we hear because there is sound or there is sound because we hear

If a tree falls in a forest and there’s no one around to hear it, does it make a sound? The answer is, it doesn’t. What happens is it creates vibrations in the air which then require the presence of a hearing system in the form of human ears to translate them into what we think of as “sound”. Similarly, if a beam of light reflects off a tree and there’s no one around to see it, only electromagnetic waves exist in the air. To create an image, eyes are required. In this way it has been argued that reality needs to be observed in order to realise its full potential of being. 

 Many animals, for instance, can see polarised light or hear ultrasonic sound frequencies which we can’t. Does this mean their perception of the world is richer or, to be more precise, corresponds to a truer model of what exists out there? 

    Actually it doesn’t because most such animals lack parts of our kind of vision. What can be said though is that their reality is different from ours and that if human eyes and ears could process such additional sensory information then we would be able to look deeper into the nature of reality.

Food Business is Bad for the Planet and Your Health,(case study:swine flu outbreak)

In modern disaster management theory, when any large system experiences a major shock or failure, you assess the risk, activate an ordered emergency response, and manage the after-effects. In the world of real people hit directly by the real shock, you look for someone to blame. For ordinary Mexicans this week, who faced the shutdown of their country by swine flu and an unknown number of deaths, it was a culprit that was needed. The source of the current epidemic was easy to identify in their eyes. Near the town of La Gloria, east of Mexico City, which appears to be the epicentre of the flu outbreak, is a giant industrial pig complex jointly owned by the world’s largest pig processor, Smithfield Foods.

Smithfield is adamant that the swine flu epidemic is not of its making and has no connection to its factory farms in Mexico or in any of the countries where it has established its powerful presence. By the end of the week, the company had, like a besieged banker, gone into shutdown mode and declined to give interviews, but it issued a statement: “We have found no evidence of the presence of influenza virus in any of our pig herds or any of our employees at any of our worldwide operations. All our herds are tested regularly for disease including influenza. We routinely administer flu vaccines to protect them and conduct monthly tests to examine the presence and identity of different flu strains.”

When a young boy from La Gloria who had been ill in March became the earliest confirmed case of the current swine flu outbreak, following new tests by the U.S. Centre for Disease Control (CDC) on previously cleared samples from Mexico, Smithfield said it too was re-examining its herds. It was confident that it could reassure people who have been “bombarded by unfounded opinions, non-scientific statements and unrestrained internet rumour and speculation” that it was not the source. It declined to answer detailed press questions on its tests.Like the rest of the world watching a potential pandemic unfold as though in a slow-motion car crash, Smithfield could do little but wait to see how hard or soft the landing would be.

Smithfield’s predicament has not been helped by the fact that it has made itself somewhat conspicuous with its habits. It operates on a grand scale. The volume of its pig waste is extravagant. But just as one bank did not alone cause the financial crisis but merely conformed to the latest banking type, so it is the very nature of today’s globalised meat industry that is at the heart of this swine flu pandemic. The factory unit near La Gloria fattens nearly a million pigs a year. Globally Smithfield slaughtered 26 million pigs in 2006, generating sales of $11.4bn and profits of $421m. It already controls over a quarter of the total U.S. processed pork market and it has expanded by acquisition in Europe. Like the banking sector, the global food system has seen the emergence of unprecedentedly large players that are dominant at every stage of production from pig breeding to bacon slicing.

Looks too big to fail

The modern food system has a sophistication and global interdependence to match the financial system, too. It looks too big to fail. But like that sector, it is also extraordinarily fragile and vulnerable to shock. Many of the shocks are likely to be of its own making.

Smithfield’s intensive factories of densely packed hogs, like those of the rest of the large-scale industry, produce vast lagoons of foul-smelling discharges. In many of the areas where it has sited its factory farms or slaughtering and processing complexes, activists and locals have campaigned against it, accusing it of environmental pollution, labour rights abuses and in some places operating without proper permits. The people of La Gloria have had long run-ins with the company’s nearby subsidiary Granjas Carroll. When 60 per cent of the town’s population became ill in March with flu-like symptoms, they quickly blamed the pigs.

Swine flu is currently being passed from human to human, and it is possible that this particular strain of swine flu was created without ever seeing a pig directly, as U.N.’s Food and Agriculture Organisation’s (FAO) experts on animal health point out. The FAO has, however, dispatched a surveillance mission to help the Mexicans check their pig herds. But the focus on Smithfield is not surprising given its history. It won notoriety a decade ago when two of its US subsidiaries were given the largest ever environmental fines by the government’s Environmental Protection Agency, having to pay $12.6m for illegally discharging pollutants from its operations in to the Pagan river in Virginia. It had committed more than 5,000 violations of permit levels for discharging faecal coli forms, phosphorus, ammonia, cyanide and oil from its pig factories over more than five years, destroying fish stocks and polluting water tables. Even more troublingly, it was also found guilty of falsifying documents and destroying records.

And as expert labs continued their forensic work through the week, the ancestry of this latest strain of flu and its connection with modern intensive pig farming in general if not with any farm in particular was established.

By Wednesday night the reason why scientists had pressed the full flu alert button even though only a few hundred cases outside Mexico, almost all mild at that point, had appeared, also became clearer. At CDC the head of virology had completed the genetic fingerprinting of the swine flu and was able to say that it has arisen from a strain first identified on industrial pig units in North Carolina in the late 1990s. It is no coincidence that this threat to global human health should have emerged from that particular state, as Michael Greger, director of public health at the U.S. Humane Society and leading author on the history of bird and animal flu explains: “North Carolina has the densest pig population in North America and boasts more than twice as many corporate swine mega-factories as any other state. With massive concentrations of farm animals within which to mutate, these new swine flu viruses in North America seem to be on an evolutionary fast track, jumping and reassorting between species at an unprecedented rate.”

Toxic debt

Novel human disease is the toxic debt of today’s industrial livestock farming. The influenza virus has eight genetic segments. If two different types of flu infect the same cell at the same time, the genes from both viruses mix, swapping segments to form totally new hybrids. In Mexico as in many poorer countries, industrial pig and poultry farms are increasingly sited close to crowded urban populations, making simultaneous infection by different flu strains more likely.

The 1918 flu pandemic was an H1N1 strain and was a kind of bird flu new to humans so they had no immunity to it. It killed at least 50 million people as it raged around the world in less than a year. The 1918 H1N1 strain passed from humans to pigs, and became the dominant form of flu among pigs, albeit one that evolved into a fairly mild strain. But then in 1998 there was an explosive new outbreak of swine flu in a factory farm in North Carolina that made thousands of pigs ill. The virus had evolved into a triple hybrid that had never been seen before, containing gene segments from bird, human and swine flu. It had found the ideal breeding ground. Pigs, whose immune systems were suppressed by the stress of crowding and fast feeding, and kept confined indoors, were perfect disease incubators for flu whose preferred method of transmission is virus-infected aerosol droplets, expelled by the million in the hog’s famous barking cough. Thanks to the modern practice of transporting live animals, the new virus spread rapidly through pig herds around the country.

Six of the eight genetic segments of today’s swine flu outbreak isolated by CDC experts can be traced back to the triple hybrid from North Carolina.

Factory animal farming has developed as a giant ecological credit bubble. It has delivered enormous growth in global meat production over the last three decades. Consumers have happily bought its cheap products just as they gobbled up the freely-offered loans of the financial boom without asking too closely how such consumption could be sustained or what the eventual consequences might be. Swine flu should make us question that complacency.

New virus

Jan Slingenbergh, a senior animal health officer at the FAO believes the precise final evolution of the current virus may never be found. “We don’t know, but what is most likely is that a human was infected by a common flu virus and at the same time with a second virus which had elements probably from pigs and they mixed to form a new virus. The last bit of human mixing probably took place around mid-March in Mexico.” Slingenbergh is sceptical that a link will be found to the Granjas Carroll factory. The current virus may now progress as a mild strain and die down or it may mutate and evolve further to become more virulent. The reason experts have invested so much effort in preparing for a flu pandemic and are taking this one so seriously, is that these rapidly evolving strains that mix bird, pig and human forms could throw up a particularly deadly variety.

A great quote

Wisdom in the man, patience in the wife, brings peace to the
house, and a happy life.

Recession helps entrepreneurs

Recession not prevent founders from starting a new venture — in fact, in many ways it may have helped. 
    Several had lost their jobs, so they weren’t risking steady employment — and they were able to hire employees who didn’t have great job prospects on the cheap. Landlords offered leases without asking too many questions about credit histories. Suppliers were willing to wait to be paid.

   What else a new entrepreneur can expect :)

Avery good advice

good is the not the enemy of the great and, just like every virus needs a host or a carrier, starting something in public policy may be more important than getting it right on first pass.

this is South Asia

COLOMBO to Kathmandu via Bangkok! 

Chennai to Lahore via Dubai! 

Sadly we are better connected with most cities in Europe and the US than to cities in our neighbouring countries.

Newcomb's paradox

A person is playing a game operated by the Predictor, an entity somehow presented as being exceptionally skilled at predicting people's actions. The exact nature of the Predictor varies between retellings of the paradox. Some assume that the character always has a reputation for being completely infallible and incapable of error. The Predictor can be presented as a psychic, as a superintelligent alien, as a deity, etc. However, the original discussion by Nozick says only that the Predictor's predictions are "almost certainly" correct, and also specifies that "what you actually decide to do is not part of the explanation of why he made the prediction he made". With this original version of the problem, some of the discussion below is inapplicable.

The player of the game is presented with two opaque boxes, labeled A and B. The player is permitted to take the contents of both boxes, or just of box B. (The option of taking only box A is ignored, for reasons soon to be obvious.) Box A contains $1,000. The contents of box B, however, are determined as follows: At some point before the start of the game, the Predictor makes a prediction as to whether the player of the game will take just box B, or both boxes. If the Predictor predicts that both boxes will be taken, then box B will contain nothing. If the Predictor predicts that only box B will be taken, then box B will contain $1,000,000.

By the time the game begins, and the player is called upon to choose which boxes to take, the prediction has already been made, and the contents of box B have already been determined. That is, box B contains either $0 or $1,000,000 before the game begins, and once the game begins even the Predictor is powerless to change the contents of the boxes. Before the game begins, the player is aware of all the rules of the game, including the two possible contents of box B, the fact that its contents are based on the Predictor's prediction, and knowledge of the Predictor's infallibility. The only information withheld from the player is what prediction the Predictor made, and thus what the contents of box B are.

Predicted choice	Actual choice	Payout
A and B	A and B	$1,000
A and B	B only	$0
B only	A and B	$1,001,000
B only	B only	$1,000,000

The problem is called a paradox because two strategies that both sound intuitively logical give conflicting answers to the question of what choice maximizes the player's payout. The first strategy argues that, regardless of what prediction the Predictor has made, taking both boxes yields more money. That is, if the prediction is for both A and B to be taken, then the player's decision becomes a matter of choosing between $1,000 (by taking A and B) and $0 (by taking just B), in which case taking both boxes is obviously preferable. But, even if the prediction is for the player to take only B, then taking both boxes yields $1,001,000, and taking only B yields only $1,000,000—taking both boxes is still better, regardless of which prediction has been made.

The second strategy suggests taking only B. By this strategy, we can ignore the possibilities that return $0 and $1,001,000, as they both require that the Predictor has made an incorrect prediction, and the problem states that the Predictor is almost never wrong. Thus, the choice becomes whether to receive $1,000 (both boxes) or to receive $1,000,000 (only box B)—so taking only box B is better.