So, what does the World Cup mean for Africa?

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World Cup 2010: Into Africa - Goal Diggers
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Click here for a fantastic and informative graphic on the Economics of the World Cup

Photo of the day: the Bhopal tragedy

A quick recap here

Union Carbide lucked out in the sense that this happened before the advent of 24x7 television news in India.  So, to a large extent, most of India did not quite understand right away what a huge tragedy this was/is.  And, India being India, well, soon after other tragedies took over dominating the news.  And by the time all the likes of NDTV came along, Bhopal became old news, and the IT-cricket-al Qaeda/Pakistan well keeps on giving now.

Why isn't uemployment a topic anymore?

In passing, I noted in an op-ed that policymakers do not seem to be worried about unemployment rates as much as they ought to be.  Daniel Gross wonders why the Fed chief, Bernanke, seem to have removed this from his considerations, and writes:

Could Bernanke go down in history as the Federal Reserve chairman who won the crisis but lost the recovery? If I were in Congress, in the White House, or at the Fed, and we were facing 9.7 percent unemployment, my hair would be on fire. In May, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, 6.8 million Americans had been out of work for more than a half a year, up 67 percent from May 2009. As this table shows, the long-term unemployed account for 46 percent of the total unemployed, up from 28 percent a year ago.

The NY Times has a discussion on what can be done about this.  I have to note a local connection here: one of the economists at the table there is Mark Thoma, who is an economics professor at the University of Oregon :)

World Classical Tamil Conference

Tamil is a rich language outside the Indo-Latin family of languages, and with a lengthy history that makes it the oldest "living" language with that kind of a long history in literature.

I suppose it is more for theatre and politics that a World Classical Tamil Conference is underway in the town where I did my undergraduate studies--Coimbatore.  (the photo here is from The Hindu, which had the following caption: A woman sells snacks at the venue of the World Classical Tamil conference. Photo: S.Siva Saravanan)

Professor Parpola said Sanskrit, with its 3,000-year-old tradition, had produced an unrivalled number of literary works. It went back to Proto-Indo-Aryan [which was] attested in a few names and words related to the Mitanni kingdom of Syria between 1500 and 1300 BCE, and earlier forms of Indo-Iranian, known only from a few loanwords in Finno-Ugric languages as spoken in central Russia around 2000 BCE.

“But, none of these very earliest few traces is older than the roots of Tamil. Tamil goes back to Proto-Dravidian, which, in my opinion, can be identified as the language of the thousands of short texts in the Indus script, written during 2600-1700 BCE. There are, of course, different opinions, but many critical scholars agree that even the Rigveda, collected in the Indus Valley about 1000 BCE, has at least half a dozen Dravidian loanwords,” he told a large gathering. 

 So, on this occasion, here is a song/dance clip from an old Tamil movie.  The song is, well, actually a poem by Subramanya Bharathi (ignore the words that pop up in the video with that song--it does great disservice to the poetry.  Click here for translation(s))

Poem for the day: from the world of science

So, there I was watching a program on Newtonian physics and the intellectual inquiries that kept accelerating since his time, and about 20 minutes was about electromagnetism and Maxwell.  It was fantastic. 
I suppose when I was younger I was way too keen on solving the assigned problems (which I did, really well too!!! ahem!!!) and didn't have the patience, nor the right kind of teacher, for understanding the profound importance of the ideas and the history of those scientific achievements.

Everyday life now owes a lot to Maxwell and his contributions to physics.  That was not quite news to me.  But, what was news was how much he was more than just an awesome physicist--he was multidimensional, as most extraordinary people seem to be ... And the story of how this casual poem, which I have copied/pasted here is way too cool ...

It was an exciting time of the first ever trans-Atlantic cable.  Samuel Morse comes up with the single-line telegraph and Morse Code, and the world begins to shrink, so to say.  The next logical thing then was to link up Europe to the emerging economic powerhouse--the US.  But, this required undersea cabling.  Quite a technological challenge for the day, I would imagine.
Maxwell's friend--a fellow Scot as well--Thompson (later, Lord Kelvin) was the technical guy behind it, but apparently the company did not follow his instructions.  So, a failed first attempt--as the ship moved along unreeling the cable, it snapped somewhere under the sea!  Of course, the next time they followed the instructions and everything worked.

So, here is Maxwell writing a poem about this ... Now, writing verses was apparently not any unfamiliar territory for him, as this collection in an 1882 work notes
And, a quick note on the "2(u)" ... for the sake of efficiency in communication (!) Maxwell used "2(u)" to denote "Under the sea, under the sea"

THE SONG OF THE ATLANTIC TELEGRAPH COMPANY
I.
2(u)
Mark how the telegraph motions to me,
2(u)
Signals are coming along,
With a wag, wag, wag;
The telegraph needle is vibrating free,
And every vibration is telling to me
How they drag, drag, drag,
The telegraph cable along,

II.
2(u)
No little signals are coming to me
2(u)
Something has surely gone wrong,
And it’s broke, broke, broke;
What is the cause of it does not transpire,
But something has broken the telegraph wire
With a stroke, stroke, stroke,
Or else they’ve been pulling too strong.

III.
2(u)
Fishes are whispering. What can it be,
2(u)
So many hundred miles long?
For it’s strange, strange, strange,
How they could spin out such durable stuff,
Lying all wiry, elastic, and tough,
Without change, change, change,
In the salt water so strong.

IV.
2(u)
There let us leave it for fishes to see;
2(u)
They’ll see lots of cables ere long,
For we’ll twine, twine, twine,
And spin a new cable, and try it again,
And settle our bargains of cotton and grain,
With a line, line, line,—
A line that will never go wrong.

Source

Can there be a good Commie?

In an op-ed in the Boston Globe, Jeff Jacoby writes that there is no "good" Communist.  He writes it in the context of the death of Portuguese writer--Nobel laureate--Jose Saramago, and the stream of obituaries that noted his Communist affiliation:

not just a nominal communist, as his obituaries pointed out, but an “unabashed’’(Washington Post), “unflinching’’ (AP),“unfaltering’’ (New York Times) true believer. A member since 1969 of Portugal’s hardline Communist Party, Saramago called himself a “hormonal communist’’ who in all the years since had “found nothing better.’’ Yet far from rendering him a pariah, Saramago’s communist loyalties have been treated as little more than a roguish idiosyncrasy. Without a hint of irony, AP’s obituary quoted a comment Saramago made in 1998: “People used to say about me, ‘He’s good but he’s a communist.’ Now they say, ‘He’s a communist but he’s good.’ ’’

But the idea that good people can be devoted communists is grotesque. The two categories are mutually exclusive. There was a time, perhaps, when dedication to communism could be absolved as misplaced idealism or naiveté, but that day is long past. After Auschwitz and Babi Yar, only a moral cripple could be a committed Nazi. By the same token, there are no good and decent communists — not after the Gulag Archipelago and the Cambodian killing fields and Mao’s“Great Leap Forward.’’ Not after the testimonies of Alexander Solzhenitsyn andArmando Valladares and Dith Pran.

In the decades since 1917, communism has led to more slaughter and suffering than any other cause in human history. Communist regimes on four continents sent an estimated 100 million men, women, and children to their deaths — not out of misplaced zeal in pursuit of a fundamentally beautiful theory, but out of utopian fanaticism and an unquenchable lust for power.

Reason, which was the link to this op-ed, has quite a collection here
Jacoby notes:

Communism is not, as its champions like to claim, an appealing doctrine that has been perverted by monstrous regimes. It is a monstrous doctrine that hides behind appealing rhetoric. It is mass crime embodied in government. Nothing devised by human beings has caused more misery or proven more brutal.

How to fake it .... learn from soccer

This Ivory Coast player bumps his side into a Brazilian player ... but he goes down holding his nose :)
ht

Come to think of it, this is what most faculty also do at meetings: pretend hurt and anger, when in reality all they do is promote their own interests, hoping that nobody will notice it.
(editor: ahem, aren't you a faculty member, too? Yes, but I skip out of most meetings!)

Keep teachers happy!

I did not say that; it is from Manusmriti--the Laws of Manu--which is about 2,000 to 2,500 years old.
Manu wrote:

तयोर्नित्यं प्रियं कुर्यात् आचार्यस्य च सर्वदा ।
तेष्वेव त्रिषु तुष्टेषु तपः सर्वं समाप्यते ॥

- मनुस्मृति

One must do all he can to keep his parents and teacher happy. If they are satisfied it is equivalent to any (all) penance.

- Manu Smriti

It was not this verse that I was searching for though.  I was trying to recall a Sanskrit verse about "five mothers" a person has and, well, I was at a loss.  So, I googled it, but was unsuccessful.  However, I landed at this site with a wonderful collection of verses along with their translations.  Spent some time there trying to read the originals in Sanskrit, and the thirty-plus years since my last Sanskrit class definitely showed :(

Anyway, the "five mothers" is, if I recall correctly (and I wish I could write it out in Sanskrit):

Gurupathni rajapthni jyeshtapathni thathaiva cha
pathnimaatha swamaatha cha panchai the maathara smrithaha

which translates to:

The guru's wife, the king's wife, along with the eldest brother's wife
Wife's mother, and own (birth) mother are to be treated as five mothers

I am all the more curious now whether listing the birth mother at the end was for poetic placement purposes, or whether the poet intended a hierarchy in such a listing.....

The nation's--world's--worst job ...

A couple of days ago, Fred Thompson (erstwhile senator and Republican presidential contender, and actor!) was on the Daily Show.  One of the questions Jon Stewart asked him was whether Thompson is relieved that he is not in the White House having to deal with all the issues.
Of course, The Onion beat everybody to the post when it declared soon after Obama won:

Black man given nation's worst job

It has gotten only worse for the president; the latest?

Yes, it is now Day 64 since the BP rig exploded, and continues to gush out oil at rates that only seem to increase every day--now at, or having exceeded, 100,000 barrels a day!
General McChrystal decides it is time to be a MacArthur, and is now looking at being removed from the job, which means a new chief for the country's longest war ever
Israel has gone complete bonkers with Gaza and occupied territories, and now even Ehud Barak is worried
The Euro is quite close to imploding, and the French-German relations are showing the stress
Unemployment continues to be high, and is a mere fractional points away from the psychological two-digit rate

WTF, eh!
And then internal issues:

The budget director, Orzsag, is leaving; A blogger at the SF Chronicle's notes the sex-issue:

Any dude who can snag ABC newscaster Bianna Golodryga while banging wealthy shipping heiress Claire Milonas, and running the country's budget is a man.
A man, yes, but not a thoughtful man.

One long summer ahead.  And then?  Midterm elections.  Odds seem to be in favor of the Republicans getting back the control of the House?

It is summer ... finally!!!

Summer officially--astronomically--began this morning.  (editor: here is a depressing thought: from now on days will get shorter!)

The summer solstice is a result of the Earth's north-south axis being tilted 23.5 degrees relative to the sun. The tilt causes different amounts of sunlight to reach different regions of the planet.

Today the North Pole is tipped closer to the sun than on any other day of 2010. The opposite holds true for the Southern Hemisphere, for which today is the winter solstice, the shortest day of the year.

Growing up in the southern part of India, I was familiar with only three seasons: hot, hotter, and hottest!  Of course, I am kidding; there was only one season--HOT :)

But, as a kid, I cared for nothing, as all kids are (and ought to be?)  Life was only in terms of school days versus holidays.  And holidays meant doing nothing, or climbing up mango and tamarind trees, or biking all over the place, or playing cricket, or fighting with my brother while doing any of the previously listed activities ... maybe the age difference was why I never fought that much with my sister? ...

It was a near magical place where I grew up, and I thank all the lucky stars for that.  It was my own Macondo.  Neyveli will always be my true home in my heart.  It will be awesome to have my ashes scattered in Neyveli--well, after I die, of course!  Perhaps under my favorite mango tree in the yard.

"The law is a ass--a idiot"--continued

A follow-up to this earlier posting where I used the Charles Dickens quote in the context of a law suit that had worked its way up to the Supreme Court.  A quick recap of that case:

Ralph Fertig hardly resembles a terrorist, but the soft-spoken 79-year-old pacifist and human rights activist from Los Angeles might well qualify as one under the government's strong anti-terrorism law.
He is the lead plaintiff in a Supreme Court case to be heard next week that will test whether speaking out on behalf of an oppressed foreign minority -- represented by a group that's been deemed a terrorist organization by the U.S. -- can result in a long prison term.

So, what did the Supremes say?  Are we to be surprised that the uber-conservative Supreme Court supports the government's position?

The court ruled 6-3 Monday that the government may prohibit all forms of aid to designated terrorist groups, even if the support consists of training and advice about entirely peaceful and legal activities.

Material support intended even for benign purposes can help a terrorist group in other ways, Chief Justice John Roberts said in his majority opinion.

Six to three!  even the retiring Stevens sided with the conservatives on the bench.  (Well, this is merely another piece of evidence that Stevens is not that much a "liberal" justice, as is often mistakenly presented.)

What did the three dissenting justices say?  Here is their spokesman, Justice Breyer:

I cannot agree with the Court’s conclusion that the Constitution permits the Government to prosecute the plaintiffs criminally for engaging in coordinated teaching and advocacy furthering the designated organizations' lawful political objectives. In my view, the Government has not met its burden of showing that an interpretation of the statute that would prohibit this speech- and association-related activity serves the Government's compelling interest in combating terrorism. And I would interpret the statute as normally placing activity of this kind outside its scope.

It is bloody f*ed up, I say. Again, as a reminder, what did Ralph Fertig do, and what does he want to achieve?

The Palestine Liberation Organization and the Irish Republican Army, two of history’s most notorious terrorist groups, have never appeared on the State Department’s List of Designated Foreign Terrorist Organizations. By the time the list was first compiled in 1997, both groups were deemed to be moving away from violence and toward a peaceful resolution of their grievances.
Ralph Fertig, president of the Humanitarian Law Project, wants to encourage a similar change within the Kurdistan Workers’ Party, a violent separatist group in Turkey also known as the PKK (its Kurdish initials). But he worries that doing so will expose him to prosecution for providing “material support” to a terrorist organization, a crime Congress has defined so broadly that it includes a great deal of speech protected by the First Amendment. When it hears Fertig’s case next week, the Supreme Court will have a chance to correct that error.
Fertig, a civil rights lawyer and former administrative law judge, seeks, as the district court described it, to “provide training in the use of humanitarian and international law for the peaceful resolution of disputes, engage in political advocacy on behalf of the Kurds living in Turkey, and teach the PKK how to petition for relief before representative bodies like the United Nations.” Fertig says he also wants to “advocate on behalf of the rights of the Kurdish people and the PKK before the United Nations and the United States Congress.”

I am looking forward to Glenn Greenwald's and Dahlia Lithwick's analyses ...

BTW, does this mean that the 80-year old Ralph Fertig is looking at prison time?

It is "nospeak" not "newspeak" that should worry us

The brilliant Tony Judt, who has been compelled by life to deal with "a bunch of dead muscles", has, as always, profound and timely observations--this time about words and articulacy and inarticulacy ...

When words lose their integrity so do the ideas they express. If we privilege personal expression over formal convention, then we are privatizing language no less than we have privatized so much else. “When I use a word,” Humpty Dumpty said, in rather a scornful tone, “it means just what I choose it to mean—neither more nor less.” “The question is,” said Alice, “whether you can make words mean so many different things.” Alice was right: the outcome is anarchy.
In “Politics and the English Language,” Orwell castigated contemporaries for using language to mystify rather than inform. His critique was directed at bad faith: people wrote poorly because they were trying to say something unclear or else deliberately prevaricating. Our problem, it seems to me, is different. Shoddy prose today bespeaks intellectual insecurity: we speak and write badly because we don’t feel confident in what we think and are reluctant to assert it unambiguously (“It’s only my opinion…”). Rather than suffering from the onset of “newspeak,” we risk the rise of “nospeak.”

The final paragraph is quite moving:

No longer free to exercise it myself, I appreciate more than ever how vital communication is to the republic: not just the means by which we live together but part of what living together means. The wealth of words in which I was raised were a public space in their own right—and properly preserved public spaces are what we so lack today. If words fall into disrepair, what will substitute? They are all we have.

BP spill at 60 days, and counting: Worst case scenario?

The BP rig exploded and sank on April 22nd.

My intro class students were just about wrapping up the assignment I had given them--on how the volcanic eruption in Iceland messed up Kenyan farmers who export flowers and, therefore, on the role of transportation in economic growth and development.

I thought that might just about be the only "current news" driven assignment for the term.  But then the BP disaster happened.  My gut instincts were that it was a catastrophe, which was the word I used to describe it when I pulled up photographs of the news story in the class (thanks to the wired "smart rooms" in which we now teach).  So, it was on to the next "current news" driven assignment.

Now, 60 days later, it does not seem like we are anywhere near the end of the story.  In fact, as Lisa Margonelli writes:

The question I'd like to ask Tony Hayward is this: To the best of your knowledge are we near the end of this spill? In the middle? Or perhaps, only at the very beginning?

Back on May 1st, I noted in the post that this was our own Chernobyl.  If I second-guessed myself that I was engaging in hyperbole, well, it sadly seems like I might have even underestimated it--it is even worse than Chernobyl because unlike the nuclear reactor accident, this one has a real probability that it could go on until there is no more oil to ooze out.  One can imagine the horrific economic and environmental consequences .... and we will still be underestimating ...

I was initially a tad suspicious of this Scienceblog post on the worst case scenario about the BP oozathon--that we will never be able to stop it.  But, even Margonelli refers to that, and adds this:

There are legitimate concerns about the integrity of the casing. Yesterday, someone asked Admiral Allen about that. He said that concerns about the integrity of the well bore were part of the decision to stop the "Top Kill" a few weeks ago, indicating that there are significant concerns. On April 23, the Coast Guard was aware that the size of the leak could grow from 8000 barrels a day to 64,000 to 110,000 barrels a day if the well completely blew out. That's quite close to the current spill estimates. Does that mean that the well is nearing a full blow out?   

The reason the casing's integrity matters is that if it's cracked, oil will push out through the cracks and into the surrounding ground, destabilizing the ground around the casing, and bubbling up from the ocean floor. Here's more, with Senator Bill Nelson's interview a week and a half ago saying just that. A seeping well, of course, will be hard to contain. 

Holy crap!
Oh yeah, happy Father's Day!