Spotted the billboards pictured above while driving around in Culver City, Calif. Their location is peculiar, because the area doesn’t have a lot of South Asians, as far as I know. The first one is located near an exit for the 10, which is a prime spot. You’ll find the second one when driving east on Venice Blvd., but it is easy to miss. There might be more out there, so if you spot one, please photograph it, and send it our way.
Throughout
the years, there have been countless attempts by educators and parents to glamorize
the academic pursuits of science and technology. Whether it was financial incentives,
or catchy tunes on PBS children’s programs, for many,
the battle usually ends in bitter defeat. What they should be doing is speaking
to kids in a language that they understand — rap and hip-hop.
At least that’s Rajeev Bajaj’s theory, and the 39-year-old engineer from Fremont, Calif. is putting his ideas into motion. From the San Jose Mercury News:
Bajaj recently spent $15,000 of his own money forming an independent record label and hiring musicians to perform four rap and hip-hop songs he wrote in praise of the engineering profession. He hopes his debut album, “Geek Rhythms,” will convince America that engineers indeed are cool.
To y’all 220 million vegetarian desis: Is your favorite Asian restaurant’s idea of vegetarian food ‘yes, it has veggies too’? Do you marvel at how many ways some insidious bastards work meat into veggie dishes (pepperoni in pasta salad, rice cooked in chicken stock)? Are you sick of throwing away soup you bought without parsing the ingredients like a copy editor? Bored of restaurant menus that read meat, meat, meat, meat, meat, meat, meat, sprig of parsley?
Soon, you may also have to check whether your PC is made from animal products. Researchers are turning chicken feathers into computer motherboards:
To turn feathers into a usable product, they are first plucked from the birds at chicken-processing plants and then the hot, wet feathers are immediately hauled to Emery’s plant. There the “undesirable parts” like chicken heads, feet, windpipes and fecal matter are sorted out from the truckload of feathers. “They’re not a nice sight, to put it mildly…”… Emery converts the feather fiber into keratin mats that resemble paper towels. They are then placed into a mold, layered on top of one another and infused with a soybean resin that hardens and forms the composite. The material is then put through the circuit-printing process to become a circuit board.
This gives new meaning to the expression ‘my new machine really screams.’ Ironically, the same people who think Gandhi, Jim Morrison and John Lennon drinking their own urine is disgusting, think eating cows fed chicken poop is perfectly ok.
But things are looking up for those who steer clear of digestive recycling: instead of ordering mu shu, you can now order Moo Shoes.
An interesting brouhaha brewing ‘cross the pond –
Britain’s food industry finds Indian chilli too hot to handle LONDON: Questions are being raised on Britain’s food industry regulations after products containing a cancer-causing dye flooded supermarket shelves. Chilli powder, allegedly containing the illegal food dye Sudan 1, on being imported to the UK from India in September 2002, was traded between more than six different companies, allowing it to spread rapidly with little chance for regulators to monitor its safety, according to a report in The Times.
“Sudan 1” – what a fantastically sinister moniker. Continue reading
An Indian airline is now worth more than American Airlines and United Airlines combined. Jet Airways’ IPO on the Bombay stock exchange last Friday was like a hipster concert: sold out in ten minutes and 50% oversubscribed (via Varnam and Winds of Change). The ~$400M IPO (~$1.2B in buying power) values the company at ~$2.2B at a price-to-earnings multiple of 21.5. That’s a higher valuation than NASDAQ darling JetBlue ($1.9B), American Airlines ($1.5B), Delta ($653M) and the bankrupt United ($142M), but lower than Southwest ($11B).
Meanwhile, the airline with ridiculously attentive service just got clearance to fly New York to Bombay starting in April. The route stops in Brussels, which is my nominee for having the most useless currency left over after a layover, the Belgian franc. Also thanks to the open skies agreement, state carrier Air-India can now fly out of San Francisco.
It’s not clear whether Jet’s bought the JFK landing slots yet, but I’m so looking forward to flying Jet again. And if they ever launch a discount airline, they can nick the sobriquets of the American carriers, calling it Tedwinder or Gana. Like United’s discount cousin, they could chop off the first part of their name and just call it T; or, since they’re a transport company, maybe even T Mobile.
With desis’ legendary respect for intellectual property, it might even fly 😉
Previous post on Jet Airways here.
A couple of SM tipsters (thanks Francis and Sachin) call our attention to the cover of New Scientist Magazine:
I’m digging the colors. There are about 20 detailed articles about science in India. I am not about to summarize them, I am just pointing them out to you science geeks (as I raise my fist in solidarity). What I do want to point out however is the following picture:
What the f*ck? I mean I guess it is just as ludicrous to subscribe to motorcycle or car magazines that drape sexy girls over the goods, but “mice?” Maybe I am not a red-blooded enough guy but this picture just doesn’t boot my hardrive. Come to think of it though I could use an optical mouse on my laptop. Damn subliminal advertising! Continue reading
Any guys that go to the gym as regularly as I do can attest to the fact that the aerobics room is always beyond reach. You CAN’T go in and participate because then the muscle bound guys outside won’t ever look you in the eyes again. You also have to purchase an extremely unflattering spandex outfit to enter. And yet… you long to be part of a place with such a favorable girl-to-guy ratio. You would be like a lion running free through a savannah of gazelles. Is there no hope? The San Jose Mercury News gives me hope:
Jane Fonda in a leotard and leg warmers super-charged the aerobics field in the 1980s.
Now, some unlikely candidates have arrived to lay claim to the throne the Hollywood icon abandoned almost 25 years ago. Two California sisters, Sheila and Sarina Jain, whose family hails from Rajasthan, India, are billing themselves as the “Indian Jane Fondas.”
Sheila, 28, of San Francisco, teaches around the Bay Area. Sarina, 29, moved to New York City to strike it big. Together, they are changing the international aerobics landscape with a pioneering and patented Indian aerobic dance routine, called Masala Bhangra Workout. Their fourth exercise DVD has just been released, and they recently have signed a contract for international distribution.
Masala means “spicy” in Hindi. Bhangra is a traditional harvest dance from northern India. Together, the popular routine is helping introduce Indian culture through exercise, and enticing those from the subcontinent to put down the greasy samosas and skip to the right, hop, hop, hop. Circle to the left, circle to the right. Knees up. Knees up.
The Jain sisters’ exercise routine is not for the faint of heart. And it’s certainly not for the uncoordinated. In some ways, it’s all about the head. It must constantly bob, side to side, to the beat of an Indian dhol drum.
“Just go to an Indian party and shake your head. You’ll look sooooo cool,” Jain shouted recently to a crowd of about 150 sweaty aerobicizers at her popular University of California-Berkeley session.
But inquiring minds in Amreeka wanted to know, too. From the Google Blog:
Wednesday, February 16, 2005
A richer Zeitgeist brew
If you were in India, what would you search for? Inquiring minds from Mumbai to Bangalore wanted to know, so now there’s a new Google India Zeitgeist. Among the most searched-for queries in January: the tsunami of course, and Bollywood star Aishwarya Rai.
Want some Zeitgeist? Help yourself…beta. Continue reading
St. Andrews Perception Laboratory’s “Face Transformer” allows you to change the age, race or sex of a facial image. The web-based Java app can also morph a photo into the style of a famous artist, caricature, or even an ape.
All you need is a browser that supports Java and a digital face image (JPEG or GIF format). Of special interest to SM readers may be the races, which include Afro-Caribbean, Caucasian, East Asian, and West Asian (their term for South Asian). The whole process is relatively quick and easy. The hardest part is finding a decent photo. While you search for one, here’s a few tests that I ran through the system:
Aishwarya Rai, Actress
Wanted to use Preity Zinta (in a variety of ways), but y’all seem quite
smitten with the lovely Ms. Rai. So, whatever, you win. It must feel good to
win. It doesn’t feel good to lose.
It’s
Valentine’s Day. Half of the country will be f–king like
wild billy goats. The other half will just be f–king bitter. The good folks
at Durex have something for both camps. The former can indulge in the contraceptive
concern’s wide range of STD- and pregnancy-busting prophylactics. And for
the latter — nothing less than an international-sized reminder of how much play
they’re missing out on.
Durex, a subsidiary of London-based SSL International, recently released their annual survey of sexual behavior around the world. The "Global Sex Survey," now in its eighth year, polled more than 350,000 people from 41 countries, and is billed as the largest such study around. Among the 16 questions, the following six stood out to me (I only listed results for first place, Canada, global average, India, U.K., U.S. and last place):