Today, I got a copy of the policy guidelines against sexual harassment in institutions of higher learning in my inbox which has been published by the Govt. of Pakistan Higher Education Commission. It contains a “listing of sexual harassment” along with “actual reported cases”. The last item in the list is Forcing students to publish their research work in Supervisors name. While the most obvious implication of this statement is that plagiarism (by the supervisor) is sexual harassment, I think there is a hidden message there as well....

Ash Court at Girton. I should get more pictures of my college… someday.

outside university library

 

If you walk into my department, one of the first things you may notice is that some of the tiles on the floor are a black and there’s no particular pattern to it. These tiles actually encode a message. The curious amongst us are supposed to decode this but despite having spent 3 years in the department, I could never get the time until last Friday. The decoding should be pretty simple if you want to try your skills....

The trending topic on twitter is #replaceawordinafamousquotewithduck. Here’s a quick script which does the same automatically. You can write your own quote and press the “Duck it!” button to …. duckofy it :) Or you can press the get new quote button and it will choose from a collection of 40 random quotes and 100 movie quote. Here’s how it is done. I am using the Javascript Part of Speech (jspos) Tagger to tag all text and convert random nouns to “duck” or “ducks”, depending on the tag....

O shell-izen! just stay inside you’re safe… and blind.

As the local myth goes, this tree outside Trinity College is a descendant of the tree which threw an apple at Newton and asked him, indirectly, and rather rudely, to come to his senses and discover gravity. Newton is also said to reside in the room directly above this tree, the window of which can be seen in this picture. But as some wise man once said, سانوں کی !...