Religion and timezones

Several (most?) Hindus engage in ritual fasts to propitiate various gods. Apparantly (via my sister), when they travel abroad, they have a problem. They don’t know when to start or stop their fasts. What timezone do Hindu gods live in?

Tradeoffs as Debt

From the latest post in Rico Mariani’s series on the history of Visual Studio
Debt is a great way to think about trade-offs: every time you make a choice that isn’t right in the long term, any short-cut, accumulates some debt.  Any bug you choose to defer, that’s debt.  Some debt you should write-off, that fix [...]

Trials in The Fountainhead

I have been very busy at work lately and have fallen behind on my usual reading schedule but I took the time to read this piece by Prof Hornstein (via Ayn Rand in India). It is a good analysis of the significance of the two trials in ‘The Fountainhead’. Definitely worth reading.

Rituals

Via Buyer Behaviour,
…Rituals give us a felling of power. They are one of the very few things, perhaps, in our control, and therefore, so important to us.
- Sumaa Tekur, The Power of Rituals
I have never understood why so many seemingly reasonable people accept and carry out mindless rituals, mostly during religious ceremonies. The quote above seems [...]

Nursery rhymes

Take a look at another hilarious post at Let’s Put DA. I liked the one on Mamata Bannerjee the best.
Old Mamata B went to a farm. Eeya Eeya O.
And on that farm, she saw a plant. Ayyayyayyo.
With some protests here,
And some violence there.
Here a speech, there a speech,
Everywhere a screech screech.
Old Mamata B caused great [...]

An enjoyable post and some queueing theory

I always enjoy reading Eric Lippert’s posts but this one is better than usual. I would like to learn to write like that.

Compromise?

I recently read Jeffrey Archer’s novel “A Prisoner of Birth”. The novel could have been much better if it had an original plot – instead of borrowing the plot of “The Count of Monte Cristo”. But this post is not about the novel. It is about an interesting issue that I thought was worth pondering [...]

The worship of suffering

I chanced upon this post at “Truth, Justice and the American Way”. Go read the post. Then read the comments. Then read this quote
I think it is very beautiful for the poor to accept their lot, to share it with the passion of Christ. I think the world is being much helped by the suffering [...]

Ayn Rand’s novels

For some time, I have been thinking of writing a series of posts on “Atlas Shrugged”. What I took away from it, why I was so influenced by it, why I enjoyed it. So I was delighted to discover the comment thread on Aristotle The Geek’s post Dry Humor that featured an excerpt from “The [...]

This is hilarious

http://informationageprayer.com/