It is just a few months short of the 20th anniversary of Loma Prieta earthquake: “a major earthquake that struck the San Francisco Bay Area of California on October 17, 1989 at 5:04 p.m. local time. Caused by a slip along the San Andreas Fault, the earthquake lasted approximately 15 seconds and measured 6.9 on the moment magnitude scale.” [Wiki] I will always remember the exact moment it happened. I was at a trade show at the San Jose convention center, and everything started to shake and things came crashing down. Now I am back in the bay area for a few weeks. Is the ground going to shake?
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Happy Fourth of July
Happy Fourth of July!
On this day in 1776 the Declaration of Independence was adopted by the Continental Congress which announced that the 13 American colonies were no longer part of the British Empire. That was the culmination of the American Revolution.
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Policy Brief on Higher Education in India
India’s higher education must reflect the dynamics of its economy and the diversity of the needed human capital for powering its growth in an increasingly competitive globalized world. The circular causation between an effective higher education sector and the economic growth makes the sector especially amenable to positive feedback effects – once the process is initiated, the system automatically builds up capacity to keep the growth of the sector to match the growth of the economy. Policy choices dictate the initial conditions and kick-starting of this virtuous process.
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Complete Video of Islamic Terror in Mumbai
I got the following link in a posting on India-gii (hat tip: Iqbal) on the Islamic terror in Mumbai past November. Click on this link at Atlas Shrugs only if you have a strong stomach because the pictures are disturbing. The title of the post — “THIS IS A STRUGGLE BETWEEN ISLAM AND UNBELIEVERS, WE ARE THE PEOPLE GOD HAS CHOSEN TO DEFEND AGAINST THE UNBELIEVERS” — is as stark as the images of the dead bodies of the innocents murdered in accordance with the religious duty of jihad.
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We cannot ignore what we don’t know
Too often I see this quoted.
“Per laws of aerodynamics, the “bumble bee” cannot fly. Its body weight is not the right proportion to its wingspan. Ignoring these laws of science, the bee flies anyway.”
It is one of those seemingly profound statements that is actually devoid of the slightest shred of sense or meaning.
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Hans Rosling: 200 Years that Changed the World
I am pretty convinced that one can learn practically all subjects from easily accessible content available for free on the web. This summer I am teaching a development economics course at University of California at Berkeley, Econ171. I will use the web extensively.
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Minsky on Words
Marvin Minsky of MIT is a cognitive scientist and an artificial intelligence pioneer. I recently came acros his 1981 paper on “Music, Mind, and Meaning” which I found informative and profoundly thought provoking. Here’s an extended quote from it, for the record.
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Weekend links: Stuff worth a look
A couple of links. One video lecture by David Weinberger. One excellent article by James Fallows.
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The US Empire in Decline
R Vaidyanathan has an interesting piece in expressbuzz cryptically titled “The Lost Horizon of the Emperors.” He takes a very big picture view of what’s happening around the world. Big picture painted rather randomly. He starts off with USA’s decline and quickly moves to India and Pakistan. Regarding the decline of the US, he write, “US is going the banana republic way what with a national debt of more than $10 trillion, which is more than 80 per cent of its national income.”
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A Letter to Aalisha
My friend Salil Naik asked me to write a letter to his daughter on her birthday. Hence you can say that this is a commissioned post. So in the style of “A Letter to Abhishek“, I offer this letter to Aalisha.
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Atanu Dey : Life is a Random Draw 