All Shook Up

Q: What does it take for you and your apartment neighbour (of more than a year) to meet up for dinner?
A: A magnitude-5.6 earthquake, that is what.

This must be one of the few places in the world where people resume their tennis games 5 mins after an earthquake. Or where you can drive to a restaurant and be served by friendly staff within 10 mins of one. Well, within minutes one can actually get back home and start googling to find out how powerful the quake was. The damages that get reported are about the wine bottles that got damaged in the local BevMo! :)

This was probably the strongest quake I have experienced so far. The other ones have been mild tremors. Or sometimes aftershocks of faraway quakes. When you live sandwiched between active faultlines, earthquakes are always on your mind. One hears about the time when someone you know was caught under a flyover in ‘89. But seriously this is nothing like what one hears (or fears) in most parts of the world. It is not hard to imagine the kind of chaos a 5.6 magnitude quake can cause in most other parts of the world.

So, he did not invent the Internet

As you all know, Al Gore and the United Nations panel* have won the Nobel Peace Prize (for their work on global warming).

So what if he isn’t President, he has won the Oscar, the Emmy and the Nobel ;)

Speaking of awards. Anasuya has just ‘awarded’ me the ‘Rockin’ Girl Blogger Award’. Aww! Thankee! I am speechless.

But, that means, I get to pass it on to … Spacebar (one more person who would love more pink on her blog). And Veena (because I know, she is dying to win one of these).

* for just doing their job?! The UN Panel, that is.

Boffins

Albert Fert of France and Peter Grünberg of Germary win this year’s Nobel Prize for Physics. For their discovery of giant magnetoresistance which has revolutionised computer data storage and retrieval.

“Harnessing those tiny changes (called “spintronics”) make it possible to pack more data onto a hard disk. This technology has also helped in the development of handheld devices such as cell phones and mp3 players.”

What that means – you wouldn’t have your iPods (small storage devices) or YouTube (massive data storage requirements) without them.

we have art …

we have art so we shall not be destroyed by the truth

- Nietzsche

{ Tim Noble and Sue Webster, Dirty White Trash [With Gulls], 1998 | six months’ worth of the artists’ rubbish }