Monthly Archives: August 2010

SMUT, I love it!

With due apologies to Tom Lehrer… Actually the SMUT I am talking about is an acronym S.M.U.T.: “Subversive Manifesto for Underground Technology.” It is a monthly event that was started by Tracy Hammond (twitter), Cody Marx Bailey (twitter), and Christopher Zebo in Bryan/College Station, Texas, USA. The “official” blurb is: S.M.U.T. is famous academics giving

If a tree falls in the forest…

“If a tree falls in the forest and there is no one to hear it, does it still make a sound?” This, in essence, is the issue of privacy. If a specific action (or information) is unobservable (even after the fact) by no one else but the actor, then that act (or information) is, by

On Cars…

I am not sure if it is just me or the past few days seem to be all about cars. New cars, old cars, concept cars, and more. Here are a few interesting things that I discovered about cars in the past few days: While going downhill, does it consume more fuel to coast on

Military-Industrial Complex as a force for good? Since when?

Josy Joseph argues in the Times of India (ToI) article “Farewell to foreign arms?” that India would benefit from a Military-Industrial Complex (MIC) as a “force for good”. Joseph’s argument is that our reliance on foreign powers for adequate military fire power is hurting us in two ways: (a) its draining our economy, and (b)