I believe that education is one of the most important factors contributing to a country’s development. Education can weed out or scale down problems such as poverty, crime, communalism and suppression of freedom. So, I was excited when the Indian HRD minister (Kapil Sibal) recently announced that he was reforming the education system in India as this was a long time coming.

Kapil Sibal’s mantra of “expansion, inclusion and excellence” along with his announcement of a few reforms such as optional Class 10 board exams, accreditation agencies for schools, free education and private sector involvement in primary learning is certainly a step in the right direction and if such reforms are implemented with passion and perseverance, then they will contribute towards giant strides along the road to India’s development.

You may wonder “Does India really need to overhaul its education system?

One of the hot topics in the Indian news media over the past couple of weeks, was Jaswant Singh’s expulsion from the BJP due to the release of his book titled “Jinnah: India-Partition-Independence”.  It seems the book blames Jawaharlal Nehru for the partition in 1947 and claims that Jinnah was wrongly portrayed as the villain of the partition.

Not long after the book’s launch, the pro-Hindutva State government of Gujarat banned the sale, publication and distribution of the book in Gujarat.

I support open source and free software and I use quite a lot of such software. However, this does not make me anti-capitalist and hate everything proprietary. If it weren’t for the capitalist businesses, the world would not have been as industrialized as it is today.

I recently came across some cool pants (created by Distilled Clothing, a San Francisco-based men’s fashion line) which block potentially harmful Electro-Magnetic Fields (EMF blocker) like those caused by radiation used by mobile phones.

According to Distilled, “The jury may still be out on whether Electro Magnetic Fields from mobile phones hurt us but phones are legally allowed to emit 1.6 watts per kilogram of radio frequency and one might prefer some insurance. Hence this pant with copper and nickel plated pocket bags that block potentially harmful radiation.”

The EMF Blocker pant design pattern has been open sourced by Distilled and is available under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 License

Some photos of the EMF Blocker pant (courtesy mattymerrill’s photostream) are shown below:

Like the tagline “Protect yourself and your future progeny”

Recently, I came across a whacky website which attempts to address an issue which probably many people have experienced while watching movies at the cinema, especially those long movies – the urge to empty the bladder (pee)! Well, a Flash developer, Dan Florio had just that experience while watching King Kong and developed a website Runpee.com to assist cinema goers in identifying when to run to pee so as not to miss the best parts of a movie!

Here’s a screenshot of the Flash application that powers Runpee.com.

The screenshot above provides the pee times for the movie “The Time Traveler’s Wife” indicating that you may pee for around 4 mins at around 46 mins into the movie and obviously, at the end of the movie (for as long as you like).