new car 

Stephen Hawking's interview

An interesting interview with Stephen Hawkings in NYT.

Some excerpts:

Are you always this cheerful?

Life would be tragic if it weren't funny.

Seriously, how do you keep your spirits up?

My expectations were reduced to zero when I was 21. Everything since then has been a bonus.

Do you think people will ever live on a planet besides Earth?

Yes, if we don't self-destruct first.

What do you and your academic friends make of the debate over embryonic-stem-cell research in this country?

In Britain, like most of the developed world, stem-cell research is regarded as a great opportunity. America will be left behind if it doesn't change policy.

Could stem-cell research help you at all?

Like Christopher Reeve, I'm very much in favor, but unlike he did, I don't expect to benefit personally.

iPodcurrent:

Vijay Singh - PGA Tour Player of 2004

Hats off to Vijay Singh who was voted the PGA Tour Player of the Year. He has been a study in what someone can achieve through determination, strong will and hard work. Even at the relatively late age of 41.

Almost everyone felt he deserved the honor last year - but lost to Tiger Woods, reportedly in a close race. Undaunted, he motivated himself by setting a goal of surpassing Tiger's #1 ranking and put himself through a strenuous work-out and training regiment that has been the talk of the tour (it includes hitting 1000 balls a day !!!). His goal was achieved in less than half that time at Boston this year.

Via Sepia Mutiny :

This is scary.

I have pretty much steered clear of hotly debatable political, social and religous issues on this blog so far, in order to avoid injustice to a serious topic through superficial coverage. However, this piece of news from Andrew Sullivan, had me really alarmed:

THEOCRACY WATCH II: I missed this quote from Alabama state rep Gerald Allen, who wants to ban public funds for any books "that recognize or promote homosexuality as an acceptable lifestyle." What of existing books by, say, Whitman or Auden or Proust, and other degenerates? We have the answer:

Allen said that if his bill passes, novels with gay protagonists and college textbooks that suggest homosexuality is natural would have to be removed from library shelves and destroyed. "I guess we dig a big hole and dump them in and bury them," he said.

Why not burn them instead? Among the books Allen wants to "bury" are "The Color Purple," "The Picture of Dorian Gray" and "Brideshead Revisited." Public schools would be barred from performing "Cat on a Hot Tin Roof." I used to read these kinds of stories and dismiss them. But in Karl Rove's Republican party, how is this in any way out of place?

Obviously, it would be very difficult to pass this kind of legislature (although I might not really be suprised if it did) and this guy is trying to get some political mileage by making this an issue. But the fact that an elected official could even suggest something on the lines of one of the most despicable acts of the last century is quite scary.

More on this and suggested forms of protest here.






iPodcurrent:

The cheesiest movie lines.......

The outcome of a survey of 2000 movie-goers by the British foodmaker Warburton as a part of their upcoming cheese campaign. Click on the title for the full story. Here are the top ten:

1. "Titanic": Leonardo DiCaprio's "I'm the king of the world!"

2. "Dirty Dancing": Patrick Swayze's "Nobody puts Baby in the corner."

3. "Four Weddings And A Funeral": Andie McDowell's "Is it still raining? I hadn't noticed."

3. "Ghost": Demi Moore's "Ditto." to Patrick Swayze's "I love you."

5. "Top Gun": Val Kilmer to Tom Cruise : "You can be my wingman anytime"

6. "Notting Hill": Julia Roberts' "I'm just a girl... standing in front of a boy... asking him to love her."

7. "Independence Day": Bill Pullman's "Today we celebrate our Independence Day!"

8. "Braveheart": Mel Gibson's "They may take our lives, but they will not take our freedom!"

9. "Jerry Maguire": Renee Zellweger to Tom Cruise: "You had me at hello."

10. "The Postman": A blind woman says to Kevin Costner : "You're a godsend, a savior." He replies: "No, I'm a postman."

iPodcurrent:

Answers to Life, Universe and Everything else.....

....coming soon to a theatre near you.

Don't forget your towels !!!




iPodcurrent:

After a long time.....

With finishing up the thesis and the post-thesis decompression in sunny (but unusally cold) southern California and Las Vegas - its been a longish break from blogging.

The last bit of thesis writing was 'fun' - especially trying to figure out and turning off all the auto-formatting actions in Microsoft Words (that too at 2am in the morning !!). Then, it was even more fun explaining to the people at Kinkos, a simple task of printing some of the thesis pages in color and the rest in b/w and then putting the colored pages where they belong to get the final document. Lessons learnt: (1) use LATEX for writing papers/thesis etc (2) don't take your print jobs to Kinko's.

The Bozone Layer: The substance surrounding stupid people that stops bright ideas penetrating. The bozone layer, unfortunately, shows little sign of breaking down in the near future.
(from an old Larson Far-side strip)

Meanwhile India won the the second test and thereby the series againts South Africa. After the attacking 3+ rpo of the matches against Australia, this series featured really dull but to some extent solid defensive batting by South Africa. Indians were guilty of that too in the first innings of the second test when they were unable to force the pace on the third day. But Harbhajan turned it around yet again at Eden Gardens.

Check out the Google scholar. It is a really neat tool that ' enables you to search specifically for scholarly literature, including peer-reviewed papers, theses, books, preprints, abstracts and technical reports from all broad areas of research '.

Unlike Pubmed which sorts the results chronologically, the results are ranked in terms of relevance that takes into account the number of citations for a particular paper. I typed in a few searches for luminescence energy transfer, single molecule fret and it worked pretty well.




iPodcurrent: