thescian | May 29, 2008Latest TWiT episode has Brewster Kahle speaking of archive.org and more. He is extremely persuasive. Must listen.
Zattoo, a new IPTV service that serves free TV on the computer (low resolution, like youtube, but uses p2p like BBC's iPlayer) in Europe and hopes to make money by sticking ads while users switch channels. It'll probably succeed. Picked this up at YC.news.
I've setup a box at home (dual boot with Ubuntu and Windows XP) for iPlayer and Miro. I hope to add Zattoo to it, buy a shipload of popcorn and spend the rest of my life watching a shiny screen and be eternally entertained.…
thescian | May 29, 2008 I recently read John Irving's Trying to save Piggy Sneed, a collection of essays and a few short stories. It's a good book to pick up if you haven't read Irving yet. Briefly, Irving's The World according to Garp is one of the craziest and astonishing book (my current read). You may know one of the later adaptation of it captured popular imagination as the movie Forrest Gump.
So, in the Piggy Sneed book (chapter one here), his essay In Defense of Sentimentality is printed, reading which prompted me to re-read Dickens' A Christmas Carol.
...who could fault "A Christmas Carol"? "Who can listen…
thescian | May 28, 2008 [Image Credit: David C. Blackburn] Who would have thought! However, the frogs have to really kick hard to unclaw - the claw comes out by piercing the frog's skin. A half-baked defense mechanism is what I think this is. Maybe in another hundred years - and if we keep pushing their habitats to the margins - they'll fully bake their claws and get it ready to wage a war on humans.
thescian | May 23, 2008Announcement at the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation:
SEATTLE -- In recognition of its groundbreaking work to prevent debilitating blindness and provide affordable, world-class eye care to the poor, the Aravind Eye Care System, based in Tamil Nadu, India, has won the 2008 Gates Award for Global Health. The $1 million Gates Award--the world's largest prize for international health--honors extraordinary efforts to improve health in developing countries.
Founded by Dr. G. Venkataswamy in 1976, Aravind has saved millions of people in India from debilitating blindness. Cataracts account for…
thescian | May 19, 2008They that have power to hurt and will do none,
That do not do the thing they most do show,
Who, moving others, are themselves as stone,
Unmoved, cold, and to temptation slow,
They rightly do inherit heaven's graces
And husband nature's riches from expense;
They are the lords and owners of their faces,
Others but stewards of their excellence.
The summer's flower is to the summer sweet,
Though to itself it only live and die,
But if that flower with base infection meet,
The basest weed outbraves his dignity:
For sweetest things turn sourest by their deeds;
Lilies that fester smell far worse than…
thescian | May 15, 2008So, it's gonna get MickeySoft (that's a Wolf in Mickey make-up, run children, run). As, one Slashdot commenter put it, "This is like McDonalds bullying and lobbying to make the BigMac the preferred choice for UN's world food programme, and succeeding."
Give a read to Ivan KrstiÄ's remarkably insightful and properly angry account.
thescian | May 15, 2008I've used music from ccMixter for TheScian audio and it was always a pleasure to listen to remixes of Calendar Girl. Here's the news from ccMixter:
In October 2006, singer song-writer Tamara Barnett-Herrin from London in the UK published a one sentence challenge to herself and to remixers around the World Wide Web: "I write one song a month. You remix and feedback. We make a record." This experiment in songwriting and remix culture unlike any other yielded over 300 remixes, setting a new record at ccMixter. Twelve of them have been chosen to be published in an album titled Calendar Songs…
thescian | May 14, 2008G1.9+0.3, remnant of the most recent supernova in our galaxy that happened a mere 140 years ago.
Wired post covering the announcement.
thescian | May 13, 2008A BBC report:
According to Unicef's latest State of the World's Children's report, India has the worst indicators of child malnutrition in South Asia: 48% of under fives in India are stunted, compared to 43% in Bangladesh and 37% in Pakistan.
Meanwhile 30% of babies in India are born underweight, compared to 22% in Bangladesh and 19% in Pakistan. Unicef calculates that 40% of all underweight babies in the world are Indian.
Put all that in hard numbers and the figures are stark. Fifty million Indian under fives are affected by malnutrition. Rising food prices, Unicef says mean 1.5 to 1.8…
thescian | May 12, 2008The intoxicated brain knows no fear. Apparently, that's why people loosen-up when drunk and will happily talk to fearsome strangers. That's funny, 'coz someone I know will go completely quiet when drunk and will simply stare at you like you are a wall of abstract painting if you talk to him. I am wondering why..
thescian | May 12, 2008I've received a couple of emails from folks who wanted to know when this year's contest would be announced. Shortly, folks. Meanwhile, get going with your story. If I may, I'd suggest mulling over the story idea, setting, characters, tone, etc obsessively and making notes before you actually begin to write the story. Try and get hold of Writing Fiction by Alan Wall and give it your undivided attention for a few days. The rules this year would be pretty much the same as before.
There will be an exciting new addition to what we'll do with this year's (and past year's stories) - besides…
thescian | May 12, 2008The divine architect of runny noses,
The wizard of ooze, of two stinky hoses,
You made every man woman a misfit
With appendages and stomach full of shit.
Sexy theater in a messy sewer,
Shame on you unintelligent designer!
Harris, Hitchens, PZ, Dennett and Dawkins:
May their godless fists land where your chin is.
Old man Paley walking by a heath found,
A perfectly wrought Timepiece on the ground.
Inside his skull god's bell went a'ringing,
A wonderful spell! Paley went a'singing.
Dear Mr Paley? Truth by rhetoric?
When there is good science and proper logic?
Teleology is warm and quite fuzzy…
thescian | May 8, 2008Donate what you can. Save the Children. Red Cross. The death toll may have crossed 100000.
thescian | April 30, 2008is a good dose of the idealism that started it. And, it has now got it in full measure! As most of the readers know, I am enthusiastic about the OLPC (and have obtained one via G1G1). Slapping Windows on it may make it more useful in the short term (every business quarter), in the long run though (years and years) it would probably kill it and leave thousands of students with a tool that pushes the wrong kind of learning down their throats.
thescian | April 23, 2008Two book podcasts I listen to regularly.
CBC Writers & Company
Eleanor Wachtel is probably the finest interviewer of writers out there. Give a listen to her recent interviews. In one of the episodes, Orhan Pamuk is interviewed and what he said about V S Naipaul is still on my mind. Naipaul, Pamuk says, sought the center of colonizers to understand his own place while he (Pamuk) does not feel the need to go out of Turkey (Pamuk rarely goes out of Istanbul) since Turkey was never colonized. In another episode, Arthur C Clarke is interviewed. Mind filling.
World Book Club
Another podcast…