Quick notes: War-by-remote | WSR economy...

• ‘War by Remote’: Most countries are insufficiently prepared to deal with the growing security challenge posed by combat drones — drones that drop bombs and are reusable. “The thing is, drones are cheaper — you don’t risk pilots by using them as it’s all remote-controlled.” UN investigators have suggested that the Houthis’ new UAV-X drone may have a range of up to 1,500 kilometers.



• Pakis may use it next: Pak drones dropping weapons into Punjab highlights the need for drone-disabling tech... The US has anti-UAV defence systems that scan the airspace for unmanned drones and disable them using radio beams..The Israelis have mastered this technology and at least two Israeli companies were identified some months ago to provide Indian agencies drone-disabling technology. Field tests had been conducted for the purpose, but no decision was taken and the issue remained unaddressed. 



• Peak cloning: If you build a product that works, Amazon or Facebook will copy it. With its vast amounts of data, Amazon can easily identify popular products. With its unprecedented scale, it can then offer those products at a fraction of the cost that other companies sell their wares. It's an aspect of the company that regulators have struggled with for a while. One potential solution to the problem is to not allow big e-commerce platforms to sell their own products on their platforms. This is something India does.



• Grab this opportunity: Taiwanese businesses look to India as alternative to China



• The WSR economy: The Wheat-Sugar-Rice economy and the polices used for 6 decades to promote & protect it, have reached a complete dead end.

#IndianEcon The Wheat-Sugar-Rice (#WSR) economy and the polices used for 6 decades to promote & protect it, have reached a complete #DeadEnd. A paradigm shift in Policy & institutions is necessary to empower farmers & provide critical #Public (& Quadi-Public) #Goods to Farmers. https://t.co/1ouktsSsso

— Dr Arvind Virmani (@dravirmani) September 20, 2019




• Vehicle pollution can affect unborn babies: The black carbon particles load found in the placentas were directly proportional to the mothers' residential black carbon exposure during pregnancy. 



• 'Earth lost forest area the size of India since 90s': More than 10 per cent of the planet's wilderness has been destroyed since the 1990s -- an area about the size of India. . . . . . Bird populations in US and Canada down 3bn in 50 years



• Choiceless Awareness: Ashtavakra says that you are already pure and there is nothing to be renounced. You are pure.
  
    न ते संगोऽस्ति केनापि किं शुद्धस्त्यक्तुमिच्छसि ।
    संघातविलयं कुर्वन्नेवमेव लयं व्रज ॥ ५-१॥
  
    Nothing touches you 
    What is there to renounce?
    Let it all go,
    The body and the mind.
    Let yourself dissolve.



• A bull will not attack if it is not threatened.: The Spanish bull run is Christian Europe's crude pastime

A teacher shows that a bull in a square full of people will not attack anyone if it is not threatened. pic.twitter.com/vopiw6diKw

— The Unexplained (@Unexplained) September 23, 2019

Quick notes: Drone attacks | Orbit deviation...

• Costly defenses no match for drones, cruise missiles: Billions of dollars spent by Saudi Arabia on cutting edge military hardware has proved no match for low-cost drones and cruise missiles used in a strike that crippled its giant oil industry. . . . Lesson for India



• Chandrayaan 2, a failure of autonomy? There were significant deviations between proposed and actual orbits. Obviously, the system malfunctioned during the autonomous mode without taking any corrective measures. 



• Bangladesh Shining: Fastest growing economy in South Asia





• Ban phosphate in detergents to save lakes: The rate of active ingredients in detergents in India is higher than prescribed. A complete ban on phosphate in detergents will simplify the process of sewage treatment.



• Election interference by Hans? Australia concluded China was behind hack on parliament, political parties 



• Han tricks: Chinese woman pleads guilty in 'birth tourism' case



• Car free:

I want to share with you two pictures of my hometown (Grenoble, France). The first one dates from the 1960s-1970s. The second is from last year.

The difference? The City Council was slowly voted out and replaced with those in favor of pedestrians, cyclists and the streetcar. pic.twitter.com/FF7aQ6FGPI

— Blaise (@DC1f525) August 29, 2019




• Sharada Bhujanga Prayatastutih:




• This Greek tradition resembles India's:

In Greek weddings we shower the couple with rice. Rice represents life and growth. In old times, people threw seeds to grow life on earth, so they throw them to bride for increased fertility. pic.twitter.com/wySJV6sDzd

— Eirini Malliaraki (@irinimalliaraki) September 7, 2019

Quick notes: RCEP trap | GM Mosquito...

• RCEP trap: Even without a Free Trade Agreement, Chinese goods swamp Indian markets. Beijing desperately needs preferential access to markets such as India due to its tariff war with the US. This is a major driving force behind RCEP.



• Border Gateway Protocol: China has been 'hijacking the vital internet backbone of western countries'



• String of pearls: Deals with Thailand, Bangladesh show China's rise as warship exporter. The largest user of Chinese weapon systems in India's neighbourhood has been Pakistan 



• Unforeseen outcomes: GM Mosquito project has gone wrong. Not only did numbers bounce back up in the months after the test, but some of the native bugs, they found, had retained genes from the engineered mosquitoes. Failed GM mosquito control experiment may have strengthened wild bugs.



• Mahishasura Mardini Stotram by Jannat Nazir: 




• Independent India's biggest failure: India fails to feature in the top 300 World University Rankings 2020 list



• Making a mockery of FDI norms: Indian's top trader body seeks ban on Amazon, Flipkart's festive season sale. “By offering deep discounts ranging from 10% to 80% on their e-commerce portals, these companies are clearly influencing the prices and create an uneven level playing field which is in direct contravention of the policy”.



• BKS Iyengar: Yoga is universal




• Soybean oil is more obesogenic and diabetogenic than sugar or coconut oil.

Soybean oil is more obesogenic and diabetogenic than fructose (sugar) or coconut oil in mice.

Yes, indeed, the soybean oil that they put in everything.

Soybean oil, which health experts say is healthier than meat.https://t.co/pPl603B1jQ

— P. D. Mangan 🇺🇸 (@Mangan150) August 30, 2019





One of my favourite things about the USA is the sheer number of different flavours of diabetes available. 😂 pic.twitter.com/SrT5UnBxSp

— ZUBY: (@ZubyMusic) September 13, 2019

Quick notes: Traffic fines | Lamborghini e-motor...

• Traffic fines in Europe: In Finland, speeding tickets are linked to your income. Switzerland and UK use a similar system. . . France, Finland, Spain and Germany all have laws that can send speeding repeat offenders to jail.



• Supercapacitors for supercars: Lamborghini employs supercapacitors rather than a battery in its most powerful car ever... Supercapacitors  in conjunction with a somewhat slower and more stable battery chemistry hold lot of promise in automobiles.



• Dirty export: Dirty air from Indo-Gangetic plains messing up neighbourhood... Roughly 30% of the boundary layer ozone in eastern India and Bangladesh comes from the Indo-Gangetic Plain and central India.



• China backs RCEP to extend its trade hegemony: India openly blamed China for unfair trade policies that created an enormous trade deficit.“The big question now is if they would like to proceed without India, which could cause some big push back from New Zealand and Australia.”



• Impact of Article 370? Netanyahu vows to annex all settlements, starting with Jordan Valley



• Thillana Brindavani:




• Tavleen Singh discovers Hindutva: Savarkar rejects the caste system and makes a serious case for Hindus to respect science and modern technology. One of the things he disapproved of totally was cow worship.



• British atrocities: Archbishop of Canterbury apologizes for massacre in India



• Here’s why: India’s Moon Mission was anything but a failure.



• Awesome Without Allah,:

Muslim twitter is having a meltdown over #AwesomeWithoutAllah, Personal attacks, homophobic abuses, misogynistic comments, abuses towards families etc are rife in comments sections. All because we dared verbalising positive changes in our lives after leaving Islam.

— ali.malik (@apostateali) September 7, 2019

Quick notes: Origins of farming | Cost of parking...

• Origin of farming: “A mainstream view is that farming came to South Asia through the large-scale movement of Iranian farmers. But the absence of Iranian farmer DNA in the Indus Valley individual suggests instead that farming in South Asia arose on its own, either through local invention or adoption of ideas or some combination”. . . . . . . . . . Genome of nearly 5000-year-old woman links modern Indians to ancient civilization: “This research, for the first time, has established the fact that people of Harappan civilisation are the ancestors of most population of South Asia. For the first time, the research indicates movement of people from east to west.



• Finally, some sense: Nitin Gadkari says Hybrids must get same reduced GST benefit as EVs. . . . EVs not a panacea, can actually increase pollution where power gen is from coal.



• The high cost of free parking: Just because you don't pay anything for parking doesn't mean the cost is not there. It is still there, just the driver isn't paying for it. It is esitmated that in America, there are 8 parking lots for every car!




• Why India must prioritize Railways over Road transport: Railways require less land than most roads and that is visible even to the naked eye of an onlooker. This is especially important in the old world where many countries including India have dense populations and agricultural land is of great value.

Bankrupting nation going on full speed. Do we need the damn super expensive Nagpur Expressway? Or is it an ego trip of @nitin_gadkari and worse @Dev_Fadnavis at public cost. #MSRDC chairman under a cloud. Wake up people! pic.twitter.com/YOAJlujXoe

— Sucheta Dalal (@suchetadalal) September 1, 2019




• Kerala: Left Front shifts a little right on Sabarimala



• China 'hacked' Indian, other Asian telcos: To spy on Uighur travellers,  Chinese hackers have compromised telecoms operators in countries including India, Turkey, Kazakhstan, Thailand and Malaysia



• Zao: China’s face-swapping app provokes privacy poncern



• How Britain's opium trade impoverished Indians: How a few thousand opium clerks controlled millions of peasants, forcing them to produce a crop that actually harmed them. The British Indian monopoly on opium continued until India won independence in 1947



• Insanity in the name of Vikas:

These are the ruins of the once-flourishing Dakhina Parswa Matha of Puri. Closely associated with Jagannatha Temple. A hub of the Maratha gurus. Half-faded murals & beautiful stucco— locals say all of it might be razed by the end of this week, for a wider road! 😭 #SaveHeritage pic.twitter.com/PPhZRnUO9w

— Prateek Pattanaik (@pattaprateek) August 22, 2019





ROFLMAO what did I predict would come out of samosaji's plans for vikas? This is what happens when u r too

Public Works Department's plan to axe trees planted by Padma Shri Thimmakka
to widen the road between Kudur and Hulikalhttps://t.co/FlzVTq5KhChttps://t.co/H8fPaCVwi3

— Spatel (@Rjrasva) June 3, 2019

Quick notes: Abhyas | Waferscale integration...

• Drone or a destroyer?  Abhyas can act as a decoy aircraft and a high speed subsonic missile. If this system was available before the Balakote strikes, this drone could have worked as decoy aircraft to test the defence mechanism of Pakistan.



• Pest-fighter: China drone attack on crop-eating ‘monster’ shows 98% kill rate



• Trapped in traffic: Indians spend 7% of their day in office commute, Bengaluru travels slowest.



• Emulation of West can be deadly if you forget your roots:

Since 2009 till today I've noticed much changes of people in India. In just 10 years I've witness a dramatic western change in appearance, attitude & talk. Globalization doesn’t mean Westernization. Emulation of West can be deadly if you forget your roots. Keep Hindu Heritage 🙏

— Renee Lynn (@Voice_For_India) August 30, 2019




• Collectives vs. Individuals: (From the archives of this blog). . . Perhaps a reformed caste system is the best form of harmonious collective. Individuals - and indeed entire castes - would be free to change their collective characteristics, while continuing to bind themselves to the rules of the collective - and collectives binding with each other. All with the glue of a duties-based Dharma Just the right balance between rights-based democratic individualism and duty-based collectivism



• Waferscale Integration: Machine Learning chip breaks new ground.

1/ Cerebras just built a chip with 50x the transistor count, 1,000x the memory and 10,000x the bandwidth of Nvidia’s flagship GPU. One such 'chip' could replace an entire rack of Nvidia GPUs.

What the heck is going on? pic.twitter.com/Rs0FaAzLUS

— James Wang (@jwangARK) August 20, 2019




• China used iPhone hacks to target Uyghurs: Victims were tricked into opening a link, which when opened would load one of the malicious websites used to infect the victim. It’s a common tactic to target phone owners with spyware.



• In Kaangress' footsteps: High Command culture comes to BJP



• IndianRaga Fellows:




• "Healthy" rubbish:

This junk being sold in the name of health has 45% MAIDA. And how misleading is the picture! Says 5 grains and contains only 14% grains. The word ‘Whole’ used 4 times on side of the pack. Older generation, most of whom are diabetic, are a fan of this rubbish. @BritanniaIndLtd pic.twitter.com/4ItD9ZKJ0h

— V (@AnkitaDontSing) August 17, 2019