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The Guardian has an interesting profile of Narendra Modi, the man who looks most likely to be India’s next Prime Minister, the leader of the largest democracy in the world: The BJP believes Modi, one of the most polarising figures to walk the Indian political stage for many years, can lead it to a landslide victory, despite opposition claims that he is a demagogue and a “hatemonger”. After a false start in 1996, the party won real power for the first time two years later, but lost the 2004 elections. Now BJP strategists believe they have an opportunity to end the long decades of Congress dominance for good – and with it the power of the Nehru-Gandhi dynasty. Insider v outsider, dynast v working-class boy made good, suspected sectarian v secularist: this electoral battle has it all. Some analysts talk of the most significant contest since India won its independence from Britain in 1947. ...

Spoilers for Season 2: Now imagine if these characters had been written by Sorkin instead… Hmm.

The scale of the solar system if the moon were a pixel. Lovely and with funny comments littered throughout the journey. This reminds me of the Douglas Adams’ quote about space: “Space is big. Really big. You just won’t believe how vastly hugely mindbogglingly big it is. I mean you may think it’s a long way down the road to the chemist’s, but that’s just peanuts to space.” it goes on from there, but of course I shouldn’t have to tell you how much I love the Hitchhiker’s Guide. ...

Only 90s web developers will get this: Towards the end of the golden era of HTML, CSS appeared on the scene, promising a world of separating content from style, and we’ve been dealing with that disaster ever since. The absolute first thing we did with CSS was use it to stop underlining links. Overnight, the entire internet converted into this sludge of a medium where text looked like links and links looked like text. You had no idea where to click, but hell that didn’t really matter anyway because we had developed cursor effects (you haven’t lived until your mouse had a trail of twelve fireballs behind it). ...

… -1/12? This is evidence that reality is a computer that has overflow at infinity, because the result is useful in String theory and therefore helps explain the physics of the universe. Feel free to blather now.