Danger words

I am compiling a list of words which sound the warning bells. Whenever you hear someone use such words, you can tell that they have been, or would very much like to go to business school. Further assessments about their character, legitimacy of birth and suchlike might follow, but that is mostly up to you. My job is to present you with the words. Here goes.

1. Leverage: should be used in a context which involves pulleys, chains, and machinery. Not in finance. Especially not in finance. If you use it in daily conversation, chances are you might have brought on the Great Recession.

2. Incentivize, also incent: an example: "we should cherish the for-profit college model because when executed well, it can incent a much greater focus on learning outcomes." Makes sense, in a certain perverse way. Only people espousing for profits are likely to use words like "incent".

3. Synergy: a douchebag word if ever there was one. Interestingly enough, finds its roots in Greek.

4. Team Player: a circle jerker. Also one with no responsibilities and a 401k.

Possible newspaper headlines

So I had this wicked idea: take two or three headlines from CNN/BBC/NYT/W.Post/WSJ or whatever your daily fix is, and parse them into one headline. make it wicked. Ok, so maybe the idea is not original, but hey, contributions welcome!!

Here, let me start off with:

Executives at AIG who received bonuses above 1 million $ will not confirm belief in evolution!

So what is wrong with the world?

This is not a question in jest. It is unthinkable that a world which has split the atom, tamed rivers and set rockets to the heavens cannot find the resources to provide food and clean drinking water to much of its population. The accumulation of obscene wealth in what is supposedly the age of 'equality' in the face of worldwide hunger is an outrage that cannot be tolerated. There is no equality in claiming that all men have the same chance when some are born with trust funds and some to parents who are already dying of AIDS. The reasons for this state of affairs are many and widespread, but certainly there is the colossal failure of the self styled intelligentsia to act as such. far from entering an age of enlightenment, humanity has chosen to sink into a comforting brain dead slumber fed by flickering images and reassuring soundbited from their new Gods, who speak in High Def images with DTS surround sound. This self inflicted lobotomisation of much of the world means that 'the people' sleep while their national coffers are being looted by a few rich and unscrupulous wealth. This article tries to answer the question of 'who owns America?'. What is to be done? Get up, move out of your comfort zone, get something done. This article talks about what is wrong in the way that we have allowed our minds and judgements to be taken over and think what we are told to. I have one simple piece of advice for everyone who does not lead a hand to mouth existance: read a book a week.

Italy: first, Ukraine: second, US: third

This is what I am talking about..
1. Italy, and this is why.
2. Ukraine, and this is why.
3. The US, and this is why.

The purpose of television really comes down to whether the person is likable or not

The title is a direct quote from this NY Times article about a conservative school for grooming "experts" who will then share their opinions with you on prime time TV. Aah, the glories of the information age... aah, statesmanship!, aah journalistic ethics and integrity! aah, expertise!

Urban Planning, Money and some totally insane shite going on in Dubai.

Read this article, which is really mostly pictures, and tells how Dubai is transforming itself from a quite Emirate into a fookin' crazy place where (presumably) urban planner and bankers smoke random shite together and decide to build nutty things and actually finance them!

The last line of the article is quoted herein:

• "There are more construction workers in Dubai than there are actual citizens."

WHAT THE HELL IS GOING ON OVER THERE?

Yeah, my question exactly! The people involved in the actual construction of these magnificent monuments to Mammon ( I love alliteration) are an unfortunate lot. They work under harsh conditions. This article and this Human Rights Watch essay details what these migrant workers go through.

The most important feature in any browser.

Happens to be the ability to symmetrically enlarge the font size without blowing up the web page asymmetrically and making all the links difficult to find. This is also true in another sense of any text editor. Why use a smaller font and strain your eyes, when you can have a nice large comfortably font size. 12 sucks. Use 16. Or larger.

Firefox 3 does this beautifully. Download it here. I don't have IE, so I don't know if it does.

Also, a note to webpage designers. Blogs/articles which have less than 10 words per line suck bitter lemons. Lemons shaped like dills. Do you know why I am using such a complex metaphor? because in the first draft, I tried to be explicitly rude and the fookin' blogger interface wouldn't fookin' let me!

Anyway, here I am.. so webmasters, .. dudes... design webpages in two formats. Letterbox/Normal and widescreen. We will all thank you.

Aah, the trouble with Facebook...

is outlined here.

Just to put some things in perspective

Source: http://www.phdcomics.com/
All credits to Dr. Jorge Cham. The man rules.

And the other major elekshun issue is...

Cow abductions! Again, I have not heard anything from either of the two presidenshial candidates about their commitment to dealing with this issue. I mean, I understand that there is some governmental attenshun being focussed on this matter, but the people involved have their own issues to deal with...

And then again, cows are sacred to some people and lunch for others. Cows are important. As this video shows.

The elekshun and possibilities of a zombie apocalypse

The most important issue in this elekshun is being totally ignored. And that is making me angry. So, no beating about the bush...

SENATORS MCCAIN AND OBAMA, DO YOU HAVE A STRATEGY FOR DEALING WITH A ZOMBIE APOCALYPSE?

Why don't people realize that this should be on everyone's mind? We need political leaders who can step up and keep a cool head in case of crises and I am not talking about something like a wimpy thermonuclear faceoff. What if, and no sniggers here, the dead come back to life and do a walkie? Are we prepared to deal with shite like that? Methinks, given our current state of preparedness, or lack thereof.. no. I mean, it could happen. Like, tonight. And if it did, then somethings would look different. Such as these.

But, the main thing is stay cool and elect leaders who will take us through without too much damage. Leaders like Shaun. Perhaps limited to a few melted Cornettos.

PS- thanks to people unknown for borrowed images.

Explaining the wurlde, one Venn diagram at a time

Fear.

Let us being by saying that I have not sat through reading any Stephen King. This is in spite of the fact that I consider myself a patient reader, and I am willing to give most things a chance.There is just something about King's writing that does not appeal to me. But some of his works have been translated into brilliant films. One of them is 'The Green Mile'. This was directed by Frank Darabont, and simply had to be awesome, with that cast.

Darabont came back to King with the 2007 film 'The Mist'. This is about people in a small (New England?) town trapped by a mist coming in from the mountains. They find themselves barricaded in a small supermarket.

Now as one person had long ago derisively captioned King's works as "IT WAS A BEAUTIFUL DAY... AND THEN THE EVIL CAME!!!!!!!!"

True, sort of. But I don't know whether it was King, or the genius of the director who made this something else. Every good "scare" moment is better for the reflections seen in the faces and minds of people themselves. Every good SF work is ultimately an exploration of the human soul. The Mist went straight to that level. The way the group splintered into a small, rational group, struggling to convince a larger hysterical group was frightening. Even more so was the hold one deranged preacher had: who saw Armageddon in what lay outside. This was an illustration of the siege mentality at its very best. The Mist is mislabeled as a SciFi/Horror film.. it is an illustration in experimental psychology. The fundamental question it comes down to is "what will fear make you do?" In that scale it excels.

Liff, work and other things...

So, being guilty of drunk dialing people on (rare) occasion, I was at the receiving end of things for once. My friends at Chicago were all getting hilariously wasted and letting me know. While, of course, I was at lab working (Friday night, sigh).

Getting back home on Friday night can be a pain. The buses are full of partying (read drunk) undergrads. And if your luck truly runs out, you will be sitting or standing right next to a drunk who will then proceed to puke his/her guts out all over you.

The driver was a sport. The bus was kinda crowded. (When I say crowded, I mean US crowded, not Gariahat Jn on a weekday rush hour crowded.. that would simply kill people here.) He pulled over in front of the undergrad dorm and we hear his disembodied voice on the PA "Here we are. Home of fine living and elegant dining". That provoked a derisive roar from everyone.

Meanwhile, I was being eyeballed by this trio of kids, one desi, one Chinese and one American. And they wanted to know if I was drunk. And if not, what was I doing so late on campus. I told them that I was a grad student. They rolled their eyes and expressed deep sympathies. Then made some smart aleck comments about Maxwell's equations (they turned out to be engineers). I watched for a while as their conversation veered towards greater and greater inaccuracy and then gently stepped in, entirely in the interests of electrodynamics and straightened things out.

Finally, on the leg home, the bus mostly empty, the driver opined that 9 out of 10 times, it was some girl who hurled in his bus. He shook his head philosophically and said that in 35 years of his driving, that was the way it was. Words of wisdom.

Monuments are built on the backs of slaves...

Empire building usually happens when there is a large surplus of humanity willing to work for horribly low wages. As this article tells you, the wave of prosperity in Dubai, culminating in the most beautiful hotels in the world, is built on the backs of Indian/Pakistani/Afghan migrant workers who are made to work obscene hours for a pittance. Why do they keep coming in such large numbers? Simply because it is even more difficult to get any kind of job back home. In some cases, like those of Afghans, their homes, indeed their whole nation has been ravaged by war. What do people go back to?

One has to think about this: it has long been understood that all economic systems thrive on inequality: there is no way that the rich of the world, or even the not so rich, who shop at Saks cannot possibly maintain their own extravagant lifestyles if we were to provide free immunization against MMR to every child in the world. Or clean drinking water.

One of the fringe benefits of maintaining low intensity conflicts around the world is the constant availability of displaced people (refugees, we called them in a distant past) who will serve as willing (or coerced) warm bodies for labour when we erect our monuments to our own undisputed glory. There is the slight problem of some of tehse displaced people whose lives have been ravaged by conflicts set up and sustained by the great powers that they will turn so angry that some of them will insist on passing on their grief to as many people as possible. But hey, thats what the police state is for!

Prezidunks, wuhs, economies, elekshuns and bailouts.

There it is again. Elekshun time! When all will be forgiven, and we can start anew, clean slate and all. Or not. Take your pick, the US Prez is the de facto leader of much of the world, sits on top of a good 20% of the world's 64 trillion $ economy and wields control over almost 6000 strategic and tactical thermonuclear weapons. The war in Iraq has killed over 4000 Americans. It is interesting the way we say it.. "the war has killed". As if the responsibility for all those lost lives can be placed on the shoulders of some malign, but ot manifest entity. Oh, and speaking of war deaths, that would be about a hundred thousand Iraqis. Indeed, we live in interesting times. There is, of course the subprime lending crisis, which has blown up in our faces. So what is the crisis about anyway? This comic illustrates. No math, no complicated five syllable words. So I happened to see 'Slacker Uprising', Mike Moore's film about the 2004 election. Watch it free here, on the official site. And then go and read the open letter from Moore to all citizens. There is a lot at stake here. Much of these are catchphrases to be used at dinner table conversations: freedom, equality, health, blah-di-blah. But let us not forget that they do mean something real.

Safecracker in shorts

So we legged it up the crooked steps into the hotel lobby. Or what looked like a lobby. We, I may point out is the esteemed big sis, henceforth referred to as S and yours truly. We carried between us, a backpack, a camera bag and a fookin' huge Samsonite suitcase with a combination lock. I lugged the suitcase through the confusion of Frankfurt's Hahn airport, through the greater confusion of Rome's Ciampiano airport and down a shady side alley where the cobblestones were pockmarked with small treacherous craters. Fookin' cobblestones!! Now I should really explain my resentment at them cobblestones.... back in India, which is home for me, one never drags one's suitcase along the road. You get a rickshaw or something which helps.. and is never super expensive. In the US, on the other hand due to the pervasive strength of the ADA, you can drag anything with wheels. Anywhere!

Add to that the minor complication that one day before flying out from Detroit, I had taken a tumble down the stairs at home and had a badly sprained ankle. More fun!! Anyway, we found ourselves in the hotel lobby and face to face with .. a pheun. Very surreal. One might even suspect that the Wachowski brothers had something to do with this. I pick up the pheun and after some time am directed by this disembodied voice to get my arse up to the fourth floor. Well, as S and me are hauling our gear into the tiny contraption that passes for a lift, this bloke with long graying hair squeezes his arse into the lift. I glare. He smiles back.

We finally make it, via much creaking and clanking of fairly ancient machinery to the fourth floor, where as it happens, said long hair is our night manager. Having signed in and collected our keys, we get to the dorm and prepare to doss down. The loo (unisex) is, thankfully clean; and also thankfully populated by a couple of fairly good-looking birds, who, less thankfully are of the giggling persuasion. Sod.

I lock up my passport, money and stuff in the suitcase and crash for the night, my camera bag snug against my feet. In the morning I am woken up by the big sis and grab a quick cuppa from a conveniently located vending machine. And then promptly discover that somehow the combination lock refuses to budge. Sod. 999 combinations to run through… but the lock has the proverbial steely glint where it would have eyes, had it been human. This was not planning to open up. After ranting and WTFing around in my shorts for a while, I realize the desperation of the situation. All my money, my passport, my fookin’ toothbrush, for crying out loud, kept from me by a couple of centimeters of thermopolymer and steel! And my clothes. Bereft clothes, a man has no dignity. I mentally see myself explaining myself to a cop or a Samsonite repairman in what is basically my undies’ and I shudder. Big sis, quite sensibly has kept a change of clothing handy and is not in the quagmire I find myself in.

Finally, I decide to leg it up to the fourth floor where the somewhat bleary eyed night manager is negotiating with some random blonde. And I ask, very politely for a crowbar. The night manager gives me the once over. Bleary eyed, unshaven, bloke in his undies. Asking for a crowbar. With commendable restraint; he enquires as to the purpose. With equal restraint, aplomb even, I explain. Brief silence. Finally something falls into place and he recognizes me as the bloke from last night. And recognizes further, the desperation not quite hidden away behind the aplomb. In undies, I might add. And offers me the biggest fookin’ screwdriver and what looks like a Grenadier’s entrenching tool. I thank him from the bottom of my heart and return.

Now begins the process of safecracking. I imagine Richard (Feynman) would have a lot to say about my lack of expertise. But I got it, finally.. I managed to jimmy the damn lock open. This event was recorded for posterity by the sis. The lock, of course refused to work any further. So we decided to grab all the valuables and keep them on our persons. Anyone interested in sniffing old socks was welcome to. And then, we went to see the Colosseum.

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.

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.