Predictions for 2007 and beyond...

Its the last week of 2006... At least, there were,

• no hurricanes in USA (yes, absolutely ZERO landfalls compared to the monstrous 2005).
  
• no major disasters in Asia like the giant tsunami in 2004 that killed 220,000 people.

And here are some of the cheerful predictions that i came across:

For 2007...

• "Religious broadcaster" Pat Robertson has published his predictions for 2007 that, God told him that a terrorist attack on the United States would result in a mass killing late in 2007 (sometime after September), though it seems that God did not particularly say that it is going to be nuclear.
  

• Some of most common people's predictions in CNN include, "US will be stuck in war and/or may retreat like from Saigon", "High gas prices as much as $100 a barrel", "Terrorist attacks on US soil"...
  

• And here are some less interesting predictions from Forbes about the US economy :-)

And Beyond...

• Arctic ice will vanish during the summer of 2040, endangering (or rather killing) ice dependant species like polar bears etc., As an early sign of the polar melting, we just saw that one of the six canadian arctic shelves had broken away from the north pole!
  

• Apophis, the kindest meteor we have known so far, will graze through earth's atmosphere at about 36000 kms (22500 miles) in 2029 and again in 2036, at about 1/10th of the distance between earth and moon, and at the same altitude range as that of the geosynchronous satellites, it is expected to be a pretty interesting rendezvous :-)
  

• We will run out of (wild caught) seafood by 2048, according to a report published in the 3rd November issue of the journal Science published by AAAS, a nonprofit science society.
  

• Last but not the least news is the (old) finding that Earth's magnetic poles are undergoing a reversal - this was found by some observations indicating a weakening magnetic field which might give rise to problems similar to the south atlantic anomaly in many places around the globe. But its okay to ignore this for now, since a complete reversal might take a 1000 or 2000 years more (did i hear thank God?!) ! Look here for a cool animation on the reversal process and if & how this might affect animals that rely on it...

Well, though all these predictions seem to portend only a grim future on earth :-), they just make me feel more determined to seize everyday of my life and enjoy it as much as I can, when I can... Still I have the whole of today to do whatever I want to, and no one can stop me from being myself... Carpe Diem!

Indian penis - much smaller than their ego!

Do you know why (many) Indian men have a huge ego ?

They are trying to compensate for their small penises!! ;-)

As per a two year study made by the ICMR, 60% Indian men measure on an average, 2.5 cm less and an another 30% measure 5 cm less compared to the the standard sizes used for making condoms.

Well, as for the Indian pride, still there's a hope: India is now the biggest proof that size does not matter for procreation... well, then for satisfaction ? "It depends!"

And here are some jokes made out of this news:

• Now indian guys need not worry about "being small" among their friends - everyone is!
• Jay Leno, "Now I know why that tech support guy was snippy!"
• SNL, "No wonder the tech support guy was grumpy"
  
• Now I have to take more seriously the “small penis” spam I receive!
• I bet this increases boys’ receptivity to arranged marriages: “Uh, yeah, I guess I’m not going to pick anyone up in a bar now, so let’s just seal the deal before I reveal.”
• May be this will start an era of male-teasing in India!
• This can also have a social impact - Dowry could now become proportional to how the guy measures up!

Tamil Blogging 101!

I just began exploring the world of Tamil blogs and boy, am I surprised by so many amateur writers jotting down nice blogs about various things from, Abhirami andhadhi to Astrophysics to whatever one can be excited about!

And here are some things I have learnt that might be helpful for other people wanting to explore and eventually end up addicted to Tamil blogging!

• Viewing Tamil Blogs
  

If you have some trouble reading this page (or this "செந்தமிழ்த் தேன்மொழியாள்") clearly, then you need to set your computer to view Unicode fonts . To view Unicode Tamil text, you need to set the character encoding to UTF-8. But still, Firefox might actually mangle up the Tamil alphabets, like the khombu, kaal etc. To fix these problems, I did the following:

1. Installed the indic fonts package and restarted the computer - this step itself fixed most of the text in my Firefox.
2. Still there were still some mangled Tamil texts due to a Firefox bug in treating justified/aligned text - for this, Saravanan has posted a javascript fix that can be installed as part of the greasemonkey extension. Be sure to install the latest greasemonkey extension, since some older version is said to have some security vulnerability. It is quite simple thing to do - just install the greasemonkey and then save Saravanan's script and add it to greasemonkey as mentioned in Saravanan's fix page. A Tamil version of the procedure is posted here by Mayuran.

• Typing Tamil Unicode text

There are different ways to do this. Here are 2 that I tried:

1. This seems to be the simplest way to start typing in Tamil Unicode: Using a Online Tamil Unicode Transliterator from Vijay Lakshminarayanan. You just type "thamiz" and it generates "தமிழ்" and you just copy and paste the tamil text into your blog editor and publish it! To include English words, you just need to use the ` character before and that text will appear as it is.
   
2. To type emails or in other text boxes directly, I find the e-kalappai program pretty useful. the feature I like in it, is the ability to switch between Tamil and English text while typing emails simply using alt-1 and alt-2 keys - which feels more like the escape modes in vi... (there seems to be an alternative firefox extension to do the same thing - but I haven't tried it)

Now you can set off, exploring the jungle of Tamil blogs from syndication sites like தமிழ்மணம் or தேன்கூடு...

Thats it for now, folks...

தமிழ் பதிவுலகம் உங்களை இனிதே வரவேற்கின்றது!