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...

Guest post: Manmohan Singh - the premier who failed expectations?

From today's Statesman, about the man who would be India's new Nehru..it is a sad day indeed when all of Indian politics seems to be either about caste politics aka Mayawati or the edicts passed from 10 Janpath. Have we completely lost the ability to rise above such pettiness? Is there no one left who speaks not just for a tribe or a community, but for the whole country? This article talks about the failed story that this the prime ministership of Manmohan Singh, once considered a man of bedrock integrity. Perhaps the fault lies in us, for expecting too much from one who obeys the diktat of the Congress' Italian Grande Dame.

Assessing Manmohan
The Doctor Of Deficit Finance Should Realise The Currency Is At Stake
Subroto Roy
The best thing that may be said of the Manmohan Singh premiership is that when it began in May 2004, it seemed, for a short while, refreshing in comparison to the dysfunctional arrogance and brutality displayed by its predecessor. By the last months of the Vajpayee-Advani Government, there were party appointees who had ended all pretence of purportedly Hindu values and were raking it in shamelessly. The Golden Rule of Democracy is “Throw the rascals out”, which is what Indian democracy upheld as it has done time and again. By 2009, India’s electorate will have the chance to decide whether the incumbent government deserves the same fate.

Lok Sabha

Manmohan Singh was seriously discussed as the Congress’s putative nominee for PM as early as 2001. The idea brewing at the time with the party’s next generation of wannabe leaders (in their 50s and 60s, where Manmohan was near 70) was that they needed to maintain good relations with the Great White Queen and wait out one term of an inevitable Singh premiership before having a shot at the top job themselves.
What is surprising is Dr Singh appeared never to feel it necessary to educate himself privately on how to retool himself for the necessary transformation from being the archetypal bureaucrat he had been in his working career to becoming the national statesman he wished to be after retirement. It is doubtful, for example, if he ever stood in front of a mirror and practised an extempore political speech in Hindi in preparation for the highest executive post in the country, let aside writing a clear-headed, original vision or mission statement of substance as to where he wished to lead it. As Narasimha Rao’s Finance Minister, he could meekly take orders from his PM; it seemed he wished to continue in the same mode even when PM himself.
Jawaharlal Nehru is supposed to have been a hero of Dr Singh’s ~ but Nehru was a thorough parliamentarian, among the finest anywhere, and someone who always respected the Lok Sabha immensely. Dr Singh, after he lost to VK Malhotra for the South Delhi seat in 1999, made not the slightest effort to enter the Lok Sabha again, even when the Akalis indicated they might not oppose him in a Punjab contest. When asked specifically at a large press conference about not entering the Lok Sabha, Dr Singh murmured words to the effect he had better uses of his time ~ a display, if anything, of the misplaced arrogance of many New Delhi academics and intellectuals. Dr Singh may be the first PM in any parliamentary democracy never to have won a seat in the lower house nor felt a need to do so.
Dr Singh’s bureaucratic expertise assisted him well in the first national crisis that came his way, which was the Tsunami of 26 December 2004. There appeared to be an air of efficiency about the Government’s response and he seemed in his element as commander of bureaucratic forces while working with Pranab Mukherjee in enlisting the military. George W. Bush (not a great geographer or historian) was apparently impressed to see on a map that India had naval forces deployed as far as the Andamans.
By 2005 though, Dr Singh’s bureaucratic mindset had its negative impact. Montek Ahluwalia had been his Finance Secretary when he was Finance Minister. Mr Ahluwalia’s spouse had been a main supporter of Dr Singh’s unsuccessful Lok Sabha attempt. During the Vajpayee Government, Mr Ahluwalia remained a Planning Commission Member for several years before moving to Washington. With Dr Singh as PM, Mr Ahluwalia returned from the USA in mid 2004 to become Deputy Chair at the Planning Commission. Simultaneously with his return, the idea that the American nuclear industry would like to sell “six to eight lightwater reactors” to India arose.
That is as much as is presently known in public. Dr Singh and Mr Ahluwalia may in the national interest want to frankly and precisely explain to the Indian people the full story of the sudden origins of this idea. Certainly, none of the lessons of the Dabhol fiasco a decade earlier seemed to have been learnt, and the Maharasthtra Government (and hence the Government of India) ended up paying some $300 million to General Electric and Bechtel Corporation for Dabhol before any nuclear talks with the USA could begin. Nor had any serious cost-benefit analysis been done or discussion taken place comparing nuclear energy with coal, hydro and other sources in the Indian case.
Indian foreign policy became frozen in its focus on nuclear negotiations with the USA, swirling around Dr Singh’s fife-and-drum welcome at the White House and President Bush’s return visit to India. At the same time arose the issue of Paul Volcker’s UN committee mentioning the name of India’s foreign minister. As The Statesman put it, regardless of the latter’s involvement, “the damage to India's diplomatic reputation in the world” was done and it was inevitable a new foreign minister would be necessary. After dilly-dallying and much 10 Janpath to-and-fro, Dr Singh followed Nehru’s mistake of becoming his own foreign minister. The idea was that this would be temporary but it became almost a year.
Instead of transforming himself towards Indian political statesmanship, Dr Singh advanced other retired bureaucrats’ ambitions on similar career-paths. Foreign policy went out of the MEA’s control and seemingly into the control of the new “National Security Adviser”. Dr Singh, sometimes with MK Narayanan beside him, travelled a large number of countries from Brazil to Finland and Uzbekistan to South Africa and Japan. Dr Singh also found time and willingness to accept honorary degrees from British and Russian universities during these short months.
While Dr Singh seemed thus preoccupied, two of India’s main neighbours underwent massive democratic revolutions (leave aside magnificent Bhutan). Nepal’s people practically stormed their Bastille while Dr Singh and Mr Narayanan visited Germany to discuss BMWs. Pakistan’s democratic forces could hardly believe the cold indifference shown to them by a New Delhi merely following Bush’s support for Pervez Musharraf. While Pakistan and Nepal, and to lesser extent Bangladesh, saw movements towards better governance, Sri Lanka descended towards civil war ~ India’s PM remained obsessed with the magic wand that the nuclear deal was supposed to be.

Inflation

Then suddenly the magic vanished ~ Dr Singh seemed to finally come to a silent private recognition that the economics of the nuclear deal simply did not add up if it meant India importing “six to eight lightwater reactors” on a turnkey basis from the USA or anywhere else. Dr Singh seemed to come out of his self-imposed trance and return a little better to reality. By the time he visited China, although he was as deferential to Hu Jintao in his body language as he had been to Bush and Musharraf and even accepted an indoor guard of honour, he also seemed willing to stand up for India. The Arunachal visit was a reality-check.
Now there is inflation ~ and one year left in the UPA’s term. What the country needs is tough sensible macroeconomics and clean public finance. A pandering profligate budget in February was not a healthy sign. Instructing Mr Ahluwalia to close down the Planning Commission and make it a minor R&D wing of the Finance Ministry would be instead a good step. Instructing the RBI to clean up its bureaucratic wastefulness and prepare itself for institutional independence from the Finance Ministry would be even better. Getting proper financial control over every Union and State government entity spending public money and resources would be most important of all. Such major institutional changes in the policy-making process are what an economist might expect of an economist prime minister who wishes to lead India in the 21st Century. India’s currency is at stake.
The writer is Contributing Editor, The Statesman

Naming cats and computers.

The naming of cats is a difficult business. So much so, that T.S Eliot wrote about it, in 'Old Possum's Book of Practical Cats'. For your edification and entertainment, the poem 'The naming of Cats' is appended below. With all due homage of Eliot.

The Naming of Cats is a difficult matter,
It isn't just one of your holiday games;
You may think at first I'm as mad as a hatter
When I tell you, a cat must have THREE DIFFERENT NAMES.
First of all, there's the name that the family use daily,
Such as Peter, Augustus, Alonzo or James,
Such as Victor or Jonathan, or George or Bill Bailey -
All of them sensible everyday names.
There are fancier names if you think they sound sweeter,
Some for the gentlemen, some for the dames:
Such as Plato, Admetus, Electra, Demeter -
But all of them sensible everyday names.
But I tell you, a cat needs a name that's particular,
A name that's peculiar, and more dignified,
Else how can he keep up his tail perpendicular,
Or spread out his whiskers, or cherish his pride?
Of names of this kind, I can give you a quorum,
Such as Munkustrap, Quaxo, or Coricopat,
Such as Bombalurina, or else Jellylorum -
Names that never belong to more than one cat.
But above and beyond there's still one name left over,
And that is the name that you never will guess;
The name that no human research can discover -
But THE CAT HIMSELF KNOWS, and will never confess.
When you notice a cat in profound meditation,
The reason, I tell you, is always the same:
His mind is engaged in a rapt contemplation
Of the thought, of the thought, of the thought of his name:
His ineffable effable
Effanineffable
Deep and inscrutable singular Name.

Having said that, it is to be noted that the naming of computers is also a difficult task. It is possible to get it wrong.. and although I consider myself fully rational (except on Thursdays), some sneaky part of my mind believes that Heaven knows no vengeance like a pissed off computer. Consider the following famous (fictional, well, maybe not all of them) computers:

1. HAL - "I'm sorry Dave, I'm afraid I can't do that". [subtext: 'die, puny human, as i bleed the atmosphere from this spaceship into vacuum and every cell in your body explodes from the pressure differential!!']
2. Hactar - "oh, so I created the Ultimate Weapon and didn't want to hand it over to the Silastic Armorfiends, so they pulverised me and I lived for 10 billion years as a sentient cloud of cosmic dust, so the only way I think I am going to redeem myself is by turning the inhabitants of beautiful Krikkit into the worst homicidal, sorry genocidal, sorry, galactocidal (i mean, those buggers want to toast the f-in Galaxy!) and get them to kill everyone. " [subtext: 'that actually makes sense']
3. Sleeper Service - "the Galaxy, and the Culture are depending on me to deal with this unimaginably powerful entity, the Excession, and here I am, obsessed with some random idiot woman." [subtext: 'complicated AI's can be highly OCD'].
4. Deep Blue - 'Is that Gary Kasparov? Haaaalp!!'
5. Multivac/Cosmic AC - "dS/dt < 0 . For the whole Universe." [subtext: '.. let there be light']
   

Ok, so you get the picture. if you do not name a computer right, chances are that it might go ape and do crazy shite and maybe destroy the very fabric of spacetime. No good. The thing is that our lab has recently acquired a new desktop. Now, we have a tradition of naming computers after musical terms (symphony, sonata.. ). And this time, we decided to do something different. So, the name I came up with is 'saha'. After this bloke. Which is a nice thing to do. Also quite easy to spell.

Gawd-dammit, I thought of this first!!!

I SWEAR that Nandi and I were talking about clean and cheap energy.. and THIS was exactly what we had come up with. How did they get into our heads and steal our ideas?

Oh shite!

The toilet wars! part of which are chronicled here!!

This is what gives modern art a bad name.

Yeah, so I believe I have already talked about my extremely underwhelming experience at the Andy Warhol museum when I visited Pittsburgh a few weeks ago. If I haven't here is the summary: most of the work, represented as 'pop' art was puerile and rather pointless. A lot of it was commercial (as is everything else, but let my cynicism not marr your happiness), and utterly trite. Most of the photographs presented were technically mediocre and artistically worthless. This is my opinion and if anyone is willing to make a valid case and prove me wrong: go for it. But I do stick to one basic argument: if a work of 'art' cannot stand by itself and needs an accompanying page of explanation in order to garner any appreciation, well, then it shouldn't be called art.

Incidentally, The Warhol also had sculptures by Ron Mueck. These were truly breathtaking. Mueck's work spanned a range from a 'self sculpture' of his sleeping face to a huge newborn baby. We also got to see a video of Mueck at work. Again, it was very obvious that there was nothing slapdash or irreverent about his work: every square inch of every one of works speaks volumes about perfectionism, both in thought and in application.

Now, let me talk for a moment about a movie called 'The Shape of Things'. This has Rachel Weisz playing an art student whose thesis is a person; or rather the deconstruction/reconstruction of a nerdy bloke with whom she carries on a relationship.

And finally, we now talk about the news article which provoked me to write this blog in the first place: the Yale Daily News carried this article about an arts major who impregnated herself artificially and then induced miscarriages. She proceeded to document this process and will now present this as an exhibit, which will feature videos of the forced misscarriages as well as blood from the process.

High art? Or crap? Who is to decide... the point, I believe is that society needs art as much as it needs construction workers: but there are lines of human conduct which should not be crossed. Not unless one is supremely confident that the results will be sufficiently compelling. And such confidence can only come from a supreme belief in one's own abilities to see further than one's peers. Unfortunately, all too many people, perhaps in the throes of a delayed adolescent rebellion against.. society, authority, an absent father, have taken it upon themselves to show us what art is and how the boundaries of sensibility should be redefined. Unfortunately, I find it difficult to believe that they have the necessary ability. Perhaps this disenchantment comes from having my feet too firmly planted on the ground and a very middle class, pedestrian sense of establishmentarism. Perhaps. Either ways, I believe that it is necessary to be exceptionally well at playing within the rules of the game, before you choose to break them. Being iconoclastic is easy: but measuring up to the canon in any field and being judged worthy, is I believe of greater import. This is why I am skeptical about modern art.

John Stewart is right!!

Ok, so why are we talking about this? It would appear that in American politics, being an 'elitist' carries horrible connotations and such a person can never lead the people. Why not? There seems to be an innate assumption that a person who is not 'one of the people' cannot lead them. Well, haven't you heard of the bell curve? Or of a Maxwellian distribution? On second thoughts, you probably haven't heard of the Maxwellian curve. To put it simply: the whole point of electing a leader is to find a person who is better than the rest of us and better suited to guiding the nation. That is a fact that seems to have escaped the political pundits in this country. Sad. Stewart is the ONLY person who has said that he would like a leader who is 'embarrasingly superior' to him. Surely that makes sense, doesn't it? Or maybe you would have just another git in the most important political office in the world making shitty decisions, or rather being manipulated into them.

Democracy is great, but leaders are not supposed to be ordinary! But I don't think that argument is going to pass muster with any number of bigoted, populist fools out there. Well, all I can say is that if you morons do not have the sense to elect decent leaders, you deserve the
shafting that you get!

Calvin? Calvin! CALVIN!!!! NOOOOOOOO!!!!!!

yeah.. see this...

Wheeler passed away yesterday.

John A Wheeler was one of the giants of theoretical physics. He pioneered the use of the S-matrix formalism, worked with Bohr and contributed to quantum gravity. Richard Feynman was his graduate student. The canonical text on GR: 'Gravitation' was co-authored by Misner, Thorne and Wheeler. Read this obituary here.

Why a baggage claim carousel is a metaphor for life itself.

Here are the points which I think justifies my claim:

1. It goes round and round.
2. You wait in eager anticipation for what is yours.
3. People will elbow you in the ribs to get closer to the carousel.
4. If you are a decent bloke, you will help the elderly, the frail and the infirm pick up theirs'. For your trouble, you might just miss your article as it swooshes past.
5. Someone else might sneak in and grab your bags.
6. Sometimes it looks like everyone else has got theirs' and you are still waiting in line.
7. When yours' finally turns up, it might be scuffed, dented, or just totally wrecked.

3.10

Once upon a time, a man called Sergio Leone took a man who spoke in a hoarse rusty whisper and made him the Man With No Name. The capitals must be pronounced. This was Eastwood at his finest in the Dollars trilogy. Except that there were greater things in store. The question to ask was: what happened to the man with no name? The answer was given by Eastwood himself in what was possibly one of the two greatest Westerns ever made: 'Unforgiven.' Here, the darkest side of what a man could become was the theme... violence fathers more violence... and those who have chosen to walk in shadows can never truly come into the light again.

Unlike the westerns made before.. including the epic 'Once upon a time in the West', Unforgiven shows that the cycle has no end.. that redemption is just another futile dream.

Now, after almost two decades, there is another western worth the name. '3.1o to Yuma' comes with two awesome names: Christian Bale and Russel Crowe, both of whom are truly awesome talents. The storyline is simple indeed: Crowe plays Ben Wade, a notorious outlaw who has been captured, and now his gang wants him back. Bale plays Evans a poor rancher who has joined the posse guarding Wade. The real surprise though is Ben Foster who plays Charlie Prince, one of the truly greatest villains to ever grace the screen.. perhaps right up there with Henry Fonda in 'Once upon a time in the West'. And that is saying a lot.

The Jonathans of this world

Jonathan Livingston Seagull was one of my early heroes. His creator, Richard Bach has remained one of my enduring touchstones of many things which must be done, but not easily.



Have you ever seen a seagull take to the air? He spreads his wings wide, does a quick hop, skip and jumps into the air. The seagull is unlike many other birds. Unlike the beautiful birds of prey, he does not circle far overhead in solitary wait. Again, unlike sparrows or pigeons, he does not find it within himself to consort with humans.



The loneliness of the seagull is a very special one. He may choose to skim the waves at dawn with a few friends, but come evening, he usually waits quietly for the waves to come in. And when they do, he flies off.. answering a call that we cannot hear. Perhaps, like Jonathan, he appears far away, at a place where mere wings cannot take you.

Lies in your living room

The pervasive influence of the advertising industry cannot be denied. That they can have a seriously deleterious effect on the ability of a kid to distinguish between a reliable source of information and something that is a lot of just nicely packaged lies is also obvious. But what is to be done, especially now that very few parents have the time to attend to their kids properly and use the TV as a parent/babysitter surrogate? This article talks about a parent who tried something different.. and it worked!

yeah, amongst other things

I was going to blog about our Pittsburgh trip over the weekend, but this caught my attenshun and I don't have too much time. Let me summarise this: Islamic law (Sharia) reportedly frowns upon interest gained from money in a bank account. So, Lloyds TSB provides 'Islamic banking' services which include zero interest savings accounts. The BBC reports here. For comparison, here is the webpage of the Islamic Bank of Britain. I just want Terry Pratchett to incorporate this into his next work. Something is fundamentally skewed with this turn of events. If I may make a suggestion, there are many people in the world who can use some largesse: why not directly send the income derived from capital belonging to our Muslim brethren who would wish to abide strictly by the 'no interest rule' to Muhammad Yunis' Gramin Bank?

Ewwww dirty UNIX!!!

why geeks love UNIX...


who | grep -i babe | talk; cd ~; touch; unzip; touch; strip; finger; mount; fsck; more; yes; unmount; make clean; sleep



also.. someone posted a random thread on reddit asking 'how many people randomly type ls into their terminals when they are bored?' The replies are here.. it is very strangely interesting to read them.. but I mainly found the following comment hilarious..

"I hate it when I'm not in vi.

It's such a nice place."

A word about Universities.

Universities exist to explore the boundaries of knowledge and pass on some of the same to young people. Or so they say.

There are several caveats to this:

Universities need a lot of funding to function: especially the experimental sciences. Funding is usually forthcoming from the government, and to a lesser extent, private enterprise. Private entities will always take their pound of flesh: any benefits coming out of research performed will go the the funding entity. In those happy circumstances when individuals donate monies to universities asking for nothing in return, things are different. The West has long has such philanthropists. People like the Rockefellers, Andrew Carnegie, and in more recent times (also, in relation to UM) Stephen Ross and Alfred Taubman are people who have really made a difference. Indian schools have rarely been as lucky. Certainly, in colonial times, Rajahs have donated huge sums to education and in more recent times, people like the Tatas have done their bit. But for the most part, Indian businessmen rarely seen the point in funding education.

It is perhaps this and other factors which have led to education being viewed as a service industry more than anything else. For a country which churns out tens of thousands of engineers each year most of whom are employed in turning the wheels of the global techno-economy, the highest one can aspire to, from a middle class background is the monetary security which comes with a decent B.E or a a B.Tech.

The price that we have paid is that the basic sciences, the social sciences and the humanities have been neglected to an extent which is criminally irresponsible. And now that everyone has woken up to the spending power of the slightly better off people in the Third World, we have education fairs sponsored by Australian and British diplomats set up stalls and woo Indian students who have the moolah, but not enough brains to make it into the IITs. At this point, of course any self respecting Indian student looks down his or her righteous nose at a non Oxbridge degree, from anywhere else in the Commonwealth.

For all that is purportedly ill with the US system, the quality control system in place is perhaps far more effective than elsewhere in the English speaking world. But, say what we will.. in an era of dwindling budgets (where is all the bleedin' money goin'???!?) all schools are defaulting to a business model of imparting education. And of course, academics are screaming bloody murder. The question remains: can we put a price tag on education, apart from the one the student chooses to put upon it himself? Yes, we can, and the figure runs into the tens of thousands per semester. The recent appointment of a controversial candidate as the President of the University of Colorado has made waves.

Here is what I think: academia could do with some reform, but more often than not it is the administration which holds all the cards. Amongst the schools I have seen, there is only one place where it is clear that the administration holds that its job is to smooth the life of the faculty and students. This is the Physics department of the Indian Institute of Science. At the end of the day, viewing Universities as part of the worldwide service industry devalues the one thing which makes us most human: the pursuit of knowledge... for as Tennyson put it in "Ulysses":

'And this gray spirit yearning in desire
To follow knowledge like a sinking star,
Beyond the utmost bound of human thought.'

Travel tips

How to make sure that you and your luggage get to the same place. An expert's advice is here.

Saraswati Pujo pictures are here

See this link..

Also, I decided to include these two pictures, which I have also loaded on Flickr, along with their captions...


I was indulging in some stage photography at the Mitali Saraswati Pujo cultural programme last weekend. During the Sarod recital, this leetil kid who was fast asleep in his pram woke up and decided to go take a walk. He strolled up to the stage and then stood enthralled by the music. I saw a wonderful photo moment here. Before his grandma could wise up to the fact that he was off and put him in the pram again, I had to take a picture. So I folded up the tripod and sat down on the ground so that I was actually below the kid's eye level. I opened the tripod at minimum extension and waited for my moment. The problem was that he was so close to the stage that I knew it would be impossible to frame him and the performers at the same time, atleast not with the lens I had. So I crossed my fingers and waited. Sure enough, in a couple of minutes (which feels like much longer with the eye on the viewfinder) he turned slightly. Then I waited a wee bit longer until he turned around completely and took this shot.

Really want to go to this place.

Check out...

About computers

Turns out that I am a git. Also turns out that my laptop is playing silly buggers with me. The battery problems which it louvvs to display around me magically disappear when I take it to the SysAd. Treachery! Also turns out that by means of using a Microsoft keyboard with a Mac (which makes me mildly schizo in the middle of the workday), I inadvertently turned on the magnification function (how??!?!?!?), and hence thought the display card was on the blink. Yeah. shite happens!

Why read?

It must be a coincidence: last night, I finished watching 'Farenheit 451', a cinematic adaptation of Ray Bradbury's novel by the French avant garde director, Francois Truffaut... and today, the first eye catching article on reddit was this: The Dumbing Of America

So... what do we say to this... it is certainly not a uniquely American phenomenon. The plain fact is that multimedia resources have so far trumped print media that any comparison on the impact that they respectively have on an average citizen's life is ludicrous. F-451 is the temperature at which paper burns.. this film is about a dystopian future in which there is music and TV and even interactive TV (which is a reality at this moment), but no books. Books are viewed as evil, as they cause unhappiness and sow the seeds of elitism. Anyone found hoarding and reading books will be punished and the books burnt. And during the relentless execution of his tasks, one of the enforcers begins to doubt the system. Anyhow, I will not talk about the entire plot, I would much rather you went ahead and read the book.

We have witnessed a systematic dumbing down of all popular media, be it news or entertainment. As we move towards a more machine driven society, it becomes all the more necessary that humanity acquires the wisdom to transcend this technological adoloscence. Alas, I don't believe that 9 second sound bites on our most respected news channels and the persistent apotheosis of delinquent celebrities is doing anything toward that goal.

Topological thoughts during office hours and what they lead to.

My boss asked me to take a visiting scientist out for lunch. This gentlemen works in a well known group at Harvard. We had an excellent lunch and then, as he had lived in Ann Arbor years ago, spent a short while walking around Central campus. We got back, and I started working on this thing I had been tweaking yesterday. The script works fine, things are just peachy.

In the meantime, my hard working laptop, a beautiful Macbook has been screaming for attention. It refuses to boot off the battery, a problem I have been pretending does not exist. Might be a motherboard issue. Anyway, today it decided to grab my attenshun by refusing to connect to the external monitor properly. Any movement of the mouse makes the whole display shake. It made me seasick. So I moved to a fairly old, but well behaved Linux machine.

Then things went wrong. I started randomly thinking about the old 'how many road must a man walk down', and then thought about Mobius strips, and then about the Koningsburg seven bridges problem. If this chain of thought is difficult to follow, don't be surprised.

So I started to try solving the Seven Bridge's problem. Now obviously, there is no solution to this problem,but let me just direct you to an excellent page which discusses this. Then a student who I am helping with some work walked in. We started talking about his work and before we knew it, it had been quite a while and our visiting scientist's seminar was over and done with.

That was pretty bad.

The Operating System Jihad

If you have ever been friends with people who are hooked on a particular operating system and hate and despise any other, you will know what I mean by OS Jihad. Simple admission here.. i used to be a Windows hater... I mean, it is ubiquitous, it is easy to hate it. I won't claim to understand technology... to me computers are black boxes.. but here is my take on things:

Windows is convenient, it is everywhere. But it is like taking the bus, you get to where you want to, but sometimes not on time, and you may get shoved around a bit. But everyone uses it, and it is not too expensive.

Macs are awesome. They are custom limos which will take you anywhere and in great comfort too. But they are bloody expensive.

And then there is UNIX. Sorry, there ARE UNIX. Which can range from a jury rigged Fedora system, which I would liken to the DeLorean running on plutonium in 'Back to the Future' to a standard implementation like Solaris 10, which is like Starship Enterprise.

I think it is simply wise to retain familiarity with all the systems out there so that one can work on whatever platform is around at the moment. But some people disagree. The comments on this blog entry are worth reading for an example of the heated debated which arise when OSs' are debated.

And this long article is an excellent history of the development of the personal computer. Definitely worth a read.

At the end of the day, perhaps the wisest comment in this context was made by my friend Pradeep: 'there are no bad users, there are only bad interfaces!!'

What do you mean, I can't have it?

The US is probably slipping into a recession as I write this, and one of the main reasons for this appears to be the sub prime lending crisis. In layman's terms, this means that banks and other moneylenders have been lending money to people who can probably not afford to pay them back. This has lead to widespread that the moneylenders have overstretched themselves and they way to recover is to withdraw funding from the worldwide investments that they have made. Which would spread the pain all over the world instead of just the US.

Now what did things come to this? The credit history of an individual is a fairly important barometer of his personal future. This is the only country in the world where the following conversation would make sense:
A: I want to buy a car.
B: So you need a loan.
A: No, I have the money. I have saved up for five years.
B: So, now you should take a loan and return it in a year.
A: Why?
B: To improve your credit history, obviously!
A: Why do I need to do that?
B: So that you can get a loan easier!
A: But I don't need a loan.
B: But you may, later.


Right, something is seriously wrong here. Let me try to put my finger on it. I don't think people in this country have ever heard of the word 'austerity'. Simply put, the culture of the US appears to be one of immediate gratification and continuous consumption. The old idea of 'saving up for something special' seems to simply not exist. Hence lending agencies. Hence, people overspending and transferring debt from one credit card to another. And speaking of which, what is the deal with so many different credit card products anyway? I personally think this whole crowded market full of different lending products is just a minefield waiting for the unsuspecting and naive consumer.

Anway, I want to finish with this story about a lady who lives on a 2500$ a month disability payment, and went ahead and leased a 100 000$ BMW with a fake credit application.

Saraswati Pujo and beyond...

The Greater Bengali Community at Ann Arbor (I just louvv putting the capitals in) put together this year's Saraswati Pujo on Saturday. Pictures will shortly follow. Right now, I am still recovering from the event... I have always been a big fan of this particular Pujo.. ever since the Institute days. This was something that we had put together back then.. and it is of course the thing to do for a group of students. This time, we did maintain all the glorious traditions of the Pujo including the "late night e labour-dewa," the "uposh" on the day of the Pujo and finally the "parking lot e dnariye counter e dhumpaan kora". Yes, all the way.

Explaining the wurlde, one Venn diagram at a time: softwares

Towards Empire

This Scottish gentleman, Iain M Banks has been one of the most prolific writers of the last two and a half decades, or so. He writes science fiction under the pen name of Iain M Banks and literary fiction under the name of Iain Banks.

I have so far only read two of his novels. The second is 'Excession'. The first is the 'The Algebraist', which deals with a multi-species pan galactic civilization in which much of the current economic and military concepts and ideals hold true. In a sense, it is merely a vastly scaled up empire, but fundamentally no different from any contemporary or historical civilisation that you may care to mention. Transport over huge interstellar distances are achieved by tunneling through artificial black holes called 'Portals'. The construction and maintainance of these Portals is extremely difficult, and they are as jealously guarded as any Roman highway through barbarian territory would be, or National Highway 1 through Kashmir is guarded by the Indian Army. Peace is guaranteed by the overwhelming superiority of the 'Summed Fleet', the strong arm of the political structure, which is called the 'Mercatoria'. Mercatorial forces are always engaged in low intensity conflicts at the periphery of the controlled Galaxy with breakaway populations which do not wish to join the Galactic mainstream. A parallel
may be drawn to the last decades of the Galactic Empire by Asimov (think of the Prefecture of Anacreon). The wildcard in this tableau happens to be the 'Dwellers', who live in gas giants. Theirs' is a very widespread and immeasurably old civilization. While their very age almost guarantees their technological superiority, their enormous lifespans also give them what is almost contempt for pretty much any other short lived species, whom they term 'Quick'. This translated into a couldn't-care-less attitude towards the Mercatoria and the rest of the Galaxy. Banks brings all these participants together in a beautifully complex mileu, rivalling anything that our twin gods of SF have ever dreamed up.

More will follow....

Funny Indians?

Everyone knows that Desi's take themselves waaaay too seriously. Indians have little, or no sense of humour at all. Apparently that is changing. There is this bloke called Russell Peters, a Canadian born Indian (a contradiction in terms, you think? Maybe we will call him a CBCD. I am SURE you know what that would mean. Hint: what does ABCD mean?). Anyways, I think Peters is funny, but only to a point. His act pulls on all kinds of racial stereotypes (a fairly common thing in stand-up comedy: the truly worst and quite disgusting example is Carlos Mencia). But Peters has a gift for comedy, far better than Mencia and he manages to get across to the audience with his imitations of different accents. Check him out here.

This new bloke just appeared on my radar, called Papa CJ. UK based, and nowhere near Peters, but he may get there.

Its Monday!!

Yeah, big fat hairy deal.. the gawd-awful joke of the previous week is :

Q: All the molecular dynamics people of the world get together and have a big party. What do you call the event?

A: 'The Penalty Function'.

Young Karthik's much more intriguing (and raunchy contribution): 'The Scoring Function'.

Some people have such amazingly complex minds.

This dude, great friend of mine, extremely smart fellow... well, I messaged him 'ki korchhish', which is Bangla for 'what are you up to?'

Here is what he had to say:
whats up

re: "ki korchhish", does that translate to a "whats up", or a "what the fuck do you think you're doing"

regardless, the answer is "i dont know"

Green Patches.

Someone sent me a 'Green Patches' invite on Facebook. Apparently, it has something to do with stopping global warming. Without going into a discussion about Global Warming (see, I think the topic deserves capital letters), I wonder how just joining a group on facebook (note small letters here) will help. I don't really see how. Ok, I appreciate the general effort in that it is good to educate people about issues affecting the environment, but I doubt that just being on Facebook and creating a community will help. My point it that it might assuage whatever latent guilt there is in people who might actually make a difference without making that difference. By the way, Green Patches was the name of a short story by Asimov which did make quite an impact on me, a long time ago.

Life is a recursive sequence....

as seen here.