Political correctness vs Islamic fundamentalism

Nick Cohen writes about the brave secularist Bangladeshi bloggers:

Liberals in Bangladesh are therefore on both Islamist death lists and police arrest lists. If killers with meat cleavers don’t get them, cops with warrants will. To Bangladesh’s shame, the state has threatened friends and allies of Ahmed and Roy with prison for the crime of “hurting religious sentiments” and jeopardising “communal harmony”.

Lenin said: “The capitalists will sell us the rope with which we will hang them.” Islamists must feel the same about the “moderate” governments they want to destroy. Instead of taking extremists on and upholding human rights, Bangladesh justifies extremism by turning on the liberal critics of religion and treating them as criminals. In one of the most pathetic interviews you’ll ever read, Sajeeb Wazed, the son of Sheikh Hasina told Reuters that his mother had found it prudent to offer only private condolences to Roy’s family after his assassination. Although “we believe in secularism”, the wretched man explained, the prime minister could not make a public stand “because our opposition party plays that religion card against us relentlessly, we cannot come out strongly. It’s about perception, not about reality.” (Incidentally, they are both related to Tulip Siddiq, the new Labour MP for Hampstead and Kilburn.)

Avijit Roy lost his life because he wanted to change reality, not perception. He knew the dangers, but knew too that there are fights that cannot be ducked. “Those who think victory will be realised without any bloodshed are living in a fool’s paradise,” he wrote before his death. “We risk our lives the moment we started wielding our pens against religious bigotry and fundamentalism.”

Compare the bravery of Bangladeshi intellectuals with the attitude of the bulk of the western intelligentsia. Whole books could be written on why it failed to argue against the fascism of our age – indeed I’ve written a couple myself – but the decisive reason is a fear that dare not speak its name. They are frightened of accusations of racism, frightened of breaking with the consensus, frightened most of all of violence. They dare not admit they are afraid. So they struggle to produce justifications to excuse their dereliction of duty. They turn militant religion into a rational reaction to poverty or western foreign policy. They maintain there is a moral equivalence between militant religion and militant atheism.

 

Water use: top 10 countries in 2010

From an IMF publication (PDF):
The 'Agricultural Land Area' heading is wrong, it is the total land area of the country.  Noteworthy are that Pakistan is the most water-intensive (water used per unit of GDP) country, and that India's per capita water use is so much higher than China's. 

Life as a dhimmi - 16

A formula for a successful school

This National Public Radio story on Brimley Elementary School in Brimley, Michigan should be listened to; but at least read the transcript.

Salient points below:

...
Brimley Elementary serves two groups that often struggle academically. Of the 300 students, more than half are Native American. Many come from low-income families.
...
At this school, American Indian students are outperforming other Natives in the state. The school as a whole performs above the statewide average for all schools, and on some tests, the low-income students are performing at the same level as kids from wealthier families.
...
First-graders who are having a tough time with reading and writing get one-on-one time with a specialist. There's an intervention teacher for kids in fourth, fifth and sixth grades — they mostly focus on math. There are teachers' aids to help out in all the kindergarten, first- and second-grade classrooms. And class sizes are small, averaging 22 kids.
...
There's one more thing. The teachers are constantly assessing their students to make sure they're where they need to be.
...
And based on the assessments, the bottom one-third of students get a lot of extra help and support.

 

India: Japan's Softbank investing in Solar Power

Widely reported in the media,

The Japanese telecoms giant Softbank has announced plans to invest around $20 billion in solar-energy-power projects in India, joining forces with the country’s Bharti Enterprises and Taiwan’s Foxconn as the Indian government targets a massive expansion in the country’s solar output from some 3 gigawatts today to 100 gigawatts by 2022.

Announcing Softbank’s plans, the company’s chief executive Masayoshi Son said, “India can become probably the largest country for solar energy,” Reuters reports.

“India has two times the sunshine of Japan. The cost of construction of the solar park is half of Japan. Twice the sunshine, half the cost, that means four times the efficiency,” Son said. The Softbank venture is aiming at generating least 20 gigawatts of energy — a goal which, if realized, will be a significant boost to Modi’s plans to develop India’s renewable energy infrastructure.

Arun Jaitley at the American Enterprise Institute

Link to the AEI page (no transcript yet).

Youtube:


My commentary:

The questions posed to Arun Jaitley reflect the right-wing ideological bent of the AEI.   They wanted to know whether it is appropriate to compare Modi to Reagan or Thatcher.   They wanted to know whether Jaitley would recommend the Indian-model or Chinese-model to an African finance minister.  And so on.  Basically, I perceive an American right-wing need to use any Indian economic  success as a way of promoting their ideological compulsions with the American electorate, and worldwide, too.

In his responses, Jaitley was very non-ideological.  He said that the problem in India that the government has to address is the 25-30% of people who are in poverty and often in distress, and thus cannot be Reaganesque or Thatcherite.  He must do the 300 small doable things rather than the one big ideological statement that will run into controversy and block everything else.  That every country must assess its own problems and figure out how to address them based on its circumstances. 

A good example is when Jaitley pointed out that he can count on the support of public sector banks for the financing of infrastructure projects and for creating bank accounts for the hundreds of millions of people not covered in the banking sector; the private sector banks are not able to deliver.  So he is in no rush to privatize the public sector banks; he is committed to reducing government equity in those banks. (See this news-item as to why the 125 million new bank accounts are such a big deal.  Among other things, leakage in subsidies to poor people for things like cooking gas or kerosene can be eliminated by government direct-deposit into their bank account.) 

The contrast with the questions Jaitley met with in the Council on Foreign Relations session are marked.  The audience in the CFR wanted to know how Jaitley would address specific problems.  The AEI audience seemed to want to know how Jaitley would advance a free market ideology.  At least in this session, it seemed to me that Jaitley is more interested in solving the problems faced by India's people than adhering to ideological purity. 

China-India comparison

In terms of size of economy in nominal dollar terms, India today is where China was in 2005. (I'm not sure I have it in constant dollars).   In terms of growth rate, China was clocking 10-11% growth rates around 2005, India is today at 7.5-7.8%.  In terms of trade, China's exports of goods and services in 2005 were 37% of GDP (World Bank http://data.worldbank.org/indicator/NE.EXP.GNFS.ZS/countries?page=1 ).  India's today (2013) is 25.2% of GDP.  Incidentally, China's today (2013) is 26.4% of GDP.   China's foreign exchange reserves reached a trillion dollars in October 2006.  India's today are around $350 billion.  China was running huge trade surpluses, India is running at a deficit.

China's growth around 2005 was very much export-led.  I'm not sure how to characterize India's growth.

In 2005, China's domestic credit to the private sector was 113% of GDP.  Today (2013) India's is 52% of GDP. ( http://data.worldbank.org/indicator/FS.AST.PRVT.GD.ZS )

India Power Sector

Via BRF, some tidbits:

1. With 40,000 MW of stalled projects coming online soon, states are scrambling to upgrade their transmission infrastructure.

2. First time in India's history annual power generation crossed 1 trillion units.

3. CEA's data for April 2015 installed capacity (PDF).  The comment added is:

Total nationwide installed capacity: 272.687GW . Between January and April, the number went up from 258GW to 272GW, a significant gain of 14GW in just one quarter. That's equal to the entire operational electricity capacity of a certain unfriendly neighbouring western country, added in a single quarter.

More on air pollution and energy in India

Wiki says:

Some 800 million Indians use traditional fuels – fuelwood, agricultural waste and biomass cakes – for cooking and general heating needs. These traditional fuels are burnt in cook stoves, known as chulah or chulha in some parts of India. Traditional fuel is inefficient source of energy, its burning releases high levels of smoke, PM10 particulate matter, NOX, SOX, PAHs, polyaromatics, formaldehyde, carbon monoxide and other air pollutants. Some reports, including one by the World Health Organisation, claim 300,000 to 400,000 people in India die of indoor air pollution and carbon monoxide poisoning every year because of biomass burning and use of chullahs. Traditional fuel burning in conventional cook stoves releases unnecessarily large amounts of pollutants, between 5 to 15 times higher than industrial combustion of coal, thereby affecting outdoor air quality, haze and smog, chronic health problems, damage to forests, ecosystems and global climate. Burning of biomass and firewood will not stop, these reports claim, unless electricity or clean burning fuel and combustion technologies become reliably available and widely adopted in rural and urban India. The growth of electricity sector in India may help find a sustainable alternative to traditional fuel burning.

This should help, I hope, place Delhi's pollution problems in the right context.

India: Nuclear Power

As far as the atmosphere and CO2 is concerned, nuclear power is clean.  Nuclear power is only a small part of India's electricity generation.  Recent news is that India is on track to double its nuclear energy generation capacity over the next five years.  Also with the lifting of various international sanctions, uranium fuel is available for existing plants and "capacity utilisation of nuclear power plants has improved from 50% in 2008-09 to more than 80% now".

Further, today we are told

India's nuclear programme is set to get a huge boost thanks to three big changes. First, Japan has asked India for a dedicated nuclear reactor site, signaling that not only is it willing to shed all inhibitions of doing nuclear commerce with India but is also keen to be counted with the US, France and Russia as a power building nuclear parks here.

Second, India is giving big contracts for six reactors each to US blue-chip companies GE and Westinghouse. This is a big shift from India's long-standing policy of signing deals for two reactors at one go. The six-reactor deal with the two American companies will mean cheaper pricing for India.

Third, a critical component of the nuclear industry, the insurance structure, will be activated next month when Nuclear Power Corporation of India Ltd (NPCIL) buys a nuclear insurance policy at Rs 100-crore premium from a consortium that includes General Insurance Corporation (GIC) and a group called Nuclear Risk Insurers from Britain.

The goal, per this news-item is to increase nuclear power generation 14-fold over the next two decades.

-----

The seven horses: the prime minister said: “Like the chariot of Surya Bhagwan (Sun God) has seven horses, we need seven horses for energy in today’s age. While thermal, gas, hydro and nuclear are just four, the other three include solar, wind and biomass.” Per this news-item the goals are 100GW of solar power; 60GW of wind power; 10GW of hydro and 20GW MW of biofuel energy by 2022.

But coal will remain the major source of energy with its implications on pollution and CO2. Modi wants to replace old plants with cleaner new ones. The question to me is - where will the huge financing for all of this come from?

Arun Jaitley at CFR

Arun Jaitley at the Council on Foreign Relations : follow the link for video and a transcript.  Or watch it below:

Air Pollution and Clean Power

Regarding air pollution: Was Pittsburgh in the 1940s-50s worse than modern New Delhi or Beijing?  Was Los Angeles as bad? This set of pictures of then and now may help.

Rich capitalists in the West want Indians to go without electric power rather than cut back themselves on carbon dioxide emissions.  They do not have the temerity to demand this of China.  They mask all this as a pious concern about air pollution in India.

The Western meat-lover's diet - diet alone - is 3.3 tons of CO2  per year.  If he drives a car or flies to Europe for a vacation, he rapidly adds up. E.g., a round trip from New York to Paris, one that a Paul Krugman, for instance, might often take, adds another 0.93 tons.  A chap driving 12,000 miles in a 2013 Ford Pickup adds 4.9 metric tons of C02 to the atmosphere.

This World Bank number is a few years out of date, but Indian per capita CO2 emission is 1.7 tons per year (2010-2014).

----
There is no denying that clean, carbon-neutral energy is important for India and for the planet.  In that regard, the target for solar power in India is ambitious.  Is is unrealistic?

According to the latest announcement, achieving the 100 GW target will require around 600,000 crore, or approximately $100 billion.

 .....

According to Bridge to India, there are a number of challenges and setbacks in the government’s way to achieving these targets, including land acquisition, grid infrastructure, and financing. The group found that it would take around $40 billion worth of debt for the country to reach the 60 GWs of utility-scale solar it aims to install by 2022. 

The American Republican Party is in denial about climate change, just listen to its Presidential aspirtants. The GOP hardly enables infrastructure investment within America.  It is therefore likely that however this plays out, America will not play a significant role in helping finance clean power for India.  It might behoove Americans (except Sun Edison and First Solar and such), then, to keep silent rather than poking at India.

----
Forbes, India, has an article about all the obstacles to achieving a 100 GW solar power target.

The government, despite pushing for the development of renewable energy, did not specify a roadmap to achieve its proposed targets in the Union Budget of 2015: The announcements of reduced taxes and increased buy-back rates made in the budget would have negligible effect on the cost of production. But Vineet Mittal, vice-chairman of Welspun Renewables, is confident of policy changes in the future: “Prime Minister Modi is passionate about clean energy. He understands the energy sector better than other politicians because he turned it around for Gujarat… The MNRE and Piyush Goyal [minister of state with independent charge for power, coal and new & renewable energy] were very scientific about this. They’ve been consulting us since July.” The Welspun Group has been one of the early movers in the solar sector and has pledged to develop 8.6 GW of solar power. The government has decided to revive the long-pending Renewable Energy Bill which will cover several aspects related to the generation and distribution of clean energy. Mittal believes the Bill, if ratified by Parliament into an Act, should increase RPOs to 15 percent and provide routes for financing, such as infrastructure funds and green energy bonds.

Amitav Ghosh on the Opium Wars

From this review/interview:

Amitav Ghosh, the acclaimed 58-year-old Indian novelist, is describing his extraordinary Ibis trilogy which has just concluded with the publication of the equally stupendous Flood of Fire. A decade in the writing, this exciting, passionate and scathing account of the First Opium War deserves to stand as one of the outstanding achievements of 21st-century literature.

...
In Ghosh’s telling, English merchants’ expansionist policy of selling opium, grown in India by near-slave labour, and sold in China where there was a vast illegal market, did not simply mark the foundations of the British Empire. It signalled a new form of global trade and politics, laying the foundations of outsourcing, migrant populations and truly international foreign relations – all driven by advances in military technology and realpolitik.
...
“It’s strange that the world pays such little attention to the Opium Wars, but opium was perhaps the largest single trade of the 19th century. All the profits went to England. All the work was done by Indians. All the silver came from China which was consuming it. It was one of the most iniquitous things that has ever happened in the history of mankind.”

India's Ambitious Power Plans

Via BRF, this outline of India's planned power sector growth:

The government has not announced how much power is required to ensure 24 x 7 supply to all Indian households by 2019. But in its reports it talks of an addition of more than 200,000 Mw of power capacity in eight years by 2022. This is more than three-fourths of the power capacity added by the country over six decades.

To put this 200,000-Mw target in perspective: In the 11th Five-Year Plan, India added only about one-fourth of it. The addition in 2007-12 was 54,964 Mw, against a target of 78,700 Mw.

The 12th Five-Year Plan (2012-17), prepared under the United Progressive Alliance (UPA) government, had planned to add 118,536 Mw. Of this, 51,795 Mw was added in the first two years of the Plan, while the remaining 66,740 Mw was to be added by 2017 . But the current government hopes to double this and add 115,603 Mw by 2017. From 2017 to 2022, the government aims to add 101,745 Mw.

This means the power added in three years from 2014-17 will be more than what will be added in the five years after.

ADVERTISING

Even this unprecedented target may not be sufficient to meet the requirements for a 24x7 target, as the government report acknowledges, noting, "these assessments have been for the purpose of transmission planning, and not for assessing generation capacity required for meeting the demands."

 Most of the added power generation will be coal.

India's dependence on coal could have been reduced if there was clarity on how gas production would ramp up. But the state Plans reflect uncertainty on this front. The Andhra Pradesh Plan notes that 2.5 mscmd of gas is being supplied against a requirement of 13 mscmd, just enough for 500 Mw, leaving 2,270 Mw of capacity stranded. It does not clarify how much gas supply it will get in the future. The power ministry calculated that 14,305 Mw of gas-based plants were left stranded in the April 2014-January 2015 period . The government has formulated a new scheme for import of gas to ease the mess in the sector.

The other potential source of energy, large hydropower, locked up in issues of litigation, displacement and environment, has grown at a much lower rate than expected . Only 5,544 Mw of hydro power was installed during the 11th Five-Year Plan, against a target of 15,627 Mw. The government is pushing states in the Northeast to cancel memoranda of association with private players and hand over hydropower projects to the public sector.

Even as the NDA government disentangles the hydropower sector out of the mess, it has given a thrust to the emerging renewable energy sectors, setting a 100-Gw target for solar power and a 60-Gw one for wind power. The rate of growth it desires is unprecedented. But the government is not inclined to formally announce these numbers as official targets under the UN climate change agreement, to be signed in December 2015 - an indication that these may be more aspirational than real.

Robins

Mr. & Mrs. Robin decided to build a nest in a crab-apple shrub right next to an outdoor faucet that I use to water my backyard.  Mrs. Robin went ahead and laid eggs, and I was concerned because there was no way I could avoid going by that shrub quite often, and the Robin family might then abandon the nest.  This picture above I took on May 11 with an iPhone.

But the Robins persisted.  There would be a fluttering in the bush, and a robin would fly out sometimes when I passed by, and that is how I knew that they hadn't given up.

The eggs had hatched by May 26, there were at least 2 babies in the nest that I could make out from a distance, by their upturned beaks. The web says the eggs take 12 to 14 days to hatch, so they likely hatched during around the Memorial Day weekend.

The web says that the baby birds stay in the nest 9-16 days.  After which they leave the nest, not yet ready to fly.  They live on the ground hiding in the bushes, still taken care of by their parents for another couple of weeks.  So one evening when it appeared no one was around, I checked, and the nest was empty.  I thought that I would learn nothing further about this family.

Until this morning, when I was changing out the hummingbird feeder, and right there was this little fellow. It stood still as a rock, petrified I thought, but fifteen minutes later when I checked again, it had gone.

On Delhi's pollution

Fakingnews has two stories:

Celebrations erupt in slums of Mumbai as Delhi declared unlivable by a New York expat

New York Times correspondent leaves Delhi, pollution levels drop dramatically

Sanskrit Immortal

http://swarajyamag.com/columns/verses-which-produce-magic-when-re-read/

After explaining some chitrakaavya, the author Suhas Mahesh writes:

The Rāmāyaṇa is atleast 2500 years old. The hanumannāṭaka came more than 1500 years after it. And more than a millennium later came Rāma Śāstrī. And half a century later came Bacchu Subbarāyagupta. This literary chain may not seem unusual at first glance, yet it is an extraordinary thing to happen in a language. Languages come with lifetimes of less than a millennium. Old English is as intelligible to me as Hebrew. Reading Geoffrey Chaucer is like wading through quicksand. Time will ensure libraries move Shakespeare from the literature section to history section. But frozen in time by the spell of Pāṇini, only Classical Sanskrit will remain untouched. A few hundred years from now, a young boy (or girl), having taught himself Sanskrit, may decide to write a work to top Rāma Śāstrī. The poet to top Kālidasa may well be born a thousand years from now. My own descendants may spend a sunday afternoon, sipping soylent, and laughing at their ancestor’s metrical misadventures. How absurd it is to label such a language dead! Immortal is more like it.

How was Niall Ferguson ever taken seriously?

Jonathan Chiat explains.

Committing the odd factual error is an occupational hazard in journalism. For Niall Ferguson, the commission of error is more than a hazard. It’s a cherished way of life. Ferguson’s distinct contribution to the contemporary political debate is the fascinating juxtaposition of his prestige — author, Harvard professor, resident faculty member of the Minda de Gunzburg Center for European Studies, senior fellow at the Hoover Institution, omnipresent talking head, and all-around handsome authority figure — with an inability to get his facts straight. There is, of course, a link between the two aspects of Ferguson’s profile: Only a figure of his standing would have the ability to publish wildly erroneous claims in major mainstream publications.

Ferguson has finally put his practice into theory. Apparently aware that his habits require a broader defense than “whoops,” his latest Spectator column assails his many fact-checkers for their literalness, and gestures toward a novel theory of truth.

.....  {Some examples}

Since David Cameron is irrefutably good, and Obama irrefutably bad, Ferguson should be free to make any factual statement on behalf of the former and against the latter without being hounded by “fact-checkers.”

Two phase Indo-European movement

NYT:  In an article on the ancestry of Europeans based on new DNA findings:

Paul Heggarty, a linguist at the Max Planck Institute of Evolutionary Anthropology, said that the new studies were important, but were still too limited to settle the debate over the origins of Indo-European. “I don’t think we’re there yet,” he said.

Dr. Heggarty noted that the studies showed the arrival of Yamnaya in Central Europe about 4,500 years ago. But Greek is an Indo-European language, and the oldest evidence of writing in Europe shows that Greek had developed about 3,500 years ago. By then, it was distinct from other Indo-European languages in Southern Europe, like Latin.

If the Yamnaya were the source of Indo-European languages, they would have had to get to southern Europe soon after they made it to Central Europe.

Dr. Heggarty speculated instead that early European farmers, the second wave of immigrants, may have brought Indo-European to Europe from the Near East. Then, thousands of years later, the Yamnaya brought the language again to Central Europe.

This last has been my speculation, too, that the Harappan civilization was Indo-European, and then there was a second wave of Indo-European migration.   That would account for the Indian geography of the Rg Veda with less than 400 words with non-Indo-European roots in its 10,000+ word vocabulary; and the lack of non-Indo-European place names, the horse, etc.,etc.,etc.

The Chinese rip-off of Pakistan?

Much is being made of the promised Chinese investment of $46 billion in Pakistan.

The plans envisage adding 10,400 megawatts of electricity at a cost of $15.5 billion by 2018. 

The China power deals with Pakistan are at $1.5 billion or so per 1000 MW of installed power.

In contrast, in Bangladesh,

"Reliance Power and BPDB today signed a MoU to develop four units of power plants to produce 3,000 MW of electricity with a cost of $3 billion," the company said in a statement. .....Adani Power will set up two coal-fired plants with a total capacity of 1,600 MW that will cost more than $1.5 billion.

The Indian companies are doing it in Bangladesh at $1 billion per 1000 MW.

This is consistent with Tata Power in Vietnam:

Long Phu 3 plant is also expected to cost roughly $2 billion, with a capacity of 2,000 MW.

Back to Pakistan:

The 1,320 megawatts coal-fired power plant, known as Port Qasim Power Project, near Karachi will be jointly carried out by Chinese Power Construction Corp with 51% and Qatar’s Al Mirqab Capital with 49% stakes in the project with a total cost of $2.1 billion.

The above is about $1.6 billion per 1000 MW, and this is without overhead one might think is contributing to the costs in other projects (e.g., setting up coal mining in Thar, or setting up railway capacity to transport coal from the port city Karachi to the interior of Punjab).

Same article, here's the Thar project, where mines will be set up to use coal relatively recently discovered in Thar:

The mining will cost $950 million while $1.1 billion will be required for power generation for the 660 megawatts coal-fired power project, he said.

$1.1B for 660MW works out to about $1.6B per 1000 MW.

It would seem to me that friendship with China is costing Pakistan 50% above the market rate for power plants. The friendship has to be indeed taller than mountains and deeper than seas for it to survive market forces.

I hesitate to call it the Chinese rip-off of Pakistan only because the Pakistanis have successfully extracted billions out of the US of A without giving anything substantial in return; and it may be in their nature to try to do the same with the Chinese.

PS: the cost in the US for a new coal power plant ranges from $3B to $6.6B per 1000 MW but I would expect costs in Pakistan to be more in line with Bangladesh and Vietnam.

Physics - A New Theory to Explain the Higgs Mass

Via a comment by David Metzler on Peter Woit's blog - this article explains a new proposal that explains the mass of the Higgs particle.

Here is the arxiv.org pre-print: http://arxiv.org/abs/1504.07551.

Cosmological Relaxation of the Electroweak Scale

Peter W. Graham, David E. Kaplan, Surjeet Rajendran

(Submitted on 28 Apr 2015)

A new class of solutions to the electroweak hierarchy problem is presented that does not require either weak scale dynamics or anthropics. Dynamical evolution during the early universe drives the Higgs mass to a value much smaller than the cutoff. The simplest model has the particle content of the standard model plus a QCD axion and an inflation sector. The highest cutoff achieved in any technically natural model is 10^8 GeV. 

In all the years since I crashed out of theoretical particle physics, I have not come across any work that I wish I had done. Of course, that may be due to my ignorance.  This, to me, is a strong candidate for such a work.  That too, may be due to my ignorance.   Ignorance is bliss, isn't it?

So I should explain why I think this paper is important.  I think the article at the first link explains to a non-physicist the problem that this paper solves about as well as is possible (until someone like Sabine Hossenfelder decides to write about it, something which we should all devoutly hope for.)

Let's just say that the Standard Model of particle physics has a problem, and the orthodoxy for the past many decades has been to try to solve it by tacking on additional particles and even things such as additional dimensions of space.   This paper solves the problem - provides an ansatz may be more accurate - without adding any such things. Its particular models may ultimately not be viable;  but it has broken the logjam; it is a demonstration that the huge zoo of postulated additional particles and such constructs of the theorists is not necessary to solve the problem, and thus is a good corrective to the last 30-40 years of mainstream particle physics theory.

As far as I can tell, there is nothing in this paper's content that could not have been figured out twenty years ago.  Perhaps it is the salutary shock of finding absolutely no trace at the cutting edge of experiments at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) of the theorists' burgeoning menagerie that enabled the mental break with the orthodoxy.  And thus it should be, physics is an experimental science; it is most certainly not mathematics.

Sarah Haider - transcript

"....an audience on the Left now frightens me nearly as much as an audience of Islamists does."



Transcript of

Sarah Haider: Islam and the Necessity of Liberal Critique
delivered at the
American Humanist Association 74th Annual Conference, May 7-10, 2015, Denver, Colorado.

Photographers?

This was too funny to forget:
Man with DSLR turns out to be a real photographer, IT industry shocked

Begins:

Bangalore. In a shockingly bizarre incident, a man with a DSLR, multiple lenses, and some very expensive camera gear was found to be an actual photographer, and not some IT engineer.

It should be noted that usually people with high end DSLR cameras are thoroughly bored-with-job engineers, desperately trying to find an alternate career in wildlife photography by capturing bored expressions of the wild animals and birds in a local zoo. They also use this passion to indulge in blatant voyeurism by clicking bikini clad women at beaches and passing them off as “candid portraits” on Facebook in hopes of a million “likes”.

Which is why the league of bored IT engineers were alarmed when a real photographer without any connection to the IT industry was found.

The War on Bangladeshi Bloggers

The Times of India reports:

He will be 'The Next', Ananya Azad was warned on a social networking site. A day after 'The Guardian' broke the story of how the 25-year-old Bangladeshi blogger was living a life of fear, Ananya spoke exclusively to TOI on Friday.

Speaking from Dhaka, Ananya — who is on a hit list containing the names of 84 atheist bloggers — said: "I am no stranger to death threats and bloodshed. My father, author Humayun Azad, was attacked on the streets. But what shocked me was the nature of threat that I got on Facebook. It addressed my father as 'Nastiker sardar'. It means the leader of atheists. It said being his son, I would meet a gruesome death. My throat would be slashed at Dhaka University's Raju Bhaskarjya! I feel lodging a police complaint is pointless. Eleven years have passed and the cops haven't been able to do anything about my father's assassins."

Today, Ananya wears a helmet even while walking the streets of Dhaka and moves around in a car with tinted glasses. Leaving Bangladesh is something he is considering after the threat. "Perhaps I need to rethink now. I've stopped writing my blog. I had begun writing a book that's halfway through. Next week, I am planning to go to India." 

Further:

TOI traced another blogger who is now in hiding in Dhaka. On May 12, a gang of masked assailants had chopped blogger Ananta Bijay Das. Ever since Ananta's death, his fellow blogger Monir Hussain has gone into hiding.

Exiled Bangladeshi author Taslima Nasrin, who is now in New York, is trying to help him move out of his country. Monir has stopped writing his blogs. Speaking from an undisclosed location in Dhaka, he said: "For 15 days, I have been locked in a room. No television. No newspapers. I've deactivated my Facebook profile."

Taslima said: "I'm trying to help these bloggers get out of Bangladesh. I am requesting organizations in America and Europe to invite these bloggers to their countries. I have requested the Swedish embassy to grant visa to Monir. Bloggers in Bangladesh are panic-striken. The government isn't giving them any protection."

Monir has heard about Ananya's threat. "Ananta, I and four others had set up the Bigyan O Juktibadi Council since 2005. We also run the Jukti Patrika in Bangladesh. Threats have been coming for the past eight months. On the day Ananta died, I got a call around 9.20 am saying: 'Are you still sleeping? Ananta is lying in the hospital bed. Run...' Three minutes later, I got the same call again. I was numb. I rushed to the hospital to find Ananta dead," the 31-year-old Monir said.

The next day, Monir lost his job of a Bengali lecturer in a private college. "One day, I got a call from an unknown international number and was played a recording from the Holy Quran. I left my rented house in Sylhet to Dhaka. My neighbours later told me that two bikers, their faces covered with helmets, had repeatedly come looking for me. Today, I can't sleep without taking pills. I can almost hear Ananta say — 'they will kill anyone they can lay their hands on. That's how they want to make a name for the organization (Ansarullah Bangla Team)'," he added. Monir, like Ananya, doesn't want to inform the cops. "We believe cops leak most of the information to these extremists," Monir said. 

Further:

However, Bangladeshi film-maker Shahriar Kabir says, "Seeking asylum in another country won't help. One has to ban Jamaat e Islami. There have been 13 attempts on my life. Yet, I haven't left Bangladesh. I carry a gun and don't move out of my house alone."

*On February 15, 2013, Ahmed Rajib Haidar, an architect by profession and an activist in the Shahbagh Ganajagaran Mancha movement, was stabbed to death in Dhaka

*On February 26, 2015, Bangladesh-born US citizen Avijit Roy was hacked to death on the streets for his blogs

*On March 30, 2015, blogger Oyasiqur Rahman was killed.

Sarah Haider: Islam and the Necessity of Liberal Critique (AHA Conference 2015)

Please listen to Sarah Haider on the timid response of liberals to the problems posed by Islam.

My opinion is that absent a liberal critique of Islam, which is often muted from fear of being labelled Islamophobes or racists in the West or communal and non-secular in India, the narrative will be taken over by the violent right-wing in non-Muslim societies. When the topic is a difficult one, the most reason-oriented and committed-to-peace people must speak up and speak up forcefully, without mincing words. They need to own the narrative, they need to be the most outspoken.

Or else, it is my belief, that there will be eventually a global reaction led by people for whom violence is always justifiable and the ensuing war will be the most devastating the world has yet seen.

Song - Maria Mena - Secrets

Prof. C. Christine Fair is incensed that a book she authored was found in bin Laden's library.

The research project that culminated in the 2006 publication of Fortifying Pakistan began in 2004, when I was a new researcher at the United States Institute of Peace (USIP). My boss, Paul Stares, (now at the Council on Foreign Relations) hired me to initiate a South Asia research program. This project was not an easy sell. Most of Washington had long decided that Pakistan was our most allegiant ally in the war on terrorism. That attitude endured until the Obama administration came into office.

Simply put: It was blasphemous to suggest, in 2004, that then-president Musharraf was playing a both sides with Washington. The Bush administration could not countenance such a possibility, or even consider the plausibility of it, given that its attention and resources were focused on Iraq.

 ____

Historians will judge the American Pakistan policy with confusion and contempt. They will logically ask why the Americans continued to treat Pakistan as a partner when it undermined so many salient American interests in the region. They will ask why the American tax payer continued to aid and arm Pakistan, even though it was responsible for the deaths of thousands of Americans and NATO allies in Afghanistan and the deaths of tens of thousands of Afghan allies, in and out of uniform. They will ask why the US government was unable or unwilling to see that Pakistan was not a problematic ally, but rather, a hostile state that cynically manipulated and exploited an impotent and incompetent America.

For years, I hoped that American policy makers would begin appreciating these facts, and change course, rather than wait for our sons and daughters to write this scathing history long after such revelations ceased to matter.

With the US military presence in Afghanistan winding town, there is still time to hold Pakistan to account and begin treating it like the hostile state it is, rather than as the challenging ally so many policy makers delude themselves into believing. This will require courage and leadership across the political spectrum. Unfortunately, such qualities seem chronically lacking in the contemporary American landscape.

Math for Poets and Drummers

Rachel Wells Hall of St. Joseph's University, Philadelphia has a paper (PDF)  about the mathematical discoveries made by ancient Indians when studying the meters of poetry and musical rhythms.

Online degrees

A new twist on online degrees - from Pakistan, where else?

Declan Walsh in the NYT:

Seen from the Internet, it is a vast education empire: hundreds of universities and high schools, with elegant names and smiling professors at sun-dappled American campuses.
....
....

In fact, very little in this virtual academic realm, appearing to span at least 370 websites, is real — except for the tens of millions of dollars in estimated revenue it gleans each year from many thousands of people around the world, all paid to a secretive Pakistani software company.

That company, Axact, operates from the port city of Karachi, where it employs over 2,000 people and calls itself Pakistan’s largest software exporter, with Silicon Valley-style employee perks like a swimming pool and yacht.
.....
....
Hands down, this is probably the largest operation we’ve ever seen,” said Allen Ezell, a retired F.B.I. agent and author of a book on diploma mills who has been investigating Axact. “It’s a breathtaking scam.”

Lots of detail in the NYT here.

Exceptionalism at risk

 http://thewire.in/2015/05/12/india-suggests-us-set-to-up-national-human-rights-commission/

India Suggests US Set Up National Human Rights Commission

By The Wire Staff on 12/05/2015
 

In response to a presentation made by the United States at the UN, India has welcomed the “openness of the US delegation in accepting areas of continuing concern such as racial bias in the criminal justice system; incidents of bias-motivated crimes including ‘those committed against Hindus and Sikhs'; and need for improved safety and living conditions at confinement facilities.”
Addressing the UN Human Rights Council in Geneva on Tuesday during the Universal Periodic Review in which the human rights record of all countries is discussed, India’s ambassador, Ajit Kumar, also said the disproportionate use of force by law enforcement agencies in the US and deficiencies in their procedures “are areas of concern”.

Among the suggestions India made was that the US consider establishing a national human rights commission, though Kumar did not elaborate on what the structure and mandate of such a commission would be.

The US in the past has found fault with the mandate of the Indian NHRC, with the State Department noting, for example, in its periodic report on the human rights situation in India, that the commission had no enforcement powers and “is not empowered to address allegations against military and paramilitary personnel.”

In his intervention at the US, the Indian ambassador also urged Washington to quickly ratify international conventions on the rights of the child (CRC), the elimination of discrimination against women (CEDAW) and on economic, cultural and social rights (CESCR).

India encouraged the US government to “take adequate steps towards gender parity at workplace, protect women from all forms of violence and enhance opportunities in education and health for children from ethnic minorities.”

The Indian ambassador also noted US “efforts towards maintaining respect for privacy and civil liberties while addressing dangers to national security” and requested the American delegation to share more information about this.

USCIRF hypocrisy

Professor Jakob de Roover writes:

The annual reports of the US Commission for International Religious Freedom (USCIRF) have long irked politicians and citizens from countries placed on its ‘watch list’. This is no different in India. In the 2015 report released about a fortnight ago, the country again occupies an unenviable spot in Tier 2, which includes countries where the religious freedom violations engaged in or tolerated by the government are serious.

Striking about this year’s report, however, is its claim that incidents of religiously-motivated and communal violence have ‘reportedly’ increased for three consecutive years in India. “According to Muslim and Christian NGOs that track communal incidents,” it adds, “2014 statistics, yet to be released by the ministry, will be likely higher” than the 823 incidents recorded in 2013.

What is so remarkable about this? Well, the Indian home ministry’s official data about communal incidents for 2014 give a very different picture. The number of incidents saw a significant decrease to 644 in 2014. The USCIRF report also includes Andhra Pradesh, “Chattisgarhi” [sic], and Odisha among states that “tend to have the greatest number of religiously-motivated attacks and communal violence incidents.” Yet the home ministry’s information recorded no incident in Chhattisgarh, just three in Odisha, and five in Andhra Pradesh.

How reliable then are the international religious freedom reports of the US government? The obvious retort to this question is that the home ministry’s data for 2014 must be very biased. But which other unbiased data could establish this bias? When asked this question, an American academic responded as follows: “I don’t have any data, but given who is in charge, it can’t help but be biased.” That, of course, is a knockdown argument.

Other academics point out that many incidents of communal violence remain unreported in India. But surely this is not the issue at stake. The real question is about the number of communal incidents in 2014 relative to the number of such incidents in the two preceding years. The data provided by the home ministry show that this number is lower. Now, are there facts (or well-founded reasons) that prove that in 2014 suddenly a much higher number of communal incidents were not reported than in previous years? If this is not the case, then we can only assume that the average number of unreported incidents has not changed significantly. And if that is the case, then the claims of the USCIRF must be false.

What evidence did the American commission draw upon to come to its conclusions? Its website claims the following: “USCIRF obtains information about violations of religious freedom abroad in multiple ways, including visiting selected countries in order to observe facts on the ground, meeting regularly with foreign officials, religious leaders and groups, victims of religious intolerance, and representatives of civil society, non-governmental organisations, government agencies, and national and international organisations, and keeping abreast of credible news reports.”

Indeed, the 2015 report shows the results of this type of deep research. It mentions conversations with minority religious leaders and NGO representatives. Its repetitive use of the words ‘reportedly’ and ‘report’ is striking: “Incidents of religiously-motivated and communal violence reportedly have increased”; “Christian NGOs and leaders report that their community is particularly at risk…”; “… Muslim communities have reported facing undue scrutiny and arbitrary arrests and detentions”; Indian Christians, converts and missionaries “have reported more frequent harassment and violence …”.

The evidence then seems to amount to impressions of particular people, hearsay, anecdotes and newspaper articles. Clearly, it gives a privileged status to the observations of certain NGOs, religious leaders, and the dominant media, which can hardly count as reliable and ‘unbiased’ sources in these matters. Moreover, the report depends on dubious concepts such as ‘religiously-motivated violence’, but forgets to mention what criteria it used to find out whether violent incidents are ‘religiously-motivated’ or otherwise.

Naturally, the fact that some religious groups feel threatened in their basic freedoms is important. Some Hindu nationalist organisations do commit unacceptable acts of violence against Christians and Muslims. Such crimes need to be addressed by the government. Some Hindutva supporters are also becoming increasingly aggressive online and elsewhere. This problem has to be examined and tackled. But can all of this serve as evidence for grand claims about the disquieting rise of religious freedom violations in India? Does it suffice to make recommendations to the US government about Tier 2 ‘watch lists’ and the like? No, it does not. It appears that forces other than evidence give shape to the claims of the American campaign for international religious freedom.

Which forces might those be?

To answer this question, you'll have to read the article. The title is a giveaway: "USCIRF hypocrisy: It's about the Protestant worldview, not religious freedom".

Seymour Hersh Fail

Seymour Hersh has a poorly constructed article on the killing of Osama bin Laden.

Consider this paragraph: (emphasis added) -

The most blatant lie was that Pakistan’s two most senior military leaders – General Ashfaq Parvez Kayani, chief of the army staff, and General Ahmed Shuja Pasha, director general of the ISI – were never informed of the US mission. This remains the White House position despite an array of reports that have raised questions, including one by Carlotta Gall in the New York Times Magazine of 19 March 2014. Gall, who spent 12 years as the Times correspondent in Afghanistan, wrote that she’d been told by a ‘Pakistani official’ that Pasha had known before the raid that bin Laden was in Abbottabad. The story was denied by US and Pakistani officials, and went no further. In his book Pakistan: Before and after Osama (2012), Imtiaz Gul, executive director of the Centre for Research and Security Studies, a think tank in Islamabad, wrote that he’d spoken to four undercover intelligence officers who – reflecting a widely held local view – asserted that the Pakistani military must have had knowledge of the operation. The issue was raised again in February, when a retired general, Asad Durrani, who was head of the ISI in the early 1990s, told an al-Jazeera interviewer that it was ‘quite possible’ that the senior officers of the ISI did not know where bin Laden had been hiding, ‘but it was more probable that they did [know]. And the idea was that, at the right time, his location would be revealed. And the right time would have been when you can get the necessary quid pro quo – if you have someone like Osama bin Laden, you are not going to simply hand him over to the United States.’

Those are two different things - knowing about OBL's whereabouts before the US raid and knowing of the US mission to capture/kill him.   Hersh raises questions about the second, but two of his three quotes deal with the first.

Carlotta Gall did not raise any question about whether Pakistani officials knew of the US mission.  Her question was about knowing OBL's whereabouts before the US raid:

Soon after the Navy SEAL raid on Bin Laden’s house, a Pakistani official told me that the United States had direct evidence that the ISI chief, Lt. Gen. Ahmed Shuja Pasha, knew of Bin Laden’s presence in Abbottabad. The information came from a senior United States official, and I guessed that the Americans had intercepted a phone call of Pasha’s or one about him in the days after the raid. “He knew of Osama’s whereabouts, yes,” the Pakistani official told me. The official was surprised to learn this and said the Americans were even more so. Pasha had been an energetic opponent of the Taliban and an open and cooperative counterpart for the Americans at the ISI. “Pasha was always their blue-eyed boy,” the official said. But in the weeks and months after the raid, Pasha and the ISI press office strenuously denied that they had any knowledge of Bin Laden’s presence in Abbottabad.

.....
.....
In trying to prove that the ISI knew of Bin Laden’s whereabouts and protected him, I struggled for more than two years to piece together something other than circumstantial evidence and suppositions from sources with no direct knowledge.

Durrani's interview with al Jazeera is available online though officially blocked in the US, and all that comes from there that this is a person who has no morals in the pursuit of his goals.  Why one would trust any information from him, I don't know.  In any case, he does not deal with the issue of whether Pakistani officials knew beforehand of the US raid.

That leaves Imtiaz Gul, whose sources just assert "the Pakistani military must have had knowledge of the operation" -- it is obvious that this is a conclusion driven by reasoning from some assumptions, and not from direct knowledge.

PS: Vox has a complete takedown.

Curiouser and curiouser

Al Qaeda in the Indian Subcontinent (AQIS) released a statement in which they claim credit for the murder of several Bangladeshis and Pakistanis.

Asim Umar, the Indian-born head of al-Qaeda in the Indian Subcontinent, has claimed responsibility for a string of attacks that killed several secular writers and intellectuals in Bangladesh and Pakistan, including Avijit Roy who was hacked to death on a Dhaka street in February.

“Like the companions of the Prophet who defended him with their lives,” Umar said in a statement that was released online over the weekend, “the mujahideen of al-Qaeda have despatched to hell many who blasphemed against God, and insulted the Prophet.”

In addition to Roy, Umar named slain Bangladeshi intellectual Ahmad Rajib Haidar and Rajshahi University scholar AKM Shaiful Islam as victims of al-Qaeda hit squads. His statement also claimed the killing of Karachi University Islamic Studies scholar Shakeel Auj, assassinated last year while on his way to a meeting with Iranian diplomats. Auj had been condemned by Islamist clerics in Karachi for is purportedly blasphemous views.

The statement also mentioned an Urdu blogger Aneeka Naz as a victim. Naz, an academic, was reported killed in a 2012 car traffic accident, in which her husband was injured. Naz is not known to have held contentious political views.

“From Waziristan to Charlie Hebdo, this war is one,” Umar said, “whether it is waged upon us with drones or with Charlie Hebdo’s pen, with the International Monetary Fund or World Bank’s policies, or with the satanic conspiracy of Kerry-Lugar bill, which sought to humiliate the believers, or whether it is waged with the hate-filled words of Narendra Modi, which call for Muslims to be burned live.”

What on earth is the Kerry-Lugar bill doing in this list of grievances?  The people who were most staunchly against the bill and felt "humiliated" by it was the Pakistani Army.  Why would al Qaeda care about it in the least?

As SSridhar wrote on BRF:

The reference to Kerry-Lugar bill by AQIS and claiming it to have 'humiliated the Believers' is a dead giveaway that AQIS and the Pakistani Army have coalesced.

Despite stiff competition from ISIS in Iraq, Pakistan remains the epicenter of global terrorism.

Song

Some neuron fired for some reason and this song that I had forgotten for aeons came to mind.

Asha Bhosle, Hare Kaanch Ki Chooriyan, 1967.   I don't think I've seen the movie.

About the Wall Street Journal editorial page

Prof. Brad DeLong writes:

The point of the Wall Street Journal editorial page is to pander to the prejudices of its core readers. It is not as malevolent and destructive as Fox News, which takes its mission to be to scare its core readers so that they keep their eyeballs glued to the screen so that those eyeballs can be sold to advertisers. But its mission of reinforcing evidence-free right-wing epistemic closure against any incursion of empirical reality is a malevolent and destructive one.

As to why he writes the above, you'll have to read the article.

To Evangelists anywhere, and in Delhi in particular.

The new ArchBishop of Delhi, per the Wall Street Journal.

http://blogs.wsj.com/indiarealtime/2012/12/23/qa-new-delhis-next-archbishop

The next ArchBishop of Delhi says that "the religious and cultural pluralism within which the Christian community finds itself" is a problem for the Church, and it only gets better from there on.

WSJ: What do you think will be the main challenges you will face as the Archbishop of a diocese which includes a mega city?

Rt. Rev. Couto: The cosmopolitan nature of the Church in Delhi and the consequent multicultural situation of the people I am called to serve will certainly be one of the main challenges.
....
WSJ: Do you think Catholics are called to evangelize and convert others to Catholicism?

Rt. Rev. Couto: The Church exists to evangelize. She can never run away from the mandate Christ has given to her to proclaim the Good News in season and out of season and to place before all nations the truth of the Kingdom of God.
....
I also pray that God may give numerous new members to the Church through the sacrament of baptism.

----
So this is my statement to such people:

We Hindus welcome the news of Jesus as another of the infinite manifestations of the Divine. We think it mistaken to consider Jesus as the only or the most important manifestation of the Divine. As long as they do not fall into this error, there is no objection to Hindus to choose or not choose Jesus as their Ishta-Devata. We Hindus can love Jesus and Jesus can love us Hindus with no intermediaries. We are human, not sheep, and we do not see any value of being the flock of some pastor or church. We think the Church, with its officialdom and bureaucracy is what keeps Christians separate from the Divine, and while recognizing the Church's right to exist as long as some Christians mistakenly think they need it, we consider the Church to be a major error made in ignorance and impediment in the spiritual evolution of Christians in particular and humankind in general. As to missionaries and evangelists, we decry the egotism in their belief that they are instruments to bring God to us Hindus, or that they are doing some kind of good work or doing us a favor. We Hindus visit the Divine every day in our puja and meditations, and He/She/It/That replies to each of us individually and appropriately based on our abilities to receive and understand. We think Jesus will speak to us directly if He thinks it necessary, and so we reject all self-styled messengers, alleged carriers of the Good News, and such, who think that our Hindu relationship with the Divine is inadequate, or false, unless mediated through their good offices, unless we have membership in some Church. We pray that they are led from this Tamasic arrogance into the Light.

Asatomasatgamaya, tamasoma jyothirgamaya, mrityormaamritam gamaya!

I will add Pulikeshi's statement too:

Have you heard the Hindu Good News? – Live mindfully, cherish your land, its flora and fauna, and be kind, seek true knowledge and most of all be free.

The divine manifests itself in infinite ways - Jesus, Mohammed, Buddha, Zarathustra, Guru Nanak, Mani, Shukracharya, Bharadwaja, Vasistha, and so many were special in their own right. As a Hindu, you have the freedom to really choose any, all, any other or none of these sages to help in your journey of self-realization. Further, as a Hindu, no matter where you live, it is imperative that you stay connected to the land, its flora and fauna in your journey. All of Earth and her creatures are sacred, so give back more than you take from her. This means anyone arguing for exclusion or special status for any land, people or Religion should be viewed with suspicion.

The Church is man made and has often lost its way, every Hindu believes that they are the Temple, Church, Mosque or Gurdwara. Every waking hour is a prayer and every dreamy night is being one with the divine. Hindus do not need devices other than those they freely choose. Hindus detest organized Religion and embrace true knowledge, come rejoice in the quest for it. Spread the word of this Hindu Good News to others. Live free or not at all. May this Hindu Good News spread through you.

Om Shanti, Shanthi, Shanthi!

S is for Sanskrit

A note on Sisupala-Vadha by Paul M. M. Cooper.

Quote:


Magha was a manipulator of the Sanskrit language who knew no equal. This can perhaps best be demonstrated by the following verse, in the 19th chapter of the poem:

सकारनानारकास-
कायसाददसायका
रसाहवा वाहसार-
नादवाददवादना

sakāranānārakāsa-
kāyasādadasāyakā
rasāhavā vāhasāra-
nādavādadavādanā.

Now, if you reverse the lines as though placing a mirror beneath them, this forms a palindrome in four directions: the most complex poetic device ever created.

sa	kā	ra	nā	nā	ra	kā	sa
kā	ya	sā	da	da	sā	ya	kā
ra	sā	ha	vā	vā	ha	sā	ra
nā	da	vā	da	da	vā	da	nā
(and the lines reversed)
nā	da	vā	da	da	vā	da	nā
ra	sā	ha	vā	vā	ha	sā	ra
kā	ya	sā	da	da	sā	ya	kā
sa	kā	ra	nā	nā	ra	kā	sa

 “[That army], which relished battle (rasāhavā) contained allies who brought low the bodes and gaits of their various striving enemies (sakāranānārakāsakāyasādadasāyakā), and in it the cries of the best of mounts contended with musical instruments (vāhasāranādavādadavādanā).” (Trans. George L. Hart)

Bonus - via the same site - the wonder that is Sanskrit (PDF)

On Sanskrit Poetry

This sulekha.com article provides an introduction.

Among other fascinating things:

5.3. There are too many Slesha-kavyas where each of its lines gives forth more than one meaning. For instance, the Rama-pala –charita   by the court poet Nandin depicts at once two stories (dwi-sandhana—kavya), one of the Sri Rama and the other of King Rama Plala of Bengal (1104-1130). Another is the ‘Raghava-yadava- Pandavveya’ by Chidambara Sumati (16^th century) a court poet of Vijayanagara which narrates simultaneously three stories (Tri-sandhana kavya’) those of Rama, Krishna and Arjuna. Such Slesha-kavyas, by laborious splitting compound words; by repetition of sounds (srutyanusara), of vowels (varna-anusara) and of words (pada –anusara);    and by interpreting the words depending on the context, can yield five or even seven stories.

5.4. There is also a Viloma-kavya where the first half of the verse is repeated backwards (viloma) in the second half; and they together form an entire line (pada). When the method is extended in a certain order the verse becomes all-moving (sarvathobhadra) or half-moving (ardha-bhrama). A 16^th century poet Daivajna Suryadasa Kavi from Godavari district in Andhra Pradesh wrote a Chitrakavya in the Viloma (reverse)style narrating the story of Rama and Krishna (Rama-Krishna-Viloma-Kavya) in 38 slokas. Each sloka has four lines, of which the first two lines relate to Rama-story while   the next two lines to Krishna story. The specialty of this Kavya is that the third line is composed by reversing the order of letters in the second line, while the fourth line is a reversal of the order of letters in the first line.

There is also a Viloma kavya by Venkatadvari titled Yadava-raghaveeyam. The Yadava-raghaveeyam a poem with two meanings (anuloma-viloma-kavya ) comprises 30 verses and deals with the story of Rama and Krishna together by adopting the style of anuloma and prathiloma, that is, reading each stanza as such and in reverse order, the former telling the story of Rama while the latter narrating the story of Krishna. Hence this work actually consists of 60 slokas in all.

======

Here is an amazing sloka of 32 syllables using only one consonant (Ya) and one vowel (Aa):

 

 

The Paduka (footwear) which adorn the Lord , which help in attaining all that is good and auspicious, which removes all ills, which gives knowledge, which inspires desire to be in presence of the Lord, by which all places of the world can be reached, these padukas are of the Lord.(This verse is taken from Sri Vedanta Desika’s Padukasahasram).

Eastern Migration Into India?

Am able to only see the title of this National Geographic story:
http://voices.nationalgeographic.com/2015/04/21/genographic-southeast-asia/

DNA Reveals Unknown Ancient Migration Into India
As the Genographic Project celebrates its 10th anniversary, team scientists announce intriguing results from a study of more than 10,000 men from southern Asia.

Was able to find more in Google Cache:
"The findings, published in the Journal of Systematics and Evolution, showed that in the last 8,000 years humans expanded west from Southeast Asia back to India."

--- So the genetic record shows this migration, but not the famous Indo-European migration?

Life as a dhimmi - 15

News-item from Malaysia:

PETALING JAYA, April 22 — For years, two non-Muslim houses of worship in Taman Medan avoided the controversy that befell a neighbouring church that was forced by residents to remove its cross, by shunning open displays of their faith.

Instead, they go about their worship without the usual trappings of their respective religions, out of caution over how the overwhelmingly Muslim community may view these.
One local church, the Petaling Jaya Church of Christ (PJCC), said it does not display overt symbols of the faith or conduct open displays of its activities.

“It’s not about the symbol that matters, but how one wants to practise or follow their faith... our faith is strong and we are not concerned about our church not bearing a cross on its façade,” a representative of the church told Malay Mail Online yesterday.

....
....
....
At a Hindu temple a short distance away, priest N. Bala from India told Malay Mail Online that the need for non-Muslim religions to be discreet was a reality in Malaysia.
....
Like the representative of PJCC, Bala was similarly accepting of the necessity to keep a low-profile in order to avoid trouble, saying that the absence of religious symbols did not weaken his faith.

Still, he lamented how non-Muslims in Malaysia must be so wary about how they practised their faiths and how religion here was used to divide rather than unite.

“I myself feel my right is being infringed...there should be equality in matter of religion,” he said. “How are churches or temples lesser compared to mosques? All religion is good.”

More on that Doniger review - NSFW

Of all the major world cultures, the Hindus have been, on the average, the least prudish about sex.   From temple carvings to sacred and secular literature, sex has its place, so much so that prudish Europeans have termed it oriental licentiousness.  But it is only one part of life.  Artha, Dharma, Kama, Moksha - these are the four purusharthas - if you like, the main goals of life.  Sex falls in the Kama bucket, though Kama is encompasses more than just sex.   Hindus also write about Artha, Dharma and Moksha; and the great epics and Puranas teach about all four buckets. To take an example from the Puranas, when things go out of balance, towards the end of this story, also on my blog, the preceptor to the Devas, Brihaspati has to take steps to restore the married life of Indra and Shachi.

The problem with a commentator on the Hindus like Wendy Doniger and her school is that they are out of balance - they find sex even where it isn't.   The review I've referred to previously goes into this a little bit.   It is a gross distortion that Doniger and co. consistently do; and their apologists constantly let them get away with it.  Anyway, now I have a witness that this is not something that only Internet Hindus are imagining, the obsession with sex is real.  The witness is Prof. C. Christine Fair, whose analyses of Pakistan have been featured on this blog.

Incidentally, you can listen to C.C. Fair on the subject of sexual harassment, and Pakistan here: http://www.globaldispatchespodcast.com/episode-49-c-christine-fair/

Below the fold, Not Safe for Work.

Project Euler

https://projecteuler.net/about

Project Euler is a series of challenging mathematical/computer programming problems that will require more than just mathematical insights to solve. Although mathematics will help you arrive at elegant and efficient methods, the use of a computer and programming skills will be required to solve most problems.

If you are looking for problems to help exercise your newly acquired skills in a programming language, then this is a place you could try.

To date, I've solved 47 of the 511 problems posted there, mostly the easy initial ones.  The hardest one, per their difficulty rating, that I've solved, is problem 259.   The next hardest problem, by their rating system, that I've solved is problem 110.  The rest that I've done are way easier.

I'm using mostly LISP.   I'm currently working on problem 201, I have an algorithm, I'm quite sure that it is correct; but it is slow (I estimate O(n^5) where n is the number of terms in the set)  so I need to put more thought into it.  

By the rules, I cannot say any more in public than what I have written.

I learned so much solving problem XXX so is it okay to publish my solution elsewhere?

It appears that you have answered your own question. There is nothing quite like that "Aha!" moment when you finally beat a problem which you have been working on for some time. It is often through the best of intentions in wishing to share our insights so that others can enjoy that moment too. Sadly, however, that will not be the case for your readers. Real learning is an active process and seeing how it is done is a long way from experiencing that epiphany of discovery. Please do not deny others what you have so richly valued yourself.

 PS: My slow solution to problem 201 gives the correct answer.  Further,  I now have a faster variant, that completes in 9 minutes instead of 9 hours!

D. Abbott: The Reasonable Ineffectiveness of Mathematics

I have considerable sympathy for the point of view expressed by D. Abbott in his IEEE paper, The Reasonable Ineffectiveness of Mathematics (hattip a commenter on Peter Woit's blog).

"Mathematics is a product of the imagination that sometimes works on simplified models of reality."

Denial of the Platonist position does not mean that Mathematics becomes an arbitrary cultural construct.

An aside:

"A genius is merely one who has a great idea, but has the common sense to keep quiet about his other thousand insane thoughts."

PS: you may also like this comment on Peter Woit's blog.

Bangladesh's Struggle and America's continuing shame

Shashi Tharoor outlines the struggle between the secular and the Islamists in Bangladesh here.

The United States under Nixon and Kissinger ignored the genocide that accompanied Bangladesh's birth (see "The Blood Telegram" by Gary Bass).

And today, the United States essentially sides with the Islamists in Bangladesh.  E.g., when in 2013 the Bangladesh High Court deregistered the Islamic fundamentalist party, Jamaat-e-Islami (JeI), thereby banning it from participating in future elections, the United States was officially unhappy.

Here is some background on JeI.

The historical fact is, apart from the Islamists who take up arms against the US, there is not an Islamist that the US does not love.  This is, incidentally, a long standing Anglo-US strategy.

As Gary Brecher wrote in this recent piece on Yemen, in the 1960s,

Arabs were getting very “modern” at that time. It’s important to remember that. You know why they stopped getting modern, and started getting interested in reactionary, Islamist repression?

Because the modernizing Arabs were all killed by the US, Britain, Israel, and the Saudis.
....
.....
...the West put its weapons and its money in on the side of “Allah and the Emir” over and over again, against every single faction trying to make a modern, secular Arab world, whether on the Nasserite, Ba’athist, Socialist, Communist, or other model.
....
Arabs are reduced to choosing which Allah and which Emir to support because a half-century alliance between the worst oligarchies in the West and the most reactionary elements in their countries wiped out the alternative.

If you do bother to read Gary Brecher's article, you can place what is written above in context of his style of writing; but the truth is there beyond the poetic exaggeration.

On Wendy Doniger's book

http://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/review/014311669X/R10UJP16SRT3XP/

So much for an alternative history. Now, how about some mundane, regular history stuff? Let’s go back to the Mahabharata, an epic that Ms. Doniger brings up dozens of times in her book (she even calls the Mahabharata “100 times more interesting” than the Iliad and the Odyssey). Let’s ask two questions: When did the main events of Mahabharata occur? And exactly how long is the epic?

Ms. Doniger mentions the years as: between 1000 BCE and 400 BCE, most likely 950 BCE, or around 3012 BCE, or maybe 1400 BCE. That narrows down the chronology quite a bit, doesn't it? Really, there is more to writing history (particularly the alternative kind) than looking up the reference books and throwing in all the numbers one could find. But in Ms. Doniger’s defense, she is not a historian per se (and she clearly tells us so), so let’s let this one slide by. I’d even say she does deserve some credit here for at least bothering to look up things. On the next topic, she fails to do even that.

Ms. Doniger says the Mahabharata is about 75,000 verses long. Then she helpfully adds, “sometimes said to be a hundred thousand, perhaps just to round it off a bit." My goodness, 25,000 verses is some rounding error, don't you think? Most sources put it between 75,000 and 125,000. It took me all of two hours to find a very detailed account (not on the Internet though), compiled in the 11th century, putting the total at 100,500—and I’m not a researcher, not by a long shot. And yes, the exact number of verses is secondary to the big picture. What bothers me is the offhandedness with which Ms. Doniger brushes off 25,000 verses as a rounding issue. Why this half-baked research?

Oh well, maybe we expected too much from the bestselling book on Hinduism and it’s our fault. So, let’s try again, one last time. Where is India located?

Ms. Doniger states, very clearly, without any ambiguity, on page 11 (footnote): “Most of India… is in the Northern Hemisphere.”

The Puranas, Mahakavyas and Modern Business