Watch this presentation. You won’t regret it.

don’t believe in UFOs (I did innocently when I was very young), but here’s a conspiracy theory from Milton William Cooper.

This one is pretty funny:

Why am I linking to this? Just to provide an example of silly conspiracy theories. Not all of them contain substance or truth (as much as wishful thinking and fantasies). Consider this as an example of things that falsify these theories: why is it that aliens — who supposedly come from distant and independent planets — always have the same scale as humans, who also look alike? It’s moronic. It contradicts the laws of probability and it’s statistically impossible.

I do believe in life in other planets, but it’s more likely to exist in bacterial form and not involve inter-intergalactic travel. If you look around the Web, you’ll find far crazier (and more laughable) characters than Mr. Cooper. Whether it’s drugs or sleep paralysis that led them to ‘believing’, who knows?

Bottom-right, from left to right: Me, my father and my sister in our younger days (click for full-sized version but beware: 1.3 MB JPEG)

IKE most people, my mood is elevated and de-elevated on different days, for a variety of reasons. While not all of them are work- or personal issues-related, most of them are. The more interesting ingredients of mood, however, relate to the ties between physical well-being and one’s mood. Here’s an article that I caught some time ago. Working in reverse, it actually talks about the effect of one’s mood on one’s health, which makes the relationship reciprocal. Cyclic relationships such as this can lead to spirals. I see some negative such spirals affecting friends. Fortunately, I am not a victim, yet.

Some recent revelations confirm what many of us have already known. There is a lot of money exchanging hands amid efforts to deny man-made climate changes.

This comes around the same time that a United Nations panel took a stance which does confirm that global warming is real. How long can companies manipulate the world though?

Yesterday, in another site, I wrote about the possible Intel-Dell kickbacks affair, which has pretty much been exposed. And only a week ago, Microsoft offered money for changes to Wikipedia. It is sad to see the extent of fraud, but encouraging to see that it gets exposed.

With the exception of certain processes in chemistry and maybe even medicine, all so called ‘intellectual property” should ultimately become void. Even in medicine there’s an in-between because people are dying due to patents that lead to heavy levy.

Intellectual property — no such thing. There is property. There is intellect. What society/industry calls “intellectual property” is neither an intellectual thing to do, nor can it be owned.

Intellectual property — no such thing. It’s a man-made concept intended to gain personal advantage at the expense of communal/mutual benefit.

(shown on the left is John Von Neumann — a man of science, not a man of money-making)

Never underestimate the forces of nature, geology, and climate. Picture from the BBC (2004).

HE article “Disappearing world: Global warming claims tropical island” caught my eye during Christmas (or “holiday period”, if you prefer). As a reminder, there are/were serious floods that cost lives over Christmas—a trend that seems repeatable, especially around Christmas time. This year was no exception. But what happens when a once-vibrant island becomes an underwater site for diver historians? What will the impact of refuge be? Can man battle climate? Does the world intend to take action at all? Or, as my father would say, is it just “busy making money”?

Rising seas, caused by global warming, have for the first time washed an inhabited island off the face of the Earth. The obliteration of Lohachara island, in India’s part of the Sundarbans where the Ganges and the Brahmaputra rivers empty into the Bay of Bengal, marks the moment when one of the most apocalyptic predictions of environmentalists and climate scientists has started coming true.

Season of the playful penguins from Oyonale

Sidling with Open Source software development is sidling with science. To use a parable, people in conferences don’t just show the end products. They often have papers explaining methods, without being restricited by patents, and increasingly some source code is available too. They want to make a difference, not (necessarily just) money.

Linux (and Open Source software) protects its users, which it does not perceive as customer, from technology that only benefits greedy companies. Avoidance of brainwash, abuse and abomination is not only an important factor to so-called technocrats. As more people grasp the value of liberty, accentuated by corporate-centirc products such as Vista, the stampede to vendor-neutral solutions will begin.