Viewpoint: The Focus

Somewhere right now, a toddler is holding up a smartphone, tapping the screen with a chubby finger, demanding a cartoon. A delivery rider is following a blue line on a map to a stranger's door. A nurse is checking a patient's lab results on a tablet. A trader in a glass tower is watching numbers flicker green and red. None of them are thinking about the internet. That's the point. It has become so woven into the ordinary business of living that we only notice it the way we notice air — when it isn't there. So let's sit with an uncomfortable question for a moment, gently, the way you'd turn over a stone just to see what's underneath. What if, for some reason — a solar storm, a chain of undersea cable failures, a cyber conflict, a catastrophic technical fault — the world's internet connections went dark. Not for an hour. For days. Maybe weeks. The invisible backbone We tend to picture the internet as something we opt into: a browser tab, an app icon, a ...

  "I want you to believe... to believe in things that you cannot." — Bram Stoker, before he asked readers to accept a vampire, he first asked them to loosen their grip on certainty. Every generation carries its own quiet miracles — and its own quiet myths about what's "impossible." For years, people repeated a curious line: that a bumblebee, by the laws of aerodynamics, should not be able to fly. It became a favorite line of encouragement — a story wrapped around a mistake. The bee never read the formula. She simply flapped her wings some two hundred and thirty times a second, and went on with her work — drifting from bloom to bloom, carrying pollen from flower to fruit, quietly feeding forests and orchards and the creatures who depend on them. The old theory wasn't wrong because the bee broke a law. It was wrong because the law was too small for the bee. We do this to ourselves more often than we'd like to admit. A mentalist walks through the air and a...

Over the past year, a strange pattern has repeated itself in town halls and county offices across the world: a company shows up with plans for a large computing facility, often called a data center, promising jobs and investment — and local residents show up too, in far greater numbers, to say no. In many cases, they win. This is not a small trend. Research groups tracking these disputes say that in just the first three months of 2026, dozens of proposed data center projects worth well over $100 billion were delayed or cancelled after local pushback in the United States alone — matching the total for all of 2025 in a single quarter. Similar fights are playing out in Europe, Latin America, and Asia-Pacific. Surveys now show that most people, when asked directly, do not want one of these facilities built near their home. So what is actually going on, and why does it matter beyond the town where it happens? What a data center actually is, in plain terms A data center is essentially a ...

  The Current Situation Sri Lanka is in the middle of its worst dengue outbreak in nearly a decade. As of the latest National Dengue Control Unit (NDCU) figures (Week 29, 2026): The surge is closely tied to the south-west monsoon: cases roughly doubled between May and June, and July has already outpaced June. This mirrors a broader global trend — the WHO reports dengue cases rising from around 500,000 globally in 2000 to 14.4 million by 2024 — but Sri Lanka's tropical climate, urban density, and monsoon-driven flooding make it especially exposed. Why Conventional Methods Fall Short Current measures — fogging/insecticide spraying, clearing stagnant water, legal action against premises with breeding sites, public awareness campaigns, and hospital surge capacity — are essentially reactive containment , not elimination: Insecticide spraying is labor-intensive, temporary, and drives resistance in mosquito populations over time. Source reduction (removing standing water) depends on susta...

* Image Courtesy: BBC/Travel A language born of trade and faith, written in a script found nowhere else on earth There is a script that looks, at first glance, like Arabic. The letters curve and join the same way, run right to left the same way, carry the same dots and diacritics. But read it aloud to an Arabic speaker and they will understand almost nothing. Read it aloud to a Tamil speaker, and something remarkable happens — the words come alive. They hear their own mother tongue, dressed in a foreign script. This is Arwi — also called Arabu-Tamil — one of the world's most unusual and least-known writing traditions. For over a thousand years, it quietly carried the religious life, the poetry, and even the medicine of Tamil-speaking Muslim communities of Sri Lanka and South India. Today, it survives mostly in old trunks, forgotten wells, mosque lofts, and the memories of a shrinking number of scholars and reciters. This piece of article is an attempt to introduce Arwi to a gene...

  Introduction: The Promise vs. The Reality We’ve all been sold the same shiny promise: technology exists to make our lives frictionless. When self-checkout kiosks first started replacing traditional cashier lanes, the elevator pitch was seamless. No more standing behind someone dividing a month’s worth of groceries with plastic bars. No awkward small talk when you'd rather keep your headphones in. Just walk up, scan your items, tap your card, and glide out the door. It was supposed to put the consumer in total control. Fast forward to today, and the reality feels entirely different. Instead of a sleek, effortless exit, walking up to a self-checkout terminal now feels like stepping onto a miniature stage under a spotlight. You’re racing against an invisible timer, fighting an overly sensitive scale, and trying to prove to a overhead security camera that you aren't trying to steal a bag of lemons. While customer service automation promised to remove social friction, it actually ...