Creative commons
thescian | March 4, 2010Life is short and truth works far and lives long: let us speak the truth
Schopenhauer in the introduction to "The World as Will and Representation". The introduction is quite remarkable and lucid for a heavyweight philosophical book. If you are wondering what the book's obscure title means, first few pages should clarify.
thescian | March 3, 2010The finest explanation I've read so far. In Margaret Atwood's post-climate-catastrophic novel Oryx and Crake. Snowman, a battered survivor is slowly losing his mind and memories.
"What is toast?" says Snowman to himself, once they've run off. Toast is when you take a piece of bread - What is bread? Bread is when you take some flour - What is flour? We'll skip that part, it's too complicated. Bread is something you can eat, made from a ground-up plant and shaped like a stone. You cook it . . . Please, why do you cook it? Why don't you just eat the plant? Never mind that part - Pay attention.…
thescian | February 14, 2010Conversation with my two year old daughter this morning.
Daughter: [looks at a picture book involving tigers] Where is the mummy tiger, daddy?
Me: It has gone for hunting, Nidhi.
Daughter: No, daddy. It has gone to a shop to buy baby-corn.
thescian | January 29, 2010You may know that a while ago the swiss voted to ban any new minarets from being built. And now comes this. A local court in Switzerland has upheld a basketball headscarf ban. From the beebs:
A Muslim woman has failed to overturn a ban stopping her from wearing a headscarf during league basketball matches in Switzerland.
Sura al-Shawk, 19, was told she could not wear a headscarf by the basketball association (ProBasket) in August 2009.
A local court in Lucerne has upheld the ruling on safety grounds. ProBasket also argued the sport needed to stay religiously neutral.
Personally, I will…
thescian | January 13, 201014 Jan 2010. Seven die in India temple festival stampede
Previous stampedes.
Sep 30, 2008. Atleast 100 dead at Chamunda Devi temple in the city of Jodhpur.
August 3. 140 dead. 40 children. Stampede at the Nainadevi temple, Himachal Pradesh.
July. 6 dead. Stampede at Jagannath temple, Orissa.
March. 10 dead. Stampede at temple, Madhya Pradesh.
January. 5 dead. Stampede at Durga Malleswara temple, Andra Pradesh.
thescian | January 13, 2010I am reading "Einstein, a life", by Denis Brian. The book is remarkable--a two decade long labor of great love and reading. Quoted in the book is a dinner conversation where Einstein is asked about his religion by someone at the dinner:
"What?" exclaimed Kerr. "It isn't possible! I must ask him right away. Professor! I hear that you are supposed to be deeply religious?"
Calmly and with great dignity, Einstein replied, "Yes, you can call it that. Try and penetrate with our limited means the secrets of nature and you will find that, behind all the discernible concatenations, there remains…
thescian | December 28, 2009
First the name. Avatar--if you play computer games, you may know this very well--is a character you use inside an unreal world. The word Avatar has its origins in Indian mythology. An Avatar (ava-tara in Sanskrit) is god's visit to earth to fix something that is broken. Vishnu, one of the three gods who protects creation, by necessity visits earth often. Vishnu, the puranas declare, is dark-blue in color (the original story teller was inspired by blue oceans, blue sky?). To go with the name Avatar, Cameron has also decided to paint the aliens blue, possibly inspired by Hindu mythology. The…
thescian | December 18, 2009See here for more.
In other news: I've gone quiet over the past weeks due to complete absorption in a few personal projects (TheScian SF Book is one of them). Regular blogging should resume next year.
Seeing Avatar movie tomorrow (3D). There would probably be a weekend post if the movie is very good (or very bad).
Happy holidays! The weather is cheery today here in England. Here's the view outside my window.
thescian | December 2, 2009Suketu Mehta writes of greed and irresponsibility over Bhopal. :
Union Carbide and Dow were allowed to get away with it because of the international legal structures that protect multinationals from liability. Union Carbide sold its Indian subsidiary and pulled out of India. Warren Anderson, the Union Carbide chief executive at the time of the gas leak, lives in luxurious exile in the Hamptons, even though there's an international arrest warrant out for him for culpable homicide. The Indian government has yet to pursue an extradition request. Imagine if an Indian chief executive had jumped…
thescian | December 1, 2009at TheScian.com. Enjoy. The authors would be glad to see your comments and--am sure--would happily respond.
The stories are a break from the past. They are uncompromising, and hence, I hope, will give the reader the rare satisfaction of a thoughtful discussion, rather than superficial entertainment.
TheScian SF book is in the works. More illustrations have been done. Here's one done recently for the story 'Live and exclusive'.
thescian | November 22, 2009Congratulations to the winners and thanks to all the participants. The stories will go online at TheScian.com within a few days.
First prize - "Stalker" by Shuchikar (author's penname)
Second prize - "On board the Ark" by Ankit Bhardwaj
Third prize - "Dropping Off" by Ramanand
I am pleased to say that all three stories have a darker theme than most of the earlier years' stories. This is good. We are moving beyond the initial awe-and-wonder phase of SF into more mature and adult themes. More on these later after I get them online. The work on the SF book is proceeding at a steady pace. As of…
thescian | November 19, 2009My father recalled sometime back the terrible drought that happened when he was a child: since the grains were running low, my grandfather would go out and dig tubers from surrounding fields, my grandmother would make something out of it for the kids. It is an experience that is far removed from my own. My father's occasional re-telling of this episode of his life affects me deeply, more so, because, although the effects of drought on rural p[oor has been minimized by the work of Amartya Sen, Dr Swaminathan and many others in the past decades, the effects have not been minimized to a level…
thescian | November 18, 2009I often go to a small woods near our home in Amersham with my daughter. Recently, I came to know a bit of history about the place that gave me a rude awakening and bought home the evil that pervaded societies in the form of Catholic Church in the past centuries (the evil still is there, in a more muted form, but it is there nevertheless). From Special Trees at Chiltern Project:
In the 15th Century, it was the execution site of a group of Lollards - a religious branch with beliefs that were similar to current Protestant doctrine - who wished for the Bible to be translated into English, were…
thescian | November 13, 2009I loathe tech support so I switched my parents to Ubuntu a while ago. But, you may not be so lucky. Your parents may not like Ubuntu. I can't imagine why they wouldn't, but, if they don't and they must absolutely have Windows, then use Windows SteadyState. It's free. [via this /. thread]
thescian | November 2, 2009So, I am in India for a short trip and was in Coimbatore yesterday. A truck almost collided with the autorickshaw (three-person tincan with an engine strapped on) I was riding in, then a bus gently nudged me as I was walking on --what I thought was clearly marked--a pedestrian path.
Things fall apart: this is a generally known in scientific circles as the second law of thermodynamics. In India, even the laws are subject to this law. Everything --including rules and laws--slowly reduce to a state of lawless equilibrium. After a while, someone or something explodes, and then things start to…
thescian | October 29, 2009Read On Writing by Carver if you harbor ambitions, then print the good lines and stick it on your wall. I came by this piece via an article in Guardian by Stuart Evers.
I am going to skip what Stuart said and point you to what interested me most in Carver's essay.
Ambition and a little luck are good things for a writer to have going for him. Too much ambition and bad luck, or no luck at all, can be killing. There has to be talent.
Without clear-headed self-appraisal and awareness of one's own level of skill and talent, we ain't going nowhere. Reminds me of a quote that's an old favorite of…
thescian | October 23, 2009This is and will be a burden on the World's conscience, the dark continent of our time. The images are devastating.
Xuanwei (宣å¨) in Yunnan province is a cancer village. Every year there are more than 20 people die of cancer. 11-year-old student Xu Li (å¾ä¸½) is suffering from bone cancer. May 8, 2007
"Pollution in China" - a documentary project of Lu Guang, a photographer from People's Republic of China.
thescian | October 15, 2009Something to read while having it. Why do people still drink it although there are no malarial mosquitoes where it is now had (such as, by me right now in Amersham)? Well, what can we say except that history is arbitrary and it has the advantage of being in the past and hence unquestionable.
thescian | October 12, 2009They are already here, they are amidst us, they zip through our heads affecting LHC funding, they come from future and cunningly prevent their production at LHC by affecting the present. Meet Bosons from the future.
So, this in short, is the paper by two physicists discussed in this NY Times article.
Dr. Nielson said of the theory, "Well, one could even almost say that we have a model for God." It is their guess, he went on, "that He rather hates Higgs particles, and attempts to avoid them."
This malign influence from the future, they argue, could explain why the United States…