The democ­ratic system today has an implicit and compul­sive need for ‘fairness’ in the polit­ical, economic and social order. While this need may be justi­fied, it is diffi­cult to satisfy because of the lack of a precise defin­i­tion of the term. ‘Fairness’ means different things to different people, even in a homoge­nous commu­nity, let alone a large and diverse society.

It is essen­tial to realize that decisions made purely on the basis of majority opinion are unfair to the minority, which is unaccept­able. Pure majority-based decisions may be useful in condi­tions where every individual has an equal under­standing of the situa­tion, and the ability to indepen­dently reach conclu­sions. For instance, a team of scien­tists and engineers could vote to decide if the launch of a space-shuttle is safe, but to ask for public opinion on the matter would be foolish­ness, because the outcome cannot be justi­fied by reason.

Polit­ical systems are no different. The work done by the minis­ters of the Central and State govern­ments has a direct bearing on the lives of millions of people. Yet when it is time to decide who is really quali­fied to do this work, we ask everyone in the country to vote, no matter how unqual­i­fied the voters are to contribute to such a decision. If we did have system where the more quali­fied individ­uals had a greater say in the electoral process, we’d run into the problem of devising such a system that is fair — which is probably impossible.

What can be done, however, is to have a system whereby an individual can have only one vote, but this vote must be earned by displaying some basic quali­fi­ca­tions, such as being able to pass a specif­i­cally designed test. As long as the require­ments and assess­ments are absolutely trans­parent, there is a reason­ably good chance of the system being successful and efficient.

The under­lying point is that if the right to vote is projected as a privi­lege (many people today are indif­ferent to the electoral system) we may finally be getting somewhere.

A high-point of frustra­tion: writing a block of well-structured text after many minutes of thoughtful delib­er­a­tion, only to have it disap­pear on account of an expired page or bad network connection.

If you’ve ever used Microsoft’s Office Suite, then you might remember an ever-helpful and much-hated paper-clip. Here’s an inter­view with Clippy, the Office Assistant.

When you connect your Linux box to a Windows network, Windows users will no doubt wish to send you popup messages over the network using the Messenger service (or WinPopup, as it used to be known). Although the Samba program on Linux can send and receive messages using this protocol, the receiving part is quite tricky because there is no straight-forward method of displaying received messages. That’s why I cooked up a little script to receive messages on a write-enabled TTY.

receive-message.sh

#!/bin/bash
SENDER=$1
RECIPIENT=$2
MESSAGE_FILE=$3
IP=$4
MESSAGE_HEADER=“Message from $SENDER ($IP) to $RECIPIENT on ‘date‘: “
MESSAGE_CONTENT=‘cat “$MESSAGE_FILE”‘
echo –e “$MESSAGE_HEADER
$MESSAGE_CONTENT” | write system
rm “$MESSAGE_FILE”

The above code needs to be placed in an executable file called receive-message.sh located in a folder included in the PATH system variable. The word system should be replaced with the username with which you login. Finally, the following line needs to be added to /etc/samba/smb.conf -

message command = receive-message.sh “%25f” “%25t” “%25s” “%25I”

I found some photographs related to the recently held Mumbai Marathon 2006.

The last couple of years has seen the dramatic rise of sites that offer social network services. If you are not familiar with the meaning of this term, allow me to explain -

First, you need to register yourself as a user on the website (Orkut, Hi5, Gazzag, Multiply, Yahoo! 360°), and create a profile for yourself. Your profile may include infor­ma­tion such as your name, age, location, photo, inter­ests, favourite books, favourite movies and so on. Quite often, your profile may be split into a general profile, a business profile and a personal profile. You can choose what to display to the public and what not to. Once you’re done with this process, you can actually get started by logging in with your new identi­fi­ca­tion and password to search for people you know (or once knew) who have similarly regis­tered themselves on the same site. You can ‘connect’ to these people and add them to your ‘friends list’.

Once you are a regis­tered user with a host of ‘friends’, there’s a whole bunch of things you can partic­i­pate in, things like maintaining a personal weblog, involving yourself in forums and commu­ni­ties, uploading and sharing files, writing friends’ testi­mo­nials, scrib­bling in their scrap­books and so on. The possi­bil­i­ties are endless, and each website offers different kinds of services.

Getting to the point – social networks are primarily a waste of time. They offer nothing that cannot be had using conven­tional forms of commu­ni­ca­tion and infor­ma­tion manage­ment. Here are some alter­na­tives for the above services -

• Sending messages – Email was designed for this purpose and it works just fine.
• Scrap­books – I’ve seen this being used only for sending messages. Why should person A write a message intended for person B and want the whole world to know about it?
• Weblogs – Dedicated weblogs offer better and far more features than the ones offered by Multiply and others.
• Forums – Online forums are meaningful only if they are hosted for a specific purpose. There is nothing partic­u­larly enter­taining about a forum thread that says, “Say something funny about the person who posted just before you did.”
• Commu­ni­ties – A forum with a purpose? Nah! This is just another place to chat.
• File-sharing – There are lots of places where this kind of service is available.
• Profiles – Get a life!

As far as commu­ni­ca­tion with friends is concerned, I believe that social network services aren’t exactly a good idea. For one thing, birth­days have lost their sheen as oppor­tu­ni­ties to foster friend­ship, because birthdays-reminders are one of the services offered by sites like Orkut. A more subtle point I’d like to raise is that, friend­ship, concep­tu­ally viewed, has a somewhat layered struc­ture. Some people are close friends, others are less so. This distinc­tion is lessened consid­er­ably in the case of online commu­ni­ca­tion through social network sites, where we invari­ably talk to people who are online most often. This is because mere words cannot make up a conver­sa­tion. A normal one-to-one conver­sa­tion between two people has a measure that can be termed degree of involve­ment, signi­fying the close­ness of the relation­ship. Unfor­tu­nately, this degree of involve­ment is hidden from view during commu­ni­ca­tion via channels like social networks.

Nothing should be made so easy that it’s not worth doing anymore.

The word hello is the first one that is uttered by the majority of people when they answer the telephone. Curious to learn more about the origin of the term, I performed a quick search on the Internet that led me to a fasci­nating article by Heinz Insu Fenkl.

The Truth is a deadly weapon, but never under­es­ti­mate the power of a lie well-told; the carefree sinner lives a happier life than the brooding saint.

Mary Shelley’s Franken­stein narrates the tale of a scien­tist, Viktor Franken­stein, who dares to challenge Mother Nature by means of his profound scien­tific knowl­edge, leading to his utter ruin at the hands of the monster that he himself created.

The under­lying theme of the narra­tion appears to be a warning – pursue your objects of study, but do not wander too far. The plot revolves around the gruesome appear­ance of the monster, symbol­izing the contrast between the work of nature and the work of science. This contrast is brought forth frequently, by means of refer­ences to the picturesque­ness of the mountains, lakes and other natural phenomena. Franken­stein is portrayed as a man of nature as well as science, insomuch that he is a lover of the resplen­dence of nature despite his pursuit of science. The former is, however, taken from him in degrees, leaving him wretched and on the verge of madness.

The daemon, as the monster is oft addressed, is abhorred and shunned by all due to his terrible appear­ance. Can the ordinary peasant folk be blamed for such behavior? The monster does not explain his motives to those that are terri­fied of him. True, he does not get many a chance to do so, but he does not try too hard either. Franken­stein, on the other hand, knows the truth about the monster, and while he is unaware of the dispo­si­tion of the being, he could have exerted himself to the task of ascer­taining whether the monster was truly evil, or perhaps only a victim of circum­stances. In fact, a long time elapses between the monster’s creation and the death of his first victim, in which time Franken­stein displays an antag­o­nism towards his creation that is both unrea­son­able and unsci­en­tific. This fear and loathing can most effec­tively be explained by the guilt he brought upon himself by allowing himself to ‘play God’.

Would events have turned out so evilly had Franken­stein not abandoned his creation? Probably yes. As one who experi­ences misfor­tune curses the God above, the monster would undoubt­edly have despised his master for having gifted him a visage detested by the world around him. He might have been soothed by love and affec­tion, but the end-result would have been inevitable.

Contin­uing with the analogy of the monster as a product of science, we find a continual person­i­fi­ca­tion of science as something to be approached with great caution. Although the monster has obviously under­gone terrible ordeals at the hands of men, this does not evoke sympathy in the minds of the readers, perhaps because the story is narrated almost wholly from Frankenstein’s point of view. Is the monster truly as ugly and evil as he has been depicted? Is the face of science really evil? These are questions that have been raised by Shelley, and answered in the affirmative.

Franken­stein or the Modern Prometheus was first published in 1818, and much has changed since then. Viewed from a modern perspec­tive, we can try to under­stand where science has got it wrong and where it hasn’t. Certainly, it is not such an object of devilry that we must shun it. Where something has been lost, something else has been gained. So it is with global warming, deple­tion of the ozone layer and so on, which is the price that has been paid for greater comfort and modern devices.

Like Frankenstein’s monster, technology may be something that we should neither love nor hate, but approach with an under­standing of its capabilities.

This is a link to an inter­esting story. Do people who maintain online journals believe that they can somehow keep it confi­den­tial and show it only to a few? I mean, here they are, revealing every­thing about their lives — what were they thinking!?