You know that some people just naturally think big. Like Richard Branson and the google guys, Larry and Brin.
[Click on image for link.]
An invitation.
Earth has issues, and it’s time humanity got started on a Plan B. So, starting in 2014, Virgin founder Richard Branson and Google co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin will be leading hundreds of users on one of the grandest adventures in human history: Project Virgle, the first permanent human colony on Mars.
And just in time for April Fool’s Day. I wonder what the newspapers around the world will unleash on the unsuspecting on April 1st. The greatest April fool’s joke is undoubtedly the Swiss spaghetti harvest of 1957. The BBC explained that the harvest was particularly bountiful not only because of the mild weather but also “the virtual disappearance of the spaghetti weevil.”
One of my pet peeves is the idiotic mixing of English and Hindi words in advertising copy which is cropping up everywhere on billboards and in print. Perhaps it is considered cool. But it is cool in only the way that displaying abysmal stupidity and illiteracy is cool–which is to say it isn’t. What it advertises is that that both the writer and the readers don’t quite know either of the languages and perhaps don’t even know that they don’t know the distinction between the two. I call it “rajivspeak” in honor of the man who was a master in this regard.
A few years ago, I was lamenting the poor grasp some people have of even one of the basic languages of India to someone. He wrote back saying, “I had the pleasure of watching Rajiv Gandhi give a speech in Hindi to the hapless denizens of Malda district in Bengal. The populace is linguistically challenged, period, at the best of times. And not just with respect to Hindi. They had to face up to Rajiv’s stuff, which if memory serves me right, went along these lines: Continue reading “Rajivspeak is getting out of hand”
Charles Babbage (1791–1871), the English mathematician was the father of the idea of a programmable computer. Babbage built a mechanical computer called “the difference engine.” He once corresponded with Alfred Lord Tennyson.
Sir,
In your otherwise beautiful poem “The Vision of Sin”, there is a verse which reads,
“Every moment dies a man,
Every moment one is born.”
It must be manifest that if this were true, the population of the world would be at a standstill. In truth, the rate of birth is slightly in excess of that of death.
I would suggest that in the next edition of your poem you have it read:
“Every moment dies a man,
Every moment 1,1/16th is born…”
If you ever wondered where Tom Friedman got the idea, here is a wild conjecture. Friedman thought that invading Iraq was a good idea. So they went and bombed Iraq and flattened it. Little surprise then that some Iraqis think that the earth is flat and Tom wrote a book that the world is flat. QED.
The following is a 1-minute video of a contestant in the Miss Teen USA 2007 contest. The video has been viewed around 22 million times on YouTube and accumulated over 65 thousand comments, and hundreds of video responses. Here’s Miss South Carolina attempting to answer a question which explores why many Americans are ignorant of basic geography:
Obviously she’s in the spotlight because she is pretty, and most certainly better looking than 99.99 percent of the population. But nature perhaps balances it out in her case by making her dumber than 90 percent of the population. It’s her beauty that brought a bit of fame, and her lack of brains that gave her a whole lot of notoriety. That’s the luck of the draw. And I suppose there’s a bit of envy of her looks that prompts the fun that one has in seeing her babble. But here’s a video response that has a very pretty face:
Clearly Miss West Carolina is not only very pretty but also articulate. And if she wrote the script as well, I say that she’s a pretty smart cookie. There’s a case of beauty and brains. I think Miss W Carolina is much much prettier than Miss South Carolina. (Miss South Carolina need not reach for her map to locate West Carolina on it.)
The other day, a BBC producer from London called me up and asked me if I would care to comment on the recent big sell-off in the Indian stock markets. I confessed that I am not fully qualified to do so but added that in all honesty that my guess would be as good as any one else’s. Still I declined. The best we can do is pull out Keynes’s “animal spirits,” which unfortunately is not amenable to rigorous scientific or economic analysis. The essential story of the stock market is well told in this cartoon.
That pretty much sums up how the stock market swings between fear and greed, the abrupt change from panic to irrational exuberance. And here are The Long Johns (John Bird and John Fortune) on turbulence in the financial markets. As one of the Johns so astutely observes, “You have to remember two things about the markets. One is, they are made up of very sharp and sophisticated people. These are the greatest brains in the world. The second thing you have to remember is that financial markets — to use the common word — are driven by sentiment.” I won’t spoil the fun for you. Just watch the video and fall off the chair laughing.
That’s why I don’t mess around in the stock market. 🙂
Atanu Dey : Life is a Random Draw 