Honking Ears by KAL

When a famous talented cartoonist meets digital animation, delightful new expressions may result. Kevin Kallaugher (aka KAL), who's been creating political caricatures for the Economist since 1978, has now set his sights on giving virtual life to his drawings.

As George Bush's term nears its end, it's probably the cartoonists who will be the most saddened. Meanwhile KAL carries on in a new media ...



And here's another on the democratic nomination race, which has just concluded ..

Who moved my chapati?

A furore has been raised in India, due to the recent comments emerging from the US administration:

In India, in many places, it's considered bad etiquette to count what the another person is eating, sometimes it bad to count your own intake as well. So such an accusatory finger pointed at the India food plate is bound to raise strong responses.

Perhaps a good factual counter-response comes in an article that my father sent me.

Total foodgrain consumption — wheat, rice, and all coarse grains like rye, barley etc — by each person in the US is over five times that of an Indian, according to figures released by the US Department of Agriculture for 2007.

Each Indian gets to eat about 178 kg of grain in a year, while a US citizen consumes 1,046 kg.

In per capita terms, US grain consumption is twice that of the European Union and thrice that of China. Grain consumption includes flour and by conversion to alcohol.

In fact, per capita grain consumption has increased in the US — so actually the Americans are eating more. In 2003, US per capita grain consumption was 946 kg per year which increased to 1046 kg last year.

By way of comparison, India’s per capita grain consumption has remained static over the same period. It’s not just grains. Milk consumption, in fluid form, is 78 kg per year for each person in the US, compared to 36 kg in India and 11 kg in China.

Another important point has been raised by one of India's eminent economists, M. S. Ahluwalia:

I don't agree that there is a global food crisis because of India and China. There is an increase in food production too in both the countries."

"The increase in production and use of biofuels might be the cause why cultivable area is limited.

This small blame-game most likely comes out of a larger pattern taking place. Due to the equalization of purchasing powers of the economies worldwide, the perception in the west will increasingly be that their standard of living is falling as it is rising in the developing countries. When balance is found, it will probably be at a disadvantage for the developed world and advantage for the developing world.

The UN and world financial bodies have pointed to an oncoming food crisis. Food riots in vulnerable countries like Haiti, Yemen and even Egypt may become more widespread. The sudden inflation is linked more to the rise in energy prices such as oil than anything else. Countries with self-sufficient food production will try to guard their stock, but higher energy prices will contribute to inflation nevertheless.

Time to tighten your grocery budget even further.

200,000 books, one Geek with his computers

A very interesting New York Times article covers what is effectively a stupendous mockery of the process of creating a book. But books are produced nevertheless, and some people buy them.

The infinite monkey theorem states that a monkey hitting keys at random on a typewriter keyboard for an infinite amount of time will almost surely type a particular chosen text, such as the complete works of William Shakespeare.  - Infinite monkey theorem, Wikipedia

Humans cannot deal with infinity, but we can use better assistants than monkeys to reduce the time it takes. In the Information age, Philip M. Parker, has put his name to 200,000 books setting records for being a prolific author. The catch to this inhuman behaviour is an array of assistant computers programmed to fetch information online on any particular topic and compile them into a book. He explains the process in the following video.



It's unnerving to think that this process can be extended to other media like games, audio and video as well. Effectively it establishes the precedent that a person is not required to compile content into human consumption media items like books or movies.

At the library end, I wonder what this implies for cataloguers. It doesn't make sense for humans to be organizing output that comes from machines. Do cataloguers they have to be human too, or can they just be machines instantly summarizing and deriving overviews from the content?

I found some of these books here on Amazon.

The New York Times article can be found here.