Fragments – 10

Beautiful China

Via Myke’s Blog, these pictures of scenes from China are breathtakingly beautiful. This is a magical world that we live in.

Searching Tips

And talking about magic, any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, as Arthur C Clarke has famously noted. To me the technology which powers Google search is magical. Almost all of the world’s information at the tip of a few keystrokes. Again, via Myke, I came across a bunch of tips on how to search more effectively on Google.

May your searches always end serendipitously.

E. F. Schumacher: “We must do what we conceive to be the right thing and not bother our heads or burden our souls with whether we will be successful. Because if we don’t do the right thing, we will be doing the wrong thing and we will just be a part of the disease and not a part of the cure.”

Thanks, Myke, for that beautiful quote.

Fragments – 9

Pippa’s Song

The year’s at the spring
And day’s at the morn
Morning’s at seven
The hill-side’s dew-pearl’d
The lark’s on the wing
The snail’s on the thorn
God’s in His heaven—
All’s right with the world!

Robert Browning (1812-1889) painted that beautiful word-picture. It has the quality of a haiku–sparse and based in the here and now. What I especially like is the “zooming in” that he does. The time of the year is the best — spring. Then it is day time, and not just any time of the day but it is at 7 in the morning. And what is going on at that time? All things are in their place and the world is perfect. It recalls to mind the insight that Siddhartha (in Hermann Hesse’s novel) communicates to his friend, “The world is perfect at every moment, Govinda.”

Education Matters — Part 2

I think it is fair to make the claim that development and economic growth are positively correlated with how educated the population is. It is also fair to say that the returns to education are positive. There are important implications which arise from the latter.
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Education Matters — Part 1

Yesterday I got a call from someone who wanted my advice. It was regarding his son who is in the 7th grade. The school required the parents to fill in a multi-page form with detailed information about the background of the student. The conjecture was that this information was going to become part of the permanent record of the boy. The form, I was told, required the parent to indicate – among other details — if the family belonged to scheduled caste, or scheduled tribes, or other backward classes.
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No Man is an Island

No man is an island, entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main. If a clod be washed away by the sea, Europe is the less, as well as if promontory were, as well as if a manor of thy friend’s or of thine own were. Any man’s death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind; and therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee.

Those lines are John Donne’s From Devotions upon Emergent Occasions. Written around the 1620’s, they are faintly reflective of Advaita Vedanta. Donne’s philosophy encompasses all humanity into a whole but places God outside and above, as you can tell from the full meditation (included below.) Advaita Vedanta negates the distinction between the “me” and the “not me.”
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Google Romance

Google Romance must be the hottest thing this April 1st. Too many people have emailed me about it. I thought it was rather lame compared to their other crackpot beta releases. (Do take their Google Romance Tour, though.) Continue reading “Google Romance”

H L Mencken

I believe that no discovery of fact, however trivial, can be wholly useless to the race, and that no trumpeting of falsehood, however virtuous in intent, can be anything but vicious.

I believe that all government is evil, in that all government must necessarily make war upon liberty, and that the democratic form is as bad as any of the other forms….

I believe in complete freedom of thought and speech – alike for the humblest man and the mightiest, and in the utmost freedom of conduct that is consistent with living in organized society.

I believe in the capacity of man to conquer his world, and to find out what it is made of, and how it is run. I believe in the reality of progress. I —

But the whole thing, after all, may be put very simply. I believe that it is better to tell the truth than to lie. I believe that it is better to be free than to be a slave. And I believe that it is better to know than to be ignorant.

Mencken quoted in H L Mencken: The Joyous Libertarian by Murray N Rothbard.

Our Moribund Educational System

The Indian education system is in distress. It is critically in need of reform since it is inefficient and ineffective. What exists today is something that was designed to serve the needs of a different era with different objectives and compulsions. For sustainable development of India, the country needs a new system which is economically efficient, socially equitable, functionally effective, and consonant with the altered needs of the present.
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Be aware of fake Rs 500 bank notes

Today I was at the bank depositing some cash when the teller discovered that one of the Rs 500 bills I gave her was fake. Visual examination did not reveal that the bill was counterfeit; only under UV light can one make out that genuine bills have a silver line which glows while the same line on a fake bill does not glow.

One of the simplest ways of undermining an economy is to introduce a huge amount of fake currency. From time to time, one hears of counterfeiting operations in Pakistan. I suppose the Pakistani terrorists operating in India get paid in fake Indian currency. What a wonderful way to kill (sic) two birds with zero stones. And I presume that some of the billions of rupees of fake currency circulating in India is brought into the country via the bus and train service between Pakistan and India.

I don’t have any proof, but my suspicion is that certain political parties in India gain from this sort of transactions.

In any event, please pass the word along that accepting Rs 500 (and perhaps Rs 1000) bank notes may be risky. If people are vigilant, the fake bills will not be able to enter the system.

A SET OF HARD PROBLEMS

The theory of computation studies a class of problems called ‘NP Complete.’ These are problems that are considered computationally hard in the sense that all known algorithms to solve them require a non-deterministic Turing machine polynomial orders of time. The traveling salesman problem is a classic example of this set. They all share one characteristic – indeed it is the test of membership in the class – that they are all isomorphic. An algorithm that solves any of the problems would therefore solve all of NP Complete problems.
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