the_unlettered_tellurian

Apparently, Indian and Chinese programmers are not contributing enough to the open source process. That’s what Dana Blankenhorn says in a recent blog post.

He thinks that the “proprietary attitude toward improvements which open source fights so hard ” remains ingrained in both these countries.

Microsoft has picked up a Platinum Sponsorship in the Apache Software Foundation (ASF). Sam Ramji, Director, Open Source Software Lab at Microsoft posted this on his blog at port 25, Microsoft’s open source community portal.

While I really don’t know what this means for Microsoft or Apache, it has surely resulted in Microsoft getting enshrined in the ASF’s “Thanks” page.

it sure is a long way from the “Apache vs IIS” days.

There are a couple of other interesting things highlighted in the post. It mentions Microsoft’s first code contribution to the PHP community via a patch to ADOdb that enables SQL Server support, and, some protocols being moved into the Open Specification Promise (OSP).

This article in The New York Times talks about overseas fuel subsidies taking a toll on U.S.

Subsidies are not good, but they might be required for certain classes of people. As mentioned towards the end of the article, removing the subsidy on kerosene might increase the utilization of wood as fuel in certain parts, and this would cause more harm (short and long term) than continuing with the subsidy.

A saner approach to subsidizing (by removing subsidies for unwanted classes of people) might make sense, but it will be difficult (impossible?) to manage it on the ground.

More importantly, an immediate increase in the fuel prices could have a disastrous effect on these emerging economies. Among other things auto sales will dip, transportation prices will sky-rocket, all essential and a whole bunch of non-essential commodities will respond to this resulting in a sudden jump in pricing. Consumers will respond by tightening their purses, further accentuating the cycle.

An immediate blow to the developing nations’ economies would possibly have a far greater effect on the global economy than the “subsidy toll” being talked about here.

Robert Samuelson makes an interesting case here in his column “You Call this a Depression?”

A few more details are required, though, for the sake of clarity.

Talking about the 1930 depression, he says that it “was a social as well as economic breakdown. Our present situation bears no resemblance to this.”

What precisely are the social and economic breakdowns he is referring to here? Where does social breakdown stop and economic breakdown start? Or vice versa? If they both co-existed and lead to the horrible depression, how did they come to co-exist? And what are we facing now – just an economic breakdown?

What happened in the Great Depression – the events – are written in great detail… what seems to be missing is a solid set of explanations about the inter-relations between the events.

Other assurances about the current scenario not being anywhere close to the harshest slumps of the past are hardly comforting. Apparently the 1929 crash was preceded by a five year bull run. Could the current scenario be a pre-cursor to worse things? If it is not – we need a few more convincing arguments. Some of the hand grenades lobbed at today’s economic that he mentions – the subprime mortgages, the credit squeeze, high oil prices – seem to be quite recent. How much more of these can be withstood, and for how long?

The second page of the article provides even more evidence that we are gazing at the future through a thick mist. We need to look harder, and be bolder in facing what we see.

We are a global economy, an economy with better ability to mitigate risks by spreading it across continents. And if the lesson being learnt, as he rightly mentions, is that the business cycle isn’t dead, what awaits us when it does go down. The answer is right there in the last sentence – “The present economy would have to get much, much, much worse before it warranted the same appraisal.”

And just saying that it is not “that” worse right now does not in any way mean that it won’t get “that” worse.

The video posted on you tube in Sep 2007 says that a terrible crash will follow in 2009…lead by China post its Olympic boom

The presenter ends the video on this polite note “… this one will leave no assets unaffected. I am sorry I can’t give you an exact date for this cataclysmic drop. I believe we’ll see first signs of late winter or spring of 2009. Until then you can do worse than hitching a ride on the back of the run away Olympic bull as long as you are aware that the ride might come to an abrupt halt a year and a half from now.

Barely a day after a series of low-intensity bombs went off in Bangalore, reports are trickling in that some more explosions have taken place in Ahmedabad in Gujarat.

Further to the recent post on the Cataglyphis fortis, a small video of the expert forager at work in the scorching heat of the desert.

David Tice, Prudent Bear Fund said there was a 100% chance of recession and a stock market decline of 50-60% on Bloomberg News Video almost 6 months back.

“This is not the time to be optimistic or pessimistic. It is time to be realistic. Our whole system is built on credit expansion. We have to grow credit year over year in order to keep the economy growing. The economy is not going to grow; it is going to enter a recession. And once it enters a recession, it is going to cascade…”

The interviewer responded with a “so you know more than Greenspan” on this… wonder is she would be dumb enough to ask the same question even today.

Just read about a certain species of ant that seems to be a bit more complicated than the average ant. Cataglyphis fortis, a species of ant found in the salt pans of the Sahara desert, sweeps the barren desert scavenging for food. The interesting bit about this peculiar species is that while its outbound journey is haphazard, its inbound journey is the shortest path back to its nest.

In short, while it goes along a zigzag “where the heck is that piece of food” trail when it gets out, it follows a no-nonsense “let’s just get back quickly to the hole” path once it gets hold of its food. It does not use the average ants’ pheromone trail following technique to retrace its way back to its nest; in that case it should be using the same path to get back home.

The rudimentary diagram given below explains it better. Point A is the opening of the ant’s underground nest, and point B represents the food it found on its outbound journey AB. The path BA represents the inbound journey of the ant carrying the food found at B.

The Cataglyphis fortis is known to go as far away as 200m from the mouth of its nest in search for food. And every time it finds some, it gets back home using the shortest path.

One stark difference between systems designed by man and those designed by nature is the efficiency. Natural configurations seem to be operating perfectly in the conditions for which (or should we say, in which) they were designed. They have a strange accuracy about themselves. There is a certain ease in the way things work in a naturally designed system that is in stark contrast to the labored ways of our creations.

Is this true or is this just an illusion? Is the synchronous activity of a bunch of ants working their way through an invisible maze of routes, carrying loads many times their own weight, an illusion? Could they possibly be going through processes and procedures that although appear simplistic to us, present a dilemma so severe to them as to make them feel the “pressure”?

And does this hold true for us too? Would our systems – however stupid and inefficient they might seem to us – appear astonishingly systematic and effortless when observed at a completely different scale? Does a man-made gantry lifting 40 feet containers continuously off docked containerships give the illusion of an effortless activity when observed from a much higher vantage point?

Now wait a minute…I think I am lost here…am I thinking about man-made systems, or systems made up of people and their creations? And why? I think I should worry about this after a nap…nothing’s making any sense right now.