Prime Stream
thescian | October 3, 2007When I was young, I used to go out with my grandfather and scout around Oddakkadu fields (our farm's name) for a certain root used as perfume and in preparations in south India, called Vettiver in tamil. I loved pulling it up and taking in the aroma along with the smell of moist dirt. Wonderfully refreshing. Lakshmi at nonscience led me down memory lane with a post on vettiver.
thescian | October 1, 2007 A Washington Post note on the coming Olympics Event in China as a chance to get the Chinese to act.
BBC on the impossibilities and possibilities.
Burmese bloggers without Borders.
India, of course, is quiet and congratulating itself for carrying the torch of realpolitik; realpolitik that sees only so far as the tip of its bayonet and not beyond. "We're not the only democracy that works with generals", an Indian official is quoted as saying. I salute you, sir, for betraying your people's humane instincts. Role models for living like animals without a shred of empathy and humanity is not in…
thescian | September 29, 2007John Bogle, founder of Vanguard Mutual Fund, brings the imbalance of American society into sharp focus with candor and insight. A conversation that I am going to watch many times, especially the part where Bogle draws parallels between pre-revolutionary French society with its castle owners and the present amercian soceity with its super-rich.
thescian | September 26, 2007 Evolution is directed blindness, a muddling-through in the direction of survival and procreation. Very early on, evolution acquired a shopping bag: the Skin. A piece of astonishing molecular engineering that is protective, flexible, regenerative, self-healing, vitamin manufacturing, and porous to a precise degree. But, there is one catch. It is colored: we call it black, white (colorless, actually), brown, and various shades in between. Unlike a shopping bag which is deliberately colorful to attract buyers, the color of our skin has little to do with consumer behavior (there's some sexual…
thescian | September 25, 2007The Indian version of penis lengthening cream is applied on the face. Cream makers are a kind bunch, mindful of cultural differences and such.
If there is one organ that has a disproportionate and ludicrious hold on us - men and women, it must be the skin.
thescian | September 23, 2007A political impossibility, apparently. A Guardian article
'We wanted a fundamental change in the relationship with the school and the established religion of the country,' said Kelley, talking about the proposals he put forward towards the end of Tony Blair's premiership. 'They accepted it would be popular but said it was politically impossible.'
One senior figure at the then Department for Education and Skills, told Kelley that bishops in the House of Lords and ministers would block the plans. Religion, they added, was 'technically embedded' in many aspects of education.
(via PZ).
thescian | September 22, 2007As soon as she saw the two darkly clad men riding towards her on camels, their heads and faces swathed in scarves, Nafisa Mohamed knew what she must do. "I told my son and my daughter to run as fast as they could." The men were the Janjaweed, nomadic Arab bandits who have been slaughtering Darfuri men and raping women, in a military offensive engineered by the Sudanese government. Jinn is Arabic for demon and jawad means horse. Darfuri people will tell you that the Janjaweed are indeed devils on horseback. Nafisa had been living for a year in Kalma camp, which houses about 120,000 Darfuri…
thescian | September 22, 2007Allow me to present to you the after effects of Evolution which did not anticipate video cameras and head-mounted projection.
The key to creating an artificial out-of-body experience is to scramble a person's visual and touch sensations, tricking their brain into perceiving that they are somewhere else.[via New Scientist]
How easily our brain gets tricked!
thescian | September 21, 2007A fascinating essay by the philosopher Daniel C. Dennett on human intuition and computational processes in Technology Review. He discusses the case of chess matches between computers like Deep Blue and players like Kasporov.
...the search space for chess is too big for even Deep Blue to explore exhaustively in real time, so like Kasparov, it prunes its search trees by taking calculated risks, and like Kasparov, it often gets these risks precalculated. Both the man and the computer presumably do massive amounts of "brute force" computation on their very different architectures. After all, what…
thescian | September 20, 2007
If you look closely, the flounder fish has a rather remarkable head. There's something amiss with the placement of its right eye and the way its mouth opens, as if it was a normal fish like, say the discus fish, that lived a normal life and one day some crazy demented person came along and said, "So you think you are ok? Let's see. I'll drop you on the sea floor and make you drag on your sides on the floor. Yes, you have noticed, haven't you? You are dragging one eye in mud. Well, let me twist your head around to bring it to the same side as the eye facing the sky. Doing that makes your…
thescian | September 10, 2007Keep those hot things under cover, especially if you are in the UK where hot-mapping is all the rage. Hot-mapping is thermal imaging houses - usually by flying an aeroplane with imaging equipment - to figure who's hot and who's not. Haringey, a town near London has now got its own hot-map. [via BLDGBLOG] The map, I must say, is just ugly. Shouldn't it be possible to export the data into a KML format, suitable for google earth or World Wind?
From the Haringey website:
[In] a poorly insulated property, up to 1 out of every 3 pounds spent on heating is being wasted
Holy pounds!
thescian | September 9, 2007A proposed bill in India to put people who don't care for their aged parents on the wrong side of the law. From The Telegraph:
Aged parents without the means to maintain themselves will be guaranteed the right to live in the homes of their sons and daughters if the government accepts the suggestions of an MPs' panel.
The right would apply even if the son or daughter has built the house from his or her personal earnings, says the parliamentary standing committee on the Maintenance and Welfare of Parents and Senior Citizens Bill, 2007.
The bill puts the same obligation on stepchildren and…
thescian | September 6, 2007It's fast, it's cool. Go get it. There are some font rendering issues on Windows XP but am sure it'll be fixed in next release. Works great on Mac too (something I hold against Firefox). Ars has a review.
thescian | September 6, 2007News from 'Weird Panditji' Department. (Pandits are the folks who interpret religious text and perform ceremonies in India, usually North India, in south they are called by other names).
The wife was talking to her friend and I happened to overhear.
Friend: (angry at something) I have to tell you this otherwise my head will explode. I called up Mrs D who used to be my neighbor a year back. She told me she has a 2 month old baby. That was news to me! I have been speaking to her regularly for the past year and she never told me she was pregnant!
Wife: That's odd. Why didn't she tell you?…
thescian | August 30, 2007 I am sitting in the smallest room in the house and thinking, Space is crazy. Space is where Euclid's parallel lines never meet. Space is where Einstein's rays of light bend for gravitational winds. Space is almost all of everything there is. Compared to the volume of space around, even the largest structures in the universe that we know of are miniscule and insignificant. Furthermore, physicists tell us that an atom is mostly space. Show a physicist your clenched fist and she'll tell you your fingers aren't touching each other at all. Deep down, in the roaring whilrlwinds of the subatomic…
thescian | August 27, 2007Check it out. There's a lot of tips for writing science as fiction. Rebecca Goldstein, MacArthur fellow, novelist, writes
I have come to believe, over the years, that literary fiction is remarkably suited to grappling - as philosophy and science grapple - with the difficulties of reconciling objective truth with inner points of view.
Science is always adding to, and sometimes changing, our views on what objective reality is like. When those modifications are radical, there is a time lag in bringing our world view into line, and sometimes we never fully succeed. So it is that we have struggled…
thescian | August 24, 2007Poverty is part of India's story writes Peter Foster (Telegraph) in his blog that expands on his earlier article. I am in agreement with Foster on the apathy among well-to-do Indians although I think he makes some generalizations about middle class that are not necessarily true. His statements reflect his anger and passion and I certainly identify with it. He is absolutely right when he says
The first is that India's poor are an unalterable fact of life. I'm reminded of the government health official who once told me that "these people don't need toilets".
This is a nasty manifestation of…
thescian | August 24, 2007A CBS Video with, shall we say, new revelations on Mother Theresa.
Shortly after beginning work in Calcutta's slums, the spirit leaves her.
"Where is my faith?" she writes. "Even deep down ... there is nothing but emptiness and darkness. ... If there be God -- please forgive me."
...
The letters were gathered by Rev. Kolodiejchuk, the priest who's making the case to the Vatican for Mother Teresa's proposed sainthood. He says her obvious spiritual torment actually helps her cause. "
In the City of Joy her Spirit leaves her. And, her 'spiritual torment' could make her a saint. I don't care…