Links For A Sunday Morning

• The Most Interesting New Tech Startup of 2009
  

  I think the most promising new startup of 2009 is one of the least likely: The executive branch of the federal government of the United States.

• Your answers to 10 tricky children's questions
• Spotting Lies: Listen, Don't Look
  Forget what you’ve learned from years of watching cop shows on television. Liars do not have trouble making eye contact. The guilty don’t fidget. Culprits don’t sweat more. As a matter of fact, research indicates that innocent people tend to be more nervous when they are being questioned because they are very intent on proving that they didn’t do it. Liars come in with a script in their heads.
• Gene May Determine How Much Sleep You Need
  A team of researchers has found a genetic mutation that appears to allow some people to get by on less sleep than others.
• The Evolution of Blogging
  

  The next generation of blogging systems needs to account for the fact that information — and most importantly, conversations — flow via email, Twitter, instant messages and other formats. In order to do that, the innards of blogging systems need to be rethought.

• Digsby Joins the Dark Side, Uses Your PC to Make Money
  Great! I have to look for another messenger now.
• Twitter Blog: Project Retweet: Phase One
  

  We’re planning to formalize retweeting by officially adding it to our platform and Twitter.com.

• Stand Up and Eat: Plates for Parties
  Convenient.
• How Men And Women Argue – flowchart
• WP.me – shorten your links
  WordPress.com adds a URL shortener.
• Movie Trailer – Wake up Sid
• Movie Trailer- Main Aur Mrs Khanna
• Movie trailer – Blue
• 'Compromised' template reason behind fake notes: CBI
  ‘Our investigations have revealed that the 2005 secret security template which was introduced as part of the new design adopted then has been compromised,’ CBI director Ashwini Kumar said.
  Asked, if the country was still using the security template, he said, ‘yes’.
  Waah!
• Probably Bad News
  Probably Bad News is a collection of journalism’s worst hours – not the evilest, not the darkest, and certainly not our finest.
• The underrated gems of A. R. Rahman
• Wikipedia enters a new chapter
  The online encyclopedia is about to hit 3m articles in English – but growth is stalling as ‘inclusionists’ and ‘deletionists’ fight for control.
• Brazil TV host 'used murder to boost ratings'
  The host of a Brazilian TV crime show has been accused of ordering a series of murders to snuff out rival drug traffickers — and boost his own ratings.
  Wait till our TV channels find out.
• Kampala to Mumbai
  Meet Cajetan Boy, the man who wrote the story on which Kaminey is based.
• Beautiful Hand Drawn Typography
• Help test Google’s next-generation search engine
• How To Send Completely Anonymous Emails
• Building a Better Baggie
  What would a legal pack of marijuana cigarettes look like? Four design firms visualise.
• The Simpsons postage stamps by the US Postal Service
• Cheese & Burger Society
  Those are some yummy looking burgers.
• Last Suppers
  A series of photographs documenting former Death Row prisoners’ requests for their last meal before execution.
• SMS Farming
  A text message a day keeps losses away, say farmers who have subscribed to Reuters Lite on their mobile phones.
  Every day, at seven, 100,000 farmers in Maharashtra, Haryana and Punjab receive messages tailor-made to their specific crop and market requirements. Each of them has paid an average of Rs 50-Rs 100 a month for this service. Reuters Market Light (RML), the SMS-based information service targeted at farmers, was launched two years ago by the $13.4 billion Thomson Reuters Group.
• Livraria da Vila
  Nicely designed book store.
• Movie Trailer – Lemonade
  More than 70,000 advertising professionals have lost their jobs in this Great Recession. Lemonade is about what happens when people who were once paid to be creative in advertising are forced to be creative with their own lives.
• A Visit to India's First Wal-Mart (a.k.a. Best Price)
• Why Exercise Won't Make You Thin
  In short, it’s what you eat, not how hard you try to work it off, that matters more in losing weight.
  This is already generating a lot of debate.
• The Real HORROR
  RGV reacts to movie reviews of Agyaat. My review – Scared looking people walking past even scarier looking vegetation. No wonder he has enough footage for two movies.
• Michael Pritchard's water filter turns filthy water drinkable
  Too much of the world lacks access to clean drinking water. Engineer Michael Pritchard did something about it — inventing the portable Lifesaver filter, which can make the most revolting water drinkable in seconds.
• Blind Search
  Type in a search query above, hit search then vote for the column which you believe best matches your query. The columns are randomised with every query.
  The goal of this site is simple, we want to see what happens when you remove the branding from search engines. How differently will you perceive the results?

Links For A Sunday Morning

• Top 10 Tricks for Making Your Playlists Rock
• Pictures – Greenland
• Sushi Goes Desi
  Its creator in Japan had always envisioned sushi as fast food, to be savoured even by the road side. Here is what it is doing on Indian streets.
  But isn’t is supposed to be served fresh.
• Is The Rediff Redesign To Blame For Top Exec Exits At Rediff?
  And you thought its childs play.
  Meanwhile, Outlook has also redesigned. Nothing impressive but the multi-page articles are gone. Good.
• EC under scanner, critics to show EVMs not foolproof
  Here we go…
• Web attack 'aimed at one blogger'
  A ‘massively co-ordinated’ attack on websites including Google, Facebook and Twitter was directed at one individual, it has been confirmed.
• I just need to wait this out
• The Longest Way 1.0 – one year walk/beard grow time lapse
  November 9th 2007 – November 13th 2008. One year on foot – 4646km through China. Unlimited beard & hair growth.
  Nice.
• Nasa proves why cricket balls really swing
  

  What the commentators, cricketers I much admire, have been saying about swing is plain wrong. They’ve been talking about the clouds, how the new ball won’t swing until the lacquer has come off, and it’s just rubbish.

• T-Shirts
  Some really nice tee designs. They seem better with the titles though…hmm…
• Rupert Murdoch plans charge for all news websites by next summer
• The Web of Seinfeld
• The 7 vices of highly creative people
• 15 More Fantastic Social Media Resources for Foodies
• Telephone Terrorist
  A TSG investigation unmasks the leader of Pranknet and the miscreants behind a year-long wave of phone call criminality.
  

  Coalescing in an online chat room, members of the group, known as Pranknet, use the telephone to carry out cruel and outrageous hoaxes, which they broadcast live around-the-clock on the Internet. Masquerading as hotel employees, emergency service workers, and representatives of fire alarm companies, ‘Dex’ and his cohorts have successfully prodded unwitting victims to destroy hotel rooms and lobbies, set off sprinkler systems, activate fire alarms, and damage assorted fast food restaurants.

• Complete list of the 2009 International Design Excellence Award winners
  There is an Indian one too featuring stackable buckets.
• New Flickr Search
  Nice.
• The largest hot-air balloon gathering in the world, Chambley, France
  Fab pic.
• Tartelette
  Yummy looking pics.
• ‘Best’ for Last?
  Or Should You Sign That E-Mail With Sincerely? Regards? Cheers? or L-, L-, Love?
  I don’t close client mails with anything not even my name, if I have already had a conversation with the person. The sign-off’s are a stupid formaility and mostly seem fake or just unnecessary. As for personal mails, you don’t have to think…you just go with the flow of the mail.
• Closing the Gender Divide
  The man girdle. Will need one of those soon.
• The Shaker Design Philosophy
  Don’t make something unless it is both necessary and useful; but if it is both necessary and useful, don’t hesitate to make it beautiful.
• Twittergraphy
  On the similarities between the telegraph and Twitter.
  

  During the late 19th-century telegraphy boom, some carriers charged extra for words longer than 15 characters and for messages longer than 10 words. Thus, the cheapest telegram was often limited to 150 characters.
  Concerns for economy, as well as a desire for secrecy, fueled a boom in telegraphic code books that reduced both common and complex phrases into single words.

• Michael Arrington snared in libel verdict: lessons for us all
• The Top 100 Web Sites of 2009 – Reviews by PC Magazine
• Pixar Short – Partly Cloudy
  Sooper!
• Clueless in South Block: SM Krishna is yet to earn his spurs
  Don’t know why and how his reputation has been built. He was the CM here for a term and I didn’t find anything impressive about him.
• Seinfeld Summed Up
  Nice.
• TV Contestants: Tired, Tipsy and Pushed to Brink
• How Different Groups Spend Their Day – Interactive Graphic
  The American Time Use Survey asks thousands of American residents to recall every minute of a day. Here is how people over age 15 spent their time in 2008.
• What’s the Japanese equivalent of [enter foreign web service here]? and What’s the Korean equivalent of Western web service?

Links For A Sunday Morning

• Seeking Delhi's 'phantom squirter'
  Every day tourists all over the world fall victim to scams aimed at relieving them of some money, and often some dignity. The BBC’s former South Asia correspondent, Sam Miller, has been on the streets of the Indian capital, Delhi, investigating one such scam.
• Axixa, A Hygienic Way Of Peeing On The Walls
  We need these here…one every few feet…
• How To Discover The RSS Feed Of A Webpage If A Link Isn’t There
  And generate a RSS feed if there isn’t one.
• WordPress 2.9 Features Vote Results
• The Bikini Virgins
  Why Indian girls talk so much about bikinis but don’t wear them.
  Open mag finally has a proper website, so am linking to a few articles. No RSS feed though. Nice neat site built on Drupal. Will have to wait and see how long it remains that way. Wish the archives were easily accessible though.
• Married to the Stud
  What do you do when your husband is a bodybuilder?
• Where are They Now?
  Every year one teenager tops the IIT-JEE, probably the toughest entrance exam in the world. Overnight he becomes some kind of a celebrity. There have been only about fifty such toppers in the history of IIT. We went in search of some of them to find out how their lives turned out.
• Why Indian Men Are Still Boys
  A decade after the New Indian Male was heralded, why are violence, boorishness and emotional clumsiness still the hallmarks of the average Indian man?
• Status Updates Since My Mother Became My Facebook Friend
  
• Top 15 Social Media Resources for Foodies
• Can Do
  How Benjamin Franklin turned America into the land of invention. New post by Maira Kalman.
• Out of the Kitchen, Onto the Couch
  Today the average American spends a mere 27 minutes a day on food preparation (another four minutes cleaning up); that’s less than half the time that we spent cooking and cleaning up when Julia arrived on our television screens. It’s also less than half the time it takes to watch a single episode of “Top Chef” or “Chopped” or “The Next Food Network Star.” What this suggests is that a great many Americans are spending considerably more time watching images of cooking on television than they are cooking themselves — an increasingly archaic activity they will tell you they no longer have the time for.
• Movie trailer – Fantastic Mr. Fox
• Twittering cricketers
  Phillip Hughes became the first player to “tweet” his own axing from the team.
• Amazon and the Quran
  In the Kindle version of the Quran the authors are listed as Muhammad and Gabriel (Jibrail).
  
• In Ann Arbor, designing a news site that doesn’t look like a news site
  I suppose this is only a phase in the evolution of the site.
• Movie Trailer – A Serious Man
  New film from the Coen brothers.
• Movie promo – What’s Your Rashee
  Ashutosh Gowarikar’s next.
• JK Wedding Entrance Dance
  Nice (12 million views!)
  And the parodies are already here – JK Divorce Entrance Dance. We’ve all seen the JK Wedding Entrance Dance. Now let’s see what happens 6 months later!
• UK's national ID card unveiled
  Should we expect something similar?
• If the Twitter community was 100 people…
• Palin's Resignation: The Edited Version
  We asked V.F.’s red-pencil-wielding executive literary editor, Wayne Lawson, together with representatives from the research and copy departments, to whip it into publishable shape. Here is the colorful result.
  
• Polite umbrella
  The Polite Umbrella folds up when you squeeze past people.
• How To Hijack 'Every iPhone In The World'
  On Thursday, two researchers plan to reveal an unpatched iPhone bug that could virally infect phones via SMS.
  If you receive a text message on your iPhone any time after Thursday afternoon containing only a single square character, Charlie Miller would suggest you turn the device off. Quickly.
• New Front Page!
  For Twitter.
• Mattress Dominoes World Record Attempt
  
• Exhibit A: Will one Chicago woman’s Tweet cost her $50,000?
• Audio File Formats Explained in Simple Terms
• How Bill Gates uses Office
• Resume/ Infographics
• Pepsi vs. Coca-Cola Logo Evolution
  That says a lot.
• Mourning the Death of Handwriting
• Women are getting more beautiful
  Ahaan…
• Choco pillow
  For chocolate covered dreams. (There are other nice pillows in there.)
• Summer Books 2009: Recommended reading list
• How Bill Gates Blew $258 million in India's HIV Corridor
  The purpose was noble, the money generous. But the software mogul’s charity for HIV prevention in India has failed to make a lasting impact.
  Something seemed fishy which they just decided to withdraw.
• 7 Surprising Facts About Sleep
• Apple joins forces with record labels
  …to stimulate digital sales of albums by bundling a new interactive booklet, sleeve notes and other interactive features with music downloads. But the interesting bit is that Apple is racing to offer a portable, full-featured, tablet-sized computer in time for the Christmas shopping season, in what the entertainment industry hopes will be a new revolution.
• High Five Escalator at Improv Everywhere
  

  For our latest mission, Agent Lathan gave out 2,000 high fives by standing next to a subway escalator during the morning rush. Five additional agents spread out along the adjacent stairs, holding signs that prepared commuters for the upcoming high five fun.

• Star Wars: Uncut
  

  You and 472 other people have the chance to recreate Star Wars: A New Hope. Below is the entire movie split up into 15 second clips. Click on one of the scenes to claim it, film it, and upload it. You can have up to three scenes! When we’re all done, we’ll stitch it all together and watch the magic happen.

• Top 5 Funniest Fake Facebook Pages

Links For A Sunday Morning

• What ID card boss Nilekani plans to do
  Don’t know why everybody is saying that it will weed out illegal migrants. How do you prove whether somebody is Indian or not? A lot of Indians don’t have any form of identification, just like the migrants. Or even if they do (like they say that the PAN or the LPG customers database is going to be used), how can you be sure that it isn’t fake?
• Fix your terrible, insecure passwords in five minutes
• Some movie trailers

  Movie Trailer – Ponyo
  Hayao Miyazaki’s latest.

  Movie Trailer – Whip It
  Drew Barrymore’s directorial debut starring Ellen Page.

  Movie trailer – Amelia
  Mira Nair’s biopic on the noted aviation pioneer Amelia Earhart.

  Movie Trailer – Alice In Wonderland
  Tim Burton’s much anticipated movie.

  Movie Trailer – The Time Travellers Wife
  Based on the popular novel.

  Movie Trailer – Inglourious Basterds
  Quentin Tarantino’s next starring Brad Pitt.

• TRAI Says, “Minimum Broadband Speed = 2 MBPS”
  Right! Everything 64kbps upwards is called “broadband” here.
• Twitter 101 for Business – A Special Guide
• Equal Rights for Men
  Hell yeah!
• TidySongs
  A program that will fix any missing or misspelled song details, add album artwork, remove duplicates songs and organize your music.
  Looks good. Haven’t tried it though.
• the Movie title stills collection
  Nice.
• How to Master Text Highlighting with Your Mouse
• This guy nails Karan Thapar’s questioning style
• Comic – News And Likes
  News and “Likes” do not always go together very well
• The Ultimate Obama Insider
  Valerie Jarrett is one of the president’s most influential advisers. So what does she do, exactly?
• Recipes for 101 Simple Salads for the Season
  I don’t even remember the last time I had a salad.
• Hitler Subtitler gets a cheap font CD
  Its getting harder to find subjects for the Hitler parodies it seems…this one’s not bad though.
• 10 Worst Evolutionary Designs
• Matt Held Studios – Facebook Portraits
  Portraits out of Facebook profile pics. Nice.
• Speechless: Dilbert Creator’s Struggle to Regain His Voice
• How to Behave: New Rules for Highly Evolved Humans
• How to Troubleshoot a Flaky Internet Connection
  Could’ve used this a few days back.
• The longest solar eclipse of the century – Pictures
• Caitlin Daley
  Thats a great business card. Am thinking of stealing the idea.
• Do You Have These 11 Traits of Highly Creative People?
• Walter Iooss – Athlete – Gallery
  Great pics. Do see.
• Yahoo’s front page makeover
• Help Remedies – over-the-counter healthcare products packaging
  Nice.
• Nasty, brutish and short
  Aakash Chopra’s new column looks at various aspects of cricket from the player’s perspective.
• Dooce’s Dilemma
  Heather B. Armstrong is living her dream by staying at home with the kids and blogging about her personal life while turning a profit. How long will she be able to keep it up?
• The Most Influential Women In Media
• Fired from the Canon
  List of 10 highly regarded books that you shouldn’t read. There is One Hundred Years of Solitude in there…hmm…
• Pictures – Our muddy world
  

  Combine two of the most common materials found on the surface of our planet – dirt and water – and you get mud, which, in turn, can be played in, struggled through, rubbed on for medicinal value, or just worn for fun. Collected over the past few months from festivals sporting events and more, you’ll find here photographs of people around the world playing with, wallowing in, wearing and just dealing with mud – one of the filthiest entries on the Big Picture to date.

• Comic – Estimation
  
• Shakespeare sketch – A Small Rewrite
  Live Shakespeare sketch called ‘A Small Rewrite’ made for Comic Relief, with Hugh Laurie as Shakespeare and Rowan Atkinson as the editor.
  
• The Anatomy Of The Twitter Attack
  Details of how Twitter was hacked recently
• 8 Tips To Effectively Boost Your Wireless Router Signal
• How to Pack a Bag for Travel

Links For A Sunday Morning

• Compulsory Voting Bill introduced in Lok Sabha
  It proposes a fine of Rs 500 or two days’ imprisonment or forfeiture of the ration card of the person who fails to cast his vote.
  How ironic.
• Comic – Just a question
  
• Some E-Books Are More Equal Than Others
  

  This morning, hundreds of Amazon Kindle owners awoke to discover that books by a certain famous author had mysteriously disappeared from their e-book readers. These were books that they had bought and paid for—thought they owned.

• In Afghanistan – Pictures – Part One and Part Two
• iPhone App Cupcakes
  Nice
• Tata Docomo pricing throws gauntlet
  Introduces billing pulse of one second. Once number portability comes the space will become very competitive.
• Exclusive Interview With Ajit Balakrishnan On Rediff Redesign, Search, Mobile, Ad Revenue & Its Future Plans
  I have never understood Rediff’s strategy when its come to its homepage design. This redesign leaves me even more confused.
• Breaking News Online: How One 19-Year Old Is Shaking Up Online Media
• fold – greeting cards
  Nice.
• Pain is my alarm clock
• Eclipse fever in India village
  An obscure village in the eastern Indian state of Bihar has suddenly shot into limelight as the best place in India to watch a total solar eclipse on 22 July.
• Cats Do Control Humans, Study Finds
• Gandhi’s Last Stand.
  This somewhat blurred photograph had been pictured about 37 years ago, at the moment when Nathuram Godse shot the Father of our Nation, Mahatma Gandhi.
  I doubt if it is real.
• First Person: Frank Ahearn
  

  Six years ago, I spotted a guy in his late forties in a bookstore in New Jersey. He was buying books about offshore banking and a travel guide to Costa Rica. He paid with a credit card. Afterwards, when he sat down in the bookshop cafe, I decided to talk to him. “I bet you want to buy a condo in Costa Rica and bank your money in Belize,” I said. “But if you’re running from someone, you’d better avoid paying for those books with your credit card.” We talked for a while. Before I left, I gave him my business card. He was the first person I helped to disappear.
  Since then, I’ve helped more than 30 people vanish – people who had problems with ex-spouses, with business partners or with criminals. Normally, it takes me between one month and three to make the necessary preparations. Depending on the case, I charge between $10,000 and $30,000, but I work free of charge for women who are being stalked.

• 10 Stunning (And Useful) Stats About Twitter
  They aren’t ’stunning’ but anyway…
• The Festival of San Fermin, 2009 – Pictures
• Savita Bhabhi’s creator decides to end campaign
• How to Get Rid of Black Circles Under Your Eyes
• 50 Scientifically Proven Ways to Be Persuasive
• TOI Online is world’s No.1 newspaper website
  Based on pageviews and stats from ComScore when most other ratings have decided to drop page views as a yardstick.
• New World, Old Strengths
  Hindustan Times newspaper has redesigned.

Links For A Sunday Morning

• 2009: Most Anticipated Books
• Open a Banana Like A Monkey
  Apparently our way is inefficient.
• Roger Federer Unbuttoned
  

  People develop Federer obsessions the way teenagers have crushes. They can’t get the guy out of their heads. The late novelist David Foster Wallace, a devotee, said of one Federer forehand against Andre Agassi that, “It was impossible. It was like something out of ‘The Matrix.’”
  I think that gets us close to the heart of the matter. Let me put this bluntly: Is Roger Federer part of a Matrix-like artificial reality or is he flesh and blood?

• Scratch
  Nice product idea. I hope they include the recipe too. I saw something similar in Namdhari’s for sambhar. It could work for other dishes too.
• Study: Night owls may benefit from evening strength
• Speeding Up RSS
  So now RSS isn’t fast or ‘real-time’ enough. I don’t get this obsession for real-time these days. Having/wanting to know everything that happens that very instant.
• Find Creative Commons images with Image Search on Google
• Weight loss tips for geeks
• Fotoglif – One source, thousands of new photos a day, the worlds top photographers and agencies, free to view & free to use
  The pics are great…the catch though is that the image embed has Google ads too. Though you get paid a percentage if they get clicked on.
• Introducing the Google Chrome OS
  After years of speculation its finally here.
• Scientists claim sperm 'first'
  Scientists in Newcastle claim to have created human sperm in the laboratory in what they say is a world first.
• Vote for WordPress 2.9 Media Features
• allt eller inget
  This guy takes pics and then blends them to create amazing scenes.
• Tipo/Cali grafia – a set on Flickr
  Nice calligraphy work.
• Kaminey – Songs
  When I got to know the title I wondered if there would be a title song. There sure is and it is the best song in the album. And it goes without saying that the whole album is littered with Gulzar gems. That would need a whole another post. Anyway…
• Fancy Fast Food
  Extreme makeovers of fast food items.
• President Obama's first 167 days – Pictures
  Many of them are from the White House photostream on Flickr by Pete Souza, who has one of the coolest jobs in the world.
• Premiere Issues
  Covers of the inaugural issues of magazines.
• Facebook Activism: Lots of Clicks, but Little Sticks
  Facebook’s Easy Virtue: ‘Click-Through Activism’ Broad but Fleeting.
• What The Trend?
  Find out what’s trending on Twitter and more importantly…why.
  Also What the Hashtag?! – the user-editable encyclopedia for Twitter hashtags
• How To: Iron a Dress Shirt and when you have – How To: Fold a Dress Shirt
• The Nike Experiment: How the Shoe Giant Unleashed the Power of Personal Metrics
  On the Nike+ sensor system.
• Interactive – How the human brain works

Links For A Sunday Morning

• Obama, a stickler for pronunciation
• India’s secret torture chambers
  They are our own Gitmos. Where, far away from the eyes of the law, ‘enemies of the state’ are made to ’sing’.
• Not safe for work: Did Techcrunch really kill Blognation? Time – and the courts – will tell
  On the Sam Sethi lawsuit against Techcrunch.
• Iran or Star Wars?
  
• Twitter followers 'can be bought'
  Twitter users who lack an audience for their messages can now buy followers. Australian social media marketing company uSocial is offering a paid service that finds followers for users of the micro-blogging service.
• MTV's brand new look
• Federal IT Dashboard
  The IT Dashboard is a new website enabling federal agencies and the general public to view details of federal information technology investments.
  Fancy.
• Introducing gdgt
• Pirate Bay's Weird New Business Plan
  The new owner of the swashbuckling Swedish peer-to-peer outfit will bundle up the collective Internet bandwidth of its users and resell it to ISPs.
• Dil Bole Hadippa – Theatrical Trailer
  Looks horrible.
• Kaminey – Dhan Te Nan – Full Song
  Like me, if you can’t wait till tomorrow for the music release. Its Dhan Te Nan time
• Worst Tech Commercial Ever, Probably – Microsoft
  The Seinfeld ones seem better now.
• 3 apps to check username availability across all sites at once
• Tell me – I forget. Provoke me – I engage. Tease me – I buy. Love me – I come back
  Nice.
• Spezify
  Spezify is a search tool presenting results from a large number of websites in different visual ways.
• Can We Blame Our Bad Behavior on Stone-Age Genes?
  Why Do We Rape, Kill and Sleep Around? The fault, dear Darwin, lies not in our ancestors, but in ourselves.
• Low-Cost Cures
  World-class healthcare at affordable rates in rural and semi-urban areas. It’s not a paradox, as this Bangalore-based start-up is showing.
• India’s New Retailers
  Microfinance institutions are going beyond financial products to sell phones, fridges and more. Everyone gains: rural consumers, rural sellers, companies and MFIs.
  Love the ChotuKool refrigerator
• Color Inspiration: Indian Matchboxes & Film Posters
• Are humans cruel to be kind?
  Making sense of human spite.

Links For A Sunday Morning

• I don’t know either why Anu has an image problem
  The Anu Malik story by Vir Sanghvi.
• Why did you leave, I thought we were having fun?
• Lisa Marie Presley on Michael Jackson
• Twitter Guide Book – How To, Tips and Instructions by Mashable
• Govt Bans Popular Toon Porn Site Savitabhabhi.com; Mounting Concern Over Censorship
• 35 Examples Of Stunning Macro Photography
• 'Stoned wallabies make crop circles'
  Australian wallabies are eating opium poppies and creating crop circles as they hop around ‘as high as a kite’.
  Thats some story.
• Advertising designs for Container Corporation of America
  See also…gallery 1 and 3.
• Can You Get Fit in Six Minutes a Week?
  Could it be that most of us are spending more time than we need to trying to get fit? The answer, a growing number of these sports scientists believe, may be yes.
• Nilekani quits Infosys to take up government project
  which is…an IT-driven programme to provide unique identification numbers to citizens of the country.
• County's crime rate at 20 year low after family jailed
  A county’s crime rate has fallen to a 20-year low after a crimimal family was jailed, a chief constable has reported.
• The Indian soap opera that's taken Brazil by storm
  

  As I go to the embassy and open my e-mail, there are the normal clutch of commercial news letters, trade enquiries, complaints about visa or passport services, invitations for events and so on.
  But these days, also something a little bit more unusual. These are queries about the significance of the bindi. ‘Can a sari be stitched, or worn without a blouse?’ Or ‘Is Kali the name of a curry or something spicier?’ and such other matters of Indian exotica. And all this in Brazil where I am the Indian ambassador, experiencing currently the strangest and strongest manifestation of India’s soft power that I have ever seen in my long and varied career.

• Twitter Creator On Iran: 'I Never Intended For Twitter To Be Useful'
  

  When I heard how Iranians were using my beloved creation for their own means—such as organizing a political movement and informing the outside world of the actions of a repressive regime—I couldn’t believe they’d ruined something so beautiful, simple, and absolutely pointless.

  

• Oscar expands best pic nominations to 10
• Twitter litter
  The problem with all of the ‘we’re tracking the most popular links on Twitter’ sites…
• Soccer in South Africa – Pictures
• Asia's Top 50 Internet People by Twitter Followers
• Pain and Posture: The Basics
• What Your Facial Hair Really Says About You
• Email patterns can predict impending doom
  Email logs can provide advance warning of an organisation reaching crisis point. That’s the tantalising suggestion to emerge from the pattern of messages exchanged by Enron employees.
• Ever Wondered What The Most Common Names On Facebook Are? Here’s A List
• Sania Mirza, Mugdha Godse, Celina Jaitley, Ranbir Kapoor, Lara Dutta
  I get that Globosport is managing them but build such crappy sites which don’t even belong in the 90’s.
• The story behind this website
  

  For as long as Stephen Harper is Prime Minister of Canada, I vow to send him every two weeks, mailed on a Monday, a book that has been known to expand stillness. That book will be inscribed and will be accompanied by a letter I will have written. I will faithfully report on every new book, every inscription, every letter, and any response I might get from the Prime Minister, on this website.
  Yann Martel

• The Story (so far) of Twitter – The poster
• Where There's Smoke…
  If they are going to have such graphics on the ciggy packs I might just start smoking again!
• WALL·E end title sequence
  and interview with end title sequence director Jim Capobianco and animator Alexander Woo from Pixar.
• Lifestream Backup
  Currently they support Flickr, Photobucket, Twitter, Google Docs, Delicious bookmarks and WordPress

Links For A Sunday Morning

• Jobs Had Liver Transplant
  Get well soon.
• 2012 – Trailer
  Looks good.
• Venn Diagram – Happiness in Business
• Rediff Message Board Gets Its First-Ever Decent Comment In 10 Years
  
• Grey-sky thinking: Nine extraordinary clouds
• 50 Books/50 Covers of 2008 selections
  After careful and considered review of more than 900 entries, the 2008 jury of the “AIGA 50 books/50 Covers” competition selected a group of 91 examples of outstanding book and book cover design produced in 2008.
• More Appropriate Wi-Fi Network Names for My Fellow Apartment Building Tenants
  
• CNBC Breaking News: Obama Swats A Fly
• A New Channel Is Born: ET Now Goes On Air With ‘The Economic Times Advantage’
• The 100 Most Beautiful Words in English
• I think I am definitely in love with you, but I'm not sure
• What is a Browser?
  Was the question we asked over 50 passersby of different ages and backgrounds in the Times Square in New York. Watch the many responses people came up with.
• New Glimpses of Life’s Puzzling Origins
• Fallen Princesses
  These works place Fairy Tale characters in modern day scenarios. In all of the images the Princess is placed in an environment that articulates her conflict. The ‘…happily ever after’ is replaced with a realistic outcome and addresses current issues.
• Opera Unite reinvents the Web
• The delicate art of the man-cry
  

  After his Australian Open defeat — in which he sobbed so unattractively and uncontrollably that a commercial break was needed to allow him time to gather himself — I was beginning to think Federer, like so many athletes before, was a lost cause.
  But on Sunday, as he stood at the podium with the Swiss national anthem playing and drops of rain falling from the Paris sky, Federer bowed his head, took a deep breath and went John Q on us.
  It was a thing of beauty: minimal facial distortion, perfectly paced tears, measured strength, snotless.

• Shutter Island – Trailer
  Martin Scorsese’s new film starring Leonardo Dicaprio.
• Hunch
  Has launched.

Links For A Sunday Morning

• Renting a house in Bangalore
  Lotsa good advice.
• Divorced City trader raffles off £1.5 million lifestyle
  A newly divorced City trader is raffling off his £1.5 million house and possessions because he claims they hold too many painful memories – but still stands to rake in £2.5 million profit from the competition.
  Smart guy. The competition – Win A New Life.
• Nude, Mona Lisa-Like Painting Surfaces
  Leonardo da Vinci, in a Renaissance version of Mad Magazine, may have painted his famous Mona Lisa in a number of ways, including nude. Now, a painting has surfaced that looks much like the original, sparking debate over just how far the master took his iconic painting.
• Iran's Presidential Election – Pictures
• IKEA drops investment plans in India worth $1bn
  
• In South Korea, All of Life Is Mobile
  Kim Hee-young, a statistics major at Sookmyung Women’s University in Seoul, wakes up in the morning when her mobile phone detonates an alarm, a loud Korean pop song. She checks weather forecasts on its screen before selecting what to wear.
  In the subway, Ms. Kim breezes through the turnstile after tapping the phone on a box that deducts the fare from a chip that contains a cash balance. While riding to school, she uses her mobile to check if a book has arrived at the library, slays aliens in a role-playing game, updates her Internet blog or watches TV.
  On campus, she and other students touch their mobiles to the electronic box by the door to mark their attendance.
  Experts say South Korea is the test case for the mobile future.
• WordPress 2.8 Release Jazzes Themes and Widgets
  Go upgrade.
• Swissarmius Cutlery Holder
  Nice.
• Silly facebook song
  Nice.
• Non-Safety Schools
  
• Aesop's Wife's Fables
  
• There's an art to writing on Facebook or Twitter — really
• Blind Prom
  Sarah Wilson’s photos from the prom for the Texas School for the Blind and Visually Impaired.
• The Uniform Project
  

  Starting May 2009, I have pledged to wear one dress for one year as an exercise in sustainable fashion. Here’s how it works: There are 7 identical dresses, one for each day of the week. Every day I will reinvent the dress with layers, accessories and all kinds of accouterments, the majority of which will be vintage, hand-made, or hand-me-down goodies.

  Very creative she is.

• Collections
  Collections are groups of related add-ons assembled for easy sharing. New feature on the add-ons site for Firefox which has been spruced up.
• Pixar Announces Up, Newt, The Bear and the Bow and Cars 2
  How did I miss this.
• Rubber Bandit
  Me wanting.
• Quick Fruit
  Nice packaging concept.
• Save J.D. Salinger's archives!
  Even if we have to save them from Salinger himself.
  If the man has written something over all these years we have the right to read it…umm..or something like that.
• Coming Soon: Facebook Usernames
  Well they are already here and mine is already taken
• Exclusive: The Future of Facebook Usernames
  
• But If We Started Dating It Would Ruin Our Friendship Where I Ask You To Do Things And You Do Them
  
• Color In Nature: Beetles
  Wow. Not for those who don’t like bugs.
• Slaughter House Files
  Ajmal Kasab and Abu Ismail could have been thwarted. Transcripts of police officers’ frantic calls from Ground Zero on 26/11 reveal a story of terrifying – almost criminal – official chaos.
• Yuva
  The recession hasn’t slowed down magazine launches. Apart from this one the recent ones I have spotted include – Open, Caravan and 360 Career Builder.
• How to Tell Real Breasts from Fake
  Without touching them that is. You can also tell by the way the skin seems too stretched out/taut. NSFW.
• Bowling At The Death
  Cricket’s stars are a ruthless lot, many have crashed and burned at its hallowed pitch. The game that begets a few stars is also father to thousands of disaffected, depressed men.
• Blogs Falling in an Empty Forest
  When the thrill of blogging is gone…
• Back in the rat race
  

  Avinash Yadav’s family lived on the frugal earnings of his father, who grazed cattle and sold milk for a living. But with an ICL cheque of about Rs 70 lakh, the Yadavs now have their own house in Benaras and a gleaming SX4 to give company to the cows and buffaloes in the courtyard. “I’m from a lower-middle class family. They don’t know what the BCCI is or what the ICL means. All they know is that because of cricket our lives have become more comfortable,” says the left-arm spinner, who didn’t go beyond playing a few Ranji Trophy games because of Murali Kartik’s presence in the Central Zone side.

• Few of the “Check please” bits from Goodness Gracious Me