Update on Chandrayaan

So my father called me up late last night (while I was dividing my attention between my dinner and Donnie Brasco on the telly) to say that Baba Ramdev had been telling people about the awesomeness coming out of Sriharikota. So he managed to switch his telly on in time to see the launch live. Something to remember for generations with pride. Chandrayaan has made it successfully to parking orbit, with an apapsis/perapsis of 23000/250 km. That is a highly elliptical orbit. Successive engine burns will extend the orbit to lunar transfer and then the fun really begins. This project is a collaboration between many countries with a mixed science payload. The report on the launch is here. The ISRO rocks.

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.

Chandrayaan: Desi hardware going to the effing moon!!

Yeah, its here and its official. After decades of launching INSAT communication satellites and the occasional Israeli spysat, ISRO has finally decided to pop the big one. In a few short hours, Chandrayaan (literally means 'vehicle to the moon') will lift off from Sriharikota. The Chandrayaan rides atop a specially outfitted PSLV with mixed solid/liquid fuel stages, delivering a final payload of 1.3 tonnes into lunar orbit. The project carries a mix of remote sensing gadgetry with significant contributions from the ESA, and has a projected lifetime of 2 years. This is the most significant effort by the ISRO ever. Chandrayaan will ride to the heavens on a towering pillar of flame. I cannot help thinking that this is a fitting tribute to the genius of Vikram Sarabhai and Satish Dhawan.

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.

Funny presidential candidates

Obama

McCain

Thanks to CNN

Explaining the wurlde, one Venn diagram at a time

Totally awesome shite!

The New Yorker faces off against XKCD in this epic, titanic, magnificent comic off!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

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.

Random conversations

Overheard on a bus returning from campus

A: What do you think about deer meat?
B: Deer meat is great. But I love beef jerky.
A: Yeah, I had this piece of deer meat that my friend gave me this summer. It's been sitting in the back of my freezer, wrapped in a newspaper or something.
B: You should marinate it. Or maybe cook a steak. But you know what tastes really great? Beef jerky.
A: What would you marinate it with?
B: Aaaah, barBQ sauce, I guess, maybe some herbs. But beef jerky tastes so much better. I have my own recipe for making beef jerky.

Aaahhhh.. Friday night

And here we are, still stuck in lab, looking at an evening and a weekend of work ahead. Not complaining, mind it. But surely there is an alternate reality where I would be going home at this time to nice food, pakodas' perhaps, maybe a hot cuppa Daarjeeling and a GoldFlake? Oh yeah, THAT reality. Never was going to work out, was it? I spent most of today at a protein sciences seminar, and then coding my way through some AA sequences. Someone must have done this, its just that I don't know where to find it. Did I mention that I dislike coding? There is sooo much more to life. Like reading HG Wells, for example. I finished his 'Imperialism and the Open Conspiracy' a few days ago. Amazing how he anticipated much of the EU today. Also Amitava Ghosh. 'Countdown' is well written.. but it is mostly a knee jerk Indian lefty intellectual turning a Nelsons' eye to larger realities. What was that shite about India and China never having any disputes? Has the man heard of Arunachal Pradesh?

Anyways, so me back again to work (and play), and this line cam to my attenshun which I decided to share with you...

Sometimes, though, late at night, I would think again of vim.

And since you obviously must read the article it came from, here it is.

And then for my "achiever" friends, the proponents of Dudeism, this discussion of how the Big Lebowski has transcended space and time to become something beyond mere cinema is worth checking out.

Email clients.. any suggestions?

I use pine. I am not afraid to admit it. It is not the snazziest interface around, in fact if it were less snazzy, it would be in direct competition with sending homing pigeons. But it never asks me to use a mouse and it never crashes. If my browser is slowed down by some junk piece of HTML on one tab, everything else might freeze. But pine, secure on its own desktop, never complains.

But there are problems:
1. attachments: they download on the IMAP server. that sucks.
2. address book implementations. not cross compatible with anything else.

So, I would like to ask the world for suggestions
I would like to email clients, for a Mac and for a RHEL desktop. Both should be free, interfaceable with Kerberos authenticated webmail, and lastly, both should have one click 'download all as a zip file'. Maybe two clicks .

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!

Weekend

I got back yesterday from Chicago. Where I had an absolutely uber time with S at the UIC Durga Pujo. Amongst other things to keep in mind, the UIC Pujo was a student affair, hence no evil ABCD influences. Quite surprisingly, my friend Ani was compering the show.. and he looked like he was at a White House briefing. We were quiz teammates while at Presi. A, old college batchmate turned up. A great time was had by all. Random people popped out of the woodwork and proceeded to become bosom buddies over a couple of smokes. There were some nice performances including a great ensemble of modern music which included Anjan, Suman, Mahiner Ghora Guli and to my delight, Chandrabindoo. Also a wunnerful play with some really

nice light work and fluent performances by all the participants. More will follow.

Linus Torvalds' Blog?!?!?!?!

Dear me, is this just an elaborate hoax, or does Linus actually have a blog? If he does, then this is where it resides. My, oh my oh my.. this is wisdom straight from the curator of the kernel, the Gawd of all linux developers, the man who can, by uttering a single phrase unleash an army of unshaven hairy knuckled programmers who will happily storm the bastions of Seattle/Cupertino/Mountain View. The last time I was this excited about anyone blogging was when JKR started hers'. But then she became unutterably boring and old Dumbly suddenly became gay and that was the end of that.

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.

Pradeep Babu's Happy Birthday

Pradeep Babu turned something this year. Just this last week in fact. So, I decided to call the C, the Nandi, the children over to celebrate the birthday, with the Padalas' (Rachna and Pradeep) being the guests of honour. A good time was had by all (methinks) with some nice cooking from the C, the Nandi and the kid. We toasted Pradeep Babu with wine poured thoughtfully by our evening's sommelier, Nandi into.. teacups! That, and Pradeep trying to blow out a lighter (no candles, sorry) were the mildly hilarious points of the evening. Many thanks to the C for das photo.

School grading systems.

I am a product of a fairly unforgiving Indian system where failure was certainly an option, but not a good one. In recent times I have heard of some Indian systems calling for the abolition of marks based ranking in primary and middle school. This would not prepare the kids for the intense competition that lies waiting just at Class X and beyond. And now read this article about how Pittsburgh schools now are mandating that the minimum a student can score is 50%. Which means that if you do one problem right in a question paper of 10, you still get 50%. Does that make any sense?

The Matador

I have to say this about the moviegoing public. They are absolute phookin' gits. Why, you ask? because The Matador, a 2005 film about an assassin suffering from a terrible midlife crisis bombed. It raked in a paltry 10 mil at the box office. While, our own Michael Bay's videogame turned retard-central movie made more than the GDP of several small European nations. You know which one you watched and which one you didn't give a shite about. What a cryin' shame... this was our man Pierce Brosnan's very finest moment.. with awesome support by Greg Kinnear.

And now for your amusement, I will include a small selection of the best lines from The Matador. Courtesy IMDB, of course!
Julian Noble: I'm as serious as an erection problem.
Julian Noble: [after flirting with some Mexican schoolgirls] I hate these Catholic countries. It's all blushy-blushy and no sucky-fucky.
Julian Noble: I look like a Bangkok hooker on a Sunday morning, after the navy's left town.
Julian Noble: An assassin without confidence is a horrible thing to behold. It's like a relief pitcher who fumbles the ball.
Danny Wright: Please tell me you know you mixed two sports in a metaphor.
Julian Noble: Huh? Yeah, I can't do that.

Financial Intervention and the Government of the day

Warning... I am not trained in finance.. these are merely the opinions of a layman. Let us begin with India. Back in the early 60's, the Government of India (GOI) decided to start a mutual fund company. This was called the Unit Trust of India (UTI), and their major vehicle was a fund called US64. Our economy has always been a troublesome one. By constitutionally describing it as a 'mixed' economy, we have brought upon us the corruption and inefficiency of the worst socialist models, while on the other end we have the unlimited wealth (greed?) of a few lucky individuals and companies who have toadied up to the Sarkar. Anyway, so the sublime ridiculousness of starting a mutual fund in an economy where almost everything was PSU owned was actually subsumed by the fact that 'national wealth', as one might term it was being drawn from the coffers of savings accounts and pumped into industry. Well, it did make sense. From a traditional Indian standpoint(still very much extant): the only true wealth one might have is property and gold. Shares and stocks come later to the aam aadmi. So, the best way to kick start a nascent economy would be to divert money from property/gold and put it into stocks. Or so we thought. Except that in the late 1990s', UTI was in deep shite. They needed a GOI bailout to the tune of perhaps 3,300 crores of Rupees. That would be almost a billion $ at today's exchange rate. UTI staggered along for a while longer and then had to fold US64. This required a much bigger restructuring package from the GOI.

Today we are seeing the same things happen on Wall Street. Bear Stearns, one of the largest finance corporations was taken over by JPM Chase for a song. On the 8th of Sept, two of the largest Mortgage financers, the Federal National Mortgage Association (Fannie Mae) and Freddie Mac were taken over by the US government. Hardly a week passed before Merrill Lynch was bought up by Bank of America. Then Lehman Brothers went under. And now, AIG which underwrites some of the biggest and potentially most hazardous investments has been given an 88 billion $ bailout by the Fed.

The question is always the same: most of these huge companies are going under because of their incompetence/greed. Remember Enron? The company whose watchword was 'innovation'? They traded in dreams too: and for a while they made it big. But then people started calling their bluffs and they went under. Except of course, when giant corporations go under; the CEO's rarely, if ever suffer. They have awesome golden parachute deals written into their contracts.. so even if they f**k up, they come out of it smelling like roses. Or a couple of hundred million bucks. Take your pick.

Why should the people of India pay through their taxes for the mismanagement of UTI? And why should US citizens pay.. what was it 29 billion $ for the Merrill Lynch deal and a colossal 88 billion $ for the AIG bailout? The point has been reached at which these companies know that they are now TBTF. That stands for Too Big To Fail. These people cannot be allowed to play fast and loose with other people's money and then yell for Fed help when they get their noses bloodied. If Government intervention is asked for, then the whole industry should submit to Government oversight, if not actual regulation. That is the bottom line.

When parking a car is too difficult...

This is what happens....

Reality bites: can one afford to be ill anymore?

This links to an excellent article on illness and financial troubles which come along with it.

LHC particle physics rap...

Yeah, this is an awesome rap song which apparently walked out of CERN and has been wandering around the Net.. shite it gave me a review of my particle physics class in 4ish minutes!!

Links to mp3, lyrics and more awesome shite is here.

Electronic Voting Machines: India vs US

Link available here to an article discussing Electronic Voting Machines used in India and the Diebold machines used in the US. Anyone feel like outsourcing this as well?

More webcomics and crazy shite!

Link here to yet another webcomic called Apathy Adventures!
Meanterwhilste, the Awesome Planet link is right here.. and anytime you want to see 15 funny signs, enter here.

Lets get this straight about the LHC.

Ok, bloody HUGE particle collider. But it will not, repeat, NOT change the way we view our Universe the moment it is switched on. That gentle process will take some time. Why? Because, dear reader, there will be reams and reams of data to analyze. There will be many, many confounded PIs and their equally mystified graduate students who will run thousands and thousands of lines of code to interpret the volcanic size burst of data on their hands. And a few years, several hundred PRLs and equally many theory theses later, something MIGHT go ping, and some graduate student very, very late at night MIGHT say 'behenchod! Did I just see the Higgs' boson?'. But, no the world will not change fundamentally this weekend.

Aaaand a brand new webcomic!

About amazing superpowers!!

It is never too late to learn some tricks on UNIX

Here are some.

And then, here are some more!

More on photography

Well, the Nikon D90 has arrived. Movie mode on SLRs! Then developments in semiconductors are pushing ISO limits up to where they have never been before. Antivibration lenses may not be necessary, under the right conditions. And then there are brilliant photographers with awesome pictures that leap off the paper or screen and grab your attention. Here are some samples of photography in the rain. Enjoy!

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.

Medicine in India.

It is unfortunate that medical care in India is mostly beyond the reach of the poor. Even in urban settings, medical care is really only available to people who can pay. Big surprise, you say? But this was not the way things were originally planned. Given that many medical students study at the taxpayer's cost, the few months of service they are supposed to put in at a government health centre is hardly compensation enough. In the midst of this dismal outlook there are, however, stories of hope. Here is one: where doctors in UP have managed to perform bronchial surgery on a child.

yes, me back

From a five week break from science, blogging, youtubing, all of those things which make up a busy graduate student's life. I went to Germany, Italy and India. India.. finally, after two long years. it was wonderful. But now that I am here again, there "are experiments to run, there is research to be done". So, let me start off with this awesome link which tells us the secret behind Arnold's cinema career. View and laugh.

Going on vacation for a month.

But I will be back, with much to write about. Have a nice summer everybody.

More entertainment from antiscience bigots...

Read here and be amused.

There is a food crisis here and people are ignoring it.

I don't know why. But that it the way it seems to be going. There are various reasons why this is so: firstly, the world population is growing with no signs of stopping. Secondly, it costs a lot in terms of foodgrains to nurture a cow or sheep or goat and then kill it for meat. Cheaper to eat those foodgrains in their natural form. Thirdly, the corn diverted for use in ethanol as a substitute for petrol is a horrible drain on food supplies. Fourth.. every bit of agricultural land taken away by misguided governments and converted to industrial land reduces our overall production of food. In this context, the colossal stupidity that the Indian government (both at the Centre and the State level) has displayed in bending over for venal businessmen and setting up SEZs with land taken away from farmers and tax holidays is remarkable. These practices have drained the national food reserves, contributed little to the local economy in terms of well paying jobs and have robbed the exchequer of tax revenue. The only people who benefit are the shareholders and the politicians. A nexus of criminal minds indeed.


The world's food supplies are dwindling rapidly. We need to curtail our use of energy, reduce our love for processed food (read chocolate bars/chips), source things locally and do a lot more. This crisis is real and it is upon us. Read on here. This is a moment when politicians, world leaders and businessmen can get together and act decisively. If not we will be remembered as the generation which inherited a beautiful, thriving planet and did our very best to destroy ourselves and our home.

The human mirror.

All it takes are a few groups of identical twins. Read on about the prank pulled on the subway here. Also check out pictures here and here.

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.

Memorial Day, an eventful weekend.

Our man Joydeep had come over from Columbus. That took some doing on his part, as he is also a newbie driver (even newer than yours truly), and driving on highways with no prior experience can be quite harrowing. Anyway, I learned a vital lesson about network security on Friday: my wireless internet at home is part of the University connection: hence configured using my University login.. and it is an unsecured network. So, some evil person downloaded a song using some bittorrent software, and it showed up on my name! Anyway, I get this notice from IT telling me that I am in hot water. I explain to them that I do not use any peer to peer software and I have never even heard of the song in question. After talking to the bloke in IT, I finally understand the only possible explanation for this, and he tells me to go secure my home wireless immediately. Which I do. Hence, a word of caution to everyone reading: secure your home wireless connection: there are much worse things people do online than merely downloading songs... and if evil neighbours do this on YOUR unsecured wireless network, then you will have a difficult time explaining to the authorities that it wasn't you. SECURE YOUR WIRELESS.

Ok, having done with that, I watched 'The Devil wears Prada' with C and V, leading to a great broadening of my horizons ( I now know that cerulean is a colour). I also hung out with our man Nandi and Rachna and got into a huge discussion about what constitutes an FOB desi (me).

Saturday was sleep, and viewing Terry Gilliam's famous work 'Brazil'. I understand why he was so pissed at the studios which cut out the ending to make it optimistically audience friendly. Dystopian works ending on a happy note speak volumes of the heavy hand of MBAs, not artists. Then I went out taking pictures with C, V and A. Which was good. There is something magical about the setting sun... here I was getting supremely pissed at this couple who were being all lovely dovey on this pier just at sunset. I realised that the shades of sunset and the angle of incident sunlight would last for 15 minutes tops.. and I wanted that pier in my shot! I mean, people, go be romantic somewhere else! Don't ruin my composition! Well, all said and done, I did find some nice angles.

Then Joydeep turned up. And we adjourned to a Thai restaurant. This one had Gawd-awful service. Will avoid in future. And quite unnecessarily expensive, too. Then we went out, and got back waaay after midnight. Tried to see 'The Kingdom', but crashed halfway through. Sunday was lunch at C's place, then a drive out to Lake Eerie, a place called Sterling State Park. Nice pictures. And finally, dinner at Niks place. Between the park and dinner was a harrowing drive through the most shady, seedy district of Detroit, and a traitorous GPS which tried to send us on the bridge to Canada twice. Joydeep had no clue why I was so shit-scared. He suggested that that we stop and ask for directions at the petrol pump.. I pointed out that the windows had bulletproof shutters, ergo I was NOT stopping. This was somewhat illuminating... I had a firsthand visual impression of what people mean when they talk about the economic downfall of Michigan. We drove past what seemed like miles and miles of abandoned factories and houses. The tailspin that the car industry seems to be in shows here in a city that is largely dead. Then we get to Niks' place, where I get yelled at for not meeting her for two semesters. But we get a great dinner. All in all, a very nice weekend.

Some tips on portrait photography.

I wonder why people don't do more natural light work? Or maybe, its just that I can't afford an FL-50 flash right now, so I only do natural light... anyway, check out this viddy on some cool portraiture tips.

About being rude...

Apropos my previous post.. linked here, I must add a corrigendum: cussing in Bangla should be likened to wiping one's arse with the finest Dhakai/Benarasi/Baluchari/Tashar. See, now I can be rude and wonderfully ethnically erudite at the same time!

How to be rude.

Me, I can cuss rather fluently in Bengali, English, Hindi, put in a bit of Urdu, and I am working on the Tamil as well. So basically, I can be rude to people all over India. I need to try some Mandarin. But what about Europe? Well, as I mentioned, I was recently at a party where someone was telling me how to ask people to well, umm perform certain services in German. But, clearly there is a lot to learn. This compilation of the best insults from many of the Occidental languages is worth a look.

But again, cussing in my mother tongue.. Bengali is probably the most mellifluous. It is like .. wiping your arse with silk.

About Fire.

About a decade ago, Indian born filmmaker Deepa Mehta directed 'Fire'. This film is about a young lady marrying into a lower middle class Delhi family. Her husband is a sleazy git who is passionately in louvv with his Tibetan/Chinese girlfriend and makes no bones about it. His elder brother runs the family business, a local take out restaurant where everyone in the house works. Said elder brother is a devotee of some kind of guru who preaches celibacy... and he practices it! Needless to say, elder bro's wife is a terribly unhappy, deprived woman. And now, so is the younger woman. Inevitably perhaps, with no remaining choices in their barren, loveless lives, they find solace in each others' arms. Oh, my, did I say the magic word.. lesbians??

Anyway, quite expectedly, the film drew intense flak from right wingers in India. And Deepa Mehta flew higher in the adoring eyes of her western audiences with each new ridiculously profane remark made by the likes of Bal Thackerey.

But why this discussion... well, yesterday, I had invited a few people to come over to see this film. As it turned out, of the people invited; the blokes copped out, and so it ended up with me being the only standard bearer of the evil Indian Hindu patriarchy around. Now, allow me to explain again, why this entire thing happened: I am a huge fan of Nandita Das (younger bride in the film). Enough said. Well, go look at my post on 1947 Earth. I wanted to see how my accurate my memories of seeing this film at the theatre ten years or so earlier were.

As I see it now, the film carries an important social message: it is no secret that homosexuality exists in India: anyone who claims otherwise is being foolish.. kind of like that Iranian premier. Whether gay people are persecuted in India is the second question: much of our penal code comes over from the fairly Victorian British way of seeing things: hence the answer is 'yes'. True also that many Indian women are unfortunate enough to live in unfulfilled marriages: but that is something that cuts both ways.

The one important factor to note is that Deepa Mehta's direction is terribly unsubtle.. it is utterly ham handed. And did she not pay any money to the composer, Rehman? All of the soundtrack is recycled from previous Rehman films. And it works badly: the music is often loud and overwhelming.. it tells you what you are supposed to feel. Actually, more like shouts it down at you. Bottom line: the film has almost no merit as a film alone: and this is something that I would be inclined to blame the director for.. the actors are very highly talented, they have not been well used. Here a few points of view on this film.

1. http://www.infinityfoundation.com/ECIToutpouringsframeset.htm
   
2. http://www.brightlightsfilm.com/30/fire.html
3. http://www.wsws.org/articles/2000/may2000/fire-m02_prn.shtml
4. http://www.sawnet.org/news/fire.html

For someone who aspires to the highest standards of filmmaking (read Satyajit Ray, Ritwik Ghatak, Mrinal Sen), Mehta has a lot to learn and a really long way to go.

On higher education.

I came across this wonderfully written article about the other side of universal higher education.. the dilemma of preserving the quality of academia while trying to get everyone to get a college education. Makes for a fairly good read, this is, after all, an anguished appeal to a system which is broken and needs to be fixed.

Honestly though, we seem to be increasingly a society which has been built on foundations laid by some really clever people; and the rest of us are struggling to keep up. I don't have any solutions, any remedies. But wiser men have thought about these things and have spoken about them. The other face of the future: the option which does not lead The Brave New World has also been spoken of by the great Aldous Huxley. It is called Pala, and for that you have to read 'Island'; Huxley's last, and perhaps greatest work.

Talks, fillums and other things.

I went to speak at a conference at Notre Dame last weekend. it was great fun.. the talk was well received, which was all good. In fact, I had been quite terrified of being grilled by hordes of angry biochemists. Quite to the contrary, it went across very well.

A few points to note, though: I use open office because it transits almost seamlessly between by Linux and my Mac. Go OO!! (very few people will understand the hidden connotation). But what really gets me is when evil video systems fail to cooperate with my Mac, just 'cos they are all Windows optimized and evil. Also, I tend to backup my presentations in .ppt, .odp, .sda, .pdf and .jpg formats, and keep them in two separate emails, and on a disc and on a flash drive (which is formatted to be readable across any OS). People may think that I am being paranoid. Far from it. Things have a way of collapsing when you least expect them to. Hence backup as much as possible. I hold true to this, and I think so should others. People who walk around without taking precautions are just asking for trouble. Having said that, I probably get more than my share of trouble in this context anyway.. but then, I try hard to solve those problems.. sort of like Rincewind.. I include here, for your edification and amusement, an excerpt from the wikipedia page on Rincewind, "In fact, Rincewind has the dubious privilege of being the Chosen of the Lady, the Discworld's most mysterious goddess. It is for this reason that he is constantly finding himself embroiled in unpleasant situations and coming out more-or-less on top. However if he ever realised this, much less acted as though nothing could seriously harm him, then she would instantly lose interest. Besides, having the favour of the Lady, in addition to being unreliable, also means having the very reliable enmity of Fate. People have said that the gods smile on Rincewind (due to his continued existence despite all odds.) Rincewind feels that, although he knew they were definitely doing something to him, he had never considered it to be smiling."

Ayan Paul, my friend from collegeis working on his PhD in high energy physics at ND. We got to hang out after a really long time.. which was awesome, as we had some six years worth of catching up. Ayan took me to this party hosted by a bunch of phys/math people. Awesome party.. the kind I have missed for way too long.. and proceeded to introduce me to his friends as '.. he used to be a physicist'. Hmmm... Anyway, I learned a little about this bloke's work: logic theory, I cracked, and got laughs for a few Erdos jokes, and I learned how to be very rude in German. Altogether, time wonderfully spent.

And then, I got back.. and happened to watch David Lynch's very very strange film 'Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with me'. Now, Mike, our media library bloke once gave me Blue Velvet to see, because 'I was seeing to many strange films', as he put it. Why would you do that to someone, unless you wanted to weird him to hell and back? David Lynch paints a very surrealistic, yet beautiful canvas filled with strong, arresting, performances. In Blue Velvet, Isabella Rosallini's performance is lovely.. yet so utterly weird. Fire Walk is stranger still... and this will take another couple of views to go down properly.

Yeah, so what was I saying now..?

Nandita Das.. I have been slightly gaga over this particular actress ever since.. Rockford. which was, my, oh, my, almost a decade ago. So we (the kids and yours truly) ended up seeing 1947 Earth last night. This film is by Deepa Mehta (the series being Fire, Earth, Water), so naturally we had quite high expectations. It starts of small... in fact the camera work is quite shoddy at times. One gets the impression that Mehta had brilliant ideas, but was quite slipshod in their execution. And the DVD print was quite crummy too (where did the AADL get their hands on it?), with lousy sound... which was a great pity, given that the soundtrack is by none other than the great Rehman. But somehow, the inchoate pieces come together in a weirdly compelling fashion, so at the end of the film, one is somewhat .. shaken.

But enough about the film, this post was supposed to be about Nandita Das (who, in fact, reminds of someone, now that I think about it).. and how Nandita Das is really lovely and all that. Well, you know what.. let me put in this picture to make my point!

Now I know why I am so bloody depressed...

I tried to post this yesterday...

but I got a 502 server error or something.. which means my compadres in CS are not doing their job properly! Anyway, yet another blog about how it is nice to be in CS and not nice to be in anything else... read this and repent, ye all!

See what I mean about Facebook?

I mean, seriously, people.. do I really want to compare movie tastes with you..? You sods probably think that Angie Jolie is the best actress since.. umm Ingrid Bergman. Then there was the brilliant superpoke application.. with all due respect, I do not appreciate you wanting to wanting to throw sheep at me. Stop sending me lame Facebook apps.. its an awesome tool to keep in touch, announce birthday and graduation party's and put up pictures of the same. Just stop it with the 'buy my friends for 10$' shite!

See this viddy.. this is what Facebook will be like if it turns into life...

The Indian baby dropping ritual.

Read and view here.

The Indian space effort.

A long time ago, in the early 1960's, an Indian physicist called Vikram Sarabhai was busy pulling all the strings he could and then some. And some of those strings were quite powerful: Sarabhai had, as a close friend Homi Jahangir Bhaba, the man who would later be called the father of India's nuclear programme and go on to establish the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research at Bombay. He (Sarabhai) was a man of impressive credentials- he had worked with C.V Raman (NL) at the hallowed Physics Dept of the Indian Institute of Science. He was much more than a scientist.. he was a visionary of sorts- had had helped establish the Physical research Laboratory at Ahmedabad when he was only 28. Anyway, coming back to the original thread of the story: why was he pulling all those strings? The reason was the Indian Space Research Organization (ISRO). This was Sarabhai's baby and his gift to independent India. Of course, there were detractors and naysayers: there always have been and always be. And they were not wrong when they pointed out that the meagre resources of a fledgling state should not be squandered on grandiose dreams when so many of our people lived off scraps of food and lived in hovels. But nations have been built out of the obstinacy of strong willed men; and Bhaba and Sarabhai were of that colour. They dreamed big and dared anyone to stand in their way.

Unlike any other space programme, the ISRO was not born out of military considerations; it's ancestry had nothing of ballistic missile development in it. Decades of effort amidst cash crunches, changes of government, hostile ministries and even more hostile Western influence who proceeded to sanction the hell out of any ongoing projects followed. The scientists persevered. Small successes were interspersed with tragic failures. Work went on. Sometime in the mid 90's, when the US government was twisting arms around the world to sign the NPT, one Indian minister made the following comment: 'the nations who are signing the NPT do not have the industrial capacity to produce safety pins. We have a satellite footprint which stretches from Malaysia to Abu Dhabi'.

So why this story? Well, yesterday, the ISRO successfully launched 10 satellites on a single PSLV rocket to polar orbit. This is a record for the largest number of satellites launched on a single vehicle and signals the successful entry of India into the highly lucrative business of space based applications and delivery systems. The full story is here. And the message for all Indians is this: be proud. And do your bit.

What would Richard Feynman do?

This, apparently...