Ever since the story about Sudan 1 contamination in chillies from India has broken, the food industry has been in a tizzy with over 300 different food preparations being recalled from marketshelves. Well, at least they are soing something about it.
In a typical reaction (I dont know if this is typically Indian or typically Congress-I), the Commerce and Industry Minister Kamal Nath brushed aside the charges. I've heard two versions of his defence, if you can call it that - it never happened, its all a conspiracy to setup artificial trade barriers or it never happened, "we have very stringent norms about colouring agents, chillies supplied to the European Union did not have any carcinogenic (cancer causing) substances".
I could not crib about this enough, why not come clean and say that mistakes have been made. Its a lot more reassuring as a victim to know that there a realization that mistakes have been made and steps are being taken to avoid repetitions. When there is no will to even recognize the problem, forget about fixing the system, who will believe us or buy from us? India may be a big contributor to the international spice trade, but I would be surprised if things stayed that way.
Wednesday, February 23, 2005
Tuesday, February 22, 2005
Global Warming Is Real
For anybody who cares and especially for anyone who knows GWBush, Global Warming Is Real......
Monday, February 07, 2005
Gigapixels - WOW
Take a look at these gigapixel images were taken with a custom camera made from bits and pieces of decommissioned Cold War hardware!! The images are taken with ultra-high resolution (4000dpi) film plates (9-inch-by-18-inch) and digitally scanned by ultra-high resolution scanners (6um resolution) giving the final gigapixel resolution image. Each image fills a DVD.
Just to give you a sense of scale of this, a full resolution print of these images can be as large as billboards with no loss of resolution or graining. 'Oceanside Pier' and 'People watching'
are two other incredible images in the same gallery that illustrate the resolution and contrast this photography has.
Incredible stuff.....
Just to give you a sense of scale of this, a full resolution print of these images can be as large as billboards with no loss of resolution or graining. 'Oceanside Pier' and 'People watching'
are two other incredible images in the same gallery that illustrate the resolution and contrast this photography has.
Incredible stuff.....
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The Aviator & Howard Hughes
I saw The Aviator a couple of days ago and that got me thinking. Howard Hughes is an almost iconic name in biology/medical research as the Howard Hughes Medical Institiute is very well known and being a HHMI investigator is something everone aspires to be.
Knowing all this, it was strange to see this strange obsessive-compulsive man on screen. I was having a hard time putting the two ends together. Anyway, I searched the net and there's a decent biography of his life at Wikipedia and this article at famous-texans gives you the lowdown, especially all the spy-politics that you dont find in the movie.
It seems scientific research can have very strange origins indeed.
Knowing all this, it was strange to see this strange obsessive-compulsive man on screen. I was having a hard time putting the two ends together. Anyway, I searched the net and there's a decent biography of his life at Wikipedia and this article at famous-texans gives you the lowdown, especially all the spy-politics that you dont find in the movie.
It seems scientific research can have very strange origins indeed.
Saturday, February 05, 2005
An interesting take on personal computing
Below is an excerpt from Salon.com's Hallelujah, the Mac is back -
'When discussing the PC business, an important thing to remember is that nothing's quite settled yet. The personal computer is a young product, and the PCs we have today are not the PCs we'll have forever. David Gelernter, the Yale computer scientist, raised parts of this argument in December in an Op-Ed in the Wall Street Journal, published on the occasion of IBM's sale of its personal computer business to Lenovo, a Chinese firm. Gelernter lamented that sale; it indicated, he wrote, that IBM no longer saw potential for the greatness of the PC, and that this "is a shame, even a tragedy -- because the modern PC is in fact a primitive, infuriating nuisance. If the U.S. technology industry actually believes that the PC has grown up and settled down, it is out of touch with reality -- and the consequences could be dangerous to America's economic health."
A conversation with Gelernter is an eye-opening experience. As modern computer users, we go through our lives resigned to mediocrity; this is true of Windows users, but it's even true, he says, of Apple users. The computer can be so much more than the systems we have today. Gelernter wants machines that are 'transparent,' that are more like appliances than fancy gadgets, machines that put your data, your information, before their own idiosyncrasies. 'I don't care about the machine, I care about my documents,' he says. It shouldn't matter which computer he goes to in his house, or whether the machine he's on is new or old; he should get access to his life on any machine. And why should anybody spend any time at all 'securing' your machine from outside threats, he wonders. Why can't the machine do this for you? 'Most people don't want to spend their time to download the latest thing to deal with the latest disaster to strike,' he points out. Would we deal with such tediousness for other products we use on a daily basis? 'Would anyone ever say, "Hey, my brakes don't work but that's O.K., I can just download a new anti-lock braking system." No; you wouldn't use a car in which the brakes didn't work. Yet we put up with computers all the time in which key functions just stop working, and, routinely, we are OK with that."
If only all our wishes would come true, but this piece also points out so well how far behind the computer technology really is. I sometimes find that hard to remember...
'When discussing the PC business, an important thing to remember is that nothing's quite settled yet. The personal computer is a young product, and the PCs we have today are not the PCs we'll have forever. David Gelernter, the Yale computer scientist, raised parts of this argument in December in an Op-Ed in the Wall Street Journal, published on the occasion of IBM's sale of its personal computer business to Lenovo, a Chinese firm. Gelernter lamented that sale; it indicated, he wrote, that IBM no longer saw potential for the greatness of the PC, and that this "is a shame, even a tragedy -- because the modern PC is in fact a primitive, infuriating nuisance. If the U.S. technology industry actually believes that the PC has grown up and settled down, it is out of touch with reality -- and the consequences could be dangerous to America's economic health."
A conversation with Gelernter is an eye-opening experience. As modern computer users, we go through our lives resigned to mediocrity; this is true of Windows users, but it's even true, he says, of Apple users. The computer can be so much more than the systems we have today. Gelernter wants machines that are 'transparent,' that are more like appliances than fancy gadgets, machines that put your data, your information, before their own idiosyncrasies. 'I don't care about the machine, I care about my documents,' he says. It shouldn't matter which computer he goes to in his house, or whether the machine he's on is new or old; he should get access to his life on any machine. And why should anybody spend any time at all 'securing' your machine from outside threats, he wonders. Why can't the machine do this for you? 'Most people don't want to spend their time to download the latest thing to deal with the latest disaster to strike,' he points out. Would we deal with such tediousness for other products we use on a daily basis? 'Would anyone ever say, "Hey, my brakes don't work but that's O.K., I can just download a new anti-lock braking system." No; you wouldn't use a car in which the brakes didn't work. Yet we put up with computers all the time in which key functions just stop working, and, routinely, we are OK with that."
If only all our wishes would come true, but this piece also points out so well how far behind the computer technology really is. I sometimes find that hard to remember...
Friday, February 04, 2005
Hide Your iPod, Here Comes Bill
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