Another Sign of Incompetence

Delhi wants to ban rickshaws ! When governments are too lazy to improve upon the exisiting transport infrastructure, when governments are just incompetent to use market mechanisms to improve rickshaw as a means of transport, when governments do not realize that parked cars are a dead use of space while rickshaws provide short range transport alternatives....what do they do? They ban rickshaws!

Chavez on US soil?

Clearly, Chavez' talk was way-way-way over the 'line'. Republicans chosfe to disrespect it without a response and Democrats criticize Chavez for stealing their job. The thing I fail to understand is this particular criticism: "Dont come to my country and attack my president".

Well, UN HQ is on international territory, not on the soils of United States. So technically, all the criticism Chavez made in the UN General Assembly is on international soils.

Now, I dont know how to interpret the above criticism. Does it assume, to the point of being arrogant, that UN is part of US?

Playdough Ganesh in a Sunnyvale Hindu temple

Playdough Ganesh in a Sunnyvale Hindu temple
Originally uploaded by kaysov.

I like the way, this playdough making of Ganesh encourging participatory religion. In India, this scaffold ganesh is usually made with clay by more traditional potters (not the Harry ones).

Munnabhai - Barney for the masses

Some random things to say about Lage Raho Munnabhai:

• The first, among a series of impressive things about Lage Raho, was the fact that one doesnt question about Gracy Singh or any of Munna's romantic past, but instead focuses on Munna's rude-but-humane-personality of getting things 'right' using seemingly 'wrong' means. There....in that moment...Munna has been transported from a movie character into a delivery means, a Barney for the masses.
  
• The screenwriters found an extremely deft way of packaging Gandhism to many of the current issues in a reaching-yet-not-preaching, hilarious and box-friendly-forms.
  
• The humor has been great ranging from verbal to situational and thankfully far from slapstick.
  
• One of the "aha!" moments that stood out was the sorry from pan-chewing-wallah and coining of a new word:Gandhi- giri.
  
• Its good to see Gandhi-hating out-of-vogue for a while.
• You are guaranteed a total ROI on your ticket in any currency.
  

Google Books and Wikipedia

Now that we have lots of books in the open domain on books.google.com, we can expect a surge in quality/quantity of contribution to wikipedia. Monitoring quantity is quite easy, but the classic problem of quality of information remains. However, an added dimension would be the new references to those books in the open domain. I will try to see what happens with _a_ particular entry when these newly accesible references are used.