Weekend Reading

Here are some links for weekend reading:


And Some fun links:

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Why is a country referred as "She"?

My curious fella once asked - "Baba, why is a country referred to as 'she' or 'her'?" e.g. Her Flag etc. I didn't have an immediate answer. I somewhat knew why would it be, but I couldn't put it in a logical convincing manner. I realised, I needed to look up some references.  My thinking was on following lines. The word "mother" instantaneously gives reference to "birth", "care". Since one takes birth in a given land, it is easy to relate it to be "motherland". It invokes the emotions similar to visiting your mother when you come back to your native place. So the feminine reference is largely on an emotional basis rather than any grammatical one. My research started indicating that although majority of the references are feminine, there's no basis for that in english grammar. English language is gender neutral and has no feminine and masculine distinction between words. However Latin, from which English is or
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What is "B A Y"?

Weekend time. I was playing with Mrunmay, one of his games - 3 letter words. Basically there are some paper strips having one letter printed on it and then there's a letter dispenser, which dispenses 2 letters at a time. The game is to make up a word with those two letters and one of the paper strips. It's too early for Mrunmay to know the spellings and obviously the job of finding out matching spellings was with me. After every round, I was telling him the meaning of the word formed, in the form of question / answers. Like "Do you know this word?", "Do you know it's meaning?" and wherever required giving him examples and/or translations. After few rounds, the dispenser gave us two letters: "B" and "A". The only possible combination left was the word "BAY". I started asking him the meaning... Me: "Do you know what is BAY?" Mrunmay: "Bay??" Me: "Yeah.. do you know what is the meaning of Bay?&q
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WinAmp - Long Forgotten Hero - to say good bye

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I got a bit nostalgic when my friend Arun posted this link on Facebook - Winamp to say goodbye on 20-Dec!! For the uninitiated ones, winamp was THE media player in our 20's era. Windows Media Player was nowhere to be seen, forget about iTunes and everything else. A thin desktop client, with loads of feature and support for almost every audio format. And yes, we could put various skins as well to suit the mood of the day. This was fun, luxury and convenience. As we grew up, slowly winamp was taken over by Windows Media Player (only to a certain extent) and then primarily by Jukeboxes of the world and then iTunes. WinAmp slowly faded away. I don't remember exactly when, but probably around 7-8 years back I stopped using it.  The one important feature - from my perspective - that I'll always remember - was the remote control. By running a tiny server, it used to allow remote clients to connect to the server and could listen to remote playlist. And you can guess the u
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