On February 4, 1948, Ceylon was granted independence by England. The British didn’t exactly pack up their things and move out overnight, however; Ceylon remained a Dominion of the British Commonwealth for the next 24 years. Being a Dominion meant that the Queen, God Bless Her, knew you were independent, but you still had to bend the knee and make ...
A man died yesterday. Train. Walked up to the 11.30 express, apparently. Drunk. Laid his neck on the tracks. Waited. The train screamed over him. A thousand tons of noisy steel. Doesn’t take a genius to figure out what happened. Squish. They never found the head. Today they held his funeral. The wife made loud wailing noises and cried. Just ...
So once again, according to Google trends, Sri Lanka is the highest volume of searches for the word “sex”. The fact itself is not interesting. What’s interesting is that this thing is actually news. It’s all over LBO,newsfirst.lk, Daily Mirror, Lanka E Gossip – in fact, FT.lk has proudly announced that “Sri Lanka’s web sex obsession persists!” And people are sharing this left, ...
On Sunday, the 6th of March, about a hundred people sat down at the hall in the middle of Independence Square. Despite it going ham on social media (there were definitely a couple of thousand more Facebook commentators than actual protestors), the aftermath seems to be fairly muddled and open for debate. Here’s what happened. A bunch of people sat ...
Everyone deserves a kind word for Christmas. Yes, even Sri Lankan politicos. So, in that spirit, we’d like to thank the following lovely souls: First the President. Merry Christmas, Mr President. I admit we had no idea who you were when we voted you in, but now we know each other better now. The good news is you’re still better ...
January has been a bad month. For some reason, I’m reminded of the opening lines of T.S. Eliot’s “The Wasteland”. I don’t know why. I’ve been over that poem many, many times, and my predicament bears nothing in relation to that poet. January, for me, has simply been a month of delays; of overdue things; of missed deadlines and half-complete ...
The word ‘utopia‘ means the ideal state – a nation, or society, where laws, government and socioeconomic conditions are as perfect as they can possibly be. We have Sir Thomas More to thank for this strangely beautiful word. Many have tried to describe a perfect state – Plato among them – but More, in 1516 book ‘De optimo rei publicae deque ...
With the elections coming up, there’s a huge tidal wave of opinion rising to catch voters everywhere. One of Maithree’s biggest hooks is the same claim made by Mahinda Rajapakse years ago: abolishing the Executive Presidency. However, while we wait for the power struggles to come to and end, here’s the elephant in the room: accountability to the public. Let ...
Depending on who you talk to, Uber’s either the devil or the disruptive darling. And, to a lesser extent, so is Lyft, Curb, Grab, Ola and what have you. These are applications that have taken the promise of ‘freeing up underutilized transport resources’ and turned that into ‘running a taxi business’, undercutting the old model in ways that don’t quite ...
a guest post by @AlanSE, in which he discusses three things really holding us back from space colonization – things that few of us bother to question. Saturday night, what are you doing? Perhaps going out to the movies? If you were a permanent resident of space in a substantially-sized colony, you might be doing the same thing. This ...
But this kind of growth, like that associated with Coursera, is “faster than Facebook,” specifically in terms of having a user growth rate greater than 2,000%. That’s growth from roughly 160,000 learners at one university in 2011 to 35,000,000 learners at 570 universities and twelve providers in 2015. – OnlineCourseReport, State of the MOOC 2016 There’s a saying that Edtech ...
