As a post script the article mentions that Venter’s lab is filing for a patent for the newly created life form. Patents never seemed like too good an idea to me. Patenting a life form seems downright ridiculous, and very dangerous.

Cool stuff, and I would cheer the Venter Lab on, if not for the patent, and the unbridled, bombastic script that issues from them, a sample of which follows:

“We are not afraid to take on things that are important just because they stimulate thinking,” he said. “We are dealing in big ideas. We are trying to create a new value system for life. When dealing at this scale, you can’t expect everybody to be happy.”

In the item description, the person who has posted the pencil for sale quotes me! Above Boing Boing - take that, Cory Doctorow Mark Frauenfelder!

Weird are the ways of the web. For what it’s worth, I am no designer, or pencil expert. I was wondering what makes a pencil SO special, and I still do. Running into your name serendipitously is weird. Really weird.

…blobby coalescences of look-alike, overnight, amoeba-like concentrations of population far from city centers. These huge, sprawling communities are where more and more Americans choose to be, the place where job growth is fastest, home building is briskest, and malls and megachurches are multiplying as newcomers keep on coming.

Read how a flyover by Disney, the man, on November 22, 1963 changed the “city” of Orlando at the National Geographic back then, Orlando was just a citrus farm, more or less. That is also about the time UCF was founded. Now, within 50 years, UCF is the seventh largest university by student enrollment numbers!

1. make the aisles in his supermarkets narrower, and thus more difficult to walk through
2. spill some wheat and seeds on the floor
3. introduce some semi-rotten vegetables into a bin of good vegetables
4. make his stores noisier

Counterintuitive for westerners perhaps, but this offers a peek into the Indian middle-class psyche.

The article about Biyani’s chain of supermarkets that generates $600 million+ in profits at WSJ is worth a read. In it, Biyani says that making things chaotic enough is not easy, and that the trick to give the customers the impression that “they have won”. Hence the half-rotten vegetables mixed in with the regular good ones, and the choas and disarray. He is quite the man when it comes to inventory control, and modern business practices, and proudly display Sam Walton’s picture on his wall, next to Mother Teresa.

He sells to “India Two”, the Indian population that includes the drivers, maids, cooks, nannies, farmers and others who serve India One. He estimates that 55% of Indians — roughly 550 million people — fall into this category, says WSJ.

“We advertise in the language that people dream in,” says Mr. Biyani, who is proud he isn’t one of the many business leaders in India who has lived or studied abroad. Though he speaks the language, “I don’t dream in English,” he says.

Remarkably enough, everything that leads to more apparent chaos serves him well, including making the check out lanes more confused and chaotic, which apparently increased sales by 30%. It takes a different kind of business smarts to make money in India. No amount of western education can teach one that!

So if you do read this blog, and think that you are one of the people I think read this blog, leave me a comment.

Or better still, take a look at this iBook for sale. If you need an iBook G4 that works, this is the one for you. It works, flawlessly and has been lovingly taken care of by someone who loves me.

If there ever was a pencil that was appreciate, it was this. I have a terrible urge to write with one of these.

I have been late to the party, but there is nothing like a legal pad, and a pencil, to get your thoughts flowing. I also hate yellow pencils. Which brings us to why pencils are mostly yellow, not counting the “Nataraj” and “Pinky” pencils I grew up on. Pencils are mostly yellow because that is the color associated (or previously associated) with royalty in China, and that’s where most of the pencils came from in the early days.

I read this wonderful article on naming conventions around the world from the perspective of a software designer who designs forms that have to be internationalized, and am already feeling really happy for having read it. Read it, and become a little more sensitive to the different folks you’d be working with.

A similar article can be written about how folks are named in different parts of India. Also about how imposing local customs by force of law can make things all the weirder. The state of Maharashtra required people to have three parts to their name - “Family name” “Father’s name” and “Given Name”, if I remember correctly. That is just so insensitive to those from outside Maharashtra who have to get a birth certificate for their kids, or register their kids in a school there. Bombay, or Mumbai is in Maharashtra.

I find it very strange to have two “given name”s in my name - “Carthik” and “Anand” - neither of which are my father’s name, or my family name. I also find it strange that in our family, we use two family names, or “surnames” - Iyer and Sharma. Most of the cousins on my father’s side are “Iyers”, while I am a “Sharma”. My sister was an “Iyer” before she got married. None of my relatives know me as Carthik. They all know me as Anand, or call me Nandu. I sometimes wonder if, “Carthik”, “Anand” and “Nandu” have different personalities - whether when someone who only knows one of these meets someone only who knows another, they’d be totally surprised to learn about the other side of me.