Day jobs of some who actually produced something ...

I recently commented (ed: to whom? yourself does not count!) that teaching as a profession is way more monetarily rewarding now than it has even been in the past.  While the list in the following graphic (ht) is not one of teachers, well, our profession now owes so much to these, and more, and these people earned less--after adjusting for inflation--than we currently do ... to think of a world without Kafka?

On another Indian-American winning the Spelling Bee

So, Anamika Veeramani has bagged this year's honors.
Good for her, I say, and adds more data for this piece that gives an explanation for why Indian-Americans have pretty much owned this tournament in recent years.
The last name Veeramani is, ahem, Tamil, which was also the story with the guy, Balu Natarajan, who catalyzed this Indian-American interest a few years ago.  (I suppose my interest in this is like that of a grad schoolmate of mine, who was Jewish, who was always curious about baseball players with Jewish roots.)

It is too bad that the media did not pick up on the name "Anamika."  Because, the literal meaning of the name is "without a name", while the philosophical and profound meaning is that something is way too important, valuable, that it simply cannot be described in words.
Words!
And she plays with words and wins the Bee.  An interesting story, right?

The wonderful names ... well, her parents too:

Her father and mother, Alagaiya and Malar, were overwhelmed with emotion after watching their daughter win . . .

The mother's name "Malar" means "flower" in Tamil, and one meaning of the father's name "Alagaiya" is a beautiful person.
I can't believe the media missed out on such a wonderful story all by itself :)

Growing up, I was also familiar with this song from the Hindi movie, Anamika: (Lyrics translation here)

And for those of you wondering where the Tamil-speaking people are ... Concentrated in the southern part of India, in Tamil Nadu, which means the land of the Tamils, and in Sri Lanka.

Can transgender men go topless?

When is a breast not a breast?

Rehoboth Beach in Delaware isn't a topless beach -- but a few transgender men caused a stir by treating it like one. Police say passers-by complained after the men removed their tops and revealed their surgically enhanced breasts overMemorial Day weekend. A lifeguard asked them to put their tops back on. The men initially refused, but covered up before police arrived.

Even if they hadn't, though, Police Chief Keith Banks notes the men were doing nothing illegal. Since they have male genitalia, they can't be charged with indecent exposure for showing their breasts. 

Reading this news item reminded me of a similar issue, from a different perspective: can a woman whose breasts have been surgically removed go topless?  A couple of years ago, a friend underwent a double-mastectomy, because of breast cancer.  Typical of her jokester persona, she said that perhaps from then on she could go topless when mowing the lawn, for instance, and be comfy and soak up the sun.  Her partner did not think it would be a good idea, particularly from a legal perspective.

All these got me thinking about a set of photographs of cleavages (ht) like the one below.  Can you figure out what the deal is?

Click on the photo for explanations :)

The US economy in a mess, but dollar surges ...

A long time ago, our high school English included a play called "The Refund" ... at least, I think that is what the title was (I am simply excited I can remember this much given that 30 years have passed since I exited the best high school I could have had.)  In that play, a character runs into his schoolmate who says he made a lot of money trading in currencies, and this oaf has no idea what is going on.  The successful guy then tells him that if he does not know even that, then he ought to go back to high school and get his tuition and fees refunded!  (Hey, anybody reading this, any chance that I might locate this play on the Web?)

I sympathize with that dolt in the play who could not understand how people can make money from currencies.  I mean, look at this: the American economy has been awful for quite some time now.  The stock-market wants to sink down to where the BP well is spewing like an undersea volcano.  Unemployment continues to be way too high.  The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan suck money, life, and any sense of hope. 

And, guess what?  The dollar is appreciating.  Money is rushing into America.  Bernanke, et al, have no pressure to raise interest rates.  It is almost like we have entered a bizarro world!

It just so happens that the US might suck, but the rest of the world seem to be suckier.  I tell you, am ready for my refund :)

Cartoon of the day

Chart of the day, on jobs: OM"f"G :(

It is not at all clear to me how we are going to crawl out of this hole soon.
I worry that we are merely one incident with profound impacts away from a complete economic and social tailspin.  Here is to hoping that such a nightmare scenario will not come about.
What is even more worrisome is the following chart (both charts from Calculated Risk)

"there are a record 6.763 million workers who have been unemployed for more than 26 weeks (and still want a job). This is a record 4.38% of the civilian workforce. (note: records started in 1948). It does appear the increases are slowing ..."

The devastating effects on career and personal lives if and when one is unemployed for this long, and still looking for jobs somewhere .... Am all the more thankful for the protected bubble within which I operate ...

Robert Reich is concerned that we are getting very close to a second recessionary dip:

The only reason the economy isn’t in a double-dip recession already is because of three temporary boosts: the federal stimulus (of which 75 percent has been spent), near-zero interest rates (which can’t continue much longer without igniting speculative bubbles), and replacements (consumers have had to replace worn-out cars and appliances, and businesses had to replace worn-down inventories). Oh, and, yes, all those Census workers (who will be out on their ears in a month or so).

But all these boosts will end soon. Then we’re in the dip.

David Leonhardt writes that new federal spending is necessary, but it:

needs to be accompanied by something more credible than Augustine-like vows of future parsimony. It should be paired with substantive cuts to continuing policies, like subsidies for oil companies and agribusinesses, outdated weapons systems, NASA’s moon program and at least some Bush tax cuts, among many other things.
That is the right economic strategy. It’s probably the right political one, too. It shows serious concern about both jobs and the deficit.

Women in Afghanistan--once, and now ...

Much before all the craziness that is now into the fourth decade, it was possible for women in Afghanistan to be like, well, the photo says it all:

More here ...
Later, it became this ...

Without our traditions ....

... our lives will be as shaky as a fiddler on the roof ...

mazel tov!

"I prefer Jon Stewart to Jesus Christ"

Ayaan Hirsi Ali talking to Colbert :)

The Colbert Report	Mon - Thurs 11:30pm / 10:30c
Ayaan Hirsi Ali
www.colbertnation.com
Colbert Report Full Episodes Political Humor Fox News

BP oil spill, and One Hundred Years of Solitude

Yes, there is a connection between the horrible oil spill and Gabriel Garcia Marquez's phenomenal work.  What is the connection, you ask?

Macondo is the magical town where the Buendia family lives, and dies.  Oddly enough, the area where BP's rig was located was called Macondo:

The Macondo Prospect is an oil and gas prospect in the Gulf of Mexico which was the site of the Deepwater Horizon drilling rig explosion in April 2010 which led to a major oil spill in the region.

Corporations give projects strange names, and this happened to be one of them. Remember the names that Enron had for its projects, such as Fatboy, Jedi, Braveheart, ...?

Ok, back to Macondo in Marquez's creation:

The novel chronicles the seven generations of the Buendía family in the town of Macondo. The family patriarch and founder of Macondo, José Arcadio Buendía, and his wife (and first cousin), Úrsula, leave their home in Riohacha, Colombia in hopes of finding a new home. One night on their journey while camping on the banks of a river, José Arcadio Buendía dreams of a city of mirrors named Macondo. Upon awakening, José Arcadio Buendía decides to found this city on the site of their campground. After wandering aimlessly in the jungle for many days, the founding of Macondo can be seen as the founding of Utopia^[6]José Arcadio Buendía believes it to be surrounded by water, and from this 'island' he invents the world according to him, naming things at will^[7]. After its establishment, Macondo soon becomes a town frequented by unusual and extraordinary events. All the events revolve around the many generations of the Buendía family, who are either unable or unwilling to escape periodic, mostly self-inflicted misfortunes. Ultimately, Macondo is destroyed by a terrible hurricane, which symbolizes the cyclical turmoil inherent in Macondo.

Well, the hurricane season has begun in the real world Macondo ...
The series of events, and the names that BP had for each of the failed maneuvers, like "tophat", will be funny and comical if only it were not so awfully tragic.

The Daily Show With Jon Stewart	Mon - Thurs 11p / 10c
There Will Be Blame
www.thedailyshow.com
Daily Show Full Episodes Political Humor Tea Party

If Marquez' Macondo story was one hundred years of solitude, then how long will this BP Macondo story run?  It might very well go past the latest August deadline--the gushing well might not be capped until December!
But, wait:

The ultimate worst-case scenario is that the well is never successfully plugged, said Fred Aminzadeh, a research professor at the University of Southern California’s Center for Integrated Smart Oil Fields who previously worked for Unocal Corp. That would leave the well to flow for probably more than a decade, he said in a telephone interview.

How to Save a Dying Ocean

Soccer mania: 1982, Brazil, and Socrates

All I remember from that World Cup was one name: Socrates.  It was a simply awesome tournament ... TV was just about being introduced then in the part of India where I lived, and it was the good ol' newspaper and radio that we had to work with.  I wonder if that made it all the more exciting, come to think of it ...
Here is a clip of one of those classic Socrates' goals from that tournament

Guess what happened to Socrates?

Sócrates is a doctor of medicine, a rare achievement for a professional footballer (he is a graduate of the Faculdade de Medicina de Ribeirão Preto). Even rarer is the fact that he earned the degree while concurrently playing professional football. There are persistent rumours that Sócrates turned out for the University College Dublin. However, the player himself has denied this saying that he has never even been to Dublin^{[citation needed]}.
He is also noted for being an intellectual (he holds a doctorate degree in philosophy), a heavy drinker and smoker, and for his height (193 cm, 6 ft 4 in).

Well, thinking about soccer, and Socrates reminded me of this Monty Python gem: Germany v. Greece :)

Oil spill, finance mess, and regulation

Ken Rogoff puts it so succinctly (ht):

The parallels between the oil spill and the recent financial crisis are all too painful: the promise of innovation, unfathomable complexity, and lack of transparency (scientists estimate that we know only a very small fraction of what goes on at the oceans’ depths.)  Wealthy and politically powerful lobbies put enormous pressure on even the most robust governance structures.

Well phrased, right?  Rogoff then writes:

If ever there were a wake-up call for Western society to rethink its dependence on ever-accelerating technological innovation for ever-expanding fuel consumption, surely the BP oil spill should be it. Even China, with its “boom now, deal with the environment later” strategy should be taking a hard look at the Gulf of Mexico.
Economics teaches us that when there is huge uncertainty about catastrophic risks, it is dangerous to rely too much on the price mechanism to get incentives right. Unfortunately, economists know much less about how to adapt regulation over time to complex systems with constantly evolving risks, much less how to design regulatory resilient institutions. Until these problems are better understood, we may be doomed to a world of regulation that perpetually overshoots or undershoots its goals.

I am not sure whether regulation will ever be able to get it right.  It is simply the nature of the beast, so to say.  But, here is the question: aren't the global economic crisis and the oil spill posters for it might be better to overshoot through regulation than to undershoot?  After all, Rogoff himself notes:

t is extremely difficult to strike a balance between managing “tail risk” – a very small risk of a very large disaster – and supporting innovation.

Overshooting means precluding that "tail risk" ... a tough call for society.  The recent announcement from Craig Venter is yet another example of how things will only get even more complex ....

Rewriting history, in a capitalist manner :)

The Soviets airbrushing photos, or Winston Smith in 1984 being one of the employees to constantly re-write history are, well, old ...
Here is a new twist to how to rewrite the past:
A few days ago, Roy Halladay of the Florida Marlins pitched a perfect game.  Suppose you want to claim that you were there at the ballpark, and you witnessed that rare event ... but you weren't actually there.  Yet, you want a piece of real evidence that you can use ... hurry up; don't let that opportunity slip past :)

Here's a chance to buy tickets to a guaranteed perfect game -- the one Roy Halladay already threw.
The Florida Marlins will begin selling on Tuesday unused tickets to the game in which the Philadelphia Phillies ace pitched the 20th perfect game in major league history, a 1-0 victory over the Marlins on Saturday.
All tickets will be regularly priced at "face value" and on sale both online and through the Marlins' box office.

ht

Photo, and story, of the day: Somerset Maugham

The photo is of Maugham with Churchill and H.G. Wells.
Talk about the combined literature talent there :)

I lifted that photo from this review of a Maugham biography.  It was because of Maugham and O.Henry that, even as a kid, I got hooked on to short stories.  My favorite Maugham short story is about two brothers, and plays on the old fable of the ant and the grasshopper. (There were/are some wonderful storytellers in Tamil, too, that I read way back when ... Maybe I ought to check whether there are English translations of some of those ...)

Even now, I way prefer short stories to full-length fiction.  There is something magical about conveying a profound tale within a few pages.  Roddy Doyle's piece in the New Yorker is the latest short story I read.  And, yes, check out the Atlantic's 2010 fiction special.  I liked the Nigerian story the best.  BTW, an exercise for the reader: compare and contrast the husband's emotions in Doyle's story and this one, titled "Hopefulness" :)

Anyway, until I read this review, I had no idea that

Some 98 films were made from Maugham's material during his lifetime — "Rain" helped establish the career of Joan Crawford, while "Of Human Bondage" and "The Letter" provided Bette Davis with characters from which to shape her smart, ruthless screen persona.

98? Wow!

Of course, apparently the book discusses Maugham's (homo)sexuality, and the legal issues related to his estate and his daughter.  But, that is not news, really.
But, I did not know about Maugham's end:

Decades of wary plotting and carefully keeping the world at arm's length exploded. As Gore Vidal has noted, Maugham built his own monument — and then blew it up. He published "Looking Back," a vicious, ill-advised memoir, and slid into Alzheimer's. Nothing grates like hate, and by the time Maugham died soon thereafter, in 1965 at age 91, the world had changed its view of the grandest of grand, old literary men. The man who had known "everyone, from Henry James to Winston Churchill, from Dorothy Parker to D.H. Lawrence" came to his sad end, raving like King Lear.

Ouch!
ht

Is Israel losing it? ...

Prior to the elections that brought Netanyahu back as the prime minister, I had hoped that Tzipi Livni would win.  I didn't know much about Livni, but never cared for Netanyahu ... If Livini had become the PM, there is a good probability that incidents such as the metaphorical slap on Joe Biden's face, or the crazy Dubai killing, or the latest one--the commando assault on the Gaza aid flotilla--might not have happened ...


Like we didn't have enough problems already!!!
Turkey is ready to sever diplomatic ties with Israel.  The US is in one hell of a tough spot now: it will find it difficult to condemn Israel's actions.  If it is not categorical in critiquing Israel, then the US will lose that much more ground in the Islamic world.  This will make the US' job in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Pakistan even more difficult.  I would assume that by now Obama's big time speech in Cairo has been thrown into the trash ...

Image of the day: the flag in flowers

Details here:

Chart of the day: IT in India

Pretty impressive over the decade ... and, given that India's GDP itself has grown at quite a pace:

India's economic expansion averaged 9% for four years through March 31, 2008, before slowing to 6.7% in the last fiscal year amid the global slowdown.

It does not surprise me, therefore, when I find out that pretty much every young twenty-something in the extended families back in India is working in IT.  Even old folks who have never used computers casually refer to "IT" ... Interesting times ...

Economic recovery depends on "gas now, brake later"?

The first time I came across the phrase was in this piece in the Economist:

Mr Obama’s fiscal policy has been described as “gas now, brake later”: wider deficits in the near term to keep the economy out of depression (which would risk even bigger deficits), followed by a switch to deficit reduction to cap the rise in the national debt. The switch, however, remains a future abstraction.

So, who actually coined that phrase anyway?  (I'll admit that it is too darn "cute" a metaphor.  So, it can't be Thomas Friedman ... muahahaha)
A Google search for "gas now, brake later" points only to the Economist as a source for it.  So, ahem, the Economist making things up but does not want to claim ownership and wants to pretend that it is something like a well-accepted descriptor of the current administration's economic policies?  Hey, whatsup?

Anyway, where will this sticky gas pedal metaphor take the US?

Fortunately, America has time. Its favourable demographic trends mean its fiscal day of reckoning is further off than Europe’s and the dollar’s reserve-currency status provides manoeuvring room. Yet this may not be the blessing it seems. Getting politicians to take the deficit seriously may well be impossible unless the bond market forces them. For now Europe’s crisis has done exactly the opposite: as investors flee the euro, the dollar has soared and Treasury yields have plunged. There is not much incentive to take the foot off the gas-pedal and apply the brakes just yet.

Great!

Way worse than the Exxon-Valdez

More mashed potatoes?

Yes, the inside joke continues. 
More here from mashed potatoes :)

A few of the awesome people at NPR

Listening to Liane Hansen remark this morning about the timetable for her exit strategy from NPR triggered me to find out how she looks--the (dis)advantages of being a radio person means that most of us do not know how those journalists look, right?
Hey, thanks for the wonderful Sunday morning programs over the years :)

So, in addition to , Hansen, whose photo is here on the left, ...
here are a few other people... can you guess who they are? :)  Answers at the very end ... after the jump BTW,do you ever wonder whatever happened to Bob Edwards?

A.
Hint: She is on the air in the afternoon

B.
Hint: she reports from Culver City, CA

 C.
 Hint: She reports from Afghanistan

D. 
Hint: On the air on Saturdays, and refers a lot to Chicago :)

Planes, trains, and automobiles: deaths in India :(

Within a matter of couple of days, transport disasters big enough to make international news :(

First was this plane crash in Mangalore, in which 158 died

Next was a Maoist sabotage of a rail line that derailed a train and triggered the death of 145

And, this morning I find this news item: 

At least 30 people have been killed and about 30 others injured in a bus crash in southern India, media reports say.

The question is how much were these avoidable ...

I can't even begin to imagine what the friends and families of the dead will be going through  ....