May 24 06
Ben Cohen, co-founder of Ben & Jerry’s ice cream, explains the trouble with the US federal budget using Oreo cookies. Even if you don’t give a sparrow’s fart about politics, finance or the budget, it is worth a watch to understand where our taxpayer money goes.
May 22 06
I would have put this story down as a rant if it did not come from a newspaper like the Washington Post. Assuming that they maintain certain journalistic standards, i.e. the passages are not cooked up, it paints a very scary picture of the Saudi nation where intolerance of other religions is bred into kids [...]
May 18 06
Trolling Google Videos for hidden nuggets is my favorite pasttime, and look what I just found – Two great videos of the UC Berkeley Raas team performing. Raas if you didn’t know, is a very energetic North Indian social dance that includes Garbha and Dandiya. [Video 1] [Video 2]
May 17 06
It looks like the Da Vinci Code might actually turn out to be a disappointment. If so, I would hardly be surprised, since the pleasure of reading the book was not because it was a thriller (which it hardly was), but because of all the details (however fake) it contained. It is very hard to [...]
May 13 06
Can a number be illegal? Strangely enough, the answer may be Yes. Consider a software program that is illegal due to some law. Now, a program is just a collection of bytes, right? A series of 0s and 1s on your computer. Every byte has a numeric representation too, and so does every set of [...]
May 12 06
Is it any surprise that the most searches for ‘sex’ on Google originate in some of the most sexually frustrated parts of the world? The funny part is that there is a good bit of regional rivalry going on – Pakistan leads the world in the number of searches for ‘sex’, but India beats it [...]
May 7 06
Back when I was 13, I made a trip to Tirupati where I and my brother shaved our heads (very reluctantly, upon my parents’ insistence). Upon seeing the mountains of hair inside that very large hall where thousands of devotees would ‘donate’ their hair to the deity, I wondered what happened to all that hair. [...]