As the graphic says...
This is a very positive change from the recent political climate in the US. This shows not just the renewed interest of people in politics, but also a serious challenge to the big lobby run election campaigns of the yore!
http://www.cnn.com/2008/WORLD/europe/08/03/solzhenitsyn.dead/index.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aleksandr_Solzhenitsyn
My impressions of Solzhenitsyn is mixed. On one hand I have high regards for his humanitarian contributions in exposing the cruelties of Stalinist Soviet regime. On the other hand, his thoroughly right wing social view has disturbed me quite a lot.
He was a frequent ideological presence in the heated discussions we used to have while in the engineering college and later in the lawns of University College, TVM.
Today, I remember him again.
Over zealous, and highly dramatized "concern" about "life" is one of the hallmarks of American Conservatism. A strong aversion to women's rights, especially reproductive rights is shared equally by both Christianity and Islam.
Bush administration has demonstrated their unwavering support for the religious right by issuing a regulation that defines abortion so broadly that it includes a wide range of contraception method including IUD as a form of abortion. This is outrageous.
http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/presidentbush/2008/07/abortion-reprod.html
Hllary has a strong statement and urges everybody to go to her new website (hillpac.com) to sign a petition, but the website is still in its infancy. Too bad.
I will look out for more links on the story and actions.
Here is the Reuter Story
http://www.reuters.com/article/newsOne/idUSN1843863720080718
http://www.themoneytimes.com/articles/20080719/clinton_condemns_bush_administration_s_abortion_plan-id-1029881.html
The new three part series in National Geographic is one of the endless series of very high definition earth imageries that now fills the Science/Discovery/NG channels. This, like most other documentaries of the type gives a rather peripheral view of the earth and its evolution.
The series examines different aspects of earth's life through beautifully captured imageries, that rightfully stands at par with Planet Earth and Blue Planet.
I have not watched the whole of it yet. But from the three parts I have already watched, it feels a bit empty except for those gorgeous shots. Dr.Iain Stewart is not the most entertaining presenter if you ask me. But more than the presentation itself, it is the abundance of platitudes that kill the enjoyment.
Here is one example. The episode is Volcanoes and Iain is talking about the carbon cycle. The scene starts with really beautiful micro-shots and quite dazzling aerial and satellite pictures of the sea green with algae. Then he describes how algae absorbs carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and eventually die and sediment at the bottom of the ocean. Then comes the revelation! If the algae continues to absorb carbon dioxide, it will eventually thin out the green house effect and the earth will become too cold. That will be the end of life! He then continues to talk about the seduction as the tectonic plates move and the carbon in the sediment gets converted to carbon dioxide.
This is actually a constant theme in these science/nature shows. There is always this single overarching reason for life to survive. Reduce the temperature by a few degrees, a rogue meteor. This not just is limited to the destiny of life, but for the universe itself! Often you will hear if the value of cosmological constant was a bit off, or if the initial temperature of the universe immediately after the big bang was a little lower...
As I see it, these are the same fatalistic deterministic world views that is so ingrained with our age old views of the world, mainly controlled by theological dogma and mythological delusions.
Deterministic narratives of cosmology is fundamental to the propagation of religious dogmas. Any assumption of creation - as Einstein amply demonstrated - has to preclude any questions about a deterministic evolution. Remember, god does not play dice!!
We should, by now, know that there is not just one path that leads to the current state of the Universe. While past might be fixed, it does not, by any means say that this is the only possible current state. Nor does it mean that our past is the only way to reach here.
I am eagerly waiting to see a narration that is devoid of the fatalistic proclamations one of these days. May be I should watch Nova more regularly!!!
We, me and Shobha had been waiting eagerly for this evening. Setup reminders in TV, turned on NASA TV in my computer by 5 PM. It sure was a nail biter. Shobha cried. I almost did. Ahh... what a wonderful landing.
No, I will not get into the politics of it yet. Today, lets all celebrate. Tomorrow we will analyze the return on investment.
Here is the moment of Zen!
Soon, there was a flurry of pictures from the lander. Watch them here.
Well, that should not be a special news from someone from Kerala. However, it is different in my case. I have been living alone as Shobha is visiting Kerala. We just finished our new kitchen and I am still in the process of stocking it and getting familiarized.
I have not been cooking rice for almost 4 months in this house. When the old kitchen was demolished in January, I was left with a microwave and mini fridge in the bedroom. The work was completed in late March, when I left for India. I came back last week and was getting used to this new home. Yes, I love it.
yep. Here is a picture...
Any ways, while i sat down for dinner with the steaming rice, which was nicely cooked (I like it well cooked), Mackerel and Tilapia fried, chicken curry, Shanghai cabbage and broccoli stir fry and onions and tomatoes in yogurt (ohh my, that is a lot of stuff) in my big green plate, I realized, it is great to eat rice :)
This is a good day. Nice to see things slowly falling in to place around me.
- I still love rain: I landed on the 22nd to the midst of a severe spring depression in the Arabian Sea. Really torrential rains for almost three days without a pause. A very nice reminder of the monsoons. Yes, it was disastrous, with large amounts of crops failing as this happened just when the paddy fields were getting ready to be harvested. The rain practically flooded large portions of the road between my brother's house and my sister's house between which I was doing most of the walking.
- Kerala drivers are not reckless, they are incredibly patient: I am still afraid of traffic in Kerala roads. I do feel much better driving in the US where there are specific rules and people largely obey them. So, the apparent chaos of the TVM traffic baffled me for a few days. I was trying to imagine how I managed to go through this when I was driving. But, the number of vehicles where several times less then than it is now. The roads have not widened at all, though in TVM, the number of roads have increased. So, as I traveled (as a passenger) around TVM, I came to learn the incredible order in all this chaos. The fundamental principle in the dynamic - you will be surprised - co-operation and patience!!! Every intersection, everybody yielded, watched for others, took the least invasive route. Of course there were tyrants and hot headed drivers and novices. But they all worked within this system of yield and cooperation much more than I see in an intersection with stop sign in the US. We are still learning the wonders of double lane traffic, but I think we are much better and getting better as we do it more.
- Kerala Govt. Hospitals are a good place to get health care: I know the maladies of our government hospitals from the corruption among doctors and staff to the lack of availability of equipments and sometimes medicine. But it does operate much more efficiently than many big hospitals in the US. It is quite amazing when you add the fact that most of the service provided by these government hospitals is free. I visited SAT, a hospital that specializes in women and children. It is where most of the difficult child births around TVM and possibly the whole of Kerala happens. In my own family, my elder niece had some complication during birth and was transferred to SAT immediately after birth in a private hospital. My sister gave birth to her daughter there as well. So, I am intimately familiar with the good and the bad. Knowing the amount of talent we have in there and the percentage of hard working dedicated people, with all the perceived bad, I will still trust SAT against any other private hospital and some of the hospitals around me in Philadelphia.
- The political discourse in Kerala has not changed a lot: This is a good sign. It has not deteriorated any further. There is the usual penetration of right wing media and further marginalisation of the left voice. But, nothing alarming there. There are the beginnings of alternative discourse becoming more visible through blogs and some odd TV programs. Coming from the US, even the worst offenders of journalistic ethics in Kerala looks like a bastion of Journalistic integrity in US standards)
- I love talking in Malayalam: I knew this. I have not done theoretical discussions in Malayalam for a while. Got some chance to do it. Loved it!
- There are way too many Cuckoos in Kerala: Yes, there are much more than say 7 years ago. I lived in TVM at two houses and in Kochin at my wife's house. In all the three places, I could hear much more Cuckoo (Kuyil) songs than I used to hear before. It was a novelty to challenge a cuckoo song and make it "mad". But now, it is actually annoying at times. My sister complains about this one cuckoo which start singing at 4 am in the morning!! I should ask an ornithologist about this.
More to come...
For a few years, we have been toying with the idea of getting permanent sterilization. However, since we have come up with a quite efficient plan of contraception and abstinence, this was not in the forefront of discussion. Last year, we asked our primary physician about it and he advised me to contact a urologist. Once I started the process, I soon found that it is not an easy thing to be done in the US, especially with the dubious status of my insurance. It was definitely too expensive to do without insurance coverage. So, when during my visit to India , I went ahead and did it. I went to the Sree Chithira Tirunal Govt. Hospital (SAT hospital for women and children. Yes, I know, not a likely place to do vasectomy) and did the Non Scalpel Vasectomy (NSV). Of course it was not among the most pleasant things done to my penis and ***. However, it was relatively low impact and I had to endure only minor post operative pain.
I know this is kind of a personal thing and might not be the best subject to discuss in a public blog. I am not that socially open person either. But what prompted me to advertise this was a rather alarming statistics. In the last year, among more than 150,000 sterilizations done in Kerala, only about 1,100, less than 1% were vasectomies. The rest were procedures done on women.
First I thought this might be a special case for Kerala, but soon it was clear that this is a global phenomenon. The percentage of males undergoing sterilization is much less than that of females. This is one of those hidden sexist actions we males do but never acknowledge.
The main two reasons for men not going for sterilization are two fold. One, they are afraid. Yes, as we men secretly know all this time that we are the meeker sex. We are afraid of so many things that might undermine our macho stature. Messing with our "Organ" definitely is the scariest things we could ever think of. The second reason is our opposition to random people handling our sex organs. The funny thing is that, we do not feel any angst when men and women medical practitioners pour over female genitalia for even the simplest of reasons as a fungus infection. It is with mortal fear men allow a doctor, male or female handling his "manhood". I think many of us fear a male doctor seeing it and judging the size of it. come on, what if his is bigger than mine and he actually sees it!!!
This is not an isolated statistics where women ends up doing men's dirty work. One other case is the HPV vaccine. The main culprit in spreading HPV are men who are the carriers of the virus. We all know that it is best to treat the point of distribution. However, the manufactures, even with indications that it will work just as well in men, went ahead and completed testing only with women (in developing countries, of course).
So, I had to announce that, I did go through NSV, I am proud of it, and recommend it to all men who does not want to have kids. It takes only a few minutes of your life, and has very minimal discomfort. I will take HPV vaccine if they are offered for men as well.
Hey, if you do it in India, you will even get Rs.1,100.00. I also strongly recommend you do it in a government hospital instead of private, where you can do it for free. If you do so, don't forget to donate the money back to the hospital. They need a lot of supplies that is hard to get through proper channel.
Before closing this post, I would like to thank the doctors, nurses and assistants of SAT hospital in Thiruvananthapuram who did my vasectomy, and all the dedicated and brilliant doctors and medical staff in the excellent government hospitals of Kerala.
I am really proud of my state :-)
There was one time, when I would have accepted a Delphi project over pretty much any other. However, last several releases of Delphi has made me change my mind.
Every release of Delphi after version 7.0 had been a total disappointment. Whatever is the official spin from Borland/CodeGear is, the botched effort at divesting and the following split up has made the products from them much less reliable.
Right now, I am using Delphi.Net 2007 and trying to use it as a first class citizen of the .Net languages. However, in every possible way, Delphi fails my efforts.
The IDE is still extremely unstable and has several quirks of usages. One of the most annoying is its disregard to relative paths, or library paths in general. It blindly adds whatever paths it can find, mostly the default project paths that points to your local documents folder.
What is more scary however is the behavior of the compiler. It has its own mind. You can compile the same set of projects 10 times without changing a single thing and have two or three of them failing mysteriously.
The latest disappointment was when I tried to create a Smart Client Software Factory (SCSF) module in Delphi. I created a simple package in Delphi, with one class. Added Microsoft.Practices.CompositeUI.dll to reference, added the namespace and hit compile. Oops... There it is. An internal error. And the compile fails. After several tries and an hour or so, I reported yet another bug (my 25th or so in the last one year) to QC and started planning for alternatives.
And for Delphi, I am not sure how much I like it anymore.. Not a lot for sure.
I was off my rocker for more about 10 weeks now. Well, it is actually a recliner. Still, one of my asses favorite resting places.
We started a rather long remodeling project earlier last year. Well, the full story of that probably will follow. Early January, most of the ground floor was under construction and I moved all my furniture and other stuff to a mobile mini thingie. When I started the project I mused about how it will be to use agile methodologies to manage it. But, later I found an even better way. Let the contractor manage the project. Well, there had been quite a lot of changes and some overruns.
Today, Bob the Builder cleaned up the ground floor enough to bring in the furniture. Now, I am sitting in my spanking new living room, with shiny bamboo floors. Mmmm, living room is a wonderful concept. Especially, when your life is limited to one room for over 2 months!!!
The commercial shows the car in the desert, climbing a hill, etc. The sound says, "you may never drive it in a desert or climb 70 degree slope... [] but someone might. Knowing that we cannot engineer anything less" thus spoke the new Mercedes commercial
And I am wondering, when did putting stuff that no one might ever need in every car become engineering? it is just obscene over indulgence!
US is getting ready to shoot down a defunct spy satellite. Read here. http://www.space.com/news/ap-080214-spy-satellite-shootdown.html. The funny thing is that US was causing so much noise against space arms race discussions put forward by Russia and China (http://news.xinhuanet.com/english/2008-02/12/content_7593704.htm) mainly pointing out Chinese action last year of shooting down a weather satellite.
This is yet another example of the unfairness and autocracy of the US administration when it comes to peace talks. Well, when a country spends more on arms than every other country combined, it is hard to believe there will be a reasonable effort from them for peace.
Codegear today announced their developer survey for Delphi product line. See the announcement here http://blogs.codegear.com/nickhodges/2008/01/31/39017#comment-18925.
Being a long term Delphi user, and my strong opinions about the recent releases from Code Gear, I immediately went to the survey and started filling out. I enthusiastically started marking my choices for the questions. The first ones were simple radio buttons in a grid, which worked well.
Then comes 3.4
"Delphi Language Enhancements: For your development needs, please rank the following language features in order of desirability for Delphi/Object Pascal"
This is followed by 9 Combo Boxes, each containing 9 items each. To my horror, I realized that the combo boxes does not filter themselves out the already selected items. It took me quite some time to figure out the unselected items for the last three selections.
This however, did not deter me and I continued on. There comes question 3.6
"VCL Enhancements: According to your development needs, please allocate 100 points across the following potential VCL framework enhancements to indicate the relative amount of support and features you would like to see CodeGear focus on for your particular needs. Assign any amounts to each feature from 0 to 100, so that the total of all the entries is 100"
It took me a few moments to figure out what is required from me. There are 9 enhancements listed below this question with an edit box left of it. I am supposed to somehow split 100 into 9 parts, according to my preference. And, yes, the total should be 100. Is it just me or is this an incredibly inefficient way to get preference?
Ahh.. by the way, none of these answers are checked against clear invalid choices.
Good job Code gear, this survey is matched only be the quality of the products that are coming out of there!!!!
David I of CodeGear has written a blog lamenting about the amount of innovation is lost through software piracy. The thing I noticed was the familiarity of this argument with the one that is put forth by RIA. Then he brings in some statistics to prove that about 35% of software "value" is being lost through piracy...
CodeGear is in a rather dangerous downward spiral in their long term strategies, and capability to deliver. Even after four releases, their new Delphi IDE line is bogged with bugs and serious performance problems. Severe fragmentation of resources into several new projects (PHP, Ruby) have not helped them at all. Instead of trying to find out why CodeGear is becoming more and more of a developer antagonistic company these days.
Instead of drumming that old drum that the RIA has been beating for sometime. Open up, look around, basically grow up!!
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