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Cooperative Politics: How the BJP continues with Congress' Policies

 

From Sanctions to Cooperation: The America-India (AI) Cooperation declaration

 

AI has hacked the operating system of human civilisation

Yuval Noah Hariri in The Economist

Fears of artificial intelligence (ai) have haunted humanity since the very beginning of the computer age. Hitherto these fears focused on machines using physical means to kill, enslave or replace people. But over the past couple of years new ai tools have emerged that threaten the survival of human civilisation from an unexpected direction. ai has gained some remarkable abilities to manipulate and generate language, whether with words, sounds or images. ai has thereby hacked the operating system of our civilisation.

Language is the stuff almost all human culture is made of. Human rights, for example, aren’t inscribed in our dna. Rather, they are cultural artefacts we created by telling stories and writing laws. Gods aren’t physical realities. Rather, they are cultural artefacts we created by inventing myths and writing scriptures.

Money, too, is a cultural artefact. Banknotes are just colourful pieces of paper, and at present more than 90% of money is not even banknotes—it is just digital information in computers. What gives money value is the stories that bankers, finance ministers and cryptocurrency gurus tell us about it. Sam Bankman-Fried, Elizabeth Holmes and Bernie Madoff were not particularly good at creating real value, but they were all extremely capable storytellers.

What would happen once a non-human intelligence becomes better than the average human at telling stories, composing melodies, drawing images, and writing laws and scriptures? When people think about Chatgpt and other new ai tools, they are often drawn to examples like school children using ai to write their essays. What will happen to the school system when kids do that? But this kind of question misses the big picture. Forget about school essays. Think of the next American presidential race in 2024, and try to imagine the impact of ai tools that can be made to mass-produce political content, fake-news stories and scriptures for new cults.

In recent years the qAnon cult has coalesced around anonymous online messages, known as “q drops”. Followers collected, revered and interpreted these q drops as a sacred text. While to the best of our knowledge all previous q drops were composed by humans, and bots merely helped disseminate them, in future we might see the first cults in history whose revered texts were written by a non-human intelligence. Religions throughout history have claimed a non-human source for their holy books. Soon that might be a reality.

On a more prosaic level, we might soon find ourselves conducting lengthy online discussions about abortion, climate change or the Russian invasion of Ukraine with entities that we think are humans—but are actually ai. The catch is that it is utterly pointless for us to spend time trying to change the declared opinions of an ai bot, while the ai could hone its messages so precisely that it stands a good chance of influencing us.

Through its mastery of language, ai could even form intimate relationships with people, and use the power of intimacy to change our opinions and worldviews. Although there is no indication that ai has any consciousness or feelings of its own, to foster fake intimacy with humans it is enough if the ai can make them feel emotionally attached to it. In June 2022 Blake Lemoine, a Google engineer, publicly claimed that the ai chatbot Lamda, on which he was working, had become sentient. The controversial claim cost him his job. The most interesting thing about this episode was not Mr Lemoine’s claim, which was probably false. Rather, it was his willingness to risk his lucrative job for the sake of the ai chatbot. If ai can influence people to risk their jobs for it, what else could it induce them to do?

In a political battle for minds and hearts, intimacy is the most efficient weapon, and ai has just gained the ability to mass-produce intimate relationships with millions of people. We all know that over the past decade social media has become a battleground for controlling human attention. With the new generation of ai, the battlefront is shifting from attention to intimacy. What will happen to human society and human psychology as ai fights ai in a battle to fake intimate relationships with us, which can then be used to convince us to vote for particular politicians or buy particular products?

Even without creating “fake intimacy”, the new ai tools would have an immense influence on our opinions and worldviews. People may come to use a single ai adviser as a one-stop, all-knowing oracle. No wonder Google is terrified. Why bother searching, when I can just ask the oracle? The news and advertising industries should also be terrified. Why read a newspaper when I can just ask the oracle to tell me the latest news? And what’s the purpose of advertisements, when I can just ask the oracle to tell me what to buy?

And even these scenarios don’t really capture the big picture. What we are talking about is potentially the end of human history. Not the end of history, just the end of its human-dominated part. History is the interaction between biology and culture; between our biological needs and desires for things like food and sex, and our cultural creations like religions and laws. History is the process through which laws and religions shape food and sex.

What will happen to the course of history when ai takes over culture, and begins producing stories, melodies, laws and religions? Previous tools like the printing press and radio helped spread the cultural ideas of humans, but they never created new cultural ideas of their own. ai is fundamentally different. ai can create completely new ideas, completely new culture.

At first, ai will probably imitate the human prototypes that it was trained on in its infancy. But with each passing year, ai culture will boldly go where no human has gone before. For millennia human beings have lived inside the dreams of other humans. In the coming decades we might find ourselves living inside the dreams of an alien intelligence.

Fear of ai has haunted humankind for only the past few decades. But for thousands of years humans have been haunted by a much deeper fear. We have always appreciated the power of stories and images to manipulate our minds and to create illusions. Consequently, since ancient times humans have feared being trapped in a world of illusions.

In the 17th century René Descartes feared that perhaps a malicious demon was trapping him inside a world of illusions, creating everything he saw and heard. In ancient Greece Plato told the famous Allegory of the Cave, in which a group of people are chained inside a cave all their lives, facing a blank wall. A screen. On that screen they see projected various shadows. The prisoners mistake the illusions they see there for reality.

In ancient India Buddhist and Hindu sages pointed out that all humans lived trapped inside Maya—the world of illusions. What we normally take to be reality is often just fictions in our own minds. People may wage entire wars, killing others and willing to be killed themselves, because of their belief in this or that illusion.

The AI revolution is bringing us face to face with Descartes’ demon, with Plato’s cave, with the Maya. If we are not careful, we might be trapped behind a curtain of illusions, which we could not tear away—or even realise is there.

Of course, the new power of ai could be used for good purposes as well. I won’t dwell on this, because the people who develop ai talk about it enough. The job of historians and philosophers like myself is to point out the dangers. But certainly, ai can help us in countless ways, from finding new cures for cancer to discovering solutions to the ecological crisis. The question we face is how to make sure the new ai tools are used for good rather than for ill. To do that, we first need to appreciate the true capabilities of these tools.

Since 1945 we have known that nuclear technology could generate cheap energy for the benefit of humans—but could also physically destroy human civilisation. We therefore reshaped the entire international order to protect humanity, and to make sure nuclear technology was used primarily for good. We now have to grapple with a new weapon of mass destruction that can annihilate our mental and social world.

We can still regulate the new ai tools, but we must act quickly. Whereas nukes cannot invent more powerful nukes, ai can make exponentially more powerful ai. The first crucial step is to demand rigorous safety checks before powerful ai tools are released into the public domain. Just as a pharmaceutical company cannot release new drugs before testing both their short-term and long-term side-effects, so tech companies shouldn’t release new ai tools before they are made safe. We need an equivalent of the Food and Drug Administration for new technology, and we need it yesterday.

Won’t slowing down public deployments of ai cause democracies to lag behind more ruthless authoritarian regimes? Just the opposite. Unregulated ai deployments would create social chaos, which would benefit autocrats and ruin democracies. Democracy is a conversation, and conversations rely on language. When ai hacks language, it could destroy our ability to have meaningful conversations, thereby destroying democracy.

We have just encountered an alien intelligence, here on Earth. We don’t know much about it, except that it might destroy our civilisation. We should put a halt to the irresponsible deployment of ai tools in the public sphere, and regulate ai before it regulates us. And the first regulation I would suggest is to make it mandatory for ai to disclose that it is an ai. If I am having a conversation with someone, and I cannot tell whether it is a human or an ai—that’s the end of democracy.

This text has been generated by a human.

Or has it?

Putin’s actions make no sense. That is his strength

 Tim Harford in The FT

Is Vladimir Putin mad? Russia’s president has launched a costly and unprovoked war, shocked his own citizens, galvanised Nato, triggered damaging but predictable economic reprisals and threatened a nuclear war that could end civilisation. One has to doubt his grasp on reason. 

Doubt is part of the point. In The Strategy of Conflict, written in 1960, the economist Thomas Schelling noted: “It is not a universal advantage in situations of conflict to be inalienably and manifestly rational in decisions and motivation.” 

A madman — or a toddler — can get away with certain actions because he cannot be deterred by threats or because his own threats seem more plausible. But Schelling’s point is more subtle than that: you don’t need to be mad to secure these advantages. You just need to persuade your adversaries that you might be. 

The idea is vividly illustrated in The Maltese Falcon, Dashiell Hammett’s 1930 novel and John Huston’s 1941 film. Our hero, Sam Spade, knows the whereabouts of the falcon, a priceless artefact. When the villainous Kasper Gutman tries to intimidate him into revealing the secret, Spade is not intimidated. If Gutman kills him then the precious falcon will be lost forever. 

“If I know you can’t afford to kill me, how are you gonna scare me into giving it to you?” Spade challenges Gutman. 

“That’s an attitude, sir, that calls for the most delicate judgement on both sides,” Gutman says. “Because, as you know, sir, in the heat of action men are likely to forget where their best interests lie and let their emotions carry them away.” 

Spade doesn’t seem too worried by this, perhaps because Gutman appears calm. Gutman might have had more success if he seemed unhinged. Then again, Gutman’s henchmen are pointing pistols at Spade and twitching with rage, so even if Gutman keeps his cool, the threat that someone might get carried away seems plausible. 

Schelling was a wonderful writer and thinker, but it gives me little pleasure to be dusting off his books. When I first encountered his ideas on nuclear deterrence, it was the mid-1990s. The cold war was over, the threat of a nuclear exchange seemed largely past and Schelling’s ideas could be enjoyed in much the same way as Hammett’s: as witty, surprising and reassuringly unreal. When Schelling shared the Nobel memorial prize in economics in 2005, it was with a sense that his clear-eyed ideas about nuclear deterrence had helped human civilisation dodge a bullet. 

That nuclear bullet is now back in the gun and Putin is waving it around unnervingly. He wouldn’t . . . would he? I don’t know, which is just the way Putin likes it. 

There was always something surreal about maintaining nuclear weapons as a deterrent. Surely such weapons could never be used, because the consequences were too horrible? And if the weapons could never be used, what sort of deterrent did they provide? 

Yet the deterrent is real enough because even a small risk of escalation is a risk worth taking seriously. That risk can come from a number of sources. There’s malfunctioning equipment: in September 1983, Soviet officer Stanislav Petrov’s early warning radar told him that the US had just launched ballistic missiles at the Soviet Union. He realised that was unlikely and ignored the warning. Petrov’s heroic inaction was made all the more remarkable because it came at a time of escalated tensions between the superpowers. 

Another risk is that a senior decision maker is insane, rather than merely feigning insanity. 

Then there is the risk of things getting out of control somewhere down the chain of command. During the Cuban missile crisis in 1962, the US decided to stop and search ships sailing to Cuba — a potential flashpoint if the result was the sinking of a Soviet ship. President Kennedy and defence secretary Robert McNamara asked the US Navy to soften this “quarantine” in a couple of ways. 

In fact, as the classic book Thinking Strategically explains, the US Navy told McNamara to mind his own business, and the blockade was riskier than Kennedy had intended. Unthinkable threats become thinkable in such circumstances. 

Putin holds a weak hand, except for the one card that no rational person would ever choose to play. But the essence of brinkmanship is to introduce a risk that nobody can entirely control. If the risk becomes intolerable, you may win concessions. I am 99 per cent sure that Putin is bluffing, but a 1 per cent chance of the end of the world is and should be more than enough to worry about. 

Faced with Gutman’s warning that someone may get carried away, Spade coolly responds, “then the trick from my angle is to make my play strong enough to tie you up, but not make you mad enough to bump me off against your better judgement”. That is the trick the western world is now attempting to perform. By Putin’s design, it is not going to be easy.

Why the Buddha would be frowning at Ukraine today

Shekhar Gupta in The Print


Strategic studies quiz: Why was the code to inform Indira Gandhi of the successful Pokhran-1 nuclear test ‘Buddha is smiling’? While you think about it, let’s switch to Ukraine.

By the time you are reading this, Kyiv would have capitulated. The question that’s been asked often in the past few days, and will continue to echo for decades to come is, would it have been so simple for Putin’s Russia to crush Zelenskyy’s Ukraine if it hadn’t given up its nuclear stockpile after the Budapest accord in 1994.

This was done in return for security guarantees by the US, Europe and Russia. One of the guarantors has now invaded Ukraine; one, Europe, is looking for a place to hide and ruing its possible loss of cheap gas; and the third, the US, is doing no more than pour tender love and care. Would Ukraine be such a pushover if it had that stockpile?

Now, let’s turn this question inwards at ourselves. Was India prescient or imprudent to not only build nuclear weapons but to declare itself a nuclear-armed state? Over the decades, this has seen a robust debate among four schools. One, the Homi Bhabha-era hawks who believed India should have built its nukes in the early sixties, even pre-empting China. Former foreign secretary Maharajakrishna Rasgotra had even stated in public interviews and seminars that President John F. Kennedy had offered to help India develop and detonate a device, but that Jawaharlal Nehru turned him down.

The second school is the opposite: Nuclear weapons are ugly, immoral, unusable, unnecessary and an affront to humanity. That school has faded lately, especially after Pokhran-2 in 1998. Some of it has morphed into a new thought process: Now that nuclearisation is a done deal, let’s work to keep it to minimum deterrence and be active and willing members of all global arrangements, including Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty (CTBT) of sorts.

The third believes that India was better served by nuclear ambiguity. That Indira Gandhi had already shown the world our capability in 1974 with Pokhran-1. The 1998 tests were unnecessary political chest-thumping that gave Pakistan the opportunity to test as well. As a result, South Asia had two self-declared nuclear weapon states.

The fourth is the team that won. That mere demonstration of capability in 1974 was not enough. It was self-inflicted double defeat. India exposed itself to sanctions, yet did not assert itself as a weapons power. To call this Peaceful Nuclear Explosion (PNE) was pure hypocrisy that impressed none. Not even India’s public opinion at a juncture when Mrs Gandhi needed desperately to shore it up. It was essential to weaponise, thump our chests, throw the gauntlet at Pakistan.

The first school did not find much purchase in the fraught 1960s, and the second was rendered irrelevant after 1998. The third and fourth need to be debated, particularly with the Ukraine staring us in the face. Similar questions were also raised when the US invaded Iraq twice, the second time on the pretext that it had nukes. Would Bush senior or junior have risked invading Iraq if it actually had any weapons of mass destruction (WMDs)?

Never mind that it wouldn’t have the wherewithal to send them to Washington. But just the threat of a nuclear reprisal for the invasion against any of the US’s Middle-Eastern allies would have done. Ukraine now has become an enduring advertisement for the WMD-sovereignty link. It is making many nations, comfortable today in the aura of guarantees, uncomfortable. Surely, no country with the nukes now, or one that’s nearly there — North Korea, Israel, Iran or any other — will ever give these up. They will remember Ukraine. 

Did India gain or lose from opening its nuclear cupboard and exposing its wares to the world? The criticism is that it enabled Pakistan to find formal parity. The answer is, nobody had any doubt that Pakistan was already a nuclear weapon state. The Americans had given their last certificate of what was often called “nuclear virginity” to Pakistan in 1989, and refused to renew it.

In the 1990-91 stand-off, Pakistan had also employed the nuclear blackmail against India. It is something books have been written about (Bob Winderm and William Burrows, Critical Mass: The dangerous race for super weapons in a fragmenting world), then-CIA deputy chief Robert Gates has spoken about it, and investigative journalist Seymour Hersh has written a detailed piece too. I too have explained it in several of my writings since.

But, the Pakistani threat, which Robert Gates also brought to India from Islamabad on his conflict resolution visit, was that they will use the nukes in the beginning of the war. The reality dawned on V.P. Singh’s government that India did not have an immediately deliverable weapon in retaliation. Over the decades, proven capability had not been developed into a credible weapon and delivery systems.

That crisis passed, but this had ended any doubts across our political spectrum, with all its divisions, that India needed the weapons fast.

Eighteen March 1989 is a significant day in Indian strategic evolution. Intelligence reports were now confirming that Pakistan was indeed a screwdriver’s turn away from a deliverable bomb. On this day, the IAF was holding it customary firepower demonstration, this one involving 129 aircraft, at Tilpat, a firing range not far from Delhi. At the demonstration, Rajiv gestured to top civil servant Naresh Chandra to follow him into a tent. He was so secretive he even shook off a curious Rajesh Pilot, then a minister. There, he told Chandra of his concern and assigned him to head an elite group, mostly of scientists, to take India to full weaponisation. I wrote about it in some detail in these 2006 articles.

The group included top nuclear scientists R. Chidambaram, P.K. Iyengar, Anil Kakodkar, K. ‘Santy’ Santhanam, missile specialist A.P.J. Abdul Kalam and then-DRDO chief V.S. Arunachalam. They were to be funded mostly covertly out of a fund for “science and technology” under the Planning Commission. A lot of the operations were undercover and covert. Santhanam, for example, was given a discrete senior posting in RAW. Kakodkar later disclosed to me in this Walk the Talk on NDTV that he had to even travel overseas under assumed names and passports. 

That baton passed brilliantly between seven prime ministers across a decade of political instability. And in 1998, Pokhran-2 happened, followed by Pakistan’s tit-for-tat in Chagai. Two decades after that, where did the two new nuclear powers stand? India mostly accepted as a legitimate nuclear weapons power, admitted to most multilateral arrangements, rid of all the sanctions and an American strategic ally. And Pakistan? It wasn’t such a bad idea to open the cupboard then.

Finally, here’s why they said ‘Buddha is smiling’ for Pokhran-1. It seems that some time in the epoch of Buddha, the ancient kingdom of Magadh launched a war of conquest over its neighbour Vaishali. While Magadh was the usual monarchy that built a big army and collected the weapons for the assault, Vaishali was some kind of an anarchic street democracy where people spent all their time arguing over whether to fight, how to fight, who will fight.

Sure enough, Magadh annihilated and massacred poorly armed Vaishali. When the news got to a meditating Buddha, it seems, he frowned in disapproval. Meaning that to keep the peace, a kingdom has to be fully prepared for war, or it will meet Vaishali’s fate. Since 1964, India was the Vaishali to China’s Magadh. Now you know why Buddha would now be smiling? Or why he would be frowning at Ukraine’s fate?

Beware the nuclear con man

Pervez Hoodbhoy in The Dawn


INDIAN leaders of unbridled ambition and meagre wisdom have recently suggested that India might revoke its earlier policy of No First Use (NFU) of nuclear weapons. They should be forgiven. To stay in the public eye, South Asia’s street-smart politicians need to make a lot of noise all the time. Most did not do very well in school and even fewer made it to college or university (and some ended up playing sports there).

Nuclear strategists, on the other hand, are advertised to be academic hotshots. The high-flying ones belong to various think tanks and universities — including prestigious ones in the United States. These so-called experts fill academic journals with thickly referenced research papers, participate in weighty-sounding conferences, and endlessly split hairs on minutiae like the difference between nuclear deterrence versus nuclear dissuasion.

Slyly hinting that NFU has run its course and needs a replacement, several Indian strategists have been openly flirting with a so-called counterforce doctrine — ie the possibility of knocking out Pakistan’s nuclear forces before they are activated. Paid to serve power rather than truth, like the proverbial serpent they whisper ideas into eager official ears. Their academic discourse and heavy language gives the impression that they really know what they are talking about. They don’t. In fact, they are clueless.

Here’s why. Every nuclear nation confines its deepest secrets to an extremely tight inner circle. Outsiders — meaning civilians — are excluded from what is critical. They cannot know such crucial details as the chain of nuclear command, geographical dispersal of warheads and delivery vehicles, intelligence on how well the adversary has concealed its nukes, whether warheads are mated or de-mated from delivery vehicles, integrity of communication channels, the efficacy of decoys and countermeasures, and much other vital information that would determine whether a first strike would achieve its objective.

So how do self-important know-nothing strategists — Indian, Pakistani, and American — ensure their salaries will continue reaching their bank accounts? Well, they write papers and therefore have to perfect the art of saying nothing — or perhaps next to nothing — in 5,000 words. Fact: no nuclear strategist knows the threshold of a nuclear war, can predict the sequence of events following a first strike, or persuasively argue whether nuclear hostilities could somehow be wound down. Of course he can guess — just as every Tom, Dick, and Harry can. But guesses are only guesses.

Could it perhaps be better inside a military organisation? War gaming is certainly a compulsory part of an officer’s training and one can feed parameters into a computer set up for simulating the onset and subsequent trajectory of a nuclear conflict. If properly programmed and proper probabilities are inputted, it will output the probabilities of various possible outcomes. But, as in tossing coins, probabilities make sense only when something can be repeated a large number of times. The problem is that nuclear war can happen only once.

That’s bad enough but, in fact, it’s even worse than that. You can give probabilities for missiles to be intercepted or for getting through, and for mechanical and electrical systems to work or fail. But you cannot assign probabilities for humans to act in a particular way during a crisis because that depends on mood, perception, personality and circumstance. Nuclear strategy pretends to be a science but is by no means one. Where has the other party drawn its nuclear red line (the real, not stated, one)? No one knows.

Consider: would one nuke fired at invading Indian tanks from a Pakistani Nasr missile battery elicit zero, one, three, or 30 Indian nukes as retaliation? The Indians say that a single nuke used against them, whether on Pakistani or Indian soil, constitutes a full-blown nuclear attack upon India. Should one believe them? Would panic ensue and cause one or both sides to descend into a totalistic use-them-or-lose-them mode? No one knows.

The nuclearised confrontation between India and Pakistan over Kashmir is best seen as a territorial fight between two street cats. I have had occasion to watch several. You can hear the growls grow louder. These then combine with hissing after which howls and growls get mixed. Sometimes they fight and sometimes not. Since they have only claws and teeth, never do both cats end up dead. But with nuclear weapons two opponents would strictly eliminate each other. In addition, their war would seriously devastate neighbouring countries and poison much of the globe.

The catfight analogy helps illuminate, for example, Defence Minister Rajnath Singh’s statement that continuation of India’s NFU policy depends upon ‘circumstances’. Since he left ‘circumstances’ unspecified, this could cover everything under the sun. Although dozens of articles were published commenting on his statement, in fact it carried exactly zero content. NFU is purely declaratory, impossible to verify and impossible to enforce. Nevertheless the statement was significant — the growling had become a tad louder. Plus, did you hear a slight hiss?

India’s hint at moving away from NFU towards counterforce owes to its increased military advantage over Pakistan. But hubris often paves the way to overconfidence and disaster. As every military commander worth his salt knows, all plans look fine until the battle begins. Last week a ragtag Houthi militia took out 50 per cent of Saudi Arabia’s oil-producing capacity, underscoring how even a relatively ill-equipped force can wreck an adversary bristling with the most advanced weapons that limitless oil dollars could buy. Sellers of snake oil and con men do not deserve anyone’s ears or respect. Whoever advocates a nuclear first strike should be quickly locked up in a mental asylum.

Some years after the Kargil episode, Gen Pervez Musharraf realised that nuclear weapons had brought Pakistan and India to an impasse. He is so far the only leader courageous enough to explicitly acknowledge this and — most importantly — to say out aloud that, for better or for worse, mutual fear of nuclear annihilation has etched the LoC in stone. It remains to be seen if other Pakistani and Indian leaders can dare to follow his example. Only then might peace get half a chance.

So much for scientific publications: Nonsense paper written by iOS autocomplete accepted for conference

Elle Hunt in The Guardian


A nonsensical academic paper on nuclear physics written only by iOS autocomplete has been accepted for a scientific conference.

Christoph Bartneck, an associate professor at the Human Interface Technology laboratory at the University of Canterbury in New Zealand, received an email inviting him to submit a paper to the International Conference on Atomic and Nuclear Physics in the US in November.

“Since I have practically no knowledge of nuclear physics I resorted to iOS autocomplete function to help me writing the paper,” he wrote in a blog post on Thursday. “I started a sentence with ‘atomic’ or ‘nuclear’ and then randomly hit the autocomplete suggestions.

“The atoms of a better universe will have the right for the same as you are the way we shall have to be a great place for a great time to enjoy the day you are a wonderful person to your great time to take the fun and take a great time and enjoy the great day you will be a wonderful time for your parents and kids,” is a sample sentence from the abstract.

It concludes: “Power is not a great place for a good time.”
Bartneck illustrated the paper – titled, again through autocorrect, “Atomic Energy will have been made available to a single source” – with the first graphic on the Wikipedia entry for nuclear physics.

He submitted it under a fake identity: associate professor Iris Pear of the US, whose experience in atomic and nuclear physics was outlined in a biography using contradictory gender pronouns.

The nonsensical paper was accepted only three hours later, in an email asking Bartneck to confirm his slot for the “oral presentation” at the international conference.

“I know that iOS is a pretty good software, but reaching tenure has never been this close,” Bartneck commented in the blog post.

He did not have to pay money to submit the paper, but the acceptance letter referred him to register for the conference at a cost of US$1099 (also able to be paid in euros or pounds) as an academic speaker.

“I did not complete this step since my university would certainly object to me wasting money this way,” Bartneck told Guardian Australia. “... My impression is that this is not a particularly good conference.”

The International Conference on Atomic and Nuclear Physics will be held on 17-18 November in Atlanta, Georgia, and is organised by ConferenceSeries: “an amalgamation of Open Access Publications and worldwide international science conferences and events”, established in 2007.

An organiser has been contacted by Guardian Australia for comment.

Bartneck said that given the quality of the review process and the steep registration fee, he was “reasonably certain that this is a money-making conference with little to no commitment to science.

“I did not yet reply to their email, but I am tempted to ask them about the reviewers’ comments. That might be a funny one.”

The conference’s call for abstracts makes only a little more sense than Bartneck’s paper.

“Nuclear and sub-atomic material science it the investigation of the properties, flow and collaborations of the essential (however not major) building pieces of matter.”

A bogus research paper reading only “Get me off Your Fucking Mailing List” repeated over and over again was accepted by the International Journal of Advanced Computer Technology, an open-access academic journal, in November 2014.

Osborne is all for renationalisation – so long as the nation isn’t Britain

Aditya Chakrabortty in The Guardian

Steel yourself, for an unlikely source is about to spout a highly unfashionable idea. This week, George Osborne will come out for renationalisation.

You won’t hear the N-word from his lips, of course. Nor shall the chancellor go full Corbyn and seize some of the FTSE’s crown jewels. Instead, you can expect something far more in keeping with the spirit of 21st-century Britain. The government will indeed put some of our most vital infrastructure under state control – but the states in question will be France and China.

At some point during this week’s visit of president Xi Jinping – perhaps sandwiched between lunch at the palace and a trip to Chequers – Osborne shall confirm that nuclear plants will be built at Hinkley in Somerset and Sizewell in Suffolk, by the energy giant EDF, nearly 85% owned by the French government, and China. What’s more, Beijing will get a shot at designing and building its own nuclear facility at Bradwell in Essex.

Britain has made 'visionary' choice to become China's best friend, says Xi


Even as that announcement is made with all the fanfare available to the British state, the promises of privatisation will be revealed as lies. What were voters guaranteed by Margaret Thatcher and John Major, as they flogged off electricity and the rest of our publicly-owned utilities? More competition, lower bills and greater investment: all the plump fruit of a more dynamic capitalism.

A generation later and their children, David Cameron and Osborne, are handing Britain’s nuclear future back to the public sector – of two foreign countries – and paying handsomely for the privilege.

Take Hinkley, which at £24.5bn will cost as much as the London Olympics, Crossrail and a new terminal at Heathrow put together. Osborne will proudly blare that taxpayers aren’t chipping in a penny towards the costs. True enough, but his civil servants will quietly admit that we are guaranteeing up to £17bn of the total cost. In the screwy logic of Britain’s renationalised capitalism, the public assumes the risk while the corporations get to scoop the profits.

Because rest assured, there will be profits – all of us will be making sure of that. To secure EDF as a builder, Cameron guaranteed a fixed price for electricity from Hinkley of £92.50 per megawatt hour. That is around double the going rate for electricity on the wholesale markets, a price so high that equity analysts term it“financial insanity”. Change your supplier as often as you like, you and everyone else in Britain will be paying for that de facto subsidy in your electricity bills for decades to come. Britons will in effect be paying more for their energy so that French households can pay less. Indeed, so generous are the terms of this deal that the government of Austria is currently taking Britain to court on the grounds that it’s handing out state aid to EDF.

Holidaymakers in Burnham-on-Sea, Somerset, across from Hinkley Point nuclear power station. Photograph: SWNS.com

Yes, you read that last sentence right: the UK stands accused of dispensing state aid – to another state. How many times have you read about some age-old manufacturer and thousands of jobs going down the swanee, while ministers wrung their hands over European state aid rules? Now we know that such rules can be tested – provided the recipient is headquartered not in Port Talbot, but Paris.

When questioned about these eye-watering numbers, ministers will inevitably defend them as a price worth paying to stop the lights going out. But like the sanctity of the state-aid regulations, this is a bogeyman deployed to shut down conversation. True, Britain has a clapped-out generating system. Realistically, the price we face for that is not our TVs going dark in the middle of Gogglebox, or our smartphones no longer charging, but paying a lot more for our electricity. Except, with Hinkley, we’re guaranteed to be paying a lot more anyway.

As James Meek points out in his prize-winning book Private Island, the publicly owned energy-generating system was in very good nick, enjoying both investment and domestic engineering expertise. A generation of privatisation has seen off both of those. Sue Ion, a fellow of the Royal Academy of Engineering who has spent over 30 years in nuclear power, says, “We have no capacity to make a reactor design from scratch.”

Hinkley’s boss, Nigel Cann, boasted to this paper last year of the thousands of local jobs his plant would bring. He gave just one example: “We’ve already seen a local food co-op … set up in preparation for feeding what we estimate to be the 25,000 people” who’ll move through the site. One insider predicts that the British will largely be employed “digging ditches, laying concrete and running the pie wagon”. The big-boy jobs will go to those calling the shots – that is, the French and the Chinese.

A share-owning democracy, Thatcher promised, as she auctioned off BT. Britons were about to be put in charge of their economy. Another fib: in 1981, ordinary Britons owned over 25% of the stock market; they now hold less than half that.

She offered a capitalism in which private firms took risks and reaped rewards, while the customer benefited. What she delivered was very different. A system in which you can’t get 3G on trains, can’t rely on broadband or buses in the countryside, and in which train operators and energy firms compete not on service – but on how many tariffs they can bamboozle customers with. In which parastatal organisations from France and China, Germany and the Netherlands take an easy clip from ordinary British customers and plough the bare minimum back. This isn’t a dynamic capitalism, it is lazy, arthritic and very expensive.

And still Whitehall and Westminster, and their mini-mes in town halls up and down the country, carry on down the same road. Cameron proposes to sell anything left in the cupboard, even old student loans. Civil servants let Redcar and thousands of steel jobs go down the drain, as they lend millions to Roman Abramovich to keep his foreign steel plant going.

Nuclear power is merely the punchline to this whole rotten joke. We won’t build it, we won’t own it, we certainly won’t control it. But we will pay for it: in lost jobs, in vanishing taxes, in whopping great winter fuel bills.

Who's Afraid Of The Big Bad Bomb?

Uri Avnery in Outlook India

I MUST start with a shocking confession: I am not afraid of the Iranian nuclear bomb.
I know that this makes me an abnormal person, almost a freak.

But what can I do? I am unable to work up fear, like a real Israeli. Try as I may, the Iranian bomb does not make me hysterical.

MY FATHER once taught me how to withstand blackmail: imagine that the awful threat of the blackmailer has already come about. Then you can tell him: Go to hell.

I have tried many times to follow this advice and found it sound. So now I apply it to the Iranian bomb: I imagine that the worst has already happened: the awful ayatollahs have got the bombs that can eradicate little Israel in a minute.

So what?

According to foreign experts, Israel has several hundred nuclear bombs (assessments vary between 80-400). If Iran sends its bombs and obliterates most of Israel (myself included), Israeli submarines will obliterate Iran. Whatever I might think about Binyamin Netanyahu, I rely on him and our security chiefs to keep our "second strike" capability intact. Just last week we were informed that Germany had delivered another state-of-the-art submarine to our navy for this purpose.

Israeli idiots — and there are some around — respond: "Yes, but the Iranian leaders are not normal people. They are madmen. Religious fanatics. They will risk the total destruction of Iran just to destroy the Zionist state. Like exchanging queens in chess."

Such convictions are the outcome of decades of demonizing. Iranians — or at least their leaders — are seen as subhuman miscreants.

Reality shows us that the leaders of Iran are very sober, very calculating politicians. Cautious merchants in the Iranian bazaar style. They don't take unnecessary risks. The revolutionary fervor of the early Khomeini days is long past, and even Khomeini would not have dreamt of doing anything so close to national suicide.

ACCORDING TO the Bible, the great Persian king Cyrus allowed the captive Jews of Babylon to return to Jerusalem and rebuild their temple. At that time, Persia was already an ancient civilization — both cultural and political.

After the "return from Babylon", the Jewish commonwealth around Jerusalem lived for 200 years under Persian suzerainty. I was taught in school that these were happy years for the Jews.

Since then, Persian culture and history has lived through another two and a half millennia. Persian civilization is one of the oldest in the world. It has created a great religion and influenced many others, including Judaism. Iranians are fiercely proud of that civilization.

To imagine that the present leaders of Iran would even contemplate risking the very existence of Persia out of hatred of Israel is both ridiculous and megalomaniac.

Moreover, throughout history, relations between Jews and Persians have almost always been excellent. When Israel was founded, Iran was considered a natural ally, part of David Ben-Gurion's "strategy of the periphery" — an alliance with all the countries surrounding the Arab world.

The Shah, who was re-installed by the American and British secret services, was a very close ally. Teheran was full of Israeli businessmen and military advisers. It served as a base for the Israeli agents working with the rebellious Kurds in northern Iraq who were fighting against the regime of Saddam Hussein.

After the Islamic revolution, Israel still supported Iran against Iraq in their cruel 8-year war. The notorious Irangate affair, in which my friend Amiram Nir and Oliver North played such an important role, would not have been possible without the old Iranian-Israeli ties.

Even now, Iran and Israel are conducting amiable arbitration proceedings about an old venture: the Eilat-Ashkelon oil pipeline built jointly by the two countries.

If the worst comes to the worst, nuclear Israel and nuclear Iran will live in a Balance of Terror.

Highly unpleasant, indeed. But not an existential menace.

HOWEVER, FOR those who live in terror of the Iranian nuclear capabilities, I have a piece of advice: use the time we still have.

Under the American-Iranian deal, we have at least 10 years before Iran could start the final phase of producing the bomb.

Please use this time for making peace.

The Iranian hatred of the "Zionist Regime" — the State of Israel — derives from the fate of the Palestinian people. The feeling of solidarity for the helpless Palestinians is deeply ingrained in all Islamic peoples. It is part of the popular culture in all of them. It is quite real, even if the political regimes misuse, manipulate or ignore it.

Since there is no ground for a specific Iranian hatred of Israel, it is solely based on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. No conflict, no enmity.

Logic tells us: if we have several years before we have to live in the shadow of an Iranian nuclear bomb, let's use this time to eliminate the conflict. Once the Palestinians themselves declare that they consider the historic conflict with Israel settled, no Iranian leadership will be able to rouse its people against us.

FOR SEVERAL weeks now, Netanyahu has been priding himself publicly on a huge, indeed historic, achievement.

For the first time ever, Israel is practically part of an Arab alliance.

Throughout the region, the conflict between Muslim Sunnis and Muslim Shiites is raging. The Shiite camp, headed by Iran, includes the Shiites in Iraq, Hezbollah in Lebanon and the Houthis in Yemen. (Netanyahu falsely — or out of ignorance — includes the Sunni Hamas in this camp.)

The opposite Sunni camp includes Saudi Arabia, Egypt and the Gulf states. Netanyahu hints that Israel is now secretly accepted by them as a member.

It is a very untidy picture. Iran is fighting against the Islamic State in Syria and Iraq, which is a mortal enemy of Israel. Iran is supporting the Assad regime in Damascus, which is also supported by Hezbollah, which fights against the lslamic State, while the Saudis support other extreme Sunni Syrians who fight against Assad and the Islamic State. Turkey supports Iran and the Saudis while fighting against Assad. And so on.

I am not enamored with Arab military dictatorships and corrupt monarchies. Frankly, I detest them. But if Israel succeeds in becoming an official member of any Arab coalition, it would be a historic breakthrough, the first in 130 years of Zionist-Arab conflict.

However, all Israeli relations with Arab countries are secret, except those with Egypt and Jordan, and even with these two the contacts are cold and distant, relations between the regimes rather than between the peoples.

Let's face facts: no Arab state will engage in open and close cooperation with Israel before the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is ended. Even kings and dictators cannot afford to do so. The solidarity of their peoples with the oppressed Palestinians is far too profound.

Real peace with the Arab countries is impossible without peace with the Palestinian people, as peace with the Palestinian people is impossible without peace with the Arab countries.

So if there is now a chance to establish official peace with Saudi Arabia and the Gulf States, and to turn the cold peace with Egypt into a real one, Netanyahu should jump at it. The terms of an agreement are already lying on the table: the Saudi peace plan, also called the Arab Initiative, which was adopted many years ago by the entire Arab League. It is based on the two-state solution of the Israeli-Arab conflict.

Netanyahu could amaze the whole world by "doing a de Gaulle" — making peace with the Sunni Arab world (as de Gaulle did with Algeria) which would compel the Shiites to follow suit.

Do I believe in this? I do not. But if God wills it, even a broomstick can shoot.

And on the day of the Jewish Pesach feast, commemorating the (imaginary) exodus from Egypt, we are reminding ourselves that miracles do happen.

25 times real life echoed The Simpsons

From The Telegraph 

1. When a lemon tree was stolen

In the 1995 Simpsons episode Lemon of Troy, the children of Springfield waged war against their Shelbyville rivals, after the latter stole a treasured lemon tree belonging to the town. But would anyone bother to steal a lemon tree in real life? Apparently, the answer is yes. In 2013, a bizarre theft took place in a suburban area of Houston, Texas, when thieves dug up and ran off with a lemon tree belonging to local resident Kae Bruney. Addressing the robbers directly, Bruney told local news channel KHOU: "I hope you find yourself stricken with dysentery on a long drive in the middle of nowhere. If you needed my lemons so bad, I hope they serve you well."

2. When a man grew a "tomacco"

Inspired by the 1999 episode in which Homer invents "tomacco", a highly addictive tomato-tobacco hybrid, Rob Baur, a Simpsons fan from Lake Oswego in Oregon, cultivated his own tomacco plants. Using a Scientific American article that outlined how to graft together a tobacco and tomato plant, Baur created a plant that produced fruit that looked like a normal tomato, but contained high levels of nicotine (enough to render it inedible and potentially very toxic). Unlike their Simpsons counterparts, Baur's tomacco plants were not eventually destroyed by a herd of marauding tobacco-addicted farm animals.

3. When a three-eyed fish was caught near a nuclear power plant

In the 1990 episode Two Cars in Every Garage and Three Eyes on Every Fish, Bart caught Blinky, a three-eyed fish, in the pond fed by Monty Burn's nuclear power plant. In 2011, a three-eyed fish was pulled from a reservoir in Argentina. Worryingly, the mutation didn't appear to be a natural one: the reservoir in question was fed by water from a nuclear plant in the province of Córdoba.

4. When a man rebelled against his parents by getting the ultimate Simpsons tattoo

Simpsons Roasting on an Open Fire, the first episode of the show to air, saw Bart rebel against Marge and sneak off to get himself a tattoo. One man who wouldn't have seen the episode at the time was 27-year-old New Zealander Lee Weir, who was banned from watching the show when growing up. (Weir describes his father as "a real-life Ned Flanders".) Like Bart, Weir subsequently rebelled against his parents by getting tattooed – with 41 images of Homer Simpson. He currently holds the world record for having the most tattoos of the same cartoon character on his body. Speaking to the Daily Mail about his record-breaking status, Weir said: "It hasn't made me a better person but I definitely think it has made me a slightly cooler one."

^{(Picture: Guinness World Records, via Twitter)}

5. When Homer's dream car became a reality

The car designed by Homer for his auto-manufacturer half-brother in the 1991 episode O Brother, Where Art Thou featured lurid green bodypaint; leashes and muzzles to restrain "fighting kids"; a bonnet ornament depicting a 10-pin bowler, giant externally mounted cup holders, and a supersized horn that blasted out La Cucaracha. For the 2013 24 Hours of Lemons race – an annual parody of the 24 Hours of Le Mans endurance race series, held in the US – Porcubimmer Motors recreated Homer's design in loving detail (right down to the La Cucaracha-blasting horn).

6. When someone invented a "real" baby translator

A "cry translator" (designed to help parents interpret the sounds produced by their babies) hit the market in 2009. The website for the device claims: "in 3 seconds it will tell you the reason for [your baby's] crying". But the Simpsons managed to get there first almost two decades earlier: in the 1992 episode Brother, Can You Spare Two Dimes?, Homer's half-brother Herb tried his hand at inventing a "baby translator", to help mothers understand their children.

7. When a Kill Bill billboard took inspiration from Itchy and Scratchy

^{The New Zealand Kill Bill billboard}

An impressive New Zealand billboard poster advertising Quentin Tarantino's Kill Bill made it appear as if blood had splattered out of the poster on to the street below, covering cars in red droplets. But, when it comes to graphic, bloody violence, it's probably fair to say that Tarantino movies have nothing on Tom and Jerry parody Itchy and Scratchy, the fictional cartoon beloved by Bart and Lisa. It's therefore not surprising that, several years before Kill Bill hit cinema, The Simpsons depicted The Itchy and Scratchy Movie being advertised via blood-spraying billboard.

^{The Simpsons' billboard for The Itchy and Scratchy Movie}

8. When Michelangelo's David was forced to cover up

Itchy and Scratchy also featured heavily in the 1990 episode Itchy and Scratchy and Marge, in which Marge led a censorship campaign, horrified by the show's violence. She later realised the censorship had gone too far, after Michelangelo's David was taken to a Springfield museum, and local citizens protested against the statue's nudity. In 2001, a Florida-based shop put a replica of Michelangelo's David outside its front door. A handful of citizens objected to the "indecent" statue and successfully campaigned to have David's private parts covered with a cloth. More recently, in 2014, an elderly British couple, Clive and Joan Burgess, received complaints from neighbours and faced an intervention from their local council, after they placed a replica of the statue in their front garden.

9. When the "Simpsons house" was built ... then de-Simpsonised

In 1997, a Fox and Pepsi-sponsored competition offered entrants a life-size replica of the Simpsons' house as its main prize. The four bedroom yellow-painted house was erected in Henderson, Nevada. Decorators had to watch over 100 episodes of The Simpsons to get the colours and furnishings just right for the eventual owner. Sadly, the winner chose a cash-prize alternative, and the house was stripped and sold in 2001.

10. When Florida launched a real life "snake whacking"

In the 1993 episode Whacking Day, Springfield's residents indulged in an annual "snake whacking", during which citizens rounded up local snakes, drove them into the town square, and beat them to death. Writer George Meyer envisaged the episode as a way to raise awareness about the mistreatment of snakes. One state who evidently didn't pick up the subtext was Florida, where wildlife officials launched the "2013 Python Challenge", a competition in which hunters competed to see who could kill the greatest number of pythons. To be fair to the Florida Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission, the idea was motivated by a need to tackle the problems caused by an explosion in the area's non-native snake population, and hunters were encouraged to kill the pythons "humanely", rather than beating them to death. But with cash prizes offered for the longest and greatest number of snakes dispatched, it's hard not to think of the Springfield "snake whacking" spirit.

11. When the Rolling Stones toured, despite being in their seventies

Lisa is given a glimpse into the future in the 1995 episode Lisa's Wedding, which was actually set in 2010. One of the episode's jokes was a poster advertising the "Rolling Stones Steel Wheelchair Tour 2010”. In real life, the Stones toured in 2005, 2012 and 2014, and are still going strong. Singer Mick Jagger is 70, as is lead guitarist Keith Richards; drummer Charlie Watts is 72, and guitarist Ronnie Wood is a comparatively sprightly 66.

12. When video phones became a reality

Lisa's Wedding also contained another prediction that went on to become real: in the episode, Lisa and Marge chatted on phones fitted with video screens. After promising Lisa that she'd make sure Homer behaved at the wedding, Marge crossed her fingers, prompting Lisa to remind her that she was on "a picture phone".

13. When thieves made off with some "retirement grease"

In 2008 thieves in New York reportedly began stealing used cooking oil left outside restaurants and selling it as biofuel. They may have been taking inspiration from Homer's "retirement grease": in the 1998 episode Lard of the Dance, Homer discovered he could make a profit through stealing and reselling grease.

14. When the real-life Bart Simpson met the real-life Mr Burns

In 2013, a British man named Bart Simpson, accused of carrying a prohibited firearm, was called to appear before a judge named Mr. Burns at Warwick Crown Court. 56-year-old company director Simpson (full name Barton Simpson) was caught with a .38 Smith and Wesson revolver in his hand luggage at Birmingham Airport. "There were some eyebrows raised when the court list was published," a court worker said at the time. "It's a bizarre coincidence that Bart Simpson is actually on trial in front of Mr Burns, but it'll proceed as any other criminal case would." In the event, the real-life Mr Burns let Simpson off with a fine and community service, acknowledging that the gun had been left in the bag due to a genuine mistake.

15. When the "Good Morning" burger stopped being a joke

Nowadays, given the proliferation of ever-bigger, ever-stranger fast food creations, it's hard to remember that The Simpsons' Good Morning burger – essentially a super-large, super-fatty breakfast burger – was originally intended as a joke. Perhaps the closest real-life equivalent was Burger King's "Enormous Omelet Sandwich". Introduced in 2005 the product consisted of sausage patties, bacon, eggs and cheese within a bun sandwich; it was later criticised for its high fat and calorie content, and discontinued in the US.

16. When a man complained that an "all-you-can-eat" restaurant wasn't living up to its name

In New Kid On The Block, an episode that first aired in 1992, Marge and Homer visited Captain McAlister's All You Can Eat Seafood Restaurant. Homer proceeded to take the "all-you-can-eat" injunction literally, prompting the Captain to declare: "Tis no Man. 'Tis a remorseless eating machine." After being removed from the restaurant before eating his fill, Homer consulted an attorney who advised him to sue. ("This is the most blatant case of fraudulent advertising since my suit against the film The Never-Ending Story.") In 2012, an outraged customer from Thiensville in Wisconsin, Bill Wisth, phoned the police and organised a picket, after an "all-you-can-eat" fish restaurant refused to continue serving him. Closer to home, the same year saw two men banned from a Brighton restaurant, after allegedly regularly abusing its "all-you-can-eat" rule.

17. When the Albuquerque Isotopes became a real baseball team

In the 2001 episode Hungry Hungry Homer, local minor-league baseball team the Springfield Isotopes decided to move to New Mexico and become the Albuquerque Isotopes. Two years later, real-life team the Calgary Cannons announced a move to Albuquerque. When they held a contest for Albuquerque citizens to name the new team, the winning entry was: the Isotopes. Like Springfield, which houses a nuclear power plant (where Homer works), New Mexico is also home to several nuclear research facilities. The term isotope, which refers to a particular form of an element (often a radioactive one) is frequently used in nuclear research.

18. When real-life voting machines began changing people's votes

In a 2008 Halloween special, Homer was seen attempting to vote for Barack Obama; the electronic voting machine continued to register a vote for Mitt Romney instead. This prediction came true during the 2012 Presidential elections, when a Pennsylvania voting machine was recorded doing the exact same thing. A man identified online as "centralpavote" recorded the malfunction on his smartphone and uploaded the video, where it shot to instant fame. The faulty machine in question was subsequently taken out of service.

19. When Simpsons products hit real shops

In 2007, as part of a marketing campaign for The Simpsons Movie, real life versions of a number of well-known Simpsons products appeared in shops belonging to the international chain 7-Eleven (the chain has no UK-based outlets). Cans of Buzz Cola, Krusty-O's cereal, Squishee slush puppies, and a special edition of the Radioactive Man Comic were all sold for a limited period, alongside other The Simpsons merchandise. However, the team behind the marketing stunt decided not to sell the Simpsons' famous Duff Beer, but instead introduced an alcohol-free Duff Energy Drink.

20. When Duff became a real beer, against the programme-makers wishes

Simpsons creator Matt Groening has publicly stated that he will not license the Duff trademark to brew an actual beer, over concern that it would encourage children to drink. That hasn't prevented a number of companies from attempting to cash in by introducing their own version of the product. In the mid-Nineties, the Australian brewery Lion Nathan attempted to sell a beer named Duff, and were subsequently sued by 20th Century Fox. Only a few cans were produced, and have since become collectors items: one case reportedly sold at auction for $US 13,000 (approximately £8000). Germany's Eschweger Klosterbrauerei brewery produces a Duff beer, while England's Daleside brewery produces a dark beer which goes by the name (Duff can be linke dto the Gaelic term dubh, which means "dark" or "black").

21. When hamburger earmuffs became a real thing

Hamburger earmuffs were invented by The Simpsons' Professor Frink, in the 1998 episode The Wizard of Evergreen Terrace. Frink explained to Homer that you can mix any two things together to form an invention; Homer suggested hamburger earmuffs. Frink then revealed that he had already made that particualr invention, and that they'd soon be on the shelves. The professor's words proved prophetic: hamburger earmuffs have subsequently become "a thing". In 2013, the item received an unexpected spurt of fame when Josh Gates, host of the SyFy reality series Destination Truth, ordered a T-shirt on Amazon and received a pair of hamburger earmuffs by mistake. Initially bemused, Gates soon saw the funny side of the mix-up, and began to tweet pictures of himself wearing product, leading to a demand that soon saw the earmuffs sell out.

^{(Picture: Josh Gates via Twitter)}

22. When real-life actors recreated the intro sequence in painstaking detail

In 2010, the UK-based advertising agency Devilfish produced a promotional video for Sky One, in which each frame of The Simpsons famous opening credits was recreated using human actors (and in which Didcot Power Station doubles up for Springfield's nuclear power plant). Matt Groening was so impressed, he later decided to use the clip as the opening sequence in the episode Homer Simpson, This Is Your Wife.

23. When a woman "became" Marge

Earlier this year, makeup artist Veronica Ershova and photographer Alexander Khokhlov worked on a project that transformed real women into works of art: the video below shows how one of their models was turned into an an eerily realistic Marge Simpson. Marge's distinctive towering hairstyle was created via a stack of chrysanthemums, painted blue.

24. When Homer's Land of Chocolate became a real place

In the 1991 episode Burns Verkaufen der Kraftwerk, two visiting German businessmen inform Homer that they are from "the land of chocolate" (meaning Germany). Homer being Homer, he instantly envisages a fantasy land, in which houses, streets, rivers, streetlamps and animals such as rabbits and dogs are all formed from chocolate. In 2013, Homer's dream became a (sort-of) reality, when the Homer-ishly titled theme park Chocolate Happy Land opened in Shanghai. Attractions on offer at the park include a 400 square-metre castle formed from 160 chocolate stands, chocolate handbags, flower vases and jewellary, a chcoolate recreation of China's terracotta army, and, according to this article in Time Out Shanghai, a chocolate Hello Kitty, and "mannequins wearing chocolate underwear and bikinis".

25. When Barbara Bush learnt a lesson from Marge Simpson

Marge Simpson is know for upholding discipline and good manners – and in 1990, the character had to teach First Lady Barbara Bush a few lessons in politeness. Bush said of The Simpsons: “It was the dumbest thing I had ever seen, but it’s a family thing, and I guess it’s clean.” She later received a letter from Marge, who politely rebuked her for describing the show as "dumb". To her credit, Bush then wrote back, apologising for her “loose tongue” and praising Marge for setting a good example to the rest of the country. Her letter even ended with "PS Homer looks like a handsome fella!"

India’s Mars mission could be a giant leap

Critics say India has too much poverty for such an endeavour. But space exploration should not be the preserve of the rich west

• 
• • Priyamvada Gopal
  • The Guardian, Wednesday 24 September 2014 20.44 BST

Staff from the Indian Space Research Organisation celebrate after the Mars Orbiter Spacecraft successfully entered the Mars orbit on Wednesday. Photograph: Manjunath Kiran/AFP/Getty Images

After a journey of 300 days and 420 million miles, an Indian satellite has arrived in orbit around Mars. To have done so on an economy ticket – at $74m “the cheapest interplanetary mission ever to be undertaken by the world”, according to the mission’s leader – only adds to the significance of the event.

India’s space agency – the Indian Space Research Organisation – is a late entrant to the space race, and the success of Mangalyaan (“Mars craft” in Hindi) makes the country an Asian leader in space exploration, if not yet a global one. The mission has been received with delight on India’s social media and across its political spectrum, where “national pride” is the watchword.

To reach a distant world, where others have failed, might have had special significance for Narendra Modi, India’s prime minister, as he finally heads off to the United States for an official visit, having been denied a visa in the past because of doubts over his role in the 2002 Gujarat bloodshed. Modi and his ministers have been quick to assert collective pride in Mangalyaan as part of their vision of a globally ascendant India, ignoring the fact that the mission was actually fostered by their predecessors.

But questions are being asked. The Economist, not a known advocate of the poor or of government spending on social welfare, demanded to know – not only of India but of Sri Lanka, Belarus, Bolivia and Nigeria, all “minnows” with fledgling space aspirations: “How can poor countries afford space programmes?” Cut aid to such over-reaching parvenus, some in Britain have suggested. The criticism seems partly directed at the fact that the mission was not privately funded, as research in the west increasingly is; state money was channelled towards it without any marketable product emerging.

But inquiry and exploration are not the prerogative of advanced capitalist western nations – with the rest of the world eternally condemned to be a footnote in the history of science, even as its historical contributions to knowledge are forgotten. A country, however “largely third world” its “reality”, as one peevish British economist put it, does not have to circumscribe its sphere of achievement to feeding its people, important as that is. Indeed, it can be argued that in a better world the search for knowledge and the quest for social justice would be necessarily intertwined. As the Economist concedes, India’s weather satellites helped reduce the number of deaths during cyclone Phailin last year.

The real problem, of course, is that in economies that are in addition seeking to win the global capitalist growth race, such symbiosis between people and science is increasingly rare. It’s what the progressive economist Jean Drèze may have had in mind when he described the Mars mission controversially as a flag-waving “delusional dream” – when public health and energy needs ought to be met first. Recent floods in Kashmir speak of failures, technological and political, to anticipate and respond to natural disasters. Indeed, placing industrial development over ecological interests often causes such disasters in the first place.

Serious questions remain about whether science and technology – and not just in poorer countries – can have a greater good in mind when the bottom line is profit. The space race between the US and the Soviet Union was not an affordable luxury undertaken for the sake of knowledge, but intrinsically tied to the military-industrial complex. Whatever the intellectual commitments of India’s space scientists, there’s no doubt that the language of national “heroism” and technological “might”, which underpins a dangerous religiously inflected military and nuclear standoff in the region, afflicts much of the praise poured on the Mars mission’s success.

Perhaps national science and technology policy can be fully prised away from corporate and defence industry interests, and placed firmly in the province of economic justice and social progress. But the current administration’s record is not encouraging: Indian ministers have flouted scientific advice by fast-tracking environmental clearances to corporations including mining firms.

Yet India is fortunate in having a long and diverse history of campaigning science movements that have sought to draw both on indigenous knowledge traditions and direct modern scientific research towards progress in health, literacy, environment, nutrition and sanitation. The best way for India to commemorate the success of Mangalyaan would be to reopen a national debate about how science and technology can best be harnessed in the widest interests of its people.

Disarmament is for wimps. Go get your nukes if you can

S A Aiyer in The Times of India

All my life I have opposed nuclear bombs. I have argued that such bombs are basically unusable; that, instead of ensuring security, they risk escalation of small conflicts into disasters; and that they lead to undesirable macho foreign policies. Most Indians exulted after India’s nuclear tests of 1998, claiming India was now a great power on par with the US. I cautioned that India was merely on par with Pakistan and North Korea. However, after seeing Ukraine bullied by Russia, I have to revise my views. Nukes are not useless, and may be essential deterrents. 

Ukraine was one of a dozen new states created when the Soviet Union broke up in 1991. It emerged independent with a massive 1,190 nuclear warheads, more than the arsenals of Britain, France and China combined. 

But it mistakenly thought that the Soviet collapse heralded the end of Moscow’s domination. So, it agreed to give up all its nukes and send them to Russia for destruction. In return, the US, Russia, and Britain signed the 1994 Budapest Memorandum on Security Assurances, pledging to safeguard Ukraine’s territorial sovereignty. This was greeted with universal applause. 

Today, Ukraine knows it made a terrible mistake: it can no longer deter its powerful neighbour. Last month, Russia sent troops to annex Ukraine’s Crimea province. Now Russia threatens to split the rest of Ukraine, converting Eastern Ukraine (where a quarter of the population is ethnic Russian) into a puppet state, just as it earlier used armed muscle to convert the Russian-ethnic regions of South Ossetia and Abkhazia in Georgia into puppet states. Armed Russian infiltrators have teamed up with local ethnic Russians to seize major cities in eastern Ukraine. Ukrainian troops and police are too fearful of Russian firepower to offer much resistance. How they regret giving up nukes! 

Last week’s Geneva talks proposed peace, but with no teeth at all. Neither the US nor the UK, both Budapest Memorandum guarantors, is willing to stop Russia militarily. They are reluctant to even impose stiff economic sanctions, since Putin could retaliate by slashing gas supplies to Europe and nationalizing Western investments in oil and gas. 

Western security guarantees to Ukraine have proved as empty as those given to Czechoslovakia before World War II. When Hitler demanded the right to expand into Czechoslovakia to “protect” ethnic Germans there — the same excuse used by Putin to move into Eastern Ukraine — the Western powers gave in. 

Putin’s words in a TV interview were straight out of Hitler’s book. “We definitely knowthat we should do everything to help these people (ethnic Russians) defend their rights and define their destiny . We will fight for this. The Federation Council (of Russia) gave the president the right to use military force in Ukraine. I hope very much that I don’t have to use this right.” 

Most Indians are uninterested in a far-away country like Ukraine. Anti-US Indians are happy to see Putin bash the West. Yet the Putin principle is monstrous. How would readers react to Pakistan wanting to take over Muslim-inhabited areas in India to protect Muslims there? Or to Bangladesh taking over Assam to protect Bangladeshi migrants there? 

India is militarily strong and so can resist any such threats. Ukraine, Georgia and most states cannot. The USSR once posed an existentialist threat to the West, which therefore took security guarantees seriously. But no more. The West will honour military commitments only when this is costless, or affects its core interests. Ukraine has taught the world not to depend on the promises of the mighty. 

One consequence will be more nuclear proliferation. Japan and Korea have long avoided nukes, and depended on a US security umbrella. After Ukraine, they will think again. I predict both will go nuclear in a decade. 

Saudi Arabia, fearful of Iran and Iraq, has long depended on US security guarantees, including steps to prevent Iran from getting an N-bomb . After the Ukraine fiasco, Saudi Arabia knows how hollow US assurances are, and will embark quietly on a nuclear plan. The US invaded Iraq and Afghanistan, and bombed Libya. Would it have done so if those countries had nuclear bombs? For an answer, look at North Korea. This country has violated the UN charter repeatedly, attacked South Korean ships, and poses a security threat to East Asia. But the US does not intervene because North Korea has nukes. 

Lesson for non-nuclear states: don’t depend for security on the big powers who will dump you when convenient. Disarmament is for wimps. Go get your own nukes if you can. More nuclearization will deter some invasions, but also increases chances of a nuclear clash or accident. It is not a panacea. But it is now inevitable.