thescian | September 6, 2007Signnup for the nifty newsletter and automatically enter the ScienceBlogs 500,000 Comment contest, the winner of which gets to visit a great science city (probably Cambridge, UK. Not far away from where I live. Woohoo! Come visit humble me while in UK.) Between, the winner of the 500k comment contest is not necessarily the writer of the 500 thousandth comment. Once Sb hits 500k comments, a winner will be randomly picked from the registered email addresses at Sb.
thescian | September 6, 2007News from 'Weird Panditji' Department. (Pandits are the folks who interpret religious text and perform ceremonies in India, usually North India, in south they are called by other names).
The wife was talking to her friend and I happened to overhear.
Friend: (angry at something) I have to tell you this otherwise my head will explode. I called up Mrs D who used to be my neighbor a year back. She told me she has a 2 month old baby. That was news to me! I have been speaking to her regularly for the past year and she never told me she was pregnant!
Wife: That's odd. Why didn't she tell you?…
thescian | September 5, 2007
Am I a HTML horror or what!
blah
meh
HTML is a den of horrors. One of the ugly ones is called the Radio Button. If you did not intend to set a radio box choice and set it by mistake, you cannot unset it easily. Why the heck is a radio box so snotty and unforgiving? Sheesh.
thescian | September 4, 2007 The performances are online. I am watching Anoushka Shankar and Joshua Bell's performance on Aug 2nd. Great show. [thanks Ramya]
While am passing on musical links, let me plug one of my favorite podcasts from NPR which has introduced me to so much of the wonderful music that I have come to enjoy: All Songs Considered hosted by Bob. The last one on Aug 30 was DJ'd by Anoushka.
thescian | September 4, 2007Few more weeks for the Sep 30 deadline. There's a countdown on the page to thrill you everytime you visit till the day you send that story in.
thescian | September 3, 2007With my reading list for the coming days
George Orwell: Essays (Penguin Modern Classics)
Just ordered. Hopefully, it should have Orwell's reflections on Gandhi.
No Gods, No Masters: An Anthology of Anarchism
With Noam Chomsky's intro. Necessary reading if you want to understand the development of Anarchism.
Negotiating with the Dead: A Writer on Writing by Margaret Atwood
Wonderful as always.
A Mathematician's Apology by G Hardy , introduction by C P Snow
Have you wondered what Hardy is apologising for?
The Dispossessed by Ursula Le Guin
The finest novel on anarchistic themes. Third reading.
thescian | August 30, 2007 I am sitting in the smallest room in the house and thinking, Space is crazy. Space is where Euclid's parallel lines never meet. Space is where Einstein's rays of light bend for gravitational winds. Space is almost all of everything there is. Compared to the volume of space around, even the largest structures in the universe that we know of are miniscule and insignificant. Furthermore, physicists tell us that an atom is mostly space. Show a physicist your clenched fist and she'll tell you your fingers aren't touching each other at all. Deep down, in the roaring whilrlwinds of the subatomic…
thescian | August 29, 2007A review of John Gribbin's The Scientists at balancinglife, by Sunil.
Holding a Program in One's Head, a spiffy essay on how to create software, by Paul Graham.
thescian | August 28, 2007Warren Ellis, the colorful British writer, writes about Burst Culture.
* Every day, millions of people download single lumps of data that take them three minutes to consume. They're called mp3s. It's a burst culture. Embrace the idea for a while.
* Bursts aren't contentless, nor do they denote the end of Attention Span. If attention span was dead, JK Rowling wouldn't be selling paperbacks thick enough to choke a pig, and Neal Stephenson wouldn't be making a living off books the size of the first bedsit I lived in.
...
* And just a thought: if you're an sf writer grappling for space in one of…
thescian | August 27, 2007Check it out. There's a lot of tips for writing science as fiction. Rebecca Goldstein, MacArthur fellow, novelist, writes
I have come to believe, over the years, that literary fiction is remarkably suited to grappling - as philosophy and science grapple - with the difficulties of reconciling objective truth with inner points of view.
Science is always adding to, and sometimes changing, our views on what objective reality is like. When those modifications are radical, there is a time lag in bringing our world view into line, and sometimes we never fully succeed. So it is that we have struggled…
thescian | August 26, 2007From the TheScian.com August Newsletter:
I want to share an incident that happened yesterday at my 3 year old neice's birthday party. A few families were invited and the kids were playing inside an inflated house - they call that bouncy-castle - with two entranes through which the kids could crawl in. The kids were jumping around and I was aghast to notice my neice and her friend (another little girl) gang up against their classmate, a little boy, and effectively bully him from entering the inflated house for almost 10 minutes. If kids were adults they would break each other's heads in an…
thescian | August 26, 2007CBS likes Lord of the Flies. What better way to show the appreciation than to use it for a reality show[NYT]. What did you say? Kids are not adults? Come on, don't be so naive. Kids acting like adults makes for a more entertaning show. No?
"Kid Nation," which is scheduled to have its premiere on Sept. 19, is a reality show that takes 40 children ages 8 to 15 to a New Mexico desert ghost town south of Santa Fe for 40 days and challenges them to build an adult-free society. Several children were injured during the production; four children drank bleach from an unmarked soda bottle and another…
thescian | August 24, 2007Poverty is part of India's story writes Peter Foster (Telegraph) in his blog that expands on his earlier article. I am in agreement with Foster on the apathy among well-to-do Indians although I think he makes some generalizations about middle class that are not necessarily true. His statements reflect his anger and passion and I certainly identify with it. He is absolutely right when he says
The first is that India's poor are an unalterable fact of life. I'm reminded of the government health official who once told me that "these people don't need toilets".
This is a nasty manifestation of…
thescian | August 24, 2007A CBS Video with, shall we say, new revelations on Mother Theresa.
Shortly after beginning work in Calcutta's slums, the spirit leaves her.
"Where is my faith?" she writes. "Even deep down ... there is nothing but emptiness and darkness. ... If there be God -- please forgive me."
...
The letters were gathered by Rev. Kolodiejchuk, the priest who's making the case to the Vatican for Mother Teresa's proposed sainthood. He says her obvious spiritual torment actually helps her cause. "
In the City of Joy her Spirit leaves her. And, her 'spiritual torment' could make her a saint. I don't care…
thescian | August 22, 2007The first essay in a series of science essays to be published at TheScian.com is out. It is titled The Joy of Questioning and is written by Sunil of balancing life blog. Yours truly imagines that he has improved his reading skills. Give it a listen. An excerpt:
...Even the most educated seem to hold on dearly to some of these beliefs. We would consult with astrologers to know blessed times (the moments when stars, planets and the moon are in fantastic positions bringing us fame and fortune). We would change the spelling of a name in the hopes of nominative prosperity. We would sit tight…
thescian | August 22, 2007Dear Neelam Shah,
Glad to see your note submitted via TheScian.com Contact Form. Unfortunately, the email you provided seems to be incorrect and my response to that email bounced. If you were wondering why I haven't replied, you now know. Here's my reply.
You asked if there is any age limit for the contest (from your email, I gather you are 15 years old and probably not sure if you can send a story to the contest). There is no age limit. Everyone who can write a good scifi story can enter the contest. There will be contests in the future too. But, don't wait. Send your story for the 2007…