Month: September 2008

Oh noes, the internets are down!!

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 your time is valuable and appreciate the time you have taken to call us”, “Please continue to hold as our customer service executives will be with you shortly”, and other such inane bullshit.

Tata Indicom is a pathetic, worthless, vile corporation run by a gang of stupid cretins whose head honcho must be a lobotomized comatose moron if this is the best that it can do.

Keeping the US afloat

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 to keep the US afloat.
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Five years of Opinions and Perspectives

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 blog as maintaining it was becoming a bit of a bother. It was my colleague Rajesh Jain who suggested that I should write a blog on economic development of India.
Continue reading “Five years of Opinions and Perspectives”

Jaime Lerner: “City is not a problem, city is a solution”

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.

http://static.videoegg.com/ted/flash/loader.swf

Thanks to Sudipta Chatterjee for the link.

The Large Hadron Collider at CERN

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, the biggest science experiment in history is ready to be tested. The “Large Hadron Collider” is an experiment created by the greatest minds in physics. It cost $10 billion and its resulting data has the potential to explain why we and the Universe exist. Their idea is to smash protons towards one another at the speed of light, trying to mimic what happened in the milliseconds after The Big Bang. Viewers will go on an amazing journey involving the struggles to plan and build the LHC, how it was constructed and what are its mechanics. Explore the future of what’s possible through the geniuses of today. [The History Channel]

For some absolutely stunning pictures (27 of them), go to boston.com’s The Big Picture.

To get a quick tutorial on how a particle accelerator works, play the LHC game. (Click on English, then click on the green arrow, the click on 1, 2, 3, etc.)

Happy Ganesh Utsav

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 stolen from some website.}

Here’s what happened. It took about 2:30 hours to get from Mumbai to the outskirts of Pune (around 150 kms) and then it took 4 hours — I kid you not — to travel the last 24 kms to my place! What happened was that there was an amazing rain storm around 5 PM in Pune which dumped gazillion amounts of water onto the Pune streets which resulted in flooding. Traffic was backed up for miles. It was a disaster.

Ganesh, as the remover of obstacles should be fired if this is what removing obstacles amounts to. Saying that his performance is below par does not even come close to it. Anyway, I am not one to hold grudges. All is forgiven. Mr Ganesh can have a nice visit but I would be very careful to do the job of removing obstacles properly the next time if I were him. It’s a matter of reputation, you know. Once your reputation is shot, it is very difficult to recover.

OK, here’s one picture of Ganesh dancing to some cool tune. Enjoy.

Have a happy Ganesh Utsav.

Previous Ganesh posts: Happy Ganesh Chaturthi 2007, and 2006.

A couple of education related TED videos

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

http://static.videoegg.com/ted/flash/loader.swf

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

http://static.videoegg.com/ted2/flash/loader.swf

[Thanks to Manish Dharod for the links.}

Two consonent views on the 123 Agreement

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 Pioneer. He says that India’s freedom to test will be curtailed. This is, in his opinion, undesirable as testing is essential for India to maintain a credible nuclear deterrence.

Arun Shourie makes the case that the Americans are bound by their Atomic Energy Act of 1954 and the Hyde Act, and that the 123 Agreement does not in any way invalidate them. (I don’t have a link to Shourie’s article, and so I will post his article below the fold until such time that I have a link.)

My view is that India should not sign the agreement. I find the arguments by Iyengar and Shourie persuasive. Just for argument’s sake, let’s assume that it is a bad agreement and India pays dearly for it down the line. What is the penalty that those who pushed India into such a bad deal face? None at all. Mr Singh and boss will never have the pay for the follies, just as their predecessors whose gross stupidity has caused untold misery on hundreds of millions of Indians got away with no penalty (and indeed they are celebrated as great visionaries and leaders.)

I think that the prime minister is not a deluded fool and knows fully well what the 123 Agreement will do to India. That forces me to conclude that he is dishonest in his insistence that it is good for India. But then it is not the least surprising to find dishonest politicians in India. That’s Indian democracy for you — and therein lies the only consolation for me: the people choose unwisely and it is they who will suffer the consequences of their choices.

It’s all karma, neh?
Continue reading “Two consonent views on the 123 Agreement”

The Transantiago Story

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.
Continue reading “The Transantiago Story”

On the proposed spectrum auction for 3G services

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.
Continue reading “On the proposed spectrum auction for 3G services”