Thats all it is – chemical reactions May 31, 2006
Posted by Sharath Rao in science.3 comments
In Lectures by Dr. V.S. Ramachandran, Professor at the University of California (San Diego) here. where he says,
“Even though its common knowledge these days, it never ceases to amaze me that all the richness of our mental life – all our feelings, our emotions, our thoughts, our ambitions, our love life, our religious sentiments and even what each of us regards us his own intimate private self – is simply the activity of these little specks of jelly in your head, in your brain. There is nothing else.”
Does that make life hopelessly meaningless or deeply profound ?
More in an interview with Shekhar Gupta here.
The orkut hoax !! May 30, 2006
Posted by Sharath Rao in rant, technology.5 comments
If you are on orkut, you have come across this ’spam’ going around that goes like this -
“Dear user because of sudden rush of people signing upto orkut is come to an attention that we are vastly running our of resources so with in a week any one who does not receive this scrap will be deleted of our server . We know that you are still using this account ….”
This is being forwarded to anyone all and sundry – not by the uneducated who may be excused for their ignorance but people who are in the top 1% of the Indian educated class by most socio-economic development parameteres. Does that message even look like its genuine ? And this inspite of Orkut clearly posting a disclaimer
In my opinion, doing this is the equivalent of spitting on someone’s face in public in broad daylight in a crowded city market. Would you do it ?
We are yet to realize that like there is something called civic sense, table manners, etc. there is something called network etiquette ( I dont know if there is such a word, but you know what I mean anyway. ). I previously have written something on this subject here – but I cant take it any longer.
I have to admit that I am ashamed that I have people in my friends list who fall in one or more of these categories -
a) a network-civic sense / netiquette
b) can somehow not guage that the message is most likely fake.
c) an idea how much damage they are doing
d) know they are doing damage, but couldnt care enough.
I am going to mail this link to every person who sends me this message – if you want to remove me from your friends list, please go ahead. Good riddance !
John Tierney in the NYTimes almost went to the extent of saying that capital punishment is inadequate to for such offences”.
“Published: July 12, 2005
Last year a German teenager named Sven Jaschan released the Sasser worm, one of the costliest acts of sabotage in the history of the Internet. It crippled computers around the world, closing businesses, halting trains and grounding airplanes.
Professor Landsburg, an economist at the University of Rochester, has calculated the relative value to society of executing murderers and hackers. By using studies estimating the deterrent value of capital punishment, he figures that executing one murderer yields at most $100 million in social benefits.
The benefits of executing a hacker would be greater, he argues, because the social costs of hacking are estimated to be so much higher: $50 billion per year. Deterring a mere one-fifth of 1 percent of those crimes — one in 500 hackers — would save society $100 million. And Professor Landsburg believes that a lot more than one in 500 hackers would be deterred by the sight of a colleague on death row.
Read his complete article here ( requires registration )
India’s most wanted – Arjun Singh ! May 26, 2006
Posted by Sharath Rao in image, india, politics, statistics, technology.add a comment
[ Picture courtesy Google Trends ]
Search statistics for Arjun Singh ( BLUE ) and “OBC reservation” (RED) since Jan 2006 – look at the spike in early April and the correlation in the two statistics. Better view here.
Meanwhile, our Prime minister can either do this -
“I am pained to see the agonising experience the youth of the country are undergoing. They should call off their strike and I assure that the government will find a viable and credible way to protect the interest of all sections of the society”
i.e. mouth platitudes like any politician would.
Or do this
“I think the matter is already settled”.
i.e. make strong statements unilaterally, like any politician would.
Who says he is technocrat and not a politician. Does he believe in what he is doing ? Or is it just another political expdiency ?
If he doesnt believe in the proposal for OBC quotas but goes ahead anyway because the parliament can pass the bill while maintaining that he supports it, does that make him a liar. Can a Prime minister possibly ever say something like – “I dont personally believe in this but its a political necessity” ? If he could, then Manmohan Singh would have spent most of the last two years saying just that ! Its a crown of thorns, sure is.
Its ironic that people like Arjun Singh who will unlikely live another 10 years have been given ministries such as HRD which are essentially far-looking – what HRD does and doesnt do has far-reaching consequences – to witness Arjun Singh will not ever live. ( Nor will Manmohan Singh himself ). I am probably being harsh, but true it is. So why is Arjun Singh who doesnt have a stake in the system given the reins for controlling it.
HRD and such ministries which dont require specific expertise ( like for. eg. Finance, Commerce) should be handed over to someone who is essentially below 50 years age ( and sane ) – who has a proved track record in policy making not 75 year old derelicts like Arjun Singh. If you call this age discrimination, then what do you which is going on right now ? Isnt dynastic rule some form of discrimination as well ?
Quote of the day May 24, 2006
Posted by Sharath Rao in littlerockers, weird.1 comment so far
“What man, there are hardly any sane people left in this world man now ! “
- Sadiq Shaik Sherieef, 5:58 PM (EST) , May 24, 2006, Bangalore
an immigrant’s life May 24, 2006
Posted by Sharath Rao in America, contemplation, india, politics.1 comment so far
Jeff Jacoby has an interesting post on the immigration problem in the Boston Globe….especially his starting is quite riveting ….
Amid the din over illegal immigration, I have been thinking about two immigrants I happen to know rather well.
One is a 3-year-old boy from southern Guatemala. He was brought to the United States in March 2004, one of 11,170 adopted orphans to immigrate that year. The other, who will turn 81 in August, comes from a small village in what is now Slovakia. He entered the United States in the spring of 1948, a few months before his 23d birthday.
Born an ocean and 78 years apart, these two immigrants might seem on the surface to have little in common. But as naturalized US citizens, they in fact have a great deal in common. English, to mention the most obvious example, is the primary language for both. Neither retains the customs of his native land. Both have a share in the American constitutional patrimony.
The little boy from Guatemala is my younger son. The older man from Slovakia is my father.”
Read complete article here. This was linked from an equally interesting, but more about the political debate on immigration, post here.
We guys who come from places where our parents’ native places are barely miles away or sometimes walking distances and often settle a few 100 kms from our ancestral homes – we will never know what it is to be in such a position. I particularly have in mind European and East Asian settlers in the United States. Cynics might speak of a identity crisis that it causes but if that were true, this nation should have been one of 200 million inferiority complexes.
Yes, such a thing as an identity crisis does exist – but in a majority of the cases, over time it disappears and if you not, people leave for home – because afterall, you leave or stay because you want to or otherwise. This ofcourse is the case of recent immigrants – people who immigrated from Europe or East Asian in the pre-war and post war years have decidedly made the United States their home.
At this point, I must refer to one particularly touching article that Jhumpa Lahiri, an engaging writer and a charming woman, wrote – I should link it again. Brilliant ones both articles !
Umpteenth time May 22, 2006
Posted by Sharath Rao in weird.3 comments
My life is so messy, I am so indisciplined, inefficient and unproductive that I cant find time to elaborate ( for now atleast ) ! Help !
Bad old days ! May 19, 2006
Posted by Sharath Rao in numbers-in-my-life, reminisces-1990s, statistics, technology.4 comments
Some dates and numbers here 
First phonecall made – Feb 1990
First STD call – sometime in 1993
First use of pager – Never !
First telegram received – Jun 1995
First telegram sent – Never !
First use of cordless phone – Oct 1995
First computer to own – May 9, 1997 – Pentium-1, 133 Mhz, 8 MB RAM, 1 GB HDD, Monochrome
First internet site visited – TimesofIndia ( bad choice I know ) in Jan 1999 – with Rajaram and Supreeth
First email ID created – March 1999 – sharrahs@usa.net ( never used it ) – with Ashith Hegde
First fax sent – Nov 2003
First cellphone used – Sometime in 2002 at KREC
First use of wireless internet – Aug 2004 at CMU
Time and again I come back to wonder at the some things, same things – one of them being how life has changed in the past say 10 years thanks to our exposure to technology, more specifically communication technologies. I just posted 2 elaborate posts on thelittlerocker and that got me thinking – how a bunch of people spread across distances have weaved a network of their classmates from school.
Let me take a closer look.
Okay, today is May 18, 2006 – 10 years back – May 18, 1996 – we were at the summer camp at Little Rock – the starting of Class X. We were barely 15. I had made my first solo night journey to Bangalore. How many STD calls had I made then ? Email ? Net ? I am sure I had heard of the words – email and internet – although I hadnt a precise idea what they were. I know I knew these words because there was my senior at Little Rock Abhishek Arora who apparently had email at home – that was a big thing then. Also he had a Pentium machine while a couple other I knew had a 80286 ! Skip next paragraph – wont hurt.
( That reminds me of something else – and let me digress – when we had a computer exhibition in Little Rock in Aug 1995 – I was demonstrating games for the visitors and was in charge of a 8088 machine most of the time showing people how to play “Dave” – once in a while I got to demonstrate the “Prince of Persia” which would run only on a 80286. A step backward, the first machine I programmed ( in BASIC ) in 1992 at the Army School, it was a 8086 machine !! )
In 1998, I remember seeing several KMC doctors with pagers fixed to their belts when our school bus stopped to pick up students. Today, pagers are obsolete – I have never used one and its unlikely I will ever get to use either.
When we first saw the color monitors at Little Rock, it was a big thing – it was the only machine with a Pentium (66 Mhz) with a color monitor and a CD ROM drive – Sajji Sir would lock it with a password and we would hate him for that ! Are you reading Sir by any chance !!
Cellphones first came in 1997-98 and a single phone call would cost Rs. 16 and that too for both parties ! Internet parlor that opened in Manipal in 1998 – the Cyberlogin near Manipal Drug house – costed Rs. 90 per hour !! Infact, by those standards Manipal is still expensive – we had access at Rs. 15 per hour in Suratkal in 2002 – I hear Manipal its still Rs. 30 and above.
What about the times when the email storage was 2 MB, 5 MB !! I remember when I was in Sirsi in July 2000 ( just before Rajkumar was kidnapped !! ), my then 13 year old cousin asked me to open an account with sawaal.com because at that time we got 10 MB storage which was a big deal since Yahoo and Hotmail gave 2 MB at that time. ( Its a different thing that sawaal.com, a product of the dotcom boom went bust without a question !! )
When we started the alumni group, most of us had 2-10 MB and this was one of the reasons we banned attachments – should you return on Monday without checking mail over the weekend, so many mails would have bounced !!
Well, today I have 5 email accounts with a combined capacity of 10 GB and I have atleast 10% of that full. When was the last time you wrote a letter ? If we dont receive a reply to an email within a day we grumble – thats true irrespective of distance – my expectations from my friend in Bangalore is the same ( or above ) the expectations of his friends in other parts of Bangalore.
This connectivity is insane – sometimes counter-productive or unproductive !!
Thats all okay. Now answer this – what have I done to enjoy all this ? Did I work hard to be able to enjoy any of these comforts ? Thats the beauty of the market !!
I quote Donald J. Boudreaux from here.
“I love this market process. People such as me — people who lack even a whiff of creativity, people who are terribly risk-averse, people who lazily prefer to read novels and work at secure jobs and spend our evenings at home dining and drinking with family and friends — just sit back and wait for profit-hungry hard-working anxiety-ridden creative entrepreneurs, each in competition with others, to find new ways to improve our lives. And we don’t even have to accept what they devise. If we like it, we buy it. If not, we don’t buy it.”
I was somewhat inspired by the two books I am currently reading.
Both highly recommended – okay, if you are not a math geek, must remind you – both of them dont contain a single graph, curve or an equation.
United States and Europe. Rosenthal and me May 11, 2006
Posted by Sharath Rao in America, history, media.1 comment so far
I linked to this article about A.M.Rosenthal, the NYTimes Editor who died today. I had heard of him in an Indian context but I wasn’t aware of the many aspects of his life and times at The Times.
I managed to read the whole 7 page article about him. Its quite interesting that this is an article as much about him as it is about the Times during the 55 years he served there and as many as 23 as editor. The one thing that stood out ( apart from his love for India ) was that pattern I am coming across so often.
He is a European of Jewish descent ( Belarus ) whose ancestors migrated in the early 20th century. How often have I come across this – East European Jews, Russian Jews, German, Hungarian, Austrian Jews who escaped persecution only to come to the United States/Canada to make it big here. Its not the physicists, mathematicians and a disproportionate share of the Manhattan project members but just even performers, artists and people in art and humanities. This is one list to savor.
This is probably what makes this such a great country. Its easy to immediately turn to Bush or even earlier US governments who have condoned deaths and ravaged societies in pure national interests. That though is not the issue here – I am talking about the common people – the man on the street who basically is a hard-working immigrant or a descendent of one, who loves this country because it gave him a honest chance. And there are so many of these. What more can a conscientious person ask for other than an honest chance and opportunity at a decent standard of living and the “pursuit of happiness”.
Yes I know that in the last few years, inequality has risen here too. People talk of how the US has one of the lesser intergenerational mobilities compared to the rest of the developed world ( would love to have statistics for India ). But Europe and Japan have the luxury of not having to do with poor immigrants – unskilled immigrants from Central and Latin America and a legacy of centuries on slavery on their land ( European Colonialists did employ slaves on colonial lands but not in Europe – they were bloody smart! ). Interestingly though, Europe and Japan also don’t have the benefit of skilled professionals from China, India, Taiwan, Korea and the like.
This is why I think the US has less of a sharp distribution of a quality I cannot exactly describe – huge variance – we have people at both ends of the spectrum and a sizeable number at that. On the other hand distributions are shaper in Europe – a huge number of them have an excellent standard of living – there is lesser variance. Higher taxes have meant slightly more egalitarian and less ruthless societies than in the United States. But is inequality bad in itself ? Two excellent posts by Nobel Laureate Gary Becker and Judge Posner have this to say. Please do read it !
Europe is more pacifist today than ever – have learnt and over-learnt the lessons of the war. I remember reading somewhere that there is a major war every 80-100 years because that is what it takes to forget the lessons of a last war ! These two cultures with a history of civilizational bonding have been moving apart from each other in every conceivable way – military intervention wise, taxes and fiscal policy wise and lives of people itself with respect to how they react to a globalizing world.
[ At this point I just went back to read what I wrote above – and was shocked to find this – “I think the US has less of a sharp distribution of a quality I cannot exactly describe – huge variance - we have people at both ends of the spectrum and a sizeable number at that.” – Note the pronoun – probably the for the first time ever I have used “we” in referring to the US. Its obviously because the context is a comparison to Europe ( not India ) but interesting nevertheless. I leave it this way anyway. ]
So coming back to Rosenthal, its his last paragraph in the last column he wrote for the Times he wrote on Nov 5, 1999 that set off the tone for this post.
“I cannot promise to change all that. But I can say that I will keep trying and that I thank God for (a) making me an American citizen, (b) giving me that college-boy job on The Times, and (c) handing me the opportunity to make other columnists kick themselves when they see what I am writing, in this fresh start of my life.”
As I read that I asked myself – now which other country can you find a few tens of millions who ( or whose fathers/grandfathers ) will have this to say about their citizenship. Now I am talking about the country that one was born to, but an adopted country. For most of the people in the United States, they are glad they were born here. For the rest, they are glad they got here.
And what about me ? While I may never end up writing a blog entry that says something on the lines of what Rosenthal said, I am glad as hell I got to spend time in this part of the world – there has not been a greater learning experience and I will make the most of this time.
My future in blogging May 11, 2006
Posted by Sharath Rao in CMU, blogging.2 comments
….And thus I finished my second semester at Carnegie Mellon. The final final went off, or rather came off pretty good. I am glad though I survived this semester. The good news is that now that I am done with the coursework for another 3.5 months, I will have more time to return to this blog more often – I hope to make atleast 3-4 posts a week.
Maintaining 3 blogs takes a toll on your time sure, but the difference is that thelittlerocker and thebroadcaster don’t take that much of a thought-toll on you because of their very nature – both are essentially journalistic, one of them more armchair than another.
This one though is different. Its more like the op-ed pages versus news stories in newspapers. This is an op-ed page – my opinion and my thought – with enough self-censorship to protect privacies of parties involved. I have had several thoughts and several things on my mind over the past couple of months – only I did not find sufficient energy to produce a few thoughtful posts – I say thoughtful, not necessarily brilliant ones.
But I plan to surprise myself with some prolific writing in the weeks to come. I promise more.
Rest in Peace, Mahajan May 3, 2006
Posted by Sharath Rao in politics.add a comment
Pramod Mahajan, I dont remember the last time I actually ever mourned the death of a politician.
For you though, I make an exception. For that is what you were – simply exceptional.
Indian political discourse will never be the same without you.
R.I.P
….hurt my feelings May 3, 2006
Posted by Sharath Rao in image, india, statistics.2 comments
This is mapping religious groups in the United States. ( click on individual links) This is notable - correlations with education and wealth is hard to miss.
True also of this map – lighter the regions, lesser is religious adherence – so CA, Washington region – lots of agnostic/atheists – also pockets in Maine, Ohio. Everything thats red and light red is what gets the votes for Bush !
Now imagine some map of this kind generated for India. Firstly, I am not sure we have the data to do this. Actually, let me take that back – we most likely do. But such a map can only come at the cost of human lives !! Yes, without a few Muslims-Hindus riots, its unlikely it may happen. And the riots will ensure something like this will not ever be available. BJP will accuse the congress of minority appeasement and Congress will hurl counter-accusations of majoritarianism. Religion is such a sensitive issue in India and its easily going to be politicised.
But what if using the census data ( assuming available to the general public via RTI bill ), a private non-profit organisation decides to come up with this. The house of the head of the organisation will be razed, he will receive death threats and the government will step in to withdraw the study.
Okay, I give up. I would instead like to see a map that shows something totally non-controversial – hmm…something like the size of people’s shoes maybe ! Who has the longest feet – that sure should not generate any controversy.
Or something like – sense of humor ( however you measure it ). Who are the funniest people around in India – ofcourse, that would mean who also appreciate jokes on themselves without starting a riot (no pun here). Aah…this is getting controversial.
There is only so much you can do in India without hurting someone’s feelings, inviting a ban or facing the wrath of the mighty state. I give up.
(Maps were linked to from here )
