Global warming is not all hot air

 Etc.  2 Responses »
Mar 032005
 

The global warm­ing debate has been heat­ing up of late, with a very vocal minor­ity deny­ing that such a thing even exists. A study from the Scripps insti­tute goes a long way towards prov­ing that global warm­ing isn’t the cre­ation of some whacko green lobby out to make bil­lions.

Since water retains heat bet­ter than the air, Tim Bar­nett and his team fig­ured they would be bet­ter off look­ing for evi­dence of global warm­ing in the oceans. They found a sig­nif­i­cant increase in tem­per­a­tures on the sur­face of all the oceans of the world. And when they used a com­puter model to track ocean tem­per­a­tures over the past 65 years or so, they found out that nat­ural cli­matic vari­a­tions alone could not explain them. But when the effects of human con­tri­bu­tions (green­house gases etc.) were taken into account in the model, the model tracked tem­per­a­ture changes accu­rately in all the 6 oceans. The Econ­o­mist has a pic­ture and an arti­cle.

As for this, it is what it is: a good read.

 Posted by at 12:51 am

More Einstein

 Uncategorized  Comments Off
Mar 012005
 

More about everyone’s favorite physi­cist. From the New Yorker.

The Ein­stein exhibit at the Museum of Nat­ural His­tory. Wish I could go.

“…but it is strangely com­fort­ing to see that the man who cre­ated the mod­ern world was so fre­quently befud­dled by it. His rela­tion­ships often failed. He fled one coun­try and lived uneasily in another. He hated total­i­tar­i­an­ism but was opposed to cap­i­tal­ism. He barely knew his sons.”

In the exhibit, the cura­tor, Michael Shara, explains how light trav­els, why time warps, what makes stars shine. Walk in the door and you are imme­di­ately greeted with a view of your­self as seen through a black hole. (It is not a pretty sight.)

And then this : an almost apoc­ryphal arti­cle about the rela­tion­ship between Ein­stein and Gödel, that had (yet another) attempt to explain rel­a­tiv­ity to the lay­man. No mat­ter how many times I read about what Ein­stein did in 1905, I can’t help being astonished.

Sup­pose to make things vivid that the speed of light is a hun­dred miles an hour. Now sup­pose I am stand­ing by the side of the road and I see a light beam pass by at this speed. Then I see you chas­ing after it in a car at sixty miles an hour. To me, it appears that the light beam is out­pac­ing you by forty miles an hour. But you, from inside your car, must see the beam escap­ing you at a hun­dred miles an hour, just as you would if you were stand­ing still: that is what the light prin­ci­ple demands. What if you gun your engine and speed up to ninety-nine miles an hour? Now I see the beam of light out­pac­ing you by just one mile an hour. Yet to you, inside the car, the beam is still rac­ing ahead at a hun­dred miles an hour, despite your increased speed. How can this be? Speed, of course, equals dis­tance divided by time. Evi­dently, the faster you go in your car, the shorter your ruler must become and the slower your clock must tick rel­a­tive to mine; that is the only way we can con­tinue to agree on the speed of light. (If I were to pull out a pair of binoc­u­lars and look at your speed­ing car, I would actu­ally see its length con­tracted and you mov­ing in slow motion inside.) So Ein­stein set about recast­ing the laws of physics accord­ingly. To make these laws absolute, he made dis­tance and time relative.

 Posted by at 11:16 pm

Too much of a good thing… or a review of Page 3

   Movies  2 Responses »
Mar 012005
 

I hardly ever watch Bol­ly­wood movies. My Hindi is lim­ited at best and I have a strong dis­like for the gloss-is-all-that-matters for­mula movies that Hindi film­mak­ers have been churn­ing out over the last few years. But Page 3 came highly rec­om­mended — every­one had good things to say about it, and Konkona Sen Sharma was being hailed as the best Indian actress since Saif Ali Khan (ok, that was a cheap dig) so I decided to take the plunge.

Page 3

The movie is mostly a series of par­ties at the homes of sev­eral rich peo­ple, attended by other rich peo­ple. They all hate each other, but don’t mind attend­ing par­ties together. Each party con­sists of a girl danc­ing on a poorly lit stage to the voice of one of the old women that sing all Hindi songs, men dis­cussing busi­ness, a bum­bling America-returned-Indian try­ing to get everyone’s atten­tion, women bitch­ing about other women to groups of women not includ­ing the bitchee, and car-drivers diss­ing about their bosses.In order to ensure that you get the mes­sage, sev­eral groups of men are shown talk­ing busi­ness, mul­ti­ple women are shown indulging in bitch­ing and so on. I am sure you get the mes­sage. There is also a lot of ogling — the direc­tor tak­ing care to cover all the pos­si­ble ogling per­mu­ta­tions between peo­ple belong­ing to both sexes.

Observ­ing all this with a mostly quizzi­cal expres­sion is Konkona — a mid­dle class jour­nal­ist with val­ues, high ambi­tion, a col­lec­tion of cot­ton dresses and a sea­son ticket to the Bom­bay metro — start­ing off her career cov­er­ing par­ties for a news­pa­per. She stays with a cou­ple of room­mates, flight atten­dant Sand­hya Mridul (who by the way, acted much bet­ter than Konkona in the movie) and Tara Sharma — a wannabe actress who looks like she’s about to cry at any moment, even when she is laughing.

In between the par­ties, Konkona man­ages to acquire a boyfriend and sev­eral friends of dif­fer­ent sex­ual ori­en­ta­tions, while one of her room­mates acquires a rich, old man for a boyfriend. Mean­while, her other room­mate man­ages to get her­self preg­nant, attempts sui­cide and hauls off to Delhi in a huff.

There is a badass reporter at Konkona’s office, who is friends with an equally badass cop. The badass reporter has a one-man infor­mant net­work that meets him at bars and passes on tips about the bad things that the peo­ple that attend par­ties do. The reporter relays the infor­ma­tion to the badass cop. The cop inflicts var­i­ous types of pun­ish­ments on the cul­prits, includ­ing but not lim­ited to push­ing them out of cars, twist­ing their arms, break­ing their jaws and talk­ing to them in Eng­lish. After inflict­ing such pun­ish­ments, the badass cop looks at no one in par­tic­u­lar and talks about Indian val­ues. The badass cop’s boss is a not-so-badass-cop who goes to par­ties and car­ries on con­ver­sa­tions with everyone.

Did I men­tion the funeral? Some­one dies, and all that any­one attend­ing her funeral wants to do is dress well and either talk busi­ness or bitch depend­ing on their sex. Again, to ensure that you get the point, any per­son or per­sons car­ry­ing on any con­ver­sa­tion at the funeral is given some screen time. And, not sur­pris­ingly, all they do is talk busi­ness or bitch. Konkona is disillusioned.

Thus dis­il­lu­sioned, Konkona sees the badass reporter at work and decides that she wants to be a seri­ous jour­nal­ist her­self. No more par­ties for me. Her skep­tic edi­tor lets her do it and Konkona and badass are now part­ners. After a riot and another party she catches her boyfriend indulging in ques­tion­able activ­i­ties of a sex­ual nature with one of her male friends. More dis­il­lu­sion­ment.

Konkona then hooks up with her partner’s infor­mant and goes with badass cop to raid a pow­er­ful par­ty­goer — a child moles­ter, and the hus­band of the woman who died ear­lier. And so it goes.

To give credit to Bhan­darkar, the movie is dif­fer­ent from your run of the mill Bol­ly­wood fare. He has dared to explore the shadier side of India’s élite, and dis­cussed homo­sex­u­al­ity pretty openly — a big no-no in Indian films. And, over­all the act­ing was above aver­age for an Indian movie. An hon­est attempt, for sure.

But an hon­est attempt does not make a good movie. Fif­teen min­utes into the movie, each char­ac­ter is well-defined. After that, the whole movie is just a reit­er­a­tion of the def­i­n­i­tions made in the first fif­teen min­utes. And there was a lot of stereo­typ­ing going on– hon­est mid­dle class girl, promis­cu­ous flight atten­dant, good cop, bad boss, arty direc­tor inter­ested in bed­ding actresses. Plus, there were too many par­ties — it took me a long time to get rid of my hangover.

 Posted by at 1:01 pm
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