Wednesday, October 27, 2021

Quick notes: Homework burden | Dr C P Mathew...

  • Way to go: China seeks to lift homework pressures on schoolchildren


  • Two Chinese Supercomputers Break Exascale Barrier: China is first to exascale and with two separate machines based on two different (but fully Chinese native) architectures.


  • Atmanirbhar China: Alibaba open-sources XuanTie RISC-V cores


  • ‘Sputnik Moment’: "Much of the Chinese military’s R&D is led by state-owned companies in the commercial sector, which isn’t counted as official defense spending". . . . . . . China's military progress is 'stunning'


  • Baryaktar TB2: Ukraine destroys pro-Russian artillery in its first use of Turkish drones


  • Fluvoxamine: Cheap, generic anti-depressant sold under the brand name Luvox, significantly reduces Wuhan Flu. "Fluvoxamine may reduce the production of inflammatory molecules called cytokines, that can be triggered by SARS-CoV-2 infection".


  • Ghar Wapsi Doctor: Dr. CP Mathew, renowned cancer specialist, passed away at 93... The turning point in his life came in 1983 when he learnt that a terminally ill cancer patient who had been sent home to die not only survived but thrived with Siddha medicine. The oncologist immediately went all the way to the patient's home, and when he found the man was hale and hearty, Mathew Sir was determined to meet the wandering 'vaidyan' who had cured him.

    A month or so later, a phone call around midnight informed him that the 'vaidyan' had been located. Mathew Sir drove at 2am to meet the 'vaidyan'. The oncologist humbly volunteered to be his disciple and learn medicine at his feet. Quickly taking leave from the medical college and wearing a simple sanyasin's robe, Mathew Sir accompanied his newfound guru on his travels, often on foot.

    From 1983 to 1992, Mathew Sir and his team of junior doctors from various streams, including modern medicine, documented more than 3,900 cases of terminally ill cancer patients who survived on integrative medicine, after failed treatments at renowned cancer centres... He received Upanayana from Suryakaladi Mana and spent the rest of his life as a Sanatana Dharma Acharya.


  • The Folly of Our Universal Vaccination: The danger is that immunity to one strain alone may lead to permanently impaired immune response to the three other serotypes, causing worse and longer illness. In chasing an empty fantasy of herd immunity, authorities are denying human populations everywhere the opportunity to develop the layered resistance against successive SARS-2 strains.


  • Sand Baked Potato: Amazing Indian street food, Mainpuri, UP



  • Unsafe at any speed’: Made-in-India Maruti Suzuki Baleno scores zero in crash test, Toyota Yaris gets one star


  • Make Paris ‘100% Cyclable’: Paris will gain 180 kilometers of new permanent segregated bike lanes and the number of bike parking spots will more than triple.


  • Say no to the Woke Revolution: “The goal of ‘cancel culture’ is to send a message to everyone else: Step out of line and you are next.

    It has worked. A recent CATO study found that 62% of Americans are afraid to voice their true views. Nearly a quarter of American academics endorse ousting a colleague for having a wrong opinion about hot-button issues such as immigration or gender differences. And nearly 70% of students favor reporting professors if the professor says something that students find offensive.

    In this ideology, the equality of opportunity is replaced with equality of outcome as a measure of fairness. If everyone doesn’t finish the race at the same time, the course must have been defective. Those who do not abide by every single aspect of its creed are tarnished as bigots and subjected to boycotts.


  • Enes Kanter: NBA player demands Nike stop its ‘Modern Day Slavery’ partnership with China


Friday, October 22, 2021

Quick notes: GM rice | Lying under oath...

  • Loss of reputation: 500 tonnes of genetically modified rice found in a consignment India exported to the EU... India is yet to approve commercial cultivation of GM crops but allowed confined field trials resulting in “contamination and leaks” that made their way to the food chain.. "Only feeds the MNCs".


  • 2-DG for Covid: Texas company to commence Phase 1a clinical trial. . . . any credit to DRDO?


  • Lying under oath: Executives at Amazon, including founder Jeff Bezos, may have misled or lied to Congress about the firm's business practices.. A trade group representing thousands of India's brick-and-mortar retailers called for action against Amazon.


  • BBC: Violence in B'desh is Hindus' fault: "The BJP has stoked fear of immigration from Bangladesh, causing anger in Dhaka, and Hindu hardliners in India have called for immigrants to be deported to Bangladesh".


  • Muslims not minorities: “There are 20-22 crore Muslims in the country. According to me, they are not minorities. How can 22 crore people be a minority?”.


  • Engineering studies in Hindi and Marathi: Pimpri Chinchwad College Of Engineering, Pune gets approval from AICTE to start BTech course in Marathi.


  • Like your American counterparts: start paying for your own education and all expenses


  • BikAss ain't BikAss: Vikas that destroys a fragile ecosystem, leads to deforestation, causes landslides, loss of lives and homes, is not vikas. Mindless construction in the Western Ghats and the Himalayas in the name of development is destroying all that is good and wonderful


  • Facts that should be in Greta's toolkit:


  • Enes Kanter: NBA player wears ‘Free Tibet’ shoes to game, China cuts livestream. . . . caught between free speech and lucrative Chinese market.


Saturday, October 16, 2021

Quick notes: Trade-deficit | Self-preferencing...

Monday, October 11, 2021

Quick notes: Solar ambitions | Sendha namak...

Wednesday, October 6, 2021

Quick notes: Chip dreams | Pandemic wind down...

  • India’s Chip Dreams Aren’t Crazy, They’re Just Misguided: While Taiwan is eager to build closer ties with New Delhi, facilitating India's chip fantasy is not high on its priority list given India's lack of expertise in the field. Today, India has a large talent pool of chip designers, but the roster of process engineers is much shorter and certainly not long enough to run a Taiwanese front-end chip factory.

    Keen to get their name in a press release alongside blue-ribbon names, generations of Indian leaders seem to have forgotten a far more suitable match: chip packaging and testing.


  • Curtains for the pandemic? An oral medication with this type of effectiveness could bring the pandemic to a functional close, turning COVID-19 from a life-threatening experience to a passing respiratory illness that can can be treated at home more often than not.

    Indian companies looking to price the drug at ₹880-1,000 for a full course.

    Like the vast majority of medicines on the market, molnupiravir was developed using govt funds.


  • Instagram harms teens: Celebrity Instagram posts detrimental to the self-image of young girls.. 13% of British teenage users and 6% of American teenage users studied traced suicidal thoughts to Instagram.

    Indians had a glimpse of life without WhatsApp.

    Fraud on advertisers: Facebook misled investors about shrinking user base, ex-employee alleges.


  • End of the road for Panjshiris? “What the Taliban have now is unstinting support from the Chinese, fairly unstinting support from the Russians – and of course they have unstinting support from the Pakistanis. They also have in their possession all the war matériel that the Americans could not destroy, and that was substantial. So the Taliban are in possession of one of the world’s largest fleets of Black Hawk helicopters. The Taliban are not terribly technologically sophisticated but their handlers in [Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence agency] the ISI are. They also have Chinese drones and they’re getting assistance in operating them from the ISI.”

    “This Taliban is a lot better armed, they are much more capable, they are much more lethal, they have better international ties than the Taliban before 9/11, and in contrast the Panjshiris have less support. Essentially the resistance in Panjshir has failed and they’ve retreated to Tajikistan. And I don’t see a way in which they’ll be able to retake that territory.”


  • New technologies can make underwater vessels “visible”: China has already developed submarine-spotting lasers. CSIRO is working with a Chinese marine science institute that has separately developed satellite technology that can find submarines at depths of up to 500 metres.


  • The Gift: The legend of Shohei Ohtani.



  • Child abuse in Church: French Catholic Church inquiry finds 216,000 paedophilia cases since 1950


  • How to divide Hindus: The Samuel Reddy playbook.


  • The heyday of Indian cultural renaissance: AshtaDiggajas of Emperor Sri Krishna Devaraya's court at Vijayanagara


  • Intel cozying up to RISC-V: Intel Infuses Nios Soft Processors with RISC-V Instruction Set