Just not cricket anymore!

May 22, 2014

It is quite possible that there are no longer any matches – especially in the Indian Premier League – which have not been fixed in some way. But the malaise is present even in English County Cricket.

1. ECB charge Lou Vincent and Naved Arif with match-fixing county cricket game

The England & Wales Cricket Board are anticipated to make history later these days by announcing they have charged Lou Vincent and his former Sussex group-mate Naved Arif with fixing the outcome of a county cricket match.

Telegraph Sport can reveal that former New Zealand batsman Vincent, who has currently confessed to fixing, and Arif, a Pakistani living in this nation, are becoming charged with additional than 15 counts of match-fixing.

If the players are found guilty they face lifetime bans from the sport, and the 40-more than match amongst Sussex and Kent played at Hove in August 2011 will be the initial verified case of the result of a county match becoming fixed.

Vincent, who has given proof to the International Cricket Council of fixing in five countries, faces a lot more than 10 charges of fixing some relate to the Sussex/Kent match and other individuals relate to an additional 1-day game he played for Sussex in 2011.

Arif faces at least 5 counts relating to the Sussex game versus Kent alone.

2. Chris Cairns named by NZ Test player’s ex-wife in match-fixing testimony

Former New Zealand Test player Chris Cairns continues to protest his innocence amid more evidence against him, this time from Lou Vincent’s ex-wife, who alleges he was a cricket match-fixing ringleader.

Cairns’ name was publicly linked with sworn evidence to International Cricket Council investigators for the first time on Tuesday, as the former New Zealand all-rounder issued a second statement in a 12-hour period. ‘‘I totally reject the allegations against me, and I will prove this.’’

The latest leaked evidence is a sworn 10-page document from Elly Riley, Vincent’s ex-wife, that she provided to anti-corruption investigators last October. It follows leaks in the past week of former Test opener Vincent’s explosive 42-page testimony, and New Zealand captain Brendon McCullum’s signed three-page statement, both of which are understood to name Cairns as a fixing ringleader.

Riley’s evidence was that the fixing began at the Indian Cricket League in 2008, and that Vincent told her: ‘‘Chris was going to pay him $US$50,000 a game for the fixing.’’

The amount of money sloshing around in Indian Premier League and in the betting surrounding the matches makes spot fixing both tempting and extremely lucrative

3. IPL spot-fixing allegations

The IPL is no stranger to controversy, but on May 16 it met arguably its biggest crisis when Delhi Police arrested three Rajasthan Royals players – Sreesanth, Ajit Chandila and Ankeet Chavan – soon after their match in Mumbai for spot-fixing. Eleven bookies were also arrested at that time, including one – Amit Singh – who was a former Royals player. Royals later suspended their players and the BCCI set up an inquiry, headed by its ACSU chief Ravi Sawani, into the allegations. The board also announced enhanced anti-corruption measures, including two more security personnel with each team. The arrests kicked off a nation-wide search and arrest of bookmakers – betting is illegal in India. One of those picked up in Mumbai was a small-time actor, Virender “Vindoo” Dara Singh, arrested on charges of links with bookmakers. His testimony led the police to arrest, on May 24, Meiyappan Gurunath, a top official of Chennai Super Kings and son-in-law of BCCI president N Srinivasan. Delhi Police eventually chargesheeted the players, among 39 persons, under sections of the Indian Penal Code and the Maharashtra Control of Organised Crime Act, while the BCCI handed out life bans to Sreesanth and Chavan after Sawani’s probe found them guilty of fixing.

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Weight discrimination against obese politicians

May 21, 2014

Two new papers of little intrinsic interest but much more interesting in juxtaposition.

On the one hand we hear from the National Health Interview Survey that obesity is increasing in the US

Prevalence of Obesity by Occupation Among US Workers

Prevalence of obesity steadily increased from 2004 through 2008 across gender and race/ethnicity but leveled off from 2008 through 2011. Non-Hispanic black female workers in health care support (49.2%) and transportation/material moving (46.6%) had the highest prevalence of obesity. Prevalence of obesity in relatively low-obesity (white-collar) occupations significantly increased between 2004-2007 and 2008-2011, whereas it did not change significantly in high-obesity (blue-collar) occupations.

On the other hand we also hear from a new study that

Weight bias plagues U.S. elections

Overweight political candidates tend to receive fewer votes than their thinner opponents, finds a new study by a weight bias expert. Both obese men and women were less likely to get on the ballot in the first place. When it came to merely being overweight, women were underrepresented on the ballot, though men were not. This is consistent with previous research showing men who are slightly heavy tend not to experience discrimination like that of slightly overweight women.

Perhaps it should be a Fundamental Human Right not to be discriminated against merely for being obese? Maybe we need some affirmative action to ensure that we have the proper representation of fat people in employment, in politics and on Company Boards?

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Posted in Behaviour, Trivia | 1 Comment »

Chinese back doors and mincing rascals from the US!

May 21, 2014

The United States on Monday charged  five Chinese military officers and accused them of hacking into American nuclear, metal and solar companies to steal trade secrets, ratcheting up tensions between the two world powers over cyber espionage.

Washington is playing the victim of cyber-espionage when in fact it is the world’s top intelligence power, a Chinese state-run newspaper has said in a sharply worded editorial after US authorities levelled criminal hacking charges at China’s army. “Regarding the issue of network security, the US is such a mincing rascal that we must stop developing any illusions about it,” wrote the Global Times, which is close to the ruling Communist party.

Meanwhile we learn from the Snowden affair that the US Government turned Silicon Valley into a surveillance partner. The second part of the United States of Secrets is to be broadcast by PBS tonight.

Increasingly industrial systems have their hardware  and/or their control systems equipped, at the time of manufacture, with “backdoors” to allow remote access at some future time. Inevitably the “backdoors” are associated with embedded software very often with features to make it undetectable. These include power plants and their components, industrial control systems, access control systems, network appliances, surveillance systems, communication devices and even commercial aircraft.

In the US not only the software giants (Microsoft, Google, Apple, Facebook…), but even hardware manufacturers such as Boeing and GE and IBM and even automotive companies have been involved with installing “backdoors” and their associated software (malware) into their products.  Many US companies have regularly utilised their security services for industrial espionage and it is not very surprising that they feel beholden. Intelligence agencies in the US and Australia and the UK are not permitted to use Chinese Lenovo hardware because they are suspected of containing hidden  “backdoors”. Lenovo isn’t unique. Chinese firms accused of espionage in the past include Huawei and ZTE. Chinese government organisations in their turn are not permitted to use Microsoft products and Windows 8 is especially suspected for its many hidden, built-in vulnerabilities.

There is much active research in designing and hiding “backdoors” and in detecting and disabling them.

Hardware backdooring is practical, Jonathan Brossard, Blackhat Briefings and Defcon Conferences, Las Vegas, 2012

(We) will demonstrate that permanent backdooring of hardware is practical. We have built a generi proof of concept malware for the Intel architecture, Rakshasa, capable of infecting more than a hundred dierent motherboards. The net effect of Rakshasa is to disable NX permanently…. resulting in permanent lowering of the security of the backdoored computer, even after complete erasing of hard disks and re-installation of a new operating system. We shall also demonstrate that preexisting work on …. subversions such as bootkiting and preboot authentication software, brute-force or faking can be embedded in Rakshasa with little effort.

Silencing Hardware Backdoors, Adam Waksman and Simha Sethumadhavan, SP ’11 Proceedings of the 2011 IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy,Pages 49-63

Hardware components can contain hidden backdoors, which can be enabled with catastrophic effects or for ill-gotten profit. These backdoors can be inserted by a malicious insider on the design team or a third-party IP provider. In this paper, we propose techniques that allow us to build trustworthy hardware systems from components designed by untrusted designers or procured from untrusted third-party IP providers. We present the first solution for disabling digital, design-level hardware backdoors. The principle is that rather than try to discover the malicious logic in the design–an extremely hard problem–we make the backdoor design problem itself intractable to the attacker. The key idea is to scramble inputs that are supplied to the hardware units at runtime, making it infeasible for malicious components to acquire the information they need to perform malicious actions.

The US accusing China is a case of the pot calling the kettle black. But the black methods now surely being used by the Chinese were all invented first in the US and probably under State sponsorship.

There are many Big Brothers out there.

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AstraZeneca prepared to talk to Pfizer if bid is increased another 10%

May 19, 2014

According to the Svenska Dagbaldet

After AstraZeneca today rejected Pfizer’s latest bid of nearly 770 billion kronor, it looks like no deal for this year But in its written response to the bid Astra Zeneca’s board writes that it is prepared to negotiate with Pfizer if the bid is raised by ten percent.

So I suspect that it may be better for shareholders in AstraZeneca to sit tight and wait for the next bid – but it may take a few months. In the worst case, holding on to an independent AstraZeneca is not such a bad deal in the long run.

I have been a little amused with the conservative politicians in Sweden and the UK abandoning their “free market” principles and  invoking the “public interest”  to oppose the deal. But unless they can convert their concern for the “public interest” into something tangible for AstraZeneca shareholders, they are doing them a disservice. In fact I would argue that without acknowledging that the AstraZeneca shareholder interests are also a public interest to be protected, both Cameron’s government and Reinfeldt’s government are engaging in an extra-legal, repressive and discriminatory behaviour.

Needless to say the Left and the Communists are opposed to the deal on religious grounds because rationalisation  – if it leads to the loss of any jobs and even redundant jobs –  is always a great SIN.

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Junk DNA is the genome’s hedging instrument

May 19, 2014

I have always been somewhat confused by the manner in which the word “junk” has been attached to the repeating sequences of DNA in our genes which – as far as was known – had no function, and also for high risk securities which offer high returns.

There is a new paper in PLOS Genetics called The Case for Junk DNA (which is a little beyond me) but there is also an eminently readable commentary by Carl Zimmer. My take-aways from Zimmer’s piece are:

  • Genomes are the pattern for life.
  • Genomes contain genes.
  • Genes are made up of DNA.
  • Our DNA is a string of units called bases.
  • Our cells read the bases in a stretch of DNA–a gene–and build a molecule called RNA with a corresponding sequence.
  • The cells then use the RNA as a guide to build a protein.
  • Our bodies contain many different proteins, which give them structure and carry out jobs like digesting food.
  • The human genome contains about 20,000 protein-coding genes.
  • Protein-coding genes only make up about 2 percent of the human genome. 
  • In the 1950’s the non-coding 98% began being called “junk” genes.
  • Functions performed by some of these “junk” gene are constantly being found. The ENCODE project has assigned some bio-chemical function to about 80% of the genome.
  • Having large amounts of truly “junk” DNA is a protection against mutation (by making most mutations of the junk portion of no consequence). Evolution requires “junk”. A junk-free genome would be too vulnerable to mutations to survive (mutational meltdown). This suggests that humans need about 90% junk DNA to avoid mutational meltdown.
  • Junk portions are also important for evolution since protein-coding genes can evolve from these non-coding regions.
  • Much of our genome is made up of viruses, and every now and then, evolution has used those viral genes. 

From all of this I come to the layman’s understanding that about 2% of our genome is made up of about 20,000 active protein-coding genes, another 10 – 30% has some active bio-chemical function (such as switching genes on of off), some unknown portion is passive material which could feasibly be activiated and the remainder is the buffer material which both provides protection from rampant mutation and provides a pool resource for future evolution.

Junk bonds are risky investments, but have speculative appeal because they offer much higher yields than safer bonds. Companies that issue junk bonds typically have less-than-stellar credit ratings, and investors demand these higher yields as compensation for the risk of investing in them. A junk bond issued from a company that manages to turn its performance around for the better and has its credit rating upgraded will generally have a substantial price appreciation. 

Now as it becomes  clear that not all sections of non-protein-coding  DNA are entirely useless, I begin to see an analogy between “junk DNA” and “junk bonds”. A high – but manageable – risk but giving high yield on the one hand and a high – but manageable –  genetic redundancy giving high evolutionary appreciation on the other.

Junk DNA is the genome’s hedging instrument.

Vertical species evolution (rather than horizontal evolution for mere survival) is then probably dependent upon achieving some optimum  balance between genome size, coding DNA and junk DNA.

This is my attempt to apply a similar description to junk DNA,

Junk DNA are the genome’s hedge instruments and have evolutionary appeal because they offer a much wider range of evolutionary possibilities. Species that build up massive genomes with very high levels of junk DNA typically lie lower on the evolutionary hierarchy and evolve horizontally rather than vertically. When junk DNA in a species high up on the vertical scale (mammals) achieves a balance with the coding genes and the size of the genome, the species will have its rating upgraded and will generally have a substantial evolutionary appreciation. 

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Paid news and media extortion

May 18, 2014

The media like to portray themselves as a vital and necessary force for democracy. Attacks on the press – in any form – are considered fundamentally a strike against democracy and press freedom. If they break the law and get arrested they claim they were doing it for the greater good. They believe they are entitled to some form of press immunity.

But the reality is that “press freedom” is far too often used as an excuse for justifying criminal behaviour and  bad journalism. Accountability is not of any great concern.

But the media (print and broadcast and on the internet) are not averse to being paid for presenting what is essentially advertising as “news”. And even being paid for not publishing negative stories!!

The Election Commission in India are basking in the soft glow of having successfully conducted the massive, 10 phase voting by 550 million of an electorate of over 800 million over a 6 week period. They have the task of maintaining a “free and fair” election and have not been slow to pull up politicians who are transgressing. They have detected nearly 700 cases of the media transgressing the bounds of propriety.

But they have no authority over the media and the media – in their own judgement – can do no wrong.

DNA: 

As many as 694 cases of paid news – or news for which the media organisations took money to publish or broadcast – were detected by the Election Commission in this election, official said.

By the time the 10 phases of the polls ended to form the 16th parliament on May 12, thousands of cases of paid news were reported, according to EC officials. In 3,053 cases, notice was issued by the EC suspecting a foul play, an official said. 

“We served 3,053 notices, 694 of which were found to be genuine cases of paid news by our Media Certification and Monitoring Committee,” EC Director General Akshay Rout told IANS. “We define paid news as those items which are published as news but are advertisement in nature,” he added.

“There is no accountability in the media. While some candidates willingly pay for positive coverage, in most other cases candidates have to pay to prevent negative coverage. The media is getting increasingly criminalised, and acting as extortionist,” noted columnist and commentator Swapan Das Gupta told IANS. He added that media is acting as a reckless body, violating every known tenet of ethics.

… The Election Commission …. said it was not obliged to act against the TV news channels or print media indulging in such practices. “The media houses or publications are beyond the EC’s purview. We simply forward the cases of paid news to the PCI and the News Broadcasting Standards Association,” Dhirendra Ojha, Director in the EC, told IANS.

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MH370: The implausible is now certain

May 18, 2014

How quickly we forget!  Or is it that what we can’t explain we don’t want to think about.

Ten weeks now.

Still nothing.

The headlines have gone. The relatives still know nothing and are struggling to find closure. The Malaysian government wants to draw a line now and move on. Death certificates have been / are being issued. Malaysian Airlines losses have increased sharply. The discussion is shifting to how to ensure live tracking and preventing this happening again.

But preventing WHAT from happening again?

When there is no plausible explanation, the implausible is no longer implausible. In fact, some implausible explanation now becomes certain.

The latest implausible suggestion now is that the plane was accidentally shot down in the South China Sea by US/Thai jets and everything subsequently was disinformation to cover that up:

Daily Mail: Cawthorne makes the incredible assertion that the plane was shot down accidentally over the South China Sea by a joint US-Thai joint strike fighter team, and the searchers sent in the wrong direction as part of a cover up.

He describes how a man, while working on an oil rig in the ocean at about the same time the plane’s transponder went off, saw a burning plane and how this was right near the military exercise being conducted with personel from various other countries.

He claims that these countries may have then sent searchers in the wrong direction in order to cover their tracks.

‘After all, no wreckage has been found in the South Indian Ocean, which in itself is suspicious.’

But I am sticking with the most plausible implausibility that the plane was deliberately destroyed and “disappeared” to prevent certain cargo and certain passengers from reaching Beijing. That control over the flight was exercised remotely, that the crew and passengers were incapacitated by the excursion to 45,000 feet and the plane then sent on a flight to nowhere to disappear in as intact a manner as possible.

Maybe we will never know.

But somebody does.

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FIFA Presidential electioneering underway as Blatter blames Platini, France and Germany for selling 2022 World Cup to Qatar

May 17, 2014

FIFA Presidential electioneering for 2015 is underway as Sepp Blatter (who is Swiss) blames Michel Platini (who is French), France and Germany for selling the 2022 World Cup to Qatar. But this attack is just positioning by Blatter in case the 2014 World Cup in Brazil doesn’t go too well and Blatter will have to take that blame.

FIFA bows primarily to financial inducements (not political pressure as it sometimes appears). In many cases the financial inducements are just simple, straight-forward  bribery implemented in a very sophisticated manner. Even after the FIFA technical committee had clearly indicated that Qatar was unsuitable as a location for a World Cup tournament, the Executive Committee decided otherwise. That Qatar bought the 2022 World Cup is clear and it seems likely that the number of deaths per goal will be the highest ever by a long way in 2022.

Qatar 2022 will achieve more deaths than goals

Based on the track record of World Cup Tournaments, the Qatar 2022 championship will see between 100 and 180 goals – most likely around 150. But this number will be easily exceeded by the number of construction workers who have been killed by then. Already over 70 Nepalese workers have died since 2012 and the total number is probably around 200. By 2022 this number will exceed 1000.

Perhaps FIFA could introduce a safety performance index for the Qatar World Cup? Maybe to have less than 6 deaths per goal?

FIFA’s next presidential election is in 2015 and Sepp Blatter will be trying to retain his seat and Michel Platini will probably be opposing him. And so the electioneering has begun. This year’s World Cup is less than a month away and kicks-off on June 12th. The stadiums and infrastructure are still not quite ready. A fiasco in Brazil will be blamed on Sepp Blatter and will undermine his chances in 2015 of being President again. For some time now he has been trying to ensure that anything negative to do with Qatar is tied to Platini. Come 2015 Platini will have to deal with the Qatari dirt if he opposes Blatter.

A plague on both their houses!

November 2013: Sepp Blatter Now Blames France and Germany for 2022 World Cup Fiasco

Always looking to blame somebody else, Sepp Blatter hasn’t let us down by now blaming France and Germany for the 2022 World Cup mess in Qatar. According to theFIFA fool, these two nations are to blame for the ongoing turmoil regarding Qatar hosting the 2022 event. In addition, he believes they’re also accountable for some of the ill treatment of the migrant workers over there, along with the construction firms. 

Blatter said on November 22 that France and Germany exerted a lot of political pressure to grant Qatar with the World Cup because of their financial interests and they’re the two biggest economies in Europe. In Blatter’s own words, there was a lot of “political pressure from European countries…because there were so many economic interests. Two of these countries pressured the voting men in FIFA: France and Germany…I think the heads of state of these two countries should also express what they think of this situation.” 

March 2014: Only I Can Beat Sepp Blatter In FIFA Elections – Platini

“Only one person can beat Blatter,” Platini said at UEFA congress in Astana (quotes from Reuters). 

Platini told the UEFA Congress he would have more meetings with European football leaders in coming months before announcing whether he would stand for FIFA.

“I will give my answer after the World Cup. There will be a series of meetings with European federation officials. Maybe 99% of them will say ‘we prefer that you stay at UEFA’, that could also be an element of reflection” in the decision, Platini said.

Meanwhile, the Frenchman earlier blasted the world federation’s lack of action over secretive companies owning players as he stepped up a war of nerves with Blatter. Platini said the so-called ‘third party ownership’ of players is a “danger” to football.

May 2014: Sepp Blatter: awarding 2022 World Cup to Qatar was a mistake

“Yes, it was a mistake of course, but one makes lots of mistakes in life,” said Blatter, Fifa’s president, in an interview with the Swiss broadcaster RTS. “The technical report into Qatar said clearly it was too hot but the executive committee – with a large majority – decided all the same to play it in Qatar.”

… Blatter is believed to have voted for the USA to host the 2022 World Cup while his prospective rival for the presidency, Uefa’s Michel Platini, voted for Qatar and has been closely linked in the public mind with the controversial plans for the 2022 tournament.

The Fifa inspection team ranked Qatar as the only “high risk” option overall, yet it was still chosen by 14 of the 22 voting members of the executive committee in December 2010. ….. 

Platini and others have denied being influenced by their heads of state into voting for Qatar for business reasons. ….. 

“I will never say that they bought it, because it was political pushing. Really, both in France and Germany,” said Blatter, who has previously claimed there was “definitely direct political influence” on European executive committee members to vote for Qatar.

France’s foreign ministry said the assertion was “without foundation”, despite the fact that Platini has admitted to attending a high level meeting with former president Nicolas Sarkozy and the now Qatari Emir.

 

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Posted in Behaviour, Corruption, Football, Sport, World Cup | 1 Comment »

Half of Newton’s papers were on religion, 10% on alchemy and only 30% on science and math

May 16, 2014

Unlike Alfred Nobel who I posted about recently, Isaac Newton left no will when he died in 1727. But he left behind him a mass of papers estimated to run to about 10 million words. But most of the notes he left behind dealt with religious subjects and alchemy and his views were not just politically incorrect but potentially embarrassing if not dangerous to his heirs.

Wired has interviewed Sarah Dry who has just published her book on “The Newton Papers“.

Wired: He wrote a forensic analysis of the Bible in an effort to decode divine prophecies. He held unorthodox religious views, rejecting the doctrine of the Holy Trinity. After his death, Newton’s heir, John Conduitt, the husband of his half-niece Catherine Barton, feared that one of the fathers of the Enlightenment would be revealed as an obsessive heretic. And so for hundreds of years few people saw his work. It was only in the 1960s that some of Newton’s papers were widely published.

Now of course The Newton Project is putting all of his papers online and they have so far transcribed about 6.4 million words:

The Newton Project is a non-profit organization dedicated to publishing in full an online edition of all of Sir Isaac Newton’s (1642–1727) writings — whether they were printed or not. The edition presents a full (diplomatic) rendition featuring all the amendments Newton made to his own texts or a more readable (normalised) version. We also make available translations of his most important Latin religious texts.

Although Newton is best known for his theory of universal gravitation and discovery of calculus, his interests were much broader than is usually appreciated. In addition to his celebrated scientific and mathematical writings, Newton also wrote many alchemical and religious texts.

Sarah Dry traces the history of the Newton papers and how they languished over the years. It was not perhaps by conspiracy but there was some clear apprehension that sorting and cataloguing them would be embarrassing because there was so much of a “heretical” nature:

Sarah Dry in Wired: There’s roughly 10 million words that Newton left. Around half of the writing is religious, and there are about 1 million words on alchemical material, most of which is copies of other people’s stuff. There are about 1 million words related to his work as Master of the Mint. And then roughly 3 million related to science and math.

…… one of the messages of the book is that getting too involved in the papers can be hazardous to your health. One of the first editors of the papers said an older man should take up the task, because he’d have less to lose than a younger man.

This is highly technical stuff. The alchemical stuff is technical, the scientific stuff is technical, the religious stuff is technical. I was more interested in the papers and the characters that worked on them. One person was David Brewster, who wrote a biography of Newton during the Victorian Era. He fought long and hard to resuscitate Newton’s reputation. But he was also one of these Victorians that had to tell the truth. So when he published his biography [in 1855], it included much of the heresy and alchemy, despite the fact that Brewster was a good orthodox Protestant.

…. When the papers came to Cambridge in the late 1800s, they were unsorted and chaotic. And the two men given to sorting them were John Couch Adams and George Stokes. Adams was the co-discoverer of Neptune. He famously never wrote anything down. And Stokes was just as great a physicist, but he wrote everything down. He in fact wrote 10,000 letters. So these two guys get the papers, and then they sit on them for 16 years; they basically procrastinate.

When actually confronted with Newton’s paper, they were horrified and dismayed. Here was this great scientific hero. But he also wrote about alchemy and even more about religious matters. Newton spent a long time writing a lot of unfinished treatises. Sometimes he would produce six or seven copies of the same thing. And I think it was disappointing to see your intellectual father copying this stuff over and over. So the way Adams and Stokes dealt with it was to say that, “His power of writing a beautiful hand was evidently a snare to him.” Basically, they said he didn’t like this stuff, he just liked his own writing.

There’s also Grace Babson, who created the largest collection of Newton objects and papers in America. She was married to a man who got rich predicting the crash of 1929. And Roger Babson [her husband] based his market research on Newtonian principles, using the idea that for every action there is an equal an opposite reaction. The market goes up so it must come down. Interestingly, he thought of gravity as an evil scourge.

Clearly people felt that tarnishing Newton’s image was a heresy in itself and they felt that publicising his stranger writings could do such damage to their icon. But the time since his death is critical here. Newton’s image  is now immune to such damage. I think that no matter how weird his views may have been about the Bible and prophecies and the occult and alchemy, they cannot – now – detract from his work on maths and physics and motion.

But his catalogers have a point. If one part of his work had been  debunked or ridiculed soon after his death, it could have damaged his reputation and even the credibility of his work in Physics and Maths. It is common practice now – as it was common practice then – for detractors to attack an opponent’s views on one subject obliquely, by denigrating his views or work in some other field. Wrong thinking in one field – by association – becomes wrong thinking in all fields.

It may have been different if they had TV in those days. For if Newton had lived in today’s world it could well be that his eminence in Physics and Maths  would have made him an instant TV pundit on all subjects. We would be suffering the pain of listening him to expound on his other weird and wonderful ideas. As we all must endure when we have to listen to actors pontificating about environmental science or psychiatrists excusing errant behaviour or politicians pretending they understand economics!!

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Indian Election: All over? Runaway victory for Modi as B/C ratio soars to over 4.6

May 16, 2014

It is definitely all over now. Narendra Modi will be the next Prime Minister and he will not have to depend on any allies for his majority. Even the Shiv Sena will be superfluous. Mamata in W Bengal and Jayalalitha in Tamil Nadu have had landslide wins but Modi will not need to be beholden to them. For the first time in 30 years a coalition will not be necessary. The Aam Admi party made a poor showing, reinforcing the view that they make a lot of noise but are scared of governing. Congress may get less than 50 seats (!!) and be reduced to little more than a rump.

1045: It is less than 3 hours since counting began and it is looking like a runaway victory for Modi and a melt-down for Congress. The B/C ratio is reaching stratospheric heights at 4.6 (318/69).

1030: B/C ratio soars to 4.05 (304/75). An absolute and a very comfortable majority for Narendra Modi is emerging. Post election haggling and sops to regional fanatics may not be needed. Varun Gandhi has won in Sultanpur. Rahul Gandhi is behind in Amethi. 

1015: B/C ratio now at 3.58 (301/ 84). Comfortable majority in sight for BJP. Profit taking apparent as Sensex comes off its euphoric highs. 

0945: B/C at 3.45 (287/83) while Sensex climbs 1400 points (5+%) today

0930: B/C ratio soars to 3.63. Leads Total: 436, BJP+ 243; Congress+ 67, Others 128. BSE Sensex up about 1000 points (4%)

0915: Leads: Total: 318, BJP+ 174; Congress+ 64, Others 80. B/ C = 2.72

0900 IST: Leads — Total: 296, BJP+ 165; Congress+ 61, Others +70. B/C = 2.7

The B/C ratio has been running at 2.5 – 2.7 through the first hour.

If the first hour of vote counting is representative of what is to come BJP will end up with around 2.5 – 2.7 times as many seats as Congress. So if Congress could end up with around 90 – 100 seats then BJP will get around 240 – 260. 

0800: Counting has begun. About 8,000 candidates, 1.8 million voting machines and about 550 million votes to be counted.

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