The fact that this ignorant racist troll got modded "Interesting" is an
indication of the level of white supremacist denial-based
hypno-propaganda present in slashdot today.
"Western culture may not be perfect, but one real advantage it has over
traditional subcontinental culture is that it has dispensed with this
particular anachronism"
Yes, and replaced it with ideologies of race-war and discrimination
based on skin-color and religion. Like here:
Not to mention the fact that Indians in the intellectual
classes, at least, generally don't subscribe to caste notions, but
Gentile Europeans and Americans in the intellectual classes do so all
the time. Using pseodo-scolarship to advance racist agendas, such as
here:
After all this, they make fun of a system that they clain is
beyond their comprehension, but use themselves on a daily basis in
their societies.
Are Americans born hypocrites or do they have to study?
"You are born into your caste. All your descendants will be of the same
caste"
Again, you might want to read a bit before jumping to such
false generalizations (unless you already know that this is false and
are using a deliberate campaign of disinformation to advance a racist
agenda, which is more likely since you, obviously, are a racist).
It is possible to change a person's caste if he or she has
demonstrated the ability to engage in the activities for which a
particular caste is suited. There is ample precedent for thi, such as
the first Maratha Emperor Chhatrapati Shivaji Bhonsle
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shivaji) who wasn't born a Ksatriya, but
was elevated to that caste because of his accomplishments and obtaining
freedom for the Maratha people from the clutches of radical Islamic
oppression.
Within a particular caste (varna), clans (jaat)
have constantly been in a state of flux. The jaats have a fine
structure of priviledges that keep changing from generation to
generation in order to accomodate for changing economies and political
climate. This is unlike the dogmatic narrow feudal systems of Europe,
where Catholics and Protestants are constantly at each other's throats
and only unite under one religious flag when it comes to pogroms
against Jews.
The defamation of Indian society is nothing new. White powers
have been doing it since the middle of the 19th century. The post above
is merely a crude descendant of the mendacious lies spread by the
British Defamers like Rudyard Kipling and German proto- Nazis like Max
Mueller and Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche
"US Declaration of Independence ('all men are created equal')"
Anybody know if online upgrading the rpms from an old version of Mandrake (say LE2005) to 2006 works? I mean, if I just use urpmi.addmedia to add 2006 repos to an installation of LE2005, install the base header rpm of 2006 by force and just update all the other roms to the 2006 ones via urpmi, will that work or will it be a wasteland of broken packages and unresolvable dependencies? What about using the "upgrade" option on the boot cd? I've googled for this and It seems to work for some people and not for others.
That works out well even if the bodies are nonspherical but the distance between them is large in comparison to the length scales of the higher order multipoles of the gravitational field.
>> My argument:
>>
>> 1. A (you) makes claim B to J (me).
>>
>...
>> than J provides more reliable information to the
opposite effect.
>Convoluted rubbish.
No. It's called the truth.
> your latin is useless - Speak English.
My latin is the product of an activity called reading. You
might want to do it sometime. Trust me it's very rewarding:
Translation: Given two equally predictive theories, choose the simpler.
Except here they only SEEM equally predictive, and that is because of
your clever abuse of the English language, not because of the nature of
your (il)logic.
>an easy to disprove blanket assertion about all of IIT-ians.
I also mentioned "statistically" in a previous post. In case
you need to read even more than I had anticipated, this means the
following:
The peak of the Gaussian curve of the achievements of iitians
is at least one standard deviation above that of wherever you came
from. This is a fact, not a blanket generalization. Again, you're just
abusing the inadequacies of the English language to try to force your
fallacious point of view.
>80-90% of the Physics Nobel prizes
Well I doubt you can take the higher ground since whatever
the percentage may be for iitians, it will be lower for your ilk.
>You know them all, or do you just intend redefining repute
I know at least 20. Each of them know an average of 30 (incl
common-counts) and so on in regression. The 20 I do know personally
agree with the 30 that each of them know and so on. Thus, my claim
still stands.
>Lets see: you go abroad, unhesitatingly
imbibe the biases of people who >probably are just bellyaching,
propagate those on Slashdot with the fervency of >a true
convert. When
they're proven wrong, you desperately throw in a >succession of
clarifications and exceptions ("not since KOBE", "except for the
>JPL")
to somehow salvage your hopeless position and when that doesn't work,
>finally lauch ad-hominem attacks "I do better than you".
You know nothing about me, yet you say the things
above.That's not a fact, that's a rant.
>I well recognize my inferiority in intellectual achievement to
most
IIT-ians. It >doesn't make me a better or worse person. How can
I have a
inferiority >complex then?
You're not inferior, and you know this consciously.
Subconsciously, it is another matter altogether. "Inferiority complex"
does not necessarily mean a conscious feeling of inferiority. While I'm
no Alfred Adler, your obssessive pathology in this regardis
obvious, comes from some deep rooted resentment you have against
iitians, and is common among many of the intermediate tier in Indian
students. I've seen it before, and it's getting rather boring.
We are not elitist or superior (in fact, many professors and
students in iitk have a Marxist bias, or at least they did when I was
there). Just that we are better trained so we have a competitive edge,
even in the pure sciences. The leading String Theorist in India (Ashoke
Sen) is one of us for a reason.
>ad-hominem attacks "I do better than you".
Charming. Not only do you not know the true meaning of the
phrase "ad-hominem",
and use it like some leftist hippie, but you misstate all of what I
said in a desperate attempt to smell clean (For whom? Nobody's reading
this thread anyway).
A (fallacious) ad hominem argument has the basic form:
A makes claim B;
there is something objectionable about A,
therefore claim B is false.
My argument:
1. A (you) makes claim B to J (me).
2. There is something objectionable (C,D
&E) about A
3. If at least one of C,D or E are true, then claim B made
by A is unreliable at best.
4. Therefore, claim B is unreliable, unless somebody who
does not have the same problems (C,D &E) other than J provides
more reliable information to the opposite effect.
You know that the above is true, but your
argument is more like"Pluralitas non est ponenda sine
necessitate" and that's juststupid.
I never said "I do better than you" (look at my posts
carefully), just that iitians do better on a statistical average than
others, and this is a fact. In the academia, physics for
instance , 85-90% of the best students in any high ranked physics
department willconsist of iitians (there are some honorable
exceptions, of course, but they're few and far between). You can blame
this on whoever you want (the sadstate of Indian Universities
etc etc) but the facts remain.
>unhesitatingly imbibe the biases of people who probably are
just bellyaching
If every theorist of repute is 'bellyaching', then go with
the flow.
>You're the undoubtedly the most foolish IITian I've come across
The last time such
a thing happened, it turned out to be a fraud. The fact of
the matter is that physics is not like pure math. Raw intelligence is
not the only requirement, but knowledge, research background and
experience count for more. Plenty of famous physicists with only
slightly above average IQ's. This bloke's in for a tough time if he
thinks he'll be able to get away with it.
Oh! Gee! You can spell! I tremble before greatness. Now, if you'll
excuse me, I have postdoctoral offers to ponder over and job offers
from CYSCO to reject.
>Don't play both sides of the court at the same time.
But I can strike a middle ground. There's another sports metaphor for
you.
>Sure,
if you want to ride the coattails of all departments in all IITs. In
your >area - physics - TIFR and IISc are more successful than
IIT
Kanpur, based on >the list of Indian Physics Assoc. awardees
[tifr.res.in].
Sure, sure. Dream on brother.
>In
any case, the reason money flows the way it does is more benefit to
this >world comes from applied science, not by endlessly funding
theoretical >paper-pushers like yourself. Don't misunderstand --
both
have their place -- >but you aren't 'better' in any meaningful
way.
Never said I was. Physics is, at it's roots, an experimantal
science. It's all good so long as we don't have crooks like NASA who
defraud taxpaying citizens off of their money and give little actual
results in return (this excludes the JPL, though it's connected to
NASA. They're all right).
>Your claim that the most successful space organization so far
is populated by >idiots, is an impossible one.
Possible and easily verifiable. Name one famous result (in the
academia, not in National Geographic) out of NASA since the CMBR stuff
from KOBE.
Furthermore, the very concept of a organization dedicated to
space exploration is a spectacular waste of resources. It's based on
the idea that space is worth exploring at great cost, and there is no
proof of that.
There are more challenging problems that can be tackled on
this planet with fewer resources (like the back of an envelope and the
human mind).
>Studying at an engineering-focussed IIT, instead of, say TIFR
or
IISc, may have >helped develop 'snobbish theoretician syndrome':
familiarity breed contempt.
Nonetheless, the top students in the country
(statistically)graduate from my Alma Mater and her sisters. I
think we can be truthful in such matters andhave a clearer
and wider perspective thanstudents from places like TIFR,
which is very isolated from anything other than mainstream academia, is
pedagogically lacking and has an ivory-tower ambience.
I think that you are enamoured by the glitter of NASA from
watching too many Kennedy speeches and National Geographic programs
than by looking at any real progress, which has been negligible for
NASA since the cold war ended.
>Like geostationary satellites.
One lucky break does not mean all his 'predictions' are
legitimate. Mr Paedophile also said that , by now, we'd have cities on
Mars. Do we? Will we ever? Not likely now that the USSR is gone and
nobody cares about space travel anymore. Clarke was a chap who rode
with the trends and fads of his generations, nothing more.
>This dispute smells of a engineer v/s theoretician catfight.
Sorry, but that won't wash.I'm an IIT alumnus, so my
training background has a fair amount of engineering in it. I"ve taken
core and ESO-BSO courses with engineering students. I am, in fact, very
engineer-friendly. Just not NASA engineers. NASA is a political
organization, not a scientific one.
I shouldn't feed the troll, but if I have to list my academic
achievements to justify the truth, then slashdot has truly descended
into the muck of religious mania.
Your resentment and bile are patently obvious from the tone of your
little troll ie a typical slashdotter. The truth is difficult to
swallow, but
the absurdity of "mass drivers" in practical military combat is
verifiable by simple classical mechanics that any undergraduate in
physics or engineering can verify by using some simple results from a
textbook (The only long-term use I can see is in perhaps interplanetary
mining, where EM launchers can be used to send ores mined from other
planets on a slow but steady orbit to earth, but that is in the very
distant future, and, of course, there are natural "rail-guns" such as
the Aurora Borealis).
Only someone who knows he has no logical or scientific basis
for his claim will resort to flaming insults instead of offerring a
logical argument. Someone whos knowledge of physics comes from watching
Hollywood movies and the occasional program on PBS with pretty pictures
of clouds with colors.
BTW my views of NASA are not singular by any means. I work in
a department where I have been taught and graded favourably by a Nobel
Laureate (have you? I doubt it) and my supervisor is an APS
fellow, the director of the Complex Systems group, has more APS
publications over the course of 20 years than even he remembers, and is
the chief editor of a major periodical in Chaos Theory, AND has written
several textbooks relating to dynamical systems. If you are a physics
student you have undoubtably taken a graduate course where you have had
to study or refer to at least one of them ( I know of no one who
hasn't).
Most of the above share my views, as do most physicists of
any repute from any of the departments I have visited in the US and
Europe. You want to see THEIR creds? Just open any textbook in Quantum
Field Theory or Advanced Many-Body Field Theory.
So there, you see? Bringing penis-waving into science doesn't
look so good when you're facing the business end, does it?
Erm, the truth hurts for delusional people it seems. I happen to be a theoretical physicist, and NASA is a cabal of idiots desperate to get funding after the post cold war world axed their cash cows. They'll make up any old "study" to dig into the pockets of taxpayers, diverting them from legitimate research into real problems. All this pseudo-scientific rubbish about mass-drivers belongs strictly in Arthur C Clarke books, not in the real world. Mass drivers and rail guns are theoretically possible, but practically pointless. There are far cheaper and more efficient ways to kill somebody using present-day technologies.
That's utterly ridiculous. If you think the moon is a static object in
the sky that you can stand on like it's an elevated platform and just
drop things on Earth, then you clearly are quite normal here in
slashdot wrt your ignorance of basic physics.
In order to launch something from the moon you'll have to
give a projectile enough energy to:
1. Escape lunar gravity (small as it might be, you still need a sizable
amount of KE to clear it)
2. Cancel out the orbital angular momentum of the moon wrt earth (part of which
it gets by momentum conservation) without which it would merely dance
around the earth in an elliptical orbit and have all the danger of a
paperweight.
3. Have enough KE to make it to the point between the moon and Earth
where their gravities cancel, and coast along from there.
Even if you use the mythical rail gun shown in crappy science
fiction movies, the power requirements are too prohibitive. Far cheaper
and easier to just launch nukes from LEO platforms and rely on good old air resistance to slow them down enough to drop in on the enemy.
>I blame writing in that it fixes the nature of the expression
and causes people to >overly worry about interpreting the words.
So you're basically saying that scripts are the reason for
scripture. Isn't that a bit like saying that the Big Bang is to blame
for AIDS? I mean, the Big-Bang generated the universe, which created
AIDS, so blame the Big Bang. I mean, you seem to imply that had we not
invented letters and words and written languages, we would
not have mania in religion, but sacrificing the most sophisticated
means of communication we have (writing) for the sake of eliminating
the bad features of religion is too high a sacrifice. Surely there's a
better reason for it. Just that neither you nor I can see it.
>Not by scripture, but by comparitive Indo-European mythology,
archeology, and linguistics.
Archeology? Don't you mean Anthropology? Why do you need Archeology to
study religions that are still in practice today???
>focuses on the themes in Norse Myth which have parallels
elsewhere in Indo-European traditions.
Erm you mean like Thor, Odin and the days of the week?
>the division of authority between the priest-magician and the
king.
That is not unique to I.E. religions. Semitic religions like
Classical Judaism had clear divisions of power between the king (aka
David) and high priest (aka Saul). Christianity is closer to being a
semetic religion than an IE religion. In fact, it can be thought of as
a fringe sect of Judaism that got lucky. Don't see how this applies
uniquely to Aryan religions.
>The more I study the more I come to the conclusion that writing
has
ultimately destroyed our capacity for the limited role of religion
So you're saying that people who didn't put their scripture
in writing didn't go crazy and start crusades and Jihads and
inquisitions and stuff??? What about the Vikings then? They didn't even
have a written language until later, and they plundered about Europe
and the Middle East for quite some time.
>Those Indo-European peoples who did not adopt writing
for purposes of
recording religious beliefs maintained a system where the religion had
a much more limited, though in my opinion more useful role than we see
even in Hinduism.
Yeah, but they're all dead now. Greeks, Romans, Vikings,
Druids, all that. All widely practiced religions today have significant
amounts of mania and control in them (even Buddhism, contrary to
popular belief). Again, I can't see how all this academic theology is
applicable to understanding the insanity of the new world religions.
My own interpretation of
the ancient Indo-European ideas of the role of
religion was that the priesthood was supposed to have a limited and
well defined role: that of managing the scary, unseen reality which was
believed to exist between the natural world and the world of human
activity.
Well you're referring to Hinduism as it existed before the
Shaivite/Vaishnavite movements and the more recent rise of
theHindutva. The theoretical interpretation of
Vedic/Paurannic or Shastric scripture can be made in the above fashion,
but this level of abstraction is rarely followed in the day-to-day
practice of the religion. Ultimately you can't judgereligion
byscripture, but action. If you judge religion by
scripture, they all sound hunky-dory.
In this respect, Hinduism doesn't measure up too badly.
However, if you look at, say, Islamic doctrine, it seems pretty
harmless. Islamic law preaches chastity, honor, charity, discipline,
service, compassion, all the good stuff. The actions of muslims,
however, are a different story. Islamic history is filled with violent
wars, persecution, rampant brigandage, mass-murder, and, more recently, terrorism. The Arabs
created a military Industrial complex designed to spread Islam through
tyranny and persecution. The Muslims' hatred and contempt for
non-muslim religions, especially Hinduism and Judaism, are known to us
all. To a slightly lesser extent, this is also true of Christianity.
It is worth reading "Mitra and Varuna" by Georges Dumezil
Well, I'm sorry, but it's rather difficult to take Western scholarship
of Indian culture seriously. Especially the "Indologists" of Britain,France and Germany (most educated and informed Indians recoil with horror at the very word). This is so because traditionally, most
western scholarship of India had the explicit intent of fuelling white
supremacist idealogies such as Nazism. Rudyard Kipling, Max Mueller,
Alfred Rosenberg, David Duke and the like have soured India's take on
Occidental scholarship of the East in general.
Ray was never really
accepted by Bollywood - they often claimed his style was more
transnational than Indian.
That's because a Gujrati businessman-dominated Bollywood can't stomach
the fact that an educated and enlightened Indian like Satyajit babu
better represents Indian culture and heritage on film than a bunch of
ignorant hatemongering pseudo-propagandists, hypocrites and criminals
more interested in gratuitous profit-making and being a front for
laundering the ill-gotten gains of the Shiv-Sena, the RSS, Arun Gawli
and his mafia thugs, and other unsavory elements. These Bollywood
producers have no concept of integrity or ethics, and only regurgitate
the same nonsensical formulaic garbage corrupting the minds of the
people who are unfortunate enough to view it. I'm a Mumbai'te, born and
raised, Hindustani to the core, and am damn proud of the fact that I've never seen a single
damn Bollywood movie on the big screen (and rarely seen any on TV
without getting migraines). Bollywood represents most of what's wrong
with our country today, and we'd all be better off without it.
Bollywood is nowhere near representing the true face of our way of
life, but presents a ridiculous fantasy
world with psychosexual undertones. I agree with teh fact that many of the ideas in his films are universal and "transnational", as you put it, but he was Hindu to the core, and a champion of nationalism. If the Bollywood
Gujus choose not to accept Satyajit babu as the greatest filmmaker in contemporary
Indian history, and injdeed the one man to put the true face of the Indian into film, then they can kiss my Bong ass and defecate on their
own beards.
Well every religious allegory or scripture-based story is borrowed from social and biological experience, this is true. Nonetheless, I cannot give them any legitimacy or credence, given my study of religious history, because all religions have a common agenda, that of mind-control. Every religion (even buddhism) is touted with the aim of increasing the power of the priesthood and diminishing the thinking capacity of the rest of humanity, and, as such , only superficially address the question of higher powers (this God-person) as a veneer behind which lie their systems of control. Rationalizing religion is tantamount to rationalizing oppression and slavery. Anywho your points are interesting.
Odd that nobody has mentioned Satyajit Ray yet...
Is it because the average./ reader's knowledge of film history is equivalent to his knowledge of spelling?
Slashdot Mirror
and I have money. You lose my hick friend.
Anytime, anywhere my incestuous white-trash friend. I'll be waiting.
The fact that this ignorant racist troll got modded "Interesting" is an indication of the level of white supremacist denial-based hypno-propaganda present in slashdot today.
"Western culture may not be perfect, but one real advantage it has over traditional subcontinental culture is that it has dispensed with this particular anachronism"
Yes, and replaced it with ideologies of race-war and discrimination based on skin-color and religion. Like here:
http://www.adl.org/main_Extremism/Hurricane_katrin a.htm
http://www.adl.org/learn/extremism_in_the_news/Whi te_Supremacy/weltner_relief_scam_9805.htm?LEARN_Ca t=Extremism&LEARN_SubCat=Extremism_in_the_News
http://www.asianmediawatch.net/starandbucwild/
Not to mention the fact that Indians in the intellectual classes, at least, generally don't subscribe to caste notions, but Gentile Europeans and Americans in the intellectual classes do so all the time. Using pseodo-scolarship to advance racist agendas, such as here:
http://www.stormfront.org/forum/showthread.php?t=2 45571
http://www.adl.org/ADL_Opinions/Anti_Semitism_Glob al/20051118-NYSun.htm
http://www.adl.org/PresRele/ASInt_13/4726_13.htm
A particularly relevant example is David Duke (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Duke). A Klansman whom the Americans have elected into office.
After all this, they make fun of a system that they clain is beyond their comprehension, but use themselves on a daily basis in their societies.
Are Americans born hypocrites or do they have to study?
"You are born into your caste. All your descendants will be of the same caste"
Again, you might want to read a bit before jumping to such false generalizations (unless you already know that this is false and are using a deliberate campaign of disinformation to advance a racist agenda, which is more likely since you, obviously, are a racist).
It is possible to change a person's caste if he or she has demonstrated the ability to engage in the activities for which a particular caste is suited. There is ample precedent for thi, such as the first Maratha Emperor Chhatrapati Shivaji Bhonsle (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shivaji) who wasn't born a Ksatriya, but was elevated to that caste because of his accomplishments and obtaining freedom for the Maratha people from the clutches of radical Islamic oppression.
Within a particular caste (varna), clans (jaat) have constantly been in a state of flux. The jaats have a fine structure of priviledges that keep changing from generation to generation in order to accomodate for changing economies and political climate. This is unlike the dogmatic narrow feudal systems of Europe, where Catholics and Protestants are constantly at each other's throats and only unite under one religious flag when it comes to pogroms against Jews.
The defamation of Indian society is nothing new. White powers have been doing it since the middle of the 19th century. The post above is merely a crude descendant of the mendacious lies spread by the British Defamers like Rudyard Kipling and German proto- Nazis like Max Mueller and Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche
"US Declaration of Independence ('all men are created equal')"
Anybody know if online upgrading the rpms from an old version of Mandrake (say LE2005) to 2006 works? I mean, if I just use urpmi.addmedia to add 2006 repos to an installation of LE2005, install the base header rpm of 2006 by force and just update all the other roms to the 2006 ones via urpmi, will that work or will it be a wasteland of broken packages and unresolvable dependencies? What about using the "upgrade" option on the boot cd? I've googled for this and It seems to work for some people and not for others.
That works out well even if the bodies are nonspherical but the distance between them is large in comparison to the length scales of the higher order multipoles of the gravitational field.
>No. Convoluted rubbish. Reread Ockham's razor.
Like I implied, Occam's Razor is a dangerous philosophy usually employed by those fighting a losing battle.
>Yes. Perhaps in your reality, words tunnel between paragraphs using wormholes.
Like I said again, reading helps a lot.
>I see you still insist on clinging to the coattails of your sister departments and >institutes.
and I see you still insist on clinging to your little delusions of grandeur. Well, you're not alone.
>It's hard for 0% to exceed anything.
Like I said again, you're in no position to take the high ground here, since it's 0% for you as well.
>here is surely some big discrimination going on
Yes, it's called "selection by merit". A method of discrimination that's led to the worldwide defeat of Communism.
>> My argument:
>>
>> 1. A (you) makes claim B to J (me).
>> >...
>> than J provides more reliable information to the opposite effect.
>Convoluted rubbish.
No. It's called the truth.
> your latin is useless - Speak English.
My latin is the product of an activity called reading. You might want to do it sometime. Trust me it's very rewarding:
Translation: Given two equally predictive theories, choose the simpler.
Except here they only SEEM equally predictive, and that is because of your clever abuse of the English language, not because of the nature of your (il)logic.
>an easy to disprove blanket assertion about all of IIT-ians.
I also mentioned "statistically" in a previous post. In case you need to read even more than I had anticipated, this means the following:
The peak of the Gaussian curve of the achievements of iitians is at least one standard deviation above that of wherever you came from. This is a fact, not a blanket generalization. Again, you're just abusing the inadequacies of the English language to try to force your fallacious point of view.
>80-90% of the Physics Nobel prizes
Well I doubt you can take the higher ground since whatever the percentage may be for iitians, it will be lower for your ilk.
>You know them all, or do you just intend redefining repute
I know at least 20. Each of them know an average of 30 (incl common-counts) and so on in regression. The 20 I do know personally agree with the 30 that each of them know and so on. Thus, my claim still stands.
>Lets see: you go abroad, unhesitatingly imbibe the biases of people who >probably are just bellyaching, propagate those on Slashdot with the fervency of >a true convert. When they're proven wrong, you desperately throw in a >succession of clarifications and exceptions ("not since KOBE", "except for the >JPL") to somehow salvage your hopeless position and when that doesn't work, >finally lauch ad-hominem attacks "I do better than you".
You know nothing about me, yet you say the things above.That's not a fact, that's a rant.
You forgot High-Tc Superconductivity? Fractional Quantum hall Effect? Tunable BEC in gases? Aren't those of equal importance???
>I well recognize my inferiority in intellectual achievement to most IIT-ians. It >doesn't make me a better or worse person. How can I have a inferiority >complex then?
You're not inferior, and you know this consciously. Subconsciously, it is another matter altogether. "Inferiority complex" does not necessarily mean a conscious feeling of inferiority. While I'm no Alfred Adler, your obssessive pathology in this regardis obvious, comes from some deep rooted resentment you have against iitians, and is common among many of the intermediate tier in Indian students. I've seen it before, and it's getting rather boring.
We are not elitist or superior (in fact, many professors and students in iitk have a Marxist bias, or at least they did when I was there). Just that we are better trained so we have a competitive edge, even in the pure sciences. The leading String Theorist in India (Ashoke Sen) is one of us for a reason.
>ad-hominem attacks "I do better than you".
Charming. Not only do you not know the true meaning of the phrase "ad-hominem", and use it like some leftist hippie, but you misstate all of what I said in a desperate attempt to smell clean (For whom? Nobody's reading this thread anyway).
A (fallacious) ad hominem argument has the basic form:
My argument:
1. A (you) makes claim B to J (me).
2. There is something objectionable (C,D &E) about A
3. If at least one of C,D or E are true, then claim B made by A is unreliable at best.
4. Therefore, claim B is unreliable, unless somebody who does not have the same problems (C,D &E) other than J provides more reliable information to the opposite effect.
You know that the above is true, but your argument is more like"Pluralitas non est ponenda sine necessitate" and that's juststupid.
I never said "I do better than you" (look at my posts carefully), just that iitians do better on a statistical average than others, and this is a fact. In the academia, physics for instance , 85-90% of the best students in any high ranked physics department willconsist of iitians (there are some honorable exceptions, of course, but they're few and far between). You can blame this on whoever you want (the sadstate of Indian Universities etc etc) but the facts remain.
>unhesitatingly imbibe the biases of people who probably are just bellyaching
If every theorist of repute is 'bellyaching', then go with the flow.
>You're the undoubtedly the most foolish IITian I've come across
Now whos resorting to implicit ad-hominems?
>Sure bro, hey - pass on my regards to the "primes are in P" , er, physicists?
Man, your inferiority complex regarding iitians is really strong. I suppose I should get used to such things. This will follow me around forever.
Get this: we do better. Live with it. You'll be a happier person.
>The JPL isn't connected to NASA - it belongs to NASA. as in "NASA's Jet >Propulsion Laboratory"
I'm a physicist, not a politician.
>It takes a true man to admit he was wrong and carry on.
It takes an even better man to admit he's fighting a losing battle.
The last time such a thing happened, it turned out to be a fraud. The fact of the matter is that physics is not like pure math. Raw intelligence is not the only requirement, but knowledge, research background and experience count for more. Plenty of famous physicists with only slightly above average IQ's. This bloke's in for a tough time if he thinks he'll be able to get away with it.
>It's 'Cosmic', not 'Kosmic'. COBE, not 'KOBE'
Oh! Gee! You can spell! I tremble before greatness. Now, if you'll excuse me, I have postdoctoral offers to ponder over and job offers from CYSCO to reject.
>Don't play both sides of the court at the same time.
But I can strike a middle ground. There's another sports metaphor for you.
>Sure, if you want to ride the coattails of all departments in all IITs. In your >area - physics - TIFR and IISc are more successful than IIT Kanpur, based on >the list of Indian Physics Assoc. awardees [tifr.res.in].
Sure, sure. Dream on brother.
>In any case, the reason money flows the way it does is more benefit to this >world comes from applied science, not by endlessly funding theoretical >paper-pushers like yourself. Don't misunderstand -- both have their place -- >but you aren't 'better' in any meaningful way.
Never said I was. Physics is, at it's roots, an experimantal science. It's all good so long as we don't have crooks like NASA who defraud taxpaying citizens off of their money and give little actual results in return (this excludes the JPL, though it's connected to NASA. They're all right).
> http://stardust.jpl.nasa.gov/news/news93.html [nasa.gov]
>Famous enough for you? It's useful too
See above.
>Your claim that the most successful space organization so far is populated by >idiots, is an impossible one.
Possible and easily verifiable. Name one famous result (in the academia, not in National Geographic) out of NASA since the CMBR stuff from KOBE.
Furthermore, the very concept of a organization dedicated to space exploration is a spectacular waste of resources. It's based on the idea that space is worth exploring at great cost, and there is no proof of that.
There are more challenging problems that can be tackled on this planet with fewer resources (like the back of an envelope and the human mind).
>Studying at an engineering-focussed IIT, instead of, say TIFR or IISc, may have >helped develop 'snobbish theoretician syndrome': familiarity breed contempt.
Nonetheless, the top students in the country (statistically)graduate from my Alma Mater and her sisters. I think we can be truthful in such matters andhave a clearer and wider perspective thanstudents from places like TIFR, which is very isolated from anything other than mainstream academia, is pedagogically lacking and has an ivory-tower ambience.
I think that you are enamoured by the glitter of NASA from watching too many Kennedy speeches and National Geographic programs than by looking at any real progress, which has been negligible for NASA since the cold war ended.
>Like geostationary satellites.
One lucky break does not mean all his 'predictions' are legitimate. Mr Paedophile also said that , by now, we'd have cities on Mars. Do we? Will we ever? Not likely now that the USSR is gone and nobody cares about space travel anymore. Clarke was a chap who rode with the trends and fads of his generations, nothing more.
>This dispute smells of a engineer v/s theoretician catfight.
Sorry, but that won't wash.I'm an IIT alumnus, so my training background has a fair amount of engineering in it. I"ve taken core and ESO-BSO courses with engineering students. I am, in fact, very engineer-friendly. Just not NASA engineers. NASA is a political organization, not a scientific one.
I shouldn't feed the troll, but if I have to list my academic achievements to justify the truth, then slashdot has truly descended into the muck of religious mania.
Your resentment and bile are patently obvious from the tone of your little troll ie a typical slashdotter. The truth is difficult to swallow, but
the absurdity of "mass drivers" in practical military combat is verifiable by simple classical mechanics that any undergraduate in physics or engineering can verify by using some simple results from a textbook (The only long-term use I can see is in perhaps interplanetary mining, where EM launchers can be used to send ores mined from other planets on a slow but steady orbit to earth, but that is in the very distant future, and, of course, there are natural "rail-guns" such as the Aurora Borealis).
Only someone who knows he has no logical or scientific basis for his claim will resort to flaming insults instead of offerring a logical argument. Someone whos knowledge of physics comes from watching Hollywood movies and the occasional program on PBS with pretty pictures of clouds with colors.
BTW my views of NASA are not singular by any means. I work in a department where I have been taught and graded favourably by a Nobel Laureate (have you? I doubt it) and my supervisor is an APS fellow, the director of the Complex Systems group, has more APS publications over the course of 20 years than even he remembers, and is the chief editor of a major periodical in Chaos Theory, AND has written several textbooks relating to dynamical systems. If you are a physics student you have undoubtably taken a graduate course where you have had to study or refer to at least one of them ( I know of no one who hasn't).
Most of the above share my views, as do most physicists of any repute from any of the departments I have visited in the US and Europe. You want to see THEIR creds? Just open any textbook in Quantum Field Theory or Advanced Many-Body Field Theory.
So there, you see? Bringing penis-waving into science doesn't look so good when you're facing the business end, does it?
Erm, the truth hurts for delusional people it seems. I happen to be a theoretical physicist, and NASA is a cabal of idiots desperate to get funding after the post cold war world axed their cash cows. They'll make up any old "study" to dig into the pockets of taxpayers, diverting them from legitimate research into real problems. All this pseudo-scientific rubbish about mass-drivers belongs strictly in Arthur C Clarke books, not in the real world. Mass drivers and rail guns are theoretically possible, but practically pointless. There are far cheaper and more efficient ways to kill somebody using present-day technologies.
It's hard to tell on slashdot, hence the tags.
That's utterly ridiculous. If you think the moon is a static object in the sky that you can stand on like it's an elevated platform and just drop things on Earth, then you clearly are quite normal here in slashdot wrt your ignorance of basic physics.
In order to launch something from the moon you'll have to give a projectile enough energy to:
1. Escape lunar gravity (small as it might be, you still need a sizable amount of KE to clear it)
2. Cancel out the orbital angular momentum of the moon wrt earth (part of which it gets by momentum conservation) without which it would merely dance around the earth in an elliptical orbit and have all the danger of a paperweight.
3. Have enough KE to make it to the point between the moon and Earth where their gravities cancel, and coast along from there.
Even if you use the mythical rail gun shown in crappy science fiction movies, the power requirements are too prohibitive. Far cheaper and easier to just launch nukes from LEO platforms and rely on good old air resistance to slow them down enough to drop in on the enemy.
Nice attempt at being paranoid though.
>I blame writing in that it fixes the nature of the expression and causes people to >overly worry about interpreting the words.
So you're basically saying that scripts are the reason for scripture. Isn't that a bit like saying that the Big Bang is to blame for AIDS? I mean, the Big-Bang generated the universe, which created AIDS, so blame the Big Bang. I mean, you seem to imply that had we not invented letters and words and written languages, we would not have mania in religion, but sacrificing the most sophisticated means of communication we have (writing) for the sake of eliminating the bad features of religion is too high a sacrifice. Surely there's a better reason for it. Just that neither you nor I can see it.
>Not by scripture, but by comparitive Indo-European mythology, archeology, and linguistics.
Archeology? Don't you mean Anthropology? Why do you need Archeology to study religions that are still in practice today???
>focuses on the themes in Norse Myth which have parallels elsewhere in Indo-European traditions.
Erm you mean like Thor, Odin and the days of the week?
>the division of authority between the priest-magician and the king.
That is not unique to I.E. religions. Semitic religions like Classical Judaism had clear divisions of power between the king (aka David) and high priest (aka Saul). Christianity is closer to being a semetic religion than an IE religion. In fact, it can be thought of as a fringe sect of Judaism that got lucky. Don't see how this applies uniquely to Aryan religions.
>The more I study the more I come to the conclusion that writing has ultimately destroyed our capacity for the limited role of religion
So you're saying that people who didn't put their scripture in writing didn't go crazy and start crusades and Jihads and inquisitions and stuff??? What about the Vikings then? They didn't even have a written language until later, and they plundered about Europe and the Middle East for quite some time.
>Those Indo-European peoples who did not adopt writing for purposes of recording religious beliefs maintained a system where the religion had a much more limited, though in my opinion more useful role than we see even in Hinduism.
Yeah, but they're all dead now. Greeks, Romans, Vikings, Druids, all that. All widely practiced religions today have significant amounts of mania and control in them (even Buddhism, contrary to popular belief). Again, I can't see how all this academic theology is applicable to understanding the insanity of the new world religions.
My own interpretation of the ancient Indo-European ideas of the role of religion was that the priesthood was supposed to have a limited and well defined role: that of managing the scary, unseen reality which was believed to exist between the natural world and the world of human activity.
Well you're referring to Hinduism as it existed before the Shaivite/Vaishnavite movements and the more recent rise of theHindutva. The theoretical interpretation of Vedic/Paurannic or Shastric scripture can be made in the above fashion, but this level of abstraction is rarely followed in the day-to-day practice of the religion. Ultimately you can't judgereligion byscripture, but action. If you judge religion by scripture, they all sound hunky-dory.
In this respect, Hinduism doesn't measure up too badly. However, if you look at, say, Islamic doctrine, it seems pretty harmless. Islamic law preaches chastity, honor, charity, discipline, service, compassion, all the good stuff. The actions of muslims, however, are a different story. Islamic history is filled with violent wars, persecution, rampant brigandage, mass-murder, and, more recently, terrorism. The Arabs created a military Industrial complex designed to spread Islam through tyranny and persecution. The Muslims' hatred and contempt for non-muslim religions, especially Hinduism and Judaism, are known to us all. To a slightly lesser extent, this is also true of Christianity.
It is worth reading "Mitra and Varuna" by Georges Dumezil
Well, I'm sorry, but it's rather difficult to take Western scholarship of Indian culture seriously. Especially the "Indologists" of Britain,France and Germany (most educated and informed Indians recoil with horror at the very word). This is so because traditionally, most western scholarship of India had the explicit intent of fuelling white supremacist idealogies such as Nazism. Rudyard Kipling, Max Mueller, Alfred Rosenberg, David Duke and the like have soured India's take on Occidental scholarship of the East in general.
Ray was never really accepted by Bollywood - they often claimed his style was more transnational than Indian.
That's because a Gujrati businessman-dominated Bollywood can't stomach the fact that an educated and enlightened Indian like Satyajit babu better represents Indian culture and heritage on film than a bunch of ignorant hatemongering pseudo-propagandists, hypocrites and criminals more interested in gratuitous profit-making and being a front for laundering the ill-gotten gains of the Shiv-Sena, the RSS, Arun Gawli and his mafia thugs, and other unsavory elements. These Bollywood producers have no concept of integrity or ethics, and only regurgitate the same nonsensical formulaic garbage corrupting the minds of the people who are unfortunate enough to view it. I'm a Mumbai'te, born and raised, Hindustani to the core, and am damn proud of the fact that I've never seen a single damn Bollywood movie on the big screen (and rarely seen any on TV without getting migraines). Bollywood represents most of what's wrong with our country today, and we'd all be better off without it. Bollywood is nowhere near representing the true face of our way of life, but presents a ridiculous fantasy world with psychosexual undertones. I agree with teh fact that many of the ideas in his films are universal and "transnational", as you put it, but he was Hindu to the core, and a champion of nationalism. If the Bollywood Gujus choose not to accept Satyajit babu as the greatest filmmaker in contemporary Indian history, and injdeed the one man to put the true face of the Indian into film, then they can kiss my Bong ass and defecate on their own beards.
Well every religious allegory or scripture-based story is borrowed from social and biological experience, this is true. Nonetheless, I cannot give them any legitimacy or credence, given my study of religious history, because all religions have a common agenda, that of mind-control. Every religion (even buddhism) is touted with the aim of increasing the power of the priesthood and diminishing the thinking capacity of the rest of humanity, and, as such , only superficially address the question of higher powers (this God-person) as a veneer behind which lie their systems of control. Rationalizing religion is tantamount to rationalizing oppression and slavery. Anywho your points are interesting.
Terribly sorry I have a job and a life so I an't pay attention to such gaffes you dumb retarded white-trash cousin-fucking inbred cracker.
Odd that nobody has mentioned Satyajit Ray yet... Is it because the average ./ reader's knowledge of film history is equivalent to his knowledge of spelling?