thescian
Posts by this author
There'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.
Yours 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…
Saw 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.
Stir 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.
Read 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…
Voyeurismo 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…
Does 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…
This 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.…
Bruce 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…
Taken by yours truly using his wobbly hands and a Sony DSC H2 camera from the backyard between 8 PM and 10:30 PM.
I thought I'd see a reddish hue as noted here. It was better. It was blue. A pebble in the sky. Magnificent.
If you spend a lot of time peering into a window that opens into the World Wide Web, you may like using Verdana font set at a comfortable font size. I personally have set Firefox to ignore all site specific fonts and just use Verdana size 18 for all western fonts.
I've heard that Verdana is a poor…
Too skeptical for our own good. That's how someone characterized many scientists and science teaching on BBC Radio 4. I was listening yesterday morning where Lewis Wolpert*, the scientist and another gentlemen - apparently religious, whose name I forgot - were guests. Wolpert is an avowed atheist…
Some personal search statistics from 2006. Almost all of these searches were done when I was not aware of google collecting data on my searches. I am mildly shocked - particularly when considering these numbers only represent a part of my actual searches and not the searches done when logged out.…
To Martin Gardner
"Lines that are parallel
meet at Infinity!"
Euclid repeatedly,
heatedly,
urged
Until he died.
and so reached that vicinity:
in it he
found that the damned things…
Over here. Arunn of Nonoscience takes the second prize in Sci/Tech category. Wonderful. Congrats to all the winners and pariticipants. Cheers, beers, etc.
We should hopefully have separate categories for Science and Technology next year. There are lot of excellent science blogs and it would be good…
So, you read my story a while back and want to know how are things now. Thanks for asking. Things have gone from 'no more tech support' to 'my mother does her own installation'. She has installed amsn to do video chat with us (take that Skype). amsn works across platforms and uses my iSight webcam…
A Beebs report on the looming sex ratio problem in China that caught my attention.
The large insect - almost two feet in length - was hiding in the loft. It looked like an enlarged scorpion with the legs and head of a cockroach. I could see it hiding because the antennae were visible and rubbing the walls. I stood transfixed at the door, my body shivering with excitement and…
Being sick helps you survive says Sharon Moalem, author of Survival of the Sickest. A condition where the body stores a lot of iron may have led to the the survival of a large number of people after the years of Black Death, the author describes in a New Scientist article.
"Iron overload was once…
I hope to move TheScian.com to a new host over this weekend. Sit tight. I am also hoping to make some changes to the site. All in the coming weeks. First the move, though.
Update: Alright. We've moved TheScian.com. On the way we lost some weight. Kitchen is closed. Many thanks for those who dropped…
The little boy went to the corner of the hut and fished out a matchbox from his school bag. He had not told anyone about his secret pet: A Ponvandu*. The colorful insect emerged out of the matchbox when he slid the lid off; its body iridescent as it reflected the morning sunlight in myriad colors…
It has been a while since I click-scratched google's back. So here. *grin*. There's more if you have clicks to spare.
"The Elements of Style". Prescriptive. Precise. Buy it for the elegant introduction by E B White. Read the original text online.
Flashing giant squids at the beebs. The video is scary.
Enormous deep-sea squid emit blinding flashes of light as they attack their prey, research shows.
Taningia danae's spectacular light show was revealed in video footage taken in deep waters off Chichijima Island in the North Pacific.
Japanese…
A 25 million dollar prize is open for an invention that can eat substantial amount of carbon out of the atmosphere. News at Nature.
"The winner must be able to demonstrate a commercially viable design which will result in the net removal of anthropogenic, atmospheric, greenhouse gases each year for…
Sean at Cosmic Variance points out the disingenuity of oil industry which encourages skeptics among climate scientists.
Yes? Here's an opportunity to correct your mistakes.
Debashish fell over the keyboard when working late in the night. Your votes in the Science/Technology were lost. Go vote once more, will ya.
A conversation between my two year old neice and her mother (my sister).
"Let me check your temperature, Nethra."
Nethra waits patiently as my sister sticks the thermometer into her mouth. After the thermometer is pulled out Nethra makes a motion as though she was eating the thermometer.
"No,…