“I buy the Bombay Times only for the pictures”

By now Swami must have lost all his nails and Surya all her hair, so I guess I am a tad late with the answer to this puzzle.
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A trader working for China’s State Reserve Bureau shorted a huge amount of Copper and Copper prices are rising, mostly because of demand from the Chinese. So the Chinese government is going to lose billions of dollars on the trade. The trader has gone missing. Real life stole Michael Chricton’s storyline.

I am on record as saying that I love urban sprawl. It turns out that whether I love it or not, it is inevitable.

The last time The Examined Life covered Dilip’s experiments with the GDP, I noted that he was making a plausible sounding, but incorrect point. Now he has gone and made another post, and this time he makes two points, one plausible, but still incorrect, and the other so baffling that only the use of big big words saves it from being identified as self-evidently absurd.
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This is something that struck me at the Bloggers’ Meet. I think that we are fast running out of good blog names (like “The Examined Life”) Of course, we early bloggers who are responsible for this. Firstly, we’ve taken all the good ones and secondly, the new bloggers think that they have to have some dramatic sounding name to get people’s attention. So we now have names like “The daily random ruminations of a demented maverick maniac” which, unfortunately, tells us only one thing – the blog has started recently and that they have expended all their imagination on the name. Also, the blog probably has a black background.

I don’t know how to solve this problem, but I just thought I’d raise it.

To my surprise, I check my comments and learn that there is atleast one person who does not know what happened at the MMRBM. Which means of course, that one of my readers reads me but not India Uncut! What’s wrong with you?
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• Tarun Pall left a comment pointing me to his post that revealed something shocking. It seems that some intrepid journalist bravely carried out an undercover operation and exposed the nefarious goings on at the Delhi Bloggers’ Meet.

  A sting operation at a Bloggers Meet? That young man will go far. He will one day get a Pulitzer for a hidden camera expose of the Prime Minister’s Independence day speech.

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My commute (by car) takes me through a toll-gate every day. You can pay cash at the gate or buy a monthly pass. If you have a pass, the guy at the toll-gate has a look at the pass and waves you through. You just have to slow down to a crawl, you don’t have to stop. Paying by cash naturally takes a few seconds more than showing a pass, as the attendant takes the money, gives change if necessary and hands over a receipt.

Naturally, it is frustrating for the regular pass-holder to get stuck behind a person who is paying cash. To avoid that problem, they have marked one lane (the right lane) as “Monthly pass only”. But unfortunately they do not enforce that rule. Given what sticklers for rules we Indians are, you can guess what happens. Non pass-holders routinely ignore the rule and choose whichever lane strikes their fancy. Naturally, their fancy tends to favour the lane that has the lowest traffic.

Which lane should a pass-holder take?

This is a somewhat cryptic question and I cannot make it any clearer because that will give away the answer. So you will have to accept that I haven’t given sufficient information and make reasonable (and eminently guessable) assumptions.

All I can tell you is, if lots of non pass-holders read this post and came to know the answer, the answer would no longer be valid.

(Clarification We are not meeting at Runwal. We are meeting at the Nirmal Lifestyles Cafe Coffee Day. Please do not turn up at the wrong Coffee Day in Mulund.

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I know that many Mumbaikars are worried that as we have gone for long without a Bloggers Meet, other cities might overtake us. To prevent that from happening, it has been decided to hold an emergency bloggers meet at 3 pm on November 13th , 2005.

Where? Well… it has been noticed that naming it the Bombay Bloggers Meet has had the unfortunate effect of potentially leaving out large sections of the population. What is Bombay? There is Bombay, one of the seven islands that were joined to form Bombay. There is Bombay, which was formed by the seven islands including Bombay. There is Bombay, that was formed by the inclusion of Bombay with Salsette island to form Greater Bombay. So although “Bombay Bloggers Meet” has the advantage of alliteration, it is potentially very confusing. Therefore, the Meet has been named the Mumbai Metropolitan Region Bloggers Meet (MMRBM)*

So to celebrate this renaming, it has been decided to hold the MMRBM at a centrally located place, which is… Mulund! (Well, if you include a large enough region, it is centrally located.) Yes Mulund, in the Central Suburbs, a nice upcoming place where hot-looking Gujju females are out on the prowl looking for a mall to shop in! That is where the MMRBM will be held. Please gather at:

There are many other places in the same mall, so if we don’t like the place, we can move somewhere else. So do come.

*Yes I did pull out this justification out of my arse. Yes, I had already decided on the venue based on the authority vested in me by the nefarious shadowy C***** that controls the MMR blogging network. The real reason is that it is closest to my home that I could hold the meet and still not get lynched on arrival. Yes, it is a flagrant abuse of authority. So shoot me. But come for the meet.

The Economist has a very good survey on the patent system. I haven’t yet made up my mind what I think of patents. I appreciate the fact that the product of your mind ought to be your property. I am wary of giving the government the right to determine if something is patentable. I also think that in many cases, (especially software and business process patents) 20 years is too long.

But then, I don’t agree with the argument that the patent system unambiguously hurts innovation or unambiguously benefits the big guys. The survey makes this point – the ability to patent enables the separation of the inventor from those who commercialise it. Without the liquidity provided by the patent system, only the big companies who could quickly commercialise inventions would benefit from inventions.

Anyway, the survey is worth reading also for this article which talks of how Indian and Chinese companies have started to take halting steps towards patenting their innovations.

But… except for the first article, the whole survey is for premium subscribers only. If you want to read the survey, and if I know you please leave a comment to this post asking for access.

There have been many criticisms of Wikipedia, many of them fair, but much of them unfair. One such criticism I believe is misplaced is by Dilip in this post. (Actually I saw it when it was linked from this post – which is criticizing the use of Wikipedia to target IIPM. I will come to that next.)

So Dilip uses the example of the Wikipedia’s entry on the 1993 Bombay Blasts. Apparently the lead section at one point said: “The 1993 Mumbai bombings were a series of bomb explosions that took place in Mumbai (Bombay), India on 12 March 1993. The attacks were the worst wave of criminal violence in the country’s history.” which is clearly inaccurate. Then someone changed it to “The 1993 Mumbai bombings were a series of bomb explosions that took place in Mumbai (Bombay), India on 12 March 1993. The attacks were the worst bomb explosions in the country’s history; various outbreaks of widespread criminal rioting (examples: 1984 Anti-Sikh riots, 1992-93 riots after the destruction of the Babri mosque in Ayodhya, 2002 Gujarat violence) have killed more Indians than these bombs did.” which Dilip found more accurate. Apparently that did not satisfy someone, so it got changed to: The 1993 Mumbai bombings were a series of bomb explosions that took place in Mumbai (Bombay), India on 12 March 1993. The attacks were the worst bomb explosions in the country’s history. This is the version that remains.

Does this example indicate that there is something wrong wrong with Wikipedia? According to Dilip, this indicates that that building something like this will not be free of political problems.
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