BBC has a pictorial story on temples whose gods specialize in visas. Chilkur Balaji temple is one of the two shrines covered there; the other is a gurdwara in the Punjab village of Talhan.
The essay features a priceless picture of toy airplanes offered by the devotees at Talhan; this alone is worth a click on that link!
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'Part Deux' is because this is the second time that this phenomenon appears in this blog. The first time was 9 years ago!
Richard Van Noorden in Nature: Publishers withdraw more than 120 gibberish papers. "Conference proceedings removed from subscription databases after scientist reveals that they were computer-generated."
Female Science Professor: Talking About a Toxic Environment. "Should you tell administrators and colleagues why you are leaving?"
In Pictures: Beautiful Science. A slide show of scientific maps and infographics over centuries. Great, great stuff. Especially, the polar area diagram, also called the Nightingale's Rose -- you can see a modern, animated version here.
Adam Gopnik's book review essay on atheism: Bigger than Phil. "When did faith start to fade?"
And here we arrive at what the [atheists], whatever their numbers, really have now, and that is a monopoly on legitimate forms of knowledge about the natural world. They have this monopoly for the same reason that computer manufacturers have an edge over crystal-ball makers: the advantages of having an actual explanation of things and processes are self-evident. What works wins. We know that men were not invented but slowly evolved from smaller animals; that the earth is not the center of the universe but one among a billion planets in a distant corner; and that, in the billions of years of the universe’s existence, there is no evidence of a single miraculous intercession with the laws of nature. We need not imagine that there’s no Heaven; we know that there is none, and we will search for angels forever in vain. A God can still be made in the face of all that absence, but he will always be chairman of the board, holding an office of fine title and limited powers.
Given the diminishment in divine purview, from Galileo’s time on, the Super-Naturalists just want the language of science not to be actively insulting to them. And here we may come at last to the seedbed of the New Atheism, the thing that made the noes so loud: the broad prestige, in the past twenty years, of evolutionary biology.
“I no longer have the confidence that Penguin will stand by my book,” Mr. Varadarajan, a journalist and former editor of The Hindu newspaper, wrote. “I would be grateful if our contract is canceled, all remaining copies of my book with you are pulped, and copyright for the book is reverted to me so that I may freely distribute it electronically without the fear of any future, arbitrary withdrawal by Penguin in the face of pressure from the sort of intellectual bullies who have managed to have their way with Prof. Doniger’s book.”
In a statement on the Doniger case, Penguin — which withdrew the book before the legal case was resolved — cited a responsibility to “respect the laws of the land in which it operates, however intolerant and restrictive those laws may be,” and “to protect our employees against threats and harassment.”
But in his letter, Mr. Sharma, a professor of political science at the University of Hyderabad, struck back at that logic. If Penguin refused to cancel his contract, he wrote, he would “resort to legal action,” on the grounds that “my books published by you are grave threats to Indian law as interpreted by you and to the safety of your colleagues and employees.”
More here (citing this ToI story) on this fitting response to the shameful capitulation by Penguin India.
If you set up a marketplace of outrage you have to expect everyone to enter it. Everyone now wants to say, ‘My feelings are more hurt than yours’.
-- Monica Ali, quoted in Kenan Malik's op-ed in The Hindu.
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In an utterly abject move, Penguin India has reached an out-of-court agreement with a fringe outfit to "withdraw and pulp all copies" of Wendy Doniger's book The Hindus: An Alternative History. There have been many expressions of dismay and outrage at the way the publisher pulper caved in, and quite a few point to the irony in the fact that the same pulper stood solidly behind one of its celebrated novelist who faced a fatwa not too long ago:
Kenan Malik in The Hindu:
Twenty five years ago on February 14, the Ayotollah Khomeini issued his fatwa on Salman Rushdie, for the “blasphemies” of his fourth novel, The Satanic Verses. It is perhaps disturbingly apposite that this should also be the week in which Penguin, the publishers of The Satanic Verses, should so abjectly surrender to hardline Hindu groups over Wendy Doniger’s book The Hindus: An Alternative History, agreeing to withdraw it from publication in India. The contrast between the attitude of the old Penguin and that of the new Penguin tells us much about how much the Rushdie affair itself has transformed the landscape of free speech.
Arundhati Roy's open letter to Penguin:
Tell us, please, what is it that scared you so? Have you forgotten who you are? You are part of one of the oldest, grandest publishing houses in the world. You existed long before publishing became just another business, and long before books became products like any other perishable product in the market—mosquito repellent or scented soap. You have published some of the greatest writers in history. You have stood by them as publishers should, you have fought for free speech against the most violent and terrifying odds. And now, even though there was no fatwa, no ban, not even a court order, you have not only caved in, you have humiliated yourself abjectly before a fly-by-night outfit by signing settlement. Why? You have all the resources anybody could possibly need to fight a legal battle. Had you stood your ground, you would have had the weight of enlightened public opinion behind you, and the support of most—if not all—of your writers. You must tell us what happened. What was it that terrified you? You owe us, your writers an explanation at the very least. [Bold emphasis added]
See also: Wendy Doniger's statment in which she promises a longer article on this issue soon.
Then there's also this telling 'reveal' in this interview of a leader of the fringe outfit; it's an apt illustration of the novelist Monica Ali's quote at the beginning of the post.
Why does it matter so much to you about what someone writes about Hinduism?
If someone makes a cartoon of the prophet Mohammad, Muslims are outraged around the world. So why should anyone write anything against Hinduism and get away with it? [...]
Latika Chaudhury What constrained the expansion of education in British India?
The overall enrolment patterns provide strong evidence of India’s limited achievement at the primary level, but relatively superior performance at the secondary level. As late as 1891, only one out of 10 primary school-age children were enroled in any type of school. The number of students enrolled steadily increased in the 20th century, but even by 1941 only about one-third of school age children were enrolled in school, with sharp regional differences. Secondary and collegiate level enrolment was more remarkable — enrolment more than quadrupled between 1891 and 1941 with more than 6% of school-age children attending secondary school by 1941.
Variations across regions and social groups
However, these enrolment levels mask the tremendous regional variation within India. At every level, the more advanced coastal provinces of Bengal, Bombay and Madras out-performed the interior provinces of Bihar and United Provinces. Tremendous variation across social groups was also evident - certain religions such as Christians and Jains were among the most literate in colonial India. At the other end of the spectrum, tribal groups living in geographically remote parts of the country had the lowest literacy rates (less than 1%). Average Muslim literacy at 6.4% was below Hindu literacy at 8.4%, but there were significant regional differences. Among Hindus, there were large differences by caste — Brahmans at the upper end of the caste spectrum averaged 33%, while lower castes averaged 1.6%.
Natasha Sarin and Sarah Cannon: Larry Summers: Two Women's Perspective
Triggered by a horrible FoxNews interview of Reza Aslan, author of a recent book on Jesus, Adam Gopnik pens a short piece on the historical narratives about Jesus.
As always in these things, the interpretation involves picking out some texts as core while dismissing others as late or interpolated, with the criterion for choosing between them seeming to be, more or less, whether stories float your boat rather than what truths can be shown to walk on water. If you privilege the radical, Zealot Jesus—the one who eats with prostitutes and dismisses kosher diets and rails against Caesar —you have a hard time explaining the unworldly, Sermon on the Mount Jesus, and a still harder time explaining the purely hieratic, apolitical non-human savior-from-heaven Jesus who emerges in Paul’s letters in the decades after Jesus’s death. If you like the messianic son-of-man Jesus, you have a hard time explaining what it was that riled up the Romans. If you go for the angry activist Yeshua who drove the poor money changers from the Temple (many of them no worse than the kinds of currency-exchange folks you see at airports), you have a hard time explaining how he emerged so quickly as Paul’s Christ, a figure so remote from politics or life itself—no personal stories with wise sayings—as to lead to the rational suspicion that Paul did not intend to indicate anyone of earthly existence at all.
NYTimes on the Colin McGinn affair, and the broader debate about sexism in academic philosophy: A Star Philosopher Falls, and a Debate Over Sexism Is Set Off.
Ruth Starkman: Confessions of an Application Reader: Lifting the Veil on the Holistic Process at the University of California, Berkeley.
Meena Menon: Of Maal and Men: "We protest about rape, dowry deaths and the murder of unborn girls, but most of us end up ignoring men who consider it their right to stare at women."
“On house-hunting at Bopal, I introduced myself as Prof Malik to an owner who took me as a Punjabi. He assured me of no hurdles in loan processing. But the deal couldn’t take place the moment I told him about my faith. The owner expressed his inability to sell the house to a non-vegetarian. I could just quip ‘Aren’t Punjabi non-vegetarian?’ But his understanding was beyond the realm of logic,” said Prof Malik, sharing his experience. The professor had almost got a house on rent through a common friend. “IIT-Gn was willing to pay extra rent for the house. Everything was finalised but the society members reportedly opposed the owner’s decision of giving the house on rent to a Muslim. Two days later when I was preparing to shift, I was told that the house was given to someone else,” he said.
More here. Prof. Javed Malik is currently at IIT-K.
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Update (23 July 2013): The link appeared in my RSS feed yesterday, I didn't check the date on the story; it turns out that it was published over 16 months ago (February 2012). Hat tip to Sunil Mukhi, who goes on to point out:
Though this story is often used for Modi-bashing, for once I don't think it's his fault (and nor is it Sonia/Rahul's fault, though so many believe them to be the root of all evil in our country!). The remarkable thing is that such blatant and ignorant discrimination is practised not by uneducated villagers, but by the upwardly mobile residents of elegant housing complexes. Even in the stylish new developments in Pune there are signs warning against "renting out to bachelors and foreigners". This is a general statement of prejudice but also comfortably covers the many Iranian students in the city. The same is true in certain areas of Malabar Hill in Bombay, where buildings are declared "vegetarian" in a bid to keep out the obvious communities. And let's not forget the time the actress Pooja Bedi Ibrahim (as she was then) was asked to drop the "Ibrahim" when applying for a credit card. "You see madam, our bank doesn't give credit cards to Muslims" she was told. It wasn't the BJP or the Congress that took this decision. It was a middle-class bank official. In other words it was you, me and our uncles and aunts.
Two posts appeared on my Google Reader just in the last couple of days. While they are triggered by the anniversary of atrocities committed many years ago (coincidentally, on the same day, the sixth of December), they really are about a slow, corrosive kind of bigotry.
First up, here is Sunil Mukhi on the twentieth anniversary of the outrage at Ayodhya:
... this fateful day still resonates in my mind after twenty years. Not because I was personally impacted, or anyone I know was personally impacted. But because this is when I saw the appallingly foolish and self-destructive fascist agenda unfurl before my eyes for the first time.
As of that date it suddenly became fashionable, even in a place like TIFR, to whisper (or hint) unpleasant things about Muslims. [...]
[...]
These "sophisticated bigots" did not personally bring down the mosque, nor would they ever engage in manifest politics. Their opinions surface only when they feel the atmosphere will tolerate it. Today the agenda of building a Ram temple at Ayodhya, and thereby miraculously converting India into a great country, is in shambles. This agenda has done terrible things to our social fabric but not one good thing for the nation's structure, morality or self-esteem, forget social or economic development (how could it possibly??). So at this time the bigots are hiding their views. But I don't intend to ever forget who they are, or what damage they did by conferring legitimacy on such an aberrant movement in India's history.
And here's Janet Stemwedel on the 22nd anniversary of the Montreal Massacre:
Most of the people who believe women do not belong in science and engineering classrooms, or in science or engineering jobs, or in other domains that used to be exclusively male, will never pick up a gun to enforce their will.
But, there are plenty who will send women the clear message that they are not welcome as equal participants in these domains. [...]
"Religion has very little to do with the number of babies per woman," says Hans Rosling in this fabulous TED talk: Religions and Babies. [via Swarup and Gwen Sharp].
Now, watch the awesome Hans in action:
Namit Arora at 3 Quarks Daily: The Bhagavad Gita Revisited: Part 1 Given the big bang summary -- "Why the Bhagavad Gita is an overrated text with a deplorable morality at its core" -- I can't wait for Part 2!
Sunshine has an article in Amreekan Desi: The FOB who became ABCD:
Her acclimatization experience did not come without some ten dozen embarrassing experiences when she made a fool of herself. But she learned well. She learned that light switches worked differently, bathrooms were restrooms, baths were showers, notes were bills, bills were checks, and checks were also checks. She learned to run hot water without burning herself. She learned not to use the word dicky for car trunks, and learned that a fast food chain was called Dick’s. She learned that it was actually okay to ask for boxes for leftover food, and capsicums, brinjals, and lady’s finger had their own names here.
She learned to drop the words sir and madam, and address her professor, as old as her grandfather, using his first name. [...]
Rahul Siddharthan: An h-index for test cricket batsmen.
Suppose we modify it as follows: the nh index is that value of h, for a given n, such that on h occasions the batsman has scored nh or more runs. For examples, the 10h index would be: if on 5 occasions I have scored 50 runs or more (and I have not scored 60 runs or more on 6 occasions) I have a 10h index of 5. For n > 1, basically, I am giving more importance to higher-scoring innings, and also benefiting those who played fewer matches (most older players played far fewer games than Tendulkar and can’t remotely approach either his career aggregate, or his h-score).
This god happens to be the christian version -- see this comment:
There’s imitation, and then there’s homage, and then there’s straight-up idea theft, which is what Your thing appears to be. Anyone who wants to check out the original should go to www.VishnuAndBrahma.com. (And check it out soon, because I think they’re about to go behind a paywall.)
Paul Rudnick of New Yorker offers us a possible preview of his tweets. A couple of samples:
I loved that best-seller about the boy who momentarily died and went to Heaven, but all I wanted to ask was, “Did He say anything about me?”
I counsel couples who are about to marry, “If it feels good, stop.”
The awesome profile, by Decca Aitkenhead, follows the publication of The Good Book: A Secular Bible which, according to Grayling, is "ambitious and hubristic – a distillation of the best that has been thought and said by people who've really experienced life, and thought about it". Halfway through the profile, Grayling gets a chance to respond to the charge that "the atheist movement has been ... by adopting a tone so militant as to alienate potential supporters, and fortify the religious lobby.":
"Well, firstly, I think the charges of militancy and fundamentalism of course come from our opponents, the theists. My rejoinder is to say when the boot was on their foot they burned us at the stake. All we're doing is speaking very frankly and bluntly and they don't like it," he laughs. "So we speak frankly and bluntly, and the respect agenda is now gone, they can no longer float behind the diaphanous veil – 'Ooh, I have faith so you mustn't offend me'. So they don't like the blunt talking. But we're not burning them at the stake. They've got to remember that when it was the other way around it was a much more serious matter.
"And besides, really," he adds with a withering little laugh, "how can you be a militant atheist? How can you be militant non-stamp collector? This is really what it comes down to. You just don't collect stamps. So how can you be a fundamentalist non-stamp collector? It's like sleeping furiously. It's just wrong."
Jacopo della Quercia at Cracked.com: 5 Ridiculous Things You Probably Believe About Islam.
Scicurious at Neurotic Physiology: Friday Weird Science: The Magnificent Mammal Menage a Trois. It's about wild whale sex.
Apoorva Mandavilli in Nature: Peer review: Trial by Twitter: "Blogs and tweets are ripping papers apart within days of publication, leaving researchers unsure how to react."
Pam Belluck in NYTimes: To Really Learn, Quit Studying and Take a Test. "Test-taking actually helps people learn, and it works better than repeated studying, according to new research."
Christine Carter at The Berkeley Blog: How to raise an unhappy child.
Rahul Siddharthan at E's Flat, Ah's Flat Too: The Indus Argument Continues: An update on the exciting statistical evidence presented last year that "the Indus symbols constituted a writing system."
Vivek Wadhwa in TechCrunch: Can Russia Build a Silicon Valley?
James Fallows in The Atlantic Blogs: A Primer on Bigotry. We can thank Marty "Muslim Life is Cheap" Peretz for this primer.
Sean Safford at Orgtheory: A Primer on 'Networking'.
Yet another Is This Legal? news, this time from West Bengal's Aliah University:
For the past three months, 24-year-old Sirin Middya has not been able to hold her classes at West Bengal’s first Muslim university. While the guidelines at Aliah University in Kolkata don’t stipulate the same, the students’ union has demanded that Middya can teach but only in burqa.
Middya was appointed a guest lecturer at the university in March this year and got the union “diktat” in the second week of April. “I was told that I would not be allowed to attend college if I did not agree to come in a burqa. The University Grants Commission does not prescribe any such dress code and even the university does not have a dress code. But the most unfortunate part is that students are forcing us to wear burqa,” Middya told The Indian Express.
Thanks to Jai for the pointer; his comment appeared in a post on Martha Nussbaum's rebuttal of arguments trotted out to support a burqa ban in France.
An extended argument -- philosophical, political, and pragmatic -- rebutting those of the supporters of a ban on the burqa (especially in some European countries).
Five arguments are commonly made in favor of proposed bans. Let’s see whether they treat all citizens with equal respect. First, it is argued that security requires people to show their faces when appearing in public places. A second, closely related, argument says that the kind of transparency and reciprocity proper to relations between citizens is impeded by covering part of the face.
What is wrong with both of these arguments is that they are applied inconsistently. It gets very cold in Chicago – as, indeed, in many parts of Europe. Along the streets we walk, hats pulled down over ears and brows, scarves wound tightly around noses and mouths. No problem of either transparency or security is thought to exist, nor are we forbidden to enter public buildings so insulated. Moreover, many beloved and trusted professionals cover their faces all year round: surgeons, dentists, (American) football players, skiers and skaters. What inspires fear and mistrust in Europe, clearly, is not covering per se, but Muslim covering.
A reasonable demand might be that a Muslim woman have a full face photo on her driver’s license or passport. With suitable protections for modesty during the photographic session, such a photo might possibly be required. However, we know by now that the face is a very bad identifier. At immigration checkpoints, eye-recognition and fingerprinting technologies have already replaced the photo. When these superior technologies spread to police on patrol and airport security lines, we can do away with the photo, hence with what remains of the first and second arguments.
Aniket Alam at Left ~ Write: How not to Understand Muslim Fundamentalism [on why he disagrees with Mahmood Mamdani's "well argued and seemingly persuasive thesis" that seeks to de-legitimize people's right to ridicule/mock/criticize a tradition/religion that they don't belong to]:
Attacking living human beings, deepening prejudice against them which weakens their political and social positions is not the same as attacking an idea or belief, however similar they may appear to us.
Steve Coll in New Yorker: What I Learned About Blogging:
Some things I did not expect that turned out to be true: ... 3) Aggregation and calling attention to other people’s good work without much effort on your own part is enough justification for blogging in the first place.
Some problems that I half-expected that also turned out to be true: 1) Writing fast about serious subjects because they are in the news, without doing a lot of reporting first, can produce crap. [...]
Harper Lee's To Kill A Mockingbird has been delighting book lovers for 50 years. Here's the NYTimes review from 1960 [pdf]. NYTimes also offers a lots of links to stuff about the author, her lone novel, the movie, reviews and critical essays.
Nishith Prakash at VoxEU: It pays to speak English: English skills raise wages for some, not all, in India.
Jonah Lehrer in The Guardian: Why We Travel, on the cognitive benefits of travel.
Mark Abrahams in The Guardian: Improbable research: The repetitive physics of Om [via Ludwig]
Suvrat Kher at Rapid Uplift: Computers And Sexism In 1920's Harvard.
Just watch the author of The Good Man Jesus and the Scoundrel Christ:
If the embed doesn't work, watch it at YouTube.
Matt Taibbi at Taibblog: The Catholic Church is a Criminal Enterprise. Here's the Taibbi Treatment:
One expects professional slimeballs like the public relations department of Goldman Sachs to pull out the “Well, we weren’t the only thieves!” argument when accused of financial malfeasance. But I almost couldn’t believe my eyes as I read through Dolan’s retort and it dawned on me that he was actually going to use the “We weren’t the only child molesters!” excuse. Dolan must have very roomy man-robes, because it seems to me you’d need a set of balls like two moons of Jupiter to say such a thing in public and expect it to fly. But this is exactly what Dolan does; he bases his entire defense of the Church on the idea that others are equally culpable.
Thomas Benton in The Chronicle of Higher Education: The Big Lie About the 'Life of the Mind':
One reason that graduate school is for the already privileged is that it is structurally dependent on people who are neither privileged nor connected. Wealthy students are not trapped by the system; they can take what they want from it, not feel pressured, and walk away at any point with minimal consequences. They do not have to obsess about whether some professor really likes them. If they are determined to become academics, they can select universities on the basis of reputation rather than money. They can focus on research rather than scrambling for time-consuming teaching and research assistantships to help pay the bills. And, when they go on the market, they can hold out for the perfect position rather than accepting whatever is available.
But the system over which the privileged preside does not ultimately depend on them for the daily functioning of higher education (which is now, as we all know, drifting toward a part-time, no-benefit business). The ranks of new Ph.D.'s and adjuncts these days are mainly composed of people from below the upper-middle class: people who believe from infancy that more education equals more opportunity. They see the professions as a path to security and status.
Massimo Pigliucci at Rationally Speaking: "Anything Is Possible." No, Not Really.
Clearly, not anything is possible. It is pretty easy to come up with examples of things that are not possible: it is not possible for me both to be and not to be (pace Hamlet); it is not possible for me to levitate; and it is not even possible for me to be in Rome at this moment, because I’m in New York writing this essay.
Those three examples are not picked at random, they illustrate three distinct classes of impossibility recognized by philosophers: the first is an instance of something that is logically impossible; the second is an example of physical impossibility; and the last one is an illustration of contingent impossibility.
Live Science: Babies Are Born To Dance. Check out the video.
