The Indian Express reports:

If one gets down at Netaji Bhavan metro station and walks towards Rammohan Dutta road straight to Northern park one would stumble upon a rather curious sight. College-goers can be seen crowding the area and a familiar smell of books envelops it. Several books are exhibited in bookshelves on the footpath and it almost seems like a bookstore at first glance. This, however, is no bookstore, instead, it is an expansive library that houses books by authors ranging from popular Bengali comic books to Sidney Sheldon. The name of the place is Street Library.

This is such a lovely concept. Anyone who wants to read can pick up a book and return it once they are finished. People who have books that they don’t plan on keeping can donate and improve the collection. People with organization skills and some spare time can chip in and organize the collection every once in a while.

This is an excellent program that encourages reading, sharing and selflessness. It also depends on a community working together to keep a good thing going. I wish this all the best, and really hope that there is enough community interest and investment to overcome the occasional miscreant. Although Kolkata is home to the National Library of India, and hosts several other libraries, they are either not free or not easily accessible for many people. Street libraries are an excellent idea for people short on time and energy but an interest to read.

If you’re in Kolkata and have some books to spare, perhaps you can consider donating to this? Or better yet, perhaps you can see if something similar can be organized in your part of the city?

From way back in 1996:

It took the European Space Agency 10 years and $7 billion to produce Ariane 5, a giant rocket capable of hurling a pair of three-ton satellites into orbit with each launch and intended to give Europe overwhelming supremacy in the commercial space business.

All it took to explode that rocket less than a minute into its maiden voyage last June, scattering fiery rubble across the mangrove swamps of French Guiana, was a small computer program trying to stuff a 64-bit number into a 16-bit space.

One bug, one crash. Of all the careless lines of code recorded in the annals of computer science, this one may stand as the most devastatingly efficient.

More links here, and the report of the inquiry into the incident is archived here.

A fascinating, and from a programmer’s perspective chilling, read. This is the stuff of nightmares — an apparently innocuous line of code causing an exception that leads to disaster!

Today, a startling new discovery: prodding the brain with light, a group of scientists got an unexpected surprise – they were able to turn back on a part of the brain that had been shut down by Alzheimer’s disease. This new science is not a cure, and is far from a treatment, but it’s a finding so … simple, you won’t be able to shake it. Come join us for a lab visit, where we’ll meet some mice, stare at some light, and come face-to-face with the mystery of memory. We can promise you: by the end, you’ll never think the same way about Christmas lights again.

I’ve been meaning to post about this particular episode ever since I listened to it. This is the Nature paper about this study. They found that simply flashing light of a certain frequency at a certain interval helps with some of the brain waves that are diminished in mice with Alzheimer’s. It’s absolutely fascinating.

(I’m not going into too much technical jargon here; go listen to the episode!)

If you don’t listen to Radiolab in general, you definitely should; it’s one of the best podcasts there are.

In light of the recent election in the UK, the Queen, of course, is supposed to make a speech regarding forming the government by the party that has won majority. Now, however, after the interesting results of the election, the Queen’s speech is delayed, and the reason for it is very interesting.

The Telegraph UK reports:

The Queen’s Speech is going to be delayed because it has to be written on goatskin paper and the ink takes days to dry.

Apparently, the British monarchy are more concerned than others would be about the archival qualities of the paper that they use.

[…] goatskin paper is not actually made from goatskin.

The material is in fact high-quality archival paper which is guaranteed to last for at least 500 years.

Well, okay, but still, why the delay?

Well, ink on this special paper takes a few days to dry. And the monarchy had “ready to go” versions of the speech for (a) a Conservative party majority, and (b) a Labour party majority. But the results of the election, that resulted in a hung parliament, has put all pre-made plans into disarray. Since the political parties themselves don’t know yet how the government will be formed, the Queen’s speech isn’t finalized yet either.

Once the details are set in stone they can be committed to the goatskin paper and sent away for binding before being presented to the Queen.

I love how even the most apparently mundane things become fascinating just by being associated with the British monarchy.

In this study, we continuously monitored Egyptian fruit bats for months, recording audio and video around-the-clock. We analyzed almost 15,000 vocalizations, which accompanied the everyday interactions of the bats, and were all directed toward specific individuals, rather than broadcast. We found that bat vocalizations carry ample information about the identity of the emitter, the context of the call, the behavioral response to the call, and even the call’s addressee. Our results underline the importance of studying the mundane, pairwise, directed, vocal interactions of animals.

This is brilliant. They were able to correlate their data analysis of the bats’ vocalizations with the behavior and responses that they observed… so now we know more about how bats communicate! Simply by listening to the vocalization, the context, addressee, and even “the outcome of the interaction can be predicted above chance level”. Fascinating.

From the discussion:

It is important to note that we used one set of acoustic features for classification. However, many other multi-dimensional spectro-temporal representations can be tested. The bat’s brain could thus be using some other representation that encapsulates much more information regarding different social aspects. The bat may be able to classify the context of an interaction with higher confidence, based on some acoustic feature which it evolved to use and is yet to be determined. Our analysis is thus probably only a lower bound on what a bat is capable of extracting from aggressive social vocalizations. For example, we did not include any temporal information in our analysis.

In any acoustic signal, and especially where communication is involved, the time parameter is usually crucial and will add rich layers of information. For example, just imagine taking a piece of human speech, and (a) only looking at the overal speech parameters, versus (b) observing how the speech parameters change during the speech. Case (b) will provide far more information than case (a). I think we will discover over time that bats have a pretty well-evolved communication scheme.

This is fascinating stuff.