I got here last night from Washington DC. I love being around New Brunswick, the home of Rutgers Univ. Lots of fun times and lots of heartaches. Khalil Gibran’s words best describe how I felt when I moved to California from here many years ago. “Nay not without a wound in the spirit shall I leave this city.”

Dateline: 29th Sept, 2010.
Washington DC.
The US is the world’s most powerful country. That’s clear enough to the casual observer. What should also be clear is that the US does not hesitate to use its power. Very few would disagree that the US does not always use that power responsibly, nor is it always successful in whatever it sets out to do militarily. No nation — even the most successful — is ruled by the infallible and the infinitely wise. Infallibility and infinite wisdom can only be claimed by the dynastic …

Hi. Second time in Washington DC within the same month! I am meeting someone at the Willard Intercontinental Hotel — which is a stone’s throw from the White House. More about my excellent adventure in DC later.

In the post — “Don’t believe everything you hear–even on TED” — I instinctively rejected the claim that it takes the energy equivalent of a lump of coal to transport one MB of data on them internets. I said that I would do the back of the envelop calculation upon request. Here it is for your kind information.

Gutenberg’s press was a huge success because it was used to print indulgences. That I did not know. Here’s more on that.

Go check out the videos shortlisted for playing at YouTube Play celebration event at the Guggenheim Museum. What’s that?

In a comment to a recent post, “The Games Built on a Cesspool,” the commenter Eroteme says, “We help elect a govt., sit on our hinnies and then find faults with whatever they do. Much like the opposition. Why don’t we demand accounts for all the projects embarked on, all the promises made, all the measures planned to address situations?” and asks, “How many RTIs were filed in the past 7 years demanding to know how well this CWG thing was progressing and where each and every rupee of ours …

Those who refuse to do arithmetic are doomed to speak nonsense. That one is a favorite quote from a computer science guru John McCarthy. To it I would add that those who are incapable of reasoning are doomed to being innumerate. The ability to reason is a prerequisite for knowing how to do arithmetic. Let me give you a shining example of innumeracy arising from an inability to reason.

A mashup of Kellogs Frosted Flakes tiger and Sylvester the cat.

No one can escape the huge amount of press on the ongoing disaster called the “Commonwealth Games” in New Delhi. There is little doubt about the train-wreck — it’s inevitable as the locomotive has long left the track and is speeding towards a chasm dragging a long train behind it. The only point of conjecture is how damaging will be the eventual crash. The action is happening so fast that estimates of damage vary widely. But it will all be over soon enough and it will be a very long …

Here’s a bit about what happened to Sikhs following the assassination of Indira Gandhi in Oct 1984 — for the record.

I just can’t bring myself to trust the Times Higher Education World University Rankings. It is clearly wrong. Any ranking which puts UC Berkeley below that junior university is obviously suspect, in my considered o-pee-nee-awhn.

For the last few days I have been busy writing. Which is the reason why I have not been writing for the blog. Actually, whenever I have any serious writing to do, I find that I have a whole lot of important pieces on the web that urgently need reading. Or videos that need watching. They’re so important that I think you should also read them or watch them, as the case may be.

This is about a bunch of articles that I have been reading.

I bet you did not know that the US Constitution is “sharia compliant.” No, seriously it is. Ok, I am not an expert on the US constitution, and quite frankly I don’t know the first thing about sharia except that I believe that it is about Islamic law and that all Islamic countries have to conform to sharia. So that’s why it came as a bit of shock to learn that the US constitution was sharia compliant. Here’s how.

The web is amazing. It is the largest smorgasbord of stuff for the brain ever imaginable. I have to admit that I spend inordinate amounts of time just learning stuff from surfing the web. It is worth reminding ourselves that the world has changed qualitatively. Used to be that information was a scarce resource. That was then. This is now. Now you have a virtually limitless supply of great information. Now the truly scarce resource is time. Anyway, go take a look at . . .

In August in a post, Is the Indian Government the Greatest Enemy of India’s Prosperity?, I had quoted a WSJ piece which read in part, “Because India’s entrepreneurs have succeeded amid dysfunctional government and financial institutions by developing a kind of independent and experimental ingenuity, it stands to reason that the enterprising class would prosper even more were India to reduce barriers to business and clean up corruption.” I commented on that and wrote:

It’s that time of the year again when he with the curved elephant’s trunk, of enormous body, with the brilliance of a ten million suns, the remover of obstacles, etc., visits our homes. Here are a couple of songs to welcome him.

I had read the story of Daniel Everette’s experience among the Piraha tribe years ago in an article by him. This morning, Hemley Gonzalez’s tweet about Everette, brought that back to mind. I watched the short BBC 4 video that Hemley linked to (embedded below.) I urge you to take the 10 minutes to watch it. It is deeply moving. (On a personal note, I am off to Washington DC for a few days. Be well, do good work, and keep in touch.)

Catholics consider the pope to be their god’s representative on earth. In other words, anyone who declares himself or herself to be a Catholic necessarily believes that what the pope says about the nature of the universe is absolutely correct. So now consider a few of the current pope’s pronouncements.