NPPs in Japan

In the first general elections held since the phased shutdown of nuclear reactors across Japan, the Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) scored a landslide victory. Incidentally, the LDP was also the party most vehemently opposed to its predecessor, the Democratic Party of Japan (DJP), when it declared the shutdown of nuclear power plants (NPPs) across Japan, increasing the economic powerhouse's reliance on fossil fuels.

Now that Abe, who termed Noda's actions "irresponsible", is in power, the markets were also quick to respond. TEPCO's shares jumped 33 per cent, Kansai Electric Power's rose 18 per cent, the Nikkei index 1 per cent, and the shares of two Australian uranium mining companies rose at least 5 per cent each.

A regulator of the press

While Cameron is yet to accept the Leveson inquiry's recommendations, political pressure is going to force his hand no doubt. Which side of the debate do you come down on, though?

I believe that a regulatory body must not exist - extraneous or no - to stem any practices by suppressing or appreciating the quantum of penalties in cases relating to privacy violations - albeit, of course, a system whose benefits in no way outweigh its hindrances.

By appreciating the solatium for prosecutors against defenders lying outside the purview of the recommended system, such as The Spectator, no justice is served if the defending party isn't part of the system purely on the grounds of principle.

And a system that openly permits such inconsistencies is serving no justice but only sanctions, especially when the recommendations are based on a wide-ranging yet definitely locally emergent blight. Then, of course, there is also the encouragement of self-policing: when will we ever learn?

The cost of solutions

Hereby, a new metric: Solution cost (SC)

SC = Cost of finding the solution to a particular problem - (Rate at which the applications of the solution become cheaper * t),

t = No. of years across which SC is being tracked.

 

Who runs science in India?

[caption id="attachment_23967" align="aligncenter" width="625"] Click on the image for the article.[/caption]

Right now, Colin Macilwain cannot be more on top of the problem: the role of a Chief Scientific Adviser has shifted toward leveraging science and technology to reap rewards through economic and industrial policy, away from bridging the gap between the ruling elite and the academically engaged.

A contrast with India, unfortunately, is meaningless in this regard. While New York and Berlin may face off over what it means to have one person at the top versus what it means to have several people engaged throughout, scientific policy in India is in a shambles more because the Chief Scientific Adviser, C.N.R. Rao, has professed no inclination toward either agenda.

Instead, given that the country is oriented primarily toward tackling the energy crisis, Rao's role in influencing the government to institute decentralization policies, cross-generation power tariffs, and subsidization of alternative energy sources pales in comparison to the industrial lobby that subsumes his voice with just a lot of money.

While we leave universities to tackle their loss of autonomy - chiefly because the boards indulge public interference in order to maximise public-funding - and our engineers to bridge the infrastructural gap between low consumption, lower private-sector investment, and invitations to greater foreign direct-investment, who is really running science in India?

The personal loss of a printed book

Over the last few days, I've been getting the feeling that buying a Kindle is the best decision I've ever made. What I find unsettling, however, is that I don't seem to miss printed books as much as I thought I would: the transition was so smooth that it might almost have been irreversible. It seems I fell in love with what the books had to say and not with the books themselves, a disengagement with the metaphysical form and a betrothal to its humble, degenerate function

First, there are two simple axioms: that a particle can represent two states at the same time (superposition), i.e. 1 and 0, and that the information contained by a particle is destroyed the moment it is read. Braid these principles with the exotic phenomenon called entanglement, where two particles yield the same information upon observation even though they may be miles apart, and you get quantum computing and networking.

And here's the router for it.

[caption id="attachment_23836" align="aligncenter" width="529"] Click on image for pre-print paper[/caption]

How many of you are familiar with the concept of a Google Hangout?

Better yet, how many of you are web developers and are familiar with the concept of a Google Hangout?

I assure you, the number in answer to this question is low in India. At least, that’s the conclusion I’m forced to reach after having liaised with a large number of such developers for a news-daily in south India. Just today, I’d asked Mr. SH, who heads a small web-dev firm in Chennai, if we could have a Hangout in the evening to iron out some creases. His response: “OK… What’s a Hangout? Do I need to be in front of a computer for it?”

Others didn't answer all that differently, either. Sure, it could be that the idea of a Hangout isn't as ubiquitous as some would like it to be, but I can't see how a developer can't have heard of it.

1. How often do we do things just because someone else we used to idolize did them in the past? When will we start doing things in the present such that they're the best things for us to do in the present?


2. More often than not, the environment to nurture success is given more importance than an environment in which failures can be tolerated, let alone dealt with constructively. More often than not (pardon me), the fear of failure trumps the allure of success.

The whole is greater than the sum of its parts.

[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jKyPQbZFr38]

I read about this development about a week ago, and I still don't know what I think about it. As a feat of engineering it is beyond par-excellence, and that is where I stop to take a few breaths... The engineer's intentions may halt with attempting to understand how the heart beats, but in creating (or recreating?) something as relatively simple as a swimming silicone-jellyfish, he seems to have stumbled upon a nexus where the multiple wills of nature meet and participate without conflict in the fashion of a life-form.

What passes for money

How many things will pass for money? Investment and disinvestment are both aimed at regulating growth from one sector to another, but at higher benefit-to-cost ratios, such moves will fail.

Two important cases in point: cap-and-trade in reducing GHG emissions and levying a fee to pursue unauthorized constructions (in cities like Chennai).

The confounding factors are posterity and space: once consumed, the machine cannot be reversed unless there is more investment/sanctioning.

Universality of the Lotka-Volterra equations

If humankind were to discover a planet that harbours water, and if, by some provenance, the same unicellular organisms that were the precursors to Earth-bound evolution were to be introduced into this environment...

1. Would the significant differences between our evolutionary pattern and their evolutionary pattern be equivalent in any measure to the significant differences between our environment and theirs? (akin to linguistic relativity; see Whorf-Sapir hypothesis) How might we measure these differences?


2. How would the second-degree Kolmogorov model predator/prey population functions change? (Lotka-Volterra equations)


3. Will the timeframe for "onset" of intelligence be determinable? Will intelligence manifest itself again at all? (Naturalism)


4. Will the Earthborn megapode be able to recognize the "alien" megapode (or vice versa)? (Vitalism)


5. Will evolutionary parameters in similar environments be similar, or will small changes in the evolution of genetic components manifest as large deviations in the final morphology?

The politico-religious wave

An electromagnetic (em) wave travels through space at an astounding 299,792,458 m/s. This number, colloquially known as the speed of light (a form of em radiation), is the speed limit for anything that moves in the universe. While such a wave moves through space, it barely loses its energy. Light from an exploding star billions of lightyears away reaches Earth, and retains the signature that dignifies it as light from a dying star—even after travelling through space for billions of years. How does it do that? The answer illustrates the ideal symbiotic relationship: an electric field that generates a magnetic field, and a magnetic field that generates an electric field, each perpendicular to the other, each feeding into the other, carrying themselves through space and time.



This description of the propagation of an electromagnetic wave parallels, with striking similarity, the relationship between politics and religion. Each entity thrives on polarization, on creating and consuming potentials, on penetrating all regions of space unless shielded by some leaden obstacle. Even though each is a necessary manifestation of humanism, one is dissociated from all mortality—exhibiting a dangerous tendency to be omnipresent—and the other is associated closely with the very act of being—wielding an omnipotent weapon. Of course, in the course of their independent existence, they are strong, weak, focused, diffuse, directional, pregnant, and many other things. Together, however, they are a lethal combination—for governance as well as discovery.

Why Open Source religion isn't religion

Required reading: Open source religion

There's something wrong about the idea of an open source religion, especially the ones doing the rounds on GitHub. For starters, their basic definition lacks any purpose: to distribute authority instead of letting it be accrued, to make it more participatory and democratic instead of authoritative, and to have consensual agreement on all developments concerning the tenets/axioms of the religion.

Granted, OS religions require a drastic redefinition of what it means to be a religion, but once that is broken, the religious essence that makes people flock to it, stay with it, and die with it, could easily be lost.

An essential part of partaking in religious faith concerns its soteriology - its doctrine of salvation. By making it less authoritative and more democratic, the concept of sacrifice loses meaning. If everyone has their own way without having to give up on anything important, then there is no sacrifice to be made, no discipline thereby to be gained, and no retentive faith to be instilled. Consequently, salvation becomes meaningless: the world to come will be no different from the world that is/was.

Another source of retentive faith is the presence of a concept that separates the faithless from the faithful as well as the faithful from the orthodox. Usually, they are things like "purity", proselytization, absolution of material desires, etc. Without centralized authority, however, there is no way to establish the dos and don'ts to characterise such laws.

Both these issues make OS religion simply a way of life and not a religion at all; even if it seeks to redefine what people think of religion, the result is only something that has lost those aspects of itself that set it apart in the first place.

My cousin is sitting behind me memorizing the rules of differentiation in preparation for her mathematics exam. She's in her last year of school, and once today's public paper exam ends, she's going to be relaxed and pressure-free even though she has a few other papers remaining. I already pity her.

Homecoming

Apparently, I'm back. There's no leaving WordPress, at least for the foreseeable future. I switched to Posterous a few days ago, enjoyed a good run, but as the days passed, I began to miss the charm of WordPress more and more.

Posterous might have made it ridiculously easy for bloggers to post content, but I believe they lack WordPress's formalized showmanship. The platform also claims that it removes a lot of distractions and lets the user focus just on content: I think that for longtime bloggers, that doesn't make a difference.

Finally, the sheer number of options on WordPress - even if many are redundant - is something I've grown used to having around, a luxury if you will. And last night, my emotions got to the point where I reopened this blog and told myself I'm not going anywhere.

I'm home. :)

Dark delusion

There is something wrong with the way we take to dark energy. It's become a dumping ground for all the mysteries of the cosmos: the moment something inexplicable turns up on the charts, we turn to dark matter and dark energy to do the explaining, comfortable as we are in its enigmatic shadow. Some day, something similar to what happened to the theory of relativity is bound to happen to cosmology. We're going to hit upon a new finding that's going to push us back to the white-boards and calculation notebooks, forcing us to recant into mainstream physics some notion that was surrendered to the esoteric allure of dark matter research.

I realize there's been a slump in the number of posts from this blog. Too many deadlines are showing up too close together on the calendar. In fact, things have become so bad that I'm whoring out my precious 9-hour sleep cycles to get more work done. Anybody can tell you that sleeping for 6 hours is not for the students of print journalism. Simply not.

But bear with me. More posts will come, and many of them have been personally researched. In the meantime, I would redirect you to a fitting riposte by Paul Raeburn to David Whitehouse's accusation in the Huffington Post that the golden age of science journalism, if there ever was one, is long past. I'd like to remind you that this, right now, is the golden age, but I think Raeburn says it better.

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The uselessness of yes

Today, I wrote an article for an in-house newsletter to reflect the opinions of my professor, instead of mine, about an issue close to my heart. Writing it was one of the most difficult things I have ever done: on the one hand, there was the constant reminder I was getting from my conscience that I was going against my integrity - which I think I have - and on the other, there was the pressure of being trapped in a course that I have been regretting taking, a course for the fulfillment of which I am sufferring through such things.

I know that you're itching to say that one is never trapped and that there are always ways out, but I disagree. If I had written the article the way I'd have liked it written, my grade would've taken a beating. And as a student, as an aspiring science journalist (which only compounds the shame), as someone for whom tens of deadlines are showing up in the same week, I can't take any sort of beatings now.

The point is this: even though my professor may not be the sort of person who allows for free debate without making you feel like an idiot, the fault is mine. I solemnly swear that the next time I have to make such a choice, I will consider the possibility of going against myself before I decide on it. I haven't been afraid to say "No" before this day, but I haven't realized the difference it is capable of making.

I haven't been writing with coherence of late. Ideas are not forming fully (or they aren't being allowed to form fully?).