Lay Lady Day

What if Billie Holiday sang the modern poet-singer greats like Bob Dylan, Leonard Cohen, Joni Mitchell, Serge Gainsbourg, Tom Waits? That would seem unlikely, given that she died in 1959. But here's the next best thing: Madeleine Peyroux.

Her singing style is clearly inspired by Holiday, but her song selection is quite contemporary. Her blues tunes have a stronger, more rock-like beat than you'd hear from Holiday, while her jazzier selections (and contemporary singer-poet covers) have a nice swing to them. Her interpretations are original and fascinating. No casual pop singer she.

I just picked up her 2004 album "Careless Love", but her website contains complete streaming versions of all her albums (flash 8 required). Check her out.

The news we don't read

So we have heard all about Jessica Lall and Priyadarshini Mattoo, and anything else that happens to the elite in Delhi and other big cities.

So why hadn't most of us heard of this, which happened over a month ago? A search on Google News for Surekha Bhotmange throws up only three news items (two in DNA in early-mid October, and one in the Times of India on October 29), and a google web search throws up about 82 hits, very few of which are on news sites.

As Dilip D'Souza says, see the pictures. Yes, they'll disturb and disgust you, but that's the point. That's the only way to bring home the horror. I never understood why the media censors "disturbing" images.

The good part is that the internet is serving as a medium to expose these stories (apparently the mainstream national media is belatedly waking up too -- NDTV has a story today). And, if justice is done (I know that's a huge if), hopefully it will increase awareness among Dalits elsewhere in India of their rights, and recognition among upper-caste thugs that they can't get away with it.

(On another note -- it's sad that several Dalit readers on that blog are arguing for doing the same to upper-caste Hindu women. It's true that the women in that village didn't stop this, but women in traditional Indian communities are hardly in a position of power. Why must the women always be the victims?)

UPDATE
Many people in our prudish country object to the pictures not because they are disturbing but because they show naked bodies. So let me point out a parallel from another prudish country (which I mentioned in a post on another site). Stories of US torture in Iraq had been appearing for months in the international media, but it took the Abu Ghraib photos of naked, humiliated prisoners to actually wake up the American public. (And even then, the response was basically to punish the perpetrators in those particular photos. Everything else is ignored. If the US media hadn't been so self-censoring in its visual imagery from Iraq, the war would have been over long ago.)

Now it turns out that one of the first US soldiers to die in Iraq (the third woman, in fact, back in 2003) committed suicide after objecting to the interrogation techniques she was forced to use. I am not sure what these techniques are -- they have nondescript names like "waterboarding" -- but I'm sure a picture, or even better, a video, would be very enlightening.

Just writing "the soldiers stripped prisoners naked and humilated them" or "the villagers stripped the family naked, raped and killed them" doesn't convey the same impact as seeing it.

We need more photos, of every atrocity that happens around the country. Reading the news is not the same as seeing it.

UPDATE 2
A photo, from another generation, of a naked girl running for her life. The photographer says "At first (his editors) didn't like the picture because the girl had no clothes." But they published it around the world, and the world wasn't the same.

Et U tu?

I was going to make a quite different music-related post, but plans changed. Last night my wife and I watched a DVD of U2's Rattle and Hum. I remembered liking the album when I was a teenager, but had assumed I'd outgrown that sort of thing. I was surprised by how much I actually liked the movie. Bono's singing and playacting are a bit over the top, and I don't see why he brandishes a guitar without actually playing it (at least, not audibly). But the lyrics and delivery are honest and heartfelt and the music sounds genuine and original, if not quite what I normally listen to. (Some complaints: the BB King song is butchered, with multiple spliced segments and intervening interviews -- the only song to suffer such a fate -- and the Dylan collaborations and the Lennon tribute are omitted entirely. But the latter were pretty mediocre anyway, as I remember.)

The most striking moment was in "Sunday Bloody Sunday", a song about the violence in Ireland, when Bono breaks off mid-song to talk about the bombing that had happened earlier that day (November 8, 1987). I can't do better than quote his entire rant, as I found it in Wikipedia.

"Let me tell you somethin'. I've had enough of Irish Americans who haven't been back to their country in twenty or thirty years come up to me and talk about the resistance, the revolution back home... and the glory of the revolution... and the glory of dying for the revolution. Fuck the revolution! They don't talk about the glory of killing for the revolution. What's the glory in taking a man from his bed and gunning him down in front of his wife and children? Where's the glory in that? Where's the glory in bombing a Remembrance Day parade of old age pensioners, their medals taken out and polished up for the day. Where's the glory in that? To leave them dying or crippled for life or dead. Under the rubble of the revolution, that the majority of the people in my country don't want. No more!"

It applies beyond the Irish-American community: many so-called "nationalist" movements are sustained by expatriates. Members of the Sikh-Canadian community kept the Khalistan movement alive, Muslim communities in Europe are more radicalised than communities in Islamic countries. But Bono's speech particularly sums up what I think about Indian Americans who emigrated 20 or 30 years ago but lavishly fund fascist organisations like the RSS and its siblings, who then go and destroy hospitals in Thane or libraries in Pune or do pogroms in Gujarat. Where's "garv se kaho, hum hindu hain" in destroying the best-equipped hospital in a community and making patients jump from their beds and run for their lives, because your leader died in that hospital (and for no fault of the hospital's)? How does destroying valuable antique manuscripts in a leading oriental library demonstrate our superior Hindu culture? Above all, where's the Hindutva pride in burning innocent defenceless civilians alive, from politicians like Ehsan Jaffrey to hundreds of ordinary people struggling to make a living? And let's not have that shit about "they started it with the Godhra train". What connection did the people killed have with the Godhra train?

If the supply of funds from rich, self-styled patriotic Indians in America to these organisations were cut off, India would be a better place.

Heads up

André Carrilho, caricaturist for The New York Times, does not like Andrew Sullivan. And is not subtle in saying so.

I can't believe the editors missed the allusion, so presumably they approve.

The Republicans will win

Mark my words. In the upcoming elections, the Republicans will retain control of both houses in the US, and will very likely increase their majority. They will also win the presidential elections in 2008.

Not because the people voted for them, but because the manufacturers of the voting machines did.

This is not news: researchers at Princeton, Johns Hopkins and elsewhere have highlighted problems with Diebold machines for years (as I wrote recently). But America's craven media have refused to report on it: only now are a few reluctant articles appearing in mainstream newspapers.

Diebold's CEO was on record back in 2003 saying he was committed to delivering Ohio's presidential votes to the Republicans. There's no reason to think that commitment has changed.

Yes, people do unintentionally write buggy software and make defective hardware. But to screw up on this scale requires malice. There is no mistake in what Diebold are doing. It's all going according to plan for them, except for the occasional squawks of protest from researchers at east coast universities, that Diebold figure they can safely ignore.

After all, what can the skeptical eggheads do? The best they can do is mount a legal challenge, and hope it goes all the way up to the Supreme Court -- the court that originally voted Bush in.

UPDATE: Why tamper with the machine? Just say the Democratic candidate's full name won't fit on the screen and leave out his last name (but leave in his nickname, so he's now James H. "Jim").

I'll believe that's an accidental error when it happens with Arnold Schwarzenegger.

The SF delusion

So does God exist? Suppose you, a humble mortal, find yourself inadequate to answer that, what do you do? You go to some of the great minds of our times.

Newton, of course, believed in God. So did Einstein, though his God may have little resemblance to the figure in the Old Testament. Very well, what's good enough for them is good enough for you, you say.

(Pascal had a good argument for believing: there may or may not be a God, you may or may not believe in Him, but you can only lose if there is a God and you don't believe in Him.)

Then Richard Dawkins comes along and not only argues persuasively that there's no God, but writes a book called "The God Delusion" to explain why not. (Watch him explain it to a mock-sceptical Stephen Colbert here.)

Then the ghost of Paul Erdős comes along and says, "Well, I don't know about God, but what about the Supreme Fascist, eh? Someone's out to get me, hiding my glasses and stealing my passport."

Irrefutable?

Hitch and hiked deaths

Christopher Hitchens is a pretty good writer -- erudite, insightful, witty -- until the topic becomes Iraq. Then he loses it. Unfortunately, these days the topic is generally Iraq.

This week (yes, I'm late to the party) he takes aim at The Lancet for publishing a recent peer-reviewed study from Johns Hopkins on excess deaths in Iraq since the invasion, poking fun at their "imprecise" figure; he's as ignorant of statistical sampling as he is of missile technology ("Not that there are any non-ballistic missiles" -- strange that the Iraq war hawk should be ignorant of guided missiles). Similar to the side-swipe that I just made at him, he takes a swipe at a letter to the editor that Lancet published some years earlier, on excess deaths of children due to sanctions.

After that, it gets a bit murkier: I really can't understand what he's saying. The few claims he makes that I follow -- such as that the occupying forces "issue regular statistics" on civilian deaths -- seem risibly naive. But mostly he doesn't make any claims at all, only insinuations, and it's hard to tell what those are too.

Why waste time on Hitchens? Because he used to be a valuable and entertaining writer and has done useful work in the past, including exposing such people as Henry Kissinger and Mother Teresa. (I wonder why more people never asked the obvious question: how did the good Mother spend those millions of dollars she received from prizes and donors over the world, and why didn't some of that money go into improving medical facilities at her hospices?) And he's still capable of taking accurate aim, with entertaining results, at the Catholic church and other easy targets when he feels like it. But he could have been a relevant writer. If he hoped, by defecting from the left (a defection I'm quite in sympathy with), to become more in tune with the new American century, it hasn't worked. He used to be amusing; now he's a joke.

The bad old days

My last post was on how electronic voting machines have changed India's election culture, and "booth-capturing" and "ballot-stuffing" have ceased.

Yesterday, in my city, local elections were held the old-fashioned way -- with ballot papers -- and this was the result.

Pushing the wrong buttons

Once upon a time, any election in India would be accompanied by "booth-capturing", "ballot-stuffing", and other unsavoury incidents; and the declaration of results would be accompanied by allegations from the other side of theft and fraud. Then India's elections went electronic: after extensive testing and local use for 10 years, the 2004 general elections were entirely conducted on electronic machines, and were the most peaceful and least contentious ever. The world watched and applauded.

Once upon a time, the US was the beacon of democracy. Then in 2000, the presidential election took ten days of wrangling and a Supreme Court vote to decide. Embarrassed by the international coverage of butterfly ballot papers and hanging chads, the US decided to go electronic too. But the 2004 elections were among the most contentious ever, especially in Ohio. And all signs suggest that future elections will be worse. Why?

For one thing, there's the main manufacturer of these machines, Diebold. Its CEO wrote to Republicans in 2003 that he was "committed to helping Ohio deliver its electoral votes to the president next year." (He later said he didn't mean it that way.) Subsequently there have been numerous questions raised regarding the security of these machines. Recently, Edward Felten of Princeton University and his colleagues infected them with a virus that could silently change voting results. A little earlier, they showed that a commonly-available hotel minibar key could be used to physically open a Diebold machine. And that's just in the past month. Earlier, Avi Rubin of Johns Hopkins had made several devastating critiques of e-voting security, Diebold's in particular; an archive of his observations is here.

Robert F. Kennedy, Jr, has written two recent articles in Rolling Stone, arguing strongly that the 2004 election was stolen, and that the next one will be, too.

And now it seems the US is not the only country facing problems with electronic voting. Brazilian campaigners are worried about aspects of their system, and now there are reports that Nedap voting machines used in the Netherlands and France can be programmed to steal votes too.

So why is there such a lack of controversy in India? It's all to do with the sort of voting machines in use. The above countries use special-purpose voting machines that are really full-fledged computers, with RAM, hard disks, touch screens, networking capabilities, PCMCIA, peripherals, Microsoft Windows, and yes, security holes including viruses. The Indian machines are basically adding-machines: externally they just have 16 buttons (one for each candidate, but up to 4 machines can be chained together if there are more candidates), and internally they have no operating system; all their software is hard-wired on a sealed microprocessor that cannot be rewritten or replaced without damaging the machine. Moreover, the voting machine does not store vote tallies: a separate control machine does that.

This blog posting (from 2004) goes into more details. As Slate (and others) noted at that time, sometimes a pencil is indeed better than a high-tech pen.

How many links in a foot?

Just got over with tiling the house. Plenty to say about that, and we've been saying it on email, so here I'll restrict myself to just one of my numerous pet peeves, that extends beyond this project: why, nearly 60 years after the sun set on the British empire, are we still stuck with imperial units in India?

For the most part, we do use metric units: distances are in kilometres, weights are in kilograms, and so on. But a few things, like body temperature, body height, and surveying, are still in the old units.

So we needed to buy four boxes of tiles for skirting, each containing four tiles. All tile shops price their tiles "per square foot". But these tiles are "20x20", i.e., 20 inches to a side. So how many square feet are 4 boxes of 4 tiles each? Quick now! Of course, he reached for his calculator, and after several fumbles, got an answer I had obtained with pencil and paper: 44.44 square feet.

Is that the answer? Not exactly: though the shops and the contractors are stuck in British days, the manufacturers have in fact gone metric. So these tiles are not 20 inches to a side, but 500 cm -- half a metre -- to a side. If you account for that, the true answer is about 43.05 square feet. Of course, we didn't think of that in the shop.

Now let's see how that would have worked out if the price were in square metres. How many square metres to a tile? A half squared, that is a quarter. How many tiles to a box? Four. How many square metres to a box? One. How many square metres in N boxes? N. How many pushes of calculator buttons needed to do that? Depends on whom you ask.

When will these people decide that their lives would be simpler if they used the same units the rest of the world (excepting one, but including our former imperial rulers) use -- the same units that the manufacturers use?

Or maybe it's a scam: they call the tiles 20x20, rather than a quarter square metre, to be able to overcharge by about 3%.

Well, that was actually the least of our annoyances in the exercise, but at least the job got done and the result looks fairly good. Could have been better, could have been much worse.

Oh, by the way: according to Wikipedia, there are 1 17/33 links in a foot.