Granted, it is about 37 minutes long. But it is one of the finest that I have ever heard. It is also one of the rarest, in the sense that a political candidate, running for the president of USA, no less, could ever dare to make. It is also rare to find even non-politicians confront the issue of race so effectively on the face. It is also one of the best references for those learning about public speech.
And curiously, if you replace black/white with upper-caste/lower-caste, it addresses as an analogy the same problems that India faces, and offers the same path of positiveness that our country needs, and what has been missing all these years because of our universally hated politicians.
I must have been living under a rock all these days. I just discovered Librarything yesterday.
Librarything.com is your online bookshelf. It lets you enter just the ISBN of books , and will pull in all the rest of the meta info - even thumbnail cover images. If you have a bar code scanner, you can scan your hundred+ book collection in no time at all. For Indian prints, I use the US ISBN number of the original written in the inside pages next to the print information, and tagging the book “indian-edition”.
So he decided that this was perhaps not such a wise move. There is a video presentation explaining why. The summary is that the representative he is fighting against is pretty strong, and for a first hand politician, the margin of defeat is going to be enormous. And “losing big” is not the best way to start such a campaign.
In other news, I have been trying out Twitter for the past few days. It is turning out to be quite addictive. Aren’t we often stuck at times, with nothing to do for hours, with just your mobile to give you company? Instead of fiddling with it, or taking lame pictures, vent yourself out on Twitter. Just keep it under 140 chars please. ;) Updating through gtalk sounds interesting till you find out that there is no way that pidgin would keep a count of characters for you and your last update has just been br0ken into two parts. About time there is a pidgin plugin which keeps track of your word count.
Flickr’s camera stats is an enormously humbling resource for me. It would be the most powerful message for newbie photography enthusiasts - creativity rules technology any day, so stop thinking too much about your camera. The kind of amazing photos taken using basic point-and-shoot cameras by talented photographers from around the world, keeps me firmly rooted to the ground while I lug my bulky Rebel Xti wherever I go.
I just saw the update on Lessig’s blog - he is actually considering running for Congress this year! You can find more at http://lessig08.org/.
Lessig’s announcement last year of the shift of his efforts over the next decade had significantly changed the way I look at myself. I had been involved in LUGs and FOSS advocacy for almost eight years by then. But I suddenly realized (and perhaps there are quite a few people out there who always felt that way about me) that I am nothing more than an armchair activist. Emailing about software freedom, harping about the evils of software patents from the comforts of my home, giving gyaan to people on FOSS lists mean nothing, or almost next to nothing.
I was recently introduced to the world of binaural recordings, and was blown away with the dramatic experience.
What is special about binaural sound is that you are totally immersed into the sound. No, the sound
isn’t around you like in 5.1 channel surround sound. Rather, the sound is almost within your head,
as if your ears were there, and the sound is moving all around you … so realistic that every one I
introduced to this magic, spent the first few minutes in disbelief. In “the sounds of the barber
shop” (link given below), the telephone rings so naturally that I almost jumped up the first time to
see whose phone is ringing near me.
This is
probably one of the the most chilling of wildlife stories I have ever read. And
the video in the article was as scary.
The wasp, which lives in tropical regions of Africa, India and the Pacific
Islands, relies on cockroaches for its grisly life cycle. But unlike many
venomous predators, which paralyse their victims before eating them or
dragging them back to their lair, the wasp’s sting leaves the cockroach able
to walk, but unable to initiate its own movement.
Really nice quote in an article of the current issue of Time. I had never looked at the differences in this way before. The actual comparison here is done between Islamic societies and the west, but you can mostly replace “Islamic” with “Eastern” over here.
“That’s the big difference between us,” he shrugged. “You Westerners make love in public and pray in private. We Muslims do exactly the reverse.”
The author raises a very important question in this article:
At the nub of debates over Muslim integration in Europe lies the question: what’s decent to do in public? Display your sexuality, or your faith? The French have no problem with bare breasts on billboards and TV, but big problems with hijab-covered heads in public schools and government offices. Many Muslims feel just the opposite.
