The Hindu : Opinion / Cartoon

http://beta.thehindu.com/opinion/cartoon/article49930.ece.

News Blog Articles | Stereotyping Increases With Age | Miller-McCune Online Magazine

I agree - as we age we should be more wary of people who talk in stereotypes.

http://www.miller-mccune.com/news/stereotypes-loom-larger-as-our-brains-age-1505

This process "appears to be a more general phenomenon of aging," they note, adding that some older adults "may be relying on stereotypes despite their best intentions to the contrary."

The second paper, published earlier this year in the journal Aging, Neuropsychology and Cognition, contains a way around this problem. It describes a study in which older and younger adults read a story in which a central character was employed in a sex-stereotyped profession. In half the stories, the character's gender was consistent with the stereotype (a male plumber), while in the other half it was inconsistent (a female plumber).

Missed Connections.

When I see work like this - I feel very happy and hopeful :)


http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/09/29/craigslists-missed-connections-as-art/

"Some browse the "Missed Connections" section on Craigslist in the hopes of spotting a posting from the dapper gent they exchanged a glance with in the checkout line. Others read the listings purely for entertainment.

Sophie Blackall, an illustrator living in Brooklyn, N.Y., saw it as an endless goldmine of material "


http://missedconnectionsny.blogspot.com/
" Messages in bottles, smoke signals, letters written in the sand; the modern equivalents are the funny, sad, beautiful, hopeful, hopeless, poetic posts on Missed Connections websites. Every day hundreds of strangers reach out to other strangers on the strength of a glance, a smile or a blue hat. Their messages have the lifespan of a butterfly. I'm trying to pin a few of them down."

[via http://waxy.org/links/]

state machine of life - do not encode in gray

Himu (pronounced he-moo) couldnt hold back his tears now. He had his feet up, while on a comfortable chair on the balcony of his new apartment in downtown Chicago. His wife was on the phone with one of her old friends. Himo had just slipped back into the past - ably assisted by the glass of absolut vodka in his hand. His father always called him Himaayat, as did the INS officer who stamped his visa the first time he entered the US. But he felt more comfortable with a name, that did not mean or stand for anything. He had been successful in life but always worried about the future and felt anxious about the present. Wanted rituals to help feel sane, and at the same time felt anxious because he didn't feel the wind in his face.
He was now thinking about the one bedroom apartment in Mahim where he grew up till he was 18. His current state of relative bliss reminded him of the times when he spent some evenings staring out of this apartment on the 4th floor. People walking by - women going to the temple, fathers returning home from work, kids playing games, stray dogs busy trying to catch their tails. He could have spent hours in that state of reverie. The best place to be is where you can see others when they can't, he thought. If he could relate his current state with one of 30 years ago, did he really have to travel so much in life. What if he had stood there on his balcony, holding onto the grills, for 30 years - would he have "felt" any different today. Even if there was an accelerated simulator for life, he thought, I couldnt have controlled values to all the input parameters. But then like Kavita had said "We make life sound too complicated". Maybe life is just a handful of states of mind - and if you profiled anyone's life, we would all have spent very similar amounts of time in each of these states. Although we keep taking these gazillion different arcs into and out of these states of life.

Paulo but-ak gaya !!

Whenever paulo wanted to stop being a glutton, the ghost of his mother would come in his dreams, and say "Yes thats the right thing to do. But maybe you should hold onto whatever you have for some more time. Who knows you might want it later and you might not be able to get it so easily. We need to be practical in life." Paulo would then begin cluttering the clean solution he had with more and more exceptions (if statements). Exceptions always make a design messy. Maybe thats why God had decided that she will not equip Paulo with a head to deal with exceptions. She could have built him with an extremely fast exception look-up table, but even she feared being not able to match the complexitty of the exceptions that Paulo might want to fit into this table. Paulo as usual is stunned into inaction and takes recourse in the sweetness dished out of Olga's kitchen. Not even being able to relish it wholeheartedly.

The United States' swine flu vaccines will leave millions worldwide unprotected. - By David Dobbs - Slate Magazine

http://www.slate.com/id/2228700/pagenum/all/#p2

this robust and effective vaccine supply stands to sharply check swine flu in the United States, saving anywhere from a few thousand to 50,000 lives.
But what if we could save two to four times that many lives by vaccinating another 200 million to 300 million people worldwide?

The Paradox of the Knower | Futility Closet

http://www.futilitycloset.com/2009/09/13/the-paradox-of-the-knower/

No one knows that this sentence is true.
That sentence can't be false, because that would lead immediately to a contradiction.
But if it's true, then omniscience is impossible.
Therefore there can be no all-knowing being.

tennis lessons

  Its interesting how tennis can teach you life lessons. When returning serves you can either slice the ball back or you can power it back. The second option needs you to move your feet and time the ball well so more energy and effort needed. But the first gives you very little in form of rewards cos a limp slice back will be simple forehand practice for the person on the other side. The other aspect of getting on top of the ball is that you move forward with the shot and your subsequent shots are more offensive.

Total Empathy

There are times when you need help in the form of - total empathy. i.e. you want someone to feel the anguish and anxiety that you are feeling. And you want to "know" that they are feeling your pain. When you dont get that - from someone you expect to deliver - you get very very angry !!

This seems to be very human. But most of us dont realize the value of this, when we are not on the demanding side.

Even after the anger loses steam, the scar remains deep. Why is that ? I hope we evolve more socially helpful body mechanisms? Maybe 10 generations from now, we will be able to heal sooner or not even feel the need of other humans. Asimov does imagine such future worlds. Lets hope we get to live his dreams. Meanwhile I can deify such ideas with repeated recollections. Also I can try to deliver when the need arises for someone close.

 

Easy Math

Funny

Easy Math - Free videos are just a click away

Personal Tech: Got a Burning Question? Ask the Net

Very nice !!

http://www.nytimes.com/indexes/2009/09/03/technology/circuitsemail/index.html?8cir&emc=cir

I've used Aardvark several times apiece for professional and personal queries, and I've been astounded by its utility every time. The answers are on my screen between 60 seconds and five minutes after I've asked them: private, targeted, and generally accurate.
When I was working on a column about U.S. cellphone ripoffs, I asked: "In Europe, are both senders and receivers of text messages and phone calls billed for each message?"
Ding! Paul from Fleetwood, England responded: "Depends what you mean: country to country or domestic?"
I responded: "I was thinking domestic." His answer: "Domestically, it is only the send who pays for both texts and calls. This is the case in all EU countries."

The Hindu : Sci-Tech / Internet : Divorce at the click of a mouse in Brazil

I think it makes sense. I don't think Indians have the balls to bring such laws into effect. As a people, we are 2 degrees away from accepting facts of life.

http://beta.thehindu.com/sci-tech/internet/article14586.ece?homepage=true

The Brazilian Senate has approved a bill that would allow consensual divorces to be filed and resolved on the Internet.
The Senate's official news agency says the bill would speed divorce proceedings, allowing couples to split without lawyers or having to wait in line in court.
Couples could file for legal separations, divide property and decide alimony via the Internet as well, according to the bill approved Wednesday by the Senate constitutional commission.

viscerally disturbed.

The smallest bad news has such a bad effect on all my senses. I begin to lose interest in topics I am usually interested in - feel like I am carrying this big cloud of negativity in my chest and throat. Every thought seems to have become heavy and burdened. I can sense it when I am trying to play hard and get it out. It poisons everything. This is worse when I am unable to act on it.

el dorado in my head.

I think I would be very happy if I lived in my head.

GSM, black boxes, and iPhones: the tech that drives Zipcar - Ars Technica

Sounds pretty cool - If I could find one every morning and every evening I could actually save the hassle of maintaining a car - and save money spent on buying a car.
 
http://arstechnica.com/hardware/news/2009/08/gsm-black-boxes-and-iphones-the-tech-that-drives-zipcar.ars

After making the reservation, I walk to the car of my choosing and wave my Zipcard over a sensor on the windshield. The car unlocks and I grab the key, which is attached to the dashboard, and off I go. When I return the car, I wave my card again and the car locks. The company bills the reservation straight to the credit card I have on file.

The tech behind it

When a reservation is made on the Internet, a package is sent over GSM to the chosen car and stored in a ring buffer until the driver shows up with his or her Zipcard, which is equipped with an RFID chip. The cardreader mounted in the windshield reads the RFID signature to authenticate the holder of the card and sends the message to the computer in the car. From there, the computer asks itself three questions: Am I the right car? Is it the right time? Is this the right driver?

India Together: Put your money down, boys - 15 August 2009

• how big of a problem is this - do we need "freedom" from tappawallas ? Maybe we should just simply improve the post offices in India. They suck big time.
  
• If we make it possible to load/unload cash onto a cell-phone (like a debit/cash card) - Then have an app to transfer this from one phone to another - I wonder how security would be handled here. In the literate world passwords would do the job - but maybe biometric sensors (in combination with the cellphone numbers) might do the job. Who takes the initiative. If the state gives a contract to someone like Nokia to make special and cheap phones and maintains these ATM centers at the post offices ?

http://indiatogether.org/2009/aug/psa-moneydown.htm

Why should people use him? Why not a bank or post office? "Several do use banks, but most of us have never had a bank account," point out those sitting around the Tappawala. And, he adds, "people feel intimidated in a bank." And the post office? "Even if you are literate, which most migrants are not, you cannot fill out your money order form in Surat in the Oriya language. Getting someone to write it in poor English risks having your money order going astray."

Orissa has recently seen a few postmasters making off with crores of rupees in savings and money orders entrusted to their care by mostly illiterate people. Migrants feel more secure with the Tappawala as his family usually lives in their village or in one nearby. "But we have a security problem," says one. "Once identified, there's a risk." Tappawalas have faced lethal attacks on that cash-carrying stretch from Berhampur to Ganjam's interior villages. Maybe that's why most of them insist they've "retired." They're silent about when they did so. But their money talks

Christmas truce - joyeux noel

This is the true human spirit that shines through here. This is what prompted us to evolve into "social" animals - prompted us to use our brains and develop them. Kids should be shown such things in school and taught to value humanity more than stupid geographical and cultural stereotypes. Education in India is seriously lacking in teaching us such basic principles. So many educated people we meet everyday carry such deep biases against people within their countries itself, just because they talk and behave differently. Its a national shame for a place like India.

I like the scene where they show the priest talking nonsense as if ordained by god to spread war on earth. Chooo saala !!

http://www.sonyclassics.com/joyeuxnoel/

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christmas_truce

The "Christmas truce" is a term used to describe several brief unofficial cessations of hostilities that occurred on Christmas Eve or Christmas Day between German and British or French troops in World War I, particularly that between British and German troops stationed along the Western Front during Christmas 1914. In 1915 there was a similar Christmas truce between German and French troops, and during Easter 1916 a truce also existed on the Eastern Front.

some souls are screwed

Can there be people who never see happiness ? There are. The sad thing is that nothing can be done to help them. Guilt, misunderstanding, underdeveloped faculties - all of this just screws their lives. I believe about half of my fellow Indians are blighted by such states of lives. The condition threatens to engulf more of us - if we try to help the unfortunate. Being strong and realizing that living life involves certain pains is important.

audience this

It should not be too difficult to come up with a browser application that does the following

Setup:

• Browser reading an article someone sent.
  
• iPod or any other MP3 device attached. If not attached will make a playlist for the iPod.

 

In action: 

• user will right click and say "audience it"
  
• tool will convert the article to sound and send it along with the images on the page onto the attached iPod.
  
• In addition the tool can create a list of relevant links based on googling  key words in the article.
  
• Ofcourse it will download the page into some open source page viewing format as well. So my ebook reader can read it at my leisure.
  

Council for Secular Humanism

Shouldnt such guys be tried in some internation court of justice,

http://www.secularhumanism.org/index.php?section=library&page=haught_29_5#

Incredibly, President George W. Bush told French President Jacques Chirac in early 2003 that Iraq must be invaded to thwart Gog and Magog, the Bible's satanic agents of the Apocalypse.

Honest. This isn't a joke. The president of the United States, in a top-secret phone call to a major European ally, asked for French troops to join American soldiers in attacking Iraq as a mission from God.

DNA origami - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2009/08/nanodna/

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DNA_origami

To produce a desired shape, images are drawn with a raster fill of a single long DNA molecule. This design is then fed into a computer program (such as SEQUIN) which calculates the placement of individual staple strands. Each staple binds to a specific region of the DNA template, and thus due to Watson-Crick base pairing the necessary sequences of all staple strands are known and displayed. The DNA is mixed and then heated and cooled. As the DNA cools the various staples pull the long strand into the desired shape. Designs are directly observable via several methods including atomic force microscopy, or fluorescence microscopy when DNA is coupled to fluorescent materials .

Andy Kessler: WSJ: The Bernanke Market

http://www.andykessler.com/andy_kessler/2009/07/wsj-the-bernanke-market.html

I remember once buying the stock of a small company and I couldn't believe my luck. Every time my fund bought more shares the stock would go up. So we bought even more and the stock kept climbing. When we finally built our full position and stopped buying the stock started dropping, ending up at a price below where we started buying it. We were the market.

Bill making free education fundamental right gets cabinet nod- Hindustan Times

Awesome !!

http://www.hindustantimes.com/StoryPage/StoryPage.aspx?sectionName=HomePage&id=75c3325d-3eea-4f50-a411-df38f441efec&Headline=Cabinet+nod+for+bill+making+free+education+a+fundamental+right

The Act provides for 25 per cent reservation of seats in private schools for poor children in neighbourhood. The government would reimburse the money at government rate towards these seats.

The Bill prohibits payment of donations or capitation fees or interviewing the child or parents as part of a screening procedure.

notes from neitzsche

 ... So far everything that has given color to existence still lacks a history; or, where could one find a history of love, of avarice, of envy, of conscience, of piety, or of cruelty ? Even a comparative history of law, or merely of punishment is completely lacking so far. Has anyone yet conducted research into the different ways of dividing the day and the consequence of a regular arrangement of work, holiday and rest? Does anyone know the moral effects of food?  Is there a philosophy of nourishment? Have the experiences of living together been assembled; for example the experiences int he monasteries? Has the dialectic of marriage and friendship been presented as yet? .....

=======================================

For one thing is needful: that a human being attain his statisfaction with himself- whether it be by this or by that poetry and art; only then is a human being at all tolearable to behold. Whoever is dissatisfied with himself is always ready to revenge himself therefore; we others will be his victims, if only by always having to stand his ugly sight. For the sight of the ugly makes men bad and gloomy.

========================================

iran on India

Iran has so much to teach us Indians about orderly debate and articulate speech. Even the people on the streets to be so much more articulate than our politicians. I began wondering what stops them from making their make in areas like software. Well maybe ahmedinijad is not letting the light shine through into the engineering colleges. Which might not be completely true we have so many successful Iranian academics and engineering professionals here in the US. Ofcourse strained relations with the US - but does that mean you have to be chummy with the US to be able to make technological progress. Or is the very premise of my argument - is it that all the progress is being put to mostly military use.

Church and State

:) I had composed this long back. I probably had some thoughts to add to it - but know I dont even remember the source for the following. They are clearly not out of my head.

The contemporary crisis in Western Christendom created an audience for Hobbes and his ideas. In the midst of religious war, his view that the human mind was too weak and beset by passions to have any reliable knowledge of the divine seemed common-sensical. It also made sense to assume that when man speaks about God he is really referring to his own experience, which is all he knows. And what most characterizes his experience? According to Hobbes, fear. Man's natural state is to be overwhelmed with anxiety, "his heart all the day long gnawed on by fear of death, poverty, or other calamity." He "has no repose, nor pause of his anxiety, but in sleep." It is no wonder that human beings fashion idols to protect themselves from what they most fear, attributing divine powers even, as Hobbes wrote, to "men, women, a bird, a crocodile, a calf, a dog, a snake, an onion, a leek." Pitiful, but understandable.

And the debilitating dynamics of belief don't end there. For once we imagine an all-powerful God to protect us, chances are we'll begin to fear him too. What if he gets angry? How can we appease him? Hobbes reasoned that these new religious fears were what created a market for priests and prophets claiming to understand God's obscure demands. It was a raucous market in Hobbes's time, with stalls for Roman Catholics, Anglicans, Lutherans, Calvinists, Anabaptists, Quakers, Ranters, Muggletonians, Fifth Monarchy Men and countless others, each with his own path to salvation and blueprint for Christian society. They disagreed with one another, and because their very souls were at stake, they fought. Which led to wars; which led to more fear; which made people more religious; which. . . .

Fresh from the Wars of Religion, Hobbes's readers knew all about fear. Their lives had become, as he put it, "solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short." And when he announced that a new political philosophy could release them from fear, they listened. Hobbes planted a seed, a thought that it might be possible to build legitimate political institutions without grounding them on divine revelation. He knew it was impossible to refute belief in divine revelation; the most one can hope to do is cast suspicion on prophets claiming to speak about politics in God's name. The new political thinking would no longer concern itself with God's politics; it would concentrate on men as believers in God and try to keep them from harming one another. It would set its sights lower than Christian political theology had, but secure what mattered most, which was peace.

whats the f@@king point

If every one is to live for themselves and the only reason to be here is just so that people arent inconvenienced then whats the fucking point of it all. All this - living to be able to marvel at the world and the nature of it all just seems to be bogus. That feeling is like any other strong emotion we feel. I see no reason to base lives on a trivial emotion.

humsafar

jeevan ke har mod pe mil jaayenge humsafar,
jo door tak saath de dhoonde ussi ko dhoonde nazar.

bequest test

When you are about to stop living, thinking of having to leave your life's work as a legacy to anyone else can be very haunting, can it not. Specially if you have tended to this all your life with meticulous care and have been a reasonable success at it. I dont know, maybe if you have gazillions saved up in the swiss banks then maybe you could be re-assured that a large fraction of it will be put to relevant use. But for the common man it is a daunting task - one of the worries he/she will probably take their last breaths with. Is there a way to convince them ? The only way I see is for them to accept the fact that it was never theirs and that their work is done and they dont have to worry about it anymore.
How about the pressure this puts on the beneficiaries ? Ah thats the price you ought to pay to see the cattle egrets fly back home while you sip coffee and ponder why you are here.

friend<

life throws bad stuff at you, but if you had good people around you, you would be able to take it well and move on.
The problem is when you dont know how to surround yourself with good friends.
Is this a problem everyone faces ?

Yoko Ogawa: The Housekeeper and the Professor

http://www.oldmustybooks.com/2009/01/29/yoko-ogawa-the-housekeeper-and-the-professor/


Yoko Ogawa made mathematics alluring with this delightful book about a mathematics professor, his housekeeper and her ten year old son.  None of the characters have names, though the son has a nickname (Root), given by the professor.  Interestingly, the protagonist, in my opinion, is the Professors short term memory.  After a devastating accident, the professor only has 80 minutes of short term memory.  This means, every single morning, the Housekeeper has to re-introduce herself to the Professor before she can go into his house.  One would think there would be no way to build a relationship with this sort of setback. This book shows its possible.

Rajan : "My lack of imagination is so glaring. My image of the professor was a much more disorganized, unhealthy and weak. The lady too wasnt a young japanese girl as shown here. I think I was using my Indian sensibilities."

Dalit in the Boardroom | Outlook

 

A team of technical and financial experts is advising Saroj on the revival. MK Gore, Managing Director, says investors have poured Rs 154 crore into the company. While Saroj holds the majority stake in KTL, many from the powerful sugar lobby in Maharashtra also hold equity. "I have secured substantial funding from friends and associates, including a Gujarati non-resident Indian in the UK," she says.

Saroj, who hails from Akola, had her first brush with Mumbai's shanties when she moved to the city as a child bride, at age 12. She abandoned the alliance and was taken back to her village. Driven to despair by her wretched circumstances, she attempted suicide, but survived. "At that very moment, I decided that if I have to live, I would achieve something, and live life on my terms," she recalls.

Determined to make it big, she returned to Mumbai a few years later and stayed with an uncle. Working in a hosiery company, she eked out a living earning a meagre Rs 2 a day. But it was in the rough and tumble of Mumbai's underbelly that she acquired her raw aggression, determination and earthy approach to conducting business.

http://business.outlookindia.com/inner.aspx?articleid=2675&subcatgid=386&editionid=73&catgid=1

Interesting how people can rise like this in business. When you stay in Bombay for a month or so you can clearly see that people with patience, energy, guts and the will to lower a bit of their moral standards can make a lot of wealth.  I wonder if someone can or already has studied this phenomenon about the effect of big cities on people's abilities and achievements.

 

Higgs Boson: A Ghost in the Machine - TIME

http://www.time.com/time/health/article/0,8599,1729139,00.html

Working from Higgs' theory, scientists postulate that initially weightless particles move through a ubiquitous quantum field, known as a Higgs field, like a pearl necklace through a jar of honey. Some particles, such as photons — weightless carriers of light — can cut through the sticky Higgs field without picking up mass. Others get bogged down and become heavy; that is the process that creates tangible matter. "The Higgs gives everything in the universe its mass," says David Francis, a physicist on the ATLAS experiment. Pointing at CERN's grand geological amphitheater of the Jura and the Alps. "None of that is possible without the Higgs."

India Together: Making news in the Northeast - March 2009

http://indiatogether.org/2009/mar/med-northeast.htm

Sharmila has been on an indefinite fast for over eight years, demanding an end to the imposition of the Armed Forces Special Powers Act, 1958, in her state. The controversial law (AFSPA), which gives sweeping powers to the military, has been in force in Manipur more or less continuously since 1980. This is despite long-standing popular opposition to it within the state and the recommendation in 2005 by a central government appointed committee chaired by Justice B P Jeevan Reddy that it be repealed. She has spent most of this period incarcerated in the security ward of the government-owned Jawaharlal Nehru hospital in Imphal (officially in the custody of the Central Jail, Sajiwa), being kept alive through force-feeding.

The Village (2004)

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0368447/
Fascinatng movie that I watched this weekend.

For One More Day - Mitch Albom

Read this last weekend. Its a fairly good and quick read. Good story telling.

link to emails from unix.

we should have ways to link to emails from comments in source code files. It will make documentation a bit more interesting in the so called "execution driven" companies.

BBC NEWS | In Pictures | In pictures: Delhi prison art

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/in_pictures/7939470.stm
Very nice pictures, arent they ?

A painting by convicted prisoner Pawan

Why TF

Why are we stupid enough to give credence to the myth of community.
The same person can also talk of being yourself.
They dont go together for the most part.

tobleralone

feeling alone
recently I heard about alone = all + one.
I can see its unhealthy
I cannot help being alone.
company seems to be just another garnment.

David Bodanis - E=mc2

I am half way through it and I am loving it.
they made a documentary too : http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/einstein/

http://www.davidbodanis.com/pages/emc2_pg.html


By the end of the astonishing E=mc2, a dedicated reader will...feel quite at ease dining with Nobel Prize winners. It's a lucid, even thrilling study. I didn't know I could know so much.
- Fay Weldon, Book of year, Washington Post

aaaaaaaaaaa

I need a patent office job in Bern !!

standing down on principles

I am troubled by the fact that standing up for principles, can become a hindrance to effective relationships.
If you stand up in an uncompromising fashion for a principle that you believe in, you can and maybe will not be able to take advantage of some good opportunities.
When you have a conflict of principles even with someone as close as your nearest family, should you just make them happy. Wont the principles become meaningless if you did.
I am still not willing to compromise on them. I dont think I'll be able to live it down.

Abusing wife common among GenY men: Study- Hindustan Times

What can women do ? Police complaint. Maybe shame the husbands in their societies or should is that not possible ?

http://www.hindustantimes.com/StoryPage/StoryPage.aspx?sectionName=India&id=091fb616-0865-4711-8be2-43183973f9bf&MatchID1=4932&TeamID1=7&TeamID2=8&MatchType1=1&SeriesID1=1247&PrimaryID=4932&Headline=Abusing+wife+common+among+GenY+men%3a+Study

If you thought that Generation Y Indian men considered women equals and didn't try to control their wives by battering them or forcefully having sex with them, think again. A six-state study has found that physical and sexual violence is widely prevalent among married youth.

Eighteen to 30 per cent of married women aged 15 to 24 reported physical abuse by their husbands at least once. Fifteen to 24 per cent of the 13,912 women surveyed had experienced violence in the last 12 months, according to the study, which was jointly conducted by the Population Council in Delhi and the International Institute for Population Sciences in Mumbai. Bihar recorded highest prevalence of physical violence and Rajasthan the lowest.

Rushdie and the importance of fiction

I am on chapter 2 of Rushdie's "Shalimar the clown". This is where he describes Kashmir and the characters' lives in that setting when the valley is still peaceful. What struck me was how nicely he describes them. Any Indian (maybe not all) is very comfortable with the idea that we can find thoughtful, intelligent, strong people amongst any geographic, economic, religious section of our country. However for people outside of our country, I would think its easy for the stereotypes to guide their understanding of us as a people. Although books analyzing India from all aspects as written by Amartya Sen or Shashi Tharoor or Edward Luce or AL Basham make a lot of sense they never get into the head of an Indian. Salman Rushdie and his ilk do that humanizing job and I think they are doing us Indians a great great service. Any person reading this can immediately connect to an Indian on basic human feelings, emotions and thoughts.

Anyways the importance of fiction just hit me hard today morning.

I am very impressed at the moment :)
Its a shame I havent read more of him so far.

Stimulus bill requires RSS feeds of how the money is spent - Boing Boing

Wow - this is cool. We should check to see even if our young guys like Rahul gandhi and Omar Abdullah can adopt tech well. Where is the incentive though. The incentive is probably recognition from the public for efficiency. Or am I being too naive again.

http://www.boingboing.net/2009/02/21/stimulus-bill-requir.html

Now this is a pretty promising step on the path to open government: the new stimulus bill has a requirement for RSS-based disclosure of funds dispersed:

   For each of the near term reporting requirements (major communications, formula block grant allocations, weekly reports) agencies are required to provide a feed (preferred: Atom 1.0, acceptable: RSS) of the information so that content can be delivered via subscription.

India Together: Whose economic crisis is it anyway? - 15 February 2009

Sainath doesn't mention anything new. However a couple of random thoughts came to my mind.
 - We in India blame the government for all its inefficiencies.
 - The brightest amongst cannot think of democratic methods to make the government more efficient.
 - Whether its a thin republican type government or a big-fat democratic type government, apathy to the "other" classes/castes seems very innate to us.
 - Bill Gates' idea of creative capitalism seems cool - but I don't see how to engineer such thoughts into the majority of the society. There has to be some memetic masala that will help us.
 - At an extreme tangent: Given our cultural heritage of inheritance and caste do you think as a society we could be as philanthropic as the americans ?

http://indiatogether.com/2009/feb/psa-crisis.htm#

In India, too, job losses are now finding some mention. When covered in the media, it's mostly about jobs in the IT sector. Or those lost in related fields in the organised sector. While these are not small, only a handful of reports look at the awful hit taken, for instance, by migrant labourers. Millions of these are people who left their villages seeking work when there was no other option. They found it in construction, in laying roads and other poorly paid work. And, keeping afloat in oppressive conditions, many still managed to send something back to their families. Now, as one of them told us: "There is nothing to send back to the village and nothing to go back to the village for." And what about all those small farmers who moved towards growing cash crops for export markets that have collapsed? And do we get to ask questions of the policy experts who brought it all to this point?

Malcolm X (1992)

Just saw Malcom X It was an education. Really liked Denzel Washington in the movie as well.

YouTube - RALPH STANLEY-RANK STRANGERS

:)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oWazA6SznPE

(via: ttbook.com)

BBC NEWS | Science & Environment | Vibrations 'could save elephants'

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/7890919.stm#
It's one of the most fabled talents in the animal world – elephants' ability to "talk" via rumbles in the earth.
Now zoologists in Namibia are trying to harness these seismic social calls - to lure rampaging males back to safety.

"Although this is maybe used to help the elephants it seems cruel in a way to me.
 Imagine how noisy we have made their environment by our cars and vehicles if they can pick up rumbles in the ground at distances of 10km. "

Essays: 'Darwin the abolitionist' by Adrian Desmond | Prospect Magazine

Interesting article via MeFi. Somehow it feels like the author is taking away the sceintific aspect of Darwinswork completely as if the theory was conceived as a political statement or a moral statement with no grounding in science and experiment.

http://www.prospect-magazine.co.uk/article_details.php?id=10581#

Shackled legs, thumbscrews used to crush the fingers of errant female slaves, a six-year-old boy horse-whipped for handing out water in a dirty glass: these sound like scenes from a modern horror story, but all were seen by the young Charles Darwin on his travels with the Beagle around the slave-owning continent of South America. You will find no mention of them in the proudly reasoned, scientific pages of On the Origin of Species. Glance at Darwin's journals, private notebooks and family background, however, and you will find a man immersed in the rhetoric and fervent belief of the anti-slavery movement. Was the public man of science influenced by these private passions? In the light of painstaking archival investigations into Darwin's letters, papers and notes, I believe the answer is a firm "yes." Although he never admitted publicly to so political a motivation, anti-slavery sentiment was the handmaiden of Charles Darwin's great intellectual achievement—the theory of evolution.

Re: Amazon’s Kindle 2 Will Debut Feb. 9 - Bits Blog - NYTimes.com

This ties in with the previous post I made. Interesting read on the free software and ebooks available such that even the kids using the OLPC can benefit. Imagine going back to India and helping kids learn with the OLPC. It'll be an experience. With so much freedom the kids will probably have more questioning and freer attitudes.

http://blog.wired.com/business/2009/02/with-some-polis.html
There are free books to be had, though. The Internet Archive currently has one million books available for free, and the nonprofit continues to add to its library at a rate of 1,000 books a day. There are also thousands of free books available through sites like Gutenberg.org, Manybooks.net and Feedbooks.com.

Amazon’s Kindle 2 Will Debut Feb. 9 - Bits Blog - NYTimes.com

http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/01/27/amazons-kindle-2-will-debut-feb-9/
Mark your calendars, e-book fans: Amazon.com will introduce the next generation of its popular Kindle reader in New York City on Feb. 9.
I am not at all impressed with this device. It just seems so inconvenient to have to buy all the material from the amazon store. We get books from the library, from friends,  and thats part of the reading experience for me atleast. If I borrow a book from a friend I will associate the reading experience with him/her. Browsing the public library is a good way to expose ourselves to newer stuff. I dont know, call me old-fashioned but this is not cool at all. Instead of liberating me this gadget is tying me down.

YouTube - The Newshour Debate 'Will Ram Sena pay for it?' Part 1

:(
the images in the background are very sad.
The course of the debate conducted on this channel is also very sad.
The idea of something like the Ram Sena spreading across the nation is very scary.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FXhQkVjdBMQ&feature=related

'Richard Dawkins interviews Nicholas Humphrey' by RichardDawkins.net - RichardDawkins.net

http://richarddawkins.net/article,3484,Richard-Dawkins-interviews-Nicholas-Humphrey,RichardDawkinsnet --- This is the full uncut interview originally filmed for Channel 4's "The Enemies of Reason." Nicholas Humphrey is a Professor of Psychology at the London School of Economics. This video is brought to you free online by The Richard Dawkins Foundation for Reason and Science.

Thought for the day

A THOUGHT FOR TODAY:

We should be careful to get out of an experience only the wisdom that is in it -- and stop there -- lest we be like the cat that sits down on a hot stove-lid. She will never sit down on a hot stove-lid again, and that is well; but also she will never sit down on a cold one any more. -Mark Twain, author and humorist (1835-1910)

[source: awad.org]