flickering pictures

So the posting here has been a little slow for the last week or so — mainly because the rest of my life has been anything but. I’ve got reams of work to plow through and don’t even really have time to be posting right now, but this story was exactly the kind of […]

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Boasting an impressive 51.7 mpg (21.97km/litre) in city driving, the Tata Nano might be the cheapest and cleanest production car in the world. And at $2,000 apiece, India’s roads are going to see a lot of them.
The Nano has five seats, a maximum speed of 60 mph (about 97km/h), twice the fuel efficiency of […]

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The always fascinating Cool Things in Random Places hosts an article on the Karni Mata Temple in Rajastan, India, based in turn on a feature in National Geographic. Devotees flock from all over to worship and feed the temple’s 20,000 rats, paying their respects to Mother Karni, a 15th-century mystic.
From the official Karni Mata […]

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A little while ago, I got an e-mail from Meg White, a graduate student at Columbia College Chicago who’s working on an article about India’s space program. She had stumbled across my post on the Chandarayaan lunar missions, and wanted to bounce a few questions off a non-scholarly blogger type.
Because I though […]

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Why shallots? Why not shallots?
From the Times of India:

India would make Pakistan a barren land in the next six years by blocking its water through construction of dams in violation of the Indus Water Treaty, Pakistan Indus Water Commissioner Jamaat Ali Shah said on Monday.
[…] Dismissing India’s claim that it had stopped Pakistan’s water […]

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Two teenaged girls were brutally killed in the Indian village of Kaluvas during the Hindu festival of Diwali, apparently because they had visited boys to wish them a happy holiday. The girls’ fathers were reportedly part of the mob that killed them.
The Times of India reports:

Rajender Shivran, who claims he couldn’t sleep under the […]

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Incidentally, 420 miles is the distance from New York to Boston and back again. In (an admittedly unfair) comparison, Toyota advertises 45mpg (highway) for its Prius.
And the engineering students, by the way, don’t attend classes at M.I.T., Stanford or Cambridge, but rather at the Rashtreeya Vidhyalaya College of Engineering, Bangalore.
From the Times of India:

The […]

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As The Economist wrote when China launched its first manned space mission a few years back: “Congratulations! So no more aid then?”
From the Times of India:

The spacecraft, lodged at `Checkout 2′ room at the centre is all decked up with golden multilayer insulated foils covering a major part of its body with the highly […]

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Reason #874 why I love the Times of India.
The article is actually pretty interesting too — apparently the Indian state of West Bengal is losing out on millions of dollars from the international Bloomberg Initiative to Reduce Tobacco Use because its chief minister refuses to set an example by kicking the habit. West Bengal […]

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Gas prices through the roof? Trust a practical country to come up with a practical solution.

From the Times of India:

The engines of the buses have been tuned to allow a maximum speed of 60 km only, an official said here on Wednesday.
The tuning of the engines would give 0.40 km mileage per litre. “The […]

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