I got the following link in a posting on India-gii (hat tip: Iqbal) on the Islamic terror in Mumbai past November. Click on this link at Atlas Shrugs only if you have a strong stomach because the pictures are disturbing. The title of the post — “THIS IS A STRUGGLE BETWEEN ISLAM AND UNBELIEVERS, WE ARE THE PEOPLE GOD HAS CHOSEN TO DEFEND AGAINST THE UNBELIEVERS” — is as stark as the images of the dead bodies of the innocents murdered in accordance with the religious duty of jihad.
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Too often I see this quoted.
“Per laws of aerodynamics, the “bumble bee” cannot fly. Its body weight is not the right proportion to its wingspan. Ignoring these laws of science, the bee flies anyway.”
It is one of those seemingly profound statements that is actually devoid of the slightest shred of sense or meaning.
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I am pretty convinced that one can learn practically all subjects from easily accessible content available for free on the web. This summer I am teaching a development economics course at University of California at Berkeley, Econ171. I will use the web extensively.
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Marvin Minsky of MIT is a cognitive scientist and an artificial intelligence pioneer. I recently came acros his 1981 paper on “Music, Mind, and Meaning” which I found informative and profoundly thought provoking. Here’s an extended quote from it, for the record.
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A couple of links. One video lecture by David Weinberger. One excellent article by James Fallows.
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R Vaidyanathan has an interesting piece in expressbuzz cryptically titled “The Lost Horizon of the Emperors.” He takes a very big picture view of what’s happening around the world. Big picture painted rather randomly. He starts off with USA’s decline and quickly moves to India and Pakistan. Regarding the decline of the US, he write, “US is going the banana republic way what with a national debt of more than $10 trillion, which is more than 80 per cent of its national income.”
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My friend Salil Naik asked me to write a letter to his daughter on her birthday. Hence you can say that this is a commissioned post. So in the style of “A Letter to Abhishek“, I offer this letter to Aalisha.
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It is hard to believe that anyone can be caught with $134 billion worth of bonds in a false-bottomed suitcase. I did a search for “134 billion” and even Google couldn’t believe it.
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Krugman is always good for a nice read. His June 14th NT Times op-ed, “Stay the Course“, does not disappoint. He writes, “For this is the third time in history that a major economy has found itself in a liquidity trap, a situation in which interest-rate cuts, the conventional way to perk up the economy, have reached their limit. When this happens, unconventional measures are the only way to fight recession.”
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My friend Rajan Parrikar has a photo blog which you must visit. Rajan’s photography site has breathtaking pictures of Goa, India, and California. Awesome. I particularly like his Death Valley National Park pictures.
As a comment on YouTube puts it, “What a fantastic work of art and horology.”
“What exactly is ‘Hindu nationalist’ about the BJP?” asks T V R Shenoy in an excellent piece in rediff.com news.
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Competition on the supply side is good if you are on the demand side, and competition on the demand side is good if you are on the supply side. Otherwise competition is evil. That is why governments of third world countries limit competition on the supply side — the better to extract rents from the economy.
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Some good stuff gets buried in all the trivia. Here are a couple of posts from December 2007 that I feel makes a bit of sense.
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Hi from Edison NJ. Got here from Mumbai on Wednesday morning at 4:40 AM, nearly an hour ahead of schedule. Too damn early. I suppose if the flight was arriving at 11 PM, then it would have arrived an hour late. Natural perversity of the universe. OK, I am done with the complaining bits. Now for the good bits.
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It seems to be the season for focusing on education. I will do the conjecturing below but first here are a bunch of articles on what’s going on in education in India.
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Just a quick personal note. I will be in Mumbai today and tomorrow I will leave for the US. I will be on the east coast for a few days and then on to SF bay area. Bye for now.
India is very widely celebrated as having a democratic government. India’s government can also be accurately described another way. A kakistocracy is defined as government by the most corrupt and the least principled. As India’s case clearly demonstrates, the two are not mutually incompatible.
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I didn’t know who Rajeev Motwani was. It’s only when I heard of his passing from my friend Rajan in the San Francisco bay that I got to know of him. Rajan wrote, “To me, he is important because he was one of the few truly great Indians in the Valley (as opposed to the many Indians in the Valley who think they are great).”
Here’s Google founder Sergey Brin’s tribute to Rajeev Motwani.
