Perfection personified

IDA - The Missing Link

The 47-million-year-old "missing link" fossil - known as Ida - believed to be man's earliest ancestor was discovered in Germany in the 1980s. This discovery according to David Attenborough in a BBC Documentary - Uncovering Our Earliest Ancestor: The Link - is set to change our understanding of evolution. It has nails and fingers just like primates, therefore it could be the most complete fossil primate ever found (female: strong, muscular and grasping hands and feet makes her living high top trees as the best guess).

Future Urban Transport Infrastructure

MIT has designed this bus stop for the city of Florence. Using state of the art tech - e.g. e-INK touch screens - this is an exploration of what future urban transport infrastructure could look like.

Terribly exciting.

Eyestop

MONGA

My surname "Monga" is -

1. A Bengla term referring to the yearly cyclical phenomenon of poverty and hunger in Bangladesh. It is also called "mora Kartik," which means "months of death and disaster."

2. Also a town and commune in Côte d'Ivoire.

Wikipedia

The Concept of Energy

Richard Feynman, a celebrated physics teacher and Nobel Laureate, said this about the concept of energy:

“ There is a fact, or if you wish, a law, governing natural phenomena that are known to date. There is no known exception to this law; it is exact, so far we know. The law is called conservation of energy; it states that there is a certain quantity, which we call energy, that does not change in manifold changes which nature undergoes. That is a most abstract idea, because it is a mathematical principle; it says that there is a numerical quantity, which does not change when something happens. It is not a description of a mechanism, or anything concrete; it is just a strange fact that we can calculate some number, and when we finish watching nature go through her tricks and calculate the number again, it is the same. ”

—The Feynman Lectures on Physics
Wikipedia

The New New Economy

Three Important Trends: More Startups, Fewer Giants, Infinite Opportunity

Detroit Reimagined: In the 1980s, MIT Professor Tom Malone predicted that some big companies would breakup into many smaller hundreds of companies - a process to "decentralize and externalize" into industry ecosystems. He told the Wired (1998) interview that "this sort of voluntary, radical disaggregation in an attractive alternative for some large organizations." Attractive to those behemoths that are suffering under the a vertical top-down hierarchical system. For the "Big Three" carmakers to survive in Detroit, they will have to tap into innovation done by startups all over the world through collarboration or down-right buying them out.

Googlenomics Explained: Steven Levy explains that the secret is that Google deploys a bott-up model for ad sales that is driven by hard numbers.

Socialism Redefined: "A century ago, mass collective action could be organized only by the
state. Now we have the Web. Kevin Kelly resurrects socialism—without
the state—in "The New Socialism'".

Wired

Nobel laureate Robert Engle discusses volatility in the FT

Five macroeconomic features were associated with high volatility according to him (conveniently he is also director of the Volatility Institute at NYU):

These were: 1) high inflation; 2) low growth rate of output; 3) high volatility of the short-term interest rate; 4) high volatility of the growth of gross domestic product; and 5) high volatility of the inflation rate.

FT.com / Markets / Insight - The threat that won’t go away

Earth Images

       This was taken by Richard Weston

Discovered in Siberia in the 1970s and named from the Russian ’chary’ which means charms’ or ’magic’ (some claim the name comes from the River Chara), charoite is purple in colour and often has a distinctive swirling appearance interrupted by yellow-brown inclusions of tinaksite crystals. The black ’rocks’ in this specimen are due to of aegirine. This image is taken from a long, narrow specimen that evokes an aerial view of a purple stream.

Art in the new age: New Yorker cover done on Apple iPhone app

The video shows how the cover was made on the Iphone using "Brushes", an application while standing for an hour outside Madame Tussaud’s Wax Museum in Times Square.

How British politics lost its way

Peter Hitchens in true Hitchens fashion (brother of Christopher Hitchens) talks about the need for a new political compass in a world where traditional boundaries between the Left and Right no longer exist. One of the best things in the whole talk is when he recalls Australian liberal Richard Neville who said, "there is an inch of difference between the political parties, and in that inch is where we all live."

Left-wingers backed the invasion of Iraq and Tories campaign for civil liberties yet conventional wisdom insists on operating as if the age-old divisions between political parties still apply, argues journalist, author and broadcaster Peter Hitchens. In his new book The Broken Compass How British Politics lost its way, Peter Hitchens, who writes for the Mail on Sunday, argues that the real divide is between politicians and the electorate and is both a threat to Parliament and to society. Peter Hitchens takes on the “conformist media” for continuing to adhere to such obsolete notions of Left and Right and calls for the re-establishment of proper adversarial politics based on principle.
Frontline

North Korea

The many recent alleged reports I have read recently about the forced-labour camps makes me worry even more.

Fever

Mad Men's Joan Holloway

Blood, Sweat and Takeaways: Tuna

After watching this BBC documentary, I don't believe I can ever complain again for some time....


Information about the show:

When it comes to food, we are spoilt for choice. From top class
restaurants to low cost supermarkets, we take it for granted that we
can buy whatever food we want, whenever we want it.


But would we feel the same if we knew the human cost of food production?


Six typical young British food consumers go to live and work alongside
the millions of people in south east Asia's food production industries.
They must catch, harvest and process food products that we eat every
day, seeing behind the scenes of the tuna, prawns, rice and chicken
industries for the very first time.


They eat, sleep and live with food workers in the poorest regions of
Indonesia and Thailand, surviving on the same wages. The average wage
for food workers here is around 3 pounds a day.


To begin with, the Brits tackle Indonesia's tuna industry in Bitung on
the island of Sulawesi. In the UK, we consume over a billion tins of
tuna a year and Bitung's canneries supply to many British supermarkets
and sandwich chains.


The Brits live with tuna workers in basic communities, endure 90-degree
heat in the canneries and struggle with the harsh realities of life on
a traditional wooden tuna boat in the western Pacific. The extreme
conditions affect them all in many different ways, as do the hand to
mouth existence of the workers they live with.







There is a good Daily Mail article on this as well

I always dreamt of becoming an Astronaut

My picture used without my permission to reflect diversity - potential for lawsuit?

London Student Housing Guide 2008-09
www.studenthousing.lon.ac.uk

Only in Japan: Tachikoma

a joystick-piloted replica Tachikoma (of Ghost In The Shell fame)

Inside Iraq

Deborah Haynes, the Times’ correspondent in Baghdad (winner of the
inaugural Tony Bevins Prize for outstanding investigative journalism)
maintains an excellent blog about life under the radar in Iraq.

One of her best posts:

The ten things they don't tell you about Iraq

A newcomer writes....
Landing in Baghdad is like arriving anywhere you've heard a lot about.
The real thing is always so different from the picture in your head.
Pitching up in Iraq, even though security has improved so much, I was
still expecting a war zone. And parts of it are, of course, but the
most striking first impressions were far from the barbed wire and AK47
wasteland I was anticipating. Things no one had told me about Iraq
include:

1.
Plastic flowers are an integral part of life. When I arrived in The
Times' bureau, one of the Iraqi staff placed a vase full of plastic
lilies on the table to welcome me. The Times' office itself looks like
a school production of A Midsummer Night's Dream, with plastic vines
trained around the picture frames and an orange plastic shrub
flourishing in the corner. The many, many checkpoints in Iraq have pots
of plastic flowers balanced on the concrete barriers, restaurants are
covered in them, and I saw one market stall entirely devoted to selling
enough garlands to supply a hundred Hawaiian fancy dress parties.

2. The sandstorms close the airport and empty the streets. That in
itself is known about, because it affects combat operations. What they
don't tell you, though, is what sandstorms do to your look. After a
"sand day" in Baghdad, my hair was so dry and frizzy that it would stay
upright if I ran my hands through it. It felt like goat hair. Even my
eyebrows went curly; I looked like Susan Boyle.

3.
There are tourists as well as terrorists here. Not Western tourists,
sure, but tourists nonetheless. People are flooding into Iraq from the
Gulf, Syria, Lebanon but most of all from Iran to visit mosques and
shrines. Most of them are Shia and, in Kerbala, the holiest Shia place,
there are thousands of foreigners and hundreds of market stalls selling
candy-coloured prayer beads, Kerbala snow domes, kebabs and tea, and
new hotels are opening. The death of hundreds of Iranian pilgrims this
week in suicide bombings is a sad sign that there are now so many of
them, they have become a target.

4.
Baghdad is really green. A river city, not a desert wasteland, its
parks and public spaces are now being cared for again, but most
impressive are the thousands of palm trees and other trees everywhere.
From the roof of the hotel, Baghdad is a sea of palm leaves with
buildings in between. Central Baghdad, anyway. I guess Sadr City
probably isn't that lush.

5. There are people who seem untouched by the war, and pretty
much everything else, too. Driving from Baghdad to Kirkuk, there were
clusters of mud brick villages in the desert, where everything was the
colour of bleached sand, and the houses didn't have satellite dishes.
There were men in grey dishdashes and ancient keffiyehs herding sheep
around the occasional palm tree. They looked like pictures of ancient
Mesopotamia.

6.
They do a weird thing with fish. In the street, there are guys who
split a fish and flatten it out, then put it in a metal device that
looks like two tennis racquets and put it on the edge of a circular
barbecue-type pit of coals. It's called mesgoof, and in Baghdad they do
it with carp - James Hider says its full of tiny bones - but in Basra
apparently they do it with a sea fish, like a flounder, and it has
aphrodisiac qualities. The women make it on Thursday night, I've been
told, to encourage their husbands to start the weekend with gusto.

7. Iraqis love disco. This may be an unfair extrapolation, but after a
road trip punctuated with Abba medleys, and tales from a friend of the
BeeGees on loop while spending time with Iraqi friends, I'm starting to
associate Iraq with synths and falsetto.

8.
The world's third-largest mosque (after Mecca and Medina) looms on the
Baghdad skyline. Started by Saddam, Al Rahman mosque was never finished
and it's spooky and vast. It looks a bit like a spaceship, or rather
like hundreds of R2D2s of different shapes and sizes clustered
together. Cranes tower above it, and the Shia and Sunni militia have
fought over it. If anyone ever finishes it, it's going to be
magnificent and hideous in equal measure.

9. There are loads of shops selling furniture and homewares who have
their merchandise out on the street. The best are the shops that only
sell headboards. They specialise in huge, carved wooden things which
look a bit like the brontosaurus ribs Fred Flintstone eats in the
opening credits of The Flintstones.

10. It's so fattening. After a few days of eating sheep, rice,
bread and chicken, I knew my descent into morbid obesity if I stayed
here was sealed when we were in a traffic jam. A boy knocked on the
window of the car selling not gum or tissues, as they do in so many
places, but dozens of bags of candy floss which he was carrying on a
stick. We had just eaten an epic lunch with five types of starch, and
were all stuffed to the point of incapacity. But one of the guys bought
two bags of candy floss anyway, and offered me some. I was so full I
literally thought I might die if I ate it but I figured in war-raddled
country of where they put plastic flowers on their checkpoints and
disco on the stereo, dying of a surfeit of candy floss would be kind of
a suitably kitsch way to go, so I took the risk. This time, I lived to
bite another day.

Inside Iraq Blog

Climate Change is no doubt in my mind should be a subject every student must understand

"We will conserve only what we love. We will love only what we understand. We will understand only what we are taught."

- Baba Dioum, Senegalese Ecologist

Finally: Federer beats Nadal in Madrid

Death by PowerPoint

Attended: Post-G20 Public Summit: Battle for the Economy

- A Battle of Ideas one-day conference, produced by the Institute of Ideas

10.05am to 11.30am The Great Hall
Demystifying the crisis
11.45am to 12.45pm Churchill Room

Recession in the heart of the Eurozone
11.45am to 12.45pm The Great Hall

Rein in the greedy bankers?

12.55pm to 1.40pm Churchill Room

Activists’ working lunch

1.45pm to 3.00pm The Great Hall

Can the state save the economy?

3.15pm to 4.15pm The Great Hall

Protectionism, global tensions and a new world order?

3.15pm to 4.15pm Churchill Room

The rise and rise of behavioural economics

4.30pm to 6.00pm The Great Hall

Investing in the Future: what are the opportunities and barriers for growth?


Saturday 16 May | Goodenough College, London

Checking out Wolfram Alpha

The new computational knowledge engine tells me some interesting things when i put down my day of birth -

My life on this little planet so far:

23 years 7 months 9 days = 1231 weeks 5 days = 8622 days

Watched: Hairspray Musical

Edna Turnbald played by Michael Ball was the real the star of the show.

Shaftesbury Theatre, London

Imperial Monthly Podast May 2009 (hearing your own voice is rather strange sometimes)

Launched in February 2007, Imperial's monthly podcast gives listeners a taste of work and play at the College.

The podcast is presented by Gareth Mitchell, a lecturer on Imperial's Science Communication MSc course and the presenter of Digital Planet on the BBC World Service.

This month it is covering the recent Npower Win at Wembley.


In May’s edition: sustainable students study climate change in Antarctica, help power firms make money from energy efficiency and zoom around the world in zero emissions cars

• 01.46 Journey to the bottom of the Earth – students reflect on Antarctic trip to see the effects of climate change
• 07.58 Headlines from around the College
• 10.22 Energy Challenge winners on how they are making energy efficiency an attractive option for power companies and their customers
• 19.47 Student Racing Green team on the challenge of building and driving fuel cell powered racing cars

Listen to the Podcast