Call some place Paradise, kiss it goodbye!

It's interesting that most cultures define heaven to have just the attributes they lack in real life. Jewish (and consequently Christian) Heaven had streams and gardens, which Israel did not. Islamic heaven is full of sex, for obvious reasons. Greek heaven, as well as Hindu Swarga in its simplest form, was about living the life of the Rich and Powerful, where debauchery isn't quite sinful any more.

So, it would seem that heaven is indeed a fool's paradise as writer Johan Hari claims.

Some cultures did get the picture. As Hari points out:

In The Epic of Gilgamesh, written in Babylon 4,000 years ago, the eponymous hero travels into the gardens of the gods in an attempt to discover the secret of eternal life. His guide tells him the secret – there is no secret. This is it. This is all we're going to get. This life. This time. Once. "Enjoy your life," the goddess Siduri tells him. "Love the child who holds you by the hand, and give your wife pleasure in your embrace."

It would seem that heaven and the afterlife are projections of a human mind that's fearful and not able to come to terms with the fact of death.

And while you're thinking of that, listen to the Eagles say it as well as anyone can.

Who will provide the grand design?
What is yours and what is mine?
'Cause there is no more new frontier
We have got to make it here

We satisfy our endless needs and
justify our bloody deeds,
in the name of destiny and the name of God

And you can see them there,
On Sunday morning
They stand up and sing about
what it's like up there
They call it paradise
I don't know why
You call someplace paradise,
kiss it goodbye

More mobile phones than toilets?

It's been all over the news media - a UN body has determined that there're more mobile phones than toilets in India. While it's well known that rural India could do with more sanitation facilities, and urban India could do with better sanitation for the poor, this sounded - how shall we put it - just a little sensationalist. Fact check time.

Step 1: read the article a bit more carefully to find out exactly what they compared, and how they measured things. One statement stood out - apparently, the comparison is between people who have access to toilets (not toilets themselves!) and mobile phones.

India has some 545 million cell phones, enough to serve about 45 per cent of the population, but only about 366 million people or 31 per cent of the population had access to improved sanitation in 2008.

Hmm, 545 million cell phones? In 2008? Unlikely. TRAI data indicates there were 543 million phone connections in November 2009. That includes 506 million mobile and 37 million wired telephones. A quick check for the previous year yields a number of 348 million mobile connections for the previous year 2008. So, even going by face value, there were fewer mobile connections than the 366 million number above.

Error 1: temporal shifts in data presented for comparison - it's not quite right to compare 2009 data for mobile phones with 2008 data for toilets. But let's grant them that.

Error 2: mixing up categories - landlines aren't mobile phones. Even if we grant the temporal inconsistency, the number of mobile phone connections is only 506 million among the 543 million reported.

Ok, move on. What's the number that TRAI reports? The summation of number of connections each operator reports to TRAI. And this also includes multiple connections used by the same person. This number is widely considered to be grossly inflated, by upto 40%. All things considered, it's unlikely that more than 300 million people use mobile phones.

Now let's look at how the alleged number of toilets was computed. The report in question doesn't state clearly how this number was arrived at (or I missed it). Page 43 reports that 31% of India have access to "improved" toilet facilities (note, not number of toilets), and 9% have access to shared (but satisfactory) toilets. Hmm, why do we not count shared toilets? Does this mean I didn't count as having access to a toilet in my days in college, when I lived in a hostel like most others?

Bottom line: while it's important to improve sanitation in rural areas, sensationalizing the numbers incorrectly isn't called for. There are fewer mobile phone users in India than those who have access to proper sanitation.

However noble your cause may be, two and two don't add up to three.

Friends, Chromans, ...

The Chrome browser has come a long way since I first blogged about it. Then, I was not going to move completely over from Firefox since Chrome was missing a working extension system, and I needed my javascript fix via Greasemonkey to handle some badly designed websites that I used regularly.

Things have evolved quite nicely since. I now use Chrome as my primary browser on my work laptop (running Windows, sadly). The Chrome extension system is stable - I haven't faced any issues so far. All my badly needed extensions - Lastpass being the primary one - now have Chrome versions. Greasemonkey isn't even required - Chrome automatically converts most userscripts into extensions. I downloaded Facebook Fixer directly off userscripts.org and it works quite well with Chrome.

Chrome extensions are a breeze to write. Simple HTML and CSS are all you need to know, and just enough javascript if you need some logic in your extension. In about a days work (mostly a few minutes caught here and there on breaks over a week), I managed to learn how to create extensions, and managed to cook up an extension that accelerates many of my common work tasks using some simple organization and light automation. I can see myself coding a lot more now.

Once Chrome gets extensions stable on Linux, it'll move on to being my primary home browser as well.

It's been some time since I loaded Firefox on my work machine, and the startup time of the browser amazes me when I do - how did I ever manage to wait that long for the browser to start?

It's instructive that Firefox stormed into the browser world on the strength of its speed and simplicity, and is now being spurned by a whole lot of users because it lacks just that - speed and simplicity. Over the years, it's turned into something else altogether. Moral of the story: stay true to your basic strengths.

I wish the firefox project reinvents itself to give Chrome some competition though. Competition is always good in the FOSS space. So, dear firefox, do as Polonius advised:

To thine own self be true, and it must follow, as the night the day, thou canst not then be false to any man

iBrother

In 1984, Apple Computer was the upstart, and IBM was Big Brother. Naturally, they used a "1984" metaphor in their first Macintosh ad, the ad, that has become part of tech industry folklore.

Apple never became dominant, and Microsoft took over IBM's role as big brother. Apple lived on in the hearts of a bunch of dedicated fanboys. Then came the iPod, the iPhone and now the iPad. Microsoft looks increasingly dinosaur-like, trapped in a software model that is sliding into obsolescence.

A quarter of a century later, Apple's revenue model is based on a tightly controlled system where hardware, software and the channel for selling to the end customer are all controlled to the minutest detail, for your convenience of course. In spite of Jobs's public hand-wringing about DRM, Apple shows no signs of openness on content or in the hardware and software they sell you or in the means of accessing that content. You have zero choice, and that is good for you, they only have your Best Interests (TM) at heart. Rupert Murdoch, for one is excited.

For a while, we were all worried about Google becoming big brother. They seem to have got the point, and are taking the "don't be evil" credo a bit more seriously, what with getting out of China and all.

It's not Google that's Big Brother - it's Apple. In intent, if not yet in size.

This is why I do not own an iPhone. This is why Cory Doctrow isn't buying an iPad, and I am not either.