What are we discovering this week?
Hey there,
There is an assortment of colorful and useful entries today. Since this is the pride month, we should be starting with pride as one of my friends made me realize.
In the India section we talk about the Kinnar / Hijra Community which is an ancient community of India, been around for thousands of years and got oppressed by the colonization of India in the beginning.
I skipped food for the stomach and leaving the rest of the month to be food for thoughts.
pride by @chrisnager
Simple hack to display the colors of the rainbow flag in the GitHub language bar. #lovewins
💻: Clojure
⭐ 59 👀 1 🍴 0 🚧 0
mermaid by @mermaid-js
Mermaid is a Javascript-based diagramming and charting tool that uses Markdown-inspired text definitions and a renderer to create and modify complex diagrams. The main purpose of Mermaid is to help documentation catch up with development.
💻: JavaScript
⭐ 36364 👀 568 🍴 2583 🚧 410
million by @millionjs
🌈 <1kb virtual DOM - it's fast!
Current Virtual DOM implementations are inadequate—Ranging from overcomplicated to abandoned, most are unusable without sacrificing raw performance and size. Million aims to fix this, providing a library-agnostic Virtual DOM to serve as the core for Javascript libraries.
💻: TypeScript
⭐ 486 👀 12 🍴 15 🚧 2
alien by @chrx_h
Artificial Life Environment (ALiEn) is a simulation program based on a specialized 2D physics and rendering engine in CUDA. Each simulated body has a graph-like structure of connected building blocks that can either be programmed or equipped with functions to act in the world (accelerators, sensors, weapons, constructors, etc.). Such internal processes are triggered by signals coming from circulating tokens. The bodies can be thought of as small machines or agents operating in a common environment.
💻: C++
⭐ 1860 👀 34 🍴 39 🚧 13
metrics by @lecoqsimon
📊 An infographics generator with 30+ plugins and 100+ options to display stats about your GitHub account and render them as SVG, Markdown, PDF or JSON!
Generate your own metrics that can be embedded everywhere, including your GitHub profile readme! It works for both user and organization accounts, and even for repositories!
💻: JavaScript
⭐ 3129 👀 56 🍴 189 🚧 14
Love it ?!
A little about India, the food, the people and the culture
The People & Culture
Kinnar / Hijra Community
In the Indian subcontinent, Hijras are eunuchs, intersex people, and transgender people. Also known as Aravani, Aruvani, or (derogatorily) Chhakka, the hijra community in India prefer to call themselves Kinnar or Kinner, referring to the mythological beings that excel at song and dance.
Religious Beliefs.
The power of the hijras as a sexually ambiguous category can only be understood in the religious context of Hinduism. In Hindu mythology, ritual, and art, the power of the combined man/woman, or androgyne, is a frequent and significant theme.
Bahuchara Mata, the main object of hijra veneration, is specifically associated with transvestism and transgenderism. All hijra households contain a shrine to the goddess that is used in daily prayer.
Hijras also identify with Shiva, a central, sexually ambivalent figure in Hinduism, who combines in himself, as do the hijras, both eroticism and asceticism. One of the most popular forms of Shiva is Ardhanarisvara, or half-man/half-woman, which represents Shiva united with his shakti (female creative power).
Ceremonies.
The central ceremony of hijra life - and the one that defines them as a group—is the emasculation operation in which all or part of the male genitals are removed.
This operation is viewed as a rebirth; the new hijra created by it is called a nirvan. For the hijras, emasculation completes the transformation from impotent male to potent hijra.
Emasculation links the hijras to both Shiva and the mother goddess and sanctions their performances at births and Weddings, in which they are regarded as vehicles of the goddess's creative power.
Art and Performance.
Hijras are performers at points in the life cycle related to reproduction, and thus much of their expressive culture employs fertility symbolism. Hijra performances are burlesques of female behavior.
Much of the comedy of their performances derive from the incongruities between their behavior and that of ordinary women, restrained by norms of propriety. Hijras use coarse speech and gestures and make sexual innuendos, teasing the male children present and also making fun of various family members and family relationships.
Some songs and comedic routines are a traditional part of hijra performances, most notably one in which a hijra acts as a pregnant woman commenting on the difficulties at each stage of the pregnancy.
In films and literature.
Hijras have been portrayed on screen in Indian cinema since its inception, historically as comic relief. A notable turning point occurred in 1974 when real hijras appeared during a song-and-dance sequence in Kunwaara Baap ("The Unmarried Father").
The Hindi movie Amar Akbar Anthony (1977) features hijras who accompany one of the heroes, Akbar (Rishi Kapoor), in a song entitled "Tayyab Ali Pyar Ka Dushman" ("Tayyab Ali, the Enemy of Love").