A snapshot out of google reader page - CNN-IBN news.

I cant stop wondering : Are journalists and media more concerned about the commonwelath games 2010 than common man’s safety ? Why didnt the news read – “The accident seems to indicate that Delhi is not FIT TO BE CALLED A SAFE PLACE” ?

Though this incident is not “big-enough” so as to demean the living standards of the city, the way the media portrays it is atrocious !!

Is the modern capitalistic society mere modification of slavery and dictatorship ? In other words :

Is capitalism a hierarchical form of dictatorship ?

The capitalist dictates terms to the board (internally/ externally)
The board dictates terms to it managers
The managerial dictatorship surpasses several levels
Finally, the lowest level of manager dictates terms to ordinary employees

There is always a race amongst peers in a specific level to reach the next higher level. Have we lost ourselves in this race to higher level ? Have we been trained to become dictators instead of being leaders ? How is leadership different from dictatorship ?

Has man come to a stage where he/she sacrifices personal growth for the profession’s sake and ultimately abandons his/her own profession goal ?

Should I be fortunate enough to be a founder of a firm, I doubt if my fortune will go to the extent of letting me change this structure. However, this thought of being enslaved will always linger in my mind (unless you could give me a satisfactory explanation).

This blog entry is just an expression of one of my curious thoughts. I am in no way trying to argue capitalism vs. communism. These two socio-economic paradigms have been well-studies and debated over by innumerable scholars and I admit that I barely know their intricacies.

Lets analyze the situation !! Hon. Mr. Raj Kapoor (then 43)wished to showcase Rev. Miss. Aman’s hind-side and smooching abilities in the afore mentioned movie; Hon. Poet Vairamuthu (then 47) enlightened the “kama” (erotic) version of tamil literature through his words in the movie Kushi (Tamil, 200); Hon. Dr. Kamal Hasan (then 46) gave common men an excellent smooching lesson with Hon. Miss. Mukharji’s aid in the movie Hey Ram (which I believe had an excellend theme).

The above snapshot of cine-perversion shows a blatant trend that all the artists who involved themselves in (what manu’s smtiti would call) “immoral” act were well above 40 years of age (If you are more scientifically inclined person looking for a better p-value, you are welcome to do more research and add to the statistics).

Lets put the above discussion on hold and consider the following scenario :

A bunch of 20 year old dudes having a good time walking on side walks of Koramangala, passing by Forum and checking out the scantily clad babes of similar age group, humming the tune of “Katti pudi Katti pudi da (Movie: Kushi)”. A bunch of 40 year old “grown-up” professionals pass by. The spontaneous remark is “Today’s youth are born perverted”.

There are certain things which we fail to note here:

#1. The 20 year guy’s mind was corrupted by the words of a 40 year old “well-educated” poet, with the help of mass media (esp radio) who broadcast it 24×7.
#2. The sons/ daughters of the 40 year old professional (who voiced out their opinion on perversion on 20 year old’s minds) are also doing the same thing, perhaps in front of Garuda Mall !!
#3. The (distant/ close)friends/relatives of these professionals are the people who broadcast gross scenes in mass media.
(FYI and #4: People are proud to be related to celebrities in most cases).
#5. The 40 year old people were once upon a time drooling all over popular celebrities’ image.

I was also enlightened by a movie critique that the “oil bath scene”(requires citation), where the actress strips naked live on stage, was pretty famous amongst the well-off “grown-ups” in 1940s. (This interaction with the movie critique took place in the book release event of – South India Heritage )

Now, here are some not-so-mind-bending-but-often-ignored thoughts :

Who is to be held responsible for adultery of young minds – the youngsters themselves or the grown-ups who actually act as a source of perverted third rated acts ?
What is the solution to this issue where ill-emotions are handed over from generation to generation with growing vigor ?

Q: “I have a wordpress blog hosted on wordpress (eg. “myblog.wordpress.com” in contast to wordpress blog hosted on a different doamin like “myblog.mydomain.com”). How do I upload a plug-in ?”

A: “No. You cannot do it” !!

As far as I know, its not possible to upload a plugin on-to your blog which is hosted on wordtess. The best-bet you have got is the widgets that come along with you blog. Here is the support page.

I am pretty sure that the inference is right. But the search of 2 hours for this piece of information was pretty frustrating. There are tonnes of tutorials on web ,including wierd tutorials on youtube – weirdest* being a tutorial “wordpress for women” (since when did wordpress pump in that extra AI in the blog that makes it work differently for women ? ). Anyways, the million $$ question is “Why didnt anyone tell that the trick wont work for wordpress.com domain?”  !!

PS :

* “weirdest” here is not used in a derogatory sense. It is based on the belief that “weird” is more casual than a rather diplomatic word like “unique” !! Nevertheless, it is very kind of the author (or webmaster) for having added the following welcoming note

Guys, if it works for you, welcome!

Many users think of R as a statistics system. We prefer to think of it of an environment within which statistical techniques are implemented. R can be extended (easily) via packages. There are about eight packages supplied with the R distribution and many more are available through the CRAN family of Internet sites covering a very wide range of modern statistics.

WHAT IS R ?
R behaves like an interpreter, which has C codes working in the back-stage. Any command given through the R front end, is interpreted and a C function is called in the background. This is achieved through the function call “.Internal()”. For detailed note on this mechanism, please go through the R help documentation.

PROS vs. CONS
R, by virtue of being a high-level interpreter, does not bother the programmer with the intricacies and nuances of tradition low-level programming languages. Thus any person, immaterial of his/her background, can make R work according to the needs.

But the fact that R is high-level language also comes with an inherent disadvantage that it is slow. Since any command in R is translated to an equivalent C function and then executed, executing a fairly sized loop in R will take huge amount of time, when compared to the execution time of the same chunk of code in C.

LOOPS IN R
R has been developed with a purpose of handling data-table like structures. Since R has this inherent capability to handle data-tables, almost any loop can be re-written in an un-looped form. However, there will be a looping taking place in the underlying C layer. Thus, a loop in R will lead to looping in both higher and the lower level. Please note that the “interpreter” does not perform any optimization of the R code.

FUNNY THOUGHT :

My parents were worried that I might elope with some random girl.. now I have to be worried that my son might elope with some random guy !!!

SERIOUS THOUGHT :

I was reading an article on BBC’s website (here) on how India is struggling to come up with a set of policies that will optimize both the rural development and industrialization.

Then there were series of articles on maoists in India, communal riots in Mysore, gang-rape in Bhopal, flooding of rain water in Mumbai and tonnes of other issues which I felt deserved some attention.

Then came this whole armada of news articles (clearly intended to boost the news channel’s ratings) on “de-criminalization of Gay” !! The first spark of thought that ignited in my mind was “Is this really essential ??”.

India – as a nation made-up of diverse groups of people, has got its own problems. Trying to ape western (read as American) ways of life is completely absurd. Its like using the same set of architectural plans to construct a house on hard rock and on water !!!

Clearly today’s USA has evolved during its 233 years of independent democracy. India on the other hand is a very young nation and needs to deal with numerous serious issues before investing its resources in such (relatively) pathetically disgusting issues as gay.

BTW … USA de-criminalized gay (just in Illinois) in 1962 … after building a 102 floor Empire State Building (1931), constructing a 13 miles Lake Pontchartrain Causeway (1956) , ensuring 97.5% literacy (here) and many such accomplishment. And.. India ???

Hence, my argument here is, since we lie in a lower level of hierarchy, it is not possible to interpret the realities of higher level or in layman’s terms, humans dont have sufficient tools to gain more knowledge.

Mathematically, the problem can be defined as trying to express one vector space in terms of basis of another vector space, which in-fact is a sub-space of the former. This leads to aliasing of signals, which indeed is misleading.

Hence, in order to understand many phenomenon, which is easily desnated as “super natural”, we have to rethink and redefine the definition of what is “natural”.

What is then the line that separates “Living” and “Dead” ?

A creature to qualify itself as living needs to exhibit such acts and to do such actions it needs energy.

Thus a simple conclusion can be – A creature is living when it contains energy and is considered dead when it looses the energy.

This argument can be extrapolated to all “Living” thing (Refer my previous post for my idea of ‘living’). An atom collapses when it looses it energy . A star undergoes super nova and eventually dies when its energy is drained out. An animal dies when it looses energy to carry out its most elementary activity of breathing. A cell destroys itself when it runs out of reserve food particle (I think lysosomes cause this destruction. Please refer to a more authoritative source).

Loss of energy to be cause of death can be applied as thumb-rule at all resolution of life.

Hence life is one or more quantum/quanta of energy stored in physical body whose dimension varies from an atom to a galaxy!!

The answers I got when I asked this question to my friends were

“The ability to reproduce”,”The ability to move”,”The ability to feel” and many more.

Well.. I personally consider life as something that gives an object a character.

Is an atom dead or living ? If its dead, How does an atom make an electron come around its nucleus so mechanically yet with subtle variations ? Why isn’t an atom considered alive ?

An atom may not exhibit “human-like ” life, yet it is very much alive. So is a solar system, a planet with all its dynamics, a plant with its ability to feel the sunlight, a galaxy with its functioning solar systems and many other things in nature which are categorized under science.