thescian | January 16, 2008
A new essay is out at TheScian.com. It is about why apples fall downwards, why frogs leap and why we fly rockets. In other words, it is about the force of gravity. It's written by a non-scientist, so there are no discussions about strings tangled in eleven dimensions, tensor calculus or fluxions that made Newton's mama proud.
In some ways, this essay started two years ago while I lived in Atlanta. I was wondering about how easy it is to move horizontally but not vertically (prompted by what JRD Tata had said). Since then it has slowly grown, shed words, morphed, evolved and finally has seen…
thescian | January 16, 2008Via BrietBart:
Pope Benedict XVI on Tuesday canceled a speech at Rome's La Sapienza university in the face of protests led by scientists opposed to a high-profile visit by the head of the Catholic Church to a secular setting.
So, what does the Pope do?
Cini said of Benedict on Thursday: "By cancelling, he is playing the victim, which is very intelligent. It will be a pretext for accusing us of refusing dialogue."
thescian | January 15, 2008
Monkeys are paving the way for future. A report in NY Times:
If Idoya could talk, she would have plenty to boast about.
On Thursday, the 12-pound, 32-inch monkey made a 200-pound, 5-foot humanoid robot walk on a treadmill using only her brain activity.
...
These experiments, Dr. Nicolelis said, are the first steps toward a brain machine interface that might permit paralyzed people to walk by directing devices with their thoughts. Electrodes in the person's brain would send signals to a device worn on the hip, like a cell phone or pager, that would relay those signals to a pair of braces, a…
thescian | January 14, 2008Concept design of the Polish Pavilion for 2010 World Expo in Shanghai. Via Geoff Manaugh's fantastic BLDGBLOG, one of my favorite places on the internets.
thescian | January 14, 2008Tom Hodgkinson writes in The Guardian:
I despise Facebook. This enormously successful American business describes itself as "a social utility that connects you with the people around you". But hang on. Why on God's earth would I need a computer to connect with the people around me? Why should my relationships be mediated through the imagination of a bunch of supergeeks in California? What was wrong with the pub?
And does Facebook really connect people? Doesn't it rather disconnect us, since instead of doing something enjoyable such as talking and eating and dancing and drinking with my…
thescian | January 14, 2008Ian McEwan (author of the novel Atonement, an adaptation of it won the Golden Globe yesterday) in an interview:
it is crucial that people who do not have a sky god and don't have a set of supernatural beliefs assert their belief in moral values and in love and in the transcendence that they might experience in landscape or art or music or sculpture or whatever. Since they do not believe in an afterlife, it makes them give more valence to life itself. The little spark that we do have becomes all the more valuable when you can't be trading off any moments for eternity.
Rejecting afterlife has…
thescian | January 10, 2008Severe famines killed many millions in India between 1700 and 1900. [Chronology at Wikipedia]. Nobel prize winning economist Amartya Sen's work on endemic deprivation stems from his experiences of the Bengal famine as a child.
Photograph of a South India family in 1878 by W.W. Hooper, a Colonel in British army who took many photographs of Madras famine.
The apathy and greed of Colonial rulers had a hand (directly or through inaction) in many famines. With that introduction let me pass you over to George Monbiot's reveiw the book Late Victorian Holocausts at Guardian where he points out the…
thescian | January 9, 2008The Onion demands your attention to inform you of an important election issue:
Poll: Bullshit Is Most Important Issue For 2008 Voters
Also, Jimmy's got a message.
thescian | January 9, 2008
If you aren't a Tamil, you probably didn't get the title. i09's got a post about a Indian sci-fi movie along with a ravishing image of Thaleevuru (a.k.a Rajnikanth, a extremely popular tamil movie star. Thaleevuru is a Tamil slang for Da Man, which is a slang for...never mind). The movie to be made in Hindi will be directed by Shankar, a popular director hailing from Chennai. The movie would probably do well if it comes out, as Shankar is a good kalyana samayalkaran (another Tamil slang for someone who satisfies everyone's tastes). I wouldn't expect any real science, though. There has been…
thescian | January 9, 2008Tangled Bank 96 - Toadally at Aardvarchaeology where you'll learn that clams have herpes (wha..WHA!!??).
thescian | January 9, 2008NEN
The National Entrepreneurship Network (NEN), founded in 2002, is a not-for-profit initiative of the Wadhwani Foundation, working to inspire, educate and support the next generation of high-growth entrepreneurs in India.
NEN was co-founded by five of India's premier academic institutions: IIT Bombay; IIM Ahmedabad; SP Jain Institute, Bombay; IBAB, Bangalore and BITS Pilani. Over the past three years, NEN's focus on introducing a new paradigm in entrepreneurship education in India -- and its innovative method of doing so -- has made it its leading catalyst on campuses across India.
NEN's…
thescian | January 9, 2008John Pollock writes at TR:
In 1798, the English economist Thomas Malthus argued that population increases geometrically, outstripping the arithmetic growth of the food supply. He promised "famine ... the last, the most dreadful resource of nature." It took another 125 years for world population to double, but only 50 more for it to redouble. By the 1940s, MexiÂco, China, India, Russia, and Europe were hungry. Franklin D. Roosevelt's farsighted vice president-elect, former secretary of agriculture Henry A. Wallace, believed the solution lay with technology. He was right: the Malthusian tragedy…
thescian | January 8, 2008The wife asked, what if we jump and there's no gravity? You are the science dude. Extrapolate.
Well, that's a great question (and you are very pretty, of course). A small correction to the question. There is no place where there's zero gravity. If there is such a place it is infinitely far away and we'll never get there. The place with no gravity is infinitely far away because the force of gravity - although it weakens as we get far away from its source - never becomes zero. However, there are places with very very weak gravity.
So, what if we jump where there's very very weak gravity?
If we…
thescian | January 8, 2008So Intel has pulled out. Well, fuck them. If you own Intel stocks and have no idea of what I am talking about, then screw your apathetic greedy self too.
Here's what got me all riled up: businessweek article where the author has got it totally backwards.
Not only is this [OLPC] profoundly anti-teacher, it also misinterprets experience learning. Children learn language by interacting with their family. Almost all learning takes place in a teaching context. Yes, of course, there is learning by the individual alone, but most "learning" takes place in a context of a guide, a coach, be it parent…
thescian | January 7, 2008Found a Buddhist statue that's got style. (Style: also know as cool, aesthetics, taste and w00t!)
I sent this picture (well, tried to) to all those unfortunate folks on my friends list in Facebook using some weird app that kept crashing on me (or my instance of Firefox 3 Beta). In the end, I think I sent more than a few duplicate messages. Sorry and dang. Facebook, as I see it now, would be my place of cool - pictures, art, music, and such. Also hopefully, I'll rub off some cool from those who unwittingly accepted my request to be their friend.
If you liked the Buddha, here's another. Both…
thescian | January 7, 2008Before anyone says anything, I'll question the metaphor myself: giant computer? That's just a stupid metaphor, as though we can compare a giant and the Universe. But then, we can't speak from a out-of-this-universe perspective, so, I suppose giant computer would have to do.
So now, if the Universe is a computer, what is it computing? How is it doing it? Are atoms and other structures it's transistors? What are we? (my theory: we are it's buffer overflow) If it is not a computer, what the heck is it?
A long running intellectual debate, the hardest problem so far, and all the blah.…
thescian | January 7, 2008Forward the article Naps May Boost Memory to your colleagues and your employer, then start boosting your memory.