Prime Stream
thescian | May 8, 2007Panta Rei? Sounds like Greek, you say. In fact, it is greek. Panta Rei means "everything flows" in Greek, explain Arunn and Lakshmi. It's a party where science flows free, like beer. Join the the party. Please divert all beer to the Chemical Sciences Special edition to be hosted at nonoscience on the 14th of this month.
I've requested Arunn to include, in the coming months, a Layperson's Special Edition of Panta Rei, to nudge non-technical science readers like myself to join the party. For that party, please remember to send your science posts geared towards explaining or sharing science with…
thescian | May 5, 2007Courtesy of BioVisions at Harvard University. [link via Scientia Natura. Thanks Janny].
Beautifully done. After watching the video I wondered if I could get some explanations on what I saw. I vaguely recognised in the video the cellular machinery that build and dismantle all the cell structures. Perhaps, someone at Harvard could explain? Well, of course.
Nothing moves us like images that show space, time and matter in comprehensible ways. It's a great way to get tax payers participate in science and increase their (our) contribution. Our short-lived mammalian brain needs all help it can get…
thescian | May 4, 2007Arunn has collected thoughts from folks who could talk science but do not do so. He concludes with the question "Is science blogging in India yet to have its time?"
Hop over and make your point. Come back and read the below in leisure.
Every week I do a search to find science blogs by Indians that I could add to my reading list. It's slim pickings. I'd look at the number of science related blogs elsewhere (see Pharyngula's blogroll for instance). Shit man, I would tell myself, we Indians are fucked. We'll learn, we'll grow and we'll adopt technology as it suits us but we won't share our…
thescian | May 4, 2007TOI has a story about the Indian government preparing to create a ten dollar computer. [via /.] No details about the hardware, software. I am all for cheap computers that have some prabablility of becoming real. But what the heck is this? A joke?
thescian | May 3, 2007A BBC News Video I saw yesterday.
A growing number of Indian women are being used as egg donors and surrogate mothers
The motivations are clear. For many childless couples surrogacy is one clear option (the other is adoption). For the poor women who agree to be surrogate mothers, it is a way out of their poverty, a way to provide for their own children. The contentius area is regulation of this apparently fast growing half a billion pounds industry.
An earlier article in Guardian.
However, campaigners in Britain question the ethics of such businesses. "What is missing here is a debate about…
thescian | May 2, 2007Robert Wright who runs Bloggingheads.tv writes Darwinism isn't depressing in IHT:
...survival machines are unfairly maligned. The name suggests, well, machines devoted to their survival. In truth, though, natural selection builds machines devoted ultimately to the survival of their genes, not themselves.
Hence love. A love-impelled grandparent sacrifices her life to save a child's life. Too bad for the grandparent, but mission accomplished for the love genes: They've kept copies of themselves alive in a vibrant vehicle that was otherwise doomed, and all they've lost is a vehicle that, frankly…
thescian | May 1, 2007Indian Express reports:
To crack down on sex-selection facilities offered on the Net, the Ministry of Health and Family Welfare has written to the Ministry of Communication and Information Technology to block websites providing access to such facilities and even search engines like Google from highlighting these sites.
Gender imbalance is a looming problem in India. The sex ratio is quite skewed - 927 girls to 1000 boys, a decline from 976 girls four decages ago. [Source: Census India]. Nevertheless, blocking websites is a slippery slope. Which websites do you block? How do you monitor? The…
thescian | April 30, 2007It emerged from behind the overflowing garbage bin at the street corner: a two-headed eight-legged mammalian apparition. It hobbled clumsily into the middle of the street: Evolution's artless rendering of two naked dogs copulating; Fluffy's underprevileged brother.
"Why are they joined at the hip?", the shopkeeper across the street wondered.
"Why can't the erection happen outside, like in humans. Why does his penis enlarge after entering?", the bitch had its own questions.
A kid came on an errand to the shop, saw the dogs and picked up a small concrete piece from the chipped pavement.
"It…
thescian | April 30, 2007A nifty blog, Denialism, added to sb. Your first stop: Unified theory of the crank.
thescian | April 27, 2007Poor man's VR. Bought a few pairs of Red-Blue 3D Glasses (you can buy them online, I paid five pounds for five glasses) to view the 3D images of Sun produced by NASA's Solar TErrestrial RElations Observatory (STEREO) satellites. This image is nifty.
thescian | April 26, 2007A discussion at nonoscience.
There is something missing here, something very simple, impalpable, profound, sacred. There is a void which can only be felt and hard to demonstrate. You can call it "scientific fervor", "fire in the belly," "passion" or use any other overworked word, which ultimately is only a word and not the real thing. Perhaps every great university of yore must have had it in abundance.
thescian | April 25, 2007Smart people suck when it comes to financial health. One study* has apparently showed that although smart people earn more, they spend more too thus justifying this blog post's title.
Posting this has been therapeutic. The study* and its conclusions make me somewhat happy considering the level of my own intelligence.
*a financial study. I'd rather call this data mining than a study (even when you call my attention to the IQ test data). Aren't financially smart people 'smart'? Accepting this would undermine the premise of the study. Slippery slope, this study is. You slide on. Happy landing.
thescian | April 24, 2007From ISRO press release.
In its eleventh flight, conducted from Satish Dhawan Space Centre (SDSC) SHAR, Sriharikota, this afternoon (April 23, 2007), ISRO's Polar Satellite Launch Vehicle, PSLV-C8, successfully launched the 352 kg Italian astronomical satellite, AGILE, into a 550 km circular orbit, inclined at an angle of 2.5 deg to the equator.
You can watch the launch at Beebs. A report at Spaceflight Now.
thescian | April 23, 2007
Bill O' Reilly supposedly interviewed Richard Dawkins. Bill had the mike, the studio and the buttons and so Bill jumped on the pulpit and delivered his sermon without having the decency to treat the guest properly (he didn't allow Dawkins to say much).
O'Reilly referred to the tides and the (apparent) movement of sun as the physiology of things. He probably meant to say, physicology of things, which is the word he must've recalled during the interview that should've seemed somewhat related to the physics of things. The mangled word, of course, comes from the science class he attended many…
thescian | April 18, 2007All the talk of citizen heros who could've killed the VT shooter is misleading at the very least. A discussion at Daily Kos. There are sociopaths everywhere: US, India, Iraq, Sudan. How dangerous a weapon they get and how easily they get those weapons makes a big difference in what headlines you see: "Loner attacks students with a knife. One seriously wounded" or "32 people killed when a shooter opened fire and systematically executed people in a classroom".
thescian | April 4, 2007In other words, it's so fractal! Here's the what and why. One is a brain cell of a mouse and the other is a simulation of our universe [via reddit] What a weird Universe we inhabit.
thescian | April 4, 2007From A History of Violence by Pinker at Edge.org
In sixteenth-century Paris, a popular form of entertainment was cat-burning, in which a cat was hoisted in a sling on a stage and slowly lowered into a fire. According to historian Norman Davies, "[T]he spectators, including kings and queens, shrieked with laughter as the animals, howling with pain, were singed, roasted, and finally carbonized." Today, such sadism would be unthinkable in most of the world. This change in sensibilities is just one example of perhaps the most important and most underappreciated trend in the human saga: Violence…
thescian | April 2, 2007Ruth Gledhill - she is the Times newspaper correspondent for Religion - writes in her blog about a recent debate on Religion organized by the Times. A section that put a smile on my face:
Nigel Spivey, who teaches classical art and archaeology at Cambridge and Rabbi Neuberger were particularly anxious to emphasise their non-religious credentials. Julia repeatedly emphasised that she was so liberal as to be almost near to dropping off the edge, and Spivey likewise was keen to make sure we knew he was not one bit religious himself. Oh no. He was just enormously appreciative of the enormous…