Watching Ken Burns' Civil War Documentary

I started watching Ken Burns' Civil War documentary series in Netflix. I think this subject is a must-read for anyone trying to make sense of modern American Politics, American Wars and even the American Psyche.

The willingness of a huge population to fight a war for a fundamentally unjust cause;

the ability of even honorable people to rationalize their unjust cause in the name of patriotism and in the name of rights;

that so many people fight so hard for for their rights to deny rights for other people;

the willingness of the people to continue tragic and costly wars that cost huge number of lives;

patience (or helplessness) of the people in putting up with feckless generals who make stupid and arrogant mistakes resulting in the death of hundreds and thousands of people;

the generals with huge political ambitions and the corrupt ones who blur the lines between war and politics and business;

that the war is really cruel, for it was really sad and gut wrenching to hear about some of the battles and its causalities.

And sadly, every one of the above statement is still true and is being clearly demonstrated up until the very latest wars and the very latest politics of today...

I thought that the political success of Lincoln during the Civil war was much more impressive than the military success of the Civil war generals. Union lost more people than the Confederates and the Confederates had more impressive military victories and the Union had more bone headed losses. How did he keep his support through the war and manage to get reelected impressively for the second term in the middle of such uncertainties? And I'm still not clear about why the Union decide to fight this war with such conviction. So far, it doesn't appear to me that most people in the Union were prepared to spend so much money and lives to free the slaves. So why did they fight so much?

Need to finish watching the series and perhaps start reading Lincoln biographies...

Doctor Watson

Inflection Point: An event that changes the way we think and act. -Andy Grove

Watson winning Jeopardy is an inflection point. I think the comparable event is the release of the Mosaic browser. At that time, we could read email, subscribe to mailing lists, connect to the modem and read uunet archives. Even though there were not many sites to visit and O'Reilly published all of the useful sites in a single book, we could see the possibilities and feel the excitement at that time. It took several years to realize those possibilities though.

Presently we routinely dial into help desks and cellphones to talk to the computers. Google voice search really works. And we now have Watson, a clear inflection point that shows off the advances in Computers understanding Humans. Will there be pitfalls out of this advance, of course! But not if you believe this guy....

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Watson Graduates From Game Contestant to Physician Assistant

Quoting from this article:

If science fiction author and physician Michael Crichton were still alive, he might be crafting his latest take on technology run amok using the Watson project as inspirational fodder.

Not to worry, Durlach explained. With so many years of training and practice, doctors may be the ultimate information judges -- ever using it but never yielding to it.

"You know physicians," he said. "They see themselves as the chief decision makers. The very tradition they come from would suggest a very, very low probability that they would take the computer's decision over their own."

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Yeah Right!

Low Cost Drip Irrigation From Silicon Valley

This is a very promising story about a very low cost drip irrigation system, DripTech from Palo Alto, for small farm plot farmers around the world (India, china, etc.)

I grew up in a home overlooking small plot agricultural fields where they were growing crops like: Turmeric, Sugar Cane and Rice using the water from a canal off of the river Cauveri. During the monsoon rains and in the wet season, when there would be water in the canal, the field would be green and fertile. During the dry years, the talk of the community around us would be about when the government was going to release water in the canal. The water came from Mettur Dam in the river Cauveri.

Later on, the government subsidized electricity for the water pumps and the pumps would irrigate the land with water from Bore wells. Clearly, I could see a lot of wasted water compared to the drip and sprinkler irrigated farms that I see in California.

There is already a lot of water wars in southern india. More than 80% of the farmers in india are small plot farmers owning 1-5 hectares of land with average plot size around 1 hectare. Their monthly income is between Rs 1500 and Rs 8300. Cost of this system can be as low as Rs 6500.

If this approach takes root (no pun intended) this can be really really good for the small farmers.

Canon T3i DSLR has been released and it is not much better than T2i

According to the PCMag article, Canon T3i is not much better than T2i. The specs are the same, it just has a 3 inch retractable LCD screen compared to T2i. It is always good to know that the technology you bought did not get obsoleted barely 2 months after purchase.

color theme for emacs

I used to put a lot of color customization variables in my .emacs. It is nice to see color themes package for emacs. I got the package from:

http://www.nongnu.org/color-theme/#sec5

unzipped it into my home and added the following to my .emacs. It just worked.

(add-to-list 'load-path "~/colortheme/color-theme-6.6.0/")

(require 'color-theme)

(eval-after-load "color-theme"

'(progn

(color-theme-initialize)

(color-theme-hober)))

It is nice to see emacs dragged kicking and screaming into the easier way of doing things. Stallman would certainly not approve of this, im sure....

Quote From Newton

If I have seen a little further it is by standing on the shoulders of Giants." - Isaac Newton

(latin equivalent: nanos gigantium humeris insidentes)