain processes visual information, and it might one…

NY Times publishes a fictional account of a fictional account assuring us that it's a real account. Kafkaesque? Whatever. The man was beyond bizarre and certainly a brain shattering phenomenon; he reached into the human mind like those tentacles we see in our worst nightmares. Anyway, I wasn't sure…

The letter below is from Perfectly Reasonabe Deviations From The Beaten Track, a book of letters of Richard Feynman. It is one of the most moving letters that I have read. Tomonaga mentioned below shared the 1965 Nobel prize for physics along with Feynman and Schwinger. A former student, who was…