A different opinion

By far, as far as I have noticed, Siddharh Varadarajan is the only one who has not praised the FDI in retail bill:

There is no doubt that foreign capital inflows, including FII monies, have played a big role in India’s success story over the past decade. But the problem with the Manmohan Singh strategy today is three-fold. First, it leaves untouched the very structural imbalances in the Indian economy that are responsible for the onset of the slowdown and, worse, stagflation. Second, by pinning all hopes on the revival of foreign inflows, those imbalances will most likely get exacerbated. Today, instead of being used for productive investment, capital is getting locked up in property, gold and other ‘safe’ outlets. A revival of the Sensex on the back of renewed FII interest may breathe some life into the stock market. But the risk is that this may trigger speculative demand and have no impact on the real economy. The third problem with the Prime Minister’s current approach is that the appetite of finance capital will not be sated so easily. One concession must necessarily beget another in order for the foreign investor to keep the faith in the India story.

But even this piece does not talk about throwing open pension and insurance sectors. Take a look!

A nice (albeit short) read

Quantum of tweed; thanks to ArunN for the recommendation.

The Finnish lesson

Via Abi: Why are Finland’s schools successful? The short answer: a strong public school system. But the long answer in the piece is worth every minute of your time that you spend reading it.

Teaching: the required catalyst for research to flourish?

Deaton quotes Feynman on how teaching helps research (link: via Abi):

Richard Feynman, in his essay The Dignified Professor, explains why he would never work with Einstein and co. at Princeton, even though the schedule and environment was designed to incubate great thinking.

When I was at Princeton in the 1940s I could see what happened to those great minds at the Institute for Advanced Study, who had been specially selected for their tremendous brains and were now given this opportunity to sit in this lovely house by the woods there, with no classes to teach, with no obligations whatsoever. These poor bastards could now sit and think clearly all by themselves, OK? So they don’t get any ideas for a while: They have every opportunity to do something, and they’re not getting any ideas. I believe that in a situation like this a kind of guilt or depression worms inside of you, and you begin to worry about not getting any ideas. And nothing happens. Still no ideas come.

Nothing happens because there’s not enough real activity and challenge: You’re not in contact with the experimental guys. You don’t have to think how to answer questions from the students. Nothing!

Here is Jay Parini in his The art of teaching:

I don’t care what they say: it is possible to write and teach at the same time. In fact, I have a hard time writing without teaching.  (Sabbaticals are always disastrous interludes for me, a time when I tend to sink into depression, writing more slowly, thinking a lot less clearly.) Teaching organizes my life, gives a structure to my week, puts before me certain goals: classes to conduct, books to reread, papers to grade, meetings to attend. I move from event to event, having a clear picture in my head of what I must do next. Without the academic calendar in front of me, I feel lost.

I am in a place where teaching is both crucial and a major chunk of job description. I also find that teaching brings discipline to my non-teaching efforts. Occasionally, it also brings a new thought thanks to the smart and inquisitive students. And, I tend to agree with what Feynman and Parini are alluding to (even though I neither have their kind of teaching experience nor their kind of research/writing output — of course, the hope is that someday I may).

How was my blogging last year: 2010 in review

The stats helper monkeys at WordPress.com mulled over how this blog did in 2010, and here’s a high level summary of its overall blog health:

The Blog-Health-o-Meter™ reads Wow.

Crunchy numbers

About 3 million people visit the Taj Mahal every year. This blog was viewed about 46,000 times in 2010. If it were the Taj Mahal, it would take about 6 days for that many people to see it.

In 2010, there were 119 new posts, growing the total archive of this blog to 3151 posts.

The busiest day of the year was September 16th with 322 views. The most popular post that day was The giant’s shoulders: September 2010 edition.

Where did they come from?

The top referring sites in 2010 were en.wordpress.com, google.co.in, imechanica.org, google.com, and met.iitb.ac.in.

Some visitors came searching, mostly for chicago city, city skyline, cloud gate, peacock, and verwey transition.

Attractions in 2010

These are the posts and pages that got the most views in 2010.

1

The giant’s shoulders: September 2010 edition September 2010
10 comments and 2 Likes on WordPress.com

2

Inspired by mercury; made up of steel! January 2007
3 comments

3

HowTo: Write a project proposal May 2007
14 comments

4

The Cahn-Hilliard equation September 2008
7 comments

5

Happy New Year from the Windy city! January 2008

Thanks to the guys at WordPress for such a nice summary and infographics!

Carnival update!

Watch this space! The Giant’s Shoulder’s September, 2010 edition will be up soon — And, it is a very heavy fare!!!

What happened to iMechanica?

Why am I seeing this strange page when I try to access the site?

The marble in space

A photo of the earth from Chandrayaan (though I would have liked a coloured one — of the famed blue marble):

Styles of brilliance

Dave at The Quantum Pontiff ponders:

Like many an arrogant kid before me, when I graduate from high school in my podunk hometown (no, it wasn’t marshy, and I say podunk with all the warm feelings of a idyllic childhood), I was filled with confidence that I was one of the smartest people I knew. Oh, I’d never say it, and yes I knew I was good mostly at only one small thing, mathematics, but I’m pretty certain looking back that I was a pretty confident ass. As you can well imagine, then, transitioning from my high school to Caltech, an institution filled with near-perfect-SAT-scoring students, Nobel laureate faculty members, and a wide range of just frickin’ brilliant people, resulted in a large dislocation in my perspective concerning my own capabilities. But over time, I began to realize that, while I wasn’t the sharpest cookie in the cookie jar, every once in a very rare while I could do something worthy of interest to my fellow genii in grooming (mostly jokes, mad rantings, or random acts of bizarreness, if you must know.) Thus I came to the perspective that there was no such thing as a universal genius, that possibly, just possibly, there are people who are good at differing things—little genii of their own domains. It’s often disheartening to sit in a room with a large number of brilliant people, until I remind myself of this fact. And Monday, while doing exactly this form of sitting, I began to ponder the different ways in which these people have their own styles of brilliance. Or, in short, I made a list.

His incomplete list (as Dave himself describes it) consists of problem solvers, random generators, field jumpers, connectors, communicators, and the refactoratti. The one class that I think he misses are the problem mongers — those whose genius lies in picking holes in existing solutions (with or without offering solutions).

Chemical magnetoreception in birds and nonequilibrium scale selection in columnar joints!

Here are a couple of interesting papers from the latest PNAS:

[1] Chemical magnetoreception in birds: The radical pair mechanism

C T Rodgers and P T Hore

Migratory birds travel vast distances each year, finding their way by various means, including a remarkable ability to perceive the Earth’s magnetic field. Although it has been known for 40 years that birds possess a magnetic compass, avian magnetoreception is poorly understood at all levels from the primary biophysical detection events, signal transduction pathways and neurophysiology, to the processing of information in the brain. It has been proposed that the primary detector is a specialized ocular photoreceptor that plays host to magnetically sensitive photochemical reactions having radical pairs as fleeting intermediates. Here, we present a physical chemist’s perspective on the “radical pair mechanism” of compass magnetoreception in birds. We outline the essential chemical requirements for detecting the direction of an Earth-strength ≈50 μT magnetic field and comment on the likelihood that these might be satisfied in a biologically plausible receptor. Our survey concludes with a discussion of cryptochrome, the photoactive protein that has been put forward as the magnetoreceptor molecule.

[2] Nonequilibrium scale selection mechanism for columnar jointing

L Goehring, L Mahadevan and S W Morris

Crack patterns in laboratory experiments on thick samples of drying cornstarch are geometrically similar to columnar joints in cooling lava found at geological sites such as the Giant’s Causeway. We present measurements of the crack spacing from both laboratory and geological investigations of columnar jointing, and show how these data can be collapsed onto a single master scaling curve. This is due to the underlying mathematical similarity between theories for the cracking of solids induced by differential drying or by cooling. We use this theory to give a simple quantitative explanation of how these geometrically similar crack patterns arise from a single dynamical law rooted in the nonequilibrium nature of the phenomena. We also give scaling relations for the characteristic crack spacing in other limits consistent with our experiments and observations, and discuss the implications of our results for the control of crack patterns in thin and thick solid films.

Have fun!

PS: The introduction sections of both the papers flow so… smoothly that if I ever teach technical writing, they will make nice examples for students to look at!