OBL gets an obituary?

Just saw this off a PZ Myers blog. It seems BHO has himself claimed this news. Love the comment by PZ:

I'm expecting his head to be mounted on a pike outside the White House now.

Other resources here and here.

The Merry Month of May

Whoever said that probably (surely) never lived in Chennai. In other news, just discovered PZ Myers and his blog, thanks to RS. Also, planning to learn (and do) some metaprogramming as well as improve my scant knowledge of python. Finally, imho, Kevin Spacey does a better Chris Walken than Chris Walken (and perhaps a better Jack Nicholson than Jack Nicholson, although the few good men of the jury might still be out on that).

This starts off May.

Mwanga na Kivuli

No, I have not gone mad. That is Swahili. It means Light and Shadow. It also refers to a new photoblog started up by AKP. This was, in his words (or a close approximation nevertheless), lying dormant for a while. Strategic application of virtual chinese feather trick has brought it out of hibernation. Thankfully! Here is a sample shot from that blog.

AKP, take a bow! :) Mwanga na Kivuli!

Identity?

Procrastination is a good thing, or so I thought, up until that moment when I realized that such a thing exists. It is a bit like The Game --- the game I alluded to in my previous post. You keep winning till you realize that you are playing it, at which point you lose The Game. Procrastination works in a funnily similar way {not sure if "funnily" is a legit word and not interested in a dictionary search right now}. So, I finally was pushed over the edge and into restarting 1:34 am by a friend of mine, who managed this feat brilliantly. You see, the reason I was procrastinating was that I thought there was nothing worth writing about. That friend, somehow (maybe with arrows) convinced me that it was not so. Hence, the blog restarted. Now, what was I going to write about again...? Ah, right, a quick peek at the title helped: Identity! A question of who we are, who we were, and who we might end up being. Let us try and explore that question in a little more detail in the next paragraph.

At this juncture let me disclaim {another word that I am not certain exists, but who cares} that this has nothing to do with the somewhat-enjoyable movie Identity, nor with its absolutely trashbag Hindivisation {hmmm, my internal dictionary seems to have gone offline --- good show!}. What I want to write about here is the interesting dilemma I faced this afternoon, and the way it was resolved. To put things in a nutshell, I was offered a nice offer by a nice company that offers nice offers --- this offer was rather nice: I was to get some shiny things and one more shiny thing for a third of the price...or if one thinks alternately, the shiny things were free and I had to pay for the shiny thing. Tough decision! The amount I had to pay to get all shiny things, singular and plural, was about the refractive index of water times my monthly acquisition. Not too-o bad, if one thinks about it. Not a big huge amount to spend for a truckload of adamantium and a juicy purple fruit (which is somewhat spectral-nomenclaturely weak). So I was in a dilemma. To be, or not to be!

Most of the people who read this blog do the same thing I do: they try and discover that nature of all things, boldly go where no one has gone before. Less romantically, they do research. For fun. For their daily bread. But mostly, for fun. Notwithstanding JC and his gang, research is a nice thing to do {in fact, very much NotNotwithstanding JC et al}. And as far as I am concerned, College Street wins every time. So, matter has been resolved, this post also looks like a perfect jogakhichuri, and things move on. As always.

Mini-blog: of mini-blogs and red buttons

Correct me if I am mistaken, but I do believe Wordpress has a Mini-blog feature. Blogger does not. That is bad. Formal potesht! Of course, there is Buzz. But that is micro-blog! I want a mini-blog feature in Blogger {or I want someone to point it out to me if it already exists, feeling too lazy to actually search for it.}

Ever noticed how completely ineffective the Gchat red "busy" button is? I'm sure you have, so I need not say more about it. Also, "AFK" means "Away From Keyboard" and not "I Am Not Here".

This was a mini-blog. Future such entries will be marked as such. Next up, a full-length blog on Ravel's Boléro.

Dear 1:34 am

Nice weather we are having, aren't we?
.
..
...
Ah well, I knew that that pathetic effort at a nonchalant hi-how-are-you-yeah-i-haven't-asked-of-you-for-a-lifetime would fall flat/splat on its face/space. You know, I am actually trying to write this using html tags. You should at least give me some credit for tha...all right, all right, no need to throw things now, is there? See? Me? Here? On my knees? Saying sorry? See? See?

Right! Let me straighten my bow tie a bit now. And no, bow ties are cool. The latest from Gallifrey, it is. Even StartThis says so. Nope, I'm keeping me bow tie.

First of all, Science Day is over! Well, if you didn't know of this that can hardly be constituted as my fault, can it? It was all over the web. Science Day @ IMSc 2011! On 27 Feb! From 8 am! We even had our own web page --> Science Day @ IMSc! So what in azure blazed were you cribbing about, eh?

Yeah, we had a blast. We had a blast last year as well. This time one of the coolest things (apart from my bow tie, of course) was our Elephant Toothpaste experiment! Wait up, I'll put up pics of that on the site soon enough. And, I also invite you to the program next year: believe me, it is a blast (or did I use that word before)!

I was talking to RA this afternoon at tea about engineering, clerkship and science. Rancho would understand: it was he who said that it is rather stupid to learn the marvelous aspects of engineering for four years and then throw it all away to do an MBA and then become a banker. Of course, he did not quite work it out that the banker in question is also the "the biggest selling English language novelist in India's history (TM)". The world moves on. Before Independence (or something like that), Indian boys had star-struck ideas of being clerks in British offices, and a clerk-babu was a superstar. Funny how history repeats itself.

Have to be honest: I had quite forgotten (damn, I just lost The Game, sorry SP) about you. And would you please not throw any more cultlery, they tend to be sharp. And yes, cultlery should have been sick (sic), but who in Gallifrey cares anyway. I think you need to give your sincerest thanks to someone who belongs to none, and you need to do this at least two hundred and four times, and maximum nBones-2 times.

Righto then, I reckon I've spent enough time with you for the time being. Back to Nicole's adventures then! Seeya later, 1:34 am.

Of Insanity and the World

August 6, 2009.

September 9, 2010.

That is a long time.

That is about to change.

------------------------------

Two things that caught my eye in the past few days. Well, two themes, actually.

1) Of madness, insanity and the society of the modern homo sapiens sapiens:

I am currently reading, outside of my academic work, two novels that are connected in more ways than one. One of them is Catch-22, the other is Foucault's Pendulum. Granted, it is perhaps not such a bright idea to take on both these giants together, but somehow it feels right. It will take me some time to get through them, and I hope to have a blog post afterwards about them, but for now, let me just quote one passage from Catch-22 which captures the meaning of the title, and the purpose, of the book pretty well:

There was only one catch and that was Catch-22, which specified that a concern for one's safety in the face of dangers that were real and immediate was the process of a rational mind. Orr was crazy and could be grounded. All he had to do was ask; and as soon as he did, he would no longer be crazy and would have to fly more missions. Orr would be crazy to fly more missions and sane if he didn't, but if he was sane he had to fly them. If he flew them he was crazy and didn't have to; but if he didn't want to he was sane and had to. Yossarian was moved very deeply by the absolute simplicity of this clause of Catch-22 and let out a respectful whistle.

'That's some catch, that Catch-22,' he observed.

'It's the best there is,' Doc Daneeka agreed.

2) Of the Environment, Consumerism, Capitalism and Anti-capitalism:

This video by former Greenpeace activist Annie Leonard was referred to me by Madhushree. I found that there is a series of four videos by Youtube user Lee Doren debunking, or at least trying to, the Story of Stuff video. Here are the links: 1, 2, 3, 4.

I think it is worthwhile to hear both sides of the story, and then if you have the time or the inclination, to look up some of the facts and counter-facts that these people are citing. Personally, I think it is true that we, as a species, are becoming more homo sapiens consumeris every day. I also agree with Leonard's argument about the non-sustenability of a linear chain with one source and one sink, none of which are ideal reservoirs (by reservoir I mean a system with infinite resources). On this point, I think Doren's argument that the resources of the Earth are not finite because the Earth is so big a bit naive. True, the Earth is big. And it has a lot of resources. But are those resources actually extractable? Do we have the technology to be able to do that? Also, if we take, for the sake of argument, that the Earth is an Ideal Source, is it also an Ideal Sink? How much can we exploit it anyway, before it reaches the breaking point? I also do not agree with Doren's hypothesis (I say so, because that is what it is) that price rise will automatically ensure that resources will be rationed. Right! But something else also increases with price, and that is the Cost of Living Index. We can afford to buy petrol nowadays at something like Rs 50/- per litre, while it only cost about half as much twenty years back (not sure about the stats), because our salaries have also increased over the past twenty years, in tandem with the rise of prices. It is a vicious circle: the rise of prices of everyday goods (or is it consumables nowadays) prompts a raise --> a raise implies that we buy more --> the feedback mechanism is activated, and the prices rise because (a) we can afford it and (b) there is greater demand and the same level of supply.

Anyway, too much talk on my behalf. I might say more later, but please do feel free to comment. And the reason I clubbed my discussion on the Story of Stuff with that of the two books is that, in my opinion (and which is not entirely formed yet), they have the same underlying cause/theme.

P.S. Let me clarify that I have not seen all the four parts of Doren's videos yet, but hope to do so soon.