Some tips on portrait photography.

I wonder why people don't do more natural light work? Or maybe, its just that I can't afford an FL-50 flash right now, so I only do natural light... anyway, check out this viddy on some cool portraiture tips.

About being rude...

Apropos my previous post.. linked here, I must add a corrigendum: cussing in Bangla should be likened to wiping one's arse with the finest Dhakai/Benarasi/Baluchari/Tashar. See, now I can be rude and wonderfully ethnically erudite at the same time!

How to be rude.

Me, I can cuss rather fluently in Bengali, English, Hindi, put in a bit of Urdu, and I am working on the Tamil as well. So basically, I can be rude to people all over India. I need to try some Mandarin. But what about Europe? Well, as I mentioned, I was recently at a party where someone was telling me how to ask people to well, umm perform certain services in German. But, clearly there is a lot to learn. This compilation of the best insults from many of the Occidental languages is worth a look.

But again, cussing in my mother tongue.. Bengali is probably the most mellifluous. It is like .. wiping your arse with silk.

About Fire.

About a decade ago, Indian born filmmaker Deepa Mehta directed 'Fire'. This film is about a young lady marrying into a lower middle class Delhi family. Her husband is a sleazy git who is passionately in louvv with his Tibetan/Chinese girlfriend and makes no bones about it. His elder brother runs the family business, a local take out restaurant where everyone in the house works. Said elder brother is a devotee of some kind of guru who preaches celibacy... and he practices it! Needless to say, elder bro's wife is a terribly unhappy, deprived woman. And now, so is the younger woman. Inevitably perhaps, with no remaining choices in their barren, loveless lives, they find solace in each others' arms. Oh, my, did I say the magic word.. lesbians??

Anyway, quite expectedly, the film drew intense flak from right wingers in India. And Deepa Mehta flew higher in the adoring eyes of her western audiences with each new ridiculously profane remark made by the likes of Bal Thackerey.

But why this discussion... well, yesterday, I had invited a few people to come over to see this film. As it turned out, of the people invited; the blokes copped out, and so it ended up with me being the only standard bearer of the evil Indian Hindu patriarchy around. Now, allow me to explain again, why this entire thing happened: I am a huge fan of Nandita Das (younger bride in the film). Enough said. Well, go look at my post on 1947 Earth. I wanted to see how my accurate my memories of seeing this film at the theatre ten years or so earlier were.

As I see it now, the film carries an important social message: it is no secret that homosexuality exists in India: anyone who claims otherwise is being foolish.. kind of like that Iranian premier. Whether gay people are persecuted in India is the second question: much of our penal code comes over from the fairly Victorian British way of seeing things: hence the answer is 'yes'. True also that many Indian women are unfortunate enough to live in unfulfilled marriages: but that is something that cuts both ways.

The one important factor to note is that Deepa Mehta's direction is terribly unsubtle.. it is utterly ham handed. And did she not pay any money to the composer, Rehman? All of the soundtrack is recycled from previous Rehman films. And it works badly: the music is often loud and overwhelming.. it tells you what you are supposed to feel. Actually, more like shouts it down at you. Bottom line: the film has almost no merit as a film alone: and this is something that I would be inclined to blame the director for.. the actors are very highly talented, they have not been well used. Here a few points of view on this film.

1. http://www.infinityfoundation.com/ECIToutpouringsframeset.htm
   
2. http://www.brightlightsfilm.com/30/fire.html
3. http://www.wsws.org/articles/2000/may2000/fire-m02_prn.shtml
4. http://www.sawnet.org/news/fire.html

For someone who aspires to the highest standards of filmmaking (read Satyajit Ray, Ritwik Ghatak, Mrinal Sen), Mehta has a lot to learn and a really long way to go.

On higher education.

I came across this wonderfully written article about the other side of universal higher education.. the dilemma of preserving the quality of academia while trying to get everyone to get a college education. Makes for a fairly good read, this is, after all, an anguished appeal to a system which is broken and needs to be fixed.

Honestly though, we seem to be increasingly a society which has been built on foundations laid by some really clever people; and the rest of us are struggling to keep up. I don't have any solutions, any remedies. But wiser men have thought about these things and have spoken about them. The other face of the future: the option which does not lead The Brave New World has also been spoken of by the great Aldous Huxley. It is called Pala, and for that you have to read 'Island'; Huxley's last, and perhaps greatest work.

Talks, fillums and other things.

I went to speak at a conference at Notre Dame last weekend. it was great fun.. the talk was well received, which was all good. In fact, I had been quite terrified of being grilled by hordes of angry biochemists. Quite to the contrary, it went across very well.

A few points to note, though: I use open office because it transits almost seamlessly between by Linux and my Mac. Go OO!! (very few people will understand the hidden connotation). But what really gets me is when evil video systems fail to cooperate with my Mac, just 'cos they are all Windows optimized and evil. Also, I tend to backup my presentations in .ppt, .odp, .sda, .pdf and .jpg formats, and keep them in two separate emails, and on a disc and on a flash drive (which is formatted to be readable across any OS). People may think that I am being paranoid. Far from it. Things have a way of collapsing when you least expect them to. Hence backup as much as possible. I hold true to this, and I think so should others. People who walk around without taking precautions are just asking for trouble. Having said that, I probably get more than my share of trouble in this context anyway.. but then, I try hard to solve those problems.. sort of like Rincewind.. I include here, for your edification and amusement, an excerpt from the wikipedia page on Rincewind, "In fact, Rincewind has the dubious privilege of being the Chosen of the Lady, the Discworld's most mysterious goddess. It is for this reason that he is constantly finding himself embroiled in unpleasant situations and coming out more-or-less on top. However if he ever realised this, much less acted as though nothing could seriously harm him, then she would instantly lose interest. Besides, having the favour of the Lady, in addition to being unreliable, also means having the very reliable enmity of Fate. People have said that the gods smile on Rincewind (due to his continued existence despite all odds.) Rincewind feels that, although he knew they were definitely doing something to him, he had never considered it to be smiling."

Ayan Paul, my friend from collegeis working on his PhD in high energy physics at ND. We got to hang out after a really long time.. which was awesome, as we had some six years worth of catching up. Ayan took me to this party hosted by a bunch of phys/math people. Awesome party.. the kind I have missed for way too long.. and proceeded to introduce me to his friends as '.. he used to be a physicist'. Hmmm... Anyway, I learned a little about this bloke's work: logic theory, I cracked, and got laughs for a few Erdos jokes, and I learned how to be very rude in German. Altogether, time wonderfully spent.

And then, I got back.. and happened to watch David Lynch's very very strange film 'Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with me'. Now, Mike, our media library bloke once gave me Blue Velvet to see, because 'I was seeing to many strange films', as he put it. Why would you do that to someone, unless you wanted to weird him to hell and back? David Lynch paints a very surrealistic, yet beautiful canvas filled with strong, arresting, performances. In Blue Velvet, Isabella Rosallini's performance is lovely.. yet so utterly weird. Fire Walk is stranger still... and this will take another couple of views to go down properly.

Yeah, so what was I saying now..?

Nandita Das.. I have been slightly gaga over this particular actress ever since.. Rockford. which was, my, oh, my, almost a decade ago. So we (the kids and yours truly) ended up seeing 1947 Earth last night. This film is by Deepa Mehta (the series being Fire, Earth, Water), so naturally we had quite high expectations. It starts of small... in fact the camera work is quite shoddy at times. One gets the impression that Mehta had brilliant ideas, but was quite slipshod in their execution. And the DVD print was quite crummy too (where did the AADL get their hands on it?), with lousy sound... which was a great pity, given that the soundtrack is by none other than the great Rehman. But somehow, the inchoate pieces come together in a weirdly compelling fashion, so at the end of the film, one is somewhat .. shaken.

But enough about the film, this post was supposed to be about Nandita Das (who, in fact, reminds of someone, now that I think about it).. and how Nandita Das is really lovely and all that. Well, you know what.. let me put in this picture to make my point!

Now I know why I am so bloody depressed...

I tried to post this yesterday...

but I got a 502 server error or something.. which means my compadres in CS are not doing their job properly! Anyway, yet another blog about how it is nice to be in CS and not nice to be in anything else... read this and repent, ye all!

See what I mean about Facebook?

I mean, seriously, people.. do I really want to compare movie tastes with you..? You sods probably think that Angie Jolie is the best actress since.. umm Ingrid Bergman. Then there was the brilliant superpoke application.. with all due respect, I do not appreciate you wanting to wanting to throw sheep at me. Stop sending me lame Facebook apps.. its an awesome tool to keep in touch, announce birthday and graduation party's and put up pictures of the same. Just stop it with the 'buy my friends for 10$' shite!

See this viddy.. this is what Facebook will be like if it turns into life...

The Indian baby dropping ritual.

Read and view here.

The Indian space effort.

A long time ago, in the early 1960's, an Indian physicist called Vikram Sarabhai was busy pulling all the strings he could and then some. And some of those strings were quite powerful: Sarabhai had, as a close friend Homi Jahangir Bhaba, the man who would later be called the father of India's nuclear programme and go on to establish the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research at Bombay. He (Sarabhai) was a man of impressive credentials- he had worked with C.V Raman (NL) at the hallowed Physics Dept of the Indian Institute of Science. He was much more than a scientist.. he was a visionary of sorts- had had helped establish the Physical research Laboratory at Ahmedabad when he was only 28. Anyway, coming back to the original thread of the story: why was he pulling all those strings? The reason was the Indian Space Research Organization (ISRO). This was Sarabhai's baby and his gift to independent India. Of course, there were detractors and naysayers: there always have been and always be. And they were not wrong when they pointed out that the meagre resources of a fledgling state should not be squandered on grandiose dreams when so many of our people lived off scraps of food and lived in hovels. But nations have been built out of the obstinacy of strong willed men; and Bhaba and Sarabhai were of that colour. They dreamed big and dared anyone to stand in their way.

Unlike any other space programme, the ISRO was not born out of military considerations; it's ancestry had nothing of ballistic missile development in it. Decades of effort amidst cash crunches, changes of government, hostile ministries and even more hostile Western influence who proceeded to sanction the hell out of any ongoing projects followed. The scientists persevered. Small successes were interspersed with tragic failures. Work went on. Sometime in the mid 90's, when the US government was twisting arms around the world to sign the NPT, one Indian minister made the following comment: 'the nations who are signing the NPT do not have the industrial capacity to produce safety pins. We have a satellite footprint which stretches from Malaysia to Abu Dhabi'.

So why this story? Well, yesterday, the ISRO successfully launched 10 satellites on a single PSLV rocket to polar orbit. This is a record for the largest number of satellites launched on a single vehicle and signals the successful entry of India into the highly lucrative business of space based applications and delivery systems. The full story is here. And the message for all Indians is this: be proud. And do your bit.

What would Richard Feynman do?

This, apparently...

Guest post: Manmohan Singh - the premier who failed expectations?

From today's Statesman, about the man who would be India's new Nehru..it is a sad day indeed when all of Indian politics seems to be either about caste politics aka Mayawati or the edicts passed from 10 Janpath. Have we completely lost the ability to rise above such pettiness? Is there no one left who speaks not just for a tribe or a community, but for the whole country? This article talks about the failed story that this the prime ministership of Manmohan Singh, once considered a man of bedrock integrity. Perhaps the fault lies in us, for expecting too much from one who obeys the diktat of the Congress' Italian Grande Dame.

Assessing Manmohan
The Doctor Of Deficit Finance Should Realise The Currency Is At Stake
Subroto Roy
The best thing that may be said of the Manmohan Singh premiership is that when it began in May 2004, it seemed, for a short while, refreshing in comparison to the dysfunctional arrogance and brutality displayed by its predecessor. By the last months of the Vajpayee-Advani Government, there were party appointees who had ended all pretence of purportedly Hindu values and were raking it in shamelessly. The Golden Rule of Democracy is “Throw the rascals out”, which is what Indian democracy upheld as it has done time and again. By 2009, India’s electorate will have the chance to decide whether the incumbent government deserves the same fate.

Lok Sabha

Manmohan Singh was seriously discussed as the Congress’s putative nominee for PM as early as 2001. The idea brewing at the time with the party’s next generation of wannabe leaders (in their 50s and 60s, where Manmohan was near 70) was that they needed to maintain good relations with the Great White Queen and wait out one term of an inevitable Singh premiership before having a shot at the top job themselves.
What is surprising is Dr Singh appeared never to feel it necessary to educate himself privately on how to retool himself for the necessary transformation from being the archetypal bureaucrat he had been in his working career to becoming the national statesman he wished to be after retirement. It is doubtful, for example, if he ever stood in front of a mirror and practised an extempore political speech in Hindi in preparation for the highest executive post in the country, let aside writing a clear-headed, original vision or mission statement of substance as to where he wished to lead it. As Narasimha Rao’s Finance Minister, he could meekly take orders from his PM; it seemed he wished to continue in the same mode even when PM himself.
Jawaharlal Nehru is supposed to have been a hero of Dr Singh’s ~ but Nehru was a thorough parliamentarian, among the finest anywhere, and someone who always respected the Lok Sabha immensely. Dr Singh, after he lost to VK Malhotra for the South Delhi seat in 1999, made not the slightest effort to enter the Lok Sabha again, even when the Akalis indicated they might not oppose him in a Punjab contest. When asked specifically at a large press conference about not entering the Lok Sabha, Dr Singh murmured words to the effect he had better uses of his time ~ a display, if anything, of the misplaced arrogance of many New Delhi academics and intellectuals. Dr Singh may be the first PM in any parliamentary democracy never to have won a seat in the lower house nor felt a need to do so.
Dr Singh’s bureaucratic expertise assisted him well in the first national crisis that came his way, which was the Tsunami of 26 December 2004. There appeared to be an air of efficiency about the Government’s response and he seemed in his element as commander of bureaucratic forces while working with Pranab Mukherjee in enlisting the military. George W. Bush (not a great geographer or historian) was apparently impressed to see on a map that India had naval forces deployed as far as the Andamans.
By 2005 though, Dr Singh’s bureaucratic mindset had its negative impact. Montek Ahluwalia had been his Finance Secretary when he was Finance Minister. Mr Ahluwalia’s spouse had been a main supporter of Dr Singh’s unsuccessful Lok Sabha attempt. During the Vajpayee Government, Mr Ahluwalia remained a Planning Commission Member for several years before moving to Washington. With Dr Singh as PM, Mr Ahluwalia returned from the USA in mid 2004 to become Deputy Chair at the Planning Commission. Simultaneously with his return, the idea that the American nuclear industry would like to sell “six to eight lightwater reactors” to India arose.
That is as much as is presently known in public. Dr Singh and Mr Ahluwalia may in the national interest want to frankly and precisely explain to the Indian people the full story of the sudden origins of this idea. Certainly, none of the lessons of the Dabhol fiasco a decade earlier seemed to have been learnt, and the Maharasthtra Government (and hence the Government of India) ended up paying some $300 million to General Electric and Bechtel Corporation for Dabhol before any nuclear talks with the USA could begin. Nor had any serious cost-benefit analysis been done or discussion taken place comparing nuclear energy with coal, hydro and other sources in the Indian case.
Indian foreign policy became frozen in its focus on nuclear negotiations with the USA, swirling around Dr Singh’s fife-and-drum welcome at the White House and President Bush’s return visit to India. At the same time arose the issue of Paul Volcker’s UN committee mentioning the name of India’s foreign minister. As The Statesman put it, regardless of the latter’s involvement, “the damage to India's diplomatic reputation in the world” was done and it was inevitable a new foreign minister would be necessary. After dilly-dallying and much 10 Janpath to-and-fro, Dr Singh followed Nehru’s mistake of becoming his own foreign minister. The idea was that this would be temporary but it became almost a year.
Instead of transforming himself towards Indian political statesmanship, Dr Singh advanced other retired bureaucrats’ ambitions on similar career-paths. Foreign policy went out of the MEA’s control and seemingly into the control of the new “National Security Adviser”. Dr Singh, sometimes with MK Narayanan beside him, travelled a large number of countries from Brazil to Finland and Uzbekistan to South Africa and Japan. Dr Singh also found time and willingness to accept honorary degrees from British and Russian universities during these short months.
While Dr Singh seemed thus preoccupied, two of India’s main neighbours underwent massive democratic revolutions (leave aside magnificent Bhutan). Nepal’s people practically stormed their Bastille while Dr Singh and Mr Narayanan visited Germany to discuss BMWs. Pakistan’s democratic forces could hardly believe the cold indifference shown to them by a New Delhi merely following Bush’s support for Pervez Musharraf. While Pakistan and Nepal, and to lesser extent Bangladesh, saw movements towards better governance, Sri Lanka descended towards civil war ~ India’s PM remained obsessed with the magic wand that the nuclear deal was supposed to be.

Inflation

Then suddenly the magic vanished ~ Dr Singh seemed to finally come to a silent private recognition that the economics of the nuclear deal simply did not add up if it meant India importing “six to eight lightwater reactors” on a turnkey basis from the USA or anywhere else. Dr Singh seemed to come out of his self-imposed trance and return a little better to reality. By the time he visited China, although he was as deferential to Hu Jintao in his body language as he had been to Bush and Musharraf and even accepted an indoor guard of honour, he also seemed willing to stand up for India. The Arunachal visit was a reality-check.
Now there is inflation ~ and one year left in the UPA’s term. What the country needs is tough sensible macroeconomics and clean public finance. A pandering profligate budget in February was not a healthy sign. Instructing Mr Ahluwalia to close down the Planning Commission and make it a minor R&D wing of the Finance Ministry would be instead a good step. Instructing the RBI to clean up its bureaucratic wastefulness and prepare itself for institutional independence from the Finance Ministry would be even better. Getting proper financial control over every Union and State government entity spending public money and resources would be most important of all. Such major institutional changes in the policy-making process are what an economist might expect of an economist prime minister who wishes to lead India in the 21st Century. India’s currency is at stake.
The writer is Contributing Editor, The Statesman

Naming cats and computers.

The naming of cats is a difficult business. So much so, that T.S Eliot wrote about it, in 'Old Possum's Book of Practical Cats'. For your edification and entertainment, the poem 'The naming of Cats' is appended below. With all due homage of Eliot.

The Naming of Cats is a difficult matter,
It isn't just one of your holiday games;
You may think at first I'm as mad as a hatter
When I tell you, a cat must have THREE DIFFERENT NAMES.
First of all, there's the name that the family use daily,
Such as Peter, Augustus, Alonzo or James,
Such as Victor or Jonathan, or George or Bill Bailey -
All of them sensible everyday names.
There are fancier names if you think they sound sweeter,
Some for the gentlemen, some for the dames:
Such as Plato, Admetus, Electra, Demeter -
But all of them sensible everyday names.
But I tell you, a cat needs a name that's particular,
A name that's peculiar, and more dignified,
Else how can he keep up his tail perpendicular,
Or spread out his whiskers, or cherish his pride?
Of names of this kind, I can give you a quorum,
Such as Munkustrap, Quaxo, or Coricopat,
Such as Bombalurina, or else Jellylorum -
Names that never belong to more than one cat.
But above and beyond there's still one name left over,
And that is the name that you never will guess;
The name that no human research can discover -
But THE CAT HIMSELF KNOWS, and will never confess.
When you notice a cat in profound meditation,
The reason, I tell you, is always the same:
His mind is engaged in a rapt contemplation
Of the thought, of the thought, of the thought of his name:
His ineffable effable
Effanineffable
Deep and inscrutable singular Name.

Having said that, it is to be noted that the naming of computers is also a difficult task. It is possible to get it wrong.. and although I consider myself fully rational (except on Thursdays), some sneaky part of my mind believes that Heaven knows no vengeance like a pissed off computer. Consider the following famous (fictional, well, maybe not all of them) computers:

1. HAL - "I'm sorry Dave, I'm afraid I can't do that". [subtext: 'die, puny human, as i bleed the atmosphere from this spaceship into vacuum and every cell in your body explodes from the pressure differential!!']
2. Hactar - "oh, so I created the Ultimate Weapon and didn't want to hand it over to the Silastic Armorfiends, so they pulverised me and I lived for 10 billion years as a sentient cloud of cosmic dust, so the only way I think I am going to redeem myself is by turning the inhabitants of beautiful Krikkit into the worst homicidal, sorry genocidal, sorry, galactocidal (i mean, those buggers want to toast the f-in Galaxy!) and get them to kill everyone. " [subtext: 'that actually makes sense']
3. Sleeper Service - "the Galaxy, and the Culture are depending on me to deal with this unimaginably powerful entity, the Excession, and here I am, obsessed with some random idiot woman." [subtext: 'complicated AI's can be highly OCD'].
4. Deep Blue - 'Is that Gary Kasparov? Haaaalp!!'
5. Multivac/Cosmic AC - "dS/dt < 0 . For the whole Universe." [subtext: '.. let there be light']
   

Ok, so you get the picture. if you do not name a computer right, chances are that it might go ape and do crazy shite and maybe destroy the very fabric of spacetime. No good. The thing is that our lab has recently acquired a new desktop. Now, we have a tradition of naming computers after musical terms (symphony, sonata.. ). And this time, we decided to do something different. So, the name I came up with is 'saha'. After this bloke. Which is a nice thing to do. Also quite easy to spell.

Gawd-dammit, I thought of this first!!!

I SWEAR that Nandi and I were talking about clean and cheap energy.. and THIS was exactly what we had come up with. How did they get into our heads and steal our ideas?

Oh shite!

The toilet wars! part of which are chronicled here!!

This is what gives modern art a bad name.

Yeah, so I believe I have already talked about my extremely underwhelming experience at the Andy Warhol museum when I visited Pittsburgh a few weeks ago. If I haven't here is the summary: most of the work, represented as 'pop' art was puerile and rather pointless. A lot of it was commercial (as is everything else, but let my cynicism not marr your happiness), and utterly trite. Most of the photographs presented were technically mediocre and artistically worthless. This is my opinion and if anyone is willing to make a valid case and prove me wrong: go for it. But I do stick to one basic argument: if a work of 'art' cannot stand by itself and needs an accompanying page of explanation in order to garner any appreciation, well, then it shouldn't be called art.

Incidentally, The Warhol also had sculptures by Ron Mueck. These were truly breathtaking. Mueck's work spanned a range from a 'self sculpture' of his sleeping face to a huge newborn baby. We also got to see a video of Mueck at work. Again, it was very obvious that there was nothing slapdash or irreverent about his work: every square inch of every one of works speaks volumes about perfectionism, both in thought and in application.

Now, let me talk for a moment about a movie called 'The Shape of Things'. This has Rachel Weisz playing an art student whose thesis is a person; or rather the deconstruction/reconstruction of a nerdy bloke with whom she carries on a relationship.

And finally, we now talk about the news article which provoked me to write this blog in the first place: the Yale Daily News carried this article about an arts major who impregnated herself artificially and then induced miscarriages. She proceeded to document this process and will now present this as an exhibit, which will feature videos of the forced misscarriages as well as blood from the process.

High art? Or crap? Who is to decide... the point, I believe is that society needs art as much as it needs construction workers: but there are lines of human conduct which should not be crossed. Not unless one is supremely confident that the results will be sufficiently compelling. And such confidence can only come from a supreme belief in one's own abilities to see further than one's peers. Unfortunately, all too many people, perhaps in the throes of a delayed adolescent rebellion against.. society, authority, an absent father, have taken it upon themselves to show us what art is and how the boundaries of sensibility should be redefined. Unfortunately, I find it difficult to believe that they have the necessary ability. Perhaps this disenchantment comes from having my feet too firmly planted on the ground and a very middle class, pedestrian sense of establishmentarism. Perhaps. Either ways, I believe that it is necessary to be exceptionally well at playing within the rules of the game, before you choose to break them. Being iconoclastic is easy: but measuring up to the canon in any field and being judged worthy, is I believe of greater import. This is why I am skeptical about modern art.

John Stewart is right!!

Ok, so why are we talking about this? It would appear that in American politics, being an 'elitist' carries horrible connotations and such a person can never lead the people. Why not? There seems to be an innate assumption that a person who is not 'one of the people' cannot lead them. Well, haven't you heard of the bell curve? Or of a Maxwellian distribution? On second thoughts, you probably haven't heard of the Maxwellian curve. To put it simply: the whole point of electing a leader is to find a person who is better than the rest of us and better suited to guiding the nation. That is a fact that seems to have escaped the political pundits in this country. Sad. Stewart is the ONLY person who has said that he would like a leader who is 'embarrasingly superior' to him. Surely that makes sense, doesn't it? Or maybe you would have just another git in the most important political office in the world making shitty decisions, or rather being manipulated into them.

Democracy is great, but leaders are not supposed to be ordinary! But I don't think that argument is going to pass muster with any number of bigoted, populist fools out there. Well, all I can say is that if you morons do not have the sense to elect decent leaders, you deserve the
shafting that you get!

Calvin? Calvin! CALVIN!!!! NOOOOOOOO!!!!!!

yeah.. see this...

Wheeler passed away yesterday.

John A Wheeler was one of the giants of theoretical physics. He pioneered the use of the S-matrix formalism, worked with Bohr and contributed to quantum gravity. Richard Feynman was his graduate student. The canonical text on GR: 'Gravitation' was co-authored by Misner, Thorne and Wheeler. Read this obituary here.

Why a baggage claim carousel is a metaphor for life itself.

Here are the points which I think justifies my claim:

1. It goes round and round.
2. You wait in eager anticipation for what is yours.
3. People will elbow you in the ribs to get closer to the carousel.
4. If you are a decent bloke, you will help the elderly, the frail and the infirm pick up theirs'. For your trouble, you might just miss your article as it swooshes past.
5. Someone else might sneak in and grab your bags.
6. Sometimes it looks like everyone else has got theirs' and you are still waiting in line.
7. When yours' finally turns up, it might be scuffed, dented, or just totally wrecked.

3.10

Once upon a time, a man called Sergio Leone took a man who spoke in a hoarse rusty whisper and made him the Man With No Name. The capitals must be pronounced. This was Eastwood at his finest in the Dollars trilogy. Except that there were greater things in store. The question to ask was: what happened to the man with no name? The answer was given by Eastwood himself in what was possibly one of the two greatest Westerns ever made: 'Unforgiven.' Here, the darkest side of what a man could become was the theme... violence fathers more violence... and those who have chosen to walk in shadows can never truly come into the light again.

Unlike the westerns made before.. including the epic 'Once upon a time in the West', Unforgiven shows that the cycle has no end.. that redemption is just another futile dream.

Now, after almost two decades, there is another western worth the name. '3.1o to Yuma' comes with two awesome names: Christian Bale and Russel Crowe, both of whom are truly awesome talents. The storyline is simple indeed: Crowe plays Ben Wade, a notorious outlaw who has been captured, and now his gang wants him back. Bale plays Evans a poor rancher who has joined the posse guarding Wade. The real surprise though is Ben Foster who plays Charlie Prince, one of the truly greatest villains to ever grace the screen.. perhaps right up there with Henry Fonda in 'Once upon a time in the West'. And that is saying a lot.

The Jonathans of this world

Jonathan Livingston Seagull was one of my early heroes. His creator, Richard Bach has remained one of my enduring touchstones of many things which must be done, but not easily.



Have you ever seen a seagull take to the air? He spreads his wings wide, does a quick hop, skip and jumps into the air. The seagull is unlike many other birds. Unlike the beautiful birds of prey, he does not circle far overhead in solitary wait. Again, unlike sparrows or pigeons, he does not find it within himself to consort with humans.



The loneliness of the seagull is a very special one. He may choose to skim the waves at dawn with a few friends, but come evening, he usually waits quietly for the waves to come in. And when they do, he flies off.. answering a call that we cannot hear. Perhaps, like Jonathan, he appears far away, at a place where mere wings cannot take you.

Lies in your living room

The pervasive influence of the advertising industry cannot be denied. That they can have a seriously deleterious effect on the ability of a kid to distinguish between a reliable source of information and something that is a lot of just nicely packaged lies is also obvious. But what is to be done, especially now that very few parents have the time to attend to their kids properly and use the TV as a parent/babysitter surrogate? This article talks about a parent who tried something different.. and it worked!

yeah, amongst other things

I was going to blog about our Pittsburgh trip over the weekend, but this caught my attenshun and I don't have too much time. Let me summarise this: Islamic law (Sharia) reportedly frowns upon interest gained from money in a bank account. So, Lloyds TSB provides 'Islamic banking' services which include zero interest savings accounts. The BBC reports here. For comparison, here is the webpage of the Islamic Bank of Britain. I just want Terry Pratchett to incorporate this into his next work. Something is fundamentally skewed with this turn of events. If I may make a suggestion, there are many people in the world who can use some largesse: why not directly send the income derived from capital belonging to our Muslim brethren who would wish to abide strictly by the 'no interest rule' to Muhammad Yunis' Gramin Bank?

Ewwww dirty UNIX!!!

why geeks love UNIX...


who | grep -i babe | talk; cd ~; touch; unzip; touch; strip; finger; mount; fsck; more; yes; unmount; make clean; sleep



also.. someone posted a random thread on reddit asking 'how many people randomly type ls into their terminals when they are bored?' The replies are here.. it is very strangely interesting to read them.. but I mainly found the following comment hilarious..

"I hate it when I'm not in vi.

It's such a nice place."