An Illustrated History of Free Speech in India

From Gandhi to Arindam Chaudhuri is the title of this illustrated history. Absolutely great stuff from the Free Speech Journal, appearing at Scroll.in.

Links

1. The Caravan: No double entendres: The words the censor board doesn't want you to hear (discretion advised).

2. Robert Frank in Vox: Why have weddings and houses gotten so ridiculously expensive? Blame inequality.

3. Paul Krugman: Floor Waxes, Dessert Toppings, and Blogging.

"Beautiful Chemistry"

Wonderful stuff [Hat tip: Cocktail Party Physics]. Here's the website with lots of interactive graphics.

Fathers Day cartoons in the New Yorker

A lovely slide-show of 14 cartoons from the magazine's archives (12 with sons and 2 with daughters). This one is raucous while this is for academics.

* * *

The New Yorker did a slide-show for Mothers Day last month with a 5:1 skew in favour of sons (and six other cartoons are more generally about mothers -- this one is LOL-funny).

When philosophy professors go to hell

SMBC gives them a preview of what they are in for. Scary!

Maria Weinstock: 15 Works of Art Depicting Women in Science

Check out this photo essay on "Visualizing notable women in the STEM fields through the lens of fine art" at the Scientific American site.

Graffiti Gandhi

Over at WSJ's India Real Time blog, a neat story -- How Gandhi Made It to Police Headquarters -- on a huge portrait of Mahatma Gandhi painted on a side wall of the Delhi Police Headquarters. This mural was done, with official permission, of course, as a part of a street art and graffiti festival at Delhi.

The pics alone are worth a click!

Links

1. Wildlife photographer, author of Secret Lives, and IISc alumna Natasha Mhatre writes about the hard work that went into the wonderful potter wasp pic that won the first prize in the National Wildlife Federation photo contest. Key quote: " I didn't click it, I didn't snap it, no, no, I stalked it and I made it."

2. Mathematical eye-candy: John Baez has an animated picture of the Enneper Surface drawn by Greg Egan.

3. Vi Hart: How I Feel About Logarithms: "I like the number 8. I like the way it smells like 2 and 4 with a hint of 3 in a cubic sort of way ..."

"You Complete Me"

What started as a romantic quote, got parodied in several films (e.g. this brilliant scene in The Dark Knight)before graffiti artist Banksy gave it his treatment.

* * *

Banksy is involved in this replication (of sorts) of the Joshua Bell experiment [Hat tip to Michael Nielsen]:

Links

1. Bob Mankoff, The New Yorker's cartoon editor, picks ten of his favorites. Delightful stuff -- the set even includes one about Einstein's pillow talk.

   Mankoff's TED talk is pretty great too:

2. What it's like to get a national security letter -- an interview with Brewster Kahle, the founder of the nonprofit Internet Archive ... and of the Wayback Machine, [... and] one of very few people in the United States who can talk about receiving a national-security letter."

3. Hmmm, extending the progression towards grimness, here are a couple of links: How not to die by Jonathan Rauch at The Atlantic, and How do physicians and non-physicians want to die? by Lisa Wade at Sociological Images. We also linked to an earlier article by Ken Murray making similar arguments.

New Yorker on the Surveillance State

"If you didn't sneeze, and I didn't sneeze, then the FBI must have sneezed."

That's from one of the cartoons in this great collection from the New Yorker archives on the surveillance state. Wonderful stuff!

Links

1. India's Physics Rebels -- a Physics World podcast, accompanying the magazine's special report on physics education and research in India. On page 13, the report features an interview with Prof. Shobhana Narasimhan.

2. It appears that the US Postal Service is going through some seriously tough times. The New Yorker has a slide show of some of its cartoons on postmen. The first and the last are especially fabulous!

3. Aatish Bhatia at Empirical Zeal: What the Dalai Lama can teach us about temperatures below absolute zero.

In honor of no one in particular ...

... here's the link of the day: Christ, what an asshole. [a bunch of remixed cartoons]

Links

1. Peter Whoriskey in The Washington Post: As drug industry’s influence over research grows, so does the potential for bias:

   Arguably the most prestigious medical journal in the world, the New England Journal of Medicine regularly features articles over which pharmaceutical companies and their employees can exert significant influence.

   Over a year-long period ending in August, NEJM published 73 articles on original studies of new drugs, encompassing drugs approved by the FDA since 2000 and experimental drugs, according to a review by The Washington Post.

   Of those articles, 60 were funded by a pharmaceutical company, 50 were co-written by drug company employees and 37 had a lead author, typically an academic, who had previously accepted outside compensation from the sponsoring drug company in the form of consultant pay, grants or speaker fees.

2. Kate Masur in CHE: A Filmmaker’s Imagination, and a Historian’s. A historian critiques Spielberg's Lincoln.

3. Louis P. Masur in CHE: Lincoln at the Movies. An overview of movies about Lincoln.

4. Jeffrey Young in CHE: Welcome to Star Scholar U. About academic stars going rogue offering online courses under their own brand.

Searching Calvin and Hobbes

This is from S. Anand's post from 2010:

There were a few Calvin and Hobbes search engines around. None quite did what I wanted them to – which was to search the text, and show me the strip, with a nice scrollable interface.

So I set out to build one. I can’t remember when, exactly, but it was before Sep 11, 2002.

It took me many years. I’d spend several train rides and evenings typing this stuff out. My friends, employers and family were a bit puzzled, but just added it to my list of eccentricities and carried on. I was halfway there in 2005, pushed further in 2006, and with some help, I managed to finally complete it.

I was able to do a lot of cool stuff with this, like statistically improbable phrases and some amusing posts as well.

When his efforts were picked up by Reddit and Metafilter, he received a take-down notice, and all his stuff went offline.

How things change in just two years!

A search engine by Michael Yingling (who credits the script, "likely from S. Anand" posted online) has also been in operation at least since the time Anand got the take-down notice, but survived long enough to get a better treatment. When news about this site went viral recently, it received official sanction, praise, and reward.

The Rolls Royce of Chalk

Over at Williams College's Mathematics and Statistics Blog, Satyan Devadoss has an old post about one of the most important items in a mathematician's toolkit: chalk. His entire post is a build-up to this all important question:

3. So what is the best chalk out there?

I have wrestled with this question and spent a bit of time pursing this over my sabbatical last year. There have been rumors about a dream chalk, a chalk so powerful that mathematics practically writes itself; a chalk so amazing that no incorrect proof can be written using this chalk. I can finally say, after months of pursuit, that such a chalk indeed exists. It is called the Hagoromo Fulltouch Chalk.

For those lucky few who have used it, it can truly be called the Michael Jordan of chalk, the Rolls Royce of chalk. [Bold emphasis added]

The Higgs! The Boson!

1. The Hunted (cartoon), by Abstruse Goose.

2. Do you still want to see this Odd Particle I’ve found? (cartoon), by Noise to Signal.

3. A sonnet on a Higgs-like particle (video) by Vi Hart.

4. BoingBoing: Gettin' Higgy With it: A Roundup of Higgs Boson Jokes on Twitter.

5. Closer Home. On the one hand, The gods of the particles ("The Higgs bit we know. But the boson? Western science is overlooking India's contribution to the discovery") by Amit Chaudhuri, and For the Indian Father of the ‘God Particle,’ a Long Journey from Dhaka by Samanth Subramanian.

6. On the other hand, Higgs and the subcontinent by Rahul Siddharthan; and also on the other hand (a very snarky one!), Putting the Bose in boson. And my fist in your face-on by Achintya Rao.

Philosophers, Wikipedia, ...

... and infographics!

Lots of stuff for philosophers and historians to nibble at, and (eye) candy for the rest of us...

[Addendum: a bigger, richer infographic of all the influentials in Wikipedia.]

Links

1. Charles Simic in NYRB: Why I Still Write Poetry. Simic had me hooked right in the first paragraph:

   When my mother was very old and in a nursing home, she surprised me one day toward the end of her life by asking me if I still wrote poetry. When I blurted out that I still do, she stared at me with incomprehension. I had to repeat what I said, till she sighed and shook her head, probably thinking to herself this son of mine has always been a little nuts. Now that I’m in my seventies, I’m asked that question now and then by people who don’t know me well. Many of them, I suspect, hope to hear me say that I’ve come my senses and given up that foolish passion of my youth and are visibly surprised to hear me confess that I haven’t yet. They seem to think there is something downright unwholesome and even shocking about it, as if I were dating a high school girl, at my age, and going with her roller-skating that night.

2. Yoni Appelbaum in The Atlantic: How the Professor Who Fooled Wikipedia Got Caught by Reddit. Worth reading to get some insights into the online culture at two sites that depend totally on contributions from their users.

3. The Oatmeal (comics): Why Nikola Tesla was the greatest geek who ever lived. Warning: Don't click if you are a fan of Edison. [Update: This post attempts a fact-check (Via this comment; thanks, Anirban!) Update 2: A rebuttal from The Oatmeal (thanks, Priyank!)]

Still We Are Saints

Of interest mainly to those in Bangalore, this post is an unpaid ad for a play -- Still We Are Saints -- to be staged this Saturday at 7:30 p.m. at Seva Sadan, Malleswaram. It's the third play by the Header and Footer Club, a student group at IISc, after Safar and 52. [Disclosure: I'm the group's faculty advisor].

I'm reproducing the mail I received from Vyasa Sastry, the writer-director of We Are Still Friends.

The Header and Footer Club have an annual fundraiser where we hold an event for charity. Last year, we collected over 1 lakh INR in just under a week for the Shri Shankara cancer foundation. This year, we plan to do the same for the cause of Seva Sadan Malleshwaram on May 5th, where we will be premiering our new English comedy play at Seva Sadan "Still we are saints". The trailers have generated quite a buzz (we've accumulated more than 1000 views for our 2 videos in less than a week!): Trailer, and Leaked footage.

We're grateful to our sponsors- Navrathan Jewelers & Corporation Bank and our partners- Shoppers Stop, Radio One, Indianstage and bookmyshow for their support.

For tickets, they could call +91 96119 48969 / +91 93428 35852.

Background

Politics is probably the most politically correct substitute word for a lot of negative human qualities. In India, exploiting every loophole is seen as a way of life- converting to another religion to legitimize a marriage, running out a fellow batsman who is playing slowly or maybe even remembering to give a dose of amnesia to a lead character in a soap opera to revive rating points. In short, no duty is dubbed too holy and no law is unbreakable in a case where private wisdom causes public tomfoolery. An alternate way to look at the politics is to call it the triumph of instinct of survival amidst challenging conditions and limited resources at disposal. When conflicting individuals fuelled by ambitions and ideas cross paths, it makes for entertaining viewing, to say the least. In a setup like a university which is a cradle for tomorrow’s leaders and a hotbed for avenues to be noticed early, one can only expect to see the desire to win at any cost, as history, is partial to winners.

The play

SWAS is story of two antipodal characters who are in pursuit of a common goal- a happy ending and a gateway to a great future. The comedy play is set in a backdrop of an engineering college campus (that the today’s adolescents throng for employable courses). The environment, full of students with kindling ambition, serves as a precursor to the way the bad world functions, although in a pre pubescent, Walt Disney way. The lead characters learn the ways of politics, rhetoric and one-upmanship en route to the top of the college food chain. Like any self respecting car manufacturer (looking for a way to the heart of the Indian consumer), they are overly concerned with mileage and image building with the perfect riposte.

The story unfolds in intriguing fashion through the eyes of a starry- eyed junior who describes the chain of events as he gets initiated to college life. The narrative is laced with satires on college going fundas, frequent monologues, pop culture parodies, ad jingles, impersonations, farcical, surreal vignettes and dialogue laden with repartee juxtaposed with everyday conversation. Five actors play the role of over a hundred characters with aplomb in the space of eighty minutes to bring the reminiscences of college in front of the audience. The number of characters was deliberately limited to less than 140 for the keeping in mind the attention spans of the twitter generation!

Running time: 80 minutes (no interval)