Burmese Indians

I watched Motor Sundaram Pillai a long long time ago, but what I remember most from it is that Sivaji Ganesan used to have a factory in Burma. I have come across several references to the cultural and trading connections between Burma and India not only in articles but also in familial anectodes, mostly recalling the days of the Raj.

With pro-democracy protests and a military junta in rule, I wondered if there were any Indian-origin people still in Burma. A Google later there was a Wikipedia article, an Atlantic article from 1958 and a Time article from 1964.

Effective way of arguing

Internet discussion is all about disagreeing with one another, denigration is uncommon and unavoidable at times.

This image(click for larger view) coaxes us not to degrade ourselves and judge the efficacy of other comments. It is a one-stop guide to countering another person's argument - maintain the upper hand at all times.

Original text written by Paul Graham and image Loudacris. Image used via CC3.0.

Adblock Plus: Guilty pleasure

To use or not? Adblock Plus is an addon for Firefox which removes all ads from webpages by blocking ad links as it loads. That's just the simple part.

At first it didn't seem very different: I already use Flashblock to stop Flash content on a page from loading automatically and have blocked images from a handful of ad sites, leaving text ads to appear, but you will feel the change when you disable Adblock Plus.

Suddenly it will feel as though the webpage is cluttered and un-beautiful. Enable it back again and you will truly appreciate the addon. I is guilty pleasure: as it is most web content survives through ads, so if those ads don't reach the user, revenue will definitely decrease. Some sites even explicitly suggest that their site be excluded from Adblock Plus.

The debate rages on - on one side the 'net should be free' people(pirates?) who want only content with zero disruption in service, on the other content producers with revenue shortfalls.

The extreme cases are interesting: if all users use the addon, noone will see ads; the other is that content producers block users who have enabled Adblock Plus.

In my opinion, Adblock Plus should not be used by the avid user who knows the difference between content and ads. We should allow producers to exhibit ads, simply because we aren't paying anything. As long as it is free, complaining would be to listen to the street musician for hours and not even acknowledge him.

If at all it should be installed, it is for novice users - the young and the old who can be tricked into entering their email for a free iPod or subscription.

Ultimately, if you are using Adblock Plus, please disable it. As much as website maybe torturous, please bear with them. It's offered free.

Mrs vs Ms vs Mz

In a social gathering, referencing other people is easy amongst peers - you could even say 'that guy' or just call him by name, 'Bala'. With elders, though, it is difficult with the elderly ladies. I've always had a bit of hesitation in naming a person - 'Who prepared this dish?' 'Ms/Mrs XY'.

Depending on their marital status, the answer can vary: the Guardian style guide says use Ms unless they have specified Miss or Mrs; Time magazine in a non-article says anything is fine.

There is one more specific: British speakers tend to pronounce Ms as Mz, indicating their current marital status is 'unknown'. I've heard it a couple of times on TV shows, so at last there seems to be a solution: Mz.

Mirror mirror who do you see

While rearranging at home, we had to move a dressing mirror(tall one) outside, where the dogs happened to find it.

The Dachshund is ferocious by nature, while the G. Shepherd is semi-mellow. The difference with which they approached the mirror is a telling lesson in how we perceive others and how they reciprocate to us.

The Dachshund, sighting another dog in the mirror, immediately started growling and then barking. Luckily I was carrying it, else it may have charged the mirror.

On the other hand, the G. Shepherd went to the mirror tail wagging - bumping into it whilst trying to sniff, obviously not expecting the dog in the mirror to move as fast as it was.

Then it struck me: isn't this how we end up viewing others? Unbeknownst to us, people are sizing us up, with little help, based on our doing. Our actions may not seem much to us: a kind gesture here, a swift rebuke there, an innocuous tease - but they may be a lot to others. If one has a frown with an authoritative voice, like the Dachshund, there is no reason for others to speak to us softly or kindly.

While, like the G. Shepherd, smile, and the world smiles with you.

'Dams remove power from the water'

My physics teacher once narrated a tale of how politicians were misleading villagers by telling them 'remove power from the water', hence crops would not grow properly.

The politician was supposedly referring to the electricity generated upstream, hence 'power removed', there would be 'lesser power' left for the crops to grow.

So, my teacher said, villagers must be given proper information about dams and how generating electricity does not remove any actual 'power' from the water, and that scrupulous politicians were using the situation to rail against the dam.

However, in my opinion, the politicians were inadvertently right, and my teacher was wrong: putting up dams does actually remove 'power' or 'punch' from the water - silt and hence nutrients are held back - which could lead to lower crop yield. I have no idea which dam he was talking about and dams have varied locations and maintenance; so silt accumulation may or may not be a major problem, but in many dams this has been a problem(wiki, Aswan dam, 1, 2, KRS Mysore, Mettur dam).

To sum up, politician makes a seemingly inaccurate statement to further his goals; they could be ultimately true albeit in a different sense.

Playing cards racist, sexist: GPTP

Faux Wire Service

Wichita, KS. Sep 29: Normal playing cards, used by millions of people daily, are racist and sexist, the Group for Proper Treatment of People(GPTP) said in a press conference today.

According to spokeswoman Scarlett Butler, the suits in modern playing cards are in red and black and an absence of white suits indicated that these cards were intentionally ignoring that color.

"That there are two black suits and two red suits but no white suits proves beyond probable doubt these cards are designed to ignore the welfare of white people," Ms. Butler said. Her organization was formed for the very purpose of pointing out such anomalies to the larger public and had several thousand followers on social networking sites Facebook and Twitter, she pointed.

Going further with their agenda, Ms. Butler also declared that the cards were sexist because there are two male faces (King and Jack) but only one female face(Queen). She suggested that the Aces should feature a female face or two of the Kings should be made female.

Noting that there are female heads of state too, Ms. Butler pressed upon the fact that a disparity in as small matters as playing cards should be the starting point for equality in gender and race.

However, during the Q&A session, Ms. Butler dodged many questions, referring them to her head office. In particular when it was indicated that playing card backgrounds are entirely white and it would not be possible to make a white suit and that most books are printed in black on white backgrounds, she said asking such questions amounted to 'racism' and that her head office would answer such 'frivolous' queries.

Ms. Butler ended the interaction when a journalist wanted to know if her organization was sexist because they had only women on their board of directors.

The GPTP did not return emails at the time of this report.

End

The above is an over the top work of imagination and has no bearings in real life.
-----------------------------------------
At first this article may seem moronic, but this post is not without reason.

This is inspired by these mainly: an email calling a blog targeting women sexist, commentators calling Obama racist and finally saying health care reform is Nazism, that too to a Jewish Senator.

You read that right. A guy calls a blog sexist because it caters to the tastes of women(notwithstanding that the site doesn't have overtly unique specialities apart from those who comment). A commentator calls the first black president of the USA racist inspite his having a white parent and grandparents one of whom fought in WWII. And somehow beyond belief a Jewish senator is accused of supporting Nazi policies.

If you just frowned your eyebrows, wrinkled your forehead, scratched your head with one hand and placed your chin in the other and said to yourself, 'Did all of this really happen?', I won't blame you.

PS: My earlier faux report was ultimately justified: PETA was unhappy Obama swatted a fly.

Indian badge in the US too

These pictures were taken on the premises of the Sri Venkateswara temple in Pittsburgh.



As you can see, those drivers didn't want to park some distance away, drove up to this spot, found the adjoining parking spaces occupied and decided to park in the No Parking zone(granted the pickup may not belong to an Indian). There were many more improperly parked cars all around.

It highlights the lethargic attitude and aloofness even though they, being in the US, know better. Had this happened in India I wouldn't have cared one bit, but this somehow it is assumed that we needn't care we come to know that it's Indian and not American. What is this, Indian when you blink, American otherwise?

Well there is the possibility that those vehicles belong to the temple trustees and marked the area so they could park. That, if true, is even worse.

Image credit: Sandy

Vegetarian? Don't go to McDonald's

If you are a pure vegetarian, please don't step into McDonald's. There's nothing in there for you. First off the personnel in fast food chains do not understand 'vegetarian'. You have to tell them 'no meat', otherwise you will end up like my roommates who ate a Filet-o-fish sandwich with the fish even though they said 'vegetarian'(and no meat I think).

The point is McDonald's doesn't have anything for pure vegetarians except salads, cookies and ice-creams.

So if you go to McDonald's and order a McChicken without the chicken, you will get a bun with lettuce and tomatoes. Sure, they will oblige to any request, but YOU WILL ONLY BE MAKING AN IDIOT OF YOURSELF, which is not worth it, SO DON'T GO THERE.

These engineers fail at basic safety

My first thoughts, aside from the insane heat generated from the processor and the materials lining the cooling unit, were, how badly they fail in basic safety.

Handling liquid Nitrogen is no small joke, mainly because it freezes anything it touches in an instant - so for these 'engineers' to use the flask without gloves and goggles should get them an F.

My friend Sunil had a one-on-one experience with liquid N, when he touched the outside of a flask filled with it. The split second touch with the non-gloved hand resulted in dark blood-clot like skin damage on the tips of his fingers, including numbness, disappearing in a few months. I asked him for a comment; his comments, edited only for netspeak:

that's dangerous sh*t he is doing

you need to have safety gloves and safety glasses

because if your skin comes in contact...... tissues will die and the whole area would be black and in severe cases you will not regain the feeling in that area..... i.e., area will be numb for life

and when he was pouring from the temp controlled big container to the thermo-flask...... he can just pour it like water...... he needs to have a nozzle for it

This is not even touching the aspect of safety which the BBC should have ensured, especially when their own shows double down upon it.

Maybe it's the reporter's duty to inform them.

Ah well, expecting that much of her is a lot especially when she asks if a hair dryer could be used instead of the blowtorch. Stay classy, lady.

Image used via: personal, non-commercial

The milk jug illusion

Getting milk in one gallon jugs and infrequent visits to the grocery store mean timing your consumption to coincide with a trip worth the time, so it took awhile to counter the milk jug illusion which tends to throw off scale visual levels for judgement.

These jugs(also called milk gallons) have pseudo-conical top halfs, so when pouring out milk, that half seems to empty faster, instructing you, albeit falsely, to slow down consumption by say one-eights so as not to make a specific visit to replace it. A couple of days later, the level reaches the cubical half, and then the level hardly seems to dip, panicking you to believe you will still have milk left when you get a new jug.

It's even worse when the level is so low when viewed from outside that what one might assume it will last for just one day actually lasts three times.

In essence, the milk jug empties out faster when opened and doesn't want to empty in the end.

Image via

Clearing flash cookies

I should have written this months ago, here it is, regarding flash cookies stored on your computer.

It all started when I reduced the volume on a YouTube video, then cleared all my cookies, temp files later and opened that site again. To my surprise the volume was still reduced, which indicated that the settings were stored elsewhere, not in the browser. A little searching showed that flash settings, including video players are stored in a flash profile under the Adobe Flash directory.

Sites recommend simple utilities like Ccleaner to clear those cookies, which I continued to use regularly.

Recently, the discussion has increased - why suddenly, I don't know, but it also turns out that those cookies store a lot more information than normal browser cookies, and that in some cases cleared browser cookies were reinstated by those flash cookies.

Hence, for privacy reasons, all cookies must be cleared reguarly.

Here is a scary demo: the Adobe Flash website can access all your cookies.

I would personally suggest that you dump IE for Firefox or Chrome, as even IE8 is clunky and tough to work with.

Tools:
1. Firefox addon BetterPrivacy shows you the cookies and offers to clear them when you exit the browser.
2. Ccleaner shows and clears temp files from a variety of applications including browsers and Office.(Applications-->Macromedia flash)

9/11, 2001

That fateful day changed the course of recent history in ways we would not have imagined. Two wars, a dramatic shift in geopolitics and an unprecedented election victory later, things are still not normal. Where was I that day?

An evening back from school, listening to the noon Newshour(with Julian Marshall I think) on BBC World Service, from 6.30 pm to 7.30pm. The first report was 'a helicopter has crashed into one of the World Trade Center towers', it was a normal breaking news, probably just an unfortunate helicopter losing control. Then it was corrected to a plane...followed by a second plane. He then announced that fighter jets had been 'scrambled' to intercept another plane. Still it was the normal routine: mentioning to top story, moving on the next, until my father called me out to see the devastating visuals of the towers engulfed in smoke.

The immediate reports were that 2 planes had struck the towers and could not be a coincidence; helicopters could not evacuate those on the rooftops because of the intense heat and smoke. Later cellphones and other communication devices were rendered useless because a lot of companies had towers on top of the two buildings.

The major news channel of the day, NDTV directly relayed live footage from CNN for the rest of the night. Sun TV had all but one story not related to the attacks.

The next day, the headline on The Hindu read "America under attack" with TV grab pictures of the towers collapsing. The day after it had the horrifying picture of people jumping out of the tower in desperation.

BBC World Service upended its entire programming - the whole schedule was news about the attacks now updated with the Pentagon and the plane crash in a field. One poignant story was that of a window cleaner, who worked on the towers, whom the Outlook programme had covered very recently. They announced that he was working there at the time of the attacks and did not survive. Earlier there would be hour-long uninterrupted programs, now every half hour it was time for a 2 minute news roundup, which still continues to this day.

Another report mentioned was that the architects of the WTC had in fact taken into an account an airplane striking the building due to fog and missing JFK, but as was apparent, the buildings withstood the impact but collapsed due to the melting of the intermediate sections causing the top sections to collapse. The attackers had planned their operations be high enough and out of reach of firefighters.

It took more than a week for regular programs to come back on air and I particularly remember one titled 'Understanding Islam' featuring introductions to the faith and their holy book. It was a time of great tribulations, with anyone with Arabic features including beards - like Sikhs being attacked, tough restrictions on travel, visas rejected, television and movie stars hosting telethons to comfort anyone calling in and the inevitability of war in the region.

What if is such a difficult scenario to address. We can't turn the clock back, but the attacks did bring to the forefront issues India has been facing for a long time: proxy war through extremism. That day is also indirectly responsible for the downfall of the LTTE - the first press conference by their chief followed a ceasefire declared in the heightened sense of insecurity in the following months. It will be the 8th anniversary - still a contentious issue amongst Americans, partly because of the wars, but it is as this generation's Pearl Harbor: 'Never Forget' is etched in stone outside many a public building.

What is your recollection of that day?

Parents right about photographs

My parents were right about photographs: it's a waste if you aren't in the picture. For one it shows that you were there, and second there is something to look at. This particularly applies to fireworks, where all of them are just like the others. It will be better if someone actually stood in front of them. Taking a picture of a beautiful mountain range? Stand at a corner. I am sure it'll be a better shot.

The era of free information?

Are we living in an era of cheap if not free information?

The way the internet has been embraced by everyone is leading to a new phase in how information is shared. Just over a decade ago you had to get the news from a TV channel or a newspaper. You could show your ire by writing a letter to the editor or Government. Want to sell something? Place an ad in the classifieds and hope someone is searching for the exact same thing. Want to hear more music? Go to a store and buy entire albums hoping you will like them too. You're an expert in fixing that nagging sound in only your model of your car. How do you tell others? Nope, no luck there.

Now the web and to a large extent Google have upended this traditional model. Hundreds of newspapers with many viewpoints, or if you wish you can hear straight from the horse's mouth via Twitter and the homepage of anyone concerned, say Obama the presidential candidate. Craigslist is the newspaper's bane. I know of one statistic where 65% if a newspaper's revenue is from ads. Advertisers can now choose to bypass them and target their audience on the web itself. Music - apart from the underground illegal filesharing, sampling and discovering new music has never been easier. Enter your search term and lo and behold people offer solutions to your car problem - for free.

One argument is that

Newspapers took two cents of journalism and wrapped in ninety-eight cents of overhead and distraction.

The tale of how newspapers ultimately maintain their current revenue levels is to be seen - in my opinion, as the above link confirms, newspapers may have to shrink their operational staff. If they erect paywalls, then other news sources will gain that traffic. Take an example: say NYT has a super exclusive story of how Apple is developing a new Google killer. What will happen is that all other news sources will either get thir own stories in no time, or simpley reference the NYT article and say "New York Times is reporting that....." As of now, even though WSJ and NYT have erected a paywall or a login-to-view-wall, if you go through Google - or Digg - you can bypass that wall. Simply search for that particular headline in Google and click on it and you will be presented with the full article. This is because just less than half of web traffic to news sites is non-intentional - search, other news sites, social networks: basically linking.

The internet has truly placed power back into the hands of the consumer - Wikipedia is a tremendous starting point for any interest, all of which has been created by people with free time - it is a gift of free labour. Many institutions have put their course content online, including MIT and the IITs enabling anyone to learn, at no cost.

Now feedback is heard louder than ever when a custormer complains. Just ask United.

One main bone of contention for the big media in the US during the 2008 elections was the Obama was bypassing them - sending messages via Twitter, text message, using Facebook and aggregators to spread his ideas. If you really want to know what he said in a press conference, if you don't like what the media is telling you, you can always watch in on YouTube, which was also a major focal point during the Iran turmoil, along with Twitter.

Definitely there will be a paid model developed soon, but the web is so big someone will come out with a free version, like Google did to mail and Skype and Yahoo to voice and video chat.

There is one very big elephant in the room - an internet connection. All this flow of information is possible only if no sites are blocked, or if the government decides not to block them. 'Free' information takes on a whole new meaning.

Do leave a comment on your thoughts and outlook for the future.

Further reading :
Link1 link2 link3 link4