Free Binayak Sen

His case has attracted little attention in the Indian media, except for Tehelka which ran a cover story three months ago.

Now there's a global appeal to release him. The signatories include 22 Nobel laureates. Is anyone listening?

News you won't see in The Hindu

Nandigram today.

Old post revisited

Someone left a comment on an ancient (November 2006) post of mine, so I went and re-read what I had written. While the immediate provocation was a newspaper article by a well-known scientist, a lot of what I wrote seems rather topical in the context of two recent posts (1, 2) by Rahul Basu (and discussion therein) (*).

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(*)UPDATE: and one at Sunil Mukhi's.

"We don't do things that way"

“Our system is so different from theirs,” said David Mack, a former U.S. diplomat who has served in American embassies in Iraq, Jordan, Lebanon, Libya, Tunisia and the United Arab Emirates... "We would never accept their way of doing things, and they don’t accept ours.”

What is this unacceptable way they have of doing things? If you kill their wives and children, and then offer them monetary compensation, it won't pacify them. They first want an apology.

"Obliterate Iran"

This time she didn't "misspeak". She meant it.

America, america

There are many songs called "America" (Wikipedia lists half a dozen). But this one is different.

Tavleen Singh wants Marine Drive to go to the dogs

This is actually old news, but surfaced in today's Dinamalar. Apparently the municipal corporation in Mumbai wants pet owners to clean up after them, as is done in major cities around the world; and Tavleen Singh, columnist for Indian Express, was not happy to be fined last year when her dog pooped on Marine Drive. (DNA link, which doesn't work for me at the moment; Google cache of same).

The DNA article has some depressing quotes from the columnist who loses no opportunity to complain about poor sanitation in Mumbai and India (1, 2, 3). Why, she asks, is Mumbai's corporation concerned about Marine Drive and not about the suburbs and the slums? Why, one could ask her, does she not choose to live in the suburbs or the slums?

She also makes the bizarre claim that the government supplies citizens with poop-scooping equipment in New York and Paris. Since she speaks with such authority, methinks she should go and live in New York for a while (Paris tends to be notoriously laissez-faire about this), and when she is fined there, she can try demanding equipment from the authorities (and also try not paying the fine in absence of such government-supplied equipment).

Around the same time, Mumbai Mirror had a story on littering, and quoted Tavleen Singh as saying: "People who spit on the road should be locked up. People who litter are criminals." Would I rather step in someone's spittle, a discarded plastic bag, or dog poo? I think the answer is "None of the above."

Today's Dinamalar says a concerned citizen filed a right-to-information request to find out whether Singh ever actually paid the fine. She didn't. Maybe she won't be asked to. She's an important person, by virtue of her regular pontifications in an important newspaper.

Presidential non-debates

From an article last year by Newt Gingrich (via Donklephant):

We don't really have presidential debates today; we have a kind of meaningless political performance art: a recitation of talking points choreographed to avoid any risk.

In the 2004 election, the Bush-Kerry debate rules ran a full 32 pages of do's and don'ts, including one rule that ordered the moderator to stop any candidate who dared to depart from the script to reference someone in the audience.

The candidates also were ordered to turn over for inspection "all such paper and any pens or pencils with which a candidate may wish to take notes during the debate." Pen and pencils. Talk about the vital stuff of democracy!

In telling contrast, the ground rules for the most famous debates in U.S. history were outlined in a two-sentence letter from Abraham Lincoln to Stephen Douglas, his opponent in the 1858 race for the U.S. Senate in Illinois. After a prompt exchange of letters, they settled on the terms for seven debates. Lincoln insisted only that "I wish perfect reciprocity, and no more." There was no talk of pens and pencils.

"Hillary Strangelove"

I was looking for a US media response to Hillary Clinton's recent threat to "obliterate" a country that has not been the aggressor in any war in living memory, a civilisation a few millennia older than her own, in the hypothetical event of its launching a nuclear attack on Israel. Other than this strong editorial in the Boston Globe, which compares her with the Kubrick movie character and concludes by rubbishing her 3AM ad, I don't see very much out there.

Let me amend the above. Even if Iran had been a johnny-come-lately country with no history or culture to speak of and even if it had been the aggressor in several recent wars, that still wouldn't be a reason to kill every single man, woman and child living there.

The only remotely reasonable explanation -- which some Clinton spinmeisters are hinting at -- is that this is not a serious threat, but a strategy: "Let's convince the Iranians that we're so batshit crazy that we will do anything."

No, let me amend that too. It is not a remotely reasonable explanation. There isn't one.

Inside view of OLPC

I have always had a dim view of the One Laptop Per Child project, which, after years of hype, is now seeing some negative publicity and the departure of many key figures. I figured that $100 per laptop per child was a lot of money for a developing country: that kind of money would buy several years' textbooks in India. I figured, also, that it is more important to teach kids basic reading, writing and arithmetic skills, and there is no evidence anywhere in the world that laptops help with this goal. And the pontifications of Nicholas Negroponte, the project's founder, always sounded a bit pompous: as if he knew better than anyone else what schoolkids in developing countries need.

But it seems I am not the only one with a dim view of Negroponte. According to Ivan Krstić:

To those on the outside and looking in: remember that, though he takes the liberty of speaking in its name, Nicholas [Negroponte] is not OLPC. OLPC is Walter Bender, Scott Ananian, Chris Ball, Mitch Bradley, Mark Foster, Marco Pesenti Gritti, Mary Lou Jepsen, Andres Salomon, Richard Smith, Michael Stone, Tomeu Vizoso, John Watlington, Dan Williams, Dave Woodhouse, and the community, and the rest of the people who worked days, nights, and weekends without end, fighting like warrior poets to make this project work. Nicholas wasn’t the one who built the hardware, or wrote the software, or deployed the machines. Nicholas talks, but these people’s work walks.

And more strong stuff about how Negroponte has actively misrepresented aspects of the project and how recent developments have been despite him, not because of him. Now, this guy is writing from the point of view of the technical aspects of the laptop; but he also says the laptop is doing real good in Uruguay, Peru, Nepal and elsewhere. It would be interesting to see some impartial reviews of this work.

I haven't changed my opinion about this project being ill-conceived, but the device they produced is pretty cool and I don't know why they don't mass-market it: I'm sure lots of parents would want to buy it as a geeky programmable toy for their kids.

As for the point about the money being better spendable on textbooks: yes, I have to ask myself, but what if the government isn't spending on textbooks? What if government schools are lamentably ill-equipped with educational materials? What if the choice is not $100 worth of textbooks and other old-fashioned materials, but -- nothing?

Our government in India rejected OLPC, for reasons I agree with. But it would be nice to see an alternative programme implemented.