Quasi-Coherent Ruminations

Awesome Indian batting.

2010-02-16T16:51:00.005-06:00

Ian Chappell may or may not be right in suggesting that India can't be a long term Number One in tests because they lack quality bowling. Time will settle that. What is beyond dispute is the amazing Indian batting.

In the last 10 years India played 105 tests winning 42, losing 27 and drawing the rest. This is a win/loss ratio of 1.55. For the last 5 years these numbers (55, 22, 11, 2) are even more impressive. For comparison, in their entire history India played 437 tests winning 103 and losing 137. The win/loss ratio is 0.75. No one can deny that batting is the force behind this transformation.It is true that bowling was also crucial because we need 20 wickets to win. However, the win/loss ratio could be improved simply by losing less (even if winning at the same rate). Indeed, while the winning rate (compared to history) improved significantly in the last 10 years, it did not change in the last 5 years (in both the 10 year and 5 year period, it is exactly 0.4). So the improvement in the win/loss ratio from 1.55 to 2 was solely because India lost less.

Batting is the reason for this reduction in the number of losses. Big scores in wins loom large in memory. The batting in the current test again South Africa was beautiful and solid. Similarly in all the wins in the last few years in all countries, batting was awesome.

But a major aspect of Indian test performances lately has been the dogged batting when needed to save test matches.

Ahmedabad last year against Sri Lanka, or Napier, or Bangalore (against Aus, 2008), or Lord's 2007, or St Kitts in 2006 -- in all these cases India needed to bat close to a day or more in the 4th innings to avoid defeat. A few years ago the outcome usually was all too painful and predictable: India would collapse under the pressure and fail to survive. But in the past 4 years or so, there is a clear and pleasing pattern of resistance and determined batting for close to 100 overs (or more) to survive test matches.

This is surely one of the crucial reasons for our Number One position.

"Speaking" mother tongue from day 1.

2009-11-05T16:16:00.001-06:00

According to this research.

A book a day.

2009-10-13T15:58:00.002-05:00

This is amazing.

Reading books has always been a passion with me. But it is also a constant challenge because I am barely keeping up with the books I want to read at any given time. Right now I am in the middle of one book and would dearly love to finish it and get to at least 3 or 4 more books (this, this, and this). And this list keeps growing too.

So it is quite appealing to see that this person has read one book every day for nearly a year. She also reviews each one of them. And thanks to her, I added a new book to my list of to-be-read-as-soon-as-possible books.

Excessive!

2009-06-16T06:31:00.002-05:00

It was sickening to see the mania created by media and other vested interests before the current World T20 tournament started. Wherever you go, you were likely to see signs of this mania with people wishing good luck to the players and praying that India brings the cup back home. It was there on TV channels (not just on sports channels) and it was there on bill boards.

Now it is equally sickening to see the reaction to the loss. I made this point here before, and it bears repeating. The India cricket team does not represent the people of India. If they fail to do well, there is no justification in feeling that they wronged the people of India. Moreover, we seem to forget the almost self-evident point that victory or defeat in sports is a function of various factors and to draw a line straight from defeat to incompetence/internal rifts/lack of motivation is quite uncalled for. What is needed is a measured reaction, which seems frankly in short supply. It is very disheartening that reactions like this are no longer on the fringes, though that particular form of expression may be still rare.

Effect of large monetary reward.

2008-11-20T23:23:00.002-06:00

This is a very interesting experiment. Though, it seems counter-intuitive, it does make sense to me.

Dan Ariely does intriguing research. His book has been on my list of must-reads for the last few months. May be I should get to it now.

He and three collaborators went to India and asked 87 people to do various tasks requiring memory, concentration, attention and creativity. They divided the 87 people and offered different monetary incentives to the three groups for the same tasks. First group got 50 cents, the second $5 and the third $50.

In real terms, these sums are much larger in India than they seem.

Their conclusions:

The people offered medium bonuses performed no better, or worse, than those offered low bonuses. But what was most interesting was that the group offered the biggest bonus did worse than the other two groups across all the tasks.

They reached similar conclusions in experiments conducted in Boston and Chicago too. For any task that requires some level of mental skill as opposed to mere mechanical effort, their research shows that large monetary reward may not have the clear motivational advantage that is usually imagined.

Bail me out!

2008-11-12T22:14:00.002-06:00

As the complex and twisted debate (see this, this and this, for a sample) on whether to bail out large companies in general, and General Motors in particular rages on, here is something amusing.

Before you throw this letter into the proverbial round file, let’s be clear: this is the first time I have ever asked for a bailout from the Federal Reserve. I know what you’re thinking. Why do I deserve your largesse, and I do mean largesse, since I’m asking for five million big ones? The answer is simple. Like many of our nation’s financial institutions, I am simply too big to fail. If investors were allowed to witness the collapse of Freddie, Fannie, and then Andy, I can’t begin to describe what havoc it would wreak on their already frayed nerves. Actually, I can describe it: global financial calamity. I think we can both agree that, to dodge this bullet, ten million dollars is a small price to pay. (I know that I originally asked for five, but since I started writing this letter my financial situation has deteriorated in grave and unexpected ways.)

232 years later.

2008-11-05T18:21:00.009-06:00

232 years ago, a country that held "all men are created equal" was self-evident.

Till 143 years ago, a country of "slave-warehouses":

A slave-warehouse in New Orleans is a house externally not much unlike many others, kept with neatness; and where every day you may see arranged, under a sort of shed along the outside, rows of men and women, who stand there as a sign of the property sold within. Then you shall be courteously entreated to call and examine, and shall find an abundance of husbands, wives, brothers, sisters, fathers, mothers, and young children, to be "sold separately, or in lots to suit the convenience of the purchaser;" and that soul immortal, once bought with blood and anguish by the Son of God, when the earth shook, and the rocks rent, and the graves were opened, can be sold, leased, mortgaged, exchanged for groceries or dry goods, to suit the phases of trade, or the fancy of the purchaser.

A 100 years ago, country of lynchings.

Till a half century ago, a country of Jim Crow and segregation.

In a little over 2 months from now, a country with a negro president.

This last does not erase or excuse what preceded it. Far from it.

What it does is give meaning to the American national commitment to perfect their union. It proves, in the words of the man himself, that "a government of the people, by the people and for the people has not perished from this Earth".

McCain is pissed.

2008-10-02T13:33:00.002-05:00

He does not look at Obama once in the debate. He looks distant as Obama approaches him in the Senate. He gets testy with the editorial board of Des Moines Register.

I have a theory. McCain is shocked that his poll numbers are falling, and he is getting very angry. I think he believes that his campaign suspension last week should have been popular. I think he really believes that people should simply accept that Palin is a maverick and love her. In the absence of these phenomenon, McCain is losing it.

This video is another case in point. He seems completely insane there. I don't even know what he is saying. They were talking about his vote for the bailout plan. Then out of nowhere, he mentions he is proud of suspending his campaign. He knows that a majority of American people thought the suspension was stupid. But he can not accept it.

The latest news is not good for him.

Country First!

2008-09-26T14:55:00.003-05:00

Words fail:

Not for Hendrik Hertzberg though. As usual, he hits the nail on the head.

In the “Putin rears his head” answer, jagged shards of the hasty briefings lately stuffed into Palin’s pretty head clang tinnily against one another. “We send those”—those? those what?—”out to make sure that an eye is being kept on this powerful nation, Russia.” Those what? We send what? My hunch is that this alarming jumble must have something to do with the path that Russian intercontinental missiles would take on their way to the lower Forty-eight and/or the air-defense installations that NORAD maintains in the state Palin is executive of. But who knows? The whole thing reads like something rendered from the Finnish by Google Translate.

For a seventy-two-year-old cancer survivor to have placed this person directly behind himself in line for the Presidency was an act of almost incomprehensible cynicism and irresponsibility. It makes a cruel—what’s the word?—mockery of his slogan. “Country First” indeed.

The myth of John McCain.

2008-09-10T15:47:00.003-05:00

I have personally believed, and heard many rational people assert, that John McCain is an independent man. That he is saner than the crowd that controls the White House now. That he is better than the various others who vied with him for the Republican nomination.

I do not believe this any more.

It may be argued that under pressures of campaigning, politicians occasionally do ill-advised things. But McCain displays a pattern of behavior which goes well behind this dubious, but necessarily limited, moral blank check.

From the moment he allowed his campaign to portray Obama as a an empty celebrity, when he questioned Obama's patriotism, when he picked Palin, and today when he sits idly as the Republicans create a "phony outrage" over Obama's comments, McCain is proving himself to be anything but independent. His campaign is being controlled by the same tactics and methods that, ironically, defeated him in 2000. There is little expectation that a possible McCain administration will be any different.

Andrew Sullivan captures these thoughts admirably.

And when he had the chance to engage in a real and substantive debate against the most talented politician of the next generation in a fall campaign where vital issues are at stake, what did McCain do? He began his general campaign with a series of grotesque, trivial and absurd MTV-style attacks on Obama's virtues and implied disgusting things about his opponent's patriotism.

And then, because he could see he was going to lose, ten days ago, he threw caution to the wind and with no vetting whatsoever, picked a woman who, by her decision to endure her own eight-month pregnancy of a Down Syndrome child in public, that he was going to reignite the culture war as a last stand against Obama. That's all that is happening right now: a massive bump in the enthusiasm of the Christianist base. This is pure Rove.

Yes, McCain made a decision that revealed many appalling things about him. In the end, his final concern is not national security. No one who cares about national security would pick as vice-president someone who knows nothing about it as his replacement. No one who cares about this country's safety would gamble the security of the world on a total unknown because she polled well with the Christianist base. No person who truly believed that the surge was integral to this country's national security would pick as his veep candidate a woman who, so far as we can tell anything, opposed it at the time.

Barack Obama's gmail account

2008-07-25T15:54:00.003-05:00

I always wonder who the special people are that get their choice user ids on free email services like yahoo, hotmail and gmail. Here is an article in New Yorker which talks about the owner of barackobama@gmail.com.

Inept American media.

2008-07-21T03:54:00.002-05:00

John McCain implied recently that Obama was a socialist. His argument for that was spurious, of course. This article in Columbia Journalism Review does a nice job of pointing that out, and simultaneously shows up the inept American media.

The larger point is this: about two minutes worth of close scrutiny would be enough to convince any reasonable observer that to suggest Obama is a socialist is to drain the term of any meaning. Everyone involved knows this, including McCain (which is why he settled for implying, rather than saying so outright.) But by the rules of today’s political press, the “news” is that McCain made an explosive-sounding attack. Whether that attack is substantively valid just isn’t relevant to reporters.

Despite losing, Indian team looks good.

2008-07-06T12:31:00.001-05:00

India just lost the final of Asia Cup, its second loss in a final in less than a month (after the loss to Pakistan in Kitply Cup). Much will be said and written about the team and Dhoni's decision to field first in the final today.

Despite today's loss, I believe that the Indian team is doing well generally. Test team has been doing well for a while now as can be seen from our second position in ICC rankings. One-day team has struggled recently, but the team improved under Dhoni's captaincy, with the CB series win in Australia being the highlight. I am impressed by the way this young team is playing together. A couple of years ago, there was concern regarding how will India cope after the Big Three depart. I think that concern has been resolved satisfactorily. While Sachin remains a key ingredient, Dravid and Ganguly are not terribly missed.

Today we basically lost because of a single outstanding spell from Ajantha Mendis. It is true that some of the batsmen played bad shots and they needed to be more responsible. But this loss is not what this Indian team is about.

A short-lived first for India.

2008-07-02T18:07:00.003-05:00

After their recent win against Bangladesh in Asia Cup, India achieved a record: for the first time since they started playing one-days, they had more wins than losses. The team record stood at 328 wins and 327 losses. After today's loss against Pakistan, we are back to 50% win percentage.

The best pick for VP....

2008-07-01T03:56:00.003-05:00

.....turns out to be the same for both candidates! According to an algorithm used by a company called Affinnova, Colin Powel might be the best running mate for both Obama and McCain.

They have an interesting page of results obtained by their methods. There is also a demo poll.

Evolution.

2008-06-29T18:38:00.001-05:00

The theory of evolution is the hypothesis that all life on earth originated from a single source via genetic mutation and natural selection of beneficial mutations. Ever since Charles Darwin first proposed the idea of evolution in mid-19th century, a growing body of evidence is emerging to support it. One of the reasons evolution is difficult to study in laboratory is the large time frames that are involved. Modern human beings first appeared around 200,000 years ago, while the family containing humans and great apes has been evolving over millions of years.

This difficulty, however, can be overcome by studying the evolution of micro-level organisms under specifically designed conditions in a laboratory. The tiny size of these organisms and the quickness with which they reproduce make the study of evolution accessible. Also, the development of DNA sequencing techniques allows the scientists to study the genetic modifications behind the evolutionary changes they observe. A new class of evidence for the theory of evolution is being established using these methods.

One of the pioneers has been Dr Richard Lenski. He, along with his associates, is conducting a 20 year experiment using the E.coli bacteria. He started with a single E.coli and began to observe its behavior under adverse conditions. After hundreds of generations, he saw that they began to reproduce more efficiently, meaning that they adopted to the new conditions. He also observed that, after about 33,000 generations, the bacteria exhibited a behavior trait (feeding on citrate) that is absent among E.coli in natural conditions. This trait developed solely due to its advantage in the circumstances created by Dr Lenski. A very accessible summary of Dr Lenski's research is here.

Finally, here is an interesting exchange between Dr Lenski and Andrew Schlafly. It tells you a little about the ridiculousness of the quack intelligent design movement which is just creationism, in a harmful disguise.

Religion in America.

2008-06-27T23:16:00.000-05:00

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.

This was the text of the first amendment to the constitution of the United States, enacted in 1791. This was one of the most remarkable events in history. All over the world at that time, religion served as the sole source of morality and was taken to be the only legitimate foundation for a civilized society. In such circumstances, for a country to codify the above principle as a constitutional backbone was unbelievable, to say the least.

The founding fathers came from different shades of the religious spectrum. There were non-religious people (Jefferson) as well as moderately pious (Washington, Adams, Hamilton and Madison). But one thing they all agreed on was the essential requirement of a republic: irreligiosity of the state.

This wisdom of two centuries ago is now in short supply. At least, that is the impression one gets from the current politics of the US. There was always a thought, usually on the fringes, in the American society which did not accept that a rigorous foundation of a civilized society can be nonreligious. This thought appears to be becoming mainstream. It reached a high in the current administration.

These trends are analyzed in this article of Steven Pinker. The specific subject of the article is a report released by the President's Council on Bioethics. This council was "charged with advising the president and exploring policy issues related to the ethics of biomedical innovation, including drugs that would enhance cognition, genetic manipulation of animals or humans, therapies that could extend the lifespan, and embryonic stem cells and so-called 'therapeutic cloning' that could furnish replacements for diseased tissue and organs". The council's 555-page report introduced a narrow religious angle into these issues and elevated a vaguely defined concept of "human dignity" as a litmus test for deciding on them. Needless to say, many of the conclusions fit the agenda of the religious wing of the Republican party. The article reveals the close ties between Bush administration and the intellectuals behind the report.

This is, of course, one of many disquieting aspects of George Bush's presidency. There are some welcome indications that the sway of the religious right on GOP is on the decline. However, the question remains:

How did the United States, the world's scientific powerhouse, reach a point at which it grapples with the ethical challenges of twenty-first-century biomedicine using Bible stories, Catholic doctrine, and woolly rabbinical allegory?

Words are also deeds.

2008-06-24T23:22:00.002-05:00

One of the key aspects of Obama which draw me toward to him is his ability to give inspiring speeches. It is not only the way he talks - it is also what he says. I find again and again that his speeches are intelligent and beautiful. His various primary victory speeches and especially his speech in Pennsylvania on race are absolute gems. I rooted for him in the primaries partly because I am excited to hear him speak at the convention in August. I am rooting for him in the general election partly because I would like to hear him giving important speeches in the next few years.

It is easy to dismiss his speeches as mere words and skillful rhetoric that have nothing to do with substantive issues. But as with many easy conclusions, it is incorrect. The style of his speaking does convey something about his substance.

This is precisely the gist of this wonderful article in New York magazine by Sam Anderson. He looks forward to the coming speech of Obama in Denver and analyzes what Obama's speeches tell about him.

Supreme Court.

2008-06-18T14:51:00.002-05:00

Men of judiciary, John Adams once wrote, should be "men of experience on the laws, of exemplary morals, invincible patience, unruffled calmness, and indefatigable application". His opinion counts because, as the author of the constitution of Massachusetts, oldest functioning in the world, he initiated many of the codes regarding judiciary that were later incorporated into the United States constitution. Prominent among these were appointment of judges by the executive (as opposed to election) and life-term appointments.

There is no reason to suppose that the present judges on the high court fall short of the demands of Adams. Their ideological differences and narrow decisions on crucial issues notwithstanding. This is really the riddle of Supreme Court.

In a significant decision last week, in Boumedience V Bush (pdf), the Supreme Court opined that foreign nationals held on terrorism charges have constitutional right to challenge their detention in US courts. This is a rebuke to the philosophy of the Bush administration and some recent decisions of the Congress granting the administration rights to hold terrorism suspects indefinitely with minimal scope for any legal recourse.

The 5-4 decision neatly broke along the ideological lines, with Justice Anthony Kennedy casting the decisive vote for the majority. The reaction too was largely on the ideological lines with the Bush administration and the Republican party disapproving and the Democrats praising it.

Barack Obama welcomed the decision. John McCain criticized the decision, ridiculously calling it one of the worst decision ever by the Supreme Court. He also made the dubious assertion that the constitutional rights do not apply to foreigners held by US.

It seems unlikely that there will be a resolution of these weighty matters anytime soon. The law of the land, as set forth by the interpretation of constitution by the Supreme Court, will swing one way or the other as the political power in this country changes hands. Issues will continue to be determined essentially through the rough and tumble of the democratic process.

Obama builds his delegate lead.

2008-03-10T13:11:00.002-05:00

Last week was a bad week for Obama. That is what we are told anyway. But as this article on Daily Kos points out, he actually came on top last week in the contest for delegates. While Clinton might fight fiercely in the days and weeks to come, an Obama win looks more and more likely. Unless, of course, Obama is caught in bed with either a dead girl or a live boy.

Clinton keeps the race alive.

2008-03-05T15:08:00.000-06:00

Hillary Clinton has registered the needed victories in Ohio and Texas to keep her hopes alive, if barely. At the very least, the calls for her to quit will go. Her victory in Ohio was impressive and in Texas she secured a narrow win, contrary to my prediction. According to exit polls, large percentage of late deciders went for Clinton. So some of her tactics in the days leading up to the election worked.

Here is the thing though. In spite of her wins, she is not in a better position in the race that matters: the delegate count. Indeed, she is worse off now that before these primaries.

According to various sources, her net delegate gain from yesterday's results could be less than 15. A final tally will not be known till full results from Texas caucus are known. Since Obama is going to win that Clinton's lead will surely come down. Some say that Obama might even have a net gain. According to Associated Press, Clinton won 185 delegates on Tuesday as opposed to Obama's 173. Obama maintains an impressive lead of 140 among pledged delegates. This will only increase as full results from Texas caucus come in. Some other sources which have the same broad message are here, here and here.

So why is Clinton in worse shape? Because there is less time for her now to make up the difference. On Tuesday, more than a third of the remaining delegates were on offer (about 360). If Clinton could cut Obama'a lead only by 10 after an "impressive" victory, with less than 600 delegates up for grabs, Obama's lead of around 140 looks impregnable. Moreover, Obama could very well offset yesterday's losses with wins in Wyoming and Mississippi in the next one week.

So it is safe to say that Clinton can win the nomination only by convincing a majority of superdelegates to vote for her. That will be hard as most of the superdelegates will opt for the winner of popular support.

The race now is set to last for at least another month and half, till the Pennsylvania contest in April. The tone of the campaigns in this period, particularly of Clinton campaign, could be damaging. Already, Clinton is damaging the prospects of Democrats in the general election by suggesting that McCain will be a better president than Obama. While a tight and protracted race may not be such a bad thing, Clinton's tactics might be damaging. So hopefully, she will not cross some lines that should not be crossed.

Sachin silences his "critics"???

2008-03-04T10:59:00.006-06:00

It is highly irritating to see scores of muddle-headed arm-chair experts proclaim that (or wonder if) Sachin Tendulkar finally answered critics by his pair of match-winning innings in the tri-series final. As someone wisely said, these people should think more and talk less.

Sachin Tendulkar does not need to silence his critics.

2008-02-28T20:55:00.000-06:00

This is really funny.

Obama will win in Texas.

2008-02-27T21:56:00.000-06:00

That is my guess. The polls have narrowed over the last few days and in fact, Obama leads the RCP average over several polls in Texas. But I wouldn't predict a victory for Obama for this reason alone.

At the first sign of trouble in Texas, Clinton campaign began to trash Texas. Undeniably, Democrats can't win Texas this November. That does not mean running an active campaign in Texas is meaningless or that Texas is irrelevant to Democrats. An efficient grassroots campaign there will help in several state elections and may change the color of the state in years to come. And it appears that in Texas, Obama campaign is "doing more to rebuild the party in two weeks than the party's done in years".

This awesome effort may not be enough to carry Texas in November (at least in 2008), but I think it is enough to deliver Texas to Obama next Tuesday.

To contest an election or not?

2008-02-25T10:30:00.003-06:00

...Without doubt, several factors need to be considered. But one necessary, though not sufficient, condition is a reasonable confidence of winning the election. Ralph Nader does not have it. So he is one of the most vainglorious and irresponsible politicians in America today.

This thought is expanded admirably here.

Further evidence of Bush administration's pigheadedness.

2008-02-23T19:51:00.001-06:00

The 8 years of Bush are an unmitigated disaster. This is fairly clear in certain areas: the mess in Iraq, Katrina, the wholesale disregard for all international norms etc. Bush era was equally destructive in less public arenas. The Bush people worked like viruses in several public institutions, eating their vitality away from inside and it would take plenty of determined effort to get rid of that virus. One recalls the rampant cronyism in all departments, only one of whose manifestations was the ineptness of FEMA. There was also the appalling partisanship which resulted in applicants to diplomatic posts in Iraq being questioned on their political views. It is my belief that more and more illustrations like this will appear far into the future.

Scott Horton has a nice article on another aspect of this. The Public Affairs Office at the Department of Defense is supposed to deal with "public information, internal information, community relations, information training, and audiovisual matters". Instead, under Bush and Rumsfeld they worked as “Department for the Political Instruction of Cadres”. Horton lists a few cases over the years when this office tried to shamelessly discredit with utter disregard for truth anyone daring to criticize any Pentagon activity.

The latest case came yesterday when Obama mentioned the following story in the Democratic debate:

I heard from an Army captain, who was the head of a rifle platoon, supposed to have 39 men in a rifle platoon. Ended up being sent to Afghanistan with 24, because 15 of those soldiers had been sent to Iraq. And as a consequence, they didn’t have enough ammunition; they didn’t have enough humvees. They were actually capturing Taliban weapons because it was easier to get Taliban weapons than it was for them to get properly equipped by our current commander in chief.

This story has been confirmed by ABC and NBC. That doesn't stop the the administration officials brazenly calling it a lie. As Horton writes, the concept of truth is different for them.

But you’d have to understand just what Mr. Whitman means by “truth” to fully appreciate the meaning of his comments. My understanding of the way the phrase works is pretty simple, and widespread in the world. Truth serves the interests of the party. Truth is what we make it. And since the interests of the party are served by implying that Barack Obama is a liar, even though Mr. Whitman has no basis to say that, of course he’ll charge right ahead and do it.

Challenges for 21st century.

2008-02-21T00:33:00.003-06:00

These are the 14 greatest engineering challenges for 21st century, according to National Science Foundation.

Make solar energy affordable.
Provide energy from fusion.
Develop carbon sequestration methods.
Manage the nitrogen cycle.
Provide access to clean water.
Restore and improve urban infrastructure.
Advance health informatics.
Engineer better medicines.
Reverse-engineer the brain.
Prevent nuclear terror.
Secure cyberspace.
Enhance virtual reality.
Advance personalized learning.
Engineer the tools for scientific discovery.

All over for Hillary?

2008-02-20T21:53:00.003-06:00

It appears now that it is all over for Hillary Clinton. That is always a risky bet, but things surely are looking gloomy for her. Even by their own admission, they need to win in Texas and Ohio. But it is not clear any more that she is a front-runner there, with Obama cutting into her traditional support among blue-collar workers and voters without college degrees and narrowing the gap among women.

Obama is showing that his appeal is sustainable. The "Obama mania" period may be nearing its end, but he still seems to be able to drive people to vote for him. Clinton is thus forced into assuming a more attacking posture, but it is not clear if it is helping her. Obama's speech in Houston last night makes it clear that he is trying to sound more substantive. He is also making conscious attempts to counter the charge that his is empty rhetoric.

This story makes it clear that the race is not over by any means. Powerful forces are working on her behalf and they won't give up easily.

Why isn't Linux More Popular?

2008-02-17T22:31:00.003-06:00

...I always wondered. May be because it is free, suggests this article. I think there is something to it.

On Democratic Race.

2008-02-13T15:10:00.003-06:00

Almost everyone now agrees that Obama has the delegate lead, even counting the superdelegates. According to AP, Obama has a 25 delegate lead. RealClearPolitics has him lead by 41. CNN says he leads by 42. And all of these agree that Clinton leads in superdelegates. Among pledged delegates, Obama leads by more than 100. I believe that as we go forward with the race and Obama extends his lead among elected delegates, more and more superdelegates will switch to him. For example, a former Clinton man in Ohio did just that today.

Some of his Obama's victories yesterday were remarkable. Clinton campaign lead in Virginia for a long time and even has its national headquarters in Virginia. For her to lose Virginia by almost 30 points is unbelievable. Except among White women, Obama beat her in every other demographic. He even lead among Latinos.

Some people are comparing Clinton to Guiliani because she is putting everything in Ohio and Texas. Given Obama's string of massive victories, she would need to win Ohio, Texas and Pennsylvania by huge margins. I believe that even simple victories there are not guaranteed. Obama will have massive financial and momentum advantage coming out of February.

More on Obama.

2008-02-12T17:14:00.000-06:00

This is a very nice article on Obama campaign in NYT. It is pretty clear that running for president as a black candidate is neither strategically wise, nor particularly uplifting. Campaigns of Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton showed that it might result in an odd primary win, but never poses a serious threat. So Obama naturally chose to present himself as a competent candidate, who merely happens to be back. From the start Obama, with an admirable consistency, refrained from playing the race card, so much so that huge black support that he has now was not evident till recently.

A very important day of primaries today. Obama is expected to win and the only question is by how much. He is set to extend his lead in pledged delegates. Clinton campaign is concentrating mostly on Texas and Ohio. It remains to be seen whether she can survive February. As the weblog Dailykos wrote sometime ago, the question for Obama was whether he could survive February 5th. He did. Now the question for Clinton is whether she could survive the rest of February. She did not start well the last weekend. She will surely hope to lose closely tonight.

Every reason to feel good, if you are an Obama supporter.

2008-02-10T14:40:00.000-06:00

Things look good for Obama. Slowly, but surely, the mighty Clinton machine looks like it will beaten for once. While the delegate count can be tricky and confusing, there seems to be more or less unanimous belief that Obama leads Clinton in pledged delegates. Even with superdelegates he is not that far behind. According to Associated Press, the count stands at 1095 - 1070 in favor of Clinton (this includes superdelegates). NY Times does not count caucus delegates because they are not yet officially determined. That is the reason for the larger lead that Clinton has in their count. According to RealClearPolitics, the gap is even narrower, with Clinton leading by only 3.

Furthermore, superdelegates can change their minds. In fact, several of them are still undecided. If Obama widens his pledged delegates lead this month, there is every likelihood that he will get the support of more superdelegates.

Given that Obama is likely to do well in contests this month, Clinton campaign seems to be focusing mainly on Ohio, Texas in March and Pennsylvania in April. Well, that might not be enough. As explained here, Clinton needs to win by huge margins in these three states to offset the advantage that Obama would have built by the time we get to March. But Clinton has not shown that she could win big. A very important feature of the campaign so far is:

Hillary received more than 60% of the vote in one state, Arkansas, whereas Obama received more than 60% of the vote in eight states, and more than 70% of the vote in three states. I'm assuming that if Hillary cannot get greater than 60% of the vote in New York where she is senator, she cannot get greater than 60% of the vote anywhere.

So as I said, things look good for Obama. But it is dangerous to discount the Clinton machine. As Frank Rich writes today in the NYT, they will fight dirty.

Pain in Sydney.

2008-01-06T02:11:00.000-06:00

It happened again. Another Indian batting collapse. This time it was more drawn out and so more painful. Ganguly got out (6th wicket) in the 41st over and then the bowlers and Dhoni hung around for another 30 overs. They almost pulled it off. But in the end, probably fittingly, Australia extended their winning streak. The critical fact which settled this match is: Indian top order could last (or made to last, if you like) only 40 overs in the second innings.

It was the same lineup which lasted for 140 overs in the first innings and obtained a rare first innings lead against Australia. The last time it happened was in Adelaide, 2006 when England got a lead in the first innings only to collapse woefully on the last day to lose. Then it was Warne, Lee and McGrath. Now it is Symonds and Clarke.

Mukul Kesavan is right. Yuvraj doesn't belong here. It is not fair to blame alone him for this. But his four innings in this series don't really give me much hope. It is not just failures. Wasim Jaffer also failed, but I would say stick with him. He is opening the innings in difficult situations and he proved his mettle over the last one year. At the very least, Yuvraj does not deserve his place at the cost of pushing Dravid to open.

Australia richly deserve this. They are an amazing team. When they were in a bother in the first innings, Symonds played a gem with ample support from the bowlers. In the second innings, an injured Hayden and Hussey played incredible innings on a wearing pitch to give them a chance. The versatility is something. On a spinning track, Symonds and Clarke, both part-timers, managed six wickets between them. They chipped in when their specialist spinner couldn't strike.

True, some decisions went against us. Some of these might well have changed the course of the match. On the first day Symonds was clearly out at 30. On the last day, Dravid was clearly not out. But Indians will do well to accept that in spite of these, they should have saved the match.

Norman Mailer on Iraq.

2007-11-28T01:48:00.000-06:00

This is from January 2003, three months before Iraq war began. Norman Mailer is prescient, sagacious and articulate.

2007-10-14T00:02:00.001-05:00

This is interesting.

Links.

2007-10-09T22:11:00.000-05:00

Recently, Clarence Thomas was in the headlines with the release of his book "My Grandfather's Son". Naturally, the issue of Anita Hill was the focus of everyone's attention. It is notable that Thomas got a much more supportive, or at least sympathetic, media coverage this time round. Two great articles analyze this: Maureen Dowd satirically, and Frank Rich more analytcally.

I enjoy Jonathan Chait's articles on New Republic. He has an op-ed in NYT today where he explains why the economic right has more of a sway over the Republican establishment than the social right.

Twenty20 World Cup.

2007-09-24T22:32:00.000-05:00

India did well enough to win the final. Sport can be so cruel sometimes, and one feels sad for the Pakistanis. Still it must be said that India deserved better to win. They kept taking wickets and controlled the middle part well and really had only two bad overs (17th and 18th by Harbhajan and Sreesanth). Anyway this is sport and in the end India will have the happier memories.

As I wrote in the last post, I am not a big fan of Twenty20 cricket. Even putting aside the personal taste, I find the reception in India way out of proportion. Granted this is a "world cup". Granted Twenty20 may be the thing for the future. Still, I find any comparison to 1983 world cup triumph quite silly, to be honest. The surrounding atmosphere, the level of intensity of the teams, the prestige attached to this world cup are all nothing compared to the "real" world cup of 50-overs. While this remains a creditable performance from a young and inexperienced team under a bold captain, there is no need to magnify the credit. Indeed, the current tendency of the TV channels to endlessly telecast images of ecstatic fans celebrating India's "great win" and screaming that "they are proud to be Indians" has the same roots as their tendency of six months ago to continuously telecast images of "irate fans" destroying Dhoni's house and burning Yuvraj's effigies. The space for balanced and sober journalism is fast shrinking in India.

This is a truly significant win for India for its showcasing of the future possibilities. For the most of the last decade and half it is fair to say that India was carried on the shoulders of Sachin Tendulkar, Sourav Ganguly, Rahul Dravid and Anil Kumble. They all served the team skillfully and it will be hard to produce more entertaining and dominating cricketers. Hoever, with the first three hovering around 35 and the last just shy of 37, time has certainly come to think ahead. Indeed, this was a major thing on any serious Indian fan's mind. It is in this context that this triumph is significant.

The oldest member of the 15 for this world cup is Agarkar at 29 and the average age is 23.86. Among the eleven players who played the final, the oldest is Harbhajan at 27 and the average age is 23.72. Clearly this is the team for the future. At 18, 21, 22 and 24, Piyush Chawla, RP Singh, Irfan Pathan and Sreesanth respectively are the bowlers for the future. At 20, 21, 22, 26, 26, and 26, Rohit Sharma, Robin Uthappa, Dinesh Karthik, Yuvraj Singh, MS Dhoni, Gautam Gambhir are the batsmen for the future. It is not an exaggeration to say that selectors have their hands full figuring out which three to drop to accommodate Sachin, Sourav and Rahul against Australia.

A final word about Dhoni, the captain. He was impressive. It is dangerous to pass judgements immediately after a close win. But I believe that close win owed as much to Dhoni's smart on-field captaincy as to happy jelling of every part. He did not shy away from running down to bowlers to have a word or two after they were hit for sixes and on the whole carried himself with a serene confidence.

A run of four victories in do-or-die matches, three of them against the very best, laced with spectacular batting, efficient bowling, and uncharacteristically tidy fielding, ends with India as champions. Their greatest triumph? No. But possibly a setting stage for one.

It's India v Pakistan!

2007-09-22T14:56:00.001-05:00

The two teams with a traumatic first round exit in the world cup of the 50-over game now meet in the final of the 20-20 world cup. The India-Pakistan must be a dream final for everyone involved, except the other 10 teams. After missing on their customary world cup showdown in the West Indies, we get two this time.

To be frank, I am not a big fan of 20-20. Not to say that I don't find it exciting. But cricket for me is special for its technique, tactics and the formal beauty of the game. In this format the technique and the formal beauty go for a six. Tactics is important, but it is not really the peculiarly appealing tactics of the 5-day version, or even the 50-over version.

Here's a prediction, which is not solely premised on what happened in South Africa. India, Pakistan, and Sri Lanka will dominate this format for at least the next couple of years. This version is rather well-suited for their game, and I don't mean it as a compliment.

From an Indian point of view, this tournament is hugely important. The big question facing everyone was how will India cope with the imminent departure of the legends. This should give a great deal of confidence, at the very least. More on this after the final.

Supreme Court's Nine.

2007-09-21T23:40:00.000-05:00

The US Supreme Court's decision in Bush v. Gore will forever remain in infamy. People respected for their erudition and detached passion for the word of the law let their political desires dictate their decision. The decision seems to have caused intense disillusionment in one justice. David Souter, a Republican who was in the minority in Bush v. Gore, was so aghast at the decision that he wept.

David Souter was shattered. He was, fundamentally, a very different person from his colleagues. It wasn’t just that they had immediate families; their lives off the bench were entirely unlike his. They went to parties and conferences; they gave speeches; they mingled in Washington, where cynicism about everything, including the work of the Supreme Court, was universal. Toughened or coarsened by their worldly lives, the other dissenters could move on, but Souter couldn’t. His whole life was being a judge. He came from a tradition where the independence of the judiciary was the foundation of the rule of law. And Souter believed that Bush v. Gore mocked that tradition. His colleagues’ actions were so transparently, so crudely partisan that Souter thought he might not be able to serve with them anymore.

Souter seriously considered resigning. For many months it was not at all clear whether he would remain a justice. That the Court met in a city he loathed made the decision even harder. At the urging of a handful of close friends, he decided to stay on, but his attitude towards the Court was never the same. There were times when Souter thought of Bush v. Gore and wept.

This comes from Jeffrey Toobin's latest book, The Nine, as quoted in this review on Harper's. The book promises to be a great read. I can't wait to get my hands on it. Here's the NYT review of the book.

Krugman is blogging.

2007-09-20T00:55:00.000-05:00

I enjoy Paul Krugman's bi-weekly columns (which are now free for all) on NYT a lot. So it is a great pleasure to note that he started blogging on NYT. His blog promises more frequent wisdom and it will surely be a regular for me. There are already two interesting posts.

The first one talks about a telling statistic about the share of the richest 10 percent in American total income. I have never been able to feel certain about what to make of the need for equality. Both extremes - equality is the primary goal or bigger cake ensures bigger slices for everyone - leave me unsatisfied. Be that as it may, the picture painted by the figure in Krugman's post is extremely important.

The second one deals with an issue which I am finding quite fascinating and which is very relevant now: the nature of political coverage, particularly during election campaigns. I am fairly convinced that the media's vision of politics is fundamentally out of tune with the character and requirements of the electorate. A wonderful book is Thomas Patterson's Out of Order. He asserts that the press employs a "game schema" or "strategic schema" when it deals with political candidates (politicians are involved in a horse race in which they are trying to outwit each other by careful strategies of message creation). On the other hand, as Patterson persuasively argues, while the game or strategy aspect is surely present, that is not fundamentally how candidates or public view politics. The book systematically analyzes media coverage during many modern presidential campaigns up to 1992, and every time I read an article on the current campaign I am struck by the relevance of his observations.

Krugman is making the same point in his post. The press is most of the time concerned with how the actions and words of the candidates are going to effect their campaign. So most news now is interpretive. Very rarely the emphasis is on what candidates actually said. Just to cite one example, recently there was a lot of coverage about whether Bill Clinton's appearances help Hillary's campaign. How Bill is trying to make sure he does not outshine his wife and so on.

Patterson is careful to stress however that, this state of affairs is not fundamentally an issue of media's ineptitude. It is in the very nature of news business. So it is also not exclusively an American issue. What is definitely exclusively an American problem is the structure of presidential elections in this country with its elaborate primaries. This system places an inordinately crucial burden on the press to inform the public about relatively unknown and fairly similar same party candidates. This is a burden which the press is not equipped to bear.

US Americans!!

2007-08-29T22:53:00.000-05:00

This is unreal!

Hat tip: Freakonomics blog.

India's one-day woes.

2007-08-27T21:51:00.000-05:00

For the second time in three one-days India looked completely out of place in this format of the game. Just as things seem rosy in test format, there is a great downturn in the shorter version. Why Dravid chose to bowl today will remain a mystery, but that is only a tactical blunder. The real cause for concern lies in the field.

Indian team for the last decade or so got its fair share of criticism, but one could not say that they were out of tune with the modern game, in the sense that England or the West Indies were. For the first time in many years I get the feeling that India just doesn't get the one-day game. The fielding has plummeted to unseen depths, running between wickets is awful, and the on-field planning non-existent. Of course, fielding was never our cup of tea, but things really seem unmanageable now. As pointed out on Cricinfo, fielding and running between wickets was the crucial difference between the two teams.

May be India will go on to win the series and make me look silly. In fact that is a fair possibility if the wickets remain batting friendly and Dravid has the luck and sense to bat first. However, I simply don't see this Indian team chasing any target of 250 plus. And that is a real worry if any serious achievement is contemplated.

Soldiers on Iraq war.

2007-08-19T18:57:00.000-05:00

The mood in America with regard to Iraq war is largely concerned with the best way to get out. There is still a respectable view point that the Americans should stay for some more time, but the only mainstream difference of opinion is how long more to stay.

There is also another emerging opinion, it seems to me, that the situation in Iraq is getting better. The "surge" is working. In an unusual step, a group of US soldiers fighting in Iraq wrote an op-ed piece in NYT saying that things are NOT improving in Iraq. They also explain why they will not improve unless the US makes substantial changes in its approach. The article shows a remarkable understanding of the Iraqi politics and historical awareness. It is a must read.

In the end, we need to recognize that our presence may have released Iraqis from the grip of a tyrant, but that it has also robbed them of their self-respect. They will soon realize that the best way to regain dignity is to call us what we are — an army of occupation — and force our withdrawal.

Until that happens, it would be prudent for us to increasingly let Iraqis take center stage in all matters, to come up with a nuanced policy in which we assist them from the margins but let them resolve their differences as they see fit. This suggestion is not meant to be defeatist, but rather to highlight our pursuit of incompatible policies to absurd ends without recognizing the incongruities.

We need not talk about our morale. As committed soldiers, we will see this mission through.

Comment on India's series win in England.

2007-08-17T18:45:00.000-05:00

Finally India have won a "meaningful" series abroad. Our win in Pakistan was in the subcontinent, and the victory in the West Indies was against a weak team. As far as away series go, nothing is more authentic than the English, even if against a comparatively weaker team. Satisfaction all round.

The fact is this win did not come out of the blue. All of this decade India have been much more than a rollover abroad. The highlights included the draws in Australia, England and the wins in Pakistan and West Indies. Another conspicuous change from the 90s was the invariable test victories in almost every series, though the series itself was lost. Series victory remained elusive till now. We came closest in Australia when we were 4 wickets away in Sydney. However, it was always just a matter of time. It is comforting that it came immediately after the world cup debacle.

Test cricket is real cricket. It is only in tests that a cricketer's skill is really put to test and consequently it is only tests that really provide true cricketing excitement. A closely fought test match offers a spectacle of complex patterns that is probably unmatched in all of sport. It is a pity that India seldom plays 5 match or (even 4) test series these days. Nevertheless it is a happy occasion to see India win and move to the third spot in test rankings.

Sterner tests (pun intended) await.

Cheney in 94 on Iraq war.

2007-08-16T12:40:00.000-05:00

At this point in Iraq war things are so bad that everywhere you turn you find something to embarrass the Bush administration. This is Cheney talking in 1994 defending Bush Sr's decision not to invade Iraq after liberating Kuwait. One must say that all the points he raised then held true also in 2003, though of course they would say that the risk was worth taking this time. Still, it is fun watching him say this stuff.

Math, Men, Women.

2007-08-15T17:29:00.000-05:00

It is widely held that men are more promiscuous than women and no doubt there is some truth to it. The problem comes when one tries to quantify it. Several studies claim to have concluded that, on average, men have more sexual partners than women. The thing is, assuming an almost equal number of males and females in a population, that conclusion is impossible. This amusing article in NYT provides a proof.

“By way of dramatization, we change the context slightly and will prove what will be called the High School Prom Theorem. We suppose that on the day after the prom, each girl is asked to give the number of boys she danced with. These numbers are then added up giving a number G. The same information is then obtained from the boys, giving a number B.

Theorem: G=B

Proof: Both G and B are equal to C, the number of couples who danced together at the prom. Q.E.D.”

Now assume that number of men is equal to the number of women. It follows that the average number of partners for men and women is also the same. Even if we take into account the slightly smaller number of men, the averages should not be as different as some studies suggest (4 for women and 7 for men).

The article provides some possible explanations for the conclusions of these studies. But the fact remains that one can't trust any study which claims the unprovable.

Freakonomics blog.

2007-08-14T23:32:00.000-05:00

I quite enjoyed reading Freakonomics by Steven Levitt and Stephen Dubner. Though I had mixed feelings about it as a book by itself, I think it raises several clever points. That tradition is continued by the two authors on their blog. I frequent it often and most of the time it is worth my while. After more than two years of independent existence, that blog now lives in the exalted locales of the New York Times. I suppose they will attract more audience now and pocket a bigger sum.

Hendrik Hertzberg...

2007-08-03T18:28:00.000-05:00

...is blogging. He chose the yearly convention of liberal bloggers to jump on the bandwagon.

I like his writing. His columns on New Yorker seldom fail to please. 40 years worth of these illuminating articles, The Politics, is a gripping read. Anyone who can write like this must be something.

If it is American to believe that God ordered Tribe X to abjure pork, or that he caused Leader Y to be born to a virgin, why is it suddenly un-American to doubt that the prime mover of this unimaginably vast universe of quintillions of solar systems would be likely to be obsessed with questions involving the dietary and biosexual behavior of a few thousand bipeds inhabiting a small part of a speck of dust orbiting a third-rate star in an obscure spiral arm of one of millions of more or less identical galaxies?

Fred Thompson?

2007-08-03T14:47:00.000-05:00

It does seem, at least to the untrained, that the Democrats should win the White House in 2008. Things appear to be working against all the Republican candidates and they are well behind the leading Democrats in fundraising. Probably as a result, people are talking a lot about Fred Thompson as a potential candidate. Eric Alterman thinks that he is the only one in the current contenders likely to win a general election.

On the Republican side the news this week was all about Fred Thompson. He's the black box of the Republican side, and perhaps the entire election. As the only candidate who is acceptable to conservatives, acceptable to moderates, admired by the media and potentially saleable to independents - he knows how to act - he is also the only candidate on the Republican side who can win.

Think about it. Those of us who knew Rudy Giuliani as our mayor feel pretty strongly that he's just too nutty to be president. On the one hand we welcome the idea of a race, given how much fun it'll be when the rest of the country focuses on say, the six combined marriages, the terrible dad syndrome, the small but unmistakable tendency toward fascism; on the other hand, we're a superpower and it's kind of scary.

The West Indies aren't much good at cricket.

2007-07-24T17:50:00.000-05:00

Talking of English cricket, this is hilarious. Stephen Fry and Hugh Laurie at their best.

More on the first test.

2007-07-24T17:46:00.000-05:00

S Rajesh at Cricinfo, as always, comes up with pertinent stats. One thing stands out. India played 96 overs in the fourth innings and only four times in their entire test history they managed to last for more overs. That is a pretty remarkable stat. Still, the middle order is a cause for concern, as Sambit Bal points out.

The crucial thing to remember now is that India managed to avoid defeat in the first test only twice (1971 and 1986) in all their tours to England. And on both occasions they went on to win the series.

Finally rain works for India.

2007-07-23T12:56:00.000-05:00

Frankly, it's about time weather went India's way. After many painful experiences of being denied victory because of rain, India have the relief of avoiding defeat because of rain at Lord's in the first test. As always, it is not just entirely luck. Dhoni played an exceptional innings and most others stuck around for enough time. The partnership with Laxman was crucial and so was the extremely tense 30 ball partnership with Sreesanth.

But on the whole India was way below the mark. The batting has much to improve. Bowlers did much better than expected. But the key really is the middle-order. Both openers got 50s and that is a welcome sign. India will feel a lot better to enter the second test on par with England. If they bat as well as they can, things will become lot more interesting.

Conflicts between modernity and orthodoxy.

2007-07-22T19:40:00.000-05:00

The world has come a long way from inquisitions. Such methods of dealing with religious heresy are no longer in vogue. It is also fair to say that to a large extent the religious fanaticism has become both less extensive and less violent. That is not to say however that all the issues of conflict between moronic religious dogma and irresistible modern truths have been resolved. This is especially true in the three great monotheistic religions. It is probably true that many people no longer believe that god created the earth in six days, but several other religious strictures continue to cause much confusion and agony among well-meaning people.

This is a very good article by Noah Feldman in NYT on his own struggles arising out of a modern Orthodox Jewish background and a liberal universal humanism. He is mostly honest in depicting the irreconcilable conflicts, though he doesn't go all the way, and takes the easy way out by suggesting that his orthodox schooling gave him something undoubtedly invaluable.

In one particularly illustrative incident, a doctor speaking at his school suggests that it is OK to treat a non-Jew to save his life on the Sabbath day. Talmud prohibits working on the Sabbath, but an exception is granted to save the lives of Jews. It is apparently pretty clear that this exception does not extend to save the lives of non-Jews. But this doctor, in consultation with his rabbi, has come to the conclusion that it is fine to save a non-Jew's life on the Sabbath only if your intention is to preserve good relations between Jews and non-Jews. It is against Talmudic principles to save his life out of universal morality. Much as I admire the formal and closed beauty of this principle, I see no way of reconciling this with a humanistic outlook.

Language Sensibility.

2007-07-08T13:43:00.000-05:00

I am "language-sensitive". Few things make me stand up at attention as a sloppily constructed or badly punctuated sentence. That is why I enjoyed this.

Where is the coach?

2007-07-02T18:05:00.000-05:00

To be sure, there's nothing mind-blowing about winning a 3-match series. Still...it is against the no.2 ranked team in one-day cricket; it is a first against SA outside India; it is the first series/tournament win away from home since 2002.

This gives some food for thought. There's been much hue and cry about picking a coach for India recently. Before that it was Greg Chappell and his machinations. It seemed as if everyone believed coaches win matches. Indeed, in the last few years, coaching has become a very high profile job.

The interesting things is: this first away one-day series win for India in 5 years has come when there is no full-time coach (Venkatesh Prasad and Robin Singh are there, but they are only specialized bowling and fielding coaches). Isn't that funny!

What happens to bodies of suicide bombers?

2007-06-30T20:26:00.000-05:00

This article in NYT sheds light.

Judicial independence?

2007-06-29T19:20:00.000-05:00

US Supreme Court yesterday delivered a judgement which is being seen as a form of resegregation. The case at hand was two programs in the cities of Louisville and Seattle that were designed to maintain racial diversity in their public schools. The program in Louisville worked by ensuring a certain ratio of black/white students, where as, in Seattle, it was only used as a "tie breaker". Basically, if you were a parent, you did not have complete choice as to which school your child can attend. All over the country such programs are in place in several school districts, and these particular programs are in news only because they happened to reach the Supreme Court.

US, of course, had a long and violent history with segregation, and things began to change for the better only in the last few decades. There is reason to believe that at least part of this change is directed by the judiciary. This was especially true when it came to school segregation. The landmark decision in Brown v. Board of Education in 1954 set the tone for more reform in later years.

This is a thorny issue. Sooner or later everything boils down to one's value judgements. Should parents have complete freedom to choose schools for their children? Does government have the mandate to interfere to ensure a racially integrated class room? If governments think they have that mandate, should the courts rule against them? Should courts themselves interfere to ensure racial diversity? These are all difficult questions. They are sure to elicit diagonally opposite, yet passionate, answers.

Needless to say, I too have opinions on these matters. What fascinates me more, however, is the role of electoral politics in all this. Constitution is just a collection of paper with splashes of ink on it. It has no meaning whatsoever until someone comes along and interprets it. In any form of governance, but particularly in a democracy, its official interpretation is bound to change in time.

There is an episode of Seinfeld (The Couch) in which Elaine says that the Supreme Court gave her the right to abortion. She doesn't say that the constitution gave her the right, though that is obviously implied. And she is right, because really Supreme Court alone gave her the right and it can take it away. Indeed, later in the episode, Elaine's date, much to her dismay, expresses the hope that one day he would have enough judges on the Supreme Court to do precisely that. May be, his time has come!

So the ordinary citizen's recourse to the constitution is through the courts (primarily, the Supreme Court). And this is where the interesting stuff happens. How Supreme Court views the constitution is largely a matter of who is on it. And that is decided by the president and ratified by the Congress, both being elected by people.

I know that anyone who ends up on the Supreme Court is incredibly erudite and sophisticated. They are bound to have well considered, rational opinions on all matters. But here's the nub. Oftentimes, when it comes to a judgment, it is a simple black and white thing. And all the nuanced scholarship in the world must lead finally to a Yes or No. And this final answer is very often predictable. Once Bush was able to get confirmations for his two nominees, Roberts and Alito, from a friendly Congress these decisions were on the card. On the other hand, if Kerry had won in 2004, most definitely these two would not now be sitting on the court, and it is fair to say that the decision yesterday would have been different.

So it all boils down to this: if more Americans wanted Kerry to be the president in 2004, the programs in Louisville and Seattle would have been constitutional. Now they are not. This is either charmingly refreshing or gloomily depressing, depending on what kind of person you are.

Stupidity versus anti-Semitism.

2007-06-19T17:40:00.000-05:00

In May this year a union of British college teachers voted to boycott Israeli academic institutions, in protest against their support of occupation. To be precise, this was only an initial vote that paved way for further debate on the subject in the union. It is not clear to me what form this potential boycott will take. On the one hand, they call for a halt to European collaboration with Israel. But then I can also call on India to stop playing cricket. These calls do not amount to anything. On the other hand, presumably this boycott will put a stop to all interactions between British colleges and Israeli academic institutions. Big deal.

This is funny. I agree that human beings (or institutions) are whole units, and that any assessment ought to consider them as such. When a brilliant scientist speaks nonsense on a general subject, my view of him is lowered just a bit, though my respect for his scientific skills is the same. However, it is quite foolish of me to insist that I will not work with another mathematician just because his views on world affairs differ from mine.

There is one subtle point here though. There do exist legitimate nonacademic reasons for refusing to work with someone. For instance, if a physicist (during the second world war) refused to work with another physicist working for Hitler, that would have been fine. Clearly the present situation with Israeli occupation is wholly different. It is surely stupid to suppose to that there is a systematic cooperation with Israeli government on the part of the universities. If anything, as far as I know, universities in Israel are the centers for vigorous anti-occupation debates.

Thus this whole episode caused some wholesome entertainment, and I naively suspected there was nothing else to be gained from it. But I was wrong! NYT's resident joker Tom Friedman chose his recent op-ed to accuse British college teachers of, you guessed it right, anti-Semitism. He comes up with watertight logic too. Here is a link to the article.

First, there are two Israeli Arabs who received Ph.D at Israel's premier university. So everything must be fine there. At the very least, situation is "so much more morally complex than the outside meddlers present it". Then there is the classic query: if you really want to help the Palestinians, why don't you do one of a number of useful things? If you are really worried about this kind of thing, why don't you also boycott Sudan? Syria? Don't tell me that there is nothing to boycott in Sudan or Syria. Finally, the clincher: don't you see that Israelis overwhelmingly want to end occupation because they elected Ehud Olmert, who will uproot settlers from the West Bank, just as his mentor Ariel Sharon did in Gaza? You tell me that he had two years and nothing happened. Ah, but that is not Israel's fault. It's only because "the Palestinians are in turmoil". Let them calm down and Israel will do the right thing.

It's all pretty obvious, isn't it? What part of this convincing argument do British college teachers not get? Having exhausted all other possibilities, we have no option but to conclude: they must be anti-Semitic. There isn't really any other explanantion. Well done, Mr Friedman!

Problems with neo-atheism.

2007-05-14T05:10:00.000-05:00

I am an atheist. I believe that the universe and life on earth were formed by natural physical, chemical and biological actions, that man evolved by natural selection over billions of years, that there is no intelligent being who created the universe and possibly is monitoring the events in it.

This much is clear. Where the indecision arises is when I try to analyze religion and its ill effects.

There is a renewed attack on religion afoot. Sam Harris, Daniel Dennett, Richard Dawkins, and now Christopher Hitchens are the star performers. Among these I have read only Dawkins. His book was exhilarating. It taught me a lot, and it fed into my hostility to religion. But after a while I started becoming uncomfortable with Dawkins, the neo-atheist.

God Delusion mounted a comprehensive attack on religion. It titillated me. Its vitriol paradoxically sweetened my world. It momentarily dulled my suspicion of his extensive charges. This was its problem. In his attempt to surround the enemy from all sides, Dawkins spread his army too thin and left room for a counter attack.

In passionate discussions with friends I tried valiantly to back Dawkins; I recounted his and Harris's list of religion's crimes; I tried to paint a picture of a peaceful world without religion. But I wasn't convinced by my own arguments. I was simply carried away by the eloquence of Dawkins.

Many of these thoughts of mine are articulated in this review of Hitchens's book by Anthony Gottlieb in New Yorker. Apart from recounting the obvious problems with neo-atheism, Gottlieb rises two key points.

First, there is a more considered and nuanced way to attack religion. One of the famous examples of this David Hume who, more than 200 years before Dawkins, brings up many of his ideas.

In his “Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion,” which was published posthumously, and reports imaginary discussions among three men, Hume prized apart the supposed analogy between the natural world and a designed artifact. Even if the analogy were apt, he pointed out, the most one could infer from it would be a superior craftsman, not an omnipotent and perfect deity. And, he argued, if it is necessary to ask who made the world it must also be necessary to ask who, or what, made that maker. In other words, God is merely the answer that you get if you do not ask enough questions. From the accounts of his friends, his letters, and some posthumous essays, it is clear that Hume had no trace of religion, did not believe in an afterlife, and was particularly disdainful of Christianity. He had a horror of zealotry. Yet his many writings on religion have a genial and even superficially pious tone. He wanted to convince his religious readers, and recognized that only gentle and reassuring persuasion would work. In a telling passage in the “Dialogues,” Hume has one of his characters remark that a person who openly proclaimed atheism, being guilty of “indiscretion and imprudence,” would not be very formidable.

Hume sprinkled his gunpowder through the pages of the “Dialogues” and left the book primed so that its arguments would, with luck, ignite in his readers’ own minds. And he always offered a way out. In “The Natural History of Religion,” he undermined the idea that there are moral reasons to be religious, but made it sound as if it were still all right to believe in proofs of God’s existence. In an essay about miracles, he undermined the idea that it is ever rational to accept an apparent revelation from God, but made it sound as if it were still all right to have faith. And in the “Dialogues” he undermined proofs of God’s existence, but made it sound as if it were all right to believe on the basis of revelation. As the Cambridge philosopher Edward Craig has put it, Hume never tried to topple all the supporting pillars of religion at once.

Second, perhaps too much is made of religion's dominance in today's world.

After making allowances for countries that have, or recently have had, an officially imposed atheist ideology, in which there might be some social pressure to deny belief in God, one can venture conservative estimates of the number of unbelievers in the world today. Reviewing a large number of studies among some fifty countries, Phil Zuckerman, a sociologist at Pitzer College, in Claremont, California, puts the figure at between five hundred million and seven hundred and fifty million. This excludes such highly populated places as Brazil, Iran, Indonesia, and Nigeria, for which information is lacking or patchy. Even the low estimate of five hundred million would make unbelief the fourth-largest persuasion in the world, after Christianity, Islam, and Hinduism. It is also by far the youngest, with no significant presence in the West before the eighteenth century. Who can say what the landscape will look like once unbelief has enjoyed a past as long as Islam’s—let alone as long as Christianity’s? God is assuredly not on the side of the unbelievers, but history may yet be.

Virginia shootings.

2007-05-05T23:50:00.000-05:00

Lot has been said and written about the Virginia shootings. This article by Adam Gopnik is one of the most sensible and to-the-point. Forget about another proof of the folly of America's gun policies, there are even arguments for more relaxed gun laws on basis of this tragedy. It's amazing! According to Gopnik, of the 14 worst mass shootings in the last half-decade, US saw seven. Still the trend in the country seems to be toward more relaxed gun control. A recent decision by federal appeals court in Washington D.C. struck down a law which prohibited residents to keep a handgun at home.

Gopnik is optimistic things will change at some future point.

There is no reason that any private citizen in a democracy should own a handgun. At some point, that simple truth will register.

Bill Maher on French phobia.

2007-05-04T18:45:00.001-05:00

This is a brilliant article by Bill Maher, ridiculing the conservative penchant for hating all things French. First of all, many of the founding fathers were inspired by the ideas of French intellectuals. So if you say America is the greatest country in the world, you must admit that the intellectual foundation for that greatness is partly due to French influence. It is absolutely hilarious to see nutjobs like O'Reilly fuming at France because they didn't support America in Iraq war. May be that, and French suspicion of Bush's foreign policy shows a more mature understanding of international affairs.

Apart from all this, Maher highlights a more important point. The completely different, and infinitely more mature, way in which politics is conducted there.

...French candidates are never asked where they stand on evolution, prayer in school, abortion, stem cell research or gay marriage. And if the candidate knows about a character in a book other than Jesus, it's not a drawback. There is no Pierre Six-pack who can be fooled by childish wedge issues. And the electorate doesn't vote for the guy they want to have a croissant with. Nor do they care about the candidate's private lives: In the current race, Ségolène Royal has four kids but never bothered to get married. And she's a socialist. In America, if a Democrat even thinks you're calling him a liberal he immediately grabs an orange vest and a rifle and heads into the woods to kill something.

And as always with Maher, the article is very funny.

Is legalizing prostitution a good idea?

2007-05-02T20:45:00.000-05:00

One approach to this question is rejecting its premise: banning prostitution is an infringement on individual rights in the first place. So while the answer to the question is "Yes", it sidetracks the real issue.

As is often the case, this kind of approach is too simplistic. It confines the issue to the intellectual plane and refuses to deal with its political aspects. (As Bismarck said "politics is the art of the possible".)

A more nuanced approach to the question, which arrives at the same answer, is to argue that legalizing prostitution is a "good" thing. This is the approach I tend to take. Clearly everything rests on proving the case.

The basic logic is: first, there are no victims involved; second, by criminalizing the act,the prostitutes are confined to the dark and are therefore more susceptible to ill treatment. So legalizing will enable prostitutes to form unions and fight for their issues. Probably the biggest concern with prostitution now is the role it plays in spreading AIDS. Legalizing prostitution helps here because it will be easier to access people and educate them.

The biggest counterargument I face is that in most poor countries (like India) prostitution is forced on young girls and legalizing prostitution will make the situation lot more dire. This is a tricky matter and it turns largely on empirical data.

This article by Nicholas Kristof cites some to conclude that it's not a good idea in India. He argues persuasively and provides lot of relevant data.

It is a must read for anyone interested in the topic.

A word on World Cup.

2007-04-30T20:38:00.000-05:00

It is tempting to fatuously ask: Why bother to have it at all? It saves a lot of trouble if we just hand the cup to Australia every four years.

Seriously, Australia prove their allround skills again, and we get to see how far ahead they are of every other team. They are taking the game to new heights. We talk a lot in India about how things can improve, what steps need to be taken etc etc. We usually have a vague vision of where we want to go. The thing is that Australia exhibit all those qualities right now. I don't know if we will ever see India play "outstanding" cricket, but we are fortunate we can watch Australia do so. It doesn't matter if there are no close matches, it is a joy to watch them anyway. As Amit writes, it is better than watching two mediocre teams in a close game.

I have a particular fondness for Adam Gilchrist, and his innings was highly enjoyable. Surely one of the best one-day innings I have seen.

Sri Lanka joined their subcontinental neighbors by losing to Australia in a WC final. But they gave a better fight than Pakistan in 99 or India in 03.

New insight into public spending (or lack of it).

2007-04-30T16:43:00.000-05:00

It is common knowledge that the US spends less on public welfare programs than many of the advanced countries in Europe. As a fraction of national income, US spends a third less than Italy, France or Belgium, and half as much as Sweden. Public welfare programs include health, unemployment benefits, social security etc. It is widely assumed that the reason is a stronger libertarian current in American way of thinking and the consequent suspicion of government's ability to do things.

It is impossible to deny this, but there appears to be another reason which is quite interesting. As this article in NYT details, there is a growing body of research suggesting that a major reason for American skepticism of welfare is its rich diversity.

The basic idea is simple enough: one is less likely to be willing to give money for the benefit of "others". This is further supported by the fact that Americans contribute much more than other countries for private charity. That is, Americans are more willing to give money away to specific beneficiaries. One example cited in the article is the following.

In a 1997 study, [the authors] looked at the relationship between social spending and ethnic diversity in 2,700 cities, counties and metropolitan areas across the United States.

They found that in more diverse cities and counties, the share of local government spending on public goods — in this case, roads, sewage treatment, trash clearance and education — was generally lower than it was in more homogeneous localities. “Our results are consistent with the idea that white majorities vote to reduce the supply of productive public goods as the share of blacks and other minorities increases,” they wrote.

Another study calculates that about half the discrepancy between American and European public spending can be attributed to "America’s more varied racial and ethnic mix".

This is a really interesting idea. At one level, this reveals the efficacy of democratic politics in these advanced countries. A majority of the citizens can, it seems, influence these decisions, which is what a democracy strives to do.

Comparison with India is irresistible. Surely India is diverse in more significant ways. But we were never half-hearted when it came to public spending. The interventionist impulse of Indian politics was way too strong, I suppose, for this factor to have any influence.

Good writers and English departments.

2007-04-26T19:50:00.000-05:00

Kurt Vonnegut once said:

Good writers don't come from English departments because they teach you great taste very early there.

That is a brilliant observation, particularly if it is true.

Finally, the Final!

2007-04-25T16:53:00.000-05:00

For the fifth consecutive time there is a team from the subcontinent in the World Cup final. For the fourth consecutive time their opponent is Australia.

Fittingly enough, Australia's opponents now are the only team to have beaten them in a WC final, other than the West Indies in 1975, and the only team, moreover, who appear even remotely likely at this stage to be capable of doing so.

Predictions are not easy (as I should know) and more so with a final. This time I am not going to make them. All I ask for is a better match than either semi final.

Far from the madding crowd.

2007-04-24T23:15:00.000-05:00

This article in Guardian talks about the emerging "social crisis" in Buenos Aires where newly successful middle class increasingly live in idyllic, affluent neighborhoods far removed from the squalor of the city itself. Evidently this is a cause for concern: it promotes the chasm between classes and prepares the ground for potentially dangerous social unrest. That is not my point however. It just prompts me to comment a bit on a more general topic, which has only a passing relevance to the above.

Discussion on issues like the above tends to be maddeningly narrow. Criticism alone goes only so far. Incisive criticism is analytical criticism. In other words, it must include an analysis of the choices involved and their differing potential outcomes, and crucially, a prescription of a different choice from the one being criticized, together with a demonstration that the alternate choice would lead to a "better" outcome.

Society is a complex thing, with a variety of forces acting in a variety of ways to produce a variety of phenomena. On the face of it, analyzing any particular phenomenon is very challenging. Some simplifying assumptions will naturally be made, but the digging has to be deep enough to uncover the treasure of truth. Am I wrong if I observe that there are too-many false treasures uncovered after digging too close to the surface?

Welcome Develpoments.

2007-04-09T17:45:00.000-05:00

The recent decisions by BCCI in wake of the world cup disaster are commendable. If carried out completely they will have very positive consequences for Indian cricket.

Greg Chappell's continuation was made impossible given the existing conditions. The powers that be were clearly favorable to him, but the situation deteriorated so much that it was not possible for him to continue as a coach. Chappell was hired specifically so that he could bring in his Australian methods to the team. To criticize him for not being sympathetic to Indian ways is unfair. It is another matter that the team was not able to adjust to him. We will never know what went on behind the doors but it seems clear to me that the seniors in the team were more interested in continuing their ways even at the cost of team's success. Chappell's failure is Indian cricket's failure. Another matter that is easily forgotten in all this is: coach's role is secondary to the role of players. As S Rajesh correctly pointed out Indian batsmen failed when it mattered in the last 12 months or so, and this was the single most important reason for the team's failures.

Continuation of Dravid's captaincy is a also good move. There was a sense before the meeting that Sachin Tendulkar could be made the captain. Given his stature and unprofessionalism of the board it was surely possible. But the fact that he was not and the surprise decision to issue him a notice, suggest there is a fresh air of fairness. All too often cricket in India is managed by underhand deals and cronyism. It's good to see that things might be changing.

Another important decision is to scrap the regional structure of the selection committee and constitute a paid body of responsible selectors. If carried out, this will be a remarkable change. Presently the selectors, being sent by their respective zones, have dual loyalty, and often this leads to conflict of regional and national interests. A capable body of individual men acting without the pressures of zonal politics will surely be more likely to unearth new talent, as well as pick the best team out of available talent. It remains to be seen however when this will actually happen.

The decision to require international players to play some domestic matches will work only if there is some relief from the hectic schedule. It's not clear BCCI would want this. Commitment to make sporting pitches sounds stale now.

Ravi Shastri's appointment as manager, Venkatesh Prasad as bowling coach and Robin Singh as fielding coach will make some difference, but they will not lead to any lasting qualitative improvements. Indian cricket (at least in ODIs) has missed the trick in the last couple of years. Batting and bowling are no longer the overwhelming factors. Agile, fit teams which are capable of saving lots of runs on the field, run smartly between wickets are going to dominate one-days. Of course batting and bowling are very important, but not nearly like they were 10 or 15 years ago.

Chappell is dead right when he says India needs a new crop of fit talented young players. When Vengsarkar says that India has no outstanding talent outside of the visible faces, it sounds scary. But it also can't be true. The talent is simply not appearing at the level the board/selectors are looking at now. They need to look deeper, and simultaneously the system which brings the talent to the top has to be made more efficient.

Commode-based wireless and Google Paper.

2007-04-01T11:33:00.000-05:00

Google usually comes up with ingenious ideas for the April Fool's Day. In the past they promised to improve our love life, came up with a drink to maximize our surfing ability, revealed that the secret behind Google's success is pigeons.

This year there are announcements for two new Google products.

First, they figured out how to provide wireless internet to anyone with a toilet connected to municipal sewage system. TiSP is a wireless service introduced by Google which works through your plumbing system. There are detailed instructions on how to install. Second, Google introduces a service called Google Paper, through which you can request paper copies of any email you get in Gmail. There is no limit on how many mails you can request. Of course, as always with Google, both the above services are free.

Incidentally here are ten of the best April Fool's Day hoaxes.

Super 8 - Some analysis and a few predictions.

2007-03-26T21:22:00.000-05:00

Though my interest was momentarily dulled by India's defeat, I am very excited now about the Super 8. It will begin tomorrow with the very interesting Aus-WI game.

When the tournament began, I predicted the four semi-finalists to be India, Australia, SA, WI. I am horribly off the mark about India. Not many will doubt that Aus and SA will be there. So there are two more spots, for which the serious contenders will be Sri Lanka, WI, England and New Zealand. Ireland and Bangladesh will struggle to win even one match, and are very unlikely to be in the semis.

If we make the safe assumption that all the above six teams are going to win if they play with either Bangladesh or Ireland (I say "if" because SL and WI will not play against BD and Ire), then the points distribution will look something like this, before we count the important matches:

Aus 6
NZ 6
SA 4
WI 4
SL 4
Eng 4

Apart from this, Aus, SA, NZ and Eng will play four matches each while WI and SL will play five matches each. There will be 13 matches in all. So 26 points are at stake. Together with the 28 points above, there will be a total of 54 points divided among 6 teams. 12 points will mean a certain spot in the semis. Anyone with 10 points will almost certainly be in the top four. 8 points should give a pretty good chance of making it to the top four.

Aus and NZ have the advantage of six points, and SL and WI have the advantage of playing 5 matches. Eng and SA have only four points and play only four matches.

I think that England are the weakest team and will not make it to semi final. Of their four matches I expect them to win at most one. I also think Australia and SA will either win all their matches or at least three. I do not see them both losing many matches. Their match on 24th March tells me that they are way ahead of others.
So if I am correct, then the contest for the remaining two spots will be between SL, WI and NZ.

NZ will have six points, so they have a definite advantage. But SL and WI will play against Eng and if they win they will be on par with NZ. So it might all come down to what happens in the three matches between these three teams. Of course any victory against Aus or SA will be huge.

Predictions are always tricky. However, I am going to make them. Aus and SA will surely be in the semi finals, and most likely in the top two slots. I have a feeling that WI is going to be also there. I think that home advantage will be important and in close matches I think WI will be better. Between SL and NZ, I will say NZ. I know SL are favorites now for many people, but I just feel that they have not been tested really. Their batting looks susceptible against quality bowling. Also Muralitharan is their only bowling threat against better batting. NZ look good now, though they have some injury worries. Their general efficiency coupled with very good bowling should see them through.

In any case, all set for an exciting Super 8 stage, with at least 13 great matches to look forward to.

World Cup debacle - Will it make this better?

2007-03-26T18:31:00.000-05:00

Just as with any debacle, India's ouster from the world cup in the first round has caused a great deal of analysis, debate etc. There were numerous articles which I enjoyed reading and mostly agreed with. Just to cite a few, this, or this, or this, or this. Attention is rightly drawn to the ineptitude of BCCI, lack of a healthy domestic league, concentration on individual glory, absence of good back-up players, poor condition of grounds, raw deal meted out to the paying spectators etc etc.

But then I can't escape a feeling that no fundamental change will take place. For one thing most of the analysis is being carried out by people who are not in charge. One of the ills bemoaned by everybody is the unaccountability of BCCI. So none of this outcry will directly impact them. What will is a real threat of people turning away from cricket. This is quite unlikely to happen.

The disaster in the WC is not typical. This outcry would not have been so intense if India made it to Super 8, but not to semi finals. All this will be forgotten the moment Indian team wins the next series. And they will soon, given the amount of cricket we play. For fans to turn away from cricket requires a string of seriously bad performances, like the one in this WC. Indian team is not so bad for that to happen.

Of course, some changes will take place. BCCI will need to appear as if they are acting. Some of the changes may even be drastic, like dropping of some senior players. But I think it's pretty unlikely that BCCI will initiate the systemic changes that will improve things in the long term. There is simply no incentive for that kind of action. What powers that be are interested in is how to reap the maximum benefits at present out of the golden duck that is Indian cricket. They are only wise enough to keep it alive.

"Nobody realizes the enormity of the defeat than the players"

2007-03-24T01:37:00.000-05:00

Dravid was professional and straightforward in the press meet. He admitted frankly that India did not deserve to proceed to the Super 8. He raised many important points, one of which is: players are having the worst time right now.

Nobody realizes the enormity of the defeat than the players. The players are the one who put in a lot of time. They worked really hard for this. It is an opportunity they get once in four years. It is something that you really look forward to in your career. So no-one understands the enormity of this more than the players. Definitely there is a lot of introspection and disappointment in the dressing room.

Players will be subjected to much nonsense in the next few days. Most of it will come from misplaced notions of entitlement and honor. We need to realize that players went out there and did what they could. While reasoned criticism is surely par for the course, there is time for that and certainly a limit. Indian players play under unreal pressures and frankly, more is demanded of them than they are capable of delivering. Burden of these unreasonable expectations was certainly one factor in this miserable world cup for India.

Many people denounce Indian cricketers by saying that they make lots of money. But this is really a stupid argument. We only see them making money now. What is not seen is how many risks they take to get there. A reader has put it best on India Uncut:

i find it insane that people should grudge cricketers their money. those guys worked hard to get where they are. they put aside their education and a ‘secure future’ for a 11 in a billion chance to make the india team. would YOU have made that choice?

Picture says it all.

2007-03-23T17:40:00.000-05:00

Sorry end to India's World Cup.

2007-03-23T17:27:00.000-05:00

India's world cup run all but ended today after the convincing victory by Sri Lanka. Barring a highly unlikely victory of Bermuda over Bangladesh two days from now, India are out.

Before the match Rahul Dravid was asked what would happen to India if they lost. He answered that they were not even thinking of the possibility. Now he needs to think about it. Many others will also need to look for some answers.

From the time colored clothes made their debut in world cup in 1992, this is probably India's worst world cup, though the seventh place finish in 1992 would be a close contender. I say this is the worst considering the expectations and the supposed caliber of this team. A look at India's performances in last the four world cups reveals a very interesting picture.

In many ways, 1992 world cup was transformational. Soon after 1992 many long and successful careers ended and a significant regrouping took place within the Indian team with Sachin Tendulkar becoming the batting backbone and Azharuddin consolidating his captaincy. In 1996 though we reached Semi-Final, it was considered a disappointment given that India was a big favorite playing at home. This also resulted in some changes, most significant being the emergence of Rahul Dravid and Sourav Ganguly, and Tendulkar's captaincy. 1999 world cup was largely dull though we managed to reach the Super 6 phase. Major changes resulted after that with a foreign coach (John Wright) taking charge for the first time and Sourav Ganguly becoming the captain. This brought about a fresh dynamism in the Indian team and one-day team with Rahul Dravid as the wicket keeper looked solid. As a consequence, 2003 was clearly the best world cup we had after 1983 and India was only second to a flawless Australia.

Now this!

What now for the Indian players? I suspect this debacle will usher in some important changes. Senior players will need to introspect. This is especially true for Sachin Tendulkar. It pains me to write this, but he is fast becoming a liability to the team. May be there is still time for a graceful exit. Dravid and Ganguly have surely some cricket left in them, though I doubt Dravid will continue as captain. May be it's a good time for Yuvraj. I surely think that a change of guard has to take place with management and administration handed to the next generation. Greg Chappell will almost certainly go. It's probably time for an Indian coach.

Painful as this early exit is, there is a part of me which senses some good coming out of it. In the last two or three years Indian cricket is being successfully and rapidly morphed by various vested interests into a sort of sensational marketing machine. BCCI has become a lucrative body with high profile politicians throwing in all their might to control it. Media, with its constant look out for sensationalist talking points, also played a big role by coining terms like "Team India" and "Men in Blue". As a result a realistic connection between team's performances and fans' expectations was destroyed.

Ground realities being disregarded, desires, passions, and emotions were exploited. It looked as if people were cashing in while the going was still good. Widely covered stories in the media of people shaving their heads, offering prayers for the team, naturally led to the ridiculous reactions to the loss. Now a national calamity will be declared and a multitude of theories will be offered as explanations. Much has been written about the financial disaster that will befall if India fails to reach Super 8. I see that as one bright spot in this gloom. It might bring in some much needed balance to cricket following in India.

The fact of course is it's not a calamity. Indian cricket team just failed to do well in a world cup. Surely a very disappointing experience, but by no stretch of imagination a calamity. Obsession with cricket team's fortunes to the exclusion of all sensible thought is a dangerous national malaise. May be this disaster will remedy it.

Some thoughts on Friday's crucial Ind - SL match.

2007-03-21T16:44:00.000-05:00

After Sri Lanka's big win over Bangladesh today, equation is pretty straightforward for India on Friday: win and qualify and carry two points to the Super 8. It is all but impossible for Bangladesh to qualify if India wins on Friday.

A quick calculation: India scored 191 + 413 = 604 runs in 100 overs and gave away 192 + 156 = 348 runs in 98.3 overs. So they are +256 in terms of runs. If they beat Sri Lanka, their net will be at least +257.

Bangladesh scored 192 + 112 = 304 in 94.3 overs and gave away 191 + 312 = 503 in 96 overs (today's match came to DL, with Bangladesh's target revised to 311 in 46 overs). This gives Bangladesh a net score of -199. This means Bangladesh will need to win the Bermuda game by just below 199 + 250 = 449. We can safely assume it's not going to happen.

So India just needs to win against Sri Lanka. In the recent past we had a good record over SL, with a 6-1 win in 2005 and a 2-1 win just before the World Cup. But things are different now. India will be under immense pressure. SL are on a high.

Common perception is that SL prefer to have BD in Super 8, as in that case they would carry 2 points. But the problem then is: it will mean all the other teams in Super 8 (other than Ireland) are virtually guaranteed 2 points. Of course, SL also have those two points. But teams carrying two points from other groups will have an advantage. These will be New Zealand, AUS/SA, WI/Ire. Frankly, NZ and AUS/SA are virtually guaranteed Semi-Final spots with two matches against Bangladesh and Ireland. So SL will end up fighting for one of the remaining two spots with WI and AUS/SA. It might be better for them to have India in Super 8, so that no spot in SF is certain, even at the cost of two points. This is not to suggest that SL will do anything less than 100% on Friday. But they might just be tempted to try out some reserve players.

Anyway for India, it's the proverbial do or die. On March 23 four years ago they had a bad day. But that was the final. Now they are in danger of a knock out in the group stage.

As for us fans, let's hope that we will have a good match while praying that India will win. But let us also remember that it's only a game.

Update: I forgot to mention that an Indian loss on Friday won't technically knock them out. They might pray for a Bermuda win over Bangladesh, which is surely highly unlikely. Given their run rate, India will qualify after a 3-way tie between Bangladesh, Bermuda and India.

NYT offers TimeSelect free to University students and Faculty.

2007-03-20T14:59:00.000-05:00

I like New York Times a lot. My day is rarely complete without reading at least some articles on NYT. Of course most of the time I read online (though in our university we get free print copies every weekday which I read occasionally). Part of the NYT experience are the bi-weekly articles of Krugman, Friedman, Maureen Dowd and others. When TimesSelect was started in Fall 2005, I was so used to their articles that I bought the subscription for one year. But then I realized that most of the articles are available free on the blogosphere. Following the graduate student motto, why pay for it when it's available free, I didn't renew my subscription after the first year.

Today I found that NYT is offering TimesSelect for free to all university students and faculty, which category happily includes me. This surely simplifies things, in addition to comforting my conscience.

If you are a university student or teacher, check this out.

Reaction to India's loss is alarming.

2007-03-18T21:31:00.000-05:00

Much as I am dejected by India's loss yesterday and our diminished chances of making it to Super 8, what bothers me much more is the way aspersions are cast on the team. There are broadly two methods that people employ to vent their anger. More sophisticated of these are acerbic rants, while others are unabashed physical gestures.

The dominant reaction to the defeat seems to be one of anger. Anger is a complicated emotion. It's not clear what causes and is caused by anger. Let's say there are two categories of anger: personal and impersonal. The former is caused by things that have immediate relevance to you (your newspaper delivery boy is lazy) and the later by things with no or very little relevance to you (your friend's newspaper delivery boy is lazy). To be sure, this is not very well defined, but I am concentrating one single aspect which will be clear.

Both these angers are perfectly justifiable. The crucial difference between them is what you do about it. First there are some absolute limits on what you can do. For instance, you can't destroy the home of the newspaper boy. Within those limits, personal anger gives you more scope for action. You can fire your newspaper boy. But the impersonal anger almost never permits action. While you can urge your friend to fire his newspaper boy, you can't do so yourself.

The anger generated in many fans by Indian team's loss is impersonal. This is the case even though it may be true that the team's performances are key to many of the fans' happiness. This impersonal anger surely allows for serious criticism, but much of what we see today is unwarranted. It has to be remembered: the Indian team is not responsible to its fans. This might sound sacrilegious in today's atmosphere of affected national pride, but it is true. If the Indian team has the power to cause a fan intense shame and misery, that power is given to them by the fan. The team did not ask for it. The fan can take that power away from the cricketers if he wishes. The fact that cricketers make insane amounts of money is not germane to the issue. Neither is it correct to argue that a cricketer's basking in the glory when he does well requires him to take the obscenities thrown at him when he doesn't. The Indian cricket team does not represent India's pride. Anyone purporting to derive national glory or shame on the basis of cricket team's results is a fool.

It seems to me that this whole affair is symptomatic of a disturbing trend that is emerging in India. Many of the new habits and practices are characterized by instant gratifications and even more instant disillusionments. Gone in the process are the balancing convictions afforded either by ancient culture, or a thorough education. This is apparent everywhere one sees. In cricket, a player is lifted to sky after a handful of good performances and his effigies are burnt after a single bad show. Whether it is the national obsession with daily junk on television, or the eager rush to modify education to suit the immediately visible needs, what seems to drive people today is the expedience of the moment.

Stephen Hawking on the origins of the universe.

2007-03-14T19:34:00.000-05:00

Stephen Hawking talked recently at University of California Berkeley on the origin of the universe. A video is here (the talk starts at around 18:30).

He is witty as usual while discussing deep issues. He gives an overview of how the theory developed starting with the widely held belief that universe did not begin (it always existed). He then refers to Hubble's discovery of expanding universe as a very important intellectual discovery of the 20th century. If the galaxies are moving apart very fast, they must have been close at some point. In spite of a few theories proposed to salvage the eternal universe theory, scientists now believe that universe began around 14 billion years ago with the big bang. He then talks about the need to combine the general theory of relativity and quantum theory to understand what happened at the singularity which was the big bang.

I am an illiterate on these matters and I found the talk quite illuminating.

2007-03-10T02:28:00.000-06:00

Occasionally I visit Wall Street Journal's editorial page to see if there is something interesting. Most of the articles on economic issues seem logically sound, though I do not always agree with their premises. The articles on domestic politics and especially foreign affairs, on the other hand, are positively atrocious. You get the impression that they are all written by a bunch of standard bearers, sophisticated and intellectual, for the Republican party.

Peggy Noonan, who writes there regularly, provides the latest example. She is the one who penned this classic article when Saddam Hussein was captured in December 2003. Reading this article you wonder what parallel universes of self delusion these people inhabit.

She wrote, talking about what Saddam's capture means,

That human agency works and is an active force in history. You don't have to sit back and accept; you don't have to continue to turn a blind eye; you don't have to sit and do nothing, because all action involves choice and all choice invites repercussion. You can move forward. You can take action. You can go in and remove a threat to the world. You can make the world safer. You can help people. Just because they live in Iraq and we don't bump into them every day doesn't mean they don't merit assistance and even sacrifice.

She is of course talking about the glorious do-good spirit of America which spreads such joy and welfare in the world.

Anyway, coming to the point, this is her latest article. It's about the declining standards of American discourse. The two incidents she provides as evidence for this are: Bill Maher's comment on his show that Dick Cheney's death would save lot of lives and Ann Coulter's reference to John Edwards as a "faggot" at the Conservative Political Action Conference. The whole argument of Noonan is based on the assumption that these two incidents are equivalent. But are they really?

Bill Maher is a comedian who is politically conscious. This consciousness informs his comedy, but basically he is a comedian. His show airs late Friday nights on HBO. All this would seem to provide him a certain license to be fatuous, which wouldn't be the case, for instance, if you are addressing a major conference attended by the who's who of the conservative circles and major presidential candidates.

It is quite silly to draw a parallel between the rot in liberal and conservative politics based on these two incidents.

World Cup Resolutions.

2007-03-07T17:43:00.000-06:00

It is probably a good time to bring in a little perspective amidst the madness of the up-coming world cup. Nirmal Shekar invites us Indian fans to make ten resolutions which do just that.

The following is very timely.

Let us resolve that we will never again say that Team India carries the hopes of a billion people and the prayers of that many are with Rahul Dravid's men. The truth — if anybody still cares for it in this age of ephemera, an age of boosterism and saturation coverage of popular sport in the media — is that a vast majority of that billion has rather more mundane everyday concerns. Their hopes and dreams are not hooked to the fortunes of the men in blue.

In fact all of them are nice. Read them.

Origins of religion.

2007-03-05T17:34:00.000-06:00

There is a lot of buzz lately about the "neo-atheists" like Richard Dawkins and Sam Harris and their renewed critique of religion. An issue that is lost in this debate (or at least not debated sufficiently), which is very interesting, is the question of how religion came into existence in the first place. Robin Marantz Henig's Darwin's God in New York Times Magazine yesterday goes into the specifics of this particular debate.

Human beings evolved to their present physiological state over countless generations of natural selection. Much of their culture and habits too evolved in a similar manner. This later is the subject of an exciting field called evolutionary psychology. For example, our aversion to snakes probably originated when many of the first humans died because of them. So the genes in man which cause fear of snakes, and thereby protect from them, had a natural selection advantage. These are the genes which survived. Most physical traits and behavior patterns of man must have evolved like this. There are two essential groups of these "adaptations".

One is those patterns which gave direct selection advantage. Most adaptations belong to this group. An important example is the innate human ability for language. Its selection advantages are obvious.

The second group consists of those traits or behavior patterns that are only indirect consequences of direct adaptations, the so-called "spandrels" or "by-product adaptations".

A naturally occurring example of a by-product of adaptation is the human belly button. There is no evidence that the belly button, per se, helped human ancestors to survive or reproduce. A belly button is not good for catching food, detecting predators, avoiding snakes, locating good habitats, or choosing mates. It does not seem to be involved directly or indirectly in the solution to an adaptive problem. Rather, the belly button is a by-product of something that is an adaptation, namely, the umbilical cord that formerly provided the food supply to the growing fetus.[Link]

The fundamental disagreement among scientists debating origins of religion is whether religion is a direct adaptation or a spandrel. The above article in NYT goes into details of this disagreement and is quite fascinating.

It seems very probable that religion (or more generally the capacity to believe without evidence) is hard-wired into human beings. Numerous experiments among children establish this. Note that this is independent of whether religion is a primary adaption or a spandrel. The fact is that humans have an innate propensity to religion. The dispute is only how this propensity evolved.

Personally I am more inclined to take the the view of "by-product theorists", those who believe that religion evolved as a side-kick of other direct adaptations. It is hard for me to believe that religion could have given direct selection advantages.

McCain's troubles.

2007-03-02T15:55:00.000-06:00

John McCain finally announced that he is running in 2008 (as if we didn't know already). McCain has come a long way from 2000 when for a moment it looked like he might win the nomination, though machinations of Karl Rove prevailed in the end. Back then he was a bit of maverick and much liked by independents and Democrats. In fact, many independents and Democrats showed up in Republican primaries and handed McCain a few key wins. If Bush the team did not resort to dirty smear tactics against him, he might even have staged a surprise victory.

But in the past seven years McCain lost many of the advantages he had at that time. For one thing he realized that he needs the support of religious right and this made him do some pretty crazy things like showing up at Jerry Falwell's Liberty University. He has gone back some liberal things he said about gay marriages. In his attempt to win favor in Iowa, he also disowned some courageous things he said about ethanol subsidies (in 2000 he skipped the Iowa primary). All this destroyed the "straight-talking" image that was his pride some time ago. There are also questions about his age. He is doing his best to counter these (showing up at Letterman to announce his candidacy).

McCain has a curious problem: he has a good chance of winning a general election, but great trouble winning Republican primaries. He did not win a single primary in 2000 where voting was restricted to Republicans. Much of the last six years he spent addressing this problem. But in the process he lost many independents and Democrats. And it remains to be seen if he has done enough to win the hearts of the Republicans.

Right now he comfortably trails Giuliani, though it is too early to say anything. Most likely he will not need to contend with dirty Rove-like tactics, but drawing Republicans away from the 9/11 hero Giuliani will be a challenge. It must be said also that McCain has a far more extensive national presence which will surely give him an edge over Giuliani.

The long shadow of Iraq.

2007-03-01T15:45:00.000-06:00

However skillfully Hillary Clinton tries to justify her decision to vote for Iraq war she will eventually be forced to pay a price for her refusal to admit the error. Democratic candidates who have either been always against the war (Obama) or subsequently admitted mistake (Edwards) are going to have the edge in primaries. (This is of course not such a major issue for Republicans as their base consists of one-time supporters of Iraq war.)

It is misleading to say that the nation was gripped by a post-9/11 shock and that there was no other option. It overlooks the fact that fully 23 Senators voted against the resolution (almost a quarter). In any case, the Senators are supposed to be independent and not susceptible to the general emotions of the moment.

Another important thing was that there were indeed other options. As the op-ed Senate's Forgotten Iraq Choice by Lincoln Chafee confirms there was a very concrete alternative option that was available at the time. Chafe was a Republican Senator from Rhode Island who lost the election last November. He is very liberal and has been a consistent critic of Bush and did not vote for him in the 2004 election.

This alternative was a resolution called Multilateral Use of Force Authorization Act of 2002 proposed by Carl Levine, a Michigan Democrat. It suggested a more multilateral strategy for the US. While agreeing that Iraq was a threat, it made the important point which seemed to have escaped many at the time, that it was far from an imminent threat.

Of course the resolution failed. But as Chafee remarks, it was "incomprehensible" why it received only 24 votes. Many Democrats (including Clinton and Edwards) and all Republicans other than Chafee voted against it.

The simple fact is that bellicose nut jobs like Cheney and Rumsfeld had decided right from the beginning of the Bush administration that they had to remove Saddam. Before 9/11 they were more interested in Iraq than serious reports from CIA about al-Qaeda. 9/11 gave them a great chance. They skillfully built up the case for Iraq war and marketed it brilliantly. All this is established wisdom now. For instance, Frank Rich lays it out nicely in his book. And many big name Democrats fell for this very easily. No amount of clever word play will change this simple fact.

Supreme Court's long-worded ways.

2007-02-27T21:23:00.000-06:00

The Supreme Court always brings to my mind high erudition and sophistication. Not necessarily in a good sense of course. It is not difficult to discern some sort of political biases at work in controversial decisions however prolix they might be. These days of intense political partisanship seem to add fuel to the fire.

One such recent decision of the Supreme Court was in Philip Morris USA v. Williams. The issue at conflict was the $80 million punitive damages awarded to representatives of Williams by Oregon Court of Appeals. Supreme Court rejected this by a vote of 5-4. The crucial concern of the jury in Oregon was the damage caused by Philip Morris to nonparties to the litigation. They held that this was huge and indicated "reprehensible behavior". But the Supreme Court explicitly rejected this argument, saying that, "[a] punitive damage award based in part on a jury's desire to punish a defendant for harming nonparties amounts to a taking of the property from the defendant without due process".

The merits of this argument are not germane. But the verbose and confusing way the Court delivered its judgment is. This is very nicely explained in this article by Douglas W. Kmiec in Slate.

It seems that the majority opinion of the court held that it is fine for a jury to consider damages to nonparties in determining whether the behavior of the defendant was reprehensible, but it is not OK for them to use this damage in punishing the defendant. Kmiec sums this up nicely:

This is not an example of clarity. It is, instead, what happens when you're lucky enough to be in a position to delegate to others the implementation of unworkable rules. As the Oregon Supreme Court had already noted, if a jury cannot punish for harm to people who aren't part of the litigation, then it is difficult to see why it may consider that harm at all. How, asked Oregon, could a jury consider harm to others and yet withhold that consideration from the punishment calculus? It's a good question. The Supremes, however, answered with a rather paternalistic "just do it."

The two Bush appointees to the court, Roberts and Alito, both voted with the majority. Kmieck also explains how this goes against their conservative credentials.

Democracy and Society.

2007-02-27T16:43:00.000-06:00

Free exercise of dissent and standing up for one's own interests are key to healthy democracy. However reading things like Andhra Pradesh says it is neglected in rail budget leaves a bad taste. One can attempt to interpret this as a sign of active participation in the democratic process, but it is difficult to deny that the real motives behind such statements are not so pure. In the existing circumstances it is easy to denounce these maneuvers as meaningless vote grabbing ploys.

More interesting is the question of whether any democratic system, where winning popular vote is the ultimate litmus test, will end up being like the one we have in India now. Though it might appear that the answer must be a sad yes, I am more inclined to think otherwise. At the risk of sounding passe, I will say that political leaders are not made out of thin air. The health of the democratic system is not independent of the overall health of a country or society. On the contrary, quality of the political leaders and the health of the democratic system are determined largely by the health of the society. If we accept that our democratic system is sick, it is only a highly visible symptom of a more fundamental and insidious sickness, that of the wider society. A careful scrutiny reveals ample evidence to support this diagnosis.

The question then translates to whether sickness is the eventual plight of all societies. The answer is of course an obvious no. Sickness is a frequent but temporary condition. So however dire the situation might seem, it is not permanent.

Symptoms serve a useful purpose: they direct our attention to the real problems, provided we look beyond the symptoms. Treating symptoms will only give temporary relief. Lasting solutions require tackling the causes of the symptoms.

God Delusion - Some thoughts.

2007-02-20T18:42:00.000-06:00

Reading God Delusion by Richard Dawkins was thoroughly enjoyable and immensely instructive. In the book Dawkins talks at length about knowledge of natural selection as a "consciousness raiser" regarding the origins of the universe. He says that this book is intended as a consciousness raiser regarding atheism: atheists can lead lives that are "happy, balanced, moral, and intellectually fulfilled" and there is nothing to be apologetic about atheism.

This book certainly raised my consciousness, though in a slightly different way. I was never actively religious and I did not think being an atheist was a big deal. But I also never seriously confronted the idea of religion and tended to be agnostic about it. That meant I did not fully appreciate various shades of religiosity and their consequences. The first important lesson from the book for me is a clear realization of the poverty of religion in all of its roles: as an explainer, as a comforter, as a moralizer etc.

The second lesson is a clearer idea of the power of science to explain the universe. In a very vague and general sense I always knew that science is incredibly successful at explaining the nature. But this book made me see this in a very concrete way and gave me an intense desire to pursue this idea further. Dawkins quotes Richard Feynman, comparing the precision of quantum mechanics's predictions about real world, "to predicting a distance as great as the width of North America to an accuracy of one human hair's breadth". This is just an example of how powerful science is. It's clear in view of this realization how utterly ridiculous any recourse to religion is when attempting to explain nature.

Dawkins is pretty systematic in his treatment of religion. He takes as the contentious issue the very believable "God Hypothesis":

There exists a superhuman, supernatural intelligence who deliberately designed and created the universe and everything in it, including us.

He persuasively argues that we should treat this as a scientific hypothesis and then destroys it. He proposes an alternate view:

Any creative intelligence, of sufficient complexity to design anything, comes into existence only as the end product of an extended process of gradual evolution.

He covers a whole gamut of issues: supposed "proofs" of god's existence, religion's role in morality, evolutionary basis of religion's development etc. His writing is delightful and the points he raises provide lot of food for thought.

Aside from the incisive criticism of the content of religion, Dawkins also attacks the "methodology of religion". The fundamental premise of religion is belief without evidence. Religion systematizes this premise and compels people to live in happy ignorance. Dawkins forcefully reasons why this widespread practice of belief without evidence paves the way for fanatical application of religion that is becoming all too common today.

I initially intended to write a detailed review of the book to encompass all the key ideas. But then days of procrastination turned into weeks and the due date for the library is now upon me. I decided finally that such a review is not necessary. It can't in a million years substitute for the book and I can't do better than simply urge you to go read it.

Truth about Pythagoras.

2007-02-19T14:07:00.000-06:00

It has always been difficult for me to decide about Pythagoras. Well till now. We all learned Pythagoras theorem in school and it is generally the first time we encounter a "proof" and it is all quite fascinating. When told that Pythagoras was the first to prove this theorem, it is hardly surprising that we are filled with respect for him. We are also told that he was indeed the first to introduce the notion of proof and was the precursor to later day trend setters like Euclid and Archimedes. And for those of us pursuing mathematics, Pythagoras is indeed a father figure.

But then you start reading independently and come across stuff saying that Pythagoras did not contribute much to mathematics. Then you console yourself saying that most of what goes under the name of Pythagoras was the work of "Pythagoreans", members of the secret society which was founded by Pythagoras.

Well, even that is dubious. Indeed, it is established quite well now that Pythagoreans were just a secret group created to achieve certain political ends, and genuine mathematical contribution from them was tiny. This history is very well summarized in this article in London Review of Books by M.F. Burnyeat.

Pythagoras was a political boss who managed to take control of parts of southern Italy through his secret society. Much of his commonly told story was made up almost two centuries after his death.

[T]he origins of the traditional picture of Pythagoras are to be sought, not during the sixth century BC, when he lived and fought his political battles, not during the fifth century, when democratic forces ousted his followers from power in various cities of southern Italy, but late in the fourth century. That was when Speusippus and Xenocrates, the dominant figures in Plato’s Academy, sought to devise ancient authority for certain aspects of their late master’s philosophy. Theirs was a conscious construction whereby Pythagoras became the apostle of mathematics and a highly mathematising philosophy, full of anticipations of Platonic metaphysics.

Starting from this Burnyeat recounts the actual story of Pythagoras and his society. He also mentions some very interesting details about Pythagoras's secret society.

It is amply clear that whatever Pythagoras and his followers were doing it was not laying the foundations for systematic and rigorous development of mathematics.

What doesn't cause terrorism?

2007-02-11T00:43:00.001-06:00

Terrorism has complex and non-obvious causes. Just a moderate amount of contemplation and study make this evident. On the other hand, there are many "reasons" which seem quite plausible to many, but which turn out to be superficial.

Everybody knows about the madrassas in Pakistan and other Muslim countries. These are usually believed to strengthen the Islamic moorings in students, legitimize religious intolerance and the use of violence. It is hard to verify this belief. One needs to really study the inner workings of several madrasssas before reaching a conclusion.

As an implication, it widely held that the graduates of these madrassas usually go on to become terrorists. This seems to be definitely wrong. At least as far as many recent terror attacks are concerned. I came across this article in NYT by Peter Bergen and Swati Pandey which address this question.

They look at the educational backgrounds of 75 terrorists who participated in major terror attacks recently.

We found that a majority of them are college-educated, often in technical subjects like engineering. In the four attacks for which the most complete information about the perpetrators' educational levels is available - the World Trade Center bombing in 1993, the attacks on the American embassies in Kenya and Tanzania in 1998, the 9/11 attacks, and the Bali bombings in 2002 - 53 percent of the terrorists had either attended college or had received a college degree. As a point of reference, only 52 percent of Americans have been to college. The terrorists in our study thus appear, on average, to be as well educated as many Americans.

Further only 9 of these 75 attended madrassas. All these 9 participated in the Bali attack. But even that attack was masterminded by 5 college-educated people.

It appears quite likely that madrassas, which may very well be breeding and nurturing violent hatred of the West, do not produce terrorists.

Israel's killing of children.

2007-02-10T20:56:00.000-06:00

The nonchalance and moral rectitude with which Israel conducts its inhumane occupation are remarkable. The justification for the killing of 3,000 adults since the outbreak of the intifada is open to debate. However no part of that justification applies to the killing of 815 children and teenagers in the same period. Latest victim of this heartbreaking and unbelievable spate of targeting children is Taha Al-jawi, a 17-year old boy in Jerusalem. See this article of Gideon Levy on the affair.

An Israeli soldier shoots at the leg of an unarmed Taha from a distance simply because he was seen near the security fence. Granted that one is not allowed to touch the fence, the question remains how can one justify firing at the boy. The boy was then left to bleed to his death. The Israeli forces claimed to have reached him earlier, but an injury to the leg results in death only if there is lot of bleeding.

The scary part is that Israeli authorities do not even appear to concede that an unfortunate mistake has been committed. They firmly stand by the soldier involved, and proclaim that he is not at fault.

By any reasonable standard this story is very important in the overall situation of Israel-Palestine conflict. The tragic thing is that these stories rarely get reported widely (a Google News search resulted in only the above two articles of Gideon Levy in Haaretz).

2007-02-09T21:31:00.000-06:00

As Garrison Keillor said in a recent episode of Prairie Home Companion, president Bush "flew Air Force 1, a 747, to Wilmington, Delaware, a distance of 98 miles, in order to give a speech on energy conservation". Keillor concluded "it's getting hard for satire ... how you can you compete with the news".

Another example is Rumsfeld's atrocious comment that everything looks fine when you fly over Iraq. Jon Stewart has lot of fun with it. The following is actually a very nice piece from the Daily Show. Stewart talks about the last days of Rumsfeld as the defense secretary.

Watch it!

"Moderate" allies of America in the Middle East.

2007-02-08T20:59:00.000-06:00

The double standards of the West in its holier than thou assertions about freedom, democracy, tolerance etc are often clear. There are numerous examples. For instance, take the shrill claims by Bush regarding democracy promotion as an American virtue. A casual look at the history of the later half of the last century puts that myth to rest. As Gaurav writes, Britain and America were deliberate causes for the overthrow in 1953 of a democratic government in Iran. That was only the beginning. Much more followed. Guatemala, Ecuador, Dominican Republic, Brazil, Indonesia, Greece, Chile. The list goes on.

Another, more contemporary, illustration is the American support of the so-called "moderate" regimes in the Middle East. This Guardian piece talks about this. The prominent moderate allies of the US are Egypt and Saudi Arabia. Most people reckon that these two countries practice worst forms of political suppression, authoritarianism and intolerance. Regardless, they remain trusted allies of the US, no doubt because of their willingness to cooperate against the wishes of the local population.

Whatever it's tactical advantages, this support of dictators is a strategic disaster for the United States. It makes these countries fertile breeding grounds for anti-Americanism. During the 80s and 90s, organized terror groups began to take shape in these countries, especially in Egypt. Many of these terrorists began their Jihadi careers after being tortured in Egyptian prisons. Jihad in Afghanistan against Soviet invasion was an extremely important unifying experience, but the Egyptian and Saudi dictatorships can't be discounted. The core of Al-Qaeda leadership comes predominantly from Egypt and Saudi Arabia (Ayman al-Zawahiri who is number two to bin Laden in al-Qaeda was tortured in Egypt and led several Jihadi groups there before joining bin Laden).

The reason why it is a strategic debacle for the US is because most of these terrorists were initially content to fight the "local infidels" and the "Zionist invaders". But American friendship toward these local infidels and Israel convinced them that they should in fact fight the "distant infidel" first.

Religious Dogma - Jewish Version.

2007-02-05T15:35:00.000-06:00

Osama bin Laden said in 1998:

For over seven years the United States has been occupying the lands of Islam in the holiest of places, the Arabian Peninsula, plundering its riches, dictating to its rulers, humiliating its people, terrorizing its neighbors, and turning its bases in the Peninsula into a spearhead through which to fight the neighboring Muslim peoples.

All these crimes and sins committed by the Americans are a clear declaration of war on Allah, his messenger, and Muslims.

What's wrong with this statement?

The first, and perhaps the most pernicious, one is the suggestion of an American plot against Islam. I will not go into an analysis of factual accuracy of the above statement. That is not my purpose here. My point is that painting this in religious colors is an extraordinarily effective thing. Whether bin Laden really sees it in those religious terms is also immaterial. For his purposes nothing works wonders like telling Muslims that America is at war with them. It serves to unite them as no other tactic will.

The subsequent tactics (terrorism) of bin Laden and others like him make it easy for the world to denounce him without really identifying the key component of his justification (yes, even bin Laden feels compelled to offer justifications, however spurious).

I have seen the same religious argument offered by many Jewish supporters of Israel. If they have their way, any critic of Israel is a priori influenced by anti-semitism. In long-winded words this is what almost all resort to. To be sure, some Israeli critics are anti-semite (just as some Americans supporting Iraq war hate Muslims). But these Jewish apologists conlude that everyone accusing Israel is anti-semite (a classic case of gulit by association).

In the present geo-political scenario this is turning out to be a fairly useful method of silencing the critics.

In this context it is refreshing to see a number of eminent British Jews raising their hands and spelling out the real issues. Their website is here. More articles here.

Load of crap!

2007-01-31T17:05:00.000-06:00

I like Bill Maher. He is a very good comedian and his heart and mind are in the right place. On most issues that is. One issue where I disagree with him (and frankly I think he is totally confused about it) is Israel. I heard him say on his show on HBO that George W Bush is the greatest president America had as far as Israel is concerned. (It was said as a concession in an argument with a Bush supporter.) And then I saw this interview with the former Israeli PM Benjamin Netanyahu, which confirmed my view.

For fifteen minutes Netanyahu held forth on the "Second Lebanon War", Israel's "disproportionately restrained" responses, Iran as the new Reich, Muslims as evil, Jews as historically perfect victims. Maher quite obediently towed the line. He quoted a Jerusalem Post article which suggests that Israel needs a "local Bill Maher" to counter the world opinion, and Maher agrees that he "could roll that way".

It almost seems frivolous to opine on this trash. Netanyahu waxed eloquent on the evils of Iran, and more generally of Muslim fanaticism. The Hitler interlude makes the inevitable appearance with Netanyahu cautioning against a repeat of World War 2, now with the new Hitler (Mahmoud Ahmadinejad) armed with nuclear weapons. A close relative of this line of thinking is the view of Islamic militants as evil fanatics of an intensity never before seen by the world and eager to get to their "good heaven" after wrecking untold miseries on innocent people.

It is ironic that Maher, whose show usually resists such demented and paranoid crap, falls for it. When pulled up by British politicians for Israel's disproportionate response, Netanyahu points out that England was worse! He draws a parallel to Nazi air-bombing of London and the later Allied bombing of Dresden which Netanyahu claims probably killed 200,000 people. He accepts that Israel was disproportionate, disproportionately restrained. Thus we are to understand that Hezbollah's kidnapping of three Israeli soldiers amounts to German bombing of London during a world war.

Then it gets positively creepy with Netanyahu suggesting that Europe's often "critical view" toward Israel is a sort of defense mechanism in response to their guilt of not rescuing the Jews from the Holocaust. He also claims that for "about 2000 years Jew was the perfect victim" without any defense. World loved this as long as it lasted. But now the Jews can defend themselves and they "deviated from that perfection of powerlessness into power" and "there is a real historical adjustment that is yet to take place".

And he thinks Muslims are fanatics! This guy is the leader of the Likud and may very well become PM of Israel again. That is a scary thought!

Jimmy Carter's honest, if weak, assessment of Israel-Palestine conflict.

2007-01-30T22:34:00.000-06:00

The nation of Israel was created in 1948 in historic Palestine. In the process at least 700,000 native inhabitants were driven away from their homes of centuries. The justification for this massive "collateral" damage was sought from two historical facts: the sacking of Jews from Palestine, hitherto their home, in the second century A.D; and the constant persecution of Jews in Europe, culminating in the horrors of holocaust. It was thought that the later stressed the need for a separate Jewish home land and the former provided one. Forgotten in this eloquent rationale was the plight of the 700,000 original refugees and their millions of descendants today. Any trace of moral outrage for this nakba (Arabic for disaster) has been successfully effaced from collective memory in the past half-decade. Today the respected disagreement is only over the Israeli occupation of the West Bank and East Jerusalem which began only in 1967.

One school of thought has it that world has come to terms with the unfortunate, but necessary, events of 1948. There is also a debatable view that if only the later events did not take the ugly turns all would have been well now. This is the view taken by Jimmy Carter in his honest book Palestine Peace not Apartheid.

The Truman administration recognized (de facto) the state of Israel 11 minutes after its establishment. Since then America has been the strongest and most faithful ally of Israel. Ironically this support increased significantly since the inception of Israeli occupation. While it is not rare to come across voices highly critical of Israeli policies and American role in them, it is fair to say that American society remains largely supportive of Israel. Indeed it has been said that a much more serious debate on the conflict takes place in Israel. In this context it is a welcome change that a former president comes out with a suggestion of being critical of Israel.

Palestine is essentially a personal account which covers the history of the conflict, especially after Carter's presidency during 1977-80. It talks about his personal visits to the region, his personal chemistry with dramatis personae, and his perspective on what went wrong and how to fix it.

The book begins with Carter's first visit to Israel in 1973. The dominant belief at the time was that Israel's occupation (six years old) was temporary and will end, pending some agreements with the neighbors. The total number of Jewish settlers at the time was only 1500 (the number now is almost 450,000). However he also recalls encounters which suggest a deeper problem. Sure enough, four months after his visit the appearance of peace was shattered with the attack of Egypt and Syria on Israel. Israel recovered after early setbacks (thanks to timely American help) to register victory.

Carter then spends some time discussing the Camp David Accords of 1978 which produced a peace treaty between Israel and Egypt. These Accords are widely seen as successful and remain models for future treaties. However Carter emphasizes the very important point that a crucial component of the Accords was Israel's commitment to implement UN Security Council (unanimous) resolutions 242 (1967) and 338 (1973) which declared that "Israel's acquisition of territory by force is illegal and that Israel must withdraw from occupied territories". The fact that Israel never really moved toward this commitment is conveniently forgotten today. Carter writes, "[f]or Menachem Begin, the peace treaty with Egypt was the significant act for Israel, while solemn promises regarding the West Bank and Palestinians would be finessed or deliberately violated."(italics mine)

This point is repeated again and again: Israel's failure to follow up on its promises. Carter is convinced that changing this attitude is key to any just solution.

The key to the future of Israel will not be found outside the country but within. It is not likely that any combination of Arab powers or even the powerful influence of the United States could force decisions on Israel concerning East Jerusalem, the West Bank, Palestinian rights, or the occupied territories of Syria.

Carter is up front on many occasions (particularly toward the end of the book) criticizing Israel's actions. For instance he says:

Peace will come to Israel and the Middle East only when the Israeli government is willing to comply with international law, with the Roadmap for Peace, with official American policy, with the wishes of a majority of its own citizens - and honor its own previous commitments - by accepting its legal borders.

It does sound refreshingly honest. But it is hard to escape the feeling that Carter is walking a political tight rope here. For various reasons he does not want to appear genuinely critical of Israel. Nor does he wish to be dishonest with himself. This balancing act means there is not much chance of this book fulfilling the purpose Carter had in mind: produce a blueprint for "peace with justice in this small and unique portion of the world".

It is all very well to say that Israel must fulfill its promises. But this impotent call for peace does not take into account the ground realities. All of Carter's ideas require Israel to be nice without presenting a solid political case for why Israel will need to be nice. He fails to seriously analyze the record of Israeli actions of last 40 years.

Key leaders of Israel during the occupation era came from the "1948 generation", and Tanya Reinhart writes that they "were raised on the myth of 'redemption of land'". This is the idea that the land that once belonged (two thousand years ago) to the Jewish people should be "taken back". Unlikely as it may sound to an outsider, leaders from both poles of Israeli politics (Labor and Likud) were animated by this idea. They differed only tactically: with Labor (Rabin, Peres) supporting negotiations to annex as much of the West Bank as possible (usual figure is 35 - 40%) and Likud (Sharon) supporting more aggressive military moves. Israel also never pretended to aspire for a diverse society where Jews and Arabs might live peacefully together. This led them to create an apartheid system where the Palestinians live like second-class citizens in the occupied territories.

Without penetrative analysis going into such issues Palestine does not add a whole lot to the ongoing debate and doesn't produce any illuminating ideas. It does however provide a refreshing re-look at the conflict from a humane view point.

Power of Words.

2007-01-27T00:41:00.000-06:00

What are words? In a sense, they are mere shortcuts to express elaborate feelings, phenomenon, concepts etc. Instead of saying "linguistic units with phonetic content and used in speech to convey certain meaning" we simply say "word". There must be a highly sophisticated layered structure to the development of words: with first words describing simple concepts and more complex words created out of old words as time went on. Studying this development is an enormously complex task and constitutes the object of various fields of study like linguistics and anthropology.

A particularly interesting aspect of this study is understanding how words enter into mass consciousness. Here I am not talking about common words like "good", "table", "run" etc. For these kind of words, the question is easy and/or uninteresting. It is lot more interesting and hard to understand how a word like "communism", for instance, caught on. The most intriguing question for me is how much does the very emergence of the word "communism" contribute to the effects of the ideology it represents. Though ill-equipped to even begin to answer that question, I am inclined to believe the answer is not a little.

Articulation is an extremely important part of any scientific endeavor. As we pursue long chains of thought and contemplation, effective articulation is necessary to organize those thoughts. In the realm of politics this role of articulation takes on added importance. Often the ability to find and popularize words to describe a political stand is key to its success. We all know how much politicians long for a "winning slogan".

This might sound a little cynical with the suggestion that the mere creation of clever phrases is enough to succeed. Of course that is not the case. To a large extent the inherent worth of an idea is what determines its success. But it must be noted that the availability of common words is very often a huge advantage.

One classic example is the word "anti-semitism". Historically various forms of racial and religious prejudices existed, but no other specific prejudice is as easily identifiable as anti-semitism. To be sure, to a large extent this is because this particular prejudice took on extreme forms for lengthy periods. But to a small extent, the recognizability of this prejudice has to do with the existence of a convenient word like "anti-semitism". In any case it accords a huge advantage to some people.

Let us look at an example. Alan Dershowitz immediately labels anyone criticizing Israeli policies anti-semite. Given the negative intonations of that word, this labeling gives Dershowitz a huge advantage before any discussion can take place. On the other hand, the target of Dershowitz's attack does not initially have the terminological facility to counter the accusations against him. What can you call someone who is apt to use the word anti-semite at the drop of a hat. Any criticism is bound to take a couple of sentences at least and thereby lose the terminological battle.

As an another example, it will be interesting to see the development of the word "Islamophobia" in the years to come. This word has caught on in the aftermath of 9/11 with many people prone to look suspiciously at Muslims. Obviously the inherent generalization was problematic and this word began to be used to denote this problem. However it has not yet attained the same level of guilt associated to anti-semitism. Still the existence of the word itself indicates some level of recognition of the problem.

One can't stress enough the importance of words in any aspect of human life, and particularly in political discourse.

Milton Friedman.

2007-01-25T22:55:00.000-06:00

This is a pretty nice article by Paul Krugman on the Nobel prize winning economist Milton Friedman who died recently. Calling him the "best spokesman for the virtues of free markets since Adam Smith" Krugman looks at three aspects of Friedman's career: the theoretical economist, the policy entrepreneur and the ideologue.

Krugman has no hesitation in saying that as a theoretical economist Friedman was great, with seminal contributions to the theory of consumer behavior and the relation between inflation and unemployment. He particularly singles out for praise Friedman's bringing back of the "Economic Man" into economics after Keynes's recourse to "psychological theorizing". A major success story of this approach of Friedman was the discrediting of A.W. Phillips's theory on the trade-offs resulting from "historical correlation between unemployment and inflation, with high inflation associated with low unemployment and vice versa". Friedman argued that no valid trade-offs existed and his argument was borne out by the American experiences in the 1970s.

But while discussing the second two avatars of Friedman Krugman is lot more circumspect. There are questions raised about how effective his policy recommendations really were and suggestions that Friedman seemed "intellectually dishonest" in his role as a popularizer of free market doctrine.

The one major policy suggestion of Friedman is the theory of "monetarism". Friedman had grave doubts about the ability of a body of men (usually those in charge of monetary policy via the central banks) to correctly maintain the money supply in the system. According to him the worst effects of the Great Depression were due to the inability of Federal Reserve to maintain sufficient money supply. So he suggested that money supply be increased every year at a low rate (around 3%), irrespective of what really is happening in the economy. This policy was tried both in America and Britain briefly around 1980 with not so nice results. It was discarded soon after that and even many conservative economists in the Bush administration are openly against it.

In the post World War 2 era the dominant doctrine guiding economic policy was developed by Keynes. He went against the conventional wisdom by talking about the importance of fiscal policy as opposed to monetary policy in shaping economy. This naturally gave governments, with all their proclivities for follies, a far larger say in the matter than what many classical economists would have found comfortable. But such was the power and appeal of Keynes's revolutionary ideas that soon they became the conventional wisdom. It was in this context that Friedman took up the mantle to bring "laissez-faire" back into prominence. Krugman attributes this to Friedman's "intellectual courage".

However, Krugman chides Friedman for taking things too far: going from "markets can too work" to "markets always work and that only markets work". In his stubbornness to deliver the essentially political message expected by the audience, he forsake the very qualities of intellectual honesty and thoroughness which made him a great economist. So "the refreshing iconoclasm of his early career hardened into a rigid defense of what had become the new orthodoxy".

Democratic Race for Nomination in 2008.

2007-01-20T17:59:00.000-06:00

The race for the Democratic presidential nomination for '08 heated up today with Hillary Clinton announcing her widely anticipated decision to run. Her main rival is expected to be the Illinois senator Barack Obama who is set to announce his own candidacy on February 10. Thus the two leading contenders for the Democratic nomination represent two electorates which had a long history of suppression and denial of voting rights. Indeed they had unimpeded voting rights for less than a century in America.

(Women were permitted vote only after the Nineteenth Amendment in 1920. Though black males enjoyed complete voting rights briefly at the end of the civil war, they were soon subjected to various forms of restrictions. Blacks began to exercise unhindered voting rights only after the Voting Rights Act of 1965.)

It will be amiss to rule out 2004 vice-presidential nominee John Edwards who is said to be making serious efforts for his nomination. It makes for a highly interesting three-way campaign over the next 18 months or so, though it is fair to say at this point that Clinton and Obama hold the aces.

Hillary Clinton definitely starts ahead with her name recognition and long public career. Obama is a novice and does not have any experience in national campaigns. But he is highly charismatic and captured the imagination of Democratic base since he entered the Senate in 2004. The immediate task for Obama would be to lure many major donors away from Clinton. There are a number of people who are unable to decide between them or having second thoughts about Clinton. George Soros seems to be moving toward Obama, according to this article in New York Times. So are influential Hollywood producers such as Steven Spielberg, David Geffen, and Jeffrey Katzenberg.

It is debatable whether money wins elections. However the first clues as to who is leading will come when we know who is leading the money stakes. The donors are shrewd and their decisions are based on well-informed assessments on who is more likely to win. So if Obama or Clinton is receiving more money it must mean that he or she is perceived to be more likely to win. Whether money is a cause of winning or not, it surely is a fairly reliable indicator. Though Clinton has the edge (with already $14 million in bank), it is only because Obama started much later than her.

With the contest for nomination likely to be confined largely to Democrats (most of the primaries are closed, meaning open to registered Democrats only), it is not clear if there is much to choose between the two. Obama's freshness could be an advantage: he did not vote for Iraq war (he wasn't in the Senate then) and he has been consistently against the war. Clinton voted for the war and has a tortuous record on it. On the other hand, the same freshness could work against Obama: he is inexperienced and could fall behind Clinton in convincing the voters of his caliber. Quite possibly his freshness will have a mixed effect and it is not easy to predict how these things turn out.

A major factor on the minds of Democrats will be who is more electable. Democrats are fed up more than usual with the Republican White House of eight years and there is bound to be a passionate desire to have their man/woman back there. This will be the unifying theme for the next year or so. Most Democrats will be happy to throw their support behind anyone who can take the White House back. Behind all the rhetoric about who is better for the country will be calculations as to who is more likely to win. Consequently the candidate who more successfully prove his/her electability will win the nomination.

It may be a stretch to read too much into this emergence of woman and black candidates for Democratic nomination. Surely this represents a sea change from the electoral scene of only 40 years ago when blacks suffered discrimination via literacy tests and gerrymandering to minimize effects of black voting. And election of Nancy Pelosi as the first female speaker of the House of Representatives confirms that Clinton's rise is not an isolated event. However, I am more inclined to attribute this to instances of individual charisma and favorable circumstances than to any deep-rooted transformations in the electoral scene. That's what makes me pessimistic about the ultimate odds of success of either of these candidates against charismatic and mainstream candidates like John McCain or Rudolph Giuliani.

Of course there is still a long long way to go, and nothing is more fraught with danger and uncertainty than guessing which way elections can go, particularly elections which are almost two years away! Let us wait and see.

America, the Rogue State.

2007-01-17T12:26:00.000-06:00

The following is a very nice article by John Judis. It offers a surprisingly (for a mainstream magazine like The New Republic) lucid and honest assessment on American assistance to Ethiopia in Somalian invasion. It is a must-read, and I am quoting it to fully here.

What exactly are we doing in the Horn of Africa, where we have encouraged the Christian government of Ethiopia to invade Somalia and replace its Islamic government? As far as I can tell, we have violated international law, committed war crimes, helped Al Qaeda recruit new members, and involved ourselves in a guerrilla war that could last decades. It's Iraq writ small. And it can't be blamed on Donald Rumsfeld.

There's an old principle of international law, going back to the seventeenth century, against one nation violating the sovereignty of another. It was often breached, but, after two world wars, it was enshrined in the United Nations charter. We criticized the Soviet invasions of Hungary and Czechoslovakia and justified the first Gulf war on these grounds. The purpose of this principle has been to prevent wars that could arise if more powerful countries simply took it into their hands to dominate smaller, less powerful ones.

Of course, when one nation attacks another, the other can respond. The U.S. invasion of Afghanistan, and the overthrow of the Taliban regime, was justified on those grounds. The Taliban weren't simply sheltering Al Qaeda; they were in league with them and had become dependent upon them. To justify its invasion of Iraq, the Bush administration invented an imminent threat from Saddam Hussein's regime. It was pure artifice--remember the drones bearing nuclear weapons headed for our shores--but the very fact that the Bush administration felt it had to resort to deception meant that it understood that a certain principle of international relations was at stake.

But, last month, the Bush administration actively supported Ethiopia's invasion of Somalia. It provided money, advisers, and, finally, U.S. warplanes. And there was no justification for Ethiopia's invasion. It was a clear violation of the U.N. charter. The neighboring people have been feuding for centuries, but Ethiopia's Christian government could not cite a significant provocation for its attack on the Muslim country and its Islamic government. If anything, Ethiopia's invasion closely resembled Iraq's invasion in August 1990 of Kuwait. But, instead of criticizing the Ethiopians, the United States applauded and aided them.

The administration claimed that, in supporting Ethiopia, it was fighting the ubiquitous "war on terrorism." According to The New York Times, administration officials even held out the Ethiopia invasion as a model of how it would prosecute the war on terrorism by proxy. By this account, Somalia was Afghanistan, and its Islamic Courts Union government was the Taliban. But the analogy does not hold up. The United States claimed that the Islamic Courts government, which took power last summer, was harboring three Al Qaeda fugitives. But the Al Qaeda members had been in Somalia well before the Islamic Courts took power. They were not part of the government. And Al Qaeda itself did not have training camps in Somalia. Somalia was less like Afghanistan than Pakistan, which, according to outgoing National Intelligence Director John Negroponte, is also home to Al Qaeda members..

In the wake of the Ethiopian invasion, the administration made a stronger claim. On December 14, Jendayi Frazer, the State Department official for Africa, said, "The Council of Islamic Courts is now controlled by Al Qaeda cell individuals--East Africa Al Qaeda cell individuals." But Frazer didn't name any individuals. And intelligence analysts have questioned her claim, which, according to The Washington Post, was "[b]ased in part on intelligence out of Ethiopia." As Matthew Yglesias put it, "In other words, we're backing Ethiopia's war against Somalia because intelligence provided by the Ethiopian government suggests we should back Ethiopia."

The Bush administration often claims that it is encouraging democracy, but the invasion itself probably represents a net loss of freedom--and that's a hard calculation to make among these governments. The U.S.-backed Ethiopian government of Meles Zenawi has been widely accused of human rights violations. After the Ethiopian opposition protested that the 2005 election was rigged, the Meles government killed 193 demonstrators and arrested about 80,000 others to quell the protests. Teshale Aberra, the president of the Supreme Court in Ethiopia's largest province who defected to Great Britain last fall, said, "There is massive killing all over. There is a systematic massacre." Meanwhile, in Somalia, the Islamic Courts replaced a weak transitional regime that was unable to control the warlords, who, since 1991, have turned the countryside into a Hobbesian jungle. The new government had brought a harsh Islamic justice and order to Somalia, which, for all its own injustice, was preferable to the chaos that had prevailed.

With the ouster of the Islamic Courts, the warlords are likely to return to power. Somalia will probably be plunged into another guerrilla war, as the Islamists try to retake power. And the United States will once again ally with these warlords and with a weak, corrupt regime. (According to Jonathan S. Landay and Shashank Bengali, the United States was actually paying off the aide to the militia leader responsible for killing 18 Americans in 1993 in the famous Black Hawk Down incident.) And who will benefit from American intervention? Al Qaeda, which will be able to draw up another recruiting poster from the American-sponsored invasion of a Muslim country. Al Qaeda will be able to point, in particular, to U.S. airstrikes that claimed to target Al Qaeda but instead killed scores of innocent civilians.

That's what happened on January 7 and 8 in Somali border towns; the United States claimed its bombs were intended to kill an Al Qaeda operative supposedly connected to the U.S. Embassy bombings in Kenya and Tanzania in 1998. But he was not among the victims; nor were other Al Qaeda members. Then reports began trickling in of civilian deaths from the AC-130 gunships that the United States supposedly sent to hunt down the single terrorist. According to Oxfam, the dead included 70 nomads who were searching for water sources. The U.N. refugee agency, UNHCR, estimated that 100 were wounded in an attack on Ras Kamboni, a fishing village near the Kenyan border. The Economist, which is not an outspoken critic of the Bush administration, wrote, "The Americans used the AC-130, a behemoth designed to shred large areas instantly, in the knowledge that the killing fields would be cleared before journalists and aid workers could reach them." It's a war crime to kill civilians indiscriminately.

In the 1990s, foreign policy experts, eager to identify a new enemy, hit upon the concept of a "rogue state." A rogue state operated outside the bounds of international norms and had to be restrained. The obvious candidates at the time were Libya, Iraq, and North Korea. But the Bush administration has turned the United States itself into a rogue state. Tough-minded conservatives, flexing their "muscular" inclinations from comfortable sinecures in Washington, may dismiss concerns about international law and war crimes as inventions of silly panty-waist liberals. But these inventions, which, in the modern era, were championed by Theodore Roosevelt, were meant to protect Americans as well as other peoples from the wars and the inhumanity that prevailed for thousands of years. We ignore them at their peril, whether in Haditha or Ras Kamboni.

Freakonomics. A Review.

2007-01-15T17:16:00.000-06:00

People usually believe things that they best understand. As John Galbraith wrote, "economic and social behaviour are complex, and to comprehend their character is mentally tiring". So we "adhere, as though to a raft,to those ideas which represent our understanding." This engenders "conventional wisdom". "The hallmark of the conventional wisdom", wrote Galbraith, "is acceptability." Conventional wisdom then is widely accepted. It does not follow however that it is correct too.

Any attempt to sift through conventional wisdom and establish truth is "mentally tiring", and its result is likely to be unpopular. Undaunted, the authors of the interesting little book Freakonomics, set about examining conventional wisdom in a chosen set of issues. More often than not, they find that conventional wisdom is wrong, or in the very least, irrelevant. Sure enough, their conclusions are provocative, dismaying, disturbing and provide lot of food for thought.

Steven Levitt, a brilliant young economist and Stephen Dubner, an enterprising journalist met when the later was working on an article about the former for New York Times Magazine in 2003. Levitt's work (empirical research in microeconomics) is of a nature which could appeal to lay readers. Dubner's background had given him a great ability to write beautifully and persuasively. Together, they began to work on the book.

The choice of topics was determined by Levitt's earlier research. All the topics are widely discussed and are loaded with conflicting opinions and mindsets. Some of the topics are the role of parents, the reasons behind the dramatic fall in crime in America during the 90s, the drug dealers, and the possibility of cheating by school teachers, etc. Any position on these topics is bound to annoy someone. But this book is particularly provocative because of its haughty dismissal of "experts" and its explicit mission to trash conventional wisdom.

The crime rose alarmingly in America during the 80s and there were not a few experts predicting apocalypse. Indeed, as 90s began everyone agreed that worse was yet to come. But quite strangely, and for a while inexplicably, crime began to fall. And drastically. Soon the same experts who were predicting apocalypse began to explain the reasons for this unexpected fall. All the standard theories were offered: strong economy, increased and stricter prison terms, innovative police measures and more police, restrictions on guns, decreased supply of crack cocaine, increased use of capital punishment etc. Levitt and Dubner even mention the number of articles in major newspapers that cite each of these reasons from 1991 to 2001. It serves to dramatize their own explanation for crime-drop. After dismissing many of the above as highly unlikely or marginal (strong economy, gun control, death sentence, innovative police measures) and admitting a moderate impact of others (more police personnel, decreased supply of cocaine, stricter prison terms), they claim that one of the major reasons for the crime-drop of 90s was the lack of criminals. In 1973 US Supreme Court legalized abortion and this meant hundreds of thousands of unwanted children were not born (around 1.6 million annually). The authors cite numerous studies to the effect that children of teenage, poor, unmarried women are highly likely to have criminal lives. So the fact that millions of people who would have reached their peak criminal phase (late teens) around early 90s were simply not born was a huge factor in the crime-drop. Surely this is a highly controversial claim with its intrusion onto lots of touchy areas. Still, as the authors claim, this is what the data reveal.

The whole book is liberally filled with equally controversial conclusions (what parents do doesn't really matter to the child's future, real-estate agents do not necessarily ensure that their clients get the best deal, many schoolteachers and Sumo wrestlers cheat, money does not win elections, drug dealing is not such a lucrative business for most of its practitioners).

The most serious shortcoming the book, in my view, is that it is essentially an elaborate and slightly repetitive plug for all the relevant research papers of Levitt. It only cites various studies, and does not offer many critical arguments or incisive analysis. All the conclusions are derived using a black box (various studies they cite) and the reader is required to simply trust that black box. Or, one can go and look into the box by studying the relevant research papers.

Most of the arguments in the book follow this pattern:

Let us study event X. The conventional wisdom has it that the reasons/consequences of X are A,B,C,D,.....But in fact the study S1 and/or S2 and/or S3 has confirmed that the real reason/consequences are only A,C,... and more importantly 1,2,...

Except for some incidentally logical passages and very little serious argument, the book has nothing more to offer in the form of scientific thought.

The authors admit right at the beginning that the book has no "unifying theme" and that it follows a "sort of treasure-hunt approach". This absence of unifying theme jars the reader throughout the book. It becomes particularly troubling toward the end when the reader is bombarded with pages after pages of useless data (which one forgets as soon as the page is turned) but in the end retains very little substance.

Aside from a few pointers to the correct way of thinking (need for a more critical study of data, importance of the difference between causality and correlation) the book is just an ad hoc collection of interesting information.

Wikipedia.

2007-01-12T16:50:00.000-06:00

This month Wikipedia celebrates its sixth birthday. Earlier this month the number of articles in English on Wikipedia crossed 1.5 million (the number stands at 1,578,633 as of this writing). This number grows by almost 2000 every single day. Compared to this the number of articles in Encyclopedia Britannica (over 122,264) is a far cry. More than a million people visit Wikipedia every day (more than half of whom visit the English language pages). 5 out of every 100 internet users visit Wikipedia daily. Only 11 other sites are visited by more people. Wikipedia is very often at the top of Google search results (almost always in the top 10 results) for things ranging from ideologies (communism - 1, capitalism - 1); sports (cricket - 2, football - 3); sciences (economics - 1, literature - 3); places (India - 1, France - 1, Budapest - 2); people (Sachin Tendulkar - 1, Einstein - 2); objects (water - 2, chair - 1).

Many things are taking place here. On the one hand, articles are being created at a rate, depth, and detail, which are utterly unprecedented. For instance, Wikipedia has detailed and easily accessible articles about "Triskaidekaphobia" and "Perfidious Albion" while a careful search did not reveal any relevant articles in Britannica. On the other hand, more and more people are consulting, quoting, referring to Wikipedia on any number of issues. It is rare to see a blog post these days which does not link to Wikipedia for the background info on some topic. This is the reason for the high Google page rank for the Wikipedia entries on any issue under the sun.

We notice then a couple of reasons for this mammoth phenomenon: extensiveness of the topics covered and the easy accessibility. Needless to say, an enormous amount of technical expertise went into achieving these qualities. Whether in allowing thousands of users to easily create and edit articles, or in enabling effective interlinking among articles, or in "redirecting", this expertise is clearly noticeable. But the real point of Wikipedia is this: its success is truly as much a matter of its millions of faceless users as of its creators. Perhaps more importantly, so are its drawbacks.

Wikipedia's more than six million articles in all languages are created by registered users and they are edited by any user, not necessarily registered. To register, one simply needs to pick a login name and password. An email address is not necessary. More than three million "Wikipedians", or registered users, edited articles at least 10 times since the time they registered. 80,000 of these edit at least 5 times every month and 10,000 edit at least 100 times a month.

It is not often the case that one single person has all (or even most) of the information on a topic. The success of Wikipedia lies in bringing together thousands of people (who think they have something to contribute on a particular topic) and enabling them to easily add their knowledge to the common pool. For instance, a look at the history page for the article on England informs us that it was created on 23 November 2001 by a user called Derek Ross with a tiny amount of information. Since then it has gone through 6398 edits, as of this writing, to become what it is today. For the last six months, every month there are roughly 500 edits on this article. So all these thousands of people are persuaded to spend their valuable time on adding to/refining/correcting/vandalising this article and without their contribution there would be no Wikipedia.

The last verb above, vandalising, is important. A glance at the history page again tells us that a number of the 6398 edits of the article on England have merely "reverted vandalism". Vandalism may or may not be intentional. But its effect is to make an article erroneous. However, tt is an enormously difficult task to define errors. Except in the case of a few easy factual errors, it is not at all clear how to define an error. This is where the most crucial problem with Wikipedia for me arises. It completely sidesteps the issue of authenticity.

I did a little experiment on this. On the morning of 8th January, 2007 I made the following two changes on Wikipedia:

1. On its page for existentialism, I changed the first sentence from "Existentialism is a philosophical movement that deals with human freedom" to "Existentialism is a philosophical movement that deals with human existence".

2. On its page for Sigrid Undset, in the first sentence I changed the year when she got Nobel prize in literature from 1928 (correct) to 1927 (incorrect).

As of this writing (12th January) both changes remain.

The first change is certainly more involved. As far as I know, it is misleading to say that existentialism deals with human freedom. It deals with human freedom also. But this is not the first sentence one writes on the topic. (Indeed, the whole article in wikipedia is unsatisfactory. I would definitely prefer this article on Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.) Of course, what I wrote is more misleading. But surely, thousands of people since 8th January have read the first sentence and retained only that confusing piece of information.

The second is more straightforward. It alarms me that no one has corrected it yet. A Google search on Sigrid Undet returns the Wikipedia page as the third result. Many people would click on this ahead of the first two results. It is conceivable that lots of people have looked at this page in the last five days and went away with the wrong information. A little bit of checking (indeed, even reading the Wikipedia page till the end) would correct them. But of course few people would actually check.

It will be interesting to see how long it will be before these changes are reverted.

This is the crux of the Wikipedia phenomenon: it pays no attention to the matter of expertise. A teenager sitting in her home in a remote village in China with an internet connection has as much weight and scope to expound on the causes and effects of the Great Depression as the renowned expert at Harvard who has spent a life time thinking about the subject. This is in itself neither disturbing nor comforting. There are contexts where it may be either.

Personally, I would not look at (or at least be very suspicious of) Wikipedia on many topics (like existentialism). On factual issues (like the dates, numbers etc) I would definitely confirm them if I am making serious use of those facts. In spite of these reservations, I am convinced that Wikipedia is a great tool with unlimited scope.

Wikipedia is an amazing possibility let loose on the world wide web, for anyone connected to explore. It is a curious entity: full of wonderful things, but never really able to deny the threat of a fatal flaw somewhere. The ironical thing about Wikipedia is that its greatness can not exist without the possibility that that greatness is flawed. If you try to remove one the other goes too.