The latest (Gold)man-made food crisis

Johann Hari writes:
"By now, you probably think your opinion of Goldman Sachs and its swarm of Wall Street allies has rock-bottomed at raw loathing. You're wrong. There's more. It turns out that the most destructive of all their recent acts has barely been discussed at all. Here's the rest. This is the story of how some of the richest people in the world – Goldman, Deutsche Bank, the traders at Merrill Lynch, and more – have caused the starvation of some of the poorest people in the world."

Those of us who come from societies which have suffered under the yoke of imperialism are of course reminded of the all too many occasions when needless mass starvation and death have resulted from blind free-market economics and a failure to check speculation and hoarding, coupled with a disregard for the lives of the oppressed peoples. Two of the most prominent examples were the Irish potato famine of 1845-52, when about a million people died, and the Bengal famine of 1943, when nearly 3 million are estimated to have perished. Of course, in many ways the circumstances of these two tragedies were quite different, but they shared in common an attitude of complete callousness on the part of the British administration; even as masses in the colonies were dying of starvation, food exports to richer markets such as England continued unabated. Winston Churchill, British Prime Minister at the time of the Bengal famine, responded to an urgent request for food on the part of the Indian authorities by asking why, if food was so scarce, had Gandhi not died yet.

However, it is shocking to see that similar phenomena persist even into the 21st century: and the new imperialists are the financial oligarchs whose recklessness has caused such misery. Dr. Jayati Ghosh, an economist at the Jawaharlal Nehru University in Delhi and a prominent advisor to the Government of India, is one of the leading authorities on the causes underlying the recent 'global food crisis' (remember how George W Bush blamed the increasing appetites of the Indians and Chinese?). She has noted how there were no massive bailouts for the starving, and demonstrated how financial speculation was the fundamental driver, rather than any dramatic shift in actual demand or supply (interview: part 1, part 2).

The World Development Movement has more information, and is leading the campaign against food speculation. For those in the UK, please take action to help end this lunacy.

The Improbable Popularity of Funny Toy Creatures

Two facts I learnt today:

1. Toy Story 3 has shot up the IMDb charts incredibly rapidly and is now rated the 6th best movie ever, despite not even having been released yet in many countries (including the UK).

2. Zoozoo is the most 'liked' Facebook fan page in India.

Interesting world we live in, is it not?

The Character of Physical Law

The one thing in the whole of science that I have found most captivating and enigmatic, pretty much ever since I first came across it (probably sometime in my early teens), is the Second Law of Thermodynamics. I still find it quite incredible how fundamental and deep-seated the idea seems to be: from car engines and refrigerators to cells and living organisms and entire human societies, the working of everything around us is a manifestation of this law, which underpins the phenomenon of irreversibility and the nature of time itself. In my school days, the fascination was a bit more prosaic: one of the reasons being simply that our textbooks contained so many different 'statements' of the law. For a naïve schoolchild brought up under an education system which essentially encouraged one to cram oneself with immutable scientific 'laws', to be regurgitated verbatim during exams, this was quite a novelty. The fact that the same principle could be expressed in so many entirely different ways meant it must be somehow special, and this was one of the things that first tickled my scientific antennae. My favourite statement of the law, however, has to be one that I first heard just a couple of days ago, at a fascinating lecture by a famous physicist:

"If you eat, you have to go to the toilet".

I wish I'd thought of that when writing my physics exams...