Clean Surfing

The Internet is the biggest single source of knowledge in the history of humankind. The problem is that it's not a source of facts,just knowledge that ranges from hard facts to absolute nonsense.

This wide spectrum leads to the accidental viewing of dirty images or animations and profanity while you are doing serious research. Removing the unnecessary elements can make browsing faster and much more enjoyable. For a family computer, filtering these elements is a necessity rather than a convenience. In this post, I am going to run through the steps to filter out unnecessary images, flash videos, advertisements and profanity.

Here is an example of a webpage with all elements present. I've chosen one with clean graphics.

(A note here - Advertisements are how Websites get their revenue, so blocking them is unethical in a way. I prefer to let the site load, take a look at the content and then unblock the advertisements - the sites don't lose revenue, and no weird images burn themselves onto my hard disk.)

Now, here are the steps to remove the unnecessary stuff:

Install Mozilla Firefox – the latest version. As it is open source, the browser is much easier to customize.

Install the following add-ons:

1. Image Switcher - This add-on lets you stop loading images with a single click. It's a good idea to block images while browsing, especially when using StumbleUpon. After the text in the page load, you can decide whether to load the images or not.

2. Adblock Plus– This gets rid of most of the unnecessary images. But after installing, you may still see some advertisements that are flash based. The next add-on takes care of this.
   

3. Flashblock – This replaces all streaming videos, flash based ads, forms, animations with a button. If you want to play one of the animations, all it needs is a single click. It is easily customizable, so that you can allow some sites to automatically load flash.
   

4. Greasemonkey: This add-on lets you run scripts in your browser. This is not useful for our purpose by itself, but it is necessary for the next step.

5. Profanity filter - This is the script which runs using Greasemonkey. It is an experimental script, but it works fine for me on Ubuntu 9.10 with Firefox. It replaces all swear words with ***. To check the amount of profanity it protects you from, check the source code here.
   

6. Disable pop-ups - This does not need an add-on, just use the preferences in Firefox.
   

Now, here's the result:

Happy Surfing!

Hypatia of Alexandria

This post is a tribute to one of the greatest mathematicians of the ancient world, Hypatia (Yπατία) of Alexandria.

Hypatia at the School of Athens by Raphael

Hypatia was born between 350 and 370 A.D to the mathematician Theon Alexandricus, a librarian of the Library of Alexandria. She was trained in Mathematics, Physics, Astronomy and Philosophy, and was a Neoplatonist philosopher. She travelled to Athens and Italy to study (something unheard of for women at the time), and rose to the position of the Head of the Platonist school at Alexandria, where she taught the philosophy of Plato and Socrates to her students, some of whom travelled large distances to study under her.

She preferred to dress in the style of men and drive her chariot herself. She had a large number of students who were from Greece as well as other countries. Though most of her works have been lost in the dark ages, some of those we know about are:

• A commentary on the 13-volume Arithmetica by Diophantus.

• A commentary on the Conics of Apollonius

• Edited the existing version of Ptolemy's Almagest

• Edited her father's commentary on Euclid's Elements (According to one account, when she was 19)

• She wrote a text "The Astronomical Canon."(Possibly a new edition of Ptolemy's Handy Tables.)

She was a good engineer as well, and some of the inventions credited to her are the hydrometer, and a version of the astrolabe.

So...what was the fate of this remarkable woman? The church condemned her as a witch and accused her of bewitching the Imperial Prefect, Orestes. One day, on her way to work, she was mobbed by a group of men. She was pulled off her chariot, (by her hair according to one source) dragged through the city, and brought to a church called Caesarion. Here, she was stripped, and killed by scraping the skin off her body with broken tiles and shells. Her body was torn to pieces and burnt, and her bones scattered on the ground to bleach in the sun.

Carl Sagan talks about Hypatia:

Throughout history, Hypatia has been hailed as a saint, and condemned as a witch and a pagan. She has recently been sainted as a Virian Saint by the Church of Virus. In my opinion, Hypatia was a person who devoted her life to the pursuit of knowledge, and died because of her gender. The motive for her murder might have been political, but the actual deed – stripping and flaying, then leaving her bones in the sun - shows the fear that men have always had of an intelligent woman. If killing a person because of their identity makes them a martyr, Hypatia is a martyr to the feminist cause. She is, in a way, a Feminist Saint.

For her on Women's Day:

போற்றி போற்றி! ஓர் ஆயிரம் போற்றி! நின்

பொன்ன டிக்குப்பல் லாயிரம் போற்றிகாண்