There is one thing that bothered me most about Avatar, and it is about the morphology of the animals on Pandora ( Read more... )

So back in 1992, we used to stay in an university campus, which was situated well outside the town limits. We were insulated from the rest of the world, rarely disturbed by what was happening in the town. We were, however not isolated. Most of the children used to go to one of the schools in town, the telephone lines used to connect us to the town ( Read more... )

Apple has been granted a patent on the use of biometrics for personalization: The U.S. Patent and Trademark Office last week granted Apple a patent for biometric-sensor handheld devices that recognize a user by the image of his or her hand. In the not-too-distant future, anyone in the house could pick up an iOS device - or a remote control or ( Read more... )

I am not being facetious. I am asking this because it is important.

Wikipedia mentions that there have been seven astronauts in space. A referenced article in the Wikipedia page mentions one additional name, a Musa Manarov. These eight astronauts have logged a total of over 1100 days in space ( Read more... )

 Someone on some quiz blog asked a question on some really big statue of a dame with a sword, and off I went to look for answers in Wikipedia and look what I found. A list of the tallest statues in the world.

StatueDepictsCountryHeightCompletedSpring Temple BuddhaVairocana BuddhaChina128 m (420 ft)2002Laykyun SetkyarStanding BuddhaMyanmar116 m ( ( Read more... )

The new Blackberry ad for Vodafone, the one that goes "We are the Blackberry Boys", well, the first time I saw that ad, it was on one of those English language General Entertainment channels, I was convinced that it was a parody, probably from some new sit-com. Of course, I eventually noticed that the actors looked Indian, and it did end with the ( Read more... )

Roger Ebert pointed to a discussion between Errol Morris and Werner Herzog on the sidelines of Toronto International Film Festival. Morris had been influenced by Herzog, and as he says, on first watching a Herzog documentary, his reaction was to exclaim, "I didn't know that this was allowed" (or words to that effect ( Read more... )

Just saw Google scribe, and decided I needed to see how it reacts to the Gettysburg address

Click to view

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Edit:
Now I remember what I was reminded on by "Google scribe". This text visualizer from Many eyes. Except that instead of working on one piece of text at a time, Google scribe is working on an universe. I suppose, Google suggest is also doing the same ( Read more... )

Hugo Winner's 2010.

I am glad that Girl Genius won for "Best Graphic Story" and Frederik Pohl (at 90!) won for Best Fan Writer.

If you haven't read Girl Genius yet, I would suggest that you read it, starting from the first page.

I wish that the medical researchers would get more responsible and use more diseasy names for diseases. If you are like me, you would also think that a lot of diseases have names that sound like they have been dreamt up by professional scaremongers working for advertising agency. Every time I hear a dental care product advertisement assure me that ( Read more... )