thescian | September 25, 2007 One of the things that rot any totalitarian regime from within is its inability to keep the route to reform open. The burmese Junta is one such rotting regime. While it's neighbors, which includes India, prefer to sit by the sidelines and watch (the Junta is the gatekeeper and preserver of India energy interests in Burma), burmese monks have been protesting peacefully in the face of certain voilence against them. As a Irrawaddy headline states, the Junta needs a grave warning from the world community.
thescian | September 25, 2007Caferati is a place for aspiring writers to meet, share and collaborate with each other. It is of Indian origin and the members meet in many cities in India. They have a number of online resources (site, google groups). Geographical accidents such as birthplace and country of residence should not worry you if you want to dive in with them and splash about. The editors are doing fantastic work to promote young writers and keep them informed of various publishing opportunities. Our own Scifi story contest (submission closes in a few days, get your story in soon) has got a number of story…
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 24, 2007The latest essay is out at TheScian.com. As I've done for the past few essays, this too has been subjected to yours truly's vocal excess. Thanks to Sunil for reading a very early draft and saving me from some glaring mistakes.
Our queue was frozen in time. We seemed to have entered an amnesiac queue that had forgotten its frail human constituents who needed to pee regularly. Cold was diffusing rapidly through my skull suffocating the brain. Ramya needed to revive her brain too; she had been rapturously staring at a road marking for the past five minutes. We were letting entropy win. We were…
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, 2007This is how hassled ground troops working for large corporations cover their rears - they shoot grandpas and babies. Beebs reports that a Supermarket staff refused to sell alcohol to a white-haired 72-year-old man - because he would not confirm he was over 21.
"I felt like saying 'What do I look like? Are you a fool?'
"He picks up the wine and, in the manner of a child taking home his ball, says 'Well, we won't serve you'."
A child taking home his ball! :-)
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 19, 2007is the homage paid by ignorance to learning. -E M Forster, Aspects of the Novel (1927)
thescian | September 19, 2007I will be away from the blog this week. I'll repost some selected posts from the past to keep the blog going. Here's the first.
A gravity well is a hole dug out in space for frogs to live in. But, nobody knows who put the frogs in there. The frogs have been suspicious of Something Beyond for a while, an Outside, an infinite expanse of water with tasty flies and warm rocks to sit on. Every self-respecting frog jumps atleast once a day to see Something Beyond. Unfortunately, even the most athletic ones that jump three feet high cannot get a glimpse out of the well.
Over generations,…
thescian | September 12, 2007Blogging will be slow for the coming few days. Before I head out to make money in the big bad world, let me quote Munro's words that I read in Margaret Atwood's 'Negotiating with the Dead'.
I bought a school notebook and tried to write - did write, pages that started off authoritatively and then went dry, so that I had to tear them out and twist them up in hard punishment and put them in the garbage can. I did this over and over again until I had only the notebook cover left. Then I bought another notebook and started the whole process once more. The same cycle - excitement and despair,…
thescian | September 11, 2007Was he William, the writer-actor entrepreneur? Was he Edward de Vere, Earl of Oxford? The inconsequential but utterly fascinating question has reared its head up again.
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, 2007asks a Beebs poll that seems to equate morality with religion. The commenters do a good job of picking the poll apart.
Britain is in moral decline say 83% of people polled for the new BBC One religious and ethical programme "The Big Questions". Do you agree?
Religion may be a way of halting this decline. According to "The Big Questions" opinion poll 62% agreed with the statement that religion has an important role to play in the moral guidance of the nation with 29% disagreeing or strongly disagreeing with that statement.
Religion may be a way of halting this decline? Which religion?…