confused of calcutta

Following a recent post, Stephen questioned:
how much power we have, as all-too-human individuals, to SET norms. (On the other hand I suspect we have all encountered bosses who felt they could, and should, set norms!) Finally, I continue to hold that the norms of the workplace do not always align with the norms of our [...]

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Shahidul Alam is a fine photojournalist, just take a look at his recent works on his blog. The photo-essay on the recent flooding in Bangladesh is particularly powerful.
My thanks to Rageboy for the tip-off. Apparently Shahidul got in touch with Chris about something or the other; which makes me wonder, is Chris Locke really Kevin [...]

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There’s been a lot written recently about the interaction between real and virtual worlds, by people far more knowledgeable about the subject than I could ever be. Yet, something that happened to me over the past couple of days made me think harder about the days to come.
What happened was almost trivial. Some of you [...]

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I don’t know if it’s apocryphal or not, but years ago I heard a story about tulips. With advances in transportation and in technology, there were people interested in time-shifting tulip production. So they tried various methods associated with making tulips believe it was spring already, placing them in hothouses, keeping the surroundings springlike, and [...]

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The kernel for this post came from my gently meandering back and forth through Nassim Nicholas Taleb’s The Black Swan; I’m still reading through it for the first time.
I quote from the book, page 29
Now consider the effect of the first music recording, an invention that introduced a great deal of injustice. Our ability to [...]

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David Eastman asked “What happened to Quaero?” in a recent comment on a post I’d written on search. Last I heard, which was early this year, France and Germany had decided to part ways on the project, but France was determined to continue. I remember reading this article while recuperating from my heart attack.
Other than [...]

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Whenever I heard the phrase Thundering Herd I used to think of Merrill Lynch, not surprising for anyone who’s worked in investment banking.
Never again. Not after seeing this video. Unbelievable.

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As a scientist I do not have much faith in predictions. Science is organized unpredictability. The best scientists like to arrange things in an experiment to be as unpredictable as possible, and then they do the experiment to see what will happen. You might say that if something is predictable then it is not [...]

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…that’s a quote from a delicious article by John Siracusa available on Ars Technica. Headlined Stuck On The Enterprise, it looks at a number of reasons why Apple doesn’t seem to do well in the enterprise space. [I must confess a very personal interest in this topic, having more than once tried to introduce Apple [...]

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As I mentioned in a recent post, India hold the unwanted record of posting the highest innings score without any individual hundreds. Today that record seemed set to be “bettered”, until Kumble came along and scored his maiden Test century. While musing about unwanted records, I commented that Michael Atherton held some record or the [...]

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