big picture

If you are fan of photography, I am sure you already subscribed to the Big Picture web site. This recent installment of Yann Arthus-Bertrand’s photographs are just breath taking.

memory problem

A real conversation.

He : “You make me happy.”

She : “Don’t ever forget that. OK ?”

He : “If you can make me happy all the time, I don’t have to ‘remember’ that. You know ?”

She : ”Ah! Smart Ass!”

bhOndOO

You know, there are some days, when some one sends you a link to a blog, and you spend the whole day reading all the posts since its inception – spending 8 hours straight. Well, today is one such day for me and the blog is bhOndOO’s life at IISc. bhOndOO is an research student “earning” his Ph.D in IISc, Bangalore, and the blog is all about his life. The posts – coffee with shami, mobile in the lab and jn tata and unix are just three of the many hilarious anectodes. Go, Read it.

gender differences and culture

This is something I wrote to a friend just two weeks ago.

It is quite a common a site in India, especially in South India, to be hugging and holding hands in groups of men. The symbols, that would probably be indication of a Gay group in USA or Europe, is very common in India. I think, when we hang out together, it was no different from how girls hang out together. I mean, if a group of girls hug and hold hands togeather, it would NOT look lesbian in any part of the world. But a group of guys somehow become ‘Gay’ in the eyes of a Westernized observer. 

This might also explain some characteristics of Indian Men, that most commonly observed among Gay men – certain likes, dislikes, behaviors. But a majority of them are heterosexual males. This also might explain certain tendencies – how men and women in India tend not be in extreme stereo types, but some where in the middle. In US, I saw these stereotypes very strong – like there is a stark difference between how a heterosexual man should behave; and any sign of a female sense within a man would be considered being ‘gay’ like watching romantic movies or listening melodramatic music. They call these chic movies and chic music. I was really surprised to see that how Men and Women are like from totally different planets there.(in US) And God help you if you are a transvestite living in US. (or for that matter any country in the world).

Here are a few quotes from an article in NY Times about this gender differences.

It looks as if personality differences between men and women are smaller in traditional cultures like India’s or Zimbabwe’s than in the Netherlands or the United States. A husband and a stay-at-home wife in a patriarchal Botswanan clan seem to be more alike than a working couple in Denmark or France. The more Venus and Mars have equal rights and similar jobs, the more their personalities seem to diverge. … The biggest changes recorded by the researchers involve the personalities of men, not women. Men in traditional agricultural societies and poorer countries seem more cautious and anxious, less assertive and less competitive than men in the most progressive and rich countries of Europe and North America.

zotero, a cool firefox plugin

If you do a lot of search, while gathering material for a particular topic, it would be better to do it as if you are writing a research paper on the topic. For that, I recommend this Firefox plugin : Zotero. Its really cool, and works with Flocktoo!

I recommend Flock too!

terminology usage

Often, we come across situation we some terminology is blatantly misused, probably because of mis-understanding of the terminology. But sometimes, we come across creative use of certain terms. I was reading this report, an appending to the Rogers Commission Report on the Space Shuttle Challenger Accident.

In spite of these variations from case to case, officials behaved as if they understood it, giving apparently logical arguments to each other often depending on the “success” of previous flights. For example. in determining if flight 51-L was safe to fly in the face of ring erosion in flight 51-C, it was noted that the erosion depth was only one-third of the radius. It had been noted in an experiment cutting the ring that cutting it as deep as one radius was necessary before the ring failed. Instead of being very concerned that variations of poorly understood conditions might reasonably create a deeper erosion this time, it was asserted, there was “a safety factor of three.” This is a strange use of the engineer’s term ,”safety factor.” If a bridge is built to withstand a certain load without the beams permanently deforming, cracking, or breaking, it may be designed for the materials used to actually stand up under three times the load. This “safety factor” is to allow for uncertain excesses of load, or unknown extra loads, or weaknesses in the material that might have unexpected flaws, etc. If now the expected load comes on to the new bridge and a crack appears in a beam, this is a failure of the design. There was no safety factor at all; even though the bridge did not actually collapse because the crack went only one-third of the way through the beam. The O-rings of the Solid Rocket Boosters were not designed to erode. Erosion was a clue that something was wrong. Erosion was not something from which safety can be inferred.

Feynman calls this “fooling oneself while degrading standards”. While Feynman ends the report by “For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for nature cannot be fooled.”, What were these officials actually fooled by ? I would say, a sense of unbridled optimism.

bengaluru

Last weekend, I was at Bangalore – my first trip. A few thoughts on the way back.

• I was very afraid to ask directions in Tamil, even by accident. Nothing happened really. But, very afraid – yes!
• Every person not earning their livelihood by IT thinks, that, the reason Bangalore “has gone bad” is the IT industry.(Unless, you are talking to a non-IT person with a sound investment in Real Estate). Every IT person either thinks that Bangalore has become better because of IT -or- blames the politicians for lack of better infrastructure. Every politician, by virtue of not being an IT person, blames of-course, the IT industry. So, there it goes – a full circle.
• I found the houses relatively smaller. Probably, because I live in a relatively bigger house in Hyderabad. Are the houses smaller in Bangalore, relatively ? -or- Are the houses relatively bigger in Hyderabad ? My friend thinks they live in smaller houses in Bangalore. Probably, they are inspired by the Japanese. Or They just have the problems of Japan – Too little space with Too much development.
• There is a stark contrast between the citizen classes in the City. For example, the Shopping crowd at MG Road/Brigade Road, consists of the affluent and the pretend-to-be-affluent crowd, where as, shopping crowd around the Majestic Bus station is made of the penny-wise, and the pound-wiser gang. The contrast jumps on your eyes like power-point slides – so quick and ugly. The difference is right at your face(at least my face), and it questioned my urban livelihood and existence…. again!.

My friend asked, if I would be interested to move to Bangalore. Well, I really don’t have any reasons to move there. Also beyond any logical reasons, I neither do have the desire to do any living there. So, it goes.

quotes from elsewhere

A quote a came across while reading the article An American in Chennai over at Rediff – a story about an American, who came to Chennai.

The appalling poverty rattles Paul. The sight of people living, eating and defecating on the streets they call home was gut-wrenching. “I saw a mom, dad and 2 kids sleeping on the street. No one should have to live this way,” he muttered sadly.
…
Paul drifts back to thoughts of the streets of Chennai and shakes his head. “How is it that such smart people can allow this to happen?”

I have thought about this question. I think it is easier for smarter people to be indifferent. Smart people just devise a philosophy on convoluted logic and believe thats how things work. On the other hand, not so smart people stop thinking and do something about it.
Another quote from BBC on an article about India and globalization.

…ask 25-year-old Devika, who works at a call centre in Mumbai, whether her life has been changed for the better because of the free market and she will give you a resounding yes.
…
“I don’t need to depend on my parents for money, I don’t need to depend on a husband for money. I can choose to get married later if I want to. I may not even need to get married. The opportunities that have opened up for me are mind-boggling.”

I wonder if India could become like Japan, where the population is shrinking. I guess, we will soon have the problems of a developed country.

why should anybody learn latin ?

In my last post, I wrote about Sudbury Valley School. I read some essays by Daniel Greenberg about the Sudbury Valley School experience. To illustrate a point, he tells a story about Issac Newton. Here goes the story.

Isaac Newton wrote a book when he was twenty-one, his first real production. It was a new theory of optics. It was a fabulous book. Physicists still read it with joy, and a lot of the ideas that he put into the book are still talked about. But they ran contrary to the accepted theories of optics in his day and, in particular, they ran contrary to the theories that the elders in the English physics establishment held to be sacrosanct. So he was lambasted for being an upstart, for not toeing the line, and he decided to never write another book. “I’m happy. I’m doing my thing. I know what I like.” He had a professorship, so he didn’t have to worry about his income, and he just sat in his place in Cambridge and did his stuff.
Twenty years later the rumor got out that he had solved the problem of gravitation. So a couple physicists who heard about this in London came up and said, “We heard that you solved the problem of gravitation. Is it true?” He said, “Yes, that’s true.” They said, “What is it?” He showed them. He wrote it out, and they were flabbergasted, because they immediately saw that he was right. They said, “Write it.” He said, “I’ve done my writing for my lifetime.” They begged him and begged him to write it, and he finally wrote it in a book called Principia Mathematica, which was written in Latin. The optics book had been written in English. His new book was written in Latin that almost nobody could understand, and all the simple proofs that were easy to read he replaced with obscure proofs that were very difficult to follow.

Hmmm.. So, latin has it uses. That and another use I know is – You can skip almost 75% of the book “Word power Made Easy” by Norman Lewis. That’s the book I was asked to read in my childhood to expand my vocabulary.(I completed almost 60% of the book) Studio Latin, Amigos !

dreams, depression, mumbai, and then hope ?

Sometimes I feel that my body seems to be so limited for the dreams i want to reach for. It looks like if these dreams, I have in me – I am not sure what part of me really  dream the dreams – those dreams might be achieved, if they were not created inside me, my body. It squeezes me in such a pressure inside me – its so depressing sometimes.

Well thats the kind of feeling i have been through for the past three days or so, and was amplified when i read the news about Mumbai bomb blasts. I still couldn’t understand these people. How could terror be some one’s purpose ?. I felt i hit bottom. But just browsing around, I hit the mumbai help blogspot website. And there  is this post on top of everything. Going through some of the posts, I remember these lines from the movie Love Actually. It is the starting line of the movie, and here it goes…

Whenever I get gloomy with the state of the world, I think about the arrivals gate at Heathrow Airport. General opinion’s starting to make out that we live in a world of hatred and greed, but I don’t see that. It seems to me that love is everywhere. Often it’s not particularly dignified or newsworthy, but it’s always there – fathers and sons, mothers and daughters, husbands and wives, boyfriends, girlfriends, old friends. When the planes hit the Twin Towers, as far as I know none of the phone calls from the people on board were messages of hate or revenge – they were all messages of love. If you look for it, I’ve got a sneaky feeling you’ll find that love actually is all around.

Well, may be there is hope. But after reading the news about a possible Pakistan link with the bomb blasts (Source : Rediff.com), then may be there is not. Anyways, I am not sure, if another War to end every other war could solve the problems caused by our economic, social and cultural differences.

Just wanted to write something…