Interesting Links for 06-11-2013

[andrewducker]

• iPhone 6 could have sapphire screen as Apple opens plant
  (tags: apple screens iphone )
• Considerable gender, racial, sexuality differences in attitudes toward bisexuality
  (tags: society lgbt )
• India launches first mission to Mars
  (tags: mars india space )
• New Katy Perry album declared a bio-hazard by Australia
  (tags: music australia funny )
• Wartune

Comments

[danieldwilliam]

It’s quite cool that India have a Mars mission.

But also, they are still in receipt of international charity and aid.

Not sure I can reconcile the two of those.

Mind you, it’s a bit difficult to reconcile the fact that the UK has Mars missions and Trident and there are still three regular beggars on my route to work.

[andrewducker]

It's a difficult one. Aiming every bit of society's money at fixing the very worst problem, and not spending any money on other ones until that's fixed isn't an approach that's going to produce the best results.

On the other hand, it _is_ scandalous that we still have people living on the streets.

[danieldwilliam]

Just turning this over in my head a bit I think it’s a bit political

[ext_208701]

It's not that I don't care about the homeless, but as a company sponsor of two spaceflight organisations I happen to think that inspiring the next generation of kids build awesome things is really important.

For every kid that grow up to be an astronaut, tens of thousands of others make incremental improvements in engineering everything in everyday life. The reason those ten thousand do it, is because when they were small there was a possibility that if they were really lucky and worked really hard, they might get to walk on the moon.

Instead I run an ISP which is probably rather more useful to society. But if there was one thing that might motivate me to grow a million pound company into a multi-billion pound company, being able to buy a trip to the moon would be it.

[danieldwilliam]

Inspiration is a good thing for all kinds of reasons I think.

Not just the tangible outcomes but the feeling of being inspired and hopeful is a good thing for people to experience.

[a_pawson]

India is the most polarised country I've been to in terms of wealth. I've been to various African countries which have widespread poverty and there are of course signs of wealth, but generally it is confined to a small percentage of the population.

But in India the gulf between the upper/middle classes and the poor is enormous, and extremely visible, because the "haves" form a significant percentage of the population. India is the only country I have been to where you can exit an air-conditioned shopping mall, complete with McDonalds, Starbucks and all the amenities we are used to in the west, travel quarter of a mile and be surrounded by literally tens of thousands of people living in cardboard boxes and begging on the streets.

[danieldwilliam]

I’ve gotten that impression from various documentaries and so on.

It seems to be almost two countries - one that looks quite Western in terms of wealth and one that looks more third world.

A curious place.

I wonder if it more like Victorian Europe than anywhere else, in terms of wealth distribution.

[del_c]

As well as the Mars mission, work is said to be about to begin on a $336m statue of Sardar Patel, twice as high as the Statue of Liberty. It's not clear to me whether it will actually happen, though.

[danieldwilliam]

That is a lot of money to spend literally bigging someone up.

I wonder what the cost of the statue is doing to the Net Present Value of his life.