Fetuses can’t feel pain
“The absence of pain in the fetus doesn’t resolve the morality of abortion, but does argue against legal and clinical efforts to prevent such pain during an abortion,” Derbyshire said. “A mandate to provide pain relief before an abortion may expose women to inappropriate interventions, risks and distress.”
Pain is an unpleasant sensory and emotional experience associated with actual or potential tissue damage, according to the International Association for the Study of Pain. It’s a conscious experience, not only a response to stimuli.
As pain is subjective, each individual uses the word differently based on his or her experience related to injury earlier in life. The limited neural system of fetuses can’t support such cognitive, affective and evaluative experiences, Derbyshire said.
Rajkumar obituary in NYTimes
New York Times has published this obituary on Rajkumar.
“On hearing of his death, thousands of Mr. Rajkumar’s fans spilled into the streets of Bangalore, India’s technology hub. They mourned him by hurling stones at buildings, burning buses and cars and rioting near his home, in the fashionable Sadashivnagar neighborhood, and the police caned some in the crowd.”
Microsoft to allow pirates Vista to run without frills
Microsoft says it will allow pirated versions of its next OS incarnation Vista to run, but will not let the jazzy 3-D graphic features operate unless its license authenticity if verified after ringing home.
“Those who are not running genuine Windows will not be able to take advantage of the Windows Aero user experience,” a Microsoft representative told CNET News.com on Wednesday.
The move is the latest salvo in Microsoft’s broad attack on those who use unauthorized copies of its operating system. In the fall of 2004, Microsoft began testing the Windows Genuine Advantage program, designed to verify that a particular cop
As I now understand, there will be the following versions for Windows Vista
http://www.microsoft.com/windowsvista/versions/default.mspx
- Windows Vista Business
- Windows Vista Business - Pirated Aero Disabled
- Windows Vista Enterprise
- Windows Vista Enterprise - Pirated Aero Disabled
- Windows Vista Home Premium
- Windows Vista Home Premium - Pirated Aero Disabled
- Windows Vista Ultimate
- Windows Vista - Pirated Aero Disabled
- Windows Vista Home Basic - Authentic Aero Disabled
and then there are other third party versions like,
Windows Vista Business - Cracked Aero Enabled
and so forth.
(originally posted at Slashdot thread)
Maid in Canada
Globe and Mail has an interesting article by Jan Wang - Maid in Canada.
The article describes about the life of servant maids in Toronto. Though insightful in parts, this feeds largely to the streotypes.
Religious identity and violence
Slate has published an essay of Amartya Sen, What clash of Civilizations? adapted from his new book Identity and Violence.
“The difficulty with the clash of civilizations thesis begins with the presumption of the unique relevance of a singular classification. Indeed, the question “Do civilizations clash?” is founded on the presumption that humanity can be pre-eminently classified into distinct and discrete civilizations, and that the relations between different human beings can somehow be seen, without serious loss of understanding, in terms of relations between different civilizations”.
Accelerated Evolution: in-vitro conversion of RNA Enzyme to DNA Enzyme
The Scripps Research Institute reports in-vitro catalytic conversion of RNA enzyme to DNA enzyme providing a snapshot of early evolutionary process.
“This “evolutionary conversion” provides a modern-day snapshot of how life as we understand it may have first evolved out of the earliest primordial mix of RNA-like molecules—sometimes referred to as the “pre-RNA world”—into a more complex form of RNA-based life (or the “RNA world”) and eventually to cellular life based on DNA and proteins.”
For the study, an RNA ribozyme was converted to a corresponding deoxyribozyme through in vitro evolution. The ribozyme was first prepared as a DNA molecule of the same RNA sequence but with no detectable catalytic activity. A large number of randomized variations of this DNA were prepared, and repeated cycles of in vitro evolution were carried out. The result was a deoxyribozyme with about the same level of catalytic activity as the original ribozyme.
Interesting in itself and remarkable. But the article also says; “The resulting molecules have interesting catalytic properties, they teach us something new about evolution, and they have potential application as therapeutic and diagnostic agents.”
It is quite tiring to hear about these new “potential therapeutic and diagnostic agents”. Looks like there is no study in biology without possible applications in medicine. Could someone please come up with simple discovery that is just plain simple curious?
Stanislaw Lem - In Poetry
I came across this excellent poem written by Stanislaw Lem today.
Come, let us hasten to a higher plane,
Where dyads tread the fairy fields of Venn,
Their indices bedecked from one to n,
Commingled in an endless Markov chain!Come, every frustum longs to be a cone,
And every vector dreams of matrices.
Hark to the gentle gradient of the breeze:
It whispers of a more ergodic zone.In Riemann, Hilbert, or in Banach space
Let superscripts and subscripts go their ways.
Our asymptotes no longer out of phase,
We shall encounter, counting, face to face.I’ll grant thee random access to my heart,
Thou’lt tell me all the constants of thy love;
And so we two shall all love’s lemmas prove,
And in our bound partition never part.For what did Cauchy know, or Christoffel,
Or Fourier, or any Boole or Euler,
Wielding their compasses, their pens and rulers,
Of thy supernal sinusoidal spell?Cancel me not — for what then shall remain?
Abscissas, some mantissas, modules, modes,
A root or two, a torus and a node:
The inverse of my verse, a null domain.Ellipse of bliss, converge, O lips divine!
The product of our scalars is defined!
Cyberiad draws nigh, and the skew mind
Cuts capers like a happy haversine.I see the eigenvalue in thine eye,
I hear the tender tensor in thy sigh.
Bernoulli would have been content to die,
Had he but known such a2 cos 2 phi
Originally written by Lem in Polish and translated by Michael Kandel (who also translated several of his other stories). The translation makes you think that it might have been written in English.
The best Sci-Fi concept albums
Wired recommends The best SF concept albums;
- The Man-Machine, Kraftwerk (1977): It’s a six-song techno-fueled meditation on the fusion of flesh and bot. Übergroovy.
- Deltron 3030 (2000): Dan the Automator, Kid Koala, and Del tha Funkee Homosapien kick it in a 31st-century world rife with computer viruses and rap battles.
- The Heliocentric Worlds of Sun Ra, Vol. 1, Sun Ra (1965): Sun Ra claimed to be born on Saturn. Free-jazz tracks like “Nebulae” prove it.
- The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders From Mars, David Bowie (1973): A freaky extraterrestrial becomes a drugged-out bisexual rock god (quite a stretch for Bowie). Glamalicious.
- The Clones of Dr. Funkenstein, Parliament (1976): Disco fiend Dr. F cranks out a clone army of “specially designed Afronauts capable of funkatizing galaxies.”
- Replicas, Tubeway Army (1979): Gary Numan makes one giant leap for electro with tracks like “I Nearly Married a Human.”
There definitely are a few more, esp. in Free Jazz. Ornette Coleman’s Science Fiction Sessions, for one.
Tools - Greatest of them all
Forbes: The 20 Most important tools ever
From dawn to dusk, humans rely on tools to get us through the day. And from the beginning of civilization, we’ve used them to build and shape our world. In order to celebrate these devices, and so we might reflect upon the ways that we are the tools we use, Forbes.com decided to compile a list of the 20 most important tools of all time. These are the tools that have most impacted human civilization and helped move the course of history.
IISc campus at Mysore University
This one is a real shocker, to say the least.
Deccan Herald reports, quoting the Mysore University VC,
IISc and University of Mysore will ink a five-year Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) next month for the setting up of the campus, which, in all probability, will be located near the Academic Staff College in Manasagangotri.
The IISc Governing Council and
IISc Court, the decision-making bodies, have recently given a green signal for the new campus. The construction of a full-fledged campus will be taken up with financial assistance from the Union Human Resource Development Ministry and State government,…
I am totally confused at this. With all due respects to Mysore University and its faculties. They simply are too below par to deserve an IISc campus - IMHO. If IISc were to look for an external campus in the neighbourhood, my first thoughts will be Madurai University - with its long, excellent track record in Biosciences. Pune University with its good Physics Department, Biotech and chemistry will, in fact, be the prime candidate. Pune U has long association with TIFR and its proximity to National Chemical Lab should give this type of expansion a big boost. But I understand that Pune U will also get an IISc campus, along with Kolkata. But it deserves to be a part of TIFR expansion, if and when that happens - just to build on its history.
Besides, the plans for Mysore seem to be bizarre, to say the least. “The IISc campus will enable university students gain advanced knowledge and exposure under an exchange programme“. Why call this an exchange, when Mysore campus will, in fact, be a part of IISc? If they are going to be freely moving between the two campus, it is not an exchange. An exchange happens when some students trained by a school (that runs on one set of philosophies) goes to another school to get a totally different outlook.
surprised also to read that Prof. Balaram, the IISc Director says that they can collaborate in Physics, Chemistry and Biology. Honestly, I do not see there is anything for IISc faculty to learn from Mysore. On the other hand, they can teach them a lot, inculcate research culture and free thinking. But then why only the traditional PCB? Why not beyond?
And to top it all, the VC says “We have qualified English faculty. IISc would like to have University English lecturers to teach the language to experts in IISc, Bangalore“. Give me a break! IISc has(d) a foreign language section (I learnt German there). Just hire a couple of english experts there and drop ‘foreign’ from the department name. Why make big fuss shipping ‘experts’ across for this. And by the way, are IISc professors informed about this ‘necessity to be educated in english by experts from Mysore U’?
(I am sure Abi might have written something on this, but I avoided reading his opinion first before writing mine).