thescian | May 10, 2007I was trying to view a tamil magazine website. The scrawny bouncers at the door of Sloppy Coders Paradise stop me with a message: "Use Internet Explorer only please". Huh, my firefox fingers bristle at the affront. Still I am not unduely surprised. I was aware the website was probably the work of a web development company with moderate to sloppy software skills. Oh well. Alright, perhaps the website will have some redeeming quality in its content. I use IE and enter. The moment I step in, the website asks me to install a particular tamil font. Well, I pause a moment to consider if I should…
thescian | May 9, 2007A news story at BBC on the Australian city of Perth.
The Australian of the year 2007, environmentalist Tim Flannery, once predicted that Perth in Western Australia could become the world's first ghost metropolis, its population forced to abandon the city due to lack of water.
...
People consume a lot of energy. It is a car-dependent city with little public transport. Many of the luxury houses overlooking the ocean (known locally as "starter mansions") boast currently fashionable black roofs that soak up the heat in temperatures of up to 42 degrees in summer, and produce a greater need for air…
thescian | May 8, 2007A soldier could take no more of the plight of a robot getting blown up by bombs and pulling itself with one leg forward. [via] The question "What's human" will be redefined one day in the far future. Today is not that day however much we would like it to be. The harware and software aren't there yet, and moreover the wetware (atleast the one making this blog post) isn't ready to concede territory yet. This case is just another empathetic misfiring of neurons (darkly ironic too, empathy is out of question with an enemy in the battlefield). Of course, the soldier wouldn't agree with my flippant…
thescian | May 8, 2007Panta Rei? Sounds like Greek, you say. In fact, it is greek. Panta Rei means "everything flows" in Greek, explain Arunn and Lakshmi. It's a party where science flows free, like beer. Join the the party. Please divert all beer to the Chemical Sciences Special edition to be hosted at nonoscience on the 14th of this month.
I've requested Arunn to include, in the coming months, a Layperson's Special Edition of Panta Rei, to nudge non-technical science readers like myself to join the party. For that party, please remember to send your science posts geared towards explaining or sharing science with…
thescian | May 7, 2007I was reading New Scientist and flipped through to the Last Word column to find this question: How long would it take an average cow to fill the Grand Canyon with milk?
Bob from New York city answers thus: It all depends upon the size of the tanker truck the cow chooses to drive, the time it would take to drive from the milk distribution point, the inflow and outflow of the tanker truck, the ability to change the absorption and evaporation rates of the milk, and the ability of said cow to effectively block the exit route of the Colorado river.
Other considerations, of course, would be does…
thescian | May 5, 2007Courtesy of BioVisions at Harvard University. [link via Scientia Natura. Thanks Janny].
Beautifully done. After watching the video I wondered if I could get some explanations on what I saw. I vaguely recognised in the video the cellular machinery that build and dismantle all the cell structures. Perhaps, someone at Harvard could explain? Well, of course.
Nothing moves us like images that show space, time and matter in comprehensible ways. It's a great way to get tax payers participate in science and increase their (our) contribution. Our short-lived mammalian brain needs all help it can get…
thescian | May 4, 2007Arunn has collected thoughts from folks who could talk science but do not do so. He concludes with the question "Is science blogging in India yet to have its time?"
Hop over and make your point. Come back and read the below in leisure.
Every week I do a search to find science blogs by Indians that I could add to my reading list. It's slim pickings. I'd look at the number of science related blogs elsewhere (see Pharyngula's blogroll for instance). Shit man, I would tell myself, we Indians are fucked. We'll learn, we'll grow and we'll adopt technology as it suits us but we won't share our…
thescian | May 4, 2007TOI has a story about the Indian government preparing to create a ten dollar computer. [via /.] No details about the hardware, software. I am all for cheap computers that have some prabablility of becoming real. But what the heck is this? A joke?
thescian | May 3, 2007A BBC News Video I saw yesterday.
A growing number of Indian women are being used as egg donors and surrogate mothers
The motivations are clear. For many childless couples surrogacy is one clear option (the other is adoption). For the poor women who agree to be surrogate mothers, it is a way out of their poverty, a way to provide for their own children. The contentius area is regulation of this apparently fast growing half a billion pounds industry.
An earlier article in Guardian.
However, campaigners in Britain question the ethics of such businesses. "What is missing here is a debate about…
thescian | May 3, 2007A two year old kid runs about, trips and crashes to the floor. She is in pain and starts crying. The adults console her saying, "Uh..oh, now, now, don't cry.. you hurt yourself.. come on..". As an adult, when you hurt yourself, the unwritten rule is: you should not compain. (In other words, you were an ass and you deserved it. So shut up.) As adults we unconsciously assume kids too know this rule when we say "you hurt yourself". Please give up this self-serving phrase. It ain't working.
I am home. The two year old niece fell down and is crying. Her grandmother's "You hurt yourself" is adding…
thescian | May 2, 2007Robert Wright who runs Bloggingheads.tv writes Darwinism isn't depressing in IHT:
...survival machines are unfairly maligned. The name suggests, well, machines devoted to their survival. In truth, though, natural selection builds machines devoted ultimately to the survival of their genes, not themselves.
Hence love. A love-impelled grandparent sacrifices her life to save a child's life. Too bad for the grandparent, but mission accomplished for the love genes: They've kept copies of themselves alive in a vibrant vehicle that was otherwise doomed, and all they've lost is a vehicle that, frankly…
thescian | May 1, 2007Indian Express reports:
To crack down on sex-selection facilities offered on the Net, the Ministry of Health and Family Welfare has written to the Ministry of Communication and Information Technology to block websites providing access to such facilities and even search engines like Google from highlighting these sites.
Gender imbalance is a looming problem in India. The sex ratio is quite skewed - 927 girls to 1000 boys, a decline from 976 girls four decages ago. [Source: Census India]. Nevertheless, blocking websites is a slippery slope. Which websites do you block? How do you monitor? The…
thescian | April 30, 2007It emerged from behind the overflowing garbage bin at the street corner: a two-headed eight-legged mammalian apparition. It hobbled clumsily into the middle of the street: Evolution's artless rendering of two naked dogs copulating; Fluffy's underprevileged brother.
"Why are they joined at the hip?", the shopkeeper across the street wondered.
"Why can't the erection happen outside, like in humans. Why does his penis enlarge after entering?", the bitch had its own questions.
A kid came on an errand to the shop, saw the dogs and picked up a small concrete piece from the chipped pavement.
"It…
thescian | April 30, 2007A nifty blog, Denialism, added to sb. Your first stop: Unified theory of the crank.
thescian | April 27, 2007Poor man's VR. Bought a few pairs of Red-Blue 3D Glasses (you can buy them online, I paid five pounds for five glasses) to view the 3D images of Sun produced by NASA's Solar TErrestrial RElations Observatory (STEREO) satellites. This image is nifty.
thescian | April 26, 2007A discussion at nonoscience.
There is something missing here, something very simple, impalpable, profound, sacred. There is a void which can only be felt and hard to demonstrate. You can call it "scientific fervor", "fire in the belly," "passion" or use any other overworked word, which ultimately is only a word and not the real thing. Perhaps every great university of yore must have had it in abundance.
thescian | April 25, 2007Smart people suck when it comes to financial health. One study* has apparently showed that although smart people earn more, they spend more too thus justifying this blog post's title.
Posting this has been therapeutic. The study* and its conclusions make me somewhat happy considering the level of my own intelligence.
*a financial study. I'd rather call this data mining than a study (even when you call my attention to the IQ test data). Aren't financially smart people 'smart'? Accepting this would undermine the premise of the study. Slippery slope, this study is. You slide on. Happy landing.