No licence to rape a woman who appears to be promiscuous: SC

This should probably rank as one of the mose weirdest ruling the Supreme court of India had to ever give. What is more weird is that the Uttar Pradesh High court had actually given the opposite overdict some time ago and had acquitted a rapist!! Bravo!!

Malthusian prediction

Thought provoking article in SciAm on Malthus's prediction.

Some time last year I read a book called Ishmael by Daniel Quinn. I read a few blogs criticising and dismissing the book and called it denigratingly Malthusian. Hidden in the criticism is the mocking attitude towards Malthus's prediction. Guess, we cannot get rid of Malthus' spectre that easily. BTW, I loved the book Ishmael.

Do you still use Deo/Scent?

Hidden power of scent talks about how important our body odor is. Some extracts...

Although humans probably do not ordinarily use smell to navigate toward the nearest source of chocolate, we do seem to use odors—in most cases, subconsciously—to evaluate potential mates. Each of us has a unique scent: milky exudates of various glands, including the apocrine glands, which are located around the nipples, genitals and armpits, contain roughly 200 chemicals. The ratio of chemicals, which are metabolized into an aromatic brew by skin-dwelling bacteria, varies from person to person. Men and women, for example, have distinct odors governed by different ratios of sex hormones.

...

One trait that people may be subconsciously evaluating through scent is immune system status. Some studies suggest that variations in the major histocompatibility complex (MHC)—a gene region coding for cell-surface proteins that help our immune system distinguish our own cells from those of invaders—can influence body odor. In a now classic 1995 experiment biologist Claus Wedekind of the University of Lausanne in Switzerland and his colleagues demonstrated that women can determine the status of a man’s immune system by sniffing his body odor. When women rated the odors of T-shirts men had slept in for two nights, they consistently preferred the scents of the men whose MHC genes differed significantly from their own, the researchers found. (Men could also differentiate MHC genes by smell.) This tendency may be adaptive: a mixing of divergent MHC genes through mating may lead to a more robust immune system in the resulting children than would occur from the mixing of similar MHC genes.

May be someone should send these research details to companies that make ads like these.

Grad school wisecrack no. 745

Grad school teaches you the ability to deal with the archer who reaches you before the arrow he fired at you does.

All the world's a panopticon

A series of excellent articles from Scientific American on online privacy and security:

1.) Scary story on how your identity can be stolen easily

2.) Issues with electronic voting

3.) Big brother sees all

4.) Loss of privacy and loss of security

5.) Privacy in an age of terabytes and terror

The paradox of choice



This is an excellent talk by Barry schwartz. He talks about the opportunity cost of providing choices. He says, for an individual, some choice is better than both no choice and lots of choice. It would be interesting to know whether this extends to the choice available to groups of people also. This could have tremendous consequences of how society is organized. For e.g., this could put an upper limit on the number of parties in a democracy.

Another thing that he talks about is about modern day technology. We all know that it provides us the opportunity to work at any time of the day and from anywhere. So, we have to make a choice every second on whether we want to work or not. Result? Stress. Having failed to work during the weekends many a times, I have felt this stress Sunday evening. I am sure this miserable feeling would not be there is there were no scope of working during weekends :)

Cucumber laws

If it were not so horrendously sad, I would be laughing like mad at this. A report in the telegraph points out why Al-Qaeda stands alienated in Iraq. They had the following laws:

• They have banned women from buying suggestively shaped vegetables viz cucumber.
• Killed female goats as their private parts were not covered as their tails point upwards.
  
• No icecream because it did not exist in the time of the prophet.

Before I go on, I should say that we need to take the news with a small pinch of salt as we know that falsehood about opposition can spread in times of war. Despite that, I beleive Al-Qaeda has the capability to do these things. Extending this, does it mean men should not buy water melons, tomatoes, lemons, apples, oranges and the ilk? Ha ha ha. Of couse, we can make all sort of conclusions if the initial premise is absurd enough. I want to laugh like mad but I feel sad for the woman who dared to buy cucumbers, carrots etc for her personal use and was caught in the act (puns intended) :D.

Trove of endangered gorillas found

Some good news finally for people concerned about mankinds closest relatives. NY Times reports spotting huge numbers of endangered gorillas. Am sure Dian Fossey and her ilk would rejoice at this.

Ignobel

I would be happy to nominate this - 'A pill to replace exercise'.