thescian | July 21, 2008How well Benjamin Cohen Rachel Carr captures the sentiment! If I could write half as well....
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 17, 2008Priya Shetty writes at New Scientist.
Why? For a start, research published in international journals might not be relevant to the needs of individual countries. For example, academics specialising in mental health, such as Vikram Patel at the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine, have argued that India's cash-strapped mental health services should offer access to community health workers and not just specialised psychiatrists and psychologists, but such debates seldom make it into the pages of international journals.
Furthermore, by developing the research culture, local health…
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, 2008From New Scientist
... rings are often a sign of being chronically worn out, stressed and run-down - tiredness rather than sleepiness. Tired people don't just need more sleep, but a better and more agreeable lifestyle. This is easier said than done, of course. They may even find that they have difficulty sleeping despite their tiredness, but resorting to sleeping tablets is not the answer.
As for the anatomy of these rings and whether they are due to blood pooling, skin-thinning through dehydration or something else, no one really knows.
thescian | July 10, 2008Someone known to me in India recently had an interview with a large mobile company in the UK. He was offered a job (via email) and he accepted. He then received an email from what appeared to be the UK Visa Office (thoroughly bogus). The email is below (with personal info masked). If you visit immi-gov.com mentioned, it is quite clear that this is a setup (in fact, it redirects to to Microsoft's officelive.com where the scammers seems to have lost interest midway through the setup). The UK company in question was contacted directly by my acquaintance. He was told that there was no one in…
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 7, 2008 There are numerous occasions when one has to consider the lifetime of the software one is using or developing (or maintaining, that awful dark side of software). Fortunately or unfortunately, business considerations (budget, in other words) dictate what problems get solved and what's left ugly or forgotten, and how existing software gets repackaged into grotesque forms (isn't this is exactly how a Flounder evolved!). The parallels between software and biological evolution are obvious (and as you would expect, there is an academic area of study - Genetic Programming).
It seems we are we at…
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.
thescian | July 4, 2008I was watching David Byrne + Daniel Levitin at The Seed Salon yesterday evening and heard Daniel Levitin (the professor dude) talk about how ironic that the brain, which receives sensory inputs from all over the body, does not itself have sensory nerves. He further added helpfully that you would not know if your brain is poked. It's a nice bit of detail to draw a non-biologist into conversations about biology and brain.
I suppose evolution did not have a good case for the brain to have sensory nerves. It had, after all, already floated the brain in a fluid and surrounded it with a thick skull…
thescian | July 1, 2008What happens when you split your brain in the middle? By splitting I mean the surgical kind where the corpus callosum (the connecting neural tissue between right and left hemispheres) is severed. Why would anyone do that, I hear you scream. Well, there are instances when this may be the only possible option for someone to survive their ailment (like severe epileptic seizures).
Back to the question. So, what happens? Back in 1950s Nobel laureate Roger Sperry assisted by his colleagues and his able protege Michael Gazzaniga tested a patient - before his brain was split and after his brain was…
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, 2008Over the long run income is more powerful than any ideology or religion in shaping lives. No God has commanded worshippers to their pious duties more forcefully than income as it subtly directs the fabric of our lives. -Gregory Clark in A Brief Economic History of the World.
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…