thescian | March 12, 2009
Twenty years ago this month, something happened at CERN that would change the world forever: Tim Berners-Lee handed a document to his supervisor Mike Sendall entitled "Information Management : a Proposal". "Vague, but exciting" is how Mike described it, and he gave Tim the nod to take his proposal forward. The following year, the World Wide Web was born.-World Wide Web@20
What an incredibly lucky turn of events since then! I still remember the day when in 1998 I first used lynx, the text-only browser, on a beaten up machine in college. It felt like I had opened the window into a new world -…
thescian | March 5, 2009Here's a list of things I want to be able to buy in the near future:
Better eyes. Check this news at beebs on a man with bionic eyes. I am very hopeful. Spectacles suck, contact lenses suck. I want a pair of bionic eyes.
Better memory. No news on this. Cognitive enhancement drugs will not cut it. I want a prosthetic that adds to the sorry excuse of a memory that evolution has endowed me with. If we can interface with the optic nerve (above), we can interface with any nerve, the brain included.
Better legs - so I can run to the office a dozen miles without breaking a sweat. Sitting inside a…
thescian | March 3, 2009Every object is mathematical but some are more mathematical than others. This morning I noticed my one year old daughter playing with one of her toys - an open cube with small spheres at each vertex which held many distractions. On one side of this cube was an Archimedes screw, an astonishing mathematical object. She was running a small wheel that ran over this little plastic Archimedes screw. What joy a simple toy holds.
Archimedes Screw is one my favorite mathematical objects. What is your favorite mathematical object (utilitarian, like the Archimedes Screw, or abstract, like E8)?
thescian | February 24, 2009What a tasteless and offensive question, you think. Let me correct that misunderstanding. Don't look upon arseholes as second-class organs. If you did not have one, you'll be full of shit. If gods don't have the hole, boy, then they surely have accumulated all the crap since the beginning of time. If they do have the hole, well, then they are no different from us, are they?
Whenever gods take form, we don't consider it necessary to discuss their bowel movement and certainly won't depict them wearing their arseholes proudly. Why? It's unimportant, you say, there are more pressing matters for…
thescian | February 17, 2009
Swarm of flies on the left. source
In Seven Samurai - one of the greatest movie of all times, there is a scene where the hired Samurai gather the villagers to instruct them on defending their village. A jittery villager runs away from the crowd and is brought back by Kambei, the aging samurai, who threatens the deserter with dire consequences. He then offers this, and I paraphrase here: An individual can fight a successful war only if he is part of a group. An individual will lose a war by standing alone.
As profound as this sounds, this is well known to birds, fishes, insects and animals…
thescian | February 9, 2009The newer model is out. The beginning of the end of paper books? Maybe. Paper books will be around, but devices like Kindle are certain to change the rules of the game. Gone are the days when we can argue that paper books are superior to electronic reading devices because they are portable, don't need a lot of maintenance, they are perfectly suited for primates to handle with their primatey hands, eyes and brains, etc.
thescian | February 3, 2009It made a deep impression in me to listen to Updike talk about the countless stars and galaxies and our cosmic insignificance in an old interview recording (one of the rare few) given to Eleanor Wachtel who hosts Writers & Company. Ian McEwan writes in the guardian:This most Lutheran of writers, driven by intellectual curiosity all his life, was troubled by science as others are troubled by God. When it suited him, he could easily absorb and be impressed by physics, biology, astronomy, but he was constitutionally unable to "make the leap of unfaith". The "weight" of personal death did not…
thescian | February 2, 2009There is and there isn't. The case for there is would go like this: let's say, our brain can store 1000 doodles in each cell and a further 5000 doodles in each distinct connection (that is, the wiring itself as information). If we consider all the permutations and combination of cells and wiring, we get 10 raised to the power of some-doodillion. So there, that is the limit. Great. However, I think arriving at a number like this is questionable. It assumes that we have a valid definition of what memory is, which may not be true. (There are valid and verifiable definitions for computer memory…
thescian | January 30, 2009I am fascinated by the question: Who was Shakespeare. I take it as an expression of awe and wonder at a genius who kept almost all of his personal life hidden. It is also an opportunity to know about the historical backdrop in which many of his plays are set. The question will never be resolved (which is great news if you want to have the bard perform in your fictional stage). I remember reading a scifi story where the protagonist travels in time and meets Shakespeare. Can't recall the title of the story, unfortunately.
Anyho, here is Keir Cutler's (a superlative Canadian playwright/performer…
thescian | January 29, 2009[text updated]
Questions about the validity of previously calculated blackhole creation probabilities at LHC are discussed in this New Scientist article.
The conclusion? We don't have a clue of what the range of probabilities are. It is however still small compared to, say, getting hit by a car or dying in a plane crash. Questions about the validity of calculations are legitimate. However, I am not sure if I will enjoy thinking about the implications of this particular question (especially if it leads to more wailing from those who are scared of blackholes). How do you arrive at a decision…
thescian | January 25, 2009I'll be back in the UK tomorrow. There is quite a lot of material that I have accumulated in the many weeks here: interviews with scientists, social entrepreneurs, ideas for articles, stories and more. I'll start publishing them in the coming weeks and months.
I've had discussions with a few publishers for TheScian Stories book so far. A few days back I had the opportunity to listen to Bob Young, founder of Lulu.com and co-founder of Redhat (at this event). Bob is a delightful speaker. Opensource Software is like Heinz Ketchup. It's not about the ingredients, it is about Brand and Service.…
thescian | January 22, 2009Read these in the past two months. I don't know if I'll get to review them properly. Still, wanted to share a few words about them while the mind is drunk with a heady concoction of ideas and stories.
Sea of Poppies by Amitav Ghosh
First of the trilogy. Exceptional. There's original research on the poppy trade: how many of us knew that most of opium sold to China by the British came from India, how were workers transported in ships to foreign lands, the mingling of cultures and languages. Extraordinary tale.
The Imam and the Indian by Amitav Ghosh
Prose pieces. The one about the ghost of…
thescian | January 20, 2009Elizabeth Alexander's poem on the inauguration of Mr Obama as President captured America at the cusp of a new day. It is plain and simple, like a Whitman poem.Someone is trying to make music somewhere with a pair of wooden spoons on an oil drum with cello, boom box, harmonica, voice.
A woman and her son wait for the bus.
A farmer considers the changing sky; A teacher says, "Take out your pencils. Begin.
We encounter each other in words, words spiny or smooth, whispered or declaimed; words to consider, reconsider.
We cross dirt roads and highways that mark the will of someone and then others…
thescian | January 19, 2009A story that I enjoyed very much. Touchstone is one of the two selected stories of the Scifi Contest. Ramanand, you may know, won the 2007 contest last year.
With this we've exhausted all the publishable stories. The Scientific Indian Stories book is in the works. I will make another announcement shortly so authors can send in their best stories to be shortlisted for the book. Get your muse going meanwhile.
thescian | January 16, 2009One chapter at a time over at Blogging the Origin. John's writing is a delight to read. Head over and enjoy his short stay (he'll be gone when he's done with the book. oh shame).
thescian | January 15, 2009The history of Congo (and Africa, in general) is one of unbroken plundering by the outside world. And, history repeats more keenly in African than anywhere else.
More than 5 million people have been murdered, women and children have been raped, families destroyed and unspeakable atrocities have been committed in Congo in the past decade - the consequence of the world's insatiable demand for raw materials. Johann Hari writes in The Independant: the debate about Congo in the West - when it exists at all - focuses on our inability to provide a decent bandage, without mentioning that we are…
thescian | January 14, 2009The 58th edition of Four Stone Hearth, the anthro blog carnival is up. One linked post at Ethblography by Fran, an anthropologist, asserts that twittering means nothing:Like Wikipedia, then, it is for this reason that Twitter gets under my skin in a most uncomfortable way. It doesn't mean anything. It is genuinely uninformative, ego-centric and self-obsessed drivel. The audience is no one and everyone; the subject is nothing and everything. I don't need to know when someone brushes their teeth or takes out the trash or picks their nose. I really don't. Humanity is exceptionally ridiculous. We…
thescian | January 14, 2009because he is the archetype of all those who hold that end justifies means. Wearing Machiavelli's shoes comes World-is-Flat-and-Black-and-White Mr Friedman, madly dancing with his column in NY Times on the recent gaza flare-up. Read Glenn Greenwald's criticism to restore some balance to this garbage from Mr Friedman.