Alfredo!

I was having dinner with mah Italian pals last night and we were discussing cuisines from different parts of Italy. He goes like yeah there is nothing like Alfredo Sauce, you will get a blank stare if you ask for dish with Alfredo Sauce. Whaaattttt? What do you mean there is no Alfredo Sauce, I have been to Italian restaurants across the country and they all have dishes named with Alfredo.

Then he smiles and says let me guess, you probably don't know that Burritos, dont really exist in Mexico and Burrito means a donkey. A double whammy. Crap! I feel cheated! F***. Got home and ran to wikipedia and searched for Alfredo Sauce and Burrito. The ray of knowledge shines from the heavens! Salvation

In both the cases, the names have their origins thanks to 2 guys.

Alfredo di Lelio attached his name to a recipie of Fettuccini (fettuccine al burro ) called he came up with. Butter is added to the serving dish before and after fettuccini is placed. Alfredo doubled the amount of butter that is added before the fettuccini is added and dish was born! His dish was made famous in US by Mary Pickford and Douglas Fairbanks. They fell in love with it when they had in his restaurent Alfredo alla Scrofa. They shared the recipie with their friends and the word spread!.

So there was this dude Juan Mendez, way back in 1910's was selling tacos using his donkey as a transport. His taco's became famous and soon ppl were looking for "Food of the burrito", and hence the name Burritos. Now get this, not everyone in Mexico would recognize the word Burrito since it was only northern parts was Burritos or known as taco de harina was known. It is a case of a Mexican food more famous outside Mexico.

Aliens found Woo hoo!

Naaaaaaah, not yet, but wouldn't that be fun if we did find them. So, here is the news, they found sugar molecule glycolaldehyde which is an ingredient in forming life. To quote

"Glycolaldehyde, the simplest of the monosaccharide sugars, can react with the substance propenal to form ribose, a central constituent of Ribonucleic acid (RNA), thought to be the central molecule in the origin of life."

Now that's interesting. If indeed is life there or if there is life being formed there or life is evolving there, wonder what it is evolving as. It is something I am never going to know since the place where it is detected is 26,000 light years away! Where is the elixir of life when I need it!!!

Stem Cells

The difference between "God" and a scientist is that God can do things instantaneously if she/he/it wished. A scientist would probably take a several million years or centuries or decades to do the same. It is all a matter of time. If history is any indication "Scientific" progress takes a really long time to happen. A look at Chinese, Egyptian, Indian, Roman civilizations and to where we are today, progress has been steady. The question is how long before we have God like powers when it comes to a human body, the ability to rebuild limbs, clone life, create a replica of a human and how quick?

If research of stem cells are any indication, conservatively maybe 50-75 yrs we should be able rebuild the human body. I doubt if the brain can be replicated as is with the same memories and personality. On second thoughts may be it would be possible in a century. I have no scientific basis for such a prediction, just a wild ass guess. :D

The pace at which the research is progressing is amazing, check out this news. If soon it becomes possible to build limbs quickly and recovery period is not long enough, how long would it before soldiers in the field are the first people who are gonna get abused for this kind of thing. They will probably become a being just with a brain with rest of the body fixable in terms of damage. I would of course want all of the technologies be available to common people and not so much for military purpose (yeah then wars will be on forever) so that they are able get a decent life again by regrowing the limbs they need.

Would then mankind become more irresponsible if reattaching a limb was an affair that is a walk in the park? If history is any indication probably yes. Lets not forget robots, they are becoming better, check this news about real time facial expressions. It is not far away before a robot like in the movie Bicentennial Man or A.I is a possibility. Now combine the robots with the human limbs that can be grown, you have an android. The progress on near human like skin tones is amazing. A search on youtube gives you a ton load of videos.

The intersection of stem cells and robotics and knowledge banks of people's memories is should be become possible rebuild a person's replica in real time. Then you have assistants who can represent you. ;)

The dark side to this is resource contention. Will human population be regulated across the world or will nature take care of human population to deal with the storage of resources?

Quantum of Solace

The pain, the pain, yes the pain manifests itself in the form of anger, determination and disregard in the movie Quantum of Solace. This is the first Bond movie that I recollect where Bond has been questioned about the price that is being paid in terms of body count and his dedication. The first Bond movie that I recollect were M is not so confident and is at loss. The first Bond movie where the opening song sequence put me to sleep. Bond was full of pain and vengeance is order of the day.

The movie was awesome. It didn't have the flashy cars with the fancy weapons. It was all hands and guns. It was all "mano a mano". I was hooked. The sidekick Bond girl was kicking ass too not because she was on a good guy;s mission to be beat bad guys but more on a personal vendatta. Bond's desire for revenge leads him to the conspiracy of the "Organization" to control fresh water supplies in Bolivia. He is unable to sleep, unable to forgive himself and unable to let go. The movie doesn't end with the usual passionate love making that Bond movies end with. It ends with letting go.

The rose's fragrance stirs the feeling of Love, the thorn in it tears you apart. Beware of the rose ;)

Restless

Restlessness has its tentacles wrapped around me tightly for the past day or two. Dunno why, can't seem sit and read, or watch a movie, or go for a drive or head to the gym. I am never like this, even as I type this away, my mind is wrenching itself away in different directions and dimensions. I can see colors flashing away , the whirlwind of arts stuff that I saw a while ago, the places I have been too and faces of people. NO I am not on drugs. I don't do drugs or smoke. Need a cure for this,

5 mins, later, I am listening to Infected Mushroom's Shakawkaw (Mayumanna remake), has me moving to the music. There is this undescribleable emotion that is sweeping through when I listen this kind of music. It is like it takes you to a different plane of existence. I close my eyes and listen to it and all my body wants to do is scream , as if there is something waiting to get out and hasn't been able to. I wonder what it is, maybe freedom, freedom for what, I dunno. Maybe it is just the urge to be lost in this world of music forever, the urge to be not limited by the confines of the human body and by time.

Broken windows

Nah, its not a thought about windows that I broke, or the beautiful pics of broken windows, its about this news article. I am sure it has been known for a long time (read centuries) that clean, tidy and well lit places foster more upbeat moods than dark/dingy/unkempt/littered places. This study gives examples of people's behavior in different settings.

Digressing for a moment, I wonder if England's "police state" practices of screaming at people to pick up litter through surveillance cameras is supposed to serve the same purpose of creating a "clean" environment. I seriously doubt it. If you don't know what a police state is, well think of Soviet Union's KGB and you will get the idea.

Its an interesting study, I gave up searching for the original work by Dr Kelling after 2 mins of search on google, too many generic results. Bah!

Pink attacks again!

No for real, I am not kidding! I am not being dramatic as I was here , check out this news. Aliens are here! Run and save your soul :D

Bliding Sun

As a wee lil kid,

I wish I can touch the sun

As a lil kid

I wish I can fly to the sun

As a kid

I wish the sun was out all the time, for me to play

As a bigger kid

Why is this magnifying glass not setting the grass on fire

As a young teenager

Holy crap, is the sun really that big? Wow it appears so small, oh that's how eclipses are formed

As an old teenager

Oh wow this fusion thing is awesome, What the sun will die ? Crap.

As a univ student

Damn there are some many electro magnetic fields and solar storms from the sun? Nice! Thanks atmosphere. :p

and the relationship with sun keeps changing. Was driving to work, today being a cloudy morning, the sun caught me in the full glare at a turn, squinting with one eye, I navigated the turn and I felt peace as the light engulfed me. Yeah it is going to be a good day.

Death

My cruising in the hyperspace came to a screeching halt when I came across this news. Kind of stunned. Dunno what to say.

Frozen Pizza

Damn, check out this video on preparation of Frozen Pizza. Its fun to watch how machines have replaced humans for faster processing and precision and probably save cost. I wonder if there will be a time when human population will be regulated to suit the resources that are available for consumption. China already does this under their one child policy. I forget the name of the Issac Asimov's story that describes a planet with very few humans and ton load of robots. I wonder if it is inevitable that the world in described in Matrix would come true. Machines becoming overlords! Ha ha ha ha.

Lets take a look at life in a developed country, the absence of electricity can bring life to a halt, for

1. Food would perish causing shortage since refrigerators (home,grocery stores) wouldn't work
2. Communication systems will be down (VOIP,Cellphones, Modems,TV)

Hmmn, 1 and 2 seem scary enough. To imagine the cascading effect of absence of electricity on 1, the food distribution networks of companies would all be down, as I would imagine a lot of the process would be automated using systems. Damn! now that is a real scary thought. I wonder what kind of backup processes, companies have if electricity failed.

In developing and underdeveloped countries absence of electricity might not be that huge a problem since many aspects of processes in society are not through systems and still a lot of human intervention.

Oh well it is time to get something to eat, I wonder if the refridgerator is humming just fine? :p

Human Extinction

Click, click, click screams my mouse when I am clicking through random links not knowing where I am going to end up. Lo and Behold! I came across this paper "Reducing the Risk of Human Extinction". I like to read to papers in full or court opinions in full when I get a chance. If you are about to yell "BORING", plz plz plz take a second to go this link. :D

The paper is interesting, a topic that I have given a considerable thought before. Possible causes that come to mind,

1. Human
   
   • Wars (Nuclear/Bio/Chem)
   • Nuclear accidents
   • Bio/Che accidents
   • Diseases
   • Pollution
   • Artificial Intelligence
   • Natural Resources.
2. Extra-terrestrial
   
   • Solar activity
   • Asteroids
   • Unknown ( Probably aliens :D )

The paper talks about the cost effectiveness of preparing and delaying human extinction as much as possible. The debate for ever is going to be when is the returns on the investment going to be seen. I am not going to summarize the paper here, it is small enough for anyone to just go and read it. Talking about ROI, I think the returns are both tangible and intangible. Intangible, is the part what we learn from the identifying and trying so solve a problem. History is replete with examples of accidental discoveries and inventions. Yeah, it is worth investing time and money in such ventures (prudently of course).
Going off tangentially and talking about wars,

Wars have been going on for time immemorial, what makes it really scary is the sophistication and ease of bio/chem/nuclear weaponry today. The quest for oil and religious wars make it even more brain dead. It is not unusual to die for an idea.

The fight for "Freedom" is worth fighting for, but then freedom from or for what? Civil rights, cruelty, equal treatment, misinformation, speech yeah make sense. The war against others, for not believing your religious ideas is the most depraved human act. The fight for resources is inevitable (no I don't condone it). The oldest cause is food.

Food riots that happened earlier in the year are examples of what is to come. Water shortage is the other resource that will become the cause of wars. It is soul crushing to see another human die from thirst/hunger. There are other things that happen in the world that I consider as soul crushing too, like rape of a woman/child etc. I digress.

While exhaustion of natural resources happen in the hands of some countries more than the others, humans are collectively responsible and the same goes for pollution.

Damages from Bio/Chem/Nuclear wars are however from the decisions of very few people, the people who authorized the launch and the people who assisted in the launch. Which is very very very scary. There are supposedly safeguards, but is every situation anticipated? Life is fun because most of it is not stuff one anticipates. :) With humans, however we can never be assured when one can push things over the tipping point. Tom Clancy's Sum of All Fears comes to mind.

Contrast sophistication of wars from like say before 1900 and now. The wars then wouldn't have really wiped out the world as such, but today with the arsenal that we have, we can easily wipe out the whole world literally. The wars before 1900 didn't really destroy a lot of plant and animal life, however today with the bio/chem/nuc we can wipe out most forms of life. Wonder what kind of life forms would evolution lead to.

I wonder if we are really better off than the people who lived centuries ago? Is longer life really worth it in today's environment? Does it really matter if lifeforms get wiped out from Earth? I wouldn't think it would affect the universe at all. Some people however beg to differ with me,

GOD! he/she/it has a divine plan. If the world today is a example of the grand plan, then it is a truly screwed up plan. At work if I built/designed solution like that of Earth, I would be fired before the sun went down.

Random attempt at poetry

seconds, rain drops plenty alike,
minutes, flow a mighty river alike,
hours, flow a mighty ocean alike
my heart, a desert traveller alike,
flounder i, in sands of time,
to quench, the thirst of time,
o time, thou the most cruel of all.

Brisingr!

Harry Potter! Yeah I am a fan of the Harry Potter series, been avoiding them for years and BAM in one week finished 6 of them after being bored after a week of hectic work. I was discussing the plot of HP7 before it came out with a friend and he goes like, there is another series that you might like, Eragon and Eldest. I go like Eragon? Yeah it is a story of dragons and all. I was skeptical. Bought Eragon anyway.

Damn! I was hooked. The book was awesome. The details the author paid attention to in building the characters and the way the plot evolved had me stuck to the couch for the whole weekend. The author Christopher Paloni was 15 when he wrote the book. As Ali G would say "RESPECT". :) Who gives a shit if the author borrowed ideas or was influenced by Lord of the Rings or Star Wars as alleged by "critics". As far as I am concerned the author rocks, the book was fun to read.

The first book is about Eragon finding a dragon egg, then birth of Saphira (the dragon) and a epic journey with Brom, Murtagh and Arya. The second book Eldest is about Eragon gets trained by the Elves and war with King Galbatorix's army. I bought the third book just right after it was released this year. Nah I didn't stand in lines for book. I didn't stand in line for HP7 either. Just walked into a book store the next day bought it without having to spend hours together in lines or put my name on the reservation lists :D.

The author decided that there would be 4 books instead of 3. The wait for the third book, Brisingr was worth it. The plot evolves into the battle between Murtagh and Eragon, a election of the king of drawfs, the last training of Eragon. secret of how Galbatorix just keeps getting more and more powerful.

What I like most about the books are that , the characters are very humane and how magic is explained. Magic as described is about channeling surrounding energies and not something that is quite mysterious unlike in HP where flow of magic is mostly through the wand.

Tree on the Hill

I lost my way to Stone Mountain Park this one weekend. It is an interesting park. It has a tram that takes you all the way upto the mountain. It is not a big park though. I finished the drive in like 10mins. Would be a fun place to bike..

The most amazing thing about the park is the sculpturing on the side of the mountain depicting the Three Confederate leaders of the Civil War, President Jefferson Davis and Generals Robert E. Lee and Thomas J. "Stonewall" Jackson.

The Stone Mountain is a largest exposed granite stone. It was formed during the time when Blue Ridge mountains when magma cooled down. Nature never ceases to amaze me. The resilience of nature and ability of plants to just about grow anywhere is simply amazing. This picture was taken at the top of the Stone Mountain.

This is a picture of Atlanta from Stone Mountain. The view was amazing. The fog made it all the more fun.

This looks almost as if some Dino walked over and made the footprint.

Samoyed Smiling

Man's best friend, DoGs! The barking, running, loving four legged animal that has no equal. Mah colleague has a Samoyed. It was all over me and with the smiley face, wagging tail and eager to lick hands and face. Of the German Shepards, Pomeranians, Dobermans that I have played with I think I liked the Samoyed the best. I am a huge fan of the Bull dog though. The slobbery face and "I give rats ass" and "Don't f*** with me" attitude, the dog rulez.

The Samyoed grows to be a decent big sized dog. Check the pic out!

Allergies! Pink

I came to a screeching halt when I walked by a colleague's desk. She had her Yahoo messenger's color scheme as PINK!! Her lunch box was PINK! WTH??? Yesterday I was snatched from heavenly world of Nine Inch Nails to a shock of the girl on the treadmill next to me was dressed in a blazing pink workout suit. It is the attack of PINK! Why do women insist on pink when there is a spectrum of colors to wear. Beat me. Mah friend goes like dude, next time the doc asks you what you are allergic to you, you should tell him you are to the color PINK. Riiggggghhhhhttt!

Winblows! Viruz

A weird thing happened last night. A friend was looking for episode guide for some TV show. Being a little more adept with Google's search tricks, I found a site that had the videos of the episodes and sent the link over.

5 mins later, my friend goes like "I think I have a virus". I am like whaaaaattttt???? My friend was like, yeah my box just turned off when I clicked on that page., That'd didn't make any sense. I was on the site earlier and then had clicked on the link to play the video and nothing had happened to me. Then it hit me, I was not using IE and that is a possible reason that I didn't see any attack if any. Groan! Bah! F**** Stupid IE.

I use firefox with noscript, flashblocker and adblock extentions. I fired up IE and went to the same link. Dude was I in for a surprise or what? The page was loaded with ton load of flash ads and there was a pop up for registry cleaner ad. The page took about a minute to load.

Now, I have a fairly decent box and it did suck up resources considering the number of instances of ads that loaded up. No wonder my friend's box which is probably not upto to date and an older system, turned off or crashed. It could have easily eaten up loads of memory and just went poof!. Arrrggggghhhh Winblows!

My friend all too tired to do anything just went to sleep. I was wondering what I would have done. I would have probably installed taken 2 different approaches.

a) Install anti virus and run a scan.
b) if I didn't have a anti virus then I would try trailware from Symantec or Clamav or other tools.
c) I would download Spybot and CCleaner first and disconnect myself from the internet.
d) Then install Spybot and have run trojans/virus scan and locked down hosts file after updating the definitions.
e) Installed CCleaner clean up the registry and the temporary Internet files.
f) b) c) , d) should give sufficient to identify what virus are there. There are virus specific removal tools from Symantec that can be used.
g) Call a friend for help!

or the other extreme

Wipe the disk out and install windows from scratch and run windows updates. Extreme way though, wouldn't recommend it.

When I have to browse the web and need to used IE from Winblows, I use a virtual instance of Windows. Makes it easy. This one time I had gone out of my way to a warez site and got myself infected with a virus to see how I could recover from it. To make a long story short, I simply wiped out the vm instance. It was FUBAR and I was too lazy to recover it. But saying it was FUBAR makes it all more believable! :p

Many a time Knoppix can come to rescue when some stubborn virus files don't allow themselves to be deleted. It certainly did rescue me from some tight spots.

If you are wondering why I chose to disconnect myself from the net, well it is because I didn't want some trojan/virus sending off files from my system.

If you want to a lil step further and do some forensics on the box, then you would be better off using some basic tools from Sysinternals. I would use at RootkitRevealer, TCPView and Process Monitor to start looking at things. Obvious indicators of processes trashing the hardisk and Processor would be the culprits to look at.

Playing for pizza

I have been a huge fan of John Grisham's works for a long time. Time to Kill, The Firm, The Pelican Brief, The Client, The Brethren, The Partner had me riveted, till I finished the books. Alas Playing for Pizza doesn't compare to any of his previous works. I was struggling to the finish the book. The plot goes some thing like this. There is a disgraced NFL player who goes and plays for a local team in ITALY and wins their first Super Bowl. That's about it. There is nothing more . Nada. You have just finished the book in that one line.

The story has no twists or have you wondering what is going to happen and is not a page turner. There is a lot of descriptions of the deceltable meats and cheese in Parma, Italy and some football play. YAWN!

Lights on Emily Dickinson

A lil nightingale slipped in a word on a poet Emily Dickinson. Piqued, I looked her up and whoa! Her poetry was different from what I had read so far. It kind of blew my head off and I was like wow! Check some of them out here. I haven't seen poets use a lot of hypens in their poems. Need to dig in to see if it was a common writting style of that age. It annoys me when people edit the original author's work to make them more marketable/publishable especially when it is posthumus.

Oh well, whatever. This particular poem titled "The Heart asks for Pleasure first", had me stunned for a moment. It just seem so profound. Damn!

Mad Lord Snapcase

Who is this Mad Lord Snapcase? Quoting the Librarian of the Unseen University.

The Patrician who came to power after Lord Winder. During his reign, he was considered "eccentric" rather than mad by the upper classes, but he is now known by most Morporkians, including the nobles, as the Mad Lord. He was sadistic, and extremely fond of torture, much like his predecessor. Mad (sometimes Psychoneurotic) Lord Snapcase was succeeded by Lord Vetinari. There are very few historical records of Lord Snapcase's Tyranny, but one documented case is that he called for the killing of John Keel / Sam Vimes.

I figured it would be fun to have a blog after a character who I am totally not like! :D

Lighten up! Foamy the squirrel

If you are big into animation that has characters rant (R Rated) you should say hello to Foamy the Squirrel. Some of it is outrageously funny!

Shadow cast by College Bubble

Again I tumbled upon this link talking about the cost of education today in US. If you have spare money do buy the book. It is a informal write up, more a like brain dump by a person who knows what he is talking about. I agree on some of his points. To beat the bubble the way he outlines requires imho :

1. A backbone and pair of balls to take risk.
2. Know what you want.
   
3. Ability to think and plan far ahead.
4. To be street smart and know how the system works.
   
5. Support from parents or the ability to be your master.

Read the book and come to your conclusion, but I expect majority of the reaction to be "But it is not so easy as you say it is....... ".

If anyone has a success story of how you built your life the non-traditional way and not be affected by the rat race, share away, it would nice to how you did it.

This also reminds me about the book, Rich Dad and Poor Dad. I tend to take most of these kind of books with ton load of salt about results that one can get. They offer good food for thought though and a chance to reflect how one is doing things.

Lights on Younger Generation!

Tumbled upon this link that talks about the younger generation is smarter, quicker and tolerant because they use the internet a lot. I almost fell out of my chair laughing. It was a funny article to read. A quick peek at history shows that fundamental human emotions haven't really changed. They are still the same. The only thing that has changed is the tools.

Tools have, time immemorial, have changed lifestyles but not humans. Starting from the time when man made fire from stones to the time we are working on stem cells to regenerate body parts, we have improved life span and made travel easy and access to information easy and nothing more than that. The notion that the younger generation is smarter is a flawed since it is based on the idea that they have easier access to information. Humans being emotional beings interpret data different ways. Societal notion of what is right and wrong determine whether a decision is smart or not. Societal notions of what is right and wrong changes, so what was considered a dumb decision a decade ago could be considered as a smart decision today. What can be considered as a smart decision today could be considered as dumb decision a decade from now.

I could agree with the notion that we are more tolerant to diversity, but I don't think it is a big deal and something to be proud of and look it as an achievement over the older generation. The tolerance of diversity is a by product of information exchange and is not something original. History has many examples of tolerance of diversity being there too. If there was no tolerance of diversity then would have been never been cultural and trade exchanges.

There is a cost to everything, the cost of generations that grow up on the net would manifest itself in the coming decades. It would be interesting to see what they would be. In the decades to come the definition of who is a human itself is going to change. It would be fun if stories of Isaac Asimov come true.

May you live in interesting times!

(which by the way is not a true Chinese curse)

Action!

And the lights come on my first post on windy fall day! Sipping hot apple cider with cinnamon and watching the leaves float away. Aah the myriad colors of the fall! I am sitting in a park and watching the frenzy activity. There is your usual couple exercising away like there no tomorrow, then the couple who need to a get a room, the lacrosse players (is it still the season?) , a small group with their mini picnic, the studious guy who is oblivious to the whole world, the young girls chatting away animatedly and the roar of the motorcade of cars whizzing by! Then there is your group of photographers. The long lenses and the patient look of the guy modeling, the impatient lights guy and photographer fumbling to get the right angle. A pleasant day indeed.

Lo and behold you find the girl with cans spray paint adding letters to the word BUST to make it BUSTED on a rock. Fun times! I wish I had my camera with me. Note to self, carry the camera at all times!