Airline Interior Design

Here's a very fun article from Salon on airline interior (and exterior) design. The chap who wrote this does a regular Salon column called "Ask The Pilot" which is very cool and captures the romance of flying.

For a taste of what the article is about, take a look at this :
http://www.airliners.net/open.file/0892433/L/That's how you could fly first class on a Japan Airlines flight !

And here's your own private cubicle on an Emirates Airlines flight:
http://www.airliners.net/open.file/0768182/L/

The 'creation hymn' of the Rig Veda

Quoting from PT Raju's book -- "The Philosophical Traditions of India":

Even the Hymns are not devoid of philosophical enquiries. The first most important philosophical hymn ever composed according to Max Mueller, by the Aryan race, is the Nasadiya Hymn of the Rgveda. It raises questions about the origin of the universe in the abstract terms of Being and Non-Being. It reads:

There was no Non-being, nor was there Being
What were its contacts, but where ?
In whose protection did it exist ?
Was there water, deep and unfathomable ?
There was neither death nor immortality then.
There was not the guidance of night and day.
That One breathed by its own power, without air.
Other than that there was nothing.
Darkness was concealed by darkness then.
All was water indistinguishable.
That which was coming into Being was covered by void.
That One was born through the power of penance.
Desire was in the beginning,
That was the first seed of mind.
The wise discovered in their hearts
The bond of Being to Non-being.

This is a philosophical questioning about what there can be beyond Being and Non-being, with which we are acquainteed in thsi world. And the composer himself of this Naasadiya hymn ends:

Whence is this creation ?
Is it founded or not ?
The presiding Deity in the skies knows it,
Or perhaps He does not..

YouTube is 'uuuge'

When somebody told me about the Ali G/Chomsky interview, I looked it up on Google and found it at YouTube. Then I looked up Chomsky (since I think so highly of him) on YouTube and found a whole bunch of uploads of his talks. And then I remembered the old Russell Peters stuff and looked him up, and again about a 100 Russell Peters uploads there. And then it struck me that YouTube is now almost like a Google for video, or a Wikipedia for video (or more ominously for it, a Napster for video). It your first stop to check for anything interesting in video and in that way its seems a perfect match for Google to buy. (Thinking deeper into the analogy it breaks down, as Google just points you to stuff, whereas stuff actually resides on YouTube)

Wikipedia is other cool site on the web that I've used quite a lot during my explorations of the past few months. But it deserves some more research before a post on it due to the interesting sociology of Wikipedia. For now, I'll just link to it, and increase its Google PageRank infinitesimally as a token of appreciation.


Addendum: It occurred to me later that none of the cool stuff above and and all the other cool stuff on the web (tell me if I'm wrong), has anything to do with Microsoft. In fact no website that I spend any length of time on, has anything to do with MSFT, and that's not because I consciously avoid them either. My theory is (or perhaps law, it seems obvious) that Microsoft culture is fundamentally orthogonal to community/sharing/no-profit ideas. So they just don't know what to do about all this stuff. Must be rough on them, slaving away in Redmond on Windows Vista (where's that at now?) watching all this other cool stuff unfold. BTW -- so far I've managed (not swimmingly, but managed nevertheless) without installing Microsoft Office on my laptop at home. I've been using Open Office which is quite nice.

I thought I would bring in the new year with some music. A little late but here it is anyway:

These are all free downloads from Salon. Go to salon.com, get past the initial ad and then use the links:


Marion Brown, Capricorn: A long and very nice jazz piece

Look up the sky is beautiful: Japanese pop. Simon and Garfunkel in Japanese. I like.

Destroyer, Painter in your pocket : A moody, unique rock thing

Kawan: A really cool punjabi electronica thing that I've pushed earlier on the blog.

More Ali G

I tried out some more Ali G with less successful results.

Here he's 'moderating' a discussion on "Animal Rights". I think this must be from his TV show. Can someone enlighten me: do the people on the show come on voluntarily knowing the nature of the show ?

Thomas Frank

"Even while we are happily dazed by the mall's panoply of choice, exhorted to indulge our taste for breaking rules, and deluged with all manner of useful "information", our collective mental universe is being radically circumscribed, enclosed within the tightest parameters of all time. In the third millenium there is to be no myth but the business myth, no individuality but the thirty or so professionally-accepted psychographic market niches, no diversit but the happy heteroglossia of the sitcom, no rebellion but the pre-programmed search for new kicks. Denunciation is becoming impossible: We will be able to achieve no distance from business culture since we will no longer have a life, a history, a consciousness apart from it. It is making itself unspeakable, too big, too obvious, too vast, too horrifying, too much of a cliche to even being addressing. A matter-of-fact disaster, as natural as the supermarket, as resistable as air. It is putting itself beyond our power of imagining because it has become our imagination, it has become our power to envision, and describe, and theorize, and resist"

-- Thomas Frank, Dark Age, The Baffler

Ahem. Discuss?

Borat -- Evil genius

Well, we'll get around to the new year thang later. If at all.

I met a bunch of IITM classmates for dinner yesterday and one of the things that came up was the Borat phenomenon, which I had vaguely heard about before. During the get-together I got a lot better but still very general idea of his whole deal. I don't want to put that half-baked knowledge down here, but the sense I got was that this guy was truly a jaw-dropping phenomenon. There was a comedian called Andy Kaufman during the 60s who really pushed the envelope of comedy far beyond what it was at that point, and I think Borat is similiar. I just got the first taste of Borat on the web today. Its one of his less-successful exploits I think, but even that was way, way cool and completely lived up to my expectations.



In this video clip, Borat in one of his alternate personas, a rapper called Ali G, interviews Noam ("Norman") Chomsky. Its a fake interview, Ali G is basically stringing Chomsky along. The results are unbelievable. Pehaps, I'm exaggerating here, but the effect for me, was mind-blowing. Parts of it come from the fantastic impersonation (Ali G/Borat is I think a white Jew in real life) and part of it is the enormity of pulling this off on someone of Chomsky's stature. And the questions he puts and the language he uses are just so jaw-droppingly absurd. Borat is going to be a huge goldmine of exploration for me.

Here's a hilarious snippet from the interview, though it loses a lot in transcription:

Ali G: How many words does you know ?
Chomsky: (gives a reasonable answer)
Ali G: What is some of them ?

I totally cracked up at this one. If you got the humor in the above, I'm sure this video will have the same effect on you as it did on me.