Author: Atanu Dey

I think Dawkins is an idiot. But then in his defense we have to admit that every one of us is an idiot in the same sense that I judge him to be an idiot in this piece. 

Here I am not using the clinical definition of an idiot as a person with profound intellectual disability broadly characterized by a mental age below three years and an intelligence quotient (IQ) under 25. Compared to us unwashed masses, Dawkins is an intellectual giant who has made significant contributions in his domain of biology. He has also affected popular culture. He coined the word “meme” half a century ago in his first best-seller “The Selfish Gene”! You don’t get more hard-core than that.

In this case of Dawkins, I am using the term idiot colloquially which means someone who appears to lack basic common sense. Continue reading “Richard Dawkins is an Idiot”

The word guru in the dharmic traditions—namely Sanatana, Buddha and Jaina—refers to someone who dispels the darkness of ignorance. Because ignorance is the primary barrier to enlightenment or moksha, the guru is supremely important.

Today is Guru Purnima. Hindus believe that on this day Bhagwan Shiva became the first guru (adi guru) when he transmitted the knowledge of yoga to the world. Also that sage Vyasa, the author of the Mahabharata, was born on this day.

For Buddhists, Guru Purnima commemorates the day when Gautama Buddha delivered his first sermon at the Deer Park in Sarnath, setting in motion the Wheel of Dharma. For Jains, it is the day when Mahavira, the 24th tirthankara accepted his first disciple. These two events are dated to around 2,500 years ago. Continue reading “Guru Purnima”

The 4th of July is celebrated in the US as its Independence Day. The independence of the 13 British colonies from the rule of the British crown in the late 18th century CE is probably one of the most consequential events of the modern world.

Very few events in human history, if any, have had such an enormous impact on the future of humanity as did that event. Many countries (including the land of my ancestors, India) gained independence from British rule but none ever attained the heights that the United States of America eventually did: it became the greatest, richest, and the most powerful nation that the world has witnessed so far.

It’s important to remember that when the American colonies decided to not be subject to the British crown sometime around the 1770s, the British Empire, though very powerful, was not then the globe-spanning force that it was to be in the 19th century CE. Though great in some sense, Great Britain’s days of greatness lay a bit in the future at the time of the American Revolution. Continue reading “The Birth of a Nation”

Frédéric Bastiat was born in this day 30th June in 1801. He died on 24th December 1850. He was a member of the French National Assembly. He developed the economic concept of opportunity cost and introduced what we call the “broken window” fallacy through a parable. He was justly described as “the most brilliant economic journalist who ever lived” by the 20th century economic theorist Joseph Schumpeter.

About Bastiat, the wiki says, “As an advocate of classical economics and the economics of Adam Smith, his views favored a free market and influenced the Austrian School. He is best known for his book The Law, where he argued that law must protect rights such as private property, not “plunder” others’ property.” Continue reading “Bon anniversaire, Monsieur Bastiat”

I love highways and I love cars. I grew up in a very middle class household in Nagpur, an unremarkable tier two Indian city. Understandably, I was fascinated by the interstate highway system and cars when I arrived in the US for post-graduate studies in computer science.

When I landed at New York’s JFK international airport one August afternoon so many decades ago, I could hardly believe that I was in New York city. After picking me up at JFK, my friends took me through Manhattan. Just the drive around town was fascinating. There were the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center, there was the Empire State Building, there we were on 42nd Street. Continue reading “Urban Highways Suck”

The first controlled flight of a heavier-than-air machine was achieved by the Wright brothers on Dec 17th, 1903 at Kitty Hawk, NC. That flight had one pilot, zero passengers, zero cabin crew, zero in-flight entertainment, reached an altitude of 10 feet above ground level and covered 120 feet in 10 seconds.

Now we routinely pack hundreds of people into large jetliners that fly between continents, measure distances covered in thousands of miles, altitude in tens of thousands of feet above sea level and time traveled in many hours. It is estimated that in 2021, commercial carriers flew over 7 billion miles (likely translating to trillions of passenger-miles given the passenger volume).

TL;DR
Commercial plane crashes are exceptionally rare, with a fatal accident rate of 0.39 per million flights in 2024. Globally, airlines operated 40.6 million flights, carried 5 billion passengers, and accumulated trillions of passenger-miles, with only 46 accidents and 251 fatalities. In the U.S., commercial aviation is even safer, with zero fatalities in many recent years and a fatality rate of 0.2 deaths per 10 billion passenger-miles. These figures underscore why flying remains the safest mode of long-distance travel, with odds of dying in a crash lower than winning a Powerball jackpot. Continue reading “Air travel is incredibly safe”

Steven Landsburg is a brilliant economist and popularizer of economics. His blog –The Big Questions– is always instructive and delightful.  I recommend his books meant for the non-specialist enthusiastically. Here he explains why he started writing them.

Begin quote:

One day in 1991, I walked into a medium sized bookstore and counted over 80 titles on quantum physics and the history of the Universe. A few shelves over I found Richard Dawkins’s bestseller The Selfish Gene along with dozens of others explaining Darwinan evolution and the genetic code. Continue reading “Are you smarter than Google?”

All of India’s media attention is currently focused on the on-going conflict between India and Pakistan. It began on April 22nd when terrorists backed by the Pakistani government murdered 26 male tourists visiting Pahalgam in Kashmir. The terrorists told their Kashmiri tourist victims to recite the Arabic kalma (the Islamic declaration of faith) and to drop their pants to show that they were circumcised to prove that they were Muslims. When they failed that test, they were shot at point-blank range, murdered in front of their families.

The message was clear: you must die because you are not Muslim.

You die not because of some harm you’ve caused anyone. No. Your unforgivable crime was that you were not a servant of Allah. Allah has commanded that each and every of his faithful has a religious duty to kill you, the non-believer. By killing you the filthy infidel, the obedient Muslim serves Allah’s will, and Allah’s reward for his jihad against you awaits him in heaven: a penis that never bends, 72 perpetual virgins, 18 pretty nubile boys, and rivers of wine. Not much is said about the rewards that female jihadists receive who kill infidels. Continue reading “The Dollar Auction Continues”

The old saw that “you can take the boy out of the country but you cannot take the country out of the boy” holds true for me. Of course, country refers to a rural area and not to a city or a modern nation state. It acknowledges that it is hard to replace one’s mindset with another merely by moving to another setting. 

You carry your conditioning with yourself. We love what we are familiar with, and the most familiar bits are those that we know from our childhood. I was born and brought up in Nagpur but I lived most of my adult life in the United States. For all that, I’m still that boy from Nagpur.

That meditation was motivated by what I was listening to today. I was enjoying Marathi abhangs written by the 15th century saint Eknath. They are devotional songs expressing love and devotion to Vitthala, another name of Bhagwan Vishnu. Though my mother tongue is Bengali, I understand Hindi and Marathi somewhat. I am richer for that. I left my home long ago but carry still within me the love of the music I grew up with. Continue reading “Majhe Maher Pandhari”