A few reflections

So, here I was, reading Promised land by Connie Willis and Cynthia Felice and all the time, I was thinking .. 'why this this remind me of Heinlein so much?' Well, specifically, 'The moon is a harsh mistress', also with certain dollops of Julian May's 'Many coloured land' tossed in. Frankly, I am disappointed. Connie Willis means a really interesting plot(Passage), some awesome humour(To say nothing of the dog) and gutwrenching drama(Doomsday Book). I think this might be due to the efforts of Cynthia Felice. [note to self: avoid literature by Cynthia Felice].

Also, in related news, I gave up on Gregory Benford's 'Beyond infinity'. Really, the only reason why I thought he was any good was because Asimov collaborated with him. (10 points if you name the work they did together). Not impressed in the least.

Is it that I am growing old or is it because I am too busy.. I don't know, but I am increasingly less tolerant of bad writing. Perhaps its the old 'life is too short to waste on bad literature'. Add bad films to that list.

Antarmahal was on my list recently... Rituporno Ghosh (yes he writes his name that way) made this film from a story by Tarashankar Bandopadhyay. A beautifully told story of Colonial (West ) Bengal, where a zamindar (landowner) has taken another wife. for obvious reasons.. (he wants a son, stupid!).. while trying to impress the hell out of his favourite British viceroy (sycophantic bastard) by fashioning the Goddess' face like Queen Victoria, during the annual Durga Pujo. Now, Ghosh has the wonderful habit of taking otherwise decent actors and extracting performances of such delicacy and nuance from them that one is taken aback. He did so this time as well... in fact, he pretty much outdid himself (wrt Utsav, Titli, Shubho Muhurat... ).

I also saw Renaissance.. a future S/F work placed in mid-21st century Paris, finished in ultracontrast B/W anime style. Very slick. Also tried to say Faces. Utter crap. Now in the meantime, here is a question.. how important is it to plan things? Or not? I recently had the misfortune to observe people arguing over the necessity of planning.

And lastly, here we go with some pictures to make you smile.
Clouds!!!
How to camouflage an aircraft factory.

Why spend money on science?

Apart from the obvious answer (fund me, I am a good person and deserving of taxpayer support)..... society can only tolerate activities which do not contribute to economic survival beyond a certain critical mass of population and overall economy size. In today's multinetworked world, where we can support Paris Hilton (understand me here, dear reader: every second that you have ever spent reading an article about her, or seen her on TV in some lame reality show has directly or indirectly contributed to her income: hence I do not mean 'support Paris Hilton' in any metaphorical sense.. this is real), we can certainly support some science.

Ok, but shouldn't we support only the science which helps us? Hmmm.. define science which 'helps us'. Most of the great revolutions of recent times have come out of unfettered 'ocean foam' thought. Quantum mechanics has lead to every solid state electronic device that enriches and makes your daily existence possible. It is not possible to classify science as useful and useless, although one might argue that the grant system of research does just that. But one thinks that the world is in very real danger of throttling intellect and exterminating creativity by demanding a clearly measurable outcome from any and every scientific project undertaken. There are no more cases of 'lets see what happens'. Every decent grant proposal is hypothesis driven, and must have a clearly defined and achievable objective. But this fetters thought, and those truly outstanding 'where no one has gone before' experiments may be a thing of the past. That would be a sad day for science indeed. That would be a sad day for humanity.

But do people care? For the most part, no. Hence, of course we are faced with such outrageous nonsense as people saying that the Mars project should be abandoned, because clearly, life originated on Earth, and hence any other planet is boring. So, what is the price we place on space exploration? Here are some answers.

The rejoinder to my arguments: that the economy cannot support such activity is rather untrue. I have no numbers to make my case, but a strong belief that if we (as in the whole world) stopped making guns and paying our CEOs/Presidents/Dictators so much, we would have money for clean water, food, housing, antibiotics for everyone on Earth. And maybe some money left over for stargazers, poets and cultural anthropologists.

Let me finish by mentioning that the dedication in 'Gravitation', by Wheeler, Misner and Thorne, if I remember is to 'the taxpayer who funds research'. Thank you, dear taxpayer.

10 tips for better cooking

Written from a western and not Indian perspective, but good to know. Click here to read on.

Why become a professor?

Why should one become a professor? Not like it is a paying profession. Nor does one get any respect. One does get a great deal of tension out of grading undergrad papers and dealing with angry med-school wannabes who do not correlate an A grade with effort. The grant system run by the NIH/NSF/DoE is brutally competitive. Without grants, you cannot have students, since you cannot pay for them. Without grant money flowing into the University with your name attached to those monies, many schools will restrict your lab space, or take away your lab altogether. Sound like a vicious cycle yet? Maybe one should have done the more obvious thing and gone into investment banking. Or joined TCS/Wipro/Infosys/Satyam if one is Indian and has the mentality of a lemming. But do note that lemmings get to eat, and live happy lives. This article starts out mentioning how the former President of Harvard was sacked because he posited that women cannot make it in academia where men can.. and then goes ahead and proves a very simple series of points about what a career in academia will give to you; and what it will take away. And why, perhaps those women who have left the sciences have probably made the wise decision in how their lives shape out. But don't listen to me, read and then come back to comment.

Religion meets Science head on: Bravo Dr. Lenski!!

So there has been a fair amount of acrimony between Richard Lenski, a biologist at MSU and certain members of the Conservapedia (the Conservative Encyclopaedia). Why? Because Lenski published results in PNAS discussing evolutionary studies on E.coli. This made people unhappy. The dialogue between Lenski and his opponents (who seem to display an appalling ignorance of science in general) is presented here. Lenski's homepage is here.

I tried to find out more about his opponents, but the Conservapedia search field does not seem to work at this time.

Some more pictures to round your day off..

So, let us start the fest with this series of dressed up dawgs. Some of them look utterly soul-crushed at what their masters/mistresses have done to them. Probably want to be born into the world again as cats. Or Republicans.

Then we have this page showing some of the beauty of India, her landscapes, her wildlife, her street urchins, her temples.. I could go on for a bit, but go ahead and enjoy.

Global Warming...

This is an interesting opinion piece which I cam across today and I think you, dear reader should look at:

Global Warming Twenty Years Later: Tipping Points Near

How to leave your husband...?

The joys of a litigious society.. this is from a financial advice page... tells women how to leave their husbands and when.

This is f-in sick, but it is exactly what happens!

You sick motherf-ers with your lame-arse male child obsession have managed to skew our gender ratio to such obscene levels that your precious male children will grow up and end up searching in vain for wives. Yeah, keep up the family name! Look at this picture and observe that the worst gender ratios are in prosperous North India!! Some statistics are listed here for your enjoyment.


What price this dangerous obsession with male children? This comes at the cost of humiliation of Indian wives if they fail to fulfill their family aspirations and give birth to another arsehole with a dong. Well, humiliation is one small part of it, they run the risk of being run out of house and left to fend for themselves. Or being burned to death. That is also an occupational hazard for Indian wives. Wonder if the OSHA would say anything about that? And incidentally, prenatal sex determination is banned in much of India. But does that deter people? Nope.. and oh, by the way, this is how they go about getting abortions...

And some more amazing photographs

Silent world, by Michael Kenna

New York in black and white

More travel resources

Tips for more efficient air travel.

Washington DC

Hello unseen reader (if you do exist). Also, unseen programmer at the NSA/CIA/DIA/GCHQ/FSB/RAW who wrote the few lines of code which will enable some bot to trawl the net and come to this blog: hello to you as well. Also, hello unseen far away alien who is monitoring all satellite traffic from a small blue-green planet on one of the outer spiral arms of the Milky Way. Peace to all.

This last weekend, I went on a roadtrip to Washington DC. DC is a small, leafy town on the banks of the Potomac river. It is named so after a certain George, a rather influential figure in the early days of the US. As the showcase of the US, DC is home to some very impressive architecture, a lot of history and some absolutely fabulous museums (most of them run by the Smithsonian, and totally free to the public). Eventually, I will put up some pictures, but right now, there are just these few, for your amusement.

What did we do? Well, we toured the Capitol building (with a very capable tour guide, I believe these people are employed by the Dept. of the Interior: our guide had a superb sense of humour.. more power to them). The rotunda was impressive.. as were the faux 3D paintings on it. We also saw the room where Congress convened when the US had far fewer states... that room has some bizarre echo properties.

The National Air and Space Museum was disappointingly small. I was told that the SR71A Blackbird is stored elsewhere. Damn! The WWII section was not adequately lit up. Makes for lousy, grainy pictures. In fact, the lighting was remarkably unimaginative.

The Library of Congress was home to Thomas Jefferson's personal library (amongst a great many other things, including a Gutenberg Bible). I was intrigued to see that Jefferson was a very erudite man.. who read about gardening, physics, chemistry and law. A man of somewhat wide interests.

The view of the White House is also nice. I keep feeling that it is much smaller than the Raj Bhawan in Calcutta. Any comparison to Rashtrapati Bhawan in New Delhi would be utterly ludicrous.

More will follow.

Skynet became self aware at 2.14 Eastern Time on the 29th of August

This was the famous line by Arnold in Terminator 2. Well, maybe it is time to build that bunker and stock up on canned food... the Brits have gone ahead and built a weapons network which enables remote operating robots to communicate to each other. Are you people stupid? And guess what they are calling it... ? Yes, Skynet. Read here.

Extreme points of view: who yaps more?

Well, I came across this article in the Telegraph (not the Calcutta version, the UK one) in which this article which professes to discuss how men and women view conversations differently has been pilloried by this other article. Interesting. But allow me to quote from the first article, "...Listening to other people's conversation or spouting off is fine, but to actively engage and explore and find out feels like work… Some people are not interested in people - that's why they chose to be an accountant."

I would like to draw attention to the tone of this sentence. Could it perhaps be that accountants are genuinely more interested in numbers than other things? How about traffic management experts? Or chefs? Or astronomers? Or civil engineers. These are just a few of the professions which keep us going. Now consider the 'people professions': PR, hospitality professionals... sounds really like the Ark B doesn't it?

Speech is not overrated: it has got us to this point: but remember that deeds speak much louder.

Stupid is as stupid does...

A long time ago, I remember reading this short story about a world where equality was not an ideal, it was enforced by law: thus athletic people would have to wear bags around their necks filled with sand, beautiful people would have to wear masks and smart people would have to wear headphones where a jolt of loud sound every few seconds would give them forced ADD.

Sounds like a world we want? What happened to the Newtonian Utopia where inquiry was held sacred, where people knew, somehow that thinking ennobles man? Read this article where a man was prevented from joining the police because he was too smart.

Shock of the day...

I shouldn't have been shocked, but then this CONSERVATIVE ENCYCLOPEDIA does it for me. Take a look. This is what the page says about Obama.

Of dinner, birthdays, films, photos and many other things.

A friend of mine has a list, actually two, put up on her fridge door which is the things she plans to do over summer with her roomie. Bear in mind that both these gurles are very nice people and great to hang out with. Anyway so the list had community service, and planting trees ad many other nice things.

YS and yours truly plan to have two lists: films to watch, and beers to drink. getting on wih the story: my efiling system is a pet black hole: which is a nice way of saying that pictures which pass over the event horizon of my computer are lost to all mankind for ever. I believe this expression was first used by Clarke to describe Kubrick. Why all this? Well, I have taken some pretty louvvly pics of people recently. Which they want. which I will provide, after processing and indexing. Which might take some time. Hence, I get yelled at. But I managed to print some other pics too. Although there is much more to do, and many more pics to take. Really, it all boils down to making the right metering. I hear some of the new Canons have 51 point AF. Do they use all of that? But really, there is a crying need for some less expensive glass on the 4/3 system. And Sigma is being a git about it.. they come out with the oh-so-desirable 150-500 mm antivibr lens. And no 4/3 mount. Bstrds! And what happened to the 14-150 mm Leica antivibr lens which was announced and never released. Will you people stop drinking Pilsner and make that piece of glass. Now? Danke!


But as it was C's birthday and YK is going to India for a bit, I exerted my lazy bum and managed to get beautiful prints of their best pics (which it pleases me to describe at shaadi.com pics) and handed them over yesterday at C's birthday party lunch. Everyone was happy.

YS insisted that we see District B13. This is a delightful work of eurotrash. Think of Mithunda making fillums in French and getting them dubbed in Whitechapel. Yeah, something like that. Eminently avoidable. We also saw the Golden Compass (Daniel Craig fights Gawd). Now the book (the Northern Lights) has a very complicated plot, but that is quite readable because Philip Pullman is a talented storyteller who puts you in his character's skin very very effectively. But translating that to a workable film was apparently way to much to ask for. For people unfamiliar with the story ( and lets be realistic, with LOTR, the bar has been set extremely high on fantastic/alt universe books converted to movies), asking them to keep pace with all that happens is way too much.