Are Indians Genetically Stupid?

This article got me thinking, nay, fuming. And this one, even more so.

Why is India's average IQ 81, and that of China 100? Is that why India is growing slower than China? It seems politically incorrect, racist but why is it impossible?

Or is it because, well, India is poorer, so Indian children are more mal-nourished, so their brains don't develop? Is there a poverty bias in IQ tests? After all, Latinos consistently test lower in IQ than Caucasians in the US - and they're poorer. Are they poorer because they have lower IQs, or is it the other way around? Is there also a language gap when it comes to the IQ tests? Were the IQ tests in India taken in English, a non native tongue to most Indians, and taken in Chinese in China - considering that English is less widespread in China, so it is conventional to do nothing in English?

And what of India? Are the richer people smarter than the poorer people? Historically, India has had this shame-on-humanity-caste-system. Did it have anything to do with IQ?

And now with this reputation for smarts than Indian Americans are building in the US ... what does that mean for India? With all the "outliers" drifting towards greener pastures in the US of A, are we leaving India a dumber place than before?

My two cents, finally: The study is not peer reviewed. It is a book. Books are not peer reviewed. It is pure junk, and more rigorous studies need to be performed to be convincing. Averaging some 10 tests in Shanghai and arbitrarily subtracting 6 will not make good IQ measurement.

While it might be possible that reality is not politically correct, I just don't think we have the information to call it yet.

India's new Nobel Hope?

If Jairam. Ramesh, in his capacity as the minister for environment and forests, does something concrete to tackle India's all-pervasive filth, he would be a candidate for the Nobel.

Here is Mr. Ramesh, contending that India deserves a Nobel for its filth.

If anybody makes serious inroads into India's filth, I will myself force the Nobel commitee to give them the prize. Because I don't think the lives of those who live within the filth (and there's around a 100M, or 12 Israels, least of those in India) are peaceful now.

And how tough do you think removing filth is? There's a lot of poor people out there who are suffering. Pay some poor people some money to take care of the filth, ensure that they're doing their job to get their pay .. and things should take care of themselves.

Mental Workouts

I have decided to stem my mental atophy by doing the of occasional mental push ups. Today, I tried to prove that \Sigma^N_{i=1}(x_i - \tilde x)^2 = \Sigma^N_{i=1}(x_i ^2- \tilde x^2)

I feel proud of myself. I intend to work out these algebraic problems occasionally (perhaps throw in some indefinite integrals for fun), so that I keep my brain nimble.

I would rather a Bonobo ran Goldman Sachs

New Scientist has this remarkable article. And here I quote:

There's even one observation of a bonobo who worried about getting too much. During tests, a female received large amounts of milk and raisins, but could hardly miss the eyes of her friends on her, who were watching her from a short distance. After a while, she refused all rewards. Looking at the experimenter, she kept gesturing to the others until they were given a share of the goodies. Only then did she finish her stash.This bonobo was doing the smart thing. Apes think ahead, and if she had eaten her fill right in front of the rest, there might have been repercussions when she rejoined them later in the day, not unlike the nasty notes scribbled on the portrait of Richard Fuld, the final chairman and CEO of Lehman Brothers.

Since Lehman is only a figment of people's imaginations right now, we must use Lloyd Bla-I'mdoinggod'swork-nkfein as a proxy. (As an aside, clearly he believes in a malevolent god rather than a benevolent one).

So, if anyone's keeping count the current score is Bonobos 1, Goldman 0. (Unless we're talking money here, then the score would be Bonobos 0, Goldman 1e+10.

Oceans Better at Absorbing Carbon?

New research in Geophysical Research Letters, by Knorr et al. seems to indicate that oceans are still absorbing a constant proportion of CO2. Their efficacy as a carbon sinks not seem to be deteriorating as the concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere is increasing.

Here's my two cents (as a layperson who has informed himself though the perusal of websites such as RC and the like)

This basically means that CO2 concentrations may not increase as drastically as some of the models have suggested, due to the worsening of the sink performance. But that certainly does not place us out of the woods. Concentrations are currently as 387ppm, which are quite high already - and they do look like hitting 450.

This essentially tells us that nature might be more forgiving than some of the gravest predictions. This is good news, a sign of hope. Also, I expect this still lies within the error bar of the IPCC projections. Of course cuts in CO2 are still necessary!

However, if I were you, I would wait for updates on RC (or some other resource made by actual climatologists) before I reach a conclusion. I'm no climatologist.

India's Brutal Occupation of Kashmir?

Professor Noam Chomsky, in his latest article available on his website lashes out at every known power structure.

Even India. He calls the Indian occupation of Kashmir "brutal".
I am sure, given the chance, he would offer a much different take on India's naxalite problem.

Professor Chomsky is usually correct. I pretty much agree to a good degree with him on a lot of topics.

Perhaps this tells us that even democratic power structures are, to an extent, repressive and evil. Consider Kashmir. Yes, the Kashmiris are suffering - at the hands of India, Pakistan and the Mujahideen.

Yes, things are brutal. But what are the options? What are the options that will be acceptable to the states of India and Pakistan? What are the options acceptable to the people of India and Pakistan? Is a reasonable resolution possible in a democracy?

Perhaps professor Chomsky's criticisms of the Indian state are actually criticisms of democracy in general. That would make sense. Because any democracy in India's shoes would occupy a territory like Kashmir. What if Pakistan were also a secular democracy? Do you think they would still not lay claim to Kashmir?

A Depression Averted

I stumbled upon this website while browsing Professor Paul Krugman's blog. The plots in this website convince me that

(1) What happened last year very similar to 1929
(2) Governments knew how to handle this downturn quite well, thanks to Keynes
(3) It looks like things are getting better again

Though plots pertaining to India and China are not shown here (primarily because they did not matter back in 1929), I anticipate that would be interesting reading too.

These plots do indeed make the case for economic stimulus very strong. I would like to see conservatives reply to this.

Benefits of Wildlife Conservation

It is nice to see the lives of those who have taken up violence terminated.

Kudos to the bears. Let's hope their numbers increase, and that they kill more terrorists.

Malthus Vindicated?

Yes, there is a lot of talk going on about climate change. There's hypotheticals being discussed. There's the Stephens at superfreakonomics trying to convince the main offenders, the public in the western world that the current global warming scientific consensus is similar to the joke that was global cooling in the 70s and 80s. There's that superfatted fanatic moron Rush Limbaugh and that nitwit fossil James Inhofe shouting that it is a lie.

And then there's ground realities. This is one of the most startling studies I have seen in a very long time. Not model projections, but data.

Tibet's glaciers are retreating. And they're going back like nobody's business. And the tree line is receding by 350m a year. (I really can't believe this 350m statistic, but apparently that's the way it is).

What does this mean to the Indian public? One simple word: THE END OF THE GANGA during summer. And possibly the more sporadic monsoons. This is a humanitarian disaster.

Droughts in north India. Desertification. Floods in south China. Droughts in north china. This is so dangerous because 30% of humanity is under the gun here. And it would be horrible if a semi-literate blowhard in the western world stops action. (I'm talking about the Limbaugh here).

Update: More perishing glaciers. This time in Tanzania.

Dyson vs Wienberg

Freeman Dyson is an eminent physicist and darling of conservatives, when it comes to climate change. While he does believe that the climate is changing due to man, he thinks that projections of the future due to models are questionable. (Personally, I agree with him to an extent - of course there are uncertainties associated with the models for the future, but, since a lot of models seem to be agreeing in trend - I think humans must take them seriously. Things could also be worse than projected!).

Steven Weinberg, an American Atheist, who probably thinks that it is wonderful that Israel kills a gazillions Gazans for each of the pathetic little rockets that they send across the border, said the following:

"With or without religion, good people can behave well and bad people can do evil; but for good people to do evil—that takes religion. "

Mr. Dyson agrees with the statement, but adds another caveat:

"And for bad people to do good things—that takes religion."

Fascinating stuff.

The "green" agenda

I don't personally like calling environmentalism "green". It sounds pompous. But I do think this website has some quotations from really smart people:

http://www.green-agenda.com/

Here's one from Paul Elrich at Stanford:

Giving society cheap, abundant energy would be the equivalent of giving an idiot child a machine gun

Feynman on Teaching

Rechard P Feynman, surely the world's best known physics teacher wrote this. His thoughts on teaching are fairly profound - even though he calls it a pain in the neck.

I find it a very inspiring piece. Especially this paragraph:

If you're teaching a class, you can think about the elementary things that you know very well. These things are kind of fun and delightful. It doesn't do any harm to think them over again. Is there a better way to present them? The elementary things are easy to think about; if you can't think of a new thought, no harm done; what you thought about it before is good enough for the class. If you do think of something new, you're rather pleased that you have a new way of looking at it.

Snakes on a ship: looks like someone's been reading my blog

There's this gentleman in Europe who decided to transport said reptiles/mammals strapped to his body on a cruise ship.
Avid reader(s) of this blog might recall a post that I had made long ago regarding snakes, airplanes and how to ship one onto the other. Looks like this gentleman did something similar. Would have been able get through security to fly with those things taped on to him? We wonder...

This is probably not going to work

Looking at how wonderfully successful cloud seeding has not been in India and other places, I cannot but be skeptical at this megalomaniacal scheme.

The Clean Coal Situation

The moniker 'clean coal' has become a lightning rod for criticism. Liberals (and I am a liberal too) seem to think that clean coal technology is a joke, an obfuscation by greedy energy companies to make profits off warm and eco-friendly sounding names. The airwaves, these days, are saturated by ads (a) advocating clean coal technologies (b) claiming that there's no such thing as clean coal. Even the yes men (whom I usually appreciate) have gone on record claiming that there's no such thing as clean coal.

So, what is clean coal?

Let me summarize. A good place, of course, to start is the wikipedia page talking about clean coal.

Coal is dirty. It is basically carbon in its elemental form. When this carbon burns in oxygen, it forms IR trapping CO2. And that's why coal is dirty in the modern perspective.

Natural gas, on the other hand, is essentially methane. The good thing with methane is that one of the products of combustion is also water. Since methane consists of a significant amount of hydrogen, the amount of CO2 per unit Joule of energy produced is considerably less.

The idea behind clean coal is to use either of the following approaches

(1) Use pulverized coal (as is being done right now). But use a carbon capture mechanism in the flue gases. This can pose some issues, since the flue gases are typically at ambient pressure. This CO2 has to be captured, compressed, liquified, transported and sequestered.

(2) Use a coal gasification scheme, where the chemical energy is transferred from C to nH2 + mCO (a syngas). (A final goal is to make m = 0, converting all the C to CO2.) This CO2 can be concentrated BEFORE combustion itself (the second C in CCS). This is the idea behind the IGCC, and this is where I come in.

The fuel obtained from the coal gasifier contains a lot of hydrogen, and relatively less CO2. This results in a higher concentration of water vapor in the flue gases. Water vapor gas a higher thermal conductivity - and therefore results in a heavier thermal load on the blade. We need more aggressive cooling of the blade - and that's my hope for the future. This gives me a reason to keep on working on better cooling of turbine blades.

Neither of the two methods is economical right now. Things will of course should be different in a cap-n-trade regime. This method of sequestering produced carbon will of course add to costs - and this would never be able to compete with current fossil fuel based energy costs.


Now that you have all the CO2 that you have either sucked from the fuel before or after combustion. The kicker is, what does one do about it? How does one store this captured carbon?

One could do the obvious stuff like grow trees (especially in deserts), bury trees in landfills, create more landfills, have pet algae sucking in CO2... But that's not what I am interested in. I am interested in the more physical ways to sequester the carbon. And here's a few (which I glean from wikipedia...)

1. Put it in spent oil wells
2. Put it in acquifiers
3. Put it in underwater (though this might end up acidifying.the sea, destroying coral reefs and killing the fauna).

Let me agree with Harry Reid here. At this point in time there is indeed nothing called clean coal. There is something called 'cleaner-coal' technology. This technology might sound bad, but it is nothing to scoff at. While we cannot get rid of all CO2 from syngas (making m=0 is very, very tough), we can reduce carbon emissions significantly. We have this sobering reality:

Coal is actually one of the world's easiest fuels. It is available in large quantities in USA, India and China. India and China don't consume much energy per-capita at this point, but they're rapidly growing. Their energy needs are growing. Energy usage will increase in India and China - and that's a human rights necessity. (I expect India and China are representative of the developing world in general). It does not look like the usage of coal will decline on planet earth. It looks all set to increase. So, if we use coal, might as well ensure that the coal technologies under use are cleaner coal technologies rather than the current dirty coal technology.

And here's another point: rather than have politicians decide what works and what does not (an approach that has a success rate in single digit percentages), why not let the market do it? All the politicians have to do is, after all their internal bickering, come up with a Carbon trading scheme - or just a carbon tax - which will make apparent economic savings of clean coal in comparison with dirty coal. And then, the politicians can just take their hands of the wheel as far as climate change is concerned.

In conclusion, while people are right to ridicule current clean coal technologies, the future almost certainly has a place for clean coal, given the relative abundance of coal reserves in comparison with depleting petroleum reserves.

Arundhati Roy on the Maoists

Ms. Roy, who seems to want to fashion herself as India's Noam Chomsky, contends that the government must end its vilification of and arbitrary attacks on the Maoists. She urges unconditional talks with the naxal terror groups.

I can't say I disagree with her. India should negotiate with the maoists - because, at some level, they are people who perceive they have been dispossessed and ripped off by the state apparatus. expect that they have indeed been ripped of by the Indian government - and they have taken to arms as a last resort.

We have two options before us. Declare all out war against these Maoists (like the US had done in Afg. and Iraq) - or negotiate with them and find out what their problem is. Arrest those who murdered policemen - hang them using the judicial apparatus - but just don't create any more entropy by declaring war on them. Nothing good can come of it - as both Iraq and Afghanistan show right now.

I fully agree with Noam Chomsky on Iraq and Afghanistan. It is quite likely that I will fully agree with Ms. Roy here, when I do read a little more about the Maoist struggle in India, which I intend to do almost immediately.

My Journal Tally Has Doubled This Weekend

Nice weekend as weekends go.

Friday evening, I had two journal publications. Monday morning, I have 4.

I had two papers languishing in the recommended-to-journal-by-conference-session-chair-but-hanging-in-balance-waiting-for-journal-editor deadlock.

Looks like the journal editor was working this weekend, clearing up his backlog.

Good stuff.

What not to do when trains run late.

When trains run late in India, and one has to catch a connecting flight, what options does one have?

One smart gentleman in Delhi decided to try his luck with a bomb hoax on a plate. He is currently, presumably, making friends with an irate cellmate in central delhi jail, one hopes.

Karzai's Humiliation

The western media confirms that even American military interference cannot ensure a fair election in the middle east. Afghanistan elections have allegedly gone the way of the Iranian elections, the west thinks.

And for some reason the Obama administration thinks that humiliating the strongman who runs the country into accepting a runoff would be good for the morale of the very proud Afghan people.

You see, it's all about sustaining political momentum in the US. The American voter is going to hold the US government responsible for screwing up the elections in Afghanistan. So, might as well make sure that the American public is convinced that democracy is doing well in Afghanistan - regardless of the fact that western interference will lead to further deaths in Afg. and now, unfortunately Pakistan also.

This article from the Hindu is a scathing analysis - the sort of analysis you just don't see in the American media, which is busy Manufacturing consent. (The Indian Media is quite reliable when it comes to affairs that do not concern it. But when it comes to Naxal violence, we see the Indian media take the government's side, just like the American media is taking its government's side right now.)

The article also contains this very good sentence towards the end:

All the same, the U.S. officials have begun arguing, the raison d’etre of continued western troop presence in Afghanistan still remains insofar as Pakistan’s stability has now become the new focal point. But then, no one remembers anymore that it was the U.S. occupation of Afghanistan that in the first instance destabilized Pakistan. Thus, the U.S. sidesteps the core issue – a timeline for ending the occupation of Afghanistan.

Who knew?

Who knew that one of the biggest problems in the successful intstallation of wind turbines here, there are everywhere is... radar?

Turns out, wind turbines are getting picked up by radars - and this noise is confusing military and civilian aircraft monitors in densely populated continental europe. (This is not so much a problem in sparsely populated US).

And turns out a British company called qinetiq has developed a way to screen the blades from radar without using a lot of paint on the blade. (Using an absorbent layer on the blade is a non-starter of an idea, considering that these things flex).

Fascinating.

The RTI

The RTI act in India is something that must not be tampered with. The idea of holding government employees accountable will go a long way in stemming corruption in India. Corruption in India is deeply inequitizing in my opinion. It allows the rich to get richer by bribing their way through.

Hope Dr. Singh listens. Putting arbitrary clauses against 'vexatious and frivolous complaints' in the law will present a massive loophole - and can also provide a shield for the guilty. The additional inconvenience caused by looking at frivolous requests will certainly not outweigh the societal costs of making corruption easier.

Dr. Singh is probably the most intellectual PM we have ever had. Would he want to go down in history as the person under whom (a) It was enacted AND (b) It was weakened?

A Chomsky Interview

This article from the Belfast Telegraph.

I am unable to find a single sentence in this article that I disagree with. From taking issues with America's arrogrant and entropy generating response to 9/11 to optimism about human rights to frustration with inaction regarding climate change.

Most of the people in the world (except 300M odd Americans and 8M odd people from Israel) think of Prof. Chomsky as the most relevant intellectual alive. 6.3B people can't be wrong.

Interestingly, Hardltalk will be interviewing the Man on 29th October, for broadcast in Novermber 2009. Here is the link - one can submit questions.

Population, Contraception and the Like

This is in response to a particularly egregiously underinformed article in the NYTimes. Rush Limbaugh was on to something (of course for the wrong reason, that goes without saying). Here's why:

Population growth is no longer a problem (link to Hans Rosling) in countries like India. India has 2.7 children per woman - and the number is coming down. It is higher than US' 2.05, yes. It is impossible that India's population will double now. The bomb went off long ago when people stopped dying, thanks to modern medicine and better sanitaion. It took some time to adjust to a low birth rate. The same is true for most south Asian countries. Africa, on the other hand, just did not develop. Of course African population will go up this century - it should, because Africans will stop dying because of ill-health.

Since the average American woman adds 2.05 people to this planet, and the average Indian woman adds 2.7, the question is, whose offspring will warm the earth more? With per-capita emissions of CO2 20 times more in the US than in India, it is a no brainer to see that the American woman is 20 times more at fault than the Indian woman.

Alas the best green technology is still the financial derivative, which can destroy economies, start recessions and reduce carbon footprint. Go, Goldman, Go!

A big yes to the yes men

Suppose, back in the 1600s, someone had penetrated into the bastion of orthodoxy that was the church, and accepted (in the name of the Pope) that the solar system was heliocentric, would it have not been a wonderful thing?

One such incident occured today in washington DC, when a very agreeable yes-man posed as a member of America's chamber of commerce, an organization whose anachronistic denial of climate change makes them appear like the modern day flat earth society.

For a few moments, some of the people in DC believed that the powerful chamber of commerce stopped living in denial and had come to accept climate change as a reality. These were just a few minutes. The chamber members finally woke up, but it was fun while it lasted..

Hyderabad's New Flyover

Turns out, Hyderabad is trying to treat the handful of rich people who inhabit it quite well. There's this new 11.6km flyover that they made in the city, which they're banning two wheelers and auto rickshaws from, because some people are more equal than others.



View Larger Map

Basically, the entire region on above map where the road is highlighed (From Mehdipatnam to NH7) is to be a flyover. This flyover, incidentally, is India's largest - proof that India's rich handful are turning their country within a country into a developed oasis.

I find it reprehensible that the government is trying to encourage such elitist behaviour. I am all for building these flyovers (it's good for the economy to transport goods fast and to employ many people while building it), but they MUST allow auto-rickshaws, two wheelers and the like on board.

I made a discovery today

As implied by the title, I did indeed make a discovery on the internets today. The discovery has something to do with a Swedish professor of Public health, Hans Rosling. Professor Rosling has these incredible presentations on TED. His talks bring statistics to life.

So, it turns out that he has done all the hard work of putting those statistics up on the internets, so that one can bring them to life oneself. His remarkable gapminder website is a wonderful way to kill time and enrich one's understanding of the planet. If one is lazy, one can watch Prof. Rosling himself deliver talks..

I had seen the TED talk by prof. Rosling a few years ago when it first came out. I did not know that the software was up and alive. I stumbled upon an obscure Tyler Cowen post, which linked to gapminder. I've been hooked to it ever since.

On birth rates

This is a wonderful website that I got off Tyler Cowen's Marginal Revolution. There's several possible combinations one can try on the x and y axes.

You can see the population bomb go off in (a) USA (b) India (c) Pakistan (d) China (e) UK in this link. Most fascinating.

A billion hungry

350M Indians don't know where they will get their next meal from. An America in India does not know if it is going to eat.

This is clearly not acceptable. We really need another Norman Borlaug.

Water Vapor Blues

There's this standard argument that so called 'climate skeptics' like to toss around.

There's so much water vapor in the atmosphere. Since water vapor is a more potent greenhouse gas, surely, the teeny weeny CO2 concentrations (only limited to ppms) can't trap all that radiation! Thus Al-gore is after my bank account.

I'd always assumed that the amount of water vapor was constant, and not growing - therefore it was not to be such a big deal. This is probably incorrect, since an increase in global temperatures will mean more evaporation, and therefore more water vapor at a given point of time. A positive feedback.

However, things, it seems are much more complicated. The atmosphere is so massive that it does not act like a single lumped layer. There's some radiation frequencies that the atmosphere fully absorbs (and starts re-radiating), there's some that go through unscathed.

Apparently, CO2 that's way high up, where no water vapor molecules dare to go. Also CO2 spectral transmittivity differs from that of water vapor. That's why increasing CO2 concentration increasing average global temperatures. This remarkable article from realcimate.org clarifies. I also found this page fun to peruse. Fairly wonkish, I will have to read this in more detail later.

So, I tell you why there's so many skeptics out there. The science is too tough to understand, so people would like to follow their gut. And the gut of the average American conservative is a pretty simple thing. It will follow the mantras of individual responsibility and small government. The American conservative does not think too much of 'ivory tower inhabiting liberal intellectuals'.

A first post on Music

To readers of the blog, I might come across as someone who is absolutely tuneless. But if one were to consult the wife, the neighbors or even the lab-mates, one would realize that the reality is different. I listen to music almost all the time.

What kind of music am I into?

• I'm a classic rock fan, who loves Zeppelin, Floyd, Beatles, Dylan, Neil Young and the like.
• I like my metal heavy. Some tracks by Maiden, Metallica, Priest and Megadeth. The only light metal I like is Lithium by Nirvana.
• I like western classical music. One of the pieces I really love is Ludwig Van's Ninth. That's why I am hoping that I never fall into the hands of the British government, a-la-Alex from Burgess' 'A clockwork orange'. I like Tchaikovsky and Morzart and Vanessa Mae.
• I have been listening to a lot of jazz lately, (especially Steely Dan). I also like Prasanna's take on jazz. He's incredible with the guitar - especially when he gets into intricate south Indian raagas.
• I personally think that I am a philistine of sorts right now, since I do not have ear for south Indian music. One of my goals in life is to develop an understanding of Indian music.
• One of the genres of music that I have been getting into of late, is essentially inspired by Dad. He's discovered this entire thing called 'alt-country' (sitting in front of his amazon in India). I usually purchase CDs in the US of A, and look for Bakras traveling to India to deposit the same with him. And I must say he's onto something good. The music sounds really good. I've gotten to alt-country all by myself too - liking and disliking songs on Pandora. Bands such as 'Son Volt', 'Band of Horses', 'Fleet Foxes' and 'Slobberbone', the last of which has a remarkable rocker called 'gimme back by dog'.