nanopolitan

Way back in March 2014, OLPC News , which used to track all the OLPC-related news and developments, bid farewell to this pipe dream riding ...

Avery Thompson in Popular Mechanics : 5 Simple Math Problems No One Can Solve . "Easy to understand, supremely difficult to prove....

Ramesh Mahadevan, a close friend from my grad school days, passed away last night. I'm posting a quick note here to alert some of his fr...

Prem Panicker at Smoke Signals : RIP Jayakanthan . Sriram V. at Madras Heritage and Carnatic Music : A Chola Gift to Chennai .

Vinod Mehta, the founder-editor of Outlook , passed away a few days ago. Many obituaries have noted his courageous journalism, one of its hi...

He has recently learned that he has "multiple metastases in the liver," the kind of cancer that "cannot be halted." He h...

On 24 June 2012, Lonesome George -- the last member of his subspecies of giant tortoises of Galapagos island -- died . The last years of hi...

Ashok Thakur, Secretary to the Government, Ministry of Human Resource Development: Despite teething troubles, new engineering admission proc...

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

All of them are about Aaron Swartz, his suicide, and its aftermath. First, a video of the speech by Taren Stinebrickner-Kauffman at the Aa...

The news about Aaron Swarz's suicide comes as such a terrible shock. I have been following his career for several years now -- primaril...

A fascinating bit (caught by Guru) from the obituary of Verghese Kurien , Milkman of India [thanks to Guru for this good catch]: “What do ...

A very, very moving piece by Emily Rapp on parenting a child who she knows will likely die before his third birthday. The mothers and fat...

The subtitle -- It’s Not Like the Rest of Us, But It Should Be -- is a little cryptic, but these early paragraphs present a good summary of ...

Blogger.com's algorithms have "identified [this blog] as a potential spam blog." See this page for a helpful definition of wh...

Jonah Lehrer in Boston Globe : The Truth About Grit : Woody Allen once remarked that “Eighty percent of success is showing up.” [Angela] Du...

The dinner was first-class, with butlers serving hors d’oeuvres and the strains of “Blue Danube” tastefully muffling the festive din. This n...

Today marks the second anniversary of the huge South Asian Tsunami that consumed 230,000 lives and devastated the lives of millions more [se...

In an admirable move, the Kannada movie icon Raj Kumar had pledged to donate his eyes on his death. When he died a few months ago, his famil...

Over at Cyborg's Contemplative Corner , Swati is moved by recent news about the terminal illness of a dear one to write a s trongly word...