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Anecdotes, Facts, Examples for GS and Essay

Today I Learnt

Since the sources for Current Affairs and other diverse topics in GS is very wide, let’s collate and collaborate to share the topics we learn in a day. 

We can share anything, be it titbits or thoughts or just the title of an article or editorial.

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“Every child that dies due to wars disappears from the world without knowing that the shell that hit the roof came with a long history- the contest over a territory, the problem of imagined communities, colonial chicanery, and above all, the chasm of religious faith among several other threads.”
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Carbon taxin a country leads banks to reduce lending to coal, oil and gas companies domestically. As a consequence they lend more in foreign countries, lacking a carbon tax. The best solution would be worldwide adoption of carbon tax.


Seasteading: a concept of creating permanent dwellings at sea, in international waters, outside the territory claimed by any government. 

  • Officials in Busan (South Korea) planned to offer space for a floating neighbourhood that may be built near its shore. The project is endorsed by UN- Habitat. 
  • The idea is to demonstrate a tool cities might use to adapt to rising sea levels. The goals right now is more technical: to find out if floating districts can be comfortable, affordable and scalable. It is said to be more sustainable than land reclamation, which requires masses of sand.


71% by market value of global tech industry controlled by America. 3 different categories of business have emerged:

  1.  global platforms: like Alphabet, Google, Meta etc dominate in areas of search, social media and cloud computing.
  2.  Protected National companies: for instance, Chinese and Russian tech companies.
  3.  Local digital and regional companies: operate in markets where local factors are dominant. eg, Reliance and Tata providing super-apps in India.


COINFLIPS: to generate random numbers. Why generation of random numbers is important? To transform random phenomena in nature into computer bits. Possible future applications in Cryptography, weather prediction, AI systems etc. 

  • An example: to interpret the results of collisions in particle accelerators, COINFLIPS can be incorporated into the sensor. The results from the collision will be randomly distributed, which will then be compared with artificial random distributions to see if they match. To be able to do this in real time will be useful, because it allows an immediate decision to be made about whether or not to store a particular result.
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"What Orwell failed to predict was that we'd buy the cameras ourselves, and that our biggest fear would be that nobody was watching" ~ Keith Jensen


This quote can be used to counter the most commonly held view that government can do surveillance on us, without our consent. We ourselves trade our privacy for convenient. And the isolation plus mental health issues associated with social media etc.

CJI Ramanna, quoting from Orwell's book "If you want to keep a secret, you must also hide it from yourself"

Justice Chandrachud: "with the advent of the internet, the platform is no longer an issue, but rather it is about grabbing someone's attention. While someone's speech may not be removed from the internet, it can be effectively drowned down by flooding the internet with massive amounts of information to the contrary. This will ensure that many people do not even read the original speech or will be unconvinced of its truth. Hence it is easy to see why Mills' marketplace of ideas approach to speech in order to uncover the truth may no longer be a valid option. The internet and social media corporations are not the only one to share the blame for the scenario"

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