October 24, 2007 • 5:53 am 1
HealthVault provides good “contextual” information and comes with health center and option of downloading the drivers for various devices which can be connected to upload the data. For example if you search for asthma you will get – conditions, procedures/treatment/causes etc.
Bio-Med on other hand provides search over the papers of research journals.(not sure though which all get indexed here), he seems to be focused on image captions and citations.
October 11, 2007 • 10:59 am 0
Nature’s article talks about providing stimulas to certain regions to provide hope for minimally conscious people. Very-2 hopeful for many folks I know of. Another article which talks about the similar stuff for “stimulating” the transcranial region.
What is consciosness – nah – I do not have profound insight – but I am skeptical when something like consciouness comes into medical literature which has different connotation and possibly should not be used in medical literature. It is more like blind folks analyzing the elephant from various angle to find out what is it that they are seeing. Everybody will have different perception.
Is ability to identify and eat is consciousness ?
Is ability to recognize people and talk is consciousness ?
Is ability to gather thoughts and use language consciousness ?
Is ability to provide gesture (a form of language) without speaking consciousness?
How do the facial expressions come to the fore – when the “person” is sleeping, what is sleeping, who is sleeping, person, face or the brain ? Who/what really controls what expressions come on the face, when we hide the expression contrary to the situation, what really happens inside down to the cell level of different kind? Which chemicals are responsible for the same? Are they produced on demand – is it possible that you can’t produce facial expressions but talk about them – would method actors have different composition of certain cells while they are playing out the roles ?
What is listening, seeing, talking?
When we are incoherent – is the main system broken down or “parts” gone for toss?
• 7:23 am 0
I did not know even British were following the French tomfoolery of enforcing extreme secularism code. This is dumb and the reason given to suspend a person desire much to be discussed. In place like India this will not be enforceable, even the smallest government office carries the imagery of God of various forms.
I remember Saudi’s and the related countries do not allow any form of worship or imagery other than one “supposedly” “right” religion for strange reason. Commercial firms (all worthy of good capitalistic tag) of all hues and national origin seem to work without problem. This points to simple fact, everything is negotiable to either side. The negotiation need to happen at right time.
October 1, 2007 • 6:15 am 4
I believe in working on core strength, from the birth I have done full justice to temptation of eating food. From the most benign with guava with salt and chilli (raw mango, sugarcane juice – recently one of the “high end restaturant” I tried 50 Rs sugarcane juice – which must be the record fleecing of any kind – thanks to Kanua) to the complete course meals. Unfortunately I was deprived of the joy of preparing and serving the stuff to others through growing years.
Mom always believed I was qualified for cleaning vessels or at the most cleaning the rice, pealing the cover of peanuts, cutting the “shankar pale“/”karanji“/”mixing the chivda“, or at best rolling the laddus(besan, ravae).
Anyway coming to present times , I was blessed to have friends like Ram, Keshav who were urbanized version of maharaj of ancient times. Ram’s gojjus, tovve, upma, Keshava’s dosai, idli, sambhar, rasam are stuff of dreams. Prakash Anna’s paneer dishes, dosai(s) with chutney/potato filling, italian fares and suahasini’s Bengali style vegetables/rice/daal – something I have not had success of emulating to her quality levels.
One thing I learnt was that, it is labor of love, one needs to like and love cooking as an art form to do justice. I was complete nubee with all these gaints around and part of it rubbed on me and I have been giving fair shot at trying the items. I can not forget Krishkp’s pongal/avial – it was literally like god serving you the food. I am not exaggerating about the quality level here.
Imagine seattle in winter with drizzling rain and friend suggests let us cookup bhajjis 
, we have done that many of the times with various right accompaniements. So this post is for all the foodies and the host in them who takes the pain to cookup those delightful foods. BTW check out PBS’s food series.
