“Without love, what is life?” sing power-pop rockers Def Leppard in their hit song “Long, Long Way to Go“. It’s a sentiment that resonates with a lot of people these days, as the chart success of the song illustrates. The rhetorical question begs another, often unasked question, however: “What is love?”

“Tis love that makes the world go round”, the Bard said, and yet at the same time it sometimes seems that the world goes around in confusion about just what love really is.

One of the reasons for this is that the word “l-o-v-e” is commonly used to refer to many different things, both as a noun and a verb, from what you feel about chocolate chip cookies to what you felt the moment you laid eyes on him / her, to what’s “gone missing in our relationship”, to what you “do” to your children, to the title and chorus of any pop song in the top forty this week.
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What’s Your i-Name?

Get a 50 year lease on your i-name for only US$25, and impress your friends and family in five years time by already having one when everyone else finally finds out what they are…

An i-name is a new standards-based persistent identity that can be used to receive email, telephone, fax and other forms of communication. It is portable and easily remembered. For example, my i-name could be =sitapati. An i-broker protects your privacy by brokering requests to communicate with you. Only persons to whom you explicitly give permission can actually use it to contact you, and they make a request through your i-broker who relays it to you. Can anybody say: “Just say No to spam”?
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Grim climate change scenario for Asia

“The weather predictions for Asia in 2050 read like a script from a doomsday movie and many climatologists and green groups fear they will come true unless there is a concerted global effort to rein in greenhouse gas emissions.

In the decades to come Asia, home to more than half the world’s 6.3 billion people, will lurch from one climate extreme to another, with impoverished farmers battling droughts, floods, disease, food shortages and rising sea levels. ”

Read the article

Boston.com / News / World / Europe / Arctic nations agree to fight glacial melting

“More than 300 scientists concluded after four years of study that melting sea ice, abrupt weather changes, and rising temperatures in northern latitudes have far outpaced climate change in other regions over the past few decades”

Read the article

The Future of Jiyuna (Free) Software, 21 April 2003 - GNU Project - Free Software Foundation (FSF)

Follow the link above for a transcription of Richard M. Stallman’s speech, given in Japan. He basically gives the same speech over and over again. I like it. He has his riff and he’s staying on it until people can understand what he’s talking about. In this article I’ve put some of my thoughts on the matter, and some quotes from the speech linked to above.

“Free” (as in Freedom) Software is important. As computers become more and more pervasive it becomes more and more important who controls the software on them. If we are not alert to assert our rights now, we will find ourselves imprisoned in twenty years time. At the moment we are alienated from the land and from the means of production, our only access through corporate entities controlling these resources. The same thing will occur in the future with software. We will lose our freedom. RIght now you can choose not to use a word processor, and to use a pen and paper. But what about in twenty years time when embedded systems with proprietary software are present everywhere and in everything? You will find yourself at the mercy of corporate entities whose legally mandated mission is to maximise monetary return on shareholders’ investment.

Of course you can trust them….
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I read with interest an article on NEWS.com.au, “Vic Police fire shot in DVD ‘arms race’” from November 26, 2004 “At the factory of Recall Secure Destruction Services today more than 90,000 DVDs, DVDRs and CD-Rs worth more than $1.3 million were piled onto a conveyor belt and then crushed in a huge grinder.”

According to Adrianne Pecotic of the Australian Federation Against Copyright Theft (AFACT) “the trade in illegal DVDs cost the Australian industry more than $150 million a year and the size of the problem (is) increasing.”

At the same time: “DVD makers were constantly working to find new technologies to prevent the copying of their films but, because of the large amount of money to be made, criminals were working just as hard to find ways around them.”

When I lived in Perú I saw so many people who made their living selling pirated DVDs and CDs. In fact, it is a major part of the economy there. Of a population of 26 million people around 12 million compose the Economically Active Population (EAP). 60% of those people are in retail - that means 7.2 million people, most of them in Lima (pop. 10 million), engaged in anything and everything from hocking vegetables on the footpath of a side street, to standing at traffic lights as a human display stand with everything from batteries to inflatable globes hanging off them. 85% of the economy is black, outside the taxation system. Original CDs are hard to come by and cost up to thirty times the cost of an audio-equivalent copy. Stalls selling every title imaginable abound. CDs and DVDs are commodity items, costing US$1 each.
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The latest edition of the prototype ezine from blog feeds that I have been working on is now out. It is called Living Sound. You can see the edition here. Information about the project is here. I will hopefully have a page up in the next couple of days where you can subscribe to receive it via email.

At the moment we are working on the design, and also on cross-platform compatibility. Screenshots of how it appears on different systems are available here.

Red Hat People: Free doesn’t just refer to Price

Here is my first post to my Red Hat blog.

MetroWest Daily News - Researchers create super-secure computer network

Researchers have implemented quantum cryptography. This works on the principle that observing light photons changes their state. Cryptographic keys are exchanged using light photons over fiber optic cable. If anyone observes the signal between the two nodes, it becomes corrupted, and the exchanged keys are not used. Otherwise, if the key exchange is successful data is transmitted normally and decrypted using the exchanged keys.

A couple of points. One is that strong encryption will become increasingly important as the use of the Internet becomes more pervasive in society. The other is this whole quantum thing. Multiple state particles? Check out the blog of my friend Peter Rohde who is doing Ph.D. research on quantum computing. Drop me a line if you can figure it out. One interesting observation that a friend made the other day: Seeing that recording light photons changes their state, what effect does all this video taping and cell-phone snapping have on the fabric of reality? What is reality T.V. doing?

CNN.com - Scientist: Man in Americas earlier than thought - Nov 17, 2004
“That had been repeated so many times in textbooks and lectures it became part of the common lore,” said Dennis Stanford, curator of archeology at the Smithsonian Institution. “People forgot it was only an unproven hypothesis.”

A growing body of evidence has prompted scientists to challenge that assumption.

(This could be a generic comment about a lot of modern scientific knowledge, actually…)

Article: Kyoto Protocol gets the green light | New Scientist
Russia formally ratified the Kyoto Protocol - aimed at curbing global greenhouse gas emissions - on Thursday. In doing so, it triggered a 90-day countdown to bring the international climate treaty into force.

Wired News: Sour Grapes Over Milk Labeling

This is a story from back in September last year on Wired News about Monsanto suing dairy producers who wish to advertise their milk as being free from the artificial growth hormones that are increasingly prevalent in the dairy industry. These growth hormones increase milk output by speeding up the metabolism of the cow, causing many health complications and necesitating an attendant heavy use of antibiotics.

Farmers who do not use the hormones are disadvantaged as their production per cow is lower, by up to 25%. The only economic advantage they have is the growing consumer awareness and preference for natural, ethical, environmentally friendly and non-genetically engineered products. So they want to label their milk as being free of these hormones. Monsanto officials say labels like “No rBST” or “rBST-free” are misleading, unfair and deceptive, and “unfairly hurt their business”.

I have been following Monsanto in this field for the past six or seven years, beginning when, as a reporter for a magazine in NZ, I interviewed a pair of journalists, Steve Wilson and Jane Akre, who had been fired by Fox Networks for producing a shocking expose on what was then called “Bovine Growth Hormone” or rBGH. The “rBST” mentioned in this article sounds exactly the same, and a quick google turned up this reference which confirms that in fact it is.

Let me tell you a few things about this hormone and the way that Monsanto have introduced it. The monopolistic manner in which they want to economically force all producers to adopt it or go out of business, and deny the public the right to know what they are buying and what goes into their food and to vote with their money, is simply the latest manifestation of what is basically an evil way of doing things.

Like I said in my summary of the Biotech conference last week, I think that a future in the hands of economic forces whose overriding concern is to maximise profits and “capture the market” is a very dangerous and potentially bleak one.

Drugs based on rBGH, or rBST as it is now known, are not approved in Australia or New Zealand. They were approved in the US by the FDA in record time in spite of research that showed that milk produced using rBGH increases the risk of cancer. This research was swept under the rug, but brought out by Steve and Jane during their investigation. Travelling north to Canada they had found that the drug regulation agency there had rejected the drug, and had been offered over a million dollars in “research grants” by Monsanto, which they had refused.

Steve and Jane’s report was envisioned by Fox producers as a special to extol the virtues of Monsanto’s new product. When it turned out completely the opposite they were first silenced and their documentary shelved, and then fired when after years of pressure they refused to change it to paint a positive picture of Monsanto and rBGH. Monsanto, through their various subsidiaries, are obviously a big contributor to the bottom line of Fox television and other entities in the Murdoch media empire through advertising revenue.

Fox muzzled them by invoking a confidentiality clause in their employment contract which stated that they were not allowed to talk about anything that they had learned while working for Fox. They circumvented this by launching an unfair dismissal complaint and then admitting everything relating to the documentary and their research as evidence, thereby placing it in the public domain and open to public scrutiny.

The right of the public to know and to choose what they support and what they don’t through their buying and consumption is fundamentally important. It is the present form of democracy where corporations buy the laws and the only real vote we have is how we spend our money.

Check out the information at this site for more indepth information on the effects of these hormones on milk.

I am participating in a wiki-based project to translate Krishna Conscious educational materials into Spanish. I was looking over the material to be translated, and came across this: Vedalearn Translations Page - Main.Chapter10

“Vedic Culture

Hinduism Defined

When we speak of Krsna consciousness we should not confuse it with Hinduism. Krsna consciousness originates in the ancient Vedic literatures; Hinduism is not mentioned in the Vedas at all.
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I edited the Wikipedia entry for A.C. Bhaktivedanta Swami Prabhupada today and modified the sentence that states that the Bhaktivedanta Book Trust is “the world’s largest publisher in the field of Vedic and Hindu Indian religious texts and commentaries”. I changed it to read “Vedic texts” only, to bring it in line with Srila Prabhupada’s statements presented in the article yesterday. There is another sentence earlier in the article that reads: “By the time of his disappearance in Vrindavan eleven years later, ISKCON was a widely known expression of Hinduism in the West”. That one I have left as it is at the moment, but I think also it should be changed. The article should be POV (point of vision) neutral so it needs to be changed to something that is acceptable to the “outside” scholars who analyze things according to their sense perception, but also it should represent the movement as Srila Prabhupada represented it (I personally think).

You can view the entry here, and the change that I made here

The entry on ISKCON is even more problematic.
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There is a misconception that the Krishna consciousness movement represents the Hindu religion…. Sometimes Indians both inside and outside of India think that we are preaching the Hindu religion, but actually we are not. One will not find the word “Hindu” in the Bhagavad-gita. Indeed, there is no such word in the entire Vedic literature.”
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Source: His Divine Grace A.C. Bhaktivedanta Swami Prabhupada, Science of Self Realization, Chapter 3 - “Krishna Consciousness: Hindu Cult or Divine Culture?”
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The entire article from the latest edition of New York magazine Citizen Culture is not available online, but I’ve reproduced below the excerpt available here in pdf form.
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For Portland monks, life and chores are all for Krishna

These are Portland’s present-day Hare Krishnas. Unlike the 1970s, you won’t find them at the airport, tossing flowers at tourists and tired businessmen. You won’t find them dancing with throngs of hippies in the park.

These days, they’re more likely to leave you with a vegetarian cookbook or just a smile and an enthusiastic “Hare Krishna!”

Read the article here

After discussions with the maintainer of Vedabase.net on Sunday night over mango lassi I have started my htdig engine reindexing the site. If I set the starting url to “http://vedabase.net/en2″ and set limiturl to “/en2″ I will get an index with no diacritics in it. The diacritics are handled horribly by htdig, which displays them as #codes.

The idea is to eventually get an online Vedabase that is as usable as the Folio Infobase, which only runs on proprietary platforms at the moment. The advantage of the Folio is its incredible search power. Google can’t compete with it. On the Folio I can type in a phrase that is knocking around in my head and locate the purport that it comes from quickly, as well as other related references that I perhaps wasn’t aware of.

The indexing should take about a third of the time of the last one, due to the fact that I am not indexing the other two versions of the site that the Vedabase.net webservant maintains with diacritics and phonetic spelling.

It seems that Altavista does a much better job of indexing Vedabase.net. I will knock up a search plugin for Firefox to search Vedabase.net using the Altavista engine, which was my search engine of choice before there was Google.

(Note: I’ve updated my Google-based Vedabase search plugin for Firefox, it should return better results until I get the Altavista one ready).

I found this article on the net today. It’s a niggling thing, but whenever I hear members of the Hare Krishna movement describe what we are doing as something “Hindu” I cringe, precisely because this was never a characterization made by the founder, His Divine Grace A.C. Bhaktivedanta Swami Prabhupada. “Purity is the Force” he would say, and he would also make it clear that compromise was not needed for success.

The term Hindu, he explained, is of Persian origin and first referred to people who lived on the other side (from a Persian point of view) of the Sindhu or Indus river. Therefore it is a geographical distinction, akin to “American” or “European”. I think Srila Prabhupada’s analysis is spot on. Hinduism is more like a form of nationalism than it is a coherent religion or philosophy. Anyway, read it and make up your own mind.

The quote at the beginning of the article is actually taken from a compilation of magazine articles, conversations and classes that was published in 1977.

From Hinduism Today Magazine, Oct. 1998

ISKCON’s Srila Prabhupada’s edicts on religion are clear

There is a misconception,” wrote His Divine Grace A.C. Bhaktivedanta Swami Prabhupada in 1977 in Science of Self Realization, “that the Krishna consciousness movement represents the Hindu religion. Sometimes Indians both inside and outside of India think that we are preaching the Hindu religion, but actually we are not.” In chapter three of the book [available from Bhaktivedanta Archives, P.O. Box 255, Sandy Ridge, North Carolina 27046 USA], this startling point is made several times: “The Krishna consciousness movement has nothing to do with the Hindu religion or any system of religion…. One should clearly understand that the Krishna consciousness movement is not preaching the so-called Hindu religion.”
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Today, Tuesday November 16th, is the disappearance anniversary of His Divine Grace Srila A.C. Bhaktivedanta Swami Prabhupada. The Wikipedia entry copied below is found online here. I added the link to Vedabase.net on that page.

A.C. Bhaktivedanta Swami Prabhupada (September 1, 1896 - November 14, 1977) was born Abhay Charan De, in Calcutta, West Bengal. His birth name Abhay Charan means one who is fearless, having taken shelter of the feet of the Lord. He studied at the Scottish Church College, Calcutta, which was then administered by the British.

Prior to adopting the life of a vanaprastha, or pious renunciant in 1950, he was married with children, and ran a small pharmaceutical business. In July 1966, he brought Hare Krishna to the West, founding the International Society for Krishna Consciousness (ISKCON) in New York City. By the time of his disappearance in Vrindavan eleven years later, ISKCON was a widely known expression of Hinduism in the West.

Upon Prahhupada’s first meeting with his spiritual master in 1922, Srila Bhaktisiddhanta Sarsvati Thakura, requested that he spread Vedic knowledge in the English language. In 1933 he became a formally initiated disciple. Starting in 1944 and without assistance he started Back to the Godhead, an English language fortnightly for which he acted as publisher, editor and copy editor. In 1947 the Gaudiya Vaisnava Society recognised Prabhupada’s scholarship with the honorific Bhaktivedanta (Sanskrit: One who has both devotion and knowledge. See Bhakti and Vedanta). Beginning in 1950 he lived at the medieval Temple of Radha-Damodara in the holy city of Vrndavana. He took sannyasa vows in 1959 following which he singlehandedly published the first three volumes his thirty volume translation of the 18,000 verse Srimad-Bhagavatam and the commentary on it. He then left India to fulfill his master’s spiritual mission. In his possession were a suitcase, an umbrella, a supply of dry cereal, about seven dollars worth of Indian currency, and several boxes of books.

In the twelve years from his arrival in New York until his death he:

* circled the globe fourteen times on lecture tours that took him to six continents.
* introduced Vedic gurukul education to a Western audience.
* directed the founding of The Bhaktivedanta Book Trust, (http://www.krishna.com/newsite/main.php?id=37) the world’s largest publisher in the field of Vedic and Hindu Indian religious texts and commentary.
* founded New Vrindaban
* authored sixty books (many available online here (http://www.vedabase.net)) on Vedantic philosophy, religion, literature and culture (including four in Bengali)
* watched ISKCON grow to a confederation of more than 100 schools, temples, institutes, farm communities and ashrams.

Prabhupada followed the teachings of Lord Caitanya Mahaprabhu and introduced bhakti yoga to a wide Western audience.