Quote

I though this quote was very funny



Quote Details: Gustave Flaubert: The whole dream of... - The Quotations Page

The whole dream of democracy is to raise the proletarian to the level of stupidity attained by the bourgeois.
Gustave Flaubert
French realist novelist (1821 - 1880)



Gustave Flaubert (December 12, 1821 – May 8, 1880) [gystav flobɛʁ] was a French novelist who is counted among the greatest Western novelists. He is known especially for his first published novel Madame Bovary and for his scrupulous devotion to his art and style, best exemplified by his endless search for le mot juste ("the precise word").

powered by performancing firefox

Anachrnoism ??

World's tallest man saves China dolphins - Yahoo! News : The long arms of the world's tallest man reached in and saved two dolphins by pulling out plastic from their stomachs, state media and an aquarium official said Thursday.



(Hahaha modern science )

powered by performancing firefox

Total Control

What if we evolve to have a bigger brain and this brain is then capable of self-awareness ?

By self-awareness I mean being intimate with the workings of our body like we are with workings of machines. And not just knowing it like we know the functioning of organs but are not aware of them. We know how the heart works but in our daily lives we cannot monitor or control the heart in any way. The awareness I am talking about should enable us to control our emotions, feelings of pain and other behaviors which we exhibit now but are not completely aware of.

Right now we claim to have self awareness and this is a step over most of the species on this planet. However most of the time we dont know why we behave or react the way we do. I feel happy and motivated when I get back from the gym with nothing else but a few new chemicals being released as a result of my physical exertion. What if my brain could order the release of these chemicals just because I chose to ? That way we could chose not to feel too hungry, we could choose to burn all the fat we have. We could chose to sharpen any skills that we choose to, choose to form certain memories or erase uncomfortable memories.

Daily Mail : Chocolate bars for PMT

More than the article I think I like this picture

BBC : Islamists debate rape law moves

Women protested outside parliament as the debate was held

Until now, rape cases were dealt with in Sharia courts. Victims had to have four male witnesses to the crime - if not, they faced prosecution for adultery. Under the amended law, the civil courts will be able to try rape cases according to the British-influenced penal code.

I am trying to think what the supporters of Sharia are thinking.
How deep rooted the feeling of "second-class status for women" would be in the minds of these men ?
Do we know how to rid people of blind faiths which have become pillars of their paradigm of the world ?
Its so damn frustrating. They just wont listen to you, because they think you are talking "non-sense". Its like teaching a mad person to do something civil.

Side note :
I watched Dor yesterday. Very nice work by Kukunoor to play on this theme. It had a street play feel to it.

Quote

Usually, terrible things that are done with the excuse that progress requires them are not really progress at all, but just terrible things.
  - Russell Baker

Quote

"Usually, terrible things that are done with the excuse that progress requires them are not really progress at all, but just terrible things.
- Russell Baker"

Gaane Anjaane

I am watching Mouna Raagam. Once again I am awed Mani Rathnam and Revathi.

So I am watching a song , when they go sight seeing in Delhi (SPB rocks. I think his voice in the background adds as much to the film as the people in front of the camera). This song is supposed to hint to us that when these two spend time together they are sexually attracted to each other. I was wondering if there was a more raw way to show this. What would a European director do with this idea, when he cant insert a song. Did Mani Rathnam take the easy route ? I think it would be rather difficult to see these emotions displayed in a real life situation. You can sense this based on how the other person looks at you and if they are body language when you are in close proximity. But that would be a huge challenge to capture on the screen. Desi songs give us(Indians) a good tool.

Toothpick Art

Thanks Boing Boing

What’s Wrong With a Child? Psychiatrists Often Disagree - New York Times

[ NYTimes] Katherine Finn, a 14-year-old who lives in Grand Rapids, Mich., said she was grateful for the growing awareness of the disease. Possessed by feelings of worthlessness as early as the fourth grade, Katherine said that by the sixth grade she "threw my sanity out the window." She became impulsive, loud, and abrasive, she said, adding, "I would blurt things out in class, I would moo like a cow, act like a little kid, just say the most random stuff." A psychiatrist promptly diagnosed the problem as bipolar disorder, after learning that there was a history of the disease on her mother's side of the family. Katherine began taking drugs that blunted the extremes in her mood, and she now is doing well at a new school.


Is there weight to the argument that when we don't know anything for sure about a problem then not doing anything to solve it is as good as doing something (totally random) to solve it ?  Mathematically this might be accurate assuming not doing anything might qualify as a solution. Like in the case of kids it is possible that their hormones settle down and they lose all the symptoms. Medicating them would have taken them down the wrong road. For a problem like "not being able to find a job" it is painfully obvious that this is not a solution.

Russell Rocks

Three passions, simple but overwhelmingly strong, have governed my life: the longing for love, the search for knowledge, and unbearable pity for the suffering of mankind.
-Bertrand Russell, philosopher, mathematician, and author (1872-1970)

Moronland.net - Hercules the Liger

Evolutionary pressure from humans ??

Metcalfe's law - Wikipedia

Metcalfe's law - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia: "Metcalfe's law states that the value of a telecommunications network is proportional to the square of the number of users of the system (n2). First formulated by Robert Metcalfe in regard to Ethernet, Metcalfe's law explains many of the network effects of communication technologies and networks such as the Internet and World Wide Web."

The law has often been illustrated using the example of fax machines: A single fax machine is useless, but the value of every fax machine increases with the total number of fax machines in the network, because the total number of people with whom each user may send and receive documents increases.

The Firefox Kid and Parakey

IEEE Spectrum: The Firefox Kid: "Pointing to the screen of his laptop, Ross shows me what he calls a “family portal” for a fictional clan named the Andersons. Mom has a page with her recipes displayed. Dad has his collection of war documents. The kids have their party photos. Although it looks like a Web site—down to the Firefox-style tabs that run across the top of the page, which each family member uses to display his or her own section—it is, in fact, something much more ambitious: a universal interface. Even though Parakey works inside your Web browser, it runs locally on your home computer, which allows Parakey developers to do things inside your Parakey site that a traditional Web site could not do, such as interact with your camera. So instead of clicking between, say, the Windows desktop and a MySpace home page displayed in a Web browser, you are always operating within your Parakey site.

Take digital photos, for example. Here’s how the Parakey experience works: you plug in your camera, and your photos get stored seamlessly on your computer in such a way that you can view them quickly and easily through your Parakey site. No more digging through folders for the right image files. They’re organized and displayed as attractively as a site like Flickr might display them, as thumbnails with identifying text beneath them. Parakey allows for serious editing functions—from cutting and cropping to eliminating red-eye—all within the context of your Parakey page. But it also brings some more basic (and fun) scrapbooking habits into the digital realm. Ross clicks on an icon representing what he calls the Toy Box. Open the Toy Box and there are all sorts of accessories for dressing up the pictures: word balloons, devil horns, goofy fonts.


Now let’s say you want to share your collection of graduation photos with some select family and friends. The problem today is that there are several layers to getting that done. Many sites require users to register before seeing a photo a"

It took me sometime to understand how parakey would be different from a clean next revision of Google Desktop. I was thinking they were trying to do something like this too. But then they could be caught up in the parts that they have bought. Maybe the sum would be much less than the parts itself. I can see Blake's effort having a better chance for success with the open-source community to back him up. Its easy and more functional to put stuff together when they have been designed to a more common interface specification. Google's inorganic growth does not give it that luxury, but then they always have the potential to "shock and awe".

[thanks /.]

The world's fastest Indian

Very nice movie.
Everyone feels so good in the company of Burt Munro. I thought it was becasue of his honesty as a person. He didnt have anything to hide from anyone. He was
almost always super-comfortable in his skin. Like most old people Tom could make Mr.Burt uncomfortable by asking him about death.

What Do Women Want? Just Ask - New York Times

What Do Women Want? Just Ask - New York Times: "We are perhaps on the first step to a matriarchal society; women will earn more money than men if current trends continue by 2028,” said Michael J. Silverstein of the Boston Consulting Group. “The trend has been escalating in the last 10 years as there has been a gradual, slow erosion of the power balance in the family, a psychic rebalancing.”

Women, Mr. Silverstein added, are “controlling purchases and driving a shift in our economy.”

Retailers like Home Depot, Lowe’s, Sears, Best Buy and others recognize that women are running their households like purchasing managers. Some are “identifying stores that have more female shoppers and offering additional services,” including sales support, customized signs and special product displays, said Dana L. Telsey, who runs her own independent research firm. Travel companies, automakers, and other companies, meanwhile, have had to cater to the tastes of women who have careers outside the home and are pursuing hobbies and other pricey interests. The phenomenon is readily apparent on the Internet, where Web sites built around the needs and interests of such groups as female homeowners and car buyers have gained steady traction."

Will Power make them crazy too ? Will a matriarchal society offer secondary status to men ? Will men be able to adapt to the change ? It'll be very interesting :)

U.S. Jobs Shape Condoms’ Role in Foreign Aid - New York Times

U.S. Jobs Shape Condoms’ Role in Foreign Aid - New York Times: "One, Garry Appling, a 41-year-old single mother, has worked before as a $6-an-hour cashier at Krystal, the fast food restaurant, and another at $7.15 an hour in a chicken processing plant. She said her 10-year-old daughter, Anterria, worries that she will have to go back to the chicken plant, a place so cold and wet Ms. Appling often fell ill.

But even facing her own impending job loss, Ms. Appling took a moment to empathize with the women making condoms on the other side of the world.

“We need a job — I guess they do, too,” she said, during a brief pause from feeding condoms into an intricate, rotating, whooshing machine that tested them for holes. “It’s sad.

“At the same time, the United States can’t just keep helping overseas. They’ve got to help us, too.”"

Its Nature's law that when you are at the lower end of the scale, smaller stimuli can affect huge changes. A capitalistic society like the American one has an almost exponential distribution of wealth. That is, as you move up the social ladder you have rate of accumulation of wealth continually grows.
The other role of capitalism seems to be, levelling the floor on which people around the world compete. This affects the poor in the US to a much more significant level than it does the relatively well-off sections of society. They have less opportunity (less pre-adapted) and more need to adapt. (I learnt a new term called pre-adaptation, which is essentially how well suited you are to adapt. For example having some air bags when you were a fish which could evolve into lungs as you adapt to conditions on land. This is proposed as a model for predicting the future economic/financial situations).

Science & Technology at Scientific American.com: The Evolution of Future Wealth -- Technologies evolve much as species do, and that underappreciated f

Science & Technology at Scientific American.com: The Evolution of Future Wealth -- Technologies evolve much as species do, and that underappreciated fact is the key to growth: "One of the key ideas in modern evolutionary theory is that of preadaptation. The term may sound oxymoronic but its significance is perfectly logical: every feature of an organism, in addition to its obvious functional characteristics, has others that could become useful in totally novel ways under the right circumstances. The forerunners of air-breathing lungs, for example, were swim bladders with which fish maintained their equilibrium; as some fish began to move onto the margins of land, those bladders acquired a new utility as reservoirs of oxygen. Biologists say that those bladders were preadapted to become lungs. Evolution can innovate in ways that cannot be prestated and is nonalgorithmic by drafting and recombining existing entities for new purposes--shifting them from their existing function to some adjacent novel function--rather than inventing features from scratch."

IndianExpress.com :: In judiciary’s most crowded space, Muslims are invisible

IndianExpress.com :: In judiciary’s most crowded space, Muslims are invisible: "This is worrying not because Muslim judicial officers would be expected to look after their own. Some, if not most, of the finest judgments of the Supreme Court or even independent judges on matters of social and religious violence and strife have not been taken by a “Muslim” bench: be it the matter of the Gujarat riot cases being re-tried or even the landmark Justice Srikrishna Report on the Bombay riots.

Yet, says former Chief Justice of India Justice J S Verma: “It’s not democracy alone that can sustain a society like India. It has to be an inclusive democracy. Democracy can last and be resilient only if all sections of society are taken along.”"


This under-representation is a reflection of the other problem of Muslims in India occupying the lower (financial) strata of the society. They are the less fortunate who are not presented with similar opportunities.

Skype founders plan to launch Web TV service: paper - Yahoo! News

Skype founders plan to launch Web TV service: paper - Yahoo! News: "The project, code-named Venice, will bring quality TV programmes for free to consumers who have a broadband Internet connection, he told Boersen financial newspaper."

Hmmm

"The only thing that sustains one through life is the consciousness of the immense inferiority of everybody else, and this is a feeling that I have always cultivated.
- Oscar Wilde"

Diary: Learned Responses

The brain is wired in such a way that we will find something shocking, only if it is not a something we have been well exposed to.
If we have a memory of an event, then when we encounter the event the next time, our brain will just output the learned response (the same response we had the last couple of times) and not trigger any mechanism which gives us the feeling of shock or surprise.
So if we hear about deaths on TV and we are shocked the first time but we respond by just carrying on with our lives then the brain learns to be more blase about such facts.
This is manifest by the level of fear you feel when you see insects. As a kid a lot of us are scared by insects, but if we are forced to live among roaches, as a lot of kids in the developing world do, then we slowly overcome our fears. This is a learned response.
I think this is also manifest in the way people age. When you are young, you are enraged by any kind of injustice happening in any corner of the world. As you grow older you still have a logical reaction to it but you don't get the same feelings you did as when you were young. It could also be that as we grow older we learn that, some situations are immutable and just a function of human social behavior (which is far away from the ideal world that our brains can imagine). But again the initial response is a learned reponse from the brain.


Thought triggered by the program "Now" on PBS (www.pbs.org)

Sources :
Phantoms in the brain - Dr. VS Ramachandran
On Intelligence - Jeff Hawkings



Afterthoughts:
The conclusions here seem so trivial when I pen it down, but as I was thinking about it, it seemed to be a very intersting thought.

Common experience

Most of us in today's time all across the world have one  experience in common :  " the blue screen of death" 

Ego Arguments

Often when we argue with someone, we are very worried about losing the argument. The argument starts because your understanding of something is not parallel to the understanding of the other person. Somewhere down the line you understand the point made by the other person, but you still continue to argue, and in the process even make up facts. Why can you not acknowledge a good point when you see one ? I think its your ego getting in the way. But then backing off straight away without trying to argue is also not good. Arguments let you explore the problem more. Its a fine balance like the rest of the phenomena in this delicately balanced world.

Workout Shirkout

I was feeling down today morning. I carried it over from yesterday evening. I had planned to go to the gym today morning. The alarm woke me up alright, but no part of my body wanted to get out of the bed. I ratiocinated, and was about to conclude that I should be going to the gym to "work", and in the present state of mind I dont think I can do any work at the gym. I wanted to get some coffee and rush to work and solve some of the boolean equations that caused me grief the previous evening. I somehow convinced myself to get my butt onto the elliptical machine.
As I walked towards my office building I was feeling upbeat, partly because I had thought of a solution while having a bath after my workout and partly because I just felt good after the workout.
So my conundrum is that everytime I workout I feel good and thats the thing I remember about working out. So why does my body have this inertia against working out. Shouldnt it like to do what it likes.

I could just refute all this babble by saying that I dont like the workiong out part and thats what pops into my head when I think of the gym. But there is clearly a way to re-train my head.

EETimes.com - AMD's new chip ploy--open source sockets

EETimes.com - AMD's new chip ploy--open source sockets: "Advanced Micro Device plans to publish its Opteron socket specification in a move that it hopes will boost sales by letting other chip makers design application-specific co-processors to be integrated alongside Opteron for optimized performance."

noTunes

Have you heard Silence, lately ??

Stress of sruvival

Have you ever seen sparrows feed on stuff thats on the ground. They seem to be so damn nervous.
Do you think they feel stress of survival being low in the food-chain ?
Do you think some of them get a thrill out of getting food in the most dangerous situations ?

Whither shall I go

It hurts to be out in the Sun and being the Dark is depressing.
Is it me or is it really difficult to find shade from the Sun ?
Whither shall I go ??

Riding in Cars with Boys

Riding in Cars with Boys is a 2001 film based on the autobiography of the same name by Beverly D'Onofrio, about a woman who overcame difficulties including being a teen mother to earning a master's degree from the span of 1961 to 1986. It starred Drew Barrymore, Steve ZahnJames Woods. It was directed by Penny Marshall and co-produced by Beverly D'Onofrio herself, though many details from the book and film differ.

There are just 4-5 days which set the course of our lives. What are we doing the rest of the time ? Just living the consequences of these 4-5 days. Shouldn't we be having more of such days. Infact we should try to make every day such a day.

powered by performancing firefox

Millenium Technology Prize

BBC NEWS | Technology | Top prize for 'light' inventor

Professor Shuji Nakamura was given the 1m Euro (£680,000) prize at a ceremony in Helsinki, Finland.

The award recognised his inventions of blue, green and white light-emitting diodes (LEDs) and the blue laser diode.

White LEDs could provide a sustainable, low-cost alternative to lightbulbs, especially in developing countries.

His other inventions such as blue LEDs are used in flat-screen displays, while blue lasers are already being exploited in the next generation of DVD player.

powered by performancing firefox

powered by performancing firefox

BBC NEWS | Europe | Merkel trumps Rice on power list

BBC NEWS | Europe | Merkel trumps Rice on power list: "Angela Merkel, German chancellor
Condoleezza Rice, US secretary of state
Wu Yi, Chinese vice-premier
Indra Nooyi, chief executive-designate, PepsiCo
Anne Mulcahy, chairman and chief executive, Xerox
Sallie Krawcheck, chief financial officer, Citigroup
Patricia Woertz, chief executive, Archer Daniels Midland
Anne Lauvergeon, chairman Areva
Brenda Barnes, chairman and chief executive, Sara Lee
Zoe Cruz, co-president, Morgan Stanley"

George Bernard Shaw - Wikiquote

George Bernard Shaw - Wikiquote: "My method is to take the utmost trouble to find the right thing to say, and then to say it with the utmost levity.

* Answers to Nine Questions"

This is a very nice quote by GB.Shaw. I wish I knew the context in which these were uttered.
Aside : "The Art of Asking Questions." by Stanley L. Payne seems like it could be an interesting read.

In Chechen’s Humiliation, Questions on Rule of Law - New York Times

In Chechen’s Humiliation, Questions on Rule of Law - New York Times: "Ms. Soltayeva, 23, had been away from home for a month and was reported missing by her family. When she returned, her husband accused her of infidelity and banished her from their apartment. The local authorities found her at her aunt’s residence. They said they had a few questions.

What followed was no investigation. In a law enforcement compound in this town in east-central Chechnya, the men who served as Argun’s police sheared away her hair and her eyebrows and painted her scalp green, the color associated with Islam. A thumb-thick cross was smeared on her brow."

Clearly civil behavior is not s a stable state for the human beings. Years of training in a good educational and social system can improve them to be in this state longer than usual. However for most of the members of this 6.5 billion population there is little or no access to this kind of training. I wonder if some sociologist can measure civility of our socities and spot a trend, from the time we call the dawn of civilization. I suspect there is a flat trend which is a minuscule level over barbarianism.

BBC NEWS | Technology | Not as wiki as it used to be

BBC NEWS | Technology | Not as wiki as it used to be: "For some time the people behind Wikipedia, the online encyclopaedia assembled from reader contributions and edited and maintained by those who care to get involved, have been coping with the fallout from a widely-publicised failure of their quality control mechanism.

Last November US politician John Seigenthaler took Wikipedia to task in the columns of USA Today over a false and defamatory biography of him that had been posted on the site."

When you distribute power, people tend to misuse it. But then centralization of power is not the solution. Where is the solution then ? Is there NO distribution of power in a social structure that is optimal and lasting ?

Animal Farm - George Orwell

My latest read was "Animal Farm" by George Orwell. I read this on my way back from San Diego.  Its a classic which I had never read. I dont think I had even heard of it until recently. I think Orwell's writing in the 1950's still resonates with the theory of Chomsky that Power can drive humans the wrong way and kill  ideas which had the noblest of intentions. " One could characterize this novel as a perfect portrayal of a world where absolute power corrupts absolutely."

BBC NEWS | South Asia | Speedy justice in India's badlands

BBC NEWS | South Asia | Speedy justice in India's badlands: "'Speedy trials make sense if all steps from filing charge sheets to the trial are done properly. Otherwise, there may be a miscarriage of justice.'

The police are, however, upbeat about fast track trials, and now setting higher targets.

'This is just the tip of the iceberg. Soon, there will be 10 convictions in the state every day compared to just three now,' says Mr Abhyanand.

Time will only tell whether these trials have been fair and will help in checking crime. "

And Now, Islamism Trumps Arabism - New York Times

And Now, Islamism Trumps Arabism - New York Times: "“The losers are going to be the Arab regimes, U.S.A. and Israel,” said Dr. Fares Braizat of the Center for Strategic Studies at the University of Jordan. “The secular resistance movements are gone. Now there are the Islamists coming in. So the new nationalism is going to be religious nationalism, and one of the main reasons is dignity. People want their dignity back.”"

BBC NEWS | South Asia | Bhopal activist dies with broken dreams

BBC NEWS | South Asia | Bhopal activist dies with broken dreams: "He was wearing his favourite T-shirt. It said in bold relief 'No more Bhopals'.

Sunil was a survivor of the 1984 Union Carbide gas leak - and a victim, suffering serious mental illness in the years since the disaster.

The end came without him realising his dream of seeing anyone brought to justice over the world's worst industrial accident.

Satyanath Sarangi, president of the Bhopal Group for Information and Action (BGIA) and a close friend, says that Sunil felt strongly that people responsible for the gas disaster should be punished.

In an interview in 1985, Sunil said: 'The people must know who was responsible for the gas disaster - who killed their loved ones?

'And those who are found responsible must be hanged. What is the use of all the money if those who have killed so many go scot-free?'

No one had faced trial over the leak by the time Sunil hanged himself."

Time

I am moving as fast as I can, but time doesnt seem to slow down. Was Albert Uncle wrong ?
No reading done in quite sometime. We should all have this ability to gate our clocks, that would be fun. Should be back online by the end of the month. A group of people want to synchronize their work and take stock of work accomplished and I need to help them because they pay my bills.
Mazdoor Union Zindabad !!

Elusive Proof, Elusive Prover: A New Mathematical Mystery - New York Times

Elusive Proof, Elusive Prover: A New Mathematical Mystery - New York Times: "Quoting Poincaré himself, Dr.Yau said, “Thought is only a flash in the middle of a long night, but the flash that means everything.”

"

Calm Assertive Energy

HAhaha I watched this program called "Dog Whisperer" on NATG. Its about this Italian guy who does psychoanalysis of pet dogs, much like Super Nanny.
He keeps using this term "Calm Assertive Energy" which is the state one should be in always.

Electronics | Shrinking wireless | Economist.com

Electronics | Shrinking wireless | Economist.com: "The researchers intend to use the standard lithographic techniques employed in chipmaking to coat a semiconductor with microscopic magnets. These magnets will generate local magnetic fields that point in opposite directions at different points on the chip's surface. Electrons have a property called spin that is affected by magnetic fields, and the team hopes to use an effect called inverse electron-spin resonance to make electrons passing through the chip emit microwaves."

What is wrong with the American Media ?

The analysis and the reporting of the news on CNN, MSNBC, FOX is so simplistic. It is so evident that they are not looking at issues from all possible aspects.
If they are unable to do so should there not be an admission to this fact. Why take strong positions based on limited vision.

Does this reflect the intellect of the American population ? Is this what the majority wants to see and hear ? Its very disturbing to see this nation with the brightest minds in the world have such an attitude. Maybe the people are used to not being exposed to global issues and do not really care. Why then does the media take this stand if not to bolster its TRP ratings ? Is it just so that their owners have dealings with the people in the administration and want to do them favors? I find so much brilliance in individuals in this country and yet their social institutions do not seem to be a reflection of their intellect.

US Womens Soccer

Its pretty interesting to see these women who recently(retired) from women's soccer. Mia Hamm being the most popular of them.  They have a fascinating story behind their success.  I was watching this documentary about them on HBO. USA, China and Norway have seemed to  be on top of the womens soccer world. Does this say something about their societies. Specially the Chinese women. I guess its to communisms credit that women are treated equally at least in this respect. The rankings here have no correlation to the mens sports.

Palestine Monitor

Palestine Monitor: "Horowitz is keen to bang the square peg of the Lebanon story into the round hole of his claims that the 'Jews' are facing an imminent genocide in the Middle East. And to help him, he and the massed ranks of US apologists for Israel -- regulars, I suspect, of shows like Laura's -- are promoting at least four myths regarding Hizbullah's current rockets strikes on Israel. Unless they are challenged at every turn, the danger is that they will win the ground war against common sense in the USThe first myth is that Israel was forced to pound Lebanon with its military hardware because Hizbullah began 'raining down' rockets on the Galilee. Anyone with a short memory can probably recall that was not the first justification we were offered: that had to do with the two soldiers captured by Hizbullah on a border post on July 12."

A good counter argument which seems very reasonable.

India rejects One Laptop Per Child | The Register

India rejects One Laptop Per Child | The Register: "India has decided against getting involved in Nicholas Negroponte's One Laptop Per Child scheme - which aims to provide kids in developing countries with a simple $100 machine.

The success of the project depends on support, and big orders, from governments. The loss of such a potentially huge, and relatively technically sophisticated market, will be a serious blow."


Is this a smart thing to do ? Maybe this kind of effort has to be spearheaded by the industry in India.

India's new lobbyists use American methods - Business - International Herald Tribune

India's new lobbyists use American methods - Business - International Herald Tribune: "Lobbyists say one secret of their craft is to invoke the public good in support of their clients' interest.

When TetraPak, a European packaging company, wanted duties cut on a raw material, it hired Dilip Cherian, a Delhi lobbyist who charges clients $100,000 a year.

The company came out with a statement criticizing the duties. But Cherian also attempted to create a groundswell of support for a duty cut from milk farmers too destitute to buy the cartons at present prices. TetraPak declined to comment for this article.

Cherian's team traveled to villages to persuade farmers' cooperatives to lobby their members of Parliament, who in turn lobbied the finance minister. 'What happens here is that actually policy- making is much more democratic than it seems,' Cherian said, when asked about lobbying's influence on democracy."

Homosexuality | Brothers in arms | Economist.com

Homosexuality | Brothers in arms | Economist.com: "Like many of the best pieces of research, this one raises questions, as well as answering them. One is, how does the mother's body keep count of how many sons she has conceived? A second is, how does that change the environment in the womb? A third is, how does that change affect sexual orientation? And a fourth is, is this an accidental effect, or has it evolved for some reason?

To these questions, Dr Bogaert has no answers, though in some cases he has his suspicions. He speculates that, for reasons as yet unknown, a mother's immune system takes note of the number of male offspring and that each succeeding male fetus is subjected to increased levels of antibodies. These somehow affect its development. Clearly, something strange is going on, because things other than sexual orientation are also affected by birth order. Boys with elder brothers are also likely to have larger-than-normal placentas while in the womb. And despite that apparent nutritional advantage (for a larger placenta should be able to draw more food from the mother's bloodstream), they are also likely to have lower birth-weights than would otherwise be expected.

Dr Blanchard, meanwhile, calculates that about one gay man in seven can chalk his orientation up to having elder brothers. But to the question of whether there is some evolutionary advantage for a mother who has many sons to include a gay one among them, neither he nor Dr Bogaert has an answer.
"

A town of foreign marriages : CSI

"Taiwanese women are too difficult," he says. "They won't take care of my parents when they get old. In Vietnam, it's more like Taiwan was in the 1960s - the traditions are still strong."

In recent decades, Taiwan's expanding economy has absorbed a female workforce that is increasingly educated and assertive, particularly when it comes to relationships. Women are delaying getting married - the average bride is 29 - and having fewer children. Taiwan's birthrate is among the world's lowest: 1.2 births per woman.

As a result, fewer women want to marry into traditional families in rural towns like Shihding. Childless men are instead traveling overseas to find a bride who will keep house and bear children without complaint. "Taiwanese women are well educated and have good jobs," says Tsai Chao-lan, a marriage broker in Taipei. "They have high demands and criteria for husbands, and I think it's difficult for men to keep up."

This is an interesting phenomenon and a similar trend is seen in multiple places all over the world. Women in democratic equalitarian societies, seem to become undesirable for men still steeped in the older chauvinistic traditions.
It would be interesting to hear, if any of this translates into all of us being genetically related more closely in years to come.
Culturally this will definitely make us more diverse and maybe in the long term cause us to forget older traditions and have only the commercially acceptable dominant societie's traditions.

Stewart on Lebanon Coverage

Jon hits the nail on the head

EETimes.com - HP develops grain-size wireless chip

EETimes.com - HP develops grain-size wireless chip: "'We are actively exploring a range of exciting new applications for Memory Spot chips and believe the technology could have a significant impact on our consumer businesses, from printing to imaging, as well as providing solutions in a number of vertical markets,' Howard Taub, HP vice president and associate director, HP Labs, said in a statement."

Intel Xeon 7100 16MB L3 model launch

According to the latest roadmap for
Intel server platform, new multi-processor Xeon 7100 family (Tulsa)
plans to launch on Aug 27, replacing Xeon 7000 (Paxville MP) to against
Opteron 8 family.



Xeon 7100 is an x86 type containing the largest number of transistor in
total of 1228M. Even with 65nm process, its size is as larger as 435 mm
sq., approximately 9 times larger then Yonah. Tulsa is a dual-core with
build-in 16MB L3 cache. With Smart Cache enabled, each core spares
independent L1 and L2 cache, and share L3 cache through Caching
Front-Side Bus Controller. Although it’s similar in the cache design to
Core architecture, Tulsa also keeps high Pipeline Stage similar to
Netburst and support Hyper-Threading.

Fox news the new Com Central

I saw this reporter, reporting on the the middle east crisis and he literally dodgin Katyusha rockets as if he was dodging gum balls chucked at him by his friend. What a buffooon !!!

Melissa Theuriau

Melissa Theuraiu is a french news-caster ... what are the US producers doing ??

Truthiness - Colbert is the father of truthiness

Truthiness - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Truthiness is the quality by which a person purports to know something emotionally or instinctively, without regard to evidence or to what the person might conclude from intellectual examination. Stephen Colbert created this definition of the word during the first episode (October 17, 2005) of his satirical television program The Colbert Report, as the subject of a segment called "The Wørd."

CNN Cuts Early to President Bush

This is a sign of too much news.

Nice pictures

[From Nat Geo]

Day to Mourn

I mourn as my home burns,
communal vengence, they say might be what motivated the vandals,
greed, others say made them so ruthless.

Hundreds sacrificed to achieve a clique's ambitions,
will such injustice ever be stopped

Avenging these deaths will not heal our wounds,
ridding our society of inequalities should be our goal

I mourn as my home burns !!

Why innocent people

What grudge did they hold against them ?? A$$holes !!

Jolie says - Our priorities are quite strange

Xinhua - English: " “Our priorities are quite strange,” the 31-year-old actress said in an interview with CNN that aired Tuesday night. Jolie said spending money on war rather than 'dealing with situations that could end up in conflict if left unassisted' could prove costly in the end.

'We're missing a lot of opportunities (to do) a lot of good that America used to do and has a history of doing,' said Jolie, who is a goodwill ambassador for the U.N.'s refugee agency.

Jolie said that when she is in Washington to raise funds for AIDS orphans, she was often told the war in Iraq is the more pressing matter."

Germany 2 - 0 Sweden

Its halirious how they are setting up Ballack for the big 3rd goal and the swedish Goalie, Issacson is frustrating the hell out of him.

KLOSE rocks !!

Homegrown terrorists

The west is seeing this for the first time. I wonder how their reaction will evolve.
Kids like me have grown up hearing of homegrown terrorsists all across my country. But then we didnt have a cosmopolitan cities or multi-racial communities.

BBC SPORT | Football | World Cup 2006 | Teams | Australia | Football on top Down Under

BBC SPORT | Football | World Cup 2006 | Teams | Australia | Football on top Down Under: "Australian Prime Minister John Howard dubbed Harry Kewell 'King Harry' after his equalising goal in their 2-2 draw with Croatia, and few people in Australia would have disagreed.

The sight of Howard watching football in the early hours of the morning and jumping out of his chair with excitement summed up how Australia has fallen in love with football. And things may never be the same again.

For years, football was the poor relation in the sports-mad country.

Despite a steady stream of talented individuals, fate seemed to conspire against the Socceroos, with just one appearance at the World Cup finals - in 1974 in West Germany - to show for years of effort."

BBC NEWS | South Asia | Villagers take on India's Maoists

BBC NEWS | South Asia | Villagers take on India's Maoists: "The Indian government is experimenting with new ways of fighting back against Maoist fighters, who now operate in almost half of the country's 28 states. In the past year, the Chhattisgarh state government has introduced new anti-terrorism training for the police - and is backing a civil militia called Salwa Judum."

I dont think this is right. How can the state arm the civilians ? Prlofieration of guns in such a sensitive area ... anyone can get killed. there ought to be a better solution.

Southwest closer to assigned seating: Financial News - Yahoo! Finance

Southwest closer to assigned seating: Financial News - Yahoo! Finance: "he carrier invented the '20-minute turn' out of necessity in late 1971, the year it began flying. In order to meet its payroll, the thinly capitalized start-up had to return one of its four leased planes. But by turning its three remaining planes in 20 minutes, it continued operating its full schedule.

The idea worked. In the process, Southwest discovered that an intense focus on the highly efficient use of assets - planes, gates and employees - is a key to its profitability. That focus on efficiency became the company's hallmark. And it has paid off with 60 consecutive quarterly profits.

Southwest's turn times have stretched in recent years to around 30 minutes, on average. In part that's because it now flies larger-capacity planes. It also flies into more big airports where congestion slows operations.

Southwest ranks as the USA's No. 6 carrier in passenger miles flown, and it is on pace to move ahead of No. 5 Northwest Airlines in the 2006 rankings due out next spring. It already carries more domestic passengers than any other U.S. carrier"

BBC NEWS | In Pictures | Day in pictures

BBC NEWS | In Pictures | Day in pictures

(England vs. Trinidad & Tobago) Crouch 1:0 - foul?

thats totally not fair, if its true

Pareto principle - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Pareto principle - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia: "The Pareto principle (also known as the 80-20 rule, the law of the vital few and the principle of factor sparsity) states that for many phenomena, 80% of the consequences stem from 20% of the causes. The idea has rule-of-thumb application in many places, but it is commonly misused. E.g., it is a misuse to state that a solution to a problem 'fits the 80-20 rule' just because it fits 80% of the cases; it must be implied that this solution requires only 20% of the resources needed to solve all cases. Mathematically, where something is shared among a sufficiently large set of participants, there will always be a number k between 50 and 100 such that k% is taken by (100-k)% of the participants. However, k may vary from 50 in the case of equal distribution to nearly 100 in the case of a tiny number of participants taking almost all of the resources. There is nothing special about the number 80, but many systems will have k somewhere around this region of intermediate imbalance in distribution.

The principle was suggested by management thinker Joseph M. Juran. It was named after the Italian economist Vilfredo Pareto, who observed that 80% of income in Italy was received by 20% of the Italian population. (Since J. M. Juran adopted the idea, it might better be called 'Juran's assumption'.) The assumption is that most of the results in any situation are determined by a small number of causes. This idea is often applied to data such as sales figures: '20% of clients are responsible for 80% of sales volume.' Such a statement is testable, is likely to be approximately correct, and may be helpful in decision making. Richard Koch has written extensively on how to apply the principle in all walks of life."

Puzzle

There are 5 thives A, B, C, D, E with 100 gold coins that they have to divide among them.
Each of them proposes a strategy to distribute the coins starting from A. If this strategy is accepted by a majority it wins (even A votes). If not A is killed. This continues until a decision is reached.
The priority for the thives are
1. Their own life
2. Gold
3. Enemity with other thieves
What is the strategy for A to get max gold coins ???

Solution in rot13 :
V nz gbb ynml gb glcr guvf bhg - ohg guvf vf n pynffvp vgrengvir fbyhgvba onfrq chmmyr. Fgneg jvgu nffhzvat 1 crefba, gura nffhzr 2 naq pbzcner jvgu gur fvghngvba va gur cerivbhf pnfr naq pbagvahr vapernfvat zb. bs ccy.
Urer vf gur qvfgevohgvba sbe N, O, P, Q, erfcrpgviryl sebz pnfrf bs 1 crefba, 2 crefbaf, 3 crefbaf, rgp ner:

1 Crefba - uhaqerq
2 Crefbaf - mreb, uhaqerq
3 Crefbaf - avaglavar, bar, mreb
4 Crefbaf - avaglfrira, mreb, gjb, bar
5 Crefbaf - avaglfrira, mreb, bar, mreb, gjb

BBC NEWS | Technology | Google listens to screen routine

BBC NEWS | Technology | Google listens to screen routine: "A system that lets your computer 'listen' to your television to create targeted web adverts has been designed and tested by researchers at Google.

The 'mass personalization' system can identify a programme from as little as five seconds of sound.

It then presents related information or adverts in the web browser.

Google researchers believe it could also be used to monitor audience size or create social networks around viewers watching the same show.

'The system could keep up with users while they channel surf, presenting them with a real-time forum about a live political debate one minute and an ad-hoc chat room for a sporting event in the next,' wrote Google researchers Michele Covell and Shumeet Baluja on the Google research blog."

Germans play well

The Germany v Poland Game was a lot of fun. Klose, Podolski, Lahm and Ballack all played very well. They look very formidable. I hope England puts up a good show today and I hope Brasil plays well on Saturday. Lahm's runs with the ball are so bloody awesome.
Football fever is full on !!

Roney is back, not playing today though.

IndianExpress.com :: Brinda brainwave: no to private, foreign universities; yes to exit tax for students going abroad

IndianExpress.com :: Brinda brainwave: no to private, foreign universities; yes to exit tax for students going abroad: "NEW DELHI, JUNE 9:Want to go abroad for higher studies? You have to pay an “exit tax.” Want to hire a college graduate in India? Pay a “graduate tax.” Allow foreign universities but subject them to stringent controls. Bring about a new law to regulate the private sector in higher education.

If you thought these recommendations of a Parliamentary standing committee, chaired by Congress MP Janardan Dwivedi, submitted last month make little sense at a time the Prime Minister has called for more private participation in education, read the lone two-page dissent note by member and CPM MP Brinda Karat."

These guys are crazy !!

Football Spirit

No Indoor game can have as much human spirit as the outdoor ones.  Human spirit is somehow entwined with nature. Playing on grass is essential :)

Modi supporters

I am appalled by the supporters of Narendra Modi on Orkut.  So many calling him an able administrtator.
What is the youth thinking ?? How did GDP become the measure of everything ... Is the economic success of our coutry through the outsourceing model, masking other social issues ??

BBC NEWS | Americas | Web users to 'patrol' US border

BBC NEWS | Americas | Web users to 'patrol' US border: "A US state is to enlist web users in its fight against illegal immigration by offering live surveillance footage of the Mexican border on the internet.

The plan will allow web users worldwide to watch Texas' border with Mexico and phone the authorities if they spot any apparently illegal crossings.

Texas Governor Rick Perry said the cameras would focus on 'hot-spots and common routes' used to enter the US.

US lawmakers have been debating a divisive new immigration bill.

The Senate has approved a law that grants millions of illegal immigrants US citizenship and calls for the creation of a guest-worker programme, while beefing up border security.

"

This is very very silly !!

Rang De Basanti

Kya awesome movie banaya hai baap !! Hilaa diya !!

Ink Pot

I was watching 'Chashme Baddhoor' again and I was reminded of the time when I used to have an ink-pot and had to religiously fill ink into my pens. Hands stained with ink. I wonder if school kids still use Ink pens :) I still write a lot, most of it is rough work like parts of an algo or stuff. Well actually I do make notes in a 'fair notebook' about the design I am understanding :))

Is religion inevitable ??

Sun Jun  4 10:53:37 CDT 2006
When external forces drive this wedge between members of different groups(religions/classes/castes) how will people get back to
normal after the storm blows over. The feeling always lurks in your mind where you find yourself different from the other group.
You have forgive the other group from the bottom of your heart (not just in word, but from your sub-concious). It is inevitable
to have clashes between groups. I cannot see clashes not happening between groups of humans ever. Though cause and effect
keeps changing though. It should be part of primary education to teach people how to forgive others and realize that the worst
actions of the other group were perpetrated in their weakest moments. By perpetrating on the same acts you will just help
them rationalize their acts. Is religion the medium for spreading this realization ? Can something like the socratic method
work at young ages ? I say it has to work at young ages because, once you grow older you inevitably have a yellowed vision.

The human brain HAS to BELIEVE in certain facts to be able to generate an action. My minuscule reading on this topic ,
influenced primarily by Dr.V.S Ramachandran has given me the impression that the brain is like a state machine, which has to
generate an ouput based on whatever partial input it is given. It tries to use history to fill in values for the rest of the
inputs. When it goes into invalid states because it cannot possibly handle the inputs, we call it a mentally unstable condition.

Given this, does it not make education based on faith ineviatble ??

----------

Official Home Page of Taslima Nasrin

Official Home Page of Taslima Nasrin

'If any religion allows the persecution of the people of different faiths, if any religion keeps women in slavery, if any religion keeps people in ignorance, then I can't accept that religion.'

Ursrpache

I got home after trying to relax at this coffee shop with "Lajja (Taslima Nasrin's)" to my aid at around 900pm. As usual I grabbed the remote to assert my authority on the one thing which has been my most obedient companion since I gained consciousness, my TV.  ABC is showing Katherine Close, a 13 year old from Jersey facing the judges in the final round of the Scripps spelling bee contest. The commentators build the thrill. Not many girls have won in the recent years. I could see Indian parents with their kids who couldn't make it to the last round. This, in a game where Indian winners are very prominent. The word in the final round was Ursprache. You should check out the pronunciation of this word.

The point of this is not to reminisce about the ennui of my evenings. I wonder if the sudden popularity of events like the spelling bee contest are an acknowledgement of the fact that the "knowledge-economy" is upon us. Are books lilke 'The world is Flat' and constant surveys comparing the college graduates in the US to the those in India and China, finally setting the ball rolling. Is the common man of this country perceiving the power of specialized skill ? Movies show spelling bee contests as a way for kids from poor societies to move upwards.

I abruptly since I need to be somewhere :)

Tarnished German image on World Cup eve | csmonitor.com

Tarnished German image on World Cup eve | csmonitor.com: "Brandenburg and other states of the former East Germany make up just 20 percent of the country's population, but half of the right-wing activity, according to a report released last week by the Interior Ministry. The lack of economic opportunities for young people in the depressed regions has something to do with the problem, say sociologists. But so do crumbling family structures, a missing tradition of multiculturalism, and westward migration.

'The people who leave are the smart ones, the ones who are good in school,' says Mr. Reinecke, the columnist. 'What remains is a negative social selection. The people who stay are not mobile, are not smart. Frustration is their reason for violence.'"

This is one more sample of what not being able to fulfil the basic needs can turn a section of the society towards.
France is having similar problems hidden under the garb of religion. Why cant the political powers acknowledge the underlying social problems.

Office software

You know what the most useful software would be ?
You should be able to capture any action that any of your team-members commits on all the shared databases and then use that event to trigger reminders/emails.

Geography bee crowns 2006 king - Education - MSNBC.com

Geography bee crowns 2006 king - Education - MSNBC.com: "Neeraj Sirdeshmukh, 14, from Nashua, N.H., came in second. He won a $15,000 college scholarship. Third-place contestant, Yeshwanth Kandimalla, 13, of Marietta, Ga., won a $10,000 college scholarship. The other seven finalists won $500 each."

This new generation fo Indians who take full advantage of the American education system seem to be winning all the bees. I wonder if this says something about the future of the US. Will the Indians figure more dominantly as leaders in various domains, more than today.

A Vision of Pale Beauty Carries Risks for Asia's Women - New York Times

A Vision of Pale Beauty Carries Risks for Asia's Women - New York Times: "Sociologists have long debated why Asians, who are divided by everything from language to religion to ethnicity, share a deeply held cultural preference for lighter skin. One commonly repeated rationale is that a lighter complexion is associated with wealth and higher education levels because those from lower social classes, laborers and farmers, are more exposed to the sun.

Another theory is that the waves of lighter-skinned conquerors, the Moguls from Central Asia and the colonizers from Europe, reset the standard for attractiveness.

Films and advertising also clearly have a role. The success of South Korean soap operas across the region has made their lighter-skinned stars emblems of Asian beauty.

Nithiwadi Phuchareuyot, a doctor at a skin clinic in Bangkok who dispenses products and treatments to lighten skin, said: 'Every Thai girl thinks that if she has white skin the money will come and the men will come. The movie stars are all white-skinned, and everyone wants to look like a superstar.'"

Iqbal - Awesome movie

Nagesh Kukonoor rocks !!
sahi movie banaya hai. very inspiring , beautiful settings, great acting, wonderful song (aashaayein)
BEAUTIFUL !!

AIDS | Bitter fruit | Economist.com

AIDS | Bitter fruit | Economist.com: "LIME juice is famous in medical history. Sailors—particularly British sailors—drank it to keep scurvy at bay. But the past few years have seen another use mooted. This is that, if applied to the vagina, it might protect a woman from HIV infection, and thus from AIDS. On April 24th a group of researchers met at the Microbicides 2006 conference in Cape Town to discuss the matter.

Though a lime-juice douche sounds a ghastly idea, women have been putting acids into their vaginas for millennia, in the hope of preventing pregnancy and sexually transmitted diseases. Indeed, cleaning with lime juice is common practice in parts of Africa. Of 200 prostitutes surveyed in 2004 in the Nigerian city of Jos, 163 said they rinsed with lemon or lime juice before or after sex to prevent pregnancy and infections. The question is, are they sensible to do so?

Acids immobilise sperm and kill pathogens, including HIV. (Laboratory studies have shown that a one-in-five dilution of lemon or lime juice inactivated 90% of HIV in just two minutes.) And, in addition to its high citric-acid content, lime juice has a second attractive feature: it literally grows on trees."

China, Vatican Edge Toward Accord

China, Vatican Edge Toward Accord: "Cardinal Joseph Zen Ze-kiun of Hong Kong, the senior Roman Catholic cleric in China, said the Vatican's readiness to drop ties with Taiwan represents a major gain for the Chinese government and is the main motive for Beijing's decision to soften hostility toward the church. Other analysts noted that the reconciliation talks also fit into a broad effort by China to establish normal trade and other relations with countries around the world, including heavily Catholic nations in Central America whose diplomatic loyalties now lie with Taiwan."

Sure looks like commercialisation of religion. The Vatican seems to be trading with the Chinese for converts. I have known religions like Hinduism, Sikhism, Buddhism, Jainsim, Zorashtrianism and some other probably who teach you how to live your life and be a staisfied. All of them have a common gist but implement it with different rigors. However none of these seem to have this overwhelming desire to impose their ideas all over the world. Frankly its like dealing with a pesky salesman calling.

Unagi !!

Hahaha .. I cant forget that friend episode where Ross is practicing Unagi (some asian art which makes you very aware of your surroundings).
Its not very difficult to understand that being aware of your surroundings/environment and of what you are doing at any point of time gives you more satisfaction and peace. I am am just re-asserting this to myself. The haelth-screen yesterday was an eye-opener in a way. It made me realze that I am not aware of most of the things that i do in life. Talk about free will huh :)) .
I dont know what i am eating, or doign towards being healthy.
I dont know how I plan to accumulate wealth.
borderline a losers life : )

I think its time for rennaissance.

Lessons in harmony, the Bengal madrasa way

Lessons in harmony, the Bengal madrasa way: "In Jalpaiguri district, about 500 km north of Kolkata, 14-year-old Julita is posting higher marks in Arabic tests than her Muslim classmates at the Badaitari Ujiria Madrasa.

'I like the subject very much and that fact that I am a Christian has never been a problem with my Muslim friends.'

Tapas Layek, the Hindu headmaster of a madrasa in south Kolkata has several co-religionists as colleagues. 'We are loved and respected by our Muslim students who are also friendly with their Hindu classmates,' he said.

Bengali Muslim scholars say that the view that madrasas are simply Islamic finishing schools is a corruption of their traditional role.

'Our madrasas are the perfect examples of what such institutes should really be,' said Dr. Mohammed Sahidullah at Calcutta University.

Renowned Bengali filmmaker Mrinal Sen, a former jury member at the Cannes festival, said the state's experiment should be copied across the country."


Awesome. These are things that make you proud to be an Indian.

Movies this weekend

After a long drought 3 entertaining movies , scary movie 4, cowboy del amor and bluff master.

cowboy del amor , is a documentary about this cowboy nut who helps lonely american guys find mexican wives. interesting to see how one of them had a serious marriage.

The Long-Distance Journey of a Fast-Food Order - New York Times

The Long-Distance Journey of a Fast-Food Order - New York Times: "Would you like your Coke and orange juice medium or large?' Ms. Vargas said into her headset to an unseen woman who was ordering breakfast from a drive-through line. She did not neglect the small details —'You Must Ask for Condiments,' a sign next to her computer terminal instructs — and wished the woman a wonderful day.

What made the $12.08 transaction remarkable was that the customer was not just outside Ms. Vargas's workplace here on California's central coast. She was at a McDonald's in Honolulu. And within a two-minute span Ms. Vargas had also taken orders from drive-through windows in Gulfport, Miss., and Gillette, Wyo. "

Parkinson's Law

Parkinson's Law: "WORK EXPANDS SO AS TO FILL THE TIME AVAILABLE FOR ITS COMPLETION’
General recognition of this fact is shown in the proverbial phrase 'It is the busiest man who has time to spare.' Thus, an elderly lady of leisure can spend the entire day in writing and dispatching a postcard to her niece at Bognor Regis. An hour will be spent finding the postcard, another in hunting for spectacles, half an hour in a search for the address, an hour and a quarter in composition, and twenty minutes in deciding whether or not to take an umbrella when going to the pillar box in the next street. The total effort that would occupy a busy man for three minutes all told may in this fashion leave another person prostrate after a day of doubt, anxiety, and toil."

When There's No Ford in Your Future

When There's No Ford in Your Future: "I know. My family was a part of the last major Ford layoff drama 25 years ago. In 1980 Ford announced the closure of several plants, including the aluminum engine plant in Sheffield, Ala., where my family was living. We were a Ford family, transferring every few years from plant to plant, from Michigan to California to Pennsylvania and, finally, to Sheffield. For years, life was good, with two cars, a nice house, even a membership at the modest local country club.

The layoff announcement threw our family, and the families of 1,500 other workers, into turmoil. Families went from planning vacations and seeking college educations to planning cutbacks and seeking low-paying but available work. There was some initial optimism. Lifetime union workers felt freed from the constraints of the factory and planned to start businesses of their own.

One of our family friends started a woodworking business. Another opened a factory outlet for mattresses that his brother manufactured in Memphis. The planning and dreaming helped ease the pain of losing a substantial paycheck. But the realities of a dwindling local economy soon shuttered these modest businesses. Wal-Mart arrived. Downtown withered.

Our own family, with me attending Stanford and my sister at Vanderbilt, took out student loans, applied for scholarships and sought positions that helped pay room and board. I bused tables at one residence and became a resident assistant my senior year, which defrayed my room-and-board cost. There was pressure to transfer back home to the University of Alabama, but I persuaded my parents to let me stay at Stanford if I could pay for my education myself."

Talking Points: The Scandal of 'Poor People's Diseases' by Tina Rosenberg - New York Times

Talking Points: The Scandal of 'Poor People's Diseases' by Tina Rosenberg - New York Times: "I. How a Beauty Regime Salvaged a Cure for Sleeping Sickness

The story of sleeping sickness is a scandalous illustration of the politics of neglected diseases — and of how much wealthy people drive the global medical market. After malaria, sleeping sickness is the most deadly parasitic disease. It is endemic in 36 African countries and is always fatal if it is not treated. The cure used in most places is melarsoprol – an arsenic-based drug so toxic that it collapses each vein into which it is injected and kills between two and eight percent of those who take it. There is another cure, eflornithine, so effective that it is called the 'resurrection drug' – it makes people in comas get up and walk.

Eflornithine is an old anticancer drug that turned out to be not very effective against cancer. In the mid-1990's, the company that made the drug stopped making it. The fact that it was extraordinarily effective at treating sleeping sickness didn't matter, because victims of that disease had little money to pay for it. After it stopped production, the company, which is now known as Sanofi-Aventis, licensed the drug to the World Health Organization, which together with the medical charity Doctors Without Borders, searched for another manufacturer. But by 2000, the existing stocks of eflornithine were dwindling and no other manufacturer was interested.It looked as though the miracle cure would disappear. Then lightening struck. Eflornithine reappeared in a six-page ad in Cosmopolitan magazine as the active ingredient in the Bristol- Myers Squibb product, Vaniqa, a new cream that impedes the growth of women's facial hair. Doctors Without Borders, which had just won the Nobel Peace Prize and was launching an initiative to find cures for neglected diseases, seized the opportunity to launch a publicity campaign. Christiane Amanpour went to southern Sudan "

Oddly Enough News Article | Reuters.com

Oddly Enough News Article | Reuters.com: "But instead of letting her emotions eat away at her, she is treating herself to an unusual form of anger management.

At the Isdaan restaurant in Gerona, about three hours north of Manila, Vescara and other patrons work out their stress for 15 pesos (30 U.S. cents) a go by hurling plates at the 'wall of fury' emblazoned with words such as ex-wife, boss and lover.

A shout of 'tacsiyapo' -- or 'shame on you' in the local dialect -- usually accompanies the sound of smashing crockery.

Vases and bowls are also available, while the wealthier of the furious patrons can toss an old TV set for 1,300 pesos."

BBC NEWS | South Asia | Pakistan gets women combat pilots

BBC NEWS | South Asia | Pakistan gets women combat pilots: "The women were part of a batch of 36 cadets who were awarded flying badges after three years of gruelling training at the PAF academy at Risalpur.

Being a fighter pilot has until now been a purely male domain. Women could join the armed forces but only for non-combat jobs like the medical corps.

Three years ago the PAF decided to allow women to train as fighter pilots."

DisneySpeak - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

DisneySpeak - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia: "A term used by Disney employees that refers to the process of adding little things to a ride, show, attraction or work of art that already seems very good. Walt Disney did plussing on every project he was involved in to reach perfection and outdo competitors. Examples of plussing include everything from adding fireworks to the rooftop scene in Mary Poppins to continuously adding things like a playable 'scavenger hunt game' in the waiting area of the Haunted Mansion attraction at Disneyland Park."

Wired News: Brain Teasers

Wired News: Brain Teasers: "A light bulb went off. If Tetris looked precisely like an IQ test, then maybe playing Tetris would help you do better at intelligence tests. Johnson spun this conceit into his brilliant book of last year, Everything Bad Is Good For You, in which he argued that video games actually make gamers smarter. With their byzantine key commands, obtuse rule-sets and dynamic simulations of everything from water physics to social networks, Johnson argued, video games require so much cognitive activity that they turn us into Baby Einsteins -- not dull robots.

I loved the book, but it made me wonder: If games can inadvertently train your brain, why doesn't someone make a game that does so intentionally?

I should have patented the idea. Next month, Nintendo is releasing Brain Age, a DS game based on the research of the Japanese neuroscientist Ryuta Kawashima. Kawashima found that if you measured the brain activity of someone who was concentrating on a single, complex task -- like studying quantum theory -- several parts of that person's brain would light up. But if you asked them to answer a rapid-fire slew of tiny, simple problems -- like basic math questions -- her or his brain would light up everywhere."

Schools Cut Back Subjects to Push Reading and Math - New York Times

Schools Cut Back Subjects to Push Reading and Math - New York Times: "Schools from Vermont to California are increasing — in some cases tripling — the class time that low-proficiency students spend on reading and math, mainly because the federal law, signed in 2002, requires annual exams only in those subjects and punishes schools that fall short of rising benchmarks.

The changes appear to principally affect schools and students who test below grade level.

The intense focus on the two basic skills is a sea change in American instructional practice, with many schools that once offered rich curriculums now systematically trimming courses like social studies, science and art. A nationwide survey by a nonpartisan group that is to be made public on March 28 indicates that the practice, known as narrowing the curriculum, has become standard procedure in many communities.

The survey, by the Center on Education Policy, found that since the passage of the federal law, 71 percent of the nation's 15,000 school districts had reduced the hours of instructional time spent on history, music and other subjects to open up more time for reading and math. The center is an independent group that has made a thorough study of the new act and has published a detailed yearly report on the implementation of the law in dozens of districts."

----
This is a really sad state of affairs in such a highly developed country. There is something fundamentally wrong. And the worst part is no seems to have an understanding of what it is. This country is facing a whole new set of problems whose solution they have no clue about.

Branded eyes

I saw this guy at the gym wear a worn out white T-shirt, and the very next second I saw a picture of tha man playing Polo at the bottom right-side of his shirt. My impression about this piece of clothing and the person wearing it changed within a fraction of  a second.
Maybe they teach you this in the marketting classes, but I still find this concept of a brand an interesting mindgame. We are taught to associate an image with high quality and social standing. Just like in India a slightly plump person is thought to be from a wealthier family. In the 'blink' of an eye we sum up the person based on a small picture at the corner of their attire.

Meals That Moms Can Almost Call Their Own - New York Times

Meals That Moms Can Almost Call Their Own - New York Times: "Takeout pizza was a mainstay, except on the nights when Chinese food seemed more appealing. When Ms. Robbins cooked, it was spaghetti or tuna casserole over and over, with rarely enough time to make a salad.

Their routine was expensive, fattening and boring. In the rush to get through the day, the family had lost control of the dinner table.

So Ms. Robbins now goes to Dream Dinners in West Seattle, where she spends just under two hours assembling dishes like cheesy chicken casserole and Salisbury steak from ingredients that have been peeled and chopped for her. She does not have to pick up a knife, turn on a stove or wash a dish.

All she has to do is pop the meals in her oven and, for about $3.50 a serving, experience the satisfaction of putting a home-cooked meal — of a sort — on the table.

Americans, pinched for time and increasingly uncomfortable in their kitchens, have been on a 50-year slide away from home cooking. Now, at almost 700 meal assembly centers around the country, families like the Robbinses prepare two weeks' worth of dinners they can call their own with little more effort than it takes to buy a rotisserie chicken and a bag of salad."

Math Trek: From Counting to Writing, Science News Online, March 11, 2006

Math Trek: From Counting to Writing, Science News Online, March 11, 2006: "Although other scholars tend to agree that Sumerian tokens could have been devices for keeping track of goods, some argue that writing was a largely independent development. These skeptics insist that there's little evidence that cuneiform writing arose directly out of a token-based accounting system. Moreover, it's likely that writing developed independently in different parts of the world—in Mesopotamia, in the Indus River valley, and in Egypt—with each region producing its own unique form of expression for its own purpose.

In response, Schmandt-Besserat contends that she has strong archaeological evidence—thousands of tokens and hundreds of clay envelopes and early tablets—to support her theory.

Schmandt-Besserat is now exploring how the development of writing influenced art by providing a way of presenting stories on vases and other surfaces. Before writing, the patterns were largely geometric; after writing, there was narrative, she says.

At the same time, art influenced writing, helping it shift from a mundane accounting tool to an evocative form of expression, beginning as a way to preserve the names of deceased members of a family."

Wired 14.03: A Nation of Guinea Pigs

Wired 14.03: A Nation of Guinea Pigs: "Little by little, however, Kalantri began to see the problematic side of outsourced trials. 'When I try to explain that a drug is experimental, that it might not work, the understanding is not there,' he observes. 'One woman said to me, 'What do you mean, the drug might not work? All drugs work!''"

132 (number) - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

132 (number) - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia: "If you take the sum of all 2-digit numbers you can make from 132, you get 132: 12 13 21 23 31 32 = 132. 132 is the smallest number with this property. But there is no number that, when added up to its own digits, adds up to 132, making it a self number.


When counting in binary with fingers, expressing 132 as 0010000100 results in the isolation of the middle fingers of each hand, a gesture generally considered rude. The corresponding one-handed gesture is the representation of 4."

drinking buddy

This term symbolizes a good friend who you can actually relate to. How many of us have a drinking buddy ?
Just 'buddy' wouldnt mean the same thing, and a 'drinking buddy' does not mean best-friend too. Well I guess I am too cold and shielded to understand what best-friend means anyways. Somehow after my BE I hardly have found any "drinking buddies". Many I time I wonder if this is because everyone gets occupied with their lives more than others. But then when I meet up with old friends things just fall in place.
Is it because that till then I wasnt living with a diverse group. I am usually comfy with bambaiyyas. Funny how I dont know a single bambaiyya in my everyday circle. Bombay rocks baby  !!

Power chip inventor speaks out : Techworld.com - Q&A:

Techworld.com - Q&A: Power chip inventor speaks out: "Among IBM’s conspicuous successes is its Power processor, invented in its northern US outpost, the labs in thermally challenged Rochester, Minneapolis -- also the birthplace of the AS/400. The chip’s in many of its servers and powered the Apple Mac until recently. Designed to work in both parallel and uni-processor designs, there are 64,000 of them in Blue Gene, the most powerful supercomputer in the world.

We recently travelled to Rochester and spoke to Frank Soltis, chief scientist at IBM’s iSeries server division. Soltis was a key member of the team that invented the Power chip, and spoke to us about the chip’s birth, the thinking behind its design, and something of what the future holds."

Is Ritual Circumcision Religious Expression? - New York Times

Is Ritual Circumcision Religious Expression? - New York Times: "Americans pride themselves on their commitment to freedom of religion, but how much religious freedom is too much religious freedom? At the moment, the thorniest dispute over the issue concerns a male-circumcision ritual practiced by some Hasidic Jews in New York. The ritual is called oral suction, or metzitzah b'peh. After removing the foreskin, the mohel, who conducts the circumcision, cleans the wound by sucking blood from it. According to city health officials, the ritual may have caused three infants circumcised by the same mohel in 2003 and 2004 to contract neonatal herpes (one of the infants subsequently died). New York's city health commissioner recently issued a warning about the dangers of oral suction, leading some Orthodox Jewish leaders to complain that Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg had reneged on promises to let religious authorities handle the issue. Meanwhile, secularists like the writer Christopher Hitchens have attacked the mayor for banning smoking in restaurants while failing to protect helpless children from diseases transmitted by 'religious fanatics.'"

Results: What kind of subatomic particle are you? - Quizilla Quizzes

Neutron -- You don't take sides, you just sort of

hang out and blend into the crowd. If someone

lets you loose though, you can cause some

serious damage. If you are arround too many

other neutrons you get bored and start to

decay.


What kind of subatomic particle are you?
brought to you by Quizilla


276 other people got this result!
This quiz has been taken 872 times.
32% of people had this result."

Results: What kind of subatomic particle are you? - Quizilla Quizzes

Results: What kind of subatomic particle are you? - Quizilla Quizzes: "Neutron -- You don't take sides, you just sort of hang out and blend into the crowd. If someone lets you loose though, you can cause some serious damage. If you are arround too many other neutrons you get bored and start to decay.

http://www.quizilla.com/redirect.php?statsid=56&url=http://www.quizilla.com">Quizilla

276 other people got this result!
This quiz has been taken 872 times.
32% of people had this result."

Should You Buy Stock Funds or Fund Company Stock?

Morningstar.com - Should You Buy Stock Funds or Fund Company Stock?: "'I decided there was only one place to make money in the mutual fund business—as there is only one place for a temperate man to be in a saloon, behind the bar and not in front of it . . . so I invested in a management company.'
Nobel Prize-winning economist Paul Samuelson uttered those words at a 1967 Senate hearing on financial legislation, but it doesn't take a genius to see the truth in it. We compared the returns of the shares of publicly traded mutual fund companies with the average returns of their mutual funds and found Samuelson's quip to be as incisive today as it was nearly 40 years ago. In most cases investors would have done better with the firm's stock than with its average stock fund."
The difference between fundholder and shareholder returns was often stark. U.S. Global Investors' GROW shares rose 24% on an annualized basis over the 10-year period ending in December, or five times the gain of the small shop's average equity fund. Over the same time period Eaton Vance EV shares rose more than 33% on an annualized basis, which was quadruple the average return of the typical Eaton Vance stock fund. Meanwhile, the shares of Alliance Capital Management AC increased by an annualized 25%, or more than three times the return of the average AllianceBernstein equity fund.

BBC NEWS | South Asia | Delhi fashion shops demolished

BBC NEWS | South Asia | Delhi fashion shops demolished: "'We were doing good business and getting foreign revenue. The mall was a success story but a lot of people could not digest that,' he said.
One designer who preferred to be unnamed said they had been selectively picked up for action by the municipal authorities.
'Municipal officials should demolish all such structures in the city together. They should not pick and choose,' he said.
The Delhi high court, which has ordered the demolitions, recently remarked that action should be taken against the 'powerful and the influential of the city' to send a message to the common man that he was not being discriminated against."

If they were illegal they should have been demolished I guess, even if they were targetted demolitions.

BBC NEWS | Europe | Anger grows over Muhammad cartoon

BBC NEWS | Europe | Anger grows over Muhammad cartoon: "The caricatures from Denmark's Jyllands-Posten paper included drawings of Muhammad wearing a headdress shaped like a bomb, while another shows him saying that paradise was running short of virgins for suicide bombers.

The offices of Jyllands-Posten had to be evacuated on Tuesday because of a bomb threat.

The paper had apologised a day earlier for causing offence to Muslims, although it maintained it was legal under Danish law to print them.

Danish Prime Minister Anders Fogh Rasmussen welcomed the paper's apology, but has rejected calls to punish the paper, saying the government cannot censor the press. "

Again freedom of speech vs being sensitive. But I think I can understand why muslims feel this way.

words of wisdom....jpg (JPEG Image, 550x408 pixels)

words of wisdom....jpg (JPEG Image, 550x408 pixels)

[From : http://fabulousfake.blogspot.com/]

Sami people - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Sami people - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia: "The abbreviation Lap(p) has been used to abbreviate peoples in Northern Scandinavia who call themselves Sápmelaš 'someone of Sami kin' or Sabme 'Sami' or Sámit 'the Samis'. However, in some Sami languages, the term Sami may refer only to speakers of these languages, e.g. Skolt Sami speakers say they speak sää´mǩiõll 'Sami language', but this term refers exclusively to Skolt Sami."
I was watching this movie called "cuckoo" it has a lapp woman in it and I didnt know who they were. The movie is pretty good with a finnish and a russian stuck with this lady in the middle of nowhere towards the end of WWII. none of them knows the other persons language.

Why Not Build a Bomb? - New York Times

Why Not Build a Bomb? - New York Times: "The problem with the N.P.T. is that it legitimates the wrong thing - not just the peaceful use of nuclear energy but the 'inalienable right' to produce your own nuclear fuel. The solution, then, is to eliminate, or at least circumscribe, that right. And this is what Washington has spurned. Last year, Kofi Annan's 'high-level panel' on U.N. reform endorsed the Proliferation Security Initiative and suggested that more nations join. It also proposed that the International Atomic Energy Agency would act as 'guarantor for the supply of fissile material to civilian nuclear users.' Nations would no longer be able to argue, as Iran now does, that they need to produce their own enriched fuel in order to ensure a steady supply for peaceful purposes. The proposal wouldn't have stopped the rogue states, but it would have delegitimated them.

The Bush administration apparently accepts the idea; it just doesn't want to see an international agency empowered to execute it. The White House has proposed that the countries that currently produce nuclear fuel - led, presumably, by the U.S. - band together to guarantee a steady and low-cost supply of uranium enriched for civilian purposes. Neither the Iranians nor other recipients are likely to accept such an arrangement. But maybe there's something halfway, or a quarter of the way, between the two systems. So far, however, the administration won't even try. Kofi Annan had good reason to describe the failure to address nonproliferation in the reform outcome document as 'a disgrace.'

When it comes to military force, the United States can, and will, act alone. But diplomacy depends on a united front. Even White House hard-liners understand this, which is why they have let Germany, France and Britain take the lead on Iran and have worked with regional powers to end North Korea's nuclear program. All this is encouraging. Still, the only way to rescue the nonproliferation regime is to rec"

Smart Investing Amidst Real Estate Mania: Why the Rich Get Richer - Yahoo! Finance

Smart Investing Amidst Real Estate Mania: Why the Rich Get Richer - Yahoo! Finance: "The angry readers should draw insight from something Warren Buffett said: 'For some reason, people take their cues from price action rather than from values. What doesn't work is when you start doing things that you don't understand or because they worked last week for someone else.'

The sage of Omaha sums up pithily: 'The dumbest reason in the world to buy a stock is because it's going up.'

Personally, I would say, 'The dumbest reason to buy anything is because the price is going up.' Yet that's what people do when they invest. They generally don't buy high-priced things when they shop."

Sri Sri Ravi Shankar heading for a Nobel

Sri Sri Ravi Shankar heading for a Nobel: "United States Congressman Joseph Crowley has nominated India's Sri Sri Ravi Shankar for the Nobel Peace Prize saying that the godman had helped bring peace to thousands of people through his Art of Living Foundation."

But :
"Are the nominations made public?

The statutes of the Nobel Foundation restricts disclosure of information about the nominations, whether publicly or privately, until fifty years have elapsed. The restriction concerns the nominees and nominators as well as investigations and opinions in the awarding of a prize." [ link ]
" Congressman Crowley has served as a Co-Chair of the Congressional Caucus on India. The seventh district of New York contains 55,000 South Asians, the second highest concentration of any district in the United States. Jackson Heights contains the United States' second largest Indian American community. Congressman Crowley believes that it is of utmost importance that closer ties are forged between the United States, the oldest democracy and India, the largest one. The India Caucus helps to facilitate more Indian American connectedness and involvement in the United State Congress. Congressman Crowley will work hard with members of the India Caucus and the Indian Americans in the seventh district to promote trade, technology and labor."

" Unlike many other awards, the Nobel Prize nominees are never publicly announced, and they are not supposed to be told that they were ever considered for the prize. These records are sealed for 50 years.

After the nomination deadline, a Committe compiles and screens the nominations to a list of around 200 preliminary candidates. The list is sent to selected experts in the field to each nominee's work and the list shortened to around 15 final candidates. The Committee then writes a report with recommendations and sends it to the Academy or other corresponding institution, depending on the prize. As an example of institute size, the Assembly for the Prize for Medicine has 50 members. The members of the institution meet and vote to select the winner(s)." [source]

Sania Mirza gets Padma Sri

Sania Mirza gets Padma Sri: "Sania Mirza was conferred with prestigious Padma Sri award for her contribution to tennis on the eve of the Republic Day on Wednesday.

The 19-year-old was one of the six sportspersons who got Padma awards today. The others were Vijaypat Singhania (aviator), Bahadur Singh (shot putter), Madhumita Bisht (badminton player), MC Mary Kom (boxer), Mohan Singh Gunjyal (adventure sports).

Singhania got Padma Bhushan while others got Padma Sri."

Is she that good ? I havent see her play yet