Re: [silk] What do you do when you get to know that you have been pwned?

[Aadisht Khanna]

>
>
> 3. Enable 2FA EVERYWHERE that supports it. Ideally, with a hardware token
> such as a yubikey.
>
>
Are these available for purchase in India?

[silk] Carbon Audits in South India - Anybody Doing Them?

[Aadisht Khanna]

Folks, a request. Do you have any contacts of any organisation or
consultant who does carbon audits in South India? Chennai is best,
Bangalore can also work.

Where I'm coming from with this request:


   1. I have a factory in Tamil Nadu which uses a PET Coke fired boiler
   (which may have to be switched back to coal in the future if PET coke gets
   banned), occasionally uses diesel gensets when there's a power failure, and
   of course draws power from the grid. I want to know the total carbon
   footprint I have from this factory.
   2. Along with this, incoming and outgoing freight also have their own
   carbon footprints, and I'd like to know how to calculate those from
   transporter bills.
   3. Company cars in turn generate a carbon footprint.
   4. I have to legally maintain some green and some open areas on the
   factory site. How much are my trees offsetting this?
   5. To become carbon neutral, if I started afforesting either barren land
   or buying agricultural land and turning it over to forestry, how much land
   would I need to get?

Looking for anybody who can answer the above questions and would appreciate
all leads.

Re: [silk] Novels about Jews in India?

[Aadisht Khanna]

On Wed, Sep 13, 2017 at 3:27 PM, Thaths  wrote:

> On Wed., 13 Sep. 2017, 12:56 pm Suresh Ramasubramanian 
> wrote:
>
> > Hm.  What’s that stuff they smoke in those parts?  Qat? Kif?
>
>
> What is chewed. And is not hallucinogenic. More of a mild upper.
>
> There seems to be some confusion - the cat is the chewer, not the chewee.

Re: [silk] Novels about Jews in India?

[Aadisht Khanna]

On Tue, Sep 12, 2017 at 4:37 PM, John Sundman  wrote:

> This is a query from Nicole Galland, a friend of mine:
>
> "Can anyone name a novel about Jews in the Arab-World-not-including-Israel?
> Also interested in hearing about novels concerning Jews in India. “
>
>
The Rabbi's Cat by Joann Sfar is a graphic novel about a Tunisian (I think,
but definitely North African) rabbi whose cat gains the power of speech and
then engages the rabbi in theological debate.

Re: [silk] Any leads?

[Aadisht Khanna]

On Sat, Jun 3, 2017 at 2:16 PM, WordPsmith  wrote:

> Thanks, Aadisht. As it happens, my friend has a couple of people on her
> list who do make these bigger pilgrimages: Vaishno Devi, Badrinath and so
> on. But I may pass on your contact if she's drawing a blank with her folks,
> if that's okay with you?
>

Yes, sure.

Re: [silk] Any leads?

[Aadisht Khanna]

On Thu, Jun 1, 2017 at 11:58 AM, Samanth Subramanian 
wrote:

> Hello:
>
> A friend in the US is working on a photo feature, and she's looking for
> families in India (nuclear or joint) that go repeatedly to a particular
> place as an act of pilgrimage -- that consider this a kind of family
> vacation, almost.
>
>
> After seeing the other responses to this thread, which all seem to be
centred around 'family deities', would your friend be interested in
families that don't have one but do a regular pilgrimage anyway? My dad's
cousin goes to Vaishno Devi once a year, and his sister used to until the
physical exertion knocked her out.

Re: [silk] Recommended Reading from 2015

[Aadisht Khanna]

>
> That's Constance Garnett, the great populariser of Russian novels in the
> West. She's still very widely read. But can I put in a word for Pevear and
> Volokhonsky? I finally finished War and Peace this year and I can't praise
> their translation enough -- it's clearly meticulous and well
> thought-through, but awe-inspiringly crisp and lucid.
>
> Noted, thank you, but the same penny pinching that drove most of my 2015
reading to free longreads will probably also keep me on free Gutenberg
translations in 2016.

Re: [silk] Recommended Reading from 2015

[Aadisht Khanna]

On Fri, Dec 11, 2015 at 8:35 AM, Thaths  wrote:

> For the seventh year in a row, I am turning to silk listers for book
> recommendation
> this holiday season.
>
> What have you read over the last year that has left a mark on you? What are
> you eagerly looking forward to reading over the Christmas/NewYear's
> holidays?
>
>
>
Books enjoyed in 2015:

Ali and Nino by Kurban Said - the great Azerbaijani novel, may not actually
have been written by an Azerbaijani. You can never really tell if it's
sincerely describing life in WW1 Baku or just dramatising the worst
stereotypes about the period. Tremendous fun to read.

Perdido Street Station by China Mieville - because I started China Mieville
with The Scar, I was pleasantly surprised to find that Perdido Street
Station actually has a plot.

Seveneves by Neal Stephenson - after the disappointment of Reamde and and
the Mongoliad, I thought Stephenson was back to doing what he does best ie
sweeping and maximalist epics.

Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy - I took two years to finish this, but enjoyed
it far more in 2015 than 2014. Tolstoy has this under-the-surface mild
sarcasm that suddenly leaps out, bites, and then goes back to rest.

The House that BJ Built by Anuja Chauhan - I don't know if I am overly
biased towards this because of my own
Delhi-family-with-scheming-relatives-background, but I hugely enjoyed this.

Royal Wedding by Meg Cabot - the happiest and funniest book I read in all
2015.


Attempting frugality, most of my reading this year was free longform
writing from www.longform.org instead of books. The few nonfiction books I
did read this year (two on the history of European Christianity and one
which was a public transport design handbook) did not impress me very much.

What I'm hoping to read in 2016:

Beowulf (after hearing an impressive BBC In Our Time podcast about it)
Fanny Burney (same reason)
catching up with my scifi reading queue/ stack, especially the
climate-scifi ones
Michael Chabon

Re: [silk] Recommended Reading from 2015

[Aadisht Khanna]

On Mon, Dec 14, 2015 at 12:12 PM, Ashwin Nanjappa <ashwi...@gmail.com>
wrote:

> On Mon, Dec 14, 2015 at 2:01 PM, Aadisht Khanna <li...@aadisht.net> wrote:
> > Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy - I took two years to finish this, but
> enjoyed
> > it far more in 2015 than 2014. Tolstoy has this under-the-surface mild
> > sarcasm that suddenly leaps out, bites, and then goes back to rest.
>
> Do you recall which translation you read? I see 6+ different
> translations of Anna Karenina on Amazon with wildly varying reviews
> from readers.
>
> I read the one on Gutenberg. Don't remember who the translator is.

Re: [silk] Does The Landline Telephone Need An Heir In The Modern Age?

[Aadisht Khanna]

 It basically makes your mobile phones and tablets another landline phone
 when you're connected to the same WiFi. Also lets you send contacts from
 your mobiles to the phone eliminating another task of manually entering
 contacts into this phone and keeping them in sync. Also, when you get calls
 on you mobile or tablet, it shows caller id based on the contacts you have
 on that device.


Please clarify. Does that mean that on my existing smartphone, I can use
the standard dialer to call a number in my address book, but the phone
connection will be made by a landline and my smartphone (which I am
speaking from), will be getting the voice stream over WiFi? Or will I need
to use a third party dialer app?

If it does that, my feelings about it are analogous to Vincent Vega's about
a five dollar milkshake.

Re: [silk] Is any industry actually profitable?

[Aadisht Khanna]

On Tue, Apr 14, 2015 at 11:12 AM, Rajesh Mehar rajeshme...@gmail.com
wrote:


 Recently I read that farmers protesting the Jaitapur power plant (
 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jaitapur_Nuclear_Power_Project) explicitly
 articulated their views on this. I'm paraphrasing from memory as They take
 away our land and then employ us as peons and orderlies. Even if the money
 we earn is more, our standing in society becomes that of a servant. We
 don't want their jobs. Tell them to leave our land alone.


If these are forward castes/ dominant OBCs, then taking away a standing in
society founded in land ownership and which encourages them to make life
miserable for Dalits in the region may actually be a social benefit and not
a social cost.

[silk] Switching Fields in One's Thirties

[Aadisht Khanna]

Hello all,

does anybody have any experience or advice on doing a second bachelor's
degree program in one's thirties? In the past eight years, I've moved from
being entranced by the idea of doing a PhD, to realising that what I wanted
was the glamour of a Doctorate and not so much the actual work of the
program itself, to oh lord, no more formal education ever. Now in the
past few months I've been thinking of doing not a masters' program, but a
second bachelor's (leaning towards Geology). Reasons for this are:


   1. Pure Wanderlust / Sehnsucht. I've been enjoying my work recently (but
   often, only as long as I start getting out of the office and factory and
   doing customer visits and chasing new projects.) Starting a whole new
   lifestyle might help.
   2. Realising, thanks to German lessons, that I really missed being in
   classroom environments.
   3. On going to mining trade fairs (the mining industry is a huge
   customer base for me) that geology is an entire area of science I have
   negligible knowledge about.
   4. Also realising that I've almost forgotten everything I learnt in high
   school (which is why I'm thinking of a bachelor's program and not a
   master's)
   5. Realising that I wasted my original bachelor's coasting through the
   program and just trying to pass (with the exception of a few courses I
   enjoyed) and feeling that I'd like to go and get it right this time.

If I do do a geology program, it won't really help me in my current line of
work, as the actual process of mine exploration / surveying/ excavation has
very little interface with what I do (supplying conveyor belts to mines
that are up and running).

Does anybody have any experience to share on switching careers/ fields
after their thirties? What is the potential of just going for a Bachelor's
program out of sheer curiosity to derail my earning potential etc?

Re: [silk] Just So Stories

[Aadisht Khanna]

On 14-07-2012 11:35, John Sundman wrote:
 I wonder what you-all think of Kipling's Just So Stories?

 Do you find them innocent  lyrical  funny  potent as I do, or do you find 
 them obnoxious and all of the same cloth as his other white man's burden 
 imperialist writings? 

In the entire collection, the story of The Crab Who Played with the Sea
and its 'your people are lazy so they will be called Malazy' leaves me
with a bad taste in the mouth compared to the rest of the stories, which
are quite delightful.

I think much of Kipling's writing is racist in that race is used to
explain a character's motivations or behaviour; but Kipling's racism is
not exactly the same racism as a lot of the other writing coming out at
the time. The chief theme in his writing seems to be anti-bureaucratism
or a love of the frontier. So white characters are good guys as long
as they operate where civilisation ends, while people sitting in Shimla
or Calcutta are bureaucrats or disconnected from the wild or the
frontier, and so the wrong sort of white people. Indians are also
treated with affection in his writing because they are seen as beyond
civilisation and closer to nature. The assumption that Indians aren't
civilised is a racist one, but the conclusion that Kipling actually
draws out of this assumption is quite different from other racists of
his era: it's that his white characters need to learn and acquire these
uncivilised characteristics and deal with Indians on their own terms,
not that Indians need to be brought to civilisation. That blunts the
impact of the racism.

The most obnoxiously racist fiction I have read is Sax Rohmer's Fu
Manchu stories.

-- 
Regards,

Aadisht

Mailing address for lists: li...@aadisht.net
Personal mailing address: aadi...@aadisht.net

Phone: 96000 23067

Re: [silk] Just So Stories

[Aadisht Khanna]

On 14-07-2012 21:39, Thejaswi Udupa wrote:
 I have no bones to pick with Kipling except one. His 'Kim' inspired
 Timeri Murari to write that utter tripe--'The Imperial Agent', a
 supposed sequel to Kim and filled with more sex and mystic mumbo jumbo
 than a hippie orgy. 

If you are holding 'The Imperial Agent' against him then in all fairness
you have to count 'The Mandala of Sherlock Holmes' in his favour and
that balances things out.

-- 
Regards,

Aadisht

Mailing address for lists: li...@aadisht.net
Personal mailing address: aadi...@aadisht.net

Phone: 96000 23067

Re: [silk] Help!--linguistic brain-tapping needed, please

[Aadisht Khanna]

On 22-05-2012 09:24, Chew Lin Kay wrote:
 Hello!

 So I was reading an essay about Indian food, when they mentioned the
 adoption of Sanskritized Hindi. Can someone explain what that is? I
 thought Hindi draws roots from Sanskrit, but this seems to be more
 complicated than that. Will offer thanks for now, and drinks when we
 find each other in the same neighbourhood.



Mahesh has already answered most of this elsewhere in the thread, but
I'll throw in my own clarifications and personal anecdotes.

Most of the languages of North India are derived from Sanskrit (I shall
leave the tedious details of its influence on the vocabulary and grammar
on present-day South Indian languages for later). Simplifying greatly,
Sanskrit is an ancient language, which had a medieval offshoot called
Khari Boli, which in turn evolved into Hindi and Hindustani - the
difference being that Hindustani happily brought in large chunks of
vocabulary taken from Urdu - which, as a bunch of people have pointed
out, itself derives from Farsi, Turkic, and many other languages.

Not being a linguist, philologist, or historian, I'm afraid I can't give
detailed timelines of when this happened or if Hindi was always a
hypothetical state of purity that Hindustani speakers aspired to or
whether Khari Boli first became Hindi and then brought in Urdu
vocabulary to become Hindustani.

Things got interesting after Indian independence where for a combination
of nationalistic, racial, and religious reasons (and it's difficult to
draw the lines between them); Pakistan decided to make its national
language Urdu and India decided to make its national language... well,
nothing, because many people refused to accept a national language that
they didn't speak themselves, but it adopted English and Hindi as the
languages of the Central Government.

This choice is grounded in the racial/ racist myths of Pakistan and
India. The upper class Muslims who formed (and form?) the Pakistani
elite have a racial myth that they are the descendants of Arabs and
Persians, and not later converts to Islam. To emphasise that purity
and connection to the original Muslims, it was necessary to purge
Hindustani of Sanskrit vocabulary until only Urdu was left.

A small correction on scripts: Urdu does not exactly use the Arabic
script, but a number of right-to-left scripts derived from the Persian
and Arabic ones. Again, I don't have personal experience or education to
provide exact details, but these are easily available on Wikipedia.

Across the border, the Brahmin(ical) elites wanted to emphasise
Sanskrit, which meant purging Hindustani of Urdu vocabulary, so that the
Hindi that was left had a vocabulary that drew from Sanskrit, even if
this meant replacing widely used Urdu words with completely unfamiliar ones.

Personal Anecdote #1: in Hindi lessons at school, my teacher would cut
marks in tests for every Urdu word she found, on the grounds that we
should be using pure Hindi instead. Now that I think about this, I'm not
sure if this was Mrs Bharti Anand acting on her own behalf or whether
this was actually prescribed by the Central Board of Secondary Education.

Personal Anecdote #2: My grandfather was a native speaker of Punjabi,
but at school learnt one of the Urdu scripts (I'm not sure which,
neither are my parents) and the Roman script. So in his adult life he
was a fluent speaker of Punjabi and Hindi, had tolerable Urdu, and
not-very-confident English. However, because after Independence,
political considerations meant that Urdu was frozen to a Persian-derived
script, Hindi to the Devanagari script, and Punjabi to the Gurmukhi
script, he could only read English and Urdu newspapers. Meanwhile, his
wife, my grandmother, could speak only Punjabi fluently, and Hindi with
less comfort, but she could read only Hindi texts.

(Incidentally, in Pakistan, Punjabi is written in the Shahmukhi script,
which is also a right-to-left script; Gurmukhi is a left-to-right script
which is visually very similar to Devanagari but has a number of
pitfalls for a Devanagari reader who's picking it up for the first time.)

IMO, the attempt to purify Hindi's vocabulary into Sanskrit-origin
words only has created a language that has lost some beautiful Urdu
words and phrases, but retains none of the cleverness of its ancestor. I
expect there are enough people on the list who will take exception to
various parts of that opinion; I shall microwave my popcorn in
anticipation of their reactions.

-- 
Regards,

Aadisht

Mailing address for lists: li...@aadisht.net
Personal mailing address: aadi...@aadisht.net

Phone: 96000 23067

Re: [silk] Fwd: Life and Love in Bangalore

[Aadisht Khanna]

On 29-03-2012 20:44, Srini RamaKrishnan wrote:

 Affluence is definitely a prime culprit - during the zenith of the
 Imperium Romanum there was a similar crisis when free Romans didn't
 want to marry, because it was a drag, orgies were much fun. Roman
 society had to introduce a variety of incentives to promote marriage
 and the family. The tax benefits handed to married couples in modern
 societies comes directly from those times.


Cheeni, do you have a citation for this, please? I was under the
impression that income tax (and therefore any benefits or exemptions to
it) was a twentieth century invention.

-- 
Regards,

Aadisht

Mailing address for lists: li...@aadisht.net
Personal mailing address: aadi...@aadisht.net

Phone: 96000 23067

Re: [silk] Freedom of Speech

[Aadisht Khanna]

On 13-12-2011 14:37, Sruthi Krishnan wrote:
 Hi,
 In 'media and moral outrage' I saw that statistics pointing to
 declining per capita availability of foodgrains was questioned.

 The source of that statistics is Utsa Patnaik -
 http://ideaswebsite.org/featart/apr2004/Republic_Hunger.pdf. She
 discusses the fallacy in the 'diversified basket' argument -
 availability includes direct consumption and indirect use (for
 livestock etc). So, availability always rises when incomes rise. If
 availability falls, as it is the case with India, it signifies there's
 acute distress.


This is an astonishing shifting of goalposts by Utsa Patnaik. Especially
astonishing because it contradicts her previous work.
UP had originally used NSSO data to make a case that hunger was rising.
NSSO is a survey that measures direct consumption by households. It
found that *direct* cereal intake was falling, which UP said was proof
that rural India was in crisis.
Many people then pointed out that the same survey which she had cited
also showed that consumption of green leafy vegetables, meat, eggs,
dairy products, etc. had risen, which is where the explanation of the
diversified basket comes about.
Now Utsa Patnaik is claiming that the empirical evidence of household
consumption doesn't matter because utilisation of foodgrains has fallen
overall [1]. In that case, why did she use the consumption data to build
her original case?
Admittedly data collection in India is so terrible that it is likely
that both the foodgrain absorption data and the overall consumption data
are flawed. Even so, I don't think that it's that bizarre for foodgrain
absorption to drop precipitously - food budgets have probably been
diverted to other consumption that was just not possible in rural India
earlier due to missing markets/ infrastructure: consumer goods
(consumable and durable), automobiles, etc.

[1] The contempt for empirical evidence seems to be a prominent feature
in the Patnaik household. Her husband once complained that people
criticising the CPM's misgovernance in West Bengal were resorting to
crass empiricism.
http://in.news.yahoo.com/blogs/opinions/crass-empiricism-102812052.html


-- 
Regards,

Aadisht

Mailing address for lists: li...@aadisht.net
Personal mailing address: aadi...@aadisht.net

Phone: 96000 23067

Re: [silk] Freedom of Speech

[Aadisht Khanna]

On 13-12-2011 16:29, Sruthi Krishnan wrote:
 Hi,
 Thanks Salil for those links. Will go through them.

 Went through your article on the Life on the 32 line.
 I don't think Utsa Patnaik refers to calorific intake - she's talking
 about absorption of foodgrains going down, defining absorption as a
 sum of both direct intake and indirect spend - for livestock feed etc.

Yes that is my point. She first made a point about household consumption
which was refuted by showing that people were eating less grains and
more vegetables and meat. The important thing here is that this was on
the basis of the *same* survey she had originally referred to. She had
just ignored all other data. When this refutation came up, she dropped
that data set entirely and started talking about overall foodgrain
utilisation.


 Aadisht, I didn't know about her previous work - I have gone through
 only Republic of Hunger. I am still not convinced that people buying
 less food because they are buying other things argument works - I may
 not buy rice, but I'll buy processed foods. But yes,  I agree that the
 lack of data from different sources makes such debates baseless.

See above - not only processed foods, other natural food items too.
Edible oil for example has shown a huge huge jump over the years thanks
to imports and oil actually reaching the rural hinterland. In general,
grain budgets have shifted to both superior foods and nonfood consumer
goods.

I think people in HUL have some interesting stories to share about how
FMCG sales in rural India have changed over the past fifteen years.

-- 
Regards,

Aadisht

Mailing address for lists: li...@aadisht.net
Personal mailing address: aadi...@aadisht.net

Phone: 96000 23067

Re: [silk] Freedom of Speech

[Aadisht Khanna]

On 13-12-2011 17:29, Sruthi Krishnan wrote:
 See above - not only processed foods, other natural food items too.
 Edible oil for example has shown a huge huge jump over the years thanks
 to imports and oil actually reaching the rural hinterland. In general,
 grain budgets have shifted to both superior foods and nonfood consumer
 goods.

 I am getting confused here - maybe I don't understand this properly.
 Let me write what I understood, correct me if I am mistaken:
 Food availability refers to both direct consumption and superior foods.
 Direct consumption is decreasing - this both you and Utsa agree upon.
Sorry I have to type with a cast on and have been trying to use as few
words as possible.

The paper you quoted referred to grain absorption which as I understood
it referred to how, of the total production of foodgrains in the country
was used

a) direct consumption as food
b) fed to livestock (and thus converted to milk/ meat/ eggs)

and if it goes into storage that's not absorption.

Utsa Patnaik first says direct consumption as food is decreasing - we
both agree as you say.
She then says that because absorption too is falling, it means that the
alternative explanation that meat and dairy is being consumed instead
must be false.
But the NSSO data which she used to show that consumption of grain as
food is falling also show that meat and dairy *are* being consumed more.
So are edible oils and vegetables.
So there is a discrepancy - foodgrain absorption is falling but meat and
milk are rising at the same time. This does need to be explained.
Possible explanations are that livestock are now being fed alternative
feed like soya meal instead of grain. This would make sense- it's more
efficient.


 So, the first point of contention is over processed foods - if people
 are consuming more of that, absorption should increase. As it is not
 increasing, people are consuming less of that. - Here there is no
 consensus between you and Utsa. You are saying that consumption of
 superior foods is increasing, which means absorption should increase.
 But it is not, right?
Not necessarily, the superior foods which show increasing consumption
don't necessarily take foodgrains as input. Vegetables and edible oils
for example. So superior food consumption can rise without rising
foodgrain absorption providing we don't limit superior foods to animal
protein. See above for why animal protein doesn't necessarily need grain
absorption.




 Second point of contention - why is this happening?
 Utsa is saying it is because of lowered purchasing power. You are
 saying it is because they are spending more on nonfood consumer goods.
 Essentially she's saying they are in distress, you are saying this
 data is insufficient to make that claim.
Both you and me think that UP claims that it is because of lowered
purchasing power.
I think it could be, but not necessarily so. Diverting grain budget to
any combination of veggies, edible oil, meat, eggs, milk and dairy,
nonfood items, education, entertainment, etc is also an explanation. And
most of these items do show an increase in relative consumption over
time in the NSSO surveys.


-- 
Regards,

Aadisht

Mailing address for lists: li...@aadisht.net
Personal mailing address: aadi...@aadisht.net

Phone: 96000 23067

Re: [silk] some notes on frugality

[Aadisht Khanna]

On 09-09-2011 12:26, Deepa Mohan wrote:

  It was just that as an Indian, I've been the recipient of the kind of
 restrictions a doctor-after-eating-too-well places on a poor
 patient...Don't consume too much! Eat less  of pate de foie gras...
 and go easy on the caviar!...Patient: Huh? What's pate? what's
 caviar? I've been told not to run my car out too often. I do NOT use
 a car on a daily basis!

Giggle. I was similarly crabby when, after three years of not bursting
firecrackers on Diwali when I couldn't take the smoke anymore,
dilettante Interact Club members in my school suddenly discovered child
labour and demanded I stop purchasing fireworks. WHERE WERE YOU THE PAST
THREE YEARS, YOU POSEURS?


-- 
Regards,

Aadisht

Mailing address for lists: li...@aadisht.net
Personal mailing address: aadi...@aadisht.net

Phone: 96000 23067

Re: [silk] thunderbird conversation view

[Aadisht Khanna]

On 27-07-2011 14:44, Sankarshan Mukhopadhyay wrote:
 It does take a long time to index (for a large datastore) and seems to
 be sucking up battery. Other than that, specifically, what annoyed you ? 

It also seemed to kill the right-click context menu items for move/
copy to folder - dealbreaker for me.

-- 
Regards,

Aadisht

Mailing address for lists: li...@aadisht.net
Personal mailing address: aadi...@aadisht.net

Phone: 96000 23067

Re: [silk] anyone near Coimbatore?

[Aadisht Khanna]

On 16-05-2011 08:42, Abhijit Menon-Sen wrote:
 At 2011-05-16 00:56:49 +, sur...@hserus.net wrote:

 You'll find that power cuts are a regular feature in industrial areas
 around india, most companies compensate by buying diesel generators
 
 (I happen to be doing some work in this area, so…)
 
 Another thing that smallish industrial units (including several textile
 mills in Tamil Nadu) are doing is bidding for electricity on the Indian
 Energy Exchange (iexindia.com). That way, they can hedge their bets: if
 the market clearing price for power is lower than the cost of running a
 diesel generator, they save money. If they have to run the generator,
 then in principle, they can even sell any surplus power they generate
 during that period. The minimum volume is 1MW, but in practice, some
 people buy even less and nobody objects.

I'm in Thiruvannamalai, not Coimbatore, but the IEX is of no use when
the electricity board cuts the grid itself off.

-- 
Regards,

Aadisht
Email for lists: li...@aadisht.net
Personal Email: aadi...@aadisht.net
Mobile (TN): +91-96000 23067
Website: http://www.aadisht.net/
Blog: http://www.wokay.in/

Re: [silk] anyone near Coimbatore?

[Aadisht Khanna]

On 18-05-2011 12:20, Abhijit Menon-Sen wrote:
 At 2011-05-18 11:58:09 +0530, li...@aadisht.net wrote:

 I'm in Thiruvannamalai, not Coimbatore, but the IEX is of no use when
 the electricity board cuts the grid itself off.
 
 Why do they do that?

Peak hour pricing runs from 6 pm to 10 pm. Then, it may or may not be
cheaper to buy from IEX.
But there is also a 3 pm to 6 pm powercut daily in which the
distribution line itself is shut down for load shedding. Then, you can't
get power from IEX unless you build your own transmission line up to the
national grid - this is completely unaffordable (for us, at the moment).
I'm guessing that in Hosur/ Coimbatore, there are enough industrial
units to either pool together and build a co-owned transmission line; or
to exert enough political influence to get it built for them.

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Re: [silk] anyone near Coimbatore?

[Aadisht Khanna]

On 19-05-2011 08:44, Kiran Jonnalagadda wrote:
 On Wed, May 18, 2011 at 11:58 AM, Aadisht Khanna li...@aadisht.net
 mailto:li...@aadisht.net wrote:
 
 I'm in Thiruvannamalai, not Coimbatore, but the IEX is of no use when
 the electricity board cuts the grid itself off.
 
 
 Have you moved from Kanchipuram?
 

No. The factory is technically in Thiruvannamalai district.

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Re: [silk] Using an X-Box Controller as a PC text input device

[Aadisht Khanna]

Sure.

On 04-05-2011 15:36, Sumant Srivathsan wrote:
 I can try taking this into the Microsoft jungle, and see if this is
 something they're already working on (if it's for the XBOX, it might be
 portable to PC). Is that okay?
 
 On Wed, May 4, 2011 at 3:23 PM, Aadisht Khanna li...@aadisht.net
 mailto:li...@aadisht.net wrote:
 
 Hello,
 
 someone I know just passed a query on to me, and I thought people on
 silk would probably be able to help.
 
 He knows two school-age children with a neuromuscular disorder (but
 doesn't have details of which one), which prevents them from writing or
 typing. However, they are able to use X-Box controllers.
 
 At present, they're using something called XPADDER which lets you use
 the controller as a mouse on a PC, and also assigns some keys to the
 controller buttons. For text entry, they use an onscreen keyboard.
 
 Mouse+onscreen keyboard is still a cumbersome and time-consuming way to
 enter text, so they're now trying to see if they can combine this with a
 software T9 keyboard so that predictive text reduces the time
 requirement.
 
 I'll use his own words for now:
 
 QUOTE:
 
 in short: we need an application that defines the buttons on a xbox
 controller as the command functions of the normal keyboard and can type
 in a on screen T9 numerical keypad with word prediction function as
 found on mobile phones.
 
 Perhaps even better, but not found on any site on the internet would be
 a combination of a numerical keyboard (like the num keypad accessory for
 laptops and mobile phones) and the Xbox controller (imagine a xbox
 controller cut in half, with a num pad glued to it), so you can have the
 mouse functions under your left thumb and writing function under your
 right thumb.
 
 hopefully you are able to help us in combining (or developing) the
 requested functionalities!
 
 END QUOTE
 
 Does anybody know of something that can solve their problem?
 
 
 
 --
 Regards,
 
 Aadisht
 Email for lists: li...@aadisht.net mailto:li...@aadisht.net
 Personal Email: aadi...@aadisht.net mailto:aadi...@aadisht.net
 Mobile (TN): +91-96000 23067 tel:%2B91-96000%2023067
 Website: http://www.aadisht.net/
 Blog: http://www.wokay.in/
 
 
 
 
 -- 
 Sumant Srivathsan
 http://sumants.blogspot.com


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Re: [silk] Is Sitting a Lethal Activity?

[Aadisht Khanna]

On 22-04-2011 20:43, Deepa Mohan wrote:

 Breathing in moderation is also good.

Do you take Deepa breaths in moderation?

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Re: [silk] Is Sitting a Lethal Activity?

[Aadisht Khanna]

On 22-04-2011 20:25, Vinayak Hegde wrote:
 Quoting Shiv from another thread.
 
 I think the old habit of doing upvaasa - fasting once a week - and on
 certain other days might be a good idea. Getting up and walking arond a lot
 more would help.
 
 Anecdotal evidence suggests this is right. Fidgety people are
 generally not obese. YMMV.
 

Silk seems to becoming Messianic, or perhaps cable-news-ic. We have gone
from Is sugar toxic to Is Sitting a Lethal Activity. Next, I expect
IS BREATHING BAD FOR YOU? THE SHOCKING TRUTH!!!

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Re: [silk] Is Sitting a Lethal Activity?

[Aadisht Khanna]

On 22-04-2011 21:15, Eugen Leitl wrote:
 On Fri, Apr 22, 2011 at 08:41:23AM -0700, Heather Madrone wrote:

 Oh, and for some reason people are down on this
 whole euthanasia thing. Beats me.

I'm not sure about the usage of your colloquialism. By 'are down on' do
you mean 'in favour of' or 'against'?

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Re: [silk] Why do we hate our girls?

[Aadisht Khanna]

On 10-04-2011 23:08, Shoba Narayan wrote:

 I didn't know the meaning on monotonically and hysteresis and looked them 
 both up.  I think the lag is at the tipping point, isn't it? Might it become 
 what somebody (Bernhard I think) talked about-- dowry flipping genders? The 
 future of this sad social experiment is going to be interesting?.

Shoba, apologies for being flip and sending a one-word reply instead of
explaining myself better. In my defence, I was rushing to Chennai and
totally meant to elaborate when I got back! Doing that now, upthread.



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Re: [silk] Why do we hate our girls?

[Aadisht Khanna]

On 10-04-2011 10:31, Udhay Shankar N wrote:
 On 10-Apr-11 10:21 AM, Aadisht Khanna wrote:
 
 in a situation where *muscle power* is of monotonically decreasing
 importance to survival, why would the sex ratio be as skewed as it is?


 Hysteresis.
 
 Fair enough (as far as it goes), but the length of lag is a matter of
 serious concern at this point.

I read Jane Jacobs' _The Death and Life of Great American Cities_ last
year and was very (perhaps overly) impressed with it. What follows is
heavily influenced by my fanboyhood for that book, and perhaps is a
little extreme. With that caveat in place...


Shoba's original article had talked about normative preferences changing
with modernisation and economic growth. I am pessimistic that the time
taken for these changes to kick in will be much longer in India than in
China/ Korea because India has a whole bunch of barriers to modernisation.

The barriers I mean are that we have a) diversity of religion, language,
class, caste, and so forth b) that this diversity acts to ghettoize our
cities, or even worse (in the case of language) to not just create
ghettos but to make migration to cities impossible.

Cities of the sort that Jane Jacobs idealises accelerate the spread of
norms/ ideas/ memes/ call them what you will. However because we have
all these different barriers to the humane interaction of strangers
inside our cities, they lose out on that acceleration.

Also our approach to diversity is not the 1850-1950 American melting pot
approach, so we cannot take that route to creating an urban culture. The
Western/ Central European approach to creating cities is also blocked to
us: that was based on cities as largely independent political entities
that acted as a counterweight to the feudal countryside. But we have
powerful national and regional governments compared to central
governments, so the path of cities growing by sucking in immigrants is
closed to us. Heck, our state and central government rhetoric is all
about *preventing* migration to cities. For example, one of the
advantages the government claims for the NREGA is that it will slow down
rural emigration. To me, this is a bug, not a feature.

That means that India will eventually have to spread this normative
change in our faux-cities and villages (which will be slow) or figure
out a uniquely Indian way to create great cities (which will also take
time). Either way, there will be a lag.



(By we I meant India as a whole.)

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Re: [silk] Why do we hate our girls?

[Aadisht Khanna]

On 10-04-2011 09:00, Udhay Shankar N wrote:
 Naturally. Boys are a better bet.
 
 I don't get it (which is why I've left your message attached below for
 context)
 
 To me, this begs the question, which is:
 
 in a situation where *muscle power* is of monotonically decreasing
 importance to survival, why would the sex ratio be as skewed as it is?
 

Hysteresis.

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[silk] Popular histories on the Balkans and the Golden Age of the Arabs

[Aadisht Khanna]

Dear all,

I'm interested in reading up on the Balkans in the middle ages/
Rennaisance, the Ottoman Empire, and the Golden Age of Islam/ Arabia
(Haroun al-Rashid, etc).

What are the popular history books that you'd recommend?

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Re: [silk] Diaspora

[Aadisht Khanna]

On 16-12-2010 14:27, Lahar Appaiah wrote:
 I'd agree with whoever raised this- it belongs in the same category as that
 PGP encryption stuff someone else has. That said, this is an opinion, not
 a request.


After the Radia tapes and their leaking, and GoI's insistent demands for
GMail and Blackberry Messaging being opened up to them, I would have
thought that more people would see the sense in moving to PGP encrypted
email for communication.


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Re: [silk] Visa-free and visa-on-arrival travel for Indians: maybe useful for last-minute travel

[Aadisht Khanna]

On 15-12-2010 22:52, Thaths wrote:
 On Wed, Dec 15, 2010 at 9:10 AM, Mahesh Murthy mahesh.mur...@gmail.com 
 wrote:
 On Wed, Dec 15, 2010 at 10:19 PM, Thaths tha...@gmail.com wrote:
 I did not realize the countries where Indians could enter easily (visa
 free/visa on arrival) was a null set.
 58 countries isn't exactly a null set :-)
 
 My misunderstanding. I read your email to mean Here is a list...
 instead of Please send me a list.

Thaths, the list is an image on an external server that your client is
not displaying.


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Re: [silk] What's the strangest thing you've eaten?

[Aadisht Khanna]

On 23-11-2010 22:35, Udhay Shankar N wrote:
 I think we had a similar thread lo, these many years ago, but still.
 

Squilla.
Locust grubs.
Red Bull.


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Re: [silk] The subaltern studies collective?

[Aadisht Khanna]

On 14-10-2010 13:24, Indrajit Gupta wrote:
 

 /She has never been known to be a lucid populariser; a female Carl
 Sagan she is not. However, contemporary studies in this space carry
 a vocabulary and, more than that, a syntax, which takes getting used
 to. If anyone is interested, I could put up examples, which make
 perfect sense to insiders, none whatsoever to Everyman./

IG, are there any lucid popularisers in this field that you know of?


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Re: [silk] The subaltern studies collective?

[Aadisht Khanna]

On 13-10-2010 18:48, Srini RamaKrishnan wrote:

 Ergo I expect to see a lot of shit flying around on the Internet
 criticizing this lady (who inexplicably hangs onto the last name of a
 man from many marriages back), but there isn't? All the heuristics

This may be a professional decision, so that work published throughout
her career is given citations under the same name.

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Re: [silk] Parenting rewires dads as well

[Aadisht Khanna]

 On 21-08-2010 20:51, . wrote:
 On Fri, Aug 20, 2010 at 14:53, Vinayak Hegde vinay...@gmail.com wrote:
 Lively Hmmm. Hopefully the Parrot is not pining for the fjords.
 ...as opposed to becoming the cat's dinner or dog's lunch?

This dog and parrot seem to have discovered co-existence. Though looking
at the dog's expression, I'd say it's possible that the parrot has
enslaved the long-suffering dog.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/ferranp/317447948/in/faves-aadisht/

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[silk] The Just William series

[Aadisht Khanna]

 I am trying to get the complete Just William series by Richmal Crompton
for a birthday present, but Macmillan has taken in out of print. Does
anybody have a collection which they're willing to part with?

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Re: [silk] The Just William series

[Aadisht Khanna]

 On 29-07-2010 06:39, Udhay Shankar N wrote:
 Aadisht Khanna wrote, [on 7/28/2010 10:01 PM]:

  I am trying to get the complete Just William series by Richmal Crompton
 for a birthday present, but Macmillan has taken in out of print. Does
 anybody have a collection which they're willing to part with?
 This does not appear to be true.

 http://www.flipkart.com/author/richmal-crompton/
The current printing is only five volumes (the first four, plus a
compendium of wartime stories). The full series extends to 38 volumes.
If Landmark Forum does have all 38, I will have to drive up there
sometime next month.

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Re: [silk] No demat accounts for Hindu gods: HC

[Aadisht Khanna]

 On 18-07-2010 14:16, Anil Kumar wrote:
  
 Just in case there weren't enough schemes to scam on the exchange; 
 but, the jolly part is that the Indian Income Tax Department seems to
 have granted Permanent Account Numbers to these dieties.  Also, do not
 miss the distinction between private [trust] god and public god :-)
  

This is really quite fascinating.
Our last major securities scam (rather, the last major one which was
discovered) involved an Ahmedabad family creating hundreds of bank
accounts and demat accounts for a single person and banks and brokers
not bothering to verify that these were not actually the same people.
The aftermath was severe strictures on said banks who then went into a
tizzy making sure all new customers were not already on the rolls, a
process known as deduplication.
If the Sangli trust registers a demat account for Lord Ganesh and then
say, the Siddhivinayak temple also decides to do this, how will the
deduplication work?
This ought to apply for PAN cards as well. Much entertainment could come
when temples take each other to court over the issue of which one has
the right to get a PAN for a particular deity.
A PAN card for Yamadev would add new dimensions to the phrase 'Death and
Taxes.'

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Re: [silk] The End of Men

[Aadisht Khanna]

 On 02-07-2010 17:11, Udhay Shankar N wrote:
 American pop culture keeps producing endless variations on the omega
 male, who ranks even below the beta in the wolf pack. This
 often-unemployed, romantically challenged loser can show up as a
 perpetual adolescent (in Judd Apatow’s Knocked Up or The 40-Year-Old
 Virgin), or a charmless misanthrope (in Noah Baumbach’s Greenberg), or a
 happy couch potato (in a Bud Light commercial). He can be sweet, bitter,
 nostalgic, or cynical, but he cannot figure out how to be a man. “We
 call each other ‘man,’” says Ben Stiller’s character in Greenberg, “but
 it’s a joke. It’s like imitating other people.” The American male
Or in 1998 - B*Witched's music video for C'est La Vie.

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Re: [silk] Ten toughest books to read

[Aadisht Khanna]

On 15-06-2010 12:38, Udhay Shankar N wrote:
 I certainly agree with _Foucault's Pendulum_. I've bounced off it
 several times over the years.
   
Can't understand why. I read it in seven nights. It's like an action
movie with bonus conspiracy theorising and delicious satire.

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Re: [silk] Ten toughest books to read

[Aadisht Khanna]

On 15-06-2010 14:10, Udhay Shankar N wrote:

 So, what are your hardest books to read?

 Udhay
   
Books I've abandoned:

* The Gospel According to Jesus Christ
* The God of Small Things
* Don Quixote (is a huge pain to get through unabridged)

Books I've struggled to complete:

* Vanity Fair - the way the apin in TGA got to Sruthi, the unrelenting
contempt for humanity in this got to me
* Snow by Orhan Pamuk - moves horribly slowly in the beginning, and
speeds up only at the end - you keep wondering what the payoff is going
to be. Also, left me with the vague feeling that if I was Turkish myself
I'd find it cliched/ too full of stereotypes.

Books that I've finished but felt it wasn't worth the effort:
* Musharraff Ali Farooqi's translation of the Adventures of Amir Hamza -
the problem here is that almost every adventure is the same one. Amir
Hamza comes across a king, defeats him in single combat, and then either
kills him or converts him to the true faith. The perils of doing a
compilation of what're basically folktales / bedtime stories.

This list is by no means complete, but this is all I can remember right now.


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Re: [silk] Ten toughest books to read

[Aadisht Khanna]

On 16-06-2010 10:07, Udhay Shankar N wrote:
 There are several series I've given up on partway through. Some examples:

 * The Song of Ice and Fire
I am informed by those who know about such things that this is true of
the author as well.


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Re: [silk] Marge Simpson poses for Playboy

[Aadisht Khanna]

On Tue, Oct 13, 2009 at 1:39 PM, Kiran K Karthikeyan 
kiran.karthike...@gmail.com wrote:

 Desperate measure or novel tactic? Guess the ladies might see naked
 superheroes in Playgirl soon if this succeeds.


Come, come, anyone who wants to see naked pictures of cartoon/ comic
characters can easily enough go to livejournal. Playboy is demonstrating
that it's ten years behind the Internet.


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Re: [silk] Ombaba gets Nobel peace

[Aadisht Khanna]

Mandela was jailed for a long time. Agreed.

 How did Mother Teresa suffer?


She lived in Calcutta.

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Re: [silk] Kerala Government Initiative for creating investmentopportunities for Muslims

[Aadisht Khanna]

On Thu, Oct 8, 2009 at 1:54 PM, Kiran K Karthikeyan 
kiran.karthike...@gmail.com wrote:



 I'm aware of co-existence to the extent that they are available, but are
 they also covered by regulations, deposit insurance etc.? Are there for
 example, different capital adequacy norms for Islamic banking? And as I
 understand it, any form of insurance is against Shari'a.


Quick and dirty response: Malaysia, UAE, and Pakistan are at least three
countries in which Shariat banking products and services are covered by the
same regulator as traditional banking (though of course different arms). As
to whether capital adequacy, despoit insurance, etc. are present or have
different norms; I am unable to inform you.

Insurance is not explicitly forbidden in the Koran or Hadith; but various
qazis have issued fatwas that it is a form of gambling and therefore haram.
Structuring a guarantee to pay deposits that does not involve any chance is
an interesting exercise for the TamBrahms, Jews and Marwaris who are
typically CEOs of Islamic Banks. [1]

[1] Only mild exaggeration. The Islamic Banking division of my former
employer was run by a TamBrahm. The most senior Muslims were the advisory
council who passed judgement on whether the products devised were halal or
not.


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Re: [silk] Guido's tweet on top posting

[Aadisht Khanna]

On Sat, Sep 12, 2009 at 4:14 PM, ss cybers...@gmail.com wrote:


 Now how's that for a bottom post?

 shiv

 Fascinating. You should name this particular bottom post The Shit Shastra
by Shiv Shastry.





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Re: [silk] Interview Questions

[Aadisht Khanna]

On Tue, Sep 8, 2009 at 9:52 AM, Kiran K Karthikeyan 
kiran.karthike...@gmail.com wrote:


 There are 12 steel (or any other material, the material is immaterial :) )
 balls (yes, I make it cubes when interviewing women) which were
 manufactured
 to be identical in every way and hence indistinguishable. However, one of
 them has a manufacturing defect and has either less or more weight that the
 other 11. Given a weighing scale (with no standard weights), you have to
 find out which of the balls is defective as well as whether it weighs
 lesser
 or more than the others.


It's a trick question. If the balls are indistinguishable, there is no way
to sort them out unless you place distinguishing marksor keep them in
distinguished containers - which would violate the starting conditions.

If an airline is thinking of extending an offer where those with miles can
 for a limited period book for twice the amount of miles they have in their
 account, what is the best time to do so (considering occupancy rates,
 costs,
 any other variable which might influence the decision).


Is this also a trick question? How do you book with more miles than you
have, unless the airline is advancing miles on credit? Smells like a bubble.



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Re: [silk] And all the yankees go OM!

[Aadisht Khanna]

On Fri, Aug 21, 2009 at 12:29 PM, Supriya Nair supriya.n...@gmail.comwrote:

 I want to know how many advocates of cremation, vegetarianism and so on
 explicitly stated or were aware of its implications of Hinduism (for the
 value of Hinduism assumed by the writer). Surely (electronic) cremation is
 gaining popularity because it's less of a bother on several levels than
 burial? And vegetarianism - which is so dubiously a 'Hindu' requirement,
 anyway - is being pushed by activism and/or the health foods industry? You
 can't attribute these to any religious sentiments.


Ah yes, was trying to find words for this. The article seems to run on

: Hindus are vegetarian, believe in reincarnation, cremate themselves, etc
: Americans are becoming vegetarian, start believing in reincarnation,
cremate themselves, etc
: Therefore, Americans are Hindu

It's a neat trick. Perhaps a magazine writer here can take it up to show
that the rice growing in Punjab is evidence of Tamizh or Bengali
colonisation of the Indus plain.

-- 
Aadisht Khanna
Address for mailing lists: aadisht.gro...@gmail.com
Personal address: aadi...@aadisht.net

Re: [silk] India: A History by John Keay

[Aadisht Khanna]

On Fri, Aug 21, 2009 at 12:45 PM, Indrajit Gupta bonoba...@yahoo.co.inwrote:


 Dalrymple as historian?

 Well, perhaps, in the sense that Barbara Tuchman was an historian, or Alan
 Bullock was an historian.

 There was a dividing line between historians and writers of popular
 historical pieces. Admittedly it is disappearing very fast now. Even so,
 Dalrymple's work is not to be considered as history.


So noted. :) But though Keay and Dalrymple are on opposite sides of the
line, they are not too far from each other as readability and popular appeal
go.


-- 
Aadisht Khanna
Address for mailing lists: aadisht.gro...@gmail.com
Personal address: aadi...@aadisht.net

Re: [silk] And all the yankees go OM!

[Aadisht Khanna]

On Fri, Aug 21, 2009 at 1:00 PM, Kiran K Karthikeyan 
kiran.karthike...@gmail.com wrote:

 What I found most interesting is  According to a 2008 Pew Forum survey, 65
 percent of us believe that many religions can lead to eternal
 life—including 37 percent of white evangelicals, the group most likely to
 believe that salvation is theirs alone. The rest of it can be effectively
 disregarded.


Did Pew also publish details of how many people believed that their work,
cryogenics or brain uploads could lead to eternal life? Inquiring minds want
to know what Woody Allen's chances are.

http://thinkexist.com/quotation/i_don-t_want_to_achieve_immortality_through_my/15280.html


-- 
Aadisht Khanna
Address for mailing lists: aadisht.gro...@gmail.com
Personal address: aadi...@aadisht.net

Re: [silk] And all the yankees go OM!

[Aadisht Khanna]

On Fri, Aug 21, 2009 at 11:29 PM, Bharat Shetty bharat.she...@gmail.comwrote:

  It's a neat trick. Perhaps a magazine writer here can take it up to show
  that the rice growing in Punjab is evidence of Tamizh or Bengali
  colonisation of the Indus plain.

 ROFL. I'm reminded of this chap called Aakar Patel who said Indians
 are opportunists and don't give back to society because of Hinduism
 and used some hi-funda stuffs like Hobbesian trust etc in his article
 for LiveMint.


 http://www.livemint.com/articles/2009/07/02203128/Why-Indians-don8217t-give-b.html


Actually some time after I sent the mail I remembered that Vir Sanghvi had
used the growing popularity of the salwar kameez and paneer butter masala to
claim that South India was Punjabi now, so the reverse statement has
definitely been done.


-- 
Aadisht Khanna
Address for mailing lists: aadisht.gro...@gmail.com
Personal address: aadi...@aadisht.net

Re: [silk] India: A History by John Keay

[Aadisht Khanna]

On Fri, Aug 21, 2009 at 11:11 AM, Biju Chacko biju.cha...@gmail.com wrote:

 I'm currently reading $SUBJECT. I've never actually studied Indian
 history or read much Indian history so I can't tell if it has any
 biases. It's fairly interesting though. Can anyone comment it's slant
 or lack thereof?


I didn't notice any when I read it (then again, I've not read much so I have
very little to compare it against).
The only thing I had to complain about in that book was not bias but that
the attempt to cover four thousand years of history in a paperback made the
book a quick skim through facts and slightly short on analysis/ narrative.
That actually strips out bias.
His other books are not as skimmish and *The Spice Route* is particularly
good. *India Discovered* is also more detailed but gets a little fanboyish
about the original Orientals. Nowhere near as much as William Dalrymple
though.

-- 
Aadisht Khanna
Address for mailing lists: aadisht.gro...@gmail.com
Personal address: aadi...@aadisht.net

Re: [silk] Fuel from trash

[Aadisht Khanna]

On Thu, May 28, 2009 at 8:06 AM, Udhay Shankar N ud...@pobox.com wrote:

 I wonder what the carbon footprint of this technology is.


Another question to throw out - what is the carbon footprint of a landfill,
and how does this compare to that?
A related question - high speed rail is advertised as more fuel-efficient
than flying - but does that include the impact of the land you are turning
over to build the rails, terminals and depots on?

-- 
Aadisht Khanna
Address for mailing lists: aadisht.gro...@gmail.com
Personal address: aadi...@aadisht.net

Re: [silk] Fuel from trash

[Aadisht Khanna]

 For a non-biodegradable component of the landfill, the carbon footprint
 should be zero, right, since it is not discharging GHGs into the
 atmosphere.
 It's only when the stuff is combusted that the footprint is calculated.
 This
 is not considering the cost of transporting the trash to the landfill.


There's an opportunity cost to a landfill - you could forest the area
instead. My question was more about how trivial or significant that
opportunity cost was.



 Probably not, but if one considers the land investment for constructing
 airports, I'd imagine that those costs are more or less the same, if not
 less for high-speed rail systems. Again, I haven't drilled into this in
 much
 detail, but just going by what seems reasonable to me.


But with airports you construct only the airports, while for the rail
systems you construct rail terminals, rail lines, depots and so forth.
Ofcourse this is handwaving until I get the numbers (in acreage as well as
money). I will JFGI... eventually.
But since we're now on costs and money - acquiring rights of way for a rail
line would cost a lot of money, and a lot of this would be transaction costs
since we're talking a whole bunch of landowners. With the same money you
could buy up contiguous land, forest it, and offset the carbon dioxide the
air transport was generating, no?


-- 
Aadisht Khanna
Address for mailing lists: aadisht.gro...@gmail.com
Personal address: aadi...@aadisht.net

Re: [silk] Booze in Kerala (was: Bangalore Meetup on May 16?)

[Aadisht Khanna]

 There are only two types of cases that ever come out of Kerala. One,


But presumably a lot of cases go into Kerala if the liquor consumption is
that high.

-- 
Aadisht Khanna
Address for mailing lists: aadisht.gro...@gmail.com
Personal address: aadi...@aadisht.net

Re: [silk] Need some help

[Aadisht Khanna]

On Tue, Apr 21, 2009 at 10:11 PM, Zainab Bawa bawazaina...@gmail.comwrote:

  And also, I am not an advocate of regulations to curb discrimination. As
 has been pointed out in some of the postings, biases and prejudices are
 very
 deep seated. Applying regulations can be counter-productive in the sense of
 increasing the antagonism. Neither do I believe that the market will solve
 the problem. Some pretty radical dislocations are required i.e. traditions
 and paradigms that challenge the hegemonic beliefs of religion, identity
 and
 property.


Zainab,

I'd be interested to know what you think the source of these dislocations is
going to be. I can think of religious reform movements like Arya Samaj or
Brahmo Samaj (both of which have lost their iconoclasm by now), and new
public institutions. Are you thinking of the same things or something
completely different?

-- 
Aadisht Khanna
Address for mailing lists: aadisht.gro...@gmail.com
Personal address: aadi...@aadisht.net

Re: [silk] democracy, elections and the protest vote

[Aadisht Khanna]

On Sat, Apr 18, 2009 at 5:10 PM, . svaks...@gmail.com wrote:

 Given the circus our politicians[0] create out of democracy, shouldn't
 the protest vote[1] be a citizens right ; one that was lost when India
 moved from a paper ballot to the electronic ballot system.


You can still use Section 49-O of the Electoral rules to register a refusal
to vote though you will lose the anonymity of the old protest vote.

But given that Indian elections are a circus, in any constituency there will
be no shortage of fringe candidates who you can give your protest vote to.
For all practical purposes, theirs' is protest candidacy so you may as well
provide them your protest vote. The downside is finding out about these
candidates which requires an investment in time and effort. I still haven't
found the list of candidates in New Delhi.
If by happy chance there is a tiny political party or independent candidate
out there with an agenda you agree with, a vote for that candidate means
much more than staying at home, registering a 49-O abstension, or defacing
the ballot (where possible). It won't make the candidate win, but if it
narrows the margin of victory for the winner, the mainstream parties will be
more concerned with how to win the votes the spoiler candidate had received.
And then of course there's the warm fuzzy feeling you'll get for voting on
principle.



-- 
Aadisht Khanna
Address for mailing lists: aadisht.gro...@gmail.com
Personal address: aadi...@aadisht.net

Re: [silk] democracy, elections and the protest vote

[Aadisht Khanna]

 I don't think 49-O ever allowed for anonymity, even with paper ballots.


Yeah I think .meant that with paper ballots you had the option to slip in a
blank ballot or deface the ballot. Not possible with EVMs.

-- 
Aadisht Khanna
Address for mailing lists: aadisht.gro...@gmail.com
Personal address: aadi...@aadisht.net

Re: [silk] On self-improvement

[Aadisht Khanna]

On Sun, Apr 12, 2009 at 7:05 PM, Suresh Ramasubramanian
sur...@hserus.netwrote:

 'Team building' sessions that involve silly games at 'retreats' when
 everybody would much rather be socializing over beer and food is another.


Fortunately whenever the team 'retreat' was organised by the team itself,
food and beer was the norm. Anything organised by HR was the silly games.
But I found those fun too. Textbook learning and exams were usually done by
the risk and compliance department.


-- 
Aadisht Khanna
Address for mailing lists: aadisht.gro...@gmail.com
Personal address: aadi...@aadisht.net

Re: [silk] On self-improvement

[Aadisht Khanna]

 It would
 be interesting to see where a self-improvement book, or series, places in a
 corporate ecosystem. Does it confirm or contradict corporate values [such
 as broad consensus can make them]? What else does it induce you to buy?
 Would an organisation distribute copies of Covey among employees as readily
 as it would, say, Goldratt?


 My former employer did not distribute Covey but mandated Gallup
Strength-finder for everyone in a certain pay grade and above, and
additional training sessions in the self-improvement line. The actual takeup
of such programs or books is probably driven by a combination of the
enthusiasm of senior management, the tenacity of training program sales
staff, and the existence of a large enough HR cadre to ensure that everyone
attends said training or receives said self-help books.

Re: [silk] Is food the new sex?

[Aadisht Khanna]

 One more critical link between the appetites for sex and food is this:
 Both, if pursued without regard to consequence, can prove ruinous not
 only to oneself, but also to other people, and even to society itself.
 No doubt for that reason, both appetites have historically been
 subject in all civilizations to rules both formal and informal. Thus
 the potentially destructive forces of sex — disease, disorder, sexual
 aggression, sexual jealousy, and what used to be called
 home-wrecking — have been ameliorated in every recorded society by
 legal, social, and religious conventions, primarily stigma and
 punishment. Similarly, all societies have developed rules and rituals
 governing food in part to avoid the destructiveness of free-for-alls
 over scarce necessities. And while food rules may not always have been
 as stringent as sex rules, they have nevertheless been stringent as
 needed. Such is the meaning, for example, of being hanged for stealing
 a loaf of bread in the marketplace, or keel-hauled for plundering
 rations on a ship.

Society itself? Huh? How?
Yes, sex between two people can affect other people (jealousy, revulsion,
and what have you), but how does that generalise to society at large?
And how does consumption of food affect any third person at all? Theft of a
loaf is a case of theft. Plundering rations on a ship is a very special
case.
Quite a strained analogy, although the next bits of the article were
interesting and largely on point.



-- 
Aadisht Khanna
Address for mailing lists: aadisht.gro...@gmail.com
Personal address: aadi...@aadisht.net

Re: [silk] Quantum of Solace - my thoughts [and an offtopic ps:]

[Aadisht Khanna]

 I was sorely disappointed with the movie too. It feels as if the
 people involved sat down with a bulleted list of stuff that should
 happen in the movie (expensive car chase opening, one Bond girl shall
 die, a secret organization for Bond to fight against, a few people
 Bond can kill) and then threw a weak plot around it. Casino Royale was
 so much better!

The movie tried to drive in Bond's emotional baggage about causing the
deaths of everyone around him with a sledgehammer. No subtlety
whatsoever. Direct reference after direct reference. By the halfway
point I had concluded that the makers had decided to reboot James Bond
as John Constantine of Hellblazer.


-- 
Aadisht Khanna
Address for mailing lists: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Personal address: [EMAIL PROTECTED]

Re: [silk] whoops

[Aadisht Khanna]

On Sat, Oct 25, 2008 at 1:35 AM, Eugen Leitl [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:


 Any first-hand reports from the trenches?

 http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/10/23/business/rupee.php


Eugen, is there anything specific you're looking for?

Consumer credit is in very bad shape. Many banks have decided to pull out of
new personal loans and credit card issuance. Gossip has it that HSBC and
Citigroup will be writing off $150 - $200 mn each from their credit card and
personal loan book in this financial year. Any new credit is basically an
enhancement of existing credit lines for customers with an impeccable
repayment record.

Banks are also trying to focus on mortgages now since secured loans are *
very* secure in India, but nobody's buying just yet - everyone's waiting for
house prices to collapse as they surely must. Nobody is getting
telemarketing calls for overdrafts or credit cards anymore. The only thing
preventing telemarketing calls for checking accounts (which banks are now
desperate for) is regulation which says you only bank employees can solicit
deposit accounts - it can't be outsourced.

It's going to be a very interesting couple of years.

-- 
Aadisht Khanna
Address for mailing lists: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Personal address: [EMAIL PROTECTED]

Re: [silk] Vir Sanghvi on Kashmir

[Aadisht Khanna]

 not exaggerate. Indian rule in Kashmir is not classical colonialism.
India has pumped vast sums into Kashmir, not extracted revenue as the Raj
did. Kashmir was among the poorest states during the Raj, but now has the
lowest poverty rate in India. It enjoys wide civil rights that the Raj never
gave. Some elections — 1977, 1983 and 2002 — were perfectly fair.

India has sought integration with Kashmir, not colonial rule. But Kashmiris
nevertheless demand azaadi. And ruling over those who resent it so strongly
for so long is quasi-colonialism, regardless of our intentions.

We promised Kashmiris a plebiscite six decades ago. Let us hold one now, and
give them three choices: independence, union with Pakistan, and union with
India. Almost certainly the Valley will opt for independence. Jammu will opt
to stay with India, and probably Ladakh too. Let Kashmiris decide the
outcome, not the politicians and armies of India and Pakistan.






-- 
Aadisht Khanna
Address for mailing lists: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Personal address: [EMAIL PROTECTED]

Re: [silk] Vir Sanghvi on Kashmir

[Aadisht Khanna]

 strategy than some communication because threats
can't be made if you don't, or can't, communicate. China follows this
strategy with its dissidents very successfully, as do the US and the UK with
the terrorists. Believe me, it works.

 *Matrix 2**a* *b*  A  1, 2 3, 1  B 0, -200 2, -300

Matrix 2 shows what can happen when there is no communication between
husband and wife. In its absence the wife has to follow strategy A, and the
husband has to follow strategy a. She gains 1 and the husband gains 2.

However, when communication is allowed, she can threaten him by saying that
she will go for B unless he agrees to play b. This is exactly the problem in
Kashmir. If India submits, the opponents gain 2 and it loses 1 (as opposed
to what would happen if there was no communication).

For India, therefore, the superior strategy, regardless of what the liberal
bleeding hearts say, is to cut off all communication with the apparatchiks
of Kashmir. As a follow-up, it must also cut off all development aid to the
Valley because it is that which provides the financial resources (via
corruption enabled by the contractors) for the apparatchiks to continue with
the game. The aid has become the incentive to continue with the game.

But if one side walks away from the game, as the USSR did in 1990, the
villains of the other side will invariably lose. Even when children play,
when one child who owns the ball walks away with it because the others won't
let it bat, in the end everyone gains because a bargaining solution with a
finite outcome is found. This is what must be done in Kashmir.

Stupid idea? OK, but has anything else worked? If not, why not try this, Mr
Vohra? As I said, nothing ventured, nothing gained.






-- 
Aadisht Khanna
Address for mailing lists: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Personal address: [EMAIL PROTECTED]

Re: [silk] Vir Sanghvi on Kashmir

[Aadisht Khanna]

On Mon, Aug 18, 2008 at 8:40 AM, Udhay Shankar N [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:

 This actually seems like a reasonable idea - hold another referendum in
 Kashmir and let them go if they want to. Anything I am missing here?

 Udhay


Finally, minor quibble - 'another referendum' -  there never was one to
begin with.

-- 
Aadisht Khanna
Address for mailing lists: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Personal address: [EMAIL PROTECTED]

Re: [silk] http://blog.wired.com/business/2008/07/bollywood-stung.html

[Aadisht Khanna]

On Mon, Jul 14, 2008 at 1:40 PM, Amit Varma [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:

 Those two don't seem connected to me. The movie-watching experience at a
 big
 screen, whether at a multiplex or a stand-alone, is entirely different from
 watching a VCD at home. How many people on this list think they are
 substitutable, and would cancel a plan to go see a film at the theatre
 because they found a VCD of the film that they can watch in their living
 room? To use a loose analogy, restaurants don't go out of business because
 people can cook at home. It's just a different category of experience.


But the gap in experiences is closing steadily. Large-screen TVs, home
theatre systems, etc. are becoming more and more affordable.

-- 
Aadisht Khanna
Address for mailing lists: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Personal address: [EMAIL PROTECTED]

Re: [silk] Adios Banana?

[Aadisht Khanna]

On Sun, Jun 22, 2008 at 6:10 PM, va [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:

 On Thu, Jun 19, 2008 at 2:02 PM, Perry E. Metzger [EMAIL PROTECTED]
 wrote:
 
  [1] My favourite are the red ones -- any idea what they're called?

 chevazhai? or is it the malai pazham (but that is green-yellow, not red,
 afaik)


  I've also very little experience with real mangoes -- the ones sold
  here are mostly notable for their durability, which is similar to that

 hmm... strange you say that, coz even as a kid i've heard the street
 vendors complain that the best produce goes to the lucrative export
 market.


IIRC, the import of mangoes from India was not permitted in the United
States until last year - I think for health and safety rather than financial
reasons, though I may be wrong about this. The export market for Indian
mangoes has traditionally been the Gulf and South East Asia.



-- 
Aadisht Khanna
Address for mailing lists: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Personal address: [EMAIL PROTECTED]

Re: [silk] Is conflict necessary for progress?

[Aadisht Khanna]

 You make an assumption that there is a well known, and widely
 accepted, objective definition of progress. Tell me, what is the
 progress being achieved in the conflict in the Democratic Republic of
 Congo? Northern Uganda with the LRA? Colombia with FARC? Are these
 conflicts maximizing individual or societal potentials?

 While I hate falling into the trap of quoting management jargon, I think
you're confusing underlying conflict with the medium through which said
conflict expresses itself. The examples which you cited are all examples of
conflict leading to war. You can also have conflict resolution through a
civil/ criminal justice process, conflict between companies expressing
itself in marketplace competition, (peaceful) conflict over resources
resolving itself through technological development to spur productivity.

This does not do anything to answer Gautam's original question. As you've
pointed out, the expression of conflict can lead to war or any other sort of
destructive power struggle - meaning that conflict is not sufficient to
achieve progress (by any common-sensical definition of the word). Also, if
you hold truck with Heroic / Great Leader theories of innovation (Mozart
would have been a musical genius and written marvelous symphonies with or
without facing any conflict), or Random Walk theories of history (things
just happen. What the heck.), then conflict is not necessary for progress
either.



-- 
Aadisht Khanna
Address for mailing lists: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Personal address: [EMAIL PROTECTED]

Re: [silk] On Japanese Waistlines

[Aadisht Khanna]

 control . The only half-hearted meek protestations I have heard from
 countries dependent on middle east oil have been about devolution of
 power to the natives. Nobody seems to care about power to the
 immigrant population.


I recall reading about immigrant labourer protests a while ago. I can't
remember or find the original story I read, but here is a NYT report (which
focuses more on the action taken post facto than the protests themselves):

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/08/06/world/middleeast/06dubai.html?pagewanted=print

Apparently the construction workers headed on to the highway and held up
traffic to protest their working conditions. The crackdown was on the
employer rather than the workers themselves.

-- 
Aadisht Khanna
Address for mailing lists: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Personal address: [EMAIL PROTECTED]

Re: [silk] FW: [IP] Professor Sues Students For Questioning Her Opinions

[Aadisht Khanna]

 They are indeed wonderful things. The world would be darker without
 art. I am not sure it would be darker without professional art
 analysis, however. I draw a large distinction between Shakespeare and
 the mounds of masters theses written about him that moulder in college
 filing cabinets.


Perry, aren't the mounds of mouldering masters' theses the inevitable
consequence of Sturgeon's Law?

[silk] Charitable Giving

[Aadisht Khanna]

I would like to pick the list's intelligence on an issue I have been facing.

CRY approached me this month for a contribution, and I gave them six
thousand rupees without very much thought. However, the following points
arise:


   1. Five days ago, my pay review kicked in, and I can now afford to set
   aside five thousand rupees a month for charitable donations. I would like to
   do this.
   2. Having done this, I would obviously like to make sure that my
   donations get the most bang for their buck. This means the efficacy of the
   charity I am donating to needs to be certain.
   3. In addition to the organisational effectiveness of the charity, I
   also want to discriminate in the type of charities/ projects I donate to.
   Again, this will be determined by what (I think) leads to the most positive
   results. So if I have to choose between giving CRY six thousand rupees for
   supporting mentally handicapped kids, and six thousand rupees for educating
   slum dweller children in Yeshwanthpur, I would rather give to the education
   project because while the mentally handicapped kids will remain mentally
   handicapped, the education project can assist the slum dwellers in getting
   out of the slums - theoretically. Other people may be able to enlighten me
   if this is belief is sensible or not. On the same lines, I would rather
   donate to medical research projects than healthcare projects, primary
   healthcare than hospices, primary education than tertiary education, and so
   on.
   4. There is also the temporal aspect. Rather than give five thousand
   rupees a month away now, I could invest it, get a return,  and give larger
   lump sums later. Which in your opinion would make more sense?
   5. Point #4 also ties up with how much a particular donation should
   be. Are large lump sump donations better or worse than regular monthly
   donations? There would be transaction costs and processing costs involved,
   but how important are these?


This is more about deciding the criteria for donation, and the process for
it, than picking any particular charity, though that itself will be
important. Would appreciate your inputs on this.

~Aadisht

Re: [silk] Crazy English in China

[Aadisht Khanna]

  For years - for many decades, Indians have been surprised by Chinese
  speaking to them in fluent Hindi. Someone wrote  about it in the press
  recently - a Chinese immigration officer welcoming a tourist in Hindi.
 
  But the opposite is not happening to a very great extent - i.e. Indians
  learning Chinese.
 

 There's always a problem with generalizing from a small sample[1].

 Udhay

 I must point out that I too have been learning Mandarin.

Re: [silk] visiting bangalore...

[Aadisht Khanna]

On Thu, Apr 24, 2008 at 2:42 PM, Gautam John [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:

 On Thu, Apr 24, 2008 at 2:38 PM, Madhu Menon [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:

   If there are enough of you (4-6 at least), I can rustle up something
  different. In other words, you will be my guinea pigs. :)

 Well, I'm in too


I'm in. Which makes it four definites.

Re: [silk] Fwd: The lesser known aspects of kAmasutra and panchatantra

[Aadisht Khanna]

On Tue, Apr 15, 2008 at 11:08 AM, Kiran Jonnalagadda [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:

 No comment. Make your own opinion.


If it wasn't for the fact that I had just finished Chapter 12 of *The Age of
Turbulence*, this would be the most beautiful thing I had read this month.

Re: [silk] Two Nations, Two Choices (Interesting article by Vir Sanghvi onIndia and Pakistan )

[Aadisht Khanna]

On 1/16/08, Bonobashi [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:

 I was enjoying your rebuttal till the last line, where your English
 confused me.

 Quote
 snip
 Ah - two biases for the price of one - anti-banker and anti-Indian!

 Unquote

 Which part of Indian with an impeccable reputation gave you the clue
 that the writer was anti-Indian?




Nothing about that line - it was more that the writer seemed to call it
divine retribution that a 'mere Indian' had displaced Shaukat Aziz as Citi
CEO.

Re: [silk] Two Nations, Two Choices (Interesting article by Vir Sanghvi onIndia and Pakistan )

[Aadisht Khanna]

The level of financial FUD in this article is horrible. Ad-hominem attacks
on Shuakat Aziz, with no proper financial reasoning. Aziz *might* be a
crook, but this article doesn't prove anything.

On Jan 14, 2008 8:58 AM, shiv sastry [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:

 Needless to say, over the past
 eight years banks have been more profitable than they had ever been. And
 who
 got screwed in the process? The average depositor, of course. Thank you,
 Shaukat Aziz.


OK, maybe the average Pakistani depositor has been screwed. I don't know if
she has. But banks becoming profitable does not automatically imply
depositors being screwed. It's not a zero-sum game.


 Yet, because of Shaukat Aziz's policies of providing cheap credit to one
 and all, he can
 be credited with selling more consumer electronics than any advertising
 campaign. But if we weren't generating more power, how was the average
 Pakistani supposed to run his fancy new air-conditioner and deep-freezer?
 Today's power crisis, which is affecting both the consumer and the
 industrial
 user, can squarely be blamed on Shaukat Aziz's flawed economic policies.


If credit *had* become cheap, it would have been cheaper to finance power
projects too. If power wasn't added, that's presumably because the power
sector wasn't liberalised enough. Which is bad. But saying that credit
should flow to power projects before it flows to ordinary citizens who can
use it to improve their quality of life (and cheap credit is used for many,
many more reasons other than buying consumer electronics) smacks of elitism.

There is an atta crisis in the land today and prices have spiralled out of
 control
 because Mr Aziz decided to allow the export of wheat as a political favour
 a
 little before he took off for London. According to news reports, a rice
 crisis is also in the pipeline.


Yeah, except food prices have increased worldwide. Can't really blame Aziz.


 Our alternate energy policy is also one of the most backward in the
 region.
 Permissions to set up wind farms have been doled out to cronies and
 political
 allies like party favours. snip
 Sweetheart deals all around for everyone. Sad, but we can thank the dream
 team.


This is probable, because it's a feature of energy politics in all
countries.


 Hiring a private banker to do the job of a policy economist is like
 getting a plumber
 to fix your car's engine. I do believe in divine justice and Shaukat Aziz
 was
 vying for Citibank's top job and was lobbying hard for it, yet the board,
 instead, picked an Indian with an impeccable reputation.


Ah - two biases for the price of one - anti-banker and anti-Indian!