This blog has been missing out on a lot of action in the recent past. The reasons are plenty and not necessary to get into. One noteworthy fact is that Twitter has managed to steal a greater percentage of my digital communication.

I also understand that I had cited a similar reason many months ago to explain the paucity of posts here. Things seldom change. While I re-resolve to blog regularly, here are some interesting links which you might find interesting (some have already been shared in my tweet stream):

• Tour de France 2010: Circle of Death marks century of suffering http://bit.ly/dx4ogO – Fantastic writeup on the history of the Tour de France and how arduous it really is! Must read to give you an idea of man’s endurance limits (or rather the lack of limits)
• Penguin’s next march http://bit.ly/atGj9i – This is about the publishing house named after the black and white forever freezing bird. Penguin’s 75th anniversary (yes, it is that old) is coming up and as it approaches this milestone, how does it deal with the rising challenges of the industry
• The urban housing conundrum http://bit.ly/9ZNlLS – Rahul Chandran writes at The Mint on the problem of “inclusive” accommodation. How India’s cities need to plan to accommodate the ever-growing population of the urban poor. Very insightful and well written.

And oh yes, in the meanwhile The Better India celebrated its 2nd anniversary.

Enjoy, ladies and gentlemen.

This is perhaps one of the biggest and most important milestones in the history of mankind. Craig Venter has created the world’s first synthetic life form. The new organism was created in a lab entirely out of four bottles of chemicals.

Excerpt from the article in Guardian:

The new organism is based on an existing bacterium that causes mastitis in goats, but at its core is an entirely synthetic genome that was constructed from chemicals in the laboratory.

The single-celled organism has four “watermarks” written into its DNA to identify it as synthetic and help trace its descendants back to their creator, should they go astray.

“We were ecstatic when the cells booted up with all the watermarks in place,” Dr Venter told the Guardian. “It’s a living species now, part of our planet’s inventory of life.”

Details of this process in some other articles indicates that the creation of this new synthetic “life-form” did involve yeast as an intermediary. Does that still count as synthetic then? Keeping that minor fib aside, I believe this is an incredibly big achievement for mankind. Creating life was the prerogative of God and by imitating Him, man has reduced Him to a much lesser stature. That is of course based on the assumption that He existed in the first place. This particular experiment and all subsequent ones might well question that assumption a lot more strongly.

Andrew Brown raises interesting questions in his article titled “Has Venter made us gods?” Some points made by him:

The man who can make life can also give humans apparently godlike powers. “We are as gods and might as well get good at it” said the Californian visionary Stewart Brand 40 years ago; and Venter’s techniques should make it possible to engineer bacteria to do almost anything we can imagine, from cleaning up the oceans to supplying us with energy. The bacteria found in nature can work like the philosophers” stone, transforming almost any substance into anything. If we can design them to turn pollution into energy, that would be wonderful; but the same techniques could produce weapons of unparalleled cruelty and efficiency.

This is exciting stuff! God knows what the future will hold for all of us. Oh wait, change that sentence…

A couple of links pertaining to the Naxalism issue, the government’s role in it and the impact being created.

Annie Zaidi, of Known Turf, jots down excerpts in her post “Some questions, some stories”
One of the excerpts:

‘My name is Lingaram, from Sameli, Dantewada. I am a driver and my family has a car, in which I can ferry people. We have some land on which we farm. I am not very literate.I was watching TV at home, around September last year. Five motorcycles came, with 10 people, who were holding AK 47s. They took me to Kokunda. They asked me questions such as “where did you get the bike from? How do you go about in style?” My family is fairly comfortably off, but they accused me of being a Naxalite.

The Open Magazine carries an article by Rahul Pandita, “The War Nobody Can Ever Win“, that details out ground realities in the deep forests of Gadchiroli. Horrifying? Yes.

A popular radio channel hosted a “coffee cup reader” on its morning show yesterday. While listening to the show I managed to figure out that a “coffee cup reader” is some sort of a soothsayer.

Out of the many people who call up to know about what lies ahead in their lives, Karan Singhvi is one. This lad of 18 years loves playing cricket and wanted to know when he would make it to the national team.

Nawal Gani, the lady who reads coffee cups (and she takes about half an hour to do so per cup per person), announces that Karan will be in the team within 4 to 5 years. She also adds the apt disclaimer that in order to make it happen Karan will have to ‘persist with his dream’ and put in the hardwork required.

Ladies and gentlemen, if you manage to see a Karan Singhvi play in the national team within the next 5 years, do let me know. I would like to be the first one to visit Ms. Gani. With my coffee cup in tow.

In other notes, here is one of India’s premier physicists Jayant Narlikar talking about “The Scientific Case against Astrology“

Steven Strogatz returns with his 8th post of the “math, from basic to baffling” series, this time focusing his articulate discourse on the concept of differential geometry.

It is a must read and will leave you a whole lot clearer on things like geodesics and shortest paths.

Loved the final paragraph, which I present below:

Sometimes when people say the shortest distance between two points is a straight line, they mean it figuratively, as a way of ridiculing nuance and affirming common sense. In other words, keep it simple. But battling obstacles can give rise to great beauty — so much so that in art, and in math, it’s often more fruitful to impose constraints on ourselves. Think of haiku, or sonnets, or telling the story of your life in six words. The same is true of all the math that’s been created to find the shortest way from here to there when you can’t take the easy way out.

Two points. Many paths. Mathematical bliss.

Steven Strogatz continues his series on “math, from basic to baffling” with his latest article talking about complex numbers. Very interesting, especially the fractal representation of multiple roots of a polynomial. Check out the article here.

Excerpt:

Better yet, a grand statement called The Fundamental Theorem of Algebra says that the roots of any polynomial are always complex numbers.  In that sense they’re the end of the quest, the holy grail.  They are the culmination of the journey that began with 1.

Which one-time TV actor in Coronation Street and Crown Court released a record on which he sang selections from The King and I with Julie Andrews, before being told by two of the Beatles that he should really take up a musical career? You want a clue? His middle name is Pandit.

Infact, his full name is Krishna Pandit Bhanji. To find out, read this article.

The recent earthquake in Haiti has destroyed the country significantly. A lot of international aid has poured in and at the same time there have been views that Haiti should not get any money, since it is a corrupt nation and the money will not end up where it should.

Nicholas D. Kristof  of the New York Times sets things straight in Some Frank Talk About Haiti.

Haiti isn’t impoverished because the devil got his due; it’s impoverished partly because of debts due. France imposed a huge debt that strangled Haiti. And when foreigners weren’t looting Haiti, its own rulers were.

Do read that article and then come right back to help the Haiti cause by donating to the Doctors Without Borders.

Excerpts from Matthew Stewart’s book The Management Myth: Management Consulting Past, Present and Largely Bogus have been adapted in this article at the Independent: Masters of illusion, The great management consultancy swindle.

He talks about management consultancy and makes for really funny reading (perhaps funny for the non-consultants alone?). Excerpts:

On how he got his first break

I landed the job by providing a credible response to this question: How many pubs are there in Great Britain? The purpose of that question, I realised after the interview, was to see how easily I could talk about a subject of which I knew almost nothing, on the basis of facts that were almost entirely fictional. It was an excellent introduction to management consulting.

On his inspirations and ‘tools’

“The Whale” is a graph. Its official title is “Cumulative Customer Profitability” and it also goes by the generic name “skew chart”. The Whale is my madeleine. One glance at its distinctive curves and in my mind I’m back, cutting and pasting charts and text, running through airports, hovering over a transparency projector in front of sceptical men in suits, and trading boozy stories with team-mates in an overpriced hotel restaurant.

I learned the art of whale-hunting – as we called the art of landing a big client – from a partner I will call Roland. He was a jolly, well-rounded figure, with a face like a pink bowling ball. He had a thick French accent and drew heavily on a limited stockpile of American colloquialisms, cheerfully painting the world in the bold strokes and primary colours, in a style typical of those who live their lives in a foreign language.

In the firm, Roland was the harpooner. His specialty was sinking the barbed hook of our services deep within the flesh of unsuspecting clients. Roland would say: “I asked Joe (or whoever the client was) ‘Joe, can your people tell you, right now, which of your customers are profitable?’” (It always sounded like he was calling them “profiteroles”.) Joe would have had no idea how his profiteroles were doing.

In fact the entire piece is hilarious, so I will stop pasting excerpts. Go ahead and read the complete article.

John Elliott, who I believe is a fabulous correspondent when it comes to talking about South Asia, has this article put up on Jyoti Basu. It starts very aptly:

India desperately needs charismatic and respected political leaders who can lead coherent policy-based opposition to the Congress Party and its coalition governments. Only two men have qualified for this statesman role in recent years. One is Jyoti Basu of the Communist Party of India (Marxist), who died yesterday aged 95. The other is Atal Bihari Vajpayee, 85, a former prime minister and leader of the Bharatiya Janata party (BJP), who is in ill health and is no longer politically active.

The article explains why Jyoti Basu should have been the Prime Minister when opportunity had arrived once. (It was the time when Deve Gowda, instead, became the PM).
Read the complete article here.