thescian
Posts by this author
February 1, 2008
The Bet: In a Google search of five keywords or phrases representing the top five news stories of 2007, weblogs will rank higher than the New York Times' Web site.
The Result:Blogs win.
Dave Winer is right. Informed people will look to amateurs they trust for the information they want.
February 1, 2008
A hilarious podcast by John Oliver (of Daily Show) and Andy Zaltzman at Times Online.
January 31, 2008
Sunil reminds us of the pleasures of haircuts.
When I first shaved my head hair off (2001 or thereabouts, when my hair retreated rapidly from the forehead and met the nape), I had recurring dreams in which I would get astonishingly hep haircuts by world's best hair artists. Slowly my brain…
January 30, 2008
You an atheist? Well, we at MySpace are all retards and don't want around us no smarties who use their own brain to think for themselves. Tuck-in your atheist tail and tow the line or MySpace Monster will eat your balls (follow the link to read points 7 and 8, that's how we feast on you, and make…
January 30, 2008
Dilip D'Souza at Washington Post. [via sqattercity]Because housing is so expensive, about two-thirds of Mumbai's population live in slums or on the streets. This has been true for decades and remains true in ready-for-boom-time India. Indian politicians have concocted countless schemes over the…
January 29, 2008
A poignant, sensitive performance by Antony Sher as Primo Levi. On BBC 4. You can watch it in iPlayer if you live in the UK.
January 28, 2008
Eye-Fi. A memory card for cameras with built-in wifi connectivity.
January 26, 2008
The bane of immigrants. Reader's comments at Spiegel following an opinion piece that was critical of germans. Quite rightly, a lot of readers point out that Germany is not special in its Xenophobia. Every country is so to varying degrees. Integration, as always, is hardsell, especially when we are…
January 25, 2008
Nicholas Carr has an insightful post that points to a fascinating study of online user behavior while they are looking for information and researching some subject, done by British Library (the research study, 35 pages PDF, well organized and well worth your time)....In one sense, the process of…
January 24, 2008
Clive Thompson in a WIRED essay:... If you want to read books that tackle profound philosophical questions, then the best -- and perhaps only -- place to turn these days is sci-fi. Science fiction is the last great literature of ideas.
From where I sit, traditional "literary fiction" has dropped…
January 24, 2008
One of the greatest living science fiction authors. His Childhood's end and The City and the Stars were a great influence on me many years ago.
January 24, 2008
I often show pictures of animals, birds and insects to my three year old niece. Today's picture: Japanese tree frog. One of it has been to Mir Space station.
January 23, 2008
One of the many ills of poverty is that it denies men and women of their aspirations and their basic right to be heard and to be acknowledged. Lakshmi and Me is a film on the unacknowledged divide between haves and have-nots, between a young domestic worker and her employer - something that all…
January 23, 2008
I have been reading Emily Dickinson from Everyman's Poetry series. Apart from a few poems published during her initial years (the poems were mangled badly by her editors because they went ballistic on seeing her punctuation, limited men as they were), she never published her poetry. In the poem…
January 22, 2008
JoVE: Journal of Visualized Experiments, an online video-publication for biological research.
schlolarZ.blog, a new blog by a group of young scientists at the University of Wuerzburg, Germany.
January 22, 2008
I was at the hospital the other day for our daughter's vaccination. On a TV mounted on the wall, a lady in white lab coat was explaining how massaging the baby increases skin tone (it doesn't). Being a new parent, I was paying careful attention to gather useful information and there seemed to be…
January 22, 2008
Good laugh to be had at this New Yorker video where Steve Brodner sketches the tempestuous relationship between Hillary and Obama. Hilarious.
January 18, 2008
The Green Children is a young band of musicians inspired by Prof Muhammad Yunus. Support them, support children and families in need.
What's Microcredit.
January 16, 2008
A new essay is out at TheScian.com. It is about why apples fall downwards, why frogs leap and why we fly rockets. In other words, it is about the force of gravity. It's written by a non-scientist, so there are no discussions about strings tangled in eleven dimensions, tensor calculus or fluxions…
January 16, 2008
Via BrietBart:Pope Benedict XVI on Tuesday canceled a speech at Rome's La Sapienza university in the face of protests led by scientists opposed to a high-profile visit by the head of the Catholic Church to a secular setting.
So, what does the Pope do?Cini said of Benedict on Thursday: "By…
January 15, 2008
Monkeys are paving the way for future. A report in NY Times:If Idoya could talk, she would have plenty to boast about.
On Thursday, the 12-pound, 32-inch monkey made a 200-pound, 5-foot humanoid robot walk on a treadmill using only her brain activity.
...
These experiments, Dr. Nicolelis said,…
January 14, 2008
Concept design of the Polish Pavilion for 2010 World Expo in Shanghai. Via Geoff Manaugh's fantastic BLDGBLOG, one of my favorite places on the internets.
January 14, 2008
Tom Hodgkinson writes in The Guardian:I despise Facebook. This enormously successful American business describes itself as "a social utility that connects you with the people around you". But hang on. Why on God's earth would I need a computer to connect with the people around me? Why should my…
January 14, 2008
Ian McEwan (author of the novel Atonement, an adaptation of it won the Golden Globe yesterday) in an interview:it is crucial that people who do not have a sky god and don't have a set of supernatural beliefs assert their belief in moral values and in love and in the transcendence that they might…
January 10, 2008
Severe famines killed many millions in India between 1700 and 1900. [Chronology at Wikipedia]. Nobel prize winning economist Amartya Sen's work on endemic deprivation stems from his experiences of the Bengal famine as a child.
Photograph of a South India family in 1878 by W.W. Hooper, a Colonel in…
January 9, 2008
It has been unveiled. More at Rediff. NDTV Video coverage.
January 9, 2008
The Onion demands your attention to inform you of an important election issue:Poll: Bullshit Is Most Important Issue For 2008 Voters
Also, Jimmy's got a message.