The Lost Symbol : A Review

After Rome and Paris, Robert Langdon faces yet another challenge to unravel ancient secrets, save a friend's life,defeat a formidable foe and avert a global disaster, all in a single day's work. But this time the adventure takes place in Washington which may initially seem surprising,given the fact that was founded roughly 300 years back whereas ancient secrets date back to well.. antiquity. The linkage of course is the well-known Masonic roots of the founding fathers of the USA and Freemason symbols and signature found in everything from the White House to the Presidential Seal and even currency bills, subjects which have provided sustenance to myriads of conspiracy theories floating on the web especially.

Musings On Mortality

Ancient philosophers as well as medieval ones often kept human skull on their writing desk, as a reminder of their own mortality. I read this long back and assumed that it is widely known but in the early years the idea appeared to me, as it would appear to most people - a freaky habit !

If at all a skull on your writing desk doesn't startle you to death when you doze off with your chin on the table and wake up to find two hollow sockets staring at you, it should at least obsess you with the idea of your own death! And people obsessed with their own deaths, (euphemistically called fatalists or nihilists) would definitely screw up their present lives as well as the lives of people close to them. So it must be one of those freaky things the ancients practiced because they had lots of free time and loads of silly ideas propagated by their wisest men who probably wouldn't be able to intellectually compete with some of the biggest dumb-asses of our time.

March 11: Japan's Early Warning System

When I first heard about a powerful earthquake, the obvious feeling was one of alarm but when told that the target was Japan, my stress had considerably decreased. Of course, the magnitude (8.9 Richter) did sound far bigger than any other earthquake I had heard or read about, but still I expected loss of lives on a much lesser scale than had it hit any other country. Just a couple of days back I was going through the report covering Russia-UK collaboration to launch new generation satellites for real times monitoring of seismic activities and eventually build tools for prediction.

Egypt: Kefaya As A Doctrine

Anonymous has joined the fray in #Egypt protests declaring that it will not stand idly as people are denied their basic rights and human dignity thus raising the possibility of Egyptian government sites becoming their new target. The online hacktivist group had earlier come out in support of Tunisian protesters and taken down Tunisian government websites. However, what interest me more are the parallels in the structure of both the organizations (for lack of a better word). Both are leaderless movements by like-minded individuals participating voluntarily to achieve a simple objective. Further, as radically decentralized networks with no hierarchy nor structure,they expose no identifiable target that the government could coerce/corrupt into submission.
{Update 24/02/11: Came across an Al-Jazeera Op-Ed : Anonymous  and the global correction)