This talk was an introduction to the propaganda carried out by the Nazi regime through the medium of cinema, with special focus on the life and works of Leni Riefenstahl.
Presenter: Ankura Ranade
Venue: Brewhaha
Gallic Conquests
A brief history of Europe through the eyes of Asterix and his friends.
Speaker: Ananth
Venue: Brewhaha
Why are we good?
Presenter: Deepak Rajanna
Venue: Brewhaha
Bibliography
1. Origins of Virtue – Matt Ridley
2. The God Delusion – Richard Dawkins
3. Selfish Gene – Richard Dawkins
Logic
“Logic” presented by Shreyas Srinivasan
The other talk in today’s session was “Biological Rhythms” by Avani Shukla.
Words English Ought To Borrow
English has a long history of absorbing words from other languages
For eg.
Déjà vu , à la carte – from French.
Safari – from Swahili.
Blighty (from vilāyatī), Catamaran (from kattumaram), Bungalow – From Indian languages.
Kayak – from an inuit language.
Schadenfreude, Weltschmerz , Zeitgeist – from German.
…and here are words that should be borrowed just for their charm.
Papiervampier (Afrikaans, literal- paper vampire) – Stapler
Zapper – Dutch for remote control
Schmutz – Yiddish for dirt, filth.
… these have no equivalents
Gigirongak – Malay for a gap between teeth.
Ethhari – Kannada for the process of mixing coffee decoction with hot milk by pouring it from one cup to the other. (one-meter south indian filter coffee 🙂 )
Bakku-shan – Japanese for a woman who looks good only from behind.
Treppenwitz/ L’esprit de l’éscalier
Backpfeifengesicht – German for “face that cries out for a fist in it”.
… this one ought to have been mentioned in the talk
Ohrwurm – German (literally Earworm) for a tune that gets stuck in the head.
Other interesting ones here.
Paragliding
Speaker: Jayant
Venue: Cubbon Park
Photos here: http://www.flickr.com/photos/wheelsofjoy/sets/72157603592361557/
Soapbox Weekend meet – 25/05/2008
About 14 of us met up in Cubbon Park for this weekends soapbox discussion. There were two talks. First by Akash on security and the “insecurity” (lack of security) on the Internet and the second by Deepak on words which belong to other languages but should be adopted in English.
I missed most of Akash’s talk as I was delayed due to rain but arrived in the end as he gave examples of various techniques of breaking one’s defenses on the Internet and what techniques are employed to obtain information from the unsuspecting users. He also gave examples of vulnerabilities in some applications of large corporations, a huge public sector bank in India (as yet unpatched) and other attacks.
In the second talk, Deepak showed us words which belonged to a variety of languages like German, French, Swahili, Sanskrit etc which have no equivalents in English and sometimes require a sentence to express in the same meaning.
I also managed to click some great pics of the people who had attended. Check out the photo set below to view them (click on the photo to view the set)
Soapbox 