Here is an article in The Tech, the MIT newspaper, about the Bhopal disaster (deadly Methyl-isocyanate gas leak in December 1984):
http://tech.mit.edu/V129/N59/chindelevitch.html
Fact:
There were about 23000 deaths (8000 of these were within three days of the disaster) and over 500,000 people were affected.
I find it astounding that even 25 years down the line we have not been able to take the culprits to task and the victims are far from justice. Dow Chemical, the company that now owns Union Carbide which was responsible for the disaster, refuses to accept its liability towards the people of Bhopal.
A deeply sad state of affairs !
Tuesday, December 8, 2009
Friday, December 4, 2009
Ray "Crackpot" Comfort
This blog-post is my take on how to deal with crackpots. The answer is simple: you don't deal with them. You just let them blabber.
On Darwin day, free copies of the Origin Of Species were distributed at MIT. I happened to be one of the people receiving a copy. I was puzzled when I saw them distribute it. What could a scientific work like that be beneficial to the distributor ? Soon I found out. The book had a Special Introduction that tried to override Darwin's thesis and try to belittle him as a person.
Here is a super-awesome hilarious video assault on the gimmickry of Ray Comfort - the author of that introduction - and a fitting example of a Crackpot.
Here are a few more gimmicks by Ray Comfort:
http://www.pulltheplugonatheism.com/
http://www.livingwaters.com/
Here are two more examples of masterpieces (of foolishness):
http://www.answersingenesis.org/
http://www.wayofthemaster.com/
Now the question is: you can spend time debating these issues. But is it something that you should spend your time on ? No. The solution is to simply ignore these idiots and just let them rejoice in their idiotic beliefs. There is only so much you can do to heal a crackpot mind, but there are more exciting things in life to do and more important problems to worry about. It is just amazing: how screwed up can a person be ?
There is a well-designed motive behind doing this: it is an easy route to fame and to catch the public eye. That's all it is. So, the best response to this is: stop listening to them and stop arguing with them.
As far as I am concerned, this is the first and last time I am going to talk about this whole Intelligent Design bullshit.
On Darwin day, free copies of the Origin Of Species were distributed at MIT. I happened to be one of the people receiving a copy. I was puzzled when I saw them distribute it. What could a scientific work like that be beneficial to the distributor ? Soon I found out. The book had a Special Introduction that tried to override Darwin's thesis and try to belittle him as a person.
Here is a super-awesome hilarious video assault on the gimmickry of Ray Comfort - the author of that introduction - and a fitting example of a Crackpot.
Here are a few more gimmicks by Ray Comfort:
http://www.pulltheplugonatheism.com/
http://www.livingwaters.com/
Here are two more examples of masterpieces (of foolishness):
http://www.answersingenesis.org/
http://www.wayofthemaster.com/
Now the question is: you can spend time debating these issues. But is it something that you should spend your time on ? No. The solution is to simply ignore these idiots and just let them rejoice in their idiotic beliefs. There is only so much you can do to heal a crackpot mind, but there are more exciting things in life to do and more important problems to worry about. It is just amazing: how screwed up can a person be ?
There is a well-designed motive behind doing this: it is an easy route to fame and to catch the public eye. That's all it is. So, the best response to this is: stop listening to them and stop arguing with them.
As far as I am concerned, this is the first and last time I am going to talk about this whole Intelligent Design bullshit.
Wednesday, December 2, 2009
GR lectures at Stanford
I recently came across a set of 12 video lectures on General Relativity (GR) by Leonard Susskind at Stanford University. This is a typical first GR course, at the advanced undergraduate/beginning graduate level. Susskind is a good lecturer and this is a great resource:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hbmf0bB38h0
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hbmf0bB38h0
Wednesday, November 25, 2009
Two Days in Delhi
I have been wanting to write this even since I got back to MIT from India in the end of July. But somehow I never got the time. Tomorrow is Thanksgiving - an American festival (or "holiday" if you so prefer) and we have a long weekend. I cannot resist the temptation of making a comment that American festivals are few and far between. In India, you have a festival almost every two weeks ! So you get used to getting days off.
I started from home early. Caught the morning Shatabdi (the name of an express train) to New Delhi. This train, which is the fastest in India, takes about 3 hours to cover the 250 km distance. It was raining. It wasn't a strong rain - and you would probably not be surprised that even minor glitches like this can cause major delays in India. A ~30 year old guy was sitting next to me in the train. I don't know why but he asked me where I was going. New Delhi - IIT. Next obvious question, "Do you study there ?" "No, I used to." "What happened ?" "I left IIT. I was in Computer Science, I did not like it, so I switched to Physics." I did not want to add MIT into the game. "It seems like you don't study - just like me. You'll always stay behind." Weird. Well, that is the stereotypical answer you can expect if you are not doing some sort of engineering - even if that happens to be from a one room college in the middle of a sugar-cane farm in Punjab.
Anyways, I have gotten used to such people and don't care anymore. I arrived at the New Delhi railway station at noon, two hours behind schedule. Next obvious adventure - getting an auto. I was in no mood to bargain, so I went straight to the pre-paid auto-rickshaw/taxi booth run by the Delhi Police. I was in queue - thankfully not too far behind the ticket-window. Now, you must understand that queues in India do not look like a line - they look more like a huddle - near the window. Suddenly, a gigantic blob of skin came up and pushed its way upto the front of the queue. It was the hardcore-fat-desi-ready-to-fight aunty trying to make use of her feminine-ness to barge herself all the way to the front. I double-checked: there was no special line for women. When the lady in front of me finished, this skin-blob tried to get her hand inside the ticket-window and push money in before me. I told her to move away. She did not. I took her hand and shoved it away. She started pushing me. I pushed her out of the line. She started bad mouthing me, "You are the son of a very decent family." Whatever. The person behind me said, "Don't worry Aunty. You can go after him, before me." Stupid idiot. Anyways, I did not stop to see whether the person behind me actually kept his word.
The auto-rickshaw ride to IIT was relatively pain-free except hold-ups in the Green Park market due to intensive construction work of the Delhi Metro - frantic bids to get the city in shape before the 2010 Commonwealth games - which, to me, seem to be heading towards a disaster. I arrived at IIT, stopped the auto right in front of the side entrance to the main building and went straight to the wind-tunnel.
The wind-tunnel, or wind-t for short is a favorite hangout place for IITD students between lectures and during lunch time. It is a passage-way essentially, with a roof being the first floor of the main building - and due to the buildings and God knows what, there is a steady current of air inside there, hence the name.
I met up with random people there - most of my Computer Science class-fellows. Rahul, Anshul, Bharath, Navneet, Shantanu, Varun, almost everyone. Then I went with Kashish and Shantanu for a lunch at Rainbows - a restaurant in the market opposite the IITD main gate.
We came back and I went to visit some professors. Went to VK Tripathi first, then Kurur, and the Ajit Kumar. Can't remember anything special about the conversations I had with them, but the warmth with which everybody greeted me was so touching. They are professors in a prestigious institute - could I imagine an MIT professor doing that. Probably not. Well, part of it also has to do with general culture in the two places, but that topic is for another day. The essence of the experience was that one can form these deep bonds with people - with friends, with faculty - that you feel at home. There was still the sense of belonging, a deep attachment, a feeling that spoke out loud - "We care, We remember".
Ajit Kumar took me for tea downstairs to the coffee shop beneath the library building. (The Nescafe outlets - the one besides "Holistic" (also a food shop), and the one near Vindhyanchal hostel no longer existed due to an expired contract.) As we were going towards the coffee shop from the main building, I ran into Priyanka - who had to return me my plug converter - which she had used over the summer while she was at MIT and forgot to return it before she left. She had been looking for me all day, but I had no cellphone - so she could not contact me.
There were CS professors having coffee at the coffee shop too. There was S. Arun-Kumar and Subhashis Bannerjee - had a brief chat. They asked me to stop by the department. Then I went to Barista with Priyanka - talked about random things - MIT, her upcoming exchange semester in Vancouver, et. al. Then there was the usual squabble over money - who pays? We split it evenly at the end.
Then I went over to Bharati building - which houses the Computer Science department. Chatted with Suban for a while. SSen dropped by and chatted. Kolin Paul, SAK and Naveen Garg were also seen in the corridor. We talked about the IITD CS curriculum, how it differed from MIT and what changes should be made in the IIT system.
Then I went over to Satpura - to Kashish's room. Later went to Jwala - to order pizza with my hostel mates. We ordered Domino's - Mazzy (my room mate when I was there) gobbling up his three loaves of garlic bread with cheese dip. After the pizza came the time for drinks - went over to the new student canteen which came up after KLS stopped operating after my first year. I remember being miserable for food in my second year because of that missing canteen.
Then we went back to Satpura and listened to some music - classical of course, when the legends are together.
Ankur came in the morning and we went to Connaught Place. We had a couple of beverages at the restaurant called Legend of Connaught. Then we went over to the New Book Depot in CP on the Inner Circle, where I bought Mankiw's economics textbooks. I wanted to visit Twinkle - my cousin who is in 12th grade taking tuition for Medical school entrance exams in Delhi. I wanted to take the Metro to her place. I made multiple calls but her host family was away - having locked her in the house (this is by no means a bad thing ). Somehow the scheduling did not work.
Came back to IIT, went to Barista with Ankur. Made multiple calls to AT - he was away somewhere and was coming back to IIT. Finally he said we could meet - Ankur left. Then I went and chatted with AT at his office. In the middle, I had to leave to bug the IITD Director for my scholarships issue - 13000 rupees from NCERT to me, lying in the coffers of IITD due to their stupid, mindless, horrible rules. Went back to AT's office - Kashish was there. There was also a random guy in his office who had apparently failed a lot of classes and was struggling to keep up. AT was giving advice in his usual but unique and mildly humorous way.
Then the three of us sat under the library building, drinking tea and chatting about random things. He dropped us in his car at Jwalamukhi hostel. I went to meet Bharati Puri - her husband was also at home. It was nice to see her. Then Varun, Kashish and I went to Priya (a multiplex with a cinema and food outlets) to have food. When we came back I went to Vindy to see Ashish. I slept in his room for a while. Then went back to Satpura - packed my stuff, and sat in Shantanu's room for a while. I was walking back to Vindy with my stuff when Papa called to day that they were there at IITD. So I called Ashish and went straight to Jwala - where Ravneet had booked us the visitor room for the four odd hours we had. Everybody was in the Jwala visitor room for a while - talking. Then people left. I slept for a while. Woke up in the morning. Bathed. Departed for the airport. ~24 hours later I was in JFK.
It was funny how hectic those two two days were. Yet so enjoyable. Meeting everyone - getting to know that people care for you. They want to spend time with you - taking out time from their schedules. Here in the US, everyone is on his own. People run about, doing their tasks to inordinate perfection, but what is lacking is that spirit of being connected - to one another, to folks, to teachers, to friends. Why did I always have people around me those two days ? Were they not in the middle of a semester and had crazy amount of work ?
I struggle to find the right mix of India and the US, the east and the west. This is a gigantic question, and extremely important. Hope I can find a way to preserve those qualities that I inculcated back home while I live here at MIT.
I started from home early. Caught the morning Shatabdi (the name of an express train) to New Delhi. This train, which is the fastest in India, takes about 3 hours to cover the 250 km distance. It was raining. It wasn't a strong rain - and you would probably not be surprised that even minor glitches like this can cause major delays in India. A ~30 year old guy was sitting next to me in the train. I don't know why but he asked me where I was going. New Delhi - IIT. Next obvious question, "Do you study there ?" "No, I used to." "What happened ?" "I left IIT. I was in Computer Science, I did not like it, so I switched to Physics." I did not want to add MIT into the game. "It seems like you don't study - just like me. You'll always stay behind." Weird. Well, that is the stereotypical answer you can expect if you are not doing some sort of engineering - even if that happens to be from a one room college in the middle of a sugar-cane farm in Punjab.
Anyways, I have gotten used to such people and don't care anymore. I arrived at the New Delhi railway station at noon, two hours behind schedule. Next obvious adventure - getting an auto. I was in no mood to bargain, so I went straight to the pre-paid auto-rickshaw/taxi booth run by the Delhi Police. I was in queue - thankfully not too far behind the ticket-window. Now, you must understand that queues in India do not look like a line - they look more like a huddle - near the window. Suddenly, a gigantic blob of skin came up and pushed its way upto the front of the queue. It was the hardcore-fat-desi-ready-to-fight aunty trying to make use of her feminine-ness to barge herself all the way to the front. I double-checked: there was no special line for women. When the lady in front of me finished, this skin-blob tried to get her hand inside the ticket-window and push money in before me. I told her to move away. She did not. I took her hand and shoved it away. She started pushing me. I pushed her out of the line. She started bad mouthing me, "You are the son of a very decent family." Whatever. The person behind me said, "Don't worry Aunty. You can go after him, before me." Stupid idiot. Anyways, I did not stop to see whether the person behind me actually kept his word.
The auto-rickshaw ride to IIT was relatively pain-free except hold-ups in the Green Park market due to intensive construction work of the Delhi Metro - frantic bids to get the city in shape before the 2010 Commonwealth games - which, to me, seem to be heading towards a disaster. I arrived at IIT, stopped the auto right in front of the side entrance to the main building and went straight to the wind-tunnel.
The wind-tunnel, or wind-t for short is a favorite hangout place for IITD students between lectures and during lunch time. It is a passage-way essentially, with a roof being the first floor of the main building - and due to the buildings and God knows what, there is a steady current of air inside there, hence the name.
I met up with random people there - most of my Computer Science class-fellows. Rahul, Anshul, Bharath, Navneet, Shantanu, Varun, almost everyone. Then I went with Kashish and Shantanu for a lunch at Rainbows - a restaurant in the market opposite the IITD main gate.
We came back and I went to visit some professors. Went to VK Tripathi first, then Kurur, and the Ajit Kumar. Can't remember anything special about the conversations I had with them, but the warmth with which everybody greeted me was so touching. They are professors in a prestigious institute - could I imagine an MIT professor doing that. Probably not. Well, part of it also has to do with general culture in the two places, but that topic is for another day. The essence of the experience was that one can form these deep bonds with people - with friends, with faculty - that you feel at home. There was still the sense of belonging, a deep attachment, a feeling that spoke out loud - "We care, We remember".
Ajit Kumar took me for tea downstairs to the coffee shop beneath the library building. (The Nescafe outlets - the one besides "Holistic" (also a food shop), and the one near Vindhyanchal hostel no longer existed due to an expired contract.) As we were going towards the coffee shop from the main building, I ran into Priyanka - who had to return me my plug converter - which she had used over the summer while she was at MIT and forgot to return it before she left. She had been looking for me all day, but I had no cellphone - so she could not contact me.
There were CS professors having coffee at the coffee shop too. There was S. Arun-Kumar and Subhashis Bannerjee - had a brief chat. They asked me to stop by the department. Then I went to Barista with Priyanka - talked about random things - MIT, her upcoming exchange semester in Vancouver, et. al. Then there was the usual squabble over money - who pays? We split it evenly at the end.
Then I went over to Bharati building - which houses the Computer Science department. Chatted with Suban for a while. SSen dropped by and chatted. Kolin Paul, SAK and Naveen Garg were also seen in the corridor. We talked about the IITD CS curriculum, how it differed from MIT and what changes should be made in the IIT system.
Then I went over to Satpura - to Kashish's room. Later went to Jwala - to order pizza with my hostel mates. We ordered Domino's - Mazzy (my room mate when I was there) gobbling up his three loaves of garlic bread with cheese dip. After the pizza came the time for drinks - went over to the new student canteen which came up after KLS stopped operating after my first year. I remember being miserable for food in my second year because of that missing canteen.
Then we went back to Satpura and listened to some music - classical of course, when the legends are together.
Ankur came in the morning and we went to Connaught Place. We had a couple of beverages at the restaurant called Legend of Connaught. Then we went over to the New Book Depot in CP on the Inner Circle, where I bought Mankiw's economics textbooks. I wanted to visit Twinkle - my cousin who is in 12th grade taking tuition for Medical school entrance exams in Delhi. I wanted to take the Metro to her place. I made multiple calls but her host family was away - having locked her in the house (this is by no means a bad thing ). Somehow the scheduling did not work.
Came back to IIT, went to Barista with Ankur. Made multiple calls to AT - he was away somewhere and was coming back to IIT. Finally he said we could meet - Ankur left. Then I went and chatted with AT at his office. In the middle, I had to leave to bug the IITD Director for my scholarships issue - 13000 rupees from NCERT to me, lying in the coffers of IITD due to their stupid, mindless, horrible rules. Went back to AT's office - Kashish was there. There was also a random guy in his office who had apparently failed a lot of classes and was struggling to keep up. AT was giving advice in his usual but unique and mildly humorous way.
Then the three of us sat under the library building, drinking tea and chatting about random things. He dropped us in his car at Jwalamukhi hostel. I went to meet Bharati Puri - her husband was also at home. It was nice to see her. Then Varun, Kashish and I went to Priya (a multiplex with a cinema and food outlets) to have food. When we came back I went to Vindy to see Ashish. I slept in his room for a while. Then went back to Satpura - packed my stuff, and sat in Shantanu's room for a while. I was walking back to Vindy with my stuff when Papa called to day that they were there at IITD. So I called Ashish and went straight to Jwala - where Ravneet had booked us the visitor room for the four odd hours we had. Everybody was in the Jwala visitor room for a while - talking. Then people left. I slept for a while. Woke up in the morning. Bathed. Departed for the airport. ~24 hours later I was in JFK.
It was funny how hectic those two two days were. Yet so enjoyable. Meeting everyone - getting to know that people care for you. They want to spend time with you - taking out time from their schedules. Here in the US, everyone is on his own. People run about, doing their tasks to inordinate perfection, but what is lacking is that spirit of being connected - to one another, to folks, to teachers, to friends. Why did I always have people around me those two days ? Were they not in the middle of a semester and had crazy amount of work ?
I struggle to find the right mix of India and the US, the east and the west. This is a gigantic question, and extremely important. Hope I can find a way to preserve those qualities that I inculcated back home while I live here at MIT.
Monday, October 26, 2009
Diwali
I found this link to be a collection of awesome Diwali photos. Check it out. I got this link from the g-chat status message of Tejasvi Venumadhav on October 26 at about 11:30 pm EST.
http://www.boston.com/bigpicture/2009/10/diwali_2009.html
http://www.boston.com/bigpicture/2009/10/diwali_2009.html
Saturday, September 5, 2009
The Ideal of a Universal Religion
During my discussions with friends, I have often been asked, "Are you religious?". I have often tried to figure out what exactly being religious entails. I do not go to a temple every Tuesday, nor do I believe in metaphysics of any religion. I am a student of science after all. The idea of the world being created in seven days, or the river Ganga flowing out of the locks of Shiva do not mean anything to me in their direct sense of meaning. In that sense, I am not religious. I am not a Hindu who chants the Gayatri Mantra hundred times or a day, or a Muslim who reads the Namaaz five times a day, or a Christian who goes to church every Sunday, or a Sikh who chants the Japji Sahib first thing every morning, or a Jew who absolutely refrains from work on Saturdays.
With the passage of time, I came up with the following answer to the question "Are you religious?" "No. I am not religious, but I do believe in God. God, not as a creator, but the ideal human being whom I would like to emulate in every step of my life." I was not satisfied with this answer, it raised more questions than it answered. I have never been able to articulate a satisfactory answer: I had the ideas in my head, but language limitations always prevented me from sharing those ideas with friends in a meaningful way.
Today I rediscovered a saying that encapsulates my ideas about religion and God. I remember Papa told us about this Swami Vivekananda quote when we were in 5th grade or thereabouts. It says:
"Each soul is potentially divine. The goal is to manifest this divinity within by controlling nature, external and internal. Do this either by work or worship or psychic control or philosophy---by one or more or all of these---and be free. This the whole of religion. Doctrines or dogmas or rituals or books or temples or forms are but secondary details."
This is the idea of religion that I believe in.
With the passage of time, I came up with the following answer to the question "Are you religious?" "No. I am not religious, but I do believe in God. God, not as a creator, but the ideal human being whom I would like to emulate in every step of my life." I was not satisfied with this answer, it raised more questions than it answered. I have never been able to articulate a satisfactory answer: I had the ideas in my head, but language limitations always prevented me from sharing those ideas with friends in a meaningful way.
Today I rediscovered a saying that encapsulates my ideas about religion and God. I remember Papa told us about this Swami Vivekananda quote when we were in 5th grade or thereabouts. It says:
"Each soul is potentially divine. The goal is to manifest this divinity within by controlling nature, external and internal. Do this either by work or worship or psychic control or philosophy---by one or more or all of these---and be free. This the whole of religion. Doctrines or dogmas or rituals or books or temples or forms are but secondary details."
This is the idea of religion that I believe in.
Monday, August 31, 2009
Two Good Resources for Popular Physics
For all people who want to know more about the beauty and secrets of physics, here are two very good non-technical resources:
1) The Cosmic Variance Blog. A Blog run by several authors including Caltech's Sean Carroll.
2) Blogging Heads. This site is not specifically for physics. It contains several good dialogues between people who know what they are talking about.
Have Fun !
1) The Cosmic Variance Blog. A Blog run by several authors including Caltech's Sean Carroll.
2) Blogging Heads. This site is not specifically for physics. It contains several good dialogues between people who know what they are talking about.
Have Fun !
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