Choosing a team

During football season, S1 is fond of asking me: "So if Ohio State plays OU, who are you going to support?" My answer is always the same: "when it happens, we'll see." A Sooner-Buckeye game is yet to happen.

But today's Vugraph on Bridge Base features Open teams from USA and India. Who would I root for? The Indians are totally outclassed, because playing for USA are Meckstroth and Rodwell (the Bridge counterparts to Jordan-Pippen or Ronaldo-Ronaldinho: these are simply the best pair the Bridge world has ever seen). And the Indians are playing quite badly too -- on the hand shown, South threw away his King-Diamond while still keeping the 7. That was worth 2 tricks and 8 IMPs. So, I found myself not quite rooting for the USA but just shaking my head at the performance of India.

Based on this experience, I know the answer to S1's question. If two of my teams play, I'll simply wish the losing team would pick up their game. I'd want both teams to give it their best, and then be quite happy if the better team wins.

Emerging trend: I too am entitled to a million dollars

The last few years of ridiculously over-paid CEOs and hedge-fund bozos have produced a sickness where everyone seems to think that they need to make a few million dollars too.

Two Pennsylvania judges decide that they too are entitled to a million a year, so this is what they did:

Judges Mark Ciavarella and Michael Conahan received a commission for every day they sent a child to private juvenile detention centres run by Pennsylvania Child Care and a sister company. The pay-offs came to $2.6m over seven years ... Hillary Transue, who is 15 and faced Mr Ciavarella without a lawyer, was sentenced to three months because she constructed a fake MySpace page ridiculing the assistant principal at her high school.

Meanwhile, a Florida professor took it upon himself to find a way to earn a million dollars:

Federal authorities raided the office of a University of Florida professor on Wednesday who, along with his wife, is suspected of defrauding NASA. ... investigators from the FBI and NASA said that since 1999, the government has awarded 13 contracts to the couple's company, New Era Technology Inc. (NETECH), and deposited $3.4 million into the company's corporate account. Investigators allege they diverted much of the money from the corporate account into personal accounts to buy cars and property.

I'm still looking for the third instance so that this can officially become a trend.

Taking out the competition: volcano monitoring, Jindal and Palin

What does Bobby Jindal have against volcano monitoring? The stimulus bill funds the USGS for "repair, construction and restoration of facilities; equipment replacement and upgrades including stream gages, and seismic and volcano monitoring systems; national map activities; and other critical deferred maintenance and improvement projects."

Since Jindal doesn't take objection to seismic (earthquake) monitoring, he's presumably okay with money being spent in California. So, what's up with volcano monitoring.? Well ... Sarah Palin's state of Alaska relies on volcano monitoring:

Recent research shows that Alaska has more than 130 volcanoes that have been active in the last two million years -- and more than 50 that have been active since 1760, about 10 more than scientists were aware of two decades ago. About two of them erupt each year.

Now Redoubt is at center stage, and every breath it takes is carefully monitored. Nine seismographic stations have been positioned around its flanks and the surrounding terrain. Data from three of them can be observed 24 hours a day by anyone with computer access to the Internet.

So, perhaps Jindal's trying take out his main 2012 competition in more ways than one!

This ageing house

Three events make a trend, and on that basis our house is falling apart. The build quality on the stuff I'm having to replace is driving me crazy -- it's almost like these things have been built without any consideration for durability or maintenance.

First thing in the trio: the light in a ceiling fan blows out. How hard can it be to replace a bulb, right? Well, I can not get the fixture open. There's a nice, friendly "Open" sticker right on the metal housing with an arrow pointing counterclockwise. I grip and turn. The whole fan unscrews from the ceiling. I try the glass dish. Nothing doing. The stuff's been factory tightened and it's not going to come loose. Worse, I don't know which thing to pry loose -- the metal housing (which has the sticker) or the glass (which is how most light fixtures work). It takes a visit to Lowe's and a chat with my builder before I get the idea of using a rubber mallet to tap the glass fixture open.

Next to go: a part of the fence in our backyard. There's often standing water on the other side of the fence, and it's rotted the post out. A little wind (a wisp by Oklahoma standards) and the fence blows down. Digging it out, I realize that the post has been set in concrete, but there is no gravel or anything to drain the water away. No wonder it rotted out so quickly.

This morning, the wife woke me up, declaiming "no hot water. Do something." "The pilot light must have gone out," I mumbled out of bed. I get to the hot water tank and find that the screws that cover the pilot assembly have been nearly welded to the metal, but I figure that if I hold the propane lighter in just the right angle, I can reach and light the pilot flame. But the pilot flame doesn't stay up. So, I twist and angle the thermocouple out. Not looking forward to angling the whole assembly back in.

New profile picture

Apparently, keeping a profile picture unchanged is just not done. For the record, this is my current profile picture:
Here are couple of choices. This is my self-image:
while this is probably the image that colleagues have of me:

What are your thoughts?

A 466-year backlog

What can I say about this? Words fail me:

The High Court in New Delhi is so behind in its work that it could take up to 466 years to clear the enormous backlog, the court's chief justice said in a damning report that illustrates the decrepitude of India's judicial system.

It's not that the court is inefficient:

The Delhi High Court races through each case in an average of four minutes and 55 seconds but still has tens of thousands of cases pending, including upward of 600 that are more than 20 years old, according to the report.

But that the legal process is inefficient (i.e. there are more cases than there should be):

Critics say other problems include the strict formalities that slow down every step of the legal process and are common across India's vast bureaucracy.

and there are not enough judges:

India - a country of 1.1 billion people - has approximately 11 judges for every million people compared with roughly 110 per million in the United States.

But ... a 466-year backlog?

Mashing up the old world and the new

Remember the family-heirloom toys that I was talking about last year? The wife's grandmother used to play with them when she was a little girl, and now they are S2's.

I was doing spring cleaning over the weekend when I found them again. She'd put them away rather neatly in a hand-me-down plastic kitchen set.

Forecasting lightning

Some real-time images from an algorithm we've developed for predicting cloud-to-ground lightning activity over the next 30 minutes:

The current lightning density:
The current reflectivity composite:
Lightning Probability at a location over the next 30 minutes:

Thin-skinned religious zealots

Johann Hari wrote an article that said that many western institutions are knuckling under assault from religious fundamentalists. He pointed to the defacement of the United Nations' universal declaration of human rights as an example:

The UN's Rapporteur on Human Rights has always been tasked with exposing and shaming those who prevent free speech – including the religious. But the Pakistani delegate recently demanded that his job description be changed so he can seek out and condemn "abuses of free expression" including "defamation of religions and prophets". The council agreed – so the job has been turned on its head. Instead of condemning the people who wanted to murder Salman Rushdie, they will be condemning Salman Rushdie himself.

The Statesman, an Indian newspaper, reprinted his article (Indian newspapers often reprint American and British columns that the editors find to be of relevance to their readers: and this one's negative reference to a Pakistani probably qualified).

Incredibly enough, a bunch of Islamic hoodlums brought Calcutta to a standstill, and incredibly enough managed to get the editor and publisher arrested! What seems to have raised their pique is the end of the "offensive" article:

All people deserve respect, but not all ideas do. I don't respect the idea that a man was born of a virgin, walked on water and rose from the dead. I don't respect the idea that we should follow a "Prophet" who at the age of 53 had sex with a nine-year old girl, and ordered the murder of whole villages of Jews because they wouldn't follow him.

I don't respect the idea that the West Bank was handed to Jews by God and the Palestinians should be bombed or bullied into surrendering it. I don't respect the idea that we may have lived before as goats, and could live again as woodlice. This is not because of "prejudice" or "ignorance", but because there is no evidence for these claims. They belong to the childhood of our species, and will in time look as preposterous as believing in Zeus or Thor or Baal.

...

But a free society cannot be structured to soothe the hardcore faithful. It is based on a deal. You have an absolute right to voice your beliefs – but the price is that I too have a right to respond as I wish. Neither of us can set aside the rules and demand to be protected from offence.

Yet this idea – at the heart of the Universal Declaration – is being lost. To the right, it thwacks into apologists for religious censorship; to the left, it dissolves in multiculturalism. The hijacking of the UN Special Rapporteur by religious fanatics should jolt us into rescuing the simple, battered idea disintegrating in the middle: the equal, indivisible human right to speak freely.

If you followed it, he's insulted (in order): Christians, Muslims, Jews, Hindus, conservatives and liberals -- it's a spirited argument, but not a prejudiced one. And of course it is offensive in the right sense of the word -- offended parties should feel welcome to make an equally spirited argument against know-it-all atheists.

It's a sad day for Indian freedom of expression that thin-skinned zealots could scrape away long-established rights and cause the arrest of editors and newspapermen for printing one side of a legitimate argument. Like the zealots rioting against a set of Danish cartoons, their rioting against this article just serves to prove Hari's point -- that we need to rescue the simple, battered idea that there is an equal, indivisible human right to speak freely.

A Middle Class Surge

An amazingly lucid graph in the Economist explains why the middle class has surged in China and is about to surge in India:

At a certain stage it [the middle-class share of the population] starts to boom. That stage was reached in China some time between 1990 and 2005, during which period the middle-class share of the population soared from 15% to 62%. It is just being reached in India now. In 2005, says the reputable National Council for Applied Economic Research, the middle-class share of the population was only about 5%. By 2015, it forecasts, it will have risen to 20%; by 2025, to over 40%.

And in case you were wondering, the article quotes an expert defining a middle class as someone that has at least 33% of income left over for discretionary spending i.e. after paying for food and shelter.

Oh Canada

Canada is thriving in the current global recession. As Fareed Zakaria explains:

Home prices are down 25 percent in the United States, but only half as much in Canada. Why? Well, the Canadian tax code does not provide the massive incentive for overconsumption that the U.S. code does: interest on your mortgage isn't deductible up north. In addition, home loans in the United States are "non-recourse," which basically means that if you go belly up on a bad mortgage, it's mostly the bank's problem. In Canada, it's yours. Ah, but you've heard American politicians wax eloquent on the need for these expensive programs—interest deductibility alone costs the federal government $100 billion a year—because they allow the average Joe to fulfill the American Dream of owning a home. Sixty-eight percent of Americans own their own homes. And the rate of Canadian homeownership? It's 68.4 percent.

The mortgage-interest deduction is a totally misguided incentive -- it makes people buy larger, more expensive houses (why would you not if Uncle Sam picks up a third of the cost?) and is the cause of labor immobility. The labor markets work much better if people can pull up and move, yet home ownership makes it more difficult (you lose about 6% of the value of your home every time you sell).

But the lack of a mortgage interest deduction is not the only thing that Canada got right. They kept on regulating their banks; they of course have universal health care and an enlightened immigration policy:

In 2007 Microsoft, frustrated by its inability to hire foreign graduate students in the United States, decided to open a research center in Vancouver. The company's announcement noted that it would staff the center with "highly skilled people affected by immigration issues in the U.S." So the brightest Chinese and Indian software engineers are attracted to the United States, trained by American universities, then thrown out of the country and picked up by Canada—where most of them will work, innovate and pay taxes for the rest of their lives.

Back in the early 2000s, when I was trying to apply for a green card, I had to prove to the INS that I had an international research profile. One of the people I contacted was a high-level honcho at Environment Canada. He wrote a letter attesting to my ability, but also had a friendly piece of advice. "Forget all this," he told me, "and move to Ottawa. Immigration is much easier into Canada, and we are in need a lot of algorithm-type work -- you'll see your ideas in operation a lot faster if you join us." When, three years later, we found that the INS had lost our application, I was sorely tempted to take him up on his offer. But Ottawa was going to be way too cold. Had it been Vancouver (and the University of British Columbia), we may very well have up and moved.