Three accidents in an hour

Yahoo! News:

A woman in Usedom, Germany, while pulling out of a car park, hit three cars and then pressed the accelerator by accident and crashed into a house across the lawn.

The ambulance that took her to hospital was hit by a truck.

All this happened within an hour.

Anthropology is Dead

If there were any two books that changed the way I looked at the world, "Collapse," by Jared Diamond should be one of them. He read so sane, it is not hard to come away thinking what he says the world is about.

This post is not about that book, which studies human nature and history through his field experiences with the indigenous people of  Papua New Guinea. This is about how civilization got at them.

I find at journalism.co.uk  that Jared Diamond wrote this about two Papua New Guineans:

• Someone called Daniel Wemp pursued revenge for his uncle's death. Three years, six battles, three hundred dead pigs.
  
• This Wemp made use of a hired assassin to get the man who, he thought, had killed his uncle: the arrow of the hitman left the man paralysed and bound to wheelchair.
  

Jared Diamond said these things in an article in the New Yorker, " "Vengeance Is Ours: What can tribal societies tell us about our need to get even?"

It looks like they learnt lessons about getting even from technological societies like ours: Daniel Wemp and Henep Isum, the alleged hitman, have filed a summons and sued Jared Diamond and the New Yorker for $10 million in the Supreme Court of The State of New York, charging defamation.

How's that!

This could happen only in India

The Hindu :  A lama in the fray: 

"Phetook Bhutia, commonly referred to as a lama, is the ruling Sikkim Democratic Front’s nominee for the Sangha seat in the State Assembly — a unique constituency, one that has no defined boundary except that of the State’s borders, and an electorate of 3058 monks and nuns belonging to the different monasteries."

This could happen only in India, I think.

Three thousand monks and nuns elect a lama for Assembly...

Great news.

Feel happy about it.

Please Don't Be Shrill...

Suppose you want to live in a liberal state where democracy and free speech are valued, how would you deal with people who hate it, who have an agenda that says we are better off without free speech, alternate views and all that as long as we can live the way we want to.

Terry Eagleton at The Guardian  writes,

" The key issue is how the liberal state copes with those who reject its ideological framework. It is fashionable today to speak of being open to the "Other". But what if the Other detests your openness as much as it does your lapdancing clubs?"

And he finds much to moan about with the paragons of rationalism and free-thinking radicals:

"If the test of liberalism is how it confronts its illiberal adversaries, some of the liberal intelligentsia seem to have fallen at the first hurdle. Writers such as Martin Amis and Hitchens do not just want to lock terrorists away. They also tout a brand of western cultural supremacism. Dawkins strongly opposed the invasion of Iraq, but preaches a self-satisfied, old-fashioned Whiggish rationalism that can be wielded against a benighted Islam. The philosopher AC Grayling has an equally starry-eyed view of the stately march of Western Progress. The novelist Ian McEwan is a freshly recruited champion of this militant rationalism. Both Hitchens and Salman Rushdie have defended Amis's slurs on Muslims. Whether they like it or not, Dawkins and his ilk have become weapons in the war on terror. Western supremacism has gravitated from the Bible to atheism."

You might think this has nothing to do with what happens in India, because all the people we have who fight for human rights, liberty, free speech and all that fight not for any freedom, but I find it ironic that all our radical, atheist intellectuals are ranked in support of Islam, and vilify the subscribers of Hindutva.

And then, Eagleton writes, 

" For the liberal state to accommodate a diversity of beliefs while having few positive convictions is one of the more admirable achievements of civilization. But such neutrality, once under pressure, can easily slide into superiority, as sitting loose to other people's faith comes to look like rising disdainfully above it. It is then only a short step from superiority to supremacism." 

I think no ideology is more evil or superior than any other. It is how you push it forward, how you peddle it- that is the difference between the liberal and the totalitarian.

"His words are absolute, like grocers' weights."

I got this through languagehat

This poem caused trouble to Mandelstam who was arrested and ultimately killed for daring to mock at Stalin-

Wikipedia

Stalin Epigram We live, but we do not feel the land beneath us, Ten steps away and our words cannot be heard, And when there are just enough people for half a dialogue, Then they remember the Kremlin Highlander. His fat fingers are slimy like slugs, And his words are absolute, like grocers' weights. His cockroach whiskers are laughing, And his boot tops shine. And around him the rabble of narrow-necked chiefs – He plays with the services of half-men. Who warble, or miaow, or moan. He alone pushes and prods. Decree after decree he hammers them out like horseshoes, In the groin, in the forehead, in the brows, or in the eye. When he has an execution it's a special treat, And the Ossetian chest swells.

Russian: Мы живем, под собою не чуя страны...

English translation by A. S. Kline

Twitter can make life meaningful

This is ultimate science: CNN Health reports:

"Adam Wilson posted two messages on Twitter on April 15. The first one, "GO BADGERS," might have been sent by any University of Wisconsin-Madison student cheering for the school team.

His second post, 20 minutes later, was a little more unusual: "SPELLING WITH MY BRAIN."

Wilson, a doctoral student in biomedical engineering, was confirming an announcement he had made two weeks earlier -- his lab had developed a way to post messages on Twitter using electrical impulses generated by thought.

That's right, no keyboards, just a red cap fitted with electrodes that monitor brain activity, hooked up to a computer flashing letters on a screen. Wilson sent the messages by concentrating on the letters he wanted to "type," then focusing on the word "twit" at the bottom of the screen to post the message."

A friend of mine- science-oriented, mathematically-inclined, crossword-solving, chess-piece-wielding, bespectacled, quark-mouthing, schroedinger-fan-- taunts me with, "What is the use of Twitter?"

Here it is: it can be useful to people locked in their brains, people who can't move, can't talk, can send tweets.

Isn't that amazing?

Incidentally, we thought twitter is useful not merely for the unhappily locked-in, it can be used with advantage by the happily brain-dead, too.

So we opened a twitter account for this blog. Here it is- vblong ...

Merry tweets.

The Fire-Bath

I don't know what it is with people here in Tamil Nadu,  we like to take fire-bath.

Yet another man immolated himself, unable to bear the suffering of Tamils in Eeelam/ Sri Lanka.

Considering that not even one man has done that in Sri Lanka, this latest addition to people doing this, I think he is number six or seven, is a bit overwhelming.

What kind of pain makes you do that?

And also, what makes this special to Tamilians- I don't think anyone elsewhere in the world does this as often as we do.

If you read a Tamil newspaper, you are certain to come across one or two news items that say a woman set herself on fire, or that a stove burst, killing the wife, and husband and the two year old child.

These are no accidents, there is nothing psychologically unique about the people of Tamil Nadu (Yesterday, I heard a nari korava- Romany like people- say this, "We all will vote for DMK only. If even one of us vote for any other party, I say this now, and I will say this later- I will immolate myself". Just like that.)

Only, the word that the nari korava youth used was not immolate- he said, thee kulippaen, which means I will bath in fire.

I think this is the issue: the romantic label that describes self-immolation: they are all described as having taken fire bath.

For a potential suicide, just mulling over this, "should I take a fire-bath... how would it feel to take a fire-bath...", would be irresistible.

Any responses?

Deflation- is it a threat or what?

I  don't know much about economics, but we seem to be in for some interesting times...

Prices are falling, and six months from now, things will cost less than what they do today- this is called deflation, and I don't know why, people are talking as if some kind of monster is stalking us.

Telegraph.co.uk  has this header, "Abandon all hope once you enter deflation", and this intro:

"The price of white truffles has fallen 84pc. Fines wines have dropped 65pc. Lobsters are off 52pc. Deflation has reached the City. It has engulfed housing and now threatens to spread through the broader economy, lodging like a virus in the British and global monetary systems."

It offers a mouth-watering solution to defeat deflation: drop bundles of money from helicopters!!!

What has happened is that  Retail Prices Index (RPI) measure of inflation fell to minus 0.4% last month. It has fallen from 0% in February and is the first negative reading since March 1960.  So this calls for screaming headlines, "UK In Deflation For First Time In 50 Years"

-Sky News 

If you are game for more bad news, read things like this:

"Faced with plunging orders, merchants across this recession-wracked country are starting to do something that many of them have never done: cut retail prices.

 "Prices dipped everywhere, from restaurants and fashion retailers to pharmacies and supermarkets in March. Hoping to increase sales, Fernando Maestre reduced prices by a third on the video intercoms his company makes for homes and apartment buildings. But that has not helped, so, along with many other Spanish employers, he is continuing to fire workers..."

-The New York Times

Spain, Luxembourg, Portugal, UK, Japan, US, Ireland, Germany...

The churn seems to be on...

If you are interested in this, you can look up MISH'S Global Economic Trend Analysis  Quite an exceptional blog.

Fake IPL Player

Some genius has got an exceptional idea about posting stuff posing as an insider of KKR. He calls himself Fake IPL Player and dishes out stuff like this:

 "The best thing about being part of this team is that it's never short of any excitement. News is that the team management and the Phoren Babas think that Lordie is Fake IPL. Apparently, he was called into the CEO's room where Dildo, Coachie, and Skipper, politely asked him about it. But, they forget that this is THE LORD OF THE RING they are dealing with. The man who has punched every possible cricket establishment in the face and continues to live by his own rules. Lordie would have nothing of it and walked off in a huff using the choicest words possible. After that, the camp's divided again. Lordie is kind of on his own. Most fringe players think that it's better to align with the New Order."

My guess is that this is a publicity stunt.

But it is a hit like nothing else I have seen.

This blog has 713 followers, and the comment count for the last six posts are 205, 70, 54, 89, 31 and 101.

This is a no frill blog, no gadget, no pictures, just words: I think there is a team of two or three having a great laugh at our expense...

Drinking is good for your purse

I can't believe this:

A research paper by Bethany L.Peters and Edward Stringham comes to this conclusion:

• Drinking leads to higher earnings by increased social capital.
  
• Drinkers earn ten to fourteen percent more than abstainers.
  
• Social drinkers, who frequent bars at least once a month earn 7 percent more than other, non-social drinkers.
  

-Thanks to SpringerLink

Teesta Setelvad: Road to Perdition

Shocking news.

"In a significant development, the SIT led by former CBI director R K Raghavan told the Supreme Court on Monday that the celebrated rights activist cooked up macabre tales of wanton killings.

The SIT also found no truth in the following incidents widely publicised by the NGOs:

• A pregnant Muslim woman Kausar Banu was gangraped by a mob, who then gouged out the foetus with sharp weapons
  
•  Dumping of dead bodies into a well by rioteers at Naroda Patiya
•  Police botching up investigation into the killing of British nationals, who were on a visit to Gujarat and unfortunately got caught in the riots

Rohtagi said: "On a reading of the report, it is clear that horrendous allegations made by the NGOs were false. Stereotyped affidavits were supplied by a social activist and the allegations made in them were found untrue.""

Times of India  

The Indian Express  alls this an unconscionable act:

The news reports of the Supreme Court appointed SIT’s charges against a leading activist, Teesta Setalvad are truly disturbing. She is charged with adding morbidity to the post-Godhra riots in Gujarat by "cooking up macabre tales of killings". One has to see the full SIT report to come to terms with how grievous the charges are. On the face of it the SIT is credible. But by all news accounts Teesta Setalvad has done the cause of justice irreparable harm. And her actions, as described, will undermine the capability of civil society to have any imprimatur of impartiality in investigating riot cases.

Justifiably so.

And there is a blog, Intellibrief, , which goes hammer and tongs at Teesta, and it has good links to back its contentions, among which is an article by Tavleen Singh in The Indian Express.  

Tavleen Singh says, among other things,

"When Zaheera Sheikh charged that Teesta had exploited her for monetary gain I remembered that people often wondered about Communalism Combat’s funding and saw it as an NGO with an agenda. Inquiries with the Charity Commissioner of Maharashtra revealed that they were not listed as an NGO, so I rang Javed Anand and asked why not. He said it was because they were a private limited company. I asked him outright if he would like to answer the charge that Communalism Combat was funded with Saudi money. No insinuation there. The reason I asked was because an editor I know was once asked to edit a magazine on communalism and refused when it was revealed that money for the enterprise was coming from the Gulf."

"I believe also that people like Teesta and Javed get into dangerous territory when they equate Hindu fundamentalism with radical Islam. One of their own headlines speaks for itself ‘Denying a shared past’ (RSS and Tableeghi Jamaat two sides of the same coin). I believe they are as different as Hinduism and Islam."

"Another problem I have with crusaders against ‘‘communalism’’ is that by banging on about secularism and communalism they distract attention from the real issue, which is the justice system. The only way to stop hate crimes is severe punishment for those who commit them. It is about justice never being done and not about that uniquely Indian, and much used, word, communalism."

"Politicians have long used secularism and communalism to distract attention from their inability to solve our real problems. But it is much easier to stir up religious and ethnic passions than to provide a billion people with drinking water, electricity, jobs and housing. Isn’t that what Modi did in Gujarat? "

Teesta is a  2005 Padma Shri awardee, we cannot comment on that.

It is sad to see that righteous indignation has degraded a person who had the courage to engage herself in moral issues, to this state of deceit and hyperbole, recklessly inciting communal hatred:

As Nietszche, that modern day prince of aphorists put it, "Battle not with monsters, lest ye become a monster, and if you gaze into the abyss, the abyss gazes also into you."

Teesta Setelvad is a cautionary tale for all us: Get off your moral high horse as quick as you can, don't enjoy the ride- you don't know where you will end up.

The Deadly Laughter

"There was once a woman who never smiled. Her name was Bao Si and she was a concubine to a king of the Zhou dynasty, which flourished in China after 1000 BCE. The king wanted so much to see her smile that he scoured the kingdom for entertainers and performing animals; not a flicker of amusement crossed her face. Then one day a bonfire was ignited, a signal of emergency. Troops poured into the capital in battle array, only to be stopped short and told that the fire had been lit by accident. At this Bao Si smiled; in fact, she began to laugh. Keen to repeat his success, the king had bonfires lit over and over again. His troops stopped paying attention to the signals; so when the invaders came, the king was driven out, and the dynasty was at an end."

-Hilary Mantel, Guardian

Dickens meets Kafka

Circumlocution Office- Containing the whole Science of Government

The Circumlocution Office was (as everybody knows without being told) the most important Department under Government.  No public business of any kind could possibly be done at any time without the acquiescence of the Circumlocution Office.  Its finger was in the largest public pie, and in the smallest public tart.  It was equally impossible to do the plainest right and to undo the plainest wrong without the express authority of the Circumlocution Office.  If another Gunpowder Plot had been discovered half an hour before the lighting of the match, nobody would have been justified in saving the parliament until there had been half a score of boards, half a bushel of minutes, several sacks of official memoranda, and a family-vault full of ungrammatical correspondence, on the part of the Circumlocution Office.

This glorious establishment had been early in the field, when the one sublime principle involving the difficult art of governing a country, was first distinctly revealed to statesmen.  It had been foremost to study that bright revelation and to carry its shining influence through the whole of the official proceedings.  Whatever was required to be done, the Circumlocution Office was beforehand with all the public departments in the art of perceiving--HOW NOT TO DO IT.

Through this delicate perception, through the tact with which it invariably seized it, and through the genius with which it always acted on it, the Circumlocution Office had risen to overtop all the public departments; and the public condition had risen to be--what it was.

It is true that How not to do it was the great study and object of all public departments and professional politicians all round the Circumlocution Office.  It is true that every new premier and every new government, coming in because they had upheld a certain thing as necessary to be done, were no sooner come in than they applied their utmost faculties to discovering How not to do it.  It is true that from the moment when a general election was over, every returned man who had been raving on hustings because it hadn't been done, and who had been asking the friends of the honourable gentleman in the opposite interest on pain of impeachment to tell him why it hadn't been done, and who had been asserting that it must be done, and who had been pledging himself that it should be done, began to devise, How it was not to be done.  It is true that the debates of both Houses of Parliament the whole session through, uniformly tended to the protracted deliberation, How not to do it. It is true that the royal speech at the opening of such session virtually said, My lords and gentlemen, you have a considerable stroke of work to do, and you will please to retire to your respective chambers, and discuss, How not to do it.  It is true that the royal speech, at the close of such session, virtually said, My lords and gentlemen, you have through several laborious months been considering with great loyalty and patriotism, How not to do it, and you have found out; and with the blessing of Providence upon the harvest (natural, not political), I now dismiss you.  All this is true, but the Circumlocution Office went beyond it.

Because the Circumlocution Office went on mechanically, every day, keeping this wonderful, all-sufficient wheel of statesmanship, How not to do it, in motion.  Because the Circumlocution Office was down upon any ill-advised public servant who was going to do it, or who appeared to be by any surprising accident in remote danger of doing it, with a minute, and a memorandum, and a letter of instructions that extinguished him.  It was this spirit of national efficiency in the Circumlocution Office that had gradually led to its having something to do with everything.  Mechanicians, natural philosophers, soldiers, sailors, petitioners, memorialists, people with grievances, people who wanted to prevent grievances, people who wanted to redress grievances, jobbing people, jobbed people, people who couldn't get rewarded for merit, and people who couldn't get punished for demerit, were all indiscriminately tucked up under the foolscap paper of the Circumlocution Office.

Numbers of people were lost in the Circumlocution Office. Unfortunates with wrongs, or with projects for the general welfare (and they had better have had wrongs at first, than have taken that bitter English recipe for certainly getting them), who in slow lapse of time and agony had passed safely through other public departments; who, according to rule, had been bullied in this, over-reached by that, and evaded by the other; got referred at last to the Circumlocution Office, and never reappeared in the light of day.  Boards sat upon them, secretaries minuted upon them, commissioners gabbled about them, clerks registered, entered, checked, and ticked them off, and they melted away.  In short, all the business of the country went through the Circumlocution Office, except the business that never came out of it; and its name was Legion.

Sometimes, angry spirits attacked the Circumlocution Office. Sometimes, parliamentary questions were asked about it, and even parliamentary motions made or threatened about it by demagogues so low and ignorant as to hold that the real recipe of government was, How to do it.  Then would the noble lord, or right honourable gentleman, in whose department it was to defend the Circumlocution Office, put an orange in his pocket, and make a regular field-day of the occasion.  Then would he come down to that house with a slap upon the table, and meet the honourable gentleman foot to foot. Then would he be there to tell that honourable gentleman that the Circumlocution Office not only was blameless in this matter, but was commendable in this matter, was extollable to the skies in this matter.  Then would he be there to tell that honourable gentleman that, although the Circumlocution Office was invariably right and wholly right, it never was so right as in this matter.  Then would he be there to tell that honourable gentleman that it would have been more to his honour, more to his credit, more to his good taste, more to his good sense, more to half the dictionary of commonplaces, if he had left the Circumlocution Office alone, and never approached this matter.  Then would he keep one eye upon a coach or crammer from the Circumlocution Office sitting below the bar, and smash the honourable gentleman with the Circumlocution Office account of this matter.  And although one of two things always happened; namely, either that the Circumlocution Office had nothing to say and said it, or that it had something to say of which the noble lord, or right honourable gentleman, blundered one half and forgot the other; the Circumlocution Office was always voted immaculate by an accommodating majority.

(Little Dorrit, Chapter 10, Charles Dickens) at Read Print 

I also found Cirumlocution Office , the blog of Tite Barnacle Esq.- "The Circumlocution Office has been procrastinating on behalf of the public sector for over 160 years. These pages reflect the thoughts of Tite Barnacle Esq., Chairman of the Board of Circumlocution." True to form, Tite made his last post on August 10, 2006 and has since gone circumlocuting.

And here is Andy Whitman , offering an insider view of the circumlocution office, in this instance, State of Ohio.

"I once spent six months redesigning the State of Ohio web site that is used to file unemployment claims. Fittingly, the State of Ohio used none of my suggested improvements, because obfuscation and consternation are valued more highly than clarity and ease of use. God knows that if the average Jobless Joe could actually navigate the site, then even more unemployed people might file for unemployment compensation, and we can't have that.

"Naturally enough, we start our tour of Bureaucratic Hell with the Login Screen (hereafter abbreviated as OH6423918O&C, OH for Ohio, 6423918 because random numbers are good, and O&C for Obfuscation and Consternation). Here the Blissfully Naive User (hereafter BNU), still actually expecting to receive money for his efforts, is encouraged to use either an existing login or create a new login. "Ah," the BNU thinks. "I'm new to this, so I'll create a new login." Already the faceless bureaucrats are snickering up their sleeves. After selecting "Create a new login" the BNU is instructed to enter a login ID and a PIN. And here's where the real fun starts...."

It gets better. Read on.

Quotes

Experience comprises illusions lost, rather than wisdom gained.

- Joseph Roux

Shameless

(Reading "The Cult of the Amateur" by Andrew Keen.

Quote: "We are blogging with monkey like shamelessness about our private lives, our sex lives, our dream lives, our lack of lives, our Second Lives")

Yesterday and today, and much of the day before yesterday, I spent my time moping around, indulging in unending monologues directed at people who had made my life a mess. Life  is not good, actually, whatever the impression I give. When I feel in the right mood, I can find scores of people who have failed me, betrayed me, misused my trust.

But as Homer Simpson (my new guru) says, "It takes two to lie. One to lie and one to listen."

This might sound uncaring and callous if you take pride in being a victim, but you have some responsibility in getting yourself screwed. 

I would love to blog about my other lives, but alas, even if I can excavate shamelessness from the depths of my subconscious or unconscious or whatever, there is nothing interesting about it.

That is another sad fact.

Not only you are screwed, you realise you are a bore- there is nothing interesting in your life, in what you do, in what you are.

For this, there is no one to blame but yourself: you are the one that screwed up.

Quote

"What are the stars but points in the body of God where we insert the healing needles of our terror and longing?"

- Thomas Pynchon, Gravity's Rainbow

Guidelines for the establishment of a dictatorship

I don't know whether you want to be a dictator or what, may be at least you would like to bring your children into line. Or may be, you want not to be dictated to.

Well, here are the ten points culled from Philip Zimbardo's article 'The situational sources of evil" ,  which discusses the findings of the famous Milgram experiment :

This might help you see how you are made to do what you don't want to, or help you make people do what they don't want to:

1. Get some kind of contract, preferable with some legalese.

2. Give them roles to play.

3. Tell them what the rules are: you can use them as you want to, you can change them as it suits you, but people will accept that rules are rules and do whatever you say.

4. Use attractive language: don't say, "we are going to hurt him," instead, "we are helping him" feels better. No matter what horrible act you want done, give it a positive spin.

5. Give them the feeling that they can pass the buck- if they are not responsible for what they do, there is nothing they won't do.

6. Start with a small, more or less symbolic act. If you can make someone steal a chocolate from a child, he will bust a bank for you sooner or later. 

7. Start small, go in small, gradual, incremental steps. If you are going to corrupt someone, you have to be patient at it so that he does not realise the enormity of the situation.

8. Don't let them get out easily- make it tough for them to quit: but allow them to moan about it: allow free speech, insist on obedience. This helps their conscience sleep.

9. I don't know what you plan to do, but be a nice guy at the start, and slowly unfang yourself. Though it gets worse, people will go along with you, because it is just that small bit badder than what they did yesterday. And you are just that small bit bad from what you were yesterday.

10. Give them a cover-story. They are not doing just what you say- they are in a big project- revolution, rebellion, research, resistance, whatever. They have to believe they are doing in a just cause.

Good luck with your slaves.

Isreali Bulls on Commie Cows

What we Indians are best at is in managing the contradictions: even Comrades who take inspiration from all-or-nothing models of politics and philosophies are not exempt from this: in fact, they are better than others at this Indian speciality of managing the contradictions:

I laughed at varnam excoriating our Keralite comrades for putting up posters of Saddam Hussein and making noise about our ties with Israel, here: 

"While the party is against Israel, one of their ministers, C. Divakaran of CPI, wanted to import Israeli bulls to impregnate Malayali cows; the Kerala bulls were only good for calling hartals. The goal of this exercise was to combine business and pleasure - for the Israeli bulls. The Israeli bulls were expected to do their magic and many mooos later milk production was to increase by 20%. Even the farmers unions were enthusiastic about this: they identified the hill station of Mattupetti for the bulls to sing songs."

You have to laugh at this.

Daniel Kish: Prometheus of the Blind

Daniel Kish is a visually challenged person, and he uses echolocation to navigate around the world.

This is how it started:

"I am 6 years old and it's my first day at school. The bell rings for recess and all my classmates run gleefully away. But unlike them I cannot see. At least, not with my eyes. Instead, I click my tongue, listening for echoes from the wall to my left. I walk with my hands slightly outstretched to keep me from running into chairs that may have been left askew. I hear kids laughing and shouting through the open door, and by clicking I also hear the presence of the sides of the doorway in front of me. I go through it to the playground for the first time.

"After a few steps, I stop to listen. I stand on a crack in the pavement that runs parallel to the building behind me. I click my tongue loudly and turn my head from side to side. The way is open, shot through with scurrying voices, balls bouncing and shoes scampering to and fro. What is around me? How do I get there? How do I get back?

Clicking my tongue quickly and scanning with my head, I move cautiously forward, catching fleeting images of bodies darting hither and thither. I follow spaces that are clear, avoiding clusters of bodies, keeping my distance from bouncing balls. I am not afraid - to me, this is a puzzle. I turn my head and click over my shoulder. I can still hear the wall of the building. As long as I can hear that, I can find my way back."

- New Scientist 

And what does he see?

"For example, I perceive a parked car as a large object that starts out low at one end, rises in the middle and drops off again. The difference in the height and slope pitch at either end helps me identify the front from the back end; typically, the front will be lower, with a more gradual slope up to the roof."

- New Scientist 

It seems miraculous to us, but he says this could be an inbuilt skill, and people are not trained enough to make use of it.

Dr Kish has now started World Access for the Blind ,  a non-profit organisation that teaches people to see the way he does- he calls his method FlashSonar.

You must read the New Scientist article. It is astonishing.

Here is a link to YouTube where Dr. Kish explains echolocation.

Dr Kish goes hiking, camping, mountain-biking and more- things we dare not do.

He says,

"The best piece of advice I would pass on is ...

Make a point of regularly challenging what you think you know. Most of it is based on assumptions that have been programmed into us by a society which doesn't necessarily have our best interests at heart. If we challenge what we think we know, there is a chance we can break out of that and begin to touch what is real.",

in a BBC interview.

If Braille opened the books for the blind, Dr.Kish's FlashSonar could open the whole wide world for them. He could be the Prometheus of the Blind.

Now, here is a man who can inspire us to believe that nothing is impossible- for the right person.

PEN condemns publication of Karadzic poems |

We are no strangers to poet-princes, horrible princes doubling up as abominable poets, but it looks like the West has a long way to go in tolerating hypocrisy.

guardian.co.uk reports that PEN- the organisation that fights for free speech worldwide- has condemned the publication of a book of poetry by Radovan Karadzic.

I don't admire the man or this poem, 

SARAJEVO

I hear the misfortune threads

Turned into a beetle as if an old singer

Is crushed by the silence and turned into a voice.

The town burns like a piece of incense

In the smoke rumbles our consciousness.

Empty suits slide down the town.

Red is the stone that dies, built into a house. The Plague!

Calm. The army of armed poplar tree

Marches up the hill, within itself. 

The aggressor air storms our souls

and once you are human and then you are an air creature.

I know that all of these are the preparations of the scream:

What does the black metal in the garage have for us?

Look how fear turned into a spider

Looking for the answer at his computer.

(Thanks to BBC ),

but surely even bad men are not to be protected from airing their bad poetry?

Omniscience

Is there anything you don't want to know?

Seems people can get crazy for anything.

Corey Menscher designed something that helped his unborn baby tweet.

Here is it: Kickbee on Gizmodo:

"The Kickbee is a wearable device made of elastic and a whole mess of sensors and electronics. Piezo sensors detect the baby's movement and transmit electrical charges to an Arduino Mini microcontroller, which in turn transmits the data to a Java application via Bluetooth. This Java app deciphers the meaning of the signals, and posts on Twitter when it determines the baby has kicked."

Here are some samplers:

I kicked Mommy at 10:56PM on Mon, Dec 22!

7:56 PM Dec 22nd, 2008 from the womb

I kicked Mommy at 09:39PM on Mon, Dec 22!

6:39 PM Dec 22nd, 2008 from the womb

I kicked Mommy at 09:36PM on Mon, Dec 22!

6:36 PM Dec 22nd, 2008 from the womb

This twitter has 592 followers.

Okay, this you can understand. The father and uncles and aunts possible love to follow what the child is doing...

But look at what  Randy Sarafan is upto-

Here is it: OfficeChair on Gizmodo: 

"The setup is surprisingly complex: A natural gas sensor does the sniffing; an Arduino does the thinking; an Squidbee wireless module does the communicating; Twitter does the sharing."

Here are some samplers of what OfficeChair has to say:

Someone please disassemble me

about 15 hours ago from web

I wish I were some other chair

about 16 hours ago from web

He farted right on me again

about 18 hours ago from web

allow me to repeat... ppppfffffffffftttttttttttt

about 19 hours ago from web

Ugh. That was a gross one

about 19 hours ago from web

It wasn't always like this.

about 19 hours ago from web

Someone please disassemble me

about 19 hours ago from web

Pfffffffffft

2:45 PM Apr 13th from web

OfficeChair has 2,444 followers.

What is it you want to follow?

Kings of Crekettes

Seeing where the English Cricket team is today, it looks likely that they are in for more humilitation.

First of all there was this discovery by Paul Campbell, an Australian, Australian, that Cricket did not originate in England.

He had uncovered a poem written by John Skelton in 1533, "The Image of Ipocrisie", where we find, 

"O lorde of Ipocrites

Nowe shut vpp your wickettes

And clape to your clickettes!

A! Farewell, kings of crekettes."

These lines are supposed to be addressed to the Flemish weavers who had settled in southern and eastern England. We have the word of an English poet that the Flemish are the "Kings of crekettes".  Well... well...

"I’m pleased but not totally surprised," says Charles Brommaert from local league Cricket Vlaanderen. "If you look closely at some of Pieter Brueghel’s paintings you see his characters playing a game that could have been cricket. This discovery will certainly put the sport in a new light in Flanders and will help to convince the Flemish that cricket isn’t an alien sport."

-Flanders Today 

Well, if that did not take them down a peg or two, here is the real one:

The Olympic Silver Medallist in Cricket, France has challenged England for a rematch. The last time they met in the finals of the Paris Olympics in the year 1900, England had defeated France by 158 runs.

Seems that they have been following the fortunes of this English team, "Now the French national cricket association, France Cricket, has challenged England to a return game in Lille just before the London Olympics in 2012," reports Telegraph.co.uk  

As if things are not bad enough...

Repentant Burglars

Yahoo! News:

A burglar in New Hampshire was caught red-handed with his loot.

He said sorry and put down the jewelry boxes and electronic items and walked away, refusing to be detained with some engaging conversations with the home-owner.

www.portsmouth.co.uk:

A Burglar who broke into a home with his accomplices and made away with jewellery and mementos of a young woman who had died in a car crash, felt contrite.

He came back the next day to return the personal journal and all the items that had belonged to the young woman.

He was caught on CCTV, but I don't know what happened to him. 

kgw.com:

Dale Alon Barton, 51, should have been tired of burgling.

When he loaded his stash from a home in Damascas onto a pickup truck, he should have been wondering what he was doing there.

The homeowner, a woman, caught him, and Barton wept, and apologised.

Acting on her advice to go to church and get his life together, he went to her church and returned the jewelry he had taken away. He got introduced to her pastor. I don't know whether he knew what he was letting himself in for.

Last heard of, he was due for arraignment.

Lancashire Evening Post:

"Sorry for taking this stuff- very, very drunk and stupid," said the burglar as he returned the computer games and DVDs he had hauled away from a home at Norwich.

The police are searching for this man, "The burglar also took some food from the fridge- but that wasn't returned," a spokesman is reported to have said.

The New York Times:

In Montreal, an old man visited the Central Police Office and startled the Sergeant on duty  by confessing that he had been a burglar in the past, and now that he has repented, he should be arrested and punished.

The man was told to give himself up to the High Constable at the Police Court.

The New York Times reports on what happened next:

"The poor old fellow walked slowly over to the Court House, glanced apprehensively into its gloomy interior, heaved a sigh, shrugged his shoulders, and walked away in the opposite direction."

Whether the police gave him a chase or not I don't know, for this was in 26.6.1892.

We All Belong Here

Want to know what this is?


This is our blog in Hieroglyphics.


Lovely, right?


Pictures speak better than words.


I want to thank http://www.upennmuseum.com/cgi-bin/hieroglyphsreal.cgi/hieroglyphsreal.cgi for this.

Hope you go there.

Life in Stereo Pics

You MUST MUST MUST MUST check this:

The Bar Mitzvah

Just click on a picture.

Astounding!

Know Yourself

Want to sign up for Bedpost?

Think of the possibilities...

Bedpost is a personal web application that will give you some insight into your sex life.

For your eyes only, Bedpost offers zero social networking features other than partner logins (coming soon).

Simply log in after every time you have sex and fill out a few simple fields.

Is there Any Reason We Should Vote- or Not?

Kartikey Sehgal at The Young India makes a case for not voting- here, and here. He does not actually say you should not vote, it is more like he says, there is no need for you to listen to people who say you HAVE to vote.

Now, we can argue back and forth about this, but it gets interesting if you see whether you can approach it from some other way. So I did some searching.

The first link I want you to check out is Less Wrong. It is a rationalist group, but not vicious rationalists, it is a great group of honest people discussing honest opinions- and the comments vouch for their intelligence.

In that particular post, I learnt of someone called Aumann. Now, Aumann is the guy who said, if two people know one another, and know what they each are thinking, it is impossible for them to agree to disagree. This is called Aumann's Agreement Theorem. It has nothing to do with the issue here, but I just found it interesting, so I put it in.

Speaking of that Less Wrong post, it makes these points:

People would often get better answers by taking other people's answers more into account.

So take the tug-of-war analogy:  "There's a knot tied in the middle of the rope, and you have some line in the sand where you believe the knot should end up.  But you don't stop pulling when the knot reaches that point; you keep pulling, because the other team is still pulling." What this means is you don't think whether your vote counts: you vote because the people on the other side will vote.

Phil Goetz, who made that post says, "Tug-of-war voting makes intuitive sense if you believe that an irrational extremist is usually more politically effective than a reasonable person is."

Sure, the reasonable person will think about the odds and sit out at home; the irrational extremist will go and vote ten times to make sure he gets the odds right.

Now, Goetz tell you how to apply Aumann's theorem to voting: you start by identifying which side has more idiots, and vote the other side. So he says a non-idiot population can eventually work out a good solution to any particular problem.  By voting, your enrol yourself to the non-idiot population and cancel out an idiot.

Now the other interesting article I read is by Presh Talwalkar, who studied Economics and Mathematics at Stanford, and now speaks about Personal Finance. 

He applies Game Theories to voting at Mind Your Decisions.

Now, his website carries an advertisement which says, "Vote for Advani," and I hope this is not Presh Talwar's considered opinion (Not that I say don't vote for Advani, it is just that in a page that discusses "Game Theory and Voting", that particular advertisement looks incongruous). The essential points are, I don't understand them entirely, but here is what I could grasp:

He starts with, "we can level the playing field by telling people about voting theory...In that spirit, I share some ideas from voting and game theory."

He asks whether there is a pivotal vote, and answers, no, voting doesn't pay ("It does pay," if you know what I mean, but you and I won't get the money. They know which way we will go). Your chances of individually making a difference is nearer to zero than one.

But collectively you can be a part of a voting bloc. You gain power through unity, and you can make a difference. Your group doesn't even have to be a major player. Even if you are part of a small group, you can make a decisive impact by acting as a bloc.

Talwalkar discusses this in a brilliant article, Voting Power in Israeli Judge Selection and the Shapley-Shubik Index. It is too long to discuss, but the conclusion he makes are these:

"Here is what you can take away when creating your own voting structures:

• Vote size does not equate to voting power
  
• Smaller voters can still hold great power
  
• Voters can increase power through voting blocs
  
• Raising a majority might not diminish the power of a voter or bloc."
  

It is well argued, though it uses maths, but in general, you can make sense of it.

I am not saying you should vote, or that you should not vote, only that you need not feel so hopeless. Just talk to people, and be a group, gather some momentum, pray to God, and hope you can get a snowball effect going.

You might be the group that votes this way or that, or a group that says no way we are going to vote- but don't think you can't make a difference either way, just by talking to people, and getting them to work cohesively, YOU make the difference.

Google Brain Search Beta

I always say this:

GOOGLE IS GOD.

Check this:

http://www.google.com/mobile/m/brainsearch/intro_android.html

This is what it says:

New! Google Brain Search uses CADIE technology to index your brain, thus improving the speed and accuracy of memory retrieval.

Features:

• Faster and more accurate memory retrieval
• Brainwave detection: put the phone to your forehead and think your query
• Eliminate "tip of the tongue" syndrome

Instructions:

1. Put phone to forehead for brain indexing.
2. Think your query.

*Please do not use Brain Search on others without their permission.

 There is a link there, which says, "Try This". I clicked it and Google certified that I have a brain: what amazes me is, it took 7 seconds to index my brain... 

I don't know what's the problem, because after indexing, Google read the question in my mind, "Wow, cute guy. Should I go up to him? "

 and came up with this answer,

 "Yeah, and maybe dance a little jig and strew flower petals in his path while you're at it? Seriously, a little hard-to-get goes a long way."

Oh my God. What did Google find in my brain?