I have made a decision but some how I am not able to put it through in action... I wonder what is holding me back? Maybe the course of action is not clear.
Jan 4, 2006
Jan 3, 2006
Slice of history... and part of the present
King's Final Years from NewsWeek
The Northern campaign went into high gear with a rally at Soldier Field and a march to city hall, where King, like Martin Luther before him, nailed his 14 demands (for things like open housing and jobs in all-white industries) to the door. At first, Daley was conciliatory. He claimed that the problems all predated him and that he had already repaired more than 100,000 apartments. When a summer riot broke out in North Lawndale (Coretta told the children to back away from the windows), the mayor sought a truce with token concessions like fire-hydrant nozzles so black kids could cool off. King held all-night talks with gang leaders and Justice Department officials in the same room, but his commitment to nonviolence was belittled by newer "Black Power" leaders like Stokely Carmichael as "too Sunday-school."
The point of the Chicago campaign was to show race as a national problem, and it did so with a bang when King led an integrated group of marchers into the racist enclave of Marquette Park. "I have never in my life seen such hate," said King, who was hit by a rock there. "Not in Mississippi or Alabama." But unlike the battle with Alabama state troopers the year before at the Edmund Pettus Bridge, marches into Marquette Park (and later into the white suburb of Cicero) led to no national catharsis or landmark legislation. Congress defeated a new civil-rights bill that would have banned housing discrimination (it finally passed in 1968). Although Northern authorities—the National Guard and Daley's police—defended the marchers rather than attack them, a backlash against the movement was setting in. "Don't you find," Mike Wallace asked King on CBS News, "that the American people are getting a little bit tired, truly, of the whole civil-rights struggle?"
...
Yet it is simply inaccurate to say that every period since King has been what he called a "valley moment." The Voting Rights Act transformed American politics, and the growth of the black middle class has changed the lives of millions of families. While New Orleans got worse, Chicago got better. Today it's a much healthier city than it was in Boss Daley's time, thanks in part to his son, Richard M. Daley, who has been mayor since 1989, and his predecessor, Harold Washington, the city's first African-American mayor.
While Chicago's public-school system remains troubled and stubbornly segregated, it now boasts several highly successful schools and realistic hope for more. Housing, too, is still largely segregated by neighborhood and is unaffordable for the poor and working class, with long waiting lists for subsidies. But notorious housing projects like the Robert Taylor Homes and Cabrini-Green have been mostly torn down and replaced by townhouse-style public housing units, a third of them owned by the residents.
BBC classic news clips over the past 50 years
Open News Archives from BBC
Some good but mostly ghastly things in history... but good selection. Refresh your memory but to view the clips you have to download them.
Cute cute cute....
The Cute Factor from NYTimes
If the mere sight of Tai Shan, the roly-poly, goofily gamboling masked bandit of a panda cub now on view at the National Zoo isn't enough to make you melt, then maybe the crush of his human onlookers, the furious flashing of their cameras and the heated gasps of their mass rapture will do the trick."Omigosh, look at him! He is too cute!"
"How adorable! I wish I could just reach in there and give him a big squeeze!"
"He's so fuzzy! I've never seen anything so cute in my life!"
A guard's sonorous voice rises above the burble. "OK, folks, five oohs and aahs per person, then it's time to let someone else step up front."
Scientists who study the evolution of visual signaling have identified a wide and still expanding assortment of features and behaviors that make something look cute: bright forward-facing eyes set low on a big round face, a pair of big round ears, floppy limbs and a side-to-side, teeter-totter gait, among many others.Cute cues are those that indicate extreme youth, vulnerability, harmlessness and need, scientists say, and attending to them closely makes good Darwinian sense. As a species whose youngest members are so pathetically helpless they can't lift their heads to suckle without adult supervision, human beings must be wired to respond quickly and gamely to any and all signs of infantile desire.
The human cuteness detector is set at such a low bar, researchers said, that it sweeps in and deems cute practically anything remotely resembling a human baby or a part thereof, and so ends up including the young of virtually every mammalian species, fuzzy-headed birds like Japanese cranes, woolly bear caterpillars, a bobbing balloon, a big round rock stacked on a smaller rock, a colon, a hyphen and a close parenthesis typed in succession.
The greater the number of cute cues that an animal or object happens to possess, or the more exaggerated the signals may be, the louder and more italicized are the squeals provoked.
Cuteness is distinct from beauty, researchers say, emphasizing rounded over sculptured, soft over refined, clumsy over quick. Beauty attracts admiration and demands a pedestal; cuteness attracts affection and demands a lap. Beauty is rare and brutal, despoiled by a single pimple. Cuteness is commonplace and generous, content on occasion to cosegregate with homeliness.
Jan 2, 2006
First non-depressing post of the year :)
New seven wonders: Taj in contention from HT
Here is the list:
Taj Mahal, India
Acropolis, Greece;
Alhambra, Spain
Angkor Wat, Cambodia
Chichen Itza, Mexico
Christ Redeemer, Brazil
Colosseum, Rome
The statues of Easter Island
Eiffel Tower, Paris
Great Wall, China
Hagia Sophia, Turkey
Kiyomizu Temple, Japan
Kremlin, Moscow
Machu Picchu, Peru
Neuschwanstein Castle, Germany
Petra, Jordan
Pyramids of Giza, Egypt
Statue of Liberty, New York
Stonehenge, Britain
Sydney Opera House, Australia
Timbuktu, Mali.
Domino effect
RR Package: A 'tribute' to minister from bar girls pushed into one-night stands from The Telegraph [via India Uncut]
Caste cruelity
Woman, 5 children burnt alive in Bihar from The Hindu
RAGHOPUR: A woman and her five minor children, including two girls, were burnt to death in Rampur-Shyamchak village of Vaishali district early on Sunday, after her husband refused to withdraw a police complaint about the theft of a buffalo. The complainant, Bijendra Mahto, belonging to the extremely backward Kahar caste, with 90 per cent burns, is battling for life at the Patna Medical College Hospital.
According to the police, about 10 persons tied up Bijendra Mahto and set fire to his thatched hut past midnight. When Mahto lodged the complaint, Jagat Rai, his son and nephew were arrested and later let off on bail. Mahto charged that Rai had been insisting that he withdraw the complaint.
According to witnesses, Rai led the mob that torched the house and also fired in the air to prevent others from coming to the rescue of the family.
Fascinating facts
Why I'm Happy I Evolved from NYTimes
Organisms like the sea slug Elysia chlorotica. This animal not only looks like a leaf, but it also acts like one, making energy from the sun. Its secret? When it eats algae, it extracts the chloroplasts, the tiny entities that plants and algae use to manufacture energy from sunlight, and shunts them into special cells beneath its skin. The chloroplasts continue to function; the slug thus becomes able to live on a diet composed only of sunbeams.
Still more fabulous is the bacterium Brocadia anammoxidans. It blithely makes a substance that to most organisms is a lethal poison - namely, hydrazine. That's rocket fuel.
And then there's the wasp Cotesia congregata. She injects her eggs into the bodies of caterpillars. As she does so, she also injects a virus that disables the caterpillar's immune system and prevents it from attacking the eggs. When the eggs hatch, the larvae eat the caterpillar alive.
It's hard not to have an insatiable interest in organisms like these, to be enthralled by the strangeness, the complexity, the breathtaking variety of nature.
Just think: the Indus River dolphin doesn't sleep as you or I do, or indeed as most mammals, for several hours at once. Instead, it takes microsleeps, naps that last for a few seconds, like a driver dozing at the wheel.
Or consider this: a few days after its conception, a pig embryo has become a filament that is about a yard long.
Or: the single-celled parasite that causes malaria is descended from algae. We know this because it carries within itself the remnants of a chloroplast.
Female Infanticide
Lajja [via Times of India]
Today after a looooong time I went to Times of India site and came accross this blog. DO TAKE TIME TO READ... also go through the comments.
Dec 31, 2005
Welcome 2006!!!!
Assamees -- Rongaali Bihur xubhessaa lobo
Bengali -- Shuvo Nabo Barsho
Farsi -- Sal-e no mubarak
Gujarati -- Natal ni shub kaamnao & Saal Mubarak
Hindi -- Naye Varsha Ki Shubhkamanyen
Kannada -- Hosa Varushadha Shubhashayagalu
Marathi -- Nveen Varshachy Shubhechcha
Malayalam -- Puthuvatsara Aashamsakal
Oriya -- Sukhamaya christmass ebang khusibhara naba barsa
Punjabi -- Nave sal di mubarak
Sindhi -- Nayou Saal Mubbarak Hoje
Tamil -- Eniya Puthandu Nalvazhthukkal
Telugu -- Noothana samvatsara shubhakankshalu
Thai -- Sawadee Pee Mai
Turkish -- Yeni Yiliniz Kutlu Olsun
Urdu -- Naya Saal Mubbarak Ho
Dec 30, 2005
quote
"Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure. It is our light, not our darkness that most frightens us. We ask ourselves, Who am I to be brilliant, gorgeous, talented, fabulous? Actually, who are you not to be? You are a child of God. Your playing small does not serve the world. There is nothing enlightened about shrinking so that other people won't feel insecure around you. We are all meant to shine, as children do. We were born to make manifest the glory of God that is within us. It is not just in some of us; it is in everyone. And as we let our own light shine, we unconsciously give other people permission to do the same. As we are liberated from our own fear, our presence automatically liberates others."
-- from movie "Coach Carter" [The passage quoted from Marianne Williamson]
Dec 28, 2005
Exploring FireFox
I never really got hooked to firefox...
But today I have done some exploring and liked these few listed here
Wizz RSS
IE Tab
Let me see maybe I will switch to Fire Fox(I have done this before and end up going back to Opera)
Dec 27, 2005
A positive move...
Stigma bogs down pre-marital HIV screening from The Hindu
But what about other states???? Most brides-to-be still shy away from seeking a pre-marital health screening of their suitors for HIV/AIDS, despite growing evidence about women being infected by their spouses.
A strong undercurrent of stigma and little power to decide about their life are preventing young women from insisting on a health report of the prospective groom before agreeing for marriage.
...
There are already 275 such centres across Tamil Nadu where anyone can get their blood tested for Rs. 10 besides free counselling.