You turned me into ....

You turned me into ..... "somebody loved" !!
- The Weepies on: Happiness

The Hindu : Business / Companies : Vimal introduces anti-microbial fabric

Vimal, the flagship textile brand of Reliance Industries Ltd. (RIL) on Wednesday claimed of a 'pioneering innovation' in the textile industry of treating fabrics with a chemical that would arrest the growth of fungi and bacteria keeping it fresh and anti-odour even after day-long wearing in humid and warm climates like India.

Announcing this, RIL President (Textile Division) Anand Parekh said the 'DEO2' was entirely an in-hose innovation of RIL and "with cent per cent indigenous technology" developed at its Naroda facility on the city outskirts.
http://www.thehindu.com/business/companies/article515841.ece

>> pretty cool !! This definitely does something to improve quality of life much more than an app to remind me when to go to the bathroom !! 

making the case for reading fiction

We all teach kids lessons using the age old "once upon a time". Using mythology to teach morality or using examples to teach math, are further examples of how story telling shapes our thinking and our biases. The veracity of the story is not material to the process of learning. We would be poorer if we judged stories on that basis.  

When you read fiction what you are reading and visualizing is something larger than the immediate images that hit you. When you watch the animation movie "cars" you see the character behind each car. You relate to their emotions and their "human" nature. You dont come out of the theater saying - man cars dont talk, what a bogus movie.Fiction helps to make the lesson interesting. Stories by being set in different times and locales educates us about how varied the the world looks when viewed at different points in space-time. One could make a case that maybe reading about true stories i.e. real life occurrences can just as enlightening. I would argue that an interesting story - well told could have a much more amplified response from your system. 

 

So much of art is a reflection of worldly life, but we are touched by art in a way that reality does not. Of course we take this emotion back to our daily lives. Can we ever express in words what music can express. I think writing is also an art form. Authors of fictional stories are masters of an art that can evoke fantastic responses in us. Fiction authors also try to explore deep themes intentionally, and  take you to  the most interesting place on earth - inside the head of humans. They understand the human condition and beyond that are able to follow thought experiments on this complicated model. Human thoughts, emotions, feelings and the resulting actions and words are very complicated to explain in a technically precise manner. It can be understood by examples though. This understanding of the human condition can lead to a broader understanding of how the world works. The authors do a what-if analysis for us and express it in words that would evoke deep responses from us. Lets say you meet a person from an unfamiliar background - you could have read about them and their problems in maybe an autobiography. The fiction writer could just amplify this image for you by contrasting this life with a life in a fortunate situation by simply making the character travel to a different country. Through the eyes of this character you can then better understand what exactly it is that they "feel". 

caliguli

Images from caligula are still making rounds underneath my scalp - bouncing of my visual areas. I am thinking a lot of Indian kings must have led this lifestyle as well, wouldn't they ?

No aid for AIDS

The last decade has been what some doctors call a "golden window" for treatment. Drugs that once cost $12,000 a year fell to less than $100, and the world was willing to pay.In Uganda, where fewer than 10,000 were on drugs a decade ago, nearly 200,000 now are, largely as a result of American generosity. But the golden window is closing. Uganda is the first country where major clinics routinely turn people away, but it will not be the last. In Kenya next door, grants to keep 200,000 on drugs will expire soon. An American-run program in Mozambique has been told to stop opening clinics. There have been drug shortages in Nigeria and Swaziland. Tanzania and Botswana are trimming treatment slots, according to a report by the medical charity Doctors Without Borders.

The collapse was set off by the global recession's effect on donors, and by a growing sense that more lives would be saved by fighting other, cheaper diseases. Even as the number of people infected by AIDS grows by a million a year, money for treatment has stopped growing.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/10/world/africa/10aids.html?src=sch&pagewanted=all

Gulf Coast oil spill fought with . . . human hair? | al.com

Two local women have a plan to save the coastline by building booms with human hair scraps to absorb the oil from the BP spill.

Liz Ann Howard-Alvarez of Mobile and Amanda Bacon of Point Clear have created a grass-roots effort to build oil-absorbent barriers filled with hair, either human or animal, as long as it's clean, they said.

"These booms can be used by local residents to shore up and protect their property," Bacon said.
http://blog.al.com/live/2010/05/gulf_coast_oil_spill_fought_wi.html

A Toxic Fix to a Toxic Problem - Science and Tech - The Atlantic

As the Gulf Coast's ruptured oil well leaks anywhere from 5,000 to 60,000 barrels of crude a day, responders are relying heavily on toxic oil dispersants.

http://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2010/05/a-toxic-fix-to-a-toxic-problem/56203/

Rumi : The Seed market

Can you find another market like this ?
Where,
with your one rose
you can buy hundreds of rose gardens ?

Where.
for one seed
you get a whole wilderness ?

For one weak breath,
the divine wind ?

You've been fearful
of being absorbed in the ground,
or drawn up in the air.

Now, your water-bead lets go
and drops into the ocean,
where it came from.

It no longer has the form it had,
but it is still water.
The essence is the same.

This giving up is not a repenting.
It's a deep honoring of yourself.

When the ocean comes to you as a lover,
marry, at one, quickly,
for God's sake!

Don't postpone it!
Existence has no better gift.

No amount of searching
will find this.

A perfect falcon, for no reason,
has landed on your shoulder,
and become yours.

scripts that can be run over the web

We need to give abilities to run perl scripts on the web.
Then people can just write small widgets easily and host them for themselves and share it with friends.
A simple widget to compute APR from APY or APR (post and pre tax).

Cesar Milan

I think I really liked the "dog whisperer" show on Natgeo. But my bloody prudish mind would let me admit it to myself.
"Darr lagta hai mujhse kehne mein ji .... Dil to baccha hai ji ..... "

Why would I not like to admit that ? I know we dont think through before we act. But what if I wanted to conciously overthrow my internal decision maker. How do I stage a coup ? I don't even know where he sits and what he looks like !!

Curly braces

Who invented curly braces. When you write on paper are you ever able to get it right ?
Do you ever use it other than in C code ?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bracket#Uses_of_.E2.80.9C.7B.E2.80.9D_and_.E2.80.9C.7D.E2.80.9D
Looks like mathematicians use it to denote sets.
I sat down for 5 mins to think of any other style of braces. The best I could come up with is  o( )o




--
"I have no special talents. I am only passionately curious" - Albert Einstein (1879-1955)

Parallel universes

WTF is going on ? There are clearly multiple worlds we live in. Are we fortunate to be able to do that -or- are we just suffering the burden of having to switch. There is a sense of one world being always better than the other - but also a sense of this bad world being the reality in some sense. So in a way the dark clouds will cover the sun soon even in the new world.
The mind makes its split personality of Dr. logic and Mr.emotion felt very strongly. Maybe this is what colors our view of the world as well. This is why we see 2 separate worlds. Maybe the heart wants to see another sunnier world and this is nothing but a mirage to help the logical side preen itself.
The funny thing is the heart comes in and tries to see the pain in this tropical bliss as well. Ofcourse it feeling like a mirage the heart doesnt have a lot of control. But wait .. shouldn't the heart be in more control of a  mirage it has conjured up. So maybe its not a mirage after all. Its just us being colored by the majority around us. If the majority have positive attitudes, then we reflect that well. The true test of character then is to be positive independent of the surroundings. Can you ? Will you ?

why set goals ?

what is kamyaabi? why am I setting goals and trying to achieve them. At times I feel its an excuse to not ponder deeply the meaning of life. But today morning I read something in "the speaking tree" that kinda made sense. The author said that "there are four main purposes to human life. They are: Moral perfection, worldly attainment, fulfilment of legitimate deries and liberation. The first 3  values have meaning only when they are aimed at the fourth. The first three practices make our lives satisfying so we can devote ourselves to the most important fourth ideal." So it is necessary to be kaamiyaab while being moral - and always concious of the fact that there is a larger goal towards which we are working.

Haan woh theek hai .... but what is the point of this liberation. I think this world is actually pointless. So this liberation is actually liberation from "struggling to survive". If you do well in life while having a clean heart then you will feel happy (because you are conditioned to feel jiittery when you lie). I think if someone is brought up to be most comfortable when they lie and cheat - then this is what they would need to do to live a fulfilling life.  Just that being social had evolutionary benefits - so we are trained this way. Bass is evolution ko samajh ke chalo aur apna kaam nikaalo .. woh to apna kaam nikal ke hi rahegi - there is no escaping her chungul.

Google pestering

I hate it when they try to sneak in other tools when i am downloading the tools that I need. In the last 2 days I have been asked if I need "chrome with real player" and "google toolbar with acrobat reader". Why is google trying to sneak into my life when I am already invested in their tools.