I’ll be back as soon as I regain full use of my two hands, two legs and one ass. They are all functioning in a somewhat reduced capacity after I went overboard when I got to play volleyball after six years.

What with a delivery coming up (in the project sense, not the child-birth sense) your favourite blogger finds that he has to keep his desire to talk about Quantum Teleportation, the Indian Economy, the impending war on Iraq, Genetic Engineering and Bappi Lahiri under tight leash.

And yes. My blog keeps British time not because of some nostalgia for the Raj, but because my hosting service is British and I have long neglected to devote the five minutes it would take to make the required time zone corrections.

But here is a quiz for my loyal readers. Who wrote to whom: “My watch still keeps Indian Time”?

Evolution is an immensely powerful creative process. From the intricate biochemistry of individual cells to the elaborate structure of the human brain, it has produced wonders of unimaginable complexity. Evolution achieves these feats with a few simple processes–mutation, sexual recombination and natural selection–which it iterates for many generations. Now computer programmers are harnessing software versions of these same processes to achieve machine intelligence. Called genetic programming, this technique has designed computer programs and electronic circuits that perform specified functions. (Scientific American: Evolving Inventions)

I couldn’t read the whole article because subscription is required, but even the bit I could is interesting.

This Economic Times editorial says that India’s poverty rate is down from 38% in 1998 to 24% now. The ET says that this finally proves that reforms haven’t hurt the poor and have actually benefitted from them.

The editorial then goes on to temper its enthusiasm. It points out that the fall is probably because of lower food prices than because of reforms.
I don’t understand how the current set of reforms could have benefitted the poor. The poor will benefit when they get better employment. They will get better employment when it is easier to set up industries. I haven’t seen evidence that there has been an increase in employment or that more industries are being set up.

If anything reforms should have led to a reduction in employment. It is still tough to sack workers in established industries, but import of goods is easier. These two things put together mean that industries are closing down rather than becoming more efficient. It is still difficult to set up new industries because there are still are restrictions like reservations for small-scale industries. (Those small-scale industries, of course, can neither grow nor become more efficient)

So why haven’t the reforms hurt the poor?

(Just to clarify, I support reforms wholehe?rtedly. I want them to move faster.)

A famed Indian composer has ?on a court order barring sales of a hip-hop hit he claims borrowed heavily and without credit from one of his songs in an act of “cultural imperialism.”
A federal judge in Los Angeles on Monday issued an order prohibiting further sales of the song “Addictive” by Truth Hurts unless and until composer Bappi Lahiri is listed on the song’s credits, Anthony Kornarens, an attorney for Lahiri told Reuters. (My Way – Entertainment via Kaush)

He has finally got justice. Till now the plagiarizers used to copy from him and backdate their work to cover their tracks.

Why have they suddenly started co-operating with our police? Have we given them back their princess?
(The story goes that one of their princesses eloped with her Mallu chauffeur and is hiding in God’s own country. UAE wanted her extradited. We refused and so they are pissed off with us.)

There’s a blog dedicated to author Ruskin Bond over at rediff blogs!
Easy publishing = interesting content I guess…

What would I do without the Timesgroup?
It tries to find me a date, it provides me with chat and email, shows me pictures of scantily clad women, brags endlessly about itself, gossips about every party thrown by people in my city – people whose only claim to fame is that they throw parties – and occasionally gives me some news.

Now it is trying to be my secretary as well. You see, the paper version of the Economic Times is rea? by busy executives like me who have only a few seconds to glance at the newspaper. So the guys over at the Times group have thoughtfully highlighted the important portions of the story. So the entire paper now looks as if it has been scribbled over by a marker pen.

The Wayback machine shows only two entries for ravikiran.com, both dating back to 2001, when the domain was not yet in my hands. Wonder what happened to the previous owner of this domain. The last entry is for September 2001.

For a machine with the ambitious purpose of recording all of net history, it seems to be doing a poor job. A future historian will conclude that rediff ceased existing in January 2002.

The Economist is required reading for my loyal readers, but if you’ve been remiss, then here is a balanced article on how the war might be fought and what the risks might be. There are other interesting stuff related to the politics and the economics of the war.

There is also a profile of Hernando de Soto, author of “The Mystery of Capital – Why capitalism triumps in the west and fails everywhere else” (read excerpt here found via the Bharatiya Blog Mela – I am growing to like the name!). He set up the “Other Path” in Peru, which is supposed to have turned poor Peruvians against “The Shining Path” terrorist group. He believes that capitalism and property rights are a potent weapon against terrorism – a man after my own heart.

NASA biography of Kalpana Chawla.
There is already a metablog to track reactions to the crash in the blog world.
This tracked the path of the space shuttle.

The spacecraft Columbia was 21 years old. The NASA space programme seems to have run into quite a lot of problems. Here is an article about someone who had warned of problems before. He also has a site called Nasaproblems.com

Arundhati Roy has spoken again. She has lied again, which is of course the same thing.

It is not a coincidence that the Prime Minister, the Home Minister, the Disinvestment Minister -the men who signed the deal with Enron in India, the men who are selling the country’s infrastructure to corporate multinationals, the men who want to privatize water, electricity, oil, coal, steel, health, education and telecommunication – are all members or admirers of the RSS.

The fact that the RSS is actively obstructing the privatisation and is in fact on her side in this matter is just an inconvenient matter of detail which can be ignored.

The good news is that we’re not doing too badly. There have been major victories. Here in Latin America you have had so many – in Bolivia, you have Cochabamba. In Peru, there was the uprising in Arequipa, In Venezuela, President Hugo Chavez is holding on, despite the U.S. government’s best efforts

Notice the difference? Hugo Chavez is the Marxist President of Venezuela who wreaked his country’s economy and is facing street protests as a result. Other countries are facing spontaneous uprisings, but Venezuela’s is orchestrated by the US!

Let me illustrate what I mean. India – the world’s biggest democracy – is currently at the forefront of the corporate globalization project. Its “market” of one billion people is being prized[sic] open by the WTO. Corporatization and Privatization are being welcomed by the Government and the Indian elite.

Let me illustrate what she means. A few among the “market” of a billion people squat outside Dadar railway station in Bombay. I see them everyday. They cannot afford a house because the government has tried to provide them with affordable housing using a law called the Urban Land Ceiling and Regulation Act. But they can afford Chinese made radios and television sets available for 1/10 th the price of Indian made ones.
Chinese made drills and other pieces of machinery, available at similarly low prices, are helping India’s manufacturers produce cheaper goods.
These drills and other trinkets can be bought now because India has foreign exchange reserves of 71 billion dollars, which she (India, not Arundhati Roy) has earned by selling software and services to other countries.
The raddiwala outside my house does not have a proper shop, but he can afford a mobile phone now, because private players have competed to give him a good deal. He gets a better deal than any villager got during the past 50 years when telecom was a public-sector monopoly

Arundhati Roy wants to put a stop to all that. That is what she means.

There is more at Kakistocracy from whence I got the link.

Look, I am not an environmentalist, but is it worth killing trees to print this?