Wednesday, August 27, 2003

Quotes !

My wife and I were happy for twenty years. Then we met."

"I drink to make other people interesting."

"A man's only as old as the woman he feels."

"Time is never wasted when you're wasted all the time."

"I can resist everything except temptation."

"I'm very pleased to be here. Let's face it, at my age I'm very pleased to be anywhere."

"Bigamy is having one wife too many. Monogamy is the same."

"I wouldn't be caught dead marrying a woman old enough to be my wife."

"At my age I do what Mark Twain did. I get my daily paper, look at the obituaries page and if I'm not there I carry on as usual."

"I drink therefore I am."

"I've had bad luck with both my wives. The first one left me and the second one didn't."

Web Services

Web Services and Semantic Web

Web services integrate programs across applications, across boundaries.

Semantic Web integrate data across applications, across boundaries.

Web Services : Program
Semantic Web : Data


Everything has a URI

Don't say "color" say

Can be encoded in XML
Simplicity and mathematical consistency
This is called Resource Description Framework (RDF)

RDF: Semantic Links join the web. ( Name: Who, Zip : Where)

Events connected to people, Flights connected to place, MAp connected to addressbook, people

The beauty Bizz

$160 billion-a-year global industry

A curvy body, with big breasts and a waist-to-hip ratio of less than 0.8?( Barbie's is 0.54 ) ?shows an ideal stage of readiness for conception

an American scientist, logged the mating preferences of more than 10,000 people across 37 cultures. It found that a woman's physical attractiveness came top or near top of every man's list

Paul Beiersdorf, a Hamburg pharmacist, developed the first cream to bind oil and water. Today, it sells in 150 countries as Nivea, the biggest personal-care brand in the world

On launching her famous eight-hour cream, developed for her horses, Arden quipped: ?I judge a woman and a horse by the same criteria: legs, head and rear end.?

Beauty firms spend just 2-3% of their sales on research & development?compared with 15% by the pharmaceuticals industry. On the other hand, they spend a whopping 20-25% on advertising and promotion.

Cosmetic surgery, already a $20 billion business, is growing and innovating by leaps and bounds. The number of cosmetic procedures have increased in America by over 220% since 1997. Old favourites, such as liposuction, breast implants and nose jobs, are being overtaken by botox injections to freeze the facial muscles that cause wrinkles. With the number of these up by more than 2,400% since 1997, botox injections have become the most common procedure of all.

The newest lines are bottom implants, fat inserts to plump up ageing hands, and fillers like Restylane and Perlane for facial wrinkles. Cosmetic dentistry is also a booming business. Jeff Golub, Manhattan dentist to stars like Kim Catrall of ?Sex and the City?, dubs himself a ?smile designer?. ?We are able to create all sorts of illusions,? he says. ?The smile has become a fashion statement.

An 18th-century British law proposing to allow husbands to annul marriages to wives who had trapped them with ?scents, paints, artificial teeth, false hair and iron stays?, had no effect on women, who continued to clamour for the latest French skin creams.

During the second world war, the American government had to reverse a decision to remove lipstick from its list of essential commodities in order to prevent a rebellion by female war workers. The beauty business?the selling of ?hope in a jar?, as Charles Revson, the founder of Revlon, once called it?is as permanent as its effects are ephemeral.

Food for thought

From Scientific American...

According to the fossil record, the australopithecines never became much brainier than living apes, showing only a modest increase in brain size, from around 400 cubic centimeters four million years ago to 500 cubic centimeters two million years later. Homo brain sizes, in contrast, ballooned from 600 cubic centimeters in H. habilis some two million years ago up to 900 cubic centimeters in early H. erectus just 300,000 years later. The H. erectus brain did not attain modern human proportions (1,350 cubic centimeters on average), but it exceeded that of living nonhuman primates.

From a nutritional perspective, what is extraordinary about our large brain is how much energy it consumes-- roughly 16 times as much as muscle tissue per unit weight. Yet although humans have much bigger brains relative to body weight than do other primates (three times larger than expected), the total resting energy requirements of the human body are no greater than those of any other mammal of the same size. We therefore use a much greater share of our daily energy budget to feed our voracious brains. In fact, at rest brain metabolism accounts for a whopping 20 to 25 percent of an adult human's energy needs-- far more than the 8 to 10 percent observed in nonhuman primates, and more still than the 3 to 5 percent allotted to the brain by other mammals.

How did such an energetically costly brain evolve? One theory, developed by Dean Falk of Florida State University, holds that bipedalism enabled hominids to cool their cranial blood, thereby freeing the heat-sensitive brain of the temperature constraints that had kept its size in check.But brain expansion almost certainly could not have occurred until hominids adopted a diet sufficiently rich in calories and nutrients to meet the associated costs.


Across all primates, species with bigger brains dine on richer foods, and humans are the extreme example of this correlation, boasting the largest relative brain size and the choicest diet
contemporary hunter-gatherers derive, on average, 40 to 60 percent of their dietary energy from animal foods (meat, milk and other products). Modern chimps, in comparison, obtain only 5 to 7 percent of their calories from these comestibles. Animal foods are far denser in calories and nutrients than most plant foods. For example, 3.5 ounces of meat provides upward of 200 kilocalories. But the same amount of fruit provides only 50 to 100 kilocalories. And a comparable serving of foliage yields just 10 to 20 kilocalories

that the earliest H. erectus sites outside of Africa, which are in Indonesia and the Republic of Georgia, date to between 1.8 million and 1.7 million years ago. It seems that the first appearance of H. erectus and its initial spread from Africa were almost simultaneous.


The impetus behind this newfound wanderlust again appears to be food. What an animal eats dictates to a large extent how much territory it needs to survive. Carnivorous animals generally require far bigger home ranges than do herbivores of comparable size because they have fewer total calories available to them per unit area.

Innovations such as cooking, agriculture and even aspects of modern food technology can all be considered tactics for boosting the quality of the human diet. Cooking, for one, augmented the energy available in wild plant foods. With the advent of agriculture, humans began to manipulate marginal plant species to increase their productivity, digestibility and nutritional content-- essentially making plants more like animal foods

it is not just changes in diet that have created many of our pervasive health problems but the interaction of shifting diets and changing lifestyles. Too often modern health problems are portrayed as the result of eating "bad" foods that are departures from the natural human diet--an oversimplification embodied by the current debate over the relative merits of a high-protein, high-fat Atkins-type diet or a low-fat one that emphasizes complex carbohydrates. This is a fundamentally flawed approach to assessing human nutritional needs. Our species was not designed to subsist on a single, optimal diet. What is remarkable about human beings is the extraordinary variety of what we eat. We have been able to thrive in almost every ecosystem on the earth, consuming diets ranging from almost all animal foods among populations of the Arctic to primarily tubers and cereal grains among populations in the high Andes. Indeed, the hallmarks of human evolution have been the diversity of strategies that we have developed to create diets that meet our distinctive metabolic requirements and the ever increasing efficiency with which we extract energy and nutrients from the environment. The challenge our modern societies now face is balancing the calories we consume with the calories we burn.

Movie Physics

http://www.intuitor.com/moviephysics/
Stupid movie Physics

The vast majority of bullets are made of copper-clad lead. They simply don't create bright flashes of light when they strike objects

Gasoline has a very narrow flammable range of about 0.8 to 6% gasoline vapor in air. In other words, the vapor-air mixture must be exactly as specified or the gas will not burn, let alone explode! Note that we say vapor.

For a car to explode during impact the tank must catastrophically rupture and spew a fine mist of gasoline over a large area so it can vaporize and mix with air in exactly the right proportions. The mixture must then find a source of ignition. Automobile gas tanks are built to withstand a considerable impact force and are usually located in a protected area between the beams of a car's frame. Common ignition sources in the car's engine are generally at the other end of the vehicle.
Even when a wrecked car catches on fire it rarely explodes. A gas tank can explode if it contains an explosive mixture and there's an opening for the flames to enter.

A shattered window contains thousands of incredibly sharp edges and dagger-like points. It takes almost no force for one of these points or edges to cause a laceration. However, people in movies routinely jump through plate glass windows without receiving a single scratch.. In the real world, jumping or driving through a plate glass window would be suicidal.Laminated safety glass adds a thin layer of plastic sandwiched between glass layers. This helps keep pieces of broken glass from becoming projectiles

The general principle is that each additional meter of height is like adding the kinetic energy of another .45 cal bullet. Hence, a mere six-meter (19.8-foot) fall, which would be routine for an action hero, compares to being simultaneously shot by six .45 cal bullets, from a kinetic energy standpoint.bullets are incredibly lethal because they can easily penetrate into vital organs. A fall on a sidewalk would lack the penetration. However, it's pretty hard to completely avoid injury from being shot point blank six times with a .45 let alone 18 times, even when wearing a bulletproof vest.

Expanded objects or persons would have such low densities that they would be blown away in the wind like big balloons. Tiny people would suddenly exert huge pressures under their little feet since the area of their feet would be miniscule but their weight the same

Outerspace lasers are another matter. There's no air and few particles to make them visible. To make matters worse, some movies show laserbeams shooting through outerspace like glowing spears. All light, including laserlight, travels at 3×108 m/s or 186,000 mi/s (in a vacuum), so fast that the human eye couldn't possibly detect the motion of a laserbeam even if it were in the form of a glowing spear. The afterimage of the moving light source would make it appear as a continuous beam from the source to the target.

By contrast the movie has a scene in which the Hulk holds his love interest King-Cong-like in his fist. The Hulk would have to be at least ten times taller than his normal self to do so. If scaled up proportionally, the Hulk would be 1000 times more massive than his human form, but it gets worse. The comic book makers correctly gave the Hulk thicker legs and a more stout body. We say correctly because, like an elephant, he would need the thicker legs to support his increased mass. Unfortunately, increased stoutness means even more mass. The movie hulk would probably end up with at least 1500 times more mass than his human counterpart and a weight in excess of 100 tons ( 91,000 kg, assuming no density difference between hulk and human forms). Where is this mass supposed to come from?

In one scene the Hulk leaps up and grabs hold of a fighter aircraft. The Aircraft immediately heads for the stratosphere and shakes off the Hulk by causing him to pass out from lack of oxygen. Keep in mind that a fully loaded jet fighter weighs only about 15 tons. Even if we ignore the drag and other aerodynamic effects of having the hulk attached, we still have to wonder how a 15 ton aircraft can lift a 975 ton Hulk.

For example, the scale-up fallacy indicates that a strand of spider web scaled up by a factor of 100 would still be able to carry 50 times the spider's weight if it could carry 50 times the weight of a spider in its normal size. Unfortunately, it doesn't work that way. The scaled-up web will only be able to carry half the spider's weight even though the web material is still stronger than steel. The diameter of the web strand would have to be increased by a total factor of 10,000 not merely 100 in order to carry 50 times the oversized spider's weight.

Technologies that'll change the world

Google Toolbar Installed

Three-D printing is changing the world of product design. These printers typically shape objects by laying down materials, such as wax or plaster, one layer upon the other. A small model can take as little as an hour to create, and some printers can create objects in full color. Three-D printing is being used to design everything from children's strollers at Graco to running shoes at New Balance and Reebok, allowing designers and engineers to show their work earlier in the process, make changes with less fuss, and get new products to market faster

the way that power is generated in the United States looks a lot like the old world of mainframe computers, says Chip Schroeder, CEO of Proton Energy, the Connecticut company installing the hydrogen system at Mohegan Sun. A few big, clunky plants are connected together in what's known as "the grid." In some ways, that system is efficient -- it's the cheapest way that we know to produce and distribute electricity -- but in other ways, it's terrible. Electricity is lost as it's transmitted over long distances. No one likes living next to a massive power plant. And the huge capital investments mean that old, expensive plants keep running long after cleaner, more efficient technology becomes available. the new power network will look a lot more like the Internet than the outmoded mainframe model. Smaller generating facilities -- some using solar, wind, and other renewable energy technologies and others using scaled-down gas-fired turbines -- will be widely distributed and placed closer to where the power is actually being used. They will be more easily upgradeable. The power will be more reliable, because most outages are caused by distribution problems, like a downed line.

The promise of smart tags is that they could serve as an advanced version of the omnipresent UPC bar code, providing information about not just what a product is, but also where it is, where it has been, and how it has been handled. A smart-tag reader in a warehouse, truck, or store can "query" all of the smart tags in its vicinity, taking inventory without human help. Smart tags are also being affixed to refrigerated containers to make sure that food is stored at the right temperature. The tipping point for smart tags will likely arrive by 2005, when Wal-Mart will require its top 100 suppliers to attach them to each forklift pallet of products they deliver to the retailer.

Tuesday, August 26, 2003

Delaying forever

Intel Fellow and Director of Circuit Research Shekhar Borkar speaks....

The transistors are becoming so small that the atoms and molecules that used to look like a continuum now look like discretes. We will shift from the deterministic designs of today to probabilistic and statistical designs of the future.

if you take a thousand samples of Intel® Pentium® 4 processors, there is some speed variation from chip to chip. Some high-speed ones, some low-speed ones, some average ones, all in a nice Gaussian distribution.

In the future, a chip will have millions, if not billions of transistors. Each transistor has a probability of meeting the performance target. In the past, the spread of this probability was very small. But in the future, due to variability in individual transistors, the whole chip could yield different results

. I want to be connected anytime, anywhere, wherever I go in the world. If I connect with a wire, I can get 10 Gbit over the wire. But if I remove the wire while I'm sitting in the airplane, at least I can get 100 megabit/second using a radio. The radio is free in the sense that I don't even know there is an integrated radio in my device. I can either hook up my cell phone or put up an antenna. But it's seamless. I remove my wire and I don't even know it. It might be a little slower, but that's OK.

Radio Free Intel is the vision of adding wireless capabilities to every device by integrating the radio circuits and systems directly into every component. By using the cost and high-volume advantages of standard CMOS (complementary metal-oxide semiconductor) processes, Radio Free Intel will make wireless connectivity ubiquitous and ultimately, easier for people to use.

Today you are limited by power. The practical limit is around 75 watts, because if you look at the cost of cooling, that too will start increasing exponentially. No one is going to buy a thousand-dollar refrigerator to cool a thousand-dollar PC!

So you have to go back and ask the question, "How can I improve my computing efficiency for the power?"

That's where the threading comes in. Right now, there is a wide disparity between processor speed at 3GHz and bus speed at 400 or 800Mhz. This gap results in the processor waiting for a long time when it makes a request to the external memory. With threading, when the processor's execution unit is waiting for data from external memory, a new thread kicks in and uses the execution unit.

During the research, our mentor provides any help and guidance that the student needs. The student comes here for internship. Our mentor is usually on the student's PhD committee, so the mentor is very engaged . Roughly half of our staff in circuit research has come from the mentoring that we have done. We know the quality of employees we're getting, because we helped build their expertise.

Our vision is that in the future, you will have a CPU with a general-purpose processor, and a bunch of power-efficient fixed-point hardware such as the TCP/IP Offload Engine, MPEG encode/decode, and a graphics engine to handle dedicated functions that don't change at all. The general and special-purpose processors will be on the same die, doing the things that they are good at doing, and doing them power efficiently. This is like the System-on-a-Chip (SOC) initiative that the industry is talking about.

Gordon Moore showed a slide saying that for every ant in the world today, there are 100 transistors. Today, transistors already outnumber ants. But my job is to grow the transistor number to 10,000 transistors for every ant. Think of each transistor as a mini-calculator. We'd like to see 100 times more transistors in the world for more computing power

today Intel products are being developed on 65nm technology. In the labs, our research is focused on 45nm and beyond. That's four to six, or eight years out. Now we're working with the universities to do research on 30nm and beyond for products that are at least eight to ten years out in the future.

And they'll succeed. If you never tell a PhD student "this is impossible," they'll just quietly go and do it.

Friday, August 08, 2003

Who'll pay for Internet Content ?

Borders is a co-founder of Borders Group, the $3.4 billion company that today is the nation's second-largest bookseller. He is also the man behind the great bust of Webvan, the billion-dollar online grocer.
Borders now launches KeepMedia a subscription-based stuff for magazines such as Business Week, U.S. News and World Report and Esquire. Though it's an idea that's already been tried and failed, Borders believes KeepMedia is different and will prove to be a superior online brand, because, he says, it offers quality publications and convenience

His biggest challenge would be to convince Web surfers to pay to access archived online content.

"One thing that struck us is that the movie business (gets) two-thirds of their money from their archives, while magazines are getting zero. That's a huge pool of content that's not monetized at all"

"Magazines are tremendous brands with great communities, but they're underutilized. So, if we can put them together to help us build a brand, then we can in turn give them a revenue stream that's essentially paying them to better utilize their brand. It's like a mall. You know the stores inside"

The biggest thing that happened in paid content this year so far was when AOL announced that their Time magazines were going to go behind the AOL pay wall, which is a huge statement that paid content is the way to go. We were pretty excited about that. The more content that moves behind the pay wall, the more willing people will be to pay. "

"it's at about 15 percent of the Web population that's paying for content right now".Very soon, you'll see that the content that's left to be free is content that will not be trusted;

Where do you think previous ventures in selling content, such as Contentville, failed?

Contentville is an interesting example. In some ways, it was the right idea. But it was the wrong time, because people were not paying for content three years ago. They also did some things that killed them--mistakes that we won't make. One is they created content and distributed it, so anyone in the business was leery of being on its platform because they saw it as a competitor. We will never do that. Another was an execution error: They mixed really high-quality content with Joe's dissertation on something. And strongly branded publishers don't like to see their content next to second-rate content.

I see the Googles of the world like the freeways, where you're going from one place to the next, and that's the place to go. They have a very viable business being the main artery across the Internet. Our approach is to be a walled garden, where we bring in this very high-quality content. As a consumer, you would certainly want to use the freeway and the walled garden for different needs"
What makes you excited about the Internet right now?
The Internet is for real. The bubble has burst on the dot-coms, but it's amazing--its traffic numbers, its usage. I'm amazed at how much smarter people will be just because they have access.








Real and the Gaming World.

In the multiplayer EverQuest" a black market exchange exists between the EverQuest characters, items and US Dollars. Sony has outlawed the exchange of EverQuest items for real money.

You can purchase upgrades or trade characters for real money.

This paper proposes a revenue model for massively multiplayer gaming based on copying the real world economy enough to give players a more exciting game. By allowing and encouraging the free convertibility of money in the real world with money in the game world, it will be possible for the game host to literally “make a fortune" by selling goods, services, and virtual real estate to the players.

Some early virtual worlds created on the Internet had unlimited virtual resources. Players quickly grew bored with them. As virtual gaming has developed two crucial ingredients have surfaced as keys to success: scarcity and competition against other players.

The ideal gaming economic model requires a virtual world with a limited amount of space, energy, raw materials, money and real estate that players can compete for. Players may be able to take the raw materials in the game and convert them to other usable objects to help them advance in their competition against other players.

Currently, in all games, except online casinos, the only investment the player makes is his time. There is no significant monetary outlay risked in the pursuit of the reward. Likewise, the rewards offered in MM games are primarily social interactions with other players.

Virtual objects in the game world cost nothing for the host to create, but may be of sufficient economic value to players to warrant spending money to obtain them.

For example, there might be a dragon in the game world guarding a treasure horde. One of the treasure items might be a virtual jewel that is actually a digital title to a real precious gem in a vault in the real world. The player who defeats the dragon and obtains the virtual gem may “cash it out" for the real gem.

the fact that players can cash out game items means that the game host must extensively test the game model to make sure that the money players take out is less than they put in at least 51% of the time. In other words, the game model is now like a virtual casino where the odds need to be geared in favor of the house or else the game will go bankrupt.

The more economic exchange that takes place inside the game, the higher the value of virtual objects in the game will be. This in turn will raise the value that players are willing to pay in order to obtain virtual real estate inside the game. However, unlike the Everquest scenario, the free convertibility of game money to real world money will prevent in-game inflation from getting out of hand.

The cost of populating the game world for the game company will be the value of the precious metals and precious stones backing the ore deposits, money, and treasures inside the game
Pecunix has solved this problem by creating a system that can handle all exchanges of value into and out of the game world. Pecunix is not a bank, and the accounts are not in national currency, so anyone of any age can open an Pecunix account for free. Pecunix debit cards are also available to anyone with an account regardless of age. It works at real ATM machines and POS terminals worldwide.


Monday, August 04, 2003

In search of Stupidity

The race goes not to the strong, nor swift, nor more intelligent but to the less stupid


100 largest personal computer software publishers in 1984
#1 Micropro International $60,Mn
#2 Microsoft Corp. $55,Mn
#3 Lotus $53 Mn
#4 Digital Research $45 Mn
#5 VisiCorp $43Mn
#6 Ashton-Tate $35Mn
#7 Peachtree $21Mn
#8 MicroFocus $15Mn
#9 Software Publishing $14Mn
#10 Broderbund $13Mn

Same list for 2001
#1 Microsoft Corp. $23Bn
#2 Adobe $1Bn
#3 Novell $1Bn
#4 Intuit $1Bn
#5 Autodesk $926Mn
#6 Symantec $790Mn
#7 Network Associates $745Mn
#8 Citrix $479Mn
#9 Macromedia $295Mn
#10 Great Plains $250Mn

every single company except Microsoft has disappeared from the top ten. The personal computer software market is Microsoft. Microsoft’s revenues, it turns out, make up 69% of the total revenues of all the top 100 companies combined.

Is this just superior marketing, as our imaginary geek claims? Or the result of an illegal monopoly? (Which begs the question: how did Microsoft get that monopoly? You can’t have it both ways

the answer is simpler: Microsoft was the only company on the list that never made a fatal, stupid mistake.

But for every other software company that once had market leadership and saw it go down the drain, you can point to one or two giant blunders that steered the boat into an iceberg. Micropro fiddled around rewriting the printer architecture instead of upgrading their flagship product, WordStar. Lotus wasted a year and a half shoehorning 123 to run on 640kb machines; by the time they were done Excel was shipping and 640kb machines were a dim memory. Digital Research wildly overcharged for CP/M-86 and lost a chance to be the de-facto standard for PC operating systems. VisiCorp sued themselves out of existence. Ashton-Tate never missed an opportunity to piss off dBase developers, poisoning the fragile ecology that is so vital to a platform vendor’s success.

Netscape’s monumental decision to rewrite their browser instead of improving the old code base cost them several years of Internet time, during which their market share went from around 90% to about 4%, and this was the programmers’ idea



India Vs China

Foreign Policy:
China focussed on getting as much foreign investment ina s possible. It did get them, on a scale much larger than India . During the last 20 years, the Chinese economy has taken off, but few local firms have followed, leaving the country’s private sector with no world-class companies to rival the big multinationals.

But India has managed to spawn a number of companies that now compete internationally with the best that Europe and the United States have to offer. Many of these firms are in the most cutting-edge, knowledge-based industries—software giants Infosys and Wipro and pharmaceutical and biotechnology powerhouses Ranbaxy and Dr. Reddy’s Labs, to name just a few. Last year, the Forbes 200, an annual ranking of the world’s best small companies, included 13 Indian firms but just four from mainland China.

India has also developed much stronger infrastructure to support private enterprise. Its capital markets operate with greater efficiency and transparency than do China’s. Its legal system, while not without substantial flaws, is considerably more advanced.

China and India are the world’s next major powers but their development is a study in contrast. In GDP figures and other headline numbers, India is still no match for China.

India is increasingly building from the ground up while China is still pursuing a top-down approach.

In China, Foreign investors have been among the biggest beneficiaries of the constraints placed on local private businesses.

While China has created obstacles for its entrepreneurs, India has been making life easier for local businesses. During the last decade, New Delhi has backed away from micromanaging the economy. True, privatization is proceeding at a glacial pace, but the government has ceded its monopoly over long-distance phone service; some tariffs have been cut; bureaucracy has been trimmed a bit; and a number of industries have been opened to private investment, including investment from abroad.

In China, bureaucrats remain the gatekeepers, tightly controlling capital allocation and severely restricting the ability of private companies to obtain stock market listings and access the money they need to grow. Compounding the problem are poor corporate governance and the absence of an independent judiciary.

WHy has India lagged behind ? that India’s economic reforms only began in earnest in 1991, more than a decade after China began liberalizing. In addition to the late start, India has had to make do with a national savings rate half that of China’s and 90 percent less FDI. Moreover, India is a sprawling, messy democracy riven by ethnic and religious tensions, and it has also had a longstanding, volatile dispute with Pakistan over Kashmir. China, on the other hand, has enjoyed two decades of relative tranquility; apart from Tiananmen Square, it has been able to focus almost exclusively on economic development.

That India’s annual growth rate is only around 20 percent lower than China’s is, then, a remarkable achievement

In a followup interview they note...
Here are our concerns for India. How will India rein in its fiscal deficit? How will India discipline its political class? One challenge India faces is deregulation. India is also quite over-regulated compared to other countries at its level of per capita income.

In India, it( this article) has spread by word of mouth and been reprinted in numerous newspapers and magazines. In China, one is hard pressed to find public discussion of the article; though the message is being discussed, we've been told, in other, less transparent forums. This is, in some sense, part of the very point of the article!







Friday, August 01, 2003

Vatican launches campaign against gay marriage

Salon.com News | Vatican launches campaign against gay marriage: "-- The Vatican launched a global campaign against gay marriages"

The Vatican launched a global campaign against gay marriages claiming
"Marriage is holy, while homosexual acts go against the natural moral law "

Interesting to note that Vatican is the sole authority on definition of the following terms

Marriage (Bertrand Russel argues Christianity's goal of marriage is Fornication prevention and procreation, in that order.

Holy ( Vatican's writ rules. It can define anything as Holy and unholy by an aptly named Papal bull :o)

natural ( is masturbation natural ? is divine conception natural ? Who defines what is natural ?

moral ( Is idolatory moral ? Is child abuse by priests moral? Who defines morality ? )
law

homosexual acts ( Interesting to note vatican is not against Homosexuality but against homosexual marriages. So who defines what Homosexual acts are ? Is kissing a homosexual act? Holding hands ? Coy looks ? )

The document comes after an appeals court in Ontario, Canada ruled in June that Canada's definition of marriage as only between a man and a woman is unconstitutional. That paved the way for legalized gay unions there.