In pictures: Force Fed from BBC
"Souadou’s fingers are often clamped between two sticks, a frequently-used instrument of torture.
This, her grandmother explains, will stem her urge to vomit by distracting her with some local pain.
Officially, force-feeding is said to have disappeared after government health campaigns pronounced it wrong, but the message has yet to reach some remote areas of Mauritania."
...
"Some young women affected suffer from conditions such as early diabetes, heart disease, gallstones and arthritis, which may immobilise and eventually kill them.
The obsession of some Mauritanians with female obesity is continuing to cripple a small but extremely vulnerable sector of its society."
Another thought... why are women in most societies treated as a object to represent something, it can be wealth, honor, anything?
Nov 2, 2005
This is pathetic!!!
Intresting non-techinical readup on Gravity etc.
On Gravity, Oreos and a Theory of Everything from NYTimes
Nov 1, 2005
Translations of Hindi song lyrics
Not bad translations.... from http://www.bollywhat.com/lyrics/swad_lyr.html
yeh jo des hai tera swades hai tera
this country of yours is your motherland
tujhe hai pukaara
and is calling out to you
yeh woh ba.ndhan hai jo kabhi TuuT nahii.n sakta
this is a bond which can never break
miTTii kii hai jo khushbuu tuu kaise bhulaayega
how can you forget the scent of your earth
tuu chaahe kahii.n jaaye tuu lautke aayega
you can go anywhere but you'll always come back
nayii nayii raaho.n me.n dabii dabii aaho.n me.n
in new paths, in every sigh
khoye khoye dil se tere
to your lost heart
koii yeh kahega
someone will say
yeh jo des hai tera swades hai tera
this land of yours is your motherland
tujhse zi.ndagii hai yeh kah rahii
life is telling you
sab to paa liya ab hai kya kamii
you have achieved everything now what's left
yuu.n to saare sukh hai barse
looks like hapiness has been showered on you
par duur tuu hai apne ghar se
but you're far from your home
haa.n laut chal tuu ab deewane
now come back oh crazy one
jahaa.n koii to tujhe apna maane
where at least someone will call you their own
aawaaz de tujhe bulaaye
and will call out to you
vahii des
that very same country
yeh jo des hai tera....
this land that is yours.....
yeh pal hai vahii jisme.n hai chhupii
this moment has hidden in it
puurii ek sadii saarii zi.ndagii
a whole century of life
tuu na puuchh raaste me.n kahe
don't ask why in the road
aaye hain is tarah do raahe.n
has come a fork with two ways
tuu hi to hai raah sujhaaye
you are the one who should choose the path
tuu hii to hai ab jo yeh bataaye
you should choose
jaaye to kis disha me.n jaaye
which direction to take
vahii des
this very country
yeh jo des hai tera....
this land that is yours....
quotes
Curious things, habits. People themselves never knew they had them.
-- Agatha Christie
It isn't what you have, or who you are, or whereyou are,
or what you are doing that makes you happy or unhappy.
It is what you think about.
-- Dale Carnegie
Happy Diwali
Oct 29, 2005
100 Years of Relativity -- Sir Albert Einstein
Einstein's Legacy -- Where are the "Einsteinians?" from Logos Journal [via ALDaily]
An excellent write up on Einstein. There is another article on him regarding the situtaion of Nazi Germany and him being a Jew. That is a good read too.
"For more than two centuries after Newton published his theories of space, time, and motion in 1687, most physicists were Newtonians. They believed, as Newton did, that space and time are absolute, that force causes acceleration, and that gravity is a force conveyed across a vacuum at a distance. Since Darwin there are few professional biologists who are not Darwinians, and if most psychologists no longer often call themselves Freudians, few doubt that there is an unconscious or that sexuality plays a big role in it. So as we celebrate the 100th anniversary of Einstein’s great discoveries, the question arises: How many professional physicists are Einsteinians?"
...
"After 1930, virtually all of Einstein’s colleagues were certain the revolution was over and that physics was nearly complete. Nearly alone in his stance, Einstein saw the quantum as only a stepping stone to the real thing, which he searched for the rest of his life. Quantum theory was not the only theory that bothered Einstein. Few people have appreciated how dissatisfied he was with his own theories of relativity. Special relativity grew out of Einstein’s insight that the laws of electromagnetism cannot depend on relative motion and that the speed of light therefore must be always the same, no matter how the source or the observer moves. Among the consequences of that theory are that energy and mass are equivalent (the now-legendary relationship E = mc2) and that time and distance are relative, not absolute. Special relativity was the result of 10 years of intellectual struggle, yet Einstein had convinced himself it was wrong within two years of publishing it. He rejected his theory, even before most physicists had come to accept it, for reasons that only he cared about. For another 10 years, as the world of physics slowly absorbed special relativity, Einstein pursued a lonely path away from it. "
...
(It took us hundred years to catch up to him)
"One way to understand this story is to say that theoretical physics has finally caught up to Einstein. While he was shunned in his Princeton years as he pursued the unified field theory, the Institute for Advanced Study where he worked is now filled with theorists who search for new variants of unified field theories. It is indeed a vindication of sorts for Einstein because much of what today’s string theorists do in practice is play with unified theories of the kinds that Einstein and his few colleagues invented."
...
"Let us be frank and admit that most of us have neither the courage nor the patience to emulate Einstein. We should instead honor Einstein by asking whether we can do anything to ensure that in the future those few who do follow Einstein’s path, those who approach science as uncompromisingly as he did, have less risk of unemployment of the sort he suffered at the beginning of his career and less risk of the marginalization he endured at the end. If we can do this, if we can make the path easier for those few who do follow him, we may make possible a revolution in science that even Einstein failed to achieve."
Oct 28, 2005
What will you name your child?
We get letters (3) from google blog
"Walid Elias Kai, a Ph.D. in search engine marketing, is, it must be said, an avid fan of our company. Dr. Kai, who is Lebanese, and his Swedish wife Carol live in Kalmar, Sweden, where their son was born on September 12. His name? Oliver Google Kai."
And here is the website of Google-Kai
what!!!!!
Body hanging from tree mistaken for Halloween decoration from CNN
"The apparent suicide of a woman found hanging from a tree went unreported for hours because passers-by thought the body was a Halloween decoration, authorities said."
hmmmm
China, India Superpower? Not so Fast! from YaleGlobal Online
"Both China and India are still desperately poor countries. Of the total of 2.3 billion people in these two countries, nearly 1.5 billion earn less than US$2 a day, according to World Bank calculations. Of course, the lifting of hundreds of millions of people above poverty in China has been historic. Thanks to repeated assertions in the international financial press, conventional wisdom now suggests that globalization is responsible for this feat. Yet a substantial part of China's decline in poverty since 1980 already happened by mid-1980s (largely as a result of agricultural growth), before the big strides in foreign trade and investment in the 1990s. Assertions about Indian poverty reduction primarily through trade liberalization are even shakier. In the nineties, the decade of major trade liberalization, the rate of decline in poverty by some aggregative estimates has, if anything, slowed down. In any case, India is as yet a minor player in world trade, contributing less than one percent of world exports. (China's share is about 6 percent.)
What about the hordes of Indian software engineers, call-center operators, and back-room programmers supposedly hollowing out white-collar jobs in rich countries? The total number of workers in all possible forms of IT-related jobs in India comes to less than a million workers – one-quarter of one percent of the Indian labor force. For all its Nobel Prizes and brilliant scholars and professionals, India is the largest single-country contributor to the pool of illiterate people in the world. Lifting them out of poverty and dead-end menial jobs will remain a Herculean task for decades to come."
Oct 26, 2005
How long has it been since India performed this way?
India wrap up comprehensive win from cricinfo
"Tendulkar's opening gambit, though, was the talk of the day. Returning after a six month lay-off, Tendulkar arrived with a gambler's instinct only to hit the jackpot with whatever he tried. There was risk, frenzied spells of play and cheeky improvisation, but all this was amid magical strokeplay reminiscent of the boy genius who charmed all in the last decade. He charged down the track to Chaminda Vaas, scampered perilous single after perilous single, was occasionally beaten by seam movement and change of pace, chipped a few that just eluded fielders, and attempted some audacious shots.
In between all this were some stomach-churning moments: a thundered six over midwicket, a classical straight-drive off the front foot - with a high elbow, minimum follow through and slight nod of the head a few moments after bat struck ball - a cheeky paddle-sweep off Vaas, when he read the line and beat the fielder to perfection. Fifty off 50 balls, momentum seized, bowlers hassled, fielders guessing, captain experimenting, crowd in a frenzy ... welcome to Tendulkar territory.
He soon shifted to a lower gear, but the experiment to promote Pathan to No.3 was working spectacularly at the other end. He fed off Tendulkar's aggression and announced his arrival with a superb pulled six off Vaas. Once the spinners came on, he began to soar. Tillakaratne Dilshan was dismissed for two fours and a six, Upul Chandana for a four and two sixes. The straight boundaries were peppered with some crisp lofted drives as Pathan, who raced to a 41-ball fifty and went on to outscore Tendulkar soon after, increased the tempo.
The fall of both Pathan and Tendulkar in quick succession gave Sri Lanka a small window of hope but Dravid's silken dismantling of their attack left them gasping. Dravid is arguably the best finisher in one-dayers today and his shot selection in the slog overs was simply impeccable. He brought up his fifty off 47 balls, mainly through some judicious strike rotation, but launched into a splendid blitz at the death and ended on 85 off just 63. If you can end an innings with a sequence that reads `four, two, four, two, dot, four, four' and rattle the Sri Lankans into elementary fielding errors, you have surely done a cracking job."
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