Nikhil Dandekar

Hahaha... this sounds familiar. - Nikhil Dandekar from Bookmarklet

"SNAKING ALONG, cutting through fields and streets, yards and gardens, the 28-mile-long Berlin Wall stood as a border between East and West Berlin from 1961 to 1989. That all changed on Nov. 9, 1989, when an inexact translation, a confused border guard and a natural longing for a better life opened a hole in that wall that would eventually end the Cold War." - Nikhil Dandekar from Bookmarklet

"This is my most recent school project. I thought it would be cool to show what life would look like without any traffic. This is going to be an ongoing project." - Nikhil Dandekar from Bookmarklet

"Since 2006, NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO) has been orbiting Mars, currently circling approximately 300 km (187 mi) above the Martian surface. On board the MRO is HiRISE, the High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment camera, which has been photographing the planet for several years now at resolutions as fine as mere inches per pixel. Collected here is a group of images from HiRISE over the past few years, in either false color or grayscale, showing intricate details of landscapes both familiar and alien, from the surface of our neighboring planet, Mars. I invite you to take your time looking through these, imagining the settings - very cold, dry and distant, yet real." - Nikhil Dandekar from Bookmarklet

"This is not the usual battle between creationist fundamentalists and evolutionists. The latest ruckus has broken out among scientists and philosophers who accept evolutionary theory as the explanation for the emergence of life's diversity. Where they differ is on the public communication of science and evolution. Dawkins in particular is being rebuked for doing more harm than good to the public face of science. The basic claim - spelled out by the journalist Chris Mooney and the biologist Sheril Kirshenbaum in their book Unscientific America, published in June - is that Dawkins presents an unnecessarily divisive choice: you can accept evolution and a scientific world-view more broadly, and therefore reject religion, or cling to religion and sacrifice scientific understanding. This strategy, critics argue, alienates moderate religious people who might otherwise be receptive to scientific theory. Faced with a mutually exclusive choice between their private faith and the objective world-view of science, moderates will turn away from the latter. Science loses out." - Nikhil Dandekar from Bookmarklet

Haha! Who the F are they talking to? How I wish I could auction my minutes ;) - Sanjit

"As the home of the infamous drug lord Pablo Escobar, the city of Medellín, Colombia, used to be one of the most violent places in the world. Today, the cells and grounds of its Bellavista prison are largely populated with people who grew up in and around the city. It’s an intimidating place, to say the least, yet as is evident in the images of Vance Jacobs’s photographic series “Colombian Prison: A View from the Inside,” even within the confines of prison walls can the beauty of the human spirit be observed. On the invitation of the Centro Colombo Americano, an English language school for Colombians in Medellín, Jacobs ventured to the Bellavista prison with an inspired assignment: to teach documentary photography to eight inmates in one week." - Nikhil Dandekar from Bookmarklet

"iCents is an open platform that websites can use to make existing payment systems (like PayPal etc) work for micropayments and micro‑subscriptions. It permits paid-links." - Nikhil Dandekar from Bookmarklet

Pretty neat... - Nikhil Dandekar

"Would I recommend it over the iPhone? Two thousand plus words later, you might be a bit sad to read: Nope. But I wouldn’t recommend the iPhone over the Droid, either – and that’s the Droid’s real win here. This is the very first phone in over two years that I would consider carrying for day-to-day use instead of my iPhone, but that doesn’t mean I would recommend it whole heartedly to everyone." - Nikhil Dandekar from Bookmarklet

"Pushkar Mela (or Pushkar Fair) is an annual five-day camel and livestock fair, held in the town of Pushkar in the state of Rajasthan, India, where over 25,000 camels are traded each year. The fair draws thousands of tourists, camels, camel traders, racers, locals and Hindu faithful who come to bathe in the sanctified Lake Pushkar - until the final day, Kartik Poornima, a Hindu holy day celebrated on the full moon day of the month of Kartik. Collected here are a handful of photographs from Associated Press photographer Kevin Frayer, from his trip to this year's Pushkar Mela." - Nikhil Dandekar from Bookmarklet

"Obama has to decide now whether to side with the American people and the Afghan people calling for a rapid reduction in US force, or with a small military clique demanding a ramping-up of the conflict. The populations of both countries are in close agreement. The latest Washington Post poll shows that 51 per cent of Americans say the war is "not worth fighting" and that ending the foreign occupation will "reduce terrorism". Only 27 per cent disagree. At the other end of the gun-barrel, 77 per cent of Afghans in the latest BBC poll say the on-going US air strikes are "unacceptable", and the US troops should only remain if they are going to provide reconstruction assistance rather than bombs. But there is another side: General Stanley McCrystal says that if he is given another 40,000 troops – on top of the current increase which has pushed military levels above anything in the Bush years – he will "finally win" by "breaking the back" of the Taliban and al-Qa'ida." - Nikhil Dandekar from Bookmarklet