Creative commons
thescian | September 17, 2008Folks, this an experimental post (for me, that is). It is slightly incoherent. Written in five minutes. No corrections made. My typing hands decide not to pause. Enjoy if you can get through the muddle.
Big Bang, a variation
I watched Brian Cox present an excellent BBC TV programme on the LHC (on iPlayer, UK only). He covered a great deal and did it engagingly. As I watched the Big Bang being presented as garguntum explosion, I wondered if this is a true picture of the beginning of the Universe. The explosions seemed to pander to the shockjocks in us. Explosions: good. Explanations,…
thescian | September 16, 2008I found the below from historian and writer Ramachandra Guha's book India After Gandhi to be of interest given the current US election campaign (Note that Mr Guha was talking within the context of Partition).
"The world over, the rhetoric of modern democratic politics has been marked by two rather opposed rhetorical styles. The first appeals to hope, to popular aspirations for economic prosperity and social peace. The second appeals to fear, to sectional worries about being worsted or swamped by one's historic enemies."
India has, I think, held up pretty well with Mr Guha's observation over…
thescian | September 10, 2008Saw this at a mailing list [Anarchy-SF]. I would have left out Harry Potter (it's gratuitous with certain themes: homosexuality, libertarian....). A good list to pick from you are looking for fiction on political sf to read.
thescian | September 1, 2008Muse and make money.
Hi all,
We're delighted to be able to tell you about this contest we have just got up and running. We're presenting it in partnership with LiveJournal, one of the oldest, most respected names in the community blogging world.
It's a pretty simple challenge we have here, one that will particularly appeal to all the fiction writers among you, but not too intimidating for those of you who like other forms of writing to give it a bash.
Can you tell a quicker, snappier story than anyone else? Would you care to pit your story-telling abilities against those of your peers?
Quick…
thescian | August 29, 2008It's blogroll rebuilding time! How better to start than with a clean slate. To begin, all the book podcasts I listen to regularly have now been placed in Google Reader. You'll also find it shared on the side bar to the left. Subscribe to the share, if you would like to keep a tab on my recommendations. At the moment, unfortunately, the shared items are listed in the order I marked them and so you may have to paginate a bit to get through them. It's still worth a look, if I may say so. Below are some I highly recommend:
I welcome your recommendations of writers/books podcast you think I…
thescian | August 21, 2008Let the writer take up surgery or bricklaying if he is interested in technique. There is no mechanical way to get the writing done, no shortcut. The young writer would be a fool to follow a theory. Teach yourself by your own mistakes; people learn only by error. The good artist believes that nobody is good enough to give him advice. He has supreme vanity.
How refreshing! That was from The Paris Reviews, the finest set of interviews with writers in all the world. You can read more about The Paris Reviews from an article Orhan Pamuk wrote for The Guardian last year. (see)
I started to post a…
thescian | August 11, 2008Anand Giridharadas (his blog) writes at IHT:
many of the people who are making the new India new - from the stockbrokers to the bedecked socialites - are responsible for preserving a certain gloomy element of the Indian past: a tendency to treat the hired help like chattel, to taunt and humiliate and condescend to them, to behave as though some humans were born to serve and others to be served.
"Indians are perhaps the world's most undemocratic people, living in the world's largest and most plural democracy," as Sudhir Kakar and Katharina Kakar, two well-known scholars of Indian culture, put…
thescian | August 4, 2008A collection of scifi speculation ranging from robocracy to anarchy at io9.
thescian | August 3, 2008Go here for some stunning time-lapse video of Britons living, moving about and talking - seen through the world of satellite and communication imagery.
Nifty new modes of perception. If some day, things beyond biology come alive, this is how they may be perceived?
thescian | July 29, 2008Orwell is a hero of mine, and of many. This news at the BBC caught my eyes.
His diary entries are to be published on a special blog - one entry at a time by The Orwell Prize.
"From 9th August 2008, you will be able to gather your own impression of Orwell's face from reading his most strongly individual piece of writing: his diaries. The Orwell Prize is delighted to announce that, to mark the 70th anniversary of the diaries, each diary entry will be published on this blog exactly seventy years after it was written, allowing you to follow Orwell's recuperation in Morocco, his return to the UK…
thescian | July 22, 2008The most essential gift for a good writer is a built-in, shockproof shit detector. This is the writer's radar and all great writers have had it.
--Ernest Hemingway
thescian | July 21, 2008Last Saturday, we went to see WALL-E with our 4 year old niece. It's the story of an ordinary cleaning robot (WALL-E stands for Waste Allocation Load Lifter Earth-Class) that, well, keeps cleaning a city on earth long after humans have left earth. Humans left earth because they had turned it into a garbage heap. They have all run away from earth when it got too messy on a spaceship operated by a giant business corporation - the same corporation that ran earth aground. The escapees hope that once earth fixes herself, humans can all come back and re-colonize. Since many generations pass on…
thescian | July 18, 2008Driving: It's half a ton of steel strapped under your bum and barreling down the road at breakneck speed. This is as crazy as it gets. Driving is, of course, a religious experience. What else could it be! It's nuts and people love it. A reasoning head would not place itself inside a steel cage and move forward with explosive liquids - especially if that head considers the road causality statistics (one million in 1998, WHO study).
Living entails risks, self-created or otherwise, isn't it? Stalking a prey through the dense forest risking snake bites, speeding on a road where getting pulped is…
thescian | July 16, 2008
Our eyes prefer to suppose
That a habitable place
Has a geocentric view,
That architects enclose
A quiet Euclidian space:
Exploded myths - but who
Could feel at home astraddle
An ever expanding saddle?
-From W. H. Auden's After Reading a Child's Guide to Modern Physics
Very cool. The saddle, if you are unaware, is one of the possible shapes of space (see a fun NASA factcard).
thescian | July 15, 2008Mark Twain sez,
It is surmised by the biographers that the young Shakespeare got his vast knowledge of the law and his familiar and accurate acquaintance with the manners and customs and shop-talk of lawyers through being for a time the CLERK OF A STRATFORD COURT: just as a bright lad like me, reared in a village on the banks of the Mississippi, might become perfect in knowledge of the Behring Strait whale-fishery and the shop-talk of the veteran exercisers of that adventure- bristling trade through catching catfish with a "trot-line" Sundays. But the surmise is damaged by the fact that there…
thescian | July 14, 2008From an old bookmark. Still fresh. Some of my picks:
6) Long plot explanations aren't going to get it. Like, when something neat (horrible?) happened to one of the characters a real long time ago, and you really really want to tell us about it, you know? Don't.
12) We can't care about sand mutants; if you do, or think you do, kill yourself.
21) If you write a sentence that isn't poignant, touching, funny, intriguing, inviting, etc., take it out before you finish the work. Don't just leave it there. Don't let anyone see it.
23) Also: Obscurity is not subtlety; intentional obscurity is…
thescian | July 10, 2008
Humans - they don't like errant Silverfish, dear;
Oh, they snap the page shut, when you read Shakespeare!
-Published at TheScian.com
thescian | July 4, 2008A gathering of Nobel Laureates in Germany. Read more at the Sb editors blog. There's also a event blog called Lindau Bangladesh run by three young researchers from Bangladesh who are participating.
thescian | July 4, 2008 Thomas Bertie, 34, male, has given birth to his child normally. Many men with imagination might wonder at times (like me, not admitting to anyone, perhaps, but wonder) about how it would be like to be pregnant - just as an imaginative woman might wonder how men manage with erections in public and dangling balls between their legs.
Isn't Thomas's pregnancy one more instance where science, imagination and human daring makes it possible to redefine the norm? Congrats to him and child.