"America is addicted to Oil"

Every now and then, I fee like debating political issues; issues that affect our current and future lives. We all know these debates are based on personal beliefs and interpretations of current news and often degenerate into ideological babble (a la religious fanaticism) where people want to hear themselves more than others. And we all know that the expense of energy, squandering of tempers, raising of voices, challenging the "adversary's" cognitive faculties and citations of highly questionable results and personal opinions as sound evidence is all for naught. The sun will still rise the next morning and the politicians will do as they please, completely oblivious to the tensions thousands of miles away in a 600 sq. ft. apartment. But, it is fun. Or as Aditya once referred to it: "mental masturbation".

I just read Aditya's current post about India's reliance on foreign oil imports and how nuclear energy might offer an alternative. I posted a reply but thought I should post it here as well.

-------Begin post

As always, a well researched post... but here's my take on it: yes, we need alternate sources of energy, but the nuclear option is not it.

By making nuclear option civilian and disabling our nuclear research apparatus, we will ensure that we become completely dependent on countries that currently possess the know-how to build and run these. Not a politically strong position. (We’ll need to throw tenders, they'll give the best deals/ bribes and they'll win)

Also, nuclear-power leads to a very profound by product: nuclear waste. Unlike C02, methane and other "organic" by-products of burning fossil fuels, the disposal of nuclear waste is a very very big problem. it has a half-life of a few billion years and is an assured way of causing cancer if ingested (alpha emitters).

The state-of-the-art disposal technique vitrification and burial is clearly an invitation to accidents and hence a persistent threat to present and future generations.

Even if we do inhumanly decide to go this route, we (India and the rest of the world) will need land fills that are isolated from human population; not just by distance, but including any and every environmental conduit such as jet streams, underwater flows, tectonic shifts and the like. With these many constraints, any piece of land seems to be a prized property (the moon and the sun now actually sound reasonable). And by the laws of supply and demand then, the cost of access to this property (since all nations will want to go there to be guilt/ litigation free) will be fairly high.

What then is the alternative then? An energy solution that is cheap and effective in its entirety: acquisition, transportation, storage, access, consumption and disposal. And we don't have anything competitive to fossil fuels. Not yet.

The one true driver for the entire energy cycle of our planet is the Sun. It has been around for at least 4 billions years (the earth's age) and is expected to remain around for at least as much. We all know that the earth receives enough absolute energy each day to solve all our problems.

However (and this is a huge "however"), the current state-of-art in solar cells is in the teens in terms of efficiency (acquisition problems).

The Sun shines the brightest in the deserts (once a day) and in space (365/24/7) which are not usually where people consume energy (transportation problems).

Related to this is the issue of energy density. To be useful in vehicles such as an 18 wheeler or a commercial airline, batteries are a bad idea. We need something with better or comparable energy density than fossil fuels (storage and access problems).

Disposal is almost completely undefined for this situation as it depends immensely on the techniques used to address the challenges in the prior categories.

Hence, for long term self-reliance, our focus should be on the Sun (tackling individual problem areas above). Invest in solar research and stocks.

bottom-line: "nucular" helps a handful of companies/ people, and may potentially harm us more

Want your voice heard? Pay up!

here's giving freedom of speech a whole new twist: if you want your voice heard, you should be able to pay for it.

came across this article: "Postage is due for Companies sending email"
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/02/05/technology/05AOL.html?_r=1&incamp=article_popular&oref=slogin

now the naive thinking is "So what? I don't have to pay, it's the companies." Please think again: who does business with the companies: we, the consumers. Each company exists for a sole purpose: to provide some service to some consumer. And in this day and age of the Internet, email notifications, confirmations and transactions are more mainstream than ever before. So like the sales taxes, if a company has to pay some extra fees to deliver the information we need to us, guess who's going to pay for it finally.

And this has serious complications as well. Like entropy, the monies collected by the companies will never reduce, making them richer and more powerful on the Net. If they are able to exercise a level of control this strong already, imagine what they'll be when they are orders of magnitude richer.

The analogy given by Yahoo and AOL is that we already pay for posting stuff through snail mail, so why not this? But before we go into that, lets read between the lines. Why do AOL and Yahoo now want to charge the companies for this?

Answer: they maintain mailboxes, mail-servers, mail-applications and the like for millions of accounts for free. Free for the user, that is. Someone obviously pays for it. Right now, its either the company itself or advertisers who foot the bill (a la GMail) or other paying users. Users paying a yearly / monthly fee (Comcast, Yahoo, AOL, MSN etc.) for connectivity get free email accounts from that company, and some of that fees can pay for the other "free" users.

They are concerned that they aren't getting enough benefit from the free accounts: the users aren't clicking on the ads enough or simply aren't paying enough. But they don't want to look as the bad guys forcing users to pay because that's simply going to cause millions of users to not have accounts with them and move to some that still have free accounts, or worse, retreat from the Net altogether. Each scenario leads to shunning of the Net and bad bad news for all these Net companies.

So what's the option? Like sales taxes, charge the service providers/ businesses. They will pay and then charge their clients for it! Brilliant!

To support their argument, they also claim that this will help curb spam as spammers will have to pay for everything they send out. Well, the people who stuff your snail-mail-boxes with junk mail sure pay the post-office, but does that stop us from getting junk mail? Truth be told, junk mail figures out you've moved faster than legit mail. I believe this argument is simply to get users on board.

So coming back to the original question: why not pay for this the same way we pay for snail-mail? Because it hampers business. Though it seems that for the short term the companies involved will make a whole lot of money, prices on the net will generally increase, leading to lower number of transactions. In short, the same detrimental effect of a monopoly (or oligopoly, cartel if you will).

Plus, we as consumers already pay for connecting to the Net. So why should it matter if we connect to one server versus another when it is already paid for? I certainly am not in favor of paying more.

So if I have to bet money on the future of this debate, where would I put it? Well, honestly with Yahoo and AOL having their way and charging, of course. We, the consumers are free to dissent. As long as we pay for it.

Antidote to a relaxed Saturday: your cell-phone company

Monday to Friday is déjà vu all over again. The alarm goes off as does your temper. In a swift, yet sleepy reflex action, the hand reaches for the snooze button. After the second alarm, the hand actually moves the alarm button to the off position. You debate getting up. Dazzling images of warm sunny beaches with excitingly clothed gals, fun times with old friends and smiles all around flash before you and entice you to give your job the "bird" and chase your dream. 5 minutes later the practicality of ordinary life, the bills, the food, the deliverables, the occasional first date in the evening make an overwhelming case in favor of getting to work. You look at the clock, rub your eyes and look again. Curse the alarm for shutting up each time you put it off, and frantically work towards getting civilized. The same shower, the same tooth-brush and paste, the same razor and cologne, the same closet and clothes you swear you've seen in a life before.

The same drive to work. For me, occasionally (once every six months), I attract unwanted/ unsolicited attention from the law. Shouldn't there be a law against handing out tickets willy-nilly? (hey Pat Robertson: It ain't my fault, God wanted me to have a lead foot.). The same faces at work, similar deliverables, the same drive back or to a "safe" / common-ground restaurant for the date, the same TV shows / phone conversations / chat sessions / friends in the evening, similar dinner and the same bed (Wow... i make it sound tons more awful than it actually is. Maybe I do possess the gift of description... hmm... watch out Leo Tolstoy, here comes another Leo) (Note to self: this self examination during a monologue sounds a lot like Conan O' Brian. Yikes! Note to self: must put an end to this “Note to self” business)

So what's special about the weekend? Everything! The name itself: Weekend. The deja-vu ends. Maybe someone should've named it "Life resumes days". Anyways, I digress. Saturdays are the days you recover from the week's drudgery, or Friday night's binging. So maybe you prepare, if need be, for that first-weekend date in the evening, but you get up really late on a Saturday. It is supposed to be your day. No, not Sunday. Sunday is the day you get things in order for the déjà vu that’s coming for the next 5 days. On Sundays you ensure that you are doing things that were on your “things I’ll do over the weekend list” (which depending on what kind of person you are, is probably just simply adding to the list. But again, I digress).

The time-table for Saturday is simple. Wake up, if you feel like it. Once up, figure out what to do about lunch. Pancake Pantry, IHOPS, Sitar, Cuisine of India, or left over pizza. Lunch with friends or go it alone for a private lunch where you may muse and cogitate about Life, The Universe and Everything or about absolutely nothing at all. Maybe that phone-call you’ve been meaning to make for a while. Feet up on the table (depending on what the “house rules” are), juice by your side, sports on the screen, smile on your face. Or maybe, start on that home project you’ve been meaning to do all along: saw pieces of wood, clean the car, mend the stereo, and solder something new (hey, I’m still the protagonist here). Maybe go buy something you’ve wanted / needed / coveted for a while.

All that bliss, unless you have a cell-phone.

Well, at least till you happen to look at the bill. In my case, every-so-often, Sprint will decide that it needs to talk to me. So like that very insecure friend (we all know at least one), it creates a mini-crisis and must have me on the phone. Only perhaps I have to do most of the talking in this case, and it is my interests at stake.

In an ironic turn of events, “How can I help you today?” I’m asked. “Well, I have 3 issues that I need to talk about. Lets start with the $186 bill”, I say calmly while chanting “Measured intolerance, assertive tolerance” over and over in my head. After the common pleasantries of social security numbers, account passwords and difficult to pronounce names have been exchanged, I'm given the reason “sir that’s because you initiated this and this action on such and such date.”

Alright, so we are going to play the “but I was only doing what you said” routine. “Well, sure, but then I also called back and wanted the said change removed. And I was assured things are going to go back to the way they were.”

“When was that?” I’m asked politely. “On such and such date. And such and such store,” I respond. “Oh, that’s correct, Sir. Let me go ahead and make sure your account reflects this.”

Makes me feel special. Just hearing my voice sets things right over there. Wow! God must’ve spent time perfecting me, right? EEERRRRRNNN… WRONG.

I’m sure some bean counting bureaucrat figured out that if they screwed over a select bunch of people every so often, a certain percentage of people probably would be just too lazy to call back. Now if this cost percentage is simply greater than the amount required to handle the customer service call and set things right, they’ve earned themselves some moolah (or at least for a per month basis).

Net result: a rude shock once every month that sends your best Saturday down the drain by setting you in a combative, bellicose mind-frame. They do this over and over again, till they grow on you, and you look forward to speaking to “Holly from Houston” or “Dana from Detroit”, or “Shaniqua from Smithsville”, or “Palkha from Noida”.

And then one day, just like that, they get things right. And so now you are really screwed over. A perfect Saturday, heaven help! What am I going to do with this? You probably end up praying that they screw things over so you won’t be left with this problem. Your problem doesn’t last long. You just need to look at your cable bill. And then your prayers get answered as well. In a different month, of course. Déjà vu.

No good deed goes unpunished

If you know me, then you know that every so often, I get inspired to write to a few of my acquaintances (if you don’t, then humor me). And no, I’m not talking about firing off an email but actually putting pen on paper and expressing my thoughts in ink. Every time I do this, I marvel at how detached and unfamiliar my body seems to find this action. But I always enjoy it (and from what I gather, the recipients do too).

A few days ago, I was surprised to find amongst the plethora of junk mail, a solitary letter, with hand-printed words, addressed to yours truly. I instantly recognized the sender’s name, but couldn’t fathom the purpose. I opened the letter and was rudely challenged with writing that possessed the calligraphic qualities of impressionist art, chicken-scrawl and a top-secret cryptographic hieroglyph.

As I deciphered the message and cogitated on the intent I couldn’t help but smile. I was being subject to the same “shock and awe” I’ve been imposing on people for a while.

A few days later, I got the following email. The following thoughts, ideas, words and malapropisms (if any), henceforth referred to as “the Email”, are (to the best of my knowledge) the creation and property of Rahul M. Rao, (born Bombay, India) and henceforth referred to as “Author”. The Email may not be copied, reprinted, transmitted, quoted or reproduced, in any way, shape or form without the Author’s prior consent and express permission. The Email’s appearance here does not constitute a waiver of any rights on the Author’s behalf. These are presented below for educational purposes.

---Begin Email---
Technologically Endangered Art
***************************************************************************************************************************************************************************

Just another mundane day. The clock sauntered away accompanied by the pitter-patter of ever gentle rain rattling onto the meandering yet stagnant streets. The occasional car zoomed by, screeching loudly at the turn to disturb my focused silence, and accelerating away into wilderness. The snow from yesterday adorned the naked tree-tops. The stillness of the moment added triteness to the otherwise empty view. With nothing but my faithful window for company, I blankly stared at the world outside. Was there anything that could add fervour to the proceedings? Or would time slip up by into the unknown, burying with it yet another anonymous day?

An ordinary idle mind may be a devil's workshop; my boisterous mind is probably closer to a devil's playground. For the lack of anything better or worse to do, I decided to do undertake something almost unthinkable in this digital age of ones and zeroes. Armed with a sleek looking pen and a neatly ruled blank paper, I set out to revive the technologically endangered species, the art of letter writing and demonstrate that a stylus is indeed more potent than the qwerty.

To be honest, this courageous endevaor of mine was more out of gratitude, than out of solitude. A Good Samaritan geek friend of mine had walked on this less trodden path nearly 30 months ago. Way back in the good old days of 2003, he had written me an innocently casual letter. It took me nearly one year to recover from the shock of him having written me note. Having overcome that jolt, it took me nearly six grueling months to comprehend his hand-writing. And being completely overwhelmed and indebted by his magnanimous act, I had been toying with the idea of penning a reply to him. But my insatiable thirst for cyber-space junk had kept me occupied and incredibly busy ever since. Till today that is. After all, I could not return to my laptop and let another 'begging-to-be-written' letter be butchered by the hands of science.

"Dear kay-gee" I wrote. And paused. What next? How in the world does one start one of these? Does one inquire about the recipient's good health? Was it 'being in the best of spirits'? Or 'being in spiritual well-being'? Damn, it had been ages since I had written a letter. Why in the heavens was I putting myself through this? Wouldn't it be so much easier to fire him an email? Will I even be able to write him one page? 'Oh Satan, why are you doing this to me?' I howled.

Two hundred and sixty-seven seconds later, I continued. "Hope this letter of mine finds you in the pink of your health". With his best interests in mind, I thought it was imperative that I mention the root cause behind this struggle of mine. And I duly pointed out to him that he is to blame for this act of mine. He is the whole and sole reason for him having to decipher through the geometric non-conformism of my alphabets. If he couldnt help his handwriting, I couldnt help, but be hundred times worse. "As you sow, so you reap" I contemplated writing. To avoid any doubt, "No good deed goes unpunished" I wrote.

So far, so good. With considerable effort, I had managed to maintain my scribblings above the horizontal lines on the sheet. I shuddered at the hypothetical scenario of having to write on a completely blank paper with no guiding lines. Whoever thought of this brilliant line concept was a genius! Else writers like me could easily violate all laws of geometry and make two supposedly parallel sentences intersect. However, the disciplined control of pen was starting to have a profoundly painful ramification on the nerves in my hand that had begun to wail with pain. The hitherto unused muscles had started to complain of over-work. The knuckle on the thumb and the right index finger were whining about their forced restraint. The proximity to the pen and the absence of 'j' and 'space-bar' was suffocating them. Their peers from the left hand were disgusted at being reduced to holding a useless piece of scrap and growled about their apparent neglect and unfair discrimination towards the rightists. There was indeed no party at peace.

Turning a Nelson's eye towards these bemoaning, I stubbornly continued. The pen picked up pace, the words began to run, and lines started being swallowed. My thoughts extensively outraced the limited abilities of my hand, and reigning them in was an arduous task. And admittedly, the sentences were getting crooked, with the crests and troughs evident. Page 2 flowed. I rambled on about me, myself and rahul. Yes, I was getting my touch back. And that obdurate creature, inertia, was making it difficult for me to stop. The mind had taken complete control over the hand and body. Like a possessed soul inside a fanatic rampant bull that had been reunited with a red rag, I raged on. Page 3 and I was proud that yet another bastion had fallen to my valiant attempt. I was no longer at the mercy of inane and obtuse email or cell phones. There was an ecstatic feeling of being a master in the land of the pen and paper. Page 4, and having contemplated, attempted and succeeded in letter writing, I stopped.

That night as I tucked myself in, I felt incredibly potent and euphoric. I re-cherished those umpteen moments, when as a kid, I had written or received those pale blue letters or those creamy postcards. I relived the elation in receiving a note from my cousins, the thrill of finding a letter with rakhee from my sister, the exuberance of scribbling anything to my aunt. Incredibly simple pleasure lost in the technological voodoo of the digital age. The world had grown closer, but we had distanced ourselves from the joys of letter writing. And I mumbled the eleventh commandment, "Thou shall write at least one letter a year"!
--- End Email --

a F-fractal-R-fractal-A-fractal-C-fractal-T-fractal-A-fractal-L world

We all trade and interact daily: some shop at grocery stores, some at a self-serve gas-station, others online and still others transact multi-million dollar deals over lunch or dinner. The money goes to banks which trade with each other within the country; cities trade with each other, as do states and nations.

We work at companies or at different institutions or are self-employed, but in our daily work lives, we jostle against each other, trying to be the best. The entities we work for (our companies, instructions or our-selves) jostle against each other, trying to be the best.

Within our bodies, the blood vessels split and split again as they nourish and sustain every single living cell in our body. Surprisingly, each set of branching looks like its "predecessor". The dendrites that facilitate the amazingly networked computer we refer to as our brain, split several times over in a pattern similar to the blood vessels.

These are just some instances of self-similarity from the countably infinite (could they be innumerably infinite??) examples that occur all around us. To me, this seems to vehemently suggest that there's a pattern underneath this all. I'm not implying the existence of God, but maybe a few "simple" "laws".

There is the second law of thermodynamics (paraphrased) "things tend to proceed in the direction of increasing entropy" or as Murphy stated it "Anything that can go wrong, will." But this isn't what I’m talking about. The 2nd law just makes a very detached, generic statement. It doesn't tell given a system how exactly it is going to evolve so that entropy increases, or even why. It just says things are going to hell (Ironically the final resting state of the universe would be when all mass/energy is uniformly distributed throughout so that everything will a uniform temperature fairly close to Absolute Zero Kelvin, quite unlike hell. Maybe that's what they mean by "when hell freezes over").

I'm more thinking about an explanation that tells given a system and its initial conditions (say, a tree of a particular kind with so many leaves and in this health with these environmental conditions) its state and that of the larger system it is part of (e.g. forest) at any time later would be determined by this "fractal" law. And I would love to use that on the stock/futures market :)

life and a sense of adventure

My last post "You have 0 friends" prompted a certain lovely lady to make the following remark... [quote]

ur 0 friends post shows that u have a really limited sense of adventure.just think of the adventure u r having fitting ur life, character, tastes and so on into those "neatly designed boxes" did u say?

the decidely (sic) odd qwerty keyboard also is a challenge. learn to find challenges in every thing...... u'll never find a place with out some. [/quote]

Firstly, let me express my honest gratitude for taking the time to comment on my post. It takes time, diligence and feeling, so thanks.

However, I would like to contest the allegation of "narrow sense of adventure”. What is adventure? I define it as pushing the limits of our existence... trying to determine where the bounds of lives are and how much can they be pushed, or better yet, breached. Would one still call that narrow? As narrow as the lady's suggestion of "finding a challenge in the decidedly odd qwerty keyboard"?

With all due respect, if someone "normal" thinks a QWERTY keyboard a serious challenge, they either have a very narrow view of their challenges, abilities or lives. It really isn't difficult at all to master the QWERTY keyboard. I'm not the most gifted or able, but I was able to self-tutor when I was 16, in a little more than a week. I've known of friends who did it just as fast, some faster.

What do I consider adventurous? Jumping off a plane, hang-gliding, standing inches away from the edge of a cliff and looking down when you know that you suffer from vertigo. "Ya right. Have you done any of those??" err... I have! And I must say, I've never felt better or more at peace with myself. Will I ever do these again? I'm looking forward to it...




"Learn to find challenges in everything you do...." sounds more like advice to an incarcerated inmate, who is coerced to make do with his / her restricted freedom. I on the other hand am free and capable to aspire to maintain that freedom. I find it a shame to willfully imprison myself within intangible, irrational bounds. I wonder if others feel the same way. If they don't, they are free to do as they please. It's their adventure!

You have 0 friends

I've been hearing about Orkut, Friendster and bunch of other networking sites for a while. I've been given those umpteen invites to "join my friends" network. For the longest time, I felt these were a waste of time. I got one more today so decided I'll just go ahead and join-in. That way, the next time someone wants me to join, they can see that I am already there and they probably won't send me mail (what was I thinking).

So anyways, I signed up. And then sat there for 15 minutes updating my profile. Telling the same thing over and over again. Trying to convince this HTML form, that yes, I do have a life. Trying to fit my life into those neatly defined boxes. What are my passions, what are my hobbies, what are the sports I play, am I straight? am I gay? What kind of women I want to meet, what kind of business network I want to create? What books do I read and what languages do I speak?

The feeling suddenly gets you: what if, your life doesn't fit in to those tiny little boxes? Hmmmn, does Rupert Murdoch have a profile like this? or Bill Clinton? Vajpayee (can he type? does he know how to get online?)? Britney Spears??

Then, after all of that, comes the amazingly shocking part: you have (0) friends. I know, I just created the profile and haven't added anybody, but think about it: "You have 0 friends". That sounds very uplifting! Here is another metric to judge you buy. Oh he has a 100+ friends, "must be popular", she has only 10+, "who wants to talk to her?" Another "box" to fit and define your life.

"But why are you taking this the wrong way?" "You are only saying all this because you don't really have any friends you can add!" Err... hate to burst your bubble, but I do. I just find it weird that instead of actually being out there, meeting, talking with people, we are being forced to confine ourselves to an XVGA view port into the world, where we deal with jpeg avatars of real people and communicate not with our hearts and tongues, but with our digits and a decidedly odd QWERTY keyboard.

We as a species have been chosen by nature for our strengths: communication, collaboration, creativity and ingenuity-in-overcoming-the-various-things-that-nature-throws-at-us. Birds can fly, so can we (airplanes, hang-gliders, hot-air balloons). The winter's really cold, and so we have fire. Food rots, we have refrigerators. If predators hunt us, we group and set up traps. Life is about finding challenges and conquering them, not fitting your life into a set/defined pattern.

Nature hates stagnation: randomness and egregiousness is encouraged over set, defined, deterministic attributes. Life at every level wants something different, something new, something more and something better. Better is very often just different.
The most basic form of life, the virus, does it. It mutates. So do our cells: human germ cells undergo meiosis to randomly scramble our genetic code so that we are always trying something different. So do we and so does the stock market.

Life does NOT and SHOULD NOT fit in to small, well-defined boxes. Don't just type, go forth and conquer. You'll make friends along the way.

Life's little pleasures

These are the things we live for: life's little pleasures. We slave through days, weeks, months, years and ages; tolerate the burden of existence; repel the ennui; fight disease in ourselves and our loved ones; triumph over rage; trounce defeat and post-pone our final moment all for this.

Not for a trophy, not for a mantle piece, not a photograph, not even a memory. Just the fleeting feeling, that evanescent perception of happiness for a vanishing moment, that moment when we close our eyes, rest our heads back, smile to ourselves, open our senses and feel gifted. Whether we believe in God or not, we thank Him for scripting that moment of pleasure in our lives.

Dear God (whether you exist or not), Thank you. For I just experienced one of those moments (I'm trying real hard to hold on to it, hence this blog).

What just happened? well nothing big really. just a little pleasure.

I was sitting at home, about to fall asleep when the mp3 player shuffled on to a song. I've heard lots of songs on my home theater, it sounds awesome, i know it. The lights in my room respond to my claps, i know it. My couch is comfy, i know it. The song, Tera Mera Pyaar, i've heard before. But i haven't felt all these together before, not like this.

I clapped twice and the lamp went off. The TV responded to my remote and its glow quietly extinguished. In that dark room, I lay down on the futon and the song happened to start playing. As the notes of the song flitted through the room with stereophonic precision (with some gratuitous help from my audio system), i closed my eyes, smiled to myself, opened my senses and felt gifted. nothing big really.

Thank You, Douglas Adams.

Thanks Douglas Adams for writing a trilogy (in 5 parts) with "Life, the Universe and Everything" as one of the titles (book number 3, actually). It makes the perfect title for my blog, as I shall comment on all those (and much more) in this blog of mine. Please accept this blatant "inspiration" from your work as my humble tribute to you.