viscerally disturbed.

The smallest bad news has such a bad effect on all my senses. I begin to lose interest in topics I am usually interested in - feel like I am carrying this big cloud of negativity in my chest and throat. Every thought seems to have become heavy and burdened. I can sense it when I am trying to play hard and get it out. It poisons everything. This is worse when I am unable to act on it.

el dorado in my head.

I think I would be very happy if I lived in my head.

GSM, black boxes, and iPhones: the tech that drives Zipcar - Ars Technica

Sounds pretty cool - If I could find one every morning and every evening I could actually save the hassle of maintaining a car - and save money spent on buying a car.
 
http://arstechnica.com/hardware/news/2009/08/gsm-black-boxes-and-iphones-the-tech-that-drives-zipcar.ars

After making the reservation, I walk to the car of my choosing and wave my Zipcard over a sensor on the windshield. The car unlocks and I grab the key, which is attached to the dashboard, and off I go. When I return the car, I wave my card again and the car locks. The company bills the reservation straight to the credit card I have on file.

The tech behind it

When a reservation is made on the Internet, a package is sent over GSM to the chosen car and stored in a ring buffer until the driver shows up with his or her Zipcard, which is equipped with an RFID chip. The cardreader mounted in the windshield reads the RFID signature to authenticate the holder of the card and sends the message to the computer in the car. From there, the computer asks itself three questions: Am I the right car? Is it the right time? Is this the right driver?

India Together: Put your money down, boys - 15 August 2009

• how big of a problem is this - do we need "freedom" from tappawallas ? Maybe we should just simply improve the post offices in India. They suck big time.
  
• If we make it possible to load/unload cash onto a cell-phone (like a debit/cash card) - Then have an app to transfer this from one phone to another - I wonder how security would be handled here. In the literate world passwords would do the job - but maybe biometric sensors (in combination with the cellphone numbers) might do the job. Who takes the initiative. If the state gives a contract to someone like Nokia to make special and cheap phones and maintains these ATM centers at the post offices ?

http://indiatogether.org/2009/aug/psa-moneydown.htm

Why should people use him? Why not a bank or post office? "Several do use banks, but most of us have never had a bank account," point out those sitting around the Tappawala. And, he adds, "people feel intimidated in a bank." And the post office? "Even if you are literate, which most migrants are not, you cannot fill out your money order form in Surat in the Oriya language. Getting someone to write it in poor English risks having your money order going astray."

Orissa has recently seen a few postmasters making off with crores of rupees in savings and money orders entrusted to their care by mostly illiterate people. Migrants feel more secure with the Tappawala as his family usually lives in their village or in one nearby. "But we have a security problem," says one. "Once identified, there's a risk." Tappawalas have faced lethal attacks on that cash-carrying stretch from Berhampur to Ganjam's interior villages. Maybe that's why most of them insist they've "retired." They're silent about when they did so. But their money talks

Christmas truce - joyeux noel

This is the true human spirit that shines through here. This is what prompted us to evolve into "social" animals - prompted us to use our brains and develop them. Kids should be shown such things in school and taught to value humanity more than stupid geographical and cultural stereotypes. Education in India is seriously lacking in teaching us such basic principles. So many educated people we meet everyday carry such deep biases against people within their countries itself, just because they talk and behave differently. Its a national shame for a place like India.

I like the scene where they show the priest talking nonsense as if ordained by god to spread war on earth. Chooo saala !!

http://www.sonyclassics.com/joyeuxnoel/

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christmas_truce

The "Christmas truce" is a term used to describe several brief unofficial cessations of hostilities that occurred on Christmas Eve or Christmas Day between German and British or French troops in World War I, particularly that between British and German troops stationed along the Western Front during Christmas 1914. In 1915 there was a similar Christmas truce between German and French troops, and during Easter 1916 a truce also existed on the Eastern Front.

some souls are screwed

Can there be people who never see happiness ? There are. The sad thing is that nothing can be done to help them. Guilt, misunderstanding, underdeveloped faculties - all of this just screws their lives. I believe about half of my fellow Indians are blighted by such states of lives. The condition threatens to engulf more of us - if we try to help the unfortunate. Being strong and realizing that living life involves certain pains is important.

audience this

It should not be too difficult to come up with a browser application that does the following

Setup:

• Browser reading an article someone sent.
  
• iPod or any other MP3 device attached. If not attached will make a playlist for the iPod.

 

In action: 

• user will right click and say "audience it"
  
• tool will convert the article to sound and send it along with the images on the page onto the attached iPod.
  
• In addition the tool can create a list of relevant links based on googling  key words in the article.
  
• Ofcourse it will download the page into some open source page viewing format as well. So my ebook reader can read it at my leisure.
  

Council for Secular Humanism

Shouldnt such guys be tried in some internation court of justice,

http://www.secularhumanism.org/index.php?section=library&page=haught_29_5#

Incredibly, President George W. Bush told French President Jacques Chirac in early 2003 that Iraq must be invaded to thwart Gog and Magog, the Bible's satanic agents of the Apocalypse.

Honest. This isn't a joke. The president of the United States, in a top-secret phone call to a major European ally, asked for French troops to join American soldiers in attacking Iraq as a mission from God.

DNA origami - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2009/08/nanodna/

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DNA_origami

To produce a desired shape, images are drawn with a raster fill of a single long DNA molecule. This design is then fed into a computer program (such as SEQUIN) which calculates the placement of individual staple strands. Each staple binds to a specific region of the DNA template, and thus due to Watson-Crick base pairing the necessary sequences of all staple strands are known and displayed. The DNA is mixed and then heated and cooled. As the DNA cools the various staples pull the long strand into the desired shape. Designs are directly observable via several methods including atomic force microscopy, or fluorescence microscopy when DNA is coupled to fluorescent materials .