{ Monthly Archives }
I was recently browsing DSLR camera reviews, and observed that Digital Camera Resource site has an extremely helpful little section at the bottom of its reviews.
One applauds both the thoughtfulness (you don’t invest in something like a DSLR by reading just one review), and their self-confidence without which no site would directly link to their competitors. Kudos!
We’re proud today to bring you a story that confirms what our most loyal readers have long suspected - we have sources and connections at the highest levels. In our efforts to bring you the best fake but possible news, we decided to follow up on a rumour at the head honcho’s office - thats right folks, we’re talking about Heaven.
According to reliable sources, recent events on planet Earth have tested God’s patience with humanity. Particularly so the actions of a bunch of Nonsensical and Unprovable Theory Creators And Science Eradication Supporters (NUTCASES) who’re preaching to anyone who listens that God created every single organism on the planet in the blink of an eye through some process called “Intelligent Design”. Our well-informed readers, of course, know that God invented evolution to let species create themselves, which saved Him a considerable amount of work, not to mention gave him tens of millions of years of peaceful (human-free) existence - and He’s pretty proud of it. One can only imagine how the big chief must feel to have His intelligence insulted by an allegation of his supposed worshippers that the world and all its creatures were constructed as arbitrary doodles. This, combined with the actions of a class of people we call politicians (and the people who elect them) are causing a major rethink in upper circles as to whether free will should really be extended so far as to allow people to be so stupid.
To cut a long story short, God needed a break. And so He decided to get some invigorating fresh air, revitalizing exercise, and the satisfying pleasure anyone derives from thoroughly crushing an opponent. For reasons we can only guess at, a reliable source assures us that He chose to take over the form of Roger Federer during an Australian Open 2007 semi-final. Perhaps it was because there’s no other human who’s name is more synonymous with “Supreme Being”.
The demolition was clear enough for all to see. While to the average observer, Federer merely played the best game of his life, this tip from the top office makes it quite clear in retrospect that Roger was in fact divinely possessed. We all expected him to win, of course, but nobody expected the contest to be the equivalent of a Formula-1 race between Michael Schumacher and my grandmother. We’re pretty sure Andy Roddick is the number seven tennis player in the world holding a tennis racket, not a newborn babe with a fly-swatter. Careful analysis of the video tapes, we’re confident, will show that space-time (and other assorted dimensions) were being continually bent to the world number one’s advantage.
We came up with the obvious question - is Roger Federer aware of what went on during the match? He did refuse to talk about it much during the post-match talk and kept referring to his experience as “unreal”. The answer, leaked to us by the Department of Heavenland Security, was a categorical “no”. Apparently, the last time God revealed himself to someone about two thousand years ago, the chap insisted on trying to get everyone on earth to be nice to each other and told them what he had experienced. That led to the misled fellow being nailed to a cross among other unpleasantries, and divine revelation to humans has since been considered practically useless and rather bad form.
- FBPNN (the Fake But Possible News Network)
I use TiddlyWiki to maintain a journal about my daily research work. It serves very well because all the journal data is kept in a single html file, which is viewable on any platform using Firefox - hence it’s far easier to put in version control.
Anyhow, one thing was lacking - I wanted a blog-like (time-based) view when I opened my tiddlywiki file, for easy parsing of previous posts (usually, the previous day’s work). A kind soul had written a plugin for it (here) - but it unfortunately it doesn’t work with the current version. So I decided to see how rusty my Javascript was (very rusty, as it turns out), and after an hour or so of hair pulling, I finally fixed it to get what I believe is a working plugin. Grab it from here.
[Update 09-Jan-2008] Emmanuel has been kind enough to add restricted tag support, so you can, for example, only apply the blog-like behavior to entries that have a certain tag. Thanks!
From a recent article about the Shilpa Shetty issue in the UK:
British celebrity culture is tolerant: ethnic minorities and homosexuals feature prominently. And it is democratic: no discernible talent is needed to enter the aristocracy of celebrity.
If there’s better way of targeting both democracy and aristocracy in such a compact fashion, I don’t know it.
I recently read about the environmental artist couple Christo and Jeanne-Claude, who’s art mission seems to be to greatly change a landscape (usually through fabric) - for two weeks. After that, everything goes back to normal. Interesting projects include wrapping the German Parliament, the Pont Neuf bridge in Paris, and installing over 7,500 saffron fabric gates in Central Park, NY (picture above). They’re currently working on obtaining permission to cover 40 miles of the Arkansas River in Colorado with fabric.
Probably the most unique part of their work is the extremely short duration - usually millions of dollars are spent on constructing the fabric - and it’s all dismantled after two weeks or so.. despite requests for extension in some cases. Why? The answer, given in a National Geographic Magazine interview in the November 2006 issue, is thought-provoking:
Artists of the past have created works in bronze, in marble, in fresco, in oil, even with televisions… But there is one quality they have never used, and that is the quality of love and tenderness that we human beings have for what does not last. We have love and tenderness for childhood and for our own lives because we know they will not last. And so we wish our work of art to be once in a lifetime and never again.
Although I don’t know much about art, one way that art probably serves us is to make us think about things differently. I can well imagine that with changes on such a massive scale for such a short period of time - anyone who’s seen these works will never look at the landscape in the same way again.
Reproducing here my rather longish comment on this rant on LinuxDevCenter about there being so many Linux distributions.
I think you ignore the benefits of having the thousand and one linux distros around.
First, all of these distros are in the end attempts to do something _different_. Puppy Linux was one of the first ones to run completely from RAM, and for that reason it was blazingly fast. Try asking a Fedora or an OpenSUSE admin to include something like that. The mainstream distros are also slow on the uptake for a lot of new software - FC6 still doesn’t have Firefox 2.0 for example - and so there is choice for the users, which directly contributes to lack of frustration.
Second, a number of distributions are created and meant only for targeted and small groups of people, for example, programmers in Bioinformatics. There is great benefit in that, because a relatively new user to Linux can simply be told to install this; and his/her required software will run straight off it. Another classic example is Knopmyth for running a media-center out of a live CD.
Third, and somewhat related to the second, is that the burgeoning numbers of distros are directly indicative of choice and freedom of Linux. I have yet to meet someone who comes over to Linux because it looks good or even because it never crashes - a Windows hater can easily go to Mac OS X. What Mac OS X lacks, however, is complete freedom - what drivers you use, basic system principles (try putting your Users (/home) into another partition on OS X and you’ll find its quite tough - and may break with an OS update). People come to Linux in the long term because of software freedom - and nothing says freedom like “whatever you want to do - there’s probably a distro that does it”.
Fourth, and probably the most important - don’t you see that these distros mean there is so much of effort in the community to develop Linux? It’s infinitely easier to just join a project than start your own, yet people do it - which means Linux development is in good shape for the years to come. If only a few major distros - those supported by companies - are left at some point, I’ll seriously start to doubt the community’s interest and/or capability of maintaining Linux anymore.
From the latest Joy of Tech, this guy is totally me!
It’s just been announced minutes ago. Apple is no longer Apple Computer, Inc. but Apple, Inc.
I had a bad feeling about this. When a whole MacWorld goes by and you see no mention of a Mac, things looked that way. In fact I was composing a post in my head with the title “Wasn’t it Apple COMPUTER”?
I’m just wondering… will there be the usual “One more thing…”? If so, I hope my wish is granted!
One of the books that I’m really thankful I’ve read. Without doubt, a wonderful read for any Indian cricket fan. John Wright describes his whole stint as Indian coach; starting from his selection as coach to finish.
Few can argue that since John Wright, Indian cricket has improved in a number of ways - professionalism, fielding, team spirit and so on. One of the major contributions of Indian summers is exactly how this was done. Wright’s before and after descriptions of team training methods, activities and Indian cricket politics are quite startling. Equally insightful are his personal dealings with players, his perspective on the relationship between players themselves, and how they saw themselves at home and away.
Then, of course, there’s the cricket. Wright describes many of the series that the team went through and includes most of the important ones - Australia, the World Cup, Pakistan and so on. He makes the reader relive moments that have to be etched in the memory of any Indian cricket fan - from Laxman and Dravid’s brilliant stand at Calcutta to save the series, to Dravid’s declaration when Sachin was batting on 194 at Multan and so many others. Sometimes I think I’ll just love any book about Indian cricket because recalling those moments is always so poignant.
Also discussed are Wright’s impressions of India and Indians and many of these are heartwarming. I guess being an Indian I can’t help but feel happy and proud that a total stranger coming to my country can find it so endearing. The book includes a very nice collection of his own photographs, mostly of cricket, but some of his memories of India as well.
Rating - 4.5/5
Quite an interesting read about the history of physics. Falk starts from ancient Greeks who theorized that Earth was the center of the universe and everything was made from earth, air, fire and water and progresses to modern day theoretical physicists who talk in terms of string theory. Throughout the book, there is a common theme - how science at various stages tried to obtain a simplified theory of everything.
The book is an impressive mix of layman descriptions of physics, anecdotes about scientists and sharp observations. It isn’t a very deep explanation of any modern physical theories, however, which may or may not be what you’re looking for. Although it’s about some of the most complex physics studied by man, it’s actually a very light read that anyone with a spirit of enquiry and story will enjoy. Personally, I was hoping for a more intricate description of modern physics but I found that this isn’t the book for that, having been written more in the spirit of “A short history of nearly everything”, only limited to physics.
Rating: 3.5 / 5
