Nikhil Dandekar

"Are there honestly 46 new Transformers in the movie? I have no fucking clue. It's impossible to tell most of them apart except for Optimus and the Racist Twins (there's another yellow Autobot who I constantly thought was Bumblebee). There could be 46, or there could be 12. I honestly would believe 12 if someone had said that." - Nikhil Dandekar from Bookmarklet

"When the Chinese government looks back on its handling of the unrest in Urumqi and East Turkestan this week, it will most likely tell the world that it acted in the interests of maintaining stability. It will most likely forget to explain why thousands of Uighurs risked everything to speak out against injustice, or why hundreds of Uighurs are now dead for exercising their right to protest." - Nikhil Dandekar from Bookmarklet

"On Sunday, July 5th in Urumqi, the capital of China's western Xinjiang region, thousands of minority ethnic Uighur residents marched, demanding a government investigation into an earlier incident - a brawl between Han Chinese and Uighurs in a toy factory in Shaoguan that ended with at least two Uighur deaths. Sometime during the July 5th protest the situation became very violent, Uighurs clashing with police and attacking local Han Chinese. Urumqi citizens woke the next morning to learn that over 1,000 people had been injured and 156 killed in their city. Government forces worked to quell the violence and to separate the newly-formed Han vigilante groups and the Uighurs still in the streets. Communications were shut off, streets closed, curfews imposed, hundreds arrested, and thousands of troops poured into Urumqi, which remains tense - several clashes reported even today." - Nikhil Dandekar from Bookmarklet

"Simpson's paradox (or the Yule-Simpson effect) is a statistical paradox wherein the successes of groups seem reversed when the groups are combined. This result is often encountered in social and medical science statistics, and occurs when frequency data are hastily given causal interpretation; the paradox disappears when causal relations are derived systematically, through formal analysis." - Nikhil Dandekar from Bookmarklet

"The product sold is a combination of good tennis and beauty — and consumer satisfaction is increased by more of both. Event planners would like the top-seeded players to be the most beautiful; absent that correlation, they believe customers are willing to trade off some tennis quality to watch more attractive players. Are they catering to customer discrimination, or are they merely indulging consumer preferences?" - Nikhil Dandekar from Bookmarklet

"The Unthinkable author Amanda Ripley points to an interesting story about child safety in air travel. In the 1990’s, a call went out for the F.A.A. to stop letting air-traveling parents carry young children in their laps, making them buy a ticket for their children instead, so that every person could wear a seatbelt. The F.A.A. refused, saying that the cost of an extra ticket could force parents to travel by car instead. Car crashes are the leading cause of death for children. On the other hand, the problem of child safety in air travel, the F.A.A. said, “barely exists.” Yet another example of how terrible we are at assessing risk, especially when it comes to our children." - Nikhil Dandekar from Bookmarklet

"The vast majority of species on Earth are single-celled. Most of these languish in obscurity – many have never even been named – but some of the relatively few species that have been studied exhibit remarkable abilities. Many of these are physical: some micro-organisms are amazingly strong; others can hibernate for hundreds of thousands of years or thrive in environments so extreme that they would kill off most other life forms in a flash. But many bacteria and protists also exhibit behaviour that looks remarkably intelligent. This behaviour isn't the result of conscious thought – the sort you find in humans and other complex animals – because single-celled organisms don't have nervous systems, let alone brains. A better explanation is that they're "biological computers" with internal machinery that can process information. Here are some of the most striking examples of this "intelligent" behaviour from the New Scientist archive." - Nikhil Dandekar from Bookmarklet

"Located at Hunyuan County of Shanxi Province, Hengshan Hanging Monastery was built at the later period of northern Wei about 1400 years ago. It is an immortal masterpiece of ancient architecture and a piece crystallization of workmanship and resourcefulness. The Hanging Monastery with Cuiping Mountain behind is opposite to the north mountain - the Hengshan Mountain. The clusters of architecture, over 40 buildings of them, are evenly distributed and well-balanced in height. In the monastery are over 80 statues; some are cast with bronze, some with iron, some with clay and some are carved out of stone. Sakyamuni, the founder of Buddhism, the Child Giving Avalokitesvara, Ludongping of Taoism and others are living together friendly and harmoniously which give one some thought that each and every sect of religions wants to capture a seat in such an extraordinary monastery." - Nikhil Dandekar from Bookmarklet

For Sampras, time between Gland Slam #1 and #14: 12 years For Federer, time between Grand Slam #1 and #15: 6 years - Nikhil Dandekar from Bookmarklet

"Some technologies are like a Tyrannosaurus running down the highway (without the awesome). They made sense once and now they're hideously out of place, carried only by momentum as they stumble toward their inevitable date with the sixteen-wheeler of Progress. But, like the T-Rex, they seem intent on doing as much damage as they can until then." - Nikhil Dandekar from Bookmarklet