Hair… Covering the bodies of every species of mammal, it seems to connect us to the natural world, a reminder of our primate past. But as human beings, with a capacity for abstract thought, we have taken a simple evolutionary adaptation and endowed it with great meaning and complexity. As one of the most important aspects of how others see us, how has our hair become interwoven with issues of race, religion, beauty, and identity?

“Hair” Documentary from Will Ellis on Vimeo.

So my buddy Mr. Sikhnet contacted me and pointed me to this intriguing app called Gurbani Anywhere. This App promises to “enable fast and efficient methods to search & display Gurbani, on a truly mobile platform.”

So I registered on the website and waited (not-so)patiently for a several hours to get my membership approved. (Update: they have listened to user requests and enabled email activation rather than manual administrator activation for the website – definetly much easier to get to the download and forums now!)Finally got the download link so let’s have a look!

The app is distributed as a .zip file download from the site containing a terse README and a standard CAB file. Any owner of a windows mobile phone will know what this is and immediately what to do with it. Note: The application and cab file come in at a hefty 66MB so you will definitely want to transfer and install this to a storage card rather than to your phones (or PDA’s) main memory.

So I transferred the cab file over to my phone and installed it to the card. Let’s take a first-look visual tour!

Overall I found this to be a very nifty app, and I’m sure once the developers do some more updates, this will quickly  become the defacto standard in Sikh mobile applications. Personally I’ve allready replaced Sikhi To The Max – Mobile on my phone with this, as it’s much better, more stable, has active developers, has more features, and is generally a better product. The various cool features, and addition of SDGS and Bhai Gurdas Vara make it especially compelling. I would strongly encourage everyone with a windows mobile device to run over to the website, register, download, and give some positive feedback to the developers as soon as you can!

Unlike my usual self, I will not mirror the installer here as the developers have asked that everyone please register on their site/forums

Volunteers in the study played intensively for 50 hours over nine weeks with either Unreal Tournament 2004 and Call of Duty 2, and the results were compared with another group who played The Sims 2, which is richly visual but does not require as much hand-eye coordination.

“To the best of our knowledge, this is the first demonstration that contrast sensitivity can be improved by simple training,” says Bavelier. “When people play action games, they’re changing the brain’s pathway responsible for visual processing. These games push the human visual system to the limits and the brain adapts to it, and we’ve seen the positive effect remains even two years after the training was over.”

So now I have more justification to play video games \o/