thescian | April 4, 2007Anna Deavere-Smith at TED. When she began she said she wanted to inspire. She did.
thescian | April 4, 2007From A History of Violence by Pinker at Edge.orgIn sixteenth-century Paris, a popular form of entertainment was cat-burning, in which a cat was hoisted in a sling on a stage and slowly lowered into a fire. According to historian Norman Davies, "[T]he spectators, including kings and queens, shrieked with laughter as the animals, howling with pain, were singed, roasted, and finally carbonized." Today, such sadism would be unthinkable in most of the world. This change in sensibilities is just one example of perhaps the most important and most underappreciated trend in the human saga: Violence…
thescian | April 2, 2007Ruth Gledhill - she is the Times newspaper correspondent for Religion - writes in her blog about a recent debate on Religion organized by the Times. A section that put a smile on my face:Nigel Spivey, who teaches classical art and archaeology at Cambridge and Rabbi Neuberger were particularly anxious to emphasise their non-religious credentials. Julia repeatedly emphasised that she was so liberal as to be almost near to dropping off the edge, and Spivey likewise was keen to make sure we knew he was not one bit religious himself. Oh no. He was just enormously appreciative of the enormous…
thescian | April 2, 2007How can I not point out a study that says coffee is good for the liver. Read this in a New Scientist article on Liver troubles:"Doctors have a saying that everything you enjoy is either illegal, immoral or bad for you, so it's nice to discover that coffee is good for you," says Arthur Klatsky, an epidemiologist at Kaiser Permanente in Oakland, California. His team has found that drinking four cups of coffee a day reduces the risk of non-alcoholic cirrhosis by 30 per cent and of alcoholic cirrhosis by 80 per cent.
The research, published last year, is the latest in a string of studies showing…
thescian | March 30, 2007So, Bono is knighted. But, hey, don't call him Sir and displease the Queen. He's Irish and shall not be sir'd. Know who else was knighted by a Queen? John Hawkins. John Hawkins who? John Hawkins, the first slave trader. He began his business of capturing and selling african people in 1562. Queen Elizabeth I was proud.
This is the 200th year since slavery was abolished in the UK. I am contrarian. This is how I remember titles and their history.
Have a good weekend.
thescian | March 29, 2007Google is busy building it, scanning books and scaring publishers off their pants. An article at Speigel:The little Google search window would be the gateway to the content of the 32 million books, 750 million articles, 25 million songs, 500 million images, 500,000 films, 3 million television programs and 100 billion public Web pages that Wired writer Kevin Kelly estimates humanity has published since the days of Sumerian clay tablets. To store all of this gigantic volume of data -- estimated at 50 petabytes -- would still require a building the size of a small town's library, Kelly wrote in…
thescian | March 28, 2007You may know by now what Kathy Sierra, a wonderfully smart blogger at CPU, has gone through. She has been the target of disturbing and sexually loaded comments, images with death threats.
She is a writer I greatly admire. She and her team has done more with her books and her blog to raise the level of discourse in IT than anyone in the recent past. It is a loss to see her withdraw because of a few people who are psychotic, demented and cowardly to exhibit their perversion online anonymously.
All social interactions have a code of conduct, explicit in some cases, implicit in many others.…
thescian | March 28, 2007The Albert Einstein Memorial in Washington DC. Light played on the puckered bronze figure that seemed to be at the cusp of another enlightening idea. A majestic triumph for Robert Berks, the sculptor who created this work of art. The posture is relaxed, mellow and exudes subdued happiness that comes from seeing truth with a clear mind. The notebook has three simple equations. Simple and profound. They carry the essence of a man who showed us how to explore the universe.
I took a picture. Just after I took the picture, a school bus stopped on the side road and more than a dozen children poured…
thescian | March 26, 2007I was having breakfast with a friend last week. I noticed him avoiding sugar substitutes and asked why. He didn't know of any scientific studies but said he preferred food that doesn't pretend. His reasoning went like this: Sweeteners mimic natural taste. This is dishonest and not the way we should treat our biology.
That was a more nuanced reasoning that isn't the same as "natural is good, artificial is bad" (the natural-artificial reasoning is, IMO, luddite - a sorry excuse for being lazy). It is still not the same as conclusions drawn from scientific studies. Nevertheless, it strikes…
thescian | March 19, 2007Yours truly will be away from the blog this week, makin money and all. While am away, here's something to think about.
Fake fights on Climate crisis. Alan Thorpe writes in New Scientist.Scepticism is one thing; cynicism and conspiracy-theorising are quite another. These are the hallmarks of a recent attempt to discredit the widely accepted theory that human-made carbon dioxide emissions are causing global warming. A loose affiliation of scientists and writers is pushing the alternative idea that fluctuations in solar activity provide a better explanation for the rise and fall in the…
thescian | March 16, 2007There's more than sufficient water at the poles on Mars [via /.]. We could soon be surfing on the red planet. A few minor things to take care of: Dig out frozen water from a few kilometers beneath the ground, thaw it, install a surfdrome and we are in business.
thescian | March 15, 2007Yours truly is still here. Read two books.
The Adventure of English by Melvyn Bragg
As the title says, the book treats English as the protogonist and traces how it was born, how it grew, how it almost died and how it came back to conquer the world. There are chapters on the various english dialects. American and Indian, in particular. I finally learnt why american english is spoken with an even stress on the syllables while britons speak it with hump and thump. Noah Webster's little book on spelling and pronunciation is the reason, sez Bragg. Bragg's love for the language comes through very…
thescian | March 13, 2007Saw this news about two children mauled by street dogs and the consequent culling in Bangalore.
Episodes like this are symptoms of the economic, social and organizational troubles palguing Indian cities. There are no quick and easy solutions.
thescian | March 13, 2007Stir your immobile self out of that chair and do something physical, would you. If you don't, you may suffer flat balls (women excused), square bottoms and other assorted syndromes.
thescian | March 8, 2007Read the transcript of a speech Sapolsky gave on biology and religion [via PZ] The audio of the speech is here.In the last 30 years we've seen a whole new psychiatric disorder, of people whose rituals take over and destroy their lives. OCD: Obsessive Compulsive Disorder. These are people who don't merely find themselves counting when they go up a flight of stairs--these are people whose lives are destroyed by this disorder. They wash their hands eight hours a day. They stop eating most foods because of the conviction of contamination, germs. They get very ritualistic and phobic about entering…
thescian | March 7, 2007Voyeurismo by Roger Sandall. A long and highly readable essay that discusses Ethno-tourism and gives a close inspection of The Naked Tourist (a book, fortunately). [via Arts & Letters Daily]You've spent 10,000 years getting there. It's not pretty but it's yours--the swamp, the forest, the tree house where you live. Bigger and stronger tribes drove you down from the better land higher up the slopes, so you retreated to a godforsaken place thick with reptiles, insects, and malarial encephalitis. Southern Papua's rain forests are hell; but at least you feel safe and alone.
Then Zurück in…
thescian | March 6, 2007Does morning coffee fix help? Beebs chimes in with some coffee research news.
I drink coffee in the early morning and it appears to nudge my brain to its proper place. "Really?", you ask, "Your brain moves in the night? Where to?". I suspect it moves down the body. There's some circumstantial evidence. On the days when I haven't had coffee, Ramya worries aloud if a kidney has slid into my brain's place. So, apparently the brain slides down to where my kidneys are during the night.
thescian | March 5, 2007This is a true story. It happened a few minutes ago. It happened when I watched.
8 :30 AM.
Dark outside. Clouds looming overhead. Windy.
8:31 AM.
It rains like a few hundred canine pranksters pissing over the house.
8:32 AM.
The rain stops as abruptly as it started.
8:33 AM.
Sunshine. Crisp day. Rain? What rain? When? Why is the ground wet? Must be the dogs.
thescian | March 4, 2007Bruce Sterling gives a rundown from Serbia."Serbia may be the world's single-greatest locale for a professional futurist. Awful things happen there faster than awful things happen anywhere else. The Balkans is a tragic region that denied stark reality, broke its economy, started multiple unnecessary wars, and basically finger-pointed and squabbled its way into a comprehensive train wreck. It suffered all kinds of pig-headed mayhem, all unnecessary.
That's just how the world behaved with the climate crisis, too. The time for action isn't now. The time for action was 40 years ago. Today we live…