What happened to Damascus steel

"Thus, by blending the unique characteristics of Wootz steel with a forging process that included tiny amounts of specialized materials, the blacksmiths of the Islamic Civilization were able to create the Damascan steel. What happened in the mid-18th century was that the chemical makeup of the raw material altered--the minute quantities of one or more of the minerals disappeared, perhaps because the particular lode was exhausted. Such a difference would not have been apparent to the blacksmith visually; but, interestingly, the blacksmiths may have extended the life of the process by including small pieces of the previous batch in each new batch." From http://archaeology.about.com/od/ancientweapons/a/damascus_steel_2.htm
Which also links to a website on Damascuss steel. The raw maretial called 'wootz steel' was from Deccan, I think http://archaeology.about.com/od/wterms/g/wootz.htm More information in Wikipedia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Damascus_steel

Meaningless jobs and no jobs

I believe that lot of our jobs are meaningless and have been trying this quote on friends and family since 2006 "all men are mild lunatics engaged in pursuits that seem to them very important while an absurdly logical force keeps them at their futile jobs." I have not been able to convince anybody, but there was an addition from Jhansi: 'many women too'. Today Dalel Benbabaali mentioned this article on bull-shit jobs. Enjoy. 
Mishra says towards the end of this article (behind a firewall)in NewYork Review of Books "It is as if we have been given a glimpse not so much of an unjust social or political setup as of what Nabokov, writing about "The Overcoat," called "flaws in the texture of life itself.""
This may very well be true, but Gaeber's point in the above, blaming many meaningless jobs on capitalism, seems to me to have some validity. Apart from this, as foreseen in the 1994 book 'A Jobless Future'  "Accordingly, if unwork is fated to be no longer the exception to the rule of nearly full employment, we need an entirely new approach to the social wage and, more generally, "welfare" policy. If there is work to be done, everyone should do some of it; additional remuneration would depend on the kind of work an individual performs." Some have been suggesting universal basic income: 
"We start by accepting that food and shelter are basic human rights. The work we do -- the value we create -- is for the rest of what we want: the stuff that makes life fun, meaningful, and purposeful.
This sort of work isn't so much employment as it is creative activity. Unlike Industrial Age employment, digital production can be done from the home, independently, and even in a peer-to-peer fashion without going through big corporations. We can make games for each other, write books, solve problems, educate and inspire one another -- all through bits instead of stuff. And we can pay one another using the same money we use to buy real stuff." Another related solution, out of temperament or necessity, is to  form small communities relatively independent of the state, described here, here and other places.

A brief preview of Piketty's book

from Thomas Piketty & Marxist Meme "So accounting identities can be manipulated mathematically while still remaining necessarily true, and this is what Mr. Piketty does. His first law is simply rewriting some known identities.

First among these is that income is allocated between capital and labor. Income from capital is known as return on capital, while income from labor is called wages. The total income is the sum of the return on capital and wages. So it could be, for example, that 30% of total income is awarded to capital, while 70% is awarded to wages. The fraction of total income that's awarded to capital is called alpha.

The second identity is a relationship between the average global return on capital (let's designate that by r), and the rate of growth of the global economy (let's call that g). Piketty shows that if r >g, then alpha must get bigger over time. That is, a larger and larger fraction of the global wealth will accrue to capital, with an ever smaller fraction going to wages.

Conversely, if r < g, then the reverse is true--wages will grow relative to capital.

In the former case, r > g, reasonably assuming that rich people own most of the capital, then more and more wealth will accrue to the 1%. The rich will get richer, and the poor, while perhaps not getting poorer, will certainly be getting richer a lot slower. In the latter case, r < g, the premium goes to wages, and so wealth is more evenly distributed across society.

So which is it? The relative values of r and g depend on empirical fact rather than accounting identities. And here Mr. Piketty apparently excels--he has collected extensive data from most of the capitalist world from before the French Revolution to the present. He has found that for most of the last 200-300 years that r > g. The exception has been the period from 1913 to 1970--during that time r < g. His conclusion is that r > g is the normal state of capitalism, while r < g was an aberration that will likely never be repeated.

Today global growth is in the 2-3% range, while the average return on capital is roughly 4-5%. Thus r > g, and accordingly an ever increasing fraction of wealth is accruing to the top 1%. This is certainly true in the US, evidenced by high unemployment, declining labor force participation, and stagnant wages. Piketty argues that global growth can't get much higher. It depends predominantly on two things: population growth (stagnant), and improvements in technology (yielding approximately 1.5%). Growth is as high as it is because of China, but as it becomes fully integrated into the capitalist system its growth rate will slow, taking global growth down with it.

The return on capital has averaged 4-5% over the past two centuries, and barring exceptional circumstances is unlikely to change significantly. So Mr. Piketty forecasts r > g for as far as the eye can see.

The exceptional period from 1913 to 1970 was due to the World Wars (echoing my Trotskyist friends). By destroying so much capital, the return on capital was greatly reduced (perhaps even negative in some years). Further, rebuilding Europe and Asia enabled very strong growth. So, with r < g, this was the heyday of labor, when workers could claim an ever larger share of the pie. Unfortunately, economists coming of age during that time thought that was normal, and that capitalism would inevitably lead to a richer and more equitable society. Mr. Piketty says that's wrong.

Piketty's view is very pessimistic, essentially condemning a large fraction of the population to relative poverty. He suggests that 50% of the population will generally benefit from the trend toward capital, but that the bottom 50% will be losers."

See also the rest of the author's comments. About the last point, Gabriel Palma's views mentioned earlier. the losers are the bottom 40 percent, the top ten percent ain and the the other fifty percent take half the income. from data of about 135 countries http://oxfamblogs.org/fp2p/its-the-share-of-the-rich-stupid-brilliant-inequality-stats-politics-from-gabriel-palma/
P.S. Another note about Palma http://blogs.worldbank.org/publicsphere/inequality-all-about-tails-palma-gini-and-post-2015

MR. & MRS. 55 on Lata and Asha's highest notes

Bollywood's Beloved Sopranos: Lata and Asha's Highest Notes "Before the arrival of the Mangeshkars onto the filmi musical scene, female singing in Hindi films was dominated by artists with heavy, nasal voices, such as Suraiyya and Shamshad Begum. Once music directors had the opportunity to work with the Mangeshkars, things changed forever: the nasalized heavy female voices were out and the delicate soprano voices were here to stay. After Lata and Asha became established as playback singers, I would argue that  music directors of the time pushed the boundaries of their compositions in terms of range to test and showcase the virtuosity of these two exceptional talents."
They also have a theory about the popularity of the male versions when both males and females sang the same song "In almost all cases that I can think of, music directors made the female singer of a tandem song sing her versions in the same key as the male version. Because men tend to be more comfortable in the higher register of their voices than women, this practice often put the female playback singer at a disadvantage when it came to hitting the highest notes of the composition. "
See also their discussion of one of the songs in a different post where they explain the lyrics etc 
http://mrandmrs55.com/2013/05/25/panchhi-banoon-udti-phiroon-lyrics-and-translation-lets-learn-urdu-hindi/
P.S. A discussion on twin sons in 'Songs of Yore'
http://www.songsofyore.com/twin-songs/

Weird News

Music used for torture "While Metallica politely asked the US military to stop using their music for the sleep deprivation of detainees, Skinny Puppy took it one step further.

"So we thought it would be a good idea to make an invoice to the US government for musical services," Key added. "Thus the concept of the [band's new] record title, Weapons.""

Swartz's dream of new order

"In his attic meeting with McLean during the OPEN summit at Holmes, Swartz had sketched the contours of a new order, in which he envisaged corporate power being severely weakened and political parties replaced by internet-based people power. In contrast to efforts by activists such as Edward Snowden and Julian Assange, who sought to reduce state power that derived from secrecy, Swartz's objective was to build citizen power to counter that of governments and corporations. He revealed a grand design by which he envisaged artificial intelligence making activists such as himself and McLean redundant." from  Aaron Swartz:a beautiful mind by Paul McGeough

Links

May be the next big thing in economics: Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty; the blurb has links to some reviews. There is also a long review by Branko Milanovic. Some of the influemtial American thinkers seem to disagree: "“Part of his interpretation I do not share. Piketty argues that there is a natural tendency for high inequality in ‘capitalist’ economies (the term capitalist is not my favorite) and that certain unusual events (world wars, the Great Depression and policy responses thereto) temporarily reduced inequality. Then both earnings inequality and inequality between capital and labor have been reverting back to their ‘normal’ levels. I don’t think that the data allow us to reach this conclusion. All we see is this pattern of fall and rise, but so many other things are going on. It is consistent with what Piketty says, but it is also consistent with certain technological changes and discontinuities (or globalization) having created a surge in inequality which will then stabilize or even reverse in the next several decades. It is also consistent with the dynamics of political power changing and this being a major contributor to the rise in inequality in advanced economies. We may be seeing parts of several different trends underpinned by several different major shocks rather than the mean-reverting dynamics following the shocks that Piketty singles out.” according to Acemoglu. More of his and collaborator's views in Democracy vs Inequality "Overall, our results suggest that democracy does represent a real shift in political power away from elites and has first-order consequences for redistribution and government policy. But the impact of democracy on inequality may be more limited than one might have expected). US-centric discussion in Economist's View of Acemoglu-Robinson post. There seems to be problems with decentralization too. According  to a new paper (via Chris Blattman): "We posit that administrative unit proliferation occurs where and when there is a confluence of interests between the national executive and local citizens and elites from areas that are politically, economically and ethnically marginalized. We argue further that although the proliferation of administrative units often accompanies or follows far-reaching decentralization reforms, it likely results in a recentralization of power; the proliferation of new local governments fragments existing units into smaller ones with lower relative intergovernmental bargaining power and administrative capacity" 

A recent discussion on Telangana

http://www.ndtv.com/video/player/the-buck-stops-here/will-telangana-be-political-death-knell-for-congress/307481?vod-related
Lon. To me it seemed that J.P. Narayan of Loksatta presented reasonable answers. But I am not following the issue carefully since I assumed that there will be separate state at some stage.
(via a comment in Dalel Benbabaali timeline).

A discussion in Ramarao Kanneganti's timeline on politics of anarchy

https://www.facebook.com/ramarao?hc_location=timeline where I begin to express some opinions. One of my comments there: "While I recognize that many groups are using relatively non-violent methods for their own ends which seem dubious (like Thailand now), I am not sure how the really poor can get justice in the current set ups in various countries. While many of us have done reasonably well, I still see lot of subsistence existence, both in person and in videos and reports (for example brick workers, tribals via Rahul Banerjee who worked with them for several years), whose lot do not seem to have improved since the British left. But how do I know how many of them are worse off and how how the rising tide will not lift them. I look at the reports of people like Jan Bremen or John Harriss and others who worked in India for over forty years. Then there are studies by Gabriel Palma which says that in about 140 countries the top ten percent and the bottom forty percent earn about the same as the rest of the fifty percent. That means that the gains of the top ten percent are at the expense of the bottom forty percent; who are being further pushed to the bottom in spite of the overall gains. Moreover, we have reports like http://marginalrevolution.com/.../why-the-worst-get-on... which indicate the stakes against the bottom forty percent. There seem to concerted wars against the poor in countries like US, UK. I do not know the motives. Either they are considered dispensable with the rise of technology or the calculation is that you need some at subsistence level for the comforts of the others (now colonialism etc are passe). We in the fifty percent are coopted in the process. If these perceptions are somewhat correct, I do not seem what options the poor have except unconstitutional protests, since new laws are being passed everyday to make all kinds of protests illegal (one law planned next week in Melbourne). See also this from today's Guardian http://www.theguardian.com/.../three-charged-vagrancy-act..."

Bricks of bondage

Vis Dalel Benbabaali timeline.

Revenge effect

is not what I thought it was. From The Ouroboros Effect: "The origin of the Ouroboros symbol (serpent devouring its own tail) can be traced to ancient Egypt and China, Norse mythology, Medieval Europe, and into modern times. It has been interpreted in a variety of ways, but here represents the cyclic and interactive nature of events. More specifically, it reflects how some of our best attempts to solve problems comes back to bite us!
Solutions to problems are usually intended as final fixes, but more often than not, while solving one problem, they generate more problems. In some cases the new problems from the intended solution are bigger, worse, or more complicated than the original problem; in other cases, the intended solution feedsback into the original problem and simply exacerbates it. The German word,verschlimmbessern, can be interpreted as "to fix something more broken," or to worsen through attempts to make better. These unintended consequences have been called "revenge effects" and are largely a function of limited scope in problem strategy conceptualization: most problem solving deals only with the problem (as defined) at hand, and does not consider the long term effects, ripple and spin-off effects (contingencies), or feedback effects in a larger system. The examples I have collected below present a variety of revenge effects that might have been prevented by taking a more systemic view of the situation." \
via Chris Dillow post Revenge Effects  who sees the recent failure of the English team in Ashes as one of those effects.

Happy Republic Day Happy Australia Day

I have spent about 40 years in India and 25 years in Australia and both countries have been overall good to me though I did not get along well with authority figures in either country. My most enjoyable years have been in Bombay learning and starting to do mathematics and my best work has been in Melbourne after the age of fifty. I now support Australia in cricket except when they play India. Home is still the few taluks in Guntur and Krishna districts where I spent my first 15 years and any other place is still a foreign country (except New York once in a while). May both countries and all other countries thrive.

Teaching methods:evidence from Mexico

How a radical new method could unleash a generation of geniuses by Joshua Davis. Excerpts:
"Juárez Correa spent his nights watching education videos. He read polemics by the Mexican cartoonist Eduardo del Río (known as Rius), who argued that kids should be free to explore whatever they want. He was also still impressed by Mitra, who talks about letting children “wander aimlessly around ideas.” Juárez Correa began hosting regular debates in class, and he didn’t shy away from controversial topics. He asked the kids if they thought homosexuality and abortion should be permitted. He asked them to figure out what the Mexican government should do, if anything, about immigration to the US. Once he asked a question, he would stand back and let them engage one another.

A key component in Mitra’s theory was that children could learn by having access to the web, but that wasn’t easy for Juárez Correa’s students. The state paid for a technology instructor who visited each class once a week, but he didn’t have much technology to demonstrate. Instead, he had a batch of posters depicting keyboards, joysticks, and 3.5-inch floppy disks. He would hold the posters up and say things like, “This is a keyboard. You use it to type.”

As a result, Juárez Correa became a slow-motion conduit to the Internet. When the kids wanted to know why we see only one side of the moon, for example, he went home, Googled it, and brought back an explanation the next day. When they asked specific questions about eclipses and the equinox, he told them he’d figure it out and report back."

And the students did very well in Mexico's national achievement examination at the end of the year.

"Juárez Correa had mixed feelings about the test. His students had succeeded because he had employed a new teaching method, one better suited to the way children learn. It was a model that emphasized group work, competition, creativity, and a student-led environment. So it was ironic that the kids had distinguished themselves because of a conventional multiple-choice test. “These exams are like limits for the teachers,” he says. “They test what you know, not what you can do, and I am more interested in what my students can do.”"

Via Felix Salmon's post How Tumbir and GitHub could be the future of education

Oxfam report on politics and inequality

Here 'Working for the few' by Ricardo Fluentes and Nick Galasso. Summary by Duncan Green here. From the summary "After the 2008 global meltdown, we have not seen anything like the New Deal, in terms of redistribution or reform. The paper argues that this is because political capture by a small economic elite is much more complete this time around.

The numbers take your breath away – my favourite new killer fact from the report (and there’s a lot of competition): The bottom half of the world’s population owns the same as the richest 85 people in the world."

Another summary in The Guardian. I wonder how a few either 85 people or the top one percent can accure so much without the cooperation of at least a considerable percentage of the rest. An earlier study by Gabriel Palma reported by Duncan Green says that the fifty percent below the top ten percent take away fifty percent of the income in most countries. So it seems to between the top 10 percent and bottom 40 percent. How alliances are formed between various groups in the middle fifty percent with the rest seem worth analysing. From Palma's study there seems to be variation in the alliances in different countries.

Links

Apparently well known but I was unaware The Citigroup Plutonomy memos
Two articles on Norway. Apparently Norway saved the oil money for its people but the personal debt levels in the country are high one by Aditya Chakrabortty in The Guardian and the second in Bloomberg News
Failing elites threaten our future by Martin Wolf (if the link does not work, searching with the title should be help), mostly about the west.
About Kolmogorov ""Kolmogorov was particularly interested in the deviation of actual rhythms from classical meters. In traditional poetics, the iambic meter is a rhythm consisting of an unstressed syllable followed by a stressed syllable. But in practice, this rule is rarely obeyed. In Pushkin’s Eugene Onegin, the most famous classical iambic poem in the Russian language, almost three-fourths of its 5,300 lines violate the definition of the iambic meter, and more than a fifth of all even syllables are unstressed. Kolmogorov believed that the frequency of stress deviation from the classical meters offered an objective “statistical portrait” of a poet. An unlikely pattern of stresses, he thought, indicated artistic inventiveness and expression. " 
Apparently ADHD incidence among French kids is low
About Bangkok shutdown corrupt but 'pro-poor' against more traditional power groups and a longer article in Asia Times (both and some of the above via Naked Capitalism)
Glenn Davis Stone on Malthus
80-year old snake venom still potent and finally a Asha Bhosle-C.Ramachandra duet

Minai on L.Vijalakshmi

Minai usually likes more classical type dances but she has finally written about one of the favourite film dancers of Andhras L.Vijayalakshmi. I came to know of Vijayalakshmi dances through my grand-daughter Ava and linked to an interview and some of her dances before (some links are not working but cinema chat links are still working). Vijayalakshmi's favourite dance among her dances seems to be

.

P.S. The comments section of the video links to this post by Lalita Mukherjea which has the lyrics and translation Sex between sects

Amitava Kumar about his mother

In Indian Express "When I was a child, hanging in our family’s drawing room was a black and white studio photograph. It showed my young mother with her BA degree in Hindi literature from Patna Women’s College. On a small table next to her, the photographer had placed Ma’s gold medal. My mother was the daughter of a policeman; two of her brothers were in the prison bureaucracy. She didn’t grow up in a literary milieu but she wanted to be a writer and a Hindi scholar; I believe she never overcame the bitterness of having her dreams thwarted by marriage and motherhood. As a result, rightly or wrongly, I felt that by writing books I was living her dream. "

Interview with Anil Kumar Gupta

Trying to see again how Honey Bee Network is doing, I came across this 2009 interview . I find that he is on Facebook (Honey Bee Network too)too and has a blog. Some related links.

B.M.Leelakumari about Dalit men and herself

Her biographical videos Part 1, Part 2 and Part 3 via Dalit Camera.

'Foibles of power and the melancholy of its abuses'

Links to Karen Knorr's art in 3quarksdaily. See also the article The Photographic Practice of Karen Knorr