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How does Aamir Khan choose movies

Aamir Khan on why he chose to do Fanaa:

Remember that scene from FANAA when I am badly injured, lost in a blizzard, stumbling along half dead, when I spot a house. I need to survive because I still need to complete my mission. So I go towards the house for shelter and help. I bang on the door in desperation. The door is opened and it is opened by …..!!!… the BLIND girl I fell in love with and then ditched 7 seven years ago!!! Only now she has eyes! And I know that, because that is the last thing I did for her before disappearing from her life! She looks at me and screems my name!!! No way!!!?? How can she recognise me?!!! She was blind when she knew me! She had never seen me! She has eyes now but how is it possible that she has recognised me???!!!!! Is all this really happening? Am I hallucinating? - I am processing all this as I am collapsing and passing out and then - from behind the door a 6 year old boy comes running…!!! So thats the Rehan who she was screeming for!!! Oh GOD… then… thats… probably… my… son!!!!!!!!!!! Swoosh… and I pass out.

Where else will I get a scene like this as an actor? Which kind of film will give me the chance to perform this kind of moment? It certainly cant be a film like RDB. Only a film like FANAA will have in it a moment like this. I love it.

See full article on his blog, it’s quite interesting.

Why does salt enhance the flavor of almost all food?

Ever wondered why salt is so important to us in our diet? Ever noticed that the taste of something can actually change significantly after you’ve added salt? The Straight Dope has the answers:

Besides banging harder on the body’s salt gong, adding NaCl to some foods can increase the volatility of certain chemical compounds, meaning the molecules are more easily released to the air, and of course aroma is an important part of the taste experience. Finally, studies have shown the sodium in salt can suppress bitter tastes.

See full article for everything you wanted to know about salt, but were afraid to ask.

Motivation: Jerry Seinfeld’s productivity secret

Lifehacker has a post on a neat idea to improve your productivity, which is attributed to Seinfeld:

He told me to get a big wall calendar that has a whole year on one page and hang it on a prominent wall. The next step was to get a big red magic marker.

He said for each day that I do my task of writing, I get to put a big red X over that day. “After a few days you’ll have a chain. Just keep at it and the chain will grow longer every day. You’ll like seeing that chain, especially when you get a few weeks under your belt. Your only job next is to not break the chain.”

“Don’t break the chain.” He said again for emphasis.

See full article.

Famous Poems Rewritten as Limericks

This guy rewrote a whole bunch of famous poems as limericks. The results are hilarious. For example, here is Wordsworth’s “I Wandered Lonely As a Cloud”:

I Wandered Lonely As a Cloud

There once was a poet named Will
Who tramped his way over a hill
And was speechless for hours
Over some stupid flowers
This was years before TV, but still.

See all of them.

Be above average at 2 or more things

Scott Adams gives advice on how to be really successful:

If you want an average successful life, it doesn’t take much planning. Just stay out of trouble, go to school, and apply for jobs you might like. But if you want something extraordinary, you have two paths:

1. Become the best at one specific thing.
2. Become very good (top 25%) at two or more things.

The first strategy is difficult to the point of near impossibility. Few people will ever play in the NBA or make a platinum album. I don’t recommend anyone even try.

The second strategy is fairly easy. Everyone has at least a few areas in which they could be in the top 25% with some effort. In my case, I can draw better than most people, but I’m hardly an artist. And I’m not any funnier than the average standup comedian who never makes it big, but I’m funnier than most people. The magic is that few people can draw well and write jokes. It’s the combination of the two that makes what I do so rare. And when you add in my business background, suddenly I had a topic that few cartoonists could hope to understand without living it.

See full article.

Are you thinking?

If you make people think they’re thinking, they’ll love you; But if you really make them think, they’ll hate you.

–Don Marquis

smritiweb.com… Making you think that you are thinking…

How to improve your Google ranking

Although there is a lot of information on the internet on this topic, I found this article to be particularly interesting, since it did mention techniques that I hadn’t heard of earlier, and which seem quite reasonable and useful. For example:

When I started work on Aerobed they only had a handful of links, so I had some serious link building to do. After looking at their competitor’s backlinks using a link command on yahoo “linkdomain:www.domain.com –site:www.domain.com”, I set a target of 2,000 backlinks. Here is the 6 point plan I adopted:

1. Link mining following by 300 email requests – This was fairly straightforward, I simply looked at the backlinks of their top 15 competitors. Then email any suitable websites with personalised email, which either suggested Aerobed.co.uk as a suitable site for their resources page, or offered a small payment for a link. Below is a sample email:

See full article. Worth reading if you have a website and want to improve its ranking.

Inside the Monkeysphere

This is a great post that contains insights on how our brain works, how we fit into society, and stereotypes:

It’s simply the way our brains are built. We each have a certain circle of people who we think of as people. Usually it’s our own friends and family and neighbors and classmates and coworkers (or at least the ones in your department) and church or suicide cult.

This is literally the reason society doesn’t work quite right. The people who exist outside that core group of a few dozen people are not people to us. They’re sort of one-dimensional bit characters.

[...]Or think of it this way: Which would upset you more, your brother dying, or a dozen kids across town getting killed because their bus collided with a truck hauling killer bees?

Which would be bigger news to your neighbors, those dozen mutilated bus children across town or 15,000 dead in an earthquake in Iran?

See full article. Long, but worth reading. Take some time out and read it some day.

“Stop trying to ’save’ Africa”

Earlier I had pointed to an article by an African economist complaining about how aid to Africa is doing more harm than good. Now Uzodinma Iweala an African author has another interesting article that is in a similar vein, but makes a slightly different point:

Why do the media frequently refer to African countries as having been “granted independence from their colonial masters,” as opposed to having fought and shed blood for their freedom? Why do Angelina Jolie and Bono receive overwhelming attention for their work in Africa while Nwankwo Kanu or Dikembe Mutombo, Africans both, are hardly ever mentioned? How is it that a former mid-level U.S. diplomat receives more attention for his cowboy antics in Sudan than do the numerous African Union countries that have sent food and troops and spent countless hours trying to negotiate a settlement among all parties in that crisis?

See the full article. It makes some rather interesting points.

Will it Blend: the iPhone smoothie - Engadget

Another video:

These guys over at willitblend.com appear to have made a career out of putting various things in a blender and uploading the resulting videos to the internet. Here you will see a brand new Apple iPhone being blended. It is fascinating in a roadside-accident sense, so I think it’s well worth the long download time.

And if you enjoy the video, you can spend a few minutes psychoanalyzing yourself to figure out why you liked it.

Found: here.