Why Barack Obama shares similarities with Pratibha Patil

The 2008 presidential election results are out . Barack Obama has swept the polls. I personally am for the Democrats especially after the three trillion dollar war. But the post election media coverage reminded me of the media coverage of Prativa Patil's election as the President of India. The little known Congress politician from Maharashtra got nominated (to many sceptics surprise) for the first citizen's seat. The newspapers came out with articles calling her "The first woman President..." blah blah blah. While this was certainly factually true, does this really indicate women's' emancipation in India? Hardly.

Now that Barack has been selected as the Chief Executive of USA, NY Times goes on to write Sen. Obama (now President) has swept away "the last racial barrier in American politics with ease as the country chose him as its first black chief executive." Again all these is factually great. But will these really help the poorer part of the African American populace? Sen. Obama went to some of the finest Ivy league schools as a student, taught at the University of Chicago for twelve years. So, should one classify him as an accomplished politician and attorney or as an African American political leader. Probably both but hyping the later identity only sounds unreasonable to me. As of now, Sen. Obama hasn't done anything to reach the level of Dr. M.L. King in terms of black (economic) freedom. It'll be an arduous journey for him given the high expectations of the American people and definitely the black voters who registered a higher turnout this time round.

Subway, Ben Franklin and the great seal

One of the ubiquitous symbols of US superiority is the insignia of the bald eagle. To my amusement, I found out that the original bald eagle designed by Charles Thomson and submitted before the Congress wasn't as graceful as the one we see today. It looks like the one above actually !!!! Now why do I care? Well it all started with me eating a turkey breast sandwich at the local subway store. Somehow in my off time I thought of gathering some info about turkey from wikipedia. One interesting piece of info caught my attention. Seems like Benjamin Franklin, one of the founding members of USA was opposed to using bald eagle as the insignia of a brave new country. In a letter to his daughter, he writes "He is a Bird of bad moral Character. He does not get his Living honestly." Whoa!!!! He went on to say about bald eagle "he is never in good Case but like those among Men who live by Sharping & Robbing...". So he had an alternate suggestion. He suggested Turkey to be made the national insignia!!!! Yeah, the same turkey that Americans feast on every thanksgiving!! Under todays global political conditions I think it would have been real injustice towards a harmless, foolish bird like turkey. With the three trillion dollar war still going on somehow I have a feeling Charles Thomson was more of a visionary than Benjamin Franklin. After all seeing 200 years ahead of time ain't a small thing!!

Hot Seat

Liked this video. So thought would post it.

Floccinaucinihilipilification

How many of you have heard the above word? It seems this is the longest non technical English word. It means "the act of describing something as worthless, or making something to be worthless by deprecation". But if you consider the finance industry and its ads I think there is another word (well almost!!) that will beat this one. The word is "Mutualfundsaresubjecttomarketriskspleasereadtheofferdocumentcarefullybeforeinvesting". Let's count. 1,2,..... 91!!!! Phew. Definitely beats you Flocci.. So did wikipedia get it wrong?The more cautious among you will tell me, "Hold on, doesn't that read like Mutual Funds are subject to market risk,please read the offer document carefully before investing". Well, it sure does, but who cares? The way the guy reads it out in ads after the rosy mutual fund dreams it sure sounds like a single word and most of us tend to think what a lousy longish thing. But with the current volatile conditions in the share market you sure will take some time to remember this "longest" word.

American and Russian Pi

For a mathematician, pi is a ubiquitous constant. Here are two pictures depicting this wonderful number. The first one is taken from here . The second one is from a series of drawings called "Mathematical Impressions" by the Russian Mathematician A.T. Fomenko . This one, also called "the amazing numbers pi and e" happens to be there in my Dept.'s undergraduate help room. If you look at it on the left side of the "skyscrapper" each block has certain number of dots... going from left to write the number of dots are 3,1,4,1,5,9.... and so on and we all know pi=3.14159.... . Can you guess the number of dots on the right side of the skyscrapper?

Progress or spin, which one do you like?

Our math department computer labs suck bigtime. The printer doesn't work.... if that works then the network connection is gone....arggghhh!!! A few weeks earlier I was desparately trying to take a few printouts from the undergrad lab. Too bad I didn't know the administrator would forget installing something as universal as Acrobat PDF reader. So everytime I would try opening the paper, safari would show the never ending spinning wheel forcing me to shift to the next available Mac. By the time I was frustrated enough to leave without the printouts, half of the macs in the lab were screwed... I mean they had that rainbow spinning wheel. This is one aspect of Mac I hate, they should say something like not responding or so instead of making the user confused about what it is "doing in the background".

The guy in this video talks about two frustrating things.... progress bars from PC and the spinning wheel in Mac, which one do you like/hate the most?

Newspeak

In his famous anti communist work "1984", George Orwell talked about a language called Newspeak. It is "the only language in the world whose vocabulary gets smaller every year." I personally found 1984 to be overtly communist phobic. But the current rise of SMS lingo, coupled with lolspeak seems to be doing the job just fine and that too in a non communist,bloodless way. We don't say a lot of stuff sometimes this days, just use a little smiley and that does the job. Funny, interesting,great all might be given by the "smiling" smiley. And what about lolspeak?? These things are doing nothing but shrinking the vocabulary and expressions.

There is a rather friendly application that is actually harming the language. I am talking about the ubiquitous spell checker. We all use it. I don't know if it has ever happened to you, but my confidence in spelling has gone down quite a bit after I started using spell checker in gmail and elsewhere. We are getting stuff done too easily and if things go along these lines it won't be too long before `oldspeak' or English becomes `newspeak'.

The Election Chronicles:The Maverick,the moose and the terrorist

The US presidential elections are just a month away. The candidates are busy calling the American middle class their friends, rolling up their sleeves to show they also can get their hands dirty like the plumber next door, loosening up their ties to show their exhaustion and so on and so forth. The whole thing has become more like a huge national ad campaign with candidates calling themselves Maverick, the opponent terrorist and even accusing opponent of buying an expensive planetorium gizmo!!!!! In the midst of all this the pan american love affair with Sarah Palin is getting stronger by the day. She doesn't understand much of politics.... so what?? She is kinda cute. Interestingly it seems like in a bid to outwit the ever eloquent Barack Obama, Gov. Palin has devised a new strategy. James Wood writes in the New Yorker that she is coining new words to defend the republicans at times. Well, that's only befitting for the "Maverick" Republican duo. After all, you don't become a maverick unless you do something out of the ordinary, do you?

Beware of ....

I am an ardent follower of the freakonomics blog maintained by Stephen Dubner and Steven Levitt. Dubner had already reported that the Israeli city of Petah Tikva is using DNA fingerprinting of canine faeces to stop rogue (yeah what else!!!) pet owners from being irresponsible. Not long after I had read the blog and found it funny I myself woke up yesterday to find quite a bit of dog poop in front of our gate. Looks like we have to put up a placard like the one here and a notice saying "Dog poopers will be prosecuted"!!!

The reason I hate chats and smileys

Have you ever been amid people who just love to chat over gtalk or ym and use hundreds of different emoticons or smileys? I just hate that "ding... ding" sound in gtalk when the other "chatter" is saying something. Another reason I hate I hate chat is smiley. Do you really think a person laughs everytime he/she says ":D"? I doubt it. Probably you're just yawning and still send a ":P" just for the heck of it.
But there is one smiley that I love. That is the love smiley "<3". When you type it, it rotates 90 degrees counter clockwise and shows a nice red heart sign. That's cute but that's not the only reason I love this smiley!!! This one is a mathematically correct smiley !!!!! Now don't frown... think about it, what can be better than two people (hopefully a girl and a guy) and some love. I'd always say a third person is strict "no no" here. So matters of heart better stay between two (or <3) people only. And we are always in love with ourselves, so the case of 1 (which is <3) is covered as well. Now that's what I call mathematical precision.
When I think of chats, there is one piece of crap that I can't stop hating. That is lolspeak. Check out this video if u aren't already pissed of by lol's.

Goddess Durga and her lion

So another Durga Puja is over. The only time of the year when the otherwise shy Bengali crowd gets jovial is over at least for another year. Sitting here in Los Angeles... 15K KM from West Bengal, the heart of all activities I could do nothing but look at the Durga Puja calender and sigh. Oh yes, I gathered some new mythological info also about how Durga was created, whether it indeed makes any sense to talk about her parental home when she actually was formed out of the divine powers of different deities and stuff like that. One integral part of Durga idol is her carrier.... the mighty Lion (not as strong as Aslan though) as one can see in the picture in the left. According to Hindu mythology Himalaya gave her this fierce lion.

This little point is disturbing me. I mean OK...the Himalayas are covered by trees doesn't mean there will be lions residing in there. The only place in India where you get to see a lion(in the wild of course) is the Gir National Park which is pretty far off from the Himalayan mountain range. So, how could Himalaya have given a mighty lion to the Goddess? I don't know. I think a tiger from Himalayas would have been better.

Several "once upon a time " feudal families in Bengal still hold the Puja every year. The Coochbehar estate's Puja is one such. Interestingly enough Durga has both a tiger and a lion by her side. What is more fascinating is that the lion is white and has a somewhat horselike face. Somewhere I had read this is because the earlier artisans had never seen a lion and thats why probably their imagination of a lion was closer to another mighty animal... the horse. Anyone has any more info in this regard?