Is it just me

... or is the new Parle LMN ad featuring the two bushmen searching for water incredibly racist?

What's with the telecom scam?

Headlines Today have been going hammer and tongs with their expose for the last two or three days, while there's not a peep from the likes of The Hindu, Deccan Chronicle, and The Times of India. Isn't a tapped telephone conversation involving a minister -- in the central government, no less -- in which he discusses portfolio allocation with a corporate lobbyist ("My case is cleared?") worthy of at least a couple of centimeters of column space?

This government has to be the sleaziest one ever, by a long mile. What with doubts being raised about our voting machines, I wouldn't be surprised if it turns out that they came to power by rigging the EVMs. Having somebody like Manmohan Singh at the helm only makes it worse.

Are we alone?

Stephen Hawking has recently weighed in on the question of whether we are alone in the universe. His logic is that there are a hundred billion galaxies, each containing hundreds of millions of stars, so it's unlikely that Earth is the only planet where life originated. Sounds plausible, but here's a counter-argument: suppose a phenomenon occurs once in 10^100 times. We know that there are 10^20 samples, which is a large enough number, and erroneously conclude that it is large enough for the phenomenon to occur more than once. The moot point here is the actual probability of the event, i.e., the 10^100 figure -- there's no reliable and/or scientific way to validate this.

Just throw the bums out

When the President of the United States cannot stay in office for more than two terms, there's no justification for these people to cling to their chairs.

Indian EVMs vulnerable to fraud

Well, all the folks patting themselves on their backs have some explaining to do. From a University of Michigan study:

Electronic voting machines in India, the world's largest democracy, are vulnerable to fraud, according to a collaborative study involving a University of Michigan computer scientist.

Even brief access to the paperless machines could allow criminals to alter election results, the seven-month investigation reveals.