about the g-man “scienti-fying religion”

Before you roll your eyes and start off visualizing couch-jumping celebrities, no this is not about any cult or an agenda propagating faith. This is about an article in the economist and it tickled my interest.

“Science and religion have often been at loggerheads. Now the former has decided to resolve the problem by trying to explain the existence of the latter.” – The Economist (find link below)

The article goes on to describe some of the experiments that were conducted indicate a pattern that describes religion and even goes to the extent of hypothesizing that religion might indeed be an evolved trait that has been deemed necessary for group-selection and maximal co-operation among members of a co-dependent society.

People with faith have been shown to perform better in these collaborative efforts and hence are better candidates for natural selection. It is interesting to see how religion has been factored in to evolution, and even more so as biologists who swear by the concept of evolution are themselves, mostly, atheists. I think it makes a very interesting read as it

explains a phenomena that we question so very often

http://www.economist.com/displaystory.cfm?story_id=10875666

Garuda is now Dual-Head !

Garuda – the word Garuda means ‘wings of speech’. He actually personifies Vedic knowledge.

I finally set up my desktop to be a server in my office and hence the luxury of a dual-head screen. Its running ubuntu ‘gutsy’ and a nifty wall paper of a santa cruz beach spread across it!

And yeah, its called Garuda !

Setting up a dual-head in gutsy seemed non-trivial but the best way, as I figured out after hours of tweaking, is to install the latest version of the drivers (the proprietary ones) for the choice of your graphics card (mine was ATI x300 and yes! it is indeed a pain to get this card to work flawlessly). Once you do that, ATI gives you some quick config tools. With the following steps you can set it up in no time:

• run ‘aticonfig –initial=dual-head’
• check your xorg.conf file to ensure that the update is reflected correctly
• run the ‘catalyst’ configuration tool installed by the driver installation
• setup your dual head configuration (right, left, top or bottom) here
• you are all set for some dual-head goodness! restart your xwindows (ctrl-alt-backspace) and if all goes well, you should be able to see a stretched out desktop!

For a more detailed description/troubleshooting, i’ll post links here eventually to help with the setup. Until then, adios!

Passwordless ssh logins

Sometimes it gets tedious to login to your own server and it gets worse with clusters. To make this process easier, here is a way to generate a password-less login between two well known hosts.

• Generate the key at the client by typing – ‘ssh-keygen -f -t rsa’.
• Do not give any passphrase. Copy the file id_rsa.pub from the client to the server machine.
• Check permissions of id_rsa.pub.
• Add the key id_rsa.pub to ~/.ssh/authorized_keys(2).
• Now just ssh user@server and save yourself some time !!

Living in Bubbles

“And be one traveler, Long I stood. And looked down one as far as I could” – Frost, Robert

I was looking through some of the photographs from the first winter that I landed here in Santa Cruz and came across the one above. I took this one on a cold winter morning. It had been raining for weeks then. Having survived the first quarter we were eager to explore the campus. We went out for a nice walk with umbrellas, three of us, from graduate housing, braving the rains. Somehow we found ourselves looking at the sight above. A road to nowhere. It seemed to symbolize the journey that we were all setting out on.

Journey to becoming Doctors of different Philosophies.

2 years have gone since then. One of us has dropped out of the program. Two of us remain.  Lots of things have happened and yet it seems like nothing has changed much. Seems like I’ve been living in a bubble.

I guess, we all live in bubbles. And we all know. Bubbles always burst.

Nobel gets ‘Gored’ – warms hearts :P

Well, now that Al Gore & Co. have won the Nobel peace prize (really ironic considering that his carbon footprint is only next to the whitehouse!), for those of you who like to have their cup of reality in mixed doses with fiction, I would have to recommend Michael Crichton’s ‘Enemy of the State’. A well researched book that weaves some amount of fiction with the realistic arguments made by scientists specializing in climate-history who agree that while we most definitively have to reduce pumping greenhouse gases into the atmosphere, it is not the cause of all the effects that doomsday callers have attributed to.

But hey, you can always make a terrific impact, if you are:
a. the ex-vice president of one of the more developed nations in the world.
b. the head of one of the most well organized campaign to promote yourself.
c. a recipient of an Oscar and a golden globe award.
d. the producer of a movie that resorts to scare tactics, calling itself a documentary while reporting the facts with a singular self-serving objective.

To top it all, I believe in ’saving the earth’ just as much as any other individual and mind you I recycle too (and I say that in-spite of running the risk of being called a hypocrite!). Its just that my love of the rationale finds this subversion of facts, well, simply distasteful.