thescian | October 8, 2007 I've been re-reading JRD Tata's Keynote: Excerpts from his speeches and chairman's statements to shareholders. It's a collection of speeches JRD gave on various occasions that trace his thoughts on India, business and future. In a speech given on November 2, 1943, he spoke to the Bombay Rotary Club marking a decade of airmail service in India. He pioneered airmail service in India, and in fact piloted the first airmail service from Karachi to Bombay in 1932 carring sacks of mails in a tiny Puss Moth airplane (top speed 200 km/hr, woot!). What impressed me was his keen interest in science and…
thescian | October 8, 2007It's one of the most wonderful, confounding, nerve-racking and sublime mathematical conundrum of all times. In the spin of quantum mechanics, in the accretion of galactic clouds, in a little girl's twirl, when a pebble is dropped on a quiet lake; wherever and whenever there is rotation, it lurks, right at the center. This then, is Pi, the ratio of a cirlce's circumference to its diameter, an infinite series, a transcendental number, one of the uncountable many that is familiar and distant, like a far away galaxy.
Euclid proved every circle has a Pi in it, Archimedes dabbled in it, Ramanujan…
thescian | October 6, 2007Before I get to the post, some contest updates. I have started reading the contest stories. To level the field, Ramya downloaded the stories from the contests email, edited the author identities out and has given me a folder full of stories without author names on it. I am reading blind, so to speak (if you want to pursue this technique yourself, Margaret Atwood speaks of this in her book Curious Pursuits). To the post now.
I watched Sunshine an hour ago. It is a wonderful movie with rare depth of science seen these days. I enjoyed the movie, the intense drama created by existential questions…
thescian | October 4, 2007Here. You can donate one and get one for yourself in November if you live in the US. Go here to sign-up.
thescian | October 4, 2007RIAA, the music industry's mouth-piece and hired hand, sends you a message through this case:
Jammie Thomas, a single mother of two, was found liable Thursday for copyright infringement in the nation's first file-sharing case to go before a jury.
Twelve jurors here said the Minnesota woman must pay $9,250 for each of 24 shared songs that were the subject of the lawsuit, amounting to $222,000 in penalties.
It's time for people who make music and buy music to move on. Like what Radiohead have done. Go for indie music. Look at ccMixter. Let the dinosaurs go extinct.
thescian | October 4, 2007 Reading it at the moment. A novel set in a single day of a neurosurgean's life. Brilliant and poetic.
An excerpt from the excerpt at New Yorker.
The culmination of today's list was the removal of a pilocytic astrocytoma from a fourteen-year-old Nigerian girl who lived in Brixton with her aunt and uncle, a Church of England vicar. The tumor was best reached through the back of the head, by an infratentorial supracerebellar route, with the anesthetized patient in a sitting position. This created special problems for Jay Strauss, for there was a possibility of air entering a vein and causing…
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 3, 2007The man that hath no music in himself,
Nor is not moved with concord of sweet sounds,
Is fit for treasons, stratagems, and spoils;
The motions of his spirit are dull as night,
And his affections dark as Erebus.
Let no such man be trusted.
-Shakespeare, The Merchant of Venice. Act. v. Sc. 1
"When people hear good music, it makes them homesick for something they never had, and never will have."- Edgar Watson Howe
Andrea Bocelli & Sarah Brightman, Time To Say Goodbye
Andrea Bocelli, "Can't Help Falling In Love"
Russell Watson, Volare
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 | October 1, 2007Dear reader, If you had subscribed to Zooillogix and have been taken for a ride by yours truly, here's your chance to get off. Andrew has a message for you:
somehow during the transition to the new email subscription system, the wires got crossed and Zooillogix subscribers started getting the Scientific Indian instead of Zooillogix. This has since been rectified, but the fix requires that current subscribers unsubscribe from Zooillogix and then resubscribe to Zooillogix.
Gonna keep away from looking at my subscription numbers for sometime. (I am a sensitive bloke, you know.)
thescian | October 1, 2007After days of agonising over the characters, phrases and storylines, you finally sent in the story for the contest. Phew! Well done. Thanks to the nineteen writers who have taken time to participate.
I will begin reading the stories in a few days. Once the selection of winners is complete, I will email all the authors with my comments. Before publication, I plan to work with the authors of all good stories (not just the winners) on polishing their stories - if they are open to my suggestions, that is. This is the part where I put on my editor's cap, wade in, and muddle the puddle, so to say.…
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, 2007I must apologize for the poor quality of the audio recording of Once upon a time in a queue essay published on the 24th. It was recorded at 6:30 in the morning while I was half asleep. I've done a new recording today and have replaced the original audio files now.
For those who are curious and interested in how I record and the equipment, I use a Samson C01U USB Microphone purchased for 100 dollars. It is a condenser mic and works very well with Apple Powerbook running Audacity for audio capture. -From the September Newsletter.
Have you subscribed to the Newsletter? It's a good way to keep…
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…