Space Photography on a balloon

This is one of the coolest things I've read about in a long time.

a bigger threat than China

Taiwan's president said climate change presents a bigger threat to the island than China.

where I write

An interesting collection of authors' workspaces. It's interesting that half of the authors have cats.

Alaskan blob

I hope Monsterquest is moving on this.

Islam's blind spot

It's interesting that only Muslims are only outraged about their fellow brethrens killed in the West while those who died in ethnic conflicts outside of Europe or the Middle East like India or China were ignored.

Cap-n-Trade

Nate Silver's take on the prospect of last week's Climate Change Bill passing the Senate.

biodegradable plastics

This is even cooler than Homer Simpson's aerodynamic nuclear power plant.

Iranian election fraud

Nate Silver applied his statistical mojo to the recent Iranian elections results and found tons of anomalies.

Final Destination

This reads like the plot of that movie.

lost in transition

I hope some thing can be done for these people.

research showed that cats contribute little to human society

Further evidence that it is the cat who domesticated men than the other way around.

pretty pictures from Jamaica

First, the bizarre food portion.
Jamaica was not as big of a haven for bizarre food as I thought. Their national dish, Ackee and Saltfish, is basically salted cod sauteed with a local fruit called ackee. It looks like scrambled eggs with mushrooms. The other famous Jamaican dish is the jerk barbecue, which is meat broiled over a type of wood. For some reason chicken is a lot cheaper in Jamaica than pork or beef.

One of the things that I found to be unusual is this drink I found in the local grocery store. It tastes like peanut butter with milk.



Another mild oddity I found is this bag of treats. It's salty and tastes more like potato chips than bananas. If you've eaten in a Brazilian restaurants before and had some of the fried plantains, that's what you can expect.


One of the common sights on a Jamaican beaches looks like this little fella. Don't worry. We didn't eat it.



The place we went to is called Montego Bay. It is the second largest city in Jamaica. As you can see from this hilltop view, that's not saying much.



However, there are pretty scenery to be found in Montego Bay. Here's a view from the famous Rose Hall Great House, home of the famous White Witch.



Here's a portrait of the famous White Witch Annie Palmer.



All in all, I found Jamaica to be a beautiful country with a fascinating history and interesting people. Its forest is rich in flora but somewhat limited in fauna. The only endemic bird species are the size of hummingbirds and the largest native mammal is a bat. Would I go back? Maybe in twenty years when I've visited Costa Rica and most of the major islands in the Caribbeans.

back from Jamaica

I was literally swimming with the dolphins yesterday morning in Jamaica, and a mere six hours later, I'm back in from of my home office replenishing my Kindle. I love the 21st Century.

Move to India or lose your job

I know I joked about this before but I didn't know that people are actually doing it.

Afghanistan's pig quarantined

It's not a grammatical error. There is just the one pig in all of Afghanistan.

Age discrimination in IT

Yet another article about out of work senior programmers. This article didn't even take into account competition from H1B Visa holders. Maybe it's time to brush up on my Hindi and move to Bangalore :) I always liked Indian food.

Patient Zero

http://www.cnn.com/2009/HEALTH/04/28/swine.flu/index.html

leaving the fold

A powerful story from the man who left the most hated family in America.

What stress test

By now we've all heard about the so-called "stress tests" that the large banks will be put to. It turns out that the government doesn't really do anything to "stress" the banks, except for the psychological pressure. The test is more like an audit where regulators and bank officers assess the assets the banks have to determine whether it's enough to cover for contingencies like an economic downturn, large than expected defaults on loans, etc. I thought the regulators would do things like reducing the money supply or change the deposit rules to put pressure on the banks, like they would in the engineering world if they want to test something.

The next bestseller?

This is the book that Hugo Chavez gave President Obama.