Realm of the SCENSCI

A Confluence of Science, Politics, and Literature

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  • Gorky in the lower depths of mother Russia

    Maxim Gorky was arguably the most famous writer in the world at the turn of the 20th century. His novel Mother inspired millions of workers for generations. His play The Lower Depths, was among the first plays to detail the lives of the lower classes in a very realistic, unromantic manner.  But Gorky is now more or less […]

    rrameez

    February 25, 2014
    Arts and Modeling, Political Science
    1905, 1917, Bolshevism, Lenin, Maxim Gorky, Russian Revolution, Socialist realism, Stalin, Trotsky
  • Rational Fools

    Rational Fools

    Nobel Prize winning economist Amartya Sen, coined the term “Rational Fools” nearly 35 years ago. In his famous paper, Sen criticized the first principle of economics: “Every agent is actuated by only self-interest”. On top of this axiom of rational self-interest lie rational action and rational expectations, leading all the way up to the efficiency […]

    rrameez

    December 31, 2013
    Abuse of Science, History of Science, Modeling
    Capitalism, Commons, Efficient Markets, Elinor Ostrom, Game Theory, Milton Friedman, Noam Chomsky, Paul Krugman, Rational Action, Rational Fools
  • Dilip Kumar: The Chekhovian Amateur who redefined acting

    Dilip Kumar: The Chekhovian Amateur who redefined acting

    Anton Chekhov revolutionized modern playwriting and short stories. And he is one my favorite writers. Thus, I remember being confused when I first read that Hemingway had said the following about him: “Chekhov wrote about 6 good stories. But he was an amateur writer”. I have never quite been able to understand why Hemingway called […]

    rrameez

    December 10, 2013
    Arts and Modeling
    Al Pacino, Amir Khan, Amitabh Bachchan, Chekhov, Dilip Kumar, Irrfan Khan, Lagaan, Marlon Brando, Method Acting, Naseeruddin Shah, Naya Daur, Robert Deniro, Shahrukh Khan, Stella Adler
  • Mandela and the Sisyphean quest for freedom!

    Mandela and the Sisyphean quest for freedom!

    It was a hot summer’s day. I remember standing in front of his cell in the Robben Island prison. He spent eighteen years of his life there. The cell was very small and a bucket had been provided to him for excrement. But this is not what moved me. What has stayed with me is the […]

    rrameez

    December 5, 2013
    Political Science
    apartheid, israel, Mandela, palestine, racism, robben island, sisypheus
  • Ali’s Greatest Fight; the sweet science of boxing, the bitter philosophy of dissidence, and the dicey art of jurisprudence

    Ali’s Greatest Fight; the sweet science of boxing, the bitter philosophy of dissidence, and the dicey art of jurisprudence

    The most exciting fight of the 20th century did not take place in a boxing ring but in the sociopolitical-legal arena. This is the story of Cassius Clay, who changed his name to Muhammad Ali, vs the United States Govt. (With special appearances from the who’s who of the 20th century)

    rrameez

    October 19, 2013
    Political Science
    60s, Antiwar movement, barack obama, civil rights, I ain’t got no quarrel with them Viet Cong, Islam, jack johnson, jesse owens, joe louis, john f kennedy, Malcolm X, Martin Luther King, Muhammad Ali, Nation of Islam, richard nixon, sonny liston
  • The Ship of Theseus sails in Water (and not H2O)

    The Ship of Theseus sails in Water (and not H2O)

    The difference between natural language and the language of science The problem of reference in philosophy deals with relations of words to the world. Do words correspond to some mind-independent objects in the external world? In the following text, I propose the thesis that “reference” is one area where science and everyday affairs take sharp, […]

    rrameez

    September 15, 2013
    Modeling, Philosophy, Philosophy of Science, Science
    Aristotle, Chomsky, H2O vs Water, Hilary Putnam, Hume, Language, Locke, Obama, Plato, Princess and the Frog, Ship of Theseus, Wittgenstein
  • Post Adolescent Idealism? Why psychologizing behavior is APSD: Acute Pseudo-Science Disorder

    Post Adolescent Idealism? Why psychologizing behavior is APSD: Acute Pseudo-Science Disorder

    The travesty that was Bradley Manning’s trial is a topic for another forum. Reading about the court proceedings, what immediately struck me was the psychotherapist’s verdict on Manning’s behavior. He was suffering from “Post Adolescent Idealism”, said the therapist. His bashers took this and other psychological judgements that were passed on Manning (narcissism, obsessive compulsive […]

    rrameez

    August 18, 2013
    Abuse of Science, Science Debates, Social Science
    American Psychiatric Association, Bradley Manning, Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, Dostoevsky, Einstein, Elizabeth Spelke, Galileo, George Miller, Herbert Simon, Human Behavior, Marlon Brando, Passive Aggressive Personality, Post Adolescent Idealism, Psychiatry, Psychology, Susan Carey, Tolstoy
  • 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
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