There were two stories relating to human cognition today that really had me thinking about the way we…think (how appropriate). The first involves the game of chess. You know, the game of kings invented so long ago in India:

Chess is commonly believed to have originated in North-West India during the Gupta empire, where its early form in the 6th century was known as caturanga (Sanskrit: four divisions [of the military] - infantry, cavalry, elephants, and chariotry, represented by the pieces that would evolve into the modern pawn, knight, bishop, and rook, respectively). The earliest evidence of Chess is found in the neighboring Sassanid Persia around 600 where the game is known under the name became chatrang. [Link]

Garry Kasparov, the former world chess champion (the current is India’s Viswanathan Anand) has penned a brilliant (absolute must-read) essay/review of the new book, Chess Metaphors: Artificial Intelligence and the Human Mind. The title of his essay could have easily been, “How I Learned to Stop Battling and Love the Computer.” It chronicles his victories over the machines, followed by his losses, followed finally by a type of brutally efficient partnership. Let the human worry about strategy and the machine about tactics.

…I narrowly defeated the supercomputer Deep Blue in a match. Then, in 1997, IBM redoubled its efforts—and doubled Deep Blue’s processing power—and I lost the rematch in an event that made headlines around the world. The result was met with astonishment and grief by those who took it as a symbol of mankind’s submission before the almighty computer. (“The Brain’s Last Stand” read the Newsweek headline.) Others shrugged their shoulders, surprised that humans could still compete at all against the enormous calculating power that, by 1997, sat on just about every desk in the first world.

It was the specialists—the chess players and the programmers and the artificial intelligence enthusiasts—who had a more nuanced appreciation of the result. Grandmasters had already begun to see the implications of the existence of machines that could play—if only, at this point, in a select few types of board configurations—with godlike perfection. The computer chess people were delighted with the conquest of one of the earliest and holiest grails of computer science, in many cases matching the mainstream media’s hyperbole. The 2003 book Deep Blue by Monty Newborn was blurbed as follows: “a rare, pivotal watershed beyond all other triumphs: Orville Wright’s first flight, NASA’s landing on the moon….” [Link]

Seems like Abhi may have more in common with turban wearing LA Mayor Villaraigosa than we thought. (via Razib)

In world wide context South Asians and mestizos can be viewed as somewhat analogous; a stable admixture between West and East Eurasian elements. Of course, the “East Eurasian” ancestry of mestizos consists of the New World descendants of Paleolithic Siberians, while those of South Asians are the ancient long resident populations of that region of the world.[geneexpression]

It is kind of a surprising finding. As an activist that works in the umbrella political category of Asian American and Pacific Islander, it’s interesting to see that Houston Gujaratis have more in common with LA Mexicans than East Asians. Of course, one is a construct of political identity and the other one is purely genetics.

Still. I totally see this as potential marriage fodder for Desis who want to prove to their parents that they have more in common with their Mexican boy/girlfriend. I guess Columbus wasn’t that far off then, was he?

Sandhya wrote a post last year related to Bhopal last year, so perhaps it isn’t necessary to go through the particulars of a case that most people know about. Still, it seems important to acknowledge that today is 25 years to the day since the Union Carbide plant at Bhopal broke down, resulting in the release of massive amounts of poisonous methyl isocyanate gas, which killed about 30,000 people and injured thousands more (more than 500,000 people claimed damages). For those unfamiliar with the story, here is a detailed chronology of events.

As many people are aware, the Union Carbide Corporation (UCC) was an American company. The plant was technically operated by its subsidiary, Union Carbide India Limited (UCIL), which was 51% owned by UCC at the time of the disaster.

In one of the strangest, and most fateful, twists in the legal history of the Bhopal disaster, a U.S. District Court decided in May, 1986 that UCIL was an Indian company (“a separate entity, owned, managed and operated exclusively by Indian citizens in India”), and therefore any litigation regarding the Bhopal disaster should be done in India. The decision by the District Court was upheld on Appeal.

The transfer of legal authority — in effect, the U.S. justice system saying, “hey, this is not an American company, so it’s not our problem” — significantly weakened the damages that were likely to be rewarded. Indeed, the final damages, reached in an out of court settlement, was only $470 million. When all was said and done, that came out to $2,200 for each person killed, and about $500 for each person injured. Neither UCIL nor UCC ever had to acknowledge culpability, or take responsibility for cleaning up the still polluted site of the Union Carbide Plant. A Dow Chemicals executive later stated that the amount “is plenty good for an Indian.” Even with the conversion to Rupees, I can’t see how $500 is a significant help for a person who may be living with a debilitating injury, with children who are born, even years later, with serious congenital birth defects associated with (still) poisoned groundwater. It’s not “plenty good”; it’s laughable.

A commenter on Sandhya’s earlier thread mentioned the Sambhavna Clinic, which was built specifically to care for victims of the disaster. There is a “donate here” button; if you have a couple of bucks to spare, you might use it.

Finally, Suketu Mehta has a column up in the New York Times today. He does lament that Dow Chemicals hasn’t done anything to help clean up the site. But what he doesn’t mention is that the reason for that is that the U.S. justice system washed its hands of the mess in 1986, and the Indian Government, which is the only entity that today has any legal responsibility to do anything for anyone in Bhopal, meekly accepted it.

What are your thoughts today? Have you read anything insightful or enlightening with regards to the Bhopal disaster in recent days?

I’ve been meaning to link to the recent study in Nature, “Reconstructing Indian Population History” (subscription reqd.) all week, but have been too busy (note: a document full of supplementary information is freely available here, though you need to be able to understand the way they do statistical analysis to make sense of all the charts).

As this is genetics, one would expect some comments from Razib, and indeed, one is not disappointed: here are Razib Khan’s comments on the study (see also this follow up post, where Razib creates his own plots based on the study’s data). The study gives data that relates to quite a number of different things, but the takeaway points seem to be : (1) South Indian and North Indian populations are genetically fairly mixed, and are (1a) more closely related to each other than to any other genetic/ethnic group; (2) the “Ancestral South Indian” genetic type is projected to most closely resemble a nearly extinct tribe in the Andaman Islands, the Onge (which is not to say that the Onge are themselves the “origin” of the South Indian gene pool); and (3) caste groups in the same regions of India show surprisingly high genetic difference in some cases, suggesting that caste endogamy within individual regions is a rather ancient practice.

According to Razib at least, the biggest limitation of this study is the small sample size (in the low hundreds). It seems clear that all of the conclusions being drawn from this study would be on stronger ground if they could go back and multiply the number of samples by 10.

Finally, there is a good, not overly technical synopsis of the Nature study at the Times of India: here. The TOI focuses on point (1) more than the others:

`This paper rewrites history… there is no north-south divide,” Lalji Singh, former director of the Centre for Cellular and Molecular Biology (CCMB) and a co-author of the study, said at a press conference here on Thursday.

Senior CCMB scientist Kumarasamy Thangarajan said there was no truth to the Aryan-Dravidian theory as they came hundreds or thousands of years after the ancestral north and south Indians had settled in India.

It is probably a mistake to read too much into this study, or even to accept the co-author’s bald claim that “there is no North-South divide” (Razib points out that it’s not that there aren’t genetic differences between North and South Indians — there are — but they fall on a gradient, rather than a solid barrier). Still, the study might have implications for South Indian activists who articulate a separatist “Dravidian” agenda, as well as North Indian “Aryan Invasion” proponents, who fantasize that they are really European. The only people who are really genetically “pure” on the Indian subcontinent are, it appears, the Onge.

I know your problem, I feel your pain. You want to read our website but you’d rather do so when you have free time. Like on the airplane. Where there is no internet access. Or on the subway. Where there is also no access. Or on the toilet. You are also a cutting-edge early adopter and purchased (or are about to) a Kindle from Amazon. Well then, we have something for you. SM’s e-subscription can now be purchased from Amazon.com for $1.99/month. That is about the cost of a mint tea at Starbucks. We get 30% of the $1.99 cost to pay down our server costs. Happy e-reading.

I find more personal joy in seeing desi characters in science fiction movies than in any other genre of film. I get a completely irrational “see, we made it into the future” type of feeling. I also like the fact that in the future one’s race is usually treated as an incidental rather than defining feature. Terminator Salvation opens next week and features at least one desi character named Rahul (played by actor Anjul Nigam). No pictures or background on his character are available yet (he explains on his Twitter account that he was asked to sign a non-disclosure agreement), but I suppose it is too much to wish that he is one of the cyborg terminators. If anyone has the scoop on his character “Rahul” let’s hear it.

If Nigam looks familiar it might be because you have seen him recently on TV’s “Lie to Me” or (*barf*) “Grey’s Anatomy.”

[warning: very very mild spoilers are contained in this post]

[warning: only a true sci-fi fan will understand all the references in this post]

Yesterday I got the chance to see Star Trek at the local IMAX theater. A little backstory about me: I am a Trekkie. I am not the kind of Trekkie that dresses up in Star Trek outfits and knows all the obscure little trivia, but I am still pretty hardcore (well, ok…only half of the previous statement is true). You see, the original Star Trek movie (which sucked by the way) is the first movie I have any memory of. I saw it at the drive-in theater in San Jose, CA in December of 1979 when I was three. I sat behind my dad and the audio was lousy but it must have made some sort of a subliminal impression on me given that I spent the next 30 years of my life quite literally trying to be Captain Kirk.

Captain Christopher Pike: [to Kirk] You can settle for less in ordinary life, or do you feel like you were meant for something better? Something special.

Sigh.

In any case, the new movie opens with the magnificent bald head (no, not Captain Picard) of Captain Robau of the Federation Starship Kelvin. Robau is played by Pakistani American actor Faran Tahir:

[It’s] a great thing,” Tahir said in an exclusive interview. “I have had conversations with J.J. about this, … because I knew the other people who were being considered for this role, and they were not [cast]. So one day over dinner I was, ‘So what was it, why?’ You know, just to get a window into it. And I think he—and I have to commend him on this—what he was trying to do was find a certain quality in the actor and just to set up the story, you know? And to me, that is refreshing, and it’s great to hear. … The biggest compliment is that he was looking for a certain quality. He could have found that in me, he could have found that in [anyone else]. And it just happened to be me, and … the added … layer to that is that, yeah, I happen to be of a certain descent, and … the casting was [in] the spirit of what Star Trek is about.” [Link]

In his weekly internet address Obama announced today that he wanted to make cuts to all the departments in his government and streamline government spending. He also wants to “promote innovation.” Therefore, as one step, he has named Aneesh Chopra as his Chief Technology Officer (start at min 3:50 in the video below):

Aneesh is being pulled from Virginia, courtesy of Obama’s BFF Tim Kaine.

Aneesh Chopra is currently Virginia’s Fourth Secretary of Technology serving Governor Tim Kaine. In this capacity, he leads the Commonwealth’s strategy to effectively leverage technology in government reform, promotes Virginia’s innovation agenda, and fosters technology-related economic development with a special emphasis on entrepreneurship…

Secretary Chopra was awarded the Healthcare Information and Management Systems Society’s (HIMSS) 2007 State Leadership Advocacy Award, and was also recently named to Government Technology magazine’s Top 25 in their Doers, Dreamers, and Drivers issue, which recognizes the 25 individuals they believe help set the standard for using technology to improve government. [Link]

Always hard at work behind the scenes (in the dark bowels of our North Dakota world blogging headquarters) our site administrator Chaitan often comes to me with suggestions for how we can improve your Sepia Mutiny experience. Often he helps us battle comment trolls and spammers by hacking clever new countermeasures on the fly to thwart them. Some of his ideas are just wacky, like the time he suggested we convert our blog to 3D (so you would need to wear those glasses). Even though I haven’t seen him in a few weeks because of some “Top Secret” project he has been working on for us, he did approach me over the weekend and said I had to blog about this new technology he heard about that was the hit of the TED conference this year. He explained that some day anyone would be able to just walk up to any wall and read SM. Heck, with this technology you could even read SM on your friend’s white t-shirt while pretending to be listening to said friend:

The inventor of this wearable technology that was constructed for ~$350 with off-the-shelf components is Pranav Mistry of MIT’s Media Lab:

Currently, I am a Research Assistant and PhD candidate at the MIT Media Lab. Before joining MIT I worked as a UX Researcher with Microsoft. I received my Master in Media Arts and Sciences from MIT and Master of Design from IIT Bombay. I have completed my bachelors degree in Computer Science and Engineering. Palanpur is my hometown, which is situated in northern Gujarat in India.

Exposure to fields like Design to Technology and from Art to Psychology gave me a quite nice/interesting viewpoint to the world. I love to see technology from design perspective and vise versa. This vision reflects in almost all of my projects and research work as well. in short, I do what I love and I love what I do. I am a ‘Desigineer’ :)… [Link]

I confess, I did find it a bit creepy when he walked up to his friend and all of the friend’s metadata was laid bare on his shirt. Imagine your FB profile being projected on your shirt when someone meets you. Then again, how great would it be to sneak in to the toilet stall at work for an extended “visit” and write a blog post on a projected keyboard on the inside of the stall door? What? A blogger can dream…

I grew up reading almost exclusively sci-fi and fantasy books, sometimes one a day during the summers. I was like the main character in Oscar Wao except I wasn’t fat or bad with the ladies (well…I wasn’t fat). To this day, even though I blog for Sepia Mutiny and am surrounded by talented co-bloggers, some of whom are authors, I have never read a single book of desi-fiction. Ever. I have no excuse at all. It just hasn’t happened yet. I read books to escape into worlds that I can never be a part of, or to get smart on something that I want to know more about before I die. Desi-lit, no matter how far removed from my experiences, just seems too close. Every time I pick up a book of desi fiction I tell myself that this time I will read it, this will be the one…only to push it aside once again. Nobody has to tell me, I already know that it is my loss. I have a theory about books. I believe the right book falls into your hands when you are meant to read it. You don’t pick books, they pick you. I haven’t read a science fiction or fantasy book in at least a decade by the way.

The other day while reading Boing Boing I came across a book review that might just become my first desi fiction book. I say “might” because I can’t guarantee it until it happens given my fickle history. The book is titled Cyberabad Days: Return to the India of 2047 and is a collection of science fiction short stories:

Cyberabad Days returns to McDonald’s India of 2047, a balkanized state that we toured in his 2006 novel River of Gods, which was nominated for the best novel Hugo Award. The India of River of Gods has fractured into a handful of warring nations, wracked by water-shortage and poverty, rising on rogue technology, compassion, and the synthesis of the modern and the ancient.

In Cyberabad Days, seven stories (one a Hugo winner, another a Hugo nominee) McDonald performs the quintessential science fictional magic trick: imagining massive technological change and making it intensely personal by telling the stories of real, vividly realized people who leap off the page and into our minds. And he does this with a deft prose that is half-poetic, conjuring up the rhythms and taste and smells of his places and people, so that you are really, truly transported into these unimaginably weird worlds. McDonald’s India research is prodigious, but it’s nothing to the fabulous future he imagines arising from today’s reality. [Link]

A few weeks ago, I posted “Data Crunching for Obama,” a look at the Democratic campaign’s microtargeting strategies led by Vijay Ravindran, chief technology officer at Catalist, Harold Icke’s start-up political technology company that built a national voter database of information on more than 260 million people for progressive groups, including the Obama campaign.

At Catalist, Ravindran led all the technology aspects of developing the company’s software products and services. The data banks and web-based tools he helped develop could answer questions such as: “How many Indian-Americans gave money to me, said they were an Obama supporter, voted in the last general election, own their home and live in Baltimore?”

Below the fold is a Q&A with Vijay Ravindran, where he talks about his engagement with politics, the 2008 election efforts, Catalist’s role in it, and what South Asian voter data tells us about the “brown” community.

Incidentally, the 34 year old is on a roll. Just yesterday, it was announced that as of February ‘09, Ravindran will be the senior vice president and chief digital officer of The Washington Post Company. Per the press release that went out:

“We are fortunate to have Vijay join the Company as we focus increasingly on electronic media,” said Donald E. Graham, chairman and chief executive officer of The Washington Post Company. “Vijay is widely recognized as one of the top innovators in the field. I am delighted that he will bring his extraordinary skills, talent and experience to our efforts to expand our digital business.”

When I saw this headline on Monday I couldn’t help but laugh a little: Four [Indian] Kids on NASA Trip Go Missing. I mean, I know NASA is occasionally accused by some crackpot (even well-respected crackpots) of covering up info about aliens, but the idea of foreign kids going missing on a NASA field trip is a whole new kind of conspiracy (wrong kind of aliens). Here is how things unfolded:

The authorities of a private school here have lodged a police complaint that two of its students, who went on an educational trip to the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) at its US headquarters, have gone “missing.”

The two students, Paramjit Singh and Kunal Bhandari, went as part of a 13-member delegation of the Dayanand Model School on July 22. While the other members returned, these two students did not come back. [Link]

Then there was this:

Four students from a school in Parowal village who went on a trip to the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) have gone missing in the US. One of the teachers accompanying them has also not returned as she reportedly got married.

Eighteen students of the CBSE-affiliated Doaba Public Senior Secondary School went to NASA for a project. While 14 returned, Arshdeep, Sumit Sahni, Dalbir Singh and Baljinder Singh have not come back. The four are aged between 14 and 15 years.

“Teacher Meenu Sharma sent an e-mail to the school authorities, requesting them to extend her leave by a month as she got married,” a source said. [Link]

Last week the nation lost Michael Vinay Bhatia to the war in Afghanistan (an IED of course). To say he was a unique breed of “soldier” would be an understatement:

Michael Vinay Bhatia, 31, was serving as a social scientist embedded with troops in the U.S. Army’s Human Terrain Systems program.

HTS program manager Steve Fondacaro said, “He was an example of a brilliant scholar who could have made his job and done well in the U.S., but who of his own accord discovered our program and volunteered to participate as a team member fully understanding the risks. This makes him a hero three, four times over…”

A magna cum laude graduate of Brown University, Bhatia was a doctoral candidate at Oxford University. “He had a lot of integrity as a scholar in terms of studying conflict and its impact on civilians and he was willing to take that into an operational field,” said Sarah Havens, a former Brown classmate. “He was adamant that that was the right thing to do.”

Bhatia’s dream of making a difference also took him to war-torn East Timor. But friends said they believed Bhatia was looking forward to a peaceful life back home. “I got the sense this was the last hurrah for him,” Havens said. “He was building his nest egg and looking for academic positions in the States for when he came back…” [Link]

I first heard about the Human Terrain Systems Program in an NPR story a few months ago (worth listening to). The idea is quite brilliant, the type of idea that our disastrous wars in Afghanistan and Iraq could use more of if we want to see a real turn around. The basic purpose of the HTS teams is to learn about the people and customs of a region so that they can advise the military on how to win hearts and minds, not through bluster, but through mutual understanding:

• HTS was developed in response to identified gaps in commanders’ and staffs’ understanding of the local population and culture, and its impact on operational decisions; and poor transfer of specific socio-cultural knowledge to follow-on units.
• The HTS approach is to place the expertise and experience of social scientists and regional experts, coupled with reach-back, open-source research, directly in support of deployed units engaging in full-spectrum operations.
• HTS believes that achieving national security objectives is dependent on understanding the societies and cultures in which we are engaged. [Link]

Cool kid alert: Teen entrepreneur Anshul Samar, age 14. This fiesty entrepreneurial spirit will be one of the key speakers at tomorrow’s Second Annual Teens in Tech Conference, sponsored by Sun, Microsoft, HP, and others.

Anshul is the founder and CEO of Alchemist Empire, Inc. He has created a fantasy role-playing chemistry board game, Elementeo: “Our aim is to combine fun, excitement, education, and chemistry, all in one grand concoction! We don’t want to create a fantasy wizard world or create a boring education textbook world, but combine the two where fun and learning come together without clashing!” [more]

MSN recently featured Anshul in “Whiz Kids: 10 Overachievers Under 21” (thanks to newstab posters garbanzobean and anmdavadi). How did he get started? In in his own words:

Entrepreneurship is cool, and so is chemistry! Both have lots of actions, reactions, explosions, experimentation, and most importantly, the joy and excitement of creating something new! Creating a company has been on my mind for a long time, but it was only in the 5th grade when the idea of a chemistry based card game struck me. I must have created and thrown away dozens of prototypes to get just the right concoction of education and fun. … Elementeo is a game where you create compounds, combat elements, and conquer chemistry… A game of battle, chemical reactions, and powerful scientists… And a game that kids, teenagers, college students, teachers, scientists, parents, and grandparents can all play and have fun.

The excitement Anshul has poured into his maiden entrepreneurial voyage (the game will be released this month!) is evident at his company’s homepage which is very much written in his voice … and in this video from Mark Coker of VentureBeat, taken at the 2007 TieCon conference in Silicon Valley.

Here’s to his motto of “Create, Combat, Conquer!”

Science fiction writer Arthur C. Clarke died earlier this week, at the age of 91. He was one of the best-known sci-fi writers of the 20th century, the author behind 2001: A Space Odyssey, among many others.

As is well-known, Clarke moved to Ceylon/Sri Lanka in 1956 — in large part for the year-around access to diving — and remained there until his death. The locale inspired at least one of Clarke’s novels, Fountains of Paradise:

Clarke lived in Sri Lanka from 1956 until his death in 2008, having emigrated there when it was still called Ceylon, first in Unawatuna on the south coast, and then in Colombo. Clarke held citizenship of both the UK and Sri Lanka. He was an avid scuba diver and a member of the Underwater Explorers Club. Living in Sri Lanka afforded him the opportunity to visit the ocean year-round. It also inspired the locale for his novel The Fountains of Paradise in which he described a space elevator. This, he believed, ultimately will be his legacy, more so than geostationary satellites, once space elevators make space shuttles obsolete. (link)

I first read The Fountains of Paradise many years ago, and I pulled it off the shelf this afternoon for a refresher. There is an intense opening, set in the classical period, 2000 years ago, involving a “Prince Kalidasa,” who does not seem to resemble the actual Kalidasa (who was not a prince, but a poet). And there are some rich descriptions of the island of Sri Lanka (named “Taprobane” — Tap-ROB-a-nee — by Clarke).

We often receive emails like the one below at the lonely North Dakota bunker that serves as Sepia Mutiny’s world blogging headquarters:

…I’d like to reach a wider audience and would really appreciate if you could link [to] my blog.

ps - I’m pretty good at keeping my site updated. Please take a look!

Thanks much!

To this, our standard response (if we have time to write one) is a polite “please read our F.A.Q.” But when I read the above email from a blogger, writing from a lonely bunker of his own, with nothing but his science and his blog…well, I’m not made of stone people. I’m quick to recognize a kindred spirit when I see one.

Plus, this guy’s research has direct bearing on my own work and career aspirations (and might save me some day):

I am a resident of Delhi, India, and a psychiatrist by profession (heal the mentally unwell). I’m also fond of the great outdoors, and cultures around the world. I’ll be spending 3.5 months in Antarctica winter of 2008, doing research at the Indian base station. Thru this blog, I hope to keep my friends and family updated on my stay in this incredible land.
—Sudhir Khandelwal [Link]

Of course he is going to be “good about updating his site!” What else does he have to do? :)

Those of you who use gmail and gchat will have seen the news that gchat has gone from monogamous chatting only to full on orgy mode:

Guess who’s coming to dinner?

My reaction to this news is that it’s about time! Not the move to group chat, but the use of Vivek in an example. I mean, if you go into one of the many googleplex fine dining establishments and holler “Yo - Vivek!” you know how many people would turn around? So what took Google so long?

Of course, if they’re going for versimilitude here, Vivek would probably not be going camping with Todd (not unless they were a couple) but instead with a truckload of other desis, especially if Vivek is an IBD. The example should really say something like “Group chat - so 10 desi couples can coordinate their camping plans!” The chat would show people discussing who was bringing the dal, who was bringing the chaval, how many kinds of pickles were necessary for an overnight camping trip, whether a pressure cooker will work over a campfire, etc.

Actually, on second thought, I think we’re better off with the example provided. I don’t think even Google’s mighty servers could survive the surge in load from brown people going camping alone, not to mention brown people coordinating movies, dinners, or weddings. Back to Todd and Vivek it is.

This print advertisement by Intel has been causing quite a stir of late [via Huffington Post]. It seems to convey the idea that owning an Intel chip will help you tackle the same amount of work as you could with a ship of slaves (while making you feel powerful):

I almost fell out of my seat when I saw Intel’s new advertising campaign. It shows six bowing African American athletes before a chino-clad, oxford-shirted white manager with the slug: “Maximize the power of your employees.” This ad reminds me of a slave-ship, and it’s hard to imagine the same imagery did not come to mind for the savvy ad exec that created it…

Intel is not just promoting insensitive images, it’s also leading a signature drive for a California ballot measure that would eliminate class action lawsuits over civil rights issues. Intel’s board of directors have been sent 25,000 faxes calling upon the company to withdraw that pending ballot measure. [Link]

As a sequel to my “Love in the Time of Terrorism” post I wanted to offer up this new one based upon a Wall Street Journal article published today titled, “‘Til Tech Do Us Part.” Although it does not specifically cite any South Asian peeps in the article, I am sure you can all agree that it is quite relevant to a great many of us (and probably tech-savvy SM readers more so than most). Here is the oh-so-juicy synopsis of the article:

Joint bank account? Check. Merging the MP3 collection? Hold on a minute. Couples are struggling with just how much to combine the digital aspects of their lives. Why spouses are bickering over shared email accounts and his-and-hers blogs. [Link]

It’s true, it’s sooo true. This is why our parents generation just cannot understand why we sometimes (well some of us) wait so long to get married. It is no longer a question of simply making sure that your prospective wife comes from a good family and that at least one of her siblings is a doctor if she failed to become one herself. No. There is the MP3 collection-compatibility-issue that is a constant cloud which hangs over many of our serial dating lives. God forbid she leaves behind an Ipod in my car and I accidentally play Akon or Fergie when there are people around who might judge me. “I listen to Kings of Leon. I swear.” What if she bookmarks the NYPost whereas I bookmark the NYTimes? Does she pay attention to RottenTomatoes.com like I do or does she just go to the movies and blindly hope for the best like some crazy free spirit? Getting to know someone and fall in love just takes a lot more research these days.

To stay on pace during his five-mile jogging workouts, Olav Junttila keeps his iPod stocked with fast, thumping electronic music. But an unwelcome sound has been intruding on his daily runs: Britney Spears singing her bubble-gum hit “Oops, I Did It Again.”

The culprit is Mr. Junttila’s wife, Katie. Her musical taste differs, but instead of setting up a separate music library in iTunes, she mixes her Beyoncé and Justin Timberlake purchases in with his picks. “I’m going, ‘Where’d this song come from? I don’t even like this song,’ ” says Mr. Junttila, a 34-year-old New York investment banker. [Link]

Then, of course, the article moves on to an issue even more troubling than music and one that I lie awake at nights stressing about. Yep. Blogs.

The Greatest Living American?

The greatest living American is Norman Borlaug, who won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1970, and joins Jimmy Carter as the two living American-born laureates around whose necks this distinction as been placed.

How did Borlaug win his Nobel back in 1970?

Through the 1940s and 1950s, Borlaug developed high-yield wheat strains, then patiently taught the new science of Green Revolution agriculture to poor farmers of Mexico and nations to its south. When famine struck India and Pakistan in the mid-1960s, Borlaug and a team of Mexican assistants raced to the Subcontinent and, often working within sight of artillery flashes from the Indo-Pakistani War of 1965, sowed the first high-yield cereal crop in that region; in a decade, India’s food production increased sevenfold, saving the Subcontinent from predicted Malthusian catastrophes.

As a temporary American expat to India, Borlaug’s impact on India’s development was possibly greater than Deming’s on Japan…

Sunita Williams has returned safely to Earth after setting the record for the longest time in space by a woman.

Praying for a safe Earth entry

“Welcome back,” Mission Control told Atlantis. “Congratulations on a great mission.” Controllers praised the crew for providing a “stepping stone to the rest of NASA’s exploration plan…”

Astronaut Sunita “Suni” Williams returned to Earth on Atlantis after spending more than six months at the space station. She set an endurance record for the longest single spaceflight by a woman at 195 days. During her stay, she also set the record for most time spacewalking by a woman. [Link]

More cute pictures after the fold.

It’s bad enough when your parents hound you for being single and ask why you were out so late last night, but the Christian Science Monitor points to the double standard that single women renters face in India at the hands of their prospective (and over-protective) landlords:

It took Chiya Singh three months and seven real estate agents working in tandem to find an apartment to rent in New Delhi.

The problem wasn’t her credit history or salary. It was her status as a single Indian woman. The questions blocking Ms. Singh from a room of her own were a bit personal, she says. Prospective landlords wanted to know why, at age 29, she wasn’t married and why, as a single person, she didn’t want to live with her parents.

“It was an exhausting process,” Singh says, of trying to find her own place after she divorced. “I became a broken record. They asked ‘Why do you want to live alone?’ I said, ‘Um, because I think I’m old enough.’ “

That response usually netted Singh a cold expression and a vague “We’ll let you know” from the landlord. [Link]

Because, I mean…why would a single woman want to live by herself?

In India, “If you want freedom, it can only be for one thing - sex,” Singh says. “You want to tell them [landlords], ‘That’s the last thing on my mind. I think I’m old enough to take care of myself.’ But for the landlord, it becomes an issue of respectability.” [Link]

When my worlds align, you know I’m going to blog it:

SUNI WILLIAMS DAY AT JSC

Help celebrate a major spaceflight milestone as Expedition 15 Flight Engineer and STS-117 crew member Sunita Williams sets a new female long duration spaceflight record. She will surpass Shannon Lucid’s long-held record of 188 days, 4 hours this Saturday, June 16 at 12:47 a.m CDT.

So how do we help celebrate this kick-ass achievement?

To show your support for Suni, wear something red this Friday, June 15 (In honor of her love of the Red Sox). Also on Friday, the Starport cafés will feature 2 eggs “Suni”-side up on Texas Toast for $.99 and Chicken Indian Spiced Malai Murgh for $ 3.49 ala cart and $5.99 Combo. The Chicken breast is coated with a mixture of spices (cumin, garlic, pepper, lemon juice, chopped jalapenos, paprika, and sour cream) then roasted and served with rice.

Oh yeah! Curry in the cafeteria. Have any of you had government institutional food before? This intrepid blogger’s passion for venturing places where no man has gone before compels him to try the chicken on Friday. If I’m ever lucky enough to go in to space someday I am going to make them serve dosas with sour cream and ketchup in the cafeteria when I come down. Let’s pray our girl makes it down ok:

NASA engineers and astronauts are working on innovative ways to fix a tear in the heat shield of the shuttle Atlantis which had taken off last Friday.

One of the methods that could be used to fix the tear would be using a stainless steel wire serving as thread and an instrument with a rounded end resembling a small needle.

This is usually used to repair tears in astronaut suits but may work here as well. [Link]

By the way, Suni’s dog, the terrier she had to leave behind on Earth and who goes by the name of “Flat Gorby,” is becoming kind of famous. You know how people sometimes take pictures of gnomes at different locations around the world? Just type in Flat Gorby in Google and see all the hits the dude has and where he has “visited” while she has been up in space.

SM Reader 3rd Eye posted an interesting stat from my corner of the RealWorld on the News Tab -

Desi’s head up 4 of 12 2007 IPO’s from Mass State

In the past two months alone, four Massachusetts based companies with Indian chief executives have registered with the Securities and Exchange Commission to go public: Starent Networks Corp, Netezza Corp, BladeLogic Inc and Virtusa Corp.

They represent a third of state companies that have filed for initial public offer (IPOs) this year.

Now Desi tech entrepreneurship is not only alive and well but also well-discussed here on the Mutiny. For a host of reasons, as the article notes, Desi’s have done an admirable job in Tech (and particularly, it appears, in MA 2007). Still, there’s an interesting angle revealed by the firms profiled here. The theme is probably quite familiar to Desi’s who live / breath the tech biz and less so to those outside of it —

Most of you have heard about the tainted pet food, right? A simple Google search yields more than 7,800 stories about the Chinese rice and wheat gluten that contained melamine to increase the apparent protein content of the food. While American pets may have died, the risk to humans posed by this, even if used as feed for chickens or fish, is pretty low.

Contrast that with the tainted cough syrup that has probably killed thousands children in the Third World. What? You haven’t heard about this? Of course not. It’s not as sexy a story. There are over 40 times as many stories about the tainted pet food in America than about tainted cough syrup overseas.

Toxic syrup has figured in at least eight mass poisonings around the world … Researchers estimate that thousands have died… Beyond Panama and China, toxic syrup has caused mass poisonings in Haiti, Bangladesh, Argentina, Nigeria and twice in India. [Link]

The Bangladesh incident happened 15 years ago, yet this kind of mass poisoning continues to happen in different parts of the world, most recently in Panama:

In Bangladesh, investigators found poison in seven brands of fever medication in 1992, but only after countless children died. A Massachusetts laboratory detected the contamination after Dr. Michael L. Bennish, a pediatrician who works in developing countries, smuggled samples of the tainted syrup out of the country in a suitcase. Dr. Bennish … said that given the amount of medication distributed, deaths “must be in the thousands or tens of thousands…” [Link]

The bones of the story are the same in both cases. FDA issues recent warnings after a Chinese manufacturer cuts corners and substitutes a cheaper lethal ingredient for a more expensive one. With the cough syrup it was diethylene glycol for glycerine.

When I was little, I went to India for my Mamaji’s wedding. At that point, we still drank the water, although it was very the last time we did so. I got very sick and lost enough weight that my ribs were visible. In fact, I became so emaciated that I could tickle my bottom few ribs from the inside, much to the horror of my parents. To make things worse, it was hot in Amritsar that year, over 100 degrees, and we were in an old house without air conditioning.

Throughout it all, as the adored foreign child, I was coddled and comforted. It wasn’t that bad for me. Still, it gave me some compassion for those who have to drink water far worse, such as the 2 million children who die each year for want of proper water and sanitation.

The big policy debate over water privatization seems to have ground to a halt. In poor countries, governments do a lousy job of getting water to their people (maybe 30% of Indians have access to clean water), and while de facto privatization proceeds apace, formal privatization schemes seem to have done poorly enough to reduce earlier corporate enthusiasm.

Still, two of the more imaginative schemes I’ve seen in the past year have argued for extreme privatization, decentralizing the provision of clean water down to the sub-village, or even personal level.

For example, the Lifestraw is designed to give each person their own personal water purification system:

… a plastic tube with seven filters: graduated meshes with holes as fine as 6 microns (a human hair is 50 to 100 microns), followed by resin impregnated with iodine and another of activated carbon. It can be worn around the neck and lasts a year.

Lifestraw isn’t perfect, but it filters out at least 99.99 percent of many parasites and bacteria, the demons in most fatal cases of diarrhea. [Link]

The original Lifestraw was field tested amongst the earthquake refugees in Kashmir.

Although the idea is pretty cool, it has its detractors. Critics argue that there is no market for such a product - that at $3.50 (or possibly even $2), it is still multiple days work to pay for each person’s straw, and it still only lasts a year. They also argue that it doesn’t reduce the long distances people have to travel to get water, thus reducing its appeal, and that local water projects are more effective because of economies of scale [Link].

If you want to learn Devanagri without too much blood sweat and tears, fear not! There are two ways to make your learning easier.

The first is watching music videos of various sort at DesiLassi, a site put together to showcase the next generation of Dr. Brij Kothari’s Same Language Subtitling approach to increasing literacy. If you’re the kind of person who knows all the words to the songs in the Bollyflicks you watch, you’ll be fluent in no time:

The idea builds on people’s existing knowledge of lyrics, enabling early literates to anticipate the subtitles and read along; the inherent repetition in songs makes them an ideal vehicle for practice. The use of subtitling is a simple approach that leverages popular culture to encourage the sizeable population of India to read. [Link]

They have some great examples of this approach being used with songs, trailers, promos and albums. Unfortunately, perhaps for copyright reasons, I can’t actually embed any of their actual Bollywood videos, so do click through.

If you use this approach, then Aishwarya can be your personal reading tutor, much as Morgan Freeman (in reruns) was mine, back in the day. Short of learning Hindi by smoking crack, it’s probably the best modern science will ever do.

The other approach uses your knowledge of English to teach you the Devanagri alphabet, like below [Thanks Blue!]:

The lessons start simply, teaching you to recognize characters from their context in English words, and get a good deal harder.

Related Posts: Mass literacy can be fun

Monday was Patriot’s day, the date of the annual Boston Marathon. While the streets of Boston were wet, the most famous desi entrant was shielded from inclement weather in her special climate controlled gym. While some had to pound hard pavement, she ran the marathon many times higher than a kite, floating on air. And while it took her 4 hours and 24 minutes to cover the 26 miles, in that same time she circled the globe twice.

I refer here to Sunita Williams, of course, who unofficially ran the marathon with bib 14,000. Although she was spared Heartbreak Hill, her race wasn’t just a walk in the park. In order to complete the run she had to be harnessed in place (so she didn’t just float away) on top of the Space Station’s Treadmill Vibration Isolation System, which, believe it or not, served to keep the space station steady while she ran:

you know when you run on the ground or on a treadmill at the gym, you are stomping on the ground/treadmill pretty hard - right? Well, the ISS can’t really take that stomping around. We’ve got huge solar arrays, radiators, module attachment systems, etc., which will feel the load of that stomping… The engineers came up with a vibration isolation system for both the treadmill and the cycle. The treadmill rides on a gyro which spins up and takes the loads of the runner. [Link]

This apparently isn’t easy on her body:

“That harness gets hard on her back and her shoulders or her hips …. Her foot was going numb because the strap was on her hip so much…” [Link]

But honestly, the hardest part of this experience would seem to be the inability to bathe or shower afterwards:

… astronauts wash their hair with no-rinse shampoo, their bodies with cleanser-soaked gauzy fabric, and their hands with baby wipes. [Link]

Wow. And she’s not going to be able to shower until she returns to earth, at the end of summer at the earliest. I guess the good news is that they won’t be able to smell the atomized wasabi any more.

There’s an interesting interview with “Rebel Scientist” Freeman Dyson over at TCS (the longer version of it is here). Desi angle? I particularly liked this blurb where he points out the similarities between the technological mood of India / China today and an emergent US of the 1930’s -

…the western academic world is very much like Weimar Germany, finding itself in a situation of losing power and influence. Fortunately, the countries that matter now are China and India, and the Chinese and Indian experts do not share the mood of doom and gloom. It is amusing to see China and India take on today the role that America took in the nineteen-thirties, still believing in technology as the key to a better life for everyone.

Now, when Dyson speaks of a “western academic world” that’s losing power and influence, it’s really one specific Old Skool corner that brashly found the answer to man’s Tragedy in more / bigger / cooler tech . In its stead, there’s no shortage of academic influence amongst the segment that’s apt to equate economic growth with Global Warming / Consumerism / Corporate Tyranny and that finds the answer not in exuberance but in restraint. Luckily, it appears that message doesn’t sell so well in India.

Intellectual$ingh3141592: Good afternoon, Sudo-Ji.

SudoSecularSAsian: Greetings, my good fellow. How goes it? I trust all is well on your end?

Intellectual$ingh3141592: Today I am, I must confess, a tad jealous of our colleague over at MIT.

SudoSecularSAsian: Please elaborate, if you would be so kind. I am, as they say, all “ears” — though what precisely that means in the context of Internet Messaging is an open question.

Intellectual$ingh3141592: It appears that Professor Deb Roy, of MIT’s Cognitive Machines Group, is pursuing a gargantuan project oriented to the study of language acquisition in human infants. What is most impressive is, he is using his own son as the source of the data!

SudoSecularSAsian: His partner must be outraged — I know my own spouse places strict rules on the degree to which I can allow my academic projects to interfere with our personal lives. In my occasional forays into the world of “weblogs” — with which you are well-acquainted — I have been asked to delineate a fairly sharp line between matters of public discussion and our own private affairs.

Intellectual$ingh3141592: I completely understand. However, in this case, the baby’s name is being shielded from participants in the study (he is merely referred to as “Dwayne,” after a character in a popular Ridley Scott film). Moreover, Roy’s partner, the eminent speech pathologist Rupal Patel (Northwestern), is apparently fully on board with the project.

SudoSecularSAsian: Singh-saab, I just checked the link you forwarded and I have to ask you… Do you really think this type of grandiose, pie-in-the-sky study is really a worthwhile usage of resources? Is it really likely that the scattered attempted phonemes of an infant in the earliest stages of language acquisition will offer significant new data? Isn’t it possible — or I daresay, probable, given Chomsky’s universal grammar — that the real root of language is to be found not in the “babble” of a child attempting to mimic adult sounds but in the neural-cognitive framework on which the linguistic capacity is built?

Intellectual$ingh3141592: I must concede I am not qualified to respond to your conjectures, though I should perhaps remind you that Chomsky’s thesis has been widely discredited in the field of linguistics. However, one thing you say does ring true — the sheer expenditure of electricity required to support the massive arrays of hard disks (1.4 petabytes!) is deeply irresponsible in this era of imminent global warming. Did you have the chance to peruse the latest tidbit in the Times about the responsibility the wealthier countries have to the global south?

SudoSecularSAsian: Yes, and it’s quite distressing. I’m afraid our beloved South Asia may bear the brunt of the developed world’s resource profligacy. The Himalayan glaciers are in trouble, and a “brown cloud” of pollutants is steadily building up over the Indian Ocean, with results on the climate-scenario that are extremely difficult to foretell, though the consequences are unlikely to be pleasant.

Intellectual$ingh3141592: :-(. (Please forgive the emoticon — it’s a childish expedient, but sometimes an eloquent one.) Well, I must be off, I’m afraid.

SudoSecularSAsian: ;-) All is forgiven. This is the brave new world of lexico-typographical expressivity! Au revoir!

[Cue crabby uncle voice] The crazy things that kids do these days! They’re glued to their mobile handsets. They eat, sleep, and even go to the bathroom while jabbering away. Why, just the other day, a Pakistani man in Italy even got married over the phone:

In Milan, the man told a court that he feared losing his job in Italy if he had flown to Pakistan to get married. Instead, he got married over the phone and had an official Pakistani marriage certificate to prove it. He even showed the court a video of relatives celebrating the wedding - without the happy couple.

The groom is legally resident in Italy and had won the approval of the local police chief for his plans to marry over the phone and then bring his bride to his new hometown in northern Italy… All that mattered, the judge said, was that a telephone wedding was recognised by law in the two spouses’ home country. [Link]

Of course, Italian immigration wasn’t too happy about it, but the judge had no problem with the idea. And who would expect less from a judge in the city of … Milan.

Is this idea so strange? If you can get divorced via text message [Exhibit A, Exhibit B*] , and if you can (ahem) perform “marital activities” over the phone [topic NSFW, but link OK], then why not get married over the phone too? I have friends whose entire LDRs seem to be over the phone these days anyway, so why not include the wedding as well?

Before you think that this is just modern technology run amuck, there was actually a similar event close to 160 years ago, on the “Victorian Internet” i.e. the telegraph:

… with the bride in Boston and the groom in New York… the bride’s father had sent the young groom away for being unworthy to marry his daughter, but on a stop-over on his way to England, he managed to get a magistrate and telegraph operator to arrange the wedding. The marriage was deemed to be legally binding. [Link]

There truly is nothing new under the sun.

*Yes, I know in K-Fed’s case he was just being informed not talaqed, but I couldn’t resist

Quite predictably, my inbox was blowing up this morning and the news of a bizarre love triangle at the workplace was the only thing people wanted to talk about. It was the first item at our weekly office meet-up (under the heading “safety”). At my workplace safety always comes first. So THIS is what they mean by a “water cooler topic”:

This is the story everyone’s talking about at the water cooler today. (Fortunately, I sit right next to the water cooler.) NASA astronaut Lisa Marie Nowak has been charged with attempted murder of another astronaut, who was in a astronaut love triangle with another astronaut. She also had on diapers so she wouldn’t have to stop on the drive. Okay, so attempted murder and kidnapping aren’t cool, but if they have to happen, I’m pretty happy that astronauts are involved. [Link]

First of all, if I was a rockstar I would totally name my band “astronaut love triangle.” It’s so edgy. If you click on my first link it will lead you to the arrest report which provides details about the steel mallet, rubber tubing, knife, pepper spray, large trash bags, wigs, and trench coat involved. I will spare you re-hashing the details that have been replayed on the news all day. This far into my post I am SURE you are all wondering “where is the desi angle?” Stay with me a moment.

Earlier this week Indian American astronaut Sunita Williams (see previous posts 1,2,3) set the spacewalking record for a woman. This is an amazing achievement that took many long hours of hard work in a dangerous environment!:

U.S. astronaut Sunita Williams has now spent more time in space [outside of a vehicle] than any other woman, setting the record on Sunday.

She and a crew mate upgraded the international space station’s cooling system.

Williams broke the previous female spacewalking record of more than 21 hours when she and Michael Lopez-Alegria completed the second of what could be a precedent-setting three spacewalks in nine days. The new record is 22 hours and 27 minutes. [Link]

So what do these two seemingly unrelated news stories have in common besides the fact that they both involve astronauts? Three words: Maximum Absorption Garment (MAG).

Madhavi Gavini is a student at a math/science high school in Mississippi, the Mississippi Institute of Math and Science. At age 14 she got interested in cystic fibrosis, especially the lung infections that kill many people suffering from CF:

It was that thirst for knowledge that drove Madhavi to search for a way to help a friend with cystic fibrosis. “I found out that most people who have CF die of pseudomonas infections,” she recalls, “so I wanted to see if there was anything I could do to help.” She was 14 at the time. “I guess the thought that a 14-year-old can’t really do much to help, didn’t really occur to me,” she says with a shrug.

Pseudomonas bacteria — in addition to killing people with cystic fibrosis — can cause deadly secondary infections in people with immune-suppressing conditions such as AIDS, cancer and severe burns. This opportunistic pathogen forms a thick, protective layer around itself, making it nearly impossible for antibiotics to penetrate and destroy it. (link)

That’s the background. Interestingly, the technique she used to find a way to kill the Pseudomonas bacteria started with Ayurvedic medicine:

With an herb book from her grandparents as her guide, Madhavi sampled common grocery store and green houseplants, such as cinnamon, ginger and aloe. She obtained a strain of pseudomonas bacteria from the local university and began subjecting the germs to various plant extracts.

One of the common tropical plant extracts penetrated the bacterium’s protective layer. Next, Madhavi isolated the specific molecule in the extract that was able to inhibit bacterial growth. She found that the molecule was heat resistant, and resistant to pressure. “It kills the cell,” she explains, “by preventing the transcription of the genes involved in energy, metabolism, adaptation, membrane transport, and toxin secretion.” (link)

The herb she started with, incidentally, is Terminalia Chebula, known in Sanskrit as Haritaki. As for which molecule exactly kills the biofilm that protects the Pseudomonas, the coverage I’ve read doesn’t say.

Wow.

I was in the middle of a meeting at work this morning when a co-worker (a meteorite expert no less) forwarded me an article about the strange goings-on in a New Jersey bathroom. I knew that I would have to write a post about it before going to bed:

A hole in the roof, a bathroom full of debris and a strange, silvery rock near the toilet — the Nageswaran family soon realized they needed an astronomer, not a contractor, to fully explain what damaged their house.

Scientists determined it was a meteorite that crashed through the roof of their central New Jersey home more than a week ago.

While extraterrestrial rocks fall to the Earth with some regularity, it is rare for them to strike homes.

“The fact that something from outer space hit our house … it’s overwhelming,” said Shankari Nageswaran in an exclusive interview with The Associated Press. [Link]

Apparently the grandma heard sounds in the bathroom that didn’t sound like those she typically associated with her son:

On the night of Jan. 2, Nageswaran walked into his bathroom and spotted a hole in the ceiling and noticed small chunks of drywall and insulation littering the room.

His mother, who has been staying with the family, recalled that she had heard a loud boom and thought it was a post-New Year’s fireworks explosion. But that didn’t explain the mess in the bathroom. [Link]

Indolink.com reports on a study released today that breaks down the impact of Indian immigrants on several key U.S. economic sectors. Titled, “America’s New Immigrant Entrepreneurs,” the document is full of interesting pie and bar charts that reveal the disproportionate influence that Indian immigrants have had in the last couple of decades. However, I’m here for those of you who don’t like pie and bar charts (slackers).

The joint Duke University - UC Berkeley study reveals that Indian immigrants have founded more engineering and technology companies from 1995 to 2005 than immigrants from the U.K., China, Taiwan and Japan combined. The report also shows that Indians have overtaken the Chinese, albeit marginally, as the leading group of immigrant entrepreneurs in Silicon Valley.

The immigrant contributions must be viewed as part of a “U.S. global advantage” and provide a pointer to what “the U.S. must do to keep its edge,” the study says. In addition the study reveals that the patents awarded to non-citizen immigrants - typically foreign graduate students completing their PhD’s, green card holders awaiting citizenship, and employees of multinationals on temporary visas - increased from 7.8% in 1998 to 24.2% in 2006.

It’s “a report that will without doubt rock the boat,” claims Vivek Wadhwa of Duke University, the primary author of the study. [Link]

Lift-off of the Space Shuttle Discovery with Astronaut Sunita Williams aboard is scheduled for 8:47:35 p.m. EST. Watch it LIVE by clicking the picture below or turning on the news (CNN has it LIVE):

Good Luck and Godspeed.

UPDATE (8:57p.m. EST): They just jettisoned the External Tank. SUCCESS!! Time for orbital insertion.

Just a reminder to everyone that STS-116’s first launch window opens up in ~three days and two hours. The mission will take Astronaut Sunita Williams up to the International Space Station where she will live and work for at least 6 months. You can watch the launch live on the internet at NASA TV (or on CNN). The best blogs to follow along at (besides us) are the official NASA blog and The Flame Trench. You can read about the whole crew here.

For those of you who are feeling a bit inspired by Williams’ impending flight, particularly if you are under ~30-years-old, you should also note that NASA is smack in the middle of an aggressive plan to return the United States to the Moon (in competition with both China and India) and just today announced plans for a permanently-manned international base by 2024 near the lunar south pole (close to Aiken Basin). If you are an undeclared undergrad then take note that engineering and science (besides just the life sciences) are about to become sexy once again.

NASA may be going to the same old moon with a ship that looks a lot like a 1960s Apollo capsule, but the space agency said Monday that it’s going to do something dramatically different this time: Stay there.

Unveiling the agency’s bold plan for a return to the moon, NASA said it will establish an international base camp on one of the moon’s poles, permanently staffing it by 2024, four years after astronauts land there.

It is a sweeping departure from the Apollo moon missions of the 1960s and represents a new phase of space exploration after space shuttles are retired in 2010.

NASA chose a “lunar outpost” over the short expeditions of the ’60s. Apollo flights were all around the middle area of the moon, but NASA decided to go to the moon’s poles because they are best for longer-term settlements. And this time NASA is welcoming other nations on its journey. [Link]

Yesterday I made the stupid mistake of forwarding this article as an internal memo to my SM bunker-mates:

Scientists at Stanford University say the United States is loaded with Internet addicts who are possibly as clinically ill as alcoholics.

The nationwide study suggests that more than one in eight adults has a hard time staying away from the Internet for more than a few days at a time. And one in 11 tries to hide his or her online habit…

The survey, conducted over the phone, found that nearly 70 percent of respondents were regular Internet users and 14 percent found it hard to stay offline for several days at a time…

According to the research, the typical Internet-addicted user is a single, college-educated, white male in his 30s who spends approximately 30 hours a week on nonessential computer use. [Link]

Minutes later the thirty-something Ennis sent out an earnest email indicating that he would not be logging on to SM for the rest of the day and asked us all to look after his post. In retrospect I realize that I should have followed the example of Kim Jong Il and kept a lid on such information. Too much knowledge decreases worker productivity. I realize also that this article might make some readers a bit anxious and reflective. Please don’t reflect. I assure you that SM falls under the essential use category.

Thanks to a couple of tipsters I also wanted to point you all to a relatively new website. CNET has a review:

That one raised eyebrow makes her an intimidating desi woman. I like it a lot.

Talk about an interactive search engine. A new search site called Ms. Dewey features a sultry woman who makes wisecracks related to the keywords that are typed in. The search results appear as a long, scrolling list in a window that pops up on the upper right.

Set against a futuristic cityscape background, Ms. Dewey—with her hair pulled back—probably represents a digital-age librarian. Her name refers to the Dewey Decimal classification system used for cataloging books in libraries.

Her quips relating to keywords range from mundane and silly to provocative. For instance, during a search for “George Bush” she mentioned how easy it was to make jokes about the president. For a search for “sex” she picked up a yellow ergonomic exercise ball and said “Safety first, and make sure you get it on film…” [Link]

So what does the first article about internet addiction have to do with the sultry Ms. Dewey? Isn’t it obvious? I’ve been reading the many neuroses laid bare on that other thread and I thought I’d offer my wise perspective on dating desi. I know that in reality nothing works. Why bother? Instead, I have found comfort in the arms of Ms. Dewey. She is the strong, beautiful, witty, articulate (sometimes verbose), and smarter-than-me desi woman I’ve been searching for my whole life. If any of you fools linger too long on her site I will hurt you.

According to an account of the Hindu mythology, Hiranyagarbha, meaning the golden womb, is the source of the creation of the universe. It is one of the Vedic myths which explain the origin and the creation of the cosmos and the universe. The legend states that the Hiranyagarbha floated around in water in the emptiness and the darkness of the non-existence for about a year, and then broke into two halves which formed the Swarga and the Prithvi, and most likely other parts of the universe. It is believed that Brahma was born from the Hiranyagarbha. [Link]

It has been way too long since we have had a nerdy science post to get everyone’s juices flowing. An article this past week in Science Magazine gives us hope that cosmologists are getting closer to understanding where it all came from and where it all might be headed. The Chandra X-Ray Observatory, named for Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar, captured images of a smoking gun. Via Science (subscription required):

This composite image shows the galaxy cluster 1E 0657-56, also known as the “bullet cluster.” This cluster was formed after the collision of two large clusters of galaxies, the most energetic event known in the universe since the Big Bang.

A fantastically energetic collision between clusters of galaxies has demolished a challenge to the law of gravity, providing the clearest evidence yet for the existence of intergalactic dark matter.

For decades, astronomers have inferred that unseen matter lurks within and between galaxies. Luminous stars alone, they realized, don’t exert enough gravitational force to explain how individual galaxies spin and clusters of galaxies clump together. Something invisible must be pulling, too.

Some of the extra matter in galactic clusters is just hot gas. But even more mass seems to exist in the form of “nonbaryonic” dark matter, made of something other than ordinary atoms.

A few holdouts have insisted that the observations could be explained by modifying the law of gravity at great distances. But a new result from the Chandra X-ray Observatory satellite offers clear-cut evidence that dark matter really does infuse galactic clusters. “It demonstrates beyond a reasonable doubt that dark matter exists,” says Sean Carroll, a cosmologist at the University of Chicago, Illinois, not involved in the study. [Link]

I love that there is an invisible physical force (that should be therefore measurable) out there that is stronger than gravity and yet remains invisible to detection by us except by inference. Its just a good mystery (which we all need once in a while).

I thought I had eyeballed the future when the first Smart car crossed my eyes, speeding down Sheikh Zayed road a few years ago. In a city like Dubai where petrol is cheaper than pop yet parking mostly comes in either the illegal or the parallel form a Smart car looked like it just might live up to its moniker. I was naive. It is today that I am really peering into that which is in store and yes it is also a small car. I like small cars but I like electric cars better.

Via Popgadget, a Bangalore-based company has been making the coolest little electric car known as the Reva since 2001. According to the site the Reva goes 85 KM on one charge through a 15 Amp socket. It boasts dent-proof ABS body panels, a dual-breaking system, climate control seats, and over 2000 colours to choose from while “elevated seats and a wide door provide excellent ingress/egress especially for ladies in saree and senior citizens”. Much better than having to sit sideways on a scooty.

Last year the Reva Electric Car Company produced a super prototype of the next generation, an electric roadster called the Reva NXG. This bad boy comes equipped with a modem, GPS navigation, MP3 player, and a 125 mile range per charge. Plus it just looks cool.

The Reva has sold 900 units in India and is also on the roads in Malta and the U.K. The base price in India is Rs. 250, 000. Having never so much as looked at a car’s price tag there I don’t know how expensive this is in comparison to other cars on the road. Please feel free to enlighten. Have any Mutineers spotted or driven these vroom-vrooms in their town?

I can see the Bollywood movie now. It would be like Swades, but instead of SRK bringing electricity into the village it would be installing an internet connection. Instead of an NRI romance, it would be internet love. What exactly am I talking about? Why, you didn't hear?

An Indian village has uploaded itself onto the Internet, giving the outside world a glimpse of life in rural India.Visitors to Hansdehar village's Web site (http://www.smartvillages.org/) can see the names, jobs and other details of its 1,753 residents, browse photographs of their shops and read detailed specifications about their drainage and electricity facilities.

Most of the residents can't yet surf the Hansdehar Web site as the village is not yet connected to the Internet. [link]

It's cute. These villagers have ideas on how to use the internet- to get better prices for crops by trading online, job hunting, and even, wife searching. The website itself has pictures of the village, tourist attractions, and even a voter list. I think there is great potential with getting Indian villages connected to the web. I really started thinking about this when I bumped into Nipun from Charity Focus, when he was walking across India in an attempt to tie in service with internet in the villages (yes, he blogged his trip). The internet does have it's advantages in connecting villages with the rest of the world, and I see a lot of potential with this.

But what about the privilege associated with getting accessing an internet connection? Seems like an MIT grad at United Villages is trying to take care of that with the advent of 'drive-by Wi-Fi.'

United Villages ...is working with Indian nongovernmental organization Drishtee to network 50 villages in Orissa's Cuttack district, where bus-powered Wi-Fi service begins this month... "You have drive-by McDonald's, and we have drive-by Wi-Fi," says Mr. Hasson. The buses will use short-range radio to pick up electronic messages three or more times per day from Wi-Fi-enabled computers placed in kiosks. Hubs near bus stations will handle traffic via a connection that can be as slow as dial-up.

UV will sell pre-paid cards, with phone number and email address assigned to them, in different denominations (up to 100 rupees, roughly $2.20).[link]

Interesting- so it seems like even though people with television sets won't be able to watch Paris Hilton's too-racy-for-India banned music video, it looks like people in buses with Wi-Fi connections will still be able to download and watch the video. Indian villages online, drive-by wi-fi at bus kiosks, and a banned Hilton video; I can see the Bollywood script now...

There’s quite a controversy brewing (thanks, Scott Carney) over the pesticide content in Indian soft drinks. The vast majority of these are owned by the multinational Coke and Pepsi companies, and are of course manufactured and bottled locally in India using all local ingredients.

The controversy actually began three years ago, with a report from the Centre for Science and the Environment that alleged high concentrations of pesticides in soda samples. The government at the time attacked the findings aggressively, and questioned the credibility of the scientists who conducted it. But as a result of the study, strict standards for pesticide content were put in place for the water that is used in soft drinks, though standards for the sugar and other ingredients that go into the soda still haven’t been finalized.

Now the CSE has done another study, and published the findings in its magazine, Down to Earth. The actual numbers, and notes on methodology, are available on this PDF. (I haven’t found a more formal, “science journal” style article indicating the methodology of the study in detail anywhere.) The CSE says it is testing the soft drinks using methodology developed by the American Environmental Protection Agency (EPA).

There are stories floating around of farmers using Coke and Pepsi drinks as low-budget pesticides, which would be a rather grim confirmation of this finding if substantiated. Of course, it’s unlikely that the amount of pesticide in these drinks is actually killing any bugs (the study finds pesticides in the drinks in the range of 11 parts per billion); it might well be the citric acid or the phosphoric acid (on the other hand, wouldn’t bugs be attracted to the sugar?). As a commentor on Scott Carney’s blog points out, it’s not clear whether this is a widespread practice, or a bit of an ‘urban legend’.

A comment on my Hindi film music post from Kush Tandon earlier in the week got me thinking:

Where do you buy India/ Bollywood music in electronic from? I have browsed Rhapsody, they seem decent. I could not find much on iTunes. Is there some other place too?

Or is it all pirated and/ or through buddies?

No one responded to the comment at the time — is it because everyone is in fact downloading pirated desi music and films over the internet, and they’re not sure they should admit it?

There are a number of good explanations for why downloading is popular. First, not everyone lives near an Indo-Pak grocery/music store, and a lot of Desi stores aren’t very serious about getting current music, or a broad range of it. Second, so much of the music is kind of crappy and derivative to begin with (Hindi film producers often borrow bass-lines and samples from western or Arabic pop songs), so why worry about making sure the artist is adequately paid for his or her work?

Third, there’s never been any attempt from Indian record and film companies to crack down on downloads of their stuff in the diaspora. Grocery/music/video stores that sell pirated material are often raided, but there’s no desi equivalent of the RIAA or MPAA suing online pirates, or shutting down BitTorrent/filesharing sites. (Note: Kazaa just settled with American record companies for $100 million.)

And finally, there’s no desi equivalent of Itunes, where you can legally buy MP3 singles from CDs and be assured that your money is going to the label and the artist who made the music (any entrepeneurs out there? go for it, buddy).

What are your thoughts on piracy? Do you yourself download pirated music (note: if you normally use your real name in comments, here I would recommend an alias)? What is your “piracy to legal consumption” ratio? Would you spend $1.00 a song if a desi version of Itunes were available?

SM reader “busybee” posted an absolutely fascinating link on our News Tab yesterday. It seems that somewhere deep within China, near a village called Huangyangtan, is a 900 x 700 m scale model (you need Google Earth to open this file) of a mountainous region somewhere on Earth. People…that is a model 9 x 7 football fields long! A model anywhere near this scale is usually only constructed when trying to train one’s soldiers how to conquer/hold the terrain in question.

So the million dollar question becomes, “what region on Earth could this be a model of?” Such an answer seems impossible to answer on its face, but sure enough someone with way too much time on their hands was able to solve this puzzle. We have to remember back to the 1962 Sino-India war:

Don’t, however, spend the next three days scouring the world’s mountain ranges trying to find a geographical match: the legwork has already been done for you by this enterprising Google Earth Community member who correctly identified the model as representing this [you need Google Earth to open this file] disputed area on the Chinese/Indian border.

Here’s a comparison of the Chinese model and the Google Earth image of the region in question… [Link]

It’s of territory occupied by China but claimed by India, north and south of the east end of the Karakoram range. The borders in this region are shown in red rather than yellow to indicate the dispute. [Link]

I have numerous jobs in addition to my writing, one of which involves working with new technology. I know it’s a stereotype to say that Indians are good with computers, but I welcome it in my case, mostly because it’s hilariously untrue. I’ve avoided technology as much as possible—I didn’t have an email address until 1996, and it’s still a crapshoot if my cell phone is working—despite coming from a family of technophiles. What they actually do to these computers, I have no idea, but despite being voted Most Likely to Spill Coke On the Keyboard Again, I find myself reasonably skilled at this new IT-oriented gig. Nature or nurture? Or dumb luck? Discuss.

But what about those who are not just computer illiterate, but actually unable to read or write? Microsoft has a plan: make computers that don’t depend on words. This March 2006 USA Today article talks about how a new breed of computers can help often-illiterate domestic servants:

Working with a local advocacy group, Microsoft has developed a prototype of a system that would connect illiterate domestic workers in India with families seeking their services. The system uses pictures, video and voice commands to tell women what jobs are available, how much the jobs pay and where they are.

Why hasn’t anyone thought of this before? For one thing:

they [the domestic workers] had trouble seeing why a computerized system for finding work was better than traditional word-of-mouth

Additionally, the computer’s images and pictures had to bridge language and cultural gaps, such as this one:

the women associated neighborhoods with landmarks rather than addresses, so an interactive map and verbal directions had to be tweaked to represent that.

Finally—the big hurdle: implementation. This CNET article discusses the difficulties poorer areas of India have getting computer literate. Apart from the most obvious issue of languages, there is problem of power:

To save power, the PCs run on car and truck batteries. Unfortunately, the batteries regularly need recharging and the public electrical power system can’t always handle the demand.

and crime:

Three weeks ago, the village transformer blew because too many people tapped into it illegally, a chronic problem here. The government refused to rebuild the transformer until the villagers promised to punish anyone who stole power.

and bad freakin’ luck:

The day after it was rebuilt, the transformer blew again.

As some of you may know, today is the day that many across the world celebrate the birthday of Lord Buddha:

Buddha Poornima, which falls on the full moon night in the month of Vaisakha (either in April or May), commemorates the birth anniversary of Lord Buddha, founder of Buddhism, one of the oldest religions in the world. Notwithstanding the summer heat (the temperature routinely touches 45 degrees C), pilgrims come from all over the world to Bodh Gaya to attend the Buddha Poornima celebrations. [Link]

Sarnath seems to have been rocking on Saturday:

Click for a larger (more enlightening) picture

Sarnath — the site where Buddha ignited the light of knowledge among five disciples centuries ago was this evening bedecked with 20,000 diyas (earthen lamps).

Marking the 2550th Great Parinirvan of Buddha, this festival of lights started off at 1840 hrs today evening in the lines of Dev Deepawali — the evening when all 84 Ganga ghats of Varanasi are decorated with diyas.

While Dev Deepawali is held every year to mark the Hindu festival of Kartik Purnima, this evening’s twinkling delight coincided with Buddha Purnima at the world famous Buddhist pilgrimage of Sarnath. [Link]

Over 2500 years after the Buddha walked the Earth there is still proof all around us of his tremendous influence and teachings. As a matter of fact I am here to tell you that those Ipods which many of you cling to so dearly (I have never owned one) are like so passé. The hottest trend to hit the streets is the divinely inspired (and powered??) Buddha Machine:

The controls are simple: There’s a volume dial on top that doubles as an on and off switch, which is next to a headphone jack and a power adaptor input (the Buddha Machine also runs on two AA batteries). A red LED on the side indicates whether the box is on, and an adjacent two-way switch allows users to flip between recorded loops. It’s available in six different colors, but you don’t get to choose - they ship randomly to mail orders from online sites such as forcedexposure.com.

So what the hell do you use this thing for?… [Link]

Good question young one, but the answers that you seek in life don’t always come simply because you demand to know them.

As seen on our News Tab, NASA officially announced the crew of Expedition 14 on Tuesday. The crew, which will be the next one rotated in to live aboard the International Space Station, will consist of mission commander Michael Lopez-Alegria, Russian cosmonaut Mikhail Tyurin serving as flight engineer, and Sunita “Sunny” Williams (formerly Pandya) who will also serve as a flight engineer.

Williams will join Expedition 14 in progress and serve as a flight engineer, after traveling to the station on space shuttle mission STS-116. This will be Williams’s first space flight.

Selected as an astronaut in 1992, Lopez-Alegria flew his first shuttle mission, STS-73, in 1995 and later visited the station on shuttle missions STS-92 in 2000 and STS-113 in 2002, conducting five spacewalks during the station assembly complex. He has logged more than 42 days in space, including 34 hours spacewalking. Lopez-Alegria is a graduate of the U.S. Naval Academy and received a Master of Science degree from the Naval Postgraduate School.

Williams was selected as an astronaut in 1998. She also is a graduate of the Naval Academy and received a Master of Science degree from the Florida Institute of Technology. Williams was designated a Naval aviator in 1989 and graduated from the Naval Test Pilot School in 1993. She has logged more than 2,770 flight hours in 30 different types of aircraft. At NASA, Williams has served as a liaison in Moscow supporting Expedition 1 and has supported station robotics work.

Tyurin was selected as a cosmonaut in 1993 and was a flight engineer aboard the station for Expedition 3 in 2001. He has spent 125 days in space. Tyurin is a graduate of the Moscow Aviation Institute. [Link]

Attentive SM readers will remember that I have covered Williams in a prior post. She is a Navy test pilot who specialized in rotary-winged vehicles (helicopters). Additionally, she is only the second rookie (Edward “Mike” Fincke of Expedition 9 having been the first) to be assigned as an ISS crew member. This is a big deal since in the shuttle era you’d never have more than one or two rookies on a given flight. Astronauts aboard the ISS have almost every minute of every day tasked out. Experience is key to making sure that everything keeps running smoothly up there. Williams has been serving as the astronaut liaison to Moscow so she is used to working with the Russians and is probably fluent in Russian. You will also note that with the current backlog of flightless astronauts, Williams has had to wait eight years for her first shot. Lesson: Get picked up by the Corp when you are still pretty young.

Every mission patch (like the one on the right) tells a story. I haven’t completely translated this one yet (I’m working on it) but the red dot may represent Mars, probably as a reminder that they are keeping an eye on the ultimate prize.

Desi women have now joined desi men in the business of assisted fertility. When you combine Indian medical prowess with lots of poor people you get pharmaceutical testing, organ sales, and now a thriving business in surrogate motherhood [Thanks to wgiia for alerting me to this story]. This sector is now worth roughly a half a billion dollars a year and growing rapidly.

Daksha, a shy Gujarati woman in her early 30s, wants a child - but not for herself. The baby is for the “Britishers”, the couple seated in the lobby of the Indian fertility clinic. It is the first time that the British Asian couple, Ajay and Saroj Shah, from Leicester, have met Daksha. The 31-year-old is “loaning” her womb to them for 150,000 rupees (£2,000) and is candid about needing the money. Her shop job pays only 2,000 rupees a month. [Link]

Daksha is getting paid six years of salary for this service, and the desi British couple involved have gotten away cheaply (why am I not surprised?). Another story gives a price almost twice as high for a Scandanavian couple:

Mehta is, in fact, renting her womb out to the couple for a cool Rs 4 lakh to Rs 5 lakh. [Link]

Like everything else in India, however, local prices are far cheaper than prices in the west:

… it costs £100-300 to advertise for a surrogate mother in India versus the £1,000 charged by a British daily. Not surprisingly, an advertisement for a surrogate mother has been appearing in Indian newspapers and magazines in a dozen cities once a week for a couple of months [Link]

[One] couple … will be spending nearly Rs 10 lakh on the entire process, far less than the Rs 26 lakh to Rs 35 lakh they would have had to fork out at an in vitro fertilisation (IVF) clinic in California, which they had considered earlier. [Link] … They opted for the Indian clinics to save 2.5m rupees (£31,000). [Link]

At about £3,000 in Britain, an IVF cycle costs five times what you might pay in India. In addition, in Britain, the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority (HFEA) has outlawed payments, but a surrogate can be reimbursed for a maximum of £10,000 to cover expenses; the payments often fall between £4,000 and £10,000. [Link]

In the US, a single IVF cycle is six to eight times more expensive than in India, where it comes for Rs 50,000 to Rs 1 lakh — or half of what it costs in the UK. [I realize that these figures are inconsistent] The refinement of such techniques and their low cost is what is spawning the boom in surrogate motherhood. And it helps that the amount earned for bearing a child for somebody else can be as high as a middle-class office-goer’s salary for two years or so. [Link]

An engineer named Vanajah Siva Subramaniam is one of the four finalists (and only woman) vying to become Malaysia’s first astronaut:

The Right Stuff

An ethnic Indian woman was on Tuesday named among four candidates short listed to become Malaysia’s first astronaut and travel to the International Space Station next year.

S Vanajah Siva Subramaniam, 35, will travel along with three Malay men to the Russian Space Agency in Moscow soon to undergo medical and technical tests that will establish which of them will take part in the scientific expedition on board the International Space Station in 2007.

The three men are Malaysia Airlines pilot Mohammed Faiz Kamaluddin, 34; army dentist Faiz Khaleed, 26; and Sheikh Muszaphar Shukor, a 34-year-old hospital medical officer.

The four were chosen from more than 11,000 candidates who had submitted their applications in a process that started in 2003.

Vanajah is an engineer by profession. She was the only woman to be short-listed. All the three men are from the dominant Malay community, while Vanajah belongs to the ethnic Indian community, which comprises 8 per cent of Malaysia’s 26-million-strong population. [Link]

Her selection of course is dependent upon whether or not Malaysians think she is too sexy for the job of astronaut (I thought astronauts were REQUIRED to be sexy) . The astronaut who makes the final cut is scheduled to spend an expedition aboard the ISS sometime in 2007 (although I will bet money that the mission will be delayed at least a year).

Vanajah has previously said she hopes to inspire other Malaysian women to participate in science-related projects, saying her achievement proved that women could compete alongside men in rigorous trials.

The finalists have endured a battery of physical and psychological examinations, and officials said the remaining four were chosen on the basis of physical fitness, personality and preparedness, including family support. [Link]

I also found an article that describes some of those psychological tests that the Malaysian astronaut candidates were put through:

After extended periods of physical and mental stress, including sleep deprivation, being roused from a nice warm bed at 3am for a run followed by a swim, it becomes virtually impossible for anyone to continue pretending to be Mr Nice Guy.

Candidates were made to spend hours in pitch-dark jungle conditions to gauge whether they could endure long periods of isolation and sensory deprivation.

“It can be frightening if one is not used to the jungle but the candidates were never in any real danger ? what they did not know was that there were commandos assigned to watch over them at all times,” reveals Dr Teoh.

Brimful points me to the newest issue of the Journal Nature which contains an account (subscription required) of how the U.S. consulate in India “humiliated” one of India’s most prominent scientists (who also serves as an adviser to the prime minister). This is a particularly relevant diplomatic flap given Bush’s impending visit to India:

Scientific cooperation between India and the United States has been dented ahead of US President George Bush’s official visit to New Delhi next month. Bush will find India’s scientific community in a bitter mood following the United States’ failure to give a visa to a leading Indian organic chemist on the suspicion that his work could be related to chemical warfare.

Bush was already preparing to deal with a nuclear establishment unwilling to separate its military and civilian atomic facilities the way Washington wants, a principle at the centre of last July’s historic deal for nuclear cooperation between the two countries (see Nature 436, 446-447; 2005). But the visa issue is creating a new wave of resentment.

Goverdhan Mehta, a former director of the Indian Institute of Science (IISc) in Bangalore, had been invited as a visiting professor to the University of Florida at Gainesville, but says he was asked to prove that he was not working on chemical weapons before a visa was issued.

This morning’s Washington Post provides greater detail on the incident (thanks Rekha):

In the face of outrage in India, the U.S. Embassy in New Delhi issued a highly unusual statement of regret, and yesterday the State Department said officials are reaching out to the scientist to resolve his case.

“It is very strange logic,” said Mehta, reached at his home in Bangalore early this morning India time. “Someone is insulted and hurt and you ask him to come back a second round…”

The scientist told Indian newspapers that his dealing with the U.S. consulate was “the most degrading experience of my life.” Mehta is president of the International Council for Science, a Paris-based organization comprising the national scientific academies of a number of countries. The council advocates that scientists should have free access to one another.

In his written account, the scientist said that after traveling 200 miles, waiting three hours with his wife for an interview and being accused of deception, he was outraged when his accounts of his research were questioned and he was told he needed to fill out a detailed questionnaire. [Link]

All of this is a result of the the shotgun approach that U.S. consulates have followed due to post-9/11 pressure from the State Department. It’s just easier to harass and deny someone rather than be wrong just once and get blamed for it. Such a policy makes us look even more Draconian in the eyes of the world. If foreign scientists are treated this way, then foreign students will be less inclined to study here. Then we will have real problems since Americans aren’t pursuing science and engineering in the numbers that they once did. It will also cripple important scientific exchange with other countries who are tired of dealing with the U.S.

Shiladitya Sengupta was on the subway in Boston when he saw someone selling balloons that contained smaller balloons inside them. If you've seen one of those things, you'll know what a hideous racket they can make when some young swine with a sharp object gets close to them. But instead of exhibiting the normal adult human reflex of covering up both ears in anticipation, Shiladitya dug into his roots and exhibited the normal desi reflex: He started thinking about work.

Sengupta, luckily for us, was a postdoctoral associate at one of the biology labs at MIT, and was part of a team that was working on a treatment for cancer. The double balloon thing eventually led his team to develop something called nanocell cancer treatment.

The January edition of India New England carries a profile of Sengupta, who was one of the five desis on TR35 - the list of top young technology innovators last year.

Sengupta, an assistant professor for Harvard Medical School and MIT, came to the United States in 2001 after receiving his doctorate in pharmacology from the University of Cambridge in the United Kingdom. He is originally from New Delhi, India, and he earned his bachelor's and master's degrees at the All India Institute of Medical Sciences in New Delhi. Sengupta now lives in Waltham, Mass., with his wife, Shivani, who also teaches at MIT.

What Sengupta developed for cancer treatment stems from the idea of a balloon within a balloon. One balloon carries a drug to shut down the blood supply, and the second, smaller balloon carries a drug to kill the cancer. [Link]

The Washington Post reports on news that is music to my ears. Scientists AND “big business” are actually joining forces for a cause that they know to be important:

Business and science groups are reviving images of the Cold War space race in an effort to persuade lawmakers to spend millions to recruit and train high-caliber math teachers.

They argue that, just as a stronger focus on math helped the United States top the Soviet Sputnik launch by putting a man on the moon, the country needs to improve math education to win an economic race with China and India and a national security race against terrorism…

“The interesting sort of difference in the dynamic then and the dynamic now is that we were competing with a military threat, whereas now it’s much more an economic threat,” said Susan Traiman, an education and work force policy lobbyist for the Business Roundtable. [Link]

Many groups have been sounding this alarm bell for a while now, but nobody listens. From 2002:

The U.S. Commission on National Security for the 21st Century warns, “The harsh fact is that the U.S. need for the highest quality human capital in science, mathematics, and engineering is not being met… We not only lack the homegrown science, technology, and engineering professionals necessary to ensure national prosperity and security, but also the next generation of teachers of science and math at the K-12 level… The nation is on the verge of a downward spiral in which current shortages will beget even more acute future shortages of high-quality professionals and competent teachers.”

According to the 2000 National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), student science scores for grades 4 and 8 are flat and there has been a slight decline in scores for grade 12 since the assessment was last administered in 1996. Furthermore, 84 percent of science teachers and 86 percent of mathematics teachers in grades 5-8 did not major in science or mathematics. This report further underscores the need for reform and investment in math and science education, particularly at a time when our economy, national security and technological advances are heavily dependent on the quality of our future workforce. [Link]

One of my favorite things about camping is that I get a chance to break out my Petzl MYO 5 Xenon Head Lamp. It has five tiny Light Emitting Diodes (LEDs) as well as a larger flood light (in case a companion falls down a bottomless pit). When I first attach the unit to my head some people smirk and comment that I look a little silly. Inevitably, they are all begging me for use of its luminosity by the end of the night. But here is the best part: I bought my headlamp three years ago and have used it on countless camping trips and all night hikes, and it’s STILL running on the original set of 4 batteries. The Christian Science Monitor reports on the great benefits that the tiny LED could bring to rural India:

As many as 1.5 billion people - nearly 80 million in India alone - light their houses using kerosene as the primary lighting media. The fuel is dangerous, dirty, and - despite being subsidized - consumes nearly 4 percent of a typical rural Indian household’s budget. A recent report by the Intermediate Technology Development Group suggests that indoor air pollution from such lighting media results in 1.6 million deaths worldwide every year.

LED lamps, or more specifically white LEDS, are believed to produce nearly 200 times more useful light than a kerosene lamp and almost 50 times the amount of useful light of a conventional bulb.

“This technology can light an entire rural village with less energy than that used by a single conventional 100 watt light bulb,” says Dave Irvine-Halliday, a professor of electrical engineering at the University of Calgary, Canada and the founder of Light Up the World Foundation (LUTW). Founded in 1997, LUTW has used LED technology to bring light to nearly 10,000 homes in remote and disadvantaged corners of some 27 countries like India, Nepal, Sri Lanka, Bolivia, and the Philippines.

As the article mentions, at least one village has already been transformed by Grameen Surya Bijli Foundation (GSBF), a Bombay-based nongovernmental organization that has created a solar powered LED unit that costs only $55. Once installed the energy is obviously free of charge. The key to this is to convince the Indian government that this is much more cost effective than spending money to light India in the conventional way. To do this you would have to lower the $55 per unit cost. This can be done if the solar cells were locally manufactured. This in turn could provide employment benefits in the communities doing the manufacturing.

Unlike much of the public I really do listen to what critics say before I go to see a movie. I especially like Kenneth Turan and Joe Morgenstern who lend their critiques to NPR every week. Some of their best reviewed films happen to be ones you’ve never heard of, but will be sorry if you miss. It comes as no surprise that many of these movies don’t make a lot at the box office. As the number of crappy films that do make it to the screen increase every year, resulting in fewer people going out to see movies, studio executives need some sort of crystal ball or…formula to know which films they should greenlight for maximum profitability. Enter Professor Ramesh Sharda of Oklahoma State University. MSNBC reports:

A scientist in the United States says he has come up with a computer program that helps predict whether a film will be a hit or a miss at the box office long before it is even made.

“Our goal is to try to find oil, in a way,” Professor Ramesh Sharda of the Oklahoma State University said Wednesday.

“We are trying to forecast the success of a movie based on things that are decided before a movie has been made,” he told Reuters by telephone.

Yes. That’s exactly what Hollywood needs. More formulaic movies. It’s even more discouraging when you see the variables that Sharda finds will maximize studio profits. Some of them are things that cause me to shy away from a movie:

Sharda applied seven criteria to each movie: its rating by censors, competition from other films at the time of release, strength of the cast, genre, special effects, whether it is a sequel and the number of theaters it opens in.

Using a neural network to process the results, the films are placed in one of nine categories, ranging from “flop,” meaning less than $1 million at the box office, to “blockbuster,” meaning more than $200 million.

I wonder what would happen if you started entering Bollywood films into the system. I predict the system would crash.

The system cannot take into account the intricacies of the plot, but Sharda says it can nonetheless get the revenue category spot-on 37 per cent of the time, and correct to within one category either side 75 per cent of the time. This is enough to make the system a “powerful decision aid”, Sharda says. [Link]

Disco DJ Ennis in da virtual hiz-ouse!

Remember “flesh colored” bandaids - the ones that didn’t look anything like your flesh, and which stood out like a pink gash on your arm? This same problem recurs in the virtual world. Cyberspace is oddly eurocentric given the vast number of cyber-coolies who work to maintain and extend it. Despite the years that have elapsed since the end of the flesh-colored crayon, very little of the virtual world is easily extensible to look like me.

One noteworthy exception is a company called Weeworld that specializes in the creation of avatars for use with Skype or other services. Their web application lets you specify settings for 23 variables, each of which can take on multiple values, to create an image of yourself for only 1.5 Euros. Not only can you specify whatever skin, hair and eye color you want, but you can also give your icon facial hair and even a fairly realistic looking turban! It is a profound demonstration of the deep penetration of desis into British cultural life when a British company, producing for a largely European audience, includes a turban as a standard option. [Hat tip to Mr Sikhnet]

In honor of the upcoming (Thursday),

The World Community Grid team has announced the FightAIDS @ Home project. By downloading their screensaver you donate your computer’s idle processing power to the project. The increased processing power will hopefully allow researchers to more aggressively and quickly screen possible HIV-fighting drugs. [Link]

AIDS is an increasing problem in India:

India has had a sharp increase in the estimated number of HIV infections, from a few thousand in the early 1990s to around 5.1 million children and adults living with HIV/AIDS in 2003. [Link]

This software is similar to the SETI @ home project that was popular a few years ago, no more intrusive but with (IMHO) a much higher probability of success. A full explanation of the program follows for the geeks amongst us:

Desis know that the seat of all emotions isn’t the heart but the belly - why else would we spend so much time catering to its needs? Based on that principle some clever desi-americans have come up with a better truth test, one almost as effective as having your mother look you in the eye and tell you that she knows what you did, so you better be honest about it. Instead of a polygraph, they used an electrogastrogram to measure changes in the digestive tract associated with stress.

Manish reluctantly posed for this photo …

… when 16 volunteers were hooked up to heart and digestive tract monitors, the researchers were surprised to find that lying had a closer correlation with stomach changes than with heart changes.

When the subjects lied, their heart rates increased, but it also did so at other times. On the other hand, lying was consistently associated with a decrease in the slow waves of the digestive tract. [Link]

Why is a stomach test more accurate? Because, as any auntie will tell you, the heart is a fickle creature, led around by hormones:

“The heart is unreliable because it’s affected by not only by your brain, but by many other factors, such as hormones,” says Pankaj Pasricha, who is leading the team. “The gut has a mind of its own - literally. It has its own well-developed nervous system that acts independently of almost everything except your unconscious brain.” [Link]

The Pasricha Family: Where nobody dares tell a lie!

The study began as a high school project for Dr. Pasricha’s daughter, Trisha, who is listed as an author. (Dr. Pasricha’s wife is a former F.B.I. agent.) [Link]

Her mom’s a former F.B.I. agent and she just helped her dad come up with a better lie detector test? Boy, she’s really not planning on dating in high school, is she?

For today’s Science Friday I wanted to talk about science policy (mostly because I don’t have time today to dissect a hard science article) .  This week’s edition of the journal Science features an article (paid subscription required) that debates the suggestion by some that there exists a glass ceiling for Asians in science leadership positions, here in the U.S.:

Virologist Kuan-Teh Jeang always thought it strange that his employer, the National Institutes of Health (NIH), would celebrate Asian Heritage Week each year with a cultural fair. “We’re not known for being great cooks or dancers. We’re known for being great scientists,” says Jeang about an ethnic group that, according to 2000 census data, comprises 14.7% of U.S. life scientists despite being only 4.1% of the nation’s overall workforce. So last year, he and the NIH/Food and Drug Administration Chinese American Association launched a new tradition: inviting a distinguished Asian researcher to give a scientific talk.

This May, as Asian Heritage Week approached, Jeang and his colleagues had another idea: Why not use the occasion to examine the status of Asian scientists within NIH’s intramural program? Jeang had already collected some disturbing numbers about opportunities for career advancement at NIH, and he was eager to see whether his numbers squared with an official tally by NIH officials.

To his chagrin, they did. Whereas 21.5% of NIH’s 280 tenure-track investigators (the equivalent of assistant professors) are Asian, they comprise only 9.2% of the 950 senior investigators (tenured researchers) at NIH. And only 4.7% of the roughly 200 lab or branch chiefs are Asian. (For this story, the term “Asian” includes all scientists with Asian surnames, regardless of their citizenship or immigration status. The group is dominated by scientists of Chinese, Korean, Indian, Pakistani, or Japanese origin.) Within particular institutes, the numbers were even more sobering. As of this spring, just one of 55 lab chiefs at the National Cancer Institute, NIH’s largest, was Asian. At the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, where Jeang works, none of the 22 lab chiefs was Asian.

To Jeang and others, the numbers point to a glass ceiling for Asian life scientists seeking to move up the career ladder.

I know this may be a contentious issue.  Some people automatically think that any suggestion of inequality is “whining.”  Maybe part of the lack of Asians in leadership positions may be due to the stigma associated with a language barrier (or a perceived barrier).  This should become much less of an issue as a generation of American-born Asians reaches “the proper age of leadership.”

For today’s edition of Science Friday here on SM, I thought I would write about the science story that made the biggest impact in this past week, as well as the one closest to my heart.  The theme of this week’s Science Friday will be Human Space Exploration.  What are countries around the world, including the U.S., India, and China doing in order to keep their societies at the forefront of space technology?  The “prestige” of nuclear weapons pales in comparison to the prestige and society-wide benefits that a country gains on the road to putting its citizens in space.  Anyone can make nukes, but only three countries (U.S., Russia, and China) have the economic power and human capital to put people into space and return them safely.

China continued its impressive run by following up its first human mission with this second one that placed two men is space for five days (the equivalent of our Gemini Program from the 60s).

Chinese astronauts Fei Junlong and Nie Haisheng, known as taikonauts, were declared to be in “fine condition” after their 5-day spaceflight which ended at 4:33 a.m. Monday, Beijing time. The mission, lasting 115 hours and 32 minutes, was more than five times longer than China’s maiden manned mission in 2003.

“We feel fine,” Fei told a crowd of well-wishers. Nie expressed thanks to the Chinese people for their “concern and support.”

Wu Bangguo, No. 2 in the Communist party hierarchy and head of the country’s national legislature, was quoted by Xinhua as saying the second manned space mission was a “complete success,” and a “milestone” in China’s space technology development. [Link]

What about India?  Is it even trying to keep pace with its ambitious neighbor?

… as China begins planning a lunar mission in 2007, and with the US and India declaring an interest in another Moon landing - and a manned flight to Mars - are we seeing the dawn of a new space race?

“Once China had announced its first unmanned lunar spacecraft, India came along and said that they were also interested in unmanned lunar exploration,” Philip Clark, of the British-based Molniya Space Consultancy, told BBC World Service’s Analysis programme.

“They’ve now signed an agreement with the European Space Agency for joint experiments with the Indian spacecraft…

While India’s space programme is relatively small, it has made considerable strides in recent years, putting a number of satellites into orbit. [Link]

There is a game of high-stakes foreign policy poker being played in Washington right now between the U.S. and India with respect to nuclear cooperation.  As with most issues of late, the normally homogenous Republicans are showing signs of a spine again by demonstrating thinking independent of their party leader.  The Washington Post reports:

Congressional leaders crucial to the fate of a controversial U.S.-India nuclear deal are pressing Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice to consult them before proposing legislation to implement the agreement.

The leaders make their case in a letter which congressional aides said reflects deep unease about the deal’s consequences and the way the administration secretly negotiated it, without input from lawmakers who must approve it.

“We firmly believe that such consultations will be crucial to the successful consideration of the final agreement or agreements by our committees and the Congress as a whole,” they wrote in the letter, which was obtained by Reuters.

Many members of Bush’s Republican party, which controls Congress, and also many Democrats fear the deal excessively benefits India and undermines international efforts to halt the spread of nuclear weapons.

Of course, this is all really about Iran.  India surprised people last month by voting with the U.S. in threatening to refer Iran to the U.N. Security Council (where it could potentially be punished) for its nuclear activities.   The genie is out of the bottle with respect to nuclear technology so we may as well spread weapons to our friends if they will help us prevent the spread to our enemies.  The U.S. however, wants assurances that their technological gifts won’t be used for India’s weapons program:

The separation plan is at the heart of the nuclear deal because it is meant to ensure any U.S. or international cooperation with India advances only the South Asian nation’s civilian energy program, not weapons development.

Burns said the separation issue will be central to his talks in New Delhi this week but it would probably take a month or two for the plan to be drawn up.

Once a clear separation plan is offered by India, it will be easier to ask the U.S. Congress for the necessary changes, he said.

I sometimes hang out at Brad DeLong’s blog, where apparently Razib thought I was a dude. Yesterday DeLong wrote a post about Tamiflu, the Roche patented drug which is the one of the only plausible defenses against the dreaded Avian influenza or Asian Bird Flu. DeLong was mostly concerned with the domestic policy and economic ramifications of nationalizing a patent in times of emergency and stockpiling a drug ahead of time, but as with Sepia Mutiny, the comments can be most educational—and that’s how I found out that clever Cipla is at its Robin Hood reverse engineering tricks again. Bird flu is, of course, a global issue:

Cipla, an Indian producer of generic drugs, is preparing to become an alternative producer of oseltamivir phosphate, an antiviral drug better known by the brand name Tamiflu.Cipla plans to offer Tamiflu in the Indian market and in 49 less-developed countries where the company already sells AIDS treatments, Hamied says. The legality of the introduction in India, where pharmaceutical patents started to be recognized this year, is uncertain.

Hamied says he will withdraw Tamiflu from the Indian market if Roche’s patent is recognized.  (Link.)

A Roche spokesman, Terry Hurley, said that the company ”fully intends to remain the sole manufacturer of Tamiflu.” . .Making the drug involves 10 complex steps, he said, and the company believes that it’ll take another company ”two to three years, starting from scratch,” to produce it. Hamied dismissed that claim, saying that he initially thought it would be too hard but that his scientists had finished reverse-engineering the drug in his laboratories two weeks ago. He said he could have small commercial quantities available as early as January 2006. Asked if he thought Hamied was making an idle boast, Hurley declined to comment. Hamied said he would sell generic Tamiflu ”at a humanitarian price” in developing nations and not aim at the US or European market. ”God forbid the avian flu should strike India,” he said. ”There is no line of defense.” (Link.)

What does this have to do with mangosteens? I’m glad you asked!

The Christian Science Monitor carries a provocatively titled article today: “How India’s nuclear secrecy hampers earthquake detection.”  The article investigates India’s refusal to share real-time seismic data on the grounds that it could reveal information about underground nuclear testing:

In the wake of the recent earthquake that devastated Kashmir, some Indian officials are reevaluating the government’s refusal to share real-time online seismology data with the international community.

India has balked at putting seismic data online because it could provide evidence of underground nuclear testing. The country’s refusal to sign the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty also excludes it from exchanging data with the International Monitoring System, a global network of seismological sensors operated by treaty signatories.

Seismologists can more rapidly and accurately pinpoint the location and power of an earthquake when real-time data can be triangulated against a wide network of sensors. A delay of even seconds in reporting data induces errors in the exact location and could set back relief efforts in their crucial early stages, prompting some scientists here to argue against data hoarding.

Such are the consequences of brinkmanship.  We can’t let the other guy know what the yield of our newest, baddest weapon is no matter what.

As for the value of sharing seismic data in the event of a future earthquake, some decision-makers in Delhi have yet to get the message. “Share data? What for?” asked an official from the Ministry of Science, sounding nonplussed when questioned about India’s policy to not make real-time data available via broadband.

“Open-data sharing in seismology over the past century … has been of enormous importance in reporting of earthquakes and studies of global and regional earthquakes,” says Shane Ingate, director of operations at the Incorporated Research Institutions for Seismology (IRIS) in Washington, the world’s repository for data from most seismic networks around the globe. “It is regrettable that India … imposes restriction on the open and rapid access of these important data.”

Emerging technologies are making it possible to detect blasts and blast yields even without rigorous seismic data, so it doesn’t make much sense for India to maintain this policy, especially when releasing that data could help save lives.

I hate paying so much at the pump but I am glad that the current gas shortage has stabbed a dagger into the heart of SUV sales.  It also seems like every other day there is a news story about someone tinkering with their engines, or the battery array in their hybrids, to get more juice for the buck.  Sometimes innovation still does take place in the trenches.  Popular Science tells the story of Somender Singh and his relentless pursuit of perfection:

India is booming. The expanding population has overwhelmed the Bangalore-Mysore road the way a river floods its banks, and the flow of two-way traffic is choked with a living history of human transportation. There are belching herds of diesel trucks, diesel buses and iron-framed diesel tractors. There are wooden-wheeled carts pulled by brightly painted Brahma bulls, and two-stroke-motor rickshaws fueled by kerosene or cooking oil or whatever else is flammable and cheap. There are mopeds and bipeds and bicycles and motorcycles, and every conceivable type of petrol-powered, internally combusting automobile, from doddering Ambassador cabs to gleaming 16-valve Mercedes miracles. But there’s only one car like the one Somender Singh and I are riding in right now.

That’s because Singh invented it. Or rather, reinvented a piece of it: a small detail on the engine that he calls “direct drive.” He claims that his invention makes an engine cleaner, quieter and colder than its internal-combustion cousins around the world—while using up to 20 percent less gas.

“Some people say to me, ‘Singh, why are you wasting your time on such a thing?’” he yells, his singsong Indian English barely piping above the tooting traffic. “But I tell you sir—I tell the world: I have conquered the internal combustion engine!”

To hear Singh tell it, his story has all the makings of a Bollywood movie, a classic heartwarmer about a small-fry Indian grease monkey who challenges the big boys armed only with a dream and a dirty wrench. And there’s no doubt that he has come up with something new, at least in the eyes of the U.S. Patent Office. But has a potbellied philosopher- mechanic from Mysore really discovered the efficiency El Dorado sought by every auto manufacturer, R&D center and thermal engineer from Detroit to Darmstadt?

Geez.  Does every story out of India have the makings of a Bollywood movie?  We could get 6-fingered Hritik Roshan to play Singh and the story can play up the fact that his extra finger allowed mechanical modifications not capable by lesser men.  Still, Singh does lead the life that every engineer secretly dreams of.  He is a fearless tinkerer who doesn’t accept that good ideas are only born in the R&D labs of large companies.  The majority of the article actually focuses on his utter frustration in getting noticed.  Heads of state, large automobile companies…nobody will listen to the man.

Conflicting reports suggest that NASA may offer an astronaut slot to an Indian citizen in one of the next selection cycles.  The Telegraph reports that an offer is imminent:

After Indian-American astronaut Kalpana Chawla, an Indian national could soon hitch a ride aboard a US space shuttle. An announcement could be made after the Joint Working Group on Civil Space Co-operation meets in Washington next month.

“The US offered to include an Indian astronaut in its training modules and later on a flight. So, it is their invitation rather than our request,” a source at the Indian Space Research Organisation (Isro) said.

“That’s why we cannot say much except that Discovery’s smooth landing means it could happen sooner than expected. We will begin working on the details after the next meeting of the joint working group.”

vs.

To a question on an Indian astronaut being trained by NASA, he [Chairman G Madhavan Nair of ISRO] said ISRO had not received any such proposal. [Link]

The India Daily seems to corroborate though, with an actual attributable source:

In a clear reflection of the newfound bonhomie, Robert Blake, Deputy Chief of US Mission in India, told reporters in Chennai that India’s moon mission would have active participation of the US.

“We wanted to do more in the area of space exploration, space navigation, satellite navigation and launch. We want to launch two US instruments on the “Chandrayan” (moon mission). Finally we agreed to include an India astronaut in the US astronaut programme,” Blake said.

India plans to send an unmanned mission to the moon by 2008, in what is seen as an effort to showcase the country’s scientific capabilities. The mission has been named as ”Chandrayan Pratham” (First Journey to the Moon).”

Now I’m a little skeptical.  Deputy State Department officials don’t usually have sway with NASA.  It’s true that foreign astronauts do fly with NASA (including an Israeli and a Japanese citizen on the last two missions), but in recent years they have almost all been from countries which have a stake in the International Space Station.  India is not one of those countries.  Israel isn’t either though.  Israel is however a strategic partner with whom we share a lot of technology.  Given that Bush is a big supporter of space exploration and a recent supporter of technology transfer with India, maybe it’s not so far-fetched after all.  My personal attitude (obviously for selfish reasons) is that there are plenty of good Indian American candidates already.  Hmmmm, maybe now would be a good time to apply for that dual-citizenship .  On the flip-side the Russians took up Rakesh Sharma over two decades ago.  It may be time for an Indian citizen to make the trip again.

A few months ago, my wife started a job that entails a monster commute across the NYC metro area. She spends a lot of time in the car, so as an anniversary present I got her XM radio to make the driving time a little more bearable. She seems to like it.

A few days after installing it, I was bragging about the device a little with my in-laws in Bombay. In the midst of my laborious explanation of how it works, they stopped me and said ‘hey, what’s the big deal? We already have one of those at home.’ Oops. In some spaces, the Indian market for consumer goods is actually a bit ahead of the western one. Satellite radio turns out to be one such space (the other space where that is true is in mobile phones).

Worldspace Satellite Radio has been around for seven years, and has had India in its service range for five of them. But it’s only this year that it has made a major push to gain subscribers in the Indian market (coinciding with a stock IPO). According to a recent Rediff report, Worldspace currently has about 40,000 customers in India, and 63,000 worldwide (compare to 4 million XM Radio subscribers and 1.1 million Sirius subscribers in the U.S.). Worldspace in fact predates American satellite radio (they originally owned XM Radio), though it seems they’ve now been eclipsed by it in terms of subscriber base. The big news this summer is that XM Radio has invested $25 million back into its parent company.

Worldspace broadcasts from two geostationary satellites, and covers an area that includes 4 billion people, including the majority of Asia (East Asia, South Asia, and Southeast Asia), the Middle East, Africa, and Southern and Western Europe. (See the full coverage map here)

The questionable business strategy and management of this particular company probably isn’t that important. More interesting is the potential of the medium as a whole: 4 billion people is a lot of potential listeners, especially considering they are being reached with just two satellites. If other companies enter the space, and put up their own satellites, the industry could explode across Asia. Among other things, it could potentially be an impressive engine for globalization: because satellite broadcasts cover huge swaths of earth on limited bandwidth, they can’t be specialized very much by region. Thus, all of South Asia gets the same broadcast. Interesting possibilities…

Greetings Mutineers. I’ve been far from the home office for far too long and my current travels take me to the distant land of Seoul, S. Korea. If there’s a Little India out here, I’m sure I’ll find it. In between travels, I had some precious weekend time in San Francisco where Anna & I held a Mutineer Meetup (Brimful’s excellent writeup is here) and I snapped the shot below with my trusty cameraphone on my way back home.

My chronicle of the Desi conquest of America earlier showcased downtown SF’s gyms; we will now take to the streets -

You too can pick up an authentic Bajaj scooter from the SF Scooter showroom for a mere $2699.

Dunno about you but seeing that logo sure brought back the memories… As a kid, I was never really impressed with the Ringling Bros “10 clowns in a Volkswagen Beetle” act cuz I’d seen the real thing in da motherland. Except instead of 10 clowns in a spacious car, we’re talking about an entire Desi-sized family perched atop a rickety little Bajaj scooter while darting in and out of downtown Cochin traffic at high speed. Everyone’s a clown and noone’s an atheist on them roads.

In less space than a friggin’ Mercury space capsule, Desi families managed to squeeze in a couple kids standing single file between dad’s arms & knees, and a couple more clutching him from behind. But the real trophy goes to mom, dearest mom, who sat in the rear with her knees vise-gripped together and daintily off to one side, with kid #5 screaming at the top of his lungs whilst in her lap. Of course, the good wife never questioned her husband’s driving nor sense of direction. Truly a sight to behold - 7 people and nary a helmet between them.

By contrast, BajajUSA’s website prefers to go with some different imagery to entice American riders -

When I worked for a few months in Delhi at the end of 2002 I was pleasantly surprised by my daily commute. I had heard that the Delhi air was absolutely choked with automobile exhaust fumes and made commuting unbearable. Having converted many buses and rickshaws over to natural gas (CNG) seemed to have done a pretty good job in cleaning up the Delhi skies. Los Angeles, where I live, is still playing catch-up. In the near future though, Indian cities may surge ahead again thanks to the most reliable form of transportation. Indianexpress.com explains:

The great Indian autorickshaw may have just shifted to the eco-friendly CNG but it’s ready for the generation-next fuel.

Taking a major leap towards Indo-US co-operation in the energy sector, the United States Department of Energy (DOE) and US Agency for International Development (USAID) have helped develop a hydrogen-run three-wheeler for Indian roads.

The Rochester Hills (Michigan)-based Energy Conversion Devices (ECD) has successfully converted and developed a CNG-run three-wheeler of Bajaj Automobiles into one run on hydrogen fuel.

Converting over to a hydrogen economy in the U.S. would be a massive undertaking that would span a couple decades. Some analysts think that China and India who have a smaller oil infrastructure could make the switch more easily, and also become more competitive economically, if they start with an alternative energy source while their economies are still developing. I know the critics will say that a hydrogen economy is pie in the sky but I’ve always had a saying: If it’s good enough for the Space Shuttle then its good enough for me (Tang and Velcro included).

For the last seven years I have kept this picture in a frame on my desk. It is a picture I took of the Astronaut memorial wall in Florida. I’m sure my family isn’t going to appreciate the fact that there are no pictures of them :)

After nearly two and a half years NASA will be launching a shuttle back into space (scheduled for Wednesday). Anna emailed me the fact that the shuttle will be carrying symbolic mementos of the seven astronauts that perished aboard Columbia in February of 2003. The Hindu reports:

Countdown began today for the launch of Discovery, the first shuttle to be launched since the Columbia crash two years ago, which will carry a photograph of India-born astrologer Kalpana Chawla, and mementos from her colleagues who perished in the tragedy.

Jean P Harrison, widower of Chawla said he was sending a photograph of his wife aboard Discovery, which is poised for liftoff day with five-man, two-woman crew on Wednesday.

The picture of Kalpana is from her college days in India, where she is sitting in her dorm room surrounded by photographs of aircraft and one of a space shuttle.

Wow. I never even knew she was an astrologer as well.

Since I myself am a teaching assistant in the sciences I had to jump on this article in the New York Times. Almost everyone whose ever been to college has had some experience with a TA they just couldn’t understand.

Valerie Serrin still remembers vividly her anger and the feeling of helplessness. After getting a C on a lab report in an introductory chemistry course, she went to her teaching assistant to ask what she should have done for a better grade.

The teaching assistant, a graduate student from China, possessed a finely honed mind. But he also had a heavy accent and a limited grasp of spoken English, so he could not explain to Ms. Serrin, a freshman at the time, what her report had lacked.

“He would just say, ‘It’s easy, it’s easy,’ ” said Ms. Serrin, who recently completed her junior year at the University of California, Berkeley. “But it wasn’t easy. He was brilliant, absolutely brilliant, but he couldn’t communicate in English.”

Ms. Serrin’s experience is hardly unique. With a steep rise in the number of foreign graduate students in the last two decades, undergraduates at large research universities often find themselves in classes and laboratories run by graduate teaching assistants whose mastery of English is less than complete.

There are several issues here in addition to the focus of the article. First, I have no doubt that Ms. Serrin deserved a C. Foreign TA’s are tougher because they are used to expecting more from their students and don’t understand that grade inflation is the norm in the U.S. This is especially true in the sciences. I have to inflate grades all the time, even at a top rated University like the one I attend. A friend of mine, who is now a Post-doc, told me that when he first came from India he was a mean and ruthless TA because that is what he thought a TA was supposed to be like. He didn’t understand why the students were so sensitive.

My cruel friends like to tease me. They tell me that by the time I become an astronaut they will be able to buy the ticket for the seat next to me. Bastards. They might be right. Space tourism, though still in its infancy, is full of possibilities. Now and Indian-American entrepreneur from Chicago is trying to get in on the action. From the Hindustan Times:

Chirinjeev Kathuria, the irrepressible Indian-American serial entrepreneur from Chicago, is returning to his first love - commercial space travel.

Kathuria, who some years ago, co-founded MirCorps, a Russian partnered company that sent American businessman Dennis Tito to space April 4, 2000, is partnering with Canadian Arrow to form a new Canadian corporation called PlanetSpace.

“We are interested in making this a profitable business. I am more interested in getting applause form Wall Street rather than from jet propulsion labs,” said Kathuria who could not become an astronaut as a teenager because he wore glasses.

“The fact is I’ve always wanted to make commercial space travel a reality for the everyday person, and to create a business to make a company profitable.

Apparently I’m not the only one who dreams of space AND politics though. Kathuria is quite ambitious. Googling him led me here. On April 15th Kathuria announced his bid for Lieutenant Governor of Illinois (in 2006).

The life of a Californian is stressful to say the least! Not only do I have to worry about random freeway shootings, but now I have to worry about some megalomaniacal dictator dropping the bomb on my ass simply because I am within range.

Asked by Senator Hillary Clinton whether North Korea had the ability to arm a missile with a nuclear warhead, [Vice Admiral Lowell] Jacoby responded:

“The assessment is that they have the capability to do that, yes, ma’am.”

He said North Korea also had the ability to deploy a two-stage intercontinental missile that could successfully hit US territory. [Yahoo News]

To stress me out even further, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff said this morning that we are overstretched in case we have to fight another war. The LA times reports:

The strains imposed by the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have made it far more difficult for the U.S. military to beat back new acts of aggression, launch a pre-emptive strike or prevent conflict in another part of the world, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff concluded in a classified analysis presented to Congress today.

Feeling rather afraid and hopeless, I made my way over to the website of the ONE institution that I can always rely on to make me feel safer. I wanted to know what I should do in case of a nuclear attack. This is what my government advises me:

The BBC and several other news orgs report that Indian textile magnate Vijaypat Singhania (who seems to be a contemporary of Howard Hughes) will attempt in November to set a new hot air balloon altitude record:

The record breaking attempt will take place in November in the western Indian city of Mumbai (Bombay).

Mr Singhania, 66, will have to fly in a pressurised capsule in sub-zero temperatures to achieve a feat that he describes as MI 70K (Mission Impossible 70,000).

The 1.6 million cubic feet capacity balloon, which is being built in UK, is as tall as a 30-storey-building, according to the organisers.

The flight could take up to five hours - three hours to go up, and two hours to come down.

Officials from Federation Aeronautique Internationale (FAI), which ratifies aviation records, will be present.

“Vijay is going for the biggest feat - this is the heavy weight championship of hot air ballooning,” UK-based adventurer, Brian Milton, who is coordinating the flight told the BBC news site.

Now for my fellow aviation geeks out there, I have a bit more. As impressive an attempt as this will be, it pales by comparison to other high altitude feats. Singhania will be in a pressurized capsule (he’d die within seconds otherwise) but a century ago, similar feats were attempted sans pressurized cabin:

I am most definitely not a morning person. I prefer working into the night when things are quiet and nobody can bother me. Consequently it makes it very difficult to get out of bed in the morning. About four years ago I perfected a technique that serves me well to this day. I set my clock-radio to NPR a half hour before I need to be out of bed. I set the volume so that it is just loud enough to first wake me, and then allow me to fall back into stage-one brainwave activity. A half hour later, there is a second alarm clock across the room which has a shrill beeping sound. It will not be pacified until I am fully up. Within that half hour however I am able to induce dreams based upon NPR’s stories, to actually live out, the days news. Over the past year I have battled insurgents in Iraq, sat in during Supreme Court hearings, and walked through tsunami devastated villages. I do all of this before even brushing my teeth. After experiencing so much at dawn everyday it becomes a little easier to get out of bed. The problem is that my technique isn’t patentable. I simply advise friends to try it. 25 year old inventor Gauri Nanda of MIT’s Media Lab has her own method of waking up that’s gotten her some publicity lately.

Clocky is, quite simply, for people who have trouble waking up.

When the alarm clock goes off and the snooze button is pressed, Clocky will roll off the bedside table and wheel away, bumping mindlessly into objects on the floor until it eventually finds a spot to rest. Minutes later, when the alarm sounds again, the sleeper must get up out of bed and search for Clocky. This ensures that the person is fully awake before turning it off. Small wheels that are concealed by Clocky’s shag enable it to move and reposition itself, and an internal processor helps it find a new hiding spot every day.

I don’t like being told when to wake up but I’ve come to terms with the idea that I have to. In designing Clocky, I was in part inspired by kittens I’ve had that would bite my toes every morning. Clocky is less of an annoying device as it is a troublesome pet that you love anyway. It’s also a bit ugly. But its unconventional looks keep the user calm, and inspire laughter at one of the most hated times of the day.

I’ve been known to hit the snooze bar for up to two hours or even accidentally turn it off. I’ve known people who put the alarm clock in the living room, but then forget to set it before going to sleep. Others say they are trying to wean themselves off of snoozing, as if it was a bad habit like smoking or drinking. In the foggy logic of our drowsiness, we disable the very device that is meant to wake us up. Having the alarm clock hide from me was just the most obvious way I could think of to get out of bed.

Clocky is not trying to solve all of the problems of alarm clocks—for example how they disrupt other people in the room—but I think maybe someday it can. I think the answer rests in the usage of multiple Clockies. Let’s say there are two people with different sleep schedules sharing a room. Maybe one person’s Clocky can tell the other to hush up if it has sounded off one too many times. Or, maybe they can form an alliance and simultaneously target the offending over-sleeper. I have adopted the philosophy that when two devices communicate, they can solve more problems—that is, two Clockies are better than one.

Also check out the rest of Nanda’s website. It’s very cool. I must confess that I surfed away with a little crush.

See also: New York Daily News article

The March 4th issue of Science Magazine (paid subscription required) features an essay by Raghunath A. Mashelkar, director general of the Council of Scientific & Industrial Research and president of the Indian National Science Academy. The essay is part of Science Magazine’s “Global Voices” series. [Tip via Francis Assisi]

Five years ago, during my presidential address to the Indian Science Congress, I made a prediction: “The next century will belong to India, which will become a unique intellectual and economic power to reckon with, recapturing all its glory, which it had in the millennia gone by,” I told the gathering of 5000, among them the country’s prime minister.

…In this essay, I focus on the importance of returnees to poor countries such as India. I will examine how demographic shifts are creating shortages of skilled scientists and engineers in developed economies and leading to a new dynamic in human capital that is enabling some developing countries to emerge as “global R&D hubs.” I also address ways in which global funding sources can be leveraged in such countries to create new knowledge devoted to the global good.

Because most readers won’t have access to the full article I will quote liberally (about a quarter of the article) for your benefit.

The question that is the title of this entry, along with several other equally frustrating questions, was left on my answering machine one night a few years back, by about a dozen friends. Such is life when you work for the supposed authority on such matters. All of them had watched a Fox Television Special earlier that night which purported that men had never actually been to the Moon, and that it was all a hoax. “Did you know?” they asked. With each message my anger increased. Not at my friends but at the system that allows such idiocy to reach genuinely thirsty minds. I get NASA related emails sent by various friends to my inbox all the time. I almost always have already heard the news, but it still makes me feel good to know that people care. Earlier this week Manish sent me some blogworthy news that I hadn’t heard.

A 17-year-old village boy has topped NASA’s International Scientist Discovery (ISD) exam, sparking a wave of jubilation across his tiny hamlet of Narhai in Uttar Pradesh.

Saurabh Singh, a senior secondary student, has bettered President APJ Abdul Kalam who finished seventh when he sat for the examinations in 1960.

Kalpana Chawla, mission specialist of the ill-fated Columbia space shuttle and the first Indian woman in space, had stood 21st in the 1988 exams.

After achieving the rare feat, Singh said he always dreamt to explore the outer space.

“I had always dreamt of going on a mission on a space craft. I knew about ISD as I was preparing for IIT-JEE. If this form would not have come I would have been giving my entrance for II-TJEE,” Singh said.

I was embarrassed by this email for two reasons. First, I HADN’T heard this news. Space enthusiast that I am, how could I have missed it? Even more embarrassing however is the fact that I had never heard of the supposed, “NASA’s International Scientist Discovery (ISD) exam.”

Throughout the years, there have been countless attempts by educators and parents to glamorize the academic pursuits of science and technology. Whether it was financial incentives, or catchy tunes on PBS children’s programs, for many, the battle usually ends in bitter defeat. What they should be doing is speaking to kids in a language that they understand -- rap and hip-hop.

At least that’s Rajeev Bajaj’s theory, and the 39-year-old engineer from Fremont, Calif. is putting his ideas into motion. From the San Jose Mercury News:

Bajaj recently spent $15,000 of his own money forming an independent record label and hiring musicians to perform four rap and hip-hop songs he wrote in praise of the engineering profession. He hopes his debut album, “Geek Rhythms,” will convince America that engineers indeed are cool.

A couple of SM tipsters (thanks Francis and Sachin) call our attention to the cover of New Scientist Magazine:

I’m digging the colors. There are about 20 detailed articles about science in India. I am not about to summarize them, I am just pointing them out to you science geeks (as I raise my fist in solidarity). What I do want to point out however is the following picture:

What the f*ck? I mean I guess it is just as ludicrous to subscribe to motorcycle or car magazines that drape sexy girls over the goods, but “mice?” Maybe I am not a red-blooded enough guy but this picture just doesn’t boot my hardrive. Come to think of it though I could use an optical mouse on my laptop. Damn subliminal advertising!

The Washington Post Magazine published a lengthy but provocative piece by Shankar Vedantam regarding a technique which tests for racial bias. The test, known as the Implicit Association Test, was developed by three researchers including Harvard’s Mahzarin Banaji:

AT 4 O’CLOCK ON A RECENT WEDNESDAY AFTERNOON, a 34-year-old white woman sat down in her Washington office to take a psychological test. Her office decor attested to her passion for civil rights — as a senior activist at a national gay rights organization, and as a lesbian herself, fighting bias and discrimination is what gets her out of bed every morning. A rainbow flag rested in a mug on her desk.

The woman brought up a test on her computer from a Harvard University Web site. It was really very simple: All it asked her to do was distinguish between a series of black and white faces. When she saw a black face she was to hit a key on the left, when she saw a white face she was to hit a key on the right. Next, she was asked to distinguish between a series of positive and negative words. Words such as “glorious” and “wonderful” required a left key, words such as “nasty” and “awful” required a right key. The test remained simple when two categories were combined: The activist hit the left key if she saw either a white face or a positive word, and hit the right key if she saw either a black face or a negative word.

Then the groupings were reversed. The woman’s index fingers hovered over her keyboard. The test now required her to group black faces with positive words, and white faces with negative words. She leaned forward intently. She made no mistakes, but it took her longer to correctly sort the words and images.

Her result appeared on the screen, and the activist became very silent. The test found she had a bias for whites over blacks.

That must suck. I think most of us are pretty sure that we aren’t racists or bigots, but its an eye-opener to see how the biases of society seep into our subconscious.

The BBC reports on the world’s smallest baby:

The world’s smallest known surviving baby has made her first public appearance at a US hospital, alongside her slightly larger twin sister. Rumaisa Rahman weighed just 244g (8.6 ounces) when she was born prematurely in Chicago on 19 September - less than a can of soft drink. Rumaisa’s Indian-born parents hope to take her and sister Hiba to their home in the city by early next month.

Continuing with the theme of comparing babies to common consumer goods, we are told that

Rumaisa was about the size of a mobile phone when she was born, 15 weeks before her due date. She still only weighs 1.18kg (2 pounds 10 ounces).

Amazingly enough, the twins can “survive” on their own, even though they were only around 4.3 months into term before they were delivered via C-section:

“They’re maintaining their temperature, they don’t need an incubator…. They’re normal babies,” said Dr William MacMillan at Loyola University Medical Center.

To provide a browner basis for comparison, I estimate this baby’s head was roughly the size (and possibly even the weight) of a gulab jamun when she was born ….

As reported in a previous SM post, it seems like India is serious this time about their moon mission. It is healthy to be skeptical because they have balked at various space exploration ventures before, but this time it appears to be legit. Science magazine reports that western scientists are now clamoring to get their experiments on board:

Western researchers often beat a path to developing countries to study endangered species, ancient civilizations, or traditional medicine, among other subjects. Now it’s time to add planetary science to that list. Five scientists from around the world are jostling to get their experiments aboard an Indian spacecraft, Chandrayaan-1, that is slated to fly to the moon in September 2007.

“Chandrayaan offers a very cost-effective means to gather critical and unique data on the moon while forging new cooperative relationships in lunar exploration,” says one of the finalists, Paul Spudis of the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory in Laurel, Maryland. Another finalist, Manuel Grande of the Rutherford Appleton Laboratory in Chilton, U.K., says he welcomes “the increasing opportunities for flying experiments on emerging space-nation launch vehicles and satellites.”

There were 30 scientists from 11 countries vying for a spot on Chandrayaan, but the list has been narrowed to five. Several other countries including the U.S. are planning robotic moon missions toward the end of this decade. However, with NASA’s budget always in flux and space science cuts looming, even American scientists were looking for a spot on the Indian spacecraft.

Given these uncertainties [in the funding of other nation’s space programs], space researchers say they welcome the chance to vie for a spot on the Indian probe. And the benefits cut both ways. The competition is designed to ensure “maximum scientific knowledge about the moon,” says ISRO chair Gopalan Madhavan Nair. Former ISRO chief Krishnaswamy Kasturirangan says it should also “enhance India’s status as a potential partner in future space exploration.”

Stories like this are why I blog. From NewKerala.com:

A group of Indian scientists here are pouring over a bunch of photographs they took in the northern Himalayas depicting a mystery object that could be either of the two but are nowhere near cracking the mystery.

“The object was about four feet in height with a red balloon and many white ones. It hovered around for about 45 minutes some 200 metres from us. We were curious to know more and took photographs,” said Anil Kulkarni, a marine and water resources scientist with the city-based Space Application Centre (SAC) of the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO).

He was part of the team that spotted and photographed the object during a just-concluded study trip to the northern state of Himachal Pradesh, bordering China.

But did the UFO have special chameleon like technology?

“Interestingly when it was exposed to the sun, it turned black and in the shadow of the hill, it became white,” the scientist said.

As the article acknowledges, it was more than likely a spy device. Still, am I the only one suspicious of the “balloon” excuse? Isn’t that what they told us about Roswell? Let’s see how Indian fighter plane handle this new threat.

I couldn’t beleive this one, but Stanford sophomore Rohan Verma has created a Mapquest type service for Delhi called, MapMyIndia.com. Never again will a rickshawallah take me for a crazy trip. How the heck can you possibly make a map of Indian roads? When I lived in Delhi a couple years ago I was at the mercy of drivers who didn’t understand my horrible Hindi when I told them where I wanted to go. Well I guess it wasn’t so bad as long as I stuck to main roads. From IndiaWest:

…Rohan Verma has been working day and night in New Delhi to put together the sort of Web site that’s mundane for U.S. Web surfers but unheard of in India - a navigational tool that produces printable maps to provide directions to destinations in India.

The result - after three-and-a-half months of work leading a team of 10 people -is Mapmyindia.com. “My role started from conceptualizing it, managing and execution of it, and deploying it, which we did on Sept. 10, and also marketing,” Verma, who is all of 19 years, told India-West.

GNXP isn't everyone's cup of tea (the material there attracts controversy like flies to cow theetum) but Razib's got some interesting material on the mtDNA of Desi's - Gene Expression -

There is a important new paper (you can view the full PDF if you follow the link) out that surveys the genetics of South Asians viewed from the angle of mtDNA, that is, the direct female lineage. If you follow this stuff, you won't be surprised to find out that the authors conclude that

Warning: Given my non-blogging job, the following posting is bias. I don't care!

The Tallahassee Democrat reports:

India is rethinking its plan to send a man to the moon by 2015, as the mission would cost a lot of money and yield very little in return, the national space agency said Thursday.

Okay, I have no problem with that. India has so many other concerns that space travel should not be even a top 100 priority. What I have a problem with is that they can't be honest about that fact and instead have to cover their retreat by saying the following:

"Whatever a man can do in space, it can be done with instrumentation, also," said G. Madhavan Nair, head of the Indian Space Research Organization.

False! Not true. This is the same myth perpetuated by the anti-space lobby in our country as well. Here is a good explanation of why robots cannot and should not compete with humans.

Also, keep in mind that the real motivation behind the Indian space program announcing a Moon mission in the first place, was probably the same motivation behind our own program in the 50s and 60s. A nuclear arms race. Whose rocket is bigger, India's or Pakistan's?

Marginal Revolution reports on fascinating research on what makes some people sexier than others - their names -

New research has revealed that the vowel sounds in your name could influence how others judge the attractiveness of your face.

Women with round-sounding names such as Laura tended to score higher than those with smaller vowel sounds. "Unfortunately for me, Amy is one of the bad names," Perfors laments.

So "Ah-Na" is good while the classic Mallu-aunty name "Ai-lee-ahm-ma" is bad (although to be honest, this often isn't just because of her name) And for the boys -

For boys, a good name will contain vowel sounds made at the front of the mouth, such as 'e' or 'i' sounds; names with fuller, rounder vowel sounds such as 'u' tend to score lower. So pat yourself on the back if you're called Ben... but if your name is Paul, you might have to work work harder to snare a date.

"V-ih-nohd" is Good. "Ah-bee" - you're screwed. ;-)

In yet another instance of Indian ingenuity, the new generation of sari weavers in Benares are using condoms to help them produce more saris, faster:

The weaver rubs the condom on the loom’s shuttle, which is softened by the lubricant thus making the process of weaving faster. The lubricant does not leave any stain on the silk thread which might soil the valuable saris. There are around 150,000 to 200,000 hand and power looms in Varanasi alone and almost all are using the technique. And every loom has a daily consumption of three or four condoms.

(analysis follows, below the fold)

Many of you probably remember the story of Hira Ratan Manek floating around the web over a year ago. If not, Hira is the 64 year old Indian engineer that had supposedly astounded NASA scientists when they verified that Manek spent 130 days surviving only on water.

According to that earlier article his wife, Vimla, said: “Every evening he looks at the sun for one hour without batting an eyelid. It is his main food. Occasionally he takes coffee, tea or some other liquid.”

Since then Mr. Manek was supposed to have come over to the U.S. to be studied by NASA more carefully. Not so said NASA spokesperson Delores Beasely in June. “We have no record of him being involved with us. We have checked with all offices doing related research at centers such as Johnson, Marshall and Ames.”

Okay, am I the only one that smells a conspiracy afoot? A guy that can survive for 130 days without food and was supposedly being studied by a federal agency is now missing? The word “super-soldier” comes to mind. But seriously…does anyone know where Manek might be?