Crime is gentler in fiction

During this long lockdown I'm reading John Sandford's "Prey" series of novels, whose protagonist  Minneapolis-based criminal detective Lucas Davenport goes after the perpetrators of rather gruesome crimes.  "Rather gruesome" is an understatement, and so when I read the author's introduction to "Mind Prey", quoted below, I had a resurgence of my ever-increasing desire to secede from the human race.

Sometime after I finished Mind Prey, I was invited to give a talk about crime-fiction writing at a medical examiners' convention. As part of the deal, I got to sit in on the convention, which I did for a while. I left after an FBI presentation on serial killers because, quite frankly, my stomach wasn't strong enough to look at the pictures. 

I covered the crash of an L1011 airliner in the Everglades, with arms, legs and heads lying all over the place, saw perhaps a hundred or so surgeries in doing some occasional medical writing, including double amputations on accident victims and debridement of burn victims, and saw any number of shot people waiting for ambulances, without much problem. But what insane criminals do to people, especially women — that I can't look at, or write. When I deal with such subjects in the Prey series, I promise you that the violence is toned down. 

Far down.

On Emergent Phenomena

Bee has a blog post: "What is emergence? What does “emergent” mean?"  For whatever reason, 99% of my comments simply don't go through, so discussion over there seems impossible.  My thoughts on the subject are newly formed, and I'm putting them down here, so that I can get unstuck, and not because these ideas are right or have any merit.  So this post will likely be revised or even deleted.

This from Bee is as good a description of "emergent" as you can find:

Something is emergent if it comes about from the collective behavior of many constituents of a system, be that people or atoms. If something is emergent, it does not even make sense to speak about it for individual elements of the system.

There are a lot of quantities in physics which are emergent. Think for example of conductivity. Conductivity is the ability of a system to transport currents from one end to another. It’s a property of materials. But it does not make sense to speak of the conductivity of a single electron. It’s the same for viscosity, elasticity, even something as seemingly simple as the color of a material. Color is not a property you find if you take apart a painting into elementary particles. It comes from the band structure of molecules. It’s an emergent property.

It is in the discussion of weak and strong emergence that I drift away.  I think I get stuck on the "can be/cannot be derived".

Weak emergence means that the emergent property can be derived from the properties of the system’s constituents and the interactions between the constituents.....In physics the only type of emergence we have is weak emergence. With strong emergence philosophers refer to the hypothetical possibility that a system with many constituents displays a novel behavior which cannot be derived from the properties and the interactions of the constituents. While this is logically possible, there is not a single known example for this in the real world.

(Perhaps it is because I'm stuck on the notion of derivation as is done in mathematical logic.)

Consider the Second Law of Thermodynamics.  Pick any set of microscopic laws - the Standard Model of particle physics; or the Standard Model modified in any way, or one of the 10^500 universes of superstring theory.   Or make heat a fluid (Lavoisier's "caloric" was the context in which Carnot did his work).  The Second Law remains true in all these cases.   While as students of physics, we are indoctrinated with statistical mechanics as underlying the Second Law of Thermodynamics, the Law actually arises from very general considerations, with no assumptions at all about the microscopic physics, i.e., from the mathematical properties of Pfaffians and some mapping of mathematical concepts into physical concepts.  (Zemansky's 1965 Kelvin and Caratheodory--A Reconciliation indicates what I'm talking about).

The way I see it, the Second Law is true if heat is an invisible fluid and it is also true if matter is made of atoms and heat is simply the energy of random molecular motion.  So in what sense can the Second Law of Thermodynamics be said to derived from the properties of the system's constituents?   The Second Law is not only an emergent law, in some sense of the term "strongly emergent", it is so. It is a law that is true no matter what the underlying microscopic physics is, and thus can be "derived" from some axiom set including axiom A with some mapping of mathematical to physical concepts, but can equally well be derived from some other axiom set including the axiom (not A) with some other mapping of mathematical to physical concepts.

In this regard, I'm not sure the concepts of "weak emergence" and "strong emergence" are particularly useful.   An example is the never-ending debate of whether the phenomenon "consciousness"  is strongly emergent, or is explainable ultimately in terms of the brain and its cells.  Let's imagine humans, electronic/compute devices, Fred Hoyle's solar-system sized cloud all exhibit "consciousness".  Taking the Second Law of Thermodynamics as our exemplar, and assuming that a mathematical description of "consciousness" is feasible,  one has to concede the possibility that such a description is rather independent of the microscopic details.   If that turns out to be true, then the same problematic situation (at least to me) arises - how can such a description be said to be "derived" from the properties and interactions of the constituents of the conscious system?

The chemistry of hydrogen, carbon, etc., are a particular way because of the properties of their constituents, and would be different if e.g., the electron/proton mass ratio was different, or if the radius of the proton measured electron Compton wavelengths was much larger.  Derivation of the chemistry crucially depends on these properties.   That is one kind of emergence.   I'd place all the things described by the Wilsonian renormalization group in this category too.

A second kind of emergence is where the behavior of the system can be described independent of its constituents, e.g., as with the Second Law of Thermodynamics.    These are perhaps two useful types of "emergence", especially if we can find more laws of physics like the Second Law.

Dehydrated Elephants

Not Even Wrong noted the recent passing of mathematician Robert Hermann 1931-2020.

In that blog post, Peter Woit wrote:

Being ahead of your time and mainly writing expository books is unfortunately not necessarily good for a successful academic career. Looking through his writings this afternoon, I ran across a long section of this book from 1980, entitled “Reflections” (pages 1-82). I strongly recommend reading this for Hermann’s own take on his career and the problems faced by anyone trying to do what he was doing (the situation has not improved since then).

The reference is to Robert Hermann's book, "Cartanian Geometry, Nonlinear Waves, and Control Theory, Part 2", which you can read in Google Books. This is where I first encountered dehydrated elephants.  To quote:

Order in Chaos

The video at this tweet.

Sri Dakshinamurthy

Sten Konow: The Aryan Gods of the Mitani People

Recent findings in ancient human DNA are leading to narratives like the following, e.g., Tony Joseph in Outlook India, September 12, 2019:

And here is an equally unambiguous and clear statement from the study published in Science a few days ago, titled: "The formation of human populations in South and Central Asia": "Using data from ancient individuals from the Swat Valley or northernmost South Asia, we show that Steppe ancestry then integrated further South in the first half of the 2nd millennium BCE, contributing up to 30 per cent of the ancestry of most modern groups".

So it is clear, without even a shadow of a doubt, that both the studies support the migration of Central Asian pastoralists who brought Indo-European languages to India, between 2000 BCE and 1500 BCE.

For our purposes, let us stipulate that the genetic evidence of the handful of ancient individuals has been interpreted correctly to show a migration into India of Central Asian Pastoralists between 2000 BCE and 1500 BCE.   The problematic assertion is this:  "who brought Indo-European languages to India, between 2000 BCE and 1500 BCE."  

The only direct evidence of language in India from that era is of the Vedic language, of the Rg Veda and subsequent works.   The theory of Aryan Invasion/Migration is that these Central Asian pastoralists brought the Vedic language to India, and so the Rg Veda, if composed in India, must date to 2000 BCE - 1500 BCE or so.

The Rg Vedic hymns sing the praises of the mighty Saraswati river, and the geographical information in later texts of the drying/dried-up Saraswati plus modern science enables us to identify the ancient perennial river that the Saraswati must have been, and it last flowed 9000 to 4500 years before present. 

The Rg Veda places the Saraswati along with the Ganga, Yamuna and the rivers of Punjab and so the theory that the Vedic people transferred the name of some river outside of India to the river that was already desiccated when they arrived is hardly tenable.  Why they would not transfer the holy name of Saraswati to one of the great rivers they newly encountered is another mystery.   Totally far-fetched is the notion that the Vedic people took an older tradition from non-Indo-European inhabitants and translated it into their hymns.

Next, we have the treaty between the Hittites and the Mitani, found in the cuneiform library unearthed at Boghazkoi in Turkey which mention Vedic gods - specifically Indra, Mitra-Varuna and the Nasatyas.   The dates given via Egyptian and Middle Eastern chronologies for the Mitani treaty are 1375 BCE - 1350 BCE.   The lineage of the Mitani signatory, Mattiuaza (a.k.a. Shattiwaza) is known, via the cuneiform libraries,  to have extended at least four  generations prior, and his ancestor, Shuttarna I, son of (legendary?) Kirta is dated to early 15 century BCE.

So how did Indra, Mitra-Varuna and the Nasatyas make their way to ancient Mesopotamia around 1500 BCE?  The Aryan Invasionist postulates that these deities developed before the Aryans reached India and then some branch of the Aryans carried these gods to the Mitani lands and some other branch carried them to India.

 Norwegian Indologist Sten Konow, in his paper published in 1923,  argues persuasively that the Vedic gods were of Indian development.  Since I found it difficult to get hold of a copy of this paper, I imagine it is the same for others,  and so I present here a scan (link) and a transcript (link) of the paper.

 Konow like the other Indologists of his time, believed in the Aryan Invasion Theory.  His chronology seems to be an early Indo-European period, followed by a period of Aryan unity, when the ancestors of the Indian/Iranian Aryans ranged from perhaps the Volga to the outskirts of India; and lastly the Indian period, after the Aryans split into Indian, Iranian and possible other branches.  Konow argues that the Vedic gods as mentioned in the Mitani treaty are developments from the Indian period, and not from the period of Aryan unity.   Konow writes:

"As far as I can see, everything points to the conclusion that Jacobi was right in maintaining that the Mitani gods were Indian and not Aryan, so that we must, in fact, assume that the sphere of Indian civilization had, in the middle of the second millennium B.C., extended into Mesopotamia. The epoch of the Aryan conquest of India and the beginning of Indian civilization must consequently be relegated to a still earlier period, though we have no means of stating how long an interval we must assume between the Aryan invasion and the Mitani treaty. There is, however, one small detail which prevents us from thinking that this interval was quite short."
...
...

"I hope to have made it probable that these gods were Indian and not Aryan or even Iranian. If the conception of the Aśvins as groomsmen belongs to the later phases of the Ṛgveda period, as it seems to do, we must further draw the conclusion that the extension of Indo-Aryan civilization into Mesopotamia took place after the bulk of the Ṛgveda had come into existence. The oldest portions of the collection would consequently have to be considered as considerably older than the Mitani treaty. "

If you accept Konow's conclusion, this means there is simply not enough time for Central Asian Pastoralists to enter India between 2000 BCE and 1500 BCE, with Indo-European languages and the precursor forms of Indra, Mitra, Varuna and Nasatyas; to develop the later forms of the deities, and then carry them to the Mesopotamia by 1500 BCE."

The modern Aryan invasionist/migrationist, as far as I know, conveniently doesn't address Konow's arguments.  It would be interesting to see a modern response to Konow.  It would also be interesting to see how the non-invasionist accommodates or dismantles Konow's arguments.

What are the possibilities that the Aryan invasions might entertain?

One could open a can of worms by casting doubt on the Mitani chronology.  One could also cast doubt on Konow's (invasionist) reading and interpretation of the Vedic literature. One might argue that developments in the Vedic pantheon were being contemporaneously being transmitted from northern India to Mesopotamia -- but in that case, one would have to rethink how language and Indo-European culture was transmitted, migrations and invasions are hardly necessary.

One might argue that the ancient human DNA is wrongly dated, and the invasion/migration that the genetic evidence indicated actually occurred a thousand years earlier.  But the geneticists are unlikely to have the eras so wrong. In any case, the Aryan invasionist won't want to give up the 2000 BCE-1500 BCE chronology in any case.

IMO, the most viable conclusion is that the Vedic pantheon was developed in India much before 1500 BC and migrated from India to the Mitani lands.   In which case the people that genetics says were migrating into India between 2000 BCE and 1500 BCE did not introduce Indo-European languages to India, the Vedic language was already there.  This is not impossible, the Sakas around 200 BCE - 100 CE, and the English, 1700-1950 CE also carried with themselves Indo-European languages to India, but did not introduce them to India.   The Aryan invasionist can continue to postulate that the first entry of Indo-European language into India was via invasion or migration, but the evidence of the Mitani treaty is that this event has to be much prior to 1500 BC; and via the evidence of the Saraswati, prior to 2500 BC.

A point peripheral to the above, but of interest is that Konow argues on linguistic grounds that the dasyus/dasas mentioned in the Rg Veda as the enemies of the Vedic people were not speakers of Dravidian languages, but rather spoke in Kolarian tongues (the Austroasiatic language family in India).

Satellite Remote Sensing Techniques to Unearth the Lost Sarasvati River & its Palaeochannels

Dr. B.K Bhadra from ISRO presents detailed multi resolution satellite studies of the river Saraswati in northern Haryana. He discusses the specifics of the remote sensing techniques, including satellite imagery, used to study the paleo channels of the river and related analysis. In his present research, he focuses on high resolution optical and microwave satellite data in delineating the paleo channels in Haryana and Punjab as well as the Sarasvati delta structure in the Rann of Kutch to present an integrated map of the Sarasvati paleo channels. He presents material to show that paleo channels have also been validated through collateral ground data such as published maps during British and Mughal periods, as well as paleo geomorphic structures, hydrological parameters and radiometric ages of river sediments. By considering evidence from archaeology as well and the spatial distribution of the Harappan settlements, Dr. Bhadra presents how the entire course of the river Sarasvati has been delineated and the growth of Indus-Sarasvati civilization studied from these disciplinary perspectives.

Is there such a thing as intelligence?

On dailykos, Nonlinear asks: Is There Such A Thing As Intelligence?

Writing about himself,

As I moved forward in school a pattern began to emerge. I am what is known as a three tier learner. There are subjects in which I express severe learning disabilities. ....Then there is a second tier, subjects where I am right around average. In school this was things like Social Studies, English, Art, Chemistry, Biology, Auto Mechanics, Wood Working, Drafting, Literature and Physics. I was a B student in all these things.

Then there were the things I was gifted in which included  Math, Metal Work, Music and Physical Education. And once I got into an enriched High School you can add Agriculture, Ag Mechanics, Home Ec, Electronics, Plumbing, and Economics. In these I was an A+ student

....
....

But depending which IQ test you administer and how you administer it I go off the conventional scoring table (over 200) or am far below average and profoundly disabled at 69. You can manipulate the test you give me to get a result anywhere in between. The smartest move I have ever made was refusing to allow them to write about me in journals and turn me into a circus freak. I am a human calculator. I honestly can’t understand why people can’t just multiply and divide large numbers in their head. I also calendar calculate. And yes I have been called an Idiot Savant, for a while that was my diagnosis.

But being a freak has lead to me being fascinated by intelligence and how it works. I have come to conclude that there is no such thing as general intelligence. All mental activity is situational. 

Nonlinear then takes up the case of animal whisperers of which he is one to make his point.

India has no native religions - a summary

From Dr Pingali Gopal's book summary of Europe, India and the Limits of Secularism by Jakob de Roover.


The two important properties of religion are: first, it must make a claim about the origin and purpose of the world (the how and why of the Cosmos); and secondly, this message must be true This is the ‘metaphysical’ position of any religion.

Based on the metaphysical conditions, Indian traditions are not possibly religions. They do not properly raise the issue of origin of the Cosmos. Vedas, Upanishads, Brahmanas, Puranas, Itihaasas have multiple stories of creation and purposes of Cosmos. The ideas in the multiple stories say just about everything and everything. Depending on the context, an individual in the multiple narratives may call the question of Cosmos origin illegitimate; or consider it pure speculation lacking any truth value; or say that all claims are true; or even suggest that Cosmos has no origin and is always present. The Buddhists and the Jains have no conception of a God in the first place! Strangely, in Indian tradition and culture, a person can equally believe all the stories and may equally reject all of them. Finally, it looks almost as if the ‘origin’ question and the place of God are irrelevant.

Religion is thus impossible in a culture where the questions of origins can be an illegitimate one. The Western world is always in a grip of historicity trying to find the truth value of its scriptures. The Biblical history is right in the center of investigation with advocates and opponents on either side of the battle line trying to prove or disprove. This attitude hardly excites or disturbs their counterparts in India. It is the attitude of a culture towards the holy books that generates questions or fails to do so. Literature investigating the truth claims made by ‘religious texts’ is absent in India. To ask whether they are true or false is to exhibit a profound ignorance of the culture whose stories they are.
As another component, there must be certain sociological conditions absolutely required for guaranteeing the identity of religions. These are:

• a world-view codified in a textual source called a ‘holy-book’ and must be widely known
•  a standard world-view with clear boundaries and which cannot undergo changes across generations
• an authority to settle disputes in transmission and interpretation of stories and legends (thus having a hierarchy of texts)
• a source of excommunication when two interpretations collide (say Shaivism, Vaishnavism, Buddhism)
• an organization to transmit and propagate its world-views.

These five sociological conditions are necessary to allow the transmission of the world-views across space and time so that they may preserve their identity over generations. None of these conditions fulfil in India with respect to Hinduism, Sikhism, Jainism, Buddhism, and so on. Hence, in metaphysical and sociological terms, it is an impossibility that Indian culture knows of religions or its secularized version-a world view.

Jammu & Kashmir - flashback to 1948

October 5th 1948:

Pakistan most certainly will not give Kashmir up in the face of Indian threats.  To many Pakistani officers it seems probable that the war in Kashmir is at present essential to the existence of the Indian Union.   They see it as the one common factor uniting all the different forces, which, if left to themselves, would pull the State to pieces.  Without a "popular war" the Nehru Administration would have to settle the conflicting claims of its own members, satisfy the Sikhs, reconcile labour and capital, deal with the Communists and take drastic and unpopular measures to stop the drift of the national economy towards complete chaos.  Hyderabad was a card which was good as long as it was held; now that it has been played there remains only Kashmir and the stakes on that card have been made so heavy in both men, money and prestige, that it cannot remain unplayed much longer.  Recent speeches by Union Ministers do tend the suggest the obtrusion [sic? intrusion] of the U.N.O. into the relations between India and her State of Kashmir has been a tedious restraint on the Union's ability to manage her own affairs efficiently.  Patel going so far as to remark on October 1st, that "if the Security Council releases us from that embarrassment we shall perform that operation also (i.e., Kashmir) with the least amount of danger." A singularly vacuous remark if ever there was one! Either Mr. Patel was using Hyderabad as a yard-stick to measure the Indian Army's martial prowess, or else he was completely ignorant of the military implications and the political consequences of a Union advance upto the Pakistan border.

This is from Adrian Reed (Junior Staff Member, Lahore Deputy High Commission posted to Rawalpindi) to Olver  (?Stephen Olver, Pakistan Foreign Service in Karachi).

(# 70 in "Towards a Ceasefire in Kashmir, British Official Reports from South Asia, 18 September - 31 December 1948", Editor: Lionel Carter).

The obliquity of the ecliptic

On IndiaFacts, Anil Narayanan makes the case that the astronomers who wrote the Surya Siddhanta measured the obliquity of the ecliptic to be arcsin(1397/3438) = 23.975° and not 24° as has been translated by Whitney et. al. since 1858; since 24° would be expressed as arcsin(1398/3438) or arcsin(1399/3438) and never arcsin(1397/3438).

This is an important observation which bears repeating: The precision of the Indian R-Sine is 1/3438.

This puts the Surya Siddhanta to some 3000 BC.  Anil Narayanan promises more to support this date.

We currently know of at least 3 other items in Indian astronomy that point to 3000 BC, or thereabouts.

1) The value of the Sun’s equation-of-center given in the SS indicates a time range of 3000 BC or older;

2) The ubiquitously mentioned pole-star in Indian astronomy and literature, namely Dhruva (modern name Thuban), indicates a period about 3000 BC;

3) It is mentioned in the Satapatha Brahmana text that the Krittika Nakshatra rises exactly in the East, which occurred only in ancient times, around 3000 BC. Nowadays Krittika rises between East and North-East.

We will discuss these in other articles.

If Anil Narayanan is right, then he is also right about this:

The misconception, which has to do with the tilt, or obliquity, of the earth’s axis, also ranks among the most clever and successful obfuscations in Indian astronomy carried out by the European scholars of yesteryear. They skillfully achieved the difficult task of hiding the treasure in plain sight, so to speak.

The two questions that I have are - how was this angle measured or inferred, and what is the origin of the Indian standard radius of 3438?

Answer to 3438 - it is the approximate radius of the circle in minutes (the exact value is  3437.74677078...).

My criticism of Anil Narayanan's article - see Aryabhatta's sine table on Wiki.  1397 comes from a linear interpolation for 24° between rows 6 and 7 of that table.

That is,
22° 30' = 1350' has jya = 1315
26° 15' = 1575' has jya = 1520
What is the angle whose jya = 1397?
The linear interpolation answer is 1350' + (1397 - 1315) * (1575' - 1350')/(1520 - 1315)
= 1350' + 82 * 225'/ 205 = 1440' (exactly!)
1440' = 24°.

This is probably how Whitney et. al. came to 24°.   The question then was linear interpolation the method of calculation used? e.g., see the same Wiki article.  I think to establish the point made Anil Narayana's article, we have to know how intermediate values in the R-sine table were computed.

Or, following Anil Narayanan's philosophy, that the precision of the Indian R-Sine is 1/3438, the obliquity of the ecliptic in the Surya Siddhanta is not an approximate 24°:

According to Mr. Bentley, the Hindu astronomers (unless in cases where extraordinary accuracy is required) make it a rule, in observing, to take the nearest round numbers, rejecting fractional quantities: so that we have only to suppose that the observer who fixed the obliquity of the ecliptic at 24 degrees, actually found it to be 23 and 1/2.

 Rather the measured obliquity of the ecliptic is bounded by arcsin(1396/3438) and arcsin(1398/3438), i.e, between 23° 59' and 24° 1'  (23.983° and 24.017°).

Using the formula here: http://glossary.ametsoc.org/wiki/Obliquity_of_the_ecliptic

or a more exactly formula one can estimate the range of times of that observation.

Talk by Bibek Debroy | The relevance of Mahabharata for our times

The start of India's space program

On the centenary birthday of Dr. Vikram Sarabhai, some remembrance of the beginnings of the Indian space program.

A Brief History of Rocketry in ISRO (2012)
PV Manoranjan Rao & P Radhakrishnan
Universities Press (India) ISBN 978-81-7371-763-5
page 2

"Independent India was lucky to have Jawaharlal Nehru as its first Prime Minister, for he shared a common ideal with Bhabha and Sarabhai.  He believed that modern science and technology were indispensable to the development of the country......Bhabha, in the 1950s and 60s, was considered the czar of organized research in India and, more importantly, had Nehru's ear!  Thus, when Sarabhai, with Bhabha's support, came up with a space initiative for the country, Nehru said 'yes' even though  the country was passing through a very difficult phase both economically and politically.

From Fishing Hamlet to Red Planet: India's Space Journey (2015)
Chief Editor P.V. Manoranjan Rao
HarperCollins, ISBN 978-93-517-689-5
page xix

"At that time India was facing severe economic and political hardships - there was a food shortage and that humiliating war in the north east.   Yet when Bhabha and Sarabhai came up with the space initiative, Nehru lent his wholehearted support.

India's Rise as a Space Power (2014)
Professor U.R. Rao
Foundation Books, ISBN 978-93-82993-48-3
Pages 7-8

"Given the background work of Dr Sarabhai and his co-workers at PRL and the expertise developed by Prof. Bernard Peters, Prof. M.G.K. Menon and their colleagues at the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research (TIFR), Bombay, who had flown a number of balloons from Hyderabad to carry out cosmic ray investigations,  Dr Homi Bhaba [sic] invited Dr Vikram Sarabhai to become a member of the Atomic Energy Commission and initiate space activity under the the umbrella of the Department of Atomic Energy.  Dr V. Sarabhai constituted the Indian National Committee for Space Research (INCOSPAR) with Prof. E.V. Chitnis, ...."

Vikram Sarabhai - A Life (2007)
Amrita Shah
Penguin Books India, ISBN 978-0-67099-951-4
Pages 120-122, scattered excerpts

"When exactly Vikram came up with the notion of a space programme for India is not known.  R.G. Rastogi, his former student, claims to have heard him talk prophetically of setting up a rocket-launching programme 'by 1963' as far back as in the 1950s.  Praful Bhavsar, who had taken a leave of absence from PRL to do post-doctorate work at the University of Minnesota, recalls Vikram telling him something similar in 1959..."
"According to Rastogi, even Vikram's co-director at PRL, K.R. Ramanathan, was openly skeptical. 'He is too young, he has no idea how the government functions.  He will not get the money nor will establishment scientists allow it to happen.'...But Ramanathan had not counted on the chief weapon in Vikram's formidable arsenal of contacts: Homi J. Bhabha. 

It is tempting to speculate that Vikram and Bhabha, the two princes of Indian science, used their youthful days in Bangalore to spin up dreams for the future......It is tempting because of the uncanny sureness with which they set about their plans and their suggestion of complicity in so many of their actions. 

In August 1961, for instance, more than a year before the Chinese invasion and at a time when Nehru was still very much at the helm of the country's affairs, the union government, urged by Bhabha, identified an area known as 'space research and the peaceful uses of outer space' and placed it within the jurisdiction of the DAE.  As a part of the move, PRL was recognized as the 'appropriate centre' for research and development in space sciences.  And Vikram was co-opted into the board of the AEC.  More interestingly, in February 1962, the DAE created the Indian National Committee for Space Research (INCOSPAR) under Vikram's chairmanship to oversee all aspects of space research in the country.  Vikram had overcome the first seemingly impossible hurdle.

History and Modernity

Bernard Cohn (1928-2003) was a professor of anthropology at the University of Chicago who studied India extensively.  In his essay, "The Pasts of an Indian Village" (1961), Cohn examines the various pasts as remembered by the peoples of Senapur village in Uttar Pradesh, India.  The various groups, Thakurs, Chamars, Brahmins, Muslims and Telis, all have a different narrative regarding their  "legendary" past, as well as that of the past several generations.

Cohn goes on to note:

All Americans share a past created by our educational system and media of mass communication.  We can invoke this past and have it be meaningful across regional and class lines.  Indians do not as yet share such a past.  An appeal for action on the part of the central government, based on what is thought to be a universal identification with a traditional or historic past, is meaningless or leads to antagonistic reactions of major parts of the population...... 

I would speculate that a society is modern when it does have a past, when this past is shared by the vast majority of the society, and when it can be used on a national basis to determine and validate behavior. 

A shared history that can be used to determine and validate behavior.  I wonder if such exists even in that bastion of modernity, the United States of America, where there are many competing histories - of the Yankee North, of the Lost Cause South, of the African-Americans, of the Latinos, of the native Americans; and those of the various immigrant groups.   In terms of sheer numbers, perhaps the first two are the most important. 

But it was just a speculation on Cohn's part.

Harper’s Index: thermostat and test scores

https://harpers.org/archive/2019/08/harpers-index-august-2019/

Percentage change in women’s math test scores in a room that is between 80° and 90° F rather than 60° and 70° F : +27

In men’s math test scores : –7

Traced the source to:

https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0216362

Battle for the thermostat: Gender and the effect of temperature on cognitive performance

The math test in question was adding pairs of five digit numbers, 50 pairs in five minutes.
The verbal test was given the letters ADEHINRSTU, build as many (German) words as possible in 5 minutes.

"Our sample consisted exclusively out of students from universities in Berlin. The advantages of this subject pool is that they are relatively easy to recruit and homogenous in their cognitive skills. The disadvantage of this subject pool is that it is not representative of the whole population with respect to age and education level. 

About the results:

"Taken together, these results show that within a temperature range of 16 and 33 degrees Celsius, females generally exhibit better cognitive performance at the warmer end of the temperature distribution while men do better at colder temperatures. The increase in female cognitive performance appears to be driven largely by an increase in the number of submitted answers. We interpret this as evidence that the increased performance is driven in part by an increase in effort. Similarly, the decrease in male cognitive performance is partially driven by a decrease in observable effort. Importantly, the increase in female cognitive performance is larger and more precisely estimated than the decrease in male performance."

 What this result establishes, IMO, is that each person, or at least student in Berlin, tends to put forth most effort in a indoor temperature setting that suits them.   This may have some relevance to supposedly gender-neutral tests, the test setting may be important.

Stanislaus versus State of Madhya Pradesh - Historical Context

{Wiki}

Rev Stanislaus vs Madhya Pradesh, 1977 SCR (2) 611, is a matter where the Supreme Court of India considered the issue whether the fundamental right to practise and propagate religion includes the right to convert, held that the right to propagate does not include the right to convert and therefore upheld the constitutional validity of the laws enacted by Madhya Pradesh and Orissa legislatures prohibiting conversion by force, fraud or allurement.

Here is a timeline.

More China is in a hurry

NBC reports
China's rising tech scene threatens U.S. brain drain as 'sea turtles' return home
Silicon Valley was "a little bit slow for us," said Shenzhen-based entrepreneur Jason Gui, one of millions of Chinese people who were educated in the U.S.

New comments policy

Henceforth, any comment that in my judgment indicates that the commenter has not even scanned the posted material will be simply deleted.  Attempts to derail a discussion will also be deleted.  In this I am following Peter Woit’s polcy on his blog.

Religious Freedom and the Limits of Propagation: Conversion in the Constituent Assembly of India

Article: link (PDF)
Religious Freedom and the Limits of Propagation: Conversion in the Constituent Assembly of India
Sarah Claerhout and Jakob De Roover

Abstract:

In discussions about religious freedom in India, the country’s conflict regarding conversion plays a central role. The Constitution’s freedom of religion clause, Article 25, grants the right “freely to profess, practise and propagate religion,” but this has generated a dispute about the meaning of the right ‘to propagate’ and its relation to the freedom to convert. The recognition of this right is said to be the result of a key debate in the Constituent Assembly of India. To find out which ideas and arguments gave shape to this debate and the resulting religious freedom clause, we turn to the Assembly’s deliberations and come to a surprising conclusion: indeed, there was disagreement about conversion among the Assembly members, but this never took the form of a debate. Instead, there was a disconnect between the member’s concerns, objections, and comments concerning the draft article on the one hand, and the Assembly’s decision about the religious freedom clause on the other. If a key ‘debate’ took this form, what then could the ongoing dispute concerning conversion in India be about? We first examine some recent historiographical accounts of the Indian conflicts about conversion and proselytization. Then we develop a hypothesis that aims to make sense of this enduring conflict by identifying a blindness at its core: people reasoning against the background of Indian traditions see ‘propagation of religion’ as the human dissemination of tradition; this is incompatible with a religious conception where conversion and propagation of faith are seen in terms of God’s intervention. These two ways of seeing ‘propagation’ generate two conflicting experiences of the Indian dispute about religious freedom and conversion.

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If for nothing else,  the glimpses of actual debates in the Indian Constituent Assembly are a reason to read this paper.

Green news: Indic women reforesters

Swarajya Magazine reports.

In Uttarakhand:

The Mahila Mangal Dal groups consisting of women volunteers also take up reforestation drives and do the valuable work towards linking trees and the planting of trees with the region's intangible heritage, festivals, rituals, weddings, and cultural events in the region.