11 Monday Jan 2016
Posted in Noteworthy Web Articles, Uncategorized
It goes without saying that writing influences us – it affects or shapes our ideas and thoughts. The more convincing the writer, the more persuaded we become of accepting his or her point of view. Novels can be vampiric and the art of storytelling is necessarily an exertion of power – as this writer tells us. I guess it is better to choose our reading well.
https://aeon.co/essays/how-books-can-sap-the-soul-and-poison-readers-with-ideas
16 Wednesday Dec 2015
Posted in Noteworthy Web Articles, Uncategorized
Tags
analgesics, medicine, Victorian surgeons, surgery, medicine, reading, anesthesia, chloroform, analgesics
This is grisly stuff. If you can’t stomach horror, you shouldn’t read any further. It is about a time much before anesthesia, pain killers, and antiseptics were invented or offered and when surgeries were mostly performed on conscious patients among blood, screams and often spectators. I find it painful to get my eyebrows plucked. I don’t know how people could bear the pain of an amputation then or how surgeons could perform the nightmarish surgeries. Sometimes, we should be thankful for the gifts of modern medicine.
31 Thursday Jul 2014
Posted in Uncategorized
One of my colleagues hates techies. He thinks they are self-obsessed and don’t give a damn about their community, society, or just about anything else. They earn good money, have weekends to cry about weekdays, and keep their rented houses dirty and noisy.
But hate them or like them, they do seem to have the envied job. It is a job in which even mediocre people seem to be doing well.
And, while tech companies have created revolutions in the way we communicate, travel, entertain ourselves or in general how we get on with our lives, what do some techies feel about the job they hold?
http://aeon.co/magazine/living-together/james-somers-web-developer-money/
05 Thursday Jun 2014
Posted in Uncategorized
Tags
Fallible forecasts, little Albert, psychology, The search for Little Albert, wrong economy forecasts
One of the first few experiments in psychology were scary. Little Albert, a small baby, was taught/conditioned to fear animals. Apart from the ethics of the experiments, the researcher burnt the papers before his death. Nobody knew what happened to baby Albert till scientists tried to find what had become of little Albert.
http://chronicle.com/article/The-Search-for-Psychologys/146747
Why do we look forward to forecasts about our economy and the world’s economy even when so many forecasts go wrong? Here’s a quote from the article: “economists should bear in mind that no self-respecting dentist would be caught dead forecasting when your teeth will fall out”.
http://www.ft.com/cms/s/2/14e323ee-e602-11e3-aeef-00144feabdc0.html#axzz33Rq67oJ9
03 Thursday Apr 2014
Posted in Uncategorized
Got some time in your hands to read a good long article – well then, check out this article on gmail – the challenges for the creator, the astonishment at 1GB storage (500 times of what Microsoft’s Hotmail offered at that time), the fool’s day launch (it was launched on 1st April and people thought it was a prank), wars with privacy advocates, and more. Moreover, it goes like a good masala story with its frills and thrills.
