Tag: buzz

This dosa maker is faster than robots, says Anand Mahindra. See video here

KV Prasad Jun 13, 2022, 06:35 AM IST (Published)

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Mahindra Group Chairman Anand Mahindra often shares videos featuring ‘ordinary’ workers with extraordinary skills. Continuing with the trend, Mahindra tweeted a video of a dosa maker Tuesday, in which a middle-aged man can be seen preparing dosas at a restaurant with supreme finesse.

And he does it all in a matter of a few seconds, almost like a robot. Mahindra captioned the video as, “This gentleman makes robots look like unproductive slowpokes… I’m tired just watching him…and hungry, of course..”

This gentleman makes robots look like unproductive slowpokes… I’m tired just watching him…and hungry, of course.. pic.twitter.com/VmdzZDMiOk

— anand mahindra (@anandmahindra) August 17, 2021

The video has already hit 2.4 million views. In the video, bystanders are awestruck looking at the man at work. The video went viral soon after Mahindra posted it on Twitter.

A Twitterati by the user name @vipinkh wrote, “This is Dadar (Mumbai) east market. Have had his dosas. Super awesome.”

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Another user @manojgjha wrote, “Famous ‘Muttu Dosa Corner’ which serves delicious Masala/ Mysore Masala Dosa. The unique swag of the owner while serving the dosa. Inspired by South Indian superstar Rajinikanth, the owner of the stall can be seen preparing one dosa after another at a mind-blowing speed.”

A couple of days ago, Anand Mahindra posted a video of a man balancing a pile of bricks on his head. In the 57-second video, the man, most likely at a construction site, can be seen piling a stack of bricks on his head one by one.

“No one should have to do such risky manual labour. But you have to admire this man for turning his drudgery into an art form. Does anyone know where this is from? Can his employers provide automation & also recognise his higher-order skills? (From Signal) (sic),” Anand Mahindra wrote.

Also Read | How this idli-dosa batter maker became a household name

Elon Musk forms several ‘X Holdings’ companies to fund potential Twitter buyout

3 Mins Read

Thursday’s filing dispelled some doubts, though Musk still has work to do. He and his advisers will spend the coming days vetting potential investors for the equity portion of his offer, according to people familiar with the matter

KV Prasad Journo follow politics, process in Parliament and US Congress. Former Congressional APSA-Fulbright Fellow

It’s Friday the 13th! Spooked out? But did you know …

KV Prasad Jun 13, 2022, 06:35 AM IST (Published)

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For centuries now, the notion of misfortunes associated with Friday, the 13th have taken over the world. The enigma dates back to legends, folklores, interpretations of mythological occurrences, and some true events.

There’s even a dedicated word to describe the fear of Friday the 13th—paraskevidekatriaphobia. The word is an extension to triskaidekaphobia, a fear of the number 13.

Here are some popular tales and events that fuelled the dread around Friday the 13th:

Norse (Scandinavian) mythology: Thanks to the Marvel movie, it is now well known Loki is considered the God of mischief in Norse mythology. According to a legend, Loki once gate-crashed a banquet in the (mythical) kingdom of Asgard. With his presence, the number of gods present in the banquet hall (Valhalla) rose to 13. During the event, Loki is believed to have tricked blind god Hodr into killing his brother Balder, the god of light, joy and goodness.

The Last Supper: In the Biblical story, the Last Supper was attended by Jesus Christ and his disciples and the 13th guest to arrive was Judas Iscariot, who betrayed Jesus, leading to his crucifixion.

Other Biblical references of unlucky Fridays: Bible’s first man and first woman Adam and Eve ate the forbidden Apple on a Friday. Adam’s son Cain murdered his brother Abel on a Friday. Noah’s ark set sail in the Great Flood on a Friday. And the Temple of Solomon in Jerusalem was also toppled on a Friday. Unlucky Fridays, indeed.

The Da Vinci Code: According to Dan Brown’s 2003 novel “The Da Vinci Code, officers of King Philip IV of France arrested hundreds of members of the Knights Templar, a Catholic military order, on Friday, October 13, 1307.

Real-life events on Friday, the 13th: German bombing of Buckingham Palace in 1940 took place on Friday, the 13th. The murder of Kitty Genovese (a crime that pushed the emergency 911 system into place) in New York in 1964 took place on Friday, the 13th. In fact, a cyclone killed more than 3,00,000 people in Bangladesh in 1970, also on Friday, the 13th. And the death of rapper Tupac Shakur in September 1996 is also recorded on Friday, the 13th. The crash of the Costa Concordia cruise ship off the coast of Italy that killed 30 people in 2012, among others also occurred on, you guessed it, Friday, the 13th.

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The other view

Paganism associates Fridays and the number 13 with good fortune. According to Pagans, Friday has a unique association with the divine feminine and is a lucky day for marriage.

Meanwhile, the Pagans linked the number 13 to the number of lunar and menstrual cycles that occur in a calendar year. The number symbolised feminine power and fertility, which were prized by the Pagans.

Back to present

A significant number of people still take Friday, the 13th to be a day of misfortune. But in pop culture, the mystery around the day is taken with a pinch of salt. For instance, a Hollywood film series based on superstition around the day became very popular.

Not to forget, the ‘meme army’. The myth prompts several netizens to share hilarious Friday the 13th memes every year.

American singer Taylor Swift is a fan of the number ’13’. She has often endorsed it. She even tattoos the number on her wrist before live performances for good luck.

In a 2009 interaction with MTV, she said, “I was born on the 13th. I turned 13 on Friday, the 13th. My first album went gold in 13 weeks. My first No. 1 one song had a 13-second intro. Every time I’ve won an award I’ve been seated in either the 13th seat, the 13th row, the 13th section or row M, which is the 13th letter. Basically, whenever a 13 comes up in my life, it’s a good thing.”

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Elon Musk forms several ‘X Holdings’ companies to fund potential Twitter buyout

3 Mins Read

Thursday’s filing dispelled some doubts, though Musk still has work to do. He and his advisers will spend the coming days vetting potential investors for the equity portion of his offer, according to people familiar with the matter

KV Prasad Journo follow politics, process in Parliament and US Congress. Former Congressional APSA-Fulbright Fellow

BOOK EXCERPT: Twice Upon A Time In India

KV Prasad Jun 13, 2022, 06:35 AM IST (Published)

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BCCI negotiates for a longer England’s visit to India

As the Indian team returned home from their successful tour to the West Indies, the Board of Control for Cricket in India (BCCI) was in discussions with the Marylebone Cricket Club (MCC) about England’s reciprocal visit in 1971.

The BCCI wanted England to play three matches against assorted sides along with five zonal games and the five tests. However, the MCC only agreed to the five tests and five zonal matches.

They also refused to play a festival match, which was intended to be a benefit game for some of India’s retired cricketers. The MCC believed it would be a huge workout for the players after a busy summer at home with tests against both Pakistan and India. Thereafter, they were to host Australia in 1972 for the Ashes.

For years, the tours to the sub-continent hadn’t been taken very seriously by the Englishmen as they generally sent in second-string sides on previous visits. “Will the same experiments be continued? The answer will depend on how we fare on the coming tour of England, beginning in June,” a report in Sportsweek noted in May 1971.

Eventually, the MCC visited only in 1972-73 and played the five tests, five zonal games and one match against the Board President’s XI.

However, despite India’s test series win in England in 1971, the MCC did not send their full-strength side. That the captain Tony Lewis made his test debut during the tour to India reflects that fact. The Indian tour was a part of a sub-continental sojourn which also took them to Ceylon (as Sri Lanka was known then) and Pakistan.

Rohan Kanhai’s generosity

Rohan Kanhai was one of West Indies’ finest batsmen. A genial man, Kanhai was respected by the opposition. Ahead of India’s visit to the West Indies in 1971, one of Kenia Jayantilal’s greatest worries was food.

For an Indian vegetarian, travelling to other countries can be challenging and the opener was making his first trip to the Caribbean. In Rohan Kanhai, Jayantilal found a saviour.

The West Indian great assured him that vegetarian food wouldn’t be a problem. “In Guyana, I got a lot of vegetarian food like bhindi masala, puran poli, biryani, baingan ka shaag. Every day there was some change,” Jayantilal recalled.

Most of the groundsmen and those who worked on the grounds were of Indian origin and they helped out Jayantilal on Kanhai’s suggestion. “Rohan knew everybody and he told me ‘Don’t worry. You will get vegetarian food’,” he said.

Jayantilal continued to get vegetarian food throughout the trip. Some of his teammates then told him, “Thoda zyada mangao. Hum non- veg kha kha ke bore ho gaye. (Order some more. We are bored of eating non-veg).”

Kanhai was known to be friendly with the opposition and was particularly encouraging of youngsters. This was yet another example of his gregarious nature.

He also encouraged a young Sunil Gavaskar during his first series. In reverence and tribute to the great man, Sunil Gavaskar named his son Rohan.

—Twice Upon A Time – India’s Fairytale Victories of 1971, is written by Nishad Pai Vaidya and Sachin Bajaj. It’s published by Global Cricket School in association with Niche Sports. Excerpted with permission.

Elon Musk forms several ‘X Holdings’ companies to fund potential Twitter buyout

3 Mins Read

Thursday’s filing dispelled some doubts, though Musk still has work to do. He and his advisers will spend the coming days vetting potential investors for the equity portion of his offer, according to people familiar with the matter

KV Prasad Journo follow politics, process in Parliament and US Congress. Former Congressional APSA-Fulbright Fellow

Explained: What’s this craze for ‘NFTs’ all about, anyway?

KV Prasad Jun 13, 2022, 06:35 AM IST (Published)

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A digital art piece, tweaked using cryptocurrency technology to make it one-of-a-kind, sold at auction this week for nearly $70 million. That transaction made global headlines and buoyed already-mushrooming interest in these kinds of digital objects known as non-fungible tokens, or NFTs that have captured the attention of artists and collectors alike.

A non-what token?

In economics jargon, a fungible token is an asset that can be exchanged on a one-for-one basis. Think of dollars or bitcoins each one has the exact same value and can be traded freely. A non-fungible object, by contrast, has its own distinct value, like an old house or a classic car.

Cross this notion with cryptocurrency technology known as the blockchain and you get NFTs. These are effectively digital certificates of authenticity that can be attached to digital art or, well, pretty much anything else that comes in digital form audio files, video clips, animated stickers, this article you’re reading.

NFTs confirm an item’s ownership by recording the details on a digital ledger known as a blockchain, which is public and stored on computers across the internet, making it effectively impossible to destroy or lose.

These tokens are white-hot in the collecting world at the moment, where they’re being used to solve a problem central to digital collectibles: how to claim ownership of something that can be easily and endlessly duplicated.

I still don’t get it. Can’t anyone just copy digital stuff off the internet?

Sure, anyone can download a copy of Beeple’s art from his social media feed, print it out, and hang it on the wall. Just like you can take a photo of the Mona Lisa in the Louvre or buy a print from the museum gift shop. But that doesn’t mean you own those original artworks.

One purpose of NFTs is that they can be used to trace an object’s digital provenance, allowing a select few to prove ownership. In the broader picture, it’s a way to create scarcity — albeit artificial so that you can sell something for higher prices thanks to its scarcity.

All the time, money and effort you spend in your digital life, you can create value for that,” said Chicago fund manager Andrew Steinwold, who started an NFT fund in 2019. You have property rights in the physical world. Why don’t we have property rights in the digital world?”

So what’s a beeple?

Beeple is an American digital artist whose real name is Mike Winkelmann and is based in South Carolina. He’s been creating digital sketches using 3D tools on a daily basis for the past 13 years. Auction house Christie’s calls his work abstract, fantastical, grotesque or absurd” and it has gained him 1.9 million followers on Instagram. In December, the first extensive auction of his art brought in $3.5 million, an eye-catching amount that was surpassed by this week’s record-shattering sale of his collage Everyday’s: The First 5,000 Days” for nearly $70 million.

So, who else is selling NFTs?

William Shatner of Star Trek fame sold 90,000 virtual trading cards last year for $1 each. Electronic musician Grimes sold $6 million worth of her digital art last month, including a video clip featuring winged cherubs floating in pastel dreamscapes that went for $389,000. Clips of NBA star LeBron James dunking are selling for as much as $225,000. Actress Lindsey Lohan sold an image of her face. You can also buy virtual land in video games and meme characters like Nyan Cat.

Digital artist Anne Spalter started out as an NFT skeptic but has now sold multiple artworks using the tokens. The latest was a video called Dark Castles — of mysteriously distorted castles generated by artificial intelligence technology that sold for $2,752.

NFTs have opened up art to a whole bunch of people who never would have gone to a gallery in New York, said Spalter, who pioneered digital fine arts courses at Brown University and the Rhode Island School of Design in the 1990s. They’re investors, they’re tech entrepreneurs, they’re in that world.

Also Read: Crypto collectibles: New talk of the town

Elon Musk forms several ‘X Holdings’ companies to fund potential Twitter buyout

3 Mins Read

Thursday’s filing dispelled some doubts, though Musk still has work to do. He and his advisers will spend the coming days vetting potential investors for the equity portion of his offer, according to people familiar with the matter

KV Prasad Journo follow politics, process in Parliament and US Congress. Former Congressional APSA-Fulbright Fellow

Disney unveils plans to stream a galaxy of new series, films; Star Wars, Marvel, Pixar fans note

KV Prasad Jun 13, 2022, 06:35 AM IST (Published)

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The Walt Disney Co.’s streaming plans shifted into hyper speed Thursday, unveiling a galaxy’s worth of new streaming offerings including plans for 10 Star Wars series spinoffs and 10 Marvel series that will debut on Disney+.

In a virtual presentation for investors, Disney chief executive Bob Chapek laid out super-sized ambitions for it direct-to-consumer efforts, leaning heavily on some of the company’s biggest brands.

Over the next few years, Disney is planning to premiere directly on Disney+ not just an armada of Star Wars and Marvel series but 15 live-action, Pixar and animated series, and 15 live-action, Pixar and animated movies.

Chapek said Disney+ subscribers worldwide have reached 86.8 million, up from 74 million last month. The service has easily exceeded most forecasts, reaching that number 13 months since its launch in November 2019.

Disney will increase the monthly price by $1 to $8 a month in March. The company forecasts 230-260 million subscribers by 2024.

To keep subscriber numbers climbing, Disney presented a blizzard of remakes, sequels and spinoffs of various shapes and sizes on Thursday. 100 new titles in all including a Beauty and the Beast prequel series, a Moana animated series, a Three Men and a Baby reboot with Zac Efron, a Swiss Family Robinson series and, yes, even the Kardashians.

But Disney also kept its biggest films including Marvel’s Black Widow,” Pixar’s Luca, a Lion King prequel on course for theatrical release.

Whereas WarnerMedia last week pushed its entire 2021 slate to stream, Disney executives signaled that theatrical release remains essential to its big-budget spectacles and its business, overall.

“We build the franchises through the theatrical window,” said Chapek.

Still, the four-hour presentation presented a more seamless vision of content across platforms that made scant mention of its closed theme parks, or of the pandemic. That included a dizzying amount of series, many of them connected to big-screen movies past and present.

Marvel Studios President Kevin Feige said a pair of new Marvel series Secret Invasion, with Samuel Jackson, and Ironheart will tie directly to Marvel future films. The only difference between the company’s short-form TV content and its theatrical content said Bob Iger, executive chairman, “is the length.”

Not all the news was in streaming. Lucasfilm announced that Patty Jenkins (“Wonder Woman”) will direct the next Star Wars” theatrical film, Rogue Squadron, with a release in theatres planned for Christmas 2023.

Jenkins becomes the first woman to direct a Star Wars film. In a video, she said the film, about starship fighters, will satisfy a long-held dream of hers as the daughter of an Air Force captain.

When he lost his life in service of this country, it ignited a desire in me to turn all of that tragedy and thrill into one day making the greatest fighter pilot movie of all time, said Jenkins in a video message.

Other films are going ahead with theatrical plans, among them a Buzz Lightyear prequel, due in 2020, and the Black Panther sequel. Feige confirmed that the role of the late Chadwick Boseman will not be recast but that its makers are still interested in exploring the world of Wakanda” in Ryan Coogler’s film, due in theatres July 2022.

Among the Star Wars series are two spinoffs of The Mandalorian, set during the series’ timeline: Rangers of the New Republic and Ahsoka, with Rosario Dawson. The shooting also recently began on Andor, a series developed by Tony Gilroy (“Bourne Identity”), with Diego Luna’s character from the 2016 film Rogue One.”

Other, less expected Star Wars stars are returning. Hayden Christensen, who played Anakin Skywalker in the prequels, will reprise his role as Darth Vader in Obi-Wan Kenobi, with Ewan McGregor.

We have a vast and expansive timeline in the Star Wars mythology, spanning over 25,000 years of history in the galaxy with each era being a rich resource for storytelling,” said Kathleen Kennedy, president of Lucasfilm. “Now with Disney+ we can explore limitless story possibilities like never before and fulfil the promise that there is truly a Star Wars story for everyone.

Disney steered several upcoming movies to its streaming service, including Pinocchio, with Tom Hanks, Peter Pan & Wendy and an Enchanted sequel with Amy Adams titled Disenchanted. The animated Raya and the Last Dragon will in March debut simultaneously in theatres and by premier access on Disney+. That’s the same approach the company took earlier this fall for Mulan, with a $30 early-access fee on top of the monthly subscription.

Disney made other adjustments to reorient its film operations around streaming. Hulu, which this year debuted the Andy Samberg comedy Palm Springs and Sarah Paulson thriller Run, will be home to more original films from 20th Century Studios and Searchlight Pictures. Hulu will also be the new home of the Kardashians, recently departed from E!. The streaming service also renewed The Handmaid’s Tale for a fifth season.

FX is developing the first series based on the Alien films, with Noah Hawley (“Fargo”) directing.

Many in Hollywood had eagerly awaited Disney’s response following WarnerMedia’s announcement last week that it will release all 17 of its 2021 films from Dune to The Matrix 4″ simultaneously on its streaming platform, HBO Max, and in theatres.

That move set off shockwaves prompting a backlash from much of the film industry, including theatre chains, producing partners and some of the studio’s top talent.

Christopher Nolan criticized the plans as a bit of a mess.

Some said the long-forecast end times for cinemas had arrived. Others questioned the economics of one of Hollywood’s top studios sacrificing a year of box office and the cascading windows of release that follow a theatrical run to salvage the rocky rollout of HBO Max a service that many HBO subscribers have yet still haven’t activated.

Wall Street approved. Stocks for WarnerMedia’s parent company AT&T are up about 6 percent since the announcement by Jason Kilar, chief executive of WarnerMedia and a veteran of Hulu and Amazon.

John Stankey, the AT&T chief executive, on Tuesday said the pandemic had unleased a new media reality unlikely to fade after COVID-19. That horse left the barn, he said.

Compared to WarnerMedia, the present situation is very different for Disney, which has already laid the foundation for a formidable Netflix competitor in Disney+ and which has for years dominated the box office.

The company’s films accounted for more than $13 billion in ticket sales worldwide last year and 38 percent of moviegoing in the U.S. and Canada. Seven Disney films topped $1 billion worldwide.

Of the 100 new titles announced today, 80 percent of them will go to Disney+, said Chapek. But we had $13 billion of the box office last year and that’s obviously not something to sneeze at. For us, it’s about balance.

As Disney made its presentation to investors Thursday, its shares reached an all-time high of $160.

Elon Musk forms several ‘X Holdings’ companies to fund potential Twitter buyout

3 Mins Read

Thursday’s filing dispelled some doubts, though Musk still has work to do. He and his advisers will spend the coming days vetting potential investors for the equity portion of his offer, according to people familiar with the matter

KV Prasad Journo follow politics, process in Parliament and US Congress. Former Congressional APSA-Fulbright Fellow