Year: 2002

Bill donated $100mn to fight AIDS in India. Interestingly, just contrast this photo of him wearing a ’tilak’ with his 1977 snap with Paul Allen. In the latter, he almost looks like a girl! via The Register

Drinking bug juice. via RobotWisdom

Altavista’s new features are pretty good. What I liked best, though, is their new interface. Especially the bar used to open the search result in a new window. Good to know that I rank 3rd on their search.

Why am I the second hit on Google for queries like “arabic food’s pictures”, “wedding pictures in chennai in geocities”, and “iim grads future”?

Opera 7 Beta is out. It sports a new look, which one tires of quite soon. But it’s as fast as ever, and has better standards compliance. via Anand

Another interesting piece related to complexity: a speech on the paradox of randomness by Gregory Chaitin. via missing matter

An interesting thread on Andersja’s about how McKinsey is blocking competitors from its site. I’m at the receiving end of it. And so far, it hasn’t affected my life in any way.

On figuring Google’s pagerank. It’s interesting to note that Google, and only Google, ranks 11 out of 10 in its pagerank.

Distributed Proofreaders. As the name suggests, it’s a distributed web-based tool for proof-reading books for Project Gutenberg. References from Slashdot and kuro5hin have spiked the number of pages proofread. But even that apart, they’re targetting over 1,000 pages a day. That’s over a book a day! via kuro5hin

Photoblogs and the Visual Thesaurus via Kribs