thescian
Posts by this author
February 11, 2007
Over 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.
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,…
February 6, 2007
It'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.
February 6, 2007
Microsoft 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…
February 5, 2007
Once again the perennially aggravating subject of Indian marriages is in the news at the beebs. The reporter sez
No 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…
February 2, 2007
Go here. The winning cartoon is very poignant. One of the commended ones that caught my eyes is below. [via reddit]
February 2, 2007
GOOGLE'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. "…
January 31, 2007
How 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,…
January 31, 2007
Sir 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…
January 31, 2007
We all are in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars. -Oscar Wilde
January 30, 2007
A 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…
January 30, 2007
From Peceptive Pixel. The technology is now part of Apple and iPhone uses it.Some background.
January 29, 2007
I'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.
January 29, 2007
An 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…
January 29, 2007
I 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…
January 27, 2007
Here's some serious fun with the desktop metaphor. Bumptop is a Desktop UI. [via] The Tube video below. Nifty.
January 25, 2007
Life 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…
January 24, 2007
Sometime 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…
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]
January 23, 2007
Vindaloo and tandoori, of course. A comprehensive summary of current scientific research about the medical properties of turmeric.
January 22, 2007
Lord hanuman needs your help. Here's the list of pleas that I received from his tailiness.
1. Ganesha is a fat bugger. Send the damned milk my way.
2. Anyone without a tail must wear one.
3. Don't eat the banana in front of me, you insensitive clod!
4. Send all your money to the blogger called…
January 22, 2007
"Got milk?", asks Sunil. A delicious post on lactose intolerance in humans and how evolution has herded (so to speak) our silly genes into overcoming it.
January 22, 2007
One small capsule in the ocean, a giant leap for ISRO.
In a pathbreaking event heralding its arrival as a space power with capability to recover an orbiting satellite, India today successfully brought back a spacecraft to earth, giving a new impetus to the proposed manned mission to space in the…
January 22, 2007
The magnificient Sombrero galaxy in infrared taken by Spitzer. A suitable hat for that wandering one-eyed turtle, perhaps.
January 17, 2007
Yes. You read that right. A really big bother. It's all over the BBC here. People in the UK and India have suddenly discovered reality shows. Racist slur on Shilpa! The Indian movie star has found herself on a show that is insulting! And, there are women who insult other women! Surprise, surprise…
January 17, 2007
"For market economies, and the Western model of democracy with which they have been associated, the existential challenge for the foreseeable future will be global warming. Other threats like terrorism may well be damaging, but no other conceivable threat or combination of threats can possibly…
January 16, 2007
Over here. There are some hilarious hate mails there for your amusement.
If you want some serious stuff about google, our future and whatever would become of it all, go here.
January 16, 2007
The Science Blogging Anthology - collection of some of the finest science blogging in a book form edited by our very own sleepless blogger.