Like to read/hear my first Tamil essay?

Of course you do! You are such a good soul! Head over to TheScian.com. It's a two-part translation of the English essay 'Leaping into the void'. I had a long post in mind on how this is an attempt to start a discussion on science with my extended family back home in Namakkal, how language shapes culture and provides a vessel to hold those momentous thoughts, etc. But, there was a bit of trouble at scienceblogs.com today. Software glitches. We weren't able to post anything all day. All those exuberant words of self-praise have evaporated from my brain into thin air.

I don't know how many Tamil speaking folks read this blog. If you are one, do raise your hand so I'd know how many I am inflicting this essay on, and please pass your thoughts on how it can be improved.

Here's the audio podcast feed that you can drop into your iTunes or any other podcast client. Apple iPod does not display Tamil (mine didn't), so you may not see the Tamil title in your audio device. I saw two unhelpful commas for a title. Grrrhh.

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For some strange reason, it did not display properly in Firefox.

Sankar, it may be due to the Text Encoding setting in Firefox. I use Firefox 3 Beta 3 and have't had problems, but a few folks have emailed to say they don't see the fonts properly. Try the guidelines here: http://ta.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Font_help

It all boils down to answering these two questions:
1. Do you have a tamil truetype font installed in your system
2. Can your browser use it

I'll put up a pdf download up there to help those who can't get around the font issue.