Category: Life

the Universe and Everything Else

A Long List of Leftover Links…

Sohaib Athar

 … from last year that couldn't grow into posts. Now I can clean up my 'TO BLOG' bookmarks folder and continue pretending to be a blogger:

CBeebies and UptoTen.com – Fun With Your Kid(s)

Sohaib Athar

The Cbeebies storytime website or UptoTen is where you should be headed to spend a few fun interactive minutes each day with your kid… the website can also give you a few moments of peace and quiet if you have a computer savvy kid (like my 5ish year old son). Better than TV or XBox IMHO. Don't forget to encourage and praise them while they play. If you didn't know about these websites already, and decide to try them out, I would be very interested to hear your story in the comments 🙂

Bobby Fischer Died Today

ReallyVirtual

dead-kingChess is like life – Boris Spassky

Chess is life – Bobby Fischer

Bobby Fischer, the renegade, recluse Da Vinci look-alike chess genius died today in Iceland at the (ironic) age of 64 today.

I have been following (and fascinated by) his life ever since I read his book “Bobby Fischer Teaches Chess” in the early 90s (and ‘forgot’ to return it to the friend I borrowed it from). His books, his openings, and the dozens of chess puzzles that resulted from his famous matches taught me a lot about the game.

He was a rebel and romantic; a proponent of the 9/11 attacks, in another life, he might have been a suicide bomber, or a cyber punk. Though he has been labeled ‘eccentric’ numerous times, but he was also brutally honest (read this rare interview to see what I mean). Thank you Bobby, for teaching us chess, and for being honest.

We are toads

ReallyVirtual1 Comment

ImagePaulo Coelho's book 'The Alchemist' has been the top favorite of the Pakistan Network on Facebook for a few months now. It is not surprising, as the story has a lot of things in common with the mystic/symbolic fairy tales that my generation (or at least a subset of my generation) was brought up on. This post, though is about Paulo's blog, which is usually filled with though-provoking positive content (and these days, we can surely use all the positivity we can get). A couple of days ago, I read an interesting observation on Paulo's blog about toads, that reminded me of this nation called Pakistan (and it had nothing to do with toads being green). He says:

Read more “We are toads”

Brainnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnns

ReallyVirtual

Its been one year since I started working with the Blue Brain Project team. Dr. Felix Schürmann, the Project Manager of the Blue Brain Project, informed me last week that the project is officially entering its next phase very soon, which has got me pretty excited.

Meanwhile, here's what the rest of the world of Brains (aka. neuroscience) has been up to recently:

PS. On the number of 'n's in the post title (18), I became curious how people actually spelled brai(n)+s, and spent the next 5 minutes charting out the Google hits. Here are the results:

brains-google-hits