Creative commons
thescian | September 11, 2007Was 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.
thescian | September 6, 2007Signnup 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 contest is not necessarily the writer of the 500 thousandth comment. Once Sb hits 500k comments, a winner will be randomly picked from the registered email addresses at Sb.
thescian | 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: All Songs Considered hosted by Bob. The last one on Aug 30 was DJ'd by Anoushka.
thescian | September 3, 2007With 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 Anarchism.
Negotiating with the Dead: A Writer on Writing by Margaret Atwood
Wonderful as always.
A Mathematician's Apology by G Hardy , introduction by C P Snow
Have you wondered what Hardy is apologising for?
The Dispossessed by Ursula Le Guin
The finest novel on anarchistic themes. Third reading.
thescian | August 29, 2007A 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.
thescian | August 28, 2007Warren Ellis, the colorful British writer, writes about Burst Culture.* Every day, millions of people download single lumps of data that take them three minutes to consume. They're called mp3s. It's a burst culture. Embrace the idea for a while.
* Bursts aren't contentless, nor do they denote the end of Attention Span. If attention span was dead, JK Rowling wouldn't be selling paperbacks thick enough to choke a pig, and Neal Stephenson wouldn't be making a living off books the size of the first bedsit I lived in.
...
* And just a thought: if you're an sf writer grappling for space in one of…
thescian | August 26, 2007From the TheScian.com August Newsletter:I want to share an incident that happened yesterday at my 3 year old neice's birthday party. A few families were invited and the kids were playing inside an inflated house - they call that bouncy-castle - with two entranes through which the kids could crawl in. The kids were jumping around and I was aghast to notice my neice and her friend (another little girl) gang up against their classmate, a little boy, and effectively bully him from entering the inflated house for almost 10 minutes. If kids were adults they would break each other's heads in an…
thescian | August 22, 2007Don Pedro: You embrace your charge too willingly. I think this is your daughter.
Leonato: Her mother hath many times told me so.
Benedick: Were you in doubt, sir, that you asked her?
-From Much Ado About Nothing
My first encounter with Shakespeare was in school at the age of 13. We had the play Julius Caesar for our english course (not summaries, the original work). Julius Caesar in all its english glory was a play that was next to incomprehensible - both in words and historical details - for us not-so-literary children of Jolarpettai. Jolarpettai is a town that grew around a large railway…
thescian | August 20, 2007I've been reading a bit of european history (because science is too exciting and I needed a history break) and waded into the time of french revolution (1789) and what the british were upto at that time. In the last decades of eighteenth century, continental europe was pre-occupied with social revolution. But, the nearby islanders wouldn't have any of it. Instead, they had their industrial revolution going strong (fabulously supported by capital plundered from India, see).
Image from here (Image 23)
By semi-random googling, I found a historically interesting caricature (above) by James…
thescian | August 16, 2007A discussion at reddit. Is it ethical to block online ads using your brower? My personal opinion: Hell, yes. I don't block Google Ads and I don't block flash ads at many sites where ads are relevant and show some taste. Site owners and advertisers who invoke guilt ethics could do better.
thescian | August 13, 2007 In Japan, robots are going to save that last dance. They would be used to store and replay dance moves of Japanese folk routine called the Aizu-Bandaisan, sez New Scientist. Oh, joy. The video (link below) where the Dance Librarian Robot HRP-2 "Promet" dances is fascinating to watch. It's like some sort of new-age thing for robots seeking zen.Video [mpg]
thescian | August 7, 2007You have been up early and are at your desk, your brows are tangled in deep concentration, you squeeze your eyes for a moment, and voila! A dream-breaking thought! You punch the computer keys quickly and catch the thought into your electronic potter's wheel to sculpt it into a work of art.
Do continue. There's still a few more weeks to polish your story before you send it off to TheScian Science Fiction Short Story Contest 2007.
A related note on an interesting book: The World Without Us. Reviews at Salon, Washington Post. I haven't read it. But would certainly like to once I finish Snow…
thescian | August 1, 2007Delicious illustrations by Josh Kirby of Discworld fame. Some wallpapers at the Liverpool National Museum website.
thescian | July 31, 2007Art 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? How about that in the beloved and beguiling city of Bombay? That, dear reader, is what DJ Fadereu and his friends have done. Armed with a cellphone, a custom built software application that translates walks into alphabets, and a pair of enthusiastic legs, the team has captured a piece of our modern…