Deepavali Greetings to you all

May you all have a joyous, healthy and prosperous year ahead!

Break

This day, we celebrate the Day of Implements. Hope our instruments, whatever they are, bring us joy and happiness.

This will be my last post for some time to come.

I have had such great time blogging here, but this has got a bit monotonous for me. I don't know how it is with you.

I have intentionally kept my personal issues out of this blog. And also the religious side, though it might have crept in now and then.

I feel that I have to take a break from this for some time, and read some religious book without any distraction. Kandharalangaram is the book I have chosen to study, and if you are interested, I shall be blogging about that. Please click the link here for Kandharalangaram.

I hope Siva and Balajhi will blog here so that it does not fall silent.

Thanks for SB and Kartikey for the interest you have taken, and for your insightful comments. I have made two really good friends in you.

Thanks a lot.

Siva, Balajhi, I will be following this blog, so please do post something for me to read and comment, please.

I wish you all a wonderful, great time.

Due for a Collapse?

Stock markets are crashing everywhere and here is a news for you. and this is news I found at The Economic Times.

Having readied the world's tallest building, "Burj Dubai", Dubai is all set to build another whopping one, this tower rising one km high towards the sky. It will have more than 200 floors. Once finished, its height would be two to three times those of the skyscrapers that line the streets of New York and Chicago. It will be made of four towers within one single structure, and will be surrounded by another 40 towers.

When I read about anything that happens inside man, I think of V.S.Ramachandran's "Phantoms in the Brain". And when I read about anything that happens outside man, I think of Jared Diamond's "Collapse'. They are so influential with me.

In "Collapse", Diamond writes that all the civilizations that are due for a fall, build large, tall, megalomaniac structures.

I think the civilization as we know it, the western civilization, is due for a fall, and I pray it does not happen in my lifetime, or in my son's.

Someone please pick up that book and find what Diamond really says about this and the solutions that he offers.

Right train but wrong destination - It can happen to you

Late last night in New Delhi, 1000 odd passengers bound for Bihar boarded their train no.4006 B. To their surprise the train crew decided to take them to Allahabad in UP. A passenger who boarded the train at Kanpur did report to officials that the train was on the wrong track. But the train continued on its own track before passengers pulled the chain and after some commotion the train returned to Kanpur and then headed for Bihar.

http://www.ibnlive.com/news/driver-loses-track-train-leaves-for-bihar-reaches-up/75155-13.html

Though it makes me laugh it is a serious mistake for which no one has claimed responsibility yet. Jittery and speechless railway officials are keeping a tight lip on the matter. The guard of the train was adamant that the instruction was to proceed to Allahabad and the train no is not 4006 B but 4006 A. Now can it get any bizarre.

Don't sleep, watch out the route when you travel next time. You may even in end up in Lahore instead of Chandigarh.

Two Passages (or) Do You Like My Posts This Way?

"What generally matters is not whether a number is right or wrong, they are often wrong, but whether numbers are so wrong as to be misleading. It is standard practice among statisticians to say how wrong they think their numbers might be, though we might not even know in which direction - whether too high or too low. Putting an estimate on the potential size of the error, which is customarily done by saying how big the range of estimates need to be before we can be 95 per cent sure it covers the right answer (known as a confidence interval),  is the best we can do by way of practical precaution against the number being bad. Though even with a confidence interval of 95 per cent there is still a 5 per cent chance of being wrong. This is a kind of modesty the media often ignore. The news often doesn't have time, or think it important, to tell you that there was a wide range of plausible estimates and that this was just one, from somewhere near the middle. So we don't know, half the time, whether the number is the kind to miss a barn door, enjoying no one's confidence, or if it is a number strongly believed to hit the mark."

(Page 94  of "The Tiger That Wasn't by Michael Blastland & Andrew Dilnot)

"Silent reading is, although no one is quite sure, a relatively late arrival historically. The Venerable Bede was regarded as prodigious in the seventh century in that he could read without moving his lips and was therefore reading faster than he could speak. What Bede had worked out, evidently, was the amazing buffering capacity of the brain: that it can take in verbiage fast and play it back to the mind's ear at the right, slowed-down speed. Larger 'eyebites' and various other 'speed reading' gimmicks were promulgated in the speed reading mania of the 1960s- when information overload first became a worry. Unfortunately, there are absolute physical limits to the rate at which one can read. Few will reach them, but no human eye will exceed them, any more than any athlete- however will trained and drugged- will run 200 metres in three seconds.

Nowadays, it seems to me, something like the 'surf and zap' approach is required. As with satellite TV and its hundreds of channels, one has to skim through, stop where it seems interesting,  zap the commercials and other impertinent material, concentrate from time to time where the offering seems genuinely interesting."

(Page 42 of "How To Read a Novel" by John Sutherland)

Presence is not far away from absence

One of the first quotations I learned was that Absence makes the heart grow fonder. As all of us who have ever tried to meditate know, to keep something absent is to grapple with its presence. Absence is in many ways related to presence, and in many cases absence underlines a presence- such as the dog who did not bark in the Sherlock Holmes story.

There are fun ways to learn philosophical ideas, and Slavoj Zizek, a Slovenian intellectual seems to enjoy this sort of approach. In one of his books, he uses a joke to demonstrate how absence and presence are never apart in our consciousness.

In an art gallery in East Europe, a guide is conducting a few tourists around the paintings collected there. One of the paintings in titled, "Lenin in Warsaw". But Lenin is nowhere in the picture. Instead, it is a handsome young member who shares the bed with Lenin's wife. So, one of the visitors asks the guide, "But where is Lenin?". To which the guide replies, "Lenin is in Warsaw!".

The Ig Nobel Prizes

The Ig Nobel Awards for this year have been presented at Harvard University. There is nothing ignoble about it, because seven of the ten award winners paid their own fare to come and get the awards. It is prestigious, and fun.

For accepting  the legal principle that plants have dignity, The Swiss Federal Ethics Committee on Non-Human Biotechnology and the citizens of Switzerland  get the Peace prize; in case you wanted to know, fleas on dogs  jump higher than fleas on  cats, this discovery won the Biology Ig Nobel; and usefully, Dan Ariely has found that expensive fake medicine is more effective than cheap fake medicine- so don't get your medicines at street corners, choose a pharmacy, preferably air-conditioned: Ariely gets the award for Medicine; and in Cognitive Science, Toshiyuki Nakagaki, Hiroyasu Yamada, Ryo Kobayashi, Atsushi Tero, Akio Ishiguro and Agota Toth (so many people!) win the award for their earth-shattering discovery that slime moulds (what are they?) can solve puzzles; in Economics, the discovery that the fertility cycle of a lap dancer affects her tip-earning potential, should improve the earnings at the Wall Street, Dalal Street, and a street here near Parry's Corner which I don't want to name- Geoffrey Miller, Joshua Tyber and Brent Jordan applied themselves to this arduous task and have justifiably been rewarded now; And in  case you did not know, Dorian Raymer and Douglas Smith have proved scientifically that heaps of string or hair or almost anything else will inevitably tangle themselves up in knots, and they walk away with Physcis Ig Nobel. Is Coca-cola a very effective spermicide? Ig Nobel does itself proud by awarding the Chemistry Prize for both the teams that proved and disproved it; And, "You Bastard: A Narrative Exploration of the Experience of Indignation within Organizations", wins the Literature Prize. Of course.

Of Fathers and Sons

There is a post here about a research finding which states that the educational and social status of girl children depend on the expectations of their mothers. If the mother thinks her daughter will go a long way with her studies, she will probably fulfil it, and she will also be more confident of herself than others.

Now here comes another study which discusses about how big a help fathers are to their sons. This makes it perfectly symmetrical.

Telegraph features the findings of Dr. Daniel Nettle and his associates at the University of Newcastle:

. Men pay more attention to sons than daughters.

. Children whose fathers spent more quality time with them, who  involved themselves in activities such as reading, organising outings etc had higher IQ.

. These children were more upwardly mobile than others, the paternal influence continuing even to the age of 42.

There is another link here, to nhs choices, which takes a more nuanced look at the findings.

God's Debris - I

Lately, I've been reading Scott Adam's God's Debris, and got bemused at many of the ideas/ questions that he has put forth in it. Bemused, because the main character in this story, Avatar, throws a lot of uncomfortable questions about god, religion, and in fact everything we base our lives on. I'm half way through the book, and so far, what he has postulated is this:

If God is omnipotent (and, if at all there is god) and has free will, he would be driven by almost nothing, since anything is possible for him. After all, god would be beyond the concept of time, without birth or death. So the only thing that would be a challenge for him is check if he can cease his own existence. Arguably, he says, since he is all-powerful and all-knowing, this would be the only thing that would drive him to act at all. Creation, cycles of birth, n number of levels of heaven and hell, reincarnation etceteras would be of no amusement. Even the self-claiming ultimate species human would be less exciting than a rock, for in time scales large enough for him to 'see', he would be able to see interesting transformations in rocks over millions of years, whereas human existence, in such time scales, would be just a rapid flash.

Scott presents a new theory, where he says that, the existence of the universe we see, is possible only if god has succeeded in the only challenge that could drive him, exploding himself thereby creating us and all matter (and anti-matter?) from his debris!

His writing and ideas are well written than this, so when you find time, read it and scribble what you feel (it’s only a 144 page book).

I'll post more soon as I finish reading it.

Frankly Speaking

I read this in the Times Literary Supplement, 25.4.2008.

Evelyn Waugh was interviewed in the BBC Radio, in Frankly Speaking.

Q: Do you find it easy to get on with the man in the street?

A: I've never met such a person.

Q: Do you like people generally when you meet them on trains or buses?

A: I never travel on a bus, nor would I address a person on a train.

How do you talk to him?

On Religion

Yesterday, I visited Rediff and was surprised to see that it had accumulated in less than eight hours more than  thousand comments for a single news article. Here I am, blogging everyday and looking for comments and feeling great when I find one.

But the Rediff comments did not make me feel good. They were in response to an interview with a Hindu fundamentalist, and as it could be expected, people were screaming at one another.  I asked myself, 'Is this what I want?'.

I feel that when you are forced to take a position, you are not yourself anymore. The Memes, so to say, take control of what you say.

In this particular issue, it was Hindus, Christians and Muslims justifying the use of violence. Well, mostly. There were some moderate comments, but not many.

When Gandhiji was asked how he felt about the Western Civilization, he is supposed to have replied, "It would be a good idea".  I did not find that kind of intelligent and  humorous comment there. I was reminded of Gandhiji, because once you read all those comments, you come away thinking, Religion is a good idea, but just that, its time has not come.

In general, we should hesitate when we find ourself reacting to something. I can't explain this clearly, but I feel that when you react to a bombing for instance, you are focused on the bombing, and because of that, your sight is clouded, your thinking gets muddled, your heart gets dehydrated and your tongue gets twisted. Same goes when you are fighting with your business partner, or wife or child.

That is why I prefer posts to comments. Ha ha!

Speaking of this Hindu-Muslim-Christian issue, it is unimaginable how scholars of  religion, the saints and the mullahs and the priests, are not speaking out against violence. No violence, never. They should make that clear. Gandhiji himself maintained that the means justified the ends. No one is saying that these days. Instead we are blowing ourself up, burning or uselessly ranting against the theory of evolution. How regressive can you get!

Seriously speaking, if anyone from any of these religions came out speaking boldly about this issue of violence, and were serious about doing something about it, they would end up as founders of another religion. That would make it only worse, of course.

I think someone questioned J.Krishnamurti what he would do if his sister or wife was raped in front of his eyes. Would he still not feel violent? JK usually did not answer such hypothetical questions, but for this, I think he replied along these lines: if your mind was in order, and if you felt love, you will find the right response without being violent.

When you hear that a nun has been raped, love is the last thing you feel. Or when you read that a small boy picked up a package to return it and it exploded in his face. It is hard not to want to hit out against these evil people.

Yet the simple fact is, it is not that the evil people enjoy violence, it is the violence in us that comes out as evil.