thought

on some days it just seems that there is a need to go through the archive of life...

it is amazing how many memories we collect in different categories happy, sad, funny, humiliating, irritating, hurtful, etc. and how over time these memories shift from one category to another without any conscious effort on our part.
...awaiting few such changes.

Could this be true?

Free Wi-Fi? Get Ready for GoogleNet via CNN

"What if Google (GOOG) wanted to give Wi-Fi access to everyone in America? And what if it had technology capable of targeting advertising to a user's precise location? The gatekeeper of the world's information could become one of the globe's biggest Internet providers and one of its most powerful ad sellers, basically supplanting telecoms in one fell swoop. Sounds crazy, but how might Google go about it?
First it would build a national broadband network -- let's call it the GoogleNet -- massive enough to rival even the country's biggest Internet service providers. Business 2.0 has learned from telecom insiders that Google is already building such a network, though ostensibly for many reasons. For the past year, it has quietly been shopping for miles and miles of "dark," or unused, fiber-optic cable across the country from wholesalers such as New York's AboveNet. It's also acquiring superfast connections from Cogent Communications and WilTel, among others, between East Coast cities including Atlanta, Miami, and New York. Such large-scale purchases are unprecedented for an Internet company, but Google's timing is impeccable."


Also there are rumores that Google is to buy Skype (my fav VoIP s/w).
Too much of google news in the past few days!

quotes

Home is where your heart is...
[via Keshi]

Home is not where you live, but where they understand you.
[via avik]

follow up on intelligent design vs evolution

I saw Larry King Live... and there was a discussion on intelligent design vs evolution. And ofcourse there were religious experts there too. And all of them amazed me by their strong conviction!!!!

One of the panalist Deepak Chopra has a blog called intentblog and he has some intresting discussion there abt this topic under the heading Intelligent Design without the Bible. There are a lot of comments but the one given by a person named chappy is intresting to read. chappy's recomendation is to read the 'Selfish Gene'. I have tried reading it twice but somehow I have never read it completely. Maybe I should try it once more.
I guess i will put something here after the followup blog by him.

Caution a lot of remarks are very provoking to the religiously sensitive.

New candiate for 'Love to Hate'

Relax, Bill Gates; It's Google's Turn as the Villain rom NYTimes

"To place Google in context, Mr. Kraus offered a brief history lesson. In the 1990's, he said, I.B.M. was widely perceived in Silicon Valley as a "gentle giant" that was easy to partner with while Microsoft was perceived as an "extraordinarily fearsome, competitive company wanting to be in as many businesses as possible and with the engineering talent capable of implementing effectively anything."
...
""Google is doing more damage to innovation in the Valley right now than Microsoft ever did," said Reid Hoffman, the founder of two Internet ventures, including LinkedIn, a business networking Web site popular among Silicon Valley's digerati. "It's largely that they're hiring up so many talented people, and the fact they're working on so many different things. It's harder for start-ups to do interesting stuff right now.""
...
"Google recently announced that it would not talk to any reporter from CNETNews.com, a technology news Web site, until July 2006, after a reporter for the site wrote an article raising privacy questions about the information Google collects about individuals.
The company also provoked the ire of many within the blogging world - not to mention snarky comments in Silicon Valley from those thinking Google was behaving like an old-line company that doesn't get it - when earlier this year it fired a new employee who had joked online that the free meals, the on-site gym and all the other perks were a clever ploy to keep people at their desks longer. "
...
""I like and respect the Google guys," Mr. Lent said, "but let's just say that their ultimate aim seems to me to be, 'One Google under Google, for which it stands.' ""

:) feminisation

The myth of "feminisation" from Hindu

The ':)' in the subject line is there cause when I read this article I was smiling... No not because I thought anything written in the article was really good or funny. I was smiling because I fail to understand what difference does it make weather it is male or female or black or white or brown person who gets the job, as long as a deserving person is given the job.
Maybe they should devise a way to appoint people for jobs without knowing these things abt them, it might solve some of the problems that arise due to the prejudice people have.

another one creation vs evolution

Grasping the Depth of Time as a First Step in Understanding Evolution from NYTimes

"The universe is perhaps 14 billion years old. Earth is some 4.5 billion years old. The oldest hominid fossils are between 6 million and 7 million years old. The oldest distinctly modern human fossils are about 160,000 years old."
...
"Accepting the fact of evolution does not necessarily mean discarding a personal faith in God. But accepting intelligent design means discarding science. Much has been made of a 2004 poll showing that some 45 percent of Americans believe that the Earth - and humans with it - was created as described in the book of Genesis, and within the past 10,000 years. This isn't a triumph of faith. It's a failure of education. "

hmmmmm... and after this?

Robertson: U.S. should assassinate Venezuela's Chavez from CNN

"Christian broadcaster Pat Robertson has called for the United States to assassinate Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez, calling him "a terrific danger" bent on exporting Communism and Islamic extremism across the Americas."

quotes

Charity is no substitute for justice withheld.
-- Saint Augustine

Pray as though everything depended on God. Work as though everything depended on you.
-- Saint Augustine

quotes

The earth laughs in flowers.
-- E. E. Cummings

The most wasted of all days is one without laughter.
-- E. E. Cummings

One more on creation n evolution

In Explaining Life's Complexity, Darwinists and Doubters Clash from NYTimes

It is always intresting to read on this topic :)

thought

how much longer?

dance with google

Keeping enemies close at the Google Dance from CNN

""Being on the first page of Google's results is like gold," said Web site consultant Gordon Liametz"

looks like lot of people want to be on the first page of google by hook or crook. so google organizes dance party to keep the friends closes and enemies even closer :)

thought

time to give up dreams... and think abt life 'practically'

India and stem cell research

How India Reconciles Hindu Values and Biotech from NYtimes

"Just four years later, this seems to have occurred. According to Ernst & Young's Global Biotechnology Report in 2004, Indian biotechnology companies are expected to grow tenfold in the next five years, creating more than a million jobs. With more than 10,000 highly trained and cheaply available scientists, the country is one of the leading biotechnology powers along with Korea, Singapore, China, Japan, Sweden, Britain and Israel."
...
"Indeed, most evangelical Christians, who believe that the embryo is a person, may find more support in ancient Hindu texts than in the Bible. Many Hindus see the soul - the true Self (or atman) - as the spiritual and imperishable component of human personality. After death destroys the body, the soul soon finds a new temporal home. Thus, for Hindus as much as for Catholics, life begins at conception.
The ancient system of Indian medicine known as Ayurveda assumes that fetuses are alive and conscious when it prescribes a particular mental and spiritual regimen to pregnant women. This same assumption is implicit in "The Mahabharata," the Hindu epic about a fratricidal war apparently fought in the first millennium B.C. In one of its famous stories, the warrior Arjuna describes to his pregnant wife a seven-stage military strategy. His yet-to-born son Abhimanyu is listening, too. But as Arjuna describes the seventh and last stage, his wife falls asleep, presumably out of boredom. Years later, while fighting his father's cousins, the hundred Kaurava brothers, Abhimanyu uses well the military training he has learned in his mother's womb, until the seventh stage, where he falters and is killed.
But the religions and traditions we know as Hinduism are less monolithic and more diverse than Islam and Christianity; they can yield contradictory arguments. Early in "The Mahabharata," there is a story about how the hundred Kaurava brothers came into being. Their mother had produced a mass of flesh after two years of pregnancy. But then a sage divided the flesh into 100 parts, which were treated with herbs and ghee, and kept in pots for two years - from which the Kaurava brothers emerged.
Indian proponents of stem-cell research often offer this story as an early instance of human cloning through stem cells extracted from human embryos. They do not mention that "The Mahabharata" presents the birth of the hundred Kaurava brothers as an ominous event.
Other Asian scientists have also pressed myth and tradition into the service of modern science and nationalism. In South Korea, where a third of the population is Buddhist, a scientist who cloned human embryonic stem cell lines claimed that he was "recycling" life just as reincarnation does."