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Travel

Flying

I take up to 10-12 flights every year. I absolutely love the experience of flying, even when it is economy class or on a low-cost airline. I was wondering though: how long are we going to have the luxury of cheap international travel? Estimates about how soon crude oil is going to run out vary wildly, although I think pretty much everyone agrees that within the next, say, 30-40 years it is going to get more expensive due to fuel shortages. It already is getting expensive. While surface transportation will probably survive in the form of biofuel or electric-powered cars, what we have absolutely no replacement for is a way to power commercial passenger planes or ships!

Think about it. Petroleum fuel-powered engines are the only viable means of powering flight at the moment. Point is, at the moment research and production of alternative means of powering transportation is simply not economically lucrative. Maybe it would need crunch-time pressure as we near the end of oil reserves to make companies sit up and work their research departments towards this. At the moment, battery technology isn’t anywhere close. The only alternative, long-term resource we have is nuclear power, and even those engines are primarily steam engines – good for slow-release engines on ships but not for the intensive take-off / landing cycles of airplanes. Nuclear technology is so strictly controlled and has so much potential for mishaps that I cannot imagine it being used in the commercial sector anyway.

So maybe humankind will figure something out in the next few decades. But what if. What if it isn’t realistically possible to make an engine that can give the performance of an internal combustion engine or jet engines? How different the world would rapidly change, back to the days when seafaring nations controlled the balance of power! Back to the days when journeys took weeks and months! Back to the days when it won’t be possible to buy 10 pence bananas flown in from Africa in a supermarket in England, or buy cheap electronic gadgets on eBay from Hong Kong! I don’t reckon producing electricity will be a problem; even if we have to gag and lock up protesting hippies, hydroelectric power could potentially fill in a major part of the shortfall. But perhaps within the next five decades, we may never ever again be able to fly to any part of the globe in less than a day.

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“Goodbye JEE”

And most of all, peo­ple might start ques­tion­ing more seri­ously which col­lege they want to be at. The IITs seem to be becom­ing more gen­eral too. I’ve heard of some intro­duc­tion of some biol­ogy degrees at some IITs. I think a col­lege ought to be gen­eral. And very loose about what they want the stu­dents to do. And there should exist no 300 stu­dent classes at any point of time, because they serve almost no pur­pose at all.

This will be of interest to my Indian readers in high school / university. I really liked Vishesh’s blog post “Goodbye JEE“. For a long time, I have rationalised, argued, and ranted with spittle flecks leaping out of my mouth about what’s wrong with the Indian higher education system. I’m glad there are still people fighting in that corner. On that note, also read Espera’s “Stupid TAs Annoy Me“. Me, I am done with trying to convince people, partly because I realised that a large part of understanding what’s wrong comes only through self-realisation. Epiphanies that you have through self-realisation have a far more powerful effect. I’d rather just smoke and pass the joint saying “It’s cool, bro”; I don’t feel the urge to make people drink my Kool Aid any more.

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Even when I was in Singapore, I felt an overwhelming bad influence of all that I feel is bad about the education system is in India. Don’t get me wrong, Singapore is doing so many things right – yet it’s getting so many things wrong too. I had this really awesome Canadian expat lecturer in software engineering who’s one of the few fighting to make learning more worthwhile and meaningful. You know what happened to him? He got brutally hacked in the student feedback. A different professor (also in Singapore) also once confided to me that a lot of them don’t want to challenge their students too hard in classes because their pay bonuses are linked to student feedback. Theoretically that’s a nice idea but what happens is that any professor or lecturer who really wants to push boundaries and challenge the class to do more get poor feedback from students across Asia (India, China, Vietnam…) who have been really used to one way of thinking / learning. The few professors who care and the new president of the university though really need to be commended for trying to shake up the system.