On the study of plant diseases through photography

From the seventeen contestants for the post of Saras garden sec a couple of years ago, to Randi’s classic manifesto that included points like ‘campaigning will be banned outside Himalaya’, ‘boys will be allowed to visit girl’s rooms’, election season throws up it’s fair share of stories that enter insti lore, the swapping of which adds some spice to some of the blandest of dinners served anywhere in the world, food as Serum wrote in the register “that is not fit to be served to dogs”, finally drawing the attention of our Al Hadji Doctor.

Re-produced here is the manifesto of Jam’s new garden sec. Don’t miss the ‘grunt of the sun’ in point seven.

Manifesto
(Garden Secretary)
Name:
Standing for : Garden secretary

A garden is not only a place where plants live, but also where one can get pleasure and happiness. The unforgotten fragrance of flowers and beauty of a garden can mesmerize anybody.

Our garden is far from reality. The following plan is a small step in favor of developing it.

1) I like to develop the small area before the notice board. It will be better if we have money plants which can grow in shady areas. It will be beautiful if we have grass too.

2) I plan to have bushes in the empty place before the 1st wing , to the north-west of the baddy court.

3) It’s a good idea to trim the trees so that the monkeys cannot enter the wings like 5thwing.

4) I like to plant a few more trees, and we surely have a lot of free space. For example, just before 2nd wing, we can have more trees.

5) As you can see, all our trees look ill, mainly the coconut trees. If you take pics of them you can surely see how bad they are. So I like to feed vermicompost or manures to the trees.

6) This is good idea, but tough to implement. I like to have a small scale pond in the tank present on the right side of our walking road. I like to have small water plants like lotuses and a grill on the top to protect them. (suggested by my friend)

7) For the sake of our top wings, to help them bear the grunt of the sun, we can have lot of small scale flower plants and creepers on the top of our hostel. It has many other advantages too.

8 ) If people agree, we can also have a small area in front of our hostel for writing our hostel name in grass.

I can assure you that I’ll work hard and renovate our garden and remove the stain on our hostel that we don’t have a good garden.

Oh and apart from gardening, his interests include kernel hacking, the subject of a talk he is going to give at the next LUG meeting.

PanIIT Day 1

What was intended to be a three day food (and drink )fest, changed minutes into the first event at PanIIT(the first for me atleast) i.e, lunch. A pale, excitable, middle-aged guy with a high-pitched voice and a habit of repeating “What’s that?” sits down and starts the usual life-then-and-now conversation. Turns out the guy is U. N. Umesh, a Professor at the business school in Washington State University. More than an hour and several fascinating mini-lectures later, having clean forgotten about Anniyan who was waiting to use my card for lunch and who was oddly enough in my room earlier in the morning looking up the best B-schools in the world(Spain of all the places, has quite a few in the top ten), he gives us his mail ID and we split.

Next up was an innovation panel discussion moderated by a familiar looking someone who was not on the official program and having gone late after lunch, all I knew about him at the end was that he taught a course at Caltech. It’s funny how IITians keep popping up everywhere.
Fittingly enough, the guy who stole the show was a non-IITian.

His advice? ‘Jump right in and innovate as you go along’.
Er, yeah. Of course. What better way to burn the family millions?
The first site he starts is from his apartment, a tamil portal. He’s making no money but notices the traffic to the matrimony section is the highest.
So he starts bharatmatrimony.com
Then he realises Indians being conservative don’t like their photos being shown to all and sundry. So, he adds a password protect feature, so only people you pick can see the pic(pardon the alliteration).
Then he finds many don’t have a credit card. So, he ties up with the Sify iWays and accepts payment through them.
People here still prefer horoscope matching to interest matching but the more modern brides/grooms to be don’t have horoscopes. So, he introduces a feature that uses your time and place of birth to draw up a horoscope and even automatically matches it. Now that IS brilliant.

An evening talk and pointless walk later¹, we end up drawn into conversation over dinner with a Jam alumni , a business head at Murugappa who offers internships, which a B.C sitting next to me gleefully offers to take him up on. His gyaan? “Don’t make the mistake I made. Go do that MS, with or without aid. You need the exposure.”
Reading this Shiny?

Pranesh having pointed out to my disbelief the now ubiquity of twitter(even in India), quoting the example of the Bombay terror strikes, when even news channels were following twitter, I check to see if PanIIT has created enough of a ripple et voila!

¹ No, there were no drinks. Yes, the food sucked.

An Exception To The Rule

Every year, when you have just about given up on the new bunch of bashful, tongue-tied freshies, you find one star, the one kid who can’t stop talking. This year’s star was so special, the unwritten no recording, no publicising rule just had to be broken. This kid’s greatest talent lies in a) his outrageous mallu accent and theatrics and b) the double meanings his bad grammar lends to most of what he says.

Here’s a sample:

We: Do you know your room-father¹?

F: Yes.

W:How do you know him?

F: I slept with him.

(we burst out laughing)

F:(waving his arms) No. No. Not like that. I slept on the floor and he slept on top.

(we are helpless with laughter by now)

F:(his voice almost a whine) Why you seniors all think like this? I slept on the floor and he slept above the bed.

W: So why did you sleep in your room-father’s room?

F: You kept me here so late last night, that when I got back, my roomie had slept with the door lock.

W: Then what did you do. Didn’t you think of waking him up or were you that keen to sleep with your room father?

F: I banged the door.

W: You banged the door? Then what?

F:The other people in my wing came and we all banged the door.

The obvious downside of ragging him for too long of course is that you start hearing double entendres everywhere.

V(while ragging another freshie): Hey, this guy is boring. I want F.

We: You want F?

V:Wait I meant, I want him to cum here.

1:For the ununitiated, your room father is the guy who occupied your room before you did. Mine for example is doing his PhD on String Theory after doing a Dual in Aero.

One interesting nick I came across belonged to one of the first to occupy the new hostels. On being asked who his room father was, he said he had none and so he was called Test Tube Baby 209 or TTB 209 for short.

Audacious and Tata Indicom

I’ve been wanting to write about a couple of Linux fixes I was forced to work through myself, so here goes.

A problem several people have had with the more popular music players like Amarok has been the extremely low volume outputs, especially if like me you splice a pair of cabinet speakers with an impedence of something like 8 ohms to a headphone jack.

So if you want to watch a movie, you have to use VLC with it’s built in audio amplifier and for music you need the xmms family of players(Beep, Audacious etc.) with their far superior equalisers.

The catch though, is that none of these players have a music library and when you have a collection 20 Gb or so in size, with favourite tracks hidden in obscure folders, a music library is indispensable.

Methlab is a music manager that allows you to play and enqueue files in your player of choice. Apart from a couple of dependencies and configuration files that need a little fiddling with, using it is a breeze.

The second is fix is a actually a solution to a minor bug in wvdial.

To set up the Tata Indicom dialer,

1. a simple sudo wvdialconf will suffice.

2. then edit the /etc/wvdial.conf to add a username and password and the number to be dialed like so

Phone = #777
Username = internet
Password = internet

Finally, run sudo wvdial every time you want to connect to the net.

The problem arises when you take your modem to another city. By default, the dialer tries to route the data to the proxy originally detected(no running wvdialconf again doesn’t help). So while wvdial connects without a hitch, you still cannot access the net. Any site you opens just times out, vainly trying to connect to the old proxy.

So you need an additional command:

sudo route add default gw x.x.x.x

where x.x.x.x is the remote IP address that wvdial connects to and which has to be run after the wvdial completes the dialing process.

Of course, a script to automate it is the ideal finishing touch, which allows me to introduce zenity, a command that allows you to interface with the GUI from the terminal.

Here’s the script I wrote to allow you to connect and disconnect from the GUI alone:

#!/bin/bash
sudo wvdial &
sleep 9
sudo route add default gw 172.23.129.14
zenity –title=”Dialer” –text=”Connected” –question
dis= zenity –title=”Dialer” –text=”Disconect Now?” –question

if [ dis=0 ]
then
sudo killall wvdial
fi

The sleep command is necessary to delay the next command so that wvdial has sufficient time to conect.

Of Shoes and Ships and Sealing Wax, Of Gaffes and Kings

Prince Philip talking about the food crisis a couple of days ago said something along the lines of “The food prices are going up and while everyone thinks it’s because there isn’t enough food, it’s actually because the demand is too great, too many people you see.” Now, quite a few times, he has said down right idiotic or insulting things in an attempt to prove he too possesses the fabled British wit. But, firstly since his gaffes have shown a loudmouthedness rather than a lack of understanding(till now that is) and secondly since he is basically a figurehead’s figurehead, his gaffe’s aren’t really in the same class as those of a certain G.W.Bush. The BBC of course keeps a comprehensive list of his gaffes .

Forget the rising oil prices, the use of agricultural land for ethanol production, the rising demand from India and China, poor production due to droughts etc. The bottom line is we are short of food and with the population continuing to rise, so too will the shortage.

In the wild, a shortage of food would mean a natural decline in population through starvation; a prospect we can not, must not contemplate. So what are the alternatives?

Genetically modified crops with their higher yield, higher resistance to pests etc are the obvious choice. But again, you can get only so much more out of a given area.

Vegetables grown somewhere in southern China are being heralded as the solution to the world’s food shortage. Their secret? They are grown from seeds that have spent a couple of weeks in space and their initial development in near zero gravity conditions makes them for some unknown reason swell to several times their usual size.

Again that too has it’s limits. So if we are not to end up subsisting on different flavoured yeasts grown chemically as envisaged by Asimov, we would need to seriously start thinking about those moon and Mars bases.

Population control is actually a tricky question. It’s seems fairly certain that population growth is actually neccessary for sustainable economic growth. Which is why countries with low birth rates like Japan or the Scandinavian countries actually offer parents incentives to have kids in stark contrast to the penalties imposed by the Chinese.

In fact, it is a historically documented fact that civilizations have to grow at something like 15% every 20 years or so for it to survive, which would mean that we as a species must grow at that rate, since for all practical purposes, we are now one civilization. That would mean the colonization of other planets and solar systems is inevitable.

Imagine now a sphere in space which is our ’sphere of influence’, growing slowly at some rate greater than the minimum needed for survival. The funny part is, after a while, the minimum rate of growth of the radius of this sphere exceeds the speed of light.

So if the speed of light is an insurmountable barrier, we are all doomed anyway.

The Crumbling Fourth Pillar

The most powerful person on the planet might for the first time ever be a woman simply because she broke down(or pretended to?) when it seemed she was down and out. Obama had taken Iowa and for the most part looked like he would take New Hampshire as well before Clinton’s emotional outburst saw that an increased number of women turned out to vote for her the next day. In turn, Obama’s strong run is built on his charm and eloquence. So where does that leave Edwards?

Most elections somehow or the other end up being a clash of personalities(or in the case of the Gujarat elections, a mandate on one personality) but when the media is dominated by a page threeish tendency to sensationalise, a million times more column space or newstime is devoted to how a said candidate interacts with the people, how understanding he/she is, his/her facial expressions and so on. Poor old Edwards who was the first to come out with a Social Security scheme(and the most comprehensive), the first to talk about his ideas on how to take the economy out of the slump, in short the one candidate who by far seems to know exactly what he’s talking about, is languishing in third because of his perceived lack of what? Social Skills? Oh yes, a great many of the articles devoted to him have discussed whether he should have stood at all with the recurrence of his wife’s cancer rather than what he stands for.

So is it any wonder Bush or Modi gets re-elected with a media too lazy to dig for the truth. After all who likes to hear bad news?

Every paper and channel has it’s bias, often reflecting the ideas of the person running the show. Even the venerable Hindu is slightly left leaning(N. Ram was active in Communist affiliated student unions in his college days). An interesting page claims seven Jews control most of the American media. But then, only channels like FOX News can get away with misrepresentation of facts, selective coverage, outright lies and have the gall to think everybody else in the media is a left wing fanatic. Bill O’Reilly, Fox News anchor and bane of the left famously said “There are no right wing critics. There are only left wing critics” when he interviewed Colbert in the ‘No-Spin Zone’.

The public fall for it too. A while ago Fox overtook CNN as the largest television provider in America. Even as late as 2005, 47% believed Saddam supported and helped plan the 9/11 attacks and 44% believed several of the attackers were Iraqi’s(Feb 2005, Harris Poll).

So that’s how you have the French paper Liberation coming up with a proof for atleast 62 million Americans being dumb, the number who re-elected Bush.

Whither Sons of Adam?

Sixty years is a long time for a man, mere childhood for a nation and but a passing second for our race. Nations like men, grow stronger when they are young, stay at a level for a while, before declining and eventually falling. And so too it was for our race. Civilizations sprang up, reached levels of technological and cultural mastery that were not seen again for centuries before another civilization sprang up, usually in another part of the world. No longer is that true.

Whether we like it or not, we are inextricably tied to each other, Americans with all their wealth, Africans their poverty, Asians their hopes and ambitions, Europeans their Imperial legacy. Never before has the whole world been one civilization. If it(or when it?) falls, there may be no recovery. It must not, can not fall. So many civilizations have fallen leaving their founder’s descendant’s to slowly die out or be assimilated into another civilization. Only now, there is no one else.

Paradoxically, it is the world’s lack of ‘oneness’ that is Man’s best hope. Asimov in one of his short stories, talked of the possibility that Humans might choose to ally with an alien race against other Humans. Citing the example of the Greek states and their wars with the Persians, the protagonist in the piece skillfully plays the several worlds inhabited by Humans against each other, forcing them into an arms race till they are strong enough to match the alien race.

Nations have usually grown on the back of conquests, before using a period of peace with beaten and subdued neighbours to grow culturally and scientifically. It is during this period that the rot sets in. Economic prosperity leaves many with time on their hands and with Man’s penchant for cruelty, things like Gladiatorial contests become common. More importantly, what was once restricted to the idle rich now draws those in power, who soon forget their real calling. Corruption and a general breakdown in law and order soon follow, leaving a shell that implodes upon itself or is swept away by conquest.

Already signs that all is not well in the developed nations, especially America are clear to those willing to look. Obscene displays of wealth are in sharp contrast to the squalor many blacks and South American immigrants live in. How very different are the rich today from the aristocracy of medieval times?

Capitalism is NOT a perfect system. How could it be, when Man’s selfishness is fundamental to its working? The dead weight loss associated with Government interference is more than compensated for by social equity gained. Yet, first the US and now the English and French Governments are dismantling their social security schemes, believing in the fable that a free market can look after itself, collapsing bridges notwithstanding.

Once infrastructure is given short shrift, America will be very much in free fall. The uncertainty in markets over the last week have shown the US will not go down alone. International trade does not mean you surrender your markets to foreign investors.

And so it is now more than ever that national identity must take center stage. Kalpana Chawla’s “citizen of the world” must take a back seat so that if the death of our civilization were to come before Man moves out into the stars, there will be someone somewhere who can rebuild the world. Independence Day takes on a whole new meaning doesn’t it?

Playstations and Supercomputers

IBM’s new supercomputer the Blue Gene/P is the first computer to manage over a petaflop(thousand trillion calculations) a second, and it does it with the help of nearly 300,00 processors in parallel. Very nice, but IBM’s not done yet. Another supercomputer being built at Los Alamos, again capable of more than a petaflop, uses just 32,000 processors. The only difference being, half of them are Cell processors, the same ones that drive the PS3.

Back in 99, Sony’s Ken Kutaragi, the father of the Playstation, came up with the idea for a new processing core which would mimic the cells in a biological system. Built jointly with Toshiba and IBM, the Cell has a Power Architecture(which drove the Macs for years before Apple announced it was switching to Intel processors simply because of all the hype built up around speed ) with co-processing elements that greatly increase performance in among things, graphics.

Designed almost completely by hand, the Cell fares ten times better than conventional processors at some tests. Incidentally, tests on Graphics Processors(like NVidia’s and ATI’s) have shown similar results.

Has the death knell for Intel and AMD been sounded? Unfortunately not. Not only does the Cell use the RISC architecture, its design makes coding on it fiendishly difficult. Besides which, Sun is to build what will be the second fastest supercomputer in the world with AMD’s Barcelona chips powering it(some 52000 of them).

But other electronic toys like Blue-Ray players, HDTV’s and even Palmtops need real processing power. Throw in the Cell’s good compatibility and you can see it’ll be around a while.

There’s been quite a lot about supercomputers in the news the last week, all involving IBMs. Scientists in Switzerland are going to try to build a 3D model of the neocortex(the part of the brain responsible for memory and complex thought) using a Blue Gene, good luck to them! . Although scientists may be coming closer to understanding love, empathy, guilt and other ‘higher’ emotions that make us different from animals, they are light years away from understanding real intelligence. Explain self-awareness and I think you are half way there.

Finally one for the Meta guys, RPI now has the 7th fastest supercomputer in the world, the fastest in a University, and a very, very far cry from the Celeron powered dinosaur I’m typing this out on.

Old Father Hubbard

A while ago there was this craze for ‘Sarma’ pics and I was led to this blog called welikeitraw.com, among its contributers being a certain Sarma MeIngailis (rather than look her up, ask Shiny or Anjuta and watch them blush).

I should be the last person to criticise but her posts are vague at best and pure drivel at worst, not that you can write a lot about uncooked food mind you. Her biggest credential of course(if you could call it that), is that she is a stunning blonde(anybody bother to look at the silver Mac Powerbook?).

Ron Hubbard realised early the power of celebrity endorsements, starting “Project Celebrity” back in 1955 and now there are eight celebrity centres around the world that serve “professionals, leaders and promising new-comers in the fields of the arts, sports, management and government,” and “for those people who are sculpting the present into the future“(say what?) The problem is unlike ordinary ads, celeb’s lives are the draw. So Scientology has turned from a cult described as “corrupt, sinister and dangerous” by a British judge to a widely accepted well…..religion? That’s what they would have us believe anyway and very touchy about being called a cult too, they are.

BBC’s John Sweeney tells a scary tale of stalkers, thugs and rude celebs(and MP’s!) as he tried to get behind their high profile public image. Worse, what is obviously a money machine has fooled more than a Cruise, Travolta or a few other not too intelligent actors. James Packer, Australia’s richest man is all set to be married in a Scientology ceremony(which involves among other things, wearing a helmet and riding a goat around a room ). Interestingly, one of Scientology’s usually reclusive heads in an interview with MSNBC’s reporters refused to give a straight answer when asked if Tom Cruise was a good advertisement for Scientology.

The interview went something like this:

Interviewer:”Is Tom Cruise actually good for Scientology?”

(This was quite a while after the jumping the couch incident)

R:(Giggles)”What sort of question is that?”

I:(Shrugs)”It’s fair question.”

R:”Tom is one of the most famous people on the planet, he’s a great actor…”

So we have here cult that firstly, brooks no criticism:Isaac Hayes quits South Park when thy satirize Scientology and Comedy Central pulls the repeat telecast presumably because Cruise refused to promote MI:3(Viacom owns both CC and Paramount).

Secondly is undoubtedly retributive: a report prepared by the UK government in the early 70’s reads like this, “….vicious and barbaric punishment for members who neglected their duties……some were forced to carry out menial jobs with no sleep for 48 hours, with a 15-minute break every six hours, others had been imprisoned for 48 hours in a hatch too small to allow them to lie down or stand up…….members had been instructed to carry out noisy investigations on any critics…… any person classified as an enemy was considered fair game by the church.”

Yet, there are millions of Scientologists worldwide, largely thanks to all the publicity it gets. I wonder what it would have been like if MGR or hey, even Rajinikanth was a Scientologist.

Jumping into the WELL

Steve Jobs’ famous talk at Stanford’s 2005 convocation(famous within the insti at any rate) came back to me after a series of people starting with Nick used the last page of the last edition of the Whole Earth Catalog to inspire themselves. “Stay Hungry Stay Foolish”. Very quaint and very prophetic when you realise this was long before the dot-com boom and the golden age of entrepreneurship. In what other industry can you start a company at near zero cost(accounting not opportunity )? When I first read that I thought it was a sarcastic take on the West’s attitude towards Africa. Africa still receives less aid than was promised, much less than what she needs and most of it, aid with strings.

The author of the catalog Steve Brand, felt people needed a source of information on practically everything under the sun(or at least as much as would fit in a square foot, inch thick tome), hoping that humanity would continue to build on what she knew and as Jobs pointed out, the WHE was perhaps a forerunner of the search engine.

Some time later, once people had figured out how to get computes talking(about the time Apple was making it big), Brand came up with The Whole Earth ‘Lectronic Link or The WELL. It never quite got round to spanning the whole virtual world though. Four thousand is a very very small fraction of net users. Yet, with it’s large percentage of journalists, many from some of the best American papers, The WELL’s influence on public opinion is far in excess of it’s direct reach(wired.com called it ‘the most influential online community’). So should a small group of intellectuals wield so much erm.. power ?

Well, I’m not complaining. Salon.com bought The WELL a while ago and now has this huge flash ad at the top of the page for The WELL. Salon.com is a left leaning online news portal that boasts Sidney Blumenthal among its regular contributers.(Anyone remember him from the Clinton impeachment?).

Another odd thing about the community is the enduring popularity of a ‘conference’ as it is called, started in 1987 to generate a little extra revenue, discussing Grateful Dead lyrics. The WELL literally became a virtual world to many people. People lived their lives outside of work on The WELL and introverts found a voice in spite of the fact that members are not anonymous. Wired.com has this story about the life of a certain Tom Mandel, a futurist who was one of the founders and posted regularly till the last few days of his battle with cancer.

As a social experiment, The WELL was more or less a success. So why vilify internet usage in the hostels, assuming junta spend enough time attending classes and mugging?