RSS

links for 2010-09-08

08 Sep
  • In his essay, "Books Won't Furnish A Room", Joseph Epstein asks himself, "They say books furnish a room but where is it written that they must furnish every room?" and then proceeds to keep just 450 books from a collection of 2000. I'm not going that far (not only do books furnish my rooms, they seem to furnish my life as well) but the sight of unread books on my shelf (on any shelf) that I don't even have an acquaintance with, let alone know intimately, depresses me. Books should be read (and re-read), should be known, should be loved.
  • The organic co-existence of the farmer who raises cows gives him a legitimacy over his livestock…
    there is a disconnect between the realities of lower Hindu castes, Dalits, tribal people, Christians and Muslims who rear cattle, and that of a few cultural elites from the Brahmin and Brahminised upper castes who don’t like to get their hands dirty doing manual labour, but construct a theory of the sacred cow. And the latter somehow always wins over the former…
    The right to one’s food preference has to be respected just as much as another’s right to avoid a particular food. Problems arise when a particular school of thought on food influences the state, and passes laws in its favour. Such actions are simply not democratic, and in this case, ahistorical, and will prove detrimental for the rural economy.
  • The Internet can't create new, clean toilets; but it can help us use the ones that already exist more efficiently! There are toilets in shopping malls, hotels, and cafes throughout our cities. The trick is to create a list of these toilets. And since creating this list will be time consuming and difficult, the best way to speed it up will be to get the users to do it themselves. If it works for Wikipedia listing trivia about every episode of every series of Star Trek, why shouldn't it work for this far more important cause? It will be a wikipedia for Indian toilets.
    Here are some points on how it should work:
 
3 Comments

Posted by on September 8, 2010 in Uncategorized

 

3 responses to “links for 2010-09-08

  1. Shefaly

    September 8, 2010 at 10:25 pm

    Recently I gave away 300 or so books. Our friend Neha got some too. That was ostensibly to make space on the shelves for some books that had been in boxes since my last move. Outcome? About 200 books on the floor neatly stacked in piles. Despite promises to self, about 40 books have been added anew. I am now working to a “formula” and hope to keep it in control. Check back with me in a year ;-)

    PS: All I own and keep is because it has passed the test of being read.

     
  2. Just Mohit

    September 9, 2010 at 9:43 am

    Ouch! :(
    You gave away 300 books! And I got none! When are you giving away more? I’m a glutton for giveaways, as you can see, although I have probably given away 80% of books I have ever owned as well.

     
  3. Shefaly

    September 11, 2010 at 3:05 pm

    Keep an eye on my rants about space and sooner than later I may give away more. But also ask me about the formula I mentioned, when we meet. :-)

     

Leave a Reply

Fill in your details below or click an icon to log in:

WordPress.com Logo

You are commenting using your WordPress.com account. Log Out / Change )

Twitter picture

You are commenting using your Twitter account. Log Out / Change )

Facebook photo

You are commenting using your Facebook account. Log Out / Change )

Google+ photo

You are commenting using your Google+ account. Log Out / Change )

Connecting to %s

 
Follow

Get every new post delivered to your Inbox.

Join 544 other followers

%d bloggers like this:
https://unjustly.wordpress.com/2010/09/08/links-for-2010-09-08/
unjustly.wordpress.com
crawl=CC-MAIN-2015-40
69530
application/http; msgtype=response
sha1:H2G4TTIBV2PB6ZFF6I2AHESW4UB23HPA
<urn:uuid:afcd0936-b1d1-4704-a2ba-5865e743bb2e>
2015-10-10T10:46:51Z
192.0.78.12
sha1:62KNSEBR5YNPBNLSFHCTM7B3ZPMROARQ
<urn:uuid:daedc71a-999e-4a7f-8370-a2008e1613f2>
https://unjustly.wordpress.com/2010/09/08/links-for-2010-09-08/
length
response
<urn:uuid:57c40532-4c8a-40a9-978d-82fadfe66a00>
robots: classic
hostname: ip-10-137-6-227.ec2.internal
software: Nutch 1.6 (CC)/CC WarcExport 1.0
isPartOf: CC-MAIN-2015-40
operator: CommonCrawl Admin
description: Wide crawl of the web for September 2015
publisher: CommonCrawl
format: WARC File Format 1.0
conformsTo: http://bibnum.bnf.fr/WARC/WARC_ISO_28500_version1_latestdraft.pdf