I am really a man whether I am online or offline, but Realwomenonline (newly started by Ashwini and Shanti) is hosting a Carnival of Vanities feature called Bharatiya Blog Mela (They are looking for a better name for the feature. How ’bout this name: Desi Bloggeran Manch? ) which contains a self-nominated bunch of the week’s best posts. Interesting stuff. Please check it out.

“What difference does it make to the dead, the orphans, and the homeless, whether the mad destruction is wrought under the name of totalitariansim or the holy name of liberty and democracy?”
– Gandhi

He meant it as a rhetorical question, but perhaps, just perhaps there is an answer?

This article says that genes are analogous to software components.

The genetic code is truly digital, in exactly the same sense as computer codes. This is not some vague analogy, it is the literal truth. Moreover, unlike computer codes, the genetic code is universal. Modern computers are built around a number of mutually incompatible machine languages, determined by their processor chips. The genetic code, on the other hand, with a few very minor exceptions, is identical in every living creature on this planet, from sulphur bacteria to giant redwood trees, from mushrooms to men. All living creatures, on this planet at least, are the same “make”.

The consequences are amazing. It means that a software subroutine (that’s exactly what a gene is) can be carried over into another species. This is why the famous “antifreeze” gene, originally evolved by Antarctic fish,can save a tomato from frost damage. In the same way, a Nasa programmer who wants a neat square-root routine for his rocket guidance system might import one from a financial spreadsheet. A square root is a square root is a square root. A program to compute it will serve as well in a space rocket as in a financial projection(Checkbiotech.org )

Interesting, but I found something amiss in the logic. A moment’s thought and I figured out what it was. Reusability does not come spontaneously. It is designed. It is not immediately obvious to a programmer that a particular piece of logic he is coding has potential for reuse. A dumb programmer coding to find the square root, for example is apt to mix up this code with the code he wrote for database access, or some other thing. Someone with some intelligence has to give thought and figure out what bits of code are reusable. Then how comes it that genes which evolved spontaneously have such high modularity and hence reusability?

I think the answer is inheritance – in this case, literal inheritance. LIke software, organisms too evolve from a simple base to more complicated ones. So simple organisms had genes that perform simple functions. When they evolved to complicated ones, the original genes stay the same and new ones get added on to perform the complicated functions.

Hmm… So the analogy is apt after all.

Employing a facet of quantum mechanics that Albert Einstein called “spooky action at a distance,” scientists have taken particles of light, destroyed them and then resurrected copies more than a mile away.

Previous experiments in so-called quantum teleportation moved particles of light about a yard. The findings could aid the sending of unbreakable coded messages, which is limited to a few tens of miles.(Light Particles Are Duplicated More Than a Mile Away Along Fiber – New York Times)

If you try this with humans, you are “not very sure to arrive”.

(Hey quantum mechanics reminds me. Where has BCG teleported him? No updates since January 18th.)

Before the Gulf war [I], India had strong economic ties with Iraq.

From 1987 onwards, more than a third of the projects awarded to Indian companies from overseas clients came from Iraq, which was also a big importer of goods and services and employed 180,000 desi expats as well.

About a quarter of India’s oil imports were sourced directly from Iraq or through a triangular rupee-rouble swap with the Soviet Union. None of these ties exist today.

India’s oil imports are widely diversified, Iraq’s importance as an export market is negligible, India’s reserves are about $69 billion today – compared to about $1 billion during the 1990 crisis, and very few Indians now work in Iraq.

So, our exposure to Iraq is minimal and a war won’t cause any major shocks to the economy.(It’s an oily war – The Economic Times)

But of course:
India stocks up oil, but price shock worries loom – The Economic Times

According to this table , India’s GDP is the fourth largest in the world according when measured according to Purchasing Power Parity (i.e., 2001 GDP according to the CIA factbook in the table).

There is less to this than meets the eye. India’s GDP is still 1/4th that of the US, while her population is 3 1/2 times more. What is interesting is that there is such an enormous difference between GDP according to standard exchange rates(2001 GDP -LAEDC) and PPP rates for India and China. The more this difference, the less the country is integrated with the rest of the world.

Another anomaly is Japan. It is the only country with PPP-GDP less than GDP according to normal Exchange Rates. This means that it is actually much cheaper to import stuff into Japan than it is to buy the same stuff in Japan. At the time of the Japanese boom, this was true even for Japanese made products. The Japanese were actually subsidizing America’s consumption. I don’t know whether it is true now.

All over the world, if you want to oppose something, then all you have to prove is that the rich will benefit out of it. To actually make a plausible case you have to prove that the rich will benefit at the expense of the poor, but in practice this is not required because everyone implicitly assumes that if the rich benefit, it must be at the expense of the poor.

So now in Bombay there is a proposal to improve road conditions, so that traffic moves faster. We hear the usual criticism that better roads benefit the rich because they travel in cars, while the poor travel in local train?.

Even if this were true, what would happen if Bombay got a superefficient rail network and a screwed-up road network? Ultimately people have to get off the trains to go home. If the roads are bad, people will want to stay close to the railway station. This will push up prices of houses close to stations, ensuring that only the rich can afford those houses.

As a general rule, if you ever find a measure explicitly enacted to benefit the poor, you will find that it is the rich who benefit.

Why aren’t they fighting the way we did back in 1942? I mean, why aren’t there demonstrations on the streets, general strikes, protest marches, fiery speeches, etc.? If they really have the support of the people, it takes much less violence to bring the government to a halt. If what is happening over there is a “freedom struggle”, it is being fought in the strangest way possible – as a struggle against its own people.

Just a thought.

This article (via Ashwin) talks of how Shell’s pipeline burst caused ecological damage in Nigeria.
We Evil Capitalists often need to be reminded that environmental problems are real, and they need solutions. We ask for the Government to move out of most areas – but we need the Government to run an efficient court system where such negligience by corporations can be punished.

This post is dedicated to Bernard Woolley, the lovable pedant who is the Private Secretary to the Principal Secretary to Jim Hacker, the minister for Administrative Affairs in Yes Minister
He is the one responsible for such immortal lines as

Jim Hacker: “Now about nailing that leak…”
Bernard Woolley: “I’m sorry to be pedantic, but if you nail a leak you make another.”

If you haven’t read Yes Minister, as opposed to watching it on TV, you haven’t lived

I wonder what he’d say about these poor abused metaphors:

There can be many a slip between the cup and the lip before the last word is said on the privatisation of public sector oil refining and retailing companies, the Hindustan Petroleum (HPCL) and the Bharat Petroleum (BPCL) corporations.(Sand in oil divestment – Indian Express)
Try not to have the last word in an argument while sipping a cup of coffee…

There’s more:
Sitting on an empire of patronage, few ministers want to hack the branch they are perched on.
Where are they sitting on?

I guess this is why George Orwell warned long back:
“Never use a metaphor, simile, or other figure of speech which you are used to seeing in print. “

We Evil Capitalists (ECs) believe that we have a way of achieving world peace. Just get the whole world to trade with one another. If the countries of the world are interdependent, then no one will have an incentive to fight each other, for the obvious reason that bombing your customers or vendors is bad for your bottomline.

So we ECs sometimes dream about getting Natural Gas to India from Iran through Pakistan. Pakistan gets rent for our using its area and we get gas. Both countries will live happily ever after.

But then this happens and we wake up.

I seem to recall that there exists a country whose official position is that a treaty it signed with a neighbouring country in 1971, after thrashing said neighbouring country in a war, overrides an earlier UN resolution passed in 1948 on the same subject.
If you belong to this country and you support your country’s position on the subject, isn’t it a bit inconsistent of you to oppose the American invasion of Iraq on the ground that it is acting unilaterally, disregarding the United Nations?

Just a thought.