thescian
Posts by this author
This is old news, but there are lot of people who may not know and still keep buying into the bottled water scam. Check the recent Economist article.
"SO THE emperor really isn't wearing any clothes. Last week PepsiCo announced that the label on its Aquafina brand of bottled water will soon carry…
We see patterns in the clouds, in the shadows of a dark street, in the martian sands, and sometimes even in the grime of dirty vessels (I see Saturn's rings in my coffee cup right now). Like our dreams, we are free to interpret patterns in any way we want, and we usually use that freedom to get…
If you access emails from open Wifi hotspots, you want to read this at Slashdot.
"Using Gmail or most other webmail programs over an unsecured access points just got a bit more dangerous. At Black Hat Robert Graham, CEO of errata security, showed how to capture and clone session cookies very…
Very scary, like a plague of ambulance chasers. The video quality is not very good but that should not put you off from some of the very serious issues raised. Check this video [graphic at places]
Scienceblogs posts on scientology
A charade involding six orangutans and two psychologists.
A while back I read an essay on Artificial Intelligence at TR by David Gelernter wherein, besides other things, he discusses where AI research stands at present (the short answer, nowhere). Like all discussions on AI, it inevitably led to the question of Consciousness. As always, I promptly got…
War, genocide
Darfur
Congo
Iraq
Climate Change, flood
China
India, Bangladesh
Britain
What shall we tell our children?
Delicious illustrations by Josh Kirby of Discworld fame. Some wallpapers at the Liverpool National Museum website.
"..trying to produce such an extraordinary product as a laptop that is kid-proof and capable of working in jungles, deserts or the bush, miles from the nearest grid connection, and all for the cheapest possible price, has concentrated minds remarkably. The XO offers a lesson for laptop-makers…
What you have always suspected to be true is probably true. Intercourse and Intelligence at Gene Expression.
...intelligent people have lower libidos and less masculine physiques. What hormone is responsible for both sex drive and masculine builds? That's right: testosterone.
And two new papers…
Humans evolved over millions of years. It wasn't inevitabe, it wasn't predictable, it wasn't random either. It just was. It has taken incomprehensible amount of time to evolve the complexity needed in our neural clumps to hold reasoned representations of the world. Considering this biological…
Art could be passive and contemplative, like gawking at a Dali painting and letting it drug you into a state of inexplicable weirdness. Art could also be active and participatory, like the thousands of nude cyclicts in Amsterdam.
How about Art with a cellphone and the cellular infrastructure?…
The Hindu on the Asian cup win of Iraqi team.
"In 90 minutes, 11 men on a soccer pitch thousands of miles away have made millions of Iraqis happy while 250 MPs, our government, the mullahs, imams and warlords can't provide us with a single smile. I hope this is a turning point for our country."
Hop over and drink scifi till you hallucinate about strange horizons. via bb
The Tempest, Act 4, Scene 1
Our revels now are ended. These our actors,
As I foretold you, were all spirits and
Are melted into air, into thin air:
And, like the baseless fabric of this vision,
The cloud-capp'd towers, the gorgeous palaces,
The solemn temples, the great globe itself,
Ye all which…
Yesterday afternoon, I took the car out and after driving a few minutes noticed the air over the bonnet shimmering and undulating like in a mirage. I have seen this before and it's not good news. The last time I saw this sign, the car burst into flames, the birds flew away, the sky clouded up and I…
A new essay has surfaced at TheScian.com. It has got pictures and you can click and hear me mumble and pretend to read it.
Whitby, a seaside town in North Yorkshire, is home to Dracula's cave, gothic gulls, and a B&B establishment that charms its guests with a roaring toilet the size of a…
A good overview of the hardware, software and the vision that powers the OLPC Laptop named XO. As the author says, XO pushes laptop technology to a higher level of harware and software excellence.
...development tools bundled with Sugar include the simple Scratch environment all the way to Python.…
The keyboard design for most laptops is just hopeless. Under the keys are multiple ecosystems hosting bacteria that are rapidly evolving to eat your fingers.
Today morning I used a USB powered cleaner to clean the keyboard of my work laptop (I got the cleaner as a gift from the sibling after she…
What children need is a go-kart (OLPC) they can play with, not a 12-wheeled Truck (Classmate PC) that can crush them while scratching a teacher's back. While OLPC focusses on fun and appropriate user interfaces for children, Classmate PC seems to pride itself on Teacher control, parental control,…
Noah Feldman on the contradictions of a religious community facing modernity in NY Times. If you read an essay on the contradictions of orthodoxy by anyone at any time in history, you will find the same themes discussed. Ignorance empowered by authority will always be at odds with Science,…
Amit Varma writes in India Uncut blog:
Pratibha Tai will also not let India's traditional sciences wither away just because they are nonsense. (What kind of silly reason is that anyway?) Consider astrology: Just last year, while launching an astrology website that she surely knew would succeed, she…
Andrea Bocelli's Amapola. Romance has not been rendered in a more beautiful and moving voice.
Beebs reports on cars developed by universities to compete in DARPA's Grand Challenge. Checkout the cool video on the page.
Well, you are lucky. PZ's has suggestions. [the last point, the post is in response to the recent disturbance in the fabric of google maps].
Details at ars technica
Microsoft has filed another patent, this one for an "advertising framework" that uses "context data" from your hard drive to show you advertisements and "apportion and credit advertising revenue" to ad suppliers in real time. Yes, Redmond wants to own the patent on the…