Atanu Dey : Life is a Random Draw

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”

Carl Jung (1875 – 1961) wrote, “Never do human beings speculate more, or have more opinions, than about things which they do not understand.” He must have been invoking his inner Alexander Pope (1688 – 1744) who in his poem “An Essay on Criticism” cautioned — 

A little learning is a dangerous thing;
Drink deep, or taste not the Pierian spring:
There shallow draughts intoxicate the brain,
And drinking largely sobers us again.

Either drink deep, or don’t drink at all. My motto also.

Superficial understanding does lead to unjustified confidence. With deeper understanding we realize the limits of our knowledge. We are not omniscient. That’s not an amazing claim. Our understanding is severely limited because we are limited beings, and therefore ignorant of nearly everything. That must teach us epistemic humility but all too often experts don’t learn that lesson. Continue reading “AI and Jobs”

In Shakespeare’s “Hamlet” in Act 1,  a guard says, “Something is rotten in the state of Denmark,” expressing his suspicion and concern about the moral corruption within the kingdom.

Now that can certainly be said about the United Kingdom. There’s something rotten, and that rot has to do with a particular kind of immigrants who follow a particular religion, and what they are doing to the British kingdom. More accurately, what those immigrants are allowed to get away with: wholesale organized rape, murder and other assorted crimes.

[Did you recognize the image at the top of the post was the flag of England?]

I am an Anglophile. I admire British history, culture, and language. Their contributions in every field of human endeavor — philosophy, politics, administration, governance, mathematics, science, engineering, technology, music, literature, etc. — is unmatched. Just a few generations ago, the sun never set on the British Empire.

All that is gone now.  Continue reading “England”

“My Dinner with Andre” is a 1981 American drama film set at a restaurant in Manhattan.  It’s a dinner conversation between two old friends, Wallace Shawn and André Gregory. Shawn, a playwright and actor, reluctantly agrees to meet his former colleague Gregory, a theater director.

Gregory had abandoned his career to travel the world in search of enlightenment. They explore contrasting philosophical themes: Gregory’s spiritual journey and Shawn’s pragmatic worldview.

Over their dinner, Gregory recounts extraordinary experiences in his quest to break free from the mechanical habits of modern life. Shawn listens skeptically while defending the value of ordinary pleasures like coffee or an electric blanket. By the end of the evening, both men, though convinced of their positions, leave with much to ponder.

I still recall the movie even though I’d watched it over forty years ago. The entire movie was just a conversation between two friends over dinner. It had no romance, no explosions, no action and (would you believe it?) no CGI. It was just two guys talking. Which is what makes it so special. Continue reading “Bill’s Dinner with Donald”

For people to be able to ask important questions, they have to have the capacity to seek, find and comprehend the answers themselves. That is, the answers are almost but not quite within their reach. The Zen proverb — when the student is ready, the teacher appears — is a version of that. 

A corollary to that is the fact that one cannot learn something from a book that is not implicitly almost known already. To have a chance to gather even the low-hanging fruits, you have to be close to the tree; if you are far enough away from the tree, you can’t even see what fruits it bears.

The less one’s knowledge of a subject, the less aware one is of one’s ignorance. It’s almost paradoxical that the more you know, the more your knowledge of your ignorance grows. Ignorance of one’s ignorance is meta-ignorance. Knowledge of one’s ignorance is meta-knowledge. Continue reading “Knowledge and Ignorance”

Unless one is a hermit or is marooned on an uninhabited island, trade is what everyone does. Even children voluntarily trade cards, marbles, toys, etc., with other children. As grownups, we produce stuff to sell and that allows us to buy stuff that we consume but couldn’t produce. Most of us sell our labor in exchange for wages, and buy stuff we want. Even within a household exchange is ubiquitous even though it is not mediated using money.

If we couldn’t or wouldn’t trade, we’d be forced to consume only what we produce. That would be an all-round disaster; we’d all be desperately poor. Self-sufficiency is a recipe for poverty. Mohandas Gandhi was the prophet of the self-sufficiency religion, and we know how that worked out. Continue reading “On Trade and Trump’s Tariffs – Part 3”