[Someone's avatar.]

The following is a 1-minute video of a contestant in the Miss Teen USA 2007 contest. The video has been viewed around 22 million times on YouTube and accumulated over 65 thousand comments, and hundreds of video responses. Here’s Miss South Carolina attempting to answer a question which explores why many Americans are ignorant of basic geography:

Obviously she’s in the spotlight because she is pretty, and most certainly better looking than 99.99 percent of the population. But nature perhaps balances it out in her case by making her dumber …

The other day, a BBC producer from London called me up and asked me if I would care to comment on the recent big sell-off in the Indian stock markets. I confessed that I am not fully qualified to do so but added that in all honesty that my guess would be as good as any one else’s. Still I declined. The best we can do is pull out Keynes’s “animal spirits,” which unfortunately is not amenable to rigorous scientific or economic analysis. The essential story of the stock market …

(Hat tip: Jan Manik)

Woman 1: “What is that little trash can on the screen?”
Woman 2: “My son says that is called the ‘recycle bin’. He tells me when I don’t want a Word document anymore and I delete it, it really goes in there.”
Woman 1: “Why in the recycle thingy? Can’t you just erase it?”
Woman 2: “Oh no, Word wouldn’t work for very long if I did that, I would run out of blank pages.”
Woman 1: “Why?”
Woman 2: “Because it cleans the words off the pages, then sends the blank sheets back to …

Philosophically, I belong to the Advaita Vedanta school of thought (and many other schools as well). Check out the Non-Duality Cartoons site. (hat tip: Amar K).

Breaking News: All Online Data Lost After Internet Crash

The British steal everything from India, don’t they? Clearly, this is a ripoff of what actually happened in a meeting with Lalu Prasad Yadav.

Read it, it’s dam funny.

A report in the Middle East section of the NY Times contains the sort of stuff that you cannot make up. It is about fatwas.
A Compass That Can Clash With Modern Life
CAIRO, June 11 — First came the breast-feeding fatwa. It declared that the Islamic restriction on unmarried men and women being together could be lifted at work if the woman breast-fed her male colleagues five times, to establish family ties. Then came the urine fatwa. It said that drinking the urine of the Prophet Muhammad was deemed …

Today I was favored with an email from the PanIIT alumni organization. The subject of the email was “Required for IIT alumni Reach 4 India! organisation” and the text was about their search for a “Chief Operations Sevak” and a “Chief Finance & Funding Sevak.”

I wrote back promptly asking if among the illustrious alumni of the much celebrated IITs there wasn’t someone who knew the distinction between the numeral “4″ and the word “for”? Methinks their reach exceeds their grasp.
[I have written previously about PanIIT here: Inspire, Involve, and …

Related to my previous post on Fanatics and Development, I think this poem is rather funny.

Take a look at this video. Damn, the world does have some very clever and creative people. Thanks to the wonder of the world wide web, we get to enjoy stuff from the comfort of our desktops.

Fool me once, shame on you; fool me twice, shame on me.
That bit of popular wisdom comes to mind when one considers POTUS George W Bush. Clearly the man is not to blame. Nearly half of the US voted for the man. Twice. Bush is not the problem; he is only the most visible symptom. The neo-conservatives that run the US are representative of a significant percentage of the US population. If the leader of the pack is as dumb as a rock, then the pack has the collective …

This blog is a big fan of Thomas Friedman (Friedman has his own category with six posts). So I would like to share a bit from this article by Norman Solomon which attempts to synthesize Friedman’s brain waves [hat tip: Ashok Bardhan]:

This is getting curiouser and curiouser. First there was “free textbooks.” Now there is free energy. Scientific American: Irish tech firm throws down “free energy” gauntlet
Perpetual motion machines of the first, second, and third kind? Not going to happen.

Yes, we do share common ancestors with the other primates. Playing and having fun is part of our common heritage.

NOTE: That “monkey” actually is an ape: I am guessing a Lar Gibbon.

A bit of Saturday silliness.

My blog is worth $101,617.20.How much is your blog worth?

{via Navin Jaganathan}

So what else is new?
And truth be told, Bush is the worst disaster to hit the world, not just the US.

Saturday silliness follows. Apologies to those who don’t know Hindi.
Windows Commands in Hindi:
Khidkiyan version shoonya bindu shoonya ek (0.01)
Phile = File
Kholo = Open
Bandh Karo = Close
Naya = New
Khatara = Old