Link Roundup

I am done with my exams and am free for 20 whole days. Got a bunch of new books I am starting off on (see the reading lists on your right) and planning to get Simpsons and SouthPark DVDs too today. Straining to keep the drool from escaping. Also, did I tell you how much I am enjoying my MacBook? I just use SpotLight for everything. The terminal has all that you get in a Linux terminal (and the copy-paste works much better than it ever did in Linux ones). Close the lid and it goes off so obediently and silently to sleep - I don't remember the last time I shut down this thing.

I plan to get out some "real content" in the next few days. Some links in the meanwhile. (Tip: Use delicious or something if you think something is interesting, but don't have the time to read now.)

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The Stanford Prison Experiment - a proof, if it were needed, that power corrupts even good-intentioned humans. If you are too bored to go through the slideshow on that page, try the Wikipedia page, although the Wiki page lacks the sense of drama. Note the interesting parallels with Nazi generals.

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Great post from Ravikiran on the roots of the Singur controversy.

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One of my favourite essays from Richard Dawkins - Gaps in the Mind. No particular reason for linking it now, I just remembered it from when I read his essay collection, and found it on the web.

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Also, some new blogs that I have been reading recently
-> Mixing Memory, a psychology blog - check out a recent post on the psychology of religion;
-> the Economist blog - who have their usual excellent fare of opinion and analysis, and via who I heard that Google is running sponsored videos on its Google Videos, and so is YouTube (somewhat) ( in other news, YouTube has removed tons of copyrighted videos from it's site)

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On the Google Research blog, Peter Norvig (you'll recognize his name if you've studied AI sometime) gives us their list of top 20 videos of talks at Google - I watched the the first one, by Sebastian Thrun of Stanford AI group, about how they won the DARPA Grand Challenge, and it is superb.

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Why multiplication is commutative? and other intriguing essays by Tim Gowers, a Fields Medalist and Math prof, many of which I haven't read yet.