Communists again

I don't know what it is between me and communists but somehow I always find something in the press that I find interesting about them. May be I just like them too much, Nah...

Here is an interesting piece of news. Basically a communist trade union leader M. K. Pandhe(who probably is instrumental in destroying economies of couple of states single handedly) thinks that if Samajavadi Party supports nuclear deal then it will lose the support of muslims.

Mulayam will have to think twice before supporting the deal as an overwhelming majority of Muslims are not in favour of the deal. Mulayam's support is much more among Muslim masses,

I fail to understand the point of Mr. Pandhe, after India announced the deal, even pakistan wanted it from US. If pakistan signs, will it not offend muslims. What muslims have got to do with the nuclear energy. I just don't get these communists.

Oil and protests

So every political party that can claim to be not in government is protesting the oil price hike. At times it is resulting in comedy. Here is an hilarious story.

chief minister Shivraj Singh Chauhan and his cabinet decided to go to work on bicycles in the afternoon.
But the CM's rally soon fizzled out with most ministers being either pushed by their bodyguards or giving up in favour of their official cars.

At 3.30pm, Chauhan and his ministers were on their way. The initial half kilometre was perfect. Soon water resources minister Anup Mishra could not keep up. More than 20kg overweight, he preferred being pushed on his bicycle by his bodyguards till the rally reached the road to Raj Bhavan , which is basically a steep climb. Here, most ministers gave up, including Mishra.

What can I say, Ha Ha..

Mystry of Oil in India

I don't understand much about oil business so I am not able to understand when different parties come up with different logic on why the price of petrol should be raised and why it should not be raised. After googling, here is some data that I found.

	Barrel	Gallons	Litres	Percentage of products	Cost per litre
Crude	1.00	44.60	168.83		30.80
Gasoline		19.40	73.44	43.50%	13.40
Diesel		7.80	29.53	17.49%	5.39
Heating Oil		2.70	10.22	6.05%	1.86
Heavy Fuel Oil		1.70	6.44	3.81%	1.17
Jet Fuel		4.10	15.52	9.19%	2.83
LPG		1.50	5.68	3.36%	1.04
Other Products		7.40	28.01	16.59%	5.11
Processing Gain		2.60	9.84	5.83%	1.80

So it seems every barrel (42 gallons) of crude produces different quantities of actual products like petrol and diesel. Now taking following numbers as indicative.

Barrel	42	Gallons
Gallon	3.78541178	Litre
USD	40	INR
Price	130	USD/Barrel

If one looks at numbers, for producing one liter of petrol, the raw material component only costs Rs. 13.40 at the current crude prices.

Now assuming that other components have only marginally increased and the primary factor in the increase of petrol is the price of crude, the current prices just don't make sense. Because the even if the price of crude has trebled, it is still capped at Rs. 13.40.

I am trying to get other data like the refining cost, marketing cost, taxes etc to make sense of Rs. 50+ of petrol price but the data is not very readily available.

If anybody has the data, give me and I will further do number crunching

Mother of all suck ups

So finally blogs outed the patent number 20080122796 filed by Apple which looks like a patent that encapsulates many things that are part of iPhone. The patent itself did not really surprise me, what really surprise me was the list of inventors that are part of this patent. The patent consisted of 20 inventors right upto steve jobs as the first inventor.

Now my mind thinks that this is just an example of of the biggest suck up in the history of patenting. Some (may be a couple of) engineer(s) invented something and then just to schmooze their boss, added his name and he added his bosses name and then it just traveled right up to CEO. It would be interesting to look at apple organization structure and see how are all these inventors arranged.

Or it could be just the places that I have worked and I could be completely wrong.

The third dimension

So this is really a story out of sci-fi story books. Almost unbelievable. When a wife went to file a complaint against her "in-laws", she realized that she has already divorced her husband 10 years back. Almost sounds like one of those movies where one can go back in time and change the present as one knows it. It would have been great if that was true, in reality it is again the corruption at work.

Virender Verma and Meena got the shock of their lives when a local court recently stated that the happily-together couple got a 'divorce' 10 years ago.

Married in 1989 and parents of two children, the two came to know about their separation on May 26. The couple accused Virender's advocate brother for forging their divorce documents.

Apparently all this happened because the wife filed the complain under domestic violence act so they just proved that this is not domestic violence because she was not even married anymore for last 10 years.