Sunday Papers #5 (a little early this time...)

Sundays are for waking up early, scrapping a Halloween costume together and thinking about all that good internet reading that you don't have time to read now but will probably read later. I'm so torn about Halloween. On the one hand, what a great holiday. On the other hand, it's such a pain to get ready for it...Happy Halloween everyone!

Blogspot Blocked in Nepal

The Nepal Telecom Company (NTC), which is the primary ISP in Nepal seems to have blocked access to blogspot.com domains today. Apparently, they filter the internet for porn and managed to (accidentally?) block blogspot and the huffington post after blocking 60 porn sites yesterday.

Given that thousands of new porn sites are created every day (and the sheer number that already exist), you have to wonder why they even bother trying to block all of it in the first place. It's a pretty hopeless endeavor, especially for a government run company that has very limited resources.

Since most people in Nepal won't be able to access blogspot (and thus, this blog) it's hardly worth going into detail about it, but one way to easily bypass the kind of filtering is to use TOR. I tried that this morning and was able to get through to blogspot domains with no problem...

The Cuteness

Yesterday was the Parent's Day Show at OGN. The kids dressed up in all sorts of costumes and put on a show for their parents. There was lots of singing, dancing, etc. The adorable factor was off the charts...

 

Sunday Papers #4

Sundays are for waking up unusually early after having extremely vivid dreams about visiting Mexico. In Dreamexico (see what I did there...), everything is made out of lego blocks...Anyways, after a traumatic experience such as this, it's good to sit back, relax, drink some tea, and have a look at the fine bounty of links that the Internet gods have offered up to us this week. As for why the Internet gods are making offerings to us - instead of vice-versa - I cannot say...

Walking Bhaktapur with Anil - Part III

This is the final installment on the series about Bhaktapur. Check out Part 1 and Part 2 if you haven't already. This final part will focus on central Bhaktapur, which is the best restored and most vibrant part of the city.

Walking Bhaktapur with Anil - Part II

One week ago, Yanik, Mikaela, and myself visited Bhaktapur with Anil Chitrakar, who gave us a tour of the city. Part I of this series was about Bhaktapur and its recent history. This post will follow the first half of our tour with Anil.

Sunday Papers #3

Sundays are for lazing about, imbibing tea (or coffee - if you're a heretic), and reading the entire internet. If that's too much internet for you, here are some select links...

Arbitrary Power

I'm going to interrupt the ongoing series on last weekend's Bhaktapur trip, in order to talk about an incident that happened yesterday, which was particularly jarring.

Walking Bhaktapur with Anil - Part I

Last Sunday, Yanik, Mikaela, and myself went to Bhaktapur for a tour with Anil Chitrakar. Given how excellent the previous tours were, we expected an interesting walk and that's just what we got. In fact, there was so much, that I've opted to post about the trip in three parts. Part I covers the recent history of Bhaktapur, while Part II and III will cover the actual details of the tour with Anil.

Sunday Papers #2

Sundays are for walking around Bhaktapur with Anil Chitrakar (more on that in the near future) then returning home, exhausted, to drink tea and read some interesting stuff that was put up on the internet this week...

Tibetan Cooking: Vegetable Momos

In the previous cooking post, I looked at how to make Shya Pakhlep aka Deep Fried Momos. But there was one caveat for vegetarians:

you can make a vegetarian version [of deep fried momos], but if you're going to do a vegetable momo I highly recommend just doing a regular steamed vegetable momo as they're better than vegetable pakhlep. I'll probably be posting on vegetable momos sometime in the future...

Now, I get too use one of my favorite phrases: THE FUTURE IS NOW!

Sunday Papers

Taking a page from the playbook of my favorite video games blog, Sundays are for kicking back, drinking tea, and linking to some interesting reading that's popped up on the internets over the last week. Ideally, I'll be doing this every week, but we'll see...

• The moderate think tank Third Way had an interesting idea: what if taxpayers were better informed about where their money goes? They propose to do this by issuing a tax receipt to every taxpayer. Lots of people have been talking about this idea, but I found Megan McArdle, Andrew Gelman and Peter Suderman to have the most interesting takes.
• Aaron Carroll at the Incidental Economist has a ridiculously good series on why American healthcare is so expensive. It's really refreshing to see something written about this that is simultaneously deeply grounded in actual numbers and really easy to read and understand. Probably best to read the whole series, but if you read nothing else, check out the part on Red Herrings.
• Tim Burke (my former professor and all around nice guy) has one of the better reactions to that study showing that most religious people know less than you'd expect about their own religions.
• Today marks the end of World War I reparations payments for Germany. Took a while...
• Google's new WebP image compression. Yet another example of how Google continues to be better at the internet than others... If none of that makes sense to you, this is pretty close to an explanation in normal language...
• An important scientific finding? Martin Robbins does a pretty spot-on satire of the poor nature of science coverage in most newspapers.

An Unusual Drink Selection...

...from the menu at an Indian restaurant that we went to recently...

Walking Patan with Anil

Almost two weeks ago, I went on a walk around Patan, a predominantly Newari Buddhist community, directly South of and adjacent to Kathmandu proper. Patan is a major tourist destination, largely because its Durbar Square is one of the best concentrations of temples and palaces in all of Nepal. However, my trip to Patan was a little unusual, because Anil Chitrakar was showing me around.