Just RS

BLOGGER BLUES! MOVED TO OPERA!

2006-05-03T14:16:00.000+08:00

Click here to check out the latest posts: http://my.opera.com/stratstrangler/blog/

The man who fought Suharto with a pen

2006-05-01T21:36:00.000+08:00

'In recent years, the Indonesian writer Pramoedya Ananta Toer, who died yesterday at age 81, came to be known as a chain-smoking curmudgeon and consistent critic of the corrupt legacies of the Suharto regime and western-style consumerism. But if anyone ever deserved the right to be the grumpy contrarian — a south-east Asian Günter Grass, the German author known for his pointed social criticism — then Pramoedya was it...' More

Did she borrow or did she steal?

2006-05-01T10:07:00.000+08:00

'Kaavya's this girl with awesome grades and parents who were obsessed about her getting into Harvard. They even hired a college admissions consultant, which lots of parents do these days. This consultant reads some of Kaavya's writing, which happened to be about a girl whose parents want her to get into Harvard so badly that she never has any fun. The consultant sends it to a big agent, who sells it to a book packager, who makes a deal with a big publisher. The book is called 'How Opal Mehta Got Kissed, Got Wild, and Got a Life'. And Kaavya, just 17 at the time, got close to US$500,000 for a two-book contract. She also got a movie deal with DreamWorks. Oh, and she got into Harvard, too...' More / Book pulled off shelves

How pizza became the American pie

2006-04-29T21:51:00.000+08:00

'Almost every American food—from egg foo yung to empanadas — is covered in the phone book under the generic heading "Restaurants". Only pizza stands alone. Pizza, a Johnny-come-lately compared with such long-standing national favourites as the hamburger and hot dog, has secured a special place on the American table. Everybody likes pizza. Even those who claim to be immune to its charms must deign to have the occasional slice; a staggering 93 percent of Americans eat pizza at least once a month. According to one study, each man, woman, and child consumes an average of 23 pounds of pie every year.'

And we thought politics was all bullshit!

2006-04-29T20:12:00.000+08:00

'I have lived through and suffered the worst abuse imaginable. Not many other politicians have weathered the beating that I have taken in such a short period of time. I have been the subject of speculation, innuendo and plain lies on a scale unseen by most politicians in their entire careers. So, although I have no pearls to offer, my lack of wisdom is compensated by some pointers that I have earned the right to give to aspiring politicians. Politics is not about power, position or personal wealth. Politics is a process in which we can make a difference to others. Politics is that fire in your belly that makes you want to change the world...' More

Diabolus in Musica.: The Devil's music

2006-04-29T17:26:00.000+08:00

'On the surface there might appear to be no link between Black Sabbath, Wagner's Gotterdammerung, West Side Story and the theme tune to the Simpsons. But all of them rely heavily on tritones, a musical interval that spans three whole tones, like the diminished fifth or augmented fourth. This interval, the gap between two notes played in succession or simultaneously, was branded Diabolus in Musica or the Devil's Interval by medieval musicians... More

Hammer & tickle: The comedy of communism

2006-04-29T16:43:00.000+08:00

'Communism is the only political system to have created its own international brand of comedy. The standard interpretation is that communist jokes were a form of resistance. But they were also a safety valve for the regimes and jokes were told by the rulers as well as the ruled — even Stalin told some good ones...' More

Bruce Lee is a hero in Bosnia

2006-04-29T16:19:00.000+08:00

'It may seem odd that a city trying to overcome its reputation for violence would choose as a symbol a man famous for artfully snapping vertebrae. But violence is relative, nowhere more so than Bosnia. Lee never used a weapon designed after the Han dynasty. His preference, famously, was the nunchaku, a weapon of wood and rope with origins in the tools of Asian subsistence agriculture. Nobody ever massacred a village with nunchucks...' More

The million-dollar news babe

2006-04-28T16:07:00.000+08:00

'Katie Couric was appointed by CBS as the first solo female anchor of a network evening news show in the USA... Couric, who will earn in the region of £8.5m per year, is an astounding and, to the British, largely incomprehensible confection... (a) tough chick with the face of America’s sweetheart and a plausible, caring manner makes a lot of money in television... (But) Couric is not some breakfast-show bimbette, but the best television journalist in the world...' More

MGG Pillai RIP

2006-04-28T12:43:00.000+08:00

Sledgehammer journalist MGG Pillai, one of the first freelancers to take to Cyberspace to rant on politics and other controversial issues, died this morning at Universiti Hospital due to heart complications. He was 67. A battle-hardened veteran (he covered the Vietnam War), Pillai wielded a highly provocative, fearless and entertaining loose-cannon style to attack the clowns running the Malaysian government, as well as their rapacious cronies and fatuous minions, on his Web site (MGGPillai.com). His sensational tales of machinations in the corridors of power will be sorely missed. More / Farewell, MGG / Tributes

Vivaldi: The Four Seasons

2006-04-28T10:17:00.000+08:00

(Click on image.)

'Banana-jawed' mammal linked to sound skill

2006-04-27T19:24:00.000+08:00

'Paleontologists at the Duke Lemur Center have assembled a new picture of a 35-million-year-old fossil mammal — and they even have added a hint of sound. By painstakingly measuring hundreds of specimens of a fossil mammal called Thyrohyrax, recovered from the famous fossil beds of Egypt's Fayum Province, the researchers determined that males of this now-extinct species — and only males — had oversized, swollen lower jaws shaped much like a banana... More

MIT chemist cracks secret of Nature's cures

2006-04-27T19:21:00.000+08:00

'MIT scientists have just learned another lesson from nature. After years of wondering how organisms managed to create self-medications, such as anti-fungal agents, chemists have discovered the simple secret. Scientists already knew that a particular enzyme was able to coax a reaction out of stubborn chemical concoctions to generate a large family of medically valuable compounds called halogenated natural products. The question was, how do they do it?...' More

Seagate's new 750G drive whirrs to the top

2006-04-27T19:13:00.000+08:00

'Seagate's Barracuda 7200.10 750GB drive, the largest hard drive to date, sets new high-water marks for capacity, price, and performance. Its speed was especially notable on the PC World Test Center's write tests, where it came within a hair's breadth of matching Western Digital's swift 10,000-rpm Raptor X...' More / Expanding universe of drive capacity

Happy sweet sixteen, Hubble Space Telescope!

2006-04-26T10:24:00.000+08:00

'To celebrate the NASA-ESA Hubble Space Telescope’s 16 years of success, the two space agencies are releasing a mosaic image of the magnificent starburst galaxy, Messier 82 (M82). It is the sharpest wide-angle view ever obtained of M82, a galaxy remarkable for its webs of shredded clouds and flame-like plumes of glowing hydrogen blasting out from its central regions...' More

Malaysia considers Islam in space

2006-04-26T10:21:00.000+08:00

'Malaysia is due to send an astronaut into space with the Russians next year. The country's first spaceman is almost certain to be a Muslim, which raises a number of practical issues. For instance, Muslims wash before they pray but not only is water a precious commodity in space, but it is also impractical in weightlessness...' More

Why Mailer still matters

2006-04-25T18:18:00.000+08:00

'"If the world is destroyed in the course of this century, I think it will be because of religious wars," says Norman Mailer... He goes on to sketch "the absolute waste of huge spiritual imbroglios between different nations..." More

The Harvard girl who stole for her novel

2006-04-25T16:23:00.000+08:00

'A Harvard University sophomore with a highly publicized first novel acknowledged Monday that she had borrowed material, accidentally, from another author's work and promised to change her book for future editions. Kaavya Viswanathan's "How Opal Mehta Got Kissed, Got Wild, and Got a Life," published in March by Little, Brown and Company, was the first of a two-book deal reportedly worth six figures. But on Sunday, the Harvard Crimson cited seven passages in Viswanathan's book that closely resemble the style and language of the novels of Megan McCafferty...' More

Iraqi 9/11 film actor denied US visa

2006-04-24T16:49:00.000+08:00

'An Iraqi actor who plays the lead hijacker in a new film about 9/11 has been refused a visa to attend the premiere in the US. Lewis Alsamari was told by the US embassy in London that he is unlikely to be allowed to enter the country for the first public screening of United 93 in New York, where it is due to open the Tribeca Film Festival. The film tells of the events surrounding United Airlines Flight 93 on September 11, 2001, when passengers revolted against four hijackers...' More

O, the power we waste!

2006-04-24T02:43:00.000+08:00

'All around the house we bleed power. The modern home is permanently on standby, full of equipment that sits "half on", waiting to spring immediately to life when we ask it to. Figures from the Energy Saving Trust on standby power use in the UK home are astonishing:

* Stereos on standby cost £290m and produce 1.6 million tonnes of CO2
* VCRs and DVD cost £263m and produce 1.06 million tonnes of CO2
* TVs on standby cost £88m and produce 480,000 tonnes of CO2

But there is a bigger culprit out there: the personal computer, as power supply manufacturer Scott Richards explains. "The PC is a special case because if you don't turn it off completely, in other words pull the switch on the back, it's always drawing some kind of power..."' More

Nuclear Nightmare: 20 years since Chernobyl

2006-04-23T05:28:00.000+08:00

'Chernobyl was just one of the devastating nuclear debacles that have taken place in the last 45 years in the former Soviet Union... These photographs by Robert Knoth, from the regions of Mayak, Semipalatinsk, Chernobyl and Tomsk-7, are testimony to the continuing medical, economic and social consequences of the thriving nuclear industry in Eastern Europe...' More

Global warming: A load of hot air?

2006-04-22T20:29:00.000+08:00

'Hardly a day goes by without a new dire warning about climate change. But some claims are more extreme than others, giving rise to fears that the problem is being oversold and damaging the issue. How much has the planet warmed up over the past century? Most people reckon between two and three degrees. They are not even close. The real figure, according to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) is 0.6C...' More

A short history of steam-powered aircraft

2006-04-22T20:20:00.000+08:00

'"Well, how does she look?" Bill Besler asked observers at the Oakland Airport one morning in 1933. That he could be heard distinctly, though he spoke from the cockpit of an experimental biplane speeding 200 feet above their heads, spooked the crowd: "Dead stick," the whispers circulated. Besler then throttled up over San Francisco Bay, leaving a wisp of water vapor condensing in the sun--and a throng of squinting witnesses to the first documented flight of a controllable airplane powered by steam...' More

A question of time in Sri Lanka

2006-04-22T20:14:00.000+08:00

'What's in half an hour? A lot more than only 30 minutes or 1,800 seconds — as Sri Lankans discovered last week. On 14 April, the government adjusted Sri Lanka's standard time to GMT+5:30 from GMT+6, which had been used since 1996. In doing so, the government completely ignored expert views of scientists and intellectuals. It listened instead to a vocal minority of nationalists, astrologers and Buddhist monks who had lobbied the newly elected president Mahinda Rajapaksa to 'restore the clock to original Sri Lankan time'. Not for the first time, science and reason lost out to nationalism and political expediency...' More

CSI: Sherlock Holmes?

2006-04-22T20:11:00.000+08:00

'Most people have heard of the world's greatest detective, Sherlock Holmes. But many may not know that Holmes, a fictional character, engaged in activities that were quite real. How so? The detective's creator, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, had an intense interest in the budding field of forensics. Doyle was inspired by Dr. Joseph Bell, a forensics expert, to study all aspects of an individual, and use science and deductive reasoning as intellectual tools. This in turn helped shape Holmes's character, and made the sleuth appear more lifelike than any fictional character before him... Holmes only scratches the surface. E.J. Wagner, a well-known crime historian and lecturer, has taken it one step further...' More