Creative commons
thescian | June 30, 2008Watching Federer's match with Hewitt. Here's an old rally to regale your spirits. [Warning! Video has loud music]
An old tribute to Federer, still eloquent.
Beauty is not the goal of competitive sports, but high-level sports are a prime venue for the expression of human beauty. The relation is roughly that of courage to war.
The human beauty we're talking about here is beauty of a particular type; it might be called kinetic beauty. Its power and appeal are universal. It has nothing to do with sex or cultural norms. What it seems to have to do with, really, is human beings' reconciliation…
thescian | June 26, 2008Statistics page at Gov. of India Directory website. I should not have dared to check the treasures that the NIC (Government's IT arm) has hidden away at the government websites. I dared and my brain just exploded.
If you are fearless, I offer you this: check the footer at the website with the NIC disclaimer.
I have been visiting many state run websites lately and have rarely found one that is well designed and well maintained. It's worrying when you consider the claim (usually from NASSCOM), that India is a Software Giant. It is certainly not. It is said that India's progress is not because…
thescian | June 26, 2008I never play cricket. It requires one to assume such indecent postures. - Oscar Wilde.
thescian | June 18, 2008reddit open-sourced!
Firefox 3. Get it. Then go check the counter!
iPlayer for UK. Zattoo for Europe. For US? Try Hulu. (to watch outside US, you want this).
thescian | June 18, 2008Time hath, my lord, a wallet at his back,
Wherein he puts alms for oblivion.
-Shakespeare
thescian | June 14, 2008 Works by Austrian painter Gustav Klimt are at Tate Liverpool. Klimt is one of Vienna's famous sons (another is Freud). He was obsessed with Sex and Death and his distillation of these quintessential human experiences is extraordinarily powerful. Consider The Kiss. It is intoxicating. One could feel the tension, power (and perhaps, responsibility too?) embodied in the male figure. Of course, if one knows Klimt's life the paintings take on more meaning (he was uncommitted to any women all through life, however, he had many relationships and supposedly fathered more than a dozen children). The…
thescian | June 14, 2008Sunil promises to send Orson Scott Card's How to write science fiction to a story with the most creative scientific content (and does not break any laws of science).
Go for it!
thescian | June 11, 2008Hear! Hear! TheScian Science Fiction Story Contest for this year has been announced! Follow this link for rules and dates and more. If all goes well, you may find your story in print next year. But first, you must compete to win. Tell your ambitious, head-in-the-galaxy friends whose speculations has amused and entertained you. Spread the word. Get going and good luck. Previous contests: 2007 , 2006.
thescian | June 2, 2008Goethe ... is a wonderful instance of the fact that the purest naïveté and the most mighty understanding can go hand in hand. -Thomas Mann on Goethe.
When I read this, it struck me as extraordinarily insightful. Perhaps, I am taking Mann out of content, but I shall talk anyway. Aren't those who pursue science to understand the world this way too - naïve but with a heart that holds the laws of the world? One could think Einstein may have been naïve when he wrote letters to President Roosevelt on the Manhattan project, but, that was not because he did not understand. Was it? It was because…
thescian | May 30, 2008I have been wondering. Do all religious explanations of Creation of the world necessarily involve narcissism and incest? If everything comes from god, Creation is an act of incest beginning with god's own self. Is that why Thomas Aquinas and St Augustine invoke god's dignity in disallowing sexual conception of Christ? If logic leads to blasphemy, fuck logic, says the religious mind. Right?
We should note that the Vedas take a more interesting approach to this impasse. They take a shock-and-awe approach. (If you can't beat them, eat them and make them a part of yourself. Hinduism's evidently…
thescian | May 29, 2008Latest TWiT episode has Brewster Kahle speaking of archive.org and more. He is extremely persuasive. Must listen.
Zattoo, a new IPTV service that serves free TV on the computer (low resolution, like youtube, but uses p2p like BBC's iPlayer) in Europe and hopes to make money by sticking ads while users switch channels. It'll probably succeed. Picked this up at YC.news.
I've setup a box at home (dual boot with Ubuntu and Windows XP) for iPlayer and Miro. I hope to add Zattoo to it, buy a shipload of popcorn and spend the rest of my life watching a shiny screen and be eternally entertained.…
thescian | May 29, 2008 I recently read John Irving's Trying to save Piggy Sneed, a collection of essays and a few short stories. It's a good book to pick up if you haven't read Irving yet. Briefly, Irving's The World according to Garp is one of the craziest and astonishing book (my current read). You may know one of the later adaptation of it captured popular imagination as the movie Forrest Gump.
So, in the Piggy Sneed book (chapter one here), his essay In Defense of Sentimentality is printed, reading which prompted me to re-read Dickens' A Christmas Carol.
...who could fault "A Christmas Carol"? "Who can listen…
thescian | May 23, 2008Announcement at the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation:
SEATTLE -- In recognition of its groundbreaking work to prevent debilitating blindness and provide affordable, world-class eye care to the poor, the Aravind Eye Care System, based in Tamil Nadu, India, has won the 2008 Gates Award for Global Health. The $1 million Gates Award--the world's largest prize for international health--honors extraordinary efforts to improve health in developing countries.
Founded by Dr. G. Venkataswamy in 1976, Aravind has saved millions of people in India from debilitating blindness. Cataracts account for…
thescian | May 19, 2008They that have power to hurt and will do none,
That do not do the thing they most do show,
Who, moving others, are themselves as stone,
Unmoved, cold, and to temptation slow,
They rightly do inherit heaven's graces
And husband nature's riches from expense;
They are the lords and owners of their faces,
Others but stewards of their excellence.
The summer's flower is to the summer sweet,
Though to itself it only live and die,
But if that flower with base infection meet,
The basest weed outbraves his dignity:
For sweetest things turn sourest by their deeds;
Lilies that fester smell far worse than…
thescian | May 15, 2008I've used music from ccMixter for TheScian audio and it was always a pleasure to listen to remixes of Calendar Girl. Here's the news from ccMixter:
In October 2006, singer song-writer Tamara Barnett-Herrin from London in the UK published a one sentence challenge to herself and to remixers around the World Wide Web: "I write one song a month. You remix and feedback. We make a record." This experiment in songwriting and remix culture unlike any other yielded over 300 remixes, setting a new record at ccMixter. Twelve of them have been chosen to be published in an album titled Calendar Songs…