This one is for Oasis fans (me included): Why the music world needs Oasis

Turning 48 yesterday, I realised the only Creation band that I still get excited about is Oasis. And who wouldn’t? The band contains two world-class songwriters, and two great ones, and their new release Dig Out Your Soul is truly tremendous. It’s as if they have re-imagined their discography and made their true follow-up to What’s the Story Morning Glory, completing the elusive and perfect rock’n'roll trilogy that began with Definitely Maybe.

It is a very well written article and I say that of course due to my extreme bias towards the music of Oasis.

Here are some of my favourites:
Wonderwall (absolutely lovely song):

Champagne Supernova (on par with Wonderwall):

Don’t Look Back in Anger (a true delight):

Needless to say, Oasis rocks.

This makes for sad reading: Big and Helpless

Google, in its official blog, has announced a new project aimed at the welfare of as many people as possible: Project 10¹⁰⁰. I think this is a great initiative from Google! 

If you have any idea that you believe can change the world, or can help the millions of people of this planet, you can submit your idea on the site.

CCD, for those of you who missed the last 10 years of India, stands for Cafe Coffee Day. These, now ubiquitous coffee shops are at every corner in Bangalore. A place where hot coffee costs Rs. 40 and a cold coffee costs Rs. 60. With these exorbitant prices, one would expect it to do low or almost nil business.

There are books which you like and make you exclaim in wonder after you are done reading them. These are good books and we have written about some of those here. They touch you, move you and leave you in applause.

Intellect is in itself a mode of exaggeration, and destroys the harmony of any face. The moment one sits down to think, one becomes all nose, or all forehead, or something horrid. Look at the successful men in any of the learned professions. How perfectly hideous they are!

And then he goes on to say this:

“I believe that if one man were to live out his life fully and completely, were to give form to every feeling, expression to every thought, reality to every dream–I believe that the world would gain such a fresh impulse of joy that we would forget all the maladies of mediaevalism, and return to the Hellenic ideal–to something finer, richer than the Hellenic ideal, it may be. But the bravest man amongst us is afraid of himself. The mutilation of the savage has its tragic survival in the self-denial that mars our lives. We are punished for our refusals. Every impulse that we strive to strangle broods in the mind and poisons us. The body
sins once, and has done with its sin, for action is a mode of purification. Nothing remains then but the recollection of a pleasure, or the luxury of a regret. The only way to get rid of a temptation is to yield to it. Resist it, and your soul grows sick with longing for the things it has forbidden to itself, with desire for what its
monstrous laws have made monstrous and unlawful. It has been said that the great events of the world take place in the brain. It is in the brain, and the brain only, that the great sins of the world take place also. You, Mr. Gray, you yourself, with your rose-red youth and your rose-white boyhood, you have had passions that have made you afraid, thoughts that have filled you with terror, day-dreams and sleeping
dreams whose mere memory might stain your cheek with shame–”

This conversation has a very deep impact on Dorian. He looks at his wonderful portrait created by Basil and instantly wishes that his youth remains forever. This wish, in a strange manner, comes true and Dorian never ages. He indulges in all the pleasures of youth and vanity, mostly ghastly acts, and yet, none of his acts affect his soul. Instead, they show up on the picture. Every act that is supposed to age his soul, has an illustrated impact on the picture. Seeing this, in turn, gives Dorian a “terrible sense of pleasure” and fuels his ambitions. How far does he go in this space of narcissism is the story of this book. The separation of the actor and the result is a beautiful concept of the book, which in effect, keeps the soul separate from the human form. The soul corrupts and the human body does not. How does this influence a person’s behavior in society? How does he use this extraordinary power, which removes any stains of guilt from his heart and brain and instead darkens the picture alone?

The plot of this book is unique in the sense that it explores the deep annals of the human mind and at the same time keeps the virtues of conscience aside. The ending of the book is exceptional. It is perhaps something you can anticipate, but yet, it leaves you with a feeling of being highly surprised. That is the power of Oscar Wilde’s prose. And that is the power of a book which, unfortunately, raises the bar of literature higher. Unfortunately, because it is difficult to then read any literature without comparing it to one of its own pinnacles.

We were in Chennai over the weekend, and yesterday, reached the Chennai Central station to take a train back to Bangalore.

The Delhi blasts had occurred a day before, on Saturday evening to be precise. The Hindu had dedicated one half of the front page for this news, and they were quite sober in their reporting, as though there were more important things to be spoken about and this had unnecessarily come up. Times of India’s headline alone occupied as much space as the entire Hindu article. Neither of the newspapers had spoken about what should be done going forward. It was all about showcasing horror or displaying indifference. ToI Chennai, for instance, screamed “Helpless?” (in a font-size 80+ I would say). Is this what we want to portray to the perpetrators of the crime? Helpless? Perhaps we are, but still would you want to give that moment of satisfaction to the criminals?

So anyway, we walk towards the entrance of Chennai Central (the main railway station). There are numerous entry points, and one of them has a metal detector installed. No one really forcing people to walk through the metal detectors. We see the metal detector and decide to walk through that one rather than the other open entries. We walk, no one notices, go ahead and then turn back to observe that there is a baggage screening machine as well. I was happy to see this level of security, but was immediately dismayed to note that no one bothered to ask us or the passengers alongside us to actually go and get our baggages screened.

We decide to do what seemed right and go back near the entrance and haul up our bag on to the rollers of the x-ray machine. The bag goes in, comes out with the others and there is a constable pasting stickers on some of the bags. He forgets ours, I pick up my bag, go a little ahead and then come back to get the “baggage screened” sticker. The constable, without raising an eye, puts the sticker on my bag too, not concerning to know whether the bag was actually screened or not.

We walk away into the sea of crowd which, in a railway station, always seems to be in some hurry. And that was the security system installed in one of India’s biggest metros, as a reaction to the Delhi blasts. You no longer want to ask this question – How safe are we?

Filminute is, as their site says, “the international one-minute film festival that challenges filmmakers, writers, animators, artists, designers, and creative producers to develop and submit the world’s best one-minute films.”

I found some very interesting one movie clips there.
The entry from India is titled “The Staircase” and is in the top 25 finalists. These top 25 films have been chosen from over 1500 entries across 16 countries.

I really liked “The Staircase” and you can click here to view this film. I liked the simplicity in which the entire scene has been conveyed and all that in just one minute! The Staircase has been directed by George Mangalath Thomas.

Another movie which I liked is “Support” from Iceland.

Check out all the 25 one-minute (or filminute) movies here.

There is something about using superlatives that is just so easy to catch on.
Hence, here is one very very insightful interview of Mark Cuban, the founder of Broadcast.com, HD Net and several other companies.

Who’s the entrepreneur you respect most? Current or past?

MC: I guess Bill Gates. Larry Ellison I respect. You know, old school entrepreneurs, it was just diffferent. There was a different crede. I used to want to be profitable every month, before going IPO. But then later I accepted running at a loss. From the Netscape moving on, that’s what has happened since — the whole idea now is to get pageviews and then figure out a revenue model. I think entrepreneurs these days have been cheated because for them, its not about understanding how to make money. But when the money goes dry, you’re shit out of luck. When the bubble burst, 9 out of 10 businesses went away. With weblogs, our mantra was sales cures all. We used to talk about bottom line, not top line. It always came down to what you’re putting into your pocket. I want a cash-in-pocket strategy not an exit strategy.When you walk down these halls, you dont have people making money yet.

Read the complete interview here. Definitely more than worth your time.

This is in continuation of my previous post on LHC (Large Hadron Collider).

For many reasons this is an amazing moment in the history of science (many which have probably been repeated on this blog before).

There are roughly 75 countries with at least one institution (university or lab) which has contributed to the construction of this machine. The list includes strange bedfellows: India and Pakistan, Israel and Iran and the United States, Greece and Turkey, Russia and Georgia, all of western Europe, most of eastern Europe, some of northern Africa and south America, Japan, China, S. Korea, etc. This unlikely team has constructed the biggest single machine in the history of the planet after over 20 years since the first plans were laid. At 10,000 scientists, this project represents the modern day pyramids.

This is the kinda stuff that makes this one of the biggest scientific experiments ever conducted by mankind! To give you a scale of the things involved, the LRC Homepage has listed out a series of facts about the experiment:

- The vacuum in the LHC is comparable to outer space, if it were a car tyre with a leak, there are so few gas molecules that it would take 10 000 years to go flat.
- When protons arrive in the LHC they are travelling at 0.999997828 times the speed of light. Each proton goes around the 27km ring over 11 000 times a second.
- The Large Hadron Collider at CERN could be the most ambitious scientific undertaking ever. The results of LHC experiments will probably change our fundamental knowledge of the universe.
- A nominal proton beam in the LHC will have an energy equivalent to a person in a Subaru driving at 1700 kph.

Check out all the other facts here.

Man has now succeeded to set up one of his biggest experiments ever to understand the fundamentals of our universe and its creation. 

“Particle physics is the unbelievable in pursuit of the unimaginable. To pinpoint the smallest fragments of the universe you have to build the biggest machine in the world. To recreate the first millionths of a second of creation you have to focus energy on an awesome scale.”