At a recent conference I got serious about video and here are the results:
There's more of my stuff under indiawaterportal username on YouTube, for those strangely fascinated by the above.
Meanwhile Vishwanath, the renaissance man, is upping the bar on Arghyam amateur video (and ecological living) drastically:
Many more under 'zenrainman'
===================
Muchos good fundas in your comment Sunil (Suneil?). I don't have any answer to your question. Generally India is not on the cutting edge of renewable technology (Suzlon an exception ?), so maybe people are waiting for the technology to reach maturity ?
Thursday, July 31, 2008
Saturday, July 26, 2008
The Economist on Energy
Priya and I are fine and no one we know has been affected in the bomb blasts. Touchwood. It feels odd, we can't ignore them completely despite the low-intensity, and it doesn't seem to be necessary to go into a serious defensive mode either.
\===
I just got around to reading in detail the June 21st issue of the Economist, which had a special report on energy. A paen is in order for this remarkable magazine but not in this post. The Economist has been spending quite some space on energy issues, not surprisingly. Their take is that rather than go into a funk with all the oil and coal pollution problems, stride bravely into the brave new world of alternate energy (and make pots of money in the bargain).
Lots of interesting ideas:
-- in the current oil scenario in the US, the case for plug-in cars is compelling, the equivalent fuel cost of a plug in is 25cents a gallon. I've seen the same point elsewhere too, and no wonder since it doesn't take a lot of brains to see the point. It should be really interesting to watch this dramatic shift happen (or not). The picture is less obvious in India where the erratic power supply gives one pause.
-- The Economist's take is that various renewables are proming and will become commercially viable on larger and larger scales at various points in the near future. Wind already provides 1% of the world's power and growing at 30%. Nuclear provides 15% of the world's power. Solar is at .01% and growing at 50% with lots of technical innovations. Putting a carbon tax on coal will bring wind and nuclear power to the same cost as coal, currently the cheapest source of power.
More: Some aspects of the changes are gradual (more energy from other sources will not change anything disruptively with respect to existing energy sources), and some are not (a wholesale shift to plug in cars will affect the power and oil industries in significant ways). Lots of people who made their fortunes in silicon valley are shifting their attention to energy, most well-known, Vinod Khosla of Sun etc., also Elon Musk of PayPal, the Google founders ( RE less than C !), Robert Metcalfe of the Ethernet and John Doerr.
Smart grids: when you use wind power or solar power, the amount of power coming into the electricity grid varies with time. So the grid must be 'smart' to accomadate this, including doing things like switching off some power consumers from the grid according to a pre-arranged contract, when the power flowing into the grid dips. There are also ways to store power, like pumping water up a gradient to let it flow down again when needed. More exciting ways of storing power include the idea of recharging your plug-in car at 3am in the morning and therefore avoiding overloading the system during higher demand times.There is a point about needing to tranfer energy over longer distances and therefore switching to a DC power grid rather than AC.
Carbon sequestration is explained (costly to impossible) as is geothermal energy (probably only after 2050 -- but what will happen to the earth's internal dynamics if we suck out all its heat, I ask !), and the next generation of biofuels (too strongly reminiscent of today's chemical farming and factory farming for my taste).
The full report from the Economist is viewable here:
http://www.economist.com/specialreports/displayStory.cfm?story_id=11565685
(Keep clicking "Next article" at the bottom to go on to succeeding articles in the special report)
I think I want to be an alternative energy marketer in my next avatar
/==
Catching up with the zietgiest: Here's a really nice speech by Dr. Randy Pausch. Lots of context, but just go and watch it:
\===
I just got around to reading in detail the June 21st issue of the Economist, which had a special report on energy. A paen is in order for this remarkable magazine but not in this post. The Economist has been spending quite some space on energy issues, not surprisingly. Their take is that rather than go into a funk with all the oil and coal pollution problems, stride bravely into the brave new world of alternate energy (and make pots of money in the bargain).
Lots of interesting ideas:
-- in the current oil scenario in the US, the case for plug-in cars is compelling, the equivalent fuel cost of a plug in is 25cents a gallon. I've seen the same point elsewhere too, and no wonder since it doesn't take a lot of brains to see the point. It should be really interesting to watch this dramatic shift happen (or not). The picture is less obvious in India where the erratic power supply gives one pause.
-- The Economist's take is that various renewables are proming and will become commercially viable on larger and larger scales at various points in the near future. Wind already provides 1% of the world's power and growing at 30%. Nuclear provides 15% of the world's power. Solar is at .01% and growing at 50% with lots of technical innovations. Putting a carbon tax on coal will bring wind and nuclear power to the same cost as coal, currently the cheapest source of power.
More: Some aspects of the changes are gradual (more energy from other sources will not change anything disruptively with respect to existing energy sources), and some are not (a wholesale shift to plug in cars will affect the power and oil industries in significant ways). Lots of people who made their fortunes in silicon valley are shifting their attention to energy, most well-known, Vinod Khosla of Sun etc., also Elon Musk of PayPal, the Google founders ( RE less than C !), Robert Metcalfe of the Ethernet and John Doerr.
Smart grids: when you use wind power or solar power, the amount of power coming into the electricity grid varies with time. So the grid must be 'smart' to accomadate this, including doing things like switching off some power consumers from the grid according to a pre-arranged contract, when the power flowing into the grid dips. There are also ways to store power, like pumping water up a gradient to let it flow down again when needed. More exciting ways of storing power include the idea of recharging your plug-in car at 3am in the morning and therefore avoiding overloading the system during higher demand times.There is a point about needing to tranfer energy over longer distances and therefore switching to a DC power grid rather than AC.
Carbon sequestration is explained (costly to impossible) as is geothermal energy (probably only after 2050 -- but what will happen to the earth's internal dynamics if we suck out all its heat, I ask !), and the next generation of biofuels (too strongly reminiscent of today's chemical farming and factory farming for my taste).
The full report from the Economist is viewable here:
http://www.economist.com/specialreports/displayStory.cfm?story_id=11565685
(Keep clicking "Next article" at the bottom to go on to succeeding articles in the special report)
I think I want to be an alternative energy marketer in my next avatar
/==
Catching up with the zietgiest: Here's a really nice speech by Dr. Randy Pausch. Lots of context, but just go and watch it:
Thursday, July 17, 2008
The Domino's Pizza at the intersection of 5th Main and 100 Ft. Road in Indiranagar does not believe in hiding its incentive schemes. There is a chart on the wall that talks about "Upsell goals"
In response to Arvind's comment on the previous post:
"is the disdainful business school practice" ... or is it the practice of business schools that you disdain ?
Wednesday, July 16, 2008
Stumbling
Recent stumbling (www.stumbleupon.com) turned up many interesting things, of which I remembered to save only one :
http://www.amk.ca/quotations/quotations.txt
Its a page of quotations. It fit my taste exactly, general human nature and philosophy, along with a dose of mathematics, physics and computer science. Here's one I liked:
http://www.amk.ca/quotations/quotations.txt
Its a page of quotations. It fit my taste exactly, general human nature and philosophy, along with a dose of mathematics, physics and computer science. Here's one I liked:
K is for KENGHIS KHAN. *He* was a very *nice* person. History has no record of
him. There is a moral in that, somewhere.
Sunday, July 13, 2008
Tipu's prison for some of his English captives -- particularly aesthetic and minimalist design I thought
Ranganathittu Bird Sanctuary
Close-up of a seed (pongamia/kanuga) germinating.
Ranganathittu Bird Sanctuary
We saw "Kung Fu Panda" today, and "Dasavataram" sometime back. And we got the 3rd season of Lost so I'm pretty much current on it. So many reviews, so little time ..just one-liners then
Dasavatharam: Quite a remarkable film though remarkably flawed. The makeup for the different Kamal characters particularly the American ones is execrable. See it.
Kung Fu Panda: Completely fitting in with what I have found about all animation films of the past few years -- remarkable animation with a very thin story.
Lost: I was thinking : me and several of my friends / relatives have had hours and hours of excellent entertainment from serials like "Lost" with essentially 0 expenditure from my side and 0 gain for the makers of the serial. How might Lost reach out to people like me to get a little bit of money for their trouble ?
Last weekend we visited Mysore and some surrounding areas with Amar our friend from Pune. Highlight was the visit to the funny island of Seringapatam, where the Cauvery splits into two and creates an island, and to Ranganathittu Bird Sanctuary. My first bird sanctuary visit, quite nice and would like to do more.
Saturday, July 12, 2008
More on McDonald's
For once a sane, sensible interesting discussion on the blog, and I miss it because all the comments went to my spam folder. Oh well. Here's attempting to get this going again.
I think Arvind's points are at first sight reasonable or plausible, but several arguments can be made against them.
The price thing -- I agree with Sajini completely -- Indians are past masters at 'low-cost'. Internationally India is known as an extremely price-sensitive market. In fact we're exporting this strength, see the Nano or perhaps even IT outsourcing. So there is no way McD's is going to come into India and teach us low-cost production. In fact, even in coupling low-cost with hygeine we're learning that ourselves witness all the Sagars and Darshinis in Bangalore (I forget the names of the couple of main Chennai chains that also do the low-cost standardized food thing very well). In fact the way these restaurants have been hiking their prices recently is alarming, if these people are not able to manage their prices, it shows the seriousness of the food crisis.
I think the way the McD's and the rest are going about their business is quite fine. When something as pedestrian (as seen in America or the west) as McD's is a reasonably cool place to be, in India -- it would be stupid of any company not to use the readymade marketing value, which otherwise would take a huge amount of money to create. What is going happen is that over time the coolness value is going to wear off and more and more restaurants are going to open and more and more people are going to be able to afford them, so they'll become like McDs everywhere else. But while people think they're cool, the fast food chains obviously should capitalize on that. The one thing that I think could be dicey is that they're very energy-heavy kind of places for India, and with the coming climate change and energy crunch, I wonder how things will evolve, and will they continue to be able to offer the same kind of experience at a reasonable price.
I don't think McD's sees itself as a provider of low-cost food and serving a useful social function in that sense -- in fact if you want to travel down that path, you would start encountering the dubious ethics of the meat industry and the dubious nutritional aspects of McD's offerings. For example its aggressive marketing at children influences nutritional habits negatively at a young age. The world over, McD's menu is basically the same and you're wishfully hoping that they completely reinvent themselves for India.
The comment about only a small segment of Indians wanting to be cool is breathtakingly stupid-ass. *Everybody* wants to be cool (more or less). The fact is that McD's has a coolness value from being fresh and different and clean and it takes a certain amount of money to provide that experience so only a fraction of the population get to experience it. But as I said, it'll likely become available to more and more over time.
I think Arvind's points are at first sight reasonable or plausible, but several arguments can be made against them.
The price thing -- I agree with Sajini completely -- Indians are past masters at 'low-cost'. Internationally India is known as an extremely price-sensitive market. In fact we're exporting this strength, see the Nano or perhaps even IT outsourcing. So there is no way McD's is going to come into India and teach us low-cost production. In fact, even in coupling low-cost with hygeine we're learning that ourselves witness all the Sagars and Darshinis in Bangalore (I forget the names of the couple of main Chennai chains that also do the low-cost standardized food thing very well). In fact the way these restaurants have been hiking their prices recently is alarming, if these people are not able to manage their prices, it shows the seriousness of the food crisis.
I think the way the McD's and the rest are going about their business is quite fine. When something as pedestrian (as seen in America or the west) as McD's is a reasonably cool place to be, in India -- it would be stupid of any company not to use the readymade marketing value, which otherwise would take a huge amount of money to create. What is going happen is that over time the coolness value is going to wear off and more and more restaurants are going to open and more and more people are going to be able to afford them, so they'll become like McDs everywhere else. But while people think they're cool, the fast food chains obviously should capitalize on that. The one thing that I think could be dicey is that they're very energy-heavy kind of places for India, and with the coming climate change and energy crunch, I wonder how things will evolve, and will they continue to be able to offer the same kind of experience at a reasonable price.
I don't think McD's sees itself as a provider of low-cost food and serving a useful social function in that sense -- in fact if you want to travel down that path, you would start encountering the dubious ethics of the meat industry and the dubious nutritional aspects of McD's offerings. For example its aggressive marketing at children influences nutritional habits negatively at a young age. The world over, McD's menu is basically the same and you're wishfully hoping that they completely reinvent themselves for India.
The comment about only a small segment of Indians wanting to be cool is breathtakingly stupid-ass. *Everybody* wants to be cool (more or less). The fact is that McD's has a coolness value from being fresh and different and clean and it takes a certain amount of money to provide that experience so only a fraction of the population get to experience it. But as I said, it'll likely become available to more and more over time.
Saturday, July 05, 2008
"I see the nuns are gay..."
Every now and then I bump into some major item of popular culture that 90% of Indians would have experienced 2 years back... sometime back it was Rang de Basanti, today it was Tunak Tunak Tun, a hit song by Daler Mehendi. According to Wikipedia its become an 'internet meme'. Dig out the Wiki article, its quite cool.
It may be contempt for the familiar, but I find this video light years more palatable than the average Telugu/Tamin movie dance sequence. On a separate note, I was wondering how our rich tradition of classical music and dance have not really survived in the 21st century. A counter-example is bhangra pop of the Daler Mehendi sort which is very popular inside and outside the country. Can someone extract some insight from this ?
Talking of bhangra, time to again push
http://www.salon.com/ent/audiofile/2006/08/02/bikram/index.html
Can someone pleeease hear this song and put in your comment. Its frustrating feeling that you have discovered something pretty cool and nobody else has anything to say about it.
The earlier Buffalax video continues to enthrall me (and several others it seems). Here are the updates:
The original video is here:
It has close to 7 million views and (hold your breath) 20,000 comments. And that doesn't include comments on sites referring to it, like yours truly's blog. The video was uploaded in August 2007 and its still getting comments today from wide eyed folks like me who are seeing it for the first time and getting completely bowled over. According to a newspaper article referenced in Wikipedia, its being called possibly the hottest Internet clip. Whoda thunk it -- a satire of a Tamil movie becoming the most viewed internet video. As one of the commenters says : "Due this video, my theory of Indian people trying to take over the earth has only grown stronger.. "
I checked out more buffalax videos, but nothing comes anywhere close to this one. Its one of those things where things just come together to take something out of the realm of the ordinary. The thing is not perfect -- at several places its pretty clear that the 'translation' is a complete fake. But when it works, it works gloriously. One good bit among many : at 2:55, the background music is given words and it works sooooo well.
Again, according to wikipedia, buffalax and 'benny lava' are now internet memes. Richly deserving.
Endnote:
Today at a KFC, we ordered "a Zing Kong box and a Zinger Chicken meal". The minor indignities ...
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