thescian
Posts by this author
December 8, 2006
"First think of the tiny fart that your intestines make. Then consider the heavens: their infinite farting is thunder. For thunder and farting are, in principle, one and the same."
Such obscene words! Who would have dared to utter these, you wonder. Well, surprise, surprise! The exalted farter was…
December 7, 2006
Go read this at 3 Quarks Daily and come back because I have more.
The hand wringing by religious apologists has gotten desperate in the past weeks. Militant atheism is the name given and it is frowned upon. The fundamental reason boils down to what Dawkins has repeatedly pointed out. Religion has…
December 6, 2006
A reader contributed list at Creating Passionate Users blog. Wonderful.
When I sit at my bedroom these days I face a rack of books. This visual delight has been a long dream of mine. Moving around all these years made book collection almost impossible. During the recent move from US to UK I had to…
December 5, 2006
A fine rant to keep everyone in line (link posted at the Kitchen by Anand).
Let me tell you a related story. When I was about 16 (1990? I feel so old), I went and joined the Sacred Heart College Library in Tirupattur (a dingy town in Tamilnadu). I was doing +1 at that time in Ramakrishna School (…
December 4, 2006
Town twinning indeed. Amersham is twinned with Benshiem Bensheim in Germany and Krynica in Poland sez a signboard in Amersham. Finally, after looking at the signboard in Amersham for a few months, I've looked up on what it is all about.
December 1, 2006
Getting Started
There are many ways to die in this dirty clayball of ours. Among the myriad possible ways, the most enticing way for a subcontinental is to have sex in a shady bush or a hut on the highway roadside. The highway is a wonderous thing in my beloved country. Births, marriages, deaths…
December 1, 2006
A few stats from the UN's AIDS Epidemic Update for 2006.
Total number of people living with AIDS as of 2006 is 39.5 Million. Of this number, 2.3 million are under 15 years of age.
5.7 million people are living with AIDS in India as of 2005. My home town Namakkal is among the places with highest…
November 30, 2006
As I was cycling on a street near my home I noticed some plumbing work going on in a house. The plumbing company van was parked outside. Of course, this mundane affair doesn't merit notice. What was of some linguistic interest was the name of the plumbing company. "Pipe Dreams" . That's right. "…
November 29, 2006
Let me put it mildly. Mr Deepak Chopra's post on Dawkins book is an intellectual abomination. [via Pharyngula] The kind of vomit only a cauldron of idiocy can spew out. Chopra calls a muddled rant on color perception as a thought experiment and asks us to give up on scientifically analyzing the…
November 29, 2006
Although it is hard to resist blogging, I've been taking a sort of reading break to catch up on my reading. Here's the last two books I've read.
How Mumbo-jumbo Conquered the World: A Short History of Modern Delusions by Francis Wheen - A collection of mostly political and economic stories of…
November 26, 2006
Some sensible things happening over here in the rainy country. No copyright extension for songs reports the BBC. At present, copyright for artists (not the same as composers, who get 120 years of exclusive rights) extends for 50 years in Britain. Within this time artists can collect royalties for…
November 26, 2006
Ramya has started reading The God Delusion and asked what's the reference to Imagine by Lennon in the first few pages. Here's Lennon performing Imagine at Google Videos. Imagine no religion. It's not that hard.
November 22, 2006
I was watching many of the videos at Beyond Belief yesterday evening. They are well worth your time, particularly if you want to understand the historical narratives of science and religion. When Carolyn Porco was talking (video, last speaker) about wonder and showing some of the stunning…
November 21, 2006
A very readable article in NY Times on Science and Religion. Here's something that I find inane that touches upon meaning and purpose of life.
"There are six billion people in the world," said Francisco J. Ayala, an evolutionary biologist at the University of California, Irvine, and a former Roman…
November 18, 2006
A fundamental difference between religious faith and science pertains to hope. Underlying religious faith is the belief that God knows everything and controls everything. In any religion, human capacity is at best subservient to God's will. This is a sorry state to be in for any human. Religious…
November 14, 2006
The Q&A session by Dawkins after the reading of The God Delusion in Lynchburg, VA . All the standard questions of the believing brigade properly disposed off. Fabulous. The video plays for about an hour.
The Colbert Episode. Dawkins plays the game very well.
November 14, 2006
During my visit to India last month, I promised myself that I would accomplish one important task. I would do everything in my power to eliminate the tech support role that I was playing to my parents. You see, my parents had inherited (ah, sweet pun) a desktop computer from me and in my absence…
November 8, 2006
Hurray! Without further delay, here are the results of TheScian Science Fiction Short Story Contest 2006!
1. 'The Asylum at Bergen' by Aditya Sudarshan (Winning entry)
2. 'To Sleep Perchance to Dream' by Rohinton Daruwala (second best)
3. 'Now We Live a Full Lifespan' Cyril M Gupta (third best)…
November 1, 2006
The panelists rankings are in. I need to average them out and publish the results. A lot of personal things to attend to at the moment and haven't got time to blog. Hang on a couple of days for the contest winners announcement. I still haven't got internet access at home. Typing this from the local…
October 30, 2006
So, what's keeping me from blogging? Two things really. Firstly, we moved to a new house over the weekend. It's a bigger and better house. The move has taken all my time and has also put my back through a wringer. Secondly, I've got no internet at the new house. That'll take a few more days to…
October 28, 2006
Am back in Amersham after a three week trip to India. The vacation (a misnomer) in India was wonderful. So wonderful it was that at one point my body gave up digesting in disgust. A few books I read during the vacation:-
Temptations of the West by Pankaj Mishra - Very engaging autobiographical…
October 5, 2006
Yours truly is travelling to his beloved country early morning today for three weeks (real early, am sleepless in amersham). Expect a short break at this blog for the next few days. I'll make the odd post from Namakkal and provide you with a glimpse of the southern country with my newly minted Sony…
October 3, 2006
Let's talk music and software for a moment. Shall we? This post is about the software I use at home to organize the audible bits I have accumulated and keep accumulating everyday. You must remember that I am not an expert on any of the software applications discussed below. If you have technical…
October 3, 2006
Religion is like Pornography sez PZ. Indeed, they both leave a nasty aftertaste. No amount of sugar coating can rectify what happens to be a fundamental perversion of the intellect. PZ is taking the offensive one step further. The offensive is necessary when you consider how entrenched religion is…
October 3, 2006
Al Gore at TED Talks. He mentions releasing the climate crisis presentation under an appropriate licensing term (he's working with Lawrence Lessig) for young people to remix. Brilliant. A tremendously engaging talk with Gore relating hilarious stories in the first few minutes. via The World's Fair.
October 3, 2006
The Nobel Prize in Physics 2006 has been awarded to John C. Mather andGeorge F. Smoot "for their discovery of the blackbody form and anisotropy of the cosmic microwave background radiation". I read Smoot's Wrinkles in Time when I was doing undergraduation in Physics in Vivekananda college, Chennai…
October 2, 2006
Then go checkout the Shaastra Festival at IIT where a lot of very smart people would be talking. Via nonoscience.
If you are going, can you take a audio recorder or a camcorder with you and get us the fine moments of science from there?
October 2, 2006
Oh dear! I can't get this out of my head [embedded audio. Via MF]. Want more? Try setting this to music.