Ashton’s mini Poutine with regular gravy(Img Credit: Wikipedia)
Mocha, the coffee and Sheesha (hookah) shop in GK-I and NOIDA, is great for unusual side dishes. Yesterday me and my bro tried out Poutine - a french canadian dish. The version served by Mocha had a cheese-curd dip and french fries alongside in a separate dish. The serving person did ask whether we want the gravy on the fries itself, but we balked at the idea.
http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20050407-4785.html
Reuters is reporting that Sony recently got a pie-in-the-sky patent on using ultrasonic waves to beam sensory perceptions, like sights, sounds, and smells, directly into the brain. So in a sense, Sony’s patent is an improvement on The Matrix and the traditional cyperpunk notions of a sensory-enabled network that inspired it, because Sony’s method is non-invasive and doesn’t require you to “jack in.” I suppose you could say it’s “wireless,” to use a current buzz word.
The drupal blog mentions that:
The company MaxMind.com has agreed to release their cities of the world database under the GPL. The database contains locations by country, city, latitude and longitude. There are over 3,047,000 records in the database.
The database seems to be at http://www.maxmind.com/download/worldcities/.
The MaxMind site also offers FLOSS software free access to their GeoIP database.
As a way of giving back to the Open Source community, we offer a free subscription to GeoIP Country Binary API database updates for use by any widely used Open Source project for the purposes of selecting the closest download mirror.
EFF reports:
March 07, 2005. Geneva. - Last week, the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) announced that it will shut out most public interest organizations at two important meetings devoted to intellectual property and development. As a result, WIPO delegates from 182 nations will discuss these issues without hearing from many of the world’s best-qualified experts.
Scheduled for next month, two WIPO “Development Agenda” meetings will focus on the impact of copyright, patent, and other intellectual property rights regimes on the developing world.
Thaths mentions a news article which reveals that Terri Schiavo was suffering from Bulimia, a psychological condition similar to Anorexia.
When Terri was 18 years old, she weighed 250 pounds. She developed an eating disorder, lost 100 pounds, got married and trimmed down to a Calvin Klein-acceptable 110. The only problem was, she was killing herself doing it. Her bulimia likely led to a potassium deficiency, which ultimately led to cardiac arrest and severe brain damage.
I might be one of the last people to know about this, but here goes anyway.
I was (yet again) at the MySQL website looking for the place to download the latest documentation, when I noticed this curious download link called Thoutreader format. Intrigued, I clicked on the link and it took me to the MySQL documentation download link at http://www.osoft.com .
Turns out that the OSoft ThoutReader is an opensource (GPL) Java based cross-platform ebook reader (Sourceforge project).
In a swooping country wide move, the HRD ministry has removed the directors of 11 NITs (previously named RECs) across the country citing an irregular process of appointment by the previous government. The present HRD ministry under Mr. Arjun Singh calls this a detoxification drive against the misdeeds of the previous government whose HRD ministry was led by Mr. Murli Manohar Joshi.
As a fallout of this action, the director of my alma-mater REC Jalandhar (now named NIT Jalandhar), Dr.
I have frequently felt moments of disorientation when certain characters of TV (mostly Americans) pronounce o-f-t-e-n with a audible ’t’. Digging around a bit, I found an interesting bit of trivia at dictionary.com.
The definition of ‘often’ mentions:
During the 15th century English experienced a widespread loss of certain consonant sounds within consonant clusters, as the (d) in handsome and handkerchief, the (p) in consumption and raspberry, and the (t) in chestnut and often.
A Bengali restaurant in New York experimented with a new concept - pay-as-you-like. You eat, and then you pay as much as you think that the food is worth. After causing serious conscience-related trauma in patrons, they finally had to put prices in the menu. Link to article.
(via TriNetre - The Third Eye)
I credit Isaac Asimov for my long-time fascination with the genre of science-fiction. Asimov (mostly) and Arthur C. Clarke were mostly what I read at the end of my school days. I was browsing through Wikipedia today and caught a recent feature by them on Asimov. The wikipedia entry on Asimov was fascinating - there were so many facts about him that I didn’t know. So I decided to create a short self-reference of facts that I would like to remember of this great man.