All the Top Ten Lists- Links at One Place

'Phinney Podium' by Velo Steve via Flickr
Image is licenced under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike licence

Check this place if you are bored- and have time to kill: Fimoculous.com

Is there anything like this that is about India?

Krishnashtakam- YouTube Video

Long time since I made a post here- so here's a YouTube Video:



via krishna.1441.org

An unfortunate occurrence in the early night...

At about eleven pm yesterday, we heard, thought we heard, noises of doors being broken down in the flat above us. We naturally assumed there was no one inside.

So, inspired by "Inglourious Basterds", we armed ourselves with an iron rod, locked the door of the abovementioned flat from outside, and rang the calling bell. To our disappointment and unspeakable embarrassment, it was our neighbour who opened the door, after properly identifying himself to the satisfaction of our belligerent queries.

No doubt we will do our best to forget this unfortunate occurrence as early as possible, but in the meantime, we console ourselves with the thought that in one of those many universes, we would have come face to face with a burglar and with a well-directed swing, taken the lid off his head, splattering the door red and white with the blood and brains of the evil man.

Image Credit: 'Bortusk Criminal Swag' by bixentro via Flickr Image is licenced under a Creative Commons Attribution licence; via Sprixi

How to take revenge on your girl friend...

Whatever you do, at least get the address right.

"An east Georgia man trying to get revenge on his estranged girlfriend by firebombing her home is being held without bond after he threw the device into the wrong house, police say."

via msnbc

How to wish Happy Christmas-

Image credit to Michael Cho

via The Daily What

Don't forget to give credit where it is due.

HAPPY CHRISTMAS!

Ukrainian Astrology

Can you guess which sign this is?

Via English Russia.

We liked Pisces, but we think it is too salacious to be shared in this blog. Reproducing it here would have expressed our taste publicly, which we feel is better served by drawing a veil over.

How to meditate (Inspiration from Gombe Baboons)

You must read this:

"“Without any signal perceptible to me, each baboon sat at the edge of a pool on one of the many smooth rocks that lined the edges of the stream. They sat alone or in small clusters, completely quiet, gazing at the water. Even the perpetually noisy juveniles fell into silent contemplation. I joined them. Half an hour later, again with no perceptible signal, they resumed their journey in what felt like an almost sacramental procession. I was stunned by this mysterious expression of what I have come to think of as baboon sangha.”"

Primatologist Barbara Smuts quoted at Shambala SunSpace

How to liven up your Gmail inbox

Get our posts delivered to your email account.

For, a post we made- the one on Ducks, brought this advertisement in the sidebar:

Waterproof Vibrating Duck
A vibrating rubber duck means you can be dirty as you get clean
www.RubYourDuckie.com

How to make money doing nothing (don't delete every spam mail)

I feel sorry now that I deleted every offer of free money that landed up in my inbox.



via Digital Information

How to escape pregnancy (helps only if you are a duck)

'Couple' by wili_hybrid via Flickr
Image is licenced under a Creative Commons Attribution licence


Secrets of duck sex revealed: It's all screwed up:

"Female ducks have evolved an intriguing way to avoid becoming impregnated by undesirable but aggressive males endowed with large corkscrew-shaped penises: vaginas with clockwise spirals that thwart oppositely spiraled males."

How to enjoy total freedom (cycle without clothes) and escape imprisonment

Wear a helmet.

via BBC

"Two young men caught cycling with no clothes on have escaped charges of offensive behaviour, but received a warning to wear protective headgear.

"Local policewoman Cathy Duder was unfazed when she came across the two nude men, both in their early 20s.

""They were more shocked than I was, trying to cover up their bits and pieces with their hands," she said."

#@*$! - Profanation!

Reading our previous post, the one previous to that in fact, the one that is titled, ""Inglourious Basterds"- I enjoyed the film, but I hate to think about it," we at this blog are embarrassed by the stiltedness of language.

Because it reminds us of Sunil Gavaskar's commentary.

When we get angry, we pretentious high-brows lapse into polysyllables.

Sorry.

How to add images to your blog post with a single click

 

'namaste' by pulihora via Flickr
Image is licenced under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivs licence

It took me about two minutes to find and add the photo you see here, thanks to Sprixi, a site I came to know of through Make Use of.com. And I had nothing to do with the text you see underneath, it came with the photo!

All you need do is search for a picture, select one, and then copy the link and paste it in your blog. The credit for the photo etc are automatically generated.

Should be useful if you are a blogger and want to add colour to your posts, right?

"Inglourious Basterds"- I enjoyed the film, but I hate to think about it.

I saw the film "Inglourious Basterds", and first off, I will cite some reactions.

photo via wsj.com

Richard Bernstein:

"“Holocaust movies always have Jews as victims,” Mr. Tarantino said to Mr. Goldberg of The Atlantic, explaining his motivation. “I want to see something different. Let’s see Germans that are scared of Jews” and “take the fun of action-movie cinema and apply it to this situation.”

"Sure, let’s make the Holocaust fun."

Praise for the villain- Colonel Hans Landa ( Christoph Waltz):

"Aided in no small measure by Quentin Tarantino’s brilliant script, the actor, unknown in the U.S. until now, creates one of the cinema’s most sinister and unforgettable villains–right up there with Dracula and Darth Vader." - Elephant Journal

Roger Ebert has this film in his list of best films in 2009: he too is all praise for the villain-

"Waltz won best actor at Cannes 2009, has swept the critic's awards, is a shoo-in as best supporting actor."

Hunter Baker at The Touchstone Magazine writes,

"Inglourious Basterds is a cultural low point. It is the revenge fantasy of a poorly educated and completely unreflective thirteen year old. It is a jerky exercise in crudely manipulating the feelings of the audience in order to give them an excuse to hate the bad guys enough to want them brutally and cruelly dispatched."

Daniel Mendelsohn has this to say,

""Facts can be so misleading," Hans Landa, the evil SS man, murmurs at one point in Inglourious Basterds. Perhaps, but fantasies are even more misleading. To indulge them at the expense of the truth of history would be the most inglorious bastardization of all."

And finally, here at "The New Yorker" is this scathing comment by David Denby-

"...But, in “Basterds,” Tarantino is mucking about with a tragic moment of history. Chaplin and Lubitsch played with Nazis, too, but they worked as farceurs, using comedy to warn of catastrophe; they didn’t carve up Nazis using horror-film flourishes. Tarantino’s hyper-violent narrative reveals merely that he still daydreams like a teen-ager."

---

I was deeply disturbed by the film, and much more by the praise it has received-

Imagine this film being made here in Tamil, where Vijaykant goes on a mission to take out the Nazis- songs, comedy and then, the stunst- where our Captain plays football with about a hundred Nazi soldiers, if not more, bites the spray of machine-gun spewed bullets, rolls them around in his motormouth, chews them out, and at last collars Hitler, delivers a long sermon on Ahimsa at the unrepentant Hitler, who in a desparate lunge at the gun, trips and falls on a grenade which blows him to pieces- and then, finally, to cut an unending story short, titles roll, as Captain walks towards us in slow motion, to the tune of a song which goes, "Don't take on the Indians- we are a non-violent people, born in the soil of Buddha, Gandhi, Anna and Aiya Periyar, but if people like Hitler mess with with us, then India will unleash a volcanic violent lava that will bathe the Nazis in a river of blood".

Nauseous? Yes, that kind of fun-film. Total nonsense, fantasy immune to the calls of reality. Or taste.

Imagine a closed theatre/ stadium set on fire, and you see fumes everywhere, and people screaming to get out but are killed by machine gun wielding soldiers... What does this remind you of in a film with Nazis? The gas? Right. The thousands of people locked in crematoriums and gassed to death. In this film, the Nazis get a taste of it.

And then there is this brilliant dialogue where our hero wants the Nazis to keep the uniform. He doesn't like them hiding inside their own human skins. May be I am reading too much into this, but what this means is that there is no ambiguity where evil is concerned. Evil people are evil, and good people are good- no matter that their actions seem similar. What is important is the side you are in, the uniform you wear. And when you catch an evil man, you have to mark him.

Kill a nazi, and when he is dead, scalp him for good measure (this dismemberment of corpses, I found repugnant). And, if for some reason, you have to let the bad man go living, you have to mark him with a swatiska-scar on his forehead to make sure the world knows here is an evil man: And the good men, they don't shoot people for disobeying orders, they just give a 'chewing up'.

And then the good folk, they can walk all over the world bombing people to pieces, no moral questions asked: all you need is a label that marks a person/ group as evil.

The more I think of it, the more the title "Inglourious Basterds" looks self-reflexive.

It is a slick film, enjoyable if you like pointless bloodletting, great acting, good picturisation and all that- but ultimately its seduction- the nonsensical posturing of Jews avenging the Nazis- is a fatuous glorification of violence: a cartoonish view of history, and a tempting justification for our lazy morality- where good and evil are diametrically opposite and your goodness is guaranteed by the extent of confidence in your cause, the outrageous faith in your overwhelming, unsullied righteousness.

I am sorry, I enjoyed watching this film, but I hate to think what it tells about me- and people like me who like the action.

Any reactions?

How to: use many IM platforms simulatenously

This sounds like an amazing resource:

Nimbuzz:

"Nimbuzz is a free service that allows its users to access several instant messaging platforms simultaneously, make free calls to some internet voice services (Skype, GTalk, MSN), make conference calls, send messages, and much more. Nimbuzz is available as web based chat service, and as downloadable clients for mobile, Windows and Mac.
Simply put, you just need to register with Nimbuzz, set all of your IM accounts once, and access all of them anytime, anywhere and from any platform or device using only your Nimbuzz account."

via makeuseof.com

Does this make sense to you?

via FAIL Blog

How to: remove ... (hey! What do you want to remove, eh?)

We are happy to note that we posted this on 4.12 this year.

Because now I find that makeuseof.com has gone one step further and compared what we are searching to remove with what the world is searching to remove- The headline at makeuseof.com is "Google Reveals The Cause Of India’s Population Growth (PIC)"- so you can guess what we were searching (but I don't know why we were googling it- is it some kind of mystery?)

Shame. We are not merely horny, but no-brainy.

HowTo: Dress for a Kill

Take your pick, but not baggy pants. No, never.

"A career criminal who slaughtered three members of a family in their apartment in New York's trendy Upper West Side Thursday plunged to his death after tripping over his baggy pants. The bloodshed began when the killer barged into the family's third floor apartment and opened fire..."

via myfoxdc.com

Learn Atomic Physics from Cute Pets

YouTube - Pets Teach Science: 16 golden retrievers explain atoms

Blogs of the Year

Continuing with the blogs I liked to read this year, there are two blogs of the Jewish faith that I found quite informative:

The first is "Beyond Religion by Rabbi Rami". I found this blog through the Twitter activity of Rabbi Rami, where he indulges in contrarian tweets:

• “Let the things you desire flow through you.” Just don’t desire anything with sharp edges.
• “When seeking guidance, consult your inner silence.” It doesn’t say anything, but it’s cheaper than consulting a therapist
• “The things you give away come back to you ten-fold.” No wonder your life is so cluttered.
• "There is no stress in the world; only people thinking they are stressed." The same is true of starvation.
• “Giving thanks for what you have is Step One in overcoming poverty.” Step Two is getting a job. If pressed for time, skip Step One."

No wonder I decided to follow his blog.

But his blog is more sombre- the last five posts being,

• on surviving climate change
• who is entitled to be buried in a Jewish cemetry (identity)
• what is good (how do you define it?)
• religious plurality (syncretism: the salad variety)
• what is Judaism? ('my religion is love'- I liked this post immensely)

Rabbi Rami writes with the consciousness of a man in tune with his times, his finger on the pulse of breaking news, and I think he is way ahead of us: may be in twenty years time, other people of his faith would accept his position, I don't know, but the truth is, I like what he writes.

---

Now, if you want to meditate in a different light,"Dover Emet: Speaking the Truth"is the place to go to. Rabbi Gin Steinlauf is nothing like Rabbi Rami- quite the opposite- but I think they both embody the spirit of what it means to be truly religious. Rabbi Rami is conversational, embraces all faiths, talks about obama and climate change; Rabbi Gin Steinlauf confines himself to the texts of Judaism, but his words speak out to us, shines with the light of wisdom.

His last five posts are:

• on Chanukah- " The act of finding that light works an even greater miracle: if you can find that light, however dim, then it ceases to be the faintest point of light, it instantly transforms itself to the fullness of light within our souls once again."
• on being a member of the Synagogue: "...synagogue membership is an act of faith in the power of community to transform the world."
• on prayer: " God is here, in my mind, my intellect, my highest thoughts of prayer, yes. But God is also down here, baMakom hazeh, in this place, down here in the most vulnerable places in my heart. God trembles in core of my being together with me as I fear the unknown."
• on eternity: " Stop there, says the Sfat Emet, and the power of all these words, of all the Torah becomes clear: What God commands upon us is ‘HaYom,’ Today! In other words, what God on high commands us to do is to be Present to what’s happening HaYom, today!" (This post, we should take note of- to be religious is to be present in the here and now!)
• On Chesed: "Both Avraham and the Baal Shem Tov’s parents teach us the same lesson: If you go through life thinking that you love God, but simultaneously you fear the stranger, then you really don’t know what it means to have a real relationship with God in the first place! In Ultimate Truth, the only way you can enter into a real relationship with the Divine is by entering into a relationship with the stranger"

---

As you can see, these two are both remarkable blogs, and I feel it is a blessing to be able to read them- especially that of Rabbi Gin Steinlauf.

The Science of Terrorism

Who would have thought that even terrorism is governed by hidden natural laws?

Read all about it at Slashdot:-

Insurgent Attacks Follow Mathematical Pattern:

"By plotting the distribution of the frequency and size of events, the team found that insurgent wars follow an approximate power law, in which the frequency of attacks decreases with increasing attack size to the power of 2.5. This means that for any insurgent war, an attack with 10 casualties is 316 times more likely to occur than one with 100 casualties (316 is 10 to the power of 2.5)."

More on the love life of bed bugs

There was a post here sometime back about the vicious love life of seed beetles and the more vicious bed-bugs, and here is an update on the activity of the most vicious animal of all- man.

Man has gone to his lab and discovered a pheramone that makes these poor male bed-bugs to mount each other and stab them to death. In the inimitable plain words of Cory Doctorow-

"A pheromone discovered by a Swedish researcher can cause male bedbugs to kill each other with their penises through uncontrolled shagging."

-Boing Boing.

Apparently all you need to do is get a powder and throw it around your bed to craze these vile creatures to go on a killing rampage.

Are taboos a way of winning freedom- looks like yes, they are.

More about "The Logic of Life" by Tim Harford.

Tim Harford writes about Thomas Schelling, who won the Nobel Prize for Economics in 2005, and his approach to Cold War- he was instrumental in forming the Cold War strategy:-

"His argument was that 'bright lines, slippery slopes and well-defined boundaries' were everything in this debate. In the quest to avoid a full-blown nuclear exchange only one focal point should be emphasises: that nuclear weapons could never be used. There was no such thing as a 'minor' use of nuclear weapons any more than one could become slightly pregnant. The taboo was purely psychological, invisible to a mathematician like Von Neumann, but real and very useful".

It looks like taboos have their use- for Schelling seems to suggest, Hartford discusses this elsewhere, our internal conflicts are a kind of cold war, where our selves battle it out for control. Schelling fought his smoking habit, and won it, using this kind of 'bright lines, slippery slopes and well-defined boundaries' strategy.

What he seems to suggest that you should form a taboo- "I won't smoke before breakfast", "I won't brush my teeth before writing at least hundred words", and so on. When you do that, chances are that you can succeed in doing that.

I am making this post mainly because I thought that taboos were all superstitious, and we should be free to act as the situation demands- any sort of psychological restraint is a denial of freedom. But people who have formed habits, and can't quit their addictive activities are not free- and taboos might be a way to break their chains.

What do you think of this- people who want to do something but can't do it- are they not free, and as such, their idea of freedom is a false one- and if it works, is it right to use taboos?

Before setting yourself a focal point or a taboo or whatever in the quest of changing your habits, dear cold war warrior, please take a look at this post in the blog: Mathematics under the Microscope

Top Ten Blogs (I liked) this year.

The year is about to end- and I've started to find top ten lists everywhere. And being a blog it would be remiss of us if we were to demur from recommending our top ten! ;)

First off, three blogs that gave me immense enjoyment. They are clever, imaginative, unpredictable and easy on the eye, being short and crisp. Truth is, I anticipate their next posts. That good.

Futility Closet calls itself as
"An idler's miscellany- of compendious amusements". I think the implication is that we are the idlers who come to be amused- it is obvious that Greg Ross is anything but idle.

The last five posts being: an acrostic of the name of the man who killed Henry IV (and its meaning), A quote of Abraham Lincoln on God's dilemma, a poem that shows you the importance of punctuation; two owls meaningfully hooting to one other and the meaning of this word- accismus. You get the idea that it is literary, but no- it is much more than that.

There is nothing to write about Indexed.. May be I should draw "posts" in X-axis and "happiness" in Y-axis and draw a diagonal across it.

Hmmm... 4-Block World is similar to Indexed. You get a taste of the variety of world penned within these four quadrants.

Do check these blogs- you're likely to appreciate them.

Hijacking the Drones

The most important news and commentary to read right now. - The Slatest - Slate Magazine

"The remotely piloted aircraft has become a key weapon in the fights in Afghanistan and Iraq. It costs millions of dollars apiece, and with the help of cheap software, insurgents can intercept the live video feeds from the drones. Using software programs such as Skygrabber, which costs $26 and copies are widely available for free online, insurgents can exploit a security hole in the system to get a look at exactly what U.S. personnel are seeing. Most of the hacking discoveries have been in Iraq, but officials have found evidence that it is going on in Afghanistan as well."

How about that!

What has Maoism to do with Taliban (and WalMart)?

Please take a look at this sensible article, "Comparing Pakistan's Islamists to India's Maoists" at FaithWorld, where Faisal Devji at Guardian is quoted :

"Both the Islamists and the Maoists have aimed to take control of parts of the country, using violence to keep out the writ of state. In this respect, argued Faisal Devji in an article in Britain's left-leaning Guardian newspaper, insurgencies behave more like private companies which operate independently of the state.

"Pakistan's Muslim militants are developing into the analogues of Maoist rebels in India, who also take over certain areas and attack government forces there to provide an alternative but non-governmental form of order. Managing territories within a state without apparently wanting to form a new government suggests a privatised and non-political ideal of governance, one that both Indian Maoists and Pakistani militants seem to espouse. The task before both governments is therefore not to de-politicize but rather bring these groups into the political arena..." he wrote."

Games we play- what we do to get what we want.

I am reading the book, "The Logic of Life" by Tim Hartford. I think it is about how everyone of us is rational in what we do (though our rationality has its limits), and how we this rationality is involved in our everyday strategies.

Reading the book, and in particular, about game-theory, I got to thinking about me and my brother while I was taking a bath.

What we used to do, when someone gave us something to share between us, I would tell my brother to take what he wanted. He would refuse to do that, asking me to have the first choice instead. We were not doing this out of love, of course. We knew that whoever made the first choice, would take a smaller part of it so that our choice wouldn't be seen as selfish.

You might ask what is wrong in dividing it equitably- as all rivals and lovers know, equitable distribution is an impossible ideal. You might divide something perfectly- but still, unless you measure it- it is impossible to be sure: fairness is not something that catches your eye, or overcomes prejudice on its own power.

Obviously, this won't work with two people who are competitive. Everyone has hidden motives, and has selfish objectives. It is in the way that you go about it that makes a relationship look harmonious or fraught with ill-will.

It is true that the one who ends up having to take the first choice will nurture some resentment- and it did happen.

But the point is, we got along.

The same pattern holds true even now- I go for a tea with my friend in the evening. We order one tea and share it between us. It is an everyday ritual between us that I ask him to divide it up, and then he asks me to do that- but whoever does it makes sure that the other person gets more of it. And then, the person who got more, gives some of it away, saying, "I don't want as much."

So we both win. First I give him more of the tea, ensuring that he sees me as a fair person. And then he gives me some of it, ensuring that I see him as a fair person.

This might look artificial, and as if we lack a common understanding about what kind of people we are- but then, we are that kind of people- it comes natural to us.

But there are some downsides to this: what happens when I interact with someone competitive? I don't have too many people of that kind as my friends, so you know- I don't have a relationship with them.

This is not right, I know. Competitive people are as good as compromising people like me, and compromising people are as bad as the competitive people: we all have wants and needs, it is just that our strategies are different. If I could, I would love to be competitive, but I can't, right now. I don't know how to. It is not easy.

There is a friend in my office with severe cervical spondilitis. I do about seventy-five percent of his work, he does not even acknowledge that- in fact he calls me a slouch!. He is good at his work, it is just that his ailment is so severe right now, so I try to help him out of the present crisis in his work-life. But the point is, I could get competitive with him, and then he might praise me or whatever, but the atmosphere won't be the same.

So what happens with me and aggressive people is that either I either go their way, or I cut them off.

So, that's it. This is about me, right? My strategies to get my hidden goals- "It is alright to look foolish, but don't be a fool".

I think this kind of strategy, without being virtuous, is more effective in most instances. In a family I know,  there are five brothers fighting over a property. They each want to make sure that the other does not get a larger share (even though it would at most be Rupees one lakh),- so I get to hear interesting conversions everyday about this interminable problem.

All our Icons

Tiger Woods:

And an idle question after reading this,

"Woods's appeal was based, ultimately, not on his physical abilities but on his mental toughness, his extraordinary capacity for focus and discipline... In other words, Woods has been presented as the embodiment of bourgeois virtues: dedication, hard work, single-mindedness. Indeed, when, in 2008, Woods won the U.S. Open while essentially playing on one leg, the Times' David Brooks devoted a column to his extraordinary ability to block out distraction and focus on the matter at hand, dubbing him 'the exemplar of mental discipline' for our time. For millions of people--many of them, to be sure, affluent middle-aged white guys--Woods embodied an approach not just to golf but to life."-

What about Sachin Tendulkar?

If you are outraged at my question, then I suppose I can come back at you, saying you are suffering from something called fundamental attribution error (FAE).

That is what this article at The Frontal Cortex, where I found all this, says.

Do you think it is true we do this?:-

"Simply put, the FAE occurs when people overestimate the importance of supposedly 'fundamental' personality traits and underestimate the importance of variables like context."

For, do you think all our idols are infallible, and are without any of the weakness of the sort that bugged Tiger? Or, just any other flaw- not the minor kind, but really major.

A model blog

Apropos my last post, about the blog being the focus of your web-life, here is a model blog: Ben Casnocha- A blog about entrepreneurship, books, current affairs and intellectual life.

More about the reasons you should blog...

Balajhi here has made a great post about Prof Samuelson- it is short, to the point- and above all, it is interesting and informative.

I know Balajhi as someone who is passionate about economics, finance and management- this is an area in which he has working experience, and obviously, he has much to say about it.

So, to take a test case- because I can't do this 'about-blogging' business in the abstract - I will take Balajhi (hope he does not bristle at this) and discuss how it makes sense for him to make a blog - or two, or more- the focus of his presence on the web.

---

Most of us use the web to make queries, book tickets, send a mail or two- we all do that, and I don't think we need to blog about it, though we can, and we should if we think we have something useful / entertaining to say.

For example, I can make a blog of this:

"Are you a blogger? : There is this great search engine that gives you information that is useful to you: Check out this blog search I made for TCWJ at Icerocket"

"I had to help out my son with his math homework. As you probably know, I am a total idiot with that. However there is this Search Engine Wolfram Alpha that lets you cheat him into believing you are some kind of genius- take a look at a math solution I found: 100 * 1000 equals what "

I am sure you'll agree these things are worth blogging about.

But we don't. We bookmark these sites, or make them as favorites, and that's it.

I don't know why it should stay that way. What's wrong if you make a blog of it and share it with your friends?

When you make a blog of this- remember: you are creating a bookmark in your blog, plus share it.

That is the point of it: a blog is a place where you save and share interesting and informative things.

It might be pictures, videos, or a link to a e-book. Whatever.

Just make a habit of blogging about that. Simple, and useful. If Balajhi creates a management blog, and shares the ideas out of his head, and the info/ interesting stuff he found on the net, at one stroke- he has a bookmarking site, and also a place from which he can talk to and talk with like-minded people.

What this does is, a community of sort accrues around the blog.

I think this is enough for now.

---

Just two things.

If you are blogging at Blogger, it is useful to have the Blog This bookmarklet on your browser- you can find it here at Blogger Help. Or better still, make use of the Google Toolbar- with Firefox or otherwise. Information on how you can share from the Google Toolbar is here at The Official Google Blog.

Hope to continue with this.

But though, some kind of feedback would help.

Respect views; you can be humble

I was reading the article 'Paul Samuelson: The Maverick Professor with three faces' in Economic times.

------

For his PhD students, as with any other friend he liked, Prof Samuelson was extremely generous and suffered idiocy with full kindness. I recall once handing him something I had written for comment and he ruefully said he was going to the Virgin Islands on vacation. I replied I would happily wait for his return. The following morning, his secretary called anxiously to say Prof Samuelson had dictated a page of remarks over the long-distance line from the Virgin Islands as he had read my stuff in the plane.

The only time I saw him angry was when a young economist wrote a caustic comment on his latest published paper and the editor of the journal sent it to Prof Samuelson for his response. Prof Samuelson asked me to examine the note.

I returned the next day upset myself that the tone of the paper was rude. “I am not asking for politeness,” he growled, “Is his point valid?”

I thought so, I stammered. “OK, go, and never forget one thing,” he said, “If the older always knew better, the monkey would be the wisest man.”

------

Humble side of a towering personality, coming out in curt manner.

Everyone should be blogging- the need for a personal/ professional blog

This is going to be a rambling post- when was I ever a focused one!

Anyway, I think I started out on the web a year back or sometime earlier. Having read some blogs, I wanted to do that, naturally. But then, if I start again, I will do some things differently.

One of that will be- I won't join a group blog. Don't mistake me, if I am not writing here, no one would read me, I am grateful to you, but when you do a group blog, you are writing with others in mind, anxious to keep in sync.

As I said in an earlier post, a blog should be the focus of your activity on the web. And when you do a group blog, it takes some time to focus properly.

---

What do I mean when I say that your blog should be the focus of your web-life?

For one thing, to state the obvious, it is a fantastic bookmarking tool.

All you need to do is, make some note when you come across something interesting, and then link it and post it your blog- giving it proper label/ tag.

When I say something, it doesn't mean any old thing. Any blog needs to have a focus, a central thread, and the problem is to find it. Unless you have it, which is to say, unless you find your voice, you will come across all confused and send out contradictory messages- people won't come back to see your posts.

In blogging, as in everything else, you need to raise some expectations, and fulfil them eighty percent of the time, at least.

I am not saying that you should try to be popular, and write the sort of content that you know will bring visitors to your blog (an easy way to do is to watch the trends, or do a blog search, and post whatever everyone is posting. But that gets dull after a time- you lose your soul, if you thought you had one, that is).

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Now, whoever you are, you have some expertise, some special knowledge in something, or you are interested in something. Start out from there- keep yourself confined to this- at least eighty percent of the time.

This is what I mean when I say you need to keep the blog the centre of your activity. Focus. It is easy to fritter away time and energy in useless discussion, and useless sharing of content- I know, I've done both. But when you decide that there is a particular area of interest, and you are going to collect information, and organise it, make sense of it and communicate it to whoever is interested in that- it re-energises your life, your activity outside blogging.

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I am not being specific, but then, as I said, this is the first post of a series of my thoughts on blogging. So let's take this as an introduction.


For a start, I will put it this way: your blog is a place to which you should bring in material relating to an area in which you are active, or about which you feel you should talk. Things happen that make you want to speak out.

Every one of us is a social creature, and we constantly share our feelings and concerns with whoever happens to be around us. It is not that we can't blog- we don't happen to see its place in our world.

And what could it be?

Any one of you have anything to add to this?

Avatar- Scriptment

Here's a interesting link: Avatar.

I didn't know what a scriptment is: it is "...a written work by a movie or television screenwriter that combines elements of a script and treatment, especially the dialogue elements, which are formatted the same as in a screenplay. It is a more elaborate document than a standard draft treatment. A lengthy scriptment may resemble a script sufficiently to be used as the basis for qualifying the writer to receive or share a screenplay credit, as opposed to just a story credit. Some films have been shot using only a scriptment..." - Wikipedia.

And the Scriptment of Avatar is here:

More on Avatar- here

Official Google Blog: Share any web page from your Toolbar (and more)

Official Google Blog: Share any web page from your Toolbar (and more)

This makes sharing (through mail and over the social networks)- and of course, blogging easier, enjoyable.

Thanks, Google.

This is such a great feature- I just sent some bookmarklets and gadgets to the bin. Sorry, folks.

This is so easy, just a click or two and you are done with.

Brilliant.

Wasabi.Netvibes.com

I'll write more about this later, but Netvibes is my preferred supplement for Google Reader.

Here is my public page: Four Corners in a Hole. This is not by way of show off, but just a hint of what is possible- no doubt, you'll do better than me.

Hope you join in and make your page public.

On Blogging

I was thinking of making a series of posts on what it is to live a life on the net- not twenty four hours a day, but the time we spend here.

Now, it could be twenty minutes or six hours a day, but whatever you do, it leaves a mark, and whether you recognise it or not, a kind of identity accrues around the stuff you throw around on the net.

So, I was thinking that- and thinking why it is better that you make your blog the centre of your web-activity, rather than a social network like facebook or a group such as one at yahoo or one of those forums like in reddit.

And I wanted to write why everyone must have a blog, and how they can do it better than what I've been doing...

I was thinking these thoughts because a friend of mine has acquired broadband, and would soon be airing his stuff- I wanted to speak to him from my experience, and here come three posts, which I would like you to read:

Because they speak about blogging in a better way than I ever could:

Two Years and a Note to the Writers

Wehr in the World.

And then, read of his happiness: Year one stats.

Hopefully I will share my ideas about this soon.

The Magic Bullet

It seems that all Asians descended from Indians (whatever that means!)- so:-

I am sorry, I can't find the link on the net, but in the print edition of The New Indian Express, Chennai edition, page 7, Samir Brahmachari, the Director General of CSIR is quoted as saying,

"Any drug which is clinically tested in India would work anywhere in the world. And a drug which has been rejected at any part of the world would work in India".

How about that!

Duality is the cause of terror...

Is this a good or bad omen?

“I am a follower of Advaita, I believe the main problem which generates terror is duality,” said Justice Kapadia, who has Theoretical Physics listed as one of his hobbies.
Touching on the concept of terror, he said, “if a religion is based on concepts like fear, greed, heaven, hell – all these fears will eventually be exploited by certain entities or persons. And finally this will lead to terror acts.”"- VisionMp.com

Justice Kapadia is set to become the Chief Justice of our Supreme Court next year.Looks like we are in for some interesting times.

Does Brahma care about the crop of Pouter Pigeon?

I am reading a book called, "Evolution- Selected Letters of Charles Darwin 1860 to 1870", and even at the first few pages, I am amazed by the modesty of Darwin's measured tone:

He writes,

• "Pray accept my sincere thanks for your kind note. Your going some way with me gives me great confidence that I am not very wrong. For a very long time I halted half-way; but I do not believe that any enquiring mind will rest half-way".
• "I am surprised considering how ignorant we are on very many points, that more weak parts in my Book have not as yet been pointed out to me. No doubt many will be..."
• "you would, if you had had my leisure done the work just as well, perhaps better, than I have done it..."

In case we are tempted to compare Darwin's tone in contrast to that of incendiary Dawkins':- Darwin writes,

"Do you consider that the successive variations in size of the crop of the Pouter Pigeon, which man has accumulated to please his caprice, have been due to "the creative & sustaining powers of Brahma". In the sense that an omnipotent & omniscient Deity must order & know everything, this must be admitted; yet in honest truth I can hardly admit it. It seems preposterous that a maker of Universes should care about the crop of a Pigeon solely to please men's silly fancies"

"Pakistan : terror hub, Jharkhand : naxal hub , Telangana :?????"

Sentiments are running high on Telangana: I think our Union Government proved once again what cowards we are when it comes to governance in the face of terror, but still, I think it is a move in the right direction.

But people don't like it, carving up small states, they liken it to secession!- and find quite original and creative reasons to resist it: look at this tweet for sampler:

RT @tejaswithota: Partitions never succeded pakistan : terror hub, jharkhand : naxal hub , telangana :????? via @tinucherian

 That is a good one.

But I welcome this for two reasons, mainly:

1. It is better to have smaller states- let's accept it- smaller states will show more equitable development than larger ones.

2. More importantly, smaller states are a slap in the face of linguistic chauvinism.



 Let's see how it goes, but I am hopeful.

Google Real-time Search

is on.

Just click this link Tiger Woods and watch news stream in.

Hypnotic, to say the least.

What we need is a RT button there!

Brilliant.

Google Goes Real-Time

You can get news as it breaks via Google Search, reports, Mashable. It will take some days for this feature to come to our Google search, but till then,

"...all users can see it now via a 'Hot Topics' feature that's been added to Google Trends. Click on any trend, then click a 'Hot Topic,' and you'll see the new 'Latest Results' area of Google search results."

"...live tweets, Yahoo Answers, news articles and Web pages..." - everything is at your call.

The First Words of Einstein

are "Die Suppe ist zu heiss." (The soup is too hot.).

Little Einstein hadn't spoken a word before that, and when his parents asked him why, little Einstein answered, ""Bisher war Alles in Ordnung." (Until now everything was in order.)"

I would have more faith in this legend if this had been Dirac (of course, he wasn't German), but still, this goes to show what a legend Einstein is.

via Languagehat.

Feet Speak of Love

Note to the romantically inclined:

"Here's the key to look out for: if a woman moves her feet away from her body while laughing and takes a more open-legged stance, it means she is attracted to you. On the flip side, if the woman has her feet tucked or crossed under her body, then you?re going to go down in flames."

via Just A Guy Thing

A Change

If you look over at the blog list you will find a blog called We Belong. Yes, it is our sister-blog hosted by Wordpress.

Balajhi here told me last month that I've become a mere news aggregator. I think he is right, and I am trying to do this better.

What will happen is that, all the links kind of posts that I make here is outsourced to that sister-blog. It is a twitter-like microblog, and all the posts go over to Twitter too. You will see those tweets right here in the sidebar.

Hope this works well for some time to come.

What is missing here are the links I like and want to share on mind, brain and consciousness, and also, religion and spirituality.

They are right now to be found in the Delicious account 1ness, a link roll of which is there in the sidebar, right underneath Twitter.

What this means is that I intend to post some other stuff here, let us see if it is possible.

As time goes, I find that I can't do much more than clicking and sharing things.

Hope something different comes out.

Odd Balls

Mark Davies added to Test squad | Cricket News | South Africa v England 2009/10 | Cricinfo.com:

"Davies, 29, has been based in South Africa with the England Performance Squad, and starred last week with four wickets on the opening day of their nine-wicket victory against Gauteng in Pretoria, before sitting out the remainder of Gauteng's innings when his bowling boots were cleared away by groundstaff during a shower."

(italics mine)

Videos

I've got some time to kill- so sorry, I think I should present you with a set of youtube videos I liked. Shall it be five or ten?

Hmmm... It is easy.

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Ahhh...

Bragging Rights

It is not often that we get a chance to brag about how right we were in predicting the future, but here is the chance of a lifetime:

Breitbart.com reports- Opening of world's tallest tower marks end of Dubai era:

"Next month's opening of the Burj Dubai tower, the world's tallest building, will bring Dubai's era of exuberant expansion to a juddering halt as hundreds of other building projects are already mothballed..."

We wrote up a post on 7.10.2008 that anticipated exactly such an eventuality: Due for a collapse?


(Image Credit: Wikimedia Commons)

Google Trends: India

Google Trends: India

I am surprised that this ranks No.40 in Google Hot Trends as of now, but why?

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