Hey folks, check out my new facebook page. It's not a profile, but an author page, and I'll be using it mostly to let people know what's new and the events at which I'm appearing. But I'll also be answering queries posted on it - so feel free to write something!

Had a great time this past Saturday at the annual Howard County Library benefit, whose theme this year was "Along the Silk Road". The whole library was decked out in colorful fabric, with eastern music and the smells of Indian food wafting through the book stacks. I gave a talk, "Capturing India through Fiction," which I'd just delivered the previous day at the India Studies program at Indiana University, Bloomington, IN. The difference was that this time, I had a somewhat larger audience - 170 people - and what a fantastic audience it was! Pulled out all the stops - even showed them my Bollywood video. Here's a blog entry describing the event by Roberta Rood, who was in attendance.

It took lots of work with Jacqueline Smith, one of the producers of the BBC program, The Forum, but after weeks of talking and e-mailing, we finally nailed down a tentative script of what I would say on the show. It was all quite ambitious - in addition to explaining an idea I've been mulling: how "basis functions" crop up in several artistic fields (watch for a YouTube show on this very soon), I was also going to expound on my mathematical research on the finite element method. Well, the show was quite lively and fun, with two other guests - Ruth Padel (the great grand-daughter of Charles Darwin) and Andrea Sabbadini, chair of the European Psychoanalytic Film Festival. You can listen to all our comments here - they sort of united to form a whole greater than the individual contributions. (I come on after Ruth.)

As part of the show, I also got sixty seconds to describe an idea that would improve the world, which you can read here (together with some complimentary and not-so-complimentary feedback). My idea: teach kids to question everything!