Supreme Nerd. Apply for a professorship at MIT now!!!.Now the question is...should I be happy or sad ? Jumping with joy, or just plain depressed ?
"A Reminiscence of Cricket"
Once in my heyday of cricket,
One day I shall ever recall!
I captured that glorious wicket,
The greatest, the grandest of all.
Before me he stands like a vision,
Bearded and burly and brown,
A smile of good humoured derision
As he waits for the first to come down.
A statue from Thebes or from Knossos,
A Hercules shrouded in white,
Assyrian bull-like colossus,
He stands in his might.
With the beard of a Goth or a Vandal,
His bat hanging ready and free,
His great hairy hands on the handle,
And his menacing eyes upon me.
And I - I had tricks for the rabbits,
The feeble of mind or eye,
I could see all the duffer's bad habits
And where his ruin might lie.
The capture of such might elate one,
But it seemed like one horrible jest
That I should serve tosh to the great one,
Who had broken the hearts of the best.
Well, here goes! Good Lord, what a rotter!
Such a sitter as never was dreamt;
It was clay in the hands of the potter,
But he tapped it with quiet contempt.
The second was better - a leetle;
It was low, but was nearly long-hop;
As the housemaid comes down on the beetle
So down came the bat with a chop.
He was sizing me up with some wonder,
My broken-kneed action and ways;
I could see the grim menace from under
The striped peak that shaded his gaze.
The third was a gift or it looked it-
A foot off the wicket or so;
His huge figure swooped as he hooked it,
His great body swung to the blow.
Still when my dreams are night-marish,
I picture that terrible smite,
It was meant for a neighboring parish,
Or any place out of sight.
But - yes, there's a but to the story -
The blade swished a trifle too low;
Oh wonder, and vision of glory!
It was up like a shaft from a bow.
Up, up like a towering game bird,
Up, up to a speck in the blue,
And then coming down like the same bird,
Dead straight on the line that it flew.
Good Lord, it was mine! Such a soarer
Would call for a safe pair of hands;
None safer than Derbyshire Storer,
And there, face uplifted, he stands
Wicket keep Storer, the knowing,
Wary and steady of nerve,
Watching it falling and growing
Marking the pace and curve.
I stood with my two eyes fixed on it,
Paralysed, helpless, inert;
There was 'plunk' as the gloves shut upon it,
And he cuddled it up to his shirt.
Out - beyond question or wrangle!
Homeward he lurched to his lunch!
His bat was tucked up at an angle,
His great shoulders curved to a hunch.
Walking he rumbled and grumbled,
Scolding himself and not me;
One glove was off, and he fumbled,
Twisting the other hand free
Did I give Storer the credit
The thanks he so splendidly earned?
It was mere empty talk if I said it,
For Grace had already returned.
Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
We now live in a world, where we are constantly being barraged about the impending oil/energy crisis. So, we are told that oil reserves will die out in around fifty years, and we are nearing the peak of oil production, and all that is left, is the inevitable fall in
production, until it just tapers off. Ok, first off, I believe that the fifty years being touted by the media and the oil companies is plain rubbish...I mean, we haven't even started to tap into the vast reserves under Siberia, Alaska, the Rocky mountains, and of course, the granddaddy of all - the deep sea oil reserves ! So, this 50 year deadline may not be such a hard one after all...thinking pessimistically, I believe that it might be closer to 150 years...optimistically, maybe even 200+ years !
This is the hope that drives us to wantonly use oil and energy without worrying about the future. The blue arrow shows us the point where an alternative energy source, possibly as yet undiscovered, will make up for the impending oil crisis, well before it is a crisis ! This is the perfect world, where we will not even notice the pinch from the production drop in oil and other conventional energy sources. The future for humanity will be bright and we will march into it with even greater speed...
This is the worst case scenario! From the above graph, we see that it is possible that the next big thing will not take off, and hey, may not even arrive, before the oil production drops to abysmal levels. This portends doom for humanity, and for human civilization at the very least...our modern way of life will be threatened, as literally everything - from transportation (people/goods) to power generation, to every day affairs often depends on an easily available resource like oil. Without it being available so abundantly, we will enter crisis mode, and from then on, one can only hope that widespread anarchy doesn't flare up...this is a very bleak future for us indeed...
The shaded blue are represents a time frame when we will feel a global crunch...the countries/communities/people at the lower rungs wil probably feel it worse than the ones at the top, but there will still be widespread effects felt for decades...this blue region depicts the time when the oil production is depleting, and the new tchnology has not quite been able to quite catch up the the demands posed by the failure of oil to supply the needs of the ever growing human populace. Global economies will be in ruins, but hopefully not unrecoverably so...prices and inflation will go up, and life will be harder to maintain...it will push back economic growth by a few decades, perhaps even a century or two...but then again, we should be able to get back on track once the new technology takes off and mass production is able to bring the prices down...perhaps the drop in oil and resulting effects might delay/advance the new technology a bit, depending on the thought processes of the world/corporate leaders (will there be a difference between the two ? That is for a later post!)...of course, it might degenerate into the pessimistic model or might be able to gather enough momentum to bring on the perfect model....but an effect will still be felt, and no small one at that.
i.e., outputs of various smaller energy sources will make up for the global drop in oil production(see blue arrow). The coloured lines representing the various energy sources are cumulative - i.e. they are "added on" to the production from the previous alternative energy source. Interesting, and makes a lot of sense...I can actually see this as one good alternative, considering the way technology has developed over the last few decades...but I have some niggling thoughts regarding this...menopause begat grandmothers, and grandmothers mean daycare and extra nutrition for demanding human babiesSome excerpts...
Women who are no longer able to have children have more time to babysit and forage for food. Both of these functions are important because at this point in her life, a woman's daughter—who is likely around 17 years old and at the peak of her fertility—is busy giving birth to more children.Although this could also explain some of the problems for women in modern life...
"[The grandmother] is investing in the second generation of her own line," Shaw said. "None of the other primates—and certainly none of the great apes—show this consistency."
While helpful for hunter-gatherers, this decline in fertility is a hindrance in modern life, Shaw says. Women now often delay childbearing until they are less fertile, and more women live past menopause, becoming more susceptible to health problems like osteoporosis, bowel cancer and Alzheimer's disease.
Paradoxically, Shaw's finding might actually prove beneficial to those wanting to have kids at an older age. Scientists already know that the process of fertility decline is controlled by genes that promote apoptosis, or programmed cell death, which causes a reduction in the number of eggs in a woman's ovaries. Knowing this, scientists might be able to use gene therapy to allow women to conceive naturally later in life, Shaw said.
Well...it seems that hot flashes were the reason why humanity has been able to evolve so much ! Hmmm...somebody up there has a wacky sense of humour !
And here is how it looks in Firefox...
Interesting ! An "error" page that doesn't appear on IE but does so on Firefox...and Microsoft doesn't even have a warning stating that they don't support Firefox...also users haven't been able to view it on Safari, or even the IE for the Mac ! So this works only for IE on Windows...
Genetic analysis strongly suggests that all men are descended from a single male, and all women from a single female !So there really were an Adam and an Eve ?
his book advertises news of scientific discoveries that might not go down well with his liberal readers. For instance, it turns out that chimpanzees are not quite the peaceable souls that decades of National Geographic specials have represented to us. Your average adult male chimpanzee likes nothing better than an aggressive border raid into the territory of the neighboring troop. The usual order of battle is for three chimps to set off into enemy territory and find a solo chimp feeding away from the rest of the troop. When they have caught their prey, two of them hold the victim down while the third kills it.Or how about this one...That might explain why humans have been so warlike over the years.About 65 percent of primitive societies are at war constantly, Wade writes, and about 30 percent of males die from conflict. The dawn raid is a favorite human tactic. You enter an enemy village at dawn, set fire to the huts, and then kill people as they run out of the burning huts to safety.
race is clearly genetic in origin, and not a “social construct” as the American Sociological Association insistsSo, could it be that all those myths are not really what they seem to be - mythical ? That there is a semblance of truth somewhere and Darwinism may not be the complete truth ?
Pink Floyd's "Dark Side of the Moon", found its way into the Billboard top 200 chart for albums in 1973...it started a long session for the album on the charts...right until July 1988 ! It dropped off the charts for a couple of weeks, and then astonishingly, it returned...and what's better ? It has stayed on ever since ! It reached the staggerging record of 1500 weeks in May 2006 !In a variety of experiments, the first person to receive the implant, Matthew Nagle, moved a cursor, opened e-mail, played a simple video game called Pong and drew a crude circle on the screen. He could change the channel or volume on a television set, move a robot arm somewhat, and open and close a prosthetic hand.
...The sensor measures 4 millimeters by 4 millimeters — less than a fifth of an inch long and wide — and contains 100 tiny electrodes. The device was implanted in the area of Mr. Nagle’s motor cortex responsible for arm movement and was connected to a pedestal that protruded from the top of his skull.
When the device was to be used, technicians plugged a cable connected to a computer into the pedestal. So Mr. Nagle was directly wired to a computer, somewhat like a character in the “Matrix” movies.
...
Mr. Nagle would then imagine moving his arm to hit various targets. The implanted sensor eavesdropped on the electrical signals emitted by neurons in his motor cortex as they controlled the imaginary arm movement.
Obstacles must be overcome, though, before brain implants become practical. For one thing, the electrodes’ ability to detect brain signals begins to deteriorate after several months, for reasons not fully understood. In addition, the implant would ideally transmit signals wirelessly out of the brain, doing away with the permanent hole in the head and the accompanying risk of infection. Further, the testing involving Mr. Nagle required recalibration of the system each day, a task that took technicians about half an hour.
Well, it seems like the future, only seen in science fiction to date, is finally here ! Perhaps we can all envision a future where human computer interactions are more "natural" than using a keyboard or mouse, or even a pen !
As I waddled into my lab this evening at 6 pm, I was unaware of the turmoil in India's financial capital, Mumbai. The news channels out here aren't very reliable in carrying "breaking news" alerts about other countries...at times other states even ! So, when I look up from my usual list of RSS feeds, and I see a vague item about bomb blasts in Mumbai somewhere deep in the Washington Post's list of stories, I was absolutely shaken ! And this was about spending 15 minutes looking at RSS feeds from the New York Times, which had no coverage on it until then ! And then I found more information on Wikinews, and finally launched into the Indian Express and the Telegraph and the list of Indian bloggers to get more information...
I would be Sibildo ! Fantastic, I say...people will go to great lengths to make funny, at times useless stuff...
When people went to the home page of Google or Yahoo and entered a few words into a search engine, what they were really doing, he realized, was announcing their intentions.They typed in "Alaskan cruise" because they were thinking about taking one or "baby names" because they were planning on needing one.Well, I wonder if the internet searches could also perhaps provide seeds for truly random number generators...
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YOU can see, for example, that the volume of Google searches would have done an excellent job predicting this year's "American Idol," with Taylor Hicks (the champion) being searched more often than Katharine McPhee (second place), who in turn was searched more often than Elliot Yamin (third place). Then you can compare Hillary Clinton and Al Gore and discover that she was more popular than he for almost all of the last two years, until he surged past her in April and stayed there.
...
Thanks to Google Trends, the mayor of Elmhurst, Ill., a Chicago suburb, has had to explain why his city devotes more of its Web searches to "sex" than any other in the United States (because it doesn't have strip clubs or pornography shops, he gamely told The Chicago Sun-Times).
McCain vs GoreInterestingly, both have similar news coverage volumes, but Al Gore seems to lead in the search category, and with a wide margin at that ! John McCain came close only once, that too in early 2004...now, if Al Gore joins the presidential race for 2008, we can perhaps venture a guess as to who will win ? Assuming of course that both will be the frontrunners from their respective parties...
