Quick notes: Fauci endorsement | Silent epidemic...

• Dr Fauci: "Covaxin found to neutralise 617 variant"... The New York Times on Tuesday said Covaxin works by teaching the immune system to make antibodies against the Wuhan virus.



• Rush to hospitals worsens Covid crisis: Less than 15% of people infected with COVID-19 actually need hospital care and even fewer will need oxygen.



• Vitamin D deficiency: India's silent epidemic




• Terrible financial sense: It is in India’s interest to halt this pandemic for the sake of its weakening economy. "Pharma companies are dictating prices for vaccines, instead of the govt negotiating and imposing price caps".



• TSMC Update: 2nm in Development, 3nm and 4nm on Track for 2022



• Battery bottleneck: All those new factories won't be sufficient to meet battery demand from all of those new EVs



• World’s Mystery Methane Hotspot: A landfill in Bangladesh is leaking huge quantities of methane into the atmosphere. Methane is about 84 times more potent greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide. The 12 highest methane-emission rates detected this year in satellite data occurred over Bangladesh



• Passive Cooling Strategies:

Quick notes: Choking India | Maldives show-offs...

• Babudom choking India: Earlier in the pandemic, the govt solicited bids for 162 PSA plants for on-site generation of oxygen at hospitals, but it took 8 months to award the contract, and so far only 33 of them have been installed (and not all are functional) across 15 states.
  
  Integrated Vaccine Complex: Nine years on, no production in Centre's IVC in Tamil Nadu.. "Kept idle in the interest of private companies".



• Gaurav Rai, Bihar's 'Oxygen Man': "Our oxygen bank provides cylinders free of cost. I spend Rs 20,000 of my salary and also a share of my wife's earnings for the purpose".



• Maldives photo shoots: Lack of empathy. "The cases of Covid are multiplying. Have a heart. Please don't taunt those who are suffering."



• Treated wastewater for chip making: TSMC tackles a major issue in chip fabrication - the world's first industrial wastewater treatment center that could "ultimately meet nearly half of its daily need for water for chip output". Chip production requires different kinds of water — some steps require ultra-pure water, others need clean water.



• Raag Nat Kamod: Pandit Mallikarjun Mansur




• Remembering Nisargadatta Maharaj: "After reading I am That a few times, I developed a great faith in Maharaj’s state and power. I knew he was the real thing. I knew that if I went to see him I would accept any advice that he gave me. Around that time I heard reports that a couple of foreigners I knew had been to see him, and that he had advised them both to go back to their respective countries. This alarmed me a bit. I was very attached to being in Tiruvannamalai, and I definitely didn’t want to go back to the West. Something inside me knew that if Maharaj told me to go back to England, I would go. I didn’t want to leave India, so I held off going to see him for a few months". --David Godman

Quick notes: Han birth-rate | Exascale computing...

• China Stresses Family Values as More Women Put Off Marriage: Mao Zedong urged women to join the workforce to help build the nation and to hold off on marrying and having children. The new regime emphasizes “family virtues” to pass on the Red Gene. Accounts used by women’s-rights groups were deleted from social-media recently.



• Tianhe-3 exascale prototype supercomputer: China’s Exascale prototype supercomputer tests AI workloads -- potential for leadership-class systems to tackle deep learning.



• Sales of Fab Tools Surge to Over $71 Billion: China is intensifying its domestic semiconductor efforts amid the trade war with the U.S.



• Golden goose for Big Pharma: Pfizer-BioNTech says immunity wanes, annual vaccination needed. . . . . yay! subscription model.. revenue stream.. Thank you, China!



• Aping Amrika: 'In 3 years, India's infrastructure will be on par with the US'. . . . . . For Gadkari, infrastructure is all asphalt.
  
  With just 1% of the world's vehicles, India accounts for 11% of the global deaths in road accidents, highest in the world



• Raag Shuddh Kalyan: Pt. Venkatesh Kumar





• Traditional ways of Storing Grains: “Seed is sacred. Seed is the embodiment of the ideas and knowledge, of the culture and heritage of a people. It is an accumulation of philosophy, of tradition, of knowledge.” . . Indigenous grain storage structures of Tamil Nadu.



• India's Hypersonic Scramjet: The hypersonic missile club is quite exclusive, only the US, China, Russia, and India are members, and advancing Indian hypersonic technology might give the Chinese Navy—and Army—pause for thought.



• Wafer Scale Chip - 2.0: 7nm, 2.6 Trillion Transistors, 850,000 Cores, 15kW of Power from Cerebras

Quick notes: Nuclear caliphate | Indian EVs...

• Erdoğan’s caliphate: Pak helping Turkey to develop nuclear weapons and control Afghanistan.
  
  The Axis: China, Pak want Turkey to replace Saudi Arabia as the leader of Islamic world?
  
  Reports from Syrian Observatory for Human Rights suggest that Turkey is in the process of deploying its Syrian Islamist client militias in Kashmir.
  
  China and Russia fear Turkey’s possible deployment of Islamist militias to Afghanistan and elsewhere in the region
  
  After nuclear weapons, Turkey, Pakistan and China bond on Afghanistan.
  
  Delhi can strengthen its old links to the Tajik and Uzbek factions, provide covert help to TTP and Baloch fighters, and cooperate with Iran in propping up the Afghan govt.
  


• Women's lib in China: A Chinese platform is erasing radical feminist accounts that shun men and the patriarchy



• EVs in India: Given India's reliance on coal, electric vehicles could at best be 10% more efficient than petrol in terms of CO2 savings.



• Shankhaprakshalana: Yogic alternative for the artificial kidney



• Upadēśa Sāra: Bhagavan Sri Ramana Maharshi

Quick notes: Afghan withdrawal | Millionaire exodus...

• Biden Will Pull US Troops Out of Afghanistan by 9/11: U.S. intelligence predicted that Taliban will make battlefield gains.
  
  'A full withdrawal from Afghanistan is dumber than dirt and devilishly dangerous'.



• Covid accelerates India's millionaire exodus: Nearly 5,000 millionaires, or 2% of the total number of high net-worth individuals in India left the country in 2020 alone.



• Chip shortage: Biden meets with CEOs. . . . . Intel to step into auto chips, but it'll take a while. . . . It takes four years to build a new fab.



• How Singapore Uses Science to Stay Cool: Scientists are coming up with novel, new designs to help keep temperatures down in Singapore.




• White man's privilege: Livestock and dairy industries responsible for 50% of New Zealand’s greenhouse gases



• Dams along the Mekong threatening farmers and fish: China's construction of large hydropower dams along the river is having devastating impacts on water availability and the fertile soil that feeds hundreds of millions of people in Southeast Asia.



• Thread on women in the military:

Thread on what actually happens when you put womyn in the military: https://t.co/zC3xNShWrs

— Frontier Indica (@frontierindica) March 22, 2021

Quick notes: Election-time Hindus | Crab-walk...

• Election-time Hindus: Dynasts perfected the art.





• Name central schemes in regional languages :

Now TN elections are over.
TN Bjp leaders should insist to name all central schemes in regional languages Bjp finding it difficult to market welfare schemes with hindi name.
Unless it is done, tn bjp can forget tamil nadu.
Eg. Many tamilians dont know what is. Pm. awas yojana.

— Rajagopalan (@rajagopalan8) April 8, 2021




• Tiger population won't survive vikAss: Despite a few hiccups, we still have tigers occupying all the habitats they were occupying at the beginning of Protect Tiger. This no longer seems to be the case with tiger reserves and sanctuaries being brought under the umbrella of development projects.



• Crab-walking SUV: Hummer EV




• Is privatisation a panacea? Private airlines such as Jet Airways and Kingfisher collapsed due to a pile up of a large amount of debt. This resulted in an increase in the non-performing assets of public sector banks. Many private companies in the telecom sector are still struggling with debt. . . . . In the financial sector, YES Bank, a private sector bank, collapsed and SBI had to rescue it. Public sector banks face huge NPAs mainly due to private sector entrepreneurs wilfully defaulting on loans. The public sector oil and gas companies are also pushing for privatisation today, as governments fail to cover subsidy losses.



• Capability Gap : CDS says China is capable of launching cyber attacks against India and that there is a capability gap between the two countries when it comes to technology.



• Peter Thiel: Google and Apple are in bed with China. “Since everything in China is a civilian-military fusion, Google was effectively working with the Chinese military”... ″Apple is one that has real synergies with China. The whole iPhone supply chain gets made from China”... China may be using bitcoin to take down US Dollar.



• Have I been Zucked? Over six million Facebook user’s data in India has allegedly surfaced on the hacker forum for free. “This means that if you have a Facebook account, it is extremely likely the phone number used for the account was leaked”.

Narendra Modi. No biggie. pic.twitter.com/EroD9IdqKG

— Jason Kint (@jason_kint) April 6, 2021




• Beijing tests the US in South China Sea: “If your goal is to take over a sea space and atoll without fighting for it, this is a brilliant if dishonest tactic. Only professional seamen know it’s a lie. Another major complication for Biden is Philippine leader Rodrigo Duterte, who has undermined the alliance while hailing closer ties with Beijing.



• Dr. Sarala: How to prepare Millet Fermented Porridge: Ambali/Khameer.

Quick notes: Amazon drivers | Border villages...

• Relentless greed: Amazon apologises after falsely denying that drivers are, at times, forced to urinate in plastic bottles after employees confirmed the same.
  
  Biden singles out Amazon for not paying federal taxes



• Licorice for Covid? Scientists from Manesar have found that an ingredient in Mulethi (Yashthimadhu) has the potential to emerge as a drug candidate against SARS-CoV-2 as it lowers the severity of the disease and brings down viral replication.



• China Building Villages in Indian Himalayas: “Beijing advanced the expansionism in South China Sea not by directly employing force but through asymmetrical and hybrid warfare. That success has emboldened China and it has taken that playbook to the Himalayan borderlands”.



• Bodhidharma: The legendary Bodhidharma gave up his throne to become a monk and propagate Zen Buddhism that he founded. He gave physical training to the monks of Shaolin, from which kung fu and other martial arts evolved.




• Ghar Wapsi: At 47%, Hinduism biggest gainer in religious conversion in Kerala . . . . . expect more in the coming decades



• Data warfare: Russian law requires smart devices to come pre-installed with domestic software.



• On-board generator: Potential game-changer for making fully electric viable for larger trucks




• Satyameva Jayate: Salvatore Babones in Foreign Policy Mag:
  
  Farm incomes in Punjab and Haryana are the highest in India, with the average farmer earning more than twice the national average. They also garner the lion’s share of govt support. More than 90 percent of their cropland is covered by heavily subsidized irrigation. And the govt buys almost the entire output of Punjab and Haryana farmers at minimum support prices that are set far above market levels. The results are huge and growing official stockpiles of wheat and rice, much of which ends up being given away to the country’s poor—or simply rotting in place.
  
  The Jat farmers of Punjab and Haryana have long lobbied India’s govt to maintain an agricultural system that is both economically wasteful and environmentally destructive. And why shouldn’t they? India is a democracy, and in a democracy, the squeaky wheel gets the grease—and the subsidies.



• On Being Quiet: