Quick notes: Stirling engine | Chinese GPU...

• France should pay us: France is seeing a spike in Rafale fighter jet orders after India acquired them.



• China's New Mortars: Designed for war with India? The PLA is now announcing the deployment of new self-propelled rapid-fire mortars to conduct “mobile, hit-and-run firing positions”.



• Stirling engine: China claims it developed the world's most powerful heat engine. “The prototype ran at a rated power of 320 kilowatts with a power conversion efficiency of 40%”. In comparison, the Stirling engine used on the Swedish Navy's Gotland submarines is rated at 75KW.. China eyeing deadlier submarines, safer nuclear reactors with new Stirling engine?



• Unstoppable: China's Fenghua-1 GPU aims for GeForce RTX 3060 compute performance. Based on Imagination Technologies' PowerVR architecture.



• Madhav Gadgil: "Most ‘development’ activities now are aimed at benefiting only the rich. The relaxations in ESA will benefit the quarries that make huge, illegal profits. Some mine-owners in Goa had told me about the huge rates they pay to the politicians, right from the bottom to the top. Before the 2014 elections, the BJP strongly supported our report, but the moment they came to power, they took a 180-degree turn".



• Gouging small businesses: For every $100 sellers earn in sales, Amazon is keeping $30 — up from 19% just 5 years ago.



• India's Population Growth: Urban India now has a fertility rate of 1.6, comparable to the European Union. In the relative weight of its states, India’s Parliament has remained frozen since the 1971 census. The average parliamentarian from Uttar Pradesh represents three million people, while a counterpart from Tamil Nadu represents 1.8 million.
  
  If Parliament were reapportioned according to the likely population in 2026, the five southern states would send 26 fewer representatives to the 545-seat Parliament. The four most populous Hindi heartland states would add 31 seats.



• Uddiyana Bandha and Nauli Kriya:




• Crafting sustainable homes: Interlocking blocks — an alternative to burnt bricks and concrete blocks

Quick notes: 1971 war | Chip ecosystem...

• US wanted China to intervene against India in 1971 War: After Indira Gandhi's visit to Washington; Kissinger said the 'Indians are bastards anyway. They are starting a war there [in Bangladesh] ... While [Indira Gandhi] was a bitch, ... she will not be able to go home and say that the United States didn't give her a warm reception.'
  
  The duo (Nixon, Kissinger) wanted China to put more pressure on India: 'I think we've got to tell [the Chinese] that some movement on their part ... toward the Indian border could be very significant.'



• Develop ecosystem for chip production: The US, South Korea and China have incentives totaling about $50 billion, $100 billion and $450 billion respectively, far higher than India's. So future chip production, if we are to have it, shouldn’t be a one-trick pony and must develop an ecosystem from design to fabrication, to packing and testing.
  
  Given the long gestation periods and rapid technology changes, India must out-strategise on design and functionality as the end product will be out only three-four years from the moment work begins, by which point the prevailing chip shortage would have been resolved, while technology would have advanced further.
  
  Designing is India’s advantage and while we leverage people skills, we must improvise research and development—an area that we are lacking in currently. Importantly, WTO-consistent tariff and non-tariff barriers should be resolved to ensure flow of goods, besides ensuring policy stability, without which our chip production prospects will remain empty.
  
  + Semiconductor capex to hit $152 Billion in 2021 as market on track for $2 Trillion by 2035



• India's Atlantis: Searching for the sunken kingdom of Dwarka




• Narinder Singh Kapany: The relentless innovator behind the science of fibre optics



• New Pfizer drug and ivermectin: Uncomfortable facts for Pfizer, Big pharma and Woke media



• Cryptocurrencies a challenge for emerging markets: "Because a lot of these crypto exchanges are offshore, they are not subject to regulation of a particular country... So, there is a need for a global policy on that front urgently".



• Why Pakistan may want the J-10: While a layperson may think the J-10 appears similar in layout to the F-16, the Chinese aircraft has a delta wing design with 'canards' forward of the fuselage. There is suspicion Israel transferred technology for the Lavi fighter to China.
  
  + Israeli companies exported cruise missiles to China without permit



• Chart buster: Bird songs bump stars off Australian music chart

Quick notes: Expired vaccines | Sigiriya...

• White man's generosity: Europe sent Nigeria up to 1 million near-expired doses of covid-19 vaccine



• Covaxin: Caught in western deviousness

💡[Whisper]… there is actually a proven vaccine for kids age 2-4 that is *CURRENTLY UNDER REVIEW* at the @US_FDA with an EUA app submitted on November 5th—but FDA has not moved yet on approval meeting. ➡️Why is the media not talking about this? #COVAXIN https://t.co/N0PmXMEWtT pic.twitter.com/szLEN8HQoK

— Eric Feigl-Ding (@DrEricDing) December 11, 2021




• Harvard report: “In speech technology, Chinese firms are beating American firms in every language, including English. The world’s top voice recognition startup, China’s iFlytek, has 700 million users, almost twice the number of people who speak to Apple’s Siri.”



• StarFive: Chinese company delivers the world’s highest performance RISC-V CPU Core IP, codenamed “Dubhe”
  - 2GHz @ TSMC 12nm
  - SPECint2006: 8.9/GHz
  - Dhrystone: 6.6 DMIPS/MHz
  - CoreMark: 7.6/MHz.



• Ancient Engineering Marvel: Sri Lanka's ancient water gardens of Sigiriya are a complex masterpiece of irrigation engineering design. During excavation, water conduits were found at different depths, likely to achieve varying water levels; something that required a masterful knowledge of physics and engineering.




• Jugaad ain't no innovation, stop romanticising it: India cannot become a world-beating economic force by under-investing in fundamental scientific research and celebrating stop-gap survival mechanisms (jugaad) as path-breaking innovation. Such celebration and characterisation should be left to advertising agencies and other creative types looking for a story to tell.
  
  The state should commit itself to turning India into a magnet for top scientific talent from around the world, increasing investment in fundamental science and engineering and creating infrastructure which will give Indian scientists the choice of working in their home country instead of moving to more hospitable climes abroad.



• Socialization of losses: PSBs lost Rs 2.85 lakh cr due to loan default of 13 firms. "Time and again public sector banks have been used to bail out ailing private sector banks such as Yes Bank, Global Trust Bank, United Western Bank, Bank of Karad, etc. Private sector's largest NBFC, IL&FS, was bailed out again by public sector SBI and LIC".



• Semiconductor subsidies: "How do you compete with a 30 to 40% subsidy? Because that means we are not competing with TSMC or Samsung, we are competing with Taiwan and Korea. The subsidies in China are even more significant."



• Ban glyphosate: Glyphosate is "reportedly" being used both for weed control and to desiccate crops prior to harvesting. The weedicide and its adjuvants are absorbed by the plant and consumed by humans.



• Market Dominance: Italy fines Amazon $1.3 Billion for abuse of dominant market position.
  
  FTC complaint: Amazon misleading consumers with 'deceptive' ads in search results.

Quick notes: Make-in-India | Israel's ally...

• Make-In-India? Yes, No, Maybe: India won’t go ahead with building Russian helicopters locally opting for off-the-shelf purchases instead. IAF needs to make immediate replacements to its fleet of over 320 aging helicopters.



• Has Israel become a top Chinese ally? Not surprisingly, China appears to have a vested interest in the Israeli tech sector, especially its advances in quantum technology. Chinese investment in Israeli technology “could lead to leaks of sensitive technology and cyber-espionage.”



• Ascendant China: Toyota turns to Chinese tech to reach its electric holy grail
  
  Chinese stranglehold: Tesla has concluded that no company in the United States is currently capable of producing artificial graphite to the required specifications and capacity needed for Tesla’s production. It said only mainland China could provide the quantity of graphite it needs in flake or powder form to manufacture its batteries in the U.S.



• Global Gateway: BRI rival from EU. Can Europe compete with China?
  
  Why US, EU are pitching an alternative to Chinese ‘hidden debts’
  
  Contaminated fertilizer: Sri Lanka bows to Chinese pressure again



• Remittance seeking mindset: Retaining - and attracting - talent is critical for India's future.

A lot has changed / is changing in India. What hasn’t change much is the Government’s remittance seeking mindset.

When GDP was <$1T it made sense to export human capital. With GDP at ~$3T, and India aiming to boost it to $10T+, retaining - and attracting - talent is critical. https://t.co/ZVwygfXpdM

— Rajeev Mantri (@RMantri) November 29, 2021




• RISC-V phones: SiFive's new chip could lead to revamped phone brains in 2023



• Semiconductor Independence Is Impossible: The EU produces cars, consumer electronics, and other things that do not need chips made using the latest nodes. Thus, the bloc wants to expand production of chips for these products to protect its economy.



• New game in town: Ola's electric scooter



• Vaccine durability: Antibody levels fall quickly in the months after people get their Pfizer and Moderna shots. The RNA in these vaccines does not last very long in the body. DNA is more stable than RNA, and might allow for a more prolonged, low-level activation of our immune system that provides longer-lasting protection.



• Not White Man's Burden: UK 'nowhere near' meeting targets agreed at Glasgow climate summit



• The return of ‘naati’ ragi: Karnataka farmers revive forgotten ragi varieties. Hundreds of local ragi varieties disappeared with the arrival of the high-yielding indaf variety of ragi.



• Why soil is one of the most amazing things on Earth: Due to intensive farming, we are losing soil 50 to 100 times faster than it is able to rebuild.

Quick notes: Civil aviation | RISC-V phones...

• Shut down the civil aviation ministry: There is no reason for keeping an entire ministry with a total staff strength of 2,300, just for the oversight of a few aviation sector laws and regulatory bodies



• Entitled MNCs: Visa Inc has complained to the U.S. govt that India's "informal and formal" promotion of domestic payments rival RuPay hurts the U.S. giant in a key market. In public Visa has downplayed concerns about the rise of RuPay. Mastercard has raised similar concerns privately with the USTR.



• Princes to paupers: India's salesmen face ruin as tycoon Ambani targets mom-and-pop stores. Tiny shops account for 4/5ths of India's $900 bln retail sector



• Omicron: No certainty if PCR tests detect Omicron Variant. . . . May elude current vaccines. . . όμικρο
  
  “There is a possibility that we are seeing a more infectious and less virulent version of the virus, which would be one of those steps along a happier route to living with the virus”.
  
  "Generally, high transmission with reduced disease severity is an evolutionary win for the virus and many viruses evolve to this state, existing in an equilibrium with the host".
  
  The theory is that, if a less virulent strain becomes dominant, more people will become infected but fewer will be critically sick. The virus, while still a problem, also becomes part of the solution; every person who recovers from a mild case is left with greater immunity against future infections than any of the current vaccines provide.

At some point in the future, I hope a thriller movie will be made where COVID variants are the dark forces & are attacked by an ‘Avenger’ hero called Omicron who compels the evil variants to mutate into a docile flu. https://t.co/rpqesqBMMs

— anand mahindra (@anandmahindra) November 30, 2021




• Manu Joseph: When Modi cancelled his most humane reform yet it was a triumph for rich north Indian farmers and the movement they handled. In the end the rich and the middle-class sabotaged reform for the poor. Same old story of India.



• Displacing ARM: The world's first RISC-V phone might be just around the corner.. The first major step on porting Android to RISC-V was, unsurprisingly, authored by Alibaba, who produced the first working Android 10 port for the RISC-V ISA.
  
  Chinese company Sipeed expects to release first RISC-V smartphone models next year.
  
  Homemade CPUs - China's Bid For Independence China's tech giants are striving for autonomy from U.S. chipsets. But true semiconductor independence will require China to develop its own extreme ultraviolet lithography machines, required to etch microscopic circuits on silicon. SMIC, China's main chip foundry, can't provide anything smaller than 14 nm.
  
  SMIC claims to have mastered the 3nm chip process in the lab and is trying to buy the EUV lithography machines necessary for production from ASML, the Dutch company that currently has a monopoly on the critical equipment. But the United States is intent on blocking the sale.
  
  The Chinese Academy of Sciences has an EUV lithography research team and Tsinghua University has developed a new type of particle accelerator light source, which could be used for EUV lithography. But getting that technology out of the lab and into a machine remains many years away.
  
  Intel's plan-B? There is no way x86 can defend itself against ARM for a whole 5–10 years longer. Intel has started a new RISC-V development platform and invested in SiFive. RISC-V has inherent advantages which will allow Intel to compete in the opposite end of the market where they cannot compete at the moment with x86.. . . . . .



• Chinese Hypersonic Missile ‘Overcame the Constraints of Physics: The July test featured “a technological advance that enabled it to fire a missile as it approached its target traveling at least five times the speed of sound—a capability no country has previously demonstrated.”



• Anonymous trolls: Australia to introduce new laws to force media platforms to unmask online trolls. "The online world should not be a wild west where bots and bigots and trolls and others are anonymously going around and can harm people,"



• Ajith Namboothiri: Ninnu Kori.. Vasantha raga Varnam




• India’s oral traditions need to be mainstreamed: The Haridasu was a singer, musician, storyteller, actor, stand-up comedian and salesperson, all rolled into one! The accompanists were talented players of the mridangam and the harmonium.



• New demographic reality: India’s fertility rate slips below replacement level.



• Bengaluru scientists find potential treatment for autism: “However, this does not mean that there will be a sudden cure. There is a long and arduous process for drug discoveries to take place and could take about 12 years to complete. The molecule has to be tested for toxicity, its solubility pattern has to be worked out.”



• Thanksgiving and the Myth of Native American ‘Savages’: The friendliness of the Wampanoag was extraordinary, because they had recently been ravaged by diseases caught from previous European explorers. Europeans had also killed, kidnapped and enslaved Native Americans in the region. The Plymouth settlers, during their desperate first year, had even stolen grain and other goods from the Wampanoag,



• Mohan Bhagwat: Kindly shut up, sir

Every time I hear this Man, my respect for him dips at least by a few thousand miles. Nothing but contradiction & confusion!! https://t.co/oFbmfRX52o

— ProfMKay 🇮🇳🇨🇭🇸🇬 (@ProfMKay) November 27, 2021

Quick notes: Digital colony | Pedestrianize...

• India happy to be a digital colony of the West and China? India has squandered its software lead and lags behind China in artificial intelligence by a decade. Many of its industries are technologically obsolete and dependent on imported technologies. While aspiring to become a world-class manufacturing base, most of India’s workforce is likely to remain immured in low-wage and low-skill tasks relative to better educated countries.



• Vietnam ahead of India in EVs: Vinfast has hired a number of executives, engineers and designers from around the world and that should help them understand consumers in markets like the US and Europe. "They're bringing them in full time, not just as consultants. I think that's going to help them when they try to enter this market."



• The ingenious living bridges of India: For centuries, indigenous groups in north-east India have crafted intricate bridges from living fig trees. Now this ancient skill is making its way to European cities.



• Pedestrianise, boost air quality: A clear improvement in air quality was recorded on pedestrianised weekends in central Bengaluru. Pedestrianising an urban street positively impacts QoL.
  
  Pedestrians are at higher risk across India: “Authorities are building more roads and flyovers. They are neglecting the most ancient mode of transportation".



• Give, Give, Give: The path to happiness - Swami Brahmananda




• The unlikely protector against Bangladesh's rising seas: Oysters engineer their environment by clustering on hard, submerged surfaces and fusing together to create reef structures. Oyster reefs can provide relief to a coast constantly buffeted by strong waves.
  
  That is not their only benefit, though. "What you want is the sedimentation behind the reef structure that the oysters naturally form. The reefs give you a more extensive foreshore and [consequently] calmer waters". Such fluidity is the hallmark of the building with nature approach. And rather than being seen as a setback, it becomes part of the plan. "It's a dynamic process – not hard concrete. And that's the new understanding of using natural forces to achieve our goals".



• Permaculture: Producing food without destroying the planet



• To curb urban flooding, China is building ‘sponge cities’: Professor Yu’s sponge city concept promotes a more harmonious relationship between humans and nature that in effect gives water more room to soak in and pool in urban areas – such as parks that are dry in some seasons and become shallow ponds or channels in rainy seasons. “Floods are not enemies; we can make friends with floods”.



• How cities are going carbon neutral: Cities are introducing ultra-Low Emission Zones (ULEZ). Paris is creating 650km of new cycle ways and hopes to open up the whole of the city to bicycles by 2026. The Colombian capital, Bogota, has made 75 miles of streets car-free.



• For every 10 boys there are only six girls: Tamil Brahmin bachelors look towards North India as bride hunt gets tough in TN.



• New details about China's hypersonic weapons test: "They launched a long-range missile. It went around the world, dropped off a hypersonic glide vehicle that glided all the way back to China, that impacted a target in China."
  
  Advanced maneuver in China hypersonic missile test shows new military capability.. Pentagon struggles to understand how China mastered the tech. . . . China expanding its hypersonic missiles.



• Analysis: Why is Apple’s M1 chip ao fast?



• Saudi Arabia’s strategy to become a global leader in AI.