Mindless Meanderings - Attempt 1

Some fun stuff from ideOS

The idea behind mindless meanderings is as follows: Start with an interesting topic, and continue reading web pages on that topic. When you come across any interesting but slightly different theme/topic while reading one of those pages, jump to that theme, and start reading web pages on that theme, and continue this process for a while. Publish what you find, and check out if this entire exercise holds any meaning at all.

I start the first attempt with the topic “The Iraq War”.

The Iraq War – “The Iraq War (2003- ), also known as the Second Gulf War, is a military engagement encompassing the invasion and occupation of Iraq by a U.S.-led coalition and an ongoing asymmetrical war between an insurgency and coalition troops as well as the New Iraqi Army, as well as escalating violence between the country's Shia and Sunni populations,” says The Wikipedia article.

Which kind of makes one want to dig up about asymmetrical warfare: Which was when I found this:

“Because asymmetrical war is a new kind of war, a war that is more about waging peace on many different levels than waging actual war itself, a war/peace in which accountants, logisticians, diplomats, economic experts will also be the front-line troops, it calls for a new kind of leadership — asymmetrical leadership.

Just as asymmetrical war is fluid, multi-dimensional, and global, asymmetrical leadership must be too. But we don’t have to create asymmetrical leadership from scratch. To some extent, it’s already being developed and modeled in a few forward-thinking American businesses. What does business leadership have to do with waging asymmetrical war? During the past 15 or 20 years, many businesses have had to compete in asymmetrical markets, markets that are global, multi-faceted and swiftly changing. To succeed in these markets, the leaders of these businesses have had to discard old leadership methods and practices and put into action new ones. In short, they’ve had to develop asymmetric leadership.” – says this article on leadership development from Leader Values

Thus I go on to what makes great leaders: This search lead me to a Time 100 Page on History’s Great Leaders. Most of the names I was familiar with, but only somewhat with that of Margaret Sanger.

I learnt from a brief on the Time that Margaret Sanger’s “crusade to legalize birth control spurred the movement for women's liberation”. While there were a number of web pages praising Sanger, I was intrigued by a web page titled “The Truth about Margaret Sanger: How Planned Parenthood Duped America” by the web site Black Genocide. While discussing some rather disturbing aspects of the “planned parenthood” program in the context of blacks and other minorities, the page says, “While Planned Parenthood's current apologists try to place some distance between the eugenics and birth control movements, history definitively says otherwise. The eugenic theme figured prominently in the Birth Control Review, which Sanger founded in 1917. She published such articles as "Some Moral Aspects of Eugenics" (June 1920), "The Eugenic Conscience" (February 1921), "The purpose of Eugenics" (December 1924), "Birth Control and Positive Eugenics" (July 1925), "Birth Control: The True Eugenics" (August 1928), and many others.”

That brings me to Eugenics. A search on eugenics brought me to the site Eugenics.net, but also more interestingly, to an article titled “IQ Will Put You in Place”. In this article, the author Charles Murray says:”A few years ago the late Richard Herrnstein and I published a controversial book about IQ, The Bell Curve, in which we said that much would depend on IQ. On average, the bright children from such (good and fortunate) families will do well in life - and the dull children will do poorly. Unemployment, poverty and illegitimacy will be almost as great among the children from even these fortunate families as they are in society at large - not quite as great, because a positive family background does have some good effect, but almost, because IQ is such an important factor.”…Hmmm, interesting, and time now to do a search on Intelligence Quotient.

This brought up a site called IQ Test, which offers “scientifically valid” IQ tests. What interested me was a statement in their FAQ section that categorized IQ Test scores and their intelligence level equivalents: The Standard Deviation of our test is currently 14.889. The mean score is currently 108.447 (Confounding variable: The lowest IQ holders will not be capable of using the internet to measure their own intelligence.) Now this is interesting – If some one who used this test to measure their intelligence was ranked in the lowest IQ category, then the test itself is not valid! This paradox got me thinking about paradoxes.

Which got me to a personal web page in which a few well-known paradoxes were presented. The one that interested me most was the “Impossibility of Time Travel”. The page does a nice job of explaining the paradoxes involved in time travel without appearing too dense. Talking of the “Grandfather Paradox” involved in time travel, the author states, “For instance, suppose the inventor of a time machine decides to use his invention to prevent the assassination of President Kennedy. He steps into the time machine in present-day Dallas and a moment later steps out on what looks like the morning of November 22, 1963. The newspaper confirms the date, everyone in the city is anticipating the President's visit, and so on. But this is not the November 22, 1963 that is recorded in the history books and in the memories of those who are old enough to remember that day. On the “original” November 22, 1963, our time traveler was not in Dallas, he did not buy this particular copy of the newspaper, and he did not surprise Oswald as the latter waited in ambush. This morning never existed before in the history of the universe. The time traveler, then, did not actually go back to November 22, 1963, i.e., he did not return to the date when Kennedy was in fact assassinated. So in that case, why would we claim that he went back in time? What he did was go to a parallel universe, one in which another set of events, some very similar to or even exactly like those that occurred in our universe, take place.” Interesting, isn’t it? That gets me to Kennedy’s assassination.

Reading many web pages on JFK’s assassination brought to my the notice bullets, and thus I did a search on the word bullets, which got me to an interesting web site How Do Bullets Fly?. While reading the detailed descriptions and pictures provided of flying bullets, I came across these sentences:”Causing a bullet to spin endows it with gyroscopic properties which are very important - but by no means exclusively - in maintaining bullet stability.”

I decided the next search will be on gyroscopes. An article on gyroscopes from HowStuffWorks about Gyroscopes says, “Gyroscopes can be very perplexing objects because they move in peculiar ways and even seem to defy gravity. These special properties make gyroscopes extremely important in everything from your bicycle to the advanced navigation system on the space shuttle.” Defying gravity? This was interesting.

A search on “defying gravity” got me into uncharted and confusing territories, finally landing me on a page where one of the items was “Man Sells Advertising Space on Neck to Support Family”.

I was sure many other (live) body parts were sold to advertisers as well, and on a search, found this article “Rent this Space: Bodies Double as Billboards” from USA Today.  Two statements stood out. “(A) Las Vegas woman says people always are looking at her breasts, anyway, so why not get paid for it?”…indeed, why not? And the second: “"Pregnant bellies are perfect (ad spots) for baby companies," says Ed Vallejo, co-owner of Belly Up Advertising, which helps connect advertisers with available body parts.”…am sure I have learnt a thing or two about innovative marketing. But now, on to the next hop.

I was torn between choosing bellies and 38D breasts for my next search, but vowing to keep it all as clean as possible, plonked for the bellies. I was hoping to find some web pages on sexy bellies of celebrities but the first interesting web page I came across was an article “Bacteria Thrive in Hostile Human Bellies” from Live Science. The article says “The medical community long believed that pretty much nothing from the outside could survive in the stomach's harsh environment. That view began to change in 1982, when two Australian scientists, Robin Warren and Barry Marshall, found spiral-shaped bacteria called Helicobacter pylori in human stomachs….Later experiments—including one where Marshal actually gave himself gastritis by drinking an h. pylori broth—confirmed their suspicions, and both Warren and Marshall were awarded the 2005 Nobel Prize in Medicine for their discovery. Since then, however, only a few other bacteria types have ever been found in the stomach. In the new study, researchers extracted snippets of genetic material from the stomachs of 19 people and found the biological blueprints of 128 bacteria types. Many of them had never been observed in the stomach before and 10 percent were previously unknown to science.”

The times are indeed a-changing, but not for the Nobel Prizes. They have been regarded as the most admired of the prizes for the last one hundred years, and they continue to be so admired even today. So, I’d end this mindless meanderings section with a search on Nobel Prize. Which actually brought up an often-asked question “Why Isn’t There a Nobel Prize for Maths”, and this time some answers were attempted at Yahoo Answers. Of course, many answered that it was because Alfred Nobel was weak in math (with some scandal-minded folks even suggesting a possible affair between Nobel’s wife and a mathematician!), I think the correct answer was the one about math not being a practical science.

This brings me to the end of the first try at Mindless Meanderings. I’m not sure if there will be a second.

This Mindless Meanderings attempt proceeded as follows:

Iraq War -> Asymmetrical War > Asymmetrical Leadership -> History’s Great Leaders -> Margaret Sanger -> Planned Parenthood -> Eugenics -> IQ -> Paradoxes -> Time Travel -> JFK Assassination -> Bullets -> Gyroscopes -> Defying Gravity -> Bellies -> Nobel Prizes

Am not really sure if this exercise meant anything to you, but if it (surprisingly) did, drop a note about your feedback to narsi@esource.in