The Tube in London is not as art-laden as the Paris Métro, but the Poems on the Underground project does get some good poems into the tube-cars from time to time. Frank O’Hara’s Animals was one of the best poems (that I was not familiar with) I’d come across on the Tube, and I was very pleased to be able to find it on the ‘net today. So without further ado, here it is:

Have you forgotten what we were like then
when we were still first rate
and the day came fat with an apple in its mouth

it’s no use worrying about Time
but we did have a few tricks up our sleeves
and turned some sharp corners

the whole pasture looked like our meal
we didn’t need speedometers
we could manage cocktails out of ice and water

i wouldn’t want to be faster
or greener than now if you were with me O you
were the best of all my days

I am not sure why this poem appealed to me so much, but the vivid imagery and uneven meter (…want to be faster / or greener than now if you were with me O you) probably played a part.

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Google Earth has had overlays for a long time — they make it easy to annotate maps with all sort of information, from vacation photos to public transport pickup points. Now, overlays work with Google Maps too. You can type in a URL of a KML/KMZ file into Google Maps and it will show you the overlaid map — here’s an example showing Metrolink stations in Manchester. This just made Google Maps much more useful.

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Rediff interviews Dr Udit Raj, chairman of the All India Confederation of the Scheduled Castes and Tribes. The interview was fascinating, I think, because it offers a nice counterpoint to the world of protestors who come from a largely urbanized middle-class environment where caste is largely meaningless and highlights the levels of us-vs-them identity politics that drives much of Indian politics. This retort from Dr Raj particularly highlights why the divide is so visceral:

For long, in many places 70 per cent to 80 per cent seats were open in the general category. The upper castes were using it. Right? Now they have been given 50 per cent of the total seats whereas the upper caste population is just 15 per cent. I think that is good enough. What more do the upper castes want?

Ultimately, one’s views on quotas will be colored by the India one sees. There are those who want a meritocratic India free of the curse of caste, where the disadvantaged are helped using sound economic principles such as better primary education and easy student loans. Then there are those who see quotas as a shortcut to success, for who dividing up every pie the country has (from institutions of higher learning to private industry) according to the caste divisions of the country makes perfect sense. (I can’t wait until they try this particular formula in Parliament, by the way.)

What I am most appalled about is that there is not one leader in the country who can make the case for sound economic welfare for the poor without carving the country up on the basis of caste. Punishing modern India’s middle-class for historical wrongs seems to violate every principle of natural justice, upto and including the Fundamental Right to Equality India’s constitution grants to its citizens (by limiting opportunities available to a person based on his caste, not his ability). I am not very hopeful about this, but I hope Manmohan Singh has the spine to resign and call for fresh elections before he is asked to preside over this travesty.

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JK notes that the good people at the Shiv Sena are protesting a book that paints Shivaji in an unflattering light. Of course, Indians are not alone in banning what they don’t like, it’s just that they do it more often (and with more enthusiasm) than Western Europe. The irony is that most Western Europeans and Indians celebrate their right to free speech without being aware how fragile it really is. The lack of a strong First Amendment in both places means that freedom of speech is malleable, subject to the tastes of the ruling classes (or mobs) of the day. Freedom of speech means nothing if it does not include the right to gore sacred cows.

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A day after I ran into the beautiful Anonymous font, I noticed that the Microsoft Download Center now has Consolas available for use on non-Vista systems. Consolas (which ships with Vista along with a bunch of other fonts) looks great on ClearType-enabled LCD screens even at small sizes and is highly recommended.

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Using Registry Cleaners are a Bad Idea (via S Anand). I agree — if your registry has enough flotsam in it to impair your system’s performance and you don’t know enough to hand-edit the registry, you’re probably better off restoring from backups (you do have backups, right?) than trusting random registry cleaners that promise a sparkly-fresh computer for $29.

If you’re concerned about easily restoring your system, you’d be better off with Windows System Restore or spending money buying Norton Ghost and backing up images of your system.

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Indian industry begins a caste census to figure out exactly how diverse its workforce is. Of all the boneheaded issues Arjun Singh and the Congress could set on the nation’s agenda, this has to be one of the worst. This is on par with LK Advani’s Rath Yatra and VP Singh’s implementation of the Mandal Commission report as a ploy against the BJP. (And this one, like the Rath Yatra and the Mandal mess, will end badly for its perpetrators.)

If India’s leaders were serious about abolishing caste, they’d follow a socio-economic approach to identifying persons from disadvantaged backgrounds irrespective of caste and offer them primary through post-graduate scholarships and on-the-job training (if corporate India plays this right, this might happen yet — they could offer this as a quid-pro-quo for not having caste quotas forced on them).

Proponents of caste-based reservations point to affirmative action rules in place throughout the world. However India is unique in that it is probably the only country where affirmative action is practiced on a non-ethnic (a.k.a caste) basis. There are many problems with affirmative action on the basis of caste. It assumes all members of a particular caste are at the same level of development, which is not true. It does not provide any assistance aid to disadvantaged people belonging to other religions (caste being a peculiarly Hindu concept). And most fundamentally, it flies in the face of centuries of reform in Hinduism that sought to abolish caste.

Of course, abolishing caste would be very problematic for our more venal politicians (that’s almost all of them) for who people voting along caste (and religion) lines are a huge convenience: creating a culture of entitlement gives them proven ‘vote-banks’ without having to worry about things actual developmental issues. Hence we end up with the curious result of a caste census in the 21st century in the hallways of private industry in the second-hottest economy in the world. God save India.

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The Scobleizer’s been raving about Second Life for some time now. I’ve been less than enthusiastic because to me Second Life has always been the CompuServe of online 3D worlds: interesting but ultimately proprietary and therefore ripe for being replaced by an standards-based competitor (much as the Web replaced CompuServe). Like Joshua Allen says, a virtual world should provide a single seamless virtual environment that’s not provided by any single vendor.

Today Google released a product that makes me wonder if they have any intentions to enter the virtual worlds biz. They released a product called SketchUp that lets users create 3D models. There’s a free version available for all and Google will warehouse your models for you. You can even download items into Google Earth.

What stops Google from offering a virtual-earth.google.com that is essentially a coordinate space for users to populate with their models? Well, creating 3D models is much harder than creating a webpage but much, much easier than creating a system that can handle and render a distributed virtual world (here’s a good FAQ on the subject). However, given the large number of PhDs who populate Google it wouldn’t be unreasonable to believe that they have made some progress on this.

Another possibility is that Google will eschew the distributed virtual world model for what I call the (far less satisfying but far more achievable) small closed spaces with portals model: multiple virtual worlds with distinct coordinate spaces each run by a single entity and traversable using portals. Such a model could be used to spice up many Google offerings, such as Google Groups’ mail list feature, IM, personal home pages and the nascent markets on Google Base.

And of course, irrespective of whether or not Google’s working on this, there is tremendous opportunity for startups and researchers to go out and create the next big thing online. The opportunity to do something creative is huge here.

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Every time I use OSX my arm hurts from all the mousing I have to do — and that’s not because I don’t know the Mac keyboard shortcuts. The culprit is OSX’s mouse cursor acceleration logic, and here’s how you can fix it to be more Windows-friendly.

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Within hours of reading about the Blank Noise Project, I read this. Sick. Sick. Sick. Looks like Bombay is picking up where Delhi left off.

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