Now that India is through to the World Cup quarterfinals ...

... against Bangladesh, the "minnow" that sent England packing, here's a fake interview of MCC Chairman. Much fun there, including a magical appearance of Moore's Last Sigh.

The interview appears in Paaji vs. Punter, a cricket blog with a keen eye on not just the game, but also on some of the controversial and fun stuff around the game; a previous post, for example, featured another fake interview with Virat Kohli.

I think it's just a matter of time before someone like Lalit Modi makes his appearance there ...

Links

1. The Caravan: No double entendres: The words the censor board doesn't want you to hear (discretion advised).

2. Robert Frank in Vox: Why have weddings and houses gotten so ridiculously expensive? Blame inequality.

3. Paul Krugman: Floor Waxes, Dessert Toppings, and Blogging.

Links

1. Relevant to the goings on at Science Congress: H.S. Mukunda et al (1974): A critical study of the work “Vymanika Shastra”. [Hat tip to V. Vinay on Twitter]

   A study of the work “Vymanika Shastra” is presented. First, the historical aspects and authenticity of the work are discussed. Subsequently, the work is critically reviewed in respect of its technical content. It appears that his work cannot be dated earlier than 1904 and contains details which, on the basis of our present knowledge, force us to conclude the non feasibility of heavier‐than craft of earlier times. Some peripheral questions concerning dimensions have also been touched upon. [Bold emphasis added]

2. Also relevant: an engaging BBC Radio 4 podcast on Indian mathematics (45 minutes, mp3, via Sidin Vadukut). See also this review of Mathermatics in India and Square Roots in the Sulbasutra by Cornell mathematician David Henderson. [Hat tip to Siddharth Varadarajan]

3. Dalmeet Singh Chawla in Science Insider: India’s major science funders join open-access push

4. My colleage Prof. E. Arunan has started blogging. Here are the first three posts:

   • Indian Science: Catch up with India, then worry about China.

   • The more zeroes you have to your name, the better scientist you are!

   • Is there a leadership crisis in Indian science?

More links

1. Dhimant Parekh: Of Rains, Cows and a Picture: "For that moment, we four [three men and a cow] were all in one world, in one picture."

2. G. Lakshmi: Handwriting:

   I hated articles that expounded the relationship between handwriting and character/future/talent/life. According to all these articles, I was a potential criminal, utter failure and possibly not worth living.

3. Anil Kumble's Mansur Ali Khan Pataudi Memorial Lecture: Perception and Practice:

   He first led the team at 21, when every other player was senior to him. He must have worked hard at appearing almost casual in his stroke play, as if to suggest that cricket was the easiest game in the world— in fact so easy that he could play the best bowlers with just one good eye. The effect on his team was phenomenal. The perception of ease communicated itself to the many who were inhibited, diffident and under-confident.

ToI threatens a law student for her blog post

And the result is absolutely, awesomely, entertainingly stunning: it receives a scathing response [this post has all the relevant links], and gets mocked by media   watchers as well as by a rival newspaper.

* * *

A not-entirely-unrelated link: I was struck by lightning yesterday -- and boy am I sore .

Quote of the Day: Trying to have a life

... I don’t leave comments on other blogs, I don’t have another Twitter account, Facebook account, Google Plus account, or any of that. Hey, I am trying to have a life.
-- Paul Krugman on his blog.

Boxed out nano seconds of fame

Today's Education Plus supplement of The Hindu daily carries an article Virtual learning spaces. It has some of my views on blogs as a boxed item (only) in the print edition. My thanks to the article author.

Ironical that the boxed item on 'online resources' doesn't appear in the online version of the article. Perhaps, in line with the purport of the article, it is meant to inspire only the off-line readers to go online.

I remember speaking to the article author about three months back on this over the telephone. What has appeared is, understandably, a heavily condensed version of it. Where it reads "...the blog... deals with nanoscience," understand it as the author's original writing.

Neal Stephenson: "Why I am a Bad Correspondent"

In his post, below, Arunn talks about Neal Stephenson's preference for pen, and his love and passion for what he does -- writing novels. It reminded me of a short piece Stephenson once wrote to explain "why I am a bad correspondent". His website doesn't have it; but, thanks to a good soul who saved it, you can read it here [Update: Thanks also to Archive.org, which has a copy]. These two paragraphs stand out:

Writing novels is hard, and requires vast, unbroken slabs of time. Four quiet hours is a resource that I can put to good use. Two slabs of time, each two hours long, might add up to the same four hours, but are not nearly as productive as an unbroken four. If I know that I am going to be interrupted, I can’t concentrate, and if I suspect that I might be interrupted, I can’t do anything at all. Likewise, several consecutive days with four-hour time-slabs in them give me a stretch of time in which I can write a decent book chapter, but the same number of hours spread out across a few weeks, with interruptions in between them, are nearly useless.

The productivity equation is a non-linear one, in other words. This accounts for why I am a bad correspondent and why I very rarely accept speaking engagements. If I organize my life in such a way that I get lots of long, consecutive, uninterrupted time-chunks, I can write novels. But as those chunks get separated and fragmented, my productivity as a novelist drops spectacularly. What replaces it? Instead of a novel that will be around for a long time, and that will, with luck, be read by many people, there is a bunch of e-mail messages that I have sent out to individual persons, and a few speeches given at various conferences.

Links

1. WiseGeek: What does 200 Calories look like? Pictures of 200 Calories of Various Foods.

2. Robert Cottrell (the editor of The Browser: Writing Worth Reading) in FT: Net Wisdom.

   My first contention: this is a great time to be a reader. The amount of good writing freely available online far exceeds what even the most dedicated consumer might have hoped to encounter a generation ago within the limits of printed media.

   I don’t pretend that everything online is great writing. Let me go further: only 1 per cent is of value to the intelligent general reader ... Another 4 per cent of the internet counts as entertaining rubbish. The remaining 95 per cent has no redeeming features. But even the 1 per cent of writing by and for the elite is an embarrassment of riches, a horn of plenty, a garden of delights.

   The essay covers a wide variety of topics -- including what is so great about blogs by academics writing about their fields of expertise.

3. Makarand Sahasrabuddhe's answer in Quora to: India: Is reservation the best method of affirmative action in India?

Links

1. An eternity of infinities: the power and beauty of mathematics by Ashutosh Jogalekar in the Scientific American blog Curious Wavefunction.

2. Science blogging, anonymity, and “being yourself” by Rahul Siddharthan at E's flat, ah's flat too.

3. Male Scientists More Prone to Misconduct, Study Concludes by Jennifer Couzin-Frankel in Science Insider.

This just in: NewProf chucks her pseudonymity

Go say hi to Prof. Kaneenika Sinha!

Links

1. Julie Mitchell in CHE Conversations Blog: Sexy in STEM?

2. The Telescoper: To Hype or Not To Hype? -- a detached approach to blogging that most people (including me) have settled down on.

3. Joshua Gans at Digitopoly: What an academic article of the future should look like.

   See also his earlier post -- I’m a Mac. You’re a PC. There really are two types of people.

4. Jonathan Beckman in FT: Bleak Encounters. "The Literary Review’s Bad Sex in Fiction Award may provoke sniggers. But its real aim is to help banish poor prose."

Birth of a Meme: Binders Full of Women

Binders Full of Women on -- where else? -- Tumblr [link via Andrew Sullivan and Ta-Nahesi Coates]

For context on Mitt Romney's poor choice of words, watch this clip from yesterday's debate:

Quote of the Day

Blogging is not writing. It's just graffiti with punctuation.
-- Dr. Ian Sussman, a character in Contagion (2011). [video]

Links

1. John Timmer in Ars Technica: Epic fraud: How to succeed in science (without doing any).

2. Early Computing's 'Deal With the Devil': Marc Perry interviews George Dyson, dwelling on themes from Dyson's new book -- Turing's Cathedral -- on the early history of Computer Science.

3. Nick Rowe: Selection bias and disagreement in blogging.

4. Greg Downy at Neuroanthropology: Talent: A difference that makes a difference.

Nanopolitan Gets a Co-Blogger

I am pleased to announce that Arunn Narasimhan is now a co-blogger here.

Arunn has been blogging on and off at several sites, and I have had many occasions to link to his posts. It's fantastic that, in a conversation yesterday, he and I came up with the idea of his joining Nanopolitan as a co-contributor.

The sidebar and the About page have been modified to reflect this change, and each contributor now has a separate "Intro" page: Abi and Arunn.

Over to you, Arunn!

A Quick Note

While it has always been nice to see people becoming "followers" of this blog using the "Friend Connect" feature in the side bar, I never quite figured this feature out. I mean, aside from allowing one to declare one's interest in a blog (which I have done at several places), it didn't seem to do much else. Now, it turns out even Google is not quite clear what to do with it, and the company has announced that it's killing this tool. I don't know if this is of any consequence to anyone, but I just wanted to note that it'll soon be gone forever.

FWIW, I have set up a Google+ page for Nanopolitan. I don't foresee any (special) activity there -- I just wanted to claim the name +Nanopolitan before someone else did.

Academic Blog of the Day

And this one is big. Really, Really Big.

It's called A central Central University -- "the Unofficial Blog of the VC, University of Hyderabad." [A big thank-you to my colleague and coffee buddy B. Anantanarayan [blog) for the alert].

The Vice Chancellor, of course, is Prof. Ramakrishna Ramaswamy. In addition to dealing with vice-chancellorly   matters and other such heaviosities, Prof. Ramaswamy is not averse to telling (and showing) us what he had for breakfast!

Prof. Ramaswamy was earlier with JNU-Physics Department. Among his many other avatars, I'll just note two that I know of / about: he is among the good folks behind Scholars without Borders, an online bookstore for academic books. And he co-edited (with my colleague Prof. Rohini Godbole) the wonderful book of autobiographical essays by Indian women scientists, Lilavati's Daughters. He has been writing this blog since July, but I came to know about it over this morning's coffee with Anant.

Go check out the awesome blog, whose URL says it all: HCU Rocks!

One year after Vinay Deolalikar's paper

Richard J. Lipton's blog was where the action was last year when Deolalikar announced he had a proof of arguably the most important problem -- Is P equal to NP? -- in theoretical computer science. Lipton has an update of sorts on the status of Deolalikar's work: nothing new on the paper itself (at least in the public domain), but plenty of lessons from those heady days of Public Science. Here's one:

... there may be substantial contributions, perhaps new conditional results, that can possibly come from [Deolalikar's] work. This may be where the worry most applies. If there is something in Vinay Deolalikar’s long paper, then this is worth attending to, and the first onus is on the author.

Academic Blog of the Day

Academic Garden is an awesome blog by New Prof in New India who joined one of the newly minted STEM institutions in India. In her blog, NPNI has been writing about her experiences at this institution. In April, for example, NPNI described the kinds of things she considered before choosing a new institution (as opposed to old, established places); this post is worth reading just for the contrasting ways in which three top institutions in her list treated her application and her subsequent visits!

In the follow-up post -- To Have or To Be -- she talks about the pros and cons of her choice. Here's a quick excerpt:

Most of us will agree that an established group in one's research area is a highly desirable attribute in a school where one hopes to work. If such a group does not exist, it helps if the department concerned has a few senior professors with productive research programs. These people, apart from maintaining a research-oriented and intellectually vibrant atmosphere, also provide leadership and much-needed guidance to the new entrants.

When you join a baby department of a very new institute, the presence of such people may not always be possible. In my subfield, for example, there are only three research institutes in India with groups of > 1 people. As these places do not have undergraduate programs and I am a strong believer of the IIT/IISER/North American model of departments with both undergraduate and graduate programs, I did not have the luxury of joining an institute with readily available research collaborators. Most of my colleagues are in a similar situation. The institute provides us with all the professional support we need, but because it is itself very new, it cannot give us previously formed research groups. In fact, it expects us, the newbies to get our research programs going and build the groups that we want. In other words, it wants us to be what we cannot have.

People looking at academic careers in India would want to keep this in mind and think about this issue carefully.

NPNI has been blogging for quite sometime now, but I just discovered the blog a few days ago; it's now on my Google Reader.