Stephen Smith was an Anglo-Indian postal employee from Shillong who experimented with mail delivery by unguided rocket before the United States got in on the concept. Like any good postman, Smith was obsessed with documenting his experiments and franking the results. Rocket post was eventually abandoned worldwide due to its cost and the tendency of […]
An hour ago, NASA twittered that its scientists saw chunks of white ice sublimate to gas over the last four days. May I be the first to say, Chak de! Here’s the classic Goodness Gracious Me clip. Yes, it’s about aliens.
As Diana Krall sings,
Fly me to the moonLet me play among the starsLet me see […]
Professor Deb Roy, 39, is head of the cognitive machines group at MIT. He is amassing an approximate 200,000 hours of his son’s life on video and multi-track audio in order to better understand how humans develop the ability to speak.
His project requires visitors meeting Roy’s son to sign consent forms in order that 11 […]
Sci-fi giant and non-child buggerer Arthur C. Clarke died today in Colombo, Sri Lanka, where he had lived for 52 years. The former RAF radarman, scuba nut and author of Rendezvous with Rama was 90 years old. Renezvous is being made into a movie starring Morgan Freeman.
… [His] technical paper, published in the British journal […]
Six months after a disastrous engine explosion, Scaled Composites showed off mockups of SpaceShipTwo today. You’d think for $200K, you’d get a better view during your 4½ minutes of weightlessness:
Pakistani-Dubaikar poet and astrologer Namira Salim will be one of the first average Jamilas to rocket into suborbit:
Namira Salim is set to become the […]
Just do it… with a Cablinasian
A new study of racial preferences in dating (full text
In Blade Runner: The Final Cut, the 25th anniversary edition of that seminal film, little-known indie director Ridley Scott (A Good Year, Black Rain) uses yellow panic to convey a dystopian future. Impenetrable Chinese and kanji ideographs and Arabic vocals from the Brian Eno track ‘Quran’ signify a future where Earth is crumbling, most have […]
A couple of early passages from David Leavitt’s The Indian Clerk, about the relationship between the great British mathematician G H Hardy and the untrained genius Srinivasa Ramanujan, whom Hardy invited to study under him at Cambridge in 1913. The f…
A Purdue University professor is helping the DoD predict what happens in case of tsunami, anarchy or war (via Reddit):
The DOD is developing a parallel to Planet Earth, with billions of individual “nodes” to reflect every man, woman, and child this side of the dividing line between reality and AR.
Called the Sentient World Simulation (SWS), […]
Seen at the Museum of Natural History in Manhattan:
That was almost as fun as watching Ben Stiller roam the museum while babbling in Hindi:
The Hindi script for Museum Ke Andar Phas Gaya Sikander has been written by Kiran Kotrial and is voiced by Damandeep Singh, Anil Datt and Saurabh Agarawal for Ben Stiller, Robin Williams […]
George Lucas’ wooden writing is legendary. Those who crossed over to the Dark Side include Dipika O’Neill Joti, who played Jedi extra Depa Billaba in Phantom Menace and Attack of the Clones:
Where is that Ramu with my Bisleri?
A serene yet strong presence on the Jedi Council, Depa Billaba was one of the members of that […]
India’s rocket program in 1966, by Henri Cartier-Bresson (thanks, Turbanhead):
In 1603, star atlas author Johann Bayer literally enshrined Cristobal Colón’s navigation error in the stars. In Uranometria, he named a nearby constellation Indus after the people of the Americas. (The ubiquitous Amerigo Vespucci had a hand in star charts too.) It’s supposed to represent a drawing of an upside-down Native American chief. It’s a […]
On Saturday, astronaut Sunita Williams finally got to stretch her legs in an orbital version of Home Improvement. One small spacewalk, one large step for womankind:
“Bye-bye Bob,” sang out Williams as she watched veteran Robert Curbeam float through the airlock into open space. She followed a few minutes later to be greeted by Curbeam, “Welcome […]