This really made me laugh.

"Sometimes, a joke will make a person laugh. Sometimes a funny picture or video will. Sometimes a clever song, a dramatic accident, the misfortune of others…nothing is ever guaranteed to make everyone laugh. Except for the sound of babies laughing."

See the other 6 videos at Say No To Crack. Each one of them is very, very funny.

Something useful, finally.

I just got some serious dental work done- a root canal. Like most people, a visit to the dentist is not something I look forward to, so I procrastinated until what could have been a simple filling needed the distressing blasting and excavation that is a root canal procedure.

One of the ways I manage to put off tasks that I would rather not do, is to cleverly channel my energies on a 'let's-gather-all-the-information-we-can-on-this' effort. This is a ploy from my management days, but it works best on me. So while my maxillary first premolar suffered its way to becoming a candidate for a root canal, I gathered a whole lot of information on the internet about teeth. You will now understand why this post is precious.

Here is some of the stuff I learnt:

The Basic stuff: Human beings, like all mammals, are diphyodont, meaning that they develop two sets of teeth (milk/baby teeth, and the permanent teeth that come around the age of seven). Sharks are blessed; they grow teeth every two weeks (polyphyodont), though all that teething must make them very irritable. A naughty thought: if I were a shark, and in a dentist's chair, it would be the dentist's turn to be very, very afraid, wouldn't it?
Also, while being a 'dog psychologist' could net you upto half a million dollars a year, you are likely to be very poor as a dog dentist - dogs' don't get cavities because their saliva is alkaline.

The Geeky Stuff: Dentists use three different systems (notations) for identifying teeth .

• The British use the Palmer notation, which was actually devised by a Hungarian called Adolf Zsigmondy (trust the Brits to steal the credit), who unsurprisingly, was also a politician. It is the easiest to understand, but is a pain to type because it uses some symbols which you won't find in Microsoft Word. I guess you won't find many British dentists blogging about their work.
  
• The Americans have a 'Universal Number System' which no one else follows, but must go well with their gallons, miles, pounds, and 110 volt/60 Hz appliances.
  
• The rest of the world follows the FDI World Dental Federation notation, which is very like the Palmer notation, but without the symbols. FDI, incidentally stands for 'Fédération Dentaire Internationale'; it is amazing how the French manage to insinuate themselves into the standards business - the metric system is also called the 'SI' system (for 'Système International d'Unités').
  

My tooth that got into trouble would have been '4/' in the Palmer system ( the slash being a crude approximation to the actual symbol), '12' in the American system, and '24' in the FDI notation.

The Historical Stuff: The outermost surface of teeth is composed of enamel, which is the hardest substance of the body. But obviously not hard enough to keep dentists out. Our diets are to blame, as usual. Archeologists have found a huge increase in tooth decay from around the Neolithic period (about 8500 BC) when most humans changed from being hunter-gatherers to 'settled' agriculturists, eating a lot of grain. There was apparently very little tooth decay before that, when the whole world was on the Atkins diet.

Incidentally, with the 'Neolithic Revolution' and dental decay and dentists, also came food surpluses, and kings who 'appropriated' those surpluses so that they could wage war against other kings - till Marx, and Lenin and Mao took them back for us. So that they could wage war on us. Religion came too, and the Pope, and Osama, and the War on Terror. It took John Lennon to imagine how different things could have been. But all that in a seperate post.

Something current: In 2006, nearly half a million Americans traveled abroad for medical treatment, according to this article in the New York Times, of whom about 40% are estimated to have been dental tourists. India, is apparently a very popular destination, 'putting smiles on many faces', as the Economic Times puts it.

This dentist prefers euros over dollars...

Photos are thanks to Matt Logelin who also writes an extremely moving blog here. By sheer coincidence, Vinoo sent me a Facebook message with Matt's blog just this morning. Later, while I was writing this, I came across these pictures by Matt via Google Images, and selected them, without realizing they were his.
No, the guy in the picture is not my dentist.

Secrets on a Postcard

This secret website:
how I miss
the churches of my youth!





Bad haiku? Beautiful blog

Periodicity

In the early nineties, when CERN first threw the World Wide Web open for everyone, some of the happiest people on the planet must have been chemists. They now had a neat little way to represent their beloved Period Table (PT). With hyperlinks, they could finally display all the important data about each element without being constrained by those little boxes. So, they set about populating the web with hundreds of these tables, improving them diligently as the technology improved.

Some of these online periodic tables are beautiful. See this Interactive Periodic Table, by Michael Dayah, which is clearly the best functionally. Read the 'about' page to understand how to work it. Or this more artsy one, from the Royal Society of Chemistry. Both came to me via Craig Stoltz's blog, 'Web 2.0h...really?'. I thought just these two exciting enough to warrant a post.

And then, I spoke to my friend Vinoo Samuel, and he explained the weakness chemists have for online periodic tables. I searched, and I found PTs in 'spectroscopic' colors and in spiral and circular shapes. Also, some really bizarre ones, with their elements linked to comic books where they were mentioned (Krypton - Superman - Krypton Chronicles,Volume 1, Number 1, September, 1981, cover), or to science fiction stories (the first deliveries of asteroidal cobalt were flown down to the north central Pacific Ocean in the form of lifting bodies in the year 2116...). And of course, there are the spoofs, such as this 'Creationist/State of Kansas' PT.

Offline, too, there has been some truly amazing efforts to ensure that the Periodic Table is never out of sight. Theodore Gray could never make the mistake that Time.com made (an index without an index, see my previous post). As he observes with some indignation, "In the well over a century since its invention by Dr. Mendeleev, the world has consistently failed to notice the word "Table" clearly contained in the name "Periodic Table", and has insisted in printing it on paper, hanging it on the wall, putting it in the back of chemistry textbooks, and generally doing all kinds of things with it that having nothing to do with being a table.". So of course, he created a Periodic Table that was - a real table! Chemists, I assume, were also behind this PT inspired song by Tom Lehrer.

And yes, there are the dangers of overdoing this stuff, especially if the people involved are not really chemists, as this complaint about an error riddled Periodic Table shower curtain proves.

Mendeleev would be proud.


Thanks to Ron Rinehart for leading me to most of these tables.

Time.com's First Annual Blog Index

Time.com has published an Index of The Top 25 Blogs. I found a lot of blogs there that I had never heard of, and which I have now subscribed to. If you have as much time on your hands as I do, have a look.

But this being Time, the Index of The Top 25 Blogs does not have an index! You must click through 25 pages (each page carrying a writeup on one blog). Fortunately, the good folks at Valleywag.com (inexplicably left out of this list) have compiled a one page version which you can read here. Vallewag's article is very appropriately tagged "Blogging for Dollars", since at least here, Time.com, is guilty of a 'crass campaign to generate more pageviews'. As Fark.com's Drew Curtis, quoted in the same Valleywag article, eloquently puts it, "That's the point — pick shit people don't agree with, generate controversy, SPREAD THE FUCKING THING OVER 50 PAGES WITH NO INDEX, profit."

Or maybe, Time thinks that their readers miss the experience of turning pages in a magazine, so they gave them "Next" buttons? Naah...

If you still want to read the original article, it's here.

But of course, at the Valleywag page, you cannot tell what each blog in the list is about. If you were reading the list in a magazine, that would be a problem. But if, like me, you are reading it on the internet, and you have a decent browser like Firefox, you could right click each name, open each blog in a new tab, and see for yourself what the fuss is about.

"...we like the big fish"

The little fish like the mangroves, the big fish like the little fish -- and we like the big fish. - Mr. Ahmed Shengabay, Eritrean fisherman/farmer.

I loved this line; hence this post. In the photo, Mr. Shengabay is on the right. To his left is Mr. Simon Tecleab, an Eritrean marine scientist, and they are planting a mangrove seed in the Eritrean Red Sea village of Hirgigo. The photo is from AFP.

I came across this in an AFP story in Yahoo! about how Eritrean villagers, working with an American scientist, Dr. Gordon Sato, are planting mangroves along the coast to improve fishing yields, provide feed for livestock, fuel for their kitchens, and combat desertification. The project is apparently very successful. You can read more about this remarkable story here, here and here.

It occurred to me that this is the sort of post that would be ideal as a Tumblelog at Tumblr. All I wanted to do here was to quote Mr. Shengabay.

The 'mouthfeel' of water?

In my last job, I was the boss of the Indian unit of an American outsourcing company. Our customers would visit from America, and it was my job to entertain them, and make sure that they were comfortable. Most of these guys liked Indian cuisine, but every once in a while, you would get a few who wanted more familiar, less spicy food. I would take them to a restaurant close to our office called Sunny's

I hate going to Sunny's.

Sunny's is not a bad restaurant. The food is good, if expensive, and the decor is not displeasing. What gets my goat is that Sunny's, like a lot of expensive restaurants in India, offers Evian water by default to its customers. Bottles of Evian are placed on your table, and should you want to drink Indian bottled water, at a tenth of the price, you have to make a special request. The waiter comes, takes the Evian away, and replaces it with the Indian water. I would have to do this each time I went there - at the risk of seeming cheap to my guests. But this was a scam that I was determined not to fall for.

HTF did water from the French Alps become the automatic choice in a restaurant in Bangalore?

Danone, the owner of the Evian brand is hard at work in India increasing sales - changing its local partner, trying to get into joint ventures with large Indian firms, identifying Indian companies for acquisition. They also have an active marketing programme that includes sponsoring parties for 'beautiful people', and working the newspapers with stories about the 'miracles of water therapy'. You absolutely must read this astonishing article in the Times of India.

Water is clearly big business.

I was reminded of this when I read this great post by Zahra at Grub Scout about how water is becoming the next wine. There are, already, 'water connoiseurs' writing books to educate people on 'the epicurean delights of water' . Companies have introduced water that costs as much as $37 for a 750 ml bottle!

While you are at Grub Scout, you can also read Zahra's earlier post about how several New York city restaurants are banning bottled water. Reason and commonsense may still win.

The March of the Meat Eating Chinese

World food prices have doubled or tripled over the past few years, with most of the increases happening in the last few months. A particularly depressing article by Paul Krugman in the New York Times looks at why this has happened, and what could be done to correct it (very little apparently). One of the reasons for the rise in prices, he says, is that the Chinese are eating more meat as they get richer, which puts more pressure on global stocks of foodgrains.

Read it here.

Open Outcry

Raymond Carbone trades in energy options on the New York Mercantile Exchange (NYMEX). Traders such as Mr. Carbone buy and sell billions of dollars worth of various metals and energy products, including crude oil and electricity. And they do this using the Open Outcry system, where traders shout and use hand signals on a physical trading floor.

Most exchanges in the world have moved to electronic systems, but defendants of the Open Outcry system claim that physical contact allows traders to 'speculate as to a buyer/seller's motives or intentions'. Mr. Carbone says he 'can signal a trade faster than you can type it.'

In this article by Ben Schott in the New York Times, Mr Carbone demonstrates the hand signals he uses on the trading floor. Fascinating.

China's Environmental Problem

I love reading The New Yorker, for the excellent writing, yes, but also for the incredible detail to which they go when following a story. The country that gets blamed the most for shortening attention spans across the world, is also the home of magazines that think nothing of devoting 40% of their pages to a single story. You read that story, and the feeling is similar to what you get when you have really done well for yourself at a feast.

Want to read such an article about the environmental damage in China? I found this feature by Jacques Leslie at Mother Jones. I counted the words-8901. There is also a photoessay by James Whitlow Delano at the same site. All lovely stuff.

Thanks to Treehugger, for leading me to this article.

Consolidate multiple email addresses with Gmail

My primary email account is now Gmail. I also have Yahoo and Hotmail accounts, which I opened years ago. These mostly receive emails from websites that I have registered with, and since those are rarely important, I don't normally check these accounts very often. However, every once in a while, a friend or acquaintance sends a mail to my Hotmail or Yahoo addresses, and several weeks pass before I read them.

I recently found an interesting article on Lifehacker which explained how you could consolidate multiple email addresses with Gmail. It worked for my Hotmail address, which accounts for most of my non-Gmail email. It didn't work with Yahoo!- I would have to upgrade to a 'Yahoo! Mail Plus' email account for $19.99 per year to pop or forward email to other accounts. So I guess I will wait till Microsoft takes over Yahoo!, and comes up with a hybrid Hotmail/Yahoo! mail service. I wonder what they would call that - Windows Live Hoomail?

Pardon my French

Ever been in a position where you are holding forth on your favourite French, Spanish, or Russian author/artist/director, and you hesitate, because you are not sure how to pronounce their names?

You could bluff your way through, and hope that no one in your audience is going to correct you, or, you could look up Forvo, a Web 2.0 service where you can listen to the pronunciation of the word.

At the time of writing this, Forvo had 2510 pronounced words in 177 languages, including Hindi, Urdu, Tamil and Marathi. Users can add words, either anonymously or with their usernames. Adding new words is easy.

However, as with all sites that rely on user generated content, Forvo is not perfect; the two most popular words in English are both what Forvo calls 'bad words', and the only two entries for Hindi, 'Mahatma Gandhi' and 'Tilaklakshmikanth(?)', are clearly fake. Still, as with other such websites, the proportion of idiots posting misleading entries should decline with time, and Forvo could end up being a really useful site.