Apparently, to be a successful “public intellectual” one of the requirements is that one must invent a catchy tag line. The tag line must have emotional appeal through a reference to some deeply held belief or social conditioning. An example of one such is the title of the book by Thomas Friedman “The World is Flat” which attempts to upset your view of the world that it is round. Another example is “the fortune at the bottom of the pyramid” which the obvious connection to the phrase “the pot of …

I have never had the pleasure of meeting Richard Feynman (May 11, 1918 – February 15, 1988). Reading the Wiki entry on Feynman is both humbling and delightful. What a prodigious brain, what a sensibility, what delight he takes in being alive and learning. But to get a better understanding of who he is, you need to watch an interview of his The Pleasure of Finding Out Things. It is 50 minutes long. I have spent too many hours watching that video. Here was a kindred spirit, I …

[Previous Posts on "Free Energy": Part 1, Part 2]
Keith Hudson, the author of the outstanding Daily Wisdom postings, recently commented on the matter of free energy. With his permission, I am sharing his post with the readers of this blog.

OM Shri Ganeshaya Namaha!

Of the 330 million gods and goddesses of the Hindu pantheon, my favorite is Ganesh, the Lord of the Ganas. He is Vighneshwara, the Remover of Obstacles. The story goes that Shiva, the great god, had challenged Ganesh and his brother Kartik to go around the universe three times. While Kartik took off in great haste on his peacock to complete the task, Ganesh walked his portly figure around his parents, Shiva and Parvati, and declared that he had accomplished the task as his parents were the …

Magical thinking and wishful thinking are fraternal, if not identical, twins. Both are cognitive traps that our emotional selves stumble into. Both are characteristically childlike. While childlike behavior and mentation is adorable in small children, when adults do it, it is childish and not cute. There is no law which says that adults cannot, or should not, behave childishly if they so wish. But they should do so in the privacy of their own homes, and I suspect most people do behave childishly occasionally in private with their significant others. …

Free National Geographic Podcasts. Go have fun and perhaps waste some time.

This is getting curiouser and curiouser. First there was “free textbooks.” Now there is free energy. Scientific American: Irish tech firm throws down “free energy” gauntlet
Perpetual motion machines of the first, second, and third kind? Not going to happen.

Scientific American podcasts. Free. Haven’t yet checked them out — so cannot say whether they are good or not.

It is a sad day for Hindustani classical music fans. Dr Bismillah Khan passed away today. May his soul rest in peace.
His sublime music will, of course, live on. I cannot express the hours of joy his rendition of Bhupali Todi has given me.

A Tentative Taxonomy of Problems
Compared to all other life forms in the known universe, our species can be characterized as the one that consciously solves problems. There appears to be – at least in some specimens of our kind – an inherent drive to not only solve problems but in fact to seek out new problems to be solved. Of course, some would argue that many of our attempts to solve problems in turn create new problems. That in itself is probably not such a bad thing because otherwise we …

Dweep’s comment on Science — Part 2 is worth responding to in a separate post because of the good points he makes. He writes:

The time has come for me to bring to a close the matter of Sri Sri Ravi Shankar and his Art of Living as discussed on this blog. It began with a simple enough request some years ago from my brother who asked me to check out AOL since he was (and continues to be) a big admirer of SSRS. I checked out the site and I realized that I had indeed heard of SSRS before. It was at an Indian classical music concert in San Francisco. The concert was …

The post , a quote from Marvin Harris’s book, entitled Science, provoked a few comments that require responding to.
Karthik Rao Cavale objected to the apparent dismissal of Indian scientific achievements of the past by the claim by Harris that “it was in western Europe that the distinctive rules of the scientific method were first codified, given conscious expression, and systematically applied to the entire range of inorganic, organic, and cultural phenomena.”

AOL refers not to “America On Line” but rather to “The Art of Living” as taught by Sri Sri Ravi Shankar (SSRS, in short).
A simple straight forward piece I wrote some years ago (Is Sri Sri Ravi Shankar a Con Man?) does get a lot of attention. I get emails from people, some of which is the average “I agree with you” type. Then there is the “How dare you even suggest that SSRS is not god almighty himself and that the sun does not shine out of his …

A particular instance of the general statement that there is no such thing as a free lunch is “There is no such thing as a free textbook.”
This line of thinking was provoked by an article titled “Ads Coming to Textbooks” (thanks to Rohit Malik) which reports that a publisher, Freeload Press, is trying to break into the $6 billion annual US textbook market by offering free PDF downloads of books which have embedded ads.
Ads supported free textbooks make sense only in specific instances and these do not include the …

I like to read. Actually, I like to read what makes me think. And that makes me a slow reader. On top of that, I am lazy. So it is a rare book that I read cover to cover. But when I do read a book completely, I usually read it all over again. If it is worth reading once, I believe, it is worth reading a second time. One such book is by a favorite author of mine — Marvin Harris. He is an anthropologist. I first read him …

Markets Work
Economists have a mantra which says “Markets work” and mumble under their breath the disclaimer “subject to a bunch of conditions, of course.” By “markets work” they mean that when a whole lot of buyers and sellers get together and buy and sell stuff, magic happens through Adam Smith’s invisible hand, and everyone ends up better off than they were before the trades took place. Each market participant has to be concerned with only his objective (maximizing utility in the case of consumers, and maximizing profits in the case …

Voltaire’s dictum that the perfect is the enemy of the good is fascinating because of the delicious ambiguity embedded in it. The ambiguity arises from what one identifies as the “perfect” and the “good.” If perfection is by definition unattainable, and the good is defined as an attainable “optimal” (again defined suitably), then it is by definition true that an attempt to obtain an unattainable perfection can be a hindrance to an attainable good. Then the only disagreement remaining pertains to what is considered the “perfect” and what the “good.”
Since …