Author Archives: Abhi

About Abhi

Abhi lives in Los Angeles and works to put things into space.

Root canals sucked even worse back then

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Via our newsline we see that Thursday’s issue of the journal Nature has a paper out which indicates that dentistry may be one of the world’s oldest professions. The paper, which has an Italian as the lead author, is titled Early Neolithic Tradition of Dentistry (paid subscription required). Now when we are old uncles/aunties we can brag to our children that South Asians invented denistry also.

Proving prehistoric man’s ingenuity and ability to withstand and inflict excruciating pain, researchers have found that dental drilling dates back 9,000 years.

Primitive dentists drilled nearly perfect holes into live but undoubtedly unhappy patients between 5500 B.C. and 7000 B.C., an article in Thursday’s journal Nature reports. Researchers carbon-dated at least nine skulls with 11 drill holes found in a Pakistan graveyard.

That means dentistry is at least 4,000 years older than first thought — and far older than the useful invention of anesthesia.

This was no mere tooth tinkering. The drilled teeth found in the graveyard were hard-to-reach molars. And in at least one instance, the ancient dentist managed to drill a hole in the inside back end of a tooth, boring out toward the front of the mouth. [Link]

My whole life I had looked down on people with multiple cavities because I had never had one. I usually snubbed these “enamelly challenged” because I saw them as being weak and unable to resist candy. I got my just desserts though. Last year I got my first (and I swear it will be my last) cavity. By the time the doctor was done she had pulled two of my innocent teeth just to get to the offending tooth which she then reconstructed with a crown. My wisdom teeth surgery was even worse (warning: NSDL). Apparently they were like upside down. I can’t even begin to imagine how people were able to withstand the pain in the Neolithic.

The site of Mehrgarh in Baluchistan lies along the principal route connecting Afghanistan to the Indus valley. After intermittent occupations by hunter-gatherers, Mehrgarh’s subsistence economy shifted to the cultivation of barley and wheat, cotton domestication and cattle breeding. Diachronic archaeological evidence records an increasingly rich cultural life, with technological sophistication based on diverse raw materials. Excavation of the Neolithic cemetery known as MR3 yielded more than 300 graves created over a 1,500-year time span…

Whatever the purpose, tooth drilling on individuals buried at MR3 continued for about 1,500 years, indicating that dental manipulation was a persistent custom. After 6,500 yr BP, the practice must have ceased, as there is no evidence of tooth drilling from the subsequent MR2 Chalcolithic cemetery, despite the continuation of poor dental health. [Link]

Teeth are the greatest find in any paleontological/archeological expedition. Measuring istope ratios can even tell you what the people ate. I keep two of my old teeth on my desk at home. This is just in case my body is lost during some adventure and someone wants to learn about my lifestyle when I was still alive.

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Possible hate crime on Baylor campus

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My friend Anji M. tips me off to a possible hate crime on the Baylor campus down in Texas. Many of the news reports seem to highlight (sometimes multiple times in the same article) that the senior was involved with Muslim-Christian dialog on campus.

A Muslim Baylor University senior of South Asian heritage who was active in Muslim-Christian relations was attacked on the school’s campus Saturday night, suffering multiple injuries.

Chief Jim Doak of the Baylor Department of Public Safety confirmed that police were alerted about the attack and that the incident is being investigated, but he refused to release further details. Neither Doak nor a university spokeswoman could immediately say whether the alleged attack will be investigated as a hate crime.

The Baylor DPS web site indicated that the attack occurred near Draper Hall between 8:45 and 9 p.m.

Rabiah Ahmed, a spokeswoman for the Washington, D.C.-based Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), said the victim called them Monday and said a man, thought to be in his 30s, grabbed her hijab, an Islamic head scarf, and threw the woman to the ground. As he did, the attacker allegedly yelled anti-Muslim and ethnic slurs at the woman including “Arabian (expletive)” and “(expletive) Muslims.”

When the woman screamed, her attacker reportedly slapped her and kicked her multiple times in the ribs, according to Ahmed. An emergency room examination found bruises and a dislocated shoulder, Ahmed said.

The victim, who was active in Muslim-Christian relations on the Baylor campus, went to her family home in Oklahoma after the attack. Ahmed said she was told the victim would stay home for about a week. [Link]

Here is another account with additional details. The Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) got in touch with the FBI soon after word of the incident surfaced. The FBI agreed to send someone down:

“We have had an FBI representative on campus with us throughout the day today and will continue to work with the agency as this process goes forward,” Doak said.

The Washington-based Council on American-Islamic relations called on the FBI Tuesday to probe the attack on the coed as a hate crime. [Link]

We’ll try to keep readers updated when additional details emerge.

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Worth a lick?

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Indian Americans have been trying for a long time to get the U.S. Postal Service to issue a Diwali stamp. The Aussies on the other hand have gone the extra kilometer. They have featured Bollywood star Saif Ali Khan on one of their postage stamps. See for yourself:

Saif Ali Khan who has danced his way to Australian history with his performance in Commonwealth Games. He became the first Indian to feature on a postage stamp published in Australia.

50-cent stamp has Saif among those released on March 27. It shows him on stage in a green kurti with other dancers. Rani Mukherjee and Aishwarya Rai had no such luck who were with Saif from Bollywood. [Link]
I can’t help but find this funny. Indians didn’t really represent at the Olympics, but seemed to do okay at the Commonwealth Games. Still, it is a Bollywood star that is on one of the official stamps from the games and not an athlete.

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No end in sight

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Two articles out on Monday provide a disturbing glimpse into how some segments of Indian society are “coping” with the ravages of sex selection. The first is from the UK based Independent:

Tripla’s parents sold her for £170 to a man who had come looking for a wife. He took her away with him, hundreds of miles across India, to the villages outside Delhi. It was the last time she would see her home. For six months, she lived with him in the village, although there was never any formal marriage. Then, two weeks ago, her husband, Ajmer Singh, ordered her to sleep with his brother, who could not find a wife. When Tripla refused, he took her into the fields and beheaded her with a sickle.

When Rishi Kant, an Indian human rights campaigner, tracked down Tripla’s parents in the state of Jharkhand and told them the news, her mother broke down in tears. “But what could we do?” she asked him. “We are facing so much poverty we had no choice but to sell her.”

Tripla was a victim of the common practice in India of aborting baby girls because parents only want boys. Although she was born and lived into early adulthood, it was the abortions that caused her death. In the villages of Haryana, just outside Delhi, abortions of baby girls have become so common that the shortage of women is severe. Unable to find wives locally, the men have resorted to buying women from the poorer parts of India. Just 25 miles from the glitzy new shopping malls and apartment complexes of Delhi is a slave market for women. [Link]

Normal laws of supply in demand would have led me to guess that when “enough” girls had been aborted, the ones that survived to birth would eventually become “more valuable” than men. I even imagined a reverse dowery situation as a possibility. Society would finally see the fallacy of its ways when men had nobody to marry. Probably like many who were as naive as me, I never accounted for the fact that a quicker way to deal with the problem was money. Just like there is a black market for kidneys there is growing black market for women.

When the police arrested Tripla’s husband, he could not provide a marriage certificate. Generally, there is no real marriage. The women are sexual “brides” only. Sometimes, brothers who cannot afford more share one woman between them. Often, men who think they have got a good deal on a particularly beautiful bride will sell her at a profit. [Link]

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I’m not one to gossip but…

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You know me by now good readers. I am normally not one to do a fluff post here on SM but I feel I must draw your attention to someting sent to me. All bloggers use some service to keep track of who visits their website (how many hits, where are they from, etc.). We swear that we won’t turn over our records to the Bush administration. Many sites, including our own, use Sitemeter. Sitemeter also tells you the search term someone keyed in to a search engine like Google to arrive at a blog. Earlier, blogger Suhail Kazi brought this to my attention. It is a screenshot of the sitemeter keeping track of his blog (see the last line). The internet is apparently buzzing with people desperately looking to substantiate rumors swirling around Manish’s trip to India.

What is Manish really doing in India? Is he keeping his fellow mutineers in the dark? You know me. I’m not one to gossip but I’m just saying…

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Boondoggle

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The New York Times reports that a former investigator with Congress’ Government Accountability Office (G.A.O) is blowing the whistle on his own office, as well as the Bush administration’s oversight of the contracters building elements of the national missile defense shield:

A senior Congressional investigator has accused his agency of covering up a scientific fraud among builders of a $26 billion system meant to shield the nation from nuclear attack. The disputed weapon is the centerpiece of the Bush administration’s antimissile plan, which is expected to cost more than $250 billion over the next two decades.

The investigator, Subrata Ghoshroy of the Government Accountability Office, led technical analyses of a prototype warhead for the antimissile weapon in an 18-month study, winning awards for his “great care” and “tremendous skill and patience.”

Mr. Ghoshroy now says his agency ignored evidence that the two main contractors had doctored data, skewed test results and made false statements in a 2002 report that credited the contractors with revealing the warhead’s failings to the government.

The agency strongly denied his accusations, insisting that its antimissile report was impartial and that it was right to exonerate the contractors of a coverup… And Mr. Ghoshroy’s assertions raise new questions about the Boeing Company’s military arm, the main contractor for the troubled $26 billion system of interceptor rockets now being installed in Alaska and California. The system’s “kill vehicles” are to zoom into space and destroy enemy warheads by force of impact. [Link]

Mr. Ghoshroy seems to have a strong background in defense weaponry and is currently at Harvard’s Kennedy School:

Until his arrival at the Belfer Center, Mr. Ghoshroy was a Senior Defense Analyst at the U.S. General Accounting Office, which he joined in 1998. Mr. Ghoshroy’s primary responsibility has been to provide independent technical advice to GAO staff and managers on GAO evaluation of weapons systems that employ sophisticated technology. In this capacity, Mr. Ghoshroy has contributed among others to reviews of National Missile Defense, Airborne Laser, Land Warrior, and Joint Tactical Radio. [Link]
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Guest blogger: Tanzila Ahmed

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I met our next guest blogger, Tanzila Ahmed (founder of South Asian American Voting Youth), under admittedly unfortunate circumstances. Through various back-channels and intelligence assets, I received word that Taz was trying to dig up dirt on…ME (presumably to infiltrate the Mutiny and bring us down). Apparently, some forces out there deemed me to be the weakest link at SM and the one most easily seduced/distracted by the feminine ways (Ha! Feel free to try). Little did Taz know that we had a counter-intelligence operation underway and that she had been under surveillance (e.g. warrantless blog taps) the whole time. We go to great lengths to assure our North Dakota-based hegemony. We’ve been holding Taz in our basement for the past eight months, flashing a series of mutinous images in front of her (our rotating banners). Before you can learn you must first un-learn. We had to be sure that she no longer feared anything. In just the past month a Stockholm-like syndrome set in and she began to come around. She is ready now, and the Mutiny is ready for her…

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Fool me twice, shame on…

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As some of you have now guessed, we were NOT in fact taken over by the junk peddlers of “Happy Hippie.” Our url is still very much our own. We want to take this opportunity to first thank the dozens who sent us emails of sympathy and offers of help to defend against the scurrilous cyber-squatters who chose the day before April 1st to attack us. Former SM guestblogger Cicatrix wrote to us immediately:

Who the f*ck are those squatters? They’re clearly not out to sell anything, but they’ve put in a lot of thought/effort (to mock either desis or hippies, I can’t tell) for random some web-hostage-takers. It’s like they deliberately hated sepiamutiny or something. I wonder if that idiot sepiahokum person is behind this. good luck, sepia crew. tell us if there’s anything we can do.

Former guestblogger PG wrote to us later in the day:

Hey’all,
Sorry to see you’ve gotten squatted. The “products” — they’re all fake and there are no working links to buy them — are insult to injury. A friend pointed out that according to register.com, you still should have the domain name until August 4, 2006. Could you give me more info on how this happened? I’d like to help if I can. Good luck,

PG

Half the Sins of Mankind & De Novo

In addition, parts of the blogosphere were in shock (and some a bit happy) to see what had become of us (see here, here, here, here, and here). Also, a special shot-out to the dark one for being such a good sport:

I was going to post something here about how sepiamutiny got hijacked, but i’ve realized i’ve probably once again been caught by their april fool’s joke.
f*ckers 🙂
p.s.–it is quite amusing when you read the entries for “happy hippie” 🙂
Let’s not forget to mention the signed petition either. But…there were also heroes out there today. A diligent few could not be fooled by so simple and pathetic a hoax. One in particular, Kaps of DesiPundit and Sambhar Mafia, took it upon himself to figure out which bloggers had been fooled and then left a comment on each of their websites informing them of the elaborate deception. Folks, I want to humbly submit his name for special recognition during next year’s world-renowned Indibloggies. That kind of devotion to truth and justice in the blogosphere simply MUST be recognized by his peers. It was, dare I say, delightful. 🙂 Continue reading →

Pilgrimages ain’t what they used to be

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Forbes magazine reports on an article first published in the German magazine Cicero which asserts that the Pakistanis are helping the Saudis develop a nuclear capability under the cover of the Haj:

…during the Haj pilgrimages to Mecca in 2003 through 2005, Pakistani scientists posed as pilgrims to come to Saudi Arabia.

Between October 2004 and January 2005, some of them slipped off from pilgrimages, sometimes for up to three weeks, the report quoted German security expert Udo Ulfkotte as saying.

According to Western security services, the magazine added, Saudi scientists have been working since the mid-1990s in Pakistan, a nuclear power since 1998.

Cicero, which will appear on newstands tomorrow, also quoted a US military analyst, John Pike, as saying that Saudi bar codes can be found on half of Pakistan’s nuclear weapons ‘because it is Saudi Arabia which ultimately co-financed the Pakistani atomic nuclear program…’ [Link]

If this is true then it is a total slap in the face of the U.S., and the assurances that we supposedly have (right?) about Khan’s network being shut down is all bulls*it. Allowing a nation like Saudi Arabia any sort of nuclear capability is crazy, especially if you think that the monarchy there is doomed to failure and that a militant uprising is just a matter of time. Also, it’s not like they have an un-met energy demand.

The magazine also said satellite images indicate that Saudi Arabia has set up a program in Al-Sulaiyil, south of Riyadh, a secret underground city and dozens of underground silos for missiles. [Link]

We’ll have to keep an eye on this to see if any other news organizations follow-up on the German assertions.

Update: Pakistan rejects accusations. See below the fold. Continue reading →

When asylum might not be a good thing

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shaluja.jpg Sri Lankans Saluja Thangaraja, who is now 26, and Ahilan Nadarajah have been sitting in a U.S. Federal pen for 4 years now. Why? They are victims in a sense of the politics that resulted from 9/11. The SJ Mercury news picks this off the AP wire:

A Sri Lankan woman fleeing persecution in her native country has been released after spending more than four years in federal detention on allegations that she entered the country illegally.

Saluja Thangaraja, 26, was freed from the Otay Mesa detention center late Monday after the San Francisco-based 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ordered the release of a Sri Lankan man who also spent more than four years in the same facility.

The court ordered the release of Ahilan Nadarajah on March 17, saying the government was violating federal law by holding him even though he wasn’t criminally charged and couldn’t be deported in the foreseeable future.

Nadarajah and Thangaraja both fled Sri Lanka and stopped at the U.S.-Mexico border in October 2001 and were charged with being in the U.S. without a valid visa. Both were granted political asylum but the government refused to release them.

In case you are keeping score at home, this is yet another example of the Executive Branch selectively ignoring the power of the Judicial Branch in the name of “protecting” Americans. The fact that these two were stopped at the Mexican border may have incentivized the government to over-prosecute this case so as to justify their specious arguments connecting illegal immigration on the Mexican border to terrorism. Thangaraja and Nadarajah were kept in jail while the original ruling was appealed by the government. As you have probably already guessed, the U.S. government insisted these two were LTTE terrorists despite evidence to the contrary. Continue reading →

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