A Coimbatore based company named Thunk has come up with a rather novel backpack which features a strip of solar cells on the front which can be used to charge devices on the go. The backpack itself is apparently "upcycled" which sounds like a marketing spin for recycled into something better. The backpack looks nifty and their promotional video is charming.

The use of statistical analysis has revolutionised sport in recent decades. Its success in baseball - as sabermetrics - was made famous by the book and movie (starring Brad Pitt) titled Moneyball.

The Economic Times has a brief blurb on the status of the IPv6 transition in India.

After the low key response to the June 9 protests, Anonymous India has labelled it only "Phase 1" of their plans and have announced "Phase 2". The second phase has been dubbed "Operation RTI" and appears to be an elaborate recce to unearth information related to Internet censorship in the country. The plan is to get "citizens of India" to file RTI applications pertaining to any communications between government officials and companies such as Google and Facebook.

In light of the recent blocking of websites in India and the cries of "CENSORSHIP!" all across Twitter, spare a thought for our Chinese neighbours who have long been suffering beneath the cudgels of the Great Firewall of China.

India Ink's story about a photograph of a newly wed Rajiv and Sonia Gandhi linked me to an interesting gallery on Corbis. While the photographer behind these images, Baldev, appears to have had free access to the Gandhis, the archive also catalogues news events from the 1970s to the early 2000s.

Recently, WSJ's Tripti Lahiri has blogged a couple of times on the legal status of the slaughter and consumption of beef in India. Apparently, the law directing states to protect the cow was (perhaps seemingly) enacted to organise agriculture and agriculture on modern and scientific lines.

You might be familiar with the story of Chinese businesses hiring white westerners to sit around in their offices and in their meetings in order to lend that subtle touch of competence and professionalism to their establishments. They are apparently getting inordinately pickier nowadays:

An article in Nature points at research claiming that human irises are not constant over time and instead change appreciably as we age. In a paper by Kevin Bowyer and Samuel Fenker, they assert that there is a noticeable change between iris scans taken only three years apart.

Following his 17 move demolition of Boris Gelfand a couple of days ago, a number of Indians on the Interwebz have been on something of an Anand-high. The India Today archives retains a fascinating interview with Anand from 1997 that documents his resolve after losing to Kasparov in the World Chess Championships in 1995.