The FDA (after a few years of debate) says that food from cloned animals and their progeny is safe to eat. Looks like this thing has been on the back-burner for a while (pun intended, I apologize, I couldn’t resist).

“This is a huge milestone,” said Mark Walton, president of ViaGen, a leading livestock cloning company in Austin, Tex. [NYT]

Well, Walton would think that, of course. I would too if I owned a leading livestock cloning company. But there’s more.

Farmers had long observed a voluntary moratorium on the sale of clones and their offspring into the food supply. The F.D.A. on Tuesday effectively lifted that for clone offspring.

Voluntary, huh? I wonder how many clones and clone-offspring have slipped into the market already? You know, now that I think about it, the beef that I bought yesterday from the grocery tasted exactly the same as the beef today. It’s a conspiracy, I tell you!

“When you buy a box of Cheerios in New York and one in Champaign, Illinois, you know they are going to be the same,” said Jon Fisher, president and owner of Prairie State Semen in Illinois. “By shortening the genetic pool using clones, you can do a similar thing.”

I knew it! And what kind of a company is Prairie State Semen, anyhow? A sperm bank? Never mind that. Getting back to the point, it looks like clone-offspring can be sold, but not clones.

…the Agriculture Department, asked farmers to continue withholding clones themselves from the food supply, saying the department wanted time to allay concerns among retailers and overseas trading partners.

Well, it looks like Walton doesn’t seem perturbed by that, though.

“That doesn’t cause me any particular heartburn,” Mr. Walton said of the extended moratorium.

Heartburn! Oh lordy, lordy lord! These meat-cloners, I tell you, they’ve got some sense of humour!

But not this Mexican kid. He certainly used glue, but not to sniff it, but to glue himself to his bed, so that he couldn’t be forced to go to school!

Diego had got up early to fetch some industrial-strength glue from the kitchen.

His mother spent two hours trying to free him with nail-polish remover before calling for expert help.

Diego watched cartoons while paramedics dissolved the glue with a spray. [link]

So kids, let this be a lesson to you. This method is legal, it’s relatively safe and you get to watch cartoons while being rescued. If you want to avoid school, don’t do drugs – just glue yourself to your bed.

This Public Service Announcement brought to you by The Great Ganesha. Because we care.

The Great Ganesha is not responsible for irreversible hand damage, bed damage or both. If, in the process of gluing your hand to your bed, you also glue your nose, your face, or any other part of your body, things will get uncomfortable. This message is not intended to endorse avoiding school, even though it comes off as such and the words “avoid school” are explicitly in the message. Also, this is not a legally binding document to show we care. In reality, we don’t care. Finally, ingesting the glue may also cause other digestive disorders like excessive gas, oily discharge in the stool and general abdominal pain. Other than that though, we highly recommend it.

So, in order to vamp up their image with the 34-56 year-old, bored housewife, technophobic demographic, they’ve taken on Fabio (yes, Fabio!) as the official “Geek Squad Ambassador”.

Now don’t laugh! Apparently, he’s a real techno-geek. He says so himself in the interview:

I’m a technology geek. And I’m a very simple person ? I love my toys, but I’m very down to earth. I think everybody’s human, and I think there’s only one God. [link]

One God, huh? Dammit! Just when I thought Ganesha was getting some street-cred here in the US, thanks to this blog. But I digress. Apparently, he does get geeky over audio/video equipment:

My father, a mechanical engineer, was big into audio/video. It’s because of him that I’m able to set everything up. I’m thankful for that. Putting together a VCR, DVD player, and speakers is easy when you have only a few components. Now, you have hundreds of components, and most people need a book to tell them how to set everything up. [link]

And he also gets some perks by being an ambassador:

They fixed up my entire house, made it wireless all over. Before with my computer, I had to always plug it in and couldn’t go anywhere ? I felt like a dog on a leash. Now, I have wireless access around the house and check my email, go online? it’s amazing. [link]

I wonder if he has a lifetime supply of I Can’t Believe It’s Not Butter from being in all those ads? And what about all those romance novels? Does he get free women for life? But maybe there’s a caveat that he has to be romantic with them. These issues need some serious thought.

Take a look at the original Relativity by Escher:

Image ? The M.C. Escher Company BV. Used with permission.

And now take a look at the Lego version by Lipson and Shiu:

Image ? 2003 Andrew Lipson. Used with permission.

Not bad at all. Here’s what they say about creating this piece:

Once again, no camera tricks, but the picture has to be taken from exactly the right place, and boy did we get tired of trying to find where that place was. The whole thing took five or six evenings spread over two or three weeks. Most of the last evening was taken up with setting up the lighting the way we wanted it and trying to get the camera position just right… [link]

Check out their other Lego-Escher works.

[There is a video that cannot be displayed in this feed. Visit the blog entry to see the video.]

They’re made to be in the style of Japanese Anime and I was intrigued, so I did a little bit of research (well ok, I just Googled ‘ramayana anime‘) and found that they were made in Japan in collaboration with India, in the early 90′s.

Directed by Yugo Sako and Krishna Shah, this adaptation of the legend combines the techniques of the Japanese school of animation called Manga, and those of Indian classical painting which have been updated by Ram Mohan, the father of Indian animation. [link]

They’ve definitely got a fair amount of action and entertainment. And several of the battles I saw involved at least one sword. This should explain that:

Rama and Lakshmana look rather like Samurai warriors, and the action sequences are graced by swordfights based on the Japanese kenjutsu tradition, but the characters deliver their speeches in a style reminiscent of the acting tradition in Indian folk theater, though with a certain Manga twist. [link]

Turns out the feature is called Ramayana: The Legend of Prince Rama and the Hindi version is voiced by (among others) Om Puri and Amrish Puri. They weren’t credited on the IMDb page, but I recognized their voices. Additionally, James Earl Jones does the narration in the English version – he’s credited on there. Here’s another clip (also in Hindi, but with subtitles) that has some more action than the previous one:

[There is a video that cannot be displayed in this feed. Visit the blog entry to see the video.]

There are some more clips available to watch, uploaded by user ‘manofsan‘. And the DVD can be bought on Amazon, if you’re interested. Although some of the subtleties and intricacies from the original stories are lost in the making of the cartoon, it makes for some fun viewing for kids, and the kid inside you.

?

So it looks like the theory that calculus in India predated Newton’s and Liebnitz’s calculus is back in the news again. I blogged about it in a series of three posts some time back, and it’s good to see that it’s getting some traction. I seriously doubt it will enter the mainstream any time soon, though. Well, not until India dominates the world, that is. Rest assured, the probability of that happening in any of our lifetimes is about the same as it snowing in San Francisco in July.

Waking up at 5 a.m., while his wife and daughter are still asleep, he pads into the darkened kitchen, logs onto his computer and changes the Netflix order to put his favorite movies on top. He knows the warehouse ships the movies by about 7 a.m., so by the time his wife realizes what he’s done, it’ll be too late. “It’s not grounds for murder, but it is irritating,” Ms. De Chellis [the wife] says. [link]

Man, that’s devious. Fortunately, I control the Netflix in our marriage, so there’s no issue about choosing movies. Of course, a bad choice (i.e., one that the wife does not like) will lie there unwatched for months on end, but that’s for a different post. Getting back to the article, things get murkier as we turn to blogging. See what happens if the couple have a common blog:

They agreed to give each other veto power over posts, which he exercised when she wanted to shout out into the blogosphere about his failure to do the dishes. “That’s a real sensitive issue,” says Mr. Griffioen, 30… Readers of the site…would have blown it out of proportion, he says: “They’re going to turn it into this whole thing of how I don’t keep up my end of the relationship.”

Veto power rocks. The consequences of publishing a post on her husband’s failure to do the dishes would be devastating. Trust me, I have three sisters-in-law. I know. [Incidentally, if one of them is reading this - I'm just kidding! See the Humor tag below? It's supposed to be funny!]

As for starting a joint-blog? Well, I’ll let the article do the talking:

As for sharing one blog, the idea “never came up,” he says. “It would be like saying, ‘Let’s share our underwear.’ ” [link]

I heard on NPR yesterday, that an Italian DJ named Gaudi (a namesake of the original, obviously) has remixed some of Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan’s early work to a reggae beat. He got some forty-year-old reel-to-reel of tapes of unreleased sessions from Khan’s record label and spent two years wading through all of it, isolating the vocals and then layering it on dub reggae beats. He spent a lot of the time listening to the music, even hiring a translator, before he came to a realization that inspired him to mix the music and create an album.

“Because the message of that music and the message of reggae is exactly the same,” Gaudi says. “It’s peace, love, and spirituality. So that was my common denominator for me, just to try and unify the two elements.” [link]

Although I haven’t heard the entire album, I heard some clips on the radio during the show yesterday, and there are two songs that are available for streaming on the NPR story page. I have to say the music reminds me of Bally Sagoo‘s old Bollywood mixes, but Khan’s music is infinitely superior. ‘Ena Akhiyan Noo’ has a nice, melancholy groove to it, but the other song, ‘Bethe Bethe Kese Kese‘ opens with a Gandhi quote (spoken by Gandhi himself) which was somewhat disenchanting. If you can get over that, then it’s worth a listen.

The album is on Amazon already (has been for about a week, actually), and is on its way to be shipped to me.

Today’s WSJ has an article about the Indian retail baron Kishore Biyani who founded Pantaloon Retail (currently the largest retailer in India, in terms of revenues) and owns the supermarket chains Big Bazaar and Food Bazaar. For the supermarkets, he initially tried to emulate the Western model of quiet, spacious aisles of products, and found that people would walk down those aisles, and walk out of the store empty-handed.

Americans and Europeans might like to shop in pristine and quiet stores where products are carefully arranged. But when Mr. Biyani tried that in Western-style supermarkets he opened in India six years ago, too many customers walked down the wide aisles, past neatly stocked shelves and out the door without buying. [link]

He then switched over to a more “traditional” style of the bazaar, where people had to walk down cramped aisles, squeezing past other people and products. And some of the produce was even defective (with spots, etc.) to let people think it came straight from the farm. He found the second model was much more effective for selling his wares.

They were more comfortable in the tiny, cramped stores — often filled with haggling customers — that typify Indian shopping. Most Indians buy their fresh produce from vendors who keep vegetables under burlap sacks. [link]

Well, hats off to Mr. Biyani. He was shunned initially, but he persisted in his vision of creating a pan-Indian retail store which wasn’t your average, neighborhood cheap Western knock-off. And boy, did he succeed. Pantaloon is now the top Indian retailer.

Su Kokila, aa sasta ma malse ke? (Translation: What ho Kokila!
Perchance, we shall acquire this cheaply?)

That said though, this is funny. We Indians actually prefer to be pushed and shoved around rather than preferring the peaceful solitude of the American shopping experience.

For the uninitiated, a word on the American shopping experience at its worst best: In the mid-west, for instance, the grocery stores are huge, measuring approximately one square mile. That’s around four full Manhattan avenue blocks. On the shelves, you will find practically every brand of potato chip, beer and bratwurst in existence. But (of course) there’s no garam masala or Hayward’s 5000.

There are days when you can wander in the store for hours searching, with only a handful of other people to keep you company in all that vastness. At the end of it, you find yourself muttering (perhaps a little too loudly) about how it’s impossible to find what you need.

But I digress. I suppose I can appreciate how I would like to shop in cramped spaces with haggling aunties on either side, jostling for the multitasking shopkeeper’s attention. Well, maybe it’s just my nostalgia, but there is a certain amiability and camaraderie in that environment. Then again, things back home always seem better from ten thousand miles away.

And you know what? I just realized – those people at the B.E.S.T. (the Bombay government-run transportation agency) are deliberately trying to create a more “Indian” transportation experience by packing us all into those buses. Right?

I was definitely an addict. I would look forward to going to the “library” (which, in 80s Bombay were basically privately run places where you could borrow books for cash) and picking up a stack of Archies. The “magazines” were good, but the “digests” were even better. I could go through a magazine in, like, fifteen minutes. In retrospect, it was almost like those things were made for “slow people” with the oversized graphics and lettering. But a digest, on the other hand, was packed with stories and could sometimes even be read over two sittings. [link]

With the lackluster humor and the incredibly thin plot-lines, I don’t think I can sit through another Archie today. But after reading this announcement, I could seriously consider it. Archie has gone multicultural with the addition of a gujju by the name of…(drumroll, please)… Raj Patel!

Well, I haven’t read it, so he may not be a gujju after all, and he may just be a “Hindu”-speaking “Hindi” but it’s good to see some of apna desh in the ol’ Archie comics, nonetheless. (via)