Livejournal

I am writing at livejournal these days. Have i shifted there? not sure, but livejournal has some interesting features that are missing here. The tags feature is one good thing. Another thing is the flexible template that i could not find here; text on this page has fixed width and appears as a narrow column on wider windows. Finally, support for back-dated entries helps me in shifting my (few) entries there easily.

You are Bloogled

Google is starting to use its acquisition...

Checkout the new Bloogle for the general noise on this.

Related story, The Nine Billion Names of God. The Onion has another piece.

Google-bashing may-just free M$ from the epidemic; that virus may mutate :-)

cyberpunk journalism

Cyberpunk journalism by William Gibson on U2 Vertgo tour technology.

Gibson (who wrote Neuromancer) is considered father-of the term cyberpunk. A small example of this is clearly seen in the choice of subject and contents for his Wired article U2's City of Blinding Lights.

Flooding in Pune

It was another flooded evening for Pune. Flow of people heading homewards in the evening was restricted over a few clear bridges and nudged through various traffic-jams on the way.

The broad Mula crossover through Aundh over Rajiv Gandhi bridge was blocked as water flooded its city-side ramp; causing all traffic to divert to the neighbouring secondary bridge. I found a page by Salil giving a short treatise on names of the two bridges i talk about here.

As the Mula raged with higher water-levels, traffic logjammed over the narrow relatively-older bridge that was not blocked; moving much slower than the racing water under it.

People persisted in the traffic flow with determination as the evening drew to a close while Mula rushed on its way to the Samgam.

aging and evolving

There was a time when people suggested that this angry-young-man should mellow down, or better, retire! And over the past years he did a bit of both;
but -- he also did a few other things while he was at it. From a unidirectional role player who almost always led you to guns and swords, Amitabh dispersed into a gala of characters; picking up threads of refined presentations -- Black and Sarkar to name a couple of works i recently caught him on. It is now that he starts to leave a yet-deeper mark in movie history.

Sarkar based on The-Godfather story, leads the two Bachchans along the roles of Marlon Brando and Al Pacino. As a Bollywood movie, it has a few things which are rarely seen in mainstream cinema from that place. And, these are things that will help define a better bollywood movie -- out of its present cliched existance.

1) The movie is devoid of song-n-dance numbers.
2) Does not attempt to reinforce the hero-and-hapless-lady constructs.
3) Skips mexican-standoffs in the face of many opportunities.

That is a lot to say for one-hindi-movie.

Getting warmed up on the Indian movie angle is a nice time to notice another development in a different genre. Ian McDonald has -- relatively recently -- written a science-fiction work set in India of the future (2047 to be precise). This should be an interesting read -- meaning, i have not got my hands or eyes on it yet; what i have read are the reviews.
One thing strikes a chord somewhere though!
The Krishna-cops of this plot seem lifted right out of the Blade-Runner movie script (which itself is right around a Philip K Dick book -- not the focus of this writing at the moment).
Here we seem to have an adapted extension of the cliche by a British author to an Indian context. Hopefully, he has grown it into an interesting plot. Planning on reading River of Gods very soon.

The Code

Found another custom crop-circle made by skeptic.com.

But, that is incidental; and only helps me connect this post to the previous one -- then again, there maybe a connection...

If you have read Dan Brown's The Da Vinci Code, and are planning to delve into studies of the various probablities, it would serve you well to lookup this review. If you have any more factual leads to the 'investigation' do add them here.

Before i close this post, a link for one 'linguistic snob' i know :-)

Circles and other discourses in geometry

It is surprising how crop circles are still carried around as mysterious phenomena.

Basic google searches seem to landup with a concoction of pages that dont always lead to a straight (and skeptic) answer.

So, i pulled a good starter on the issue.

InquiringMinds.Org has a page on lecture notes (More Hoaxes (crop circles)) of Professor Randall J. Scalise and Professor John Cotton.

These notes have links to several interesting references and other work.

For those new to this topic (really?) or in need of a context, there are a couple of articles on the subject:
An Aug-2002 article Weird science: Circular logic with a followup link to a little more recent (and aptly named for July-2004) The fellowship of the rings.

enjoy!