Author: Atanu Dey

Economist.

The LHC Explained

The questions about our universe — how it evolved, what governs it today, and where is it going — have been asked for a while. A small step in answering those questions has been the construction the Large Hadron Collider (LHC). Here’s a great explanation of the LHC is and how it works.
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Internet and Higher Education

A BusinessWeek article of 14th September, “Next: An Internet Revolution in Higher Education,” makes the case that the way higher education is done will be changed by the internet revolution. This is not the most earthshaking bit of news you may have heard since it is fairly obvious that nearly everything has been affected by the internet and in the future, every aspect of human society will be qualitatively different as a consequence of the ease with which information is recorded, stored, transmitted, searched, and retrieved.
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Government Spending on Travel

One suspects that the government of India spends considerable amounts on its office bearers — bureaucrats and politicians. Although their nominal salaries perhaps don’t amount to much, the costs of the royal perks they enjoy must be pretty large. Many of these perks were meant for the British rulers of India, naturally, and the new rulers saw no reason to not enjoy them as well. What’s good for the white must be good for the browns. Indeed, I also suspect that the perks must have increased.
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Learning to eat gruel

The title of this post is borrowed from an article by Arun Shourie in today’s Indian Express, “Conduct above all.” In it Shourie recounts a story told about an ancestor of mine, a fellow called Diogenes. Also known as Diogenes of Sinope, he was a cynic. Here’s that story:
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It’s a joke, you stupid cretins

Getting things ass backwards is not a crime. Most people act stupid from time to time but are not congenitally stupid. But when organizations, and people who are high up in such organizations, get things ass backwards and persistent in doing so for decades, the results are neither pretty nor trivial. A shining example of the consistent ass-backwardness amounting to criminal stupidity is being reported.
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Thomas Jefferson on Christianity

UPDATE 23 Oct 2018:

The post is clearly wrong. It was Mark Twain, not Jefferson, who wrote this about Christianity.

See this: TwainQuotes.com

Thomas Jefferson (1743 – 1826), the third President of the United States (1801–1809), the principal author of the Declaration of Independence (1776) had this to say about Christianity —
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How Does one Market Something Free

My friend, Dr Aniruddha Malpani, is an IVF specialist in Mumbai. When he is not busy getting women pregnant, he runs “HELP” — the world’s largest free patient education library. Now he needs help. He wrote to me, saying, Continue reading “How Does one Market Something Free”

The Endurance of Indians

Reports of gross misdeeds by people in power leave as much of an impression on the Indian mind as does yesterday’s weather forecast. And they appear to be as helpless in the face of institutionalized corruption and criminal behavior as in altering the weather. They take both as a given, a fact of nature that is outside their control.
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Paul Romer: Charter Cities

Cities are the engines of growth. Therefore, a policy that promotes urbanization of the population is an indispensible instrument for economic growth and development. In the following TED Talk, Paul Romer, a world-class growth economist at Stanford, makes the case.
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