Fandom

When do admiration, affection, respect etc turn fanatic?

Check this:

how is babby formed - Wolfram|Alpha

via www53.wolframalpha.com on 5/29/09

And you will find this-

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Input interpretation:

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Result:

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Computed by Wolfram MathematicaDownload as: PDFLive Mathematica

You have to believe this, I felt happy for this bloomer by Wolfram Alpha. Because Google's competitor tripped.

In case you want to know the answer to my question, you are a fan when your idol's rival falls and you feel great.

Such is life.

Jonathan Lee Rices- The Most Litigious Man in the World;

When the Guinness Book of World Records decided to name Jonathan Lee Riches as the most litigious man, they should have anticipated how he would react to that.

He sued them- The Spokesman.

"He has sued President George W. Bush, entrepreneur Martha Stewart, entrepreneur Steve Jobs, Somali pirates, and pop star Britney Spears. He also sued the late Benazir Bhutto, Pervez Musharraf, and the Immigration and Naturalization Service on November 7, 2007, to prevent him from being deported to Pakistan upon his release from prison in March 2012 so that he will not be tortured."

- wikipedia

(Powers has also sued Plato, Nostradamus, Che Guevara, James Hoffa, "Various Buddhist Monks", the Lincoln Memorial, the Eiffel Tower, the USS Cole, the book Mein Kampf, the Garden of Eden, the Roman Empire, the Appalachian Trail, and the entire Three Mile Island.)

In his suit against Benazir Bhutto and Pervez Musharaff,

"Plaintiff seeks a temporary restraining order against Defendants Benazir Bhutto, Pervez Musharraf, Shaukat Aziz and the Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) to stop his extradition to Pakistan on March 2012 because he will be tortured. Plaintiff asserts that the case is one of mistaken identity and that Pakistan wants another Jonathan Lee Riches, who is an international fugitive and made nuclear weapons with Pakistan scientist A.D. Khan"

- news.justicia.com, where you will find a list of his suits.

Why Powers is suing is that "he objects to the names Guinness intends to call him, including: “The litigator crusader,” the “duke of lawsuits,” “Johnny Sue-nami,” “Sue-per-man” and the “Patrick Ewing of suing.”"

He thinks he has bragging rights:

"“I’ve filed so many lawsuits with my pen and right hand that I got arthritis in my fingers, numbness in my wrists, crooked fingers,” he wrote – by hand – in the latest filing. “I flush out more lawsuits than a sewer.”"

You would think someone who says that- more lawsuits than a sewer- might be silent about the values of his suits, to say the least. But, oh no, " “The Guinness Book of World Records have no right to publish my work, my legal masterpieces,” he says.

Powers is receiving treatment for mental problems, and is currently jailed at Federal Transfer Center (FTC) Oklahoma City for wire fraud .

Am I running a risk, posting this?

The pain of not-knowing

There is an excellent post by Daniel Gilbert at New York Times that discusses uncertainty and how it makes us unhappy-

• Who do you think will be more worried and unhappy- someone who knows he will get a shock every time the switch gets connected, or some one who knows it might happen or not?
• Who do you think will be more worried and unhappy- someone whose colostomy is final (colostomy is where stuff gets out of your abdomen through a tube) or someone whose is probably reversible?
• Who do you think will be more worried and unhappy- someone who has done genetic testing for Huntington's Disease and is sure he will get it (it means progressively worsening condition of uncontrolled movements, emotional instability, and loss of intellectual faculties till it is all over) or some one who does not know what his risk is?

Yes, uncertainty is what makes us miserable...

Daniel Gilbert is an excellent writer, and he makes this observation:

"...we can’t come to terms with circumstances whose terms we don’t yet know. An uncertain future leaves us stranded in an unhappy present with nothing to do but wait.,"

And at the beginning of the post I found this inspiring passage:

"Seventy-six years ago, Franklin Delano Roosevelt took to the inaugural dais and reminded a nation that its recent troubles "concern, thank God, only material things." In the midst of the Depression, he urged Americans to remember that "happiness lies not in the mere possession of money" and to recognize "the falsity of material wealth as the standard of success."

""The only thing we have to fear," he claimed, "is fear itself.""

Ringing words.

The post is about American economy and how people who, though better off, are more unhappy than the Americans who lived a hundred years ago. He puts it down to this existing climate of uncertainty. As Roosevelt said, "The only thing we have to fear is fear itself".

Life is not misery

"Ban Ki-moon, the United Nations Secretary General, came face-to-with the despair of Tamil civilians in Sri Lanka when he visited refugee camps in the north-east of the country.," reports Telegraph 

Ban Ki-moon is reported to have said, "I'm very moved after what I have seen...I've seen so many wounded."

See this picture, see the spirit that lives despite the suffering, see the hands stretched out, and the faces lit up- this is what is moving- not the suffering, but the spirit that looks forward, that has enough poise to rise above its concerns and bask in the glory of a momentary triviality; see how alert it is to hold charisma in its hands: this moment of contact with greatness might be passing, but the certainty, the hope that one will live and be in a frame of mind to recall and cherish, "I shook hands with the UN Secretary-General,"- this is Life.

Not our earnestness, not our sense of the tragic or the welling of compassion or anger or outrage that are generated by thought and emotion, but the spontaneous rise of the will to contact- this is it.

This is what helps man pass through all suffering and come out smiling into a bright day..

Hope such a happy day breaks for all the people of Sri Lanka.

Brain controlling flies and zombie ants

This is a must-watch video:



I got this from wikio

Thanks to Paul Hamaker at Examiner.com , I found this at National Geographic:

Fire ants are widely hated, because they bite people's feet, kill infant birds, short out electrical units, and outcompete native ant species.

But as punishing as fire ants can be, they've got serious competition in parasitic phorid flies.

Plentiful in fire ants' South American home ranges, phorid fly females inject their eggs into the fire ants.

The egg develops into a maggot, which appears to control the ant's behavior. The maggot "directs" the ant to a moist, leafy place—phorid larvae are vulnerable to drying out—a safe distance from other fire ants.

The larva then eats the ant's brains, causes the ant's head to fall off, then finally "hatches" from the ant's hollowed-out head about 40 days later.

"Not only is it decapitating it, but it turns the ant into a zombie," said Sanford Porter, a research entomologist with the U.S. Department of Agriculture's Agricultural Research Service.

More videos are there at US Department of Agriculture- videos that show a hatched phorid fly coming out of a fire-ant's head and fire-ants fighting phorid flies. Check them.

Devastating, really.

The equitable distribution of power

I was returning home with my father, he was talking about the shenanigans of DMK with its knife neck-deep in Congress back, and turning, when a man in a motorbike happened to see the liquor shop and veered to his right, coming straight at me and threatening to put my knee out of business when the brain-wave hit me. I don't know why it happened just then, but it did.

This could change the way we do politics.

DMK has a formula, and Congress has a formula and no one is agreeing with anyone.

Now could there be a formula that every party could adopt?

Yes, there is, give me a Nobel.

What I suggest is that all the parties in the ruling coaliton should count the budgetary expenditure and revenues of each and every ministry, and share the ministries equitably and proportionate with the bench strength at the Parliament.

And after that, it is every man for himself.

The Duck Man

See him catch them ducklings...






Great to see that people can take time off to do things like this.

The Voice of Mickey Mouse is Dead

The Hollywood Reporter has the news that,

"Wayne Allwine, who provided the voice of Mickey Mouse for the past 32 years, died May 18 at UCLA Medical Center in Los Angeles from complications due to diabetes. He was 62.

"Allwine's wife, Russi Taylor, who provides the voice of Minnie Mouse, was at his side at the time of his passing."

Much as we like Mickey Mouse, we are not likely to mourn the death of his voice, Wayne Allwine, skin-bound that we are. But it is a bit ofa whimsical fact, but hardly surprising, that his wife gave voice to Minnie Mouse (One imagines that playfully or wickedly, the duo shared some intimate moments in their animated voices... That would have been fun).

But as I said, this is hardly the kind of news that makes us sit up and note that a world has come to end. Only, looking around for a description of the much loved voice of Mickey Mouse, I found this observation by David English of Somerville, Mass., at The New York Times: 

"Mickey Mouse's helium-tinny voice may not have weathered the years as durably as Donald Duck's larynx-scrambled squawk, but I'd rather listen to Mickey reading ''The Waste Land'' in its entirety than sit through 10 minutes of the televised caperings of a certain magenta reptile."

Mickey Mouse rendering "The Waste Land", that would be something. If Mickey could do opera, why not poetry? Disney could have had a shot at it, I feel.

By the way, may Wayne Allwine's soul rest in peace- we are not heartless, despite all appearance to the contrary.

The Coconut Crab

Life is diverse, we know that, but even with all our assumptions, some things do surprise us because we could never imagine them to be so.

The Coconut Crab inhabits the Indo-pacific islands, and can grow upto 40 cm and can weigh as much as 4 kg, so it is big, in fact, the biggest Crab in the world, I think.

What it does is, it likes Coconuts. It comes out at night, climbs up the Coconut tree, and as Holger Rumpf observes,

"The animal has developed a special technique to do so: if the coconut is still covered with husk, it will use its claws to rip off strips, always starting from the side with the three germination pores, the group of three small circles found on the outside of the coconut. Once the pores are visible, the crab will bang its pincers on one of them until they break. Afterwards, it will turn around and use the smaller pincers on its other legs to pull out the white flesh of the coconut. Using their strong claws, larger individuals can even break the hard coconut into smaller pieces for easier consumption."

If you have ever tried to husk a coconut, as I have tried and always failed, you will appreciate what an amazing feat this is.

Here is a video of the Coconut Crab husking a Coconut (I couldn't see it do that, may be I am not really sharp, but apparently it does- you can see  it take out the edible part of ithe coconut- YouTube 

Listen to whatever your wife says...

The Times of India   reports that  Supreme Court justices Markandeya Katju and Deepak Verma in a divorce case  observed:

"Bibi joh boltee hai woh sunno (listen to whatever your wife says), as otherwise it could land you in trouble. Because if you do not listen to her, you will suffer the consequences."

"Hum sab bhogi hai (we are all sufferers)," the bench said in a lighter vein.

The bench further said that a husband has to accept the suggestion of a wife irrespective of the fact whether it is sensible or not.

"If your wife asks you to put your face that side, put it that side. If she says, put it this side, then put it this side. Otherwise you will face trouble. Hum sub bhogi hai," the bench remarked again. 

The case itself seems tragic enough, even without sexist humour such as this. I don't have anything against the learned judges, but surely when someone wants divorce saying that his wife has falsely charged him with habits of sodomy and is willing to pay Rs.10 lakh to get out of wedlock, humour such as this is more like turning a butterfly on a wheel or something like that?

There is an anguished voice that responds to this, and I found it in the blog,  Stop Legal Terrorism :

In this country even a animal have right to get Justice, Protection, well fare but not for Indian Husbands. Supreme court of India opnely said the hard reality, Indian Husbands are Just Like a "Free ATM Machine".

And then the blogger asks,

We wonder Whose life is in More Danger in India: Men or Women?

1. Crime Bureau data 2005: Married Men Suicide : 52k vs Married Women Suicide 28K.Still there is no LAW to Protect Men why?

2. 2006 Crime Bureau Data: Married Men Suicide: 55452 vs. Married Women Suicide:29869.

3. 2007 Crime Bureau Data : Married Men Suicide: 57593 vs. Married Women Suicide:30064.

Now, if I were someone younger, taking these statistics together with the remarks of the judges, I certainly will not want to take the fateful step of getting married, and I would feel justified to fear the awful act and its terrible consequences: "Hum sab bhogi hai (we are all sufferers)", as honourable judges rightly observed.

But for some of you, it need not be so.

Don't get married.

Police Brutality

By rights this post should go into Awaken Arjuna, but since this is election day here, and I am concerned about who we vote for, and what kind of government we want, I post it here- no one looks into Awaken Arjuna as far as I know.

This is to do with a blog by Peter Foster at Telegraph.co.uk: "China vs India: where would you rather be arrested?"

This is the question he asks,

"If it were possible to complete a free and fair survey of the citizens of India and China, asking a representative sample who had a better experience of daily interaction with their respective police forces, whose would come out on top?"

It is not hard to see which way he would answer:

• He quotes a report that states that on average, four people died every day in police custody between the years 2002-2007.
  
• He cites the fact that India didn't sign the UN's Convention Against Torture until 1997 (China did that in 1988) and to date has not ratified it (China did that in 1988).
  
• India has not invited the UN's Special Rapporteur since 1993. Pakistan, Nepal, China and Sri Lanka have all done that.
  
• India ranks 85th in corruption, China is better off at 72.
  

Foster also notes the daily incidents of police corruption at the traffic signals, and the almost daily airing of police brutality in public places.

I agree with Foster that we are complacent about our superiority over the Chinese when it comes to freedom, and this post should wake us to reality.

I don't know whether we are better or worse than the Chinese, but we are bad enough for our people. I am sure of that.

The Revenge of the Pirates

You might have heard of the sentence imposed on Pirate Bay. And that its founder has resolved not to pay a single SEK of the 30 million SEK he is saddled with.

Now there is news that he is not only not going to pay, but he is planning to make the prosecutors pay for winning their case.

His plan is simple. Danowsky's law firm, which represented the  music companies is a small one, and has its account with a bank, that levies generous surcharges on transactions.

The scheme of Gottfrid Svartholm, the founder of Pirate Bay- "Because Sharing is Caring," as Blog Pirate has it- is to ask internet users around the world to pay extremely small amounts of around 1 SEK (0.13 USD).

What this will do is,

• Since the bank offers its customers just 1000 free transfers, and will levy a surchange of 2 SEK on them for every transaction above that, for each 1 SEK it gets, it loses 1 SEK.
  
• Danowsky's law firm is a small one that handles all transactions by hand- so you can guess how it will process 30 million banking transactions with its meagre staff.
  
• And then the beauty of the scheme is that in accordance with Swedish law, if you think that you paid some erraneous payment, you can ask it back. Think what it will do to the law firm.
  

I am doubtful about the ethics of this, but it sure is devilish.

Blog Pirate  calls this DDo$ attack.

Bangalored

This is outsourcing with a difference, I found to my shock at  Economic Times:

A French textile firm has ordered nine of its workers should move to a factory at Bangalore or face termination.

The average salary they get in France is 1321 Euros and at Bangalore, where they will have to work six days a week, they will get 69 Euros per month plus one month pay as bonus every year. There are health benefits, of course.

The textile firm is doing this not because they like Bangalore, but because according to French regulations, a business has to offer its employees the choice of another job before terimating them.

Francois Mores, the boss of the firm at Castres, finds these rules "stupid".

But what he is doing, it is not so stupid.

Tendulkar or T.A.Sekhar- who will live longer?

"The more test matches a cricketer plays, the longer he is likely to live", reports Science Daily. 

This is the conclusion of the analysis of  the length of the lifespan of 418 test match cricketers, who played for England, and who were born between 1827 and 1941.  Sixty nine were alive at the time of the study. People who had played more tests lived longer than others, the study surprisingly concludes. Whether anyone had more money or belonged to a higher socio-economic class had no effect, it seems.

I was amazed, and googled more and found the blog, "Stumbling and Mumbling", a blog by Chris Dillow  -An extremist not a fanatic- where I found this is as it should be.

It seems that Nobel prize winners live longer than people who were nominated but not given the award, and Oscar-winning actors live longer than those who were also nominated but had never won. By the same logic, cricketers who play more tests should live longer than people who were dropped as not good enough. Which is what the study finds true.

There is one fact that contradicts  this theory that success makes you live longer- screenwriters who had won Oscar die sooner than people who were mere nominees.

Let's not go into the why and what of all this,  because one feels one is not qualified to do that- but a comment at Stumbling and Mumbling made me laugh.

It was by  Igor Belanov, and he posted,  "If that's correct then most England cricketers from the late 80's, early 90's should be dead by now."

I think he is referring to the 1980's and 1990's.  Good thinking.

Makes me think: here in India, our batsmen are safe, it is the 'quick' bowlers that face an early death.  Hope some compassion can be shown to Munaf Patel, Irfan Pathan, R.P.Singh, Sreesanth and so on. It is not just a career- it could actually be an extension of five years of life.

Dating Tricks- Gift your girlfriend a cat (but keep away from it)

Taxoplasma Gondii is a cat parasite that has infected about half of us, and it makes us do things we won't be doing otherwise. I was shocked when I read this piece in the ABC :

It reports that Kevin Lafferty  has put forth a provocative theory that says the cat virus can change human cultures on a massive scale. When infected with it through association with cats, women change and get to be warm, outgoing and attentive to others, while infected men tend to be less intelligent and probably a bit boring. But both men and women who are infected are more prone to feeling guilty and insecure.  

That is not something to worry,  may be if you are a man, you have to do something about this, because when I googled some more, I found this demoralising story at The Esquire  which says that Toxoplasma gondii gives the female libido a noticeable boost. T. gondii has the opposite effect on men, decreasing their IQs and making them more jealous,  more morose and less attractive to women.

(I learnt there that 85 percent of people in France are infected- may be which is why Madame Bovary did what she did.  Esquire says this could be the reason French women are so sensual and may be this is why the French are terrible drivers (Infected persons are 2.6 percent more likely to get in a traffic accident.).)

In addition to all this, Toxoplasma gondi could be the cause of schizophrenia in adults and  hyperactivity and lower IQs in children.

T Gondii is really a sinister monster- It changes the personality of a rat so much that it gets killed more easily-  a rat which eats the cat feces infected with the parasite eggs is itself  infected. And then the rat becomes more adventurous and foolhardy- cats find it easy to find them. Cat eats the rat, and the parasite completes its life cycle.

There are other instances of parasites influencing host behaviour- Natural News 

• Rabies virus increases salivation, and makes its hosts aggressive and more likely to bite- it spreads through saliva.
• The malaria parasite plasmodium initially makes the infected mosquito cautious and less likely to bite- so that it has time to breed; and later, it makes the mosquito bite more and hard- so that it has a chance to get more hosts.
• Trematodes that infect brackish water crustaceans change the way they escape so that it gets eaten- they are eaten by birds, and the parasite spreads to other hosts through the bird's droppings.
• Grasshoppers that are infected with the hairworm parasite fling themselves into the water to their deaths, because the hairworm can only reproduce in water (You can all about it here- discarded lies-  "The parasitic Nematomorph hairworm (Spinochordodes tellinii) develops inside land-dwelling grasshoppers and crickets until the time comes for the worm to transform into an aquatic adult. Somehow mature hairworms brainwash their hosts into behaving in way they never usually would – causing them to seek out and plunge into water.  Once in the water the mature hairworms – which are three to four times longer that their hosts when extended – emerge and swim away to find a mate, leaving their host dead or dying in the water.")

All this is terrible, and it makes me wonder why should Toxoplasma gondi make women happy, social and sensual, and men dull, anti-social and morose... What advantage does it give the cats, and indirectly, the parasite? May be it finds women catty and so want to take men out of the equation?

Whatever. But it is a good idea that if you are a man and your girl keeps away from you, well, bring a cat in, but don't let it get near you.

I wonder what other parasites help us decide what we should do.

Check it out

http://www.flixxy.com/wildlife-film-cougar-bear.htm

Life Is Good

Bush is one of my favorite people, I think it is to do with the fact that he is so human. Despite, or more accurately, because of his failings. There is nothing pretentious about him, even his pretence advertises its presence. Bush is not devious, can never be- his deviousness comes out open. And he never tries to come across as an intellectual, we understand that he can never be. He has a way with words, but they have no spin- he is like Anil Kumble on a roll, it is his straighter ones  that hit the stump.

His gaffes have a certain charm- remember his 'authoritarian voice'?- and an aura of truth. Bush is  a prankster who wants people to spot his pranks.  I think he will be terribly disappointed if people do not laugh at him, and he is, in my eyes, seriously sad that they are not laughing with him. Bush is not someone who belongs anywhere. He has his own voice, and his own way. All he asks is, "Notice me. I am not much, but I am good at what I do."

In Vanity Fair, I find that post-Presidency, 

Bush confessed that on his first day home, "...he kicked back on the couch and hollered, “Baby, free at last!” To which Laura responded, “‘Yeah, you’re free to take out the trash. Consider it your new domestic policy agenda.’”

And 

"Onstage in Calgary, Bush played up his winning down-to-earthness with a story about taking a trip to his local hardware store, where the owner, Kyle Walters, offered him a job as a “greeter.” (“He’d be lucky to get a job as a casino greeter,” opines Bill Maher.)

“And a guy in there says to me, ‘Hey, did anybody ever tell you you look like George W. Bush?’” Bush said. “And I said, ‘Yeah, man, happens all the time.’ And the guy says, ‘Oh, that must make you mad!’”"

And then, 

"“I’m the only former president to have both parents alive,” Bush told his audience in Calgary. “I said to my mother, ‘Mother! I can’t wait to get back to the way we used to be!’ And she said, ‘Is this gonna be like when you were young?’ And she immediately checked herself into the hospital for open-heart surgery.”

The article in Vanity Fair discusses what the legacy of Bush would be: what his post-presidency life would be: would he take a leaf out of the pages of his predecessors- 

"Hayes, for example, worked tirelessly to provide education for free blacks; Hoover devoted himself to food relief worldwide; and Nixon made the miraculous morph from “crook” to, in biographer Stephen Ambrose’s words, a “senior statesman above the fray.”"

I don't think any of that would suit Bush. He is great at role-playing, and brings a certain perceptive intelligence into the deployment of language, he wants to be liked, he asks to be laughed at- he would do great as an actor. 

Should he do that, his legacy as an actor would obliterate the history of his presidency.

But I don't think he is worrying about all that. He is not insane with it. Vanity Fair notes  that,

"...Bush told the crowd in Calgary, “Life is good.” He said he feels no regret for any of the decisions he made as president: “If you’re a leader, you have to have principles that are inviolate, and make tough calls.”"

Life is good, yes, if you can say that at the end of your days, whether you succeeded in anything you did or failed in everything you tried your hands at, your life is a worthy one- as good as any.

TIME Pic

 TIME

Extraordinary pic:

Falling for Fun...

I remembered this poem by Sid, now happily unpoetic:

I was enjoying my drive to work this morning

And i saw two men shamelessly peeing

Not by the road-side, neither on the pavement, nor suvar,

But on the ramp of our newly constructed Kathipara flyover!

* (suvar: tamil word for wall)

The reason why I remembered this has to do with this news I found:

"Man Falls Urinating Off Highway 77 Bridge" @  wcco.com

The man was drunk, he wanted to pee, and when his friend let him out of the car he peed and for fun, pretended to fall off, and, for real, fell off.