confused of calcutta

When I was around ten years old, my father introduced me to this poem:

It was an inflection point for me. Until then, I had always thought of poets as creative people who expressed themselves in verse when caught by the muse; as artists who penned off heaps of poems in seconds flat as and when [...]

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Over the last couple of years, I’ve noticed that my reading has become more and more heterogeneous and spread out; there has been a perceptible shift away from an A-list approach to a Long Tail, avoiding the “hit culture” implied by A-list approaches.
During that same period, there have been a number of articles about the [...]

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I blame Christopher Carfi for this post. It was he who tweeted:
Wasilla’s all I saw
If that was not enough, he went further: he called it a Palin-drome.
Which had me on the verge of snorting green tea out my nostrils in ways God never intended nostrils to be used. Thank you Chris.
You know something? I had [...]

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A few days ago, @shannonpaul referred to something @kdpaine had said, discovered via @kanter. And it was this:
“the word “reputation” is so 1990. today it’s all about relationships”
Maybe it’s the Calcuttan in me, but I guess I’ve always thought that way. For me, it’s always been all about relationships. Relationship before conversation before transaction. But [...]

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When I wrote about my quest for the bolognese in the summer, some of you came to me and told me your secret ingredients, some sent in links, some even sent in treasured handed-down-over-generations recipes. I’m really grateful to all of you for taking the time and the effort; as I get around to trying [...]

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So everyone’s preparing for hard times. Markets down, property down, jobs down, prices up, uncertainty everywhere. As your parents might have said, a proper recession, like they used to have in the old days.
At times like this, some people are tempted to feel sorry for themselves, on the basis it will somehow make them feel [...]

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I was looking through the latest issue of Edge, where Daniel Kahneman, the 2002 Nobel Laureate for Economics,  was having a conversation with a bunch of luminaries that included Richard Thaler, Nathan Myrhvold, Elon Musk and Sendhil Mullainathan.
There’s a short video and some transcripts, followed by annotations and commentaries. Worth a look, as Kahneman runs [...]

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It must be nearly ten years since I first read Larry Lessig’s Code and Other Laws of Cyberspace. When I read it, I remember being very taken with one of his early stories, that of Martha and Dank. Here’s an excerpted version:
It was a very ordinary dispute, this argument between Martha Jones and her neighbours. [...]

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Remember Happy Days? Here’s a video that’s worth seeing (if you haven’t already), courtesy of Funny Or Die, which is a site worth bookmarking. Ron Howard making an appearance with Henry Winkler, the Fonz himself. Depending on your political persuasion, you’re going to love it or hate it. The good thing about such viral approaches [...]

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I came across this Linux Foundation press release via the 451 CAOS Theory blog. Headlined Estimating the Total Development Cost of a Linux Distribution, I had no choice but to read it. And it makes interesting reading.
I gave the report a quick once-over; initial reactions were not good, I was up in arms about a [...]

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