చందమామ సీరియల్స్ December 6, 2017

సీరియల్ పేరు	First Issue	Last Issue	Number of Issues	Rerun First Issue	Rerun Last Issue
తోకచుక్క	Jan 1954	Jun 1955	18	May 1980	Oct 1981
మకరదేవత	Jul 1955	Dec 1956	18	Nov 1981	Apr 1983
ముగ్గురు మాంత్రికులు	Jan 1957	Jun 1958	18	May 1983	Oct 1984
కంచుకోట	Jul 1958	Dec 1959	18	Nov 1984	Apr 1986
జ్వాలాదీపం	Jan 1960	Jun 1961	18	May 1986	Oct 1987
రాకాసిలోయ	Jul 1961	May 1964	35	Sep 2005	Jul 2008
దుర్గేశనందిని	Jun 1964	Jul 1965	14
నవాబు నందిని	Aug 1965	Apr 1966	9
పాతాళదుర్గం	May 1966	Dec 1967	20
శిథిలాలయం	Jan 1968	Sep 1970	33	Mar 2010	Dec 2012
రాతిరథం	Oct 1970	Apr 1972	19
యక్షపర్వతం	May 1972	Jun 1974	25	Jan 2001	Jan 2002	13
విచిత్ర కవలలు	Jul 1974	Dec 1975	18
మాయాసరోవరం	Jan 1976	Jun 1978	30	Feb 2002	Oct 2003	21
భల్లూకమాంత్రికుడు	Jul 1978	Apr 1980	22	Nov 2003	Aug 2005	22
బంగారులోయ	Nov 1987	Nov 1988	13
ఐదు ప్రశ్నలు	Dec 1988	Apr 1989	5
తండ్రి కొడుకులు	May 1989	Aug 1989	4
బందిపోటు యువరాజు	Sep 1989	Feb 1991	18
అపూర్వుడి సాహసయాత్రలు	Mar 1991	Mar 1992	13
మాయా భవనం	Apr 1992	Mar 1993	12
విచిత్ర పుష్పం	Apr 1993	Apr 1994	13
కీర్తిసింహుడి కథ	May 1994	Sep 1994	5
భువనసుందరి	Oct 1994	Jun 1995	9
రూపధరుడి యాత్రలు	Jul 1995	Dec 1996	18
సామ్రాట్ అశోక	Jan 1997	May 1998	15
స్వర్ణ సింహాసనం	Dec 1999	Oct 2000	11

Impact of Electric Vehicles on Oil Demand February 6, 2017

Does electrification of automobiles mean the end of the oil industry? Perhaps not, because crude oil has other uses beyond being an energy carrier — like producing for example. How does it oil compete with electricity as a fuel? As of today, batteries are expensive but electric motors are simpler to make than IC engines and a transmission. But suppose battery costs go down enough that an electric car doesn’t cost any more than a gasoline car. How do the energy costs compare? Let us do a little math

I spend anywhere between 0.33 to 0.4 Wh per mile on Tesla and I get 18 miles per gallon on my gasoline SUV. To drive 18 miles, I need approximately 7 kWh. At 10 cents per kWh, I would need around 70 cents. To compete with electricity, gasoline needs to drop down to 70 cents per gallon. If a $53 per barrel translates to $2.10 at the pump, what price do we need to sustain $0.70 per gallon?  Perhaps $18 per barrel.

This is without considering all the pollution that gasoline creates. It is hard to put a price on pollution, but it suffices to say that gasoline needs to be a lot cheaper than $18 for it to compete with electricity.

So if you want to invest in oil stocks pay attention to progress in battery technology.

 

 

 

Lok Satta on Chapter 11 August 6, 2014

When a new visitor sets foot on US soil the first thing  he or she notices is the physical infrastructure be it buildings or roads or airports. After a while you notice something even more important, the respect an averqawge American has for rule of law, fairness, and freedom of expression. The issues used to bother me long before I experienced life in US. It is JFK that remarked “people think we built roads because we are rich but we are rich because of our roads”. He might as well have said we are rich because of our respect for rule of law. A just society is a prerequisite for economic development. If physical structure is  all that one is looking for Dubhai perhaps may be even more impressive.  Those of you who think US is a monster, I am not going to argue with you. Most of you are simply simply clueless. Experiencing life here for the past 25 years I am very well aware of the problems that afflict US society and govt.

What was appealing about JP is not the fact that he lamented about about the problems in Indian politics, but his vision for  reforms in public administration.  Being an engineer, running public administration by a well designed system that is constantly tuned by few people at the top had a natural appeal to me than relying on individual heroes and messiahs. Not that any of us expected him to make any serious inroads but a few voices of reason fighting for justice would bring us closer to the rule of law.

What followed on the ground was something else. Even if you describe you journey as a marathon you need to be closer to your destination by one mile;. Instead if your distance increases to 27 miles after first ten minutes, you should perhaps abandon the race. When somebody asked Feynman his solution for solving world’s hunger he remarked that question is better directed to people who have given it lot more thought than him. When you have a party idealogue running the day to day affairs of party what you get is Lok Satta.  I know that JP tried but never managed to attract a competent hand to run his party.  About the  way the party was run prior to elections, the less said the better.

The other factor that affects his style of politics is that an infinitely divided India is a very difficult place to govern.  Primordial loyalties run much deeper than any desire for rule of law. We clamor for special privileges for us, our caste, our group, our region at the expense of  others. We vote for corrupt politicians who promise freebies with least regard for who pays for them.

To summarize, JP had his chance. However unappealing the current choices are, it is pointless to hope that people will pay attention to him in future. If you are from AP/Telangana we are stuck with TRS, TDP, YSRCP and perhaps BJP.  Pick your poison.

Lok Satta — On Selection of Candidates May 14, 2014

After the lackluster performance in 2014, Lok Satta needs to seriously re-evaluate its strategy for contesting future elections. In 2009 and 2014 it has contested in a large number of seats but didn’t poll significant votes in more than a handful constituencies. One wonders what purpose is served by contesting in an assembly seat and getting only 1000 votes. One of the reasons I heard is that even if a contest doesn’t result in a win, it builds the party infrastructure. However, no such effect is seen from 2009 to 2014.  Instead of energizing the party shooting for an unrealistic goal only pulls the morale of the cadre down. The resources of Lok Satta are extremely limited. For the foreseeable future they will be limited and election will continue to be a resource intensive process. The party achieves better results if it focuses it resources on few seats instead of spreading them thin all over the state.

Lok Satta’s money requirement is lower than other parties because it does not bribe voters, but  is still significant.  Election costs money, period.  One of the blind spots many aspirants of Lok Satta suffer from is that they expect the money to come from somewhere else, mostly from the central party funds.  There is  no secret sauce to fund raising, it comes from ones ability to network and inspire others to donate. Ability to fund raise should be one of the key qualifications to contest.  One has to be either independently rich or one has to convince others to donate money to contest in elections. This may sound harsh, but the sooner we stop pretending there is a way around the money requirement the less disappointment we face in the election. Life is not fair, get used to it.  It is not unreasonable for the party to insist on showing a source of funds from a candidate and ensure his willingness to spend on his own election.

Once we filter out candidates by the qualifications required we are left with the question, how we select our candidates.  In US, people go through internal elections of the party called primaries. At the first glance, this looks like a great idea to emulate. Once you start examining closely, the flaws become clearer.   Only 10% of the people vote in primaries in US and they tend to be extremists. It is difficult to elect moderates in primaries who are more acceptable to other parties and bulk of the population.  Lok Satta does not have primaries but it has internal elections. Apart from favoring extremists over more electable candidates, they have an additional problem. From what I observed in the Telugu cultural  organizations in US, the internal elections can be easily gamed.  For example, you will find the membership suddenly increases before the elections. Of course, these are not members who are inspired by the party ideals. They  are disinterested voters  brought in by a candidate just before the elections to ensure his/her victory. We can mitigate this somewhat by giving the right to vote only some time after becoming a member.  At the current stage of the party, the selection of the candidates is best handled manually by JP himself. The selection inevitably results in disappointment for some people. There is no way around it.

The last idea I want to propose is to allocate a seat to a candidate well in advance so that he is willing to invest time in developing contact with people of his constituency.  In the current climate, candidates are very unsure whether they will get the ticket and hence nobody is focusing on a constituency.  One significant weapon in the Lok Satta arsenal can be their willingness to work throughout the year instead of showing up with lot of money at the last minute like opponents.

To summarize,

• Redefine the goals of the party to what is realistically achievable and focus its resources on achieving those goals instead of spreading too thin
• Make fund raising a requirement for qualifying a candidate
• Revamp the constitution to do away with elections
• Commit a constituency years in advance to a candidate so that he/she invests his time and energy in a particular constituency

Lok Satta — What’s Next? May 8, 2014

I have been meaning to write this for quite for some time, but held off because I didn’t want to discourage anybody passionately for Lok Satta. I know some of you don’t want to hear this, but most likely Lok Satta is losing all the seats including JP. It is perhaps time for a little introspection.

People make all kinds of silly accusations on JP and Lok Satta, he is a casteist, he has a hidden agenda, he has taken 250 crores From YSR/Sonia. I don’t want to waste time arguing this kind of crappy arguments, but I have a serious problem with JP and the way the party is run.

Excessive money flowing into election campaign has a very pernicious effect on any society. When politicians spend money on elections with “Return on Investment” in their mind, it is meaningless to expect them to work for people. JP understands this very well but does he have a game plan to fight it effectively? It does not appear so. It is perhaps worth looking at how an election happens at a nuts and bolts level.

A typical MLA constituency has anywhere from 150 to 500 booths. Each booth covers around thousand voters. Once you are in the fray you are approached by an agent who will deliver all the votes to you… for a price. If you are willing to shell out money you have the burden of evaluating whether the agent is a fraud or actually capable of delivering the votes. Lok Satta does not have this problem because it doesn’t want to bribe voters but we have to seriously ask ourselves whether all those fine speeches by JP will make them vote for him. Of course we know the answer. They won’t.

Lok Satta may not distribute money but it has other expense. For example, we need at least 3 agents per booth. If there are 300 booths we need at least 900 agents. Others simply pay money to recruit agents for the poll day. I have heard of amounts 4000 Rs and up per agent. If you have recruit 1000 agents it amounts to 40 lakhs. Can we get 1000 volunteers in one constituency who will give their one day to you for free. Going by Lok Satta record, it does not appear so.

Now, add the expense of conducting public meetings, advertising, bill boards. The money that election commission allows is too low to cover even the legitimate expenditure. Most Lok Satta candidates are not independently rich and do not have the money to afford this kind of money.

There is no point in lamenting about the situation. I do not see any point in contesting an election that cannot be won. Perhaps it needs to pool all the volunteers and focus on very few constituencies. The primary constraining resource in fighting an election is the cadre of the party. Trying to contest on the basis of mere TV appearances is a losing idea. Unless the party recognizes its own resource constraints and operates within, it will lose credibility and invite derision.

Unless the party reinvents itself after May 16, I am mentally writing Lok Satta off. That is frustrating because I do not trust any of the traditional parties and AAP is no substitute for Lok Satta.

Case Insensitive Transliteration Scheme for Typing Telugu August 8, 2012

RTS is undoubtedly the most popular transliteration scheme for typing Telugu in Roman script. It started off as as an input method for a “soon to arrive” WYSIWIG display of telugu characters. Instead it ended up as a standard for “Telugu in Roman Script”.  Soon after the standard was posted in the usenet group soc.culture.indian.telugu in 1994, people started posting in RTS ascii. There were some programs that would convert RTS ascii text in a batch mode to PDF files and web pages. I wrote one of the earliest programs (in 1994) to convert LaTeX file with Telugu in RTS to a PDF file.  The supposedly “Round the Corner” Telugu word processor took some time to make way into popular word processors like MS Word.  I never attempted to type Telugu in MS Word. I have no clue whether any transliteration can be used  to  type in MS Word at all.

Off late, Emacs Mule has become quite practical to type Telugu in. The only trouble is that the transliteration scheme Emacs uses is  ITRANS — not necessarily a favorite of mine. ITRANS was written with primarily Devanagari in mind. It was extended to Telugu later. For more than 2 years I have been using Emacs to type Telugu in ITRANS. I was hoping somebody would put in RTS scheme in Emacs also. Since nobody is doing that I decided to jump in myself.

Once I started looking into the LISP code, I came to the conclusion tot he conclusion, it takes more time than I am willing to spend  to generate the sunna with ‘n’ and ‘m ‘. Once I started to deviate fromt he standard anyway, I decided to redesign anyway.   I may end up adding RTS also if I find the need. Here are the main ideas:

1. 100% case insensitive i.e. use upper case lower case as you wish, you will get the same Telugu character.
2. Distinction for similar character like త-ట,  రు-ఋ-ఱు is shown by appending 5 special characters  quote — ‘ ,  period — .  tilde — ~ and carrot — ^. colon :
3. The characters quote and period do not require pressing of the shift key. Only tilde, carrot, and colon require the shift key.  They are used for relatively infrequent characters —    ఌ(~lu),   ౡ(~loo),  ఙ(^n) , ఞ(~n),  అరసున్న  ఁ (~m) and విసర్గ    ః (:h). Everything else is managed with period quote.
4. Multiple of achieving the same characters is supported to suit individual preferences  ఔ (ou, au, ow).
5. సున్న is produced by typing .n or .m. For example, we need to type ga.nga to get గంగ and ga.mpa to get గంప. I would rather have the simple ganga and gampa instead to generate సున్న . If any of you are willing to spend a little time on Emacs Lisp and achieve that let me know. I will be willing to incorporate that. Of course, if for some reason one wants, one could also type ga.npa to get గంప.

అ  a	ఆ    aa	ఇ    i	ఈ   ee	ఉ    u	ఊ    oo
	ఋ   r’u	ౠ  r’oo	ఌ   ~lu	ౡ  ~loo
ఎ  e	ఏ     ae e’	ఐ     ai	ఒ    o	ఓ    oa o’	ఔ     ou ow au
క  k	ఖ     kh	గ     g	ఘ   gh	ఙ    ^n
చ  c ch	ఛ     chh	జ     j	ఝ   jh	ఞ    ~n
ట  t’	ఠ      t’h	డ     d’	ఢ    d’h	ణ     n’
త  t	థ      th	ద     d	ధ    dh	న     n
ప  p	ఫ      ph	బ     b	భ    bh	మ    m
	య     y	ర     r	ల    l	వ     v
		స     s	శ    sh	ష     shh
	హ      h	ల      l	క్ష    x ksh	ఱ     .r
	అరసున్న ఁ ~m	సున్న ం .n .m	విసర్గ ః :h	పొల్లు ్  .h

What version of Emacs does it work with?

I modified lisp files that came with Emacs 24.1. I’ll submit the patch to Emacs team and see if it gets accepted.

What is the name of the transliteration scheme?

I’ll think of a suitable name. For now, it is ‘Juvvadi Transliteration Scheme’ (JTS). Emacs files calls it as such.
Where can I get the patch?
I’ll make a separate patch available if official incorporation into Emacs take too long.  Otherwise wait for me to work witht he emacs folks.

60 Year History of Different Countries in a Nutshell January 27, 2011

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We all know that South Asia is teeming with people. How well have the countries managed their affairs? Looking at this UN site this is what I find.

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	Bangladesh		China		India		Pakistan		USA
	1950	2010	1950	2010	1950	2010	1950	2010	1950	2010
Population (1000s)	43595	164425	544951	1354156	371851	1214614	41177	184753	157813	317641
Births per year (1000s)	2194	3428	25017	18046	16891	26929	1596	5295	3994	4402
Deaths per year (1000s)	1222	1053	14321	9321	9930	9960	929	1225	1558	2432
Total fertility rate	6.77	2.36	6.11	1.77	5.91	2.76	6.6	4	3.45	2.09
Net Reproduction Rate (Daughters per woman)	1.87	1.06	1.85	0.77	1.66	1.17	2.1	1.73	1.6	1.01
Sex ratio	115.9	102.3	108.1	107.9	108	106.8	124.5	106.1	99.8	97.5
Median age	20.5	24.5	23.9	34.2	21.3	25	24.2	21.3	30	36.6
Population density (persons/sq. km)	303	1142	57	141	113	369	52	232	16	33
Infant mortality rate	200.5	44.8	195	22.9	163.7	54.6	154.3	63.9	27.8	5.9

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• Number of births per year in India have gone up from 17 millions to 27 millions whereas China has reduced it from 25 million to 18 million.
• Bangladesh controlled its births per year from 2.2 million to 3.4 million whereas Pakistan let it go from 1.6 million to 5.3 million.
• US Population has doubled in 60 years but the births per year have gone up from 4.0 million to only 4.4 million.
• Bangladesh population has gone up 3.77 times  but the number of  deaths have gone down by 14%.
• China’s population has gone up 2.48 times, the births per year decreased by 28% and the deaths per year decreased 35%.
• India’s population has gone up 3.27 times, births per year increased  59% and deaths essentially remained the same.
• Pakistan managed to multiply its population 4.5 times, births per year 3.32 times and deaths 1.32 times.
• US doubled its population in 60 years, but births per year increased only 10%, while deaths increased 56%. The natural increase in US (births minus deaths) is only 2 million per year, but it gets a million legal immigrants and a half million immigrants per year bringing the net increase to around 3.5 million per year. Even after taking immigration into account, Pakistan is adding more people per year than US!

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A loose definition of Total Fertility Rate (TFR) number of children born to a woman on the average. Net  Reproduction Rate (NRR) refers to number of daughters that survive per woman. In almost every society slightly  more boys than girls are born, but women live for longer time. Not all children survive into their reproductive age. NRR takes infant mortality into account whereas TFR doesn’t. That explains why NRR in 1950 is much less than half of TFR in almost every country. NRR is a very good measure of how fast a population is replacing itself. Interestingly, even in 1950 Pakistan had a higher NRR than the other four countries. Pakistan’s NRR today is lower than where India was 1950!  In 60 years, all that Pakistan did was to reduce its NRR from 2.1 to 1.73.

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To summarize, China had done a tremendous job in controlling its population. Bangladesh has done a slightly better job than India and Pakistan has done an atrocious job. Infant mortality in all three South Asian giants is higher today than where US was in 1950!