How to get from anywhere to anywhere, on a train in India. Good thread. They keep it updated. Indiamike is also a good board, albeit Nazi-modded.

Train information - Planes, Trains, and Automobiles - India Travel Forum

Last summer, the "flash mob" fad hit Moscow but died a quick death at the truncheon-wielding hands of Moscow's humor-challenged militsia. Never were we more grateful that Russia has a notoriously brutal police force, which was finally put to good and arbitrary use.

Flash Retards - eXile - Issue #214

On a larger scale, such as a continent surrounded by oceans, heat build up on land over time will result in lower density air masses, or areas of low pressure. Conversely, denser air associated with high pressure dominates ocean surfaces. Wind and ocean currents that result from air flowing from high to low pressure mix areas of warmer and colder air and water, contributing to the global energy balance. This exchange is evident at different levels of the atmosphere. Air converging into a low pressure center at the surface rises, leading to moisture condensation and the subsequent release of heat into the upper atmosphere. Diverging air at the surface in a high pressure center is associated with subsiding air from the upper atmosphere and evaporation, a mechanism for energy storage.

Just as energy imbalances develop between land and water surfaces, the variation in space and time of solar heating due to the earth's tilt create seasonal hemispheric energy imbalances. The hemisphere receiving the most direct radiation (during the summer months) experiences a net radiative heating (more energy is gained from the sun than is lost to space). The winter hemisphere is at the same time experiencing net radiative cooling. As part of a global compensation, heat is transported from warmer to cooler areas by ocean and wind currents. Since the areas of heat surplus and deficit change throughout the year, as in the sea breeze example, the direction of transport must change as well. Figure 3 shows low latitude surface wind directions averaged over the summer and winter seasons. As noted earlier, climates dominated by monsoons experience the most pronounced seasonal wind shifts, indicative of a pronounced land-sea effect. In the South Asian example, the rainy season, typically beginning in June, is preceded by nearly two months of scorching temperatures, cooled only with the commencement of the summer rains brought by the southwesterlies. January is the peak of the dry season, which is marked by cool, dry northeasterly flow over most of the region.

Nice explanation of why it rains in through the cracks of my windows.

The Indian Monsoon ...

There is scope to make greater use of flowcharts and broadsheets in the law. As a teaching and learning technique, they find application in the law in statutes, cases and textbooks, and become more common as the law becomes more extensive and complex.

They have two main advantages. In hard copy format flowcharts provide a basis upon which a lecturer can organise his or her materials; they can also be hyperlinked to both primary and secondary law materials in electronic format. And from a student’s perspective, flowcharts can act as a road map or guide to their learning, showing where they are going, where they have got to, and from whence they have come.

This presentation demonstrates the application of flowcharts to a subject in Income Tax law, using both hard copy and online formats. If time permits we will also look at how the technique is being replicated in Intellectual Property law.

Finally, we consider how in this age of digital technology judgments could be written and delivered in broadsheet format.

More from Ian Iredale about representing legal data visually.

LawTechTalk - Flowcharts with hyperlinks for teaching and learning taxation law - Baker&McKenzie Cyberspace Law and Policy Centre UNSW

Bottom line: We urgently need a national commission to look at all the little changes we have made in response to 9/11 - from visa policies to research funding, to the way we've sealed off our federal buildings, to legal rulings around prisoners of war - and ask this question: While no single change is decisive, could it all add up in a way so that 20 years from now we will discover that some of America's cultural and legal essence - our DNA as a nation - has become badly deformed or mutated?

This would be a tragedy for us and for the world. Because, as I've argued, where birds don't fly, people don't mix, ideas don't get sparked, friendships don't get forged, stereotypes don't get broken, and freedom doesn't ring.

Thats it! I'm reading every Friedman column from now on.

America's DNA - Tom Freidman

In our book "All the President's Men," Carl and I described how we had speculated about Deep Throat and his piecemeal approach to providing information. Maybe it was to minimize his risk. Or because one or two big stories, no matter how devastating, could be blunted by the White House. Maybe it was simply to make the game more interesting. More likely, we concluded, "Deep Throat was trying to protect the office, to effect a change in its conduct before all was lost."

Each time I raised the question with Felt, he had the same answer: "I have to do this my way."

How Mark Felt Became 'Deep Throat'

#Books are the tools of trade of lawyers. Primary law materials, whether they are statutes or judgments are recorded, published and read in book format. Secondary materials, such as, text and case books are likewise published in book form. Architects, engineers, builders and mariners primarily work from plans, diagrams and charts. In recent times the law has made use of diagrams and flowcharts to enhance access to and understanding of the law. For example, diagrams and flowcharts can be found in statutes such as, ... Flowcharts can also be found in textbooks, such as...

# It is possible to go further in transforming the way the law is recorded and read from the material literary book format to the diagrammatic plan, chart or broadsheet format. The way in which the law has evolved conveniently lends itself to these alternative formats. Examples can be drawn from Contract law, Intellectual Property law and Taxation Law...

This is at the heart of what Jello is working on in India. He cites four examples, RTF diagrams, that are pretty damned cool, considering that its... just RTF. He uses different levels of abstraction to represent the process of law, as well as the flow of individual cases.

This is a more intuitive representation for legal data than the "stack of text files" folder paradigm. Its really good to see that someone with so many degrees agrees.

E Law: Transforming the Way we Record and Access the Law

] Aron also noted that the research answered the "historic
] question of whether love and sex are the same, or
] different, or whether romantic passion is just warmed
] over sexual arousal." He said, "Our findings show that
] the brain areas activated when someone looks at a photo
] of their beloved only partially overlap with the brain
] regions associated with sexual arousal. Sex and romantic
] love involve quite different brain systems."

In other news: The sky is blue.

Jello: Yes, sorry hon... I can never speak to you again because I want to do you, but you're not into me. This causes me acute anxiety[1].

Source it so you're not a pig.

Science proves Billy Crystal (Harry) was right?

Sex alleviates tension. Love causes it.

] One provocative hypothesis that might account for the
] rise of spectrum disorders in technically adept
] communities like Silicon Valley, some geneticists
] speculate, is an increase in assortative mating.
] Superficially, assortative mating is the blond gentleman
] who prefers blondes; the hyperverbal intellectual who
] meets her soul mate in the therapist's waiting room.
] There are additional pressures and incentives for
] autistic people to find companionship - if they wish to
] do so - with someone who is also on the spectrum. Grandin
] writes, "Marriages work out best when two people with
] autism marry or when a person marries a handicapped or
] eccentric spouse.... They are attracted because their
] intellects work on a similar wavelength."
]
]
] That's not to say that geeks, even autistic ones, are
] attracted only to other geeks. Compensatory unions of
] opposites also thrive along the continuum, and in the
] last 10 years, geekitude has become sexy and associated
] with financial success. The lone-wolf programmer may be
] the research director of a major company, managing the
] back end of an IT empire at a comfortable remove from the
] actual clients. Says Bryna Siegel, author of The World of
] the Autistic Child and director of the PDD clinic at
] UCSF, "In another historical time, these men would have
] become monks, developing new ink for early printing
] presses. Suddenly they're making $150,000 a year with
] stock options. They're reproducing at a much higher
] rate."
]
]
] Genetic hypotheses like these don't rule out
] environmental factors playing a role in the rising
] numbers. Autism is almost certainly not caused by the
] action of a single gene, but by some orchestration of
] multiple genes that may make the developing child more
] susceptible to a trigger in the environment. One
] consequence of increased reproduction among people
] carrying some of these genes might be to boost "genetic
] loading" in successive generations - leaving them more
] vulnerable to threats posed by toxins in vaccines,
] candida, or any number of agents lurking in the
] industrialized world.

Really interesting. Really interesting. Really interesting. Really interesting. Really...

Wired 9.12: The Geek Syndrome

"A preposterous but utterly enchanting story about a young Indian boy adrift in a lifeboat with his good friend, a Bengal tiger, and some other zoo animals."

E-gads, how did I miss this book? It won the Man Booker prize in 2003. It is the bomb shits.

The Life of Pi, by Yann Martel (Salon Review)