India puts the population growth to good use..

What good could 25 million births a year in a 1 billion strong country do? Well, that's 25 million umbilical cords that contain valuable stem cells that might one day produce revolutionary cures for parkinsons, multiple sclerosis and even cancer! (via The Scientific Indian)

Tags: research

A Star Wars experience

I was not born when the first (fourth, whatever) Star Wars movie came out, so I never thought for a moment that the greatest sci-fi adventure was about Darth Vader and Luke Skywalker. (Instead I grew up thinking that Terminator 2 had the greatest special effects ever.) The Star Wars movies (which I always thought were related to Star Trek that I knew faintly about) emerged from the fringes of my vision when Episode I was released and I read about fanatics camping in front of theaters for days to be the first in line. Believe me, I know something about movie fanaticism, having lived in India where movies are the holy word of God and movie stars are the preachers of this gospel, but this level of rabid idolatry for a movie struck me as being pretty out of place in a country that I always viewed as being relatively sane.
Not having seen the original trilogy, and not having the enthusiasm to dig up thirty year old movies, I still went to watch Episode I and II, driven by a curiosity to see what the hullabo was all about, and a faith that any movie that calls itself Episode I cannot depend on the knowledge of Episode IV.

Nevertheless, I did not understood anything about the story, though I did feel that the effects were simultaneously cool and out of place in a movie that still had the 70s style scene wipes and hairstyles. By now I have hopefully established I am a Star Wars atheist, one who has no desire to find the higher truth from the holy trilogy. When my friend asked me to accompany him for Episode III, I had to accompany him, mainly because I was dying to watch a movie in a theatre. Here's some of my random thoughts while watching the movie. There might be spoilers, but I don't think they matter because there are only two classes of people who will watch the movie - the fanatics and the I-don't-give-a-rabbit's-ass-but-I-am-still-curious types. The first class will already have seen the movie, and the second class won't remember any of these details anyway. So here's a few thought bubbles..

• Irritating as hell, is Yoda. Would like to strangle him, I would. Keep talking like that, why does he? Walking stick, why does he use when great somersaults he can do?
• Natalie Portman is Hot! If only she didn't have those weirdo hairstyles.. But she's Hot!
• There's a lot of funny looking non-humans in there, but why are all the humans caucasian?
• Oh wait, I was wrong, there is the 'token black guy' but I still want to see some Chinese guys there!
• The non-humans (I don't know what else to call them) must have been hacking into Al-Jazeera transmissions from earth because they all speak middle-eastern accented English.
• Is that a subtle satire on politics? I'm pretty sure I heard Darth make a very familiar statement 'If you're not with me, you are my enemy!'.
• Lots of fights between strange creatures and kickass weapons. Feels like watching the World of Warcraft over your buddy's shoulder, but gawd, I wish it did not go on forever!

Phew!

Tags: star+wars, movie

This is contagious!

A while ago contagiousmedia.org announced a contest to see who could create the most viral Internet campaign. Over the past couple of weeks well cloaked entries have popped up in a number of places, creating some pretty popular websites including the Ringtone Dancer and Crying, while eating. The contest winner will be the website with the most number of hits by June 9, so what better way than to get your site submitted to Slashdot, as the creators of Blogebrity ingeniously discovered!

UPDATE 1: I thought of helping out the current #3 site by writing up a neat technology related story that would pass under the radar of Slashdot editors, and well, it looks like it has worked and they are up at #2!

UPDATE 2: I knew I was rooting for the right guys.. they are #1 at the end of the contest!

Tags: media, marketing, campaign

More Russell Peters videos

My friend Vivek has an insanely popular Russell Peters video on his site and now there are two new short videos out there that you might wanna check out!

Tags: russell+peters, standup, comedy, humor, funny

Apple and free speech

There's a lot of hullabo in blogdom about 'Apple suing bloggers', and Wonkette puts Steve Jobs in the league of Bush-Rumsfield for not believing in freedom of the press, among other things. Here's what I have to say:

1. Somebody within Apple broke an NDA to give their trade secrets to ThinkSecret.
2. ThinkSecret is not a blog, it is a regular ad-driven website.
3. Apple is not suing them, it has simply subpoenaed a few sites - to obtain information on the Apple employee who broke the NDA. Their target is the Apple employee, not these sites.
4. There is no First Amendment issue here - one could argue about free speech if someone was being sued for revealing information that is of public interest, but what public interest is served by revealing Apple's impending product designs? If you had a company and some of your employees were regularly revealing your product designs, wouldn't you want to put a stop to it?
5. Drawing parallels between a company trying to protect its trade secrets (excluding stuff that might be of public interest) and the loss of free speech only weakens the case of those who are genuinely fighting for free speech related issues.

Tags: apple, bloggers, eff, speech

Anil does some navel-gazing..

It's not often that someone blogs about me, but when it does happen, I have to suffer the ignominy of being presented as a drunk hippie. Take a good look at the real me before you visit that page.

Conan went to Harvard?

For a long time I thought that Conan O'Brien was more of a lunatic than a comedian since he would do stuff on his show that I usually do in the privacy of the bathroom with a loud shower running to drown out my voice. Jay Leno was the gold standard, with his erudite approach to comedy, his suave mannerisms and a subtle way of letting you know that he was just as much a celebrity as his guests.

That was two years ago. Even though Jay still has a funnier and lengthier monologue than Conan, I find myself looking forward to the celebrity guest interviews on Conan rather than the ones on Jay Leno since he has a way of poking fun at himself just as much as he does to his guests, quite unlike Leno who has a very condescending way of talking to the guests he is not in awe of. Conan is always the man from the street who happens to be on a big show, and that's what gives him an extra serving of charm.

I had no idea though, that this modest guy graduated from Harvard. I came across his commencement speech to the class of 2000, which is liberally peppered with his self-deprecating humor.

Let me see—by your applause—who here wrote a thesis? That’s nice. A lot of hard work went into that thesis. And no one is ever going to care. I wrote a thesis—this is true, I don’t lie—“Literary Progeria in the Works of Flannery O’Connor and William Faulkner.” Let’s just say that during my discussions with Pauly Shore, it doesn’t come up much. For three years after graduation I wanted to show it to everyone, and so I kept my thesis in the glove compartment of my car, so that I could show it to a policeman in case I was pulled over.

Reminds me of my own paperweight-thesis. There's a lot of mathematics and theory in there, but holy crap! who's gonna want to read it ever? Not even me.

And this was what the most respected and widely read television critic, Tom Shales, wrote in the Washington Post. “O’Brien is a living collage of annoying nervous habits. He giggles and jiggles about and fiddles with his cuffs. He has dark, beady little eyes like a rabbit. He is one of the whitest white men ever. O’Brien is a switch on the guest who won’t leave: he’s the host who should never have come. Let the Late Show with Conan O’Brien become the late Late Show, and may the host return to whence he came.” There’s more, but it gets kind of mean.

Ironic that the official NBC biography should quote the same Tom Shales describing Conan as "modest, wry, self-effacing and demonstrably the most intelligent of the late-night comics". More from the speech..

If you’ll indulge me for just a second, I’d like to read a little something from just this year. “Somehow, Conan O’Brien has transformed himself into the brightest star in the late-night firmament. His comedy is the gold standard, and Conan himself is not only the quickest and most inventive wit of his generation, but quite possibly the greatest host ever.”
Ladies and gentlemen, class of 2000, I wrote that this morning. As proof that when all else fails, you always have delusion. I will go now to make bigger mistakes and to embarrass this fine institution even more. But let me leave you with one last thought. If you can laugh at yourself, loud and hard, every time you fall, people will think you’re drunk. Thank you.

It's hard not to love this guy.

Tags: humor, conan

Blockbuster.. or Netflix...

This would have been funny if it didn't make them look so pitiable. (almost) Blockbuster now offers two months of free service plus one free DVD... if you cancel your Wal-Mart of Netflix membership and stay away from them for a year! Even though this promotion makes them look like a whiny runner-up, I was curious to see if Blockbuster has more foreign titles to offer than Netflix. (Netflix has a pretty good collection of Bollywood movies, but there's more to Indian movies than just Bollywood.)

A search for the brilliant director Mani Rathnam gave me a few spelling suggestions on Netflix with a paltry collection of movies. Blockbuster on the other hand returned almost all his movies including some of his earliest Tamil ones that I have been unable to find elsewhere! (Hopefully they all have english subtitles so I can make sense of them) Suddenly Blockbuster is looking like a good proposition to me.. and it's cheaper at $15 a month compared to Netflix's $18 a month for 3 DVDs.

Why fingerprint based biometric systems are bad for you..

Biometric systems are the coolest thing in security technology at the moment, and there are plenty of cheap development kits available from a variety of vendors, but regardless of the convenience of not having to remember passwords, there are many reasons why fingerprint based biometric systems are bad. Here are five scary reasons:

1. You need to use your bare finger, which is not a good idea if you are trying to open your car door in a freezing cold place, or if you are a germ-phobe. (well, that's probably not so bad, but we're just getting started..)


2. They can be easily defeated by using a combination of photoshop and gummy bears.


3. Your fingerprint can be stolen with far less effort than it takes to get your alphanumeric password. Every time you touch an object you are leaving your biometric 'password' behind.


4. It's like chaining a suitcase to your hand. If someone wants the suitcase badly, they might just chop your hand off. If you are using a biometric security system, then some limb/organ of yours is in peril, as this gentleman in Malaysia found out.


5. If you use a biometric system in addition to a regular password/card based system, then you get the added convenience of the biometric system, but you also get the security risks mentioned above. If you use a purely biometric system, then you risk getting locked out of your entry system forever if you ever lose the ability to use that limb/organ due to an accident.

Feel free to add your own..

Tags: biometric, security, fingerprint

Mallika cannes show and she will..

I just had to find an excuse to put up this picture of Mallika Sherawat [left]. After graciously giving vent to the long suppressed libidos of Indian men, she has decided to be charitable and go international. This is her Cannes appearance with Jackie Chan for his new movie 'The Myth' where he rescues an exotic Indian princess in Indiana Jones style. Mallika's can-and-will-bare attitude stands out in a nation where the 'good girl' image is so highly rated, even while the biggest draws in Bollywood are the sex-flicks. (She is however going to disappoint many men who turn up for her 'Vagina Monologues' expecting a titillating play instead of the serious monologue it really is.)

While I admire her attitude, the truth has to be said. While Mallika has a good taste in clothes and jewellery, she has a really bad taste in unnaturally elevating push-up bras.

UPDATE: Check out Shahrivar Shermine (also at Cannes, 2005) above for a classier take on the same idea.

Tags: movies, celebrities, fashion, cannes, bollywood

Jason Bourne surfaces..

This is the kind of stuff that begs to be made into a movie. A mystery man is picked up from the streets of Sheerness, Kent in a soaking wet suit and tie. Like Bourne, he has no memory of who he is, nor does he speak a word, but when he is given a pen and paper to write his name, he draws a grand piano! The staff takes him to the hospital chapel where he gives an extraordinary performance of classical music. It won't take much effort to spin a story of international espionage around his persona. From the story..

Karen Dorey-Rees, adult mental health manager for the West Kent NHS and Social Care Trust, said the mystery man was very vulnerable.
"He is not talking at all, he is very frightened," she said.

The mystery grows deeper..

She said that the labels had been removed from every item of clothing the man was wearing when he was found on The Broadway in Minster, Sheerness. [...] Several lines of inquiry have been followed, and the hospital brought in interpreters to see if the mystery patient was from Eastern Europe.

International man of mystery indeed!

Tags: news, mystery

A brief history of Lena (Lenna)

The Lenna story used to be located here, but since I'm pulling everything off that server, I'm moving it here.

Tags: lena, lenna, playboy, image processing, history

The Laplace transform ain't nothing like love

One of the saddest postcards I've seen at Post Secret. (The website is an indescribably wonderful trip through the most intimate secrets of people)


Tags: love

The real world of Disney

Who are the people inside the Mickey and Goofy costumes in Disneyland? According to an 'exposé', there is a parallel world where these characters can shed their costumes and get lost in sex, drugs and booze.

While recruits are supposed to be living there under Disney's draconian code of behavior, "they're among the youngest, freest, and horniest of the corporation's workforce," Gray writes. And they learn "the thrill of defying the Disney image."

Sex, drinking and drugs are rampant. And the place's reputation is so notorious that Paris Hilton "is rumored to have dropped by," according to Gray.

Wally Wood was not off the mark when he drew his great 'memorial orgy' cartoon showing Mickey shooting heroin, Goofy boning Minnie and the seven dwarfs groping Snow White while a whole bunch of other characters do their own thing. It's also funny - like knowing that jolly Santa is losing hair because of a disease he got while sleeping with Mrs. Santa's sister.

Tags: disney, humor

What the eff is Gouranga?

A weird email escaped Gmail's spam filter and landed in my inbox today. I am used to seeing incoherent, badly spelled spam messages, but what do you make of a message that's perfectly spelled, and appeals to some higher consciousness in you, but still fails to make any sense? Here's the email:

From: Neateye <nitaigouranga@aol.com>
To: Anilkumar <__________@ieee.org>
Date: May 11, 2005 10:24 PM
Subject: Gouranga

Call out Gouranga be happy!!!
Gouranga Gouranga Gouranga ....
That which brings the highest happiness!!

A search on Google shows that this has been floating around for a couple of years, and no one's any wiser about who's behind this. Is it viral marketing for Grand Theft Auto, or is it some crazed Hare Krishnaites spreading happiness through spam? Here's what the Urban Dictionary has to say about it:

1. gouranga
A word that appears on moterway bridges in north west UK. It's only purpose to annoy drivers who are left with a nagging curiosity for the rest of their day until the next day when it ceases to become important ever again.
2. gouranga
is a word that is used by Hare Crishna monks meaning be happy!
EG 1.
happy monk guy- how are you today friend? are you happy?
guy- no! now go away!
happy monk guy- say gouranga it means be happy it will cheer you up
Guy- humph! gouranga...............he your right i feel happy already!

Well, it's true that it's annoying as hell. See, I just spent 10 minutes of my life writing about Gouranga, and it hasn't made me any happier.

Tags: gouranga, spam, religion

We don't believe in no stinkin' editors

The Times of India used to be a great newspaper, before they decided in the mid 90s that being a great newspaper was not good enough if it didn't bring in the big dough, so they changed it into the worthless tabloidish rag that it is now. The print version is still readable if you can find the articles in between the advertisements, but the online version has enough rotating, spinning and popup ads to give you an epileptic fit . Every article is split into a minimum of three pages, each consisting of just a couple of paragraphs, to maximize the probability of sending you into an ad-induced trance. (Happily I have no qualms about using Adblock on all the ads on their pages.)

This time, however, they have outdone all their past achievements by picking up a story from thespoof.com (They managed to get even the name of the website wrong and attributed the story to spoof.com instead) and publishing it as real news. Hello.. Doesn't a website called The Spoof mean anything? Neither the satire, nor the bold disclaimer at the bottom of the story registered with the reporter. (or was it some enterprising reporter trying to pull a fast one on the editor?)You have to read the full Times story (screenshots available below) to believe it! This should go into the annals of great unintended humor.

More about the Times' standards (via SM)

UPDATE1: TOI has removed that story, but I have screenshots of the pages. [1] [2] [3] [4]

UPDATE2: All criticism of TOI's online edition aside, they have a nice ePaper.

Tags: humor, journalism

The real Barney!

And who says science journalists don't have a sense of humor. "Breaking News" screams the New Scientist, "Meat-eating dinosaur caught turning veggie!". I immediately had visions of a dinosaur looking into the camera with a sheepish grin when caught 'in the act'. Turns out this guy was quite a colorful character..

Palaeontologists have caught a cousin of the carnivorous Velociraptor in the process of turning vegetarian. Named Falcarius utahensis, it resembled its predatory meat-eating ancestors, but evolved teeth shaped for shredding leaves and a paunchy gut to digest plant material.

Paunchy gut too eh? So now we have a jolly looking velociraptor with a lettuce fetish. Ah well, everyone has a cousin who's the black sheep in the family but not only was this guy a traitorous plant eater, he was also a closet ballerina!

The teeth were leaf-shaped, which Kirkland says is "a first step toward plant eating" from eating meat or insects. He adds that it had long filamentary feathers, like those of Beipaosaurus, a slightly smaller and more advanced therizinosaur that lived in China at about the same time.

Leaf shaped teeth and long filamentary feathers... so now we know that they turned gay on the path to extinction.. ahem..

Elsewhere: How to tell your friend his cat's dead.

Tags: science, dinosaurs, palaeontology

Rediff's foot-in-the-mouth affliction

Not content with poorly researched articles in the past, Rediff has come up with yet another feel good Indian-company-shows-rest-of-the-world story. This time it's about an engineer Arvind Thiagarajan who has reportedly come up with a lossless image compression scheme that can achieve '35 times lossless compression'. Since this is a pretty astounding claim (The best I've heard of is the 30% lossless compression claimed by Stuffit) one would expect a reporter to do some fact-checking before publishing the story. My friend Avinash who showed me the Rediff story said that the whole story sounded too good to be true, so he googled for a few minutes and came up with enough material to cause a stink.

According to this website, Thiagarajan's company MatrixView's compression is nothing but a mix of JBIG, ABC, JPEG and some other methods. Apparently, a disassembly of the MatrixView binaries reveals stuff that came from JBIG, LZW and JPEG among others. Reminds me of CherryOS that claimed to have a proprietary fast Mac OSX emulator for Windows that turned out to the open-source PearPC in disguise. MatrixView has illustrious company though - there are plenty of other companies that have popped up claiming to have found the holy grail of data compression before dying out.

The patent files found here show a 188kb file compressed down to 44kb - which is a compression of ~4 times. Maybe there's more to it than meets the eye, but when the company claims to achieve ridiculously high levels of data compression using a ridiculously simple technique, there's reason to be skeptical. The rediff article uses words like 'Discrete Cosine Transformations' and talks about bit-planes which are bound to sound impressive to laymen, but it sounds more like 'if you can't convince them, confuse them'.

Reporters can't be engineers, but it might do Rediff a world of good to actually cross check the stuff they publish with some university experts.

An excerpt from H2G2

A taste of the maniacal logic served up in the Hitchhiker series:

"The Babel fish," said The Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy quietly, "is small, yellow and leech-like, and probably the oddest thing in the Universe. It feeds on brainwave energy not from its carrier but from those around it. It absorbs all unconscious mental frequencies from this brainwave energy to nourish itself with. It then excretes into the mind of its carrier a telepathic matrix formed by combining the conscious thought frequencies with nerve signals picked up from the speech centres of the brain which has supplied them. The practical upshot of all this is that if you stick a Babel fish in your ear you can instantly understand anything said to you in any form of language. The speech patterns you actually hear decode the brainwave matrix which has been fed into your mind by your Babel fish.

"Now it is such a bizarrely improbable coincidence that anything so mindboggingly useful could have evolved purely by chance that some thinkers have chosen to see it as the final and clinching proof of the non-existence of God.

"The argument goes something like this: `I refuse to prove that I exist,' says God, `for proof denies faith, and without faith I am nothing.'

"`But,' says Man, `The Babel fish is a dead giveaway, isn't it? It could not have evolved by chance. It proves you exist, and so therefore, by your own arguments, you don't. QED.'

"`Oh dear,' says God, `I hadn't thought of that,' and promptly vanished in a puff of logic.

"`Oh, that was easy,' says Man, and for an encore goes on to prove that black is white and gets himself killed on the next zebra crossing.

You have to read the book to believe it. Every time I read the books, I discover something new and funny!

Tags: h2g2, hitchhikers guide, douglas adams

HOWTO create a Blogger powered photo album

Blogger is great for weblogs, but there is no easy way to use Blogger to create a photo album where you can get one image per page, and browse back through the archives. Some of the best albums I've seen are actually powered by Movable Type with a few hacks thrown in. Since my goal is to create a weblog where I do not have to install anything on my server (I trust Blogger and Flickr to keep my data safe more than I trust my hosting provider - also, for a long time I was using my student web space on ASU's servers, where you cannot install any server side scripts), I decided to see if Blogger could be used to get the same functionality.

Here's the result, and here's the howto (Feel free to use this anywhere):

1. Make a regular Blogger blog with the following setting: Formatting> Show 1 post on the main page

2. In your template, put the following code somewhere between the <head></head> tags.

<script type="text/javascript">
<!--
var blogger_links=new Array("#"<BloggerPreviousItems>,"<$BlogItemPermalinkURL$>"</BloggerPreviousItems>);
function blogger_prev(){
<Blogger><ItemPage>
if(blogger_links.length>1)
{location.href = blogger_links[1];}
else
{location.href = blogger_links[0];}
</ItemPage></Blogger>
<Blogger><MainOrArchivePage>
if(blogger_links.length<3)
{location.href = blogger_links[0];}
else
{location.href = blogger_links[2];}
</MainOrArchivePage></Blogger>
}
-->
</script>


3. Note that the blogger_prev() javascript function provides the browsing functionality. Create a link somewhere in your template (preferably near your image) that incorporates this function. For ex you could use:
<a href="javascript:blogger_prev();">Previous</a>

4. Publish your photographs directly from Flickr, or grab the url from Flickr and paste it within an <img /> tag within your blog post. Of course, you don't need to use Flickr - you could use the image upload feature from within Blogger, or just upload your photograph somewhere and grab the url.

That's it! This makes use of the Blogger tag that dumps the previous 10 post links. Unfortunately there is no way to get the following post, so browsing is purely one-way (It's not really a problem since you always have the 'back' button in your browser). You may need to hack the javascript further to further customize the operation of the album. I hope it works for you.

Tags: howto, photography, flickr, blogger, album, gallery

Now that's what I call love!

If the saccharine loaded 'Love is' comics make you look around for a barf bag, then you'll surely love seeing what it could have been!

And oh, if you are still wondering about heartless bitches, here's something to chew on.

Tags: comics, humor

Microsoft vs. Apple vs. Linux

One of the funniest exchanges on Slashdot

An all new photo gallery

Having nothing better to do, I decided to rework my photo gallery. The original gallery was a bandwidth hog since the Flash gallery would preload all the images in the slideshow. (That said, SimpleViewer is one of the best Flash applications and possibly the best online image viewer I have seen. The guys at Airtight do some really cool stuff with Flash!)

The new gallery is basically a blogger blog, but the images are hosted either on my server, or on Flickr. Also, the images are bigger, and you can save them if you like. I am posting some of the better images from my gallery before I post any new ones, and it will take a while to put up all the old images since I don't want my archive page to be unmanageably huge, so do bear with me! My camera is a Canon Powershot S410 with few manual features, but I will provide the EXIF data just the same. (Maybe I will have an SLR in the future, heh)

The old Flash gallery will still be available, and I will maintain it as a slideshow of my favorite images, so if you want a quick peep into my gallery, head for the Flash version.

As you can see, black is my favorite color.. Let me know if it works for you!