On futility of arguing
17/May/2006 19:24
I have often felt that argument doesn't do any good, only realization does. Moreover, I have also felt that at some level, people tend to take arguments personally and lose their way.
An article I read today puts it more elegantly:
... Arguments rarely bring agreement. Most of the time, they drive us apart. You can have the most rigorous reasoning and the most solid supporting evidence imaginable and still fail to convince the other party, because arguments aren't really about the truth. They are about the very human need to be right - regardless of facts.
This is why sages refrain from arguments. Arguing require much effort but deliver poor results. The more you force a different view on people, the more they resist. Thus, arguments and debates are usually the very opposite of wu wei.
"Guan Yin"
17/May/2006 19:04
Check out this video of "Thousand-Hand Guan Yin": a dance performance that depicts Bodhisattva with a thousand hands. What's more, the artistes are deaf!
Spectacular: Video (35MB), Info
Paradise lost
25/Apr/2006 21:10
"The story of Nauru's descent from prosperity to penury is one of the most cautionary tales of modern development." —The Economist
A most engaging read: Paradise well and truly lost
Dance girls of Mumbai
23/Apr/2006 15:57
An Outlook article on the dance girls of Mumbai. The State government recently prohibited dance bars in the city, although the High Court stayed the order. The government has now decided to appeal to the Supreme Court. Meanwhile, thousands of women have been rendered jobless.
At 13, Salma's parents cut her off after she married against their wishes. The boy turned out to be a drug addict; and after Salma left him, she spent the first year as a house-maid. The money wasn't enough to raise two children. When her younger daughter was two days old, Salma joined a dance bar. Salma's moment of truth came when her four-year-old daughter asked her, "Mummy, where do you go wearing such clothes? To dance bars?"
Gosh! I can only imagine the range of emotions the mother must have felt when the child asked so: anger, sorrow, revulsion at oneself, helplessness, misery!
Two Onion pieces
19/Apr/2006 18:34
When it comes to satire, The Onion is a class apart. There is a serious statement in these two pieces, deep beneath the wry humour: a sad commentary on our society.
Added Jobs: "No more searching through your movies folder for that footage of your 50th wedding anniversary. Now all you need is a 768Kbps broadband connection and your credit card, and every timeless personal memory you've ever shot will be right at your fingertips."
[ ... ]
However, some early users report running into technical glitches with the software.
"I was really looking forward to watching my son's Easter greeting from Iraq," Eugene, OR resident Luka Bartoli said. "But the image froze and an alert came up saying it was temporarily unavailable due to low bandwidth. I miss my boy so much."
—iTunes to Sell You Your Home Videos for $1.99 Each
* * *
In perhaps the most morbidly poetic chapter of the troubled relationship, a cancer-ridden Quigley will die alone, burdened on her deathbed with the worst pain of her life, after her repeated pleas for aid and comfort go unanswered by Caitlyn, who, though longing for reconciliation with her mother, will refuse to return the calls, saying she is "done" with her.
—Childbirth To Be Area Woman's Least Painful Interaction With Daughter
The experience of S.F. Chinese, post 1906-quake
19/Apr/2006 11:21
A hundred years ago, on this day, San Francisco was devastated in a massive earthquake. A New York Times op-ed describes how the experience of Chinese survivors was far more ghastly, because they were not wanted in California:
Anti-Chinese prejudice, a staple of California politics since the 1870's, was still in full force at the time of the earthquake. In the days after the disaster both San Francisco and Oakland (where thousands of people sought refuge) barred Chinese from white relief camps. San Francisco officials put Chinese in tents at the foot of Van Ness, but worries that they might stay in the neighborhood led to their relocation to the golf links on the Presidio. After white neighbors protested that "the summer zephyrs will blow the odors of Chinatown into their front doors," the city moved the refugees again, to a more remote location on the Presidio near Fort Point.
Meanwhile, looters (mostly members of the National Guard) ransacked Chinatown. A crowd stoned to death a young Chinese man who tried to retrieve items from his home.
All this, in the land of liberty! What then can be said about Bangalore, which too faces riots and violence from time to time against "marginalization" of natives due to the large number of immigrants?
It is heartening to note that the Chinese stayed on, at least partly due to market forces:
But it was economic interest — rather than patriotic appeal — that checked the momentum for removal. City officials realized that they stood to miss out on revenue from taxes paid by Chinese. Perhaps more important, San Francisco risked losing the China trade, as Oakland, Los Angeles and Seattle quickly offered their ports. Moving Chinatown to another area in San Francisco proved impossible because no other neighborhood would stand for it.
Keenly aware of racist sentiment, Chinese leaders sought to rebuild in a way that would let Chinatown overcome its reputation as an overcrowded, diseased bachelor's slum full of gambling and opium halls.
Promoting wholesome tourism was part of the plan. Look Tin Eli, a wealthy merchant and founder of the Bank of Canton, wanted to create a city of "veritable fairy palaces."
Just as in San Francisco, we see a similar "invisible hand", as Adam Smith would call it, at work in Bangalore. The Kannadigas may resent the Tamils, Biharis, or the techie parvenus, but they are here to stay. The city, and the ebullient Indian economy, needs them. Again, just as Seattle and Los Angeles welcomed the S.F. Chinese, if Bangalore in its xenophobia shoves out the foreigners, there are Hyderabad and Pune to grab the opportunity to their benefit!
NYT: San Francisco's Survivors
Illegal prime
16/Apr/2006 22:49
If you possess a number that corresponds to an illegal computer program, do you go to jail? Note that on a hard disk, it is all ones and zeros: the 1-0 pattern that "stores" the program corresponds to a number by itself.
Intriguing: Illegal primes
Mockery considered beneficial
16/Apr/2006 17:53
I have often felt that criticism is less injurious than contempt. Scott Adams writes similarly in his blog today:
The only thing that keeps most people from acting on their absurd beliefs is the fear that other people will treat them like frickin’ retards. Mockery is an important social tool for squelching stupidity. ... Or to put it another way, I’ve never seen anyone change his mind because of the power of a superior argument or the acquisition of new facts. But I’ve seen plenty of people change behavior to avoid being mocked.
Later on in his blog entry, Adams imagines an unending debate of religions: it would go on "until even a child could recognize which positions are the most easily mocked. Sometimes that’s as close to wisdom as we can get."
Scott Adams: Respecting the Beliefs of Others
Love me or hate me?
13/Apr/2006 22:29
Cool! Link
For the nerd, it's all normal
11/Apr/2006 17:50
As a developer I have found it hard to understand the GNU autoconf/automake tools for Unix software, but a tutorial I read today gave me a good feel of its depth, at least. ;-)
This seems pretty crazy. And it gets crazier: Subsequent runs of "autoheader", "autoscan", "autoconf", "automake", and "aclocal" will modify more files, which means you'll need to run more of "autoheader", "autoscan", "autoconf", "automake", and "aclocal" again to sync all files, which will cause more files to change.... Often times you won't even know which files need syncing so you'll just run any of these commands at random to get the files to sync. Don't worry -- it's normal.
(Excerpted from Summary, Autotools Tutorial for Beginners. Emphasis mine.)
Role of sanctions on group dynamics
10/Apr/2006 23:20
Suppose there is a group that rewards the good guys but also punishes the bad ones. Suppose also that there is a group that does neither. If you were asked to join one of them, which would you choose?
SEED magazine presents a very interesting research experiment. Initially most subjects preferred a group that imposed no sanctions and joined the same. However, the group quickly became ineffective, and in the end, all had moved over to the group that had rewards and punishments. What's more, the sanctioning group was also more effective and had more contributions, simply because punishment acted as a deterrent!
I think the results have profound implications on such things as criminal law and effects of (dis-)incentives on human behaviour.
What makes 'em lucky
10/Apr/2006 22:11
Scientific American debates whether lucky people are really lucky, or it's just an attitude.
I know what to expect on articles like these, and sure enough, I saw it. "Lucky" people were extroverted, not neurotic, and were more open. So far, so bland. What did pique my interest, however, was the way these caused the "luckiness" attitude. Here is the reasoning:
- "There are three ways in which lucky people's extroversion significantly increases the likelihood of their having a lucky chance encounter," Wiseman explains: "meeting a large number of people, being a 'social magnet' and keeping in contact with people." Lucky people, for example, smile twice as often and engage in more eye contact than unlucky people do, which leads to more social encounters, which generates more opportunities.
- Wiseman found that the lucky ones were half as anxious as the unlucky ones--that is, "because lucky people tend to be more relaxed than most, they are more likely to notice chance opportunities, even when they are not expecting them." In one experiment, Wiseman had volunteers count the number of photographs in a newspaper. Lucky subjects were more likely to notice on page two the half-page ad with the message in large bold type: STOP COUNTING--THERE ARE 43 PHOTOGRAPHS IN THIS NEWSPAPER.
- Wiseman discovered that lucky people also score significantly higher in openness than unlucky people do. "Lucky people are open to new experiences in their lives.... They don't tend to be bound by convention and they like the notion of unpredictability," he notes. As such, lucky people travel more, encounter novel prospects and welcome unique opportunities.
Link: Are some people really lucky?
In El Salvador, abortion means jail
10/Apr/2006 20:08
New York Times has an article in its Magazine section today that made me cringe with "shock and awe", literally.
It talks about abortion in El Salvador. This predominantly Catholic Christian country has legislation that outlaws all kinds of abortion, without exception. That is, even if a woman becomes pregnant out of rape, or even if pregnancy puts her in grave medical risk, the foetus cannot be killed. "Article 1 of El Salvador's constitution declares that the prime directive of government is to protect life from the 'very moment of conception.'"
In case a woman does attempt abortion, she will face trial as a criminal, and up to 30 to 50 years in jail if the foetus happens to weigh more than half a kilo. Anybody who abets abortion, including the victim's family and the doctor (or quack) who killed the foetus, go to prison too.
Interview with V S Ramachandran
02/Apr/2006 23:08
Frontline's cover story this week is an interview with Dr V S Ramachandran, an eminent neuroscientist and winner of many awards and honours. He gave the annual BBC Reith Lectures in 2003. I have read his book Phantoms in the Brain and liked it thoroughly.
The interview greatly interested me. Ramachandran meanders through subjects that fascinate me: consciousness, neurobiology, philosophy, psychology, etc. In one part, he links what have been termed mirror neurons with autism. (To really empathise with an autistic child, I recommend the book The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time.)
Mirror neurons are "empathy neurons", or as Ramachandran calls them, "Dalai Lama neurons". They fire when someone pokes you, but they also fire when someone else is poked. Ramachandran speculates that they may have a role in autism. In his own words:
... But autistic children, typically, are reluctant to interact socially. They have grossly impoverished language and communication skills, no empathy for other people, and inability to adopt another person's point of view. And, as has been known for a long time, they have a huge problem with metaphor, the metaphoric use of sentences.
A bulb flashed in my mind and I said: "My God, what's gone wrong in autism are precisely the functions of mirror neurons. So maybe autism is caused by deficits of mirror neurons." So Eric Altschuler, who was a post-doctoral fellow in the lab in 1999, and I said, let's test this idea and measure human EEG, brain waves, in autistic children. What we found was that in autistic children the command system was completely normal. If they reach out and grab something, the neurons fire. But when they watch somebody, there is no activity. So we had evidence -- we hadn't proved it conclusively -- that autism is caused by a deficit in the mirror neurons.
Capital! :-)
There are many other parts that I liked in the interview -- where he says scientific revolutions have always been "dehumanising"; where he compares structural and functional approaches to research; where he talks about "trial balloons", and about ethical and philosophical ramifications of advances in neurosciences.
Dr Ramachandran works at University of California, San Diego, but I was pleasantly surprised to read that he comes home to Chennai "at least twice a year", just to be with his ailing mother.
The interview is available online: Wired Wonder
pr0n: Is it for good or bad?
02/Apr/2006 14:42
Financial Times has a long but thought-provoking article on the effects of Internet pornography on people and society. Excerpts:
"I know it's not doing me good or making me happy at some level and I'd be embarrassed to let anyone know how much time I was spending online looking at porn. It's like when the doctor asks how many units you're drinking and you halve it."
"More than anything else it was making me jaded," Kevin tells Paul. "I wasn't finding pleasure in the little things, with women or with life in general. Things that used to be erotic bored me."
"To me, the most disturbing thing about the internet is that it has the perfect structure to promote dissatisfaction. You click on an image, it's not quite right. So you click on another, then another. It's completely open-ended. If you just keep looking there'll be that image that's just right. But the more you look, the less you get turned on by the stuff you did before. So, you have to search harder."
Link: Not tonight darling, I'm online