Humans are rare in having prominent female breasts. I think it was in the "Naked Ape" that I first read Desmond Morris suggestion that breasts mimicked the buttocks as humans walked straight and changed the way they copulate. According to his framework, breasts were primarily sexual signaling devices. Of course, Desmond Morris has been accused of story telling without any evidence, and will eventually get knocked on his head for his labor.

Nor does he manage to explain the point made: why in the absence of European morality, in a number of places across the world, an uncovered breast was not an aberration attracting undue attention.

Nor, do we have any way to explain why now in parts of the west, an unadorned breast doesn't necessarily signal anything; while on a recent visit to a beach in Goa I read a sign board informing me the law wouldn't look kindly upon breasts being exposed to the sun and the sand.

The truth is that I do not understand, nor have the will to investigate.

Most of the time, it is involuntary: just about not being able to tear off your eyes, and just sitting there gaping.

[This was leading somewhere, I just forgot where...]

[west civil kerela. would there have been this obsession with breasts without this education]

[more victorian than the victorians]

[what exactly were the norms - is art that survives an appropriate guide]

[what about the movies that get made ~ kama sutra, The cloud door]

[what about the portrayal in the west. Cashback - 100 girls. Cool casual nudity]

[what about Indian serial - do they portray the right image - afgan ban etc.]

[what were the norms again.]

Neil Gaiman on his story I, Cthulhu

That Lovecraft, a devoted anglophile, was a fan of the man's work is unsurprising. That P.G. Wodehouse was a fan of Weird Tales is perhaps more so. How their lengthy correspondence got into my grubby little hands I do not wish to go into at this point. Suffice it to say that I possess not only their only collaborative novel (alternatively titled The What Ho! On The Threshold and It's the Call of Cthulhu, Jeeves ) but also fragments of their musical, Necronomicon Summer , in which the heroine is called upon to sing those immortal lines:

I may be just a bird in a gilded cage
A captive like a parakeet or dove,
But when a maiden meets a giant lipophage
Her heart gets chewed and broken, like that old adage�
-I'm just a fool who
Thought that Cthulhu
Could fall in love!

Oprah, in case you didn't know, is about to end her show, taking with it that strange beast: Oprah Book Club.

Now, I don't usually watch The Tonight Show with Conan O'Brien. But today, while waiting for the highlight's of the day's play of the India vs. Sri Lanka Test, I started flipping channels and caught TTS. He was talking about how the 1974 SciFi/ Horror film Killdozer jumped 126% up in popularity on IMDB after he recommended the movie, in a preemptive 'attempt' to fill the void about to be left by Oprah Book Club.

Killdozer has a 4.7 rating on IMDB, and though I don't care about IMDB ratings, Killdozer must be a really bad movie. It has bee reference on the Mystery Science Theatre 3000, that barometer of terrible B-Movie.

However, Killdozer, the movie, is based on a Theodore Sturgeon story of the same name. I remember reading the story about 8-10 years ago in 'The Mammoth Book of Golden Age Science Fiction' and loving the story. It freaked me out, the premise is great, and Sturgeon is a great writer.

May be it should be remade.

+++++++++++++++++++
The story is about an alien ancient (I remembered it as alien, but I was wrong) being trapped in a pacific island possessing a bulldozer, and going about killing the people on the island.

You should read the Sturgeon's story, probably after my description has faded in your mind.

WTF! When did IBM buy SPSS? And SPSS is now "PASW (Predictive Analytics SoftWare)"! Stupidest rebranding.

Chaining with previous post

I should start reading the DNA. It is, like HT or TOI, full of crud, but it does seem to carry useful stuff.

Yesterday, I spotted an article on PlayPower. From their wiki explains

Playpower is creating new software for a $10 computer that already exists and is being sold in street markets around the world. These computers are typically packagedwith a full keyboard, mouse, game controllers, and a cartridge filled with software like typing games and BASIC programming. The computer is located inside the keyboard, which connects directly to a family's television as a screen. The computer is based on the 8-bit 6502 chip, which was used in the famous Apple IIe computer and the Nintendo Entertainment System (NES). In fact, the computers are technically a clone of the Nintendo Famicom, which is why they are referred to as "FamiClones". This computer hardware is now in the public domain, due to expired patents. As a result, millions of these devices are being produced every year by dozens of manufacturers, under a variety of brand names. You can even obtain them in the USA through Makershed.com.

Playpower's Goals

• In countries like India and Ghana, skills as simple as learning to type can mean the difference between earning $1/day as a menial laborer and $1/hour in a back-office. We want to faciliate these kinds of economic transformations through affordable, effective and fun learning games.
• By freely providing our source code directly to the FamiClone manufacturers, Playpower hopes to leverage their global distribution network to introduce quality educational software to millions of children around the world.
• We're trying to legally license the source code of 8-bit abandonware educational games (such as Number Munchers, Lemonade Stand, etc). We're developing aporting process to enable these games to run on the existing FamiClones
• By organizing and translating development materials, and through the creation of new development tools, we're trying to make it easier for diverse groups of people to create new games and educational software for "the world's most affordable home computer."
• We believe that 8-bit computers, simple as they are, can be very effective at introducing computing cultures to children in emerging economies because of their low-cost and wide distribution. After all, 8-bit computers were highly effective at introducing generations of Americans and Japanese to games and programming! Because these devices enable their users to learn programming in BASIC, these computers could provide a powerful experience that could act as a stepping stone to far more advanced computer use.
• Playpower is all about content: open-source educational content for low-cost computer platforms. In the future we may focus on multiple low-cost computers, but right now we are focused on creating content for the 8-bit famiclones.
• We are not trying to design a new computer. We're trying to maximize the educational value of what's already available in the market.

A smashing good idea, if you ask me.

I probably follow a larger set of blogs than most people around me, and I follow them on Google Reader. Now, following feeds from a large set of blogs means that I generally have a lot of unread posts to go through when I want to while away time. But, at the same time I do not want most of those unread posts to be by people who talk about Things I Don't Care About (NFL, Reality show updates, The next coming of the Messiah, etc.). Because of this set up, cluster blogs suck. Unless there is a common theme (as in Monkey Cage or Language Log), the range of topics covered in a blog with multiple authors would include a large proportion of posts on Things I Don't Care About.

One way to avoid having cluster blog choke the feed reader is to avoid feeds and just visit the websites. After all the websites would presumably allow a way to filter by author. Unfortunately, visiting the websites for the updates is painful, especially if the author I am trying to follow only posts occasionally.

There is this documentary maker, Errol Morris, who has this great blog at NYT, talking about the nature of truth in photography, documentaries, and art. Absolutely beautiful. If you want to get a flavour of his work, I suggest this seven part essay on the Dutch forger, Han van Meegeren. Since, Errol Morris updates in only occasional bursts. He has put out just about 40 posts in just over two years, each of which is a magazine article length and quality. You could say that his philosophy towards the posts is the absolute opposite of mine towards my posts.

The thing is I loved that blog. Unfortunately, NYT merged his blog with a bunch of other people who talk about Things I Don't Care About and created something they are calling 'The Opinionator'. They merged the blogs, they merged the feeds. Now, for Errol Morris's once a month article, I will have to scan through the 10 posts a day on Things I Don't Care About.

So, Fuck you NYT and fuck you Opinionator.

So, it was a long day capping a long week. And the weekend would not quite be the weekend I dreamt it would be. The cold beer I had been dreaming about all day, like the alcoholic I am, just to get through the day, might just remain a dream as it is nearly too late to go out.

But, then you decide to just play your random playlist out loud to the empty work floor, and then you decide to read up the comics you had been saving up in the feed reader all week. First, the music plays, something easy by one of them folksy girls, and then the blog feeds read up like one epiphany after another.

Sometimes it is good to be alive.

[It helps that the workspace is being repainted, and you might as well be a junkie on paint thinners.]

The new cricinfo sucks
It has broken statsguru
and now it broke me

I tried to verify my assumption that the centuries by Dravid and Tendulkar are, respectively, their fastest and slowest century innings. So, when I tried to verify that, the "advanced filter for statsguru" refused to respond reasonably and kept giving me 500, and asked me for my feedback. So I wrote the lines above. Unfortunately, I don't think it would make any difference, because when I tried to post my response, cricinfo returned 'Internal Server Error."

And anyway, finally after refreshing the pages obsessively for half an hour, I can now tell you that Dravid's innings was his third fastest 100 plus score and Tendulkar's innings was his third slowest 100 plus score (and his only score of exactly 100). So there.

Now you know.

I like Takehiko Inoue's Real more than his work on Slam Dunk or Vagabond.

PBS: Secrets of the Dead - Mumbai Massacre
Channel 4/ HBO: Terror in Mumbai - Dispatches
NatGeo TV: Mumbai Terror

McKinsey Quarterly: The Use and Abuse of Scenarios [Registration Required]

The former CEO of a global industrial company once suggested that scenarios are an abdication of leadership. His point was that a leader has to set a vision for the future and persuade people to follow it. Great leaders do not paint four alternative views of the future and then say, "Follow me, although I admit I’m not sure where we are going."

Leaders can use scenarios without abdicating their leadership responsibilities but should not communicate with the organization via scenarios. You cannot stand up in front of an organization and say, "Things will be good, bad, or terrible, but I am not sure which." Winston Churchill ’s remarks about British aims in World War II—“Victory at all costs, victory in spite of all terror, victory however long and hard the road may be”—are instructive. By insisting on only one final outcome, Churchill was not refusing to acknowledge that a wide range of conditions might exist. What he did was to set forth a goal that he regarded as what we would call "robust under different scenarios." He was acknowledging the range of uncertainties ("however long and hard the road may be"), and he resisted overoptimism (which affected many bank CEOs early in the recent crisis).

I don't get Twitter. There are people putting twits that look like this:

RT @ksavai @zoooni #sachinisgod and #dravidiswall :)#cricket #Dravid #INDvsSL #dravidiswall

I have this small, how shall I put it, quirk.

Generally speaking, if I hate the genre of the story, or hate the story premise, or the actors, and otherwise displeased in any way, I just cannot give in the story. However, I am a sucker for melodrama. I surrender to the scenes designed to work on my heart string without even a token protest.

So, even in movies that I hate, if there is a scene worked over with wailing violins and piano, and the dog dies or the hero has to speak out against the world that has forsaken him, I just can't stop the tears flowing down my cheeks.

Even with an absolute turd of a movie like 'Mera Dost Yaar ki Shaadi Hai', the ape man, Uday Chopra, managed to get me teared up.

Now, the reason why I am telling you this is to try and explain how bad 2012, the movie, is.

Forget the technical/ scientific goof ups and unanswered questions. Forget the unfathomable responses of the various characters.

The involved tragedy is about as big as any tragedy can be. Yet, the story didn't manage to make me give a fudge about the assorted people. It didn't manage to make me care about those struggling to survive and failing. I didn't manage to make me give a flying fudge for those who were surviving by the thinest of margins.

I spent most of the movie rooting for the volcanoes, earthquakes and tsunamis. The movie would have been far far better if they had left out story and just kept the special effects.

Ebert on 'The Mist'

If you have seen ads or trailers suggesting that horrible things pounce on people, and they make you think you want to see this movie, you will be correct. It is a competently made Horrible Things Pouncing on People Movie. If you think Frank Darabont has equaled the "Shawshank" and "Green Mile" track record, you will be sadly mistaken.

I started using Firefox in the days before it was called Firefox (or, officially: 'Mozilla Firefox'). Back then it was around version 0.6 or 0.7, and the name of the browser had just changed from Phoenix to Firebird.

Firefox had been born because Mozilla suite had grown too fat, and so when it came in, it was a beautiful sweet little thing. However since then it has grown less fun.

Is it that the browser got worse, or the options got better?

I am helping out, helping a man managing a huge project. One of those large scale IT projects where there are project managers piled five deep, and I have to track what's up in all that crowd. Now, I don't know why I do what I do, because it just doesn't matter who I call up to ask "What's up?" All that anyone will every say in reply is 'Well, well, you know it is not my shit. I might be a dirty monkey herding cats, but I just didn't shit that.'

Languagehat wrote about a delicious book

The excellent folk at OUP sent me their latest magnum opus, the Historical Thesaurus of the Oxford English Dictionary, and I've been marveling at it for the last month. Well, to be more specific, I spent some time circling warily around it, admiring its two dark blue volumes in their classy slipcase (the whole thing weighing almost 15 pounds); after a while I opened it at random and stared in awe at the many columns of small type (not small enough to require a magnifying glass, I hasten to add); finally I started actually figuring out how to use it, looking up words in Volume II, the index, and finding them in various sections of Volume I, the thesaurus proper. Eventually I got the hang of it, and I'm here to tell you about it.

Let's say you look up squirrel in the OED and discover it entered English in the 14th century (Chaucer: "And of squyrels ful great plente"); it's from Old French esquireul, from a diminutive form of a Latin borrowing of Greek skiouros 'shadowtail.' All very well, but then it occurs to you to wonder what they called the creature before they borrowed the French word. Until now, you would have had to ask a medievalist; now you look up squirrel and are directed to 01.02.06.20.05.08 (n.), Order Rodentia/rodent, where under subentry 03, family Sciuridae/squirrel, you discover that what they used to say was aquerne, from Old English acweorna.

And what if you want to know in general what words were available in a given period? OUPblog has a cute piece by Ammon Shea called "Rewriting The Gettysburg Address" in which he chooses four words from Lincoln's speech and asks "What options would you have to replace these words with synonyms if you were using the HTOED, as opposed to if you were using an online thesaurus?" But aside from a stunt like that, any historical novelist who cares about linguistic accuracy must have struggled with this; if your novel is set in the 1820s, how can you be sure you're using vocabulary appropriate to the time and not introducing anachronisms? Now you can find out.

And you never know what you're going to find just browsing through it. Flipping through Volume II, my eye was caught by Loucheux. "What on earth is that?" I asked myself, and turned to Volume I to find out. It turned out to be under 01.02.07.07.48.08 (n.), Peoples of British Columbia/Alberta/Alaska, along with Carrier 1793-, Beaver 1891-, Slave/Slavey/Slavi 1801-, Takulli 1820-, and over a dozen other ethnonyms, ending with Snohomish 1910-. (The Loucheux were first mentioned in 1828.) And glancing around, I realized that the 01.02.07.07 section, "People," was a thorough cataloguing, by region, of every ethnic group that had occurred in English texts, from "Nomads" and "Person of mythical race" (pygmy, Cimmerian, Yahoo, etc.) through general terms for persons of specified races (under "White person" are long knife, Pakeha, whitefellow, leucoderm, and jumble, among many others), to specific groups (the only other words ever used for Basques are Baskle 1330 and Euskarian 1864-1883). And that's followed by 01.02.07.07 "Nation/nations," which starts with general terms ("National of a country," "Compatriot," etc.) and proceeds to specific nations, from "British" and "English" (Angelcynn OE to Percy 1932 [US derog.]) to "South American." And after that comes 01.02.08.01 "Food"...

I've only scratched the surface (there are more tidbits here—the word immediately has 265 synonyms!), and I'm sure I'll be discovering more and quoting from it many times in the years to come, but I hope I've given some idea of what a valuable and enjoyable work this is. Yes, it costs $400 (though Amazon has it for a mere $316.00!), so most people will probably consult it at the library, but hey, it's a lot less than the OED itself, and it did take 44 years to complete. Once again, Oxford UP has proved itself the leader in English lexicography, and it will be a long time before speakers of other languages have anything remotely similar to this arweorþlic/reverend/canonizable work of scholarship.

I should have been doing other things. But I was busy watching 'Stranger than fiction' instead.

As the Rolling Stone review mentioned in the Wikipedia page says about the initial premise of the movie, "It's a setup for farce the kind Ferrell built his rep on. But the farce never comes."

It is a brilliant movie.

I loved the voice over. I loved the way the GUI existed.