Finally, higher education in Bihar has received its long awaited shot-in-the-arm through the route of foreign-university collaboration. A university in the UK has started a course in Astrobiology. Astrobiology, as the discerning mind would immediately grasp, is man's age-old hunger to search for alien life.
The course, besides studying astronomy, will also examine 'popular culture, including films like ET and students will also study obscure texts' related to extra-terrestrial life.
Aliens according to popular culture and obscure texts (and lately definitive literature like 'Men in Black' and 'Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy'), are strange looking people who disguise themselves as people and clandestinely mix with the Earth public and work from inside to destroy humanity via economic and social misdeeds.
Now we know for sure where to find these Aliens... among the politicians of Bihar! Hence, the students' field trips and live experiments are largely going to be in Bihar. Now the question is, will these students do enough research to help these Aliens find their way back home?
Friday, September 30, 2005
Thursday, September 29, 2005
Our celebrities just don't get it
Former Beach Boy Brian Wilson on his website has made an open offer that if you donate $100 for Katrina victims, he will will give you a call on your phone and answer a question of your choice.
True to his word, people have actually testified to receiving calls from him after they made the donation (courtesy Boing Boing).
I wonder why celebrities in India cannot do something like this in the times of Tsunami or Gujarat Earthquakes. A similar offer by people like SRK, Amitabh Bachchan, Aamir Khan, Shekhar Suman or Sachin Tendulkar would do magic to calamity donations. What we do see them doing, though, is participating in an all-star show the proceeds of which they claim would go into a relief fund. And we all know how much an educated man trusts such claims.
True to his word, people have actually testified to receiving calls from him after they made the donation (courtesy Boing Boing).
I wonder why celebrities in India cannot do something like this in the times of Tsunami or Gujarat Earthquakes. A similar offer by people like SRK, Amitabh Bachchan, Aamir Khan, Shekhar Suman or Sachin Tendulkar would do magic to calamity donations. What we do see them doing, though, is participating in an all-star show the proceeds of which they claim would go into a relief fund. And we all know how much an educated man trusts such claims.
Tuesday, September 27, 2005
Whoa-cabulary!
OK, the week gone by, counting from today, is the one that I wrote most extensively in since moving to Mumbai. A list of Top Words and Phrases I used in my newspaper writing in the past week. They keep ringing in my head.
nagpada, chappell, building collapse, eloquence, beach, delighted, saki naka, reliance, patel, VoIP, a study in stupidity, bluetooth, parochial blasphemy, underrated, indian penal code, commendable, investment per megawatt, susu kare chhe, bourses, sensex, zoomed, climbed, hedge funds, flew, sped, tarannum, bungalow, bookies, dabhol, stem cell, kaun banega marodpati, entwine, lokhandwala, sylvan, 26/7, eviscerate, cellular, fixed, gorgeous, MHADA, MMRDA, BMC, vilasrao, biotech, alternative, sectoral, earnings per share, core banking solution, basel ii standards, capital adequacy ratio, organic network, promoter group, paid-up capital, premium, jungle mein mangal, naxalites, rr patil, ipod, itunes, sex scandal, cocaine, main toh bas naukri kar raha hoon, relief package, bridge, port, low pressure area, subir raha ko gussa kyon aata hai?, broker, value addition, VAT, marginal pricing, nefarious, nepotism, vixen, gandhian, pole dancer, Q1 profits.
In other news, I enjoyed test-riding an iPod Nano today. That installing its supporting software on my office computer nearly crashed it is another issue.
nagpada, chappell, building collapse, eloquence, beach, delighted, saki naka, reliance, patel, VoIP, a study in stupidity, bluetooth, parochial blasphemy, underrated, indian penal code, commendable, investment per megawatt, susu kare chhe, bourses, sensex, zoomed, climbed, hedge funds, flew, sped, tarannum, bungalow, bookies, dabhol, stem cell, kaun banega marodpati, entwine, lokhandwala, sylvan, 26/7, eviscerate, cellular, fixed, gorgeous, MHADA, MMRDA, BMC, vilasrao, biotech, alternative, sectoral, earnings per share, core banking solution, basel ii standards, capital adequacy ratio, organic network, promoter group, paid-up capital, premium, jungle mein mangal, naxalites, rr patil, ipod, itunes, sex scandal, cocaine, main toh bas naukri kar raha hoon, relief package, bridge, port, low pressure area, subir raha ko gussa kyon aata hai?, broker, value addition, VAT, marginal pricing, nefarious, nepotism, vixen, gandhian, pole dancer, Q1 profits.
In other news, I enjoyed test-riding an iPod Nano today. That installing its supporting software on my office computer nearly crashed it is another issue.
Man is a Political Animal!
If politicians have the right to behave like animals, why can't we let dogs vote? They have paws too.
A look into history reveals that politics and animals have consistently been in cahoots.
Last week in Bihar, a group of dissidents of a national party took out a rally featuring a battery of pigs and donkeys, drawing a similarity between their own state and that of the animals.
Devi Lal, our former Jaat Deputy Prime Minister's state residence in New Delhi had two well-bred buffaloes from Rohtak as housemates. The old man refused to evict the bovine beasts from the state property, insisting that he could not run the country properly without two fresh glasses of buffalo milk every morning. Cops on security at the house confessed to have mistaken the beasts for the D-PM and vice versa on many occasions. Why two buffaloes? Nobody knows, but the second one was for backup, one might guess. Even Saddam Hussain kept two lookalikes.
The charkha-weilding Mahatma Gandhi mentored what was probably the world's most traveled goat, which he took with him on all foreign tours. One European country even accorded the goat in the esteemed 'state guest' status.
Of course, every now and then politicians turn into the equine to be traded like silk in greedy government formation attempts. Some actually behave like stampeding horses when put inside an assembly hall and armed with mikes with weak bases fixing them to the tables.
A look into history reveals that politics and animals have consistently been in cahoots.
Last week in Bihar, a group of dissidents of a national party took out a rally featuring a battery of pigs and donkeys, drawing a similarity between their own state and that of the animals.
Devi Lal, our former Jaat Deputy Prime Minister's state residence in New Delhi had two well-bred buffaloes from Rohtak as housemates. The old man refused to evict the bovine beasts from the state property, insisting that he could not run the country properly without two fresh glasses of buffalo milk every morning. Cops on security at the house confessed to have mistaken the beasts for the D-PM and vice versa on many occasions. Why two buffaloes? Nobody knows, but the second one was for backup, one might guess. Even Saddam Hussain kept two lookalikes.
The charkha-weilding Mahatma Gandhi mentored what was probably the world's most traveled goat, which he took with him on all foreign tours. One European country even accorded the goat in the esteemed 'state guest' status.
Of course, every now and then politicians turn into the equine to be traded like silk in greedy government formation attempts. Some actually behave like stampeding horses when put inside an assembly hall and armed with mikes with weak bases fixing them to the tables.
Friday, September 23, 2005
Anti music-swapping tool is ineffective
Infuriated by file sharing programs that supposedly make musicians like Metallica take to begging bowls and encouraged by the ruling against Kazaa in Australia, the IFPI, a British music industry conglomerate akin to the RIAA, has launched an anti music-swapping tool that searches for file sharing programs on your hard drive and then proceeds to delete them. The conglomerate has further called upon all the world's offices and colleges to run this tool on PCs in their premises so as to ' increase efficiency by preventing workers from wasting time downloading music' and protecting copyrighted music at the same time. You can test-drive the program here, its called Digital File Check.
Now don't tell me these people can afford to write bad software, because on my pc, which has both WinMX and Ares P2P clients, it fails to locate any of them!
Now just to be sure the files were not protected and all this was not a surreal abberation, I copied the P2P program files to several locations on my hard drive and ran Digital File Check again in a rather uneducated but rational-sounding attempt to help it trap the P2P devils but to no happiness.
Any takers for this software... whatsay, Pointy Haired Boss?
Now don't tell me these people can afford to write bad software, because on my pc, which has both WinMX and Ares P2P clients, it fails to locate any of them!
Now just to be sure the files were not protected and all this was not a surreal abberation, I copied the P2P program files to several locations on my hard drive and ran Digital File Check again in a rather uneducated but rational-sounding attempt to help it trap the P2P devils but to no happiness.
Any takers for this software... whatsay, Pointy Haired Boss?
Wednesday, September 21, 2005
Offshore
Big ideas and projects take too much time to take off in India. Protesting environmentalists, a free media, ballot-happy legislators and the gang are forever finding faults with development. Stay orders in courts, misleading media reports, protests that go beyond the right to freedom of speech are tools that delay power projects, housing schemes, flyovers, highways and industries.
A very dangerous and unpardonable specimen that poses a high risk to development is the uninformed journalist, the media's in-house ignoramus.
In April 2004, several villages near Satara in Maharashtra, the hub of wind energy in India, turned against windmills because they believed that the windmill blades drove away rain clouds, causing a drought.
A local newspaper ran a story 'confirming the villager's concerns': "The large blades of a windmill first attract rain coulds towards them using magnetic power. The blades then slash through the clouds to cut them into pieces, thus affecting rainfall and causing a drought."
Soon, the local MLA sensed that playing the tune of the people and the media is best for future election prospects. The next day he was seen leading a rally demanding the demolition of the thousands of plush windfarms in Satara spread across thousands of acres and worth hundreds of crores of rupees. He even produced rainfall statistical data for the last 4 years, attributing a universally bad monsoon to the windmills' rain-killing tendency.
Not to be left behind in displaying utter stupidity, the country's only Ministry of Renewable Sources of Energy in the Maharashtra government ordered a probe into the issue.
Not one soul of consequence came forward to talk reason for weeks. The controversy died with a big Indian Express story pointing out the stupidity of it all, the only oasis of rationality.
I am a firm supporter of renewable sources of energy, be it big dams and hydro projects, wind, biomass or the lesser prevalent solar and geothermal. With fossil fuel prices going up and the Kyoto Protocol in place, I think they provide a great opportunity for the country to build a cheap and robust power infrastructure from the start and and accumulate carbon credits. So incidents like the one above and the following one evoke a sense of comic frustration in me.
Very respectable publications in their editorials have been creating a lot of hype about offshore wind energy projects. They tout it as the ultimate solution to all power problems in India. One of them even assailed the IPO of Suzlon Wind Energy, world's sixth largest wind ev\nergy equipment manufacturer, because its Red Herring Prospectus did not mention anything about offshore projects. I find this obsession with offshore wind projects preposterous, just as I find rain-water harvesting as a solution to water problems in India plain dumb.
Offshore wind energy projects, incidentally, are windmill farms installed on the sea, a few kms away from the coast, because wind patterns are stronger out there.
India has an on-land wind potential of 45,000 MW, of which a little over 3,000 MW has been installed. The remaining 42,000 begs to be converted to installed capacity. State governments are putting in place laws favourable to renewable energy installation. As much as 875 MW wind capacity was added in 2004 itself, the third largest in the world for that year.
Offshore wind projects are at best a futuristic technology. They are installed mainly due to two reasons, first being the lack of enough landmass in a country for on-land projects (European countries, for example) and the second being opposition from extreme environmentalists who (legitimately) oppose windmills on land because their rotor blades are known to kill migratory birds en masse.
Other than that, offshore projects require nearly five times the investment per MW as on-land wind projects. They cannot be installed in large MW chunks and are still at research stage. The cost of power per unit from offshore projects is insanely astronomical.
Most of all, it is slightly too much to talk vigorously of the expensive offshore wind projects in India when only 7 percent of the on-land potential has been converted.
A very dangerous and unpardonable specimen that poses a high risk to development is the uninformed journalist, the media's in-house ignoramus.
In April 2004, several villages near Satara in Maharashtra, the hub of wind energy in India, turned against windmills because they believed that the windmill blades drove away rain clouds, causing a drought.
A local newspaper ran a story 'confirming the villager's concerns': "The large blades of a windmill first attract rain coulds towards them using magnetic power. The blades then slash through the clouds to cut them into pieces, thus affecting rainfall and causing a drought."
Soon, the local MLA sensed that playing the tune of the people and the media is best for future election prospects. The next day he was seen leading a rally demanding the demolition of the thousands of plush windfarms in Satara spread across thousands of acres and worth hundreds of crores of rupees. He even produced rainfall statistical data for the last 4 years, attributing a universally bad monsoon to the windmills' rain-killing tendency.
Not to be left behind in displaying utter stupidity, the country's only Ministry of Renewable Sources of Energy in the Maharashtra government ordered a probe into the issue.
Not one soul of consequence came forward to talk reason for weeks. The controversy died with a big Indian Express story pointing out the stupidity of it all, the only oasis of rationality.
I am a firm supporter of renewable sources of energy, be it big dams and hydro projects, wind, biomass or the lesser prevalent solar and geothermal. With fossil fuel prices going up and the Kyoto Protocol in place, I think they provide a great opportunity for the country to build a cheap and robust power infrastructure from the start and and accumulate carbon credits. So incidents like the one above and the following one evoke a sense of comic frustration in me.
Very respectable publications in their editorials have been creating a lot of hype about offshore wind energy projects. They tout it as the ultimate solution to all power problems in India. One of them even assailed the IPO of Suzlon Wind Energy, world's sixth largest wind ev\nergy equipment manufacturer, because its Red Herring Prospectus did not mention anything about offshore projects. I find this obsession with offshore wind projects preposterous, just as I find rain-water harvesting as a solution to water problems in India plain dumb.
Offshore wind energy projects, incidentally, are windmill farms installed on the sea, a few kms away from the coast, because wind patterns are stronger out there.
India has an on-land wind potential of 45,000 MW, of which a little over 3,000 MW has been installed. The remaining 42,000 begs to be converted to installed capacity. State governments are putting in place laws favourable to renewable energy installation. As much as 875 MW wind capacity was added in 2004 itself, the third largest in the world for that year.
Offshore wind projects are at best a futuristic technology. They are installed mainly due to two reasons, first being the lack of enough landmass in a country for on-land projects (European countries, for example) and the second being opposition from extreme environmentalists who (legitimately) oppose windmills on land because their rotor blades are known to kill migratory birds en masse.
Other than that, offshore projects require nearly five times the investment per MW as on-land wind projects. They cannot be installed in large MW chunks and are still at research stage. The cost of power per unit from offshore projects is insanely astronomical.
Most of all, it is slightly too much to talk vigorously of the expensive offshore wind projects in India when only 7 percent of the on-land potential has been converted.
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