thescian | April 24, 2007
A contest [via]. I like the interface that streams the photos depending on your mouse movements. A browser barely manages to contain such interfaces. We need VR, 3D interfaces, holographic projections, cranial data accessories...
thescian | April 24, 2007Jonathan Gottschall writes in The Age:
At exactly the same time I was reading The Naked Ape I was re-reading Homer's Iliad for a graduate seminar on the great epics. As always, Homer made my bones flex and ache with the terror and beauty of the human condition. But this time around I also experienced the Iliad as a drama of naked apes - strutting, preening, fighting and bellowing their power in fierce competition for social dominance, beautiful women and material resources. Darwin's powerful lens brought sudden coherence to my experience of the story, inspiring me to abandon my half-drafted…
thescian | April 24, 2007From ISRO press release.
In its eleventh flight, conducted from Satish Dhawan Space Centre (SDSC) SHAR, Sriharikota, this afternoon (April 23, 2007), ISRO's Polar Satellite Launch Vehicle, PSLV-C8, successfully launched the 352 kg Italian astronomical satellite, AGILE, into a 550 km circular orbit, inclined at an angle of 2.5 deg to the equator.
You can watch the launch at Beebs. A report at Spaceflight Now.
thescian | April 23, 2007
Bill O' Reilly supposedly interviewed Richard Dawkins. Bill had the mike, the studio and the buttons and so Bill jumped on the pulpit and delivered his sermon without having the decency to treat the guest properly (he didn't allow Dawkins to say much).
O'Reilly referred to the tides and the (apparent) movement of sun as the physiology of things. He probably meant to say, physicology of things, which is the word he must've recalled during the interview that should've seemed somewhat related to the physics of things. The mangled word, of course, comes from the science class he attended many…
thescian | April 21, 2007I was reading The Telegraph Magazine today [paper copy]. Salmon Rushdie introduces Taryn Simon's An American Index of the Hidden and Unfamilar - a collection of portraits that capture the hidden reality: bushmeat, fruits and other items confiscated by US Customs; playboy Braille Edition; Transatlantic sub-marine cables reaching ashore and much more. Enthralling images, slingshots capable of sending us in a tangent, magical carpets of color which could transport us into a richer reality.
The image shown is from a NY Times article published last year. It's the nuclear waste storage facility…
thescian | April 20, 2007Look to the left under Suggestions. The suggestions were shamelessly copied from Kenny Craig, the hypnotist in Little Britain (My three year old niece calls it the Vomit Show). I have Senegal Fast Food on the wishlist, if you are feeling charitable today.
thescian | April 19, 2007They are on the left column and come out of Picasa servers. Yet another part of my life inexorably eaten by the Google Monster.
For those who are wondering where were the photos in the first place: it was in Flickr. I used to login with my gmail login name into Flickr. Not anymore. Yahoo guys messed it all up. Sod it. Spend a few minutes uploading the photos and hey, we've got a new home.
thescian | April 19, 2007A english language style quiz. Give it a go. I failed miserably. I should've RTFM. [via a reddit story]
Before the style guide, Orwell's essay on english writing would be a good refresher.
Since you've come this far, you might as well let Strunk give you a good beating.
thescian | April 18, 2007Found via RichardDawkins.net. A commenter there had linked to the video below.
thescian | April 18, 2007All the talk of citizen heros who could've killed the VT shooter is misleading at the very least. A discussion at Daily Kos. There are sociopaths everywhere: US, India, Iraq, Sudan. How dangerous a weapon they get and how easily they get those weapons makes a big difference in what headlines you see: "Loner attacks students with a knife. One seriously wounded" or "32 people killed when a shooter opened fire and systematically executed people in a classroom".
thescian | April 17, 2007I Am John by Emil Svanängen.
What did the pope say? Ask gawker.
Darfur.
Keeping cool and waiting for strange things to leap out of a seething sea.
The real deal. A Romantic or more appropriately Anarcho-Environmentalist in India. A review of his Manifesto. I read some chapters. The prose is not eloquent but the points are.
thescian | April 15, 2007National Study on Child Abuse here (200 pages report). I haven't read it fully. A few things I noted: My home state Tamilnadu was not part of the survey - of the southern states, Andhra and Kerala are. The summary shown below is a slap in the face of any society that lets such atrocities happen to its children.
I read a related post via reddit that got me thinking.
Take a predominantly patriarchal society - like all other societies of , well, almost all times; let this society wither time and space like no other over a few thousand years; let social cohesion be defined by fluid but loosely…
thescian | April 15, 2007One of the most emailed stories in the Beebs today is about a man in Sudan who has started a family with a goat, involuntarily, it seems. If the Swan (undercover Zeus, one of the numerous horny greek gods) can, the Sudan man can too. Is there an equivalent Indian mythology? I am not aware of any, yet. Surely, there must be.
thescian | April 12, 2007It was the very first time. Her optic nerve sparked like a benevolent thunderbolt. The lucky photon came bouncing off the dining room light. It penetrated layers of stretched biological tissue, the amniotic sac, the translucent fluid inside, and reached the photo-sensitive cell at the precise moment when the cell became active. She twitched her still-developing limbs; her first acknowledgement of a visible world beyond.
She was a fortunate child amidst caring people: the mother, father, grandparents, aunt and uncle, a little niece too.
They were eating dinner and talking about light and…
thescian | April 10, 2007Sure, you have read it already. Read it again. The author answers questions here. A previous post (you'll find NPR link there to Bell's Vocalise).
thescian | April 7, 2007Wade Davis, National Geographic explorer, gives a talk on ethonsphere and the perils facing cultural diversity in this increasingly monocultural world. He ends his talk with the narration of an Innuit grandfather: The Innuit family were being resettled by the Canadian government from their icy land; the grandfather refused to leave. The family fears that he would kill himself and takes away all his weapons and the sled. Wade describes what followed:
..he pulled down his sealskin trousers, defecated into his hand, as the feces froze he shaped it into a knife, butchered a dog with the knife,…
thescian | April 4, 2007This year's scifi contest at TheScian.com will open for submissions in June and end in September as it did last year. There will be a few important changes to the contest from last year. This year the story contest will have a theme. The theme is this: "Living on Earth and Elsewhere". I imagine the theme would cover a story about a bacteria that fights for freedom inside an acidic gut, a story of a silicon creature in future making a pilgrimage to earth, and a lot others I can't imagine. In any case, I would expect the story to entertain - and inform if it must, but not necessarily - in…
thescian | April 4, 2007In other words, it's so fractal! Here's the what and why. One is a brain cell of a mouse and the other is a simulation of our universe [via reddit] What a weird Universe we inhabit.