Month: April 2023

Magic

I love anything that evokes a sense of childlike wonder in me. Magic does that to me.

I have loved magic shows ever since I was little. My father would take us to P. C. Sorcar’s magic “INDRAJAL” shows, which generally showed up in Nagpur every couple of years.[1]

Unfortunately, I did not get to watch any live magic shows since my childhood. Fortunately, these days I can watch the best of them on the internet. Granted that it’s not the same as a live performance but in some senses it is better — you get a much more intimate view of the show. Continue reading “Magic”

Vitamin D

This is a public service announcement: Take vitamin D supplement.

Fun fact: most people are deficient in D. People in higher latitudes naturally receive less sun during winter months and therefore produce low amounts of D of course, but even in tropical countries like India, people are D deficient.

I’ve been taking daily vit D3 supplements for the past 10+ years. (Image of the D3 I get from Costco.) I like to think that fact may be causally related to the fact that I’ve not contracted the Chinese corona virus yet.

Good news is that D3 is pretty safe. Here’s Dr John Campbell on the topic. I’m a big fan ever since the pandemic started. Watch: Continue reading “Vitamin D”

Starship

What a stunning beauty!

An historic event is likely to happen tomorrow — the attempted orbital launch of SpaceX’s Starship from Boca Chica, TX.

Elon Musk is cautious in his expectation. He believes that if it does not blow up on the launch pad, it’ll be a success. It could blow up. As he put it, “Success maybe; excitement guaranteed.”

I am already excited.

(Click on the image to embiggen. Credit: SpaceX.)

When will be the launch? The launch window opens tomorrow 17th April, Monday, 7 AM Central. See end of post for details.[1] (For viewers in India, that will be Monday 5:30 PM.) Set your alarms for the webcast which beings 45 minutes before launch. Continue reading “Starship”

China and the US

Douglas Murray is arguably one of the sharpest observers of the contemporary world. He’s a worthy successor to the late Christopher Hitchens (whom he knew very well.)

Every piece that flows out of his pen is brilliant. He is a prolific writer and commentator. He wrote his first book at the tender age of 18; his recent books are “The Madness of Crowds,” “The Strange Death of Europe,” and “The War on the West.” He writes for the NY Post, the Spectator, and The Telegraph.

His April 7th piece for The Telegraph is  particularly worth noting. Here’s a slice: Continue reading “China and the US”

Good God – Part 2

In the previous bit, I claimed that the monotheistic religions’ concept of god has no counterpart in the dharmas (Hinduism, Buddhism and Jainism.) In the former set, you have an entity that creates the world much like a watchmaker fabricates a watch. The watchmaker and the watch are necessarily distinct. They describe the world with an engineering metaphor. The world is a fabrication.

In Hinduism, however, the world is not a fabrication but is an expression of the ultimate reality or “Brahman.” Nobody knows what Brahman is but whatever it is, it pervades the entire world, and is in fact congruent with the world. Brahman is not a creator god because all of existence and Brahman are identical. Continue reading “Good God – Part 2”

Good God – Part 1

Even if syntactically correct, some questions and propositions are not well-formed. Chomsky famously illustrated this with a sentence — “colorless green ideas sleep furiously” — which though grammatically correct is meaningless. It is syntactically fine but devoid of any semantic content.

I think the question “Do you believe in god” to be an example of a question that is syntactically fine but is semantically pure nonsense. Why? Because the word “god” is imprecise and undefined in the general context. The most appropriate response to that question is “what do you mean by that?” Continue reading “Good God – Part 1”