The Man in Black is Back

I'm not a big fan of country, but I cannot deny the power of the Man in Black, Johnny Cash. Like Van Morrison, Ella Fitzgerald, Reggie Watts of Maktub and Bono, he just has a voice I'm drawn to. Marc Greilsamer of Amazon.com put it best in his review of Cash's latest album, American III: Solitary Man: "The simple truth is that Johnny Cash could read the phone book and make it compelling."

American III: Solitary Man is a mix of Cash originals and covers from other artists. Tom Petty's I Won't Back Down and U2's One are modern songs, surprising choices that sound comfortable in Cash's presence (Remember, this is the man that covered Soundgarden's Rusty Cage on his 1996 album Unchained). Listening to the new album there's an aura of sadness and demise held strong by a sense of hope and Cash's unrelenting voice. My favorite section of the album are tracks 4-7: One, Nobody, I See a Darkness, and Mercy Seat. Each is a slow, sad and strong melody, the type of song Cash is famous for, and he pulls them off brilliantly.

Johnny Cash is 68 years old, he released his first album in 1957, and he's released an album almost every year after that. He was popular in the 50s, popular with the Woodstock generation of the 70s, and with this album, he's proved he can be popular well into the next century. Lately it seems many artists have been reinventing themselves in order to stay in the limelight. But Johnny Cash has quietly but defiently stood in the limelight from the beginning with the same sad songs.

But Geneica's new MPTrip seems to offer the perfect solution. This device looks like an ordinary portable CD player; in fact it plays ordinary CDs, but with a twist. The device can also read CD-Rs and CD-RWs burned with MP3 files. At 650Megs, one CD can hold about 150 songs! Imagine carrying a whole case of CDs, imagine fumbling to exchange CDs every hour or so. Now imagine abandoning all that for one CD!

The player has the normal CD features, including shuffle, which is an amazing feature with 150 songs. Using a CD to store information also eliminates the download times that hinder other memory-driven devices. All this makes the MPTrip a very powerful and appealing device, and the best part is yet to come. The MPTrip weighs in at a mere $87, a flyweight in the world of MP3 devices.

Have my prayers for the perfect music device been answered? Anxious, I did a bit of research, and conveniently compiled it here. The overall buzz on this has been positive, with a few negative comments. The biggest complaint is not with the technology but with the interface. For 10 hours of music, thats a fault I can deal with. My unit should arrive soon; I'll post my own review once it does.

And a side note for all you Radiohead fans; Radiohead was named Spin's Band of the Year...

Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) is a standard (remember that word, its important) created by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) to help control consistant formatting of a webpage across multiple browsers and platforms. Using CSS, you can control pretty much any aspect of a page's layout, including font size.

Easy enough so far. Before I rant, here's a quick HTML lesson. Font sizes in HTML are dictated by a number 1 through 7; 1 being the smallest font, 7 being the largest. In CSS, these seven values map to these seven categories (I can only wonder why they just didn't use the same numbers instead of categories...): xx-small (1), x-small (2), small (3), medium (4), large (5), x-large (6), xx-large (7). Easy enough so far, right?

To illustrate my frustration, look at this sample file on three different browsers: Internet Explorer 5, Netscape 4.x and Netscape 6. The file has 3 columns, the first telling you which font is displayed, the second displaying CSS fonts of different sizes, and the third displaying standard fonts of different sizes. On IE5, you will notice that both the CSS fonts and the standard HTML fonts render at the exact same size, as it should be. No problems here.

Now look at the file on Netscape 4.x. Notice how there is a slight difference between the CSS fonts and the standard font. This is a small oversight on Netscape's part, but something worthy of addressing. But practically it isn't terrible, because the difference is only noticable at small fonts. Shame on you, Netscape.

Now look at the file in Netscape 6. In 6, Netscape fixed the consistency problem between the CSS and standard fonts, but haphazardly introduced a new bug. Notice how the xx-small and x-small fonts are exactly the same! The small font then maps to size 2 instead of size 3, and so on and so forth, until the xx-large font maps to size 6 instead of size 7. Big oversight. Under this scheme, not only will pages combining xx-small and x-small show no difference in font size, but webpages on IE5 and Netscape 6 will render very differently.

So what is a point of having a standard if it doesn't standardize anything? We are faced with 3 of the newest and most popular browsers, and none are consistent with each other. Netscape 6 is a browser with flashy looks, but it seems that in that flash the notion of consistency was lost. If I may fall back on the popular architecture metaphors, its like decorating the exterior of a building without first properly laying down the foundation. The W3C creates standards, not surprisingly, to keep things standard across dissimliar platforms. Netscape needs to take that lesson to heart. For as the browser wars continue, it is only the developer who suffers.

Consult this site for a list of more CSS bugs across different browsers.

But I was wrong! According to Merriam-Webster, the word "toupee" comes from French. I find it a rather amazing coincidence that two similar words with similar meanings could have two different roots.

Its possible that the word crept into Bengali from Europe, which is a more common occurrence than one would think. There are no Bengali words for "table" and "chair"; we just call them "table" and "chair". These words crept into the language after hundreds of years of British rule. But it makes you wonder what these words were before the British arrived.

Though certain words have leap-frogged across languages, it is very rare to see one language fully integrated into another. This is the case for Vietnamese, which has an Asian sound but French letters. I'm baffled as to how this evolved. Rather than fully adopting French, the French language had to be adapted to Vietnamese; an arduous and complicated task. I was once told a French monk introduced this system, but I don't know why. A simple Internet search and a trip to Britannica.com didn't elucidate the issue.

However one interesting fact from the Britannica article is that of the 150 or so languages spoken in Southeast Asia, Vietnamese has one of the longest recorded history. Although this only raises more questions then it answers, like how a language with such a long history could be so easily altered...

This all makes you wonder about the nature of human language and its development, a field I've never explored but would now like to. Maybe this is a good place to start… This site also has a comprehensive list of English words borrowed from other languages.

Time is no longer as important a constraint in blogging. In conversation it is tough to have immediate access to resources, quotes, facts and data to support your arguments. With weblogs these barriers are limited only by the extent to which you can research. I've only written a few blogs, but each has grown from a small seed of an ideas. A one-sentence afterthought can blossom into a full-fledged article with only a few ideas uncovered through research.

Through this, your voice on the net is formed. It isn't (nor should it be) the same as your voice in conversation. I think it should present a stronger voice, the voice your conversation should aspire to become. So that eventually your blogs help hone your notion of self while creating ever-improving ideas for others.

After decades of speculation, scientists have finally figured out how Gecko's defy gravity to walk on walls and ceilings; and the answer is so fascinating I just felt compelled to blog. Turns out its not any sort of suction, as intuition would presume, but a weak force called the van der Waals force. Now if I remember my chemistry, the van der Waals force is a very weak force, far weaker than gravity, electric and magnetic forces, and any other chemical forces in existence. It is so weak it is only powerful at small magnitudes over small distances. In fact we experience van der Waals forces in everything we touch, yet it is too small to register with our senses. Which means A) the gecko's feet must have microscopic hairs at the atomic scale, yet B) there are enough of these hairs to carry an animal thousands of orders of magnitude heavier. Since van der Waals forces are molecule-to-molecule interactions (independent of chemical composition), the gecko could walk across any solid surface. The van der Waals forces are feeble; imagine discovering their powerful possibilities in something as simple as a gecko's walk. How cunning evolution must be to discern then exploit this afterthought of forces; such minute details remind us just how awesome yet sublime Nature is. (Another article on the subject can be found here)

Recently a slew of movies have been exploring the lives of first-generation children, and I've never felt more at home at the movies. These movies rise above stereotypes and present real emotion, probably because they are written by Indians or Muslims who have lived these experiences.

The most recent of these films is Maryam. Though I have not seen it, Roger Ebert gives it a favorable review. Maryam follows the life of a young Iranian girl in New Jersey during the Iran hostage crisis. I imagine she endures much the same hostility many felt during the gulf war. Hopefully Maryam will be in wide release soon.

My Son the Fanatic and East is East present two complimentary views on the domestic lives of Indians/Muslims England. My Son the Fanatic explores the relationship between a Muslim father and his overtly religious son whereas in East is East the father is overtly religious, forcing religion on his seven children. Both films have been criticized for presenting Islam in an unfair light. But one must remember that these movies are not blanket statements on religion, but the specific experiences of their authors. Their purpose is not to preach about religion, but to tell the story of growing up trapped between two cultures. Add to this the fact that Om Puri plays the father in both movies, and these are a great pair of films to watch in tandem.

It surprises me that these movies are being released so quickly, almost a year from each other. Along with the Indian-directed The Sixth Sense and The Cell, bands such as Cornershop, Talvin Singh and Asian Dub Foundation, and authors such as Salman Rushdie and Arundhati Roy, there's a strong Indian presence adding to the melting pot of Western culture. Its slowly happening, and this is only the beginning.