S Anand

Bought one of these Eicher Maps. They’re fantastic. I sure wish I had access to the GIS on their website! Have a whole bunch of cool ideas.

How the FBI hounded Bobby Fischer via Pathologically Polymathic

Lazy Geek on the possibility of Mani Rathnam and Kamal Hassan working together on Dragon Fire.

IBM has this cool tool: Multimodal browser extension. With this, I can create a textbox on my site, which you can fill in by speaking to the web page. The underlying standard is W3C’s XHTML+Voice. Two years ago, I’d have downloaded it and had it on my site in a few hours. Today, I’m a married consultant. I don’t have a few hours. :-(

An intruiging case of 22 Patels in a cricket match. via Kamat

An article in the Scientific American linking two-leggedness, non-vegetarianism and our brain size. Contrast that with this (funny) talk.origins post on the trade-off between a large brain and two-leggedness. via Ravikiran, via RobotWisdom

The Mumbai police are using a hacker to resolve some cybercrimes. It’s interesting to note some of his efforts: freeing the IDBI, HDFC sites from hackers, and tracking Chhota Shakeel’s money laundering. via FilterCoffee

Does education really pay? An interesting article on Forbes arguing that education does not cause higher salaries, but is merely correlated with it. The logic sequence is broadly: Labour markets want smart people. Smart people tend to want education. Hence labour markets appear to want educated people.

Gates beats Stallman in India. via RobotWisdom

Cute letters to Einstein from kids. Dear Sir, I probably would have written ages ago, only I was not aware that you were still alive. I am not interested in history, and I thought that you had lived in the 18th c., or somewhere around that time… Tyfanny Dear Tyfanny, … I have to apologize to you that I am still among the living. There will be a remedy for this, however. … ...

Microsoft (2002) vs IBM (1982). An article on whether Microsoft will go the IBM Way. Microsoft’s ability to adapt and prosper hinges on meeting a third main challenge: creating trust.

Stars of Amazon – Anita’s article on book reviewers at Amazon. via Anita

101 things you can do in Mozilla and not IE. But apart from 1. Tabbed browsing and 2. Popup blocking, I don’t quite use the other features. Mozilla (and Opera) still need some catching up to do. via New Architect

Nice strategy, Microsoft. Users aren’t upgrading to your new products. So you decide to focus on security and force upgrades. And, in the meantime, sue open-source competitors and spend lots of money to beat Linux.

But then, I should also keep in mind that Mozilla is open source. So they’ll keep coming out with cool stuff like Mozilla’s Bayesian spam filter and type ahead find. via Boing Boing

Interesting article on the Kelkar report on tax reforms. The point about simplifying tax and removing exemptions reminds me of a statement by George Winston in Tom Clancy’s Executive Orders: The purpose of taxes is to provide revenue for the country’s government so that the government can serve the people. But along the way we’ve created an entire industry that takes billions of dollars from the public. Why? To explain a tax code that gets more complex every year, a code that the enforcement people themselves do not understand with a sufficient degree of confidence to undertake responsibility for getting it right. ...

Bill donated $100mn to fight AIDS in India. Interestingly, just contrast this photo of him wearing a ’tilak’ with his 1977 snap with Paul Allen. In the latter, he almost looks like a girl! via The Register

Drinking bug juice. via RobotWisdom

Why am I the second hit on Google for queries like “arabic food’s pictures”, “wedding pictures in chennai in geocities”, and “iim grads future”?

Altavista’s new features are pretty good. What I liked best, though, is their new interface. Especially the bar used to open the search result in a new window. Good to know that I rank 3rd on their search.