confused of calcutta

While researching aspects of the lives of Mahatma Gandhi and Martin Luther King Jr, I was reminded of the works of Richard B Gregg. While I had come across Gregg while reading Economics, I hadn’t appreciated quite how influential he’d been on King, or for that matter just how dedicated he’d been in seeking to [...]

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Have you ever seen Adelson’s Illusion?
The squares marked A and B are the same shade of grey.
I won’t spoil it for you by giving you the proof here. Instead, why don’t you go visit the original site and see for yourself? There are a number of really worthwhile illusions there. I first saw it maybe [...]

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There’s a lovely little story going around, about a band called 7 seconds of love.
They’re very today, they even have a myspace site;
They’re very yesterday, they play ska;
They’re very tomorrow, they’re unsigned.
Somehow a 2005 hit of theirs got copied lock stock and barrel. Seriously plagiarised. Not just the tune, but the characters and costumes in [...]

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Cory pointed me towards this article in the New York Times, headlined Record Labels Contemplate Unrestricted Digital Music. [An aside: The retarded hippie in me just cannot comprehend the use of the word "contemplate" in a context where "navel" and "lint" are absent...]
Where was I? Oh yes, the New York Times article. Here are a [...]

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You may have figured out that I was born and raised in Calcutta. Lived there from 1957 to 1980. For much of that time, the roads there were less than perfect. So much so we used to joke that, when confronted with a particularly poor road, the smart way to drive was to stay in [...]

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Sean’s having trouble finding vendors that try to Keep the Customer Satisfied; in fact he seems to be doing better at finding Deputy Sheriffs, according to his recent post.
Deputy Sheriff said to me
Tell me what you come here for, boy.
You better get your bags and flee.
You’re in trouble boy,
And now you’re heading into more. [...]

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I’ve spent some time reading a recent study titled Economic Impact of Open Source Software on Innovation and the Competitiveness of the Information and Communications Technologies (ICT) Sector in the EU. Don’t worry, you won’t think the title is too long when you see the document, all 287 pages of it. And no, I haven’t [...]

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One of the key points made by Larry Lessig in his 23C3 speech is how code, once used solely to make things work, is now being used to make culture; as he says “the tools of creativity have become the tool of speech”.
When we hear statements like this, it’s important to experience them, not just [...]

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the omensare not goodWhy 6174? Read this article. I love the symmetry and chaos of numbers, and have been entranced by Kaprekar’s constant ever since I heard about it, too many decades ago. You could say that for four-digit numbers, when you apply Kaprekar’s operation, all roads lead to 6174. Which is the way I [...]

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from DVDsto cigarettesThanks to Doc, I came across Mark Pilgrim’s post on A History of DVD Copy Protection. I have always found DVD Region Coding to be laughable, almost tantamount to fraud, so I loved the article. Read it and decide for yourself.
What I particularly enjoyed was how Mark moved from DVDs to cigarettes:

On a [...]

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