Author: Atanu Dey

Today is the first day of Fall in the Northern hemisphere, and at 3:50 am Eastern Time (7:50am UT)  was the beginning of the September equinox. At 3:50 am ET, the Sun crossed the celestial equator.

“An equinox is commonly regarded as the instant of time when the plane of Earth’s equator passes through the center of the Sun. This occurs twice each year: around 20 March and 23 September. In other words, it is the moment at which the center of the visible Sun is directly above the Equator. … On the day of an equinox, daytime and nighttime are of approximately equal duration all over the planet. They are not exactly equal, however, due to the angular size of the Sun, atmospheric refraction, and the rapidly changing duration of the length of day that occurs at most latitudes around the equinoxes.” [Wiki.]

At my location (39.66N, 75.67W) sunrise was at 6:51 am and sunset will be at 6:59 pm, making the day 12 hours and 8 minutes long. Continue reading “Change of Seasons — Fall Begins”

At heart, I am an anarchist. The average person will recoil with shock and horror from such an admission because ‘anarchy’ almost always implies social disorder, chaos and disaster.

But that reaction is wrong, and not surprisingly so. After all, that same fellow would get starry-eyed at the mere mention of democracy. India is the largest democracy in the world, don’t you know!

As a system of governance, anarchy resonates most with how I approach the world. I reject hierarchy and authority. I had arrived at this conviction long before I got to know about the French politician and philosopher Pierre-Joseph Proudhon (1809 – 1865), the first self-professed anarchist.

Proudhon in his Confessions of a Revolutionary defined anarchy as “order without power” and “the absence of a master,” and wrote that “whoever lays his hand on me to govern me is a usurper and tyrant, and I declare him my enemy.”

I concur.
Continue reading “Small is Beautiful. Government is not.”

It is fun to learn new stuff. Today I learned some interesting things about the global oxygen cycle. Of course, I had known about photosynthesis from my school days. It is the process which converts CO₂ and H₂O and produces oxygen and the stuff that trees and plants are made of.

Aside: Many people don’t realize that all plants are basically carbon and that the carbon comes from atmospheric carbon-dioxide. Therefore higher concentration of CO₂ implies higher rate of plant growth, and so increasing CO₂ concentration has the beneficial effect of faster plant growth (and not just global warming.) Continue reading “TIL about the Global Oxygen Cycle”

Any serious analysis of the structural causes of India’s dysfunction has to refer to the institutional deficiencies. One major causal factor is that the government has practically no constraints on it. An unconstrained government has the power to effect radical change if it so desired, or to impose the status quo by not allowing any innovation or dissent. The content of the actions of an unconstrained government, therefore, matters immensely.

Unconstrained government power is wonderful provided good and wise people govern. But good and wise people, by their very nature, are the exception in the population, and even rarer in government. Given that an unconstrained government has the power to extract and exploit riches from the economy, the most avaricious and the most corrupt can be expected to compete for the power to govern. The outcome is predictable: a kakistocracy — the government of the least capable and the most corrupt. Continue reading “From the archives: Unconstrained Government”

Adam Ferguson (1723 – 1816) was a moral philosopher and historian. He was a major figure in the Scottish Enlightenment. In his An Essay on the History of Civil Society (1767) he observed:

“Every step and every movement of the multitude, even in what are termed enlightened ages, are made with equal blindness to the future; and nations stumble upon establishments, which are indeed the result of human action, but not the execution of any human design.”

The claim is that sometimes order emerges from the actions of the collective without there being some master plan that was being followed. The term “spontaneous order” describes that well: “the emergence of various kinds of social orders from a combination of self-interested individuals who are not intentionally trying to create order through planning. The evolution of life on Earth, language, crystal structure, the Internet and a free market economy have all been proposed as examples of systems which evolved through spontaneous order.” (wiki) Continue reading “Order without intent”

I am reading a most delightful book. It’s Confucius Lives Next Door: What Living in the East Teaches Us About Living in the West by T. R. Reid, published in 1999. He was the Tokyo bureau chief of the Washington Post. He and his family spent a few years in Japan in the 1990s.

Here’s an except from chapter 2 “Eastern Flavor”:

Continue reading “Reading: Confucius Lives Next Door”