l33t for dummies

Here's a parents' primer to computer slang from Microsoft to help protect kids from dangers of the online kind. If nothing else works you can always try a contract to enforce family rules. Well, I suggest an EULA since a) It will not be read and b) It can hide all kinds of rules. (Did you know that the ACDSee EULA prohibits using the image viewer for viewing any pornographic images?)

[Elsewhere: How to make a Windows XP installation CD for unattended installation]

Tags: microsoft, kids, online gaming, eula

Math remixed

Math.com has a great site that demonstrates fractals, lissajous figures, spirographs and other mathematical curiosities such as chaos (umm, I did my thesis on chaos.) and mazes. There are also some great links in there for the curious-minded. Don't forget to check out the wonderful game of life!

Tags: math, science

Democracy and ending poverty

The NYT has an editorial on the United Nations proposal to halve poverty by 2015:

The strongest, and probably most legitimate, critique of approaches that flood poor countries with money is that many of these poor countries are run by corrupt governments that will stash most of the donor money in private Swiss bank accounts. That has certainly proved true in the past, particularly in Africa, where the poor have stayed poor while a succession of despots have run country after country into the ground. But it is counterproductive to make poor people suffer because they have bad governments.

R.J. Rummel makes a fine point on his blog about how democracy can help tackle these issues:

There are tons of websites devoted to famine, hunger, and trying to help the starving around the world. Yet, not one of these good people devoted to this great cause realize that there is a solution to famine at hand, which is practical and much desired in itself. What is this miracle? Democracy. No democracy has ever had a famine.

Why are democracies immune to this greatest of all disasters. Three fundamental reasons. One is that democracies have a free or semi-free agricultural market that usually produces more than enough food and is resilient in the face of local shortages. Two is that democracies have a free press that almost immediately communicates nationally, and especially to elected legislators and administration leaders, dangerous agricultural conditions in one part of the country or another. And three is that these politicians better do something about it, since their political future depends on the rapidity and success of their response.

[via azpnj > dean's world]

Tags: poverty, united nations, democracy, politics

Plants are just like us.. just slower

I am a vegetarian whenever possible (which I admit, is a very weird form of vegetarianism) i.e., I am totally vegetarian when I am at my parents' place, but I can eat anything else when I am elsewhere. (If it doesn't bite you back, eat it!) Well, plants are no different from animals - they are alive too, they just don't move as much. Or talk. I don't know if any plant can make sounds, but they definitely move just like us animals. Only a lot slower. Come to think of it, there are animals that move slower than these plants!

Tags: vegetarian, plants

Mouth to Speech

The Mouthesizer tracks the shapes made by the mouth and uses it to control a music synthesizer. It's an interesting idea to segment the region between the lips and to use the width and height of the segmented region to control the characteristics of the generated sound. If lip movements can be mapped to actual human speech, this could be used by visually impaired people to generate speech from the lip movements of people in front of them.. (the opposite of this)

Tags: mouthesizer, speech, image processing, science, signal processing

Much Ado..

Much has been said about the case of Saurabh Singh - an ingenious scammer and wannabe NASA scientist. While the whole episode has been hilarious in the way an entire nation, including politicians, reporters, editors and ordinary people fell for the scam, it also showed how India is so starved of real life heroes that a report about a possible child prodigy throws it into a frenzy of adulation and self-congratulation. (not to mention the opportunists who crawl out of the woodwork to claim credit and share some of the limelight). There are so many other people who truly are heroes due to their selfless deeds in a nation where recognition is hard to come by, unless you have done well in a phoren country. I guess Saurabh Singh knows how the Indian mind works - if you top the IIT-Entrance exams, you will be talked about for a few days, but mention that you have topped an exam conducted by NASA (a foreign institution with sufficient brand recognition) and you will be a national hero! Folks, we hardly need to show off - our real achievements are much more impressive!

Tags: news, india, media, journalism

The boy who topped NASA but didn't..

On February 17th, Rediff along with many other Indian news agencies reported that a 17 year old boy from Uttar Pradesh, Saurabh Singh had topped the NASA International Scientist Discovery exam. I thought it was interesting and checked Google News for other related reports, but it seemed that only Indian news agencies were reporting it. Pretty strange for an exam of supposedly high repute. Not even the main Google search engine had anything to say about this exam. Nevertheless, the story kept getting bigger and bigger with newspapers reporting that the Indian president had taken the exam in 1960 and 'finished seventh' while astronaut Kalpana Chawla had 'stood 21st in 1988'.

Ah, it keeps getting curioser and curioser. One newspaper, the Indian Express (check facts? real journalists don't check no facts!) even wrote about the tough exams that he passed. "He scored a mere A+ for Electronics and he is furious with himself". His school announced a scholarship - the Saurabh Singh scholarship for Rs. 40,000. The UP Legislative Assembly decided to 'honor him' and declared that every member would donate a day's salary to him.

Every bubble of bullshit has to break due to its own pressure. The enterprising reporter who contacted NASA for further information must have really shocked the folks out there. Of course, NASA doesn't have any such exam, nor did Abdul Kalam or Kalpana Chawla take those fictitious exams. (The Indian Express reported that the President had 'expressed a desire to meet him' - Well, Kalpana Chawla being dead cannot dispute the story, but did someone really get that news from the office fo the President who must have surely remembered that he had never taken such an exam? This must be a new high in news reporting). The whole story would have been ridiculously hilarious, if not for the fact that it shows (sadly) how easily the media and with it, an entire nation can be manipulated!

UPDATE: Google News shows that the scam has been outed all over.

Tags: news, reporting, scam, fake news

A Flickr for videos

Vimeo lets you upload your video clips, and tag them just the way you do with pictures on Flickr. The interface is simple and the clips download snappily. So let's share some video clips! The site is in closed beta, but when it opens up, it should be a nice way to put video clips on blogs too. (I have a few funny ones lying around, but I need life insurance before I post them online)

Tags: vimeo, flickr, movies, clips, share

"The pleasure and pain of 'Dand'"

I don't know which is funnier: The corny title by Indiatimes, or the image gallery itself for this movie that shows girls with pouts that would put any porn actress to shame. Enjoy this one guys, the movie won't be half as funny..

Tags: funny, humor, bollywood, movies

Selective pricing - what's the logic?

On tuesday I sat down with my friend Vivek to e-file his tax return. We used one of the IRS recommended websites - ezTaxReturn.com and found something befuddling - My windows machine showed the e-filing price as $29.95 while his OSX browser Safari showed $19.95. Firefox on his machine showed yet another price - $34.95! (Vivek has the screenshots) What does your browser say?

Tags: e-file, taxes, tax return, humor, weird

The streetlamp orator

One rainy afternoon in Scottsdale, AZ. [gallery]

The tipping dilemma

I always thought that 15% was the normal tip at a restaurant, but Ryan Kost at the State Press at ASU quotes a waiter who says that "Eighteen percent [is the norm]... Fifteen is like giving a server a slap in the face, 15 you might as well leave nothing.". BitterWaitress defines a shitty tipper as one who tips less than 17%! One of my friends who used to work as a waiter told me that the minimum wage in the service industry is terribly low (correct me if I am wrong) and that waiters are supposed to make their living almost entirely from the tips. Now this puts a lot of emotional burden on the diners - the last thing I want to think about while eating out is whether my tip is adequate or not. It would be so much better if restaurants simply added the requisite amount as a service charge on the bill itself.

It is hard to understand why a restaurant which charges so much for food (and ensures that their profits are not dependent on the generosity of the diners) cannot afford to pay their waiters well. After all the waiters are the face of the restaurant - why leave their livelihood to the mercy of the diners' tips? Most countries have systems where the tips are optional - a tip is a sign of appreciation, but the lack of a tip, or a small tip is not a 'slap on the face', nor is it going to yank food out of the waiters' mouths.

Now, I understand that waiters out here depend on the tips, so I always make it a point to tip generously, but I do wish restaurants would simply pay the servers more and make the extra dough from a fixed service charge and allow patrons to give an optional tip as a reward for good service. Also, the service charge should be proportional to the time spent in a restaurant, not the amount of money spent there. What if someone spends an hour drinking coffee? Or what if someone has a half-hour dinner that includes a $100 bottle of wine? If someone is willing to spend more at a restaurant, surely some of that profit should go to the server as an employee of the establishment, but should that person pay a bigger tip just because he spent some more money? A better way would be to put the time spent on the bill, so that the resulting service charge ensures that the waiter gets an assured minimum for every table served, regardless of the price of food served.

Sometimes I like to eat cheap food from the menu too - that shouldn't make me a cheapskate, and that shouldn't get the waiter stiffed either. And for heaven's sake, the $3 minimum wage for the service industry is a sad joke! Request to all restaurant owners: please pay your waiters well - increase the price of food if you wish, or take it out of your projected $476 billion sales (how low is the profit margin anyway?) and allow your patrons to give tips as a sign of appreciation, not charity.

Tags: waiter, server, restaurant, tips, tipper

Hilarious freshman papers

This guy found some freshman physics papers waiting to be picked up at UT Austin, so he went 'mwaaaahahaha' in his head and put his own comments on the papers, scanned them and uploaded them to his website. I died laughing when I saw the paper which ended with a chatroom smiley!

Tags: humor

Grape expectations..

What would you do if you were blessed with a scientific mind and lots of time? Why, study the effects of grapes on a microwave oven, of course! Did you know that a few grapes in the oven can explode, cause arcs and even shoot around like tiny rockets? This guy is inspiring me to put something in my microwave tonight... I once put in a CD in the microwave for a few seconds to create a wonderful pattern of rainbow colors on it. Too bad the microwave smelled horrible for the next few days but the beautiful spark show almost made it worth it though. Time to verify the grape story now..

Tags: mad scientist, grapes, microwave, experiment

A snapshot of the world

10x10 creates a 100 image tapestry every hour from news sources around the world (currently Reuters, BBC and the NYT) that presents a snapshot of the stuff everyone is talking about at the time. This isn't useful as a news source in itself, but it is a slick way to show what's happening all over. I can think of one cool application for this idea - make this a huge digital art piece by creating a framed flat panel with this image collection...

Tags: 10x10, tenbyten, news, art

Flexible Displays!

A $43.7 million collaboration between the Army Research Labs and Arizona State University has resulted in the Flexible Display Center at the ASU Research Park. Even though it is being funded by the military there are plenty of obvious civilian applications and the center aims to come up with plenty of commercial applications for this technology which will result in displays that can be folded up or rolled up. The center aims to demo its first concept display - a 4 inch diagonal monochrome display later this year. Ever since Michael Crow became president of ASU, there has been a massive influx of grants for various research centers along with plenty of construction with the aim of attracting even more funds. I daresay within the next 10 years ASU will be one of the top research institutions in the United States.

Tags: asu, research, flexible displays, display, arizona state university, arl, army research labs

Mindblowing Tattoos

Check out this gallery of absolutely brilliant tattoos by New York artist Anil Gupta. His tattoos are custom designed and range from complex celtic designs to stunning color portraits. I didn't even know you could create such complex artwork using needles!

Tags: tattoo, tattoos, anil gupta, art

Konfabulator for Windows

Beats me why there is no talk about this, but the cool (but oft critized for being resource hungry) widget utility for Mac OSX has been released for Windows. Almost all the OSX widgets work fine on Windows too and it is really impressive to see OSXesque shiny widgets on my Windows desktop! If you don't know what Konfabulator is all about, just give it a spin!

Tags: konfabulator

How to tie a tie

It's job hunting time for me, and that means having to wear a suit for interviews. I have never learnt how to tie a tie properly and I have been relying on a knot that my roommate did for me sometime back. Someday I will open the knot by mistake and then I will have to wear a suit without a tie. There's this nice website that explains how to tie some great knots, so if it helps anyone else, please do teach me.

Tags: tie, knot

Technorati tags in the long run

Technorati tags (like the ones at the bottom of this post) allow bloggers to tag their content so that they can be combined with similar tags from Flickr photographs and Del.icio.us websites. Sounds like a great idea and I have been religiously tagging my posts ever since Technorati introduced this idea. However, Vivek pointed me to this discussion where Dare Obasanjo says that these tags are no different from the <META> keyword tags that everyone used to put in their html during the early days of the web. Then of course, people began to put all kinds of irrelevant keywords in their meta tags just to get noticed by the search engines and as a result Google stopped giving any importance to keywords in the META tags. Technorati tags are also put in by the users, so are they any good?

Yes and no. People have mentioned that such tags will lead to a semantic web where content can be understood by search engines. However, the moment any search engine begins to take note of tags in a webpage, content spammers will put tags indiscriminately on their webpages, and pretty soon search engines will have to disregard the tags. (Which means that Google will probably never consider the tags in the first place).

So as long as these tags are not relevant for search engine rankings, there is no incentive to create any 'tag spam', which means that bloggers can continue to tag their posts and find other relevant posts from Technorati. My personal experience has been that it drives a lot of traffic to your website from Technorati. The flip side is that any tagging system that requires human input will never lead to a semantic web since you can never trust humans to be honest in the tagging.

On a related note, Paul Allen's Vulcan Inc has been funding a research project named Project Halo where three teams are competing to create a 'Digital Aristotle', which is an application that can solve advanced problems in many disciplines such as Physics and Chemistry. The idea is to summarize the complete knowledge in any subject so that future PhDs can simply add new stuff to this database. Sounds like the stuff of science fiction, but for the first phase of this project, all three teams were able to create applications that could solve high school level Chemistry questions from a 50 page Chemistry book.

Tags: technorati tags, vulcan, halo, digital aristotle, aristotle