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June 29, 2005
Object Lust #1: Double feature
Some people, particularly women, have a strange shopping gene in their genome. To them, spending hours walking through shops, looking through things they probably won't buy, is a perfectly acceptable timepass. I certainly can't stand being dragged through real-life store after real-life store (as I am sometimes by the various women in my life) all day. Sometimes though, I catch myself doing the online equivalent of the same activity. I float aimlessly from online store to online store viewing all manner of weird and wonderful things that teh InTaRw3b has to offer. Sometimes I even run into something I think is cool. I definitely don't need these items but I keep thinking about how fun it would be to own them.
I am starting this new section of my blog called Object Lust (nod to the Salon column of the same name). From time to time, it will feature some stuff which caught my attention either because it is cool, or weird or otherwise distinctive. Don't use this section as a wishlist necessarily *wink*. You can rest assured though that all the items in this section either interest me or interested me at some point, even if very briefly.
Because this is the first post in this section, I will feature two cool items:
Caffeine strips. For the caffeine junkies among us, this is quite an awesome invention.These strips deliver caffeine straight to your bloodstream, bypassing your gastrointestinal tract. You put them under your tongue, where they dissolve and give you an instant energy boost. $2.99 for a 24-pack.
On an unrelated note, like they have the nicotine patch, wouldn't it be awesome if they had the caffeine patch and the adrenaline patch too?
Paramotors. Imagine being able to make a powered flight with an aircraft that fits in the back of your car. All you need to do to get in the air is to turn on a motor, run for a short distance in an open space and watch the ground recede under your feet as you are lifted by an aerodynamic parachute-like wing. You can stay in the air for upto two hours and climb to great heights considering you're doing it on our own. Paramotor pilots generally reach 2,000 feet, but are licensed to go upto 18,000 feet, by which time it gets freakin' cold. And best of all, it's a self-regulated sport for which you don't need a pilot certificate from the FAA. So, you too can fly without appearing on Department of Homeland Security no-fly lists for having taken flight training. $5,000 or so for a paramotor, $2,000 for a wing and an additional $2,000 for training.
Posted by Vishy at 09:37 PM | Comments (2)
June 28, 2005
Vishy's Useless Factoid of the Day #14: Handedness and season of birth
Or, how I learned to stop worrying about when the stork dropped me off and hit the ball with my left hand.
Not all the endocrinal functions of the mysterious pineal gland are fully understood. In ancient cultures, such as that of India, it is known as the Third Eye and has been associated with giving special powers such as clairvoyance. It is activated by prolonged periods of darkness, and its function is to suppress the production of sex hormones. What good does this serve? When summer arrives and the days start to get longer, the pineal gland lets the sex organs do their work to increase libido. This evolutionary adaptation of the pineal gland results in babies being born at the start of spring, when fresh food is available. In sum, when the days are long, hormonal levels, especially those of sex hormones, are high.
It is well documented that men and women both secrete trace quantities of the other sex's sex hormones. In other words, women too secrete trace amounts of testosterone. In a pregnant woman, increased levels of testosterone are associated with increased asymmetry in how the analytic, visuo-spatial left brain hemisphere of her developing child dominates over the holistic, non-visual right brain hemisphere. Much like an embryo is female by default, neither hemisphere dominates the other one particularly strongly by default. Along comes testosterone to change everything. In addition to being produced by the pregnant mother, testosterone is also produced by genetically male embryos, starting at 8 weeks of gestation. It converts the so-far female embryo to a male embryo and skews the left hemisphere to dominate over the right hemisphere. High levels of testosterone are therefore more likely to lead to right handed people, whose left hemisphere dominates their right hemisphere. This effect is more pronounced when the fetus is exposed to high levels of testosterone in the first six
s of pregnancy.
So where does this leave us? If a baby is conceived in the winter months (between December and May in the Northern Hemisphere), it is exposed to lower levels of testosterone overall, which means a lower likelihood of left hemisphere dominance and a higher occurrence of non-right-handedness. These left-handed and ambidextrous babies are born from August to January. This effect is more pronounced in the temperate latitudes, where seasonal effects are stronger. I didn't find studies to corroborate a complementary seasonal pattern for handedness in the Southern Hemisphere. However, exposure to high hormonal levels has been linked with occurrence of schizophrenia and other psychological conditions. Complementary seasonal patterns have been observed in schizophrenic births in Europe and South Africa.
I am left-handed. I was born in September. I am the World's Largest Repository of Useless Knowledge.
Source for the above, with lots of citations
Posted by Vishy at 12:09 AM | Comments (0)
June 26, 2005
Vishy's Indian English Dictionary: nonveg
nonveg./NON·vej/
1. Any item from the meat, poultry and seafood food groups. A contraction of 'non-vegetarian food'. Frequently used as a substitute for 'meat' in sentences, but includes poultry and seafood as well. Common uses include "I don't eat any nonveg" or "I eat nonveg only on Wednesdays and Fridays". Keeping your ears peeled for mentions of 'nonveg' in a food context sometimes provides glimpses into the intricate and apparently nonsensical dietary habits of Indians. 'Nonveg' is well-understood at Indian food establishments and would probably even work in Indian restaurants in the U.S. However, to extend it to non-Indian food establishments in the U.S. may lead to unexpected results. Overheard at a pizza/deli in New York:
Indian guy: "Does that slice have nonveg?"
Latino behind the counter: "What you sayin' man?"
Indian guy: "Nonveg. Does that slice have any nonveg in it?"
Latino: "I don't understand you, amigo."
Indian guy: "Never mind. Is that slice veggie?"
Latino: "No. It's cheese."
Indian guy (bewildered): "The slice isn't veggie either?"
Latino: "It's a cheese slice."
Me (to the Latino): "That slice has no meat right?"
Latino: Right. It's just cheese.
Me (to the Indian guy): "It's all right. I am vegetarian too, and the cheese slice is okay. A veggie slice would have vegetables on it, like mushrooms, olives and peppers. Next time, just ask if the slice has meat on it or not."
2. Used to describe jokes not usually told in polite company. Nonveg jokes are best told in an all-male group of friends after a few drinks.
Posted by Vishy at 04:00 PM | Comments (0)
June 25, 2005
Idle games with mapping services
Some of the major providers of mapping and directions services on the Web today are Google Maps, Yahoo! Maps, MapQuest and MSN MapPoint (especially after it acquired the pioneers of LineDrive™, MapBlast. Of these, I find myself using Google Maps, MSN MapPoint and Yahoo! Maps the most. Of course, in recent times, Google Maps has managed to hog most of the attention because of its excellent user interface. For the kind of geek like me, who spent his childhood poring over atlases trying to beat his friends in placename games, it lets him idly glide over vast landmasses with a responsive user interface that fully stretches the capabilities of modern browsers. However, in terms of raw mapping capability, I respect MSN MapPoint a lot more. It is after all made by the same company that backs the preëminent TerraServer. (I do note that Google Maps gets to say it is perpetually in beta.)
[For your convenience and ease of comparison, all links after this line open in new windows.]
Let's say you get sick of the cold in Prudhoe Bay, Alaska and want desperately to drive all the way to Miami, Florida. This route pretty much approximates the furthest you can travel between any two points in the United States. You could get a set of fairly comprehensive directions from MSN MapPoint, which tell you that you'd be driving for almost 90 hours, or nearly 4 straight days of driving.
You would think Google Maps lets you find directions between the same two points. Nothing too hairy -- they are both in the United States and lie on the contiguous North American landmass (I am not going to be pathological and choose a point in say, Hawaii.) Wrong! Perhaps it is because the route travels through Canada. So let's try a route from Bellingham, WA to Miami, FL, something Google Maps spits back at you after some thought. Let's change Bellingham, WA to Edmonton, AB. Voila, it works! So it's not the lack of Canadian highway data that prevents a route's being calculated from Prudhoe Bay, AK to Miami, FL.
If you want to see the true power of MSN MapPoint, try a route from Prudhoe Bay, AK to Villahermosa, Mexico, which approximates the furthest you can travel between any two points in North America. MapPoint casually informs you that you have almost 102 hours, or more than 4 straight days of driving ahead of you. To locate Villahermosa, Mexico, I used the Find a Place tab on MSN MapPoint to paste in a free-form North American place name. From our experience so far, I don't think we need to key in these addresses into Google Maps to guess that it cannot generate this route, but let's confirm our suspicions.
At this point, the Slashdot crowd would say Google is adhering to its motto of being not evil and protecting the remote environmental preserves of Alaska by not providing directions for people to drive through them. Of course, in contrast, Microsoft is getting ready to take over North America, nay, the world, with its comprehensive mapping and routing solution. In reply to this, I have only one piece of wisdom that I also picked up from Slashdot, "Never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by stupidity." MSN MapPoint sometimes likes to give you the scenic route. Until it was fixed recently, the quickest route between two cities in Norway used to cross 7 countries and take almost 48 hours. After they fixed the route, it takes only 11 hours. Before taking over the world, MSN MapPoint definitely has to root out other similar routing gems that may exist in its database.
Google Maps and MSN MapPoint each have their shortcomings, but I am going to thank my good fortune they are not as bad as some other maps out there. Here's a gem Karolina discovered: go to this listing of mattress retailers in New York, NY and click on the map link for Dial a Mattress at 991 Third Avenue, New York, NY. Waterbed, anyone?
Update: I ran into another fairly big boo-boo by Google Maps: their apparent confusion between Belgium and The Netherlands. In case they correct it later, here's a screen capture I made. The weirdest thing is that the problem fixes itself if you increase the zoom by a couple of levels.
Posted by Vishy at 01:09 AM | Comments (1)
June 22, 2005
Vishy's Indian English Dictionary: timepass
timepass. /tAIm·pAHs/. Any activity undertaken to pass time. Also seen in an adverbial form.
Some people in India think substituting 'pastime' for this word makes sense, but it really doesn't because pastimes occasionally have connotations of being gainful, such as say, doing woodwork in your garage. Doing something for timepass, in contrast, is rarely gainful. People munch on junk food for timepass. People watch TV for timepass. People sit around on street corners and pass rude comments at girls for timepass.
There is no direct noun equivalent to timepass in U.S. English that I know of, but you could plausibly substitute 'for timepass' with 'to kill time' in any Indian English sentence to get its U.S. English equivalent. For example, 'I injected this lab rat with a lethal dose of nicotine for timepass' can be transformed to yield 'I injected this lab rat with a lethal dose of nicotine to kill the time'.
Timepass is also the most common reason given by people in India when they have no better answer for why they are doing something. As in
"Rahul, why you are picking your nose?"
"Timepass, mummy!"
"Stop it right now, or else mummy's going to tell daddy Rahul's been a very bad boy."
Posted by Vishy at 10:17 PM | Comments (0)
Vishy's Useless Factoid of the Day #13: Dieresis
You may have noticed certain esteemed publications like the New Yorker or Technology Review print cooperation as coöperation and reelect as reëlect and wondered which Martian does their typesetting. Turns out they are are pedantically following the rule of the dieresis in spelling (Brit. diaeresis).
A dieresis usually appears on the second of a sequence of two vowels to indicate that it begins a new syllable. This means that the two vowels should be pronounced as two syllables rather than as one diphthong. This rule of spelling was apparently followed in older English publications, which explains why I have seen it appear in some elegantly typeset Arthur C. Doyle books. The dieresis is easy to miss if you are reading a passage quickly, but chances are you won't miss it if you spell naive as naïve, similar to its French analogue, naïf.
Most publications either ignore the rule of the dieresis entirely and omit it from typesetting. Others put in a hyphen where the syllable break occurs, as in re-elect.
Note that strictly speaking, a dieresis is a different diacritic than the umlaut. It is rendered the same way, but they are semantically and phonologically very different. A well-designed typeface would have umlauts very close to the vowel they modify, but would place dieresis marks over vowels slightly higher than an umlaut in the same font.
Posted by Vishy at 12:46 AM | Comments (0)
June 14, 2005
Vishy's Useless Factoid of the Day #12: Copying Windows XP error dialogs
Every so often you're trundling along doing something in Windows XP and all of a sudden, your application crashes with an Unspecified Error and a dialog box filled with gobbledygook. Said gobbledygook sometimes contains an error code in hex (like 0x80346513) and a bunch of other useful diagnostic information. Your face turns several shades paler. It is time to call Microsoft Support at $2.79 a minute with a $35 minimum charge. You can be sure they won't charge you just the minimum, though. With the money you would eventually spend, you could probably have gotten considerably more satisfactory *ahem* service on your friendly neighborhood 1-900 party line.
So you decide to post to Usenet (Note: Usenet? Usenet is part of the Googleplex. It has always been part of the Googleplex. It has always been known only as Google Groups.) Painstakingly you write down every digit in the horrendous HRESULT you got, as well as every other hex digit Windows spewed back at you. Little do you know that you've transposed two digits in the HRESULT and it's going to seem like an entirely different error to the trolls that troll Use^H^H^HGoogle Groups for nubile users like yourself.
Wouldn't it be great if you didn't need to write down anything by hand? Well, fear not, genuinely useful help from Windows XP is at hand!
Click on any dialog box. When it is the active window, hit Ctrl+C. Open Notepad or your favorite text editor and hit the Paste command, usually Ctrl+V. Voila! The contents of the dialog box are pasted into your text editor. It even draws cute lines for the borders of the dialog box. I did the Ctrl+C trick on a dialog box and this is what I got.
---------------------------
Notepad
---------------------------
The text in the Untitled file has changed.Do you want to save the changes?
---------------------------
Yes No Cancel
---------------------------
Look familiar? I only wish this worked for BSODs as well. Oh well, maybe in Longhorn!
This has been a presentation of the World's Largest Repository of Useless Knowledge. Heck, this factoid may even prove useful to you one day.
Posted by Vishy at 09:55 PM | Comments (1)
June 11, 2005
D: Movie Review
I went and saw D with some of my friends from work last night. When we got to the movie theater there was a long, serpentine line, which, at first glance, seemed to be all for D. This got us excited, because earlier in the evening some of us were abandoned Bunty Aur Babli, another Hindi movie playing at the same theater, for this. Little did we know. If this review dissuades even one person, who originally intended to see the movie, from seeing it, I shall consider my work done.
The movie is billed as a prequel to one of the milestone movies that came out of Bollywood in recent years, Company. Company, despite its fervent disclaimers that any resemblance to characters or events in real life is purely coincidental, is based on the turf wars between the gangs of Dawood Ibrahim and Chhota Rajan in Mumbai. Ever notice that the only movies with such disclaimers are movies loosely adapted from true stories? It's almost as if this disclaimer is a signal that makes movies less fantastic and more believable. D has the same disclaimer at its beginning too, but it leaves one wondering at the end if so many clichés could be crammed into real life after all.
D is said to be based on the life story of Dawood Ibrahim. It traces one man's entry into and meteoric ascent within a gang that strongarms customers to buy from Hashim, a businessman, who keeps repeating how he is only interested in his profits. Hashim has two incompetent sons, Shabbir and Muqram, who are nonetheless drunk with a sense of entitlement on the fact that they are blood relatives of the big boss, Hashim. They mostly kill time by engaging in all manner of unhealthy and unislamic activities, such as heavy smoking, heavy drinking, gambling and gamboling with random women. Meanwhile, Deshu, the chief protagonist of the story, who stands for the D in the title, returns from working as a mechanic in Dubai to an unemployed life back in Mumbai. He witnesses a cold blooded murder right outside the doorstep of a friend's house and is forced to deny the killing to the police by Hashim's rival, who initiated the killing. After being interrogated somewhat brutally by the police, he decides that the best way to fight the system would be by joining Hashim's gang, and gaining some money, power and business experience on the side. In the early parts of the movie, the script hints at the fluidity of this man's situation. When undergoing weapon's training with Hashim's gang, he mentions how he has undergone police training before, which leads one to wonder if his lust for power would have been any different if he had joined the police instead.
Hashim lets Deshu take on several new projects to expand their sphere of business and quickly learns to trust him with risks, much to the chagrin of his incompetent sons. Deshu also helps protect a Bollywood starlet from the unwanted advances of an actor. After a brief but forced on-camera courtship, they end up in bed together, also to the chagrin of Hashim's sons. After helping influence the outcome of an election in the area, the rancor between the two factions grows to such an extent that Hashim sends Deshu's faction off to Gujarat to look after business. Deshu continues to outperform the incompetent Hashimlings back in Mumbai and solidifies his control over business in Gujarat. In fact, such is his influence that clients though him no longer speak directly with Hashim, who he nominally works for. Deshu moves in with his girlfriend into her expensive bungalow in Juhu. Meanwhile, Hashim's sons poison his ears with various accounts of how Deshu is expanding his influence so much that there isn't space for both factions in the same gang and ask for permission to eliminate the other faction. Hashim, in spite of himself, washes his hands of the situation. Hashim's sons eliminate Deshu's closest partner in a somewhat gruesome scene and nearly succeed in eliminating Deshu and his girlfriend right in their expensive Juhu bungalow. However, Deshu, wearing nothing more than a wifebeater, sprints away with his girlfriend to safety, evading 20 gun-toting people with really bad aim.
Hashim's business partner brokers a truce between the two warring factions, where they agree to stop baiting each other. Deshu pulls out a gun and kills one of Hashim's sons at the truce meeting in return for their killing his close associate. He walks away, leaving behind a room full of stunned onlookers. Then he kills just about everybody else in Hashimling faction, leaving Shabbir, with his fear-filled, kohl-lined eyes, for the very end. He swings by a bedridden Hashim to take his leave and tells him that he always hated Hashim a lot more than his sons. The End. No really.
The movie is shot in a stark, minimalistic way, reminiscent of Ram Gopal Varma's other mafia-related movies, Satya and Company. The city of Mumbai, with its overpowering grime and squalor, is itself a character in this movie. Technically, the movie has many failings. The camera work is a significant departure from classic Bollywood movies and tries to show the gritty, grimy lives of its characters. Unfortunately, it outdoes itself and moves around so much that the movie feels like a veritable Blair Witch Project. Several dialogues are woefully out of sync with the actors' lips on screen. The dialogue and plot constantly leapfrog each other in a competition of banality. The audience develops no sympathy for any of the characters and remembers them as little more than the products of a series of unfortunate circumstances. The movie promises to show how one man grew to own, corporatize and transform the Mumbai underworld, but falls woefully short. I wish D wouldn't be billed as a prequel to Company because in doing so, it gives Company a bad name. If you have not seen Company before, you may give this movie a D, but if you have, you would certainly give it an F.
D may stand for Deshu. D may stand for Dawood. I say D stands for Don't.
Posted by Vishy at 11:05 AM | Comments (0)
June 09, 2005
Vishy's Indian English Dictionary: ragging
ragging. /RAG·ing/. Rhymes with flagging. A series of rituals performed by new members of a social group to gain familiarity and respect with the members and customs of the group. In the U.S., ragging is known as hazing. Ragging used to be the rage in many colleges in India. New students would occasionally get assigned over the top tasks, sometimes with grotesque results. However, in recent years, there has been a major crackdown on ragging, with some major institutions finding even minor ragging to be an offense under a zero-tolerance policy.
A typical exchange might use the word ragging as follows:
"Dude, I knew college was going to be a challenging place, but today I got ragged pretty badly."
"Did you have to wash a senior's underwear?"
"No, I was forced to teach differentiation fundas to a really ugly girl who obviously seemed to have the hots for me. By the end, I was almost throwing up the butter chicken parcel I had for lunch."
"That sounds majorly traumatic dude. I bet the seniors were sniggering at your plight in the distance."
"Dude, I am so traumatized, it looks like I have to prepone my trip home. I am leaving tonight only. My bags are already in my dicky."
[Major bonus points to observant readers for understanding the above conversation *completely*. All seemingly unfamiliar words have been covered before in this blog.]
P.S.: There has been a reorganization of posting categories in this blog, based on the types of content I found myself posting. Some categories have been removed and others have been refactored into more specialized ones. I hope the reorganization has no adverse effects on my bustling *cough* community of three readers.
Posted by Vishy at 11:04 PM | Comments (2)
June 07, 2005
Vishy's Vonderful Vitticism #5: The Morning Theory of Relativity
"It always takes longer to do something in the morning than to do it the night before (relatively speaking)"
In my long *cough* wisdom-bestowing experience, I have found that I save what seem like ridiculous amounts of time if I do some of my morning chores the night before. Two quick examples: it seems to take longer for me to choose my outfit for the day or to shave the night before I go to work than in the morning, just before I go to work. In absolute terms, it probably takes the same amount of time irrespective of when I perform a task. It's just that in the morning, I am only half-awake and there's many more things to do, such as get ready, mentally prepare myself for early morning meetings, think of any errands I need to do on the way to work and so on.
In the vein of what a renowned physicist once said
When you sit with a nice girl for two hours, it seems like two minutes. When you sit on a hot stove for two minutes, it seems like two hours -- that's relativity.this seems like a relativistic time contraction. Am I the only one who experiences this phenomenon?
To use a computer science analogy for this, CPU time for a task is probably the same regardless of when I am performing it, but real time for a task in the morning is longer. If we allot one thread per task, it would seem a lot more of my time is spent thread switching in the morning than the night before, which leads to the perception that I have less time. The perception of having less time is what makes it seem that tasks take longer to do (is this a whole different theory of time relativity in itself?)
Posted by Vishy at 09:03 AM | Comments (0)
June 05, 2005
Vishy's Useless Factoid of the Day #11: Fried Uzbek tetrahedrons
A sine qua non of Uzbek cuisine is the somsa. It is a flaky pastry filled with minced meat, onions and animal fat. Mmmm... (Who am I kidding? Even if I knew an Uzbek person, I wouldn't eat it because of my dietary habits.)
This delicious word snaked its way into Persian as samosa. Hindi picked it up later as samosā, with a long terminal vowel sound. So next time you're about to sink your teeth into a samosa, make a mental note to learn more about Uzbekistan, because the scrumptious fried tetrahedron you're holding in your hand came from there.
This useless factoid has been brought to you by the World's Largest Repository of Useless Knowledge.
Posted by Vishy at 02:04 PM | Comments (1)
June 04, 2005
Why a .blog top level domain is a good idea
The wires are buzzing with news of the approval of .xxx, a new top level domain (TLD) for adult oriented sites. Pornographic websites are not required to, but have the option to switch to this top level domain. This move will protect children from adult content by creating, in effect, a red light district online, distinct from the .coms, the .nets and the .orgs. I too approve of this move, not because I have any children that would be benefited, but because it gives recognition and legitimacy to a very important segment on the Internet. Adult websites have contributed significantly to the growth of Internet technologies by adopting them early, in an ongoing quest to deliver adult content creatively and realistically. However, the adult entertainment industry, excluding its flirtations with the cultural mainstream, has had little impact on the lives of its patrons beyond their most private moments. In contrast, another segment of the Internet, the so-called blogosphere, is affecting people's opinions and lives very tangibly. In fact, blogs are turning out to be so influential that they deserve to be hosted on their own top level domain, .blog.
The dream of a unified Europe cherished by many suffered a major setback, when the people of France and The Netherlands, both founding members of the European Union, roundly rejected a constitution that would have meant greater integration among the members of the EU. While sifting through the innumerable pieces of news and analysis related to this cataclysmic event, I came across a BBC report that highlighted the role of French bloggers in helping the Non vote. Opponents of the constitution argued that blogs were an important way for democratic discourse to be conducted on the Internet, because the government and the mainstream media were pushing an establishment viewpoint unabashedly in favor of the EU constitution.
Blogs have come of age in the last year or so due to the 2004 presidential election in the U.S. and have had significant influence since. Bloggers were admitted into the Democratic National Convention alongside mainstream media for the first time in 2004. The Internet in general and blogs in particular contributed significantly to the mobilization of the American electorate, which turned out in record numbers to cast its vote. Influential blogs such as Daily Kos and Captain's Quarters provide alternative news and commentary to ordinary Joe, whose only other recourse for such content is cable news. Mainstream media organizations are worried about losing their monopoly on providing news coverage to the masses. Even worse, they are so clueless about how to cope with the rise of blogs as a viable alternative media, that they shamelessly read blogs aloud on TV!. The way blogs have come of age in 2004 is highlighted by Merriam-Webster's selection of blog as the #1 Word of the Year 2004, based on the number of online lookups.
Blogs are becoming important not only in political discourse but also in the workplace. Large corporations such as Microsoft encourage its developers to blog as a way of reaching out to customers. A cursory keyword search of job banks for 'blog' or 'blogger' yields several hits. In early 2005, Apple sued three bloggers for leaking secrets about their upcoming product line and asked them to reveal their sources. The Supreme Court of the United States considered whether the bloggers could refuse to reveal their sources to Apple claiming journalistic privilege. The verdict came out in favor of Apple, which means that bloggers cannot currently claim protections granted to journalists. However, as blogs continue to gain influence, this question is likely to come up again sooner or later in the judiciary. Hopefully, the courts will recognize the role blogs are playing in contemporary society.
Blogs are bound to play a pivotal role in the much-heralded fragmentation of the media. Media experts argue that the rise of Internet advertising and alternative models of targeted content delivery will eventually lead to the decline of the few large media organizations and result in a number of small content-focused organizations with a small but dedicated following. The increasing number of content-based top-level domains (.info, .xxx and others ) already stands testimony to the phenomenon of media fragmentation. Creating a new .blog TLD for blogs would make it easier for search engines like Google to separate search results originating in blogs from those originating in other segments of the Web. Most importantly however, it would recognize the fact that blogs are having an enormous influence on public life and political discourse and deserve to be accorded at least as much respect as Kara's XXX Playground.
Posted by Vishy at 12:22 PM | Comments (0)
June 02, 2005
Vishy's Useless Factoid of the Day #10: What does serendipity have to do with Sri Lanka?
The word serendipity was coined in a Jan 28, 1754 letter by the English author Sir Horace Walpole to describe lucky accidents. He created this word from the title of an old fairy tale called The Three Princes of Serendip, who "... were always making discoveries, by accidents and sagacity, of things which they were not in quest of...? Serendip derives from the Persian Sarandip, which in turn comes from the Arabic sarandib. This word is an old name for today's Sri Lanka.
Hm, any other present day English words containing country names? How about the word indigo? Indigo descends from indicum (Lat.)/Indikon (Gr.), meaning "from India". It was a simple name for a shade of blue so distinctive that it was just called "the Indian dye". Did Microsoft name its sexy new messaging system after the large number of Indians who are probably working on it?
That, my friends, has been today's useless factoid from the World's Largest Repository of Useless Knowledge.
Sources: serendipity, indigo. *sigh* The things you learn from Answers.com.
Posted by Vishy at 12:07 AM | Comments (0)