Archive for December, 2005
Smoke, Dust, Haze
I was checking the weather forecast as we pack for India. I was a little surprised at what I saw for the three cities we will be visiting: Ahmedabad, New Delhi, and Derhadun:
I just love that Indian sunlight!
{forecast, India, sunlight, weather}
Tags
There are two models of tags in use on the web: tags-as-folders, and tags-as-meta-info. Gmail uses the first form, allowing you to store messages in more than one folder at a time. This is a step beyond the one-to-one filing systems of traditional e-mail programs. But its utility stops there. Such a system forces you […]
Masala
ABCDLady has a nice profile of Shashwati:
For the future, Talukdar hopes to turn a screenplay she just finished into a film. Double Vision is a sci-fi thriller with a South Asian American female as the main character. “I’d love to make it,” she says, “You never really see South Asian American women in action films.” […]
Blackboard
Guest post by tf
Blackboard is an online system used by many universities, in the United States and elsewhere, to animate classroom discussions beyond the classroom, through forums and other web-based tools. Administrators at New York University (NYU) are pioneering a new use of Blackboard: to spy on faculty and graduate teaching assistants.
Graduate students who work […]
Hydrant Envy
Guest post by tf
Does Paris suffer from a lack of fire hydrants? Look, not a hydrant in sight:
It took me several years of living here to recognize this absence. And now I understand better how gazing upon this lack, this empty space where a hydrant should be, has been at the root of a deep-seated […]
Sang-Froid
Guest post by tf
I often hear people in France expressing fascination with guns in the United States. Michael Moore’s film Bowling for Columbine was a big hit here, and Moore was on magazine covers across the country:
With all this talk, a person can get nervous heading back to the States. Especially when, traveling on French […]
Bus Lanes
Guest post by tf
The streets are a mess in Paris, as the Delanoë administration carries out its Mobilien project of constructing reserved lanes for several of the city’s bus routes:
Taxis can also use these lanes. As can bicycles; interestingly, as one would think that cyclists would feel uncomfortable with enormous buses looming behind them, but […]
Exotica
Guest post by tf
The will to exoticize is often flagrant in Paris. This is a window display from an agency of a large French travel chain:
It seems to me one part Josephine Baker, whose 1926 banana dance remains a popular image here, and one part sorceress, from the popular 1998 animated film Kirikou and the […]
An anthropologist and documentary filmmaker, 
