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Yet Another Self-Important Blog.
Rohit Singh
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[Sat, 11 Oct 2003]
Turkish Troops in Iraq: Good or Bad ?
Its easy when WSJ and NYT can't agree about something- you just ignore
the ranting idiots at WSJ and go with whatever NYT says. But when the LA Times and NYT start having diametrically different viewpoints about the same event, its damn
confusing- you have to really think about your opinions then. Or you could just stop
caring, which works just as well.
Sumerian, Mayan, Bengali, and Braille
The new Mars pathfinder needed a circular disc with a post in the middle
for some calibration calibration. Lo and behold, somebody made it into a Mars sundial. NASA must get credit for the messages they send out with
such time capsules- they try to represent all of Earth, not just America.
The sundial has words of peace and welcome engraved
in 17 different languages- including Braille and extinct languages like
Sumerian and Mayan. Bengali and Hindi are there but not Sanskrit or Tamil. Here's a pic and a story. They had interesting linguistic and relativistic issues: is a martian day made of 24 mars-hours ? When you see the time, is the time at Mars now or as of 11 min ago ?
Murder at Nob Hill and Honolulu
Pity, this would have been a good time to be at Stanford- with such juicy rumours of the Univ's first president having poisoned the Univ's founder about 100 years ago [via AS].
Believe
Red Sox 1 - Evil Empire 1. I totally didn't get baseball in the 3 years of
my stay in the U.S. Then I came to Boston and, during orientation, they
got us cheap tix to a Red Sox game. I had the good fortune of sitting next
to a couple of very enthusiastic Red Sox proselytizers. Not only did they
explain the game to me, their fervor also rubbed off. I must be lucky for
the Red Sox- the very year I show up in Boston, they are up in the league
championships hoping to beat the hated Yankees (one reason Red Sox rarely
makes it to the play-offs is that we share the division with Yankees and
they usually win the divsion- they're too rich). Here's hoping...
Sordid Stuff
One of the seamier parts of research is the divvy-ing up of credits-
especially stuff that was done a long time ago and has turned out to be
hugely successful. It gets worse when people bring this stuff out in the
open. Here's one guy who thinks he should have shared this year's Nobel
Prize for Medicine (for MRI, this year). This guy holds the patent on some
MRI stuff, and did the initial work on extending NMR for medicinal purposes. But the people who won
the prize were the ones who made the *large* creative leap to take it from NMR to
MRI. Whether or not he deserves to share the Nobel is debatable (Nash,
after all, did nothing with Economics yet he won the Nobel), but this is
becoming a dirty mess.