More wonderful images at Spectraleyes.

| posted by Ramki @ 7:50 PM

  Law of Mechanical Repair:                                                  
  After your hands become coated with grease, your nose will begin to itch.                                                                      
                                                                            
  Law of the Workshop:                                                      
  Any tool, when dropped, will roll to the least accessible corner.                                                        
                                                                            
  Law of the Telephone:                                                      
  When you dial a wrong number, you never get a busy signal.                                                                    
                                                                            
  Law of the Alibi:                                                          
  If you tell the boss you were late for work because you had a flat tire, the very next morning you will have a flat tire.                    
                                                                            
  Variation Law:                                                            
  If you change lines (or traffic lanes), the one you were in will start to move faster than the one you are in now. (works every time)                                                                
                                                                            
  Bath Theorem:                                                              
  When the body is fully immersed in water, the telephone rings.                                                          
                                                                            
  Law of Close Encounters:                                                  
  The probability of meeting someone you know increases when you are  with someone you don't want to be seen with.                              
                                                                            
  Law of the Result:                                                        
  When you try to prove to someone that a machine won't work,it will.                                                              
                                                                            
  Law of Bio mechanics:                                                      
  The severity of the itch is inversely proportional to  the reach.                                                                
                                                                            
  Theatre Rule:                                                              
  At any event, the people whose seats are furthest from  the aisle arrive last.                                                                      
                                                                            
  Law of Coffee:                                                            
  As soon as you sit down to a cup of hot coffee, your  boss will ask you  to do something which will last until the coffee is cold.                                                                      
                                                                            
  Murphy's Law of Lockers:                                                  
  If there are only two people in a locker room, they will have adjacent    lockers.                                                                  
                                                                            
  Law of Dirty Rugs/Carpets:                                                
  The chances of an open-faced jelly sandwich landing face down on a  floor covering are directly correlated to the newness and cost of the  carpet/rug.  

| posted by Ramki @ 1:30 PM

I thought it was because he couldn't find a girl friend in swimming and managed to find one(or many) in Anna University. It seems the reason is something else...
http://in.rediff.com/sports/2005/oct/06spec.htm

[Thanks Shailley]

| posted by Ramki @ 1:47 PM

Many of UTD junta have bought HP laptops. You might get a free notebook battery replacement. Check if ur model is applicable for a battery replacement.
http://bpr.hpordercenter.com/bpr/

| posted by Ramki @ 10:31 PM

Indian President A.P.J. Abdul Kalam expressed concern Saturday about a free mapping program from Google Inc., warning it could help terrorists by providing satellite photos of potential targets.

| posted by Ramki @ 10:25 PM

| posted by Ramki @ 11:32 PM

Created by MIT Media Labs.
I/O Brush is a new drawing tool to explore colors, textures, and movements found in everyday materials by "picking up" and drawing with them. I/O Brush looks like a regular physical paintbrush but has a small video camera with lights and touch sensors embedded inside. Outside of the drawing canvas, the brush can pick up color, texture, and movement of a brushed surface. On the canvas, artists can draw with the special "ink" they just picked up from their immediate environment.

This video is a must see...

| posted by Ramki @ 11:18 PM

Lightning Strikes Everyday: Navarathri: "The whole I-visit-you-and-you-visit-me amazes me. Because everytime women visit other women's house (its a custom that all women you know come over and visit your house and vice versa) they are given sundal ( delicacy) and a gift. Of course! those gifts are re-gifted to other women. My question is (sorry! but I have hangover from my statistics class) - given the high probability that the social circle of women is highly networked with very little standard deviation -- how come they aren't gifted with something that they had gifted to someone else two days ago. That the gifts did not choose to loop and come back to the same person bugged my engineering senses ( Then again I wasn't bugged so much because I had very little engineering sense). Everytime my mom came back, I'd look at the gifts to see if something we gave out 2 days before came back. Sundals are a cool thing ofcourse. You never knew so many varieties of sundal existed. Now navarathri is like a distant memory in a place where no festivals of this ilk exist. I was pleasantly surprised when my wife kept a 3 step golu arrangement and invited a couple of confused n.indians to give out sundal. Started narrating the spilled-coffee-on-pant-when-chics-visited kind of embarassing navarathri stories to my wife and that ultimately led to this blog."

| posted by Rajan @ 8:25 PM

A gist of award winning entries:
Physics - John Mainstone of Queensland, Australia, for patiently conducting an experiment that began in the year 1927 -- in which a glob of congealed black tar has been slowly, slowly dripping through a funnel, at a rate of approximately one drop every nine years.
Economics - Gauri Nanda of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, for inventing an alarm clock that runs away and hides, repeatedly, thus ensuring that people DO get out of bed, and thus theoretically adding many productive hours to the workday.

| posted by Ramki @ 7:17 PM

| posted by Ramki @ 7:11 PM

Smart enough to snap a photo only when you smile, next-generation digital cameras are packing the best technology has to offer. They are getting cheaper and easier to use, yet their highly computerized internal workings are literally making good photography a snap.

Canon's automatic smile detection system prototype turned heads at the recent Japanese giant's Canon Expo 2005 in New York, an event also held in Paris and Tokyo every five years.

The camera's artificial intelligence tracks all moving faces within sight and snaps the picture when smiles and bright eyes peak -- a challenge for even professional photographers. It will be a while before this camera hits the streets.

So too for Canon's long-lasting hydrogen fuel cell-powered camera showing in the next booth.

| posted by Ramki @ 7:03 PM

Why is c the symbol for the speed of light?: "'As for c, that is the speed of light in vacuum, and if you ask why c, the answer is that it is the initial letter of celeritas, the Latin word meaning speed.'
Isaac Asimov in 'C for Celeritas (1959)' [1]


"

| posted by Rajan @ 5:51 PM

Waging battle on foreign labor | CNET News.com: "The research shows that nearly 37 percent of H-1B approvals in 2003 were for workers born in India. Berry estimates that 18 or 19 of the 20 lowest-paying employers, among companies seeking at least 100 visas, are led by Indian citizens or U.S. citizens of Indian descent.

To make this claim, the guild did not conduct an exhaustive study of the companies on its list. Its analysis of the employers' leadership is based largely on a review of surnames and where companies have operations.

Berry denied any ethnic bias in his group's research, defending its methodology as a way to illuminate what he sees as a chief problem of the visa program: tech staffing firms bringing over low-paid H-1B workers even when qualified U.S. employees are available.

'This is a niche that Indians have developed,' he said. 'It helps to understand the problem to point out what the data shows. Body shops are essentially onshore offshoring.'"

| posted by Rajan @ 10:19 PM

The New Yorker: The Critics: A Critic At Large: "By 1908, the freshman class was seven per cent Jewish, nine per cent Catholic, and forty-five per cent from public schools, an astonishing transformation for a school that historically had been the preserve of the New England boarding-school complex known in the admissions world as St. Grottlesex.

As the sociologist Jerome Karabel writes in “The Chosen” (Houghton Mifflin; $28), his remarkable history of the admissions process at Harvard, Yale, and Princeton, that meritocratic spirit soon led to a crisis. The enrollment of Jews began to rise dramatically.By 1922, they made up more than a fifth of Harvard’s freshman class. The administration and alumni were up in arms. Jews were thought to be sickly and grasping, grade-grubbing and insular. They displaced the sons of wealthy Wasp alumni, which did not bode well for fund-raising. A. Lawrence Lowell, Harvard’s president in the nineteen-twenties, stated flatly that too many Jews would destroy the school: “The summer hotel that is ruined by admitting Jews meets its fate . . . because they drive away the Gentiles, and then after the Gentiles have left, they leave also.”

The difficult part, however, was coming up with a way of keeping Jews out, because as a group they were academically superior to everyone else. Lowell’s first idea—a quota limiting Jews to fifteen per cent of the student body—was roundly criticized. Lowell tried restricting the number of scholarships given to Jewish students, and made an effort to bring in students from public schools in the West, where there were fewer Jews. Neither strategy worked. Finally, Lowell—and his counterparts at Yale and Princeton—realized that if a definition of merit based on academic prowess was leading to the wrong kind of student, the solution was to change the definition of merit. Karabel argues that it was at this moment that the history and nature of the Ivy League took a significant turn.

The admissions"

| posted by Rajan @ 7:17 AM

Top Graduates Line Up to Teach to the Poor - New York Times: "Teach for America grew out of a senior thesis by Wendy Kopp, a Princeton student, proposing a national teacher corps. Ms. Kopp quickly got seed money from Exxon Mobil, then, with a small staff, began a grass-roots recruitment campaign that yielded 500 fledgling teachers, who were placed in six regions in 1990. Teach for America has grown rapidly, with backing from corporate partners, philanthropists interested in education reform and Americorps, which provides the teachers with $9,450 after two years, to repay education loans or to pay for future schooling. Since 2001, the group has benefited from the same surge of interest that has brought record numbers of applications to long-established groups like the Peace Corps.

Teach for America is a growing presence in many school districts, including New York City's, which has about 800 of the group's members this year, twice as many as last year. All told, Teach for America has about 3,700 teachers - 2,190 in their first year and 1,520 in their second - teaching in 22 areas, from Los Angeles and Baltimore to the Arkansas Delta and the Pine Ridge Lakota Sioux reservation in South Dakota. The group only operates in regions certified as high need by the federal government and willing to employ teachers who lack certification.

As much as anything, Teach for America is a triumph of marketing. The group, based in Manhattan, recruits on more than 500 campuses and spends about a quarter of its nearly $40 million budget on recruitment and selection. The bulk of its members come from 141 top schools where it hires students, at about $500 a semester, to help organize recruiting events and act as headhunters.

'It's very intensive recruiting, to meet the goals Teach for America sets for us,' said Mike Kalin, who was a Harvard recruiter his junior and senior years, and teaches in the South Bronx. 'Some of my friends might h"

| posted by Rajan @ 10:21 AM

| posted by Ramki @ 5:19 PM

A very interesting "treasure hunt" type game... Find the bomb in the room and defuse it!
It took me 1 hour to find the bomb itself. Challenge urself before looking for clues on the net! :-)

| posted by Ramki @ 5:11 PM

The circular kitchen is an innovative high-tech compact kitchen concept for commercial and residential use. This 180° revolving kitchen design features all the characteristics of a traditional kitchen with an incredibly low demand on overall space, less than 1.8 sqm.

| posted by Ramki @ 3:58 PM