New Home, New stuff

Am back after a 10 day hiatus. I moved into a new apartment on 24th. So for the past 5-6 days I am experiencing some peace and quiet and can go to sleep whenever I wish. Of course, the moving was a bit of work but the main effort is the unpacking. It is one thing to load and unload packed boxes and quite another to open them and redistribute all the stuff contained in them all over the house. It's like a reality jigsaw puzzle and though it's not terribly hard, it's a lot more work.
My new apartment though is University owned. So except for electricity everything is paid (including gas, local telephone and standard cable). My friend Sachin who lives in UCSD student housing became jealous as he doesnt get all this. In addition we can get cable internet for about $2.25 a month.
I am thinking of buying a computer. My friends want me to buy a laptop but it's beyond my budget, even the ones on ebay. I checked out desktops on the net and I think I will mostly settle for a Dell desktop for around $700. The problem is Dell charges sales tax even on it's online purchases. So I am also going to go and check out deals in Best Buy et al. Hopefully, I should be done by this weekend.

Sovereign Brain

Just saw this hilarious clip: Sovereignty
The knowledge of English and the intellect of the Leader of the Free World is breath-taking. One wonders if his brain is sovereign or someone else does his thinking for him.

The Importance of Elections

Read the following article on Rediff today. Swapan Dasgupta compares the conditions in India in January and August. The article is well written and describes the current position of India in the World Order quite accurately. The stark difference between the positive outlook then and the dejection today is surprising. However, Swapan says that every nation gets it's comeuppance. That we were guilty of "irrational exuberance". But were we? The low rate of inflation in January was not a result artificial fiscal measures by the RBI. The GDP growth rate of 8% plus was not a juggling of numbers. The network of highways connecting major cities of India was not a empty dream but actual tar on the earth. Why then this sudden turnabout? The answer is that between January and August India got itself a new set of rulers. They replaced set of leaders who actually showed some results with people who have failed them many times before. I will not say that the NDA government was the answer to all our problems. They had their high points and low points. But they were leaders who placed the good of the country before personal gain at least a majority of times. The NDA was a government who asked ministers charged with corruption to resign rather than make them Railway ministers. The truth is that people deserve the leaders they get. Within a mere 57 years of winning our independence from Britain, we install another foreigner as out leader. To add insult to injury, Sonia plants a hard slap on India's face by installing a puppet prime-minister to keep the seat warm for her progeny. I have no doubts about Manmohan Singh's integrity and capability, but the fact remains that he cannot take one step without the express permission and blessings of 'Madam'. In fact he cannot even get elected to any House of the Parliament without support from some political party. Add to that the people who are supporting this government. On one hand we have the communists who oppose PSU disinvestment in the rest of the country but are actively shutting down PSUs in West Bengal. On the other hand we have Laloo, who builds a totally useless Railway factory in his constituency and builds bridges connecting it to his sasural.
All this brings me to the whole point of this rant, the importance of elections. Indians need to take national and state elections a little more seriously. The recent national elections were fought primarily on regional issues. This is not only wrong but also seriously detrimental to national welfare. If our attitude towards our nation is one of indifference how will the world take us seriously? When our attitude towards elections is one of apathy, we have ourselves to blame when leaders with proven ineptitude and corruption records rule us.

Sea-side musings

As a person born and brought up in Mumbai, I have always had a special relationship with beaches. To add to that, me and my closest friends have spent countless evenings at a place called Rock Beach in Andheri, Mumbai. We used to walk along the sea shore or just sit on the large rocks there (which give it the name). We used to talk about various things like girls, our studies, our future etc. Though it didn't seem like that at the time, those were some of the most care-free days of my life.
Unfortunately, after coming to the US, I have had very few chances of going to a beach and I certainly missed my companions. Yesterday, however, I visited Corpus Christi and had the chance to spend some time on a beach. The sea water here was much cleaner but it nevertheless brought flooding back, my memories of Rock Beach. I wondered if it would ever be possible for me to be have a care-free, worry-free life again, to spend idyllic evenings with friends discussing trivial things which seem very important at that point of time. The sea, obligingly, provided me with the answer to my question. As I stood there gazing into the infinitude of the Atlantic ocean, the waves crashed against my feet and washed away the sand beneath them. It created the familiar feeling of floating backwards, away from the water. I realized that just to stay where I was, I am going to have to move forward.

Commercial use of Bush's IQ

Today saw the picture below at http://in.rediff.com/news/2004/aug/12look.htm.

A clothing store is advertising it's prices to be less than Dubya's IQ. I am quite sure that in most places around the world, he enjoys a similar if not worse reputation. But then he doesn't need to care about what the world thinks. He is, theoretically at least, the most powerful man on earth.

The Da Vinci Code - Another slap on the common man's face.

Just finished reading the above novel. The first 3/4th is quite spell-binding [My Potter mania shows clearly :-)]. But the climax is quite tepid and is infact a let-down.
The book is about a symbologist and a cryptologist who get entwined in a murder, the victim of which tries to lead them to the Holy Grail using a series of complex puzzles. The book presents the view that Jesus was not divine but was infact a mortal and that the Catholic Church has been playing a trick on everybody for two thousand years. The Holy Grail is said to be a set of documents which support this view. At the end, the two main protagonists do locate the Holy Grail but decide not to reveal it's location. The purported reason for this was that they did not want to invade upon peoples established beliefs. They feared that maybe, this would lead people to reject the concept of God and would lead to anarchy.
I feel that this is a classic example of intellectual arrogance. A few people, just because they have studied a few more books than others, presume to be able to predict the reaction of the 'common man'. This prediction invariably portrays the common folk as weak. In my experience, the 'common man' as a group has shown wisdom, fortitude and resilience far greater than the greatest leaders known to mankind. The common man has survived countless kings, tyrants, corrupt leaders, plagues, wars and crusades. Surely, they need leadership and direction. But this is not because of any weakness of character but because of the incoherence and amorphousness naturally present in such a large group. To say that this group would tumble into helplessness or anarchy just because one leader's credentials are challenged is to grossly underestimate them.
Also purely as a matter of principle, the suppression of truth/scientific evidence should never be condoned. It is far better to confront it than to keep it secret. To suppress the truth or evidence for fear of the reaction to it, is to deprive mankind of an option or thought. It makes the suppressor a far greater criminal against mankind than the people who suppressed it originally for personal gain.
All this said, the book still makes a good read. I just didn't agree with the author as to the direction he gave it.

Of sleep cycles and other things.

Continuing on the moving between apartments theme, I discovered that it is very important to have room-mates whose sleep cycle matches yours. As happenned yesterday, because of an eight hour difference between my cycle and that of my room-mates, they go to sleep when I wake up. This along with the entertainment situation in the house (see below) resulted in my getting minimal sleep last night which has generally screwed up my day.
However, on the positive side, I came across a person running DnD games in College Station and I hope to get back to gaming once a week soon. This is something really great asI really enjoyed gaming and the intervening two gameless months were really boring for me.
Today is also the day that I am finally done with my TA duties. So in balance, it's not that bad.

Moving between apartments

Currently, I am temporarily housed with a few friends. This is because there is a three week difference between the time we had to empty our old apartment and the time we get our new one.
Leaving an apartment is a harrowing experience. Apart from the sadness associated with 'leaving your house', the horrendous amount of cleaning to be done is just crushing. This is so because there is always the fear that the apartment people will charge us cleaning fees over and above the deposit. You might say that this wouldn't be so bad if we had cleaned our apartment regularly. But not having to clean your apartment regularly is one of the perks of single graduate student life :-) .
The friends we are temporarily living with, all have either a desktop or a laptop. So in a house of 4 people we have 5 computers. The fifth one belongs to a friend who is currently vacationing in India. Add to that a TV. So on a typical evening one finds Friends, South Park, Civilization, Microsoft Word and a couple of movies running simultaneously in the house. An overdose of entertainment if there ever was one :-)

Harry Potter Discovery

Recently, I was surfing JKR's website and made a discovery. On the website, there is a phone in the top left hand corner. If you dial a specific number (an easy guess for Potter fans) it shows you a page from one of the earliest drafts for book 1 in which Harry begins to suspect that his parents took/stole the philosophers stone from Nicholas Flamel.
I am sure many people must have found this one before me but was excited so just shared it.

Scientific Temperament

A friend recently brought to my attention, an article on Rediff, http://us.rediff.com/news/2004/aug/03hole.htm . It is about an Indian physicist who, four years ago, tried to publish a paper proving that Hawkings theory of black holes was flawed. It resulted in a lot of ridicule being directed at him and in his isolation in his workplace, the Bhabha Atomic Research Center. I felt really sad on reading the article. Not because an Indian chap was involved and that he has been proven right, but because it reflected a deep malaise in the scientific community.
As a person who is himself pursuing a PhD and who has published and reviewed a few papers, I firmly believe that emotions have no place in scientific writing. Scientific writing should be based purely on verifiable facts, findings of repeatable experiments or simulations and indisputable logic. Ridiculing a person just because he has put forward thoughts contrary to ones propagated by a famous scientist is at best irresponsible and at worst a serious disservice to Science and Technology.
I think that the only way (atleast in the scientific community) to reject somebody's work is to find shortcomings or holes in his experiments, proofs, results etc. If you can't find any, it's ok to still disagree with him/her while keeping in mind that he/she might yet be right. But it's not ok to ridicule, reject and discourage a scientist.

Starting out

This is the start of my blog life. I can only hope that it is long, interesting and fun. I have something to write but right now I have to meet with a professor. So will do it later. Till then, ciao.