Science Addiction

A dormant blog by Devanshu Mehta

Month: June, 2007

June 29, 2007

Eating Seasonal

I’ve been reading a lot lately about food- eating seasonal, local, healthy and so forth. These goals are inter-linked. I checked if the place where we get our vegetables bought from local farms, turns out “they do when they can”:http://www.russos.com/home/home.html (in the summer). A little more Googling lead me to “Sustainable Table”:http://www.sustainabletable.org/ which is a phenomenal site about all the goals I listed above. Here’s a list of “what’s in season in which month”:http://www.sustainabletable.org/shop/eatseasonal/ in for many states in the United States.

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June 29, 2007

Wobble and Clock

I walked by a “Brookstone”:http://www.brookstone.com the other day and saw this:
Wobble and Bob

Now this may seem like a totally random and totally acceptable clock to many people. These people are clearly not fans of the funniest cartoon on the Internet, a.k.a. “Weebl and Bob”:http://weebls-stuff.com/wab/ about the wobbling, oval shaped Weebl and sometimes his friend Bob. Now tell me the Brookstone folks thought up the name _Bob Wobble Clock_ without ever having seen Weebl & Bob!

To prove I am not crazy, or at least my form of madness is common, here’s “another blogger”:http://kenny.wordpress.com/2006/06/03/bob-the-ripoff/ who had the same idea.

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June 28, 2007

Linux for President!

Marketing blogger Douglas Karr has an “interesting study up on his web site”:http://www.douglaskarr.com/2007/06/23/2008-elections-by-server/ about the operating systems that power the web sites of United States presidential candidates.

Let’s just say, Linux lies to the left of the political spectrum. Democrats are 90% open source, Republicans 30% and Obama is on FreeBSD. I have no idea if any of this means anything, but according to 73% of Internet history experts, cool, obtusely meaningless statistics are what the Internet was designed to propagate.

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June 27, 2007

Radio Open Source Goes Silent

The “best radio show on traditional radio and the internet”:http://www.radioopensource.org/we-interrupt-this-program/ is going on a hiatus for the summer following a series of setbacks involving loss of many of the pillars that formed its financial support- UMass Lowell, WGBH and unnamed others. A last ditch fundraising effort kept them afloat for the last few weeks, but the Christopher Lydon and Radio Open Source are off the radio for now.

How ironic that this happened the day after “Internet radio’s day of silence.”:http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20070626-internet-radio-day-of-silence-hushes-thousands-of-stations.html

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June 16, 2007

An Open Letter to Barack Obama from an Indian American

*UPDATE*: _Mr. Barack Obama released an “official statement today”:http://www.safo2008.com/2007/06/senator-barack-obamas-response-to-safo.html (6/18/07). The words “the memo’s caustic tone, and its focus on contributions by Indian-Americans to the Clinton campaign, was potentially hurtful, and as such, unacceptable,” were especially important for me to be able to support him in the future. My letter of two days ago follows:_

Dear Mr. Obama,
The “recently disclosed memo”:http://www.nydailynews.com/blogs/dc/2007/06/team_obama_rips_clintons_in_op.html from your campaign that faulted Sen. Clinton for associating with Indian Americans is depressing. As an Indian American, and one that has supported you since the beginning of your Senate campaign, your painting of Indian Americans as the new foreign boogeyman has me leaning away from your campaign. (Let me make it clear that I am referring to Americans of Indian origin). Read the rest of this entry »

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June 8, 2007

We’re Censored in China!

Good news, everyone- this site is censored in China! We must be doing something right…

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June 8, 2007

Habeas Corpus and Other Quaint Ideas From the Past

While I admit that there may be some geeky fashions and some fashion geeks, here at Science Addiction I try to stay away from fashion. But this one is different.

See, back in the 20th century- and in fact, much earlier- there used to be a quaint concept called Habeas Corpus that was quite in vogue. Now, along with the dot-com boom (renamed as Web2.0) and the Y2K crisis (renamed as Daylight Savings bug), this idea from the past is making a come back!

It’s all Greek to me, you say. Well, it’s Latin, young Geek. Habeas Corpus, literally translated as you have the body.

In the legal system, in many countries around the world including the United States, it means that a person detained by the government has the right to seek relief from unlawful imprisonment. The United States Constitution specifically states that it shall not be suspended, unless there is a rebellion or invasion and the public safety requires it.
Read the rest of this entry »

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June 8, 2007

xkcd: Blogging About My Generation

A brilliant comic from “xkcd”:http://xkcd.com for a Friday morning:

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