Its snowing!

Its snowing! Thick, fast and heavy and its only the end of October. I love watching snowfall but it is distracting me from work.

Beauty

Where beauty is worshipped for beauty's sake as a goddess, independent of and superior to morality and philosophy, the most horrible putrefaction is apt to set in. The lives of the aesthetes are the far from edifying commentary on the religion of beauty.

Aldous Huxley


I am still trying to think this through.

Thought: Beauty is inextricably tied to morality and philosophy. If we consider this as an assumption then the next sentence just serves the same idea by saying that the lives of those sentient to beauty are far from instructive on the religion of beauty. The crux of this, I am not sure what to call it - argument, statement lies obviously in the idea put forth initially that (if simplistically put) beauty without brains does not last and withers away. If beauty is worshipped for beauty's sake, i.e., worshipped just as an art form without being embellished with philosophy and morality then its akin to a cat's meow but without a cat. I am still having trouble crossing the chasm on this bridge of 'morality and philosophy'. I definitely see that beauty by itself just as a pure art form cannot and will not last for all to see and revel for a long time. It has to be associated with an 'edifying commentary'. I am having a little trouble associating beauty with morality.

I am still going to mull this over.

Any thoughts? Anybody?

Update 2:
Let me draw a simple analogy to religion and add in the same breath that I am not religious.

When the Gods are worshipped for worshipping sake, most probably because one has always been told to worship God (whatever the reason, it falls outside the scope of the argument that I am trying to present), people (at least people like me) start to question the givens in this religion. With unanswered questions comes doubt. With doubt comes decay in the once strong belief system. With decay and an absence of an equally strong second set of beliefs, putrefaction sets in. It is the same in the case of beauty - it is not lasting, it is not captivating enough when seen and appreciated just for what it is in the present frame of reference. For eg., when you watch a beautiful sunset at a beach, your eyes might pop out at the sight of it. When you try and describe it to your friend and try to tell him/her about the wondrous riot of colors, the streaks of motley hues of red in the sky, gold shimmering on the waves - what do you think happens? They might excited for the first time. What about the second time? and the third? How long do you think they are going to share, in their mind's eye, this wonderful image of a sunset at the beach?

Back to the religion analogy, the aesthetes in this case are high priests involved in worship. Do their lives, in any manner, serve as an edifying commentary on religion? In my opinion, not at all. So what is it what keeps me interested in religion, continue to foster my belief in God? Theology? Maybe. Why? because it is the philosophy of religion. It rationalizes, tries to explain and answer your queries. It puts religion and its underlying foundation of a system of beliefs in a different perspective. The change in perspective is what makes it self-sustainable and not the aesthetes themselves. Would you remain interested in God and religion and recite the same prayers over and over because the priests (aesthetes) do? or would you be interested in religion if you were to read vedic texts, upanishads?

Back to the sunset at the beach example, if you distill the essence of nature's beauty into lets say, a poem (or an essay) wouldn't that be more self-contained and sustainable than all your explanations? - the functional being a change in the frame of reference, "philosophizing" beauty. Or would the fact that you are sentient to nature's beauty generate continued, sustained interest on the part of your friends.

I rest my case.

Quality, Uncertainty and Market Mechanism - Part 2

The Model with Automobiles as an Example:
Suppose (for the sake of clarity rather than reality) that there are only four types of cars – new and used cars, good cars (creampuff) and bad cars (lemons). A new car may either be a good one or a bad one and the same is true for used cars too. The individuals in this market buy new cars without knowing whether the car they will buy is a creampuff or a lemon. Let us say that the probability of buying a new car that is also good is “q” and that of landing up with a lemon is “1-q”. “q” by assumption is the proportion of good cars produced and “1-q” is the proportion of lemons. After owing a specific car for certain duration of time, the owner has a good idea of its quality and assigns new probability to the event that the car is a lemon. Note that this estimate is more accurate than the previous one. An asymmetry in available information has now developed for the sellers have more information about the quality of the car than do the buyers. It is also clear that a used car cannot have the same valuation as that of a new car – if it did, it would be clearly advantageous to trade a lemon at the price of a new car and buy another new car, at a higher probability q of being good and a lower probability of being bad. Thus the owner of a good car is locked in and not only cannot he receive the true value of his car but cannot even obtain the expected value of a new car.
Thus, the bad cars drive out the good cars as most traded cars are lemons. This is analogous to the way “bad money drives out the good” as stated by Gresham’s law. Gresham’s Law is explained in simple terms over at the Wikipedia. For those Indians who are reading without clicking through to Wikipedia, let me give you a quick analogy to illustrate Gresham’s law – remember the times when all the currency notes that exchanged hands were soiled, torn notes and everybody, in spite of possessing good clean bills preferred to trade in the soiled ones? As this practice continued, all the notes that were traded in the market were soiled torn ones that actually had a lower value (on account of being torn, when one exchanges these notes at the bank one is left a little short of the face value of the turned in bill) but were traded at the same exchange rate as good clean bills were. If the picture is still not clear, then I advise you to click through to Wikipedia and go through the explanation.

Utility Theory: A Brief Introduction
[Source: Wikipedia]
In economics, utility is a measure of the happiness or satisfaction gained from a good or service. There are mainly two kinds of measurement of utility implemented by economists: cardinal utility and ordinal utility. Utility was originally viewed as a measurable quantity, so that it would be possible to measure the utility of each individual in the society with respect to each good available in the society, and to add these together to yield the total utility of all people with respect to all goods in the society. Society could then aim to maximize the total utility of all people in society, or equivalently the average utility per person. This conception of utility as a measurable quantity that could be aggregated across individuals is called cardinal utility. Cardinal utility quantitatively measures the preference of an individual towards a certain commodity. Numbers assigned to different goods or services can be compared. I would assign a utility of 100 to a glass of chilled beer in summer and desire it twice as much as a cup of steaming coca which I would assign a utility of 50. There is already an obvious disadvantage – that of comparing cardinal utilities across people. The concept of cardinal utility suffers from the absence of an objective measure of utility when comparing the utility gained from consumption of a particular good by one individual as opposed to another individual.
Another approach is based on preferences - an individual is observed to prefer one choice to another. Preferences can be ordered from most satisfying to least satisfying. Only the ordering is important: the magnitudes of the numerical values are not important except in as much as they establish the order. It is nonetheless possible, given a set of preferences which satisfy certain criteria of reasonableness, to find a utility function that will explain these preferences. Such a utility function takes on higher values for choices that the individual prefers. With this approach to utility, known as ordinal utility it is not possible to compare utility between individuals.
Let X be the consumption set, the set of all packages the consumer could conceivably consume. The consumer's utility function u: X-> R assigns a happiness score to each package in the consumption set. If u(x) > u(y), then the consumer strictly prefers x to y. In microeconomics models, there are usually a finite set of L commodities, and a consumer may consume an arbitrary amount of each commodity. This gives a consumption set of R_L and each package x Є R_L is a vector containing the amounts of each commodity. For u to be a utility function on X, it must be defined for every package in X. A von Neumann-Morgenstern utility function u: X -> R assigns a real number to every element of the outcome space in a way that captures the individual's preferences over both simple and compound events. The individual will prefer a lottery L1 to a lottery L2 if and only if the expected utility (iterated over compound lotteries if necessary) of L1 is greater than the expected utility of L2.

I’ll give you guys a couple of days for all this to sink in – it is a little heavy on the digestive system

Quality, Uncertainty and Market Mechanism - Part 1

     A seminal paper by this title published by George A. Akerlof in 1970 was so influential in helping analysts analyze quality and uncertainty in markets under conditions of asymmetrical information flow that in 2001, George A. Akerlof was awarded the Nobel Prize in economics. His paper has been singular in analyzing markets ranging from the used car market to health insurance markets. After being awarded the Nobel Prize, Akerlof penned an interpretive essay on this paper and it can be found [here].

     I have since read his 1970 paper and would like to share the wonderful and thought provoking points he makes by reviewing his paper. In the next section, I will try to give the interested reader a brief run through of the philosophy of Akerlof’s theory. Most of the subsequent sections will be taken right out of his paper simplified, expanded and presented. Of course, he does assume (and so will I) that his readers have been blessed with some exposure to basic economic verbiage. I will provide the necessary information and references to background wherever necessary. I must bring to your notice that most of the language will be his but I will provide explanations/analogies to make things (seemingly) simpler.

A Brief Run Through:
     In the seminal paper on markets with asymmetric information, George Akerlof strives to provide “a structure for determining the economic costs of dishonesty”. He points out two possible outcomes that may occur where sellers have better information about the quality of products than do buyers. There are many markets in which buyers use some market statistic to judge the quality of prospective purchases. In these cases, there is incentive for sellers to market poor quality merchandise - if buyers cannot distinguish the quality until after the purchase is made, there is no incentive for the sellers to provide good quality products and the average quality of traded goods will decline below the socially optimal level. This is often referred to as “bad driving out the good”. The explanation for this course of events is fairly logical – if all sellers, despite having the information advantage, traded only in high quality goods then average quality of goods in the market will go up, prizes will stabilize leaving a small operating and profit margin. If under these conditions, a seller makes use of his informational advantage to sell a poor quality product – his profits are much higher and the buyer in his position has no way of determining the quality until after the sale has been made. In Akerlof’s own language – “…. the returns for good quality accrue mainly to the entire group whose statistic is affected rather than to the individual seller.” Akerlof cited the used car market as an example for his findings – in the case of used cars, buyers who find out much to their chagrin that they are now the proud new owners of a “lemon” will now attempt to sell it to an unsuspecting buyer (such as themselves) in the used car market. As this continues, more lemons make their way to the market and not only does the quality decline but the market itself is threatened as all buyers are wary and there exists a huge disparity between the number of sellers and buyers. Contributing to the declining quality of this market are owners of “creampuff”(s) who do not sell their cars as they are indistinguishable from lemons and the price is dictated by the demand for cars which the buyers suspect to be primarily lemons. Thus, this information asymmetry leads to quality uncertainty which in turn leads to reduced volume of transactions thereby threatening the very survival of the market itself.
     A second possibility as suggested by Akerlof is that institutions may develop to counteract the effects of quality uncertainty. Warranties and brand names can be used to give the buyer an assurance of quality. These institutions may prevent good products from being driven out of the market but will not necessarily eliminate the inefficiency. These institutions may be costly to set up, run and sellers may over invest in signaling the quality of their product to buyers.
     Stabilization (not necessarily efficient) of the market can be attributed to the development of counteracting institutions. The provision of warranties and the seller’s concern for his reputation may prevent sellers from supplying inferior quality products. Another possibility is that the buyer has somehow stabilized the initial information asymmetry by obtaining additional information enabling him to use a more global market statistic to evaluate the quality of the product prior to sale. The market is still deemed inefficient if this stabilization is achieved through costly counteracting institutions or through expensive information search by buyers. In the context of the used car market, this explains the existence of “information stabilizers” such as Kelly’s Blue Book, Car Fax etc.

     I hope everyone appreciates the theory so far. If you have ever bought a used car, you can analyze for yourselves why you did what you did – paid to go through car fax reports, paid mechanics to give a prospective car a once over to ease your fears – all in your attempt to equalize the information flow in the market.

I will post more technical details in upcoming posts.

Announcing my link blog

“Knowledge is of two kinds. We know a subject ourselves, or we know where we can find information upon it.”
—Samuel Johnson quoted in Boswell’s “Life of Johnson.”

In the spirit of that quote, I have decided to link to all the blogs/posts/webpages that interest me on my MSN Spaces blog.

Toodle doo!

update: Mike Tyson Vs. Keshto Mukherjee

I have updated this [post] with a couple of links and a rather short rue on the state of India's development. Worth checking it out.

Black Metal Silliness

Those who know me know that I am a huge black metal fan and even I found this funny. This is just a take on the awe and shock promoted by black metallers in their photo shoots in an attempt to create this dark atmosphere replete with pagan imagery. The intention is to remain 'true' to the cause - corpse paint, bleak winters in the mountains, old forests, primitive wicca/occult rituals and medieval weapons. Of course, some of them carry it off very well but at some point of time the charade just turns out to be that - a charade. To see exactly what I mean, visit this page.

Of Lovecraft and Spiritual Anamolies

Though cthulu and the necronomicon of the mad arab Abdul are more often associated with any tale from Lovecraft's stable, there are a couple of astounding nuggets to be found in his short stories that have an undercurrent of the morbid and macabre.

One such story is called "The Shunned House" - a typical theme of a supposedly haunted house replete with a history of unexplained deaths, now dilapidated but yet draws our protagonists into a lengthy and costly investigation into its macabre past. After reading quite a few Lovecraft stories, I see that most movies have popularized his dark psychological terror theme. So a movie buff may not find a twist to the tale so to speak but has found a treasure trove of good old story telling, not to mention a very dark evil brooding terror that waits in the dark recesses of your mind, biding its time to unleash its numbing horror on your psyche.

This is THE best attempt at a rational explanation for the existence of parasites at a spiritual level. One can be anal and argue some points from a technical and scientific standpoint but I urge you to gloss over them and appreciate the entireity of the argument - its language and the poetic way in which Lovecraft crafts his terror.

"Scientific study and reflection has taught us that the known universe of three dimensions embraces the merest fraction of the whole cosmos of substance and energy. In this case an overwhelming preponderence of evidence from numerous authentic sources points to the tenacious existence of certain forces of great power, and so far as the human point of view is concerned, of great malignancy. To say that we believed in vampires or werewolves would be a carelessly inclusive statement. Rather it must be said that we were not prepared to deny the possibility of certain unfamiliar and unclassified modifications of vital force and attenuated matter; existing very infrequently in three dimensional space because of its more intimate connection with other spatial units, yet close enough to the boundary of our own to furnish us occasional manifestations which we, for lack of a proper vantage point, may never hope to understand.
Such a thing was surely not a physical or biochemical impossibility in the light of a newer science which includes the theory of relativity and intra-atomic action. One might easily imagine an alien nucleus of substance or energy, formless or otherwise, kept alive by imperceptible or immaterial subtractions from the life force or bodily tissue and fluids of other more palpably living things into which it penetrates and wth whose fabric it sometimes completely merges itself. It might be actively hostile or may be dictated merely by blind motives of self preservation. In any case such a monster must be in our scheme of things, an anamoly, an intruder whose extirpation forms the primary duty of every man not an enemy of the world's life, health and sanity.
It might be pure energy - a form ethereal and outside the realm of substance - or it might be partly material; some unknown and equivocal mass of plasticity, capable of changing at will to nebulous approximations of solid, liquid, gaseous or tenuously unparticled states."

Mike Tyson Vs. Keshto Mukherjee

Yes, thats what Amit Varma has likened has likened the much hyped China Vs. India economic duel and refers to a [column] penned by Shankar Acharya, the chief economic adviser to the Indian govt. Pay special attention to the table.

But, not to worry - the future is indeed colored saffron! James Waterton has made a case against China [here] and for India's cause [here].

Venus has an interesting post [here] on competing oil interests and how their lopsided economic status and differing foreign policies affect their run ins.

Atanu Dey, an economist who runs a fantastic blog on India's development, labels the Indian democracy a cargo cult democracy. To see what he means, go [here] and [here].

This ties in with the table you saw in Shankar Acharya's column that documents India's miserable socio-economic indices. Without carrying the people along, no country can make any progress, atleast progress that can be called progress. Flashy malls, booming IT sector are leaps but eventually they all are drawn back and move on an average with the slowest link - social development. Without progress in education, health care and other primary concerns India's development is largely still on paper. Atanu is bang on target when he writes "Democracy cannot work when the electorate is nearly totally uninformed, where there are strong vested interests, where the notion of accountability is non-existent, where voters can be intimidated and bribed, where the culture is steeped in feudalism, and where illiteracy, superstition and corruption is the norm."

I urge you all to subscribe to Atanu's feed, he writes with clarity, perspective and passion for India's development.

Catch 'em, Kill 'em Pt.2 - Kill 'em

After the overwhelming response of all the code warriors out there, I decided to put the answers up. I could have provided alternate answers, but I just chose to provide the ones that the author provided.

the original posts can be found at Michael Howard's Web Log

// Example #1 (code prior to this verifies pszSrc is <= 50 chars) #define MAX (50) char *pszDest = malloc(sizeof(pszSrc)); strncpy(pszDest,pszSrc,MAX); The code is allocating the size of a pointer, 4-bytes on a 32-bit CPU, and then trying to copy 40 bytes.

// Example #2
#define MAX (50)
char szDest[MAX];
strncpy(szDest,pszSrc,MAX);
If the length of the string pointed to by pszSrc is exactly MAX, then strncpy does NOT null-terminate szDest.

// Example #3
#define MAX (50)
char szDest[MAX];
strncpy(szDest,pszSrc,MAX);
pszDest[MAX] = '\0';
Oooops - we just whacked element 51, not 50!

// Example #4
#define MAX (50)
char szDest[MAX];
strncpy(szDest,pszSrc,MAX-1);
strncat(szDest,pszSrc,MAX-1);
The last arg to strncat is not the total length of szDest, it's how much space REMAINS!

// Example #5
char szDest[50];
_snprintf(szDest, strlen(szDest), "%s",szSrc);
szDest hasn't been initialized yet, so strlen(szDest) could return any value!

// Example #6
#define MAX (50)
void func(char *p) {
char szDest[MAX];
strncpy(szDest,p,MAX);
szDest[MAX-1] = '\0';
}
If p == NULL, your app just died!

Legal Case Study of iTunes' business model

Ars Technica (In my opinion this is one of the best tech sites out there, top notch and very authoritative) has links to a Harvard Law School legal case study of the iTunes business model. Now, most people who know me also know that I dislike the iTunes store inspite of all its perceived "coolness". I will over the course of the next few days go through the paper and write up my own summary (of course, the underlying premise being that I can understand the legalities). Until then, you can browse through Ars Technica and read the official report and/or the official summary.

Explore the Ars Technica treasure trove of tech articles [here]

The Ars Technica page hosting the report on the Harvard Law School study can be found [here]

The full 100 page study can be found [here] and a summary can be found [here].

teaser -
"The paper looks at a number of interesting issues, including the convergence of copyright and contract, the legal cushioning that props up Digital Rights Management Technologies (e.g., the DMCA), and fair use. The paper begins by outlining how contracts are being used to restrict the normal freedom given to users by copyright law in general. Contract trumps copyright, at least in the United States and Europe, which means the courts will typically arbitrate disputes based on contract and not intellectual property law per se. This is already an interesting development because of what we tend to call the shrink-wrap phenomenon: digital content is being sold in a manner more akin to software than tangible content, although even there, software buyers typically have more rights. One of the biggest legal questions to arise out of the DMCA and DRM-efforts relates to how these technologies conspire to essentially shut down or make exceedingly difficult the right of second sale of protected content.The paper rightly notes that the US and Europe, acting in order to fulfill the demands of the WIPO, are drafting and enforcing laws designed to trump fair use by making it illegal to circumvent DRM. The chain works loosely as follows: copyright is trumped by contractual law, which seeks to restrict fair use in legal terms, which then backs up that by requiring adherence to the rules that are technologically enforced by DRM, which itself is protected by laws such as the DMCA in the US and the EU Copyright Directive in Europe."

Carnival of Computing

Andrew Hughes is running a "Carnival of Computing" theme and has collected loads of very interesting tech blogs to catch up on. Check them out.

Catch 'em, Kill 'em Pt.1 - Catch 'em

aaaaah yes, the code developers out there - find the bugs in these simple code samples involving just strncat and strncpy (n byte copy and concatenating). Of course, I didn't make up these questions. I shall provide the necessary back track to the source after I provide (his) answers. I got most of them, so that should be very encouraging for all of you. You can close your mouth now (in case its still open with shock that I managed to get even one).

// Example #1 (code prior to this verifies pszSrc is <= 50 chars)
#define MAX (50)
char *pszDest = malloc(sizeof(pszSrc));
strncpy(pszDest,pszSrc,MAX);

// Example #2
#define MAX (50)
char szDest[MAX];
strncpy(szDest,pszSrc,MAX);

// Example #3
#define MAX (50)
char szDest[MAX];
strncpy(szDest,pszSrc,MAX);
pszDest[MAX] = '\0';

// Example #4
#define MAX (50)
char szDest[MAX];
strncpy(szDest,pszSrc,MAX-1);
strncat(szDest,pszSrc,MAX-1);

// Example #5
char szDest[50];
_snprintf(szDest, strlen(szDest), "%s",szSrc);

// Example #6
#define MAX (50)
void func(char *p) {
char szDest[MAX];
strncpy(szDest,p,MAX);
szDest[MAX-1] = '\0';
}

What you thought you knew about Economics

Starting a discussion of the supply curve or price elasticity of demand can be a good way to clear out a crowded room. But does tuning out economics come at a cost?

For most Americans, a mandatory high school or college introductory course constitutes the extent of their economic training. However, though we may choose to leave economics alone after we have left the classroom, economic forces don't stop exerting a powerful influence on our daily lives.

The Wall Street Journal Online asked bloggers Russell Roberts, a professor of economics at George Mason University, and William Polley, an economics professor at Western Illinois University, to discuss what the public doesn't know about economics, and whether and how that knowledge gap might hurt.

Here is a link to the discussion titled "Knowledge Deficit"

Russell Roberts is professor of economics at George Mason University and he regularly blogs over at "Cafe Hayek" with his colleague Don Boudreaux.
William Poley is an assistant professor of economics at Western Illinois University. He dishes out economic commentary over at his blog "William J. Polley".

The strange liaison of Sartre and Beauvoir

Who hasn't heard of these two philosophers, thinkers and foremost proponents of existentialism. My brush with them started with reading one of the best psychological profiles of the Marquis de Sade ever written - written by Simone de Beauvoir as an introduction to the (in)famous 120 Days of Sodom. On the other hand, I have only heard and read titbits about Sartre and his philosphy of existentialism. Though I am in the process of learning more about the man and his philosophy through one of this books rather than news clippings, the book whose review I want to take you to is a careful documentary of the platonic relationship the two shared. One can get a view into the minds of these two philosophers/existentialists through their correspondences with each other, correspondences which their individual estates have been kind enough to provide. Some of their libertinous experiences and their candid assessment of their explorations, their contempt of the people who were used as a medium to explore these emotions will shock a few existentialists too.

Read all about it here -

"Stand By Your Man."
by Louis Menand

How stupid can one get?

A man walked into the downtown Bank of America and on the back of a deposit slip wrote, "this iz a stikkup. Put all your muny in this bag." While standing in line, waiting to give his note to the teller, the man began to worry that someone may have seen him write the note and might call the police before he could reach the teller.

So, the criminal left the Bank of America and walked across to the street to Wells Fargo. After waiting in line for several minutes there, he handed his note to a teller. After reading it, the teller determined that this robber was perhaps a few sandwiches short of a picnic.

She told him that because his note was written on a Bank of America deposit slip, she could not honor his demand. He would either have to fill out a Wells Fargo withdrawal slip or go back to the Bank of America.

Feeling defeated, the man said he understood and left. The Wells Fargo teller promptly called the police, who arrested the man a few minutes later--still waiting in line at the Bank of America.

Of Deepak Chopra, tsunami's, New Orleans

[Link] Follow the link to Deepak Chopra's post on the New Orleans tragedy. He makes a lot of comments that I had problems with. I have reproduced his entire post here for convenience along with my comments.

The blog "Intent Blog" is great source for 'food for thought' kind of posts with Deepak Chopra making bulk of the contributions along with many other celebrities such as Shekar kapur, nandita Das, Anil Dash etc. Check it out!

Deepak Chopra says -
New Orleans is a monumental and heart wrenching tragedy which maybe impossible to comprehend and come to terms with.

Our hearts go out to all those that suffer while life goes on as normal for the rest of us. Let us do everything to help those in need in whatever way we can, because the immediate need in the face of a disaster like the New Orleans flood is to offer every form of aid and compassion that can be mustered. But in the back of many people's minds is a lurking apprehension that grows larger every year.

The annual floods in Bangladesh have always seemed far away, as did the torrential monsoon last month in Bombay that crippled the city and killed hundreds. Hurricanes come closer to home, and the destruction wrought by Katrina is almost beyond comprehension, for it occurred with the same fury as the South Asian tsunami. Whole communities have been wiped out of existence, and the prospect of a major American city being under water for weeks or months feels as if Third World calamity, like those faraway Turkish and Iranian earthquakes that kill thousands without causing a ripple in America, has suddenly arrived here.

Both Katrina and the tsunami are forcing us to globalize our thinking under crisis conditions. Instead of approaching global warming positively, we are facing it the hard way, by enduring droughts, floods, and extreme natural disasters in general. No one knows to what extent any of these events is connected to human activity. It seems that global warming is playing its part in the increased force of hurricanes; one cannot find a similar connection to tsunamis, which are more like earthquakes and volcanic eruptions, but devout believers in the Gaia hypothesis have conjectured that perhaps our war against Nature is causing these responses from the planet.

I have no interest in metaphysical explanations here, and I would never join those religionists who will inevitably begin to mutter about God's retribution and premonitions of the End Time. But the fact that we are at war against Nature seems undeniable.

Katrina, we are told, would have been less devastating if local developers had not been destroying the marshlands that protect New Orleans from the fury of storms. But this ecological barrier was deemed unnecessary, and wetlands have been disappearing around the city at a rate of an acre every 24 minutes.

The war against Nature has been launched on many fronts:

--Abolishing native plant species in favor of overplanting the same few crops: wheat, rice, corn, and soybeans.

--Exploiting fossil fuels without regard for their environmental effects.

--Polluting the ocean to the extent that half the world's coral reefs are immediately in danger.

--Diverting and damming rivers without regard to the ecology or human needs downstream.

--Eliminating wild lands and forests by stripping them of all vegetation.

When Thoreau made his famous comment, "In wildness is the preservation of the world," he had no idea of the alarming rate at which human beings would mistake short-term gratification for successful living. The environmental argument has been well addressed in hundreds of places, and perhaps the stridency of ecological alarmists has numbed the public to what's going on, leaving an opening for President Bush and other anti-environmentalists to deliver the reassuring message, "Nothing's wrong. Go back to whatever you were doing."

I think New Orleans will stick indelibly in our national consciousness as stark evidence that the war against Nature has to be ended. The choice is more clear cut than ever, and one only hopes that international cooperation is in the offing, since we are no longer apart from the so-called Third World in enduring intolerable calamity.

My comments are below -

1. we, as you have, extend our heartfelt wishes to the affected families.

2. maybe I didn't catch your drift when you talked about "third world disasters" but it seemed to me that you did so with an air of a "we are a developed nation, we are above all the riff raff and nothing can touch us, better than the best" attitude that makes small of hundreds of people dying elsewhere as it doesn't mean anything to american interests. And now, disaster of such colossal magnitude (as the tsunami) has brought home death and destruction akin to the afflictions of the "third world" and you feel victimized by it? I disagree with the whole tone of your argument - "the prospect of a major American city being under water for weeks or months feels as if Third World calamity, like those faraway Turkish and Iranian earthquakes that kill thousands without causing a ripple in America, has suddenly arrived here.". Your closing argument is more humble but I still find an elitist element to it - "The choice is more clear cut than ever, and one only hopes that international cooperation is in the offing, since we are no longer apart from the so-called Third World in enduring intolerable calamity". I am confused and would like you to explain yourself better. As I said, maybe I misread you here but I would live to have this sorted out.

3. Though I agree with you and note with appreciation the thought that disasters are forcing us to globalize our crisis management, I fail to see the validity/applicability of the sudden inclusion of global warming into your case for war against nature especially when global warming is not the only consequence of unbridled human expansion and exploration.

4. "Instead of approaching global warming positively, we are facing it the hard way, by enduring droughts, floods, and extreme natural disasters in general." By approach positively you must mean corrective measures to counteract eons of our destructive way of life? Even in the case that we go about our lives destroying nature's fabric with impunity, your argument seems to suggest that we are running into hurricanes, earthquakes, tsunamis etc as a matter of choice between being good or face hardships if not. Then you go on to say that you will never take up rank with dooms day religionists (a view that I share) and the rest of your argument seems to suggest that you subscribe to the viewpoint of the Gaia principle though you haven't explicitly sided with that school of thought

5. I second your notion that the general public has been numbed by the continuity of dire predictions by environmentalists and may not fully appreciate our destructive way of life.

Feed on me!

I'm back here! Spaces is great but I amback here to try my hand at some coding for customization that I can only do here at blogger! I've added the atom feed icon in the navigation panel on the left. I am trying to get my blogmap up next on the right. And, just in case you missed it, click on the "Atom Feed" icon. I've just included the icon in the post, if you want to subscribe to this feed, click on the icon in the nav panel!

I also fixed the grammar in the # of comments that my good readers have left. Earlier, irrespcetive of whether the number of comments were 0, 1 or more than 1 it always read 'comments'. I fixed it to say 'No comments', '1 comment' or '2 comments'. Yeah, I know its pretty anal but I was just trying it out.

I am moving!

I checked out MSN Spaces and it rocks! Its all that I wanted from Blogger and much more. Its awesome and I am moving my blog out there.

These are the new coordinates for my brand of paranoia on the web.

The Great (fire)Wall of China

The blogging world has been turned upside down over reports that Microsoft and Google (amongst many other companies, for a list look here) have bowed to the Chinese government in their effort to curtail free speech and post only 'appropriate' content on their blogs on MSN spaces and are treated to only those news pages that have been stripped off sensitive content. It has been reported that sensitive words such as "democracy" or "human rights" result in error messages and do not show up in posts (I am not sure if this is in the title of the post or in the body, reports vary) on the chinese version of MSN Spaces. Google too has suitably altered their news pages so that they do not provide the 'dissident' chinese with 'inflammatory and incidiary' content. They have joined hands with the Chinese government in their effort to build the The Great (fire)Wall of China.

Robert Scoble, numero uno blogger of Microsoft defends his company here
Rebecca MacKinnon rips apart his arguments here and makes many valid points about Chinese culture and is sort of inline with a point that I made many posts ago of the lack of effort in understanding foreign cultures. Read this, its very interesting. There is also an update clarifying a few issues [here].
Dan Gillmor asks - "Microsoft and Google, like so many others, rose to enormous wealth and influence by leveraging the freedom they enjoy in the United States. They may be serving their shareholders' interests. But what they're doing is not honorable. Why does money trump honor? Is this really the American way?". Listen to his post here

Given that "MSN Spaces is not exactly my idea of a new form of journalism that will set the world free and change the geopolitical landscape for decades to come" (from the comments section in Dan's blog) - I agree with this point but one should look at the bigger picture of cencorship of speech and access rights to any and all information and that of corporations siding with this form of oppression and making money in the process.

Meanwhile, Rick Segal sighs and says, "Its hard to be an American"

To end it all, a very nice wrap up by Shelley Powers [here]

Some people have started to test how free is speech on the web here in the US and have discovered that MSN spaces also clamps down on usage of certain words, words that are synonymous with the porn industry. Certain combinations are allowed and certain others aren't. People who want to get around will always will. Scoble asks if its cencosrship if I can still get my point across without using sensitive words. I think banning certain words (I am talking about the US MSN Spaces) is okay given that the words deal mostly with the porn industry and MSN spaces have no age verification scheme in place and is accessible even my pre-teens and kids. If innocent looking combinations are not allowed to pass through, then I guess one better swallow the pill and re-write your post title - its the intention matters here - a scammer can have a perfectly innocent title and banned content in the body while normal bloggers can use 'dangerous' titles for socially sensitive topics such as "Prostitution and the Law".

I also am of the opinion that MSFT took a monetary decision that allowed them to do business in a new country - they are not in the business of revoltion but in that of computer technology which they want to push into an emerging market. Operating in a different country means that you obey the law of the land or just pack up and go home. First amendment activists often forget that the same oppression makes it possible for Chinese goods to be half the price of US produced goods and americans have embraced these goods making Wal-mart, Apple and dozens of other companies very profitable in the process. Three guesses why US trade deficit with China is so high.

You can't oppress them in one way and balk at oppressing them in an other way. And wondering whether the average citizen is truly free on account of whether he can include certain combinations of words on MSN spaces blog posts and using that as being representative of his right to free speech is rather lame.

Go here to read Dare Obssanjo's (he works for MSN Spaces) post on this issue. It clarifies what content they are exactly monitoring and what it means to operate a common platform for users of all ages across countries and languages when each one's definitions of appropriateness is defined by prevalent local culture.

I am going to put an end to this topic. Enough said!