Jon Stewart cracks me up.

The Acorn says that now is the time to drop trade barriers with Pakistan.
Pakistan’s economy is in a tailspin. Since the second last thing that the international community wants in Pakistan is an economic meltdown, Friends of Pakistan are coming together to provide emergency foreign aid.
The “Friends of Pakistan are “Britain, France, Germany, the United States, China, the United Arab Emirates, Canada, Turkey, Australia and Italy plus the United Nations and the European Union.” Among these are nations — US, China, the Arab states, France, Britain — that give …

Richard Feynman has claimed that “it is safe to say that nobody really understands quantum mechanics.” He was serious about it because of the complexity of the subject and the counter-intuitive consequences of the theory. Sometime I think that the global financial system is also beyond comprehension. But that is not quite true. Unlike quantum mechanics, the financial system is an artifact, albeit a very complex one. Also, it is possible to understand something and yet be unable to fully control it all the time. Once in a while, it …

Steve, a friend in San Diego, forwarded me this email. It’s doing the rounds and sooner or later you are bound to read it. So you may as well read it here.

I suppose you all know that I love them internets. It is the most potent instrument for the minor enlightenment of humanity. By “minor” I mean that which enables knowledge and therefore prepares the way for the major enlightenment. Once upon a time, not too long ago, you could only know what was allowed by those who were in charge of the information channels such as print, radio, and TV. The rich and powerful controlled what information the unwashed masses could be trusted with. Dictators found this very useful.
I think …

The op-ed “India can’t afford to fall victim to psywar” in the New Indian Express of Sept 19th did not make much sense to me. I find the entire piece confusing. Perhaps I am simple-minded and cannot navigate through contradictions, or perhaps because it is an “op-ed by committee,” signed by 20 prominent people.
It begins:
SOME stray voices in the media have been questioning, with surprising nonchalance and lack of depth, the wisdom and expediency of retaining Kashmir as a part of India. This matters not because such voices reflect …

The Dance of Creative Destruction
At the shining bright core of our galaxy of ideas lie a bunch of super-massive ideas that are tightly bound to each other. The core’s gravitational attraction holds the galaxy together, draws in stuff and transmutes them into higher elements.

Exploring the metaphor a bit further is interesting. At the center of galaxies dwell huge black holes which destroy both matter and time. And like the great god Shiva — the Mahadeva as Nataraja, the king of dancers, dancing the Tandava, the cosmic dance of creative …

Well, now we can be assured of our security and safety from Islamic terrorism. TRAI — the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India — is taking steps to combat terrorism by securing WiFi networks.
With terrorists using unsecured wireless fidelity (WiFi) networks to shoot off emails every time they carry out bomb blasts, TRAI is examining a series of measures to have security processes in place to protect such networks. [Source]

Prof Pranab Bardhan in the Financial Times on “What does this authoritarian moment mean for developing countries?”
India’s experience suggests that democracy can also hinder development in a number of ways. Competitive populism– short-run pandering and handouts to win elections– may hurt long-run investment, particularly in physical infrastructure, which is the key bottleneck for Indian development. Such political arrangements make it difficult, for example, to charge user fees for roads, electricity, and irrigation, discouraging investment in these areas, unlike in China where infrastructure companies charge full commercial rates. Competitive populism …

Christopher Hitchens writing in Slate:
The very name Pakistan inscribes the nature of the problem. It is not a real country or nation but an acronym devised in the 1930s by a Muslim propagandist for partition named Chaudhary Rahmat Ali. It stands for Punjab, Afghania, Kashmir, and Indus-Sind. The stan suffix merely means “land.” In the Urdu language, the resulting acronym means “land of the pure.” It can be easily seen that this very name expresses expansionist tendencies and also conceals discriminatory ones. Kashmir, for example, is part of India. …

For the last few days, internet service has been terrible at my end and I could not get online. Tata Indicom VSNL at its best. And when I tried to call in to their customer service, I realized how utterly miserable that company is. Not only do you get put on hold, but while on hold they have the most astonishingly irritating music that they play at an ear-shattering volume, and interrupt it every few seconds to announce, “Tata Indicom, the best way to connect to the Internet”, “We know …

They say that if you owe the bank $1,000 you cannot repay, you are in trouble; but if you owe the bank $1 billion and you cannot repay, the bank is in trouble.
Think of the rest of the world’s central banks who hold dollar reserves as the bank and the US as the creditor who is in danger of defaulting. It puts the US in a very interesting position — it can take a lot of folks down if it starts to drown. The rest have a very good incentive …

Everything we hear is an opinion, not a fact. Everything we see is a perspective, not the truth.
– Marcus Aurelius [121 CE - 180 CE] (Emperor and stoic philosopher.)
This blog had its first post on this day in 2003. For five years, I have been expressing my opinion and perspective on a range of topics that deal with development and India. I had been writing a blog at Berkeley, “Life is a Random Draw”, for a while before I started on this one. I shut down the Berkeley …

If you needed more convincing on the matter of why India needs to build cities (and not futz around in villages), here’s a video of a TED presentation by Jaime Lerner. A video made more delightful by the way he wanders all over the place.

Thanks to Sudipta Chatterjee for the link.

Now for some smashing news. The European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) will be firing up the Large Hadron Collider (LHC). It will happen at 1 PM (IST) on Wednesday.
The first attempt to circulate a beam in the LHC will be made on 10 September at the injection energy of 450 GeV (0.45 TeV). This historical event will be webcast through http://webcast.cern.ch, and distributed through the Eurovision network. See http://www.cern.ch/lhc-first-beam for further details.

[Via Cosmic Variance.]
Watch a documentary on the LHC on the History Channel.
After 40 years of planning and construction, …

I missed posting on Ganesh Chaturthi this time. I was in Mumbai last Monday. Tuesday evening was when I foolishly decided to make my way to Pune from Mumbai. As a matter of practical importance, I made the proper offerings to Ganesh, the Remover of Obstacles, before I embarked on my journey. After all, Mr Ganesh was around in the vicinity seeing as it was his time for his annual visit. So what happened? Well, I’ll tell you. Shri Ganesh failed miserably in removing obstacles from my path.

{Image above …

Richard Baraniuk: Goodbye, textbooks; hello, open-source learning. (Filmed Feb 2006)

Jonathan Drori: Why we don’t understand as much as we think we do. (Filmed Feb 2007)

[Thanks to Manish Dharod for the links.}

The American administration sent a letter to the Congress clarifying what the 123 Agreement with India entails for the US. The letter was leaked recently. There’s nothing in the letter which should come as a surprise because its contents are consistent with what the Americans have been saying all along. What the letter strongly suggests is that either that Prime Minister Manmohan Singh is lying or it is clearly delusional.
Here’s the view of a former chairman of the Atomic Energy Commission, PK Iyengar, expressed in an article in The …

This story comes from the other end of the world but has lessons for any part of the world. It is “a parable about the combustible combination of optimism and ignorance.” Go read “Planning Order, Causing Chaos: Transantiago” by Michael Munger in the Library of Economics and Liberty.
Below the fold I have quoted the last part of the essay. If you wish to skip the article, do read the last bit.

Today’s Mint has an opinion piece by yours truly which they titled “India needs a good 3G order.” I confess that I don’t know what that title means. Whatever that means, here is the full text of the piece below the fold.