[silk] Biryani Recipes
I've been a lurker on this list for many years and it has taken a very sad and earth shattering event to bring me out of hibernation. I'm not too keen on my biryani recipe any more. Wait... let me back up. Like every other person on this planet I enjoy a good biryani. Whilst there are many places to get a good biryani, cooking it at home is fun in so many ways. Over time I've experimented with many recipes, finally settling down with a biryani recipe which was shared by a fellow biryani loving friend.It’s been 3 glorious years now and many a polished dish later I have come to the conclusion that I have to move on. I need a change. The biryani that often takes the center stage on my table needs a makeover. Knowing that there are quite a few foodies on this list, I submit to you all a request to share your #1 biryani recipe. What i mean by #1 is that you would vouch for the recipe. Do share a note on why you think its special. I would also urge you to speak to your family (the older the generation the better), friends and other cooks that have served you biryani that managed to pervade your senses and lodge there. The kind of biryani that you don't need to have in front of you to taste. That's the kind of biryani recipes i am hoping to find . Over the next few weeks I can share my views of the recipes I choose to cook from the ones that are posted. Maybe a few more folks on this list will try them and share their views as well. I dare say this exercise can only lead to a better world. Have a good weekend all Julian
Re: [silk] Biryani Recipes
On Sat, Feb 5, 2011 at 6:19 AM, Julian Philips jazzmob...@gmail.com wrote: I've been a lurker on this list for many years and it has taken a very sad and earth shattering event to bring me out of hibernation. I'm not too keen on my biryani recipe any more. Wait, but aren't you supposed to begin by sharing your 3-year favorite recipe before requesting others to follow up with their own? I have very fond memories of Biryani I had as take out many times in a Kuwaiti cafe in the middle of nowhere in mid-west USA. I would totally make a trip back there to nowhere cafe just to sample the dish again, but I suspect by now my memories of the dish are superior to the original :-) Cheeni
Re: [silk] Biryani Recipes
On Sat, Feb 5, 2011 at 9:02 PM, Srini RamaKrishnan che...@gmail.com wrote: I have very fond memories of Biryani I had as take out many times in a Kuwaiti cafe in the middle of nowhere in mid-west USA. I would totally make a trip back there to nowhere cafe just to sample the dish again, but I suspect by now my memories of the dish are superior to the original :-) I know exactly how you feel. There is this Biryani joint just outside the Trichur railway station called Saphire. I've had a few biryanis from there many years ago and have always wanted to go back for more though I'm quite sure that some of the biryanis that I've had from Hyderabad and Old Delhi are much superior. -gabin -- measure with a micrometer, mark with a chalk, cut with an axe
[silk] Skepticism on Technological Singularity
There has been a lot of interest around the idea of the technological singularity. There is even an operating system by Microsoft carrying that name. Anyway, I have been quite skeptical about the whole concept. Anyway, I emailed Mr. Jasen Murray of the Singularity Institute about some of the issues I had with the concept of singularity. He suggested for me to read a chapter by one Eliezer Yudkowsky in a book that is apparently forthcoming. And here is the chapter : http://singinst.org/upload/artificial-intelligence-risk.pdf. My thoughts on the chapter are below. I will add that while it may be a reasonable hypothesis to work with, I am deeply skeptical about the idea of the technological singularity. As a public service, I emailed Prof. Noam Chomsky to find out his thoughts on the concept of the singularity. I was very pleased to note (in his two sentence reply to me yesterday) that he was similarly skeptical. The fact that we are both skeptical having arrived at our conclusions entirely independently says something. Anand =+= http://groups.yahoo.com/group/indo-euro-americo-asian_list/message/223 =+= http://groups.yahoo.com/group/indo-euro-americo-asian_list/message/231 Hi Jasen: I have gone through the paper you sent me (I assume this book you mention is a book of papers, and this is one of the chapter?). I am puzzled by some of the exposition in the paper. The paper suffers from quite a few problems, in my opinion. If I were reviewing this paper, I would give it a Reject simply because the author does not seem to appreciate the organizational perspective. What I would like to note (perhaps it is a new claim, but it is a rather obvious one) is that businesses are not interested in developing technologies that could spiral out of control. The potential damage to a business is too great. Ultimately, we must view technological systems, social systems and economic organizational systems as acting in conjunction. To be clear, the organizational perspective is a rather intuitive perspective and one does not need to have studied organization behavior deeply to understand it. Perhaps, working in a business or a university for a certain period of time will provide the same intuitions. (The response paper by John Seely Brown and Paul Duguid (http://www.aaas.org/spp/rd/ch4.pdf) seems to have none of these problems.) This intuitive sense is missing in this paper. I have an extract from the paper in the section below. I recognize that the author is trying to draw some sort of analogy between communism and technology developers - creators (authors of???) of catastrophes need not be evil. Technology developers may be developing something evil without being aware of it. However, he seems to not be aware of the organizational perspective. The reasons for the problems with communism from an organizational perspective is that it is not a very economically efficient way of structuring society. There were two schools of thought that argued that communism was doomed to failure. The first was the Austrian school of whom the most famous economist was Hayek. Hayek argued that price is unable to act as a signal in such economies (and so you had the situation in Russia that there were huge inefficiencies due to central planning). The second was a set of maverick economists such as Stigler and Friedman who argued that it would be best to simply leave the market unregulated. There were some elegant refutations of communist ideas by Paul Samuelson which underpin the theoretical response to communism/Marxism. This part of the paper The folly of programming an AI to implement communism, or any other political system, is that you're programming means instead of ends. You're programming in a fixed decision, without that decision being re-evaluable after acquiring improved empirical knowledge about the results of communism. seems quite wrong-headed. Communism is a form of economic organization. Artificial intelligence is a technology. Any sort of mix-and-match of economic organization and technology is possible. You have AI systems in China, a communist nation. It is entirely unclear what it even means to say that The folly of programming an AI to implement communism, or any other political system, is that you're programming means instead of ends. I would reject this paper if it came to my desk. Anand == In the late 19th century, many honest and intelligent people advocated communism, all in the best of good intentions. The people who first invented and spread and swallowed the communist meme were, in sober historical fact, idealists. The first communists did not have the example of Soviet Russia to warn them. At the time, without benefit of hindsight, it must have sounded like a pretty good idea. After the revolution, when communists came into power and were corrupted by
Re: [silk] a judgment by Supreme Court, India
Nikhil - Thank you for your note. To follow up on your reply : my aim was to point out that there was a problem with the ruling. I have been reasonably successful in arguing points of law on various Internet forums. Given that this was a judgement by a Judge of the Supreme Court of India and given that I am not an expert on Indian law, I will consider this a success. I will reply to your further concerns via email to your email id in private. Anand From: Nikhil Mehra nikhil.mehra...@gmail.com To: silklist@lists.hserus.net Sent: Fri, January 21, 2011 10:42:39 PM Subject: Re: [silk] a judgment by Supreme Court, India On Sat, Jan 22, 2011 at 9:28 AM, Anand Manikutty manikuttyan...@yahoo.com wrote: For Advocates of consociotionalism and multi-culturalism, this judgement may be acceptable, but to me, it is disturbing. This is in regards to case involving the alleged persecution of a tribal woman. My sympathies are with the woman if such an incident indeed happened, but when I tried to learn more about the case, I was a bit disturbed by what I found. The draft of the judgement is on the website and is easy enough to find (please see information below). The concluding words of the judgement were the following: What's truly depressing is that none of these observations were necessary. In fact, what I find more objectionable is that the judgment has not dealt with the evidence against the accused. Instead she's gone on some historical tirade. She recites all that history only to make the point that 92% of India's population consists of immigrants. And that the remaining 8%, particularly the Bhils, have been brutally discriminated against. I don't think she needed to do that because observations such as these are the bases of the various sections of the IPC and that of the SC/ST Atrocities Act is precisely such logic. She only needed to apply the various sections and test the evidence for the proper standard of proof. She's set out the prosecution's case (which is merely their say) but has not discussed the evidence. It isn't so disturbing that she wanted to cite historical sources and certainly not that she wanted to use Eklavya to illuminate her point. Rather it is a matter of legal error and therefore possibly injustice that she has written a judgment convicting a person(s) without reasoning out the evidence.
Re: [silk] Skepticism on Technological Singularity
On Sat, Feb 5, 2011 at 11:15 PM, Anand Manikutty manikuttyan...@yahoo.com wrote: There has been a lot of interest around the idea of the technological singularity. There is even an operating system by Microsoft carrying that name. Anyway, I have been quite skeptical about the whole concept. snip What I would like to note (perhaps it is a new claim, but it is a rather obvious one) is that businesses are not interested in developing technologies that could spiral out of control. The potential damage to a business is too great. You seem to be assuming that businesses (or anyone/anything else, for that matter) can even know all possible outcomes of a technology. This seems obviously mistaken. Have you read the original Singularity paper by Vernor Vinge [1] ? He's also done a talk on What if the Singularity does not happen [2]? where he reiterates his belief that the Singularity is still the most likely non-catastrophic outcome of current human activity. Overall, either I am not understanding something basic in your position, or it is not fully thought-through. Say more? Udhay [1] http://www-rohan.sdsu.edu/faculty/vinge/misc/WER2.html [2] http://www-rohan.sdsu.edu/faculty/vinge/longnow/ -- ((Udhay Shankar N)) ((udhay @ pobox.com)) ((www.digeratus.com))
Re: [silk] Rockets, path dependence, and lock-in
On Saturday 05 Feb 2011 8:11:37 am Udhay Shankar N wrote: http://www.slate.com/id/2283469/pagenum/all/ Reminds me of Arundhati Roy. This long article has so many holes that need to be ripped open to allow the rubbish to spill out freely that I am not going to bother spending time on it. I will excuse the man - he belongs to the generation that thought The US is the center of the universe and lived in an era when this seemed to be true. and writes from that perspective. But he certainly does lay on the crap fairly thick to make an argument that ends up looking like the strawman it is if you can wade thorugh the thick layers of crap. shiv
Re: [silk] Rockets, path dependence, and lock-in
On Sun, Feb 6, 2011 at 7:46 AM, ss cybers...@gmail.com wrote: http://www.slate.com/id/2283469/pagenum/all/ Reminds me of Arundhati Roy. This long article has so many holes that need to be ripped open to allow the rubbish to spill out freely that I am not going to bother spending time on it. As a matter of interest, can you point out a few of these holes? Udhay -- ((Udhay Shankar N)) ((udhay @ pobox.com)) ((www.digeratus.com))
Re: [silk] Rockets, path dependence, and lock-in
On Sunday 06 Feb 2011 8:20:08 am Udhay Shankar N wrote: On Sun, Feb 6, 2011 at 7:46 AM, ss cybers...@gmail.com wrote: http://www.slate.com/id/2283469/pagenum/all/ Reminds me of Arundhati Roy. This long article has so many holes that need to be ripped open to allow the rubbish to spill out freely that I am not going to bother spending time on it. As a matter of interest, can you point out a few of these holes? Udhay Udhay, Stephenson, like Arundhati Roy and like all great fiction writers builds up an elaborate strawman by the use of subtle untruths hidden among reams of facts. There is far too much that is debatable or just plain wrong in that. The folowing long post deals with only the first four paragraphs - which are used to set the stage to cook up more rubbish later. I refuse to spend time writing any more. In fact I will stick to 3 paras - the fourth alone requires a separate message as explained below. The author builds up the impression that large rockets (hitherto unimagined size) were the brainchild of the sytem created by Hitler. That is wrong. All the elements were in place before Hitler. he father of spaceflight might have been Tsiolovsky - who in turn was inspired by Jules Verne. Both rocket planes and large unguided rockets had been built outside of Germany before the Hitler era. But none was in America, Stephenson then passes off the following personal judgement as accepted fact. At best it is debatable, if it isn't complete nonsense: These rockets, which were known as V-2s, were worse than useless from a military standpoint, in the sense that the same resources would have produced a much greater effect had they been devoted instead to the production of U-boats or Messerschmitts. But that paragraph sets the stage perfectly for what he goes on to say next using same language that I use to fudge facts - by noting in words that are difficult to argue with: Accordingly, the victorious nations showed only modest interest in their development immediately following the war. Modest interest. Humph! That language is perfect for saying something and then pretending that it almost wasn't said. Both the US and USSR actively started testing captured V2 rockets immediately after the WW2. Stephenson says: It is reasonable to suppose that little more would have been done with them, had it not been for another event, happening at the same time, even more bizarre and incredible than the seizure of absolute control over a modern nation-state by a genocidal madman. I refer, of course, to the sudden and completely unexpected development of nuclear weapons, undertaken over the course of a very few years by a top-secret crash program atop a mesa in New Mexico. Completely unexpected? That is baloney of the first order. The real history of nukes is available form various sources, with Wiki being as good as any. I quote: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_nuclear_weapons#Physics_and_politics_in_the_1930s In 1934 the idea of chain reaction via neutron was proposed by Leo Szilard who patented the idea of the atomic bomb. The patent was transferred in secret to Britain's Navy in 1936. In a very real sense, Szilárd was the father of the atomic bomb academically. and: As the German army marched first into Czechoslovakia in 1938 and then Poland in 1939, beginning World War II, many of Europe's top physicists had already begun to flee from the imminent conflict. Scientists on both sides of the conflict were well aware of the possibility of utilizing nuclear fission as a weapon, but at the time no one was quite sure how it could be done. In the early years of the war, physicists abruptly stopped publishing on the topic of fission, an act of self-censorship to keep the opposing side from gaining any advantage. The development of nuclear weapons in the United States was as much of a quest for an ultimate weapon by the forces of good (read USA) as the development of the V2 by the forces of evil (read Hitler) Paragraph 4 is another paragraph of cooked up self-servong nonsense from Neal Stephenson: Atomic bombs turned out to be expensive, dirty, controversial, and of limited military use (it was difficult to find targets sufficiently large to be worth using them on). So they might have fizzled out, were it not for the fact that there just happened to be another victorious nation, controlled by a dictator, every bit as evil as the V-2 maker, but not so crazy, who insisted that his nation, the USSR, had to have atomic bombs too. Moreover, the conditions existing in the USSR then were such as to enable the development of that bomb in near-perfect secrecy. The United States could only guess at what the Soviets were doing; and given the stakes, they naturally tended to make the scariest guesses possible. The military logic of nuclear warfare forced them to develop the hydrogen bomb. Excuse me? Dirty? Controversial? Limited Military use.
Re: [silk] Rockets, path dependence, and lock-in
I do have to agree with Shiv that this article is poorly researched. It could have done with far less verbosity as well. ss [06/02/11 10:30 +0530]: On Sunday 06 Feb 2011 8:20:08 am Udhay Shankar N wrote: On Sun, Feb 6, 2011 at 7:46 AM, ss cybers...@gmail.com wrote: http://www.slate.com/id/2283469/pagenum/all/ Reminds me of Arundhati Roy. This long article has so many holes that need to be ripped open to allow the rubbish to spill out freely that I am not going to bother spending time on it. As a matter of interest, can you point out a few of these holes? Udhay Udhay, Stephenson, like Arundhati Roy and like all great fiction writers builds up an elaborate strawman by the use of subtle untruths hidden among reams of facts. There is far too much that is debatable or just plain wrong in that. The folowing long post deals with only the first four paragraphs - which are used to set the stage to cook up more rubbish later. I refuse to spend time writing any more. In fact I will stick to 3 paras - the fourth alone requires a separate message as explained below. The author builds up the impression that large rockets (hitherto unimagined size) were the brainchild of the sytem created by Hitler. That is wrong. All the elements were in place before Hitler. he father of spaceflight might have been Tsiolovsky - who in turn was inspired by Jules Verne. Both rocket planes and large unguided rockets had been built outside of Germany before the Hitler era. But none was in America, Stephenson then passes off the following personal judgement as accepted fact. At best it is debatable, if it isn't complete nonsense: These rockets, which were known as V-2s, were worse than useless from a military standpoint, in the sense that the same resources would have produced a much greater effect had they been devoted instead to the production of U-boats or Messerschmitts. But that paragraph sets the stage perfectly for what he goes on to say next using same language that I use to fudge facts - by noting in words that are difficult to argue with: Accordingly, the victorious nations showed only modest interest in their development immediately following the war. Modest interest. Humph! That language is perfect for saying something and then pretending that it almost wasn't said. Both the US and USSR actively started testing captured V2 rockets immediately after the WW2. Stephenson says: It is reasonable to suppose that little more would have been done with them, had it not been for another event, happening at the same time, even more bizarre and incredible than the seizure of absolute control over a modern nation-state by a genocidal madman. I refer, of course, to the sudden and completely unexpected development of nuclear weapons, undertaken over the course of a very few years by a top-secret crash program atop a mesa in New Mexico. Completely unexpected? That is baloney of the first order. The real history of nukes is available form various sources, with Wiki being as good as any. I quote: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_nuclear_weapons#Physics_and_politics_in_the_1930s In 1934 the idea of chain reaction via neutron was proposed by Leo Szilard who patented the idea of the atomic bomb. The patent was transferred in secret to Britain's Navy in 1936. In a very real sense, Szilárd was the father of the atomic bomb academically. and: As the German army marched first into Czechoslovakia in 1938 and then Poland in 1939, beginning World War II, many of Europe's top physicists had already begun to flee from the imminent conflict. Scientists on both sides of the conflict were well aware of the possibility of utilizing nuclear fission as a weapon, but at the time no one was quite sure how it could be done. In the early years of the war, physicists abruptly stopped publishing on the topic of fission, an act of self-censorship to keep the opposing side from gaining any advantage. The development of nuclear weapons in the United States was as much of a quest for an ultimate weapon by the forces of good (read USA) as the development of the V2 by the forces of evil (read Hitler) Paragraph 4 is another paragraph of cooked up self-servong nonsense from Neal Stephenson: Atomic bombs turned out to be expensive, dirty, controversial, and of limited military use (it was difficult to find targets sufficiently large to be worth using them on). So they might have fizzled out, were it not for the fact that there just happened to be another victorious nation, controlled by a dictator, every bit as evil as the V-2 maker, but not so crazy, who insisted that his nation, the USSR, had to have atomic bombs too. Moreover, the conditions existing in the USSR then were such as to enable the development of that bomb in near-perfect secrecy. The United States could only guess at what the Soviets were doing; and given the stakes, they naturally tended to make the scariest guesses possible. The military logic of nuclear warfare
