The world on fire

One of my favorite scenes in the movie 'Saving Private Ryan' is towards the end, when the group is waiting for German forces to arrive after they find Ryan. Edith Piaf's opera 'Tu Es Partout' is playing on an old gramophone among ruins of a city. There is something very powerful about juxtaposition of classical music with war and its ruins. The same juxtaposition powers the Fallout-3 universe. Scavenging the nuclear wasteland and fighting the super-mutants while 'I don't want to set the world on fire' plays in background makes Fallout-3 an experience unlike any other.

Online social networks and Privacy

I'm not a big fan of online social networks. I ended up opening accounts on Facebook and Orkut because I got invites from some friends. But I don't frequent these sites much and use the most stringent privacy settings they provide. After Facebook changed their privacy policy declaring certain information (like your profile picture) to be public by default, I deleted my profile picture. I'm always amazed that people put their private information on the web without giving second thoughts. Whatever you put on net will probably live forever on some hard disk somewhere and will be open for misuse by hackers, identity-thieves, potential employers or the big bad government.

Too much paranoia, you say? Well,

- There have been several reports of HR execs doing internet search for prospective employees and denying employment in case they found some offending (to their personal tastes) Facebook picture or comment on some blog.

- Putting address or date of birth (along with real name) on a public site is just asking for trouble. Even if you make your information private to friends, servers can always be hacked and information stolen.

- What about Government? Let's say you post potentially controversial thoughts, say about religion, atheism etc, on your Facebook page. Then ten years later religious right-wing nutcases win the election and decide to purge the Atheist scums. Out goes a warrant to Facebook to hand over records of all non-believers. If China and Iran (who blocked Gmail today) didn't exist in contemporary world, all one has to do is point to Nazi Germany and Communist Russia, to show that this is not baseless paranoia.

People want to share their lives with their friends and relatives and that's why Facebook et al are so popular. But there are costs to living your lives online - some mildly annoying (Facebook selling your information to advertisers), some more dangerous (Mullahs knocking on your door because you posted blasphemous thoughts).

Happy Holidays

The dinosaurs are gone. That was not inevitable. They could still have been masters of the planet.

Some trees live for hundreds of years. But that's about it.

The Roman Empire crumbled. The mighty British empire didn't last forever. The American empire seem to be the next mighty one on a downward slope.

One day the Sun itself will be gone - ending its bright and illustrious life as a red dwarf.

Life on Earth may disappear much before that - a nearby gamma ray burst, an asteroid, magnetic pole shift, nuclear winter created by Yellowstone super-volcano eruption, black hole created by high energy physics experiments...who knows...

The Universe itself may not last forever. Who knows what's in its future - cold death, or big crunch, or collision with another universe in the Multiverse...

Birth, Growth, Decay and Death is built into the very fabric of this cosmos. And you want to live forever. Ha!

Reading Habits... Part Two

(Part 1)
I was looking at my bookshelves today. There is a one whole shelf dedicated to philosophy books - both western and eastern. I would have loved to get my hand on some of these books 15 years ago, when I was eager to read anything on Indian philosophy but couldn't get access to quality stuff. Now, I'm thinking about getting rid of some of these books. I've completely lost interest in Hindu and Buddhist philosophy and only philosophy of science interests me a little bit as far as Western philosophy is concerned. Most of my reading these days is limited to Science, History and occasional science-fiction books.

Speaking of history, I'm fascinated by history of Hinduism and Christianity. Specifically, the evolution of these religions and how they got their current form and character over centuries. I mentioned couple of books related to history of Christianity in a previous post. These days I've been reading 'Hindus: An alternative history' by Wendy Doniger. I also purchased Nirad Chaudhury's 'Hinduism: A religion to live by', D.D. Kosambi's 'Myth and Reality', and A.L. Basham's 'The Origins and Development of Classical Hinduism'. It's really fascinating to think about how Vedic Hinduism, Upanishadic Hinduism, Bhakti traditions, Puranic Hinduism, local/tribal/non-aryan traditions, all these different strands mingled together to create Hinduism as we know today.

PS - Here is an interesting fact related to Indo-Aryans or rather Indo-Europeans with whom the Vedic Aryans are supposed to be related (same language tree). This really got me hooked into understanding early Aryan history (I also have 'The Quest for the Origins of Vedic Culture' sitting partially read on the bookshelves. Need to return to it sometime) -

In 1400 BC, a peace treaty was signed between the Hitties and the Mittani (in modern Syria). There are several gods referred to in the treaty as witness and among them are - Indara, Mitrasil, Uruvanaššil, Našatianna. These correspond to the Vedic gods, Indra, Mitra, Varuna and Nāsatya (Aśvin). Super cool, isn't it!!

If the Indo-European migration theory is correct, then Vedic Aryans, Iranians, and Greeks/Romans were all once part of a group of people speaking same language and sharing same mythology. If I have a time machine, that's one of the things I would like to go back and observe - how all these groups evolved differently from a common base.

QoTD

Let teachers and priests and philosophers brood over questions of reality and illusion. I know this: if life is illusion, then I am no less an illusion, and being thus, the illusion is real to me. I live, I burn with life, I love, I slay, and am content.
- Conan the Barbarian