Rumi Nations

As long as we use the Internet, we have to have some basic understanding of how this behemoth works. We cannot just pretend that we are technologically-illiterate. All of us have to be somewhat technologically literate. The attack on the nytimes.com domain is a good opportunity to educate ourselves about how to pull such a trick. Of course, the idea is not that EVERYONE should then try to pull similar tricks but just educate ourselves about HOW STUFF WORKS. Here's the Washington Post explaining the attack on the NYT. Here's one more technical look at the whole fracas.

What business books to read? Andrew Ross Sorkin lost a lot of the regard I had for him when he opined that Glenn Greenwald should be 'almost arrested' for exposing NSA spying through the whistle-blower. That is the problem with 'experts' in one domain butting into other domains which are not their bailiwick. Sorkin is good in finance though and he wrote this column about the best business books for this 'summer' in America. He lists some good books and readers have added their own favorites in the comments. The list includes everything from The Art of War to Machiavelli to Warren Buffett, Michael Lewis, Michael Porter, Malcolm Gladwell, to Andrew Sorkin himself. The well known books such as Barbarians at the Gate and books about insider trading feature in the list.

No well-known person or personality would perhaps say what I’m going to say here. It’s merely stating the obvious to say that the world of Kabir Bedi does not exemplify the life of the average Indian. I am all for live-in relationships. Some talked about ‘blowing the brains off’ of the perpetrators. It’s worrying to see such over-the-top reactions. Is it too much to expect that people react calmly and in a measured way? What gave the incident prominence was clearly the fact that it was caught on video. We do not have video footage of those incidents of rape in moving cars and elsewhere. Imagine what the reaction would be if there was. Much killing of various sorts happened in Punjab in the 1980s and in Kashmir in the 1990s. But none of that was captured on video. Unmarked graves and skeletons are all that still give mute testimony to some of the chilling reality of Kashmir. The lack of video footage from inside the death chambers of Auschwitz and elsewhere do not...

It was bedtime for Krista and Tatiana Hogan, and the 4-year-old twin girls were doing what 4-year-olds everywhere do at bedtime. They were stalling, angling for more time awake. Their grandmother, Louise McKay, who lives with the girls and their parents in Vernon, a small city in British Columbia, was speaking to them in soothing tones, but the girls resorted to sleep-deferring classics of the toddler repertory. “I want one more hug!” Krista said to their grandmother, and then a few minutes later, they both called out to her, in unison, “I miss you!” But in the dim light of their room, a night light casting faint, glowing stars and a moon on the ceiling, the girls also showed bedtime behavior that seemed distinctly theirs. The twins, who sleep in one specially built, oversize crib, lay on their stomachs, their bottoms in the air, looking at an open picture book on the mattress. Slowly and silently, in one synchronized movement, they pushed it under a blanket, then pulled it out aga...

Well, that's disappointing. At least, would be to some people ... people who are in it to reduce weight, look slim, etc. But if people look for short term gains from exercising, they are — as it were — looking to make a quick buck in my opinion. The New York Times has a story about how exercising doesn't necessarily lead to weight loss and why ... http://well.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/11/04/phys-ed-why-doesnt-exercise-lead-to-weight-loss/ One has to be able to take into account the numerous other benefits of exercising ... not just weight loss. The human body is fundamentally designed to work!!! It's as simple as that. The muscles that we have are meant to be put to their test and we are definitely not designed through evolution to slouch all day in front of a computer. Those who might feel disheartened when exercising doesn't lead to weight loss would do well to consider what would have been the case if they had not been exercising ... they would have been fatter with ...

Well, that might be self-evident to some folks. But researchers like to find out exactly how the brain works. And with the help of our good old friends, researchers have seen how rodents that exercise are less stressed-out than those that don't. Here's the story from the New York Times ... http://well.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/11/18/phys-ed-why-exercise-makes-you-less-anxious/?em Personally, it makes me feel less tired and more active during the day, I guess ... I mean, we all do such sedantary jobs now-a-days ... which primarily involves sitting in front of a computer the whole day. In the old days — and to a certain extent even today — people would spend some time in front of an image of some Hindu deity in the morning and do some chants or something ... that would a regular way of doing worship ... In the modern era, it's as if we have all now decides to 'worship' the computer deity and do so by sitting in front of the 'God' the whole day!!! Ohhhhhhhh!!! Wha...

And I am not talking Arthur C. Clarke kind of science fiction. "A start-up company from the Seattle area won $900,000 on Friday in a NASA contest to build a miniature prototype of a machine that could one day climb from Earth to outer space," according to a New York Times article here ... http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/08/science/space/08nasa.html?hpw Arthur Clarke has of course envisioned high-rise buildings going all the way up to geostationary orbit at 36,000 kms. Well, I would not be around to witness any of that ... Which is just as well because I don't have the brains either to develop something like that ... As each generation gives way to the next smarter generation, humans will eventually acquire the smarts to realize what might seem today to be crazy dreams. But then the cellphones that we find to be so commonplace today would have seemed quite magical one century ago ... same goes for airplanes. There's no reason why people won't go to Mars for their ho...

Well, not quite. But the opinion piece columns in the New York Times as well as the Wall Street Journal were analyzing the results of the gubernatorial elections in New Jersey and Virginia and a few Congressional elections and it was interesting to see the contrasting conclusions that they drew from the same results. While Obama supporters like Gail Collins and Maurren Dowd described the results as being not connected to Obama's presidency and local in nature and therefore having no bearing at all on Obama's performance or lack of it, WSJ columnist Peggy Noonan describes these results as a wake up call for the Obama White House. It seems to me that the results might be described using that rather ungainly phrase: "anti-incumbency" factor. That's a very popular phrase during elections in India when the voters find an outlet to show their anger at the government and throw out whoever is in power. I think it might be the same in the U.S. as well where lobbyists have ...

Bob Herbert talks about President Obama promoting solar energy in his New York Times column here ... http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/03/opinion/03herbert.html?_r=1&hp Meanwhile, David Brooks of the New York Times has written an interestingly argued article about the chaging nature of relationships in the age of texting and cellphones here ... http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/03/opinion/03brooks.html?hp Roger Cohen of the New York Times both reminisces about the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall as well as pines for a different outcome to the recent semi-uprising/revolt in Iran here ... http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/03/opinion/03iht-edcohen.html?hp What more do you want? Enough nutritious intellectual fodder for a day?

The travails of Wall Street forces one to think about some fundamental facts. Is there any specific reason why bankers and other financial industry executives should be millionaires? The New York Times has an interesting analysis about the troubles of the financial industry here ... http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/30/business/30norris.html How much pay do doctors and teachers and research scientists in the physical and biological sciences earn? Does a person need millions of dollars of pay per year to maintain a good standard of living? How does society benefit by having some people who are spectacularly rich while others live in poverty? Do these millionaires contribute anything of value to society that would justify their earning those pay packets? Of course, in a free market economy, these are difficult choices to make ... But society can come to a consensus as to what are the really important activities that a society must engage itself in and what are not so important. I do not be...

Dennis Overbye has written an intriguing article in the New York Times about some researchers who are giving a very interesting reasoning about why the Large Hadron Collider is going through so many birth pangs. The scientists think that the Higgs boson which they think they will find at the kind of energies that the LHC will be able to generate is trying to prevent its own creation. In what is certainly a pretty interesting thought, the scientists think that this is a case of the future trying to make sure that that future does not occur. This is certainly interesting, if possible, as it shows that the idea of time travel is fundamentally not impossible.

Paul Krugman had some harsh words for climate change deniers in his recent New York Times column: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/29/opinion/29krugman.html?_r=1&em With his customary clear-thinking, he has wondered about the implications of the narrow margin with which the Waxman Markey bill passed in the House. The scary part about all this is if legislators in advanced nations find it hard to come to a consensus about climate change, what would be the fate of similar bills in legislatures in less developed nations such as China and India ... Will people realize the gravity of the issue only when the dire consequences predicted by scientists become real and people start dying ? When hurricanes with the ferocity of Katrina become annual events rather than unusual anomalies and droughts become commonplace around the world, perhaps people will begin to realize that we can't go on burning fossil fuel without suffering consequences.