DesiPundit
thescian | May 24, 2009This news at the beebs.
A Catholic church in Malaysia which prays to Allah has prompted a court case over who can use the word.
Muslim leaders say Islam should be the only faith to use it, saying its use in other faiths could lead to confusion and conversions.
The medieval argument to own god's name has taken a modern twist: that of trademark ownership. I don't think there is a legally sound case here. But, this is in Malaysia and things may be different there.
thescian | May 19, 2009A few days back, I happened to watch a few scenes of an old Star Trek episode. There was the usual fare of beam-me-ups, tea materializer, mother levitator, etc. And then there was the Matter Displacement Detector. That piqued my interest. This device allows the Star Trek crew to check if there was someone at a place in the past. Presumably, the said person left eddies in the spacetime continuum that can be detected to ascertain the presence of the person in question. Naturally, I started wondering if the physics behind it is plausible in some way. It was not explained in the episode, so we…
thescian | May 16, 2009Watched this delightful interview by Gabby Logan with Agassi and Graf, two of my favorite tennis players when I was young. It was more than just two former professional tennis players talking. Very smart and very self-aware. I've grown fond of this couple even more now.
The greatest sports piece ever written. Foster Wallace on Federer. Reading it again. Poignant when you know that David Foster Wallace was a child prodigy who played tennis really well before taking up writing, and then dying. Sad, sad, sad.
The second best sports writing, written in 1960 by John Updike on Ted Williams, the…
thescian | May 14, 2009
Layman: What are the strings in String Theory made of?
Physicist: Well, they are not made of anything. They are fundamental.
Layman: Like how sometime back protons were fundamental, and then how quarks were fundamental?
Physicist: You see, physics usually advances gradually, building upon our earlier understanding. Sometimes, we have breakthroughs: times such as when Newton published his Principia, when Einstein published his Theory of Gravitation or when Quantum Mechanical Laws were published. New models of reality that change our conception fundamentally are found and we begin again. The…
thescian | May 12, 2009Dubliners, naturally. Counterparts is as simple and as powerful as it gets. The story leads us to these lines:
The boy uttered a squeal of pain as the stick cut his thigh. He clasped his hands together in the air and his voice shook with fright.
"O, pa!" he cried. "Don't beat me, pa! And I'll... I'll say a Hail Mary for you.... I'll say a Hail Mary for you, pa, if you don't beat me.... I'll say a Hail Mary...."
Everytime one reads it, the utter blindness of everyday life and the attendant cruelty looms larger and larger before one's eyes.
thescian | April 30, 2009
It happens when matter meets anti-matter. That there is such a thing called anti-matter never ceases to amaze me. Paul Dirac, when he arrived at the famous equation for electron-, realized that the equation predicted two particles: one was the electron and the other a as yet unknown particle which he called the positron. Great physicists are guided towards Truth by the subtle hand of Beauty. Dirac's equation was exquisite. Hence, it must be true, he declared in 1928. The positron was discovered in 1932. (Dirac was awarded the Nobel Prize for Physics the following year.)
The positron is…
thescian | April 21, 2009World Digital Library, the UN project to provide digital access to cultural heritage of our world. The search interface is quite interesting. Give it a go.
Susan Boyle. For a few minutes, I forgot my distaste for gawdy talent shows and delighted in Possibilities. The unlikely and heart-warming realization of a middle aged woman's dream.
thescian | April 20, 2009The accomplished author died a few days ago at 78. This, at Guardian:
[As a] science fiction author [he] "wasn't interested in the far future, spaceships and all that", he explained; rather he was interested in "the evolving world, the world of hidden persuaders, of the communications landscape developing, of mass tourism, of the vast conformist suburbs dominated by television - that was a form of science fiction, and it was already here".
Ballard was the first author who brought the vision of bleakness and dystopia into my teenage life.
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 8, 2009Would you please piss-off. -Dawkins.
Dawkins responds to Mr Blair, who wrote:
The 21st century will be poorer in spirit and ambition, less focused on social justice, less sensitive to conscience and the common good, without a full and proper recognition of the role that the great faiths can and do play. I hope my foundation, in its own way, can work with others in those faiths to help harness their full power to transform our world for the better
How grandiose can a man get! Clearly, Faith facilitates - nay, actively promotes - one to be this delusional. Dawkins exposes this BS for what it…
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 23, 2009Where there is nothing, there is no thing as there. That's the usual response to 'what's outside the universe'. Evidently, this stands at the very edge of meaning: meaning in the scientific sense, meaning derived from being able to observe and measure some thing.
This response would satisfy those engaged in scientific observations and measurements. They can sleep easy in the knowledge that even if they don't know, they are making the attempt to know (am not saying they do sleep, but that they can sleep). In the end, this is probably the most rational way to proceed. But, what about ordinary…
thescian | March 20, 2009Ladies and lads, Extreme Sheep LED Art, a.k.a Welsh herd hacking and The Baa-Vinci Project.
via
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 | March 3, 2009Every object is mathematical but some are more mathematical than others. This morning I noticed my one year old daughter playing with one of her toys - an open cube with small spheres at each vertex which held many distractions. On one side of this cube was an Archimedes screw, an astonishing mathematical object. She was running a small wheel that ran over this little plastic Archimedes screw. What joy a simple toy holds.
Archimedes Screw is one my favorite mathematical objects. What is your favorite mathematical object (utilitarian, like the Archimedes Screw, or abstract, like E8)?
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 17, 2009
Swarm of flies on the left. source
In Seven Samurai - one of the greatest movie of all times, there is a scene where the hired Samurai gather the villagers to instruct them on defending their village. A jittery villager runs away from the crowd and is brought back by Kambei, the aging samurai, who threatens the deserter with dire consequences. He then offers this, and I paraphrase here: An individual can fight a successful war only if he is part of a group. An individual will lose a war by standing alone.
As profound as this sounds, this is well known to birds, fishes, insects and animals…