Creative commons
thescian | April 12, 2007It was the very first time. Her optic nerve sparked like a benevolent thunderbolt. The lucky photon came bouncing off the dining room light. It penetrated layers of stretched biological tissue, the amniotic sac, the translucent fluid inside, and reached the photo-sensitive cell at the precise moment when the cell became active. She twitched her still-developing limbs; her first acknowledgement of a visible world beyond.
She was a fortunate child amidst caring people: the mother, father, grandparents, aunt and uncle, a little niece too.
They were eating dinner and talking about light and…
thescian | April 7, 2007Wade Davis, National Geographic explorer, gives a talk on ethonsphere and the perils facing cultural diversity in this increasingly monocultural world. He ends his talk with the narration of an Innuit grandfather: The Innuit family were being resettled by the Canadian government from their icy land; the grandfather refused to leave. The family fears that he would kill himself and takes away all his weapons and the sled. Wade describes what followed:
..he pulled down his sealskin trousers, defecated into his hand, as the feces froze he shaped it into a knife, butchered a dog with the knife,…
thescian | April 4, 2007This year's scifi contest at TheScian.com will open for submissions in June and end in September as it did last year. There will be a few important changes to the contest from last year. This year the story contest will have a theme. The theme is this: "Living on Earth and Elsewhere". I imagine the theme would cover a story about a bacteria that fights for freedom inside an acidic gut, a story of a silicon creature in future making a pilgrimage to earth, and a lot others I can't imagine. In any case, I would expect the story to entertain - and inform if it must, but not necessarily - in…
thescian | April 4, 2007Anna Deavere-Smith at TED. When she began she said she wanted to inspire. She did.
thescian | March 15, 2007Yours truly is still here. Read two books.
The Adventure of English by Melvyn Bragg
As the title says, the book treats English as the protogonist and traces how it was born, how it grew, how it almost died and how it came back to conquer the world. There are chapters on the various english dialects. American and Indian, in particular. I finally learnt why american english is spoken with an even stress on the syllables while britons speak it with hump and thump. Noah Webster's little book on spelling and pronunciation is the reason, sez Bragg. Bragg's love for the language comes through very…
thescian | March 7, 2007Voyeurismo by Roger Sandall. A long and highly readable essay that discusses Ethno-tourism and gives a close inspection of The Naked Tourist (a book, fortunately). [via Arts & Letters Daily]
You've spent 10,000 years getting there. It's not pretty but it's yours--the swamp, the forest, the tree house where you live. Bigger and stronger tribes drove you down from the better land higher up the slopes, so you retreated to a godforsaken place thick with reptiles, insects, and malarial encephalitis. Southern Papua's rain forests are hell; but at least you feel safe and alone.
Then Zurück in…
thescian | March 5, 2007This is a true story. It happened a few minutes ago. It happened when I watched.
8 :30 AM.
Dark outside. Clouds looming overhead. Windy.
8:31 AM.
It rains like a few hundred canine pranksters pissing over the house.
8:32 AM.
The rain stops as abruptly as it started.
8:33 AM.
Sunshine. Crisp day. Rain? What rain? When? Why is the ground wet? Must be the dogs.
thescian | February 26, 2007 Some personal search statistics from 2006. Almost all of these searches were done when I was not aware of google collecting data on my searches. I am mildly shocked - particularly when considering these numbers only represent a part of my actual searches and not the searches done when logged out. Addicted to Google, I suppose. We all are, isn't it.
thescian | February 22, 2007The large insect - almost two feet in length - was hiding in the loft. It looked like an enlarged scorpion with the legs and head of a cockroach. I could see it hiding because the antennae were visible and rubbing the walls. I stood transfixed at the door, my body shivering with excitement and terror. I am going to kill it I said, my voice hoarse with animal rage. My chins hurt. I was grinding my teeth hard. My ears must have lost their hearing. I could not hear any sound. My right hand clenched the large sword; the sword quivered. A vague perception wedged itself into my mind - the sword's…
thescian | February 16, 2007 The little boy went to the corner of the hut and fished out a matchbox from his school bag. He had not told anyone about his secret pet: A Ponvandu*. The colorful insect emerged out of the matchbox when he slid the lid off; its body iridescent as it reflected the morning sunlight in myriad colors in a thousand angles. A bonsai version of an impossible aurora borealis. The wings covered a heavy body. It would have to think twice before flying. A peacock among the insects. The wings resembled - indeed more than just resembled - the shields of an ancient warrior. The wings defended the ponvandu…
thescian | February 13, 2007It has been a while since I click-scratched google's back. So here. *grin*. There's more if you have clicks to spare.
thescian | February 13, 2007
"The Elements of Style". Prescriptive. Precise. Buy it for the elegant introduction by E B White. Read the original text online.
thescian | February 12, 2007Yes? Here's an opportunity to correct your mistakes.
Debashish fell over the keyboard when working late in the night. Your votes in the Science/Technology were lost. Go vote once more, will ya.
thescian | February 11, 2007Over here. Jury duty is done (yours truly had a jury hand in the Science/Tech and Humor category). Its all upto to you now. Help Debashish with the public voting process.
thescian | February 2, 2007Go here. The winning cartoon is very poignant. One of the commended ones that caught my eyes is below. [via reddit]
thescian | February 2, 2007GOOGLE'S MOON SHOT at The New Yorker.
"No one really knows how many books there are. The most volumes listed in any catalogue is thirty-two million, the number in WorldCat, a database of titles from more than twenty-five thousand libraries around the world. Google aims to scan at least that many. "We think that we can do it all inside of ten years," Marissa Mayer, a vice-president at Google who is in charge of the books project, said recently, at the company's headquarters, in Mountain View, California. "It's mind-boggling to me, how close it is. I think of Google Books as our moon shot."
thescian | January 31, 2007We all are in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars. -Oscar Wilde
thescian | January 29, 2007I'll jury around the SciTech and humor category. Nominate away. If there is any particular blog you liked and want to personally recommend (with a personal note), don't hesitate to email me after tagging it in delicious.
thescian | January 29, 2007I and the wife were having coffee on Saturday. For the past two weekends I have been buying the weekend newspaper and not reading it. Ramya mentioned this and reminded me not to bother this time. Like most men above the age of thirty, I like news - a lot. But newspapers do not seem to cut it for me. I reasoned thus: Those who are on the internet have a lot of news sources and are used to hearing different viewpoints. In fact, the variety of views is the norm. I can always click around and find what many folks think of a certain event. Consider, religion. I hear Dawkins and then I also hear E…
thescian | January 24, 2007Sometime back I couldn't even spell philosophy correctly. And now, I not only read it but tell you why I read it. How I change! Well, read on.
As a child I grew up in a small town in the south of India. That meant I had very little access or exposure to the finer things in life - especially the earth-shattering ideas that transformed human lives during humanity's short history. If you were lucky like me, you had parents, relatives or someone who exposed you to books, thoughts and people who created sparks in your young impressionable mind. Even then there are large areas of knowledge and…