thescian
Posts by this author
September 25, 2007
One of the things that rot any totalitarian regime from within is its inability to keep the route to reform open. The burmese Junta is one such rotting regime. While it's neighbors, which includes India, prefer to sit by the sidelines and watch (the Junta is the gatekeeper and preserver of India…
September 25, 2007
Caferati is a place for aspiring writers to meet, share and collaborate with each other. It is of Indian origin and the members meet in many cities in India. They have a number of online resources (site, google groups). Geographical accidents such as birthplace and country of residence should not…
September 25, 2007
The Indian version of penis lengthening cream is applied on the face. Cream makers are a kind bunch, mindful of cultural differences and such.
If there is one organ that has a disproportionate and ludicrious hold on us - men and women, it must be the skin.
September 24, 2007
The latest essay is out at TheScian.com. As I've done for the past few essays, this too has been subjected to yours truly's vocal excess. Thanks to Sunil for reading a very early draft and saving me from some glaring mistakes.Our queue was frozen in time. We seemed to have entered an amnesiac queue…
September 23, 2007
A political impossibility, apparently. A Guardian article'We wanted a fundamental change in the relationship with the school and the established religion of the country,' said Kelley, talking about the proposals he put forward towards the end of Tony Blair's premiership. 'They accepted it would be…
September 22, 2007
As soon as she saw the two darkly clad men riding towards her on camels, their heads and faces swathed in scarves, Nafisa Mohamed knew what she must do. "I told my son and my daughter to run as fast as they could." The men were the Janjaweed, nomadic Arab bandits who have been slaughtering Darfuri…
September 22, 2007
Allow me to present to you the after effects of Evolution which did not anticipate video cameras and head-mounted projection.The key to creating an artificial out-of-body experience is to scramble a person's visual and touch sensations, tricking their brain into perceiving that they are somewhere…
September 21, 2007
A fascinating essay by the philosopher Daniel C. Dennett on human intuition and computational processes in Technology Review. He discusses the case of chess matches between computers like Deep Blue and players like Kasporov....the search space for chess is too big for even Deep Blue to explore…
September 20, 2007
This is how hassled ground troops working for large corporations cover their rears - they shoot grandpas and babies. Beebs reports that a Supermarket staff refused to sell alcohol to a white-haired 72-year-old man - because he would not confirm he was over 21."I felt like saying 'What do I look…
September 20, 2007
If you look closely, the flounder fish has a rather remarkable head. There's something amiss with the placement of its right eye and the way its mouth opens, as if it was a normal fish like, say the discus fish, that lived a normal life and one day some crazy demented person came along and said, "…
September 19, 2007
is the homage paid by ignorance to learning. -E M Forster, Aspects of the Novel (1927)
September 19, 2007
I will be away from the blog this week. I'll repost some selected posts from the past to keep the blog going. Here's the first.
A gravity well is a hole dug out in space for frogs to live in. But, nobody knows who put the frogs in there. The frogs have been suspicious of Something Beyond for a…
September 12, 2007
Blogging will be slow for the coming few days. Before I head out to make money in the big bad world, let me quote Munro's words that I read in Margaret Atwood's 'Negotiating with the Dead'.I bought a school notebook and tried to write - did write, pages that started off authoritatively and then…
September 11, 2007
Was he William, the writer-actor entrepreneur? Was he Edward de Vere, Earl of Oxford? The inconsequential but utterly fascinating question has reared its head up again.
September 10, 2007
Keep those hot things under cover, especially if you are in the UK where hot-mapping is all the rage. Hot-mapping is thermal imaging houses - usually by flying an aeroplane with imaging equipment - to figure who's hot and who's not. Haringey, a town near London has now got its own hot-map. [via…
September 9, 2007
A proposed bill in India to put people who don't care for their aged parents on the wrong side of the law. From The Telegraph:Aged parents without the means to maintain themselves will be guaranteed the right to live in the homes of their sons and daughters if the government accepts the suggestions…
September 6, 2007
It's fast, it's cool. Go get it. There are some font rendering issues on Windows XP but am sure it'll be fixed in next release. Works great on Mac too (something I hold against Firefox). Ars has a review.
September 6, 2007
asks a Beebs poll that seems to equate morality with religion. The commenters do a good job of picking the poll apart.Britain is in moral decline say 83% of people polled for the new BBC One religious and ethical programme "The Big Questions". Do you agree?
Religion may be a way of halting this…
September 6, 2007
Signnup for the nifty newsletter and automatically enter the ScienceBlogs 500,000 Comment contest, the winner of which gets to visit a great science city (probably Cambridge, UK. Not far away from where I live. Woohoo! Come visit humble me while in UK.) Between, the winner of the 500k comment…
September 6, 2007
News from 'Weird Panditji' Department. (Pandits are the folks who interpret religious text and perform ceremonies in India, usually North India, in south they are called by other names).
The wife was talking to her friend and I happened to overhear.
Friend: (angry at something) I have to tell you…
September 5, 2007
Am I a HTML horror or what!blahmeh
HTML is a den of horrors. One of the ugly ones is called the Radio Button. If you did not intend to set a radio box choice and set it by mistake, you cannot unset it easily. Why the heck is a radio box so snotty and unforgiving? Sheesh.
September 4, 2007
The performances are online. I am watching Anoushka Shankar and Joshua Bell's performance on Aug 2nd. Great show. [thanks Ramya]
While am passing on musical links, let me plug one of my favorite podcasts from NPR which has introduced me to so much of the wonderful music that I have come to enjoy:…
September 4, 2007
Few more weeks for the Sep 30 deadline. There's a countdown on the page to thrill you everytime you visit till the day you send that story in.
September 3, 2007
With my reading list for the coming days
George Orwell: Essays (Penguin Modern Classics)
Just ordered. Hopefully, it should have Orwell's reflections on Gandhi.
No Gods, No Masters: An Anthology of Anarchism
With Noam Chomsky's intro. Necessary reading if you want to understand the development of…
August 30, 2007
I am sitting in the smallest room in the house and thinking, Space is crazy. Space is where Euclid's parallel lines never meet. Space is where Einstein's rays of light bend for gravitational winds. Space is almost all of everything there is. Compared to the volume of space around, even the largest…
August 29, 2007
A review of John Gribbin's The Scientists at balancinglife, by Sunil.
Holding a Program in One's Head, a spiffy essay on how to create software, by Paul Graham.