Reading list for 2010

Here is a list of books and their authors that I intend to read in 2010. I hope that reading these will improve my understanding of the world around me and provide me with some much needed inspiration. You might notice that almost all of them are science books. I spent the better part of the last two years reading books by Osho, Robin Sharma, Deepak Chopra, Dalai Lama and Gurcharan Das. I even read Dan Brown's "The Lost Symbol". I feel that there has been an over-dosage of "meta-physics" and "philosophy". A stiff dosage of science is required to restore some balance! Some of these are classics worth reading multiple times. I hope to be able to lay my hands on most of them. Wish me luck! I might even blog about some of the "interesting" things I learn from these books.

I'm considering taking a vacation to do this as well. I hope that the recession thing is done with and one can hope to live a little again; Rather than work one's butt off in perpetual fear of the axe.

A Short History of Nearly Everything	Bill Bryson
Dragons of Eden	Carl Sagan
Cosmos	Carl Sagan
Mind's I	Daniel Dennet and Douglas Hofstader
Stumbling on Happiness	Daniel Gilbert
Godel Escher Bach	Douglas Hofstader
Blackholes and Warped Spacetime	Kip Thorne
Complexity	Mitchell Waldrop
The God Delusion	Richard Dawkins
The Selfish Gene	Richard Dawkins
Climibing Mount Improbable	Richard Dawkins
The Greatest Show on Earth	Richard Dawkins
Shadows of the Mind	Roger Penrose
The Road to Reality	Roger Penrose
Programming the Universe	Seth Lloyd
A Brief History of Time	Stephen Hawking
The Universe in a Nutshell	Stephen Hawking
At Home in the Universe	Stuart Kauffman
The User Illusion	Tor Norretranders

Stop the climate change denial.

There are a set of jobless scientists who have spent years of their lives trying to establish that human activity is contributing to climate change. Clearly human beings have nothing to do with it. Actually Human beings have nothing to do with anything. It is ridiculous to suggest that we are in any way responsible for anything. Every event that occurs on earth can only be influenced by celestial objects. For instance, people lost their jobs recently because saturn transited from the 4th house to the fifth. Clearly the fact that the person was not being productive or that the economy tanked had nothing to do with it. On similar grounds, it is quite obvious that the changes in the global climate are the result of Sun transiting from house 8 to house 3 and the mars transiting from house 6 to house 3. Mars is the ruling planet that controls the emission of lava from volcanoes. Just in case you did not know. The stupid scientists at IPCC etc should have just consulted any local astrologer who would have been able to confirm the same. The fools went around the globe with their fancy measuring apparatus, dug holes in the artic ice to recover ice samples and many other "discredited" methods.

I guess one needs to be bit careful these days. I actually think that the attempts to blame the sun and volcanoes for climate change are no different from citing "astrological" reasons for events in our lives. A lot of human do so. I'm not surprised that some of them are trying to use similar "reasons" for climate change. Seriously people it IS that lame.

I do hope that better sense prevails in copenhagen. I woke up today morning to a nice editorial from the hindu on the topic. You can view it here if you have not done so.

Lets stop the silly denial and get to action. We owe our kids a better life.

A silly fable.

Back in the 1980's the school I went to had a class on moral science. The teacher uses parables to get the students to see what morality is. The idea of using parables to get a point across is quite interesting. Aesop's fables are possibly the most popular literature of this kind. Well, I do have a point to get across and intend to use a fable to do so.

Kamal Education Promotion Board is a non-profit organization working to advance the cause of academic achievement amongst children living in the suburban areas of Chennai. The board would like to see the children in these areas achieve better scores in their exams. It is quite evident that improving the scores would allow the students access to elite schools and subjects of their choice in the future.

The board comes up with the following recommendations that it believes will allow it to achieve its goal.

1. Teachers will be held accountable for achieving the target score in select subjects. 70% in Physics, 80% in Maths, 90% in Chemistry.
2. The questions in exams should be clear. For instance, all questions should end with a "?". Questions should require elaborate answers. Multiple choice questions and fill-in-the-blanks type questions are to be avoided.
3. The students will be required to wear white uniforms with their report card (scores) printed on them to school.
4. It is desirable that the students achieve these scores without any "additional" classes. The Board should be notified if teachers deem it necessary to train specific students with additional classes.
5. Supplementary exams for students who did not do well are banned. Students must do well in the exams that are already in place.

These recommendations are then shared with the teachers and students printed in nice glossy paper. A bunch of kids were found looking at these papers, laughing and making paper planes out of them.

There you go! That's my fable. It it not very good. That is the point.

Replace the KEPB with management, improving student scores with improving an organization's or an individual's performance. Do you see similarities between the list mentioned above and some steps management in general takes to improve performance? Are you surprised that the kids (workers in this case) don't take it seriously? Would you be surprised if the kids don't score better?