Foreign Accent Syndrome

I StumbledUpon a page that listed a bunch of 'bizarre mental disorders'. In the list was Foreign Accent Syndrome. It is a rare medical condition (mostly brought about due to injury), which causes the afflicted to speak their native language with an (apparently) foreign accent. There have been 50 recorded cases of this.

I guess the key word here is 'recorded'. If we were to record cases, then there would be a few hundred thousand (if not million) cases in India alone. And the condition wasn't brought upon them by trauma. A short visit to any natively English speaking country (US, UK etc) seems to be 'injury' enough. ;-)

Videos..

Rangashankara Viral Ad Campaign



Yesteryears' superhit: Tum Tu There Pardesi

Stupidity... taken to all new levels... down

Google has recently announced plans for the Chrome OS. And many articles have popped up on the www including one on CNET by Peter Glaskowsky.

A quote from the article:

"Turning the Chrome browser into the Chrome OS is technically straightforward, though of course it'll take a lot of work. A browser already has most of the key elements of any OS: application programming interfaces (APIs) to allow application software to display content and accept user input, store and retrieve data from mass storage, communicate over the Internet, and so on."

I am unable to control my laughter over this guy's ignorance of computers. And he is a tech analyst!!! Poor guy doesn't seem to know that the browser needs the OS achieve each of the 'element' that he lists. He doesn't seem to know that anyone with a bit of programming experience can write a simple app to read a file system and send it over a network. Well...

FF 3.5 - ACID Test

FF 3.5 (released yesterday) scores 93 on the ACID3 Test. Not bad. But one point less than the previous version. :)

Intel has come up with a new set of marketing names for its Core brand of processors. My first reaction to this news was to shake my head in disapproval.

Intelligence... human/machine

Machine learning algorithms have their limitations. They can find interesting, funny relationships. Take the 2 screenshots. The first one shows an image of a TATA Nano and relates it to a news item concering a student of TISS (TATA Inst. of Social Sciences) . The key thing here is the common word TATA.


The second one is in similar lines. The Indian Govt had something to say to the Pakistan Govt on the same day that India won their T20 WC warmup match against Pakistan. :D
Or finding some interesting correlation between why Adobe flash doesn't work on IE8 and SFU business. ;-)



Other funny output can be due programming blunders. Like the Y! weather page telling that "tonight" will be "sunny". Nights can be 'clear', of course, but never heard of them sunny. Or just plain... having a playlist of size -1 (minus 1)! :)



Click on the images to see the bigger versions.

LHC

A short video on the LHC at CERN.

Austin Powers Credit Card

Did you know: There was a limited edition Visa Credit Card called the Austin Powers Titanium Visa Card. Named after Austin Powers, the International Man of Mystery.

Don't believe? Check slide 11 in the Credit Card Flashback slide show on BigMoney.

99

From the hindi movie 99

"दिल्ली में लड़की का नाम या तो पूजा है या नेहा"

So far, this statement has been a tautology. I have come across a bunch of instances conforming perfectly to the 'rule' above.

megaphone hack

Spy Megaphone Hack - Click here for more blooper videos

What!er

Basha vs. Anthony - Paper Presentation

Ahem! Ahem!

Photo in the Deccan Herald newspaper (1st May, 2009) after the 3rd phase of polling in the general elections.

Passport

Searching on Google Image Search for 'India passport' threw up a page from Frogview among others. It was captioned 'The Most Beautiful Passport in India'. That page had the image below. Would this not account as an invasion of one's privacy?

Axiomatic love theory

प्यार किया नहीं जाता. प्यार हो जाता है.
As you might have realized, this is a typical Hindi movie dialogue.
Happened to be watching a Hindi movie. And in the course of the usual melodrama, Som proposed: Axiomatic Love Theory(ALT).

The first axiom of ALT has already been shown.
Axiom 2: प्यार करने वाले से निभाने वाला बडा है.

Okuribito

Okuribito (Departures) won the US Motion Picture Academy Award for Best Foreign Film - 2008. Recommended!

"ಒಕುರಿಬಿತೋ" (ನಿರ್ಗಮನಗಳು) ೨೦೦೮-ನಲ್ಲಿ ಉತ್ಕೃಷ್ಟ ವಿದೇಶಿ ಚಲನಚಿತ್ರ ಆಸ್ಕಾರ್ ಪ್ರಶಸ್ತಿ ಪಡೆಯಿತು. ತಪ್ಪದೆ ನೋಡಿ!

R

A quick and dirty intro to R statistical package (by me).

ಪೇಟೆಂಟ್

ನನ್ನ ಪೇಟೆಂಟ್ ಅರ್ಜಿ ಯುನೈಟೆಡ್ ಸ್ತೆತೆಸ್ ಪೇಟೆಂಟ್ ಕಛೇರಿಯಲ್ಲಿ ದಾಖಲಾಗಿದೆ. ಭಾರತದ ಪೇಟೆಂಟ್ ಕಛೇರಿಯಲ್ಲಿ ಕೂಡ ಅರ್ಜಿ ಸಲ್ಲಿಸಲಾಗಿತ್ತು. ಆದರೆ ಹುಡುಕಿದರೆ ಏನು ಮಾಹಿತಿ ಸಿಗುತ್ತಿಲ್ಲ.

ಯು.ಎಸ್.ಪಿ.ಟಿ.ಓ. ಅರ್ಜಿ ಸಂಖ್ಯೆ 20090080442

Smale's Paradox

Happened to find this video on another Ananth's blog. Awesome video. Math, topology and stuff.

Vijay Dhobi

Awesome! Vijay Dhobi is probably the standing round the corner with his pushcart pressing clothes at Rs 2 per piece of clothing. And Vijay probably does not know that his store had made it to Google Maps and he 'world famous'.


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