Una verdad simulada

Gaurav writes about his experience at an upscale restaurant in Mumbai, where the waiter was pleasantly shocked when he received a tip of Rs. 300.

I had a similar one too, back in December 2000. I had lunch and the bill came to a paltry Rs. 360. I left Rs. 410 and left. The waiter came running behind me… I thought I had perhaps put 310 by mistake. Nope. He actually came because he thought I forgot to take the fifty rupee change. I told him it was his tip. He thanked me and started to return back to the restaurant. Then, he saw me trying to flag down a rickshaw to get home. He came back and asked me where I wanted to go. When I told him the destination, he crossed the street, spoke to a rickshaw driver (who until then refused to acknowledge my attempts to get his attention) and got the rickshaw for me.

The most surprising part came at the end, when I reached the destination. The rickshaw driver told me that the waiter had paid him twice the fare (Rs. 18).

During my next visit to India in 2002, the restaurant management had changed and the waiter was no longer working with them.

Tags: General by Niket
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When the last time there were scares about bird flu and SARS, I was in US. This time, I am amazed at the information network in India. Even small children know about the flu and the poor folks have also started taking precautions they can afford. We have received more than 15 emails in the last 24 hours on our institutes announcement email list: from faculty, students and the institute hospital.

What was most amazing was that three kids in the second grade were talking about wearing masks to the school. One said that it was compulsory to do so, the second said that it wasn’t, whereas the third kid said that they ought to wear it anyway as a precautionary measure.

While there is bound to be some misinformation that will get spread around, most of what I have heard in and out of the campus makes me at least a little happy.

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When I was a graduate student in GaTech, I lived for 18 months in Cobb County, which became famous recently for putting anti-evolution stickers in biology textbooks. It was therefore heartening to read that a local atheist gave “invocation” at a meeting of Cobb County Board of Commissioners (via Pharyngula):

Rather than any form of deity, [Smyrna atheist Edward Buckner] invoked “the 700,000 people who live in this county — especially the majority (yes, over half) of those 700,000 who are not members of any church, mosque, temple, or other religious organization,” he said.

“I speak as well for those political leaders who despair that success in politics cannot be achieved without hypocritical piety from politicians and who would prefer to run for office and to govern based on competence and political philosophy rather than on beliefs, real or pretended, in any supernatural beings.”

I have written about invocation in India. Somehow, I found invocation in India to be bit more of “culture and tradition” thing while that in US to be purely a “religious” thing. In that sense, invocations here, though more frequent, have been less annoying than those in US. Perhaps this is because I was born to Hindu parents in India; so I find Indian type of invocation less of an affront to my secular sensibilities.

Interestingly enough, my grandmom, were she alive, would invoke 330 million gods (tehtis koti dev). I can’t help but wonder if her invocation was somehow similar to Buckner’s invocation of 700,000 people of Cobb county.

Tags: General by Niket
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What a nerve to say: “Well Science doesn’t know everything”

Science knows it doesn’t know everything. Otherwise it would stop.

Really, it takes a comedian to drive home a point about science much better than any of us could. I feel often that we are nutheads who would pin our hopes on alternative medicines and spirituality and prayer and other woo-woo, instead of relying on evidence-based science.

Yes, science doesn’t know everything. We know that and scientists are forever trying to push that boundary of what is known further. In fact, its a blessing that we know what exactly is unknown.

I have tried to transcribe a few more quotes from the video below:

• There is kind of a notion that “every opinion is equally valid.” My arse.
• Horse-shit-path (audience laughter). And I am sorry if you are into homeopathy. Its water (audience laughter).
• Science knows it doesn’t know everything. Otherwise it would stop (laughter and applause). Just because science doesn’t know everything doesn’t mean that you can fill in those gaps with any fairytale that appeals to you.
• Herbal medicine is around for thousand years. Indeed it has. And then we tested it all. And the stuff that worked became medicine (audience laughter). And the rest of it is just a bowl of soup and some potpourri (audience laughter).

(via Bad Astronomer)

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Whoa!

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Its hard to imagine a prose such as this on sexual ethics was written more than 70 years back. The essay on “Sexual Ethics” by Bertland Russell is an excellent read. The final paragraph just sums it best:

[I]t would be well if men and women could remember […] to practise the ordinary virtues of tolerance, kindness, truthfulness, and justice. Those who, by conventional standards, are sexually virtuous, too often consider themselves thereby absolved from behaving like decent human beings. Most moralists have been so obsessed by sex that they have laid much too little emphasis on other more socially useful kinds of ethically commendable conduct.

As they say, what consenting adults do in their own bedroom is nobody else’s business.

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It took me almost a minute to get the ad (via Sullivan):

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