RIFLE RANGE BOY

The Great Hack (Documentary; 2019) Netflix They say there is no such thing as a free lunch. Everything comes with strings attached. When something as luring as a freebie on the internet in exchange for some seemingly unimportant information and filling up questionnaires of sweet nothings, it is not just public service. There was a devious plan to collect little data about users. Sure, these were useful in devising digital businesses like Uber and Food Panda and developing algorithms into human behaviour. Unfortunately, this familiar and predicable human behaviour is the very thing that think-thank groups used to influence people's actions. Cambridge Analytica (CA) and its parent company SCL (Strategic Communication Laboratories) are specially mentioned in this documentary to have been mining data from people with the help social media platforms like Facebook and WhatsApp.  CA and SCL employed psychologists help to improve advertising and influence public opinion. They furt...

To all my friends who ask me not to think too much, please ponder upon the following. We think we know everything and there is nothing more to learn. How wrong we are? I have come to realise that every living day is another fresh day to acquire knowledge. At the end of the 19th century, investigative officers thought they had a full-proof system to track down criminals. Anthromorphological features as described by witnesses and evidence at crime were sufficient to convict suspects. We all know how unreliable are accounts by bystanders or witnesses.  This arrangement worked fairly well when it was practised in the West where individual variations in hair, eye colours and other obvious physical were there. The British Colonial Police had a tough time policing as the natives all looked the same in their eyes. That is when fingerprinting techniques became the state-of-art avantgarde armamentarium in crime-busting. For some time, the method was thought to be so unique that it could...

Radiopetti (Radio Box, Tamil; 2015) I used to wonder why the humming of the radio was the constant background of my home as I was growing up. At the first break of dawn, if Appa had the choice and not for Amma's nagging, it would start with the early morning chanting of Subrapaatham and just breeze through the day and night until transmissions ended. Yes, there used to be a time when even broadcasters called it a day,  mostly at the stroke of midnight. At that time, the radio announcers' songs and rants sounded more like a nuisance, as my sisters and I were busily cramping our cranial vaults with facts and notes to regurgitate in the next tests. Nobody could understand Appa's fixation with his cranky radio box, which he later graduated to a transistor radio. It was not that the devices were manufacturing Top 40 hits. Sometimes, only white noise or high-pitched zapping sounds emanate when he tunes in to the short-wave bands from Kuala Lumpur or Singapore.  But he cont...

S2B: Seoul to Busan It is not a race. Ep #1 Episode #2: Meet the P-stars. It is time to see our pedalling stars. Officially there will be seven cyclists. The seventh participant will be joining us from Australia. A young punk teeming with adrenaline and power, he is Coach's son and is doing his secret training to 'keep up' with the oldies. Coach @Coach Spending half of his adult life on the hockey fields, he continued to keep himself fit even after hanging his boots. After his retirement from work, rather than lazing around counting his end of days, he found pleasure in the outdoors. He remains the driving force in pushing us to explore our true grit. Like Jesus Christ, he goes around recruiting same-minded people who are willing to fight a good fight against surrendering to effects of ageing.  Wayang @Wayang He is the second most seasoned rider in the group. He is nicknamed 'Wayang' (Theatrics) not because he is showy but precisely the opposite r...

https://kitaab.org/2019/08/31/short-story-oh-deer-my-dear/ Mitali Chakravarty    August 31, 2019   2017 best fiction ,  2019 ,  Asian short stories ,  Immigrants ,  immigration ,  short story Short Story:  Oh  Deer!  My Dear… By Farouk Gulsara Malaysia National Day Special Like the Sword of Damocles, his domestic troubles hung over his head. There was nothing much he could do about it. It had gone on too long, too deep. He just had to live with it and move around it. He could not give up everything. There was a nagging heaviness in his temples. He knew things were going to take a nasty turn and it might get worse. He had created some arbitrary goals to improve his life, but this one had crashed it all. But still, life had to continue. As they say in showbiz, the show must go on. He knew it was a bad idea. With all these problems plaguing him, he thought it was inappropriate for him to participate in this ev...

Leila (Miniseries, Hindi; 2019) Netflix Many Indians have accused this miniseries and Netflix as being anti-Hindu.  They even called for a boycott of the channel. Some suggest that the setting of the show, a dystopian India of 100 years after its independence, reflects many things of the present. Detractors assert that this fictitious 2047 India, which worships one man as a demi-god cannot get more real than the present. They insist that the division of the nation along religious and class lines already exist. The film tries to imagine a future when the schism along these lines goes overboard. The rulers of the day want to purify the race, separating couples of mixed marriages and of their offspring. India has been renamed Aryavarta, with an apparent reference to its Sanskrit roots. In Aryavarta, the rich have swapped places with the working class. A new nationalist leader has taken charge. An ultra-conservative stance is revered by all. The people who used to be amongst t...

Signature in the Cell (2009) DNA and the Evidence for Intelligent Design Stephen C. Meyer Take the instance when you receive a fax. You marvel at how a message at one end of the line is transmitted to the other many miles away. You think you know it all when you discover the nitty-gritty of how a facsimile machine works. You forget all about the composer of the document. Learning about the essence of life, DNA is something like that. When Watson and Crick suggested the double helix model as the prototype for DNA in 1953, the world thought material science could explain everything. Delving further, later scientists came with theories after theories of how internal milieu of the cell worked. The author posits that the possibility of creation of life from the Universe's 'pre-biotic soup' just by chance - by random 'trial-and-error' is merely impossible. The probability, in statistically sense, of Nature coming up with the correct combination that can sustain life, ...