Creative commons
thescian | October 8, 2009Inspired and inspiring young man from Africa William Kamkwamba. Watched him on The Daily Show just now.
thescian | October 5, 2009Congrats to all the participants who took the critical first step by courageously sending your baby into the wild. The number of submissions this year is eleven which is not too many. I hope to provide good feedback to authors as I can spend more time with fewer stories.
The book preparation is coming along fine. An illustrator living in NY is doing the illustrations for the stories. The site logo has been re-designed and it'll go on the book cover as well. Here's a draft (there are a few other variants of this theme):
I'll share the illustrations when they are ready.
thescian | October 4, 2009There's a reading at Kings place tomorrow. See here for details. You'll have to buy tickets. If you read Neruda, I don't have to tell you it will be worth the money. I hear there will be a screening of a reading by Neruda himself.
emjohnson | October 2, 2009
I had the opportunity to see this live in April. I had never heard of Lawrence Lessig prior to this presentation, but I haven't been able to forget it. I'm so pleased to have found it online.
thescian | October 1, 2009Saw a post on the crazy-dangerous-pathetic-dude on Pharyngula. One comment(#8) stood out as an answer to the question "When you get rid of God, what do you fill the void with?" :Earth..:If you have a void that was filled with an imaginary friend, its still a void.
thescian | September 30, 2009Dropbox works very well. To keep notes and to keep them synchronized, I use Tomboy + Dropbox. LifeHacker has pointers on this.
thescian | September 28, 2009Alright. Now, you have no excuses. Send it in before I come and snatch it. Here is the link to go to, if you have not heard about the contest.
thescian | September 22, 2009Since I am not posting much on the blog, the wife suggests I leave a few links she supplies. So here they are:-
http://beta.thehindu.com/opinion/lead/article22217.ece
Since Indian rural workers under National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme do not get their wages in time, they are powerless, starving and helpless.
http://beta.thehindu.com/sport/article23212.ece
Can Women concentrate on a career post childbirth? Of Course, yes.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2009/sep/20/japan-relatives-professional-stand-ins
You can rent a friend, a spouse or a parent if you are in Japan
Just the act of…
thescian | September 5, 2009A poem from the book I am reading at present. The Mirror Maker by Primo Levi. I had an epiphany few weeks back--an epiphany that I was unable to describe--, an epiphany that I have now found the words for in Levi's lucid poem: 'between us, for at least a moment, was drawn a segment, a well-defined chord.' It is a privilege to live in this maelstrom of a world where one has Levi, a fellow human, friend, who carried and still carries, with his immortal words, the torch that illuminates the darkest corners of human history and experience.
To My Friends
Dear friends, I say friends here
In the…
thescian | September 2, 2009
From the beebs:Only one crime was solved by each 1,000 CCTV cameras in London last year, a report into the city's surveillance network has claimed.
The internal police report found the million-plus cameras in London rarely help catch criminals.
Bruce Schneider calls this security theater. It makes a good show to be able to show pictures on TV of alleged criminals. We watch it and feel safe: if a criminal is caught on a camera, it wouldn't be long before he is caught physically as well. Right? Wrong. It seems very reasonable and natural but fact is not obliged to follow our misguided…
thescian | August 27, 2009
A few links on the great Uruguayan writer. His latest book is called Mirrors, he explains why in this video, in a voice that makes one to listen to it far into the night.
He is interviewed by Michael Silverblatt for KCRW Bookworm.
Blogging will be infrequent for some weeks due to travel, study and personal commitments. I'll update Today's recs on the left side, if you like to hop-off elsewhere.
emjohnson | August 17, 2009I'm sorry, I'm afraid that title's misleading. This is actually an early video of UnitedHealth CEO Stephen J. Hemsley (whose salary is estimated at $102,000 an hour) discussing his principled stance on why he's opposed to the public option in US health care reform.
Or it could be The Money Song from Monty Python's Flying Circus. It's difficult to tell them apart.
thescian | August 17, 2009A celebration of human ingenuity through the life of Benjamin Franklin by Maira Kalman at And the Pursuit of Happiness.
thescian | August 12, 2009From the preface of his Collected Fictions translated by Andrew Hurley.
Reading is an activity subsequent to writing--more resigned, more civil, more intellectual. (1935)
The learned doctors of the Great Vehicle teach us that the essential characteristic of the universe is its emptiness. They are certainly correct with respect to the tiny part of the universe that is this book. Gallows and pirates fill its pages, and the word iniquity strikes awe in its title, but under all the storm and lightning, there is nothing. It is all just appearence, a surface of images--which is why readers may,…
thescian | July 31, 2009Sympathy, help, and a positive engagement. - Robert Louis Stevenson.
That partial quote is from a fascinating essay called My First Book by the same author. A must read for all young writers. Here's a bit more:The accepted novelist may take his novel up and put it down, spend days upon it in vain, and write not any more than he makes haste to blot. Not so the beginner. Human nature has certain rights; instinct--the instinct of self-preservation--forbids that any man (cheered and supported by the consciousness of no previous victory) should endure the miseries of unsuccessful literary toil…
thescian | July 24, 2009In India snakes charm you. Yes, they do, especially if you are a legislator in Orissa state assembly.
Have time to hear a personal anecdote of the charms of snakes? Here we go.
When I was about 6 or 7, I used to roam around the fields in my mother's native village (google map). There were two rocky mounds, each about the height of a four storey building covering perhaps five football fields. It was a magical space for young children. At times, the magic would be enhanced by a fight between a snake and a mongoose (mongoose eats snakes, there were days as a child when I wanted to be one). So…
thescian | July 20, 2009Yesterday night I happened to listen to the BBC programme called The Bottom Line. Mr James Dyson was on. For those who are not aware, he is one of the finest engineers around. His company makes many things, most famous of all the Dyson Vacuum Cleaner. So, he was asked what gets the creative juices flowing for an entrepreneur. Mr Dyson said "anger". Anger at something that does not work well. Chanelling that anger to come up with a better solution is creativity, it is the entrepreneurial spirit (in software, it is sometimes called scratching an itch). Great to listen to. Check this video where…
thescian | July 17, 2009Do you think you ought to 'own' your digital content the same way you own material content? Take ebooks from Amazon stored in the Kindle. Recently, Amazon snuck into users Kindle and removed a book with questionable copyright (the book is 1984, feel free to laugh with irony). Pogue writes: "As one of my readers noted, it's like Barnes & Noble sneaking into our homes in the middle of the night, taking some books that we've been reading off our nightstands, and leaving us a check on the coffee table."
This is a PR disaster for Amazon and they have recognized how offended consumers are.
You'…
thescian | July 16, 2009Bill Gates has made it available online. You need to install Silvelight (the flash alternative from Microsoft). It's worth it.
thescian | July 15, 2009Recently discovered the works of Raqib Shaw. Raqib Shaw was born in Culcutta, spent his youth in Kashmir and now lives and works in London.
There are conflicts at so many levels in Raqib Shaw's paintings that, as we look at it, we are drawn deeper and deeper into a strange, fantastical and unsettling world.
One can detect a potent mix of western and eastern influences in the the paintings. Raqib Shaw explains in an interview: "Japanese look at my work and think it's Japanese, Indians look at my work and think this is Indian. But, [I think my art is ] a very mediocre example of what is to…