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Read about the Project Steve. (more links here)

On a related note, see these comic strips: 1, 2. (Thanks, Sam!); and of course, thanks to Dubya for inspiring this post. :-|

- Chinmay

Categories - ~Fun~ ~Science~ ~USA~

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An excellent observation by BBC's Washington correspondent Justin Webb -

"America is fast becoming a nation of faith not fact. A nation where the unpleasant aspects of human existence are simply airbrushed away."

On the other hand, Rob Watson, also a Brit journalist, says to his Beloved US of A -

"... the rest of the world has far more to learn from you than it has to fear."

- Chinmay

Categories - ~USA~ ~World~

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Bush is back [with all the implications and more], the ice caps are melting fast, Rupee and the Indian stock market have surged [my mock portfolio is up 10.4% in little over a month, but my real Rupee worth is down!]

I guess I won't be buying any beach-front properties anytime soon.

- Chinmay

Categories - ~Environment~ ~Money~ ~USA~

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People, there are barely three weeks left before the US election. I'd have to agree with George Soros that "a second Bush term would unhinge the future of the world."

Spread the word.

Here are some stuff to start out with -

The Soros speech

An NYTimes article detailing Kerry's foreign policy [which is, rather unfortunately, still undeclared]- specifically for controlling terrorism.

Watch The Choice on your local PBS station tomorrow [Tuesday, Oct. 12, 9pm]

The Bush Archives by Sierra club and RAW Archives

Finally, I quote Rick Bass from Orion Magazine -

"Forty years from now, young people will be calling upon us to tell them what it was like, in this crucible-forged time when democracy was attacked not just from abroad, but from within. What was it really like, they will ask. They will want to know how close and intense it was, and how we achieved our victory, their victory.

"We sharpened our knives, we will tell them. We were frightened, and we were fearless. We chose courage rather than silence. We turned our backs forever on the myth of pure self, on the myth of utter independence and disconnectedness. That myth, we will tell them, was no longer compatible with the genius of democracy.

"We were frightened -- terrified -- of the seeds, the sprouts, of dictatorship arising in our own homeland, we will tell them, but we cut it down, just barely in time, by throwing everything we had at it -- body and soul, intellect and intuition, everything. We rose above our fears, we will tell them and chose action.

"It was terrifying, we will tell them. It was glorious."

- Chinmay

Categories - ~USA~ ~World~

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Those looking to the US for technological innovation and scientific leadership in the 21^st century [OK, enough with the 21st already, we need a new mirage to chase!] can stop now. It's not gonna happen. Trust me.

Via the pages of one of my friend's advisor* and his advisor* [--- more fun links here!] I reached this amazing page - Fellowship Baptist Creation Science Fair 2001.

Elementary school kids won prizes for such amusing projects like
"She tried to feed her uncle bananas, but he declined to eat them... conclusively shown that her uncle is no monkey"
and "how specifically complicated pine cones are and how they reveal God's design in nature."

Middle school children were far more scientific and demonstrated that
"life cannot come from non-life through natural processes - placed all the non-living ingredients of life - carbon (a charcoal briquet), purified water, and assorted minerals (a multi-vitamin) - into a sealed glass jar. The jar was left undisturbed, being exposed only to sunlight, for three weeks. No life evolved." 'Elementary', Holmes would have said!

High schoolers, of course, with their superior ability for rational thought, greater knowledge of the physical sciences, and apparently, greater ability for brutality, tackled such mind numbing concepts as "Using Prayer To Microevolve Latent Antibiotic Resistance In Bacteria" [Christians for Untreatable Diseases?];
"Maximal Packing Of Rodentia Kinds: A Feasibility Study" [No, you'll never guess what that means, our minds just don't operate that way] - "The Rodentia [using fancy words makes stuff more scientific of course; I know I've done it!] were placed in a cage with dimensions proportional to a section of the Ark.... Although there was little room left in the cage, all Rodentia were able to move just enough to ward off muscle atrophy."
and "Thermodynamics Of Hell Fire" [Now that's something I can't even imagine how to start thinking about. By a long shot. My brain will probably crash if I try that!]

There are more links on this page that promise to show you "a wonderful scale model of a section of Noah's Ark made with popsicle sticks" [Yes, it's a little mentioned fact, but the whole sentence goes - 'On the seventh day He rested; and set up a popsicle factory.]

*Before you not visit the Advisors' pages and form a negative opinion of them, let me clarify that they are actually against this stuff too. They probably laughed as hard as I did too. So there is still hope, though perhaps only a fool's hope.

- Chinmay

Categories - ~Fun~ ~Science~ ~USA~
Edited on: Monday, September 27, 2004 12:31 AM
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Check this out! We who came to US in August 2002 paid the absolute maximum price for our dollars, ever!
Price then ~ Rs. 49/$. Price now ~ Rs. 43/$. A difference of Rs 6000/1000 $!!! Argh!

Meanwhile, although I haven't read any analysis of the current strengthening of the rupee, I won't be surprised if is somebody's [illegal] way of making a lot of money.... The jump is rather anomalous in recent past....

- Chinmay

Categories - ~India~ ~Money~ ~USA~
Edited on: Wednesday, April 14, 2004 1:28 PM
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While I have marked this post as fun, it's a dark comedy type of fun. An article in The Atlantic talks about how Bush 43 is making all sorts of decisions without the backing of any facts, rationality, or even thinking...

The Faith-Based Presidency
You can question Bush's veracity, his grip on reality, and the rationality of his policies, but not his faith.
George W. Bush has made rationality an antonym of Republican. His is the first faith-based presidency....
read on....

- Chinmay

Categories - ~Fun~ ~USA~

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A very detailed [and long!] article in the NYTimes Magazine [free. reg. req.] on "How the Bush administration quietly — and radically — transformed the nation's clean-air policy" For the worse, of course...

An Excerpt:
Quote
...the [Bush] administration's real problem with the new-source review program wasn't that it didn't work. The problem was that it was about to work all too well -- in the way, finally, that it was designed to when it was passed by Congress more than 25 years ago.

[Energy companies] faced potential fines of tens of millions of dollars. Cost estimates for fitting power plants with new scrubbers and, in some cases, reconfiguring entire plants to run on cleaner-burning natural gas were estimated in the hundreds of millions of dollars. Still, the companies were not about to be put out of business by complying with E.P.A. regulations. In 1999, the Southern Company reported profits of $1.3 billion.

Thomas R. Kuhn, a Yale classmate of President Bush's and president of the Edison Electric Institute... sent energy-industry executives a confidential memo, on May 27, 1999, later made public in the course of a lawsuit, advising them to bundle their contributions to the Bush campaign under a tracking number to ''ensure that our industry is credited'' for its generosity.

"Taking a lesson from Reagan's experience with Gorsuch and Watt, Bush officials realized that it would be self-defeating to appoint to public positions people with outspoken views on the environment, so they found noncombative figures instead.... they adopted a two-track strategy. Publicly, the president asked Congress to pass major environmental legislation like the Clear Skies Initiative and a sweeping energy bill, which he knew would face considerable opposition. Privately, the president's political appointees at the Department of the Interior, Environmental Protection Agency, Department of Agriculture and Office of Management and Budget would carry out those same policies less visibly, through closed-door legal settlements and obscure rule changes.... These second-tier appointees knew exactly which rules and regulations to change because they had been trying to change them, on behalf of their industries, for years."

"President Bush went on CNN and blamed environmentalists for the [California electric energy] crisis. ''If there's any environmental regulation that's preventing California from having 100 percent max output at their plants -- as I understand there may be -- then we need to relax those regulations,'' he said. California utility officials denied that environmental rules had anything to do with the crisis. But their protests didn't matter. The president had forged the link."

President Bush's final National Energy Policy (N.E.P.) was published on May 16, 2001. [laying] the administration's vision of the environmental future of the United States. The policy's defining notion was simple: environmental regulations have constrained America's domestic energy supply. In broad strokes, the N.E.P. laid out the next three years of the Bush administration's energy and environmental agenda: roll back wilderness and wildlife protections to open up more public land to oil and gas development; establish fast-track hydropower permits; expand offshore oil and gas drilling; and replace tough Clean Air Act rules, including new-source review, with an industry-friendly market-based pollution trading system.

...when President Bush announced Clear Skies, the E.P.A. was already on track to require deeper reductions in air pollution than his cap-and-trade proposal would produce. So the air would actually be dirtier under Clear Skies than if the president allowed the E.P.A. to enforce the existing law. Clear Skies allowed 50 percent more sulfur dioxide, nearly 40 percent more nitrogen oxides and three times as much mercury as the Clean Air Act -- rigorously enforced -- called for.... ''We can do better under current law than what they're putting on the table,'' Eric Schaeffer told George Stephanopoulos [ABC's ''This Week'']. Schaeffer, the E.P.A.'s head of civil enforcement from 1997 to 2002, had worked on the new-source review lawsuits since their inception. He left the E.P.A. in early 2002, tired, as he said in his letter of resignation, of ''fighting a White House that seems determined to weaken the rules we are trying to enforce.''

Sylvia Lowrance, the E.P.A.'s deputy assistant administrator for enforcement.. a 24-year veteran of the agency, had officials in her office study years of data, looking at figures that came from actual power plants, and on June 3, 2002, she wrote a memo to Holmstead indicating that her office thought 0.75 percent was a reasonable figure.In other words, if the total value of a generating unit was $1 billion, a power company should be able to legitimately spend up to $7.5 million a year on routine repair and maintenance without being required to install new pollution controls. Marianne Horinko, acting E.P.A. administrator...said, utilities would be allowed to spend up to 20 percent of a generating unit's replacement cost, per year, without tripping the N.S.R. threshold. In other words, a company that operated a coal-fired power plant could do just about anything it wanted to a $1 billion generating unit as long as the company didn't spend more than $200 million a year on the unit. To E.P.A. officials who had worked on N.S.R. enforcement, who had pored over documents and knew what it cost to repair a generator, the new threshold was absurd. ''What I don't understand is why they were so greedy,'' said Eric Schaeffer, the former E.P.A. official. ''Five percent would have been too high, but 20? I don't think the industry expected that in its wildest dreams.''

The framework of new-source review would remain, but the new rules set thresholds so high that pollution-control requirements would almost never come into effect. ''It's a moron test for power companies,'' said Frank O'Donnell, executive director of the Clean Air Trust, a nonprofit watchdog group. ''It's such a huge loophole that only a moron would trip over it and become subject to N.S.R. requirements.... the new rules would result in emissions increases of 7 million tons of sulfur dioxide and 2.4 million tons of nitrogen oxides per year by 2020.

By the end of 2003, with new-source review all but dead, the White House began moving on to other projects. Mike Leavitt, the newly installed E.P.A. administrator, proposed two new regulations. The first suggested new standards for mercury emissions that would in the short term permit the release of as much as seven times as much mercury as current law allows. The second, known as the interstate air-quality rule, and was seen by many as the administrative enactment of Bush's Clear Skies Initiative.... Yet the new rule set higher national limits for emissions of dangerous chemicals like sulfur dioxide and nitrogen oxides than Clear Skies, which in turn was considered by critics to be weaker than the existing Clean Air Act.

UnQuote
Just one of the reasons why I recently termed him a dispicable thug of the worst kind.

- Chinmay

Categories - ~Environment~ ~USA~
Edited on: Monday, April 05, 2004 11:06 AM
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An excerpt from Tour of Duty: John Kerry and the Vietnam War
and
Interview with the auther of the same.

And, The Wal-Mart You Don't Know, on how the world's largest company is driving US manufacturers [not to mention other retailers] out of business.

- Chinmay

Categories - ~Money~ ~USA~ ~World~

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[This post a comment on a line in Anya's post, and on the comments on the post..]

Yesterday, I voted on some [desi] site about who's going to win the '04 presidential race. While there were 23% who thought Bush will win, 60% were for Kerry. I don't understand why people are so strongly in favour of Kerry. It's one thing to want Bush to lose, but the ground reality is quite different. Right now, most polls show that there's a 50-50 split in US. Here's why I think Bush will be President again -

I don't think issues really count for much in US elections - or in any elections for that matter. He who can put the best spin wins. Bush's got LOADs of money, and when his ads start coming out... it's going to be a riot.

The outsourcing/workers from outside issue has been blown out of all proportion. The majority of workers - that used to work in factories, auto industries etc have already lost their jobs years back... White collar outsourcing is more prominent because these people have more visibility in the media and on the net. [As opposed to the rednecks who are for Bush but don't have a clue as to what the 'net is! ;-)]

Also, the white collars don't have much political clout, whereas the companies that want to start moving overseas [or creating new ones, if you belive that] a lot of their jobs very soon are the ones funding the campaigns [this year the most funds - on both sides - are from financial companies]. Bush has also played very well to the Hispanic community - 14% of the US population - [and to their employers] recently by offering them blanket work visas. And to top it up, he is sending out messages to the 'Christian' population [whole another story...] by opposing gay marriages, abortion, advocating abstinence and so on.

Last but not the least, Bush is going to milk the National Security issue for all it's worth and more, while Democrats have only a wimpy stand - if at all it's a stand - on the whole thing. There's a hell of a lot of jingoism in US, and the Republicans are going to take full advantage of that. There's no motivation like fear, after all... Other issues like environment, image of the US in the world and so forth are non issues as far as the common man in US is concerned. Heck, most of the times they don't know, or care, what's going on outside of their county unless it affects them directly.

In short, Bush may be a despicable thug of the worst kind, but he's no fool - he's targeting the very rich, the very poor, and the fundamentalists-jingoists; and those combined make for a huge votebank.

- Chinmay

Categories - ~USA~
Edited on: Monday, April 05, 2004 11:04 AM
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The American Physical Society report, and the National Academy of Science report on the Hydrogen Economy Initiative*.

In Short -

• Major scientific breakthroughs are required for the Hydrogen Initiative to succeed.
• Basic science must have greater emphasis both in planning and in the research program.
• The Hydrogen Technical Advisory Committee should include members who are deeply familiar with the core basic science problems.
• “Bridge” technologies should be given greater attention.
• The Hydrogen Initiative should not displace research into promising energy efficiency and renewable energy areas.

The committees also conclude that hydrogen will become a viable technology in 30 to 50 years rather than in the 20 year time frame given by Bush.
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*The Hydrogen Economy Initiative involves using H2 as fule in fuel cells to generate electricity, in all/most of the places that we use fossil fules now. Mainly cars, but possibly also mainstream power generation.
The problem is that all the technologies involved - hydrogen production, storage, and Fuel Cells -are rather inefficient right now, and plagued by basic scientific problems [as against problems of implimentation/initiative in say, malaria irradication...]
Bush is mainly pushing it as a carrot.. by showing the promis of a very clean future just around the corner, he's justifying pollution excesses being carried out in the present.

- Chinmay

Categories - ~Environment~ ~Science~ ~USA~
Edited on: Thursday, March 25, 2004 1:44 PM
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	U.S.A.	India
Percent of world's population	5% (~270 million)	16% (~980 million)
Use of world's non-renewable resources	25%	3%
Creation of world's trash and pollution	25%	3%
Production / consumption of goods and services	21%	1%
Exports [Billions of USD]	687 [# 1]	44.5 [# 33]
Imports [Billions of USD]	1165 [# 1]	53.5 [# 25]

Source [Indiana University] [Statistics from ~ 1998]
Source for trade statistics [Indian - 2001, USA - 2002 est. ]- CIA Factbook.
Total world trade in 2002 - 6.6 trillion USD. So [Ex+Im/World] is 28% for US and 1.5% for India. Not sure that's the right way to calculate it though.

- Chinmay

Categories - ~Environment~ ~India~ ~USA~ ~World~
Edited on: Tuesday, March 02, 2004 11:53 AM
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NYTimes link [registration required] - "More than one child in six born in the United States could be at risk for developmental disorders because of mercury exposure in the mother's womb, according to revised estimates released last week by Environmental Protection Agency scientists.... Mercury pollution has become a contentious environmental issue with the Bush administration's proposal to create a market-based trading-pollution system." [i.e. Power companies - mainly coal based electricity generation - can promise not to pollute in one area but skip cleanup measures in another.]

If you are concerned about the environmental policies of the Bush Government, subscribe to RAW: : the Uncooked Facts of the Bush Assault on the Environment.

Excerpt from this week's RAW -
Mercury + Hot Air = Silence- The apparent ebullience and jubilation with which EPA Administrator Mike Leavitt celebrated this effort seems to have vanished from the White House along with holiday spirit. In December, Mr. Leavitt bragged that the new standard was better than the stronger one recommended by the previous administration and that it was, in fact, "more aggressive." Well, maybe it was better if you define "better" as a standard that's more favorable to polluting power plants than to the American people, but clearly we disagaree with the Bush administration on this point. So why has the administration allowed the subject to grow cold, instead of continuing to remind us how grateful we should be? In fact, we think the administration has missed the boat on three really good opportunities to sing its own praises regarding this special gift to its polluting friends.

And so on in that vein...

- Chinmay

Categories - ~Environment~ ~USA~
Edited on: Thursday, February 19, 2004 2:38 PM
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