Re: [silk] The US of A is officially paranoid.
On Jan 23, 2008 12:54 PM, Charles Haynes [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: and has fewer linguistic divisions than india Europe has 23 official languages: Bulgarian, Czech, Danish, Dutch, English, Estonian, Finnish, French, German, Greek, Hungarian, Irish, Italian, Latvian, Lithuanian, Maltese, Polish, Portuguese, Romanian, Slovak, Slovenian, Spanish, Swedish. India has 22: Assamese, Bengali, Bodo, English, French, Garo, Gujarati, Hindi, Kannada , Khasi, Kokborok, Konkani, Malayalam, Marathi, Meitei, Mizo, Nepali, Oriya, Punjabi, Tamil, Telugu, Urdu. I'd call that a tie, really. Just nitpicking, but if one were to use living languages rather than official languages as a criterion then the picture looks slightly different: http://www.ethnologue.com/show_country.asp?name=IN vs. http://www.argador.info/skope/tero/Regioi/Europa/kultur/scpraaxoi/index.html http://www.ethnologue.com/country_index.asp?place=Europe Not drawing any conclusions, just trying to inject some facts. Yup. Udhay -- ((Udhay Shankar N)) ((udhay @ pobox.com)) ((www.digeratus.com))
[silk] Treating the dead
http://www.newsweek.com/id/35045 To Treat the Dead The new science of resuscitation is changing the way doctors think about heart attacks—and death itself. By Jerry Adler | Newsweek Web Exclusive Consider someone who has just died of a heart attack. His organs are intact, he hasn't lost blood. All that's happened is his heart has stopped beating—the definition of clinical death—and his brain has shut down to conserve oxygen. But what has actually died? As recently as 1993, when Dr. Sherwin Nuland wrote the best seller How We Die, the conventional answer was that it was his cells that had died. The patient couldn't be revived because the tissues of his brain and heart had suffered irreversible damage from lack of oxygen. This process was understood to begin after just four or five minutes. If the patient doesn't receive cardiopulmonary resuscitation within that time, and if his heart can't be restarted soon thereafter, he is unlikely to recover. That dogma went unquestioned until researchers actually looked at oxygen-starved heart cells under a microscope. What they saw amazed them, according to Dr. Lance Becker, an authority on emergency medicine at the University of Pennsylvania. After one hour, he says, we couldn't see evidence the cells had died. We thought we'd done something wrong. In fact, cells cut off from their blood supply died only hours later. But if the cells are still alive, why can't doctors revive someone who has been dead for an hour? Because once the cells have been without oxygen for more than five minutes, they die when their oxygen supply is resumed. It was that astounding discovery, Becker says, that led him to his post as the director of Penn's Center for Resuscitation Science, a newly created research institute operating on one of medicine's newest frontiers: treating the dead. Biologists are still grappling with the implications of this new view of cell death—not passive extinguishment, like a candle flickering out when you cover it with a glass, but an active biochemical event triggered by reperfusion, the resumption of oxygen supply. The research takes them deep into the machinery of the cell, to the tiny membrane-enclosed structures known as mitochondria where cellular fuel is oxidized to provide energy. Mitochondria control the process known as apoptosis, the programmed death of abnormal cells that is the body's primary defense against cancer. It looks to us, says Becker, as if the cellular surveillance mechanism cannot tell the difference between a cancer cell and a cell being reperfused with oxygen. Something throws the switch that makes the cell die. With this realization came another: that standard emergency-room procedure has it exactly backward. When someone collapses on the street of cardiac arrest, if he's lucky he will receive immediate CPR, maintaining circulation until he can be revived in the hospital. But the rest will have gone 10 or 15 minutes or more without a heartbeat by the time they reach the emergency department. And then what happens? We give them oxygen, Becker says. We jolt the heart with the paddles, we pump in epinephrine to force it to beat, so it's taking up more oxygen. Blood-starved heart muscle is suddenly flooded with oxygen, precisely the situation that leads to cell death. Instead, Becker says, we should aim to reduce oxygen uptake, slow metabolism and adjust the blood chemistry for gradual and safe reperfusion. Researchers are still working out how best to do this. A study at four hospitals, published last year by the University of California, showed a remarkable rate of success in treating sudden cardiac arrest with an approach that involved, among other things, a cardioplegic blood infusion to keep the heart in a state of suspended animation. Patients were put on a heart-lung bypass machine to maintain circulation to the brain until the heart could be safely restarted. The study involved just 34 patients, but 80 percent of them were discharged from the hospital alive. In one study of traditional methods, the figure was about 15 percent. Becker also endorses hypothermia—lowering body temperature from 37 to 33 degrees Celsius—which appears to slow the chemical reactions touched off by reperfusion. He has developed an injectable slurry of salt and ice to cool the blood quickly that he hopes to make part of the standard emergency-response kit. In an emergency department, you work like mad for half an hour on someone whose heart stopped, and finally someone says, 'I don't think we're going to get this guy back,' and then you just stop, Becker says. The body on the cart is dead, but its trillions of cells are all still alive. Becker wants to resolve that paradox in favor of life. © 2007 Newsweek, Inc.
Re: [silk] The US of A is officially paranoid.
On Jan 23, 2008 1:35 PM, Udhay Shankar N [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: On Jan 23, 2008 12:54 PM, Charles Haynes [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Europe has 23 official languages, India has 22. I'd call that a tie Just nitpicking, but if one were to use living languages rather than official languages as a criterion then the picture looks slightly different: http://www.ethnologue.com/show_country.asp?name=IN 178 languages http://www.argador.info/skope/tero/Regioi/Europa/kultur/scpraaxoi/index.html http://www.ethnologue.com/country_index.asp?place=Europe 204 languages -- Charles
Re: [silk] The US of A is officially paranoid.
Charles Haynes wrote: http://www.ethnologue.com/show_country.asp?name=IN 178 languages How did you get that? Quoting from the page above, q The number of languages listed for India is 428. Of those, 415 are living languages and 13 are extinct. /q http://www.argador.info/skope/tero/Regioi/Europa/kultur/scpraaxoi/index.html http://www.ethnologue.com/country_index.asp?place=Europe 204 languages
Re: [silk] The US of A is officially paranoid.
On Jan 23, 2008 3:16 PM, Udhay Shankar N [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Charles Haynes wrote: http://www.ethnologue.com/show_country.asp?name=IN 178 languages How did you get that? Quoting from the page above, q The number of languages listed for India is 428. Of those, 415 are living languages and 13 are extinct. /q I wrote a script to count them from the listing. Trust, but verify. :) http://www.argador.info/skope/tero/Regioi/Europa/kultur/scpraaxoi/index.html http://www.ethnologue.com/country_index.asp?place=Europe 204 languages This script was a little trickier. Maybe I had a bug in my script - please feel free to check my work. :) -- Charles
Re: [silk] The US of A is officially paranoid.
oops. Must have had a bug, this time I got 428. On Jan 23, 2008 3:41 PM, Charles Haynes [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: On Jan 23, 2008 3:16 PM, Udhay Shankar N [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Charles Haynes wrote: http://www.ethnologue.com/show_country.asp?name=IN 178 languages How did you get that? Quoting from the page above, q The number of languages listed for India is 428. Of those, 415 are living languages and 13 are extinct. /q I wrote a script to count them from the listing. Trust, but verify. :) http://www.argador.info/skope/tero/Regioi/Europa/kultur/scpraaxoi/index.html http://www.ethnologue.com/country_index.asp?place=Europe 204 languages This script was a little trickier. Maybe I had a bug in my script - please feel free to check my work. :) -- Charles
Re: [silk] Treating the dead
On Jan 23, 2008 2:02 PM, Udhay Shankar N [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: http://www.newsweek.com/id/35045 To Treat the Dead The new science of resuscitation is changing the way doctors think about heart attacks—and death itself. Didn't someone post this before? -- b
Re: [silk] Treating the dead
Biju Chacko wrote: http://www.newsweek.com/id/35045 To Treat the Dead The new science of resuscitation is changing the way doctors think about heart attacks—and death itself. Didn't someone post this before? It appears so. Both Eugen and Cheeni did. My bad. Udhay
Re: [silk] Treating the dead
On Wednesday 23 Jan 2008 4:09 pm, Biju Chacko wrote: On Jan 23, 2008 2:02 PM, Udhay Shankar N [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: http://www.newsweek.com/id/35045 To Treat the Dead The new science of resuscitation is changing the way doctors think about heart attacks—and death itself. Didn't someone post this before? Humph! That's no reason to treat it as dead is it? shiv
Re: [silk] Treating the dead
Didn't someone post this before? It appears so. Both Eugen and Cheeni did. My bad. It does seem to more or less follow the time honored SF practice of cryo revival.. Lois McMaster Bujold has that procedure done on Miles Vorkosigan in at least one novel that I can remember, written a good few years before this article. And there might have been other such cases, but googling for cryo revival only brings up pages and pages of Bujold stuff. srs
Re: [silk] Treating the dead
And there might have been other such cases, but googling for cryo revival only brings up pages and pages of Bujold stuff. Oh yeah, and Brad Templeton insisting its going to be a pipe dream because nobody is going to care / spend enough to build a workable system http://www.cryonet.org/cgi-bin/dsp.cgi?msg=5253
Re: [silk] Treating the dead
On Wed, Jan 23, 2008 at 04:31:05PM +0530, Suresh Ramasubramanian wrote: Oh yeah, and Brad Templeton insisting its going to be a pipe dream because nobody is going to care / spend enough to build a workable system Why should we care about what Brad Templeton thought 1995? Despite all noises to the contrary, people would kill if given a slight chance to live forever. The only reason cryonics is being laughed upon is because people think it is a scam (and no celebrities are doing it). (Notice that Brian Wowk is actively working on the problem, while Brad Templeton... What the fuck does Brad Templeton do, these days?) The suspension technology is well-developed, albeit lacking quality control and wide infrastructure. The technology required for resurrection involves computers with ~mole number of switches and/or machine-phase nanosystems a la http://www.nanomedicine.com Cryolazarusse would be a side effect of such technology. http://www.cryonet.org/cgi-bin/dsp.cgi?msg=5253 -- Eugen* Leitl a href=http://leitl.org;leitl/a http://leitl.org __ ICBM: 48.07100, 11.36820 http://www.ativel.com http://postbiota.org 8B29F6BE: 099D 78BA 2FD3 B014 B08A 7779 75B0 2443 8B29 F6BE
Re: [silk] Will India Become the New Vanguard of the Open SourceMovement?
On Tue, 2008-01-22 at 17:10 -0800, Suresh Ramasubramanian wrote: People with MBAs from far better schools than mine, who actually do practice management (I forgot most of mine already) assure me that Maslow's hierarchy is a throwback to the 50s, debunked / replaced by better theories many times over etc. sure, in the details, but the basic principle that people usually tend to meet basic needs before they meet less basic ones, and that the basic-less basic ordering is generally similar for all people, is reasonable. there's even evidence from evolutionary biology for this - e.g. starvation leads to a longer life as the body redirects the limited available energy to the more basic needs of survival from the less basic needs of reproduction. oh, what thread creep. welcome to silk.
Re: [silk] The US of A is officially paranoid.
On Wed, 2008-01-23 at 09:55 +0530, shiv sastry wrote: The fact is that such a commonality was repeatedly recognised and picked up and utilized by Shankaracharya, Viveknanda, Mahatma Gandhi and Aurobindo among others. But these names mean little or nothing from the viewpoint of the school education that Indian children get. Hence Indians go through life imagining that there is nothing unifying in India. so? there are lots of commonalities among indians. there are lots of commonalities among europeans. there is no evidence (certainly none you cite) that the commonalities among indians (on whatever attributes) is in any way greater than the commonalities among europeans (perhaps on other attributes). before 1947, india hasn't been one nation, politically, except under imperial rule that was foreign to much of the population (yes, even ashoka etc). as anyone who's wandered around south asian gatherings abroad can testify to, punjabis have much more to share across the religious and national boundaries than indian punjabis have to share with people from nagaland or chennai. similarly, large parts of europe have been part of one nation, politically, under various imperial regimes that were seen as foreign by at large parts of the population. modern europe is composed of many nations, including some that make no cultural sense, due to the rise of nationalism as a trait in the 18th and 19th centuries. that essentially european trait is well represented in india, which never went through an indigenous period of nationalism. in many parts of the world, wealth leads to a form of nationalism based increasingly on shared economic interest. the US is one of the few countries explicitly defined by shared values aligned to economic interest (life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness) and the absence of too much history is precisely why foreigners can integrate much better and faster and more successfully there than in any other country. at least if their presence there is voluntary.
Re: [silk] The US of A is officially paranoid.
On Wed, 2008-01-23 at 10:33 +0530, Suresh Ramasubramanian wrote: Lets put it this way. The average fat, overfed gujju sheth (and the average deep south redneck with a rusting chevy in his backyard + a shotgun rack made of deer horns) is deeply racist. And hopelessly inadequate at a variety of things. [...] Both those groups deserve exactly the kind of leader that they got now. unfortunately, when they are a majority, the rest of the population gets to share that leader. however, one difference between george bush and narendra modi, noted by the economist [1], is that the latter was a much more competent administrator. it may not be unreasonable to conclude, as does the economist (like lots of other international media; i am puzzled by the article's claim that there was no coverage of the Modi election victory) that many people may have voted for him simply because of the improvement in gujarat's economy and administration. for many, his rabid sectarianism could be somewhat irrelevant, a bonus, or a risk worth taking. -rishab 1. http://www.economist.com/world/asia/displaystory.cfm?story_id=10443177
Re: [silk] Will India Become the New Vanguard of the Open SourceMovement?
On Jan 23, 2008 5:41 PM, Rishab Aiyer Ghosh [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: [...] oh, what thread creep. welcome to silk. And my whole life is a thread drift that'll beat silk hands down :-) Cheeni
Re: [silk] The US of A is officially paranoid.
On Wednesday 23 Jan 2008 5:54 pm, Rishab Aiyer Ghosh wrote: so? there are lots of commonalities among indians. Lots of commonalities among Indians. Does that not also mean that there are lots of commonalities between Hindus, who form a huge majority in India? Is it that difficult to say? Incidentally what was historically India is still not one united nation. The minute the British left it was broken into two pieces, India and Pakistan. Now it's 3 pieces. So no historic rule about India never having been one nation is being violated by truncated modern India being a united country. It is still in several pieces. Let us not get fooled by the fact that two of the parts of Indian have a name that is not India. And the 65% fragment of Imperial India that the British had united now remains united, thanks in no small measure to the collective desire for unity by a vast majority of the population. And a vast majority of the unity seekers happen to be Hindus. Would it destroy the secular fabric of India to say that? This is not saying that Muslims and others do not seek unity, But once again - do not forget that a large part of anything that represents India be it poverty, distress, malnutrition or progress, has a Hindu signature. Why do some people find it so difficult to get that past their lips. Is there a lurking fear that non Hindus will give up and run away if Hindus are given any credit for anything positive? Or if Hindus for a minute stop self flagellation and grovelling admission and responsibility for all of India's gigantic problems? shiv
Re: [silk] New Lurker Introduction
On Wednesday 23 January 2008, Rishab Aiyer Ghosh wrote: welcome to silklist, taj... i had a cobwebsite for a long time at dxm.org, then after 10+ years i finally decided that i don't need to put content there when i can have the one of the world's richest companies do it for me, and dxm now just redirects to a google search for my name. you could definitely do the same :-) You are still doing the things that got you that Google juice, Rishab. In my case it will - for better or worse - highlight a productive Brahmachari period with a far less well-defined Grihasta phase. ;) -Taj.
Re: [silk] The US of A is officially paranoid.
On Wed, Jan 23, 2008 at 06:41:46AM -0800, Suresh Ramasubramanian wrote: however, one difference between george bush and narendra modi, noted by the economist [1], is that the latter was a much more competent administrator. Hell yes, and Herr Hitler made the trains run on time, too. yes, and hitler won his first election unfudged too, unlike bush. -rishab
Re: [silk] The US of A is officially paranoid.
On Jan 21, 2008 9:57 AM, Srini Ramakrishnan [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: I assume that question largely went out to the Indians on the list who would fit nicely into the emigree-to-USA crowd. So, my additional question to them is, how safe do you feel about living in India? How safe do you feel when you are in the presence of a policeman, politician, government bureaucrat when you transact official business with them? Would your feelings change if you were from a different Indian ethnicity, perhaps a minority - religious, ethnic, geographical or a combination of those. How about a different economic condition, say much poorer or much richer. How safely do you think India protects your assets? What is your level of comfort in owning land for example, where the records system is usually without backup, and really has no protection against illegal modification? How confident are you that you will not be subject to illegal detention in the prisons you helped pay for with your taxes, and if you were ever to find yourself in such a situation, how would you rate your chances of getting access to a free and fair trial and timely legal remedy? For all of the above questions, would your answer change significantly if you were in a strange part of the country with no access to your friends, powerful connections and money? How effectively do you think you would fit in with local society if you were to move to a different part of India, perhaps one where you don't speak the local language? Most of these questions would work just as well if you are talking about the United States. I see your point about people being naturally xenophobic. What really scares me though is a xenophobic government. And of the countries I've visited, the most xenophobic is quite definitely the United States right now. Venky, the Second.
Re: [silk] New Lurker Introduction
Welcome, Taj. C -- http://www.flickr.com/photos/ravages http://www.linkedin.com/in/ravages http://www.selectiveamnesia.org/ +91-9884467463
Re: [silk] The US of A is officially paranoid.
On Wed, 2008-01-23 at 12:54 +0530, Charles Haynes wrote: On Jan 23, 2008 7:14 AM, Rishab Aiyer Ghosh [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote Eurobarometer 2005 showed that only 52% of Europeans believe there is a god and 18% say I don' t believe there is any sort of spirit, God or life force while the 2001 Indian census shows over 80% of Indians are Hindu. the problem with wikipedia is that it only has part of the information and the information it has on different things is not necessarily presented in a comparable format :-) the indian census didn't show how many indians believe there is a god. according to the CIA world factbook which _does_ show european populations by religion, shows that about 70% of the population is christian in germany (where only 47% told eurobarometer that they believe there is a god) and over 90% of italians are (though only 74% told eurobarometer they believe there is a god). i believe a very large majority (well over 80%) of germans allow the government to deduct and transfer to the church a tax on their income - without which they are not given a christian burial. danes talk about 4-wheel-drive christians who visit the church for baptisms in a pram, marriages in a limo and burial in a hearse. they still hold a christian identity enough to want to keep turkey out of the EU because it's muslim (though more secular, officially, than many EU countries). i'm not sure if the indian census allows you to respond that you don't believe there is any sort of spirit, god or life force or even that you are atheist. i do believe it does not allow you to report multiple religions within a single family. i could be mischievous here and note that if we include india's neighbours in the definition of india, the hindu population is most certainly a smaller share of the population, compared to christians in the EU... and has fewer linguistic divisions than india Europe has 23 official languages: Bulgarian, Czech, Danish, Dutch, udhay already dealt with that, i believe. india does not officially recognise most languages because languages with significant populations get their own state in india. for that matter, they usually do so in europe, too. -rishab
Re: [silk] The US of A is officially paranoid.
On Jan 23, 2008 10:28 PM, Venky TV [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Most of these questions would work just as well if you are talking about the United States. I see your point about people being naturally xenophobic. What really scares me though is a xenophobic government. And of the countries I've visited, the most xenophobic is quite definitely the United States right now. To bring this back around to the start of the thread... it seems to me there would be a fair amount of selection bias in that. I don't know about you, but I tend to avoid countries with strongly xenophobic governments, being a xeno and all. What bothers me more than individually xeonophobia, is the apparent rise in isolationism globally. It seems much more apparent to me in traditionally liberal western democracies, perhaps because I had enjoyed the relative openness in the past. These days I find myself more comfortable in countries that are traditionally the source of immigrants than in the traditional destinations. To pick a recent example, when in Zurich recently we briefly saw a billboard with some cute sheep on it. I pointed it out to debbie saying Look! Sheep! It was only later when reflecting more on what I saw that I realized it had been three white sheep standing on a swiss flag, kicking a black sheep off of it. I did a little research and was saddened to discover it was a political ad by a right leaning political party, nominally against criminal and anti-social elements of society. No one is fooled though... -- Charles (who still thinks the sheep were cute.) -- Charles
Re: [silk] The US of A is officially paranoid.
On Jan 24, 2008 2:03 AM, Rishab Aiyer Ghosh [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: On Wed, 2008-01-23 at 12:54 +0530, Charles Haynes wrote: On Jan 23, 2008 7:14 AM, Rishab Aiyer Ghosh [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote Eurobarometer 2005 showed that only 52% of Europeans believe there is a god and 18% say I don' t believe there is any sort of spirit, God or life force while the 2001 Indian census shows over 80% of Indians are Hindu. the problem with wikipedia is that it only has part of the information and the information it has on different things is not necessarily presented in a comparable format :-) I would welcome more directly comparable information. That was just what I could discover in a ten minute web search. Entirely subjectively, India feels much more homogeneous religiously than Europe taken as a whole, but yes, it does feel comparable to say Spain or Italy in religiousity where the vast majority of the population is nominally of a single religion, where most of the middle and upper class are not particularly religious, and religious minorities feel conspicuous and there is some overt discrimination. and has fewer linguistic divisions than india Europe has 23 official languages: Bulgarian, Czech, Danish, Dutch, udhay already dealt with that, i believe. india does not officially recognise most languages because languages with significant populations get their own state in india. for that matter, they usually do so in europe, too. I'm not sure what we're dealing with. I was just trying to check the facts behind the claims, I'm not even sure what your point was supposed to be. The facts as far as I can tell are that Europe as a whole seems to be less homogeneous religiously and less religious in general than India as a whole, but as you say the statistics are not directly comparable and it'd be nice to have better facts. Linguistically both India and Europe are extremely diverse, with dozens of official languages, and hundreds of living languages. My wild ass guess is that both are more diverse linguistically than any other comparable political divisions. Which means... what? -- Charles
