In some countries, ‘denying the Holocaust’ is a crime — a crime that is punish­able by jail-time. This is stark hypocrisy, or what has happened to the the much-lauded freedom of speech?

It is not the holocaust that is the point of debate. If we are to live in a truly free society, we must learn to let people have their individual views, because views are something akin to religion or personal beliefs. If we claim that people should be free to practise their own religions and live their own personal lives, then we must be prepared to allow individ­uals to possess and broad­cast their own views, no matter how outra­geous these views may sound. To bully a person into accepting a set of ideas is not good form.

The only circum­stances in which the freedom of speech needs to be curtailed, is where it can trans­form into physical action that is socially unacceptable.

Coffee — what a fabulous drink! If someone were to say that I’d have to choose a single edible item to live on for the rest of my life, I’d gleefully point to my cup of hot coffee before pouring it over the person’s head. I know it’s not exactly filling, but I’d rather be happy and hungry than coffee-less and full.

Speaking of coffee, I’ve changed the theme of junkLAND to Coffee Cup, one of the winners of the theme design contest held by the makers of the Serendipity weblog system.

This is an all time favourite, especially when it comes to children’s books — the phrase ‘and they lived happily ever after’. Everyone knows that’s not true. The prince might be getting married to the love of his life, but even princes and princesses are mortal, and there are problems to be faced. What’s the point in pretending that every story has a rosy ending?

The History of Indian Science and Technology project is a useful resource for gaining an anthro­po­log­ical perspec­tive on Indian contri­bu­tions to global science and technology. There’s a lot of inter­esting stuff on the site.

The universe (which others call the Library) is composed of an indef­i­nite and perhaps infinite number of hexag­onal galleries, with vast air shafts between, surrounded by very low railings. From any of the hexagons one can see, inter­minably, the upper and lower floors. The distri­b­u­tion of the galleries is invari­able. Twenty shelves, five long shelves per side, cover all the sides except two; their height, which is the distance from floor to ceiling, scarcely exceeds that of a normal bookcase. One of the free sides leads to a narrow hallway which opens onto another gallery, identical to the first and to all the rest. To the left and right of the hallway there are two very small closets. In the first, one may sleep standing up; in the other, satisfy one’s fecal neces­si­ties. Also through here passes a spiral stairway, which sinks abysmally and soars upwards to remote distances. In the hallway there is a mirror which faith­fully dupli­cates all appear­ances. Men usually infer from this mirror that the Library is not infinite (if it were, why this illusory dupli­ca­tion?); I prefer to dream that its polished surfaces repre­sent and promise the infinite… Light is provided by some spher­ical fruit which bear the name of lamps. There are two, trans­ver­sally placed, in each hexagon. The light they emit is insuf­fi­cient, incessant.

–Jorge Luis Borges, Library Of Babel

There are many kinds of stories, each one different from the other. Some are visions of things as they might be, while a few others are visions of visions themselves, of what imagi­na­tion might look like, suggesting that many things in the world are so obvious that we fail to question why they are as they are, and not otherwise.

If you don’t know what a disk parti­tion is, this piece ain’t for you.

It’s far more diffi­cult for a Linux user to get comfy with Windows than the other way around. That’s because Microsoft Windows works in myste­rious ways.

Last night, I decided to install Microsoft Windows XP on my SATA hard-disk, which already had Linux installed on it. The disk had three primary parti­tions and one extended parti­tion. I emptied one primary parti­tion and deleted it, so as to make space for Windows.

However, when I tried to install Windows, it refused to create a new parition in the free space, claiming that the maximum number of parti­tions had been reached. Whoa! I’d been under the impres­sion that a maximum of four parti­tions were supported. If Linux could do it, why not Windows? Anyway, I recre­ated the deleted parti­tion using Linux, and tried to format the now-existing parti­tion, but our friendly Windows installer refused to oblige, stating that it couldn’t possibly format a parti­tion whose filesystem it could not recognize.

Now here’s the best part: when I decided to forget about installing Windows and deleted the empty parti­tion, the Windows parti­tioning tool made sure Linux couldn’t boot after that. Somehow, the parti­tion table had been poisoned. I had to boot from a LiveCD of Knoppix to reinstall Grub, and even after that, the 40GB free space on which I had tried to install Windows remained unusable, because the Linux fdisk utility couldn’t recog­nize it.

I had to take drastic measures. Knowing that many GB of precious data lay stored on my disk, I used fdisk to delete all existing parti­tions on the disk. Then I recre­ated all the parti­tions, speci­fying the original start and end cylin­ders of each parti­tion, and rebooted the system.

After a few moments of suspense, the system managed to boot success­fully. Whew! Take that, Windows!

There’s something about the Memory­Wiki that gives me the creeps. History textbooks make me feel the same way.

…and I’m still awake. It’s strange how my sleeping habits have changed radically after I got into college. Now when I think of the times when I was much littler and went to bed at eight o’clock in the night, it almost makes me laugh. Person­ally, I like to get up early when it’s cool and silent, and watch the rising of the Sun. It’s kinda sad though, to watch the stars fade away with the approach of the dawn.

Today is the fourteenth of February, St. Valentine’s day, and I see a lot written and said about it wherever I turn. Hallmark undoubt­edly made a lot of money over the weekend, thanks to St. Valen­tine — or should we thank Hallmark for making St. Valen­tine a lot more famous than he intended to be?

Inter­est­ingly, I’ve a seen lot more ‘Anti V-Day’ stuff doing the rounds than the ‘Pro V-Day’ ones. Has V-Day lost its charm? I don’t think so. But there are some in India who feel that the concept is an import from the ‘West’ and an assault on the Indian culture. Well, if this is how they feel, they probably don’t realize that torching V-Day cards and shutting down shopping-centres is not going to be of much help. Violent propa­ganda never worked, except when the majority supported it. Today, it’s going to be pretty diffi­cult to convince ‘global’ and liberal Indians that they should desist from doing what they want to do, in lieu of a cultural command­ment they don’t have faith in and whose origin they cannot verify. And let’s face it — it’s impos­sible to have a global commu­nity where commu­ni­ca­tion is practi­cally instan­ta­neous and travel­ling across the globe takes no more than a few days, and yet expect that each group of individ­uals should maintain their distinct cultural identi­ties. The only effec­tive way to have a semblance of the notion of cultural purity is by ensuring that parents teach their children about the culture that they inherit, because this kind of knowl­edge doesn’t magically permeate the atmos­phere and get imbibed by the human mind. On the other hand, it’s not a good idea to dictate to mature adults what they should or should not do. Individual liberty is something that ought to be respected at all costs.

This is a really good one. It’s a humourous piece about the hunting accident in which US Vice-President Dick Cheney shot fellow hunter Harry Whittington, who is currently still in inten­sive care.