too = two... Sergey Brin's new blog

too

Sergey Brin has launched his own personal blog. He is talking about Parkinson's Disease, his risk of getting the disease, and some other posts. The blog is very new so doesn't have much content but I think I will be reading it fairly regularly. It's called TOO, kinda like google is malformed googol, Too is played off of Two. According to him on his first post, Two = in addition = his life outside of work.

Sidenote: Really ugly blog design, cannot believe of all the standard templates Blogger has, he chose something that's this hard to read.

Stuff Indians Like

My search for entertaining desi sites never ends. Today I have found that one desi blog/website that has the potential to keep me up the whole night. Its one of those blogs that makes you go "Oh! Please, please, please, can I contribute to this blog??! Please!?".  I have already started to think of my own list of Stuff Indians Like.

Enjoy the blog for a while, come up with your own list, let me know in comments or email, repeat.

Keep them questions coming - Prashnottarang

This is the kind of stuff that makes me feel guilty...guilty of spending countless hours on the internet and not coming up such ingenious ideas for bridging the gap between the illiterate and the Internet. Prashnottarang or the Question Box is a very simple telephone intercom which requires no computer literacy (in fact, not even literacy). A user simply presses the green button, talks or asks a question, an Internet user (a volunteer) on the other end browses the web for an answer, and responds to the user of the box. This has started as a non-profit project in India (in two villages). These boxes are placed near a shop where people have easy access to it. Well, wont spoil the fun...read all about it here, Question Box. While you are at it, check out their Flickr page too.
Some ways I imagine the villagers would use it would be: to find out weather forecasts for the region, cricket scores, which politician has what agenda, and most of all, symptoms of diseases and other healthcare related information, etc etc. I am sure the list is infinite.
Mobile?: On the for-profit side, I thought I had heard of services where you can just call a service and get someone to find something out from the web. I have called my friends or my brother on numerous occasions to find out about an address on the web, or listings of movies in the area....i sure could have used a Question Box. Could there be a potential for a company like ChaCha (the search engine where a live quide chats with you) to have a version of their service accessible via a regular phone call. Those damn tiny qwerty buttons on my Blackberry don't make it fun to browse the web on the mini screen!

Staple Free Stapler: No more "Where are the staples now!?"

I will add this to the list of things I don't need but I badly want.
As with the other stuff on my list of things I don't need, I didn't know such a device existed. Remember the Ginsu knife that can cut through a shoe? Well, now add this to the collection. A stapler than staples up to 5 sheets of paper without staples. We might as well call this the Stapleless Stapler, or better yet, Stapleless-er!
ThinkGeek :: Staple Free Stapler

Fast Company hops onto the Social Bus

Not sure why I browsed over to FastCompany.com but once there, I was pleasantly surprised by the new features. Fast Company has gone social. It pitches the idea of becoming a part of the business community, exchanging ideas with other readers on business issues, and engaging in activities like blogging, discussing in forums, answering posted questions etc. Its interesting to see how user based content is getting more and more adopted by websites as a strategy for making websites sticky. My take on this is: its a cross between Blogger/Wordpress, LinkedIn, a business magazine, discussion forum, and slow servers to host the applications.
Well, give it a try and see for yourself if you see the value. Its still quite new, and my test blog there "What's That Again?" showed up in the Featured Blogs section within minutes. It will be quite interesting to see how this latest social effort is faring in a few months. More updates on this coming soon.

Happiness Quotient - Astoundingly unhappy millionaires

This is an article many of us just simply need to know by heart. So the next time, we feel compelled to buy or acquire that one extra thing we feel gives eternal happiness, we can pull a print out of this article and read it out aloudto it. And for those amongst you too lazy to read this...here are some good excerpts:

"Psychologists have spent decades studying the relation between wealth and happiness," writes Harvard University psychologist Daniel Gilbert in his best-selling "Stumbling on Happiness," "and they have generally concluded that wealth increases human happiness when it lifts people out of abject poverty and into the middle class but that it does little to increase happiness thereafter."

In a typical survey people are asked to rank their sense of well-being or happiness on a scale of 1 to 7, where 1 means "not at all satisfied with my life" and 7 means "completely satisfied." Of the American multimillionaires who responded, the average happiness score was 5.8. Homeless people in Calcutta came in at 2.9. But before you assume that money does buy happiness after all, consider who else rated themselves around 5.8: the Inuit of northern Greenland, who do not exactly lead a life of luxury, and the cattle-herding Masai of Kenya, whose dung huts have no electricity or running water. And proving Gilbert's point about money buying happiness only when it lifts you out of abject poverty, slum dwellers in Calcutta—one economic rung above the homeless—rate themselves at 4.6.

"Americans who earn $50,000 per year are much happier than those who earn $10,000 per year," writes Gilbert, "but Americans who earn $5 million per year are not much happier than those who earn $100,000 per year."

(Curiously, although money doesn't buy happiness, happiness can buy money. Young people who describe themselves as happy typically earn higher incomes, years later, than those who said they were unhappy. It seems that a sense of well-being can make you more productive and more likely to show initiative and other traits that lead to a higher income.

The last excerpt above is my favorite.
Why Money Doesn’t Buy Happiness | Print Article | Newsweek.com:
Technorati Tags: wealth, money, economics, happiness, life

YouTube - Human face fish

This is a bit freaky!
YouTube - Human face fish

Checkershadow Illusion

This is really cool. Squint your eyes, take back a few steps and marvel at the way your mind plays games with you.
Checkershadow Illusion
I think I should go home now.

Learn Hindi from Bollywood Movies

Interesting.
http://cuttingchai.castpost.com/