Links

India’s first eunuch mayor has been dismissed because he/she was occupying a seat reserved for women.

Deepti: a Hindi chatterbot (sic). Apparantly, it’s downloadable, but I couldn’t find it.

Progress on the polynomial-time computability of prime numbers.

Asimov’s Foundation was translated into Arabic. Title: Al-Qaeda. The Guardian explores the link between Asimov and bin Laden.

P K Rappai has been banned from restaurants because he eats too much.

Contract research by Eli Lilly. They put up problems in chemistry. You solve them. You get paid.

The Invisible Library. Has books that exist only inside other books. Neat stuff. Talks of various books by Holmes & Watson (Doyle) as well as Oolon Colluphid (Douglas Adams), though I was disappointed that too little of Lewis Caroll is mentioned.

The flip side of copyright: Hindi songs featured in albums.

Bizarre. Funeral homes offer to convert cremated ashes into a diamond.

Now the UK wants a DMCA-like law.

Matt’s excellent summary of the current state of the Standard Model at kuro5hin. (The Standard Model what we know of fundamental particles today. Quarks and stuff.)

I’m famous. Thanks, Anita!

Musharraf is now officially a dictator. In all but name.

Publicly available web services from xmethods.

It’s possible to type with your eyes. Hope this is commercialised soon. The details are available for free.

Good summary of what Microsoft is up to at the Economist.

A different approach to spam. Habeas is using haikus to morph spam into copyright violation – making it more prosecutable. Clever, but practical?

FindArticles: A good search for magazine articles (review)

Suku on movies. Beautiful. Says what I feel.

The most cruel sentence I’ve heard. Death by stoning. Crime: childbirth over 9 months after divorce. Redeeming feature: stoning to take place after weaning.