Good one

I like it! John Hodgman at the White House Radio and TV correspondents dinner...

Credit Crisis visualized

I liked this...clear and concise.





The associated web site is here.

John Oliver goes to LHC

The Daily Show With Jon Stewart	M - Th 11p / 10c
Large Hadron Collider
thedailyshow.com
Daily Show Full Episodes Economic Crisis First 100 Days

A R Rahman ad jingles

In spending time with my feedreader this afternoon, I saw this, featuring a clip from the movie Slumdog Millionaire that apparently has music composed by my man ARR. It is the first I heard of this movie. I am way behind on my Rahman listening. I was stuck on Jaane tu ya jaane na for a long time. I have just moved on to Sakkarakatti, am yet to open my Ada CD (I know, Sakkarakatti jumped the line, but it was in Tamil, so that was inevitable). And it also got me thinking that I have not yielded to my Rahmania in a while. So, I spent some time that was to be used to finish a calculation googling around for A R Rahman ad jingles that I remembered from a long time ago. Find below a few for your amusement :

1. Garden Sarees

Featuring Lisa Ray and sounding so Rahman:

2. MRF tires

I actually did not realize this was Rahman until recently actually:

3. Premier

This one is sung by Sujatha, you know the one that sang “puthu vellai mazhai” in Roja:

4. Titan

And of course the famous one that has Rahman paraphrasing Mozart for Rajiv Menon:

And finally the bonus video of anyone that made it this far down the post, Baby Rahman on Surabhi

Trigger any nostalgic memories that you want to share? Pointers to any ads that I missed (I know the leo coffee one, but it featured in an earlier post), or trivia about the ads featured here would be great too!

Religion again

I do not know how I missed knowing about this guy for so long...this is fun!

LHC linking park

The Large Hadron Collider comes online on the 10^th and there is little else that is the topic of conversation at any place where there are more than two physicists. Higgs or no Higgs? That is the first thing we will know. And supposedly a whole lot more.

As with all else in the world, LHC has been associated with theories that tell you that the world will end when we turn the machine on. You can find out about these concerns from the horse’s mouth here. And I also came across this refutation/explanation by Sunil Mukhi (via).

If you wanted to know more about the LHC, you could try this. Or at 8pm on the history channel tomorrow there is a show on the LHC that I must have received 10 emails telling me to watch. The host of the show talks about it over at Cosmic Variance.

Or, you could watch this video I found recently…LHC rap…pretty cool I thought it was…

Must see

Absolutely, no holds bar must see...

Frying our brains apparently

Unless cell phones emit some particular frequency that is in resonance with some crucial mode in the corn, I think this is BS. Do watch and tell me what you think. And if you google, there are a whole number of people doing this experiment apparently.

Are you a Rahmaniac?

As regular readers of this blog would know, I am crazy about the music of A R Rahman [1]. A random phone conversation with a friend a few days ago revealed to me that I actually know too much trivia about the guy and his music. So, find below a few random facts from the early years of this musical superstar (early years being pre Rangeela and Bombay, after which he stopped being the exclusive property of us Tamil folks). Interspersed with these random facts are a few questions for you. If you can answer all of them, then you must be a fellow Rahmaniac as well! [2]

Let us start with a classic:

While you listen to it, let me tell you something about it. Legend has it that when Mani Ratnam first talked to Rahman about the possibility of them working together on Roja, this was the music that Rahman played for him, having composed this some time earlier.

Now to Question 1: Do you know the first movie that Rahman committed to as a music director?

Next, we all know that Rahman was doing ad jingles before he started his movie career. Here is an ad from his early days.

This was the first time Arvind Swamy was featured in a work that had music by ARR. Now Question 2: Can you name three other instances? Everybody can name two for sure. A not so helpful hint: The following song is one of the lesser known ones in a candidate for the third album, but I like it a lot. Do you?

Moving on, after very urban scores in Roja, his second tamil release Pudhiya Mugham, ARR came up with this album that was so ethnic Tamil that it surprised everyone. Here is one of the lesser known songs from this album. Question 3 : Can you name the album?

He has subsequently come up with a whole bunch of such songs of course; Karuthamma and Sangamam come to mind when thinking along these lines.

Next, here is one more lesser known song by my man. It is still on my all time favorite list after all these years.

Question 4 for you: Can you name the movie? Hint : The movie had Ajith in it and if I remember correctly, the thalai actually dies in the movie!

Finally, deviating from my early Rahman theme, this song, composed slightly later in his career is one of my really really favorite songs that somehow many people do not remember.

Do you think it is good? Question 5 for you: Can you name the movie? Hint : This album features one song in which Apache Indian is credited as co-composer, the video of which is below:

[1] Those reading by feed : a) This post is an anomaly. So feel free to ignore it. Also, there are music pieces embedded in the post that might not show up in your reader.

[1] Without the aid of google of course. With google, we are all experts in everything, are n’t we?

On Religion

Here are a couple of things for your amusement.

1) First up, questions on Jesus Christ in the form of this lovely video by somegreybloke

You can find a whole bunch of videos by this guy here.

2) It would not be fair to leave the Hindus out would it ? So consider the following image

Does it offend you? Apparently it does for some people. And here is a whole website dedicated to such things. Do check it out. It is priceless I tell you, priceless.

Confessions and other things

a) I ran away from the department yesterday ridiculously early so as to avoid running into my paymaster and having to explain to him why he still has not got the first draft of a paper we are writing together.

b) The reason I am not able to write the paper is because I have a “Yeah, so what?” reaction to the results in the paper. He is excited about them though.

c) This tells me that I am unable to get excited by inherently non-mechanistic theories (the ones where the mathematics does not really reveal why something is happening and you have to answer the why part with words). This is a very disturbing revelation for a theoretical physicist primarily interested in emergent phenomena.

d) I got a new comment on my post on elastomers at SC. To be able to respond to the comment, I reread the post as I had forgotten what I had said in it. I realized I like rereading what I have written. So I went and read “the hugely popular for mysterious reasons “Micelles and Vesicles post””. Is this normal? To like rereading one’s own posts?

e) Also, blogging break coming up. Going to NYC for a few days of what is hoped will be fun.

And on a completely different note, I came across this “gives you unjustifiable patriotic goose bumps” video from Lead India. Also gives me an opportunity to test iShare (trying to be the youtube of India?) Do complain if it does not work here or in your feedreader so I will know if there are problems.

[via]

Jai Hind

Even I begin to feel a little patriotic when I see these BharatBala videos…[via]

You can watch a whole bunch of their videos here (requires you to register though).

Random stuff 5

I spent part of this weekend watching Quentin Tarantino's grind house flicks (not by choice, I assure you), involving flying off of appendages, cutting off of unmentionables, smashing of faces and lots of squirting of blood and goo. So this post on Death and Tombstones did not put me off at all. I thought it was a cute compilation (I know, I am crazy, but you get numb beyond a point).

On a different note, have you seen these new videos from Delta airlines? People appear to like Kidtastrophe best. Here is my favorite though…I am always praying just like the couple in this one, for exactly the same miracle especially on my semi annual transatlantic flights.

And this last video, music video, “12 days of Christmas” by boymongoose I am sure you have already seen. But for some reason I am not able to get the song out of my head since I heard it! I have no idea why.