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.
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 from the first grade itself. Apparently the Saudis did a high-profile cleanup of their textbooks to purge content that taught hatred of “unbelievers”, but according to textbooks smuggled out of the country, the books remain just as intolerant as before. Sample the progression of hatred from the from the first grade to the twelfth.
FIRST GRADE
” Every religion other than Islam is false.”“Fill in the blanks with the appropriate words (Islam, hellfire): Every religion other than ______________ is false. Whoever dies outside of Islam enters ____________.”
TWELFTH GRADE
“Jihad in the path of God — which consists of battling against unbelief, oppression, injustice, and those who perpetrate it — is the summit of Islam. This religion arose through jihad and through jihad was its banner raised high. It is one of the noblest acts, which brings one closer to God, and one of the most magnificent acts of obedience to God.”
If this is what the five million students enrolled in the Saudi public schools learn, it is they who need a shot at democracy and free thinking, not their neighbor to the north.
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]
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 capture all of that into a couple of hours of film (remember THHGTTG?)
“‘Nothing really works. It’s not suspenseful. It’s not romantic. It’s certainly not fun,’ said Stephen Schaefer of the Boston Herald. ‘It seems like you’re in there forever. And you’re conscious of how hard everybody’s working to try to make sense of something that basically perhaps is unfilmable.’ [Reuters]
If all else fails, you can always fall back on the porn parody to entertain you.. in this case, The Da Vinci Load! It’s a pity that the creativity that goes into the names of pornos never shows up in the actual movie itself, but this one might be an exception:
Operatives of the Priory of S__en, including pen__e profiler Dr. Nadia Saint (Missy Monroe) discover that Leonardo Da Vinci painted the Mona Lisa using his own sp__m. Determined to resurrect Da Vinci and overjoyed that the master’s sp__m was not all �lost up a man’s a__�, they steal the painting and kill anyone who gets in their way.
[Unsanitized version here - NSFW]
Since the Da Vinci Code is a potential downer, it doesn’t feel so bad to know that it might be banned in parts of the world thanks to the zealous protectors of religion who feel so threatened by it.
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 bytes, however large. So, if the program was illegal to possess, it would automatically mean that this number (the numeric representation of the bytes that constitute the program) would be illegal to possess (and distribute) too.
How do you get around that? Well, if the number in question had a well known mathematical property, you could publish that number, not as the numeric representation of an illegal program, but as a number with an interesting property. For example, prime numbers (numbers whose only divisors are the number itself and 1) are regularly generated and collected because of their very interesting properties and applications. What if the ‘illegal’ number mentioned earlier was a prime? You could just publish it as an interesting prime number of a certain length and possibly evade the law that prevents you from publishing the original program. This is the concept of ‘illegal primes‘ and there are interesting ways of creating prime numbers which could be converted to a binary representation of a program, whether or not the original numeric representation of the program was a prime number or not. Legal or not, it’s definitely a creative application of mathematics to skirt around the law.
Links:
– The first illegal prime number
– The first executable prime number
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 hands down in the number of searches for ‘naked’.
Other interesting searches: love / hate | education / sports | books / movies..
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. Maybe they make wigs out of those, I thought..
Today I chanced upon this link (via SM) that claims that the reducing agent used in baking is L-cysteine which comes from.. human hair, among other sources.
The source of L-Cysteine is human hair, chicken feathers, cow horn, petroleum by-products and synthetic material. It was reported by a food company that a Rabbi refused to Kosher certify L-cysteine from human hair obtained from a temple in India where hairs are cut because of religious rituals.
Holy cow! That temple just has to be Tirupathi! I guess my hair must have found its’ way out of the country before I did. Wonder where this L-cysteine is used..
L-Cystein is used in Bagels, Croissants, Hard Rolls, Cake Donuts (from human hair in Dunkin Donuts cake donuts only, Yeast raised donuts do not contain L-Cysteine), Pita Bread, some Crackers and Melba Toast. It is also used as a nutrient in baby milk formula and dietary supplements.
Enjoy your bagels folks!