True Secularism

Indian President, today, condemned the killing of Mr Suryanarayan-an Indian engineer- by the Taliban forces in Afghanistan. No President of any country needs to react to a single death from his country with such proportion unless he is a C.E.O. of that country like the American President; or unless he is Mr Abdul Kalam.

This is not the first time when this man has spoken out about things when all his predecessors would have chosen to remain silent. He has not allowed the so called, either explicitly or implicitly, diplomatic Do’s and Don’ts of his high office to overshadow, what he must be considering, as his basic tenets about humanity. Isn’t this secularism in its true sense ? Does secularism need to be free only from the religious imperatives; does it not need to be free from all temporal imperatives?

I think he represents our country’s conscience and may be he needs to be made the next Secretary General of the United Nations Organization so that he can effectively represent our global conscience.

Who's the most Kafka-esque of them all?

The French goverment has created a Kafka Index to measure the number of hurdles to be crossed by a citizen / organization to obtain something from the Goverment (say a permit or financial aid, etc).

The index will range from 1 to 100 and the 'score' of the various ministries will be posted on a Government website. The article doesn't go into just how the score will be calculated, whether actual citizens will be involved in the scoring, etc, etc.

Since government procedures to do anything tend to be so arcane and downright incomprehensible at times, my geeky tangential idea is to have an equivalent of the SoYouWanna website for each Government branch that the public needs to deal with. So the RTO (Indian equivalent of the DMV) will have entries like - So you wanna get a learner's permit? So you wanna sell your old car?

Now if they did the same thing in India, what is the likelihood that we'll be totally off the charts?

A judge with a sense of humor or You've been Da Vinci-ed

Justice Smith (the judge in the Dan Brown plagiarism case) disovered that nobody really reads all those court rulings all that carefully anyway. He embedded his own little "Smithy code" in the 71 page ruling and kept waiting for someone to notice. Its been 3 weeks and though the code has been finally discovered, it hasn't been broken yet.

[1] The original text of the ruling.

[2] According to CNET, the code (scattered all over the ruling) reads "smithcodeJaeiextostpsacgreamqwfkadpmqz."

[3] Judge Smith was kind enough to give out some clues to a reporter for the New York Times -

- the year 2006 is significant.
- Some of the methods used in the Dan Brown novel (especially the mathematical ones) may work.
- Read the Judge's own Who's Who entry which mentions his interest in Jackie Fisher (the British Admiral).

Training to be a couch potato

Having fallen off the exercise wagon a long, long time ago, I have finally hit upon an idea guaranteed to get me back on track.

Every time that I manage to get myself to the gym, I'm going to pay myself a small amount of money. All the money accumulated in this manner will go towards buying a nice flat screen TV I've had my eye on for quite some time.

So all around me in the gym as people sweat it out to train for an upcoming marathon or triathlon or just to lose some precious pounds, I, my friends, will be in training to be a couch potato!

(Gawker describes the long road back to not-so-flabbydom here).

What's Arabic for Google?

CNET yesterday carried the story of an Arabic language search engine to be launched sometime this year. According to research quoted in the article, 70% of the WWW is in English and a mere 0.2% in Arabic. And 65% of Arabic web surfers don't speak English. A language-specific search engine is not new, Chinese web surfers already have their very own Baidu.

Geek dream? A combination of Google and Babelfish which provides a user with a native language interface, actually searches all-language content on the Web and returns results translated into the user's native language.

I can just imagine Bush now, going to Sawafi and painstakingly typing in - Where is Osama?

Brokeback Mountain

Screen, big or small, and stage are, unarguably the most popular forms of entertainment. Entertainment of the masses may be the primary, but certainly not their sole function and purpose. Many of us tend to take this latter - entertainment-centric view and overlook that cinema and stage also constitute a strong medium for or an expression of performing art. Isn’t it true that most of us would rather avoid serious theatre and cinema and leave them only for the critics?.

I too had procrastinated for a while before finally deciding to see 'Brokeback Mountain' at the semi-open air movie hall of our Club last week. I had reservations about seeing this movie, inter alia, because of the sexual orientation of the lead characters reportedly portrayed in the movie. When the movie started, I was taken in by the formidable combination of beautiful Canadian landscape and modern cinematography but as it progressed, I became increasingly aware of my own heterosexual prejudices and even considered walking out. But something inside me asked me to hold out, and just as well that it did.

As the emotional bond between Ennis Del Mar and Jack Twist builds up, it also grows on you. It did not take me long to turn a Nelson eye to the physicality of the relationship between the ranch hand and the rodeo cowboy and succumb to its sheer sentimentality instead. Jack’s single line "I wish I knew how to quit you" is quite moving and reminded me of, what may be termed as its heterosexual equivalent, a somewhat similar exchange between Dr Yuri Zhivago and Lara Antipova in that great movie classic.

Like all good movies, Brokeback Mountain too has many great scenes but I found the last scene between Jack’s mother and Ennis as the most moving of them all. They were probably the only ones who had known and loved Jack as no one else had done; and more importantly, as it happens with such people, they both seemed to sense out each other instinctively although they met very briefly and were never to meet again.

Almost all questions answered

The Linux Journal carries this story about a website started by IIT Powai which functions as a user/expert exchange targeted at the Indian agricultural community.

Aaqua lets users post questions, exchange information, search through archived answers and even check out the market rates for particular produce all over the country. The questions range from tomato plant diseases to obtaining government land records and are answered by agricultural experts from Krishi Vigyan Kendras (Agricultural Science Centers) around the country. Crop recommendations, information about government schemes for farmers are also posted on the site.

The plan is to support as many Indian languages as possible (the Natural Language Processing lab at IIT Bombay is working on that) and to reach an ever widening audience.

And the best part? Aaqua is run entirely using open source software.

Science quiz hot shot!

How much science should a high school graduate know?

If you had to pick a single question (science question) that you think anybody who went through 12 years of school should be able to answer, what would your question be?

The Star Tribune recently polled teachers, institute heads and some Nobel Prize winners to come up with this list (you can find it here) -

1. What percentage of the earth is covered by water?

2. What sorts of signals does the brain use to communicate sensations, thoughts and actions?

3. Did dinosaurs and humans ever exist at the same time?

4. What is Darwin's theory of the origin of species?

5. Why does a year consist of 365 days, and a day of 24 hours?

6. Why is the sky blue?

7. What causes a rainbow?

8. What is it that makes diseases caused by viruses and bacteria hard to treat?

9. How old are the oldest fossils on earth?

10. Why do we put salt on sidewalks when it snows?

Extra credit: What makes the seasons change?

King David

I do not quite remember whether it was Michelangelo or Leonardo da Vinci that I had first read about. I remember starting to read ‘The Agony and the Ecstasy’ sometime in the sixties or seventies and somehow giving it up even before young Michelangelo had finished his apprenticeship under the painter Domenico Ghirlandaio and joined the sculpture workshop in the Medici house. I think I had read about his work in the Sistine Chapel before I had heard about his sculpture of David. Moreover, one gets to see the picture post cards of the former more often than those of David. Similarly, Vinci’s Mona Lisa is probably the most publicized and therefore overexposed piece of art. May be that is why when I actually saw these two masterpieces during my Europe visit last year, I could absorb their impact within my usual (sensory) perceptibility.

On the other hand, I was totally mesmerized and even disturbed when I saw David for the first time at the Academia Gallery in Florence. I must submit here that for me, being disturbed is the highest expression of my appreciation for any work of art/literature/music; it means that my perception of that piece of art goes beyond the sensory bracket and becomes, what I may term as, a supra-sensory experience. I just did not want to take my eyes off the magnificent statue that stood before me. I stood there as if in a trance, and wishing that Time would stand still because that was the only way I would not have to quit King David’s presence.

We did not visit Milan and therefore could not view Vinci’s The Last Supper. Dan Brown’s ‘Da Vinci Code’ had recently hit the bookstand and Mirchi had finished reading it in between visiting Rome and Florence. Much has been written in the past about the mysterious and enigmatic smile of Mona Lisa but if Mr Brown has his way, it is the Subject- Da Vinci himself, rather than the Object of his art, that is intrigue personified. Even Will Durant suggests that Mona Lisa probably wears Leonard’s smile-the smile of an inverted spirit.

As we know, Da Vinci was also an engineer, a scientist and an inventor. Will Durant describes him as the fullest man of the Renaissance, perhaps of all time. We had arrived into Italy from the North by a land route but flew out from Rome. As we were proceeding to the city’s airport, I noticed that the airport had been named after Leonardo da Vinci. For some reason, I felt a little uneasy with this name. I am sure they did not name this airport after Da Vinci just because he had thought of a flying machine in his time. I felt that, although they could have named the airport in Florence after Da Vinci with some justification, they should have chosen a truly Roman name from the pre-Christianity era for the airport in Rome. Or, may be deep down inside, I belong to a Michelangelo camp.

Insomnia at will

It all started out of necessity.

While I was still at the Academy, my close friends were either students or had finished with their studies and had taken up jobs instead and they were not available to me during the day hours when I would be home on holidays. We would meet up late evening everyday and stay up till wee hours.

We would walk along the depopulated roads at those late hours; I think the cabs were probably the only vehicles that were seen on the roads then because their yellow-red taillights seem to have entrenched in my sub-conscious memory since. Or, we would sit in an Irani restaurant near the railway station, that would remain open for the late night rail commuters, and share our increasing and dwindling stocks of thoughts and cigarettes respectively.

A few years later, I would sit with my fiancée in her house, look out and remark, “It is so beautiful outside, I think sleeping at this hour would be simply wasting it”. We would talk most of the time but there would be intermittent spells of silence, sometimes for breathing in the magnificent quiet that pervaded beyond and sometimes for no reason at all since we do not always need words for communicating.

Communication may be a necessary initial investment for creating a feeling of togetherness but not for long. Later, communication joins this feeling of togetherness in a feedback loop; whenever one weakens, the other fortifies it…..

We don't need no stem cells!

This is completely and truely awesome. Dr. Anthony Atala and colleagues at the Wake Forest University in North Carolina have managed to grow brand new bladders, using cells from the patients themselves, in a matter of weeks. These bladders were then transplanted into the respective patients and so far all the transplants have been successful.

Engineered organs In the new procedure, doctors extract muscle and bladder cells from a small piece of the patient's own bladder. The cells are grown in a Petri dish, then layered onto a three-dimensional mold shaped like a bladder. In a few weeks, the cells produce a new bladder, which is implanted into the patient. Within a few more weeks, the new bladder has grown to normal size and has started functioning. Atala is working to grow 20 different tissues and organs, including blood vessels and hearts, in the laboratory, according to the university. "We're not using any type of stem cell population or cloning techniques, but mainly the patient's own cells that we're using to create these organs and put them back into the patient," Atala told CNN. Because the bladders are grown from a patient's own cells, there is no risk of rejection, as in a traditional transplant.