Month: July 2013

• World Bank and Mother India!

  So I was queued up at the university train-ticket shop. A middle-aged man was sitting on a sofa while his wife was buying tickets to some destination. Bound by my old habit of starting conversations with total strangers, true to form and tradition, I started a conversation with him. After the initial hi-hello, he asked […]

  rrameez

  July 30, 2013

  Abuse of Science, Economics, Social Science

  Farmers Suicide, free markets, IMF, Indian Farmers, Kaushik Basu, Mother India, Nargis, Neoliberalism, World Bank

• Eric Schmidt’s Nightmare

  The night of the happy day when Eric Schmidt, former CEO of Google had declared to the world that privacy was not that important and that if you have something that you don’t want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn’t be doing it in the first place, he had a dream that he had died and had ascended […]

  rrameez

  July 26, 2013

  Abuse of Science, Distributed Systems, Engineering, Science Debates, Social Science

  Ads, Big Octopus, Edward Snowden, Eric Schmidt, Google, Google Glass, NSA, Prism, Privacy

• Hippocratic oath or Hypocritic oath

  I remember around 10 years back, a friend who is a doctor, went to an impoverished locality in Karachi with a team to vaccinate children against some disease(s). Their team was harassed by some ignorant and mostly illiterate people who felt that such vaccination campaigns are part of a “western conspiracy” to harm them. “Why […]

  rrameez

  July 14, 2013

  Abuse of Science, Social Science

  Abbottabad, CIA, Hippocratic oath, Hypocritic oath, Osama bin Laden, Pakistan, polio, St. Augustine

• Abdus Salam and Galileo: The separation of science from religion (and philosophy)

  Dr Abdus Salam, the late Pakistani particle physicist is the only Muslim physicist till date to have been awarded the Nobel Prize. Dr Salam was rare among modern day scientists in that he was a devout Muslim. While most modern scientists are not concerned with religious matters, Dr Salam found his inspiration for science in religion.

  rrameez

  July 6, 2013

  Abuse of Science, History of Science, Philosophy, Science Debates

  Abdus Salam, Copernicus, Galileo, Inquisition, Lawrence Krauss, Philosophy, Ptolemy, Separation of science and religion, St. Augustine, The Assayer