thescian
Posts by this author
October 19, 2007
Read three novels in one week. (Why you ask? So I could nod knowingly tomorrow at a one day lecture course on reading modern fiction. See). Haven't done this sort of a thing since I was a wide-eyed teenager from the railway town Jolarpet who walked into his first proper library in the great city of…
October 18, 2007
BBC reportsA spokesman for the Science Museum said: "We know that eminent scientists can sometimes say things that cause controversy and the Science Museum does not shy away from debating controversial topics.
"However, we feel Dr Watson has gone beyond the point of acceptable debate and we are, as…
October 17, 2007
[via Times Online] Dr Watson, co-discoverer of the structure of DNA and author of "Avoid Boring People", says thathe was "inherently gloomy about the prospect of Africa" because "all our social policies are based on the fact that their intelligence is the same as ours - whereas all the testing says…
October 17, 2007
Go here. A free service that asks companies to stop sending paper catalogs to you. [via Joel On Software]
October 16, 2007
By Ibrahim Lukman, a Syrian artist [via Spiegel]
A video of another installation.
Intense. Like a slap in the face.
October 16, 2007
Here's a BBC news that reports on a study about bed bugs that is so confusing that I can't make out what is really being suggested. At the beginning, there is this: "bugs cannot survive in the warm, dry conditions found in an unmade bed" Unmade bed is bad for bugs, and good for you, atleast that's…
October 15, 2007
An exhibition of equations. A proper nerd's day out last sunday in London. Here's an equation I love, by Alison Gopnik's.
October 12, 2007
Advice from a very cool multi-lingual guy.The first thing I advise people to do when they think they know a language well enough is to shut up. You don't learn a language to tell people what YOU think, you learn it to understand what THEY think. And hopefully what THEY think will change or enhance…
October 11, 2007
An Independent article."There were about 400 of us in one room. No toilets, no buckets, no water for washing. No beds, no blankets, no soap. Nothing," said a 24-year-old monk who was held for 10 days at the Government Technical Institute, a leafy college in northern Rangoon which is now a prison…
October 11, 2007
Via Living the Scientific Life (Scientist, Interrupted)
October 8, 2007
I've been re-reading JRD Tata's Keynote: Excerpts from his speeches and chairman's statements to shareholders. It's a collection of speeches JRD gave on various occasions that trace his thoughts on India, business and future. In a speech given on November 2, 1943, he spoke to the Bombay Rotary…
October 8, 2007
It's one of the most wonderful, confounding, nerve-racking and sublime mathematical conundrum of all times. In the spin of quantum mechanics, in the accretion of galactic clouds, in a little girl's twirl, when a pebble is dropped on a quiet lake; wherever and whenever there is rotation, it lurks,…
October 6, 2007
Before I get to the post, some contest updates. I have started reading the contest stories. To level the field, Ramya downloaded the stories from the contests email, edited the author identities out and has given me a folder full of stories without author names on it. I am reading blind, so to…
October 4, 2007
Here. You can donate one and get one for yourself in November if you live in the US. Go here to sign-up.
October 4, 2007
RIAA, the music industry's mouth-piece and hired hand, sends you a message through this case:Jammie Thomas, a single mother of two, was found liable Thursday for copyright infringement in the nation's first file-sharing case to go before a jury.
Twelve jurors here said the Minnesota woman must pay…
October 4, 2007
Reading it at the moment. A novel set in a single day of a neurosurgean's life. Brilliant and poetic.
An excerpt from the excerpt at New Yorker.The culmination of today's list was the removal of a pilocytic astrocytoma from a fourteen-year-old Nigerian girl who lived in Brixton with her aunt and…
October 4, 2007
A Writer's People: Ways of Looking and Feeling reviewed at Prospect.
October 3, 2007
When I was young, I used to go out with my grandfather and scout around Oddakkadu fields (our farm's name) for a certain root used as perfume and in preparations in south India, called Vettiver in tamil. I loved pulling it up and taking in the aroma along with the smell of moist dirt. Wonderfully…
October 3, 2007
The man that hath no music in himself,
Nor is not moved with concord of sweet sounds,
Is fit for treasons, stratagems, and spoils;
The motions of his spirit are dull as night,
And his affections dark as Erebus.
Let no such man be trusted.
-Shakespeare, The Merchant of Venice. Act. v. Sc. 1
"When…
October 1, 2007
A Washington Post note on the coming Olympics Event in China as a chance to get the Chinese to act.
BBC on the impossibilities and possibilities.
Burmese bloggers without Borders.
India, of course, is quiet and congratulating itself for carrying the torch of realpolitik; realpolitik that sees only…
October 1, 2007
Dear reader, If you had subscribed to Zooillogix and have been taken for a ride by yours truly, here's your chance to get off. Andrew has a message for you:somehow during the transition to the new email subscription system, the wires got crossed and Zooillogix subscribers started getting the…
October 1, 2007
After days of agonising over the characters, phrases and storylines, you finally sent in the story for the contest. Phew! Well done. Thanks to the nineteen writers who have taken time to participate.
I will begin reading the stories in a few days. Once the selection of winners is complete, I will…
September 29, 2007
John Bogle, founder of Vanguard Mutual Fund, brings the imbalance of American society into sharp focus with candor and insight. A conversation that I am going to watch many times, especially the part where Bogle draws parallels between pre-revolutionary French society with its castle owners and…
September 26, 2007
I must apologize for the poor quality of the audio recording of Once upon a time in a queue essay published on the 24th. It was recorded at 6:30 in the morning while I was half asleep. I've done a new recording today and have replaced the original audio files now.
For those who are curious and…
September 26, 2007
Evolution is directed blindness, a muddling-through in the direction of survival and procreation. Very early on, evolution acquired a shopping bag: the Skin. A piece of astonishing molecular engineering that is protective, flexible, regenerative, self-healing, vitamin manufacturing, and porous to…