Creative commons
thescian | April 15, 2009From his collection Death of a Naturalist. A wonderful collection of short poems. This particular poem's theme and language resonates across cultures and continents. It triggered memories of my time with my grandfather on the land picking cotton and onion, cutting grass and sugarcane, wading through the wet clay of paddy fields, sleeping under coconut trees...
Digging
Between my finger and my thumb
The squat pen rests; as snug as a gun.
Under my window a clean rasping sound
When the spade sinks into gravelly ground:
My father, digging. I look down
Till his straining rump among the flowerbeds…
thescian | April 9, 2009An interesting article by Nicholas Kulish on something very german: Rules.What the Germans call Ordnung (the usual translation is "order," but it is a much broader concept) is the unwritten road map of one society's concerted effort to permanently banish the instability and violence that have marked its history. That sense of insecurity includes Germany's forced division in the cold war, the Nazi era and the hyperinflation of the 1920s, but it also stretches at least as far back as the Thirty Years' War in the 17th century, which decimated much of the German territories and population, and…
thescian | April 8, 2009First published around this time in 1869 in The Atlantic. Stirs me whenever I read it. Some parts of the poem:
Pround music of the storm!
Blast that careers so free, whistling across the prairies!
Strong hum of forest tree-tops! Wind of the mountains!
Personified dim shapes! you hidden orchestras!
You serenades of phantoms, with instruments alert,
Blending, with Nature's rhythmus, all the tongues of nations;
You chords left us by vast composers! you choruses!
You formless, free, religious dances! you from the Orient!
You undertone of rivers, roar of pouring cataracts;
You sounds from distant…
thescian | March 27, 2009Business that requires direct customer service, that's where. If the post's heading attracted you, you should give this HN thread about Google Checkout woes a read. As many on the thread point out, there is a upper bound you hit when optimizing customer service against efficiency. After a stage, the more you serve, the less you can attend to them when they have problems. So, you automate and automate and hope all customers will be robots who follow a process without error. But, then, as always, reality intervenes. Clearly, Google isn't the only company you can beat in this area.
thescian | March 26, 2009TEDIndia Conference: "The Future Beckons" has been announced. It will take place November 4-7, 2009, in Mysore, India. More here.
iAccelerator 2009 startup incubator at IIM Ahmedabad is now accepting applications. They help first time technology entrepreneurs. Go here and get started.
thescian | March 20, 2009Ladies and lads, Extreme Sheep LED Art, a.k.a Welsh herd hacking and The Baa-Vinci Project.
via
thescian | March 18, 20091. grandeur, not excess
2. sublimity, not harshness
3. strength, not rashness
4. severity, not grimness
5. gravity, not dullness
6. joy, not abandon
7. pleasantness, not decadence
8. greatness, not pomposity
I like 1, 6 and 8. They make my sensibilities feel warm and fuzzy, like a campfire that is neither too close not too far. The rest are, well, they are unpleasant, harsh, rash, grim, dull and decadent. I feel pompous for saying that.
thescian | March 12, 2009
Twenty years ago this month, something happened at CERN that would change the world forever: Tim Berners-Lee handed a document to his supervisor Mike Sendall entitled "Information Management : a Proposal". "Vague, but exciting" is how Mike described it, and he gave Tim the nod to take his proposal forward. The following year, the World Wide Web was born.-World Wide Web@20
What an incredibly lucky turn of events since then! I still remember the day when in 1998 I first used lynx, the text-only browser, on a beaten up machine in college. It felt like I had opened the window into a new world -…
thescian | March 5, 2009Here's a list of things I want to be able to buy in the near future:
Better eyes. Check this news at beebs on a man with bionic eyes. I am very hopeful. Spectacles suck, contact lenses suck. I want a pair of bionic eyes.
Better memory. No news on this. Cognitive enhancement drugs will not cut it. I want a prosthetic that adds to the sorry excuse of a memory that evolution has endowed me with. If we can interface with the optic nerve (above), we can interface with any nerve, the brain included.
Better legs - so I can run to the office a dozen miles without breaking a sweat. Sitting inside a…
thescian | February 24, 2009What a tasteless and offensive question, you think. Let me correct that misunderstanding. Don't look upon arseholes as second-class organs. If you did not have one, you'll be full of shit. If gods don't have the hole, boy, then they surely have accumulated all the crap since the beginning of time. If they do have the hole, well, then they are no different from us, are they?
Whenever gods take form, we don't consider it necessary to discuss their bowel movement and certainly won't depict them wearing their arseholes proudly. Why? It's unimportant, you say, there are more pressing matters for…
thescian | February 9, 2009The newer model is out. The beginning of the end of paper books? Maybe. Paper books will be around, but devices like Kindle are certain to change the rules of the game. Gone are the days when we can argue that paper books are superior to electronic reading devices because they are portable, don't need a lot of maintenance, they are perfectly suited for primates to handle with their primatey hands, eyes and brains, etc.
thescian | February 3, 2009It made a deep impression in me to listen to Updike talk about the countless stars and galaxies and our cosmic insignificance in an old interview recording (one of the rare few) given to Eleanor Wachtel who hosts Writers & Company. Ian McEwan writes in the guardian:This most Lutheran of writers, driven by intellectual curiosity all his life, was troubled by science as others are troubled by God. When it suited him, he could easily absorb and be impressed by physics, biology, astronomy, but he was constitutionally unable to "make the leap of unfaith". The "weight" of personal death did not…
thescian | January 30, 2009I am fascinated by the question: Who was Shakespeare. I take it as an expression of awe and wonder at a genius who kept almost all of his personal life hidden. It is also an opportunity to know about the historical backdrop in which many of his plays are set. The question will never be resolved (which is great news if you want to have the bard perform in your fictional stage). I remember reading a scifi story where the protagonist travels in time and meets Shakespeare. Can't recall the title of the story, unfortunately.
Anyho, here is Keir Cutler's (a superlative Canadian playwright/performer…
thescian | January 22, 2009Read these in the past two months. I don't know if I'll get to review them properly. Still, wanted to share a few words about them while the mind is drunk with a heady concoction of ideas and stories.
Sea of Poppies by Amitav Ghosh
First of the trilogy. Exceptional. There's original research on the poppy trade: how many of us knew that most of opium sold to China by the British came from India, how were workers transported in ships to foreign lands, the mingling of cultures and languages. Extraordinary tale.
The Imam and the Indian by Amitav Ghosh
Prose pieces. The one about the ghost of…
thescian | January 20, 2009Elizabeth Alexander's poem on the inauguration of Mr Obama as President captured America at the cusp of a new day. It is plain and simple, like a Whitman poem.Someone is trying to make music somewhere with a pair of wooden spoons on an oil drum with cello, boom box, harmonica, voice.
A woman and her son wait for the bus.
A farmer considers the changing sky; A teacher says, "Take out your pencils. Begin.
We encounter each other in words, words spiny or smooth, whispered or declaimed; words to consider, reconsider.
We cross dirt roads and highways that mark the will of someone and then others…
thescian | January 19, 2009A story that I enjoyed very much. Touchstone is one of the two selected stories of the Scifi Contest. Ramanand, you may know, won the 2007 contest last year.
With this we've exhausted all the publishable stories. The Scientific Indian Stories book is in the works. I will make another announcement shortly so authors can send in their best stories to be shortlisted for the book. Get your muse going meanwhile.
thescian | January 11, 2009at Locus. Pay close attention to 'Don't research' especially if you write (or plan to write) speculative fiction. There's a Writer's Kit at TheScian,com that may interest you as well.