Nirmalya’s Blog

There exists a patch of floating garbage, several 10s of thousands of square kilometers, floating in the middle of the north Pacific ocean, approximately 3000 miles west of L.A.

Any garbage (namely, plastics) that makes its way into the ocean, be it in South/North Asia, or North America, floats with the ocean currents (sometimes for several years) to be concentrated at this one area, due to the clockwise motion of the ocean currents, in an area referred to as the North Pacific Gyre.

How does it matter? It all adds up in the food we eat.

Check out the series of 12 videos (each approximately 5-6 minute) at
http://www.vbs.tv/video.php?id=1485308505
[The 1st of video summarizes the whole series]

xiaonei.com, China
Click on image to visit site. Site looks like below as of right now, July 11, 2008.

vkontakte.ru, Russia
Click on image to visit site. Site looks like below as of right now, July 11, 2008.

hainei.com, China
Click on image to visit site. Site looks like below as of right now, July 11, 2008.

Kootali, India
Click on image to visit demo site. This company sells software to create Facebook clones! Demo Site looks like below as of right now, July 11, 2008.

[Via Reuters] About 12000 students sitting for their GCSE music exams had the answers (accidentally) printed at the back of their question papers! Wish some of us had the same luck!

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And it is has been running almost continuously. Someone calculated the light bulb to have clocked in over a million hours!

More at www.centennialbulb.org.
Also check out the live “Bulb cam” there.

Yes, such a contest exists and has been held in the Finnish town of Savonlinna, for the last 7 years!

This year’s event, held last Saturday (26th August) had 100 contestants from countries like Canada, Russia, Belgium; and Finland ofcorse.

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A friend has moved house earlier this week. His bank, UOB, sends him an address update form…

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The nice people at the Institute for Posttayloristic Studies in Austria have come up with an interesting(?) work around for people who want to watch the world cup but only have access to telnet. A stream of the World Cup in ASCII!

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Imagine yourself feeling elated for securing an air ticket for a 2 hour 35 minutes (1987 km) flight for just US$66 (in a country where regular airfares are in the US$400+ range for the same route).

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Like as if giving me a 4 Million Euros wasn’t enough, Bill Gates is now going to pay me US$245 for every person that I send this email to; and if they forward it someone else, I get another US$243! Ain’t he soo sweet!

Doing a bit of Math, if I send it to just 5 people and each of them send to 5 people each, I receive US$7300! Wow!

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