Life's a bitch, and then you permalink

There's a bunch of people bitching about Big Media at DesiMediaBitch, at the invitation of that human dynamo, Rohit Gupta, including (but don't tell any of the magazines we write for), this blogger. Do drop by.

We don't need no education, but we'd like some of the royalties, please.

ThisisLondon reports:

A group of former pupils at a London comprehensive school are poised to win thousands of pounds in unpaid royalties for singing on Pink Floyd's classic Another Brick In The Wall 25 years ago.
The pupils from the 1979 fourthform music class at Islington Green School secretly recorded vocals after their teacher was approached by the band's management.
Now the 23 ex-pupils are suing for overdue session musician royalties, taking advantage of the Copyright Act 1997 to claim a percentage of the money from broadcasts.

[Via Indian Dope Trick.]

Finding Griffins...

...and Yara-ma-yha-whos, and Yofune-Nushis and Vilkacis and Amphisbaena and Nahuelitos and Simurghs and Kulshedras and Bunyips. Try the Bestiary at the Encyclopedia Mythica.

Dilemma for the day

We just read on Ananova that coffee can cure baldness.
But wait. Apparently you have to smear it on your scalp. Adolf Klenk of Kurt Wolff cosmetic research said "One would have to drink between 60 and 80 cups of coffee a day for the necessary amount of caffeine to reach the roots."
Oh well. Better to go around reeking of beer and saying its conditioner?
And there's this. "Men who are frightened that they may lose their hair should start treating their scalps with caffeine while they are still young."
So that leaves us out. We'll just continue swilling the stuff down our throats. Which you ask? The beer now. The coffee, lots, strong, tomorrow.

Greek tragedy

Go see this.

Kiss my chuddies, man

Our fave cat, Putu, has fun with the Dalrymple-Guha spat.
Hurree, of course, has all the links, including the retort to the reply to the response, plus a third voice. Here. And an update here.

idle, or switch off?

Adam Kotsko has a question that has often crossed what passes for our mind:

In general, is turning off one's car rather than idling, for instance at a long stop light, an effective way to save gasoline? Does restarting the car take such a significant amount of gas that the wait would have to be unrealistically long to produce a net savings of gasoline?

Go read the comments to that post. And do come tell us if you have a different opinion. (: Adapted for Indian road conditions, of course. :)

The We Are Not Worthy Department

We just learned that the worthy folk at Blogstreet India are running out of blogs to feature. No, really. In case you click that link and find they've corrected their mistake, we took a screen grab for posterity. Not that it's got us huge spikes in traffic, or anything. Or even a measly book deal. But we'll take what we get. Maybe we'll even blog more regularly now. Sigh. What suckers for publicity we bloggers be.

Search. For the bright ones in the class.

Google Scholar (Beta) "enables you to search specifically for scholarly literature, including peer-reviewed papers, theses, books, preprints, abstracts and technical reports from all broad areas of research. Use Google Scholar to find articles from a wide variety of academic publishers, professional societies, preprint repositories and universities, as well as scholarly articles available across the web."

Link via Amardeep Singh, who says "Scholars are increasingly prone to googling subjects before going to library catalogs, World-CAT, or the MLA Bibliography. Google is just faster, simpler, and more up-to-date than slow, CD-ROM based databases that require log-ins and proxy servers. If you can find a book on a topic you're looking for through Google, why go to the library website?

"Of course, that short-cut often creates a problem, which is that you get a lot of personal websites when what you really want to know is: who's published something serious on this? As much as I enjoy doing this blog and am pro-blogging in general, sometimes you want books, not blogs. Scholar.google fixes that problem, and cuts out anything that isn't a journal or a book pub."

But Dr Desai, we already have Page Three people

P.B. Desai, former director of the Tata Medical Center, proposes that we breed headless humans that can be used as a source for organs. and other forms of commercial exploitation. "Science is moving at such a fast pace that scientists have proven that they can create headless mice through removal of genes in embryo that control development of the head," said Desai "But the body would have the capacity to keep the organs functional for use as transplants."