thescian | February 11, 2007Over here. Jury duty is done (yours truly had a jury hand in the Science/Tech and Humor category). Its all upto to you now. Help Debashish with the public voting process.
thescian | February 8, 2007 There was a few inches of snow today in Amersham. I didn't venture out on wheels. Instead we went for a walk. A good number of people had come out. Some cars skidded by to hug the trees on the roadsides. A gentleman pulling his young daughter on a red plastic sled. A tiny puppy rushed to them, wagging its tail vigorously in excitement. I think it wanted to pee on the gentleman's wellies. We - the wife and I - made a snowball and rolled it along with us. I quickly learnt the lesson: a rolling snow ball gathers lot of flakes. That reminds me. Is it "a rolling stone gathers no moss" - the…
thescian | February 6, 2007It's going to rain satellites on us quite soon. A New York Times article on space junk and the impending disaster accompanied by a nifty interactive presentation.
thescian | February 6, 2007Microsoft on Monday rebuffed a public appeal by Mikhail Gorbachev for its chairman, Bill Gates, to intervene on behalf of a Russian school principal charged with software piracy. -IHT
Many may have noticed this case where Gorbachev asked and Bill Gates declined.
It bears repeating. Personal computers do not need proprietary software. There are excellent alternatives like Ubuntu and a host of useful applications that come with it (read my story). Whatever machine you buy or acquire, you can wipe the harddrive and install free software alternatives. There are numerous local linux groups that…
thescian | February 5, 2007Once again the perennially aggravating subject of Indian marriages is in the news at the beebs. The reporter sezNo Indian wedding can even begin without a visit to the astrologer, who for centuries, read the charts and mapped the planetary alignments to pick the best matches.
Now, even they have had to adapt.
"Many of my clients have very specific requests," says NS Murthy, one of the city's top astrologers.
"Last year, I saw more than 6,000 horoscopes. My clients want to know about the prospects for the future, their prosperity, happiness, the number of children they'll have, and even their…
thescian | February 2, 2007Go here. The winning cartoon is very poignant. One of the commended ones that caught my eyes is below. [via reddit]
thescian | February 2, 2007GOOGLE'S MOON SHOT at The New Yorker.
"No one really knows how many books there are. The most volumes listed in any catalogue is thirty-two million, the number in WorldCat, a database of titles from more than twenty-five thousand libraries around the world. Google aims to scan at least that many. "We think that we can do it all inside of ten years," Marissa Mayer, a vice-president at Google who is in charge of the books project, said recently, at the company's headquarters, in Mountain View, California. "It's mind-boggling to me, how close it is. I think of Google Books as our moon shot."
thescian | January 31, 2007How I wish! It ain't I but a Volcano that's gonna get it.Indonesian geophysicists hope to stem the flow of a destructive mud volcano on East Java by dropping chains of concrete balls into its mouth.
The mud eruption began on 29 May last year in the middle of a rice paddy in the village of Porong, 30 kilometres south of Surabaya, the provincial capital. Since then, the volcano has spewed out up to 126,000 cubic metres of mud a day, flooding an area of more than 4 square kilometres.
(via /.)
If you read the article you'd realize how uncretain the whole experiment is. Crazy as it is, even…
thescian | January 31, 2007Sir Richard Branson offers this fabulous deal. Am unhelpful sidenote on the news page chirps thus:"The chance of an individual using personal cord blood for a blood cell disorder before the age of 20 is estimated to be between 1/20,000 to 1/37,000"
Dang! But then, with the population of aged shooting over the roof in the UK, the chances of using the stem cells collected when you were born would improve quite a bit in the future I would think.
A scifi novel read a few weeks ago is relevant in this context. Bruce Sterling's Holy Fire. The novel is set in the near future when life extension…
thescian | January 31, 2007We all are in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars. -Oscar Wilde
thescian | January 30, 2007A discussion at Dr.Katte's blog that is worth your time. It may not make much sense to you if you are not aware of the religious marking that hindus, particularly those in south India wear (not all). I applaud both Dr.Katte and the student for conducting the discussion openly.
Marking oneself ritualistically is not something that's confined to religion alone. There is also a wide degree of variability based on culture, personality and whetever-else-there-is. Some are severe (Link not for the squeamish). Some really funny. And many not worth bothering at all.
thescian | January 30, 2007From Peceptive Pixel. The technology is now part of Apple and iPhone uses it.Some background.
thescian | January 29, 2007I'll jury around the SciTech and humor category. Nominate away. If there is any particular blog you liked and want to personally recommend (with a personal note), don't hesitate to email me after tagging it in delicious.
thescian | January 29, 2007An Edge essay by V S Ramachandran on What is self?
It has recently been shown that if a
conscious awake human patient has his parietal lobe stimulated during
neurosurgery, he will sometimes have an "out of body" experience -- as
if he was a detached entity watching his own body from up near the
ceiling. I suggest that this arises because of a dysfunction in the
mirror neuron system in the parieto-occipital junction caused by the
stimulating electrode. These neurons are ordinarily activated when we
temporarily "adopt" another's view of our body and mind (as outlined
earlier in this essay).…
thescian | January 29, 2007I and the wife were having coffee on Saturday. For the past two weekends I have been buying the weekend newspaper and not reading it. Ramya mentioned this and reminded me not to bother this time. Like most men above the age of thirty, I like news - a lot. But newspapers do not seem to cut it for me. I reasoned thus: Those who are on the internet have a lot of news sources and are used to hearing different viewpoints. In fact, the variety of views is the norm. I can always click around and find what many folks think of a certain event. Consider, religion. I hear Dawkins and then I also hear E…
thescian | January 27, 2007Here's some serious fun with the desktop metaphor. Bumptop is a Desktop UI. [via] The Tube video below. Nifty.
thescian | January 25, 2007Life goes on but what a loss.(thanks Ramya) I was in Bhuj after the quake. We passed through village after village and saw not a single structure standing. It was devastation on a scale I've never seen before. One of my friend said that it was like a curse. If you were a believer that is a succint description of the carnage.
I am sure Bhuj people have recovered. I saw how resourceful they were.
This is also the day India was constituted and came into existence as a soverign secular socialist democratic republic nation. Have a thoughtful day.
thescian | January 24, 2007Sometime back I couldn't even spell philosophy correctly. And now, I not only read it but tell you why I read it. How I change! Well, read on.
As a child I grew up in a small town in the south of India. That meant I had very little access or exposure to the finer things in life - especially the earth-shattering ideas that transformed human lives during humanity's short history. If you were lucky like me, you had parents, relatives or someone who exposed you to books, thoughts and people who created sparks in your young impressionable mind. Even then there are large areas of knowledge and…
thescian | January 24, 2007 I don't know classical music and it didn't matter. Music made of sublime and uplifting sadness. [via NPR - you can listen to the complete song here]