Never thought this would happen… Sesame Street meets Sufi classic hit ‘Dama Dam Mast Qalandar’ and that too in its film soundtrack version from a 70s Pakistani flick. Though the element of surprise was the killer translation or transliteration or whatchamacallit. It’s brilliant.
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Walking home on Sunday night
I passed a couple at a bus stop
Loving each other
With eyes locked into eyes
And arms locked into arms,
And just as I reached them,
I heard him say,
And though I wanted to stay
And listen,
I knew it wasn’t meant for me,
So I just made up the rest,
I want to bite the end of the cone off
And suck the whole scoop through it,
I want to make love under a streetlight
(To which I’d like to imagine she’d push
him away, but just so)
I want to pretend I’m a busker playing an
Exotic instrument, when in fact I’d just be
Beating an old shoe box,
I want to read the Ulysses and get past
Page 255 for once,
I want to burn my laptop, Blackberry, iPad,
(And she would remind him he didn’t have an iPad)
(Yeah right, she’d say, but how will I reach you?)
(She’d laugh- That’s silly!),
So that’s what I thought he’d want to do
That he couldn’t do,
As for me, I wanted to call someone,
And hear her say,
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Speak of stupidity. A mugger tried to unburden a German medical exchange student in a Sydney alleyway. Except that he forgot about the Ninja school right there. The realization dawned when he found himself surrounded by the boys in the black. And then I guess realization dimmed as a passing shuriken probably turned off his light bulb. Well… in retrospect, speak of forgotten culture. Go Ninja!
More on Reuters here.
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I might be stirring the hornet’s nest here. So be it.
Late last year standing outside my office in Mumbai, surrounded by a posse of alms seekers, and feeling no empathy for them (we are pretty immune in India), I had a couple of quick thoughts.
BANG!
Get them to generate power!
How?
Rig up a power station with treadmills and get the homeless / under privileged but otherwise healthy adults to run on them for 2-4 hours a day and create electricity to power Mumbai.
Offer incentives like proper housing, schooling for kids, medical treatment and overall rehabilitation. Let them earn their living as the so called privileged class does.
Mumbai had 300,000 estimated beggars in 2006. If every person generates 100W, think of the energy potential. I’m no mathematician but I’ll be damned if that doesn’t light up a bulb.
However, the idea has gone through a few iterations. As it turns out, treadmills are rather power hungry with 1500W needed to run them. Using exercise bikes or bicycles are a more feasible solution.
Also, there are a few raised eyebrows. Is this in some way akin to slavery or perhaps is it a human rights violation? Perhaps not. If rehabilitation is thought out intelligently, and with more empathy than I can muster, this might just prove beneficial to the underprivileged. There is a give and take involved. A man who no one would hire (socialite aunties can snub their noses now) pedals 4 hours a day and the state offers him a better standard of living. Employment opportunities are created and energy requirements have a rather large finite range. Everybody gets a job, albeit a temporary one till the person can stand on his own two feet and hopefully not too wobbly from all that exercise.
This doesn’t end here. Communities can set up their own energy camps. With the proper state sponsored rig, small societies can power their own homes and offices.
Out of the way, stuck in the wilderness villages, forgotten or ignored people, can power their own region with this rig. Schools can be powered up. That light bulb that lets the child study after sun down can be powered up. Think about it.
So what are the questions still pending?
Well… one biggie is of the human condition. How does one motivate a beggar to accept this opportunity? Rationally, if she’s able, there is no reason why she shouldn’t. But then, rationality isn’t really our strength.
Also, how can the bicycle rig be designed to be cost effective? Think of it from a third world perspective. We have so many engineers, if you know anyone who might have an idea, please ask them to get in touch. I really do want to play around with this thought. The target to be generated is 100W or more with 2-4 hours of pedaling.
Finally, will the local government be open to this? What are the barriers it can put up? Let’s discuss this point. Seriously.
Frankly, human generated energy is not a new idea. Nor is using bicycles for that matter.
The solutions are everywhere. They are fun. And they are human. Need some more inspiration? Check out this post from GreenDiary.com.
Have an opinion? Share it with me and the rest of the readers. Hate this idea? Let’s slug it out. Love this idea? Let’s work on it.
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Pictures from the exhibition at Barbican Center. Ron Arad is one of the most brilliant designers today. I know for real, I sat on his chair(s).
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We don’t take kids seriously. We take ourselves too seriously. Which is why Santa is dead, Imaginary Friends have left the building and the horrible closet from our childhood doesn’t have skeletons, it has a 200 megaton nuclear bomb and a BIG RED BUTTON in the drawer.
So, I was at this amazing talk on codes and code breaking by Simon Singh, the author of The Code Book and other killer pop-science books. He did a little show and tell with a vintage gizmo called The Enigma. It was basically a really tricky code making gadget used by the Nazis to piss off the Allies.
Secret codes were generated using an insane set of permutations and combinations and the British code breakers, and Alan Turing (big daddy of the modern computer) were draining the country off it’s tea reserves trying to hack the damn thing.
Simon Singh bounced off some numbers and asked the audience to guess how many combinations of codes were possible. A little boy raised his hands. People sniggered. Simon Singh asked him to name a number over 100 if he could, and the boy went, “umm… yeah… umm… I know the answer,” more sniggering from the audience and the kid says, “20 factorial 6 into 2 factorial 6,” or something like that. It completely stumped Mr. Singh. He finally had to admit he wasn’t quite sure of the answer himself but it ranged in the vicinity of a hundred million million… million. Which as it happens is really close to the little boy’s qualified guess.
Later, snooping around Simon Singh, trying to touch the Enigma (yeah I’m that kind of geek so sue me), it all fell into place. The kid’s a prodigy. He’s studying university level mathematics and has a fascination for probability. And while others were chatting around, Doogie Howser tapped the keys of the Enigma, as kids usually do, and ended up throwing some other crazy numbers that brought around a moment of uncomfortable, uncertain, incredulous silence.
His mum is thinking of getting him an Enigma machine of his own so he can send his granddad secret codes. I wish she’d get me one too. On a student budget, I can barely afford a pencil sharpener.
Any how, it turns out the Brits did manage to break the code but kept it a secret for 30 years. 30 YEARS! Guess why? Because after the war, they tried to sell all the acquired Enigmas to their buddies, the Aussies and the Americans. I don’t know, but maybe the cold war would have gotten a little colder if this had slipped out.
Moral of the story:
Don’t mess with kids, they might just win a Noble Prize and leave you out of the thank you speech. And send me money… so I can buy a vintage Enigma Machine and send you secret love notes.
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You know how it is with really large folks being super light on their feet? Watch them move on the dance floor and it’s glide and swoop versus your bump and grind.
So it is in nature.
This how the humpback whale feeds on the little fish. It spots a school of herring and then gradually descends circling slowly around the fish. This causes a wall of bubbles to form around the herring. Being fairly low in the food chain, and hence not very sharp, the herrings believe the wall of bubbles to be impenetrable. So just as they are thinking “DAM(n)!”, the whale swoops up from right under them, and with its mouth open, swallows them all.
There is a certain beauty to all this, forming a wall of bubbles, or spinning an invisible web, or changing color to match the terrain. It’s like a grand scale illusion where the magician introduces a saw floating in the air and then proceeds to cut the lady in half, without touching the saw, and takes his bow. You leave thinking, great trick, but he hasn’t put the lady back together.
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Warning: Before you proceed, this is a little like watching your great grand mum in the buff. So viewer discretion is advised.
Hedy Lamarr
Here’s a quick run through of the events that followed the release of the film.
It was banned in Germany, because Hedy was a Jew. Though the truth could just as well be that it made the Nazi boys all tingly, and they’d forget to heil the Fuhrer.
Pope Pius XI had the official Vatican paper condemn it. Which leads us to wonder about the truth of the secret naughty vault somewhere there.
Hedy’s husband Fritz Mandl was so peeved, he tried to buy and burn all copies of the film. That’s not all, he even kept her prisoner in their mansion for a couple of years, till she escaped dressed as a maid, and went on to marry 5 other guys. The last of these Joes was a lawyer who helped her fight the divorce case against the second last.
Quite a fiesty woman, makes Lindsay Lohan look like a minor character in a Dickensian novel.
Just a passing thought, is it just me or do you too see a Freudian motif in the horse in the scene?
Here’s a list of Top 100 Celebrity Nude Scenes compiled by MrSkin.com. Fun in a harmless sort of way and surprising in a gag and sputter style.
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From the super creative mind of edgy designer Lauren McCarthy comes a diabolic new device to make you smile… painfully. This is the Happiness Hat, an excellent Christmas present for the family grouch.
Notice the Pain in the Eyes
The beanie works on mechanics that would make Vlad the Impaler proud. Here’s the description from Lauren McCarthy’s site:
An enclosed bend sensor attaches to the cheek and measures smile size, a servo motor moves a metal spike into the head inversely proportional to the degree of smile.
This essentially means that if you don’t smile, a metal spike is going to stab you on the back of the head, till you do. Which would perhaps explain the pained look in the eyes. It’s a little like taking a picture with Jack the Ripper in a photo booth, or making polite conversation with the ugliest blind date you’ve gotten yourself stuck with.
According to Lauren, the Happiness Hat will train your brain to induce a smile over a period of time. So regardless of how you feel, you’ll be baring your teeth in a psychotic grin.
Watch the video, and watch the eyes.
happiness hat from Lauren McCarthy on Vimeo.
The Happiness Hat has been made using Arduino, which is perhaps the coolest thing I’ve come across in a while. It’s basically an electronic platform developed for creative people. You program a chip using the Arduino lingo (relatively simpler to learn) and you come up with killer stuff. More on Arduino later.
The Happiness Hat is first in a series of Tools for Improved Social Inter-Acting.
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In a curious and fortunate incident that could turn Bollywood on its head, a dad’s math quiz helped a teenager slip out of coma.
Vicki Alex, 15, was diagnosed with acute myeloid leukaemia. She was under treatment, but she caught an infection and her condition rapidly deteriorated. The doctors decided to put her under medically induced coma, in the hope her body would be able to fight the infection better. Unfortunately, after 3 days, they couldn’t rouse her from it.
Her parents were asked to talk to her, perhaps trigger a reaction. After a couple of failed efforts, her dad finally turned to math. Vicki loves mathematics. So he asked her a simple sum- What is 1 + 1? BOOM! they got a reaction, a rather tiny one, but a reaction nonetheless. The doctors figured it was a coincidence. So they tried again, asking her if she’d like an English question, and Vicki hates English. She shook her head in response. It began to add up and the doctors agreed.
The next day, Vicki removed her breathing tube. There was a huge ruckus, Vicki was back. She has been discharged from the hospital for now, but her treatment continues.
So… Bollywood… no more incessant ringing of temple bells and beating of heads on temple floors. Hope and prayer doesn’t need sacrificial virgins, or emptying the body of life fluid. And hell… no more Body Heat induced passionate embraces either. Fact is way more bizarre than fiction and I think that just about sums this up.
Vicki and her Dad
News link: Daily Mail UK Online
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