Una verdad simulada

While thinking about my previous post on grad student life and cooking, I came across a lot of interesting things on Food Network and other websites. P and I were thinking of buying better and sharper knifes to replace the ones we owned for the last few years. A legacy from our childhood days was to use inexpensive light-weight serrated knifes that did the job, but we still felt something missing in our kitchen. So for a while now, we have been looking to buy decent quality knifes: the ones that aren’t expensive like those used by professional chefs, while still of a decent quality — much better quality than what we are used to.

Of the several choices, we homed in on a seven-piece Twin Signature Knife Set by Henckels. Henckels is a German company with a reputation of manufacturing high-end knives. However, they also carry several moderately priced series of knives that are a good compromise between quality and price. The one knife P really wants but is not included in the set is the hollow-edge Santoku knife. I think I prefer the chef’s knife and P prefers the Santoku. Santoku is a Japanese-style knife, usually better suited for people with smaller hands. She also wants to try the hollow-edge knife, which is advertised to prevent veggies from sticking to the knife while cutting. Since I don’t care for those hollow edges, we are going for the “normal” Chef’s knife and the hollow-edge Santoku.

Tags: Recipes and Kitchen Tips by Niket
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An undesirable side effect of the extended debates on global warming is the huge misconceptions that the “environmentally sensitive” folks now harbor about carbon dioxide. An Inconvenient Truth has undoubtedly made people realize that they leave a “footprint” on the planet, and their consumption pattern will have a long-term impact on the ability of this planet to support human life. It bears repeating, not life but human life.

However, what the movie has also done is to cast the good old CO2 in an undeservingly bad light. Too many people are becoming too worried about CO2 emissions, its just CO2 that is in minds of so many folks. So lets be clear: CO2 is possibly one of the most benign pollutants, perhaps after water. As a matter of fact, I hate to even label CO2 as a pollutant.

Several times I have heard people being worried about vehicular pollution because their cars spew huge amounts of CO2. This comment about Pune being polluted because vehicles emit CO2 is just one of the several examples I have encountered. No! If CO2, H2O and N2 were the only pollutants from a vehicle exhaust, the air would be as fresh to breath as that in a forest, miles away from civilization. The real problem in vehicular emissions are particulates, unburnt hydrocarbons, carbon monoxide and nitrous oxides (in roughly that order; also ozone). Heard about a catalytic convertor… its job is to ensure that the pollutants from a vehicular exhaust are CO2, H2O and N2, as far as possible.

CO2 is a non-reactive, (relatively) non-toxic gas. In fact, it is necessary to sustain life: ever heard of photosynthesis. At higher concentrations, exceeding 4%, it is hazardous. This means that exposure to CO2 approximately two orders of magnitude higher than what we are typically exposed to is hazardous, unless you work in a field where you are exposed to elevated levels of CO2.

Besides CO2 finds several applications. Another misplaced concern comes from people who use the CO2 gas, for example, in food industry (freezing or colas), medicine (respiratory systems or laparescopy), fire extinguishers etc. I have seen people worried about these applications of CO2. Newsflash: get over it. CO2 alternatives (eg, helium in laparescopy) could be more energy consuming (and thus, more environmentally harmful) than CO2 itself. When you completely burn a fuel, you get CO2: a process can hardly be more efficient (I am using this term loosely) than that. But most importantly, CO2 is an industrial off-gas. A lot of CO2 is not manufactured by burning additional fuel, in fact, its manufactured by recovering and purifying the CO2 that would otherwise be let out in the environment anyway.

Bottomline, CO2 is not evil, not even close to evil. The problem lies elsewhere: our penchant for high consumption and choosing expediency over efficiency.

Tags: General by Niket
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Richard Dawkins, a notable athiest and author of “the god delusion” has been labelled by a number of people as an “atheist fundamentalist”. In his documentary “Root of All Evil”, Dawkins concludes that religion is a cause of a lot of strife, a root cause of some of the evil in this world. Without religion, all these bad things won’t just go away, but there will be one less reason for people to dogmatically and irrationally stick to their dearly held beliefs.

Its no surprize that several people, including atheists, have called Dawkins’s style atheism a disservice to the cause of atheism. Laying the blame of all the wars and strife and killings on the doorstep of religion, they say, is a logical fallacy.

They are right. But the point this criticism misses is that no one is really blaming religion for all evil. PZ Myers, who could be said to be every bit as “fundamentalist” as Dawkins puts it best, when he says that its not religion or the religious who are the enemies, its the bad ideas, the irrationality, dogma and superstition that really are the enemies. Quote:

Ultimately, though, our enemies are not the propagandists of the DI, they are not the dishonest televangelists and wandering creationist preachers, they are not the people who have been duped by the misleading dogmas of the church — our enemies are bad ideas. The pope is a mouthpiece for bad ideas. When we go easy on bad ideas because they aren’t coming out of the mouths of the usual suspects, or because they’re said by someone who might support us in other ways, we have lost our perspective on what we are fighting for.

(original article)

While Myers writes in the limited context of the papal views on evolution, the reason for the rational people to speak out is really the same. Seventy two virgins waiting for you in heaven is a bad idea, and so is the belief that a supernatural being has deigned you to carry a crusade to bring democracy to the people of the world; the Nazi irrationality is a bad idea and so is the belief that bringing communism to the people, with any force necessary, will usher a utopia.

Tags: General by Niket
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Norm Jenson annotates all of his Daily Show posts with the statement that forms the title of this post. This week, TDS aired some of its older episodes. For your viewing pleasure, here is Jon Stewart interviewing John Bolton, the past ambassador to UN. John Bolton made some really incredulous and some factually incorrect statements. In the next episode, Jon Stewart brought on Doris Kearns Goodwin (author of “Team of Rivals” a book on Abraham Lincoln) to call on the bullshit by ambassador Bolton.

I am not saying that the Daily Show is factually correct. In fact, the journalistically proper way to do it would be to have Bolton defend his statement. However, he did what a lot of news shows ought to do (and unfortunately don’t): call out politicians’ bullshit and go beyond the soundbites that they spew.

Tags: General by Niket
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Namesake is the story of a Bengali-American family, seen from the eyes of Ashima Ganguli (Tabu) and Gogol (Nikhil) Ganguli (Kal Penn). Ashima gets married to someone she has met just once and comes with him to a foreign country, where she has no friends or family. In part, Namesake is her story. Gogol’s story is that of an American trying to make sense of his hyphenated reality: trying to balance the “Indian” and the “American” parts of being an “Indian-American”. In an attempt to tell both these stories, Mira Nair has managed to create a movie that shows shades of brilliance at times and at other times, barely manages to rise above a cliche (I know, I too can hurl cliches that I read in other cliched reviews of unrelated cliched movies… and I don’t even know what really makes a movie cliched :)).

My pet peeve with the movie revolved around the name Gogol. After making a big deal about the circumstances for naming the child ”Gogol”, it hardly seemed to have any bearing on the storyline. The child could as well have any other funny name and ths story would hardly change. Judging from the fact that my wife (who, unlike me, has read the novel) vehemently disagreed with this criticism, I believe there is much more to the name in the book than in the movie. I had read somewhere that if you introduce a sword in the first act of a play, you better use it by the end of the second act; namesake broke that cardinal rule.

And, BTW, who breaks up with one’s boyfriend at his father’s funeral on a seemingly frivolous reason? And who starts having second thoughts about her marriage because her husband dislikes her revealing to her friends that he has a funny name?

I think the movie would have been much better had Mira Nair stuck to telling the story from either Ashima’s or Gogol’s point of view.

Tags: General by Niket
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