Category Archives: Science and Technology

Space and Politics

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My cruel friends like to tease me. They tell me that by the time I become an astronaut they will be able to buy the ticket for the seat next to me. Bastards. They might be right. Space tourism, though still in its infancy, is full of possibilities. Now and Indian-American entrepreneur from Chicago is trying to get in on the action. From the Hindustan Times:

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Chirinjeev Kathuria, the irrepressible Indian-American serial entrepreneur from Chicago, is returning to his first love – commercial space travel.

Kathuria, who some years ago, co-founded MirCorps, a Russian partnered company that sent American businessman Dennis Tito to space April 4, 2000, is partnering with Canadian Arrow to form a new Canadian corporation called PlanetSpace.

“We are interested in making this a profitable business. I am more interested in getting applause form Wall Street rather than from jet propulsion labs,” said Kathuria who could not become an astronaut as a teenager because he wore glasses.

“The fact is I’ve always wanted to make commercial space travel a reality for the everyday person, and to create a business to make a company profitable.

Apparently I’m not the only one who dreams of space AND politics though. Kathuria is quite ambitious. Googling him led me here. On April 15th Kathuria announced his bid for Lieutenant Governor of Illinois (in 2006).

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The changing face of wealth

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The Washington Post features a story on the shifting strategy of large brokerage houses to recruit minority investors, particularly from amongst the South Asian an Hispanic communities (where they see the most opportunity):

A handful of well-dressed professionals gathered in a gallery at Christie’s auction house here the other day to listen to a South Asian art expert discuss works soon to go on sale, including several by Maqbool Fida Husain, considered India’s Picasso.

No one in the crowd planned to buy any art. In fact, few even cared about it. They just wanted to sound smart at a cocktail reception later in the evening.

The Christie’s event provides a snapshot of Merrill’s aggressive effort, replicated to varying degrees among Wall Street firms, to harness demographic shifts in American wealth.

The Merrill effort, headed by three-time cancer survivor and former star financial adviser Subha V. Barry, has so far focused on wealthy South-Asian Americans and Latinos in a handful of big cities, including the District…

According to the article the sudden shift in strategy is tied to the fact that as baby boomers retire they will only be withdrawing from their investments. Thus, Merrill is targeting South Asians because, “25 percent of South-Asian Americans earn more than $100,000, far more than the average.”

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Jessica Alba works in Karachi

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A couple of months ago, I had a delicious lunch (at Manhattan’s Jaiya Thai, which seems to hold a monopoly on the Thai-food-for-desis market) with a friend who had just been to Pakistan on business. He told me about a company in D.C. which had outsourced its receptionist to Pakistan via videoconferencing. Today, our mutual friend Mitra Kalita published the story in the Washington Post:

In a chic downtown lobby across the street from the Old Executive Office Building, Saadia Musa answers phones, orders sandwiches and lets in the FedEx guy. And she does it all from Karachi, Pakistan.

As receptionist for the Resource Group, Musa greets employees and visitors via a flat screen hanging on the lobby’s wall. Although they are nine hours behind and nearly 7,500 miles away, her U.S.-based bosses rely on her to keep order during the traffic of calls and meetings…

She turns the camera — which is usually focused on her face — to offer a view of her surroundings in Karachi: a lounge, a cafeteria, a pool table… Just then, a phone call interrupts her. It is 1:15 a.m. where Musa sits. “Good afternoon,” Musa says brightly. “Thank you for calling the Resource Group.”

Musa went through Stepford Wife-like call center training:

“A smile can be heard,” Musa recited in an interview via her flat screen. She worked as a call-center operator before being promoted to secretary. “Posture can make a difference. A dress code makes a difference.”

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Murderous Mirchi

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Coming soon, to the purse of an auntie near you, a hot sauce so hot it could literally kill you:

Ultra-concentrated “16 Million Reserve” is the hottest science can make. The sauce is 30 times hotter than the spiciest pepper and 8,000 times more fiery than Tabasco. Diners must sign a disclaimer recommending “protective gloves and eye wear” — but even sweating testers in safety gear were blinded by tears for 30 minutes. Medical experts fear it could kill asthmatics or hospitalise a user who touches a sensitive part of the body afterwards. It is made of pure capsaicin, the chemical that makes peppers “hot”. [UK Sun, via BoingBoing]

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He blinded me with science (updated)

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As Abhi posted, Amal Dorai of MIT threw a party for time travelers last Saturday. He begged visitors to bring a cure for cancer or some other proof of their travels. Here’s a report from Afua, the Samoan particle physicist-slash-bouncer:

“Two surfer dudes named Bill and Ted showed up claiming to be from the year 1989. I asked them to prove it, but all they said was ‘way!’ and ‘bogus.’ So I threw ’em out. They yelled ‘Party on, dudes!’ and disappeared into a phone booth.

“A crazy-eyed old man with Van der Graaf hair showed up in a DeLorean. I ejected him, and he peeled out at 88 mph stuffing garbage scraps into a blender.

“Some huge thug showed up in a monster suit. He gave his name as Moore Locke, shrieked loudly and bit someone’s head off.

“A tall, thin man with pointy ears wandered by muttering something about a whale.

“A guy named Spicoli showed up stoned out of his mind. ‘Dude, I’m, like, from 30 seconds in the past,’ he said, adding, ‘huh-huh-huh.’

“So there were no time travelers at the party.”

By the end of the party, the only confirmed time travelers were Dorai’s purple leisure suit and zebra-stripe shirt. No other travelers showed up, so the party was a bust. The MIT boys squabbled over the only female-like creature in the room, a girl from BU who took a wrong turn and got trapped in Morss Hall like a dinosaur surrounded by velociraptors. Thousands of years later, they will find her bones.

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Q: What is EVEN BETTER than a Star Trek convention?

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If I wasn’t a broke ass graduate student I’d be on a flight to Boston tomorrow morning. “Why,” you ask? The Guardian says it all [tip from Francis Assisi]:

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One of the strongest arguments against time travel is that we are not overrun with curious tourists from the future. A university student in Boston plans to change that, by inviting budding Doctor Whos to the world’s first time traveller convention this weekend.

The organiser, Amal Dorai – a masters student in electrical engineering and computer science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology – aims to test the theory of time travel by inviting people from the future to the event.

This is friggin awesome! Dorai’s hypothesis seems to me to parallel the Fermi Paradox which asks why we haven’t been overrun by intelligent beings from elsewhere in the galaxy yet.

“We are doing this as a very low-risk, low-cost way to investigate the possibility of time travel,” he said. “I think the probability they will come is very low, but if it does happen it will one of the biggest events in human history.

“Of course, no time travellers doesn’t rule out the possibility of time travel, they could have just decided not to come to our convention.”

Ahhh…hope. The last refuge of the nerd. Incidentally there was a Star Trek the Next Generation episode years ago where a time traveler from the past pretended he was a time traveler from the future. No word yet on how Dorai plans to handle this possibility. If we were to teach a time traveler from the past too much, he/she could pollute the timeline. It’s enough to make your head spin. Continue reading →

Why I Stopped Worrying and Learned To Love the Bomb

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The life of a Californian is stressful to say the least! Not only do I have to worry about random freeway shootings, but now I have to worry about some megalomaniacal dictator dropping the bomb on my ass simply because I am within range.

Asked by Senator Hillary Clinton whether North Korea had the ability to arm a missile with a nuclear warhead, [Vice Admiral Lowell] Jacoby responded:

“The assessment is that they have the capability to do that, yes, ma’am.”

He said North Korea also had the ability to deploy a two-stage intercontinental missile that could successfully hit US territory. [Yahoo News]

To stress me out even further, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff said this morning that we are overstretched in case we have to fight another war. The LA times reports:

The strains imposed by the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have made it far more difficult for the U.S. military to beat back new acts of aggression, launch a pre-emptive strike or prevent conflict in another part of the world, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff concluded in a classified analysis presented to Congress today.

Feeling rather afraid and hopeless, I made my way over to the website of the ONE institution that I can always rely on to make me feel safer. I wanted to know what I should do in case of a nuclear attack. This is what my government advises me:

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Pakistan Purloins Plenty Pirated Pictures (polished)

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Traditionally, the Pakistani economy has been based in agriculture, so I was surprised to learn that Pakistan has made a leap into the new economy. Pakistan is now one of the top 10 sources of pirated recordings and movies. The quality of the material and the packaging is apparently as good as the original source, and (according to the International Federation for Phonographic Industries) “illegal replication facilities in Pakistan were doubling their copying capacity every 18 months“

Here’s how it all breaks down:

  • Pakistan produces over 230 million priate CDs annually
  • 25 million of those disks are for the local market, the rest go abroad to Dubai, Nepal and India and from there, all over the world.
  • Pakistan exports at least 13 million disks monthly (back of the envelope calculations indicate this should be at least 17 million, so I don’t know why the BBC says 13 million)
  • These disks sell for $1 in Pakistan (less for orders of more than 10) and $10 elsewhere.
  • Profit margins on pirated CDs / DVDs are four to five times the cost
  • The recording industry tells us that the annual cost to copyright holders is at least $2.7bn [Source: Pakistan – copyright piracy hub (BBC)]

This is a serious problem for the recording industry:

The International Federation of the Phonographic Industry has published a report claiming that 35% of all CDs sold around the world are illegal copies – that’s 1.1 billion pirate disks. …Clearly the biggest threat to the record industry today is not P2P networks but the more traditional CD copying seen in the the IFPI’s ten priority countries where anti-piracy offensives are most needed

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