11/15/2015
... India is, in the description of BR Ambedkar, a society embedded in inequalities invoking a social milieu marked by the worst forms of hostilities and antagonisms. ...
... Ambedkar was correct in stressing that our inability to overcome caste as a modern nation would continue to make us deeply suspicious and distrustful of each other. Our loyalties would never extend beyond our primary socialisation. We would be a nation perpetually fragmented and at war with itself...
... modernity wears thinly on our being, beneath the veneer of civility we continue to practice caste as if it were our birth right. Caste antagonism, hatred and perversion surface at the slightest provocation...
... an expression of the natural attitude that has completely internalised a consciousness of caste that we are not even aware of when we insult and humiliate our fellow beings. It is a condition of normalcy especially when practiced by the upper castes on the Dalits...
... Dalits and minorities are the worst hit given the growing intolerance and insensitivity of a majoritarianism that is repeatedly threatening not only our rich cultural diversity, but also the very foundations of our constitutional democracy...
... Notwithstanding their democratic victory, what is now on public display is a clear deficit of democratic sentiments where respect for human rights is being replaced by the diktats of majoritarianism...
http://www.tehelka.com/2015/11/if-a-general-barks-who-is-responsible/
11/16/2015
So for 300,000 years after the big bang, there were just hydrogen 75% and helium 25% and a trace amount of Lithium.
Then began from star dust the formation of stars like our sun (that itself will call for an essay of it's own).
All the elements after Helium to Iron were forged in the center of the stars.
The temperatures there can exceed 15 million degrees and pressure is extreme.
This allows nuclear fusion leading to the formation of successively heavier elements till the formation of most stable element iron.
No star can fuse elements heavier than iron due to shortage of neutrons.
So then where did our Gold come from?
That will have to wait for another day and another essay.
Time to read.
Good night mon ami.
Today I listened to very clear and plain speaking discussion on the rise of Wahabi terrorism, it's origins, it's sustainance and the political hypocrisy and a huge financial greed backing it.
If the Western powers think they can battle the Islamic hydra by blowing away the Middle East and North Africa to the dark ages, they are fighting a losing battle.
Good night mon ami.
11/17/2015
On a late November morning in the year 1095, Pope Urban II delivered a sermon that would transform the history of Europe.
It was outside the French town of Clermont where he declared that Christianity was in dire peril.
The holy city of Jerusalem was now in the hands of Moslems.
This started a series of holy wars or crusades against the Muslim world.
The bloody struggle raged for 200 years.
The advent of crusades stirred Islam to action, reawakening dedication to the cause of jihad (holy war).
The dates are 1095 and 1291.
It is a rich history which can tell us a profoundly lot about the modern crisis.
Time to hit the bed.
And do some reading.
Good night mon ami.
11/18/2015
I often wondered that I could use the speed of the earth's incredible rotation to travel.
Just leap up, or stay suspended in a hot air balloon and let the earth go under me at the speed of roughly 230 m/s or 800 km/hr.
But alas no!
My hopes were dashed.
Because the envelope of air that surrounds dear mother earth also participates in the earth's axial rotation.
And it carries everything along with it, including clouds, birds, aeroplanes and even insects.
After all, if the air did not spin together with mother earth, we would always be unleashed with winds so terrible that the worst of hurricanes would seem a gentle breeze.
And another thing...
Even if there was no atmosphere and we would leap up, the ground below us would still not shift.
Can you tell me why?
Hint.
No, Allah is not involved in this trick.
Time to read.
Good night mon ami.
11/18/2015
Of course
I never consider myself or most doctors in private practice honest
That is why I never criticize our netas or babus or businessmen at least for being corrupt.
11/19/2015
The earth rotates at a speed of 465 m/s.
We at equator are zipping away roughly half a kilometer every second (earth's rotation).
And the earth is revolving around the sun at an incredible rate of 30 km every second!! That is crazy speed!
So why don't we feel it?
My neonatal mind always thinks such useless questions (which as a responsible adult one must out grow).
Well...
To perceive a motion visually, we need a reference point.
Our other sense which perceives motion are the otoliths in the utricle and saccule of our inner ears.
But they can perceive only a change of speed, not a constant speed. Meaning only acceleration or deceleration.
But as I had said yesterday, on our dear earth, everything spins along with us, including the air, clouds, birds, rickets and rockets.
So on earth, we have no reference point.
But we do have sun and the stars in the heavens.
But alas, we foolish humans all the years thought it is they which move and we who are stationary.
Until the arrival of the scientific method of fiddling with the nature (like dropping balls).
Time to hit the bed for reading.
Good night mon ami.
11/19/2015
To answer yesterday's question...
There is a property all objects in the universe possess: INERTIA
So the most basic truth of our universe is this:
Any body will continue to move with a constant velocity until a force acts on it. (It still boggles my mind. This fundamental truth).
So.
When u leap up from the earth floor moving at 465 m/s, you will also be moving along with it at the same speed.
And hence, when u drop down due to gravity, your position will remain unchanged.
Now mon ami, I can rest in peace.
11/20/2015
Many people have a deep hostility to the idea of banks, finances and financiers.
Many feel that finance is the cause of poverty rather than prosperity and volatility rather than stability.
But Jacob Bronowski thinks otherwise.
He believes that the accent of money has been essential to the accent of man.
Financial innovations has been an indispensable factor in man's advances from wretched subsistence to the giddy heights of material prosperity that many know today.
The evolution of credit and debit was as important as any technological innovation in the rise of civilization.
Banks and bond markets provided the material basis for the splendours of the Italian Renaissance.
Corporate finance was the indispensable foundation of both the Dutch and the British empires.
The triumph of the United States was inseparable from advances in insurance, mortgage finance and consumer credit.
Behind each great historical phenomenon there lies a financial secret.
Of course, the biggest and greatest flaw of the financial system that it exaggerates and magnifies human differences between us, enriching the lucky and the smart, impoverishing the unlucky and not-so-smart.
There is greater opportunity for the financially knowledgeable people and great risk for downward mobility for the financial illiterate.
Going to bed.
Good night mon ami.
11/21/2015
I tell people investing should be dull. It shouldn't be exciting. Investing should be more like watching paint dry or watching grass grow.
Paul Samuelson
Nobel Laureate
Nobody can predict turns in share market over short terms or medium terms.
Economic experts are no experts.
To invest wisely, 4 things can be suggested:
1. Buy average stocks, bonds
2. Be patient. Hold your stuff instead of constant trading.
3. Be risk aware but not risk averse
4. Be balanced. Rebalance your portfolio annually.
You will have to accept that neither you nor anyone can predict the markets, at least in the short and the medium term.
This strategy will not make you super rich but will ensure that your money plant grows steadily.
You may even be able to retire early.
Don't expect any excitement though.
Time to hit the bed and read.
Good night mon ami.
11/21/2015
The Life of Wen the Eternally Surprised"
"Wen considered the nature of time and understood that the universe is, instant by instant, recreated anew. Therefore, he understood, there is in truth no past, only a memory of the past. Blink your eyes, and the world you see next did not exist when you closed them. Therefore, he said, the only appropriate state of the mind is surprise"
"The only appropriate state of the heart is joy. The sky you see now, you have never seen before. The perfect moment is now. Be glad of it"
"The first words read by the young Lu-Tze when he sought perplexity in the dark, teeming, rain-soaked city of Chengdu were : Rooms for Rent, Very Reasonable" And he was glad of it.
No god but God
The origins and evolution of Islam
Reza Aslan
The books starts at 6 AD with the prevailing sociological religious conditions prevailing at that time.
The pagan Arabs that time worshiped 360 idols and gods placed inside the nondescript sanctuary in Mecca called Ka'ba: the Cube.
Remarkably, the statues included Syrian god Hubal, Egyptian goddess Isis and even Christian god Jesus and his holy mother, Mary.
The word Allah is not a proper name but a contraction of the word al-ilah, simply meaning "the god".
Will keep u updated (even against your wishes) this pagan blasphemous kafir.
Today hope to watch Part 2 of:
In search of Putin's Russia on Al Jazeera.
11/22/2015
An important function in mathematics is the logarithm, log x.
Log xy= log x + log y
This is a very powerful idea
It can be used to convert multiplications into additions (which is far simpler).
To multiply x and y
Find their logarithms
Add them
Then find the number whose logarithm is that result (the antilogarithm of the result).
Nowadays logarithm is thought of as the reverse of exponentials.
Ex. Since 10 raised to power 3 is 1000, the logarithm of 1000 (to base 10) is 3.
John Napier, Baron of Murchiston in Scotland devised Napier's bones in 1590s to do quick multiplications.
It would later lead to on to the more refined Napierian logarithms.
I happened to see these Napier bones in the computer science museum at Mountain View, California.
I owe this trip to my greatest friend Monish, the only person I know personally who loves numbers and equations.
Time to immerse myself into the origins of Islam.
Good night mon ami.
11/23/2015
What is the biggest source of danger for any organism?
Predators?
Natural disasters?
Fellow organisms of the same species, who constitute the most direct competition for everything?
Sibling rivals, who even compete in the same family, the same nest?
No.
The biggest danger is the future.
We view ourselves as creatures that exist in time, not in an ever-changing present.
We have established elaborate methods to foretell the future (thinking it is pre-determined).
More about it later.
Fascinating subject.
Reading time.
Good night mon ami.
11/24/2015
Dinner time
11/24/2015
I am lucky to be human in that I have a language with which I can convey my thoughts to you miles away.
A language has 3 distinct components very closely interwoven:
1. Lexicon: building blocks or words which can be nouns, verbs etc.
2. Semantics or meaning.
Eg. Colourless green ideas sleep furiously.
Is meaningless ( Chomsky).
3. Syntactic structure or grammar.
Another interesting thing about language is an embedding process called recursion.
Eg. I gave the book which you gave me to Mr. Monk.
I gave the book which you gave me while I was in the school to Mr. Monk.
It allows complexity inside sentences.
The brain concerned with semantics is located in the left temporal lobe called Wernicke's area.
The brain specialized exclusively for syntactic structure is the Broca's area.
More about it some other time.
Time for some more reading.
Good night mon ami.
11/25/2015
Our crest fallen hero
11/25/2015
You may think it is nothing, but starting with a vacuum and a few rules has enormous potentiality.
Given enough time, this can lead to earth, sun and us.
We, or our brains, have trouble with the concept of "beginning".
And even greater trouble with the concept of "becoming".
The universe does not work the way our brains has evolved to work.
Getting bit late.
Going to bed.
Good night mon ami.
11/26/2015
The idea that atoms combine together using chemical bonds is fairly new.
The combining power of an atom with other atoms (specially hydrogen or chlorine, both univalent) is known as valence.
It's exact inception can be traced to an 1852 paper by Edward Frankland.
German organic chemist August Kekule is credited to be the founder of the theory of chemical structure.
His idea of assigning certain atoms to certain positions within the molecule, and connecting them using valences or bonds was largely based on evidence from chemical reactions.
Nowadays we have a direct method of peering into the molecules using x-ray crystallography.
Kekule's greatest feat was the structure of benzene.
The evolution of the modern theories of chemical bonding went through various stages of Lewis structures (based in Rutherford's model of atom), valence bond theory, molecular orbitals, valence shell electron pair repulsion theory to advanced quantum chemistry (relying on spectroscopy).
Lots of hard work.
Lots of intelligent men.
And lots of experiments.
Time to hit the bed.
And read.
Good night mon ami.
11/27/2015
Hell, a Calcutta resident had once remarked, was being born an Untouchable in Calcutta's slums.
On 16 August 1946, howling in quasi-religious fervour, Moslem mobs came out bursting from slums, waving clubs, iron bars, shovels, any instrument capable of bashing human skull.
They came in to answer to a call issued by the Moslem League, proclaiming 16 August 'Direct Action Day'.
They savagely beat to sodden pulp any Hindus in their path and stuffed their remains in the city gutters.
Later, the Hindu mobs came out storming, looking for defenceless Moslems to slaughter.
Never, in all it's violent history, had Calcutta known 24 hours as savage as this one.
Like water soaked logs, scores of bloated corpses bobbed down the Hooghly river.
Others, savagely mutilated, littered the city's streets.
The great Calcutta Killings triggered bloodshed in Noakhali, where Gandhi was.
In Bihar.
And in Bombay.
I write this as a reminder.
To not allow religious madness and insanity get over basic humanity in future.
Time to go to bed.
Good night mon ami.
11/28/2015
Damage to certain parts of the frontal lobe can make people feel calm but it also deprives them of the power to plan.
The only thing which connects anxiety and planning is thinking about the future.
Our frontal lobe empowers healthy human adults with a time machine that allows us to vacate the present and plan and even experience the future before it happens.
Interestingly, the first brains appeared on earth about 500 million years ago (earth is 4300 million years old).
It spent evolving leisurely 430 million years or so evolving into the brains of primates.
And another 70 million years or so into the brains of the first protohumans.
But then came the spurt in just 2 million years that doubled it's mass from one-and-a-quarter-pound brain of Homo habilis to the nearly three-pound brain of Homo sapiens.
And this is the only brain that has the soft ware of 'What If?".
Time to hit the bed.
Sri Ganesh has shaken me to the core today by his incredible performance of live surgery on his own eyes with an entirely novel excimer laser ablation protocol called non linear aspheric ablation.
Time to read.
Good night mon ami.
11/29/2015
Earth is 4.3 billion years old.
Our sun was formed about 5 billion years ago.
How?
Gravitational force acting on a diffuse cloud of gas of hydrogen and helium with little bits of deuterium and lithium.
As the gas cloud got denser, the gravity pull on one part became stronger, causing the cloud to collapse further in on itself.
As the gravity squeezed the cloud tighter, it got hotter.
Ultimately, it got hot enough to ignite nuclear fusion.
This generated enough outward-flowing radiation to stem further gravitational contraction of the gas.
A hot, stable, brightly burning star was born.
Time to hit the bed for some reading.
Good night mon ami.
11/30/2015
Today I would like to tell how all the elements heavier than iron were formed.
To recall:
1. Almost all the hydrogen and helium were formed just 3 minutes after the big bang.
2. All the elements from lithium to iron were formed in the furnaces of the star.
Now for Part 3.
Rest of all the elements were formed and are being formed in supernovae (Plural of supernova).
Supernovae are exploding stars which happens when the iron-cored stars begin to collapse on themselves.
The temperatures achieved during these explosions can reach 100 billion degrees (our sun's core temperature is around 15 million degrees).
Thus as the universe evolved, it slowly created it's own rules and generating the elements which would go on, or rather, which went on to make you and me and the gold which we cherish so much in our silly magnificent weddings.
Time to read about Ravana, the asura who was vanquished.
It is the story of the great epic Ramayana seen from the view of the defeated Ravana.
It is like reading Bible or Qur'an from the point of view of the devil or the Shaitan.
Such are the interests of this vile pagan kafir.
Good night mon ami.
12/1/2015
Almost all of us are guilty to our ignorance of history and substituting it with myths and legends.
Three hundred years ago, no one considered themselves Indians but races like the Mughals, Afghans or Rajputs;
Castes like Brahmins, Kshatriyas, Vaishyas, Shudras, Baniyas, Chamars etc.
300 years ago, very few people considered themselves Hindu.
They considered themselves as Vaishnavas, Shaivites, Kabirpanthis, worshippers of Kali etc.
It was only in 1826 that Raja Ram Mohan Roy used the original Persian word Hindu as a unifying label for various indigenous forms of worships.
Later, reformers and philosophers like Dayanand Saraswati, Vivekananda, Radhakrishnan et al tried to integrate these various faiths into a religion similar to the Semitic religions such as Islam, Judaism and Christianity.
Be ready to have many of your "popular opinions" about India smashed to bits and pieces.
This is the price you will have to pay for befriending a vile heathen and disbeliever like I.
Time to read.
Good night mon ami.
Post Script:
Today I came to know that Oliver Sachs, the great neuroscientist himself suffered from genetic condition of complete inability to recognize faces.
12/2/2015
After all the options...
12/2/2015
Atoms can randomly link up to form sometimes very stable molecules.
Just by simple laws of chemistry and physics.
An example being the hemoglobin molecules.
They are complex proteins made up of amino acids which in turn are made up of simple few dozen atoms arranged in precise patterns.
The hemoglobin molecule has 574 amino acids arranged in 4 chains which twist around to form a globular 3-D structure of bewildering complexity.
The great thing is that it is not a random thing but a definite invariant structure.
The chains consisting of the same sequence of amino acids will tend, like 2 springs, to come to rest in exactly the same 3-D coiled pattern.
Thus from simplicity can arise complexity which is very very counter intuitive.
Time to do some reading.
Good night mon ami.
I must add that the benevolent Almighty Lord has not been very kind to the the people of Madras.
12/3/2015
Since the conquest of the Ireland in the 16th century (i. e. 1500s), the English gradually emerged as the new Romans.
They "new Romans were charged with civilizing backward peoples" across the world, from Ireland to America and from India to Africa.
It happened in 2 phases:
1. The first empire starting across the Atlantic towards America and the West Indies.
2. The second empire from around 1783 swinging east towards Africa and India.
In a post Enlightenment intellectual environment, the British started defining themselves as modern and civilised vis-à-vis the Orientals.
This rationalized their imperial vision in the 19th century.
I had failed in my history test in Class 7 and it had left a deep scar in my psyche.
May be that is where my love for past comes from (also to understand the present).
Time to read.
Wish I had Asimov's memory.
Good night mon ami.
12/5/2015
It is great to be back.
The struggle for existence never gets easier.
No matter how well we or any species get adapted to their environment, we or they can never relax.
Because the competitors are also getting adapted.
Who are our competitors?
Who are our enemies?
Who or what killed our ancestors two or more centuries ago?
It was small pox, tuberculosis, pneumonia, plague, scarlet fever, diarrhea.
The first world war of 1914-18 killed 25 million in 4 years.
The influenza epidemic that followed killed 25 million in four months.
So even though we are each others' enemies, the microbial parasites are our numero uno enemy.
So what is our defence against it?
Correct, our immune system, consisting of antibodies and white blood cells and much more.
But what determines how strong our immune system is?
The histocompatibility genes.
It is these genes which constantly need to shuffled and reshuffled to prevent the viruses from subvert our cellular machinery.
And how are these genes shuffled?
Sex!!
Now u see, what the mating game is all about!
To produce offsprings who can survive the onslaught of germs/parasites.
Time to read.
Good night mon ami.
12/6/2015
The first living creatures were purely chemical.
But chemistry began to give way to electronics in animals that moved.
Example plants are pure chemistry
But even a sea Nautilus has a primitive eye to perceive photons, and thus is electronic.
The electronics was initially for guidance like sonar but later evolved to predatory activities like a guided missile.
The arms race what happened in nature is somewhat parallel to our military electronics progress (depending how u see it).
U see, it was this nature's tooth-and-claw arms race that eventually gave rise to our intellectual capabilities.
It was chemistry which gave rise to electronics support it.
But now, it is our electronic brain which runs the show and controls our chemistry ( in what we eat, who we mate with and how we treat our bodies).
Time to read.
By today midnight, we would have added another 200,000 humans on this planet in 24 hours. And they would all be wanting to drive fancy cars.
Good night mon ami.
But
12/7/2015
Around 1900, a theory was developed to explain what matter was.
It was the electron theory.
The theory evolved gradually to include heavy nucleus with electrons going around it.
Attempts to understand the motion of electrons going around the nucleus using mechanical laws (like what Newton used to figure how planets go around the sun) was a real failure.
All predictions came out wrong.
Working out another theory to replace Newton's laws took a long time.
Why?
Because phenomena at the atomic level were quite strange.
One had to lose one's common sense in order to perceive what was happening at the atomic level.
Finally, in 1926, an "uncommon sensy" theory was developed to explain the "new type of behavior" of electrons in matter.
It is called the theory of quantum mechanics.
Time to immerse myself into the world of ultimate pleasure.
Good night mon ami.
12/8/2015
Our fire drill expert
12/8/2015
I keep repeating ad nauseum that earth is 4.3 billion years old.
Yet, no one questioned me why do I say so.
No one asked me:
You idiotic neonate, do u have a clock, or a wrist watch to measure earth's age?
Well...
U would have be surprised by this neonate's answer.
Nature has gifted us with clocks!
These are radioactive isotopes.
Isotopes are same elements having same number of protons but different number of neutrons.
Some isotopes are not active but decay spontaneously at a very predictable rate (though not at predictable moments).
This rate of decay is half life meaning a fixed proportion of that element will decay into another in a fixed time.
Examples.
Half life of Rubidium-87 is 49 billion years.
So a 100 gram of Rubidium-87 in 49 billion years will consist of 50 gm of Rubidium-87 and the rest 50 gm of Strontium (to which it has decayed to).
So once the clock is zeroed (when it started decaying which is obtained by knowing the process of crystallization) and the ratio of parent to daughter isotope, we got a clock of nature in our hands.
Fascinating stuff, isn't it!
This is a very specialized field called geology which is very little known.
But it was this field of geology which provided Darwin with the strongest support for his theory to work.
Geology and isotope dating gave biology what they needed most:
THE TIME for natural selection to work.
Time to read.
Good night mon ami.
12/9/2015
Rain man in ludicrous attire
12/9/2015
The common core of modernity is fundamentally built upon an indifferent, disenchanted cosmos in which no mysterious incalculable forces come into play or can be invoked.
One can, in principal, understand the workings of universe by revealing it's fundamental laws using the scientific method.
Modernity followed from Enlightenment from Europe of the 17th century.
Enlightenment attacked and severed the roots of traditional European culture of beliefs in the sacred, magic, kingship and hierarchy secularizing all institutions and ideas.
It also demolished all legitimations of monarchy, aristocracy, women's subjugation, ecclesiastical authority and slavery replacing them with principles of universality, equality and democracy.
In other words, it was a revolt against superstition.
But all this transformation is at the risk of being replaced by post modernism.
Postmodernism challenges the very possibility that knowledge can be independent of it's local cultural traditions.
And most people love it since cultural affinities are emotionally very powerful.
Time to indulge myself.
Good night mon ami.
12/9/2015
Cravings
12/9/2015
This rat understands my fear
12/10/2015
Yawning workout
12/10/2015
Finally
Dengue vaccine goes in the market for the first time in Mexico
French company Sanofi Pasteur
The same company which manufactures vaccine against influenza
12/10/2015
The priests of every religion shamelessly borrow popular philosophies, myths, customs and rituals from each other.
The Egyptian custom of tombs strongly influenced Christian and Islamic burials later.
The skull caps now used by Jewish and Muslim worshippers began with the Magi priests of ancient Persia.
The word Pope is derived from Pharaoh. His crown and his shepherd's crop is almost identical to that of the Pharaoh.
The worship of Mary and his son came from the Egyptian cult of Isis and her beloved son Horos.
The Roman Catholics believe in the Trinity whereas the Greek Orthodox church (Russians) believe only in the duplicity of the Father and the Son (pun intended).
The Qur'an and the Hadith contain a huge baggage of Jewish and Christian ideas.
If Moslems recited 99 names of Allah, 99 or 108 names of Vishnu became a similar chant for many Hindus.
Shias had their Muharram processions so our Gangadhar Tilak began the Ganesh Chaturti tamasha a century ago to units Hindus of Maharashtra.
Now Sunnis have started competing with similar tamasha on the birthday of the Prophet.
Perhaps the greatest competition is in the sound levels beginning with the Moslem Muezzin calling by loudspeakers to the faithful.
An omnipresent old god is almost considered deaf and demented and amnesic considering from the volume and frequency of the prayers of the faithful.
Time to hit the bed.
Now more people will crave and worship money then ever before. (After the High Court verdict today)
Good night mon ami.
12/11/2015
Wishing for the impossible
12/11/2015
Catastrophic expenses on privatized health care
12/11/2015
The idea of a single unified self "living" in the brain is most likely an illusion.
We create our own "reality" from fragments of information.
What we "see" is reliable but not accurate representation of what exists in the world.
The circuit in our brain which gives rise to the vivid subjective quality of consciousness resides mainly in parts of temporal lobes (such as amygdala, septum, hypothalamus and insular cortex) and a single projection zone in the frontal lobes - the cingulate gyrus.
One of the most important component of consciousness is qualia.
Qualia is the raw feel of sensations such as the subjective quality of "pain" or "red" or even a "religious experience".
Time to do bit of reading.
I came to know today that almost all of the Indian states with Maharashtra at the top are in debt (living on borrowed money) amounting to lakhs of crores of Indian rupee.
Good night mon ami.
12/12/2015
He has something to teach us
12/12/2015
All of you agree that the moon goes around our earth.
And I think, inspite of all our differences, you would agree that the earth revolves around the sun.
But what u may not know is that even our entire solar system orbits around the center of the Milky Way galaxy.
The speed is colossal 230 km per second or 1/1300 the speed of light. (Speed at which an object could circumnavigate our equator in 3 minutes).
The time taken is 225 to 250 million earth years. We call it galactic year.
So 1 galactic year is roughly 0.22 billion years, a useful unit for depicting cosmic and geological events.
So for example, if the earth is 4.5 billion years old, it would be almost 20 galactic years old.(multiply by 4.4)
And if the first life began on earth around 3.6 billion years ago, then it would be around 16 galactic years ago.
Time for some reading.
Good night mon ami.
12/13/2015
At around 250 BC, a Greek Eratosthenes noted that at the city of Syene (presently Aswan, Egypt), the midday sun reflected at the bottom of the well.
Meaning the sun was dead overhead.
But in Alexandria, at midday Eratosthenes saw his shadow being cast.
He estimated from the angle of the shadow that the angle between the sun and vertical to be just over 7 degrees, or 1/50 of 360 degrees.
From this he made this remarkable deduction based on 2 assumptions.
1. The sun is in the same place from wherever you observe it.
2. Sun was very far away, so the rays of light reaching Alexandria and Syene must be very nearly parallel.
The deduction was:
Only a round earth would explain this.
He also added the distance between Syene and Alexandria must be 1/50 of the earth's circumference.
This is pure science.
Common sense applied to evidence.
Most fascinating!
Time to do some reading.
Good night mon ami.
12/14/2015
Mrs Gandhi, after the emergency in 1977, was an unparalleled disaster.
In Punjab, the Akali Dal formed a coalition government with the new Janata party.
Sanjay Gandhi new that the coalition was fragile.
Zail Singh advised Sanjay to try to break the Akali Dal.
Akali Dal was dominated by 3 men:
1. Prakash Singh Basal
2. Harchand Singh Longowal
3. Gurcharan Singh Tohra
Zail Singh told Sanjay to search for a new religious leader or a sant to be a rival to this troika.
The man Sanjay eventually found was sant Jarnail Singh Bhindranwale!
They found an issue to politicize in Nirankari group of Sikhs.
Slowly Sanjay helped Bhindranwale form a political party called Dal Khalsa.
This man would, as we all know, would lead to the siege of the Golden temple in Amritsar in June of 1984 and eventually the cold blooded assassination of Mrs. Gandhi on 31st October 1984.
This reminds me of how the Mujahedeen once a big ally of America against Soviets turned around to bite their own mentors like the viper in "The Speckled Band" who struck Professor Roylott.
Time for some reading.
Good night mon ami.
We have grown a further more by another 200,000 since the last time I wrote my bed time story to you.
12/15/2015
It is very shocking (and even insulting) to know how solar systems and stars form.
The universe is made up of random clouds of interstellar dusts and gases.
Random jigglings trigger collapse of dustcloud.
All it takes to start such a collapse is some lumpiness or concentrations of matter somewhere.
Then gravity acts on this lumpiness.
Random jigglings will produce such a concentration if u wait long enough.
At first the collapsing cloud is spherical.
But as it us being carried along by the rotation of the entire galaxy, it's outer edge moves more slowly than it's edge.
Conservation of momentum tells that as the cloud collapses, it begins to spin.
The more it collapses the faster it spins.
The cloud slowly flattens out into a rough disc.
Such has been our humble beginnings.
This is cosmology.
Today I learnt an interesting economic fact:
The middle class of India is just 3% or so of our population!
We are still a very low income nation.
Time to befriend a book.
Good night mon ami.
12/16/2015
Deficits are like putting dynamite in the hands of children.
They can get out of control very quickly.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
The weird thing is almost every nation state is running on huge, really HUGE piles of debts and deficits.
12/16/2015
The Harvard Medical Practice Study published a series of landmark paper in 1991.
It consisted of review of more than 30,000 admissions in the New York state.
It estimated that more than 44,000 patients die every year at least partly due to errors in care.
The errors follow bell-shaped distribution, saying that most surgeons have complications in their surgical life times.
Most surgeons are sued at least one time in their career.
The fact is that virtually everyone who cares for hospital patients will make serious mistakes, and even commits acts of negligence, every year.
For this reason, doctors are seldom outraged when the press reports yet another medical horror story.
We have a different reaction:
That could be me.
So the important question isn't how to keep bad physicians from harming patients; it's how to keep the good ones from harming patients.
That is why, for me, every surgery and even every procedure is stressful.
Time to read.
Reading and weight training and running and staircase training are one of my biggest stress busters.
Good night mon ami.
12/17/2015
Even as late as in early 1870s, the most eminent doctors had as little knowledge of the cause of epidemics as an ignorant Russian villager.
Robert Koch was one such German doctor with very little interest in practicing medicine.
He settled in Wollstein in East Prussia where his wife gifted him a microscope to take his mind off what he calls his stupid practice.
He began to transfer diseases from sick animals to rats, then cutting open the rats and examining their organs under microscope.
He also learnt the art of preparing glass slides simply by experimenting.
He, through his experiments, not only saw these bacilli and cocci but came to the conclusion that one certain kind of microbe causes one definite kind of disease.
There is more to write about him which I shall do so on another day.
Time to read.
Good night mon ami.
12/18/2015
Robert Koch Part 2
Accidentally, one day, Koch looked at the surface of half of a boiled potato.
There was a curious collection of little coloured droplets scattered on it.
With a slender wire of platinum he fished one of the grey droplets and placed it on a pure water between 2 bits of glass under his microscope.
He saw swarms of bacilli all looking exactly alike!
Then in a flash Koch saw the beautiful experiment nature had done for him.
"Every one of these droplets is a pure culture of one definite kind of microbe - a pure colony of one species of germs... How simple!
When germs Falk from air into liquid soups we have been using, the different kinds get all mixed up.
But when different bugs fall on the solid surface of potato, each one has to stay where it falls...it sticks there... And it grows there, multiplies into millions of its own kind... absolutely pure!"
Koch had changed the microbe hunting from a guessing game into a sure science.
A huge leap!
Also it would later on lead to unprecedented increase in human population!
Time to immerse myself.
Good night mon ami.
12/19/2015
Robert Koch Part 3
Koch finally turned his mind to consumption or tuberculosis.
He began to inject materials from yellow tubercles from dead people into the eyes of rabbits and skins of guinea pigs.
After staining the tissues of these infected animals, after months of toiling, he saw blue coloured infinitely thin bacilli which had little bends and curves.
Now he wanted to isolate these microbes.
After trying hundreds of soups and broths, he invented his famous blood serum jelly that closely resembled tissue of living animals.
He got the growth after 15 days of incubation!
Then he began to inject these microbes into healthy guinea pigs and several other healthy animals including rabbits, hens, rats, mice, monkeys and even his goldfish.
He worked like a single-minded maniac.
But no animal succumbed to consumption.
But then he recalled that TB is spread by inhaling. So why not spray the healthy animals with his cultured bugs?
And he did just that by doing this risky experiment of devising a gas chamber where he pumped using a pair of bellows this poisonous mist of bacilli.
And lo behold!
On ten days the rabbits were gasping and in twenty five days all the guinea pigs had died of consumption!!
On 24th March, 1882 in Berlin, Koch told this story at the Physiological Society meeting where great men like Paul Ehrlich and Rudolph Virchow were present.
From here, the news travelled from Kamchatka to San Francisco, making Koch a hero!
He is a true hero we must never forget.
Good night mon ami.
Asura
Tale of the vanquished
The story of Ravana and his people
By Anand Neelakantan
Though a book of fiction as it is narrating Ramayana from a novel perspective, it makes a profound introspection on the contemporary society of India.
Never has blunt truth been so beautifully and elaborately woven, interweaving the past myth with the current harsh realities.
Another thing I learnt.
Why is Ravana portrayed as ten-faced?
His ten faces reflect of a complete man replete with all the flaws and imperfections a human is:
Intellect
Anger
Pride
Jealousy
Happiness
Sadness
Fear
Selfishness
Passion and
Ambition
Ravana sees himself as the epitome of complete human being;
Without any pretence to holiness or restricted by religious and social norms.
12/20/2015
It is nearly impossible for us humans to believe that human life is just a more-or-less farcical outcome of a chain of accidents reaching back to the first three minutes after the big bang.
It is very hard to realize that the present universe has evolved from an unspeakably unfamiliar earlier condition and faces a future extinction.
The more the universe seems comprehensible, the more it also seems pointless.
Some men and women are not content to comfort themselves with tales of gods and giants.
They few are also not content to confine their thoughts to daily affairs of life.
These few men build telescopes and satellites and particle accelerators and sit at their desks for endless hours working out the meaning of the data they gather.
Maybe, this endeavor to understand the universe is one of the very few things that lifts human life a little above the level of farce, and gives it some of the grace of tragedy.
Steven Weinberg.
Very very sobering words indeed.
Good night mon ami.
12/20/2015
Science fiction is when we see into the future of our planet.
Fantasy is when we believe humanity will survive.
Kaz Lefave
12/21/2015
Making the work more and yet less miserable
12/21/2015
Fear is the emotion which motivated our ancestors to cope with the dangers they were likely to face.
People react in different ways to different frightening things, each reaction appropriate to the hazard.
An animal triggers an urge to flee.
But a precipice freezes us.
Social threats leads to shyness and gestures of appeasement.
People faint at the sight if blood, their blood pressure drops down presumably to minimize further loss of one's own blood.
But fears in modern city-dwellers protect us from dangers that no longer exist and fail to protect us from dangers around us.
We ought to be afraid of guns, driving fast, driving without seat belts, crossing railway tracks, talking on smart phones while crossing roads.
But still, we fear snakes, lions or sharks or even terrorists which we are unlikely to encounter.
Time to read.
Learnt a new Italian word:
Pezzonovante
Meaning Big shot
Good night mon ami
12/22/2015
The big bad world
12/22/2015
The media in India loves to talk about the environment in terms of pretty trees and tigers.
In India, the state and fate of natural environment is intimately linked to livelihood and survival.
Without sustainable irrigation practices, the farmers cannot assure themselves a long-term future.
Without decent public transport and energy conservation, we will be beholden to the whims and fancies of oil-rich nations.
Without clean air and safe drinking water, our children will be far less healthy than we want them to be.
But the market-friendly media wish their readers to have their cake and eat it too.
To live resource-intensive lifestyles and yet be able to glory in the beauties of the wild.
But we are blind to the fact that the one imperils the other.
It has become quite chilly now which is good but it also raises my fear of an epidemic of influenza or common cold.
Time to read.
Good night mon ami.
12/23/2015
Last minute visit to arboretum
12/23/2015
Most of us are convinced that physics is beyond us. It is impossible to understand (though there are many who think they know enough physics since they have passed class 12 with science).
Now why may we not understand a physics lecture?
1. May be the teacher's language is poor or he has an accent or he speaks too rapid like I do.
2. If the lecturer is a physicist, he will use ordinary words like "work", "action", "energy" or even "light" in a very funny unusual way.
3. Physics often explains how nature works and not why it works that way. But then no one understands why nature works the wat it works.
4. But the real reason you don't understand physics may be you just can't believe it. You can't accept it. You don't like it.
Physicists have learnt to deal with this problem. They have learnt to realize that whether they like a theory or not is not the essential question. Rather, it is whether or not the theory gives predictions that agree with experiment.
Once you study physics, you will realize that nature is absurd. Not in the religious crack pot way, but really REALLY strange.
More about the details later.
I used to be a big fan of a radio show on the BBC world service "Letters from America" by Alister Cook.
In a vicarious way, I feel like him when I write this.
Good night mon ami.
12/24/2015
Charles Schepens was a Belgian ophthalmologist from Brussels.
Germans invaded his country in May 1940.
He joined the Belgian Resistance and helped many fighters, Jews and Allied airmen escape capture by the Nazis.
At the end of the war, he worked at Moorfields eye hospital in London.
He was very frustrated in not being able to see detached retinas in 3-D relief with the ophthalmoscope (invented by Herman Helmholtz in 1853).
For stereoscopic view, we need to use both the eyes.
But our eyes are spaced too far apart to use together when trying to see through a space as small as another person's pupil.
And there is an additional challenge of having a light source strong enough to be transmitted along the line of sight.
He experimented with prisms and mirrors.
He placed a prism in front of each eye which bent the line of sight from each eye towards the nose.
Then in the middle, right in front of the nose, he added 2 more prisms which bent the sight lines straight ahead.
Now the sight lines from each eye were adjacent to each other, almost touching.
He mounted this unwieldy apparatus on a headband and positioned himself directly underneath a powerful light.
A mirror reflected the light straight out, along the axis of sight.
He held a magnifying lens between him and the eye of his patient.
And lo behold, suddenly he saw as aerial view of the retina.
He had invented the indirect ophthalmoscope!!
In 1945, it was in it's rudimentary prototype.
He emigrated to Boston, America in 1947 and established the Schepens Eye Research Institute in 1950.
Good night mon ami.
12/25/2015
Srinivasa Ramanujan ( 1887-1920) had some extraordinary characteristics which set him apart from majority of mathematicians.
One was lack of rigor.
Very often he would simply state a result which, he would insist, had just come to him through intuition (he gave the credit to goddess Namagiri).
This happened time and again and as it turned out, occasionally some of his "intuition theorems" turned out to be wrong.
The other outstanding feature of Ramanujan was his "friendship with the integers".
Many mathematicians share it to some degree but Ramanujan possessed it to an extreme.
There are great number of anecdotes on it.
In the end, this unique genius was done in by tuberculosis which our friend Robert Koch had not so long back discovered but not it's cure.
Will read some.
Good night mon ami.
12/26/2015
Complete rationality for humans is unattainable.
But progress in the world comes from increase in rationality, both practical and theoretical.
A man is rational in proportion to his information/intelligence and his ability to control his desires.
The control of our acts by our intelligence is very important and it will alone make social life possible as science increases the means at our disposal of killing each other.
Education, the press, politics, religion; almost all these great forces are at present on the side of irrationality.
The remedy lies in the efforts of individuals towards a more sane and balanced view of our relations to our neighbors.
It is to intelligence that we must look for the solutions of the ills from which our world is suffering.
Time to indulge in books.
Good night mon ami.
12/27/2015
It is safe to say that no modern politician had anywhere near a difficult job as Jawaharlal Nehru's.
At Independence, the country he was asked to lead was faced with horrific problems.
Riots had to contained, food shortages to be overcome, princely states (as many as 500) to be integrated, refugees (almost 10 million) to be resettled.
This, so to say, was the task of fire-fighting; to be followed by the equally daunting task of nation building.
A constitution had to be written that would satisfy the needs of this diverse and complex nation.
An election system had to be devised for an electorate that was composed mostly of illiterates.
And an economic policy had to be forged to take a desperately poor and divided society into the modern age.
No new nation was ever born in less propitious circumstances.
It is crucial that we are reminded of our birth.
Time to read.
Good night mon ami.
12/28/2015
There is a notorious and a famous tank problem.
It goes back a long way back, some 2000 years since Heron of Alexandria.
It is this:
A tank has 2 pipes - one leading in and the other leading out.
The first pipe would fill the tank in 5 hours
The second pipe would drain the filled tank dry in 10 hours
So how long will it take the tank to fill up when both pipes are at work?
The odd thing is that this problem has always been solved wrongly
The most common solution given is this:
In one hour, 1/5th of tank is filled
In one hour, 1/10th of tank is emptied
So, with pipes open, in one hour 1/5 - 1/10 = 1/10th tank must fill
So total tank will fill in 10 hours
But this is wrong!!
Can u tell me why?
Just a simple thought will do.
Good night mon ami
12/29/2015
We have an infinite capacity for taking good things for granted
12/29/2015
Now, let put this question in a different way
U have vessel which holds 30 glasses of water
U open the circular drain at the bottom and let flow the water to fill one glass
It takes 1 minute
So how long would it take the vessel to run dry if you open the drain?
So is the answer 30 minutes?
No.
The rate at which the water flows out is not constant.
It depends on the height of the water column.
This famous relationship was discovered by the Italian Torricelli in 1600s.
He was a brilliant pupil of none other than Galileo who destroyed our bloated ego by proving that we were not the center of the universe
v = √2gh (Square root)
So to go back to my yesternight's question, if it takes 10 hours for the pipe to drain the tank, it does NOT follow that 1/10th water flows out every hour.
This problem cannot be solved with elementary mathematics and would probably need Newton's/Leibniz's calculus.
Hope it was not too tedious a reply.
Good night mon ami.
Today read an interesting article which sensibly argued that partition of India was probably good for India as Islam is inherently incompatible with modernity, democracy and rational thinking. (Though I think, any religion, if faithfully and literally followed as pronounced in the scriptures would lead to the same path as Islam).
12/30/2015
Light is certainly a wave but it is also made up of particles.
How do we know that?
Because light can be dimmed to such an extent that only single photon is emitted
And there is an instrument called photomultiplier which clicks when it detects a single photon. (Our retinal cells can be activated by 5 or 6 photons).
So how does a photomultiplier detect a single photon?
It has a metal plate A which is exposed to the incoming photon
When the photon hits it, an electron is knocked loose.
This electron is attracted to a positively charged plate B kept close to it.
This electron hits the plate B with enough force to dislodge 3 or 4 electrons.
Each of the electron of the plate B is attracted to plate C (which is also charged) and their collision with plate C knocks loose even more electrons.
This cascade is magnified by repeating this process 10 or 12 times until billions of electrons, enough to make a sizeable electric current, hit the last plate say L.
This current is amplified by an amplifier and sent through a speaker to make audible clicks.
Most fascinating!
It may be that it is used in one of our ophthalmic diagnostic tools though I am not certain about it.
Time to immerse myself.
Good night mon ami.
12/30/2015
it's like this,
even samurai
have teddy bears and even
teddy bears get drunk
12/31/2015
Few people realize that it is mythology that is the joker which has constantly distorted both history and religion in every country.
Historic thinking specially gets distorted when mythology becomes embedded into religious scriptures.
Few people realize that India does not even have monopoly on the epic Ramayana as there are dozens of versions deeply loved in Sri Lanka, Thailand, Cambodia and Vietnam.
Till a hundred years ago, as a result of Mughals and British rule, most Indians were largely illiterate.
There were no books available in vernacular languages.
Most people want to consider the past as a pleasant golden period from where there has been a steady descent into the present times of uncertainty and conflict.
In all societies, even when science and historical evidence better define past events, most people still want to cling on to their cherished myths.
As I had some time back, humans can never be completely rational beings.
Good night mon ami.
1/1/2016
Irresponsible aliens (sarcasm)
1/1/2016
When the earth condensed from the primal dust cloud, it separated into layers.
The center of the earth is spherical iron of radius 3500 km. It's center is solid but outer layer is molten.
It is very hot 6000°C with extremely high pressures (3 million times atmospheric pressure).
Heat tends to melt the rocks and the metals.
Pressure tends to solidify them.
It is these two conflicting factors that determines the state of rocks there.
The very top layer is the crust which forms a thin skin of just few miles where we inhabit.
Between these two is the mantle, which is solid, formed from variety of silicate rocks.
The outermost part of the mantle and the deeper part of the crust where the two join, are again molten.
Talk more about the crust tomorrow.
Time to hear out my best friends.
Good night mon ami.
1/2/2016
End moment leaf collection
1/2/2016
The crust where all humans, rather where all life exists is mere 5 to 20 km thick.
The crust that form the continental land masses are made of granite.
Beneath the oceans, the crustal layer is predominantly basalt.
So the continents are broad, thin sheets of granite stuck atop basalt skin.
All the mountains are granite.
Though the mountains appear big to us, they rise no more than 9 miles above sea level, a mere 0.7% of the earth's radius.
The deepest ocean plunges 11 km beneath the waves.
The overall deviation from an ideal spheroid is about 0.33% ( about as irregular as shallow indentations you find on a basketball).
Our home planet is, give or take a bit, remarkably round and surprisingly smooth (thanks to gravity).
The terror strike in the Punjab air force base was expected.
A natural outcome of Modi's meeting with Nawaz Sharif.
Time to immerse myself.
Good night mon ami.
1/3/2016
Most of us are unaware of
"The other revolution of 1857"
In India. (Besides the Sepoy Mutiny).
It was the year when the universities of Calcutta, Bombay and Madras were founded by the British.
These were the crucible of modernity.
They opened new horizons in a society that had stood still in a conservative and hierarchical mould for centuries.
These universities were the first open and secular institutions in a society that was governed largely by the rules of kinship, caste and religion.
The age-old restrictions of gender and caste did not disappear, but they came to be questioned here.
It was here that young men and women learnt to question the logic of colonial rule and to raise the ideals of justice and liberty that the British so propounded at home.
Gandhi and Ambedkar had their education under the auspices of the Bombay university, Subhas Chandra Bose under the Calcutta and C. Rajagopalachari under Madras university.
Education, specially in science or in professional courses like medicine, law and engineering is an extremely precious asset to have.
One must never forget that just even few hundred years back, most humans tended to be illiterate.
And even those who were literate, knew a fraction of what today a class 10 student knows or plays with in his hands.
Time to read and contemplate.
Good night mon ami.
1/4/2016
Hopeless teachers useless knowledge
1/4/2016
Medicine is an inexact science.
It cannot predict what will make individuals live longer or more healthy.
Neither can doctors.
So the best course of action is to stay away from them unless you feel unwell or become pregnant.
Consulting doctors, taking precautionary tests or having regular check-ups does not increase life expectancy.
Instead, they can lead to further expensive and unpleasant tests and treatment, and possibly even unnecessary surgery.
It is best to take a statistical, evidence-based approach to your own health care (I am assuming you are an educated and curious person who has desire to ask questions about health and good life).
Just to show, I am not fooling, I will show u a table a major study published in Lancet which shows a gain in life expectancy by avoiding major risk factors.
It shows that avoiding the eight risk factors can at the most, increase life expectancy by just 4 to 5 years.
So rest in peace.
Good night mon ami.
1/5/2016
The mysterious leaf pile
1/5/2016
I very strongly believe, rather have strong evidence, that extraordinary successes are a result of pure chance and randomness.
Hard work, persistence, doggedness and perseverance are necessary, very necessary.
Building up your skill counts.
But they are useful for repeated work, say an eye surgeon or a dentist, but not to become a billionaire like Warren Buffet or a super star in movies or sports.
Our brain assumes that good qualities cause success; that since most intelligent, hardworking, persevering person become successful we tend to mistake every successful person to be intelligent, hardworking and persevering.
Our brain greatly misjudges the role of chance and luck in our lives.
Risk taking is necessary for success but it also has contributed to great many failures which go down in the history never to be heard of.
Today I did my ultrasound of kidney and urinary bladder.
No stones were detected.
Good night mon ami.
1/6/2016
You may know that earth behaves like a magnet.
But why? Or how?
The core of our planet is iron, mostly molten because of heat but slightly solid due to pressure.
And this molten iron is circulating within itself up and down due to convection current (center being more hot than the peripheral).
A moving fluid can develop magnetic field if:
1. It conducts electricity.
2. There is a tiny magnetic field to begin with.
3. Something is twisting the fluid which in our planet is the Coriolis forces caused by earth's rotation.
Besides these, there are at least 7 other factors that contribute to the earth's magnetic field.
There is more to go on, but on some other evening.
Time to go for the slumber.
Good night mon ami.
1/7/2016
Invention of a man in desperate strait
1/7/2016
In the upper regions of the atmosphere is a layer of ionosphere, i.e. gas bearing electrical charge.
It is a moving layer and hence it too creates a magnetic field.
This magnetic field protects us from the solar wind which bombards us with electrons, neutrons and cosmic rays which can cause lethal mutations in our DNA (incidentally this is the same sun which gives chlorophyll photons to start the food chain).
The interaction of these deadly and powerful solar winds (having charged particles) with our magnetic field results in very interesting convective currents near the poles.
They are seen as eerie ghostly lights.
The ones seen near the north poles are simply called the northern lights and fancifully called aurora Borealis.
The ones seen near the south pole are simply called the southern lights and again technically known as the aurora australis.
You can go to YouTube and Google earth's magnetic field, aurora Borealis and PBS.
PBS has a short video on this phenomenon explained with amazing graphics.
Yesterday had my first Lasik complication of corneal flap slip.
It was repositioned today.
The flap thickness is a mere 110 microns.
Science works (and explains).
Good night mon ami.
1/8/2016
Fascination with nature is short lived
1/8/2016
Our earth is 4.6 billion years old. Or 4600 million years old (love it or hate it).
But just 300 million years ago, all our 7 continents were joined to form just one supercontinent (called Pangea meaning all-earth).
But how can such massive continents drift?
Well...for one, if you go deep down in a submersible in the middle of Atlantic ocean (and elsewhere in other oceans), roughly north to south and mid way between South America and Africa, u will see a ridge.
You will actually see volcanic material (lava) welling up along the ridge, and spreading sideways.
This is what is making the Americas move about 2 cm further away from Africa every year!
More about it later.
Today I am going to inaugurate a modern classic:
Love at the time of Cholera
Written by the Columbian Gabriel Garcia Marquez in 1985, it is claimed to be even superior to his masterpiece:
One Hundred Years of Solitude
If anything can reach the supreme achievement of science and medicine by humans, it is literature.
Good night mon ami
1/9/2016
Why is my real life not like a reel life?
1/9/2016
Most of us are now aware that the earth acts like a magnet, having a north and a south pole.
But few are aware that every so often - once in every half a million years - the magnetic field flips polarity.
We are not sure why. It is a topic that needs investigation.
The process of flipping takes about 5000 years.
The periods between them are about 500,000 years.
This flipping is recorded in our continental rocks.
Yesternight I told you about the deep oceanic Atlantic ridge.
The rocks on either side of this ridge show a curious pattern of magnetic stripes, reversing polarity from north to south and back again.
The most fascinating aspect of these stripes are that they are symmetric on either side of the ridge.
This is the most striking evidence for the continental drift.
Time to read the mind of the great Gabo.
Good night mon ami.
+2+3+4+...+98+99+100
The teacher wanted to keep the class busy for the whole period so that he could be by himself.
As soon as a pupil finished, he was supposed to write his answer on his small slate and place it face down at the teacher's table.
Within seconds, one of the boys placed his slate face down at the desk and went to his seat where he remained quiet.
At the end of the class, the teacher told the other boys, who were still busy calculating, to finish up and place their slates in a pile.
All on top of the first boy's slate.
When the teacher examined the slates, he found that only one of them had the correct total of 5050.
And it was in the last slate.
The boy turned out to be Carl Friedrich Gauss, probably and arguably the only mathematician to match the genius of Srinivasa Ramanujan (1887-1920) when it came to pure numbers.
Both had poverty of birth and ordinary lineage in common.
But how did Gauss the boy do it?
Can u think of any simple way?
Solution to come in some future good night story.
Till then keep thinking.
Good night mon ami.
/11/2016 Now since I am patently stubborn and a librocubicularist, I must continue my story.
Now this 8 year boy Gauss mentally arranged the numbers 1 to 100 in one row and below it from 100 to 1.
Like this:
1 + 2 + 3...+ 99 + 100
100+99 +98...+ 2 + 1
Now did u notice something?
Each addition of top and bottom adds to 101!
Incredible!
From an eight year old!
In 1785!!
So there are one hundred of 101s to be added.
So 100 x 101
But since they were added exactly twice, his solution was:
(100 x 101)/2 = 5050
But the greatest beauty is it can be generalized.
If u want to the sum of 1 to 1000, all u need to do is:
(1000 x 1001)/2
Or
To get the sum of the first natural numbers till n, all u need to do is:
[n(n+1)]/2
Alas, such fantastic prodigies are a rare event, probably one in half a century of human reproduction!
Time to immerse myself.
Good night mon ami.
1/11/2016
Just in case if you were wondering
1/12/2016
In 1783, John Mitchell reasoned out they must exist.
In 1916, Karl Schwarzschild calculated their possible size.
In 1930, Subramanyan Chandrasekhar (defying Eddington and even backstabbed by him), showed that big enough stars were doomed to become them.
Yet, it was only in the 1970s that they were begun to be taken seriously.
What am I talking about?
Black holes!
They are the universe's most fascinating objects because inside them all the laws of physics breaks down.
Where gravity does not even let photons escape.
So then how do we view them?
Well...
The edge of black holes are called event horizons where matter is being accelerated into phenomenally great speeds before being swallowed into the darkness.
This generates electromagnetic waves.
Our own milky way in it's center has one massive black hole which is estimated to be of 12 million km wide.
Event horizon telescopes, based on very long baseline interferometry, are currently looking at this spot in our galaxy and sending the data to a facility in Cambridge, Massachusetts for processing.
Time to read.
Good night mon ami.
1/13/2016
While science has greatly helped me to know and understand reality (let not be fooled by the bigotry of post modern relativism which ascribes to multiple cultural realities), it did not teach me how to live my life.
Life, as we all know, is harsh, brutal, unpredictable and at the very least unfair.
So how do I live with my failures, insignificance, pending death and worse, to be forgotten in no time? (Even if u reproduce, u are most likely to be unknown history in mere 2 generation).
Why must I do good or at least not harm others if I know there is no divinity, no justice, no heaven or hell, but just elements to which I will revert back to?
My greatest succour came from philosophy, specially from the Greeks of roughly first century A.D.
The two philosophers who showed me the guidance were Epicurus and Seneca and the philosophy of stoicism.
I will elaborate on them some other night.
But I hope that I can show to you that one can be decent, content and at peace without resorting to silly parochial mythologies or falling at the feet of other mortals and raising them to the status of saints, babas, gurus etc.
Got to immerse myself into literature.
Good night mon ami.
1/13/2016
"..so, In the face of overwhelming odds, I'm left with only one option, I'm gonna have to science the shit out of this."
1/13/2016
more...."...They say once you grow crops somewhere, you have officially colonized it. So, technically, I colonized Mars. In your face, Neil Armstrong!"
1/13/2016
....and "...I don't want to come off as arrogant here, but I'm the greatest botanist on this planet."
1/14/2016
Consider a line 2 cm long marked 0 on left side and 2 on right side.
Half way, we naturally put 1.
Half way between 0 and 1 we put 1/2;
Half way between 0 and 1/2 we put 1/4 and so on.
Between 1 and 2 we mark 1 1/2, between 1 1/2 and 2 we mark 1 3/4 and so on.
We keep marking in the same way to 1/3, 2/3, 1 1/3, 1 2/3 and thus keep splitting each segment.
So, in imagination, if we do this for all possible common fractions and common mixed numbers between 0 and 2, we get all the rational numbers between 0 and 2.
There is an infinity of them, you will agree.
Do they completely "cover" all the line?
NO!
Because to what point will √2 correspond as it cannot be represented by a fraction but yet falls somewhere between 1.41 and 1.42!
Such problems concerning with the infinite, the infinitesimal and continuity worried the Greek Zeno (495 to 435 B.C.).
It were these simple worrisome issues that more than 2000 years later would be tackled to some extent by the giants Newton and Leibniz.
Time to dedicate to books.
Good night mon ami.
1/14/2016
Gone through 3/4th of it.
Simply brilliant!
1/15/2016
Teaser for the show and tell
1/15/2016
An optician from Munich, Germany in 1814 noticed something odd.
That when light from the sun is made to pass through a slit and then prism, the spectrum of colours is crossed with hundreds of dark lines.
I wonder how Sir Newton missed them.
These dark lines were always found at the same colours, corresponding to a definite wavelength.
His name was Joseph Fraunhofer and the lines called spectral lines have been named after him.
They are produced by selective absorption of light as it passes from the hot surface of the star to cooler outer atmosphere.
The elements that the photons go through decide the selective absorption and hence the specificity of these lines.
Now, the picture became even more interesting when the Doppler effect principal began to be applied on these lines coming from different stars.
It had a story to tell that would shake the very foundations of centuries old held beliefs.
More about it later.
Just to let u know, we eye doctors use ultrasound every day.
Today I learnt about an entity called twin primes.
Good night mon ami.
1/15/2016
I thank you Monish for opening to me the world of mathematics
For science you need laboratory and expensive equipments
For mathematics, u just need a paper and pen
1/16/2016
No annoying human interaction
1/16/2016
Even by 1925, RSS (Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh) had become a force of cohesive, motivated and disciplined young Hindu men.
Gandhi himself was impressed by their discipline and absence of caste feeling but less so by their antagonism to other religions.
Unlike Gandhi, Jawaharlal Nehru was not impressed. Indeed, he told his home minister, Vallabhbhai Patel, "it seems to me clear that the RSS has a great deal to do with the disturbances not only in Delhi but elsewhere".
The worry was that these Hindu fascist elements were functioning in a favourable atmosphere as the Hindu and Sikh refugees from Pakistan were baying for the Muslim blood.
At the initiative of Gandhi and Nehru, the Congress passed a resolution on 'the rights of minorities'.
'Whatever be the situation in Pakistan, India would be a Democratic secular state where all citizens enjoy full right and are equally entitled to the protection of the State, irrespective of the religion to which they belong'.
Have we lived up to this ideal?
M. S. Golwalkar and Nathuram Godse then did not accept such an ideal.
And many more do not do so now.
Time to read.
Good night mon ami.
1/16/2016-)
1/16/2016
Will study it Monish
Will have coffee and go to gym
Coffee apparently increased cAMP cyclosine amino mono phosphate in the cells
Which I think are the molecules which feed the Kreb's cycle
1/17/2016
Mathematicians are one of the most low keyed people among intellectuals and thinkers.
Bernhard Riemann, the German mathematician, took this shyness to an extreme, with a horror of public speaking or drawing attention upon himself.
This serious handicap he overcame by diligent preparing for every public utterance he was likely to make.
He is known for his two masterpieces:
1. His doctoral dissertation of 1851 Foundations for a general theory of functions of a complex variable.
At the age of 25.
2. His lecture delivered on June 10, 1854 titled:
On the hypothesis which lie at the foundations of geometry.
At the age of 28.
Both are very very technical topics, which I very difficult for me to explain.
But both these works aroused great enthusiasm from Gauss (the child prodigy I had told you about), who was by now a legendary figure and just four years from his death.
Riemann was one of those few mathematicians in the league of Newton, Gauss and Einstein who had a feeling for what is important, or likely to be so, in physics.
I hope to read and know more about his work and try to write about it in future.
Time to read.
Good night mon ami.
1/17/2016
German names can be tricky
1/18/2016
How with undying persistence we balance our lives
1/18/2016
The earth and it's atmosphere condensed together out of the primal gas cloud that gave rise to the sun and the solar system.
The atmosphere then, i. e. 4.6 billion years ago was very different from what it is today.
The atmosphere of giant planets like Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune are rich in methane, ammonia, water and neon.
Lighter gases with molecular weight of less than 10 like hydrogen 2 and helium 4 have a speed faster than earth's escape velocity and can and do overcome earth's gravity and disappear into space.
So maybe, or quite likely, our earth too had a atmosphere rich in methane and ammonia some 4 billion years ago.
Today there is little of it.
Why?
How did the atmosphere come to be which allowed aerobic multicellular organisms like us to evolve?
Fascinating questions!
They will be dealt slowly.
Today I read something about Riemann zeta function.
It is very very fascinating that a mind can even contemplate such abstract ideas.
The mind that never really was supposed to be.
But that did happen to be through series of chance events and accidents over hundreds of millions of years.
Time to devote to romantic literature.
Good night mon ami.
1/19/2016
Our lives could stand a lot more pizzazz
Original Theory or New Hypothesis of the Universe.
He suggested in it that the stars lie in a flat slab, a "grindstone", of finite thickness but extending to great distances in all directions in the plane of the slab.
His theory has long since been confirmed.
The milky way does consists of flat disk of stars, with a diameter of 80,000 light years but a thickness of just 6000 light years.
That is why we see more light when we look out from the earth along the plane of the slab than when we look in any other direction. This is what we see as the Milky Way.
Yet, it is estimated that nearly 70% of us modern humans who are born into the electrified world have never seen it.
I myself saw this beautiful view of the perfectly clear night sky only as late as in 2009 at the Yosemite National Park, California thanks again to my friend Monish.
Time to continue my nocturnal readings.
Good night mon ami.
1/19/2016
We will Monish
I promise you
Once I retire
1/19/2016
Well...
Now I won't
As long as I am focussed in my shop
1/19/2016
Wait...
Got a shop to run
1/20/2016
As Lorentz transformation applied to relativity had explained, time does slow down
1/20/2016
In order to describe movement of a body, a second body is needed to which the movement of the first body is referred to.
Even Greeks knew of it.
In physics, the body to which events are spatially referred to is called the coordinate system.
A coordinate system applied in mechanics is called an 'inertial system'.
A coordinate system that is moved uniformly (free from rotation and acceleration) and in a straight line relative to an inertial system is likewise an inertial system.
The special principle of relativity generalizes the definition to include any natural event.
Thus, every universal law of nature which is valid in relation to a coordinate system C, must also be valid, as it stands, in relation to coordinate system C', which is in uniform translatory motion relative to C.
Does it make sense?
This is an example of one of the many instances when mathematics becomes critical to describing nature than mere English words.
Time and again, it has turned out, that mathematics is the lingua franca of the universe.
Time to turn in.
Good night mon ami.
1/21/2016
Shortly after the earth was formed 4.6 billion years ago (along with the rest of the solar system) condensing from a vast cloud of gas and dust, it's atmosphere contained very little oxygen.
Around 2 billion years ago, the proportion of oxygen in the atmosphere increased to around 5%.
How?
The most likely cause was the evolution of the photosynthesis.
The bacteria in the oceans had evolved this trick as back as 4 billion years ago.
Using the solar energy, they were able to turn water and carbon dioxide into sugar and oxygen.
6H2O + 6CO2 + energy = C6H12O6 + 602
The oxygen they produced did not show up in any appreciable amount until 2 billion years ago.
The oxygen level stayed that level until about 600 million years ago, when it underwent a rapid increase to the current level of 21%.
By then, the plants had taken over this process from the cyano bacteria.
You see, that if the primitive atmosphere once kick started life, life then had a huge impact on the atmosphere.
Time to do some reading.
Good night mon ami.
1/22/2016
The correspondence of a genius
1/22/2016
An idiot like me can never imagine that so deep a mathematics could be hidden in such a simple sounding childish problem known as the "Bridges of Konigsberg" problem.
It was proposed by the great Leonhard Euler (1707-1716).
It was once called Kaliningrad when it belonged to USSR.
I have no idea what it is called now as Russians like us Hindoos love to change the city names.
This town Euler knew was centered on an island that was connected to the surrounding suburbs by seven bridges over the Pregel river.
I will send the image below.
The problem is very simple.
How do u, starting from any desired point proceed to any other by crossing each bridge just once?
Is it even possible?
Just give it a few minutes thought.
Do not worry about solving it.
Time to immerse myself.
Good night mon ami.
1/22/2016
Ha ha ha
Beautiful
Simply beautiful
1/22/2016
Exactamente that.
Ha ha ha
Well said
1/23/2016
Learn how to watch television from supreme earthling potentate's father
1/23/2016
Well...
I am sure you must have given deep thought to the problem.
I will disappoint you by telling that the famous Bridges of Konigsberg problem has no solution.
Meaning, there is no way one can carry out this Euler walk without walking on a bridge twice.
The beauty lies in how Euler converted this problem to simple concept of vertex (suburbs) and edges (bridges).
So here we have 4 vertex joined by 7 edges.
Each vertex (suburb) is connected to 3 or 5 edges (bridges).
Euler went on to prove that to make this walk possible, each vertex must be connected to even number of edges (unlike odd numbers here).
This may sound innocuous, but here Euler had given rise to two important fields of mathematics:
Graph theory (used in integrated circuits, railways and other areas) and
Topology (a field which revolutionized Euclidean geometry)
Below is a figure of how a topologist would envision the city of Konigsberg.
Got to read.
Good night mon ami.
1/23/2016
Topological transformation of Konigsberg problem
1/23/2016
interesting in 2-d what's value of f?
1/23/2016
Enjoy Viete with hi school math...
1/23/2016
...the rest for brevity!
1/23/2016
Wait...
Will shower
Then feed my body
1/23/2016
It troubles me u see
Remember
It is about being the righteous and noble asshole
[10:43 PM, 1/23/2016] Navin: For a triangle
v + f - e
= 3 + 1 - 3
= 1
[10:51 PM, 1/23/2016] Navin: Wait...
I will come..
5 minutes
[12:40 AM, 1/24/2016] Navin: Ha ha ha
It is not intuition mon ami
It is knowledge
[12:42 AM, 1/24/2016] Navin: But I think it as you say...
When you experiment, it is messy
Even for standard physical equations
1/24/2016
It is exactamente that way
1/24/2016
When the universe conspires against you
1. Embryology - development from an egg (and sperm).
2. Evolution - coming of present forms through a continuous chain of past ancestors
DNA sequencing has shown that not only do flies and humans share large cohort of development genes, but that mice and humans have virtually identical sets of 29,000 genes;
And that chimps and humans are nearly 99% identical at the DNA level.
This molecular evidence is by far the most powerful evidence that humans are an evolved part of the animal world.
But how does large organisms like a butterfly, a leopard or even a trilobite gets formed from a single cell?
We know that most animal designs are repeating modular.
Both the enormous sauropod dinosaurs and small, delicate salamanders from the Jurassic age (over 150 million years ago) display the same repeating modular architecture of the vertebrate body plan.
And it is not only limited to vertebrates.
The famous fossils of the Burgess Shale (I think in Canada), some of the first large, complex animals that populated the Cambrian seas more than 500 million years ago, display all sorts of variations on modular body plans, as do their living ancestors today.
In my future bed time stories, I shall dwell deeper into the mystery of the formation of our bodies.
I shall try to send you pictures of our ancestors who lived in the Cambrian age.
Time to read.
Good night mon ami.
1/24/2016
A lobopodian and a trilobite
1/24/2016
Pursuing one's passion can also be disastrous
1/24/2016
you won't be able to move, think or breathe without ATP synthase JJ
[1/24, 3:39 PM] Monish Unni: ATP synthase is some 200, 000 times smaller than a pinhead made up of 31 proteins. It rotates about 60 times a second. It creates the energy currency of the cell - ATP.
[1/24,
[1/24,
[1/24,
[1/24,
[1/24,
[1/24, 4:14 PM] Monish Unni: check out how a protein gets to a stable state under thermodynamic forces - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1eSwDKZQpok.
[1/24, 4:16 PM] Monish Unni: a protein can fold in 2^100 to 10^100 ways - so to get this simulation for villin - we need to spread the action of six-millionths of one second out over several seconds.
[1/24, 4:17 PM] Monish Unni: the simulation shows how heat energy makes the initial linear chain of 87 amino acids jiggle; the linear protein shivers this way and that and, over the course of micro seconds goes thru many different conformations.
[1/24,
1/24/2016
Yes
But like a true baniya, cleaning up my shop first
True to the traditions of my grandfather for certemente if not my forefathers
.
1/24/2016
I have no choice
I tried to be not-a-chutiya
Flopped miserably
1/24/2016
Wait
Customer
Boni ka time hai
1/25/2016
One of the greatest advancement ever made in geometry was made long time back.
It is this:
It has intimate connection with algebra.
It can be applied to lines, planes and much more.
Another beauty is the addition of Cartesian coordinates which (0,0) as origin and point (x,y) indicates x units east of it and y units north of it.
Now with this simple idea, you can define a circle of radius 1 with this magical equation:
X^2 + y^2 = 1
And you can go yet further.
If you can conceive of any relationship between x and y (matrimonial relationship does not count) such that when x is given y may be calculated, then y is said to be a 'function' of x.
You can write it as:
y = f(x)
And this can be 'translated' geometrically.
For example,
Look at these 2 beauties.
y = mx + c
defines a straight line
And
y^2 = ax
A parabola
This discovery allowed men like Descartes and Fermat in 1600s to transform any of the Euclidean geometric theorems into algebra and establish their validity or falsity by algebra alone!
Fascinating stuff!
Time to enter the solitude state.
Good night mon ami.
1/26/2016
Perfectly planned operation Kapow flopped due to lack of snow
1/26/2016
Besides the milky way, if you see in a clear night sky, towards the Andromeda constellation, you will see a hazy patch.
The first written mention of it appears in the "Book of the Fixed Stars", compiled in 964 AD by the Persian astronomer Abdurrahman Al-Sufi (before Islam had time to kill reason, rationality and enquiry).
He described it as a "little cloud".
Charles Messier in 1781 published a celebrated catalog, Nebulae and Star Clusters where he lists this object as M31 Andromeda Nebula.
With the advent of telescopes, it was Immanuel Kant who first proposed that these nebulae are galaxies like our own.
In 1755, in his "Universal Natural History and Theory of the Heavens", he suggested that these nebulae are galaxies which appear elliptical because most of them are viewed in slant and are faint because they are very far away.
It was a huge leap of thought in 1800s to suggest that the universe was filled with galaxies like our own.
Certemente no religion had described the heavens in this manner.
It was quite a blasphemous idea.
More of it later.
Good night mon ami.
1/27/2016
If only wishes could come true
1/27/2016
I always knew that my room gets very dusty whenever I leave the windows open even for few hours (That is the charm of living in the heart of Bombay city).
But I had envisaged that at least up there in the heavens it will be all neat and clean, meaning dust free.
Alas, as usual, I was again proven to be wrong.
Our universe, the cosmos, the heavens is fundamentally made up of dust (besides hydrogen, helium and ionized gases).
These are the fundamental constituents of nebulae which are the "Pillars of Creation".
They can range from few molecules to 0.1 micron chondrites.
They are hard, refractory chemically being silicon carbide, graphite, aluminium oxide, aluminium spinel that condensed at high temperatures from a cooling gas.
Within these dust have been found CO, silicon carbide, polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons, water ice and more.
Do u see what this dust has?
Are u getting it?
It has everything to manufacture us!!
Fascinating!!
Got to read.
Good night mon ami.
1/28/2016
Our hero reminds us how screwed up our lives are
1/28/2016
This is one of the most famous puzzles that have confused bright people for centuries.
Why is everything in a mirror reversed left-right but not up-down?
I bet you find it very obvious and you go everyday through your life without giving it a thought.
Many of you may even reply saying "there is no problem here to even consider".
Since your head is reflected from the top of the mirror and your feet from the bottom of the mirror, why must it change?
But then I can argue same for the left and the right hand.
The mirror is optically symmetrical.
To prove it, simply rotate the mirror around it's center and yet your head and feet remain unchanged.
So how does this mirror "know" which is right-left and which is up-down?
Is the answer in the ray diagram which we eye doctors were made to learn only for passing exams and then never to used?
Einstein is famous for having conducted such "thought experiments" which is rather bizarre if you come to think of it.
Experiments need to be done.
Data recorded.
Data analysed and see if it fits to your theory or proposed idea.
Maybe, this mirror question also needs a real experiment.
Think about it.
Use your grey cells as Poirot would say.
Good night mon ami.
1/29/2016
How to get the last piece
1/29/2016
This question was posed to the great Richard Feynman when he had joined for his physics course at MIT, Cambridge, Ma.
He made some few observations:
1. If u point your arm to the east, your mirror image also points to the east.
2. If you point up and down, then your mirror image also points to the same direction.
3. But if you point inwards towards the mirror, your mirror image points back in the opposite direction.
So, like a true physicist, he considered the 3 axes:
The x axis (horizontal):
No change
The y axis (vertical):
No change
The z axis (the long axis running through the mirror):
Reversal!
Voila!
The mirror reverses the image in the z axis!
It is as if Alice has entered the mirror (Alice of Charles L. Dodgson aka Lewis Carroll) and then suddenly her back of the head morphs into face like Terminator!
But here is another interesting part.
Why do we find it hard to consider this possibility but usually consider the left-right reversal?
Here is where our evolutionary brain and everyday experience pops in.
What is most common happening in our everyday lives is somebody walking around us and standing opposite to us, rather than someone suddenly standing upside down or somebody's back suddenly morphing into her front!
Fascinating stuff!
Finished reading a most beautiful love story:
Love in the time of cholera.
Never thought at this age a love story would impress me.
Good night mon ami.
1/29/2016
Yup
I saw it before writing my yesterday
I try to do little research
1/29/2016
I have given me an excellent preamble to Principia
In a way, it is frightening
But when climb an Everest, it is important to be prepared
1/30/2016
Ruptured intestines
1/30/2016
Thanks to our education, even the greatest arithmophobe amongst us is familiar with pi.
It is an oddity which cannot be expressed exactly as a fraction.
The unforgettable ratio of 22/7 is merely an approximation of 3.14159...
It has fascinated mathematicians from time immemorial.
They have all derived it in many different ways.
You obviously know about dividing circumference with diameter.
Ramanujan published dozens of innovative formula for pi, remarkable for their elegance, mathematical depth and rapid convergence.
But let me tell you a strange strange way.
Take lots of matchsticks on your hand.
Then take a large paper and ask your friend to draw parallel lines on it spaced at twice the length of your match sticks.
Now just throw all the match sticks you have on this paper. Let them be x.
Now count how many match sticks have crossed the lines on the paper. Let them be y.
What do you suppose you will get if you divide x by y?
You got it!
x/y will be pi or very close to pi!!
Damn!
Always!
What the.. ?
This is the famous Buffon's needle problem poised in 1700s by the French polymath Georges-Louis Leclerc, Comte de Buffon.
It falls under the Monte Carlo method of using repeated random sampling to obtain numerical results.
It is used as computational algorithm whose knowledge I personally lack.
Before I end, I want you to bowl a googly.
What on earth or why should sprinkled match sticks over vertical lines should have anything to do with pi?
Chew on it or sleep over it.
Good night mon ami.
1/30/2016
Demo picture
1/30/2016
Monish
Going to gym
U keep my grey cells active
And I got to keep my flesh and bones active
1/31/2016
We were all slobbering nudists with legs like link sausages
1/31/2016
The irony of biology is, that though it is life science, it has never been able to define life.
Just as physics grapples with the idea of force and mathematics with infinity or shall I say, infinities.
Perhaps it is so because the difference between the animate and inanimate is extremely subtle.
Strangely enough, or rather aptly enough, the first person to define life in terms of pure physics and chemistry was an Austrian physicist.
Perhaps that was the day when modern biology was born.
Erwin Schrödinger, more famous for his wave equations in quantum mechanics, in February of 1943 in Dublin (he had run away from Hitler's madness) gave a series of lectures.
These lectures have been converted into a small book titled:
What is life?
It is a remarkable slim volume confronting the two major problems of biology:
1. Heredity: where he predicts there has to some kind of genetic code; (Remember, this was much before the discovery of the structure of DNA April 25,1953).
2. Order: How does life defy the second law of thermodynamics and maintains order and complexity from the surrounding chemical chaos?
From then to now, we have come a long way and safely define life to be digitized, DNA-driven biological machines.
I am aware that his goes against all your deeply cherished beliefs and faith and everything you have been told, but it is the truth.
Going back to the Buffon needle problem...
The strewn match sticks can cross the lines in all different angles, starting from being parallel to being right angle.
In fact, they can all in all, be seen as be doing all possible rotations around a point.
The more the matches, the more the possible rotations.
A full rotation is 360 degrees or 2 pi radians.
The brains of the original thinkers defy all imagination.
Good night mon ami.
2/1/2016
A subject that bothers even our supreme earthling potentate
2/1/2016
What is the characteristic feature of life?
When it goes on 'doing something'.
When a system that is not alive is isolated, all motion comes to standstill; difference of electric or chemical potential are equalized, temperature becomes uniform.
The system fades away into a dead, inert lump of matter.
Physicist call it the state of thermodynamic equilibrium, or of 'maximum entropy'.
An organism is enigmatic precisely because it defies this state of decay.
It is so enigmatic that from earliest times humans have claimed that spirits or a vital soul play the crucial role.
But that is nonsense.
The decay is avoided by eating, drinking, breathing and (in the case of plants) assimilating.
This is metabolism.
What is that precious something contained in our food that keeps us from death?
Is it material?
No.
Is it energy?
No.
It is the negative entropy that organisms feed upon to keep aloof from approaching the state of maximum entropy, I.e. death.
Metabolism frees an organism from all the entropy it cannot help producing while alive.
From
What is Life?
Erwin Schrödinger
Trinity College, Dublin, 1943 amidst the raging world war 2 and when India was struggling for it's freedom.
As my friend Monish described the book, it is a tour de force.
Good night mon ami.
2/2/2016
Our embittered old man who has seen it all
2/2/2016
Entropy is not something vague.
It is a measurable quantity.
The entropy of any substance is zero at - 273 degree Celsius.
Any substance that is brought out from that state, it's entropy increases.
The entropy increase is calculated by the heat supplied to it divided by the absolute temperature at which it was supplied.
So entropy S has it's unit as calorie/°C.
There is yet another important way of considering entropy.
That is the statistical understanding of it wherein the idea of order and disorder comes in (of which I wrote a little yesterday).
This pioneering work was done by Boltzmann much before Schrödinger and Einstein.
He came up with a most beautiful formula while walking with his wife.
He engraved this gem on the stone of the bridge.
S = k log D
Where D is a quantitative measure of the atomistic disorder of a body.
More of it in some future story.
Good night mon ami.
2/3/2016
How our supreme earthling potentate begins his day
2/3/2016
Just finished my staircase workout
Now shower
Followed by dinner
2/3/2016
If I were to ask a group of people
"Do you love nature?"
All would raise their hand.
If I were to ask them
"Do you wish to leave civilization/city and live like adivasis/natives/tribals in nature"
Then may be their enthusiasm might peter down.
Our romance with the nature stems from Nat Geo beaming sterile edited images to our drawing rooms via satellites.
The total amount of suffering per year in the natural world is beyond all decent contemplation.
As I write, thousands of animals are being eaten alive, many running for their lives, whimpering in fear.
Others are slowly being devoured from within by grating parasites.
Thousands of all kinds are dying of starvation, thirst or disease.
Do you know why it is so?
It is because we live in a universe of electrons and selfish genes, blind physical forces and genetic replication.
Some of us are going to be hurt, others will get lucky.
You will not find any reason or rhyme or any Justice for solace.
The universe that is around us has exactly the properties we should expect if there is, at bottom, no design, no purpose, no evil, no good, nothing but pitiless indifference.
Time to imbibe myself with the knowledge of a distant genius.
Good night mon ami.
2/4/2016
Time for pounding
2/4/2016
The story of two radio astronomers,
Arno A. Penzias
and
Robert W. Wilson
Is a very interesting one.
In 1964, the Bell Telephone Laboratory was in possession of an unusual radio antenna on Crawford Hill at Holmdel, New Jersey.
This antenna had a characteristic 20-foot horn reflector with ultralow noise.
These astronomers set out to measure the intensity of radio waves emitted from outside the plane our galaxy (remember our galaxy is a flattened disc with swirling arms lying in a plane).
It is a difficult measurement because the radio waves are best described as noise, much like the 'static' one hears on the TV set when not tuned to any channel (in olden days).
It is a long story and I will deal it in few parts.
To be continued.
Good night mon ami.
2/4/2016
Surprising that I managed to get Principia but not the Red Limit
May be it reflects the legacy of Newton
2/5/2016
Secretary needed
2/5/2016
Now u see, the problem is not so serious when one is studying a "small" source of radio waves like a star or distant galaxy.
Then you could beam your antenna back and forth between the source and the neighboring sky.
In that case any spurious noise coming from the antenna structure, amplifier circuits or the earth's atmosphere could be cancelled out.
However, Penzias and Wilson were trying to measure the radio noise in general all over the sky.
They made their observations for a long wavelength of 21 cms to study the galactic noise.
Any electromagnetic waves longer than 21 cms (up to 1 metre) are known as microwave radiation.
To their surprise, Penzias and Wilson in the spring of 1964, found that they were receiving a sizeable amount of microwave noise at 7.35 cms that was independent of direction.
This "static" did not vary with the time of day or, as the year went on, with the seasons.
The lack of any variation with direction indicated very strongly that these radio waves, if real, were not coming from the milky way, but from a much larger volume of the universe.
They even cleaned out the pigeon goo to cut out a possible source of the noise.
But even then, this noise from the universe persisted!
This was a huge mystery:
Where the hell is this microwave noise coming from?
I want you to sleep over this question if you are on the planet's dark side and chew over it if you are on the lit side of our spinning sphere.
Good night mon ami.
2/6/2016
Things are never the way we wish them to be
2/6/2016
Any body at any temperature above absolute zero will always emit radio noise.
This is produced by the thermal motions of electrons within it.
The intensity of the radio noise at any given wavelength depends on the the temperature.
So even though a radio telescope is not a thermometer as it measures tiny electric currents produced in it's antenna by the radio waves, yet a radio astronomer can convert the measured radio noise into it's equivalent temperature or antenna temperature.
Penzias and Wilson found that the equivalent temperature of the radio noise they were receiving to be 3.5°Kelvin (meaning 3.5°C above absolute zero).
This was very surprising and hence they were left brooding over their result before publishing it.
Such are the doubts which plague true scientists.
What next?
I shall perhaps conclude this story tomorrow as I want you to think over this microwave noise.
What would you have done?
How would you have thought?
Remember, this is 1964 when cosmology and astrophysics are still nascent sciences.
Will send you a picture though.
Good night mon ami.
2/6/2016
The 20 foot horn antenna used by Penzias and Wilson
2/6/2016
I hope it did
I am obsessive
Maniacally obsessive
2/6/2016
...and this.....
"So if things are this bad, how do we get by? The answer is simple. We have a marvelous reactive neural system for killing tigers (or each other) and solving the day to day survival problems, the tenacity for surviving harsh environments (be they social or climate) and enough of us have enough kids to more than make up for the losses (the excess children being another human idiocy). An intellectual creature by nature? Bah! Humbug!
To sum it up: the human is a survival creature with a very weak intellect and a very strong set of instincts.
And that's why we have wars, poverty, hunger, neural disease, bigotry, terrorists, criminals, greedy self-centered leaders, and the list is endless. As a species, we'd like to get rid of this stuff. To do so can't be business as usual. The first thing we must do is to recognize the frailty of the mechanism that we must use.
Anyone who believes for an instant that any human is capable of creating
truth in its own mind without reference to reality is a dangerous fool.
It has been said that it is a poor worker who blames the sharpness of his tools. So how does an artisan use a defective and inadequate tool? The answer is: very carefully..."
2/6/2016
...this is nice as well..."Professional philosophers have developed an intricate and extensive knowledge base in formal logic, much in the same manner as professional mathematicians in the field of mathematics. Both are invaluable in research. Both extend the horizons of human acquisition of intellectual concepts, many of which can then be developed for species utility. Both must be used with caution in practical matters. Not that they are wrong, mind you, it's that dependence on them can, in many cases, cause unnecessary project failure. It is far safer, though a bit longer, to segment the problem into small, logically simple segments, then verify each, than to proceed through logical steps to completion where verification failure would mean starting all over.
Logic and reason, as applied to practical matters, are extremely difficult even on the most objective of projects. No matter how hard we try, subjective thought creeps in. Wanting a project to end in a particular way can bias all of the work along the way. Even striving too hard for success can turn a doomed project into a catastrophe.
The application of logic and reason in cultural matters is orders of magnitude more difficult. Human instincts arise in righteous indignation at every step, fighting tooth and claw to make sure that the final answer is emotionally compatible. Modern scientists learn their trade in an academic elitist (PC) social atmosphere. Science and dogma do not mix well. Even modern hard science is regularly distorted and truncated to safeguard egalitarian ideology. A new and widespread movement among scientists is to "humanize" science, by insuring that science does not threaten the world government, multicultural, egalitarian ideology. This is scientific hypocrisy at its worst..."
2/6/2016
Yes
That is another quality which I greatly greatly admire
Asimov gave utmost importance to clarity of thoughts rather than the poetry of a prose
2/6/2016
Yes
It is running low
2/6/2016
See how beautifully Watterson puts it
2/7/2016
If Penzias and Wilson were tinklers and doers like Faraday, their theoretical counterparts were just 60 km away at Princeton.
A friend of Penzias at MIT told him about a theoretical astrophysicist at Princeton named Peebles.
Peebles along with Robert Dicke and Wilkinson had given a talk at Johns Hopkins where they had argued that there out to be a background noise left over from the early universe.
Robert Dicke had reasoned the big bang must have scattered not only matter that condensed into galaxies but also must have released a tremendous amount of radiation.
Peebles noted that had there not been intense background of radiation present during the first few minutes of the universe, nuclear reactions would have proceeded very rapidly.
This would have "cooked" a large fraction of the hydrogen into heavier elements.
This would be in contradiction to the fact that about 3/4th of the universe is hydrogen.
Penzias gave a call to Dicke.
Only then did the significance of their discovery dawned upon Penzias and Wilson!
This is one of those crowning moments of the scientific method.
But look at the beauty.
Both the teams jointly decided to publish a pair of companion letters to the Astrophysical Journal.
Penzias and Wilson announced their observation;
Dicke, Peebles, Roll and Wilkinson explained the cosmological interpretation.
It is quite surprising how modest the title of the paper was that Penzias and Wilson submitted:
"A Measurement of Excess Antenna Temperature at 4,080 Mc/s."
Mc/s meaning million cycles per second.
It is the dictum of modern thinking that extraordinary claim requires extraordinary evidence.
And the claim that these men were making is so extraordinary that most humans, particularly the religious types, still are unwilling to accept.
So weak is human intellect and so powerful are his cultural and emotional instincts.
Good night mon ami.
2/7/2016
Soon shopping time
Brushing my teeth
Then off
2/7/2016
If a male is removed from the top of the pile and placed on a bare rock, he becomes a she and awaits the arrival of a male.
Once a female, SLs remain females!
phew!!
2/7/2016
The Blue headed wrasse, a large reef fish familiar to scuba divers, change into females if a male is present. If no male is around, or if the local male disappears, large females change sex to become males.
In these fish, the hypothalamus regulates sex hormones and controls growth/shrink of needed reproductive tissues.
Simple eh?
2/7/2016
What did your mother have?
Retinal hole?
Lattices?
2/7/2016
In class 11
Madras
Dr. Amar Agarwal
Another of my clan
2/8/2016
People quite often say, "Everything happens for a reason."
In some ways, it is true.
I catch a cold because a patient of mine sneezed his viruses on to my face.
Or say, my car stalled due to lack of petroleum.
Or Tsunamis happen due to undersea earthquakes which in turn occur due to shift of tectonic plates.
That is the true sense in which things happen for a reason.
But people, in general, use this reason in a very different sense.
They will claim that Nepal suffered earthquake because the people there kill cows and they had it coming.
It is amazing how often people resort to this kind of nonsense.
There is deep seated belief in a "fair-world" hypothesis.
Most believe that sinners get their comeuppance and virtue is rewarded.
It is still very difficult for most to accept that the universe has no mind, no feelings or personality.
Bad things happen as much as they will happen by chance.
The universe is simply indifferent to our feelings or preferences.
Perhaps the fault lies in our upbringing and our ubiquitous cultural indoctrination, specially fiction in all it's forms.
May be, that is why, it is important to read the great tragedies like Leo Tolstoy's Anna Karenina and Gustave Flaubert's Madame Bovary.
Good night mon ami.
[10:34 PM, 2/8/2016] Navin: Yes
Against our builder
No no
My father is our lawyer
[10:47 PM, 2/8/2016] Navin: Wait Monish
Entering court or rather the forum
Offing the phone
2/9/2016
The great book
"Freedom at Midnight"
By Dominique Lapierre and Larry Collins is one of the most popular and highly acclaimed work on the tragedy of India's partition.
But it's major flaw or rather bias (very understandably) is it's magnification and glorification of the last viceroy and governor general of India Lord Mountbatten.
Few men have been so concerned about how history would portray them as this man.
A veteran journalist once remarked of him, 'he acts as his own Public Relationship Officer'.
An aide of Mountbatten was more blunt, calling his boss 'the vainest man alive'.
The viceroy had instructed his photographers to shoot him six inches above the eye line, as his friend, the actor Gary Grant, had told him that this way his wrinkles wouldn't show.
After he left India, he worked hard to give and portray the best possible spin to his tenure.
He commissioned or influenced a whole array of books that would magnify his successes and gloss over his failures.
All these books portray him as a wise umpire successfully mediating between squabbling school boys, may it be India and Pakistan, the Congress and the Muslim League, Mahatma Gandhi and Jinnah, or Jawaharlal Nehru and Vallabhbhai Patel.
But there was one place where he did play a role.
It was a problem the like of which no newly independent state ever faced.
When the British departed, they did not leave behind two nations as is widely known but more than 500 distinct pieces of independent territories called the princely states.
And these states had no intention of being a part of India.
I am writing this lesser known facts specially for Muslim haters or Pakistan bashers.
Given a choice, most of us would like to flee away from this country.
The story of the princely states is a fascinating topic for any bed time story.
Good night mon ami.
2/10/2016
Why after all, we need shouting tamasha on news shows
2/10/2016
Even the most erudite among us are probably guilty of complete ignorance of Penzias and Wilkinson and their discovery of cosmic microwave background radiation.
But even the most ignorant amongst us will certainly have heard about Watson and Crick and their unraveling of the double helical DNA structure not many years before the former event.
In the story of DNA, there is a person who has been tragically looked over and has gone unrewarded to her grave.
She is Rosy.
Rather, Rosalind Franklin.
She was a X-ray crystallographer.
Meaning, she would fire x ray beams on to biological molecules and study how the atoms within the molecule diffracted the x rays.
It is somewhat like estimating an object from it's shadow which we know can sometimes be tricky.
But Rosy was convinced that the only way to establish the DNA structure was by pure crystallographic approach.
She never considered using large molecular models; the approach which Watson and Crick later took.
But it was the image taken by Rosalyn in 1952 that inspired the idea of helix.
In fact, that famous black cross could only arise from helical structure as you will agree if you imagine a winding staircase going vertical up around a central pole.
Now if throw light from one end, the shadow on the other end will somewhat look this one.
Scientific discoveries are very often a group endeavor with one lucky chap at the end getting the whole credit.
That is why it is important that these stories be told so that the left out ones are not really left out.
Good night mon ami.
2/10/2016
The landmark picture
2/10/2016
Beautiful
2/11/2016
Alaska is worth a trip
0, 1, 2, 3, 4...are natural numbers
... - 3, - 2, - 1, 0, +1, +2, +3... are called integers
1, 1/2, 2, - 1/2, -2, 3/2, - 3/2 are fractions or rational numbers
And then there are real numbers whose familiar number can be represented by infinite decimal expansions, such as:
1/3 = 0.333333333...
Now what do u think?
Don't you think that there are far more infinite integers than natural numbers?
Would you also not consider that there would be far more infinite fractions than integers?
It is interesting that anybody would even consider such questions considering one has to make a living, get married, have kids, educate the kids and get them married...
You know, the routine animal cycle.
By the way, as I type, scientists at Caltech, MIT and the LIGO international project (laser interferometer gravitational-wave observatory) are presenting their "status report on the effort to detect gravitational waves".
Wonder what is their finding.
Good night mon ami.
2/11/2016
Ha ha ha
U remember that incident!!
What kind of neurons do you possess Monish?
2/11/2016
Ha
It gets more interesting
2/12/2016
This is the way to raise your child (not that I have any experience)
2/12/2016
The accuracy of the physical measurement used at the LIGO observatories boggles my not-so-smart mind.
Yes, not one but two L-shaped observatories were and are being used.
One of them is in Livingston, Louisiana located south east in US.
The other is at Richland, Washington up north west in US.
They are separated by a distance of 3002 kilometres. And that for a special reason.
It helps us to locate the source of the gravitational wave.
But how?
Well, think about your ears.
Why was there an evolutionary pressure to have two ears when one should have sufficed on top of the head?
Well..
It is about triangulation.
Much before we found it out, nature very blindly of course, had figured it out (it had too much time to tinker and sacrifice animals).
Triangulation is a process of determining the location of a point by measuring angles to it from known points at either end of a fixed baseline.
The gravitational waves coming to these two observatories arrive with a difference of 10 milliseconds.
10 milliseconds!
This is enough for our mathematics to determine the source of the wave!!
Ingenious!
I will tell you more about this LIGO observatories over few nights.
This endeavor is far more delightful than any Bollywood movie or more delicious than any tasty Indian curry!
It is a story that must be told.
And it must be savoured slowly like a four course gourmet dinner.
Good night mon ami.
2/12/2016
Aerial view of the LIGO observatory at Richland with two arms each 4 km long
2/13/2016
The way things are, it would be comical if not for the tragedy
2/13/2016
As you can see from the picture, the observatory is an L shaped ultra high vacuum system, each arm being 4 km long.
But, at the very heart of the LIGO observatory is the Michelson interferometer.
Yes Sir,
The very same Michelson of the famous Michelson and Morley experiment of 1887.
This is one of the few handful of the experiments that completely transformed physics.
They were hoping to show via their experiment that just as sound travels through a medium of air, light also travels through a universal medium called ether.
And just as sound waves speed, the speed of the light must change relative to the observer depending upon whether the observer is moving towards the light or away from it.
But they found none!
The experiment was performed at the Case Western Reserve observatory in US.
All the great Lords of Britain like Lord Kelvin found the result preposterous and assumed the experiment to be flawed.
But in science, unlike religion, men do not matter.
Only experiments do.
This experiment laid the foundation for the modern physics in more ways than one.
But I digress.
Tomorrow I shall dwell more on the workings of the Michelson interferometer.
Just in case if you are one of the guys who like frying pan science (for it's applications) rather than for it's sheer power of explaining nature...
At the heart of our commonly used ophthalmic device OCT which gives us retinal imaging to almost cellular resolution, lies this same awesome Michelson interferometer!!
Incredible, isn't it!
Tomorrow entire day I will be in an ophthalmic conference at Andheri near the airport.
One has to keep learning.
Good night mon ami.
2/13/2016
Yes
Even as I was typing, I knew I might be typing not what I was meaning to
I am very happy my writing is under scrutiny, for to be ignored would be it's greatest sorrow
2/14/2016
Michelson interferometer is essentially a partially reflective mirror or beam splitter with 2 mirrors at 90 degrees to each other.
The partially reflective mirror or the beam splitter receives a light from a laser which it divides 50% to the x axis and the other 50% to the y axis.
Both these light are made to travel along those 4 km long arms but through a devise called Fabry-Perot etalon which in effect makes the light waves travel 75 trips up and down the arms.
This is done to increase the sensitivity of the whole experiment.
The beam of lights returning from the two arms are kept out of phase such that when both arms are in resonance (like when no gravity wave is passing through), their light waves cancel out (peaks and troughs) and there is no interference pattern seen at the receiving photodiode.
But when the gravitational waves passes through the interferometer, the two L shaped arms shorten and lengthen by a miniscule amount (or rather should as theoretically predicted), causing the beams to become slightly less out of phase, so that instead of cancelling out the photodiode receives interference patterns of concentric circles.
I will show you the schematic representation of the set up.
Since the effect of the gravitational waves originating from millions of light years away is so tiny on our earth, that it requires the interferometer to be scaled to such gigantic proportions.
And unlike all of us ordinary humans, the scientists are very aware of the danger of fooling ourselves.
(Almost all of us suffer from this confirmatory bias.
For example, if I think all poor people are foolish and if I see the world around me, no matter what data you present to me, it will only confirm my bias more and more even if you show me all data why initial poverty is a great set back to an individual who has same intelligence as the so called successful person).
They set up controls, null hypothesis, work in teams who are blind to each others' work and blind to the origin and selection of data.
In fact, they try to even disprove themselves.
You remember Penzias and Wilson, how baffled they were about the source of noise and how they held on their data before publishing?
Tomorrow I will give you the kind of data the LIGO scientists are dealing with.
Today my eyes were given visual treat of astounding surgical skills.
Good night mon ami.
2/14/2016
Basic Michelson interferometer
2/15/2016
TV shows and movies are our key referral points
2/15/2016
Now we come to the crux of the experiment.
What did it seek out to measure?
The gravity waves that originate millions of light years by cosmic cataclysmic events are expected to distort the 4 km mirror spacing by about 10^-8 m!!
It is so small a distance that it is less than 1/1000th the charge diameter of a proton!!
In relative terms to the 4 km arms, the change in distance of approximately one part in 10^21!!
This is insanely miniscule!
But the very fact that we humans have even the technology to actually measure it demonstrates the power of the scientific method.
It is this fact which blew away my mind more than anything else.
A typical event which might cause a detectable event would be a late stage inspiral and merger of two 10 solar mass black holes.
This technique has opened up a whole new way of looking or listening at the universe.
I end my 4 part series of the LIGO experiment.
Hope you got the sense of how the scientific method works and now with this understanding you will realize that there is something special about the scientific truth.
Good night mon ami.
2/15/2016
Yes
The second question was bothering me as well.
I have to do a story on that one too if I first get my head around that one
In fact, a story is already forming in my brain
Though I need to get the facts first
2/16/2016
Some few lucky people
2/16/2016
I have been a student of science and medicine all my life.
And yet, not once I remember a chapter or a lecture devoted to:
"How to set up an experiment?"
Not once I have remembered the usage of the term scientific method.
It is very sad that I have to admit this today, but science was taught to me almost like a religious doctrine.
Newton's law because Newton said so.
Darwin's theory because Darwin thought so.
Dalton's atomic theory because just like Mohammed, one day he was vouchsafed about atoms.
No wonder science courses have been useless and futile.
The very basis of science, that is experiments have been gravely and I dare say, mortally undermined.
But experimental evidence is the ultimate way of understanding our universe, may it be medicine or be it physics;
Provided you know how to set up your experiment;
Provided you know how to cover your biases;
Provided you understand the importance of controls;
Provided you are thorough about the concepts of false positive, false negative...;
Provided you have the knowledge or the software of statistical analysis of your data.
I am not sure if any of us are even aware how to differentiate a rigorous experiment or a study from a frivolous one.
In view of this, it is critical that we question the LIGO experiment and ask the question:
How do we know that the chirp we heard from the black holes collision was really that and now a rat squeaking away inside on of it's silicon suspenders?
I will talk about it tomorrow night if I am able to get a good grasp of the study by then (though I am hardly qualified to do it).
Good night mon ami.
2/17/2016
Weirdness comes in the most weirdest of ways
LIGO experiment has ultra high sensitivity I.e. very high true positive
But what about it's specificity or ability to keep false positives low?
Let me enlist in very simple terms what was done to keep the specificity high:
1. Looking out for a very specific type of signal
(Human and rodent activity signals are bit different)
2. Multi-centered analysis of the data as the LIGO collaboration team consists of 991 scientists spread over several countries including Russia, Brazil, India, Australia and many more.
3. Intermittently and without anyone knowing, injection of simulated data into the system and observing the team's response ( the first blind exercise took 18 months).
4. Elimination of all possible spurious sources of noise, human and animal activities and seismic vibrations by high power lasers, fused silica mirrors, fused silica fibre suspensions in 4 pendulum stages).
5. Dedicated highly sophisticated computer algorithms to find the characteristic signal.
6. Running the data through parallel processing on multiple super computers.
LIGO started operating in 2002.
Enhanced LIGO started operating in 2009.
Advanced LIGO started operating in 2015.
Over all these years, the first signal was detected in September 2015.
In fact, when it came, the first reaction was:
"It is too good to be true. Was there a blind injection?".
I have to say I am no expert and I have not seen the data.
But...sometimes and somewhere experts need to be listened.
Good night mon ami.
2/18/2016
This is why physics is important
2/18/2016
The structure of life would rapidly break down were it not for the powerful low entropy source, upon which almost all life on Earth depends, namely the sun.
Most of us see sun as the supplier of energy which is not altogether correct.
Why so?
Because the energy which earth receives from the sun is returned back to the empty space.
If not, earth would heat up till it reached an equilibrium.
The life on earth depends on the fact that the sun is much hotter than the dark space.
Each individual photon (yellow light) from the sun carries far more energy than the infra red photons (longer wavelength) that earth returns to space.
This is given by the Planck's formula:
E = h(nu)
Thus there are many more photon leaving earth than those that it gets from the sun for the same energy.
More photons means more degrees of freedom
And from Boltzmann's
S = k log V
Higher entropy.
Hence sun in other words is a source of low entropy for life on earth (which we consume in the form of food after chlorophyll has done it's work).
I am trying to give you a sense of how fundamental the second law of thermodynamic is to everything in the universe.
Good night mon ami.
2/19/2016
Note the asterisk after the good
2/19/2016
Photon is a fascinating particle.
It has no mass.
It has no charge.
Yet it is real.
Each one carries some energy.
Each has momentum.
And even has a definite spin.
You remember the cosmic microwave background radiation which is all around us.
We always discussed it as an electromagnetic radiation.
But you can also view it from a quantum mechanical point of view.
Instead of looking at as a continuous wave, you can also consider it as discrete photons.
Why should you see it this way?
Well...
When any electromagnetic wave or radiation interacts with atoms or atomic nuclei, it happens on an individual photon basis.
In our present universe, photons can travel millions of light years unimpeded.
But during the first 700,000 years of the universe, a photon was unable to travel immense distances.
Why not?
That would form another story for another night.
I have been following the story of JNU with Ravish Kumar and the issue of nationalism.
I pity the fools who go out as gangs waving national flag and screaming ad nauseam "Bharat mata ki jai".
Nationalism, casteism, racism are such primitive anachronistic ideas that they would have been laughable if not for the sheer threat they pose to a free thinker.
Good night mon ami.
2/20/2016
How a guilty one would start his letter
2/20/2016
The task of development is immense.
No, I am not talking about socioeconomic development.
It is the embryological development.
The task of building a large complex animal or even a small "simple" insect beginning with only a tiny cell is herculean.
There are millions of details and details count.
A small shift in an early process can have a cascade of later effects that could be incompatible to life.
Given such enormous differences in scale, and such a great variety of animal forms, it would seem that it would involve infinite particulars which have to be sorted out case by case.
But to our delight, surprise and relief, there are generalities we can make about form that extend far more deeply than outward appearances.
One I had mentioned in a previous bed-time story of mine.
One is the modular and repetitive aspect of animal design found in vertebrates, arthropods and even extinct animals such as Cambrian trilobite or a Jurassic salamander.
I will elaborate and weave my story further upon it later.
Many of you wonder why I am so disorganized, random, haphazard and utterly lacking pattern in my bed-time narratives.
Well...to be truthful, I am an obsessively methodical person in my professional life.
It is only in my bed-time story telling that I permit myself the luxury of indiscipline.
Good night mon ami.
[11:16 PM, 2/20/2016] Navin: Which is why all religions have their own evil devils
2/21/2016
Another point is our limbs and digits.
The limbs of four-legged vertebrates usually bear one to five digits.
The similarities become very obvious when you study their x rays.
The basic five-digit design has persisted for more than 350 million years (earth is 4600 million years old).
The forelimbs of salamander, sauropods, mice and our arms are all derived from a common ancestral forelimb and hence they are all homologous.
And with respect to each other, the forelimbs and the hind limbs are serial homologs.
They arose as a repeated series only to become differently adapted.
Similarly, vertebrates and the associated ribs, forelimbs and hindlimbs, digits, teeth, mouthparts, antennae, the walking legs of arthropods and hindwings of insects are serial homologs.
In addition to the repetition of modular parts, animal bodies and body parts display usually display two additional features:
1. Symmetry
2. Polarity
Most familiar animals like us are bilaterally symmetrical.
Echinoderms such as sea urchins and star fish are pentaradial.
Polarity in most animals are seen in 3 axes:
1. Head to tail
2. Top to bottom (in our case back to front since we are the upright apes literally speaking)
3. Near to far from the body like arm and forearm.
Now if you see it this way, we seem to fall in a fascinating pattern which makes the challenge of development less intimidating.
Today finished two books by the great Erwin Schrödinger:
1. What is life ?
2. Mind and matter
Good night mon ami.
2/22/2016
So as we saw, modularity, symmetry and polarity are nearly universal features of animal design.
This suggests that there is order and logic to animal architectures.
It gives us a hint that underneath the great variety of forms, there are some general rules on which animals are built.
What are these rules?
Where are these rules stated or better, encoded?
Well..
Of the second question, the answer is now certain.
It is in our chromosomes or to be more precise, in our genes.
But does that mean there are genes for fingers, spots, stripes?
It behoves us to ponder over this question:
How is anatomy encoded in the genome?
It will take me few sessions of bed-time stories to explain this fascinating topic.
In a sense, embryology mirrors cosmology wherein both have the beginnings with a big bang if you know what I mean.
Time to indulge myself in literature.
The latest victim being:
The surgeon of Crowthorne
By Simon Winchester
Good night mon ami.
2/22/2016
Ha ha ha
Well...
That is the most popular accepted theory ever held and that will be ever held
After all, we are men the wise
2/23/2016
Our supreme earthling potentate will make the most successful TV anchor
2/23/2016
We again need to dirty our hands and do experiments.
We need to probe nature to reveal itself.
Hans Spemann too a newt embryo under a microscope.
Taking his daughter's fine hair, he tied off and separated the first cell of the embryo along the furrow of it's division.
What happened?
The cells on each side of the knot gave rise to normal newt tadpoles.
Next he divided the the egg not along the furrow but perpendicularly across the furrow.
Now what did he get?
Only side made a normal tadpole while other gave rise to disorganized mess of belly tissue.
By more finer experiments, he realized that a region of the embryo called dorsal lip of the blastopore was critical for the organization of the embryo.
In another experiment, he transplanted a dorsal lip from one embryo to the presumptive belly of another, it organized a second embryonic axis and TWO embryos were formed!!
So what did this experiment reveal?
One way a body begins its organization is by interaction of one key part of embryo with others.
I will discuss some other such organizers to give you more convincing illustrations on how nature uses simple tricks to get oriented.
Got to take a break now.
I hope you are getting a sense what powerful tools experiments can be.
Good night mon ami.
2/23/2016
Of course
As long as it does not concern mating or breeding very directly
2/24/2016
The Constantly scrutinizing god
2/24/2016
The formation of our limbs is another fascinating aspect of embryology.
It starts as a small bud on the flank of an embryo.
In a 3-day old chicken embryo, this bud is merely 1 mm long and 1 mm wide.
But it will grow over a thousand fold when the chick hatches.
This tiny pad of tissue will not only grow and lengthen, but will also develop bone, cartilage, muscles, tendons, digits and feathers in a mind blowing display of coordinated development.
Even the orderly formation of cartilage is striking which will be later replaced with the bone.
The cartilage forms around condensations of specialized cells called chondrocytes.
It is laid down in order from shoulder to the wrist and finally to the digits.
Here too scientists found that there were organizers, I.e. area of specialized cells which guided polarity to the other cells.
One way these cells give polarity is by secreting biochemical substances which diffuse outward forming concentration gradient from the source.
More of this fascinating mystery to come in the ensuing bed-time stories.
Good night mon ami.
2/25/2016
Our intestines harbours millions of bacteria called Escherichia coli.
Some obviously are good for us since they have been living within us since our birth.
Some are very dangerous and can kill us.
Just like us, these guys love glucose (sugar).
But when glucose is absent and lactose is present or added, these guys start making an enzyme called beta-galactosidase.
Now this smart enzyme can break lactose into glucose and galactose so that these guys can keep having a good kingfisher life.
So when glucose is present, these guys don't waste their energy in manufacturing beta-galactosidase.
But the moment glucose is missing and lactose is added to the culture medium, the rate of enzyme production is cranked up a thousand fold such that it's presence can be detected in just 3 minutes!
What the...!
And we always thought only we humans are intelligent.
How the hell can this simple cell "know" what enzymes to make?
How is the production of the right enzyme is induced by the appearance of the very compound it breaks down?
The mystery deepens.
We shall carry it over for another bed-time story.
Good night mon ami.
3:00
2/25/2016
Bobby McFerrin of Don't worry be Happy is telling us something deep about our brain
2/26/2016
This whole god judgement stuff bothers me as well
2/26/2016
The answer to this question was revolutionary.
It would change the very basic understanding of biology bringing it very close to digital information technology which was also all set to fly off.
This discovery came very soon after the unraveling of the DNA structure.
The men who found the answer were three and they were not your typical ivory tower theoreticians.
Jacques Monod was a leader in the French Resistance during the Nazi invasion.
François Jacob was a medic with the Free French during the North African campaign and getting severely wounded during the Normandy landing in 1944 (shown beautifully in the opening scenes by Spielberg in Saving Private Ryan).
The third scientist was Andre Lwoff who gathered intelligence for the French and gave shelter to the downed aviators.
These guys were also very elegant writers and they wrote so beautifully that their papers are compelling masterpieces in the biological literature.
In fact, Monod's book:
Chance and Necessity is a biological classic in the league of Schrödinger's:
What is life?
But what was their finding?
How do the E. coli figure out what enzyme to turn on?
We shall deal with it tomorrow on condition that I don't digress to romantic and poetic story telling.
Which is really not that big a crime considering the whole point is to tell a bed-time story.
Good night mon ami.
2/27/2016
This whole god thing just doesn't make sense
2/27/2016
Har Gobind Khorana while working at the University of Wisconsin, Madison had deciphered the genetic code.
He had found out that DNA uses its four different bases in sets of three (codons) to code for each of the twenty different amino acids that are used by cells to make proteins.
Jacob, Monod and Lwoff in turn had figured out the genetic switch and genetic logic.
They found a key DNA binding protein which they named it as lac (for lactose) repressor.
This lac repressor protein is bound to a short stretch of DNA sequence before the beta-galactosidase gene.
As long as it is stuck on, the beta-galactosidase gene is unreadable and it will not undergo transcription (meaning no mRNA formation).
Once there is lactose in the vicinity, this lac repressor protein falls off from the DNA.
Now how it falls off, or how it evolved to fall off calls a whole new line of thinking.
Leaving that aside, this mechanism had profound implications for the understanding of the mystery of cellular differentiation during embryology.
One of the most famous remark made by Jacques Monod is this:
"What is true for E. coli is also true for the elephant".
And I would like to add:
And true for us humans as well.
In the end, we are all survival machines for the same kind of replicators, the DNA molecule!
Good night mon ami.
2/28/2016
Yes, out with it; who made you the master of my fate?
2/28/2016
As ophthalmologists, we are aware of a condition called aniridia.
It is technically called Pax-6 gene found in our chromosome 6.
It is the gene responsible or associated with our eye development.
It's mutation leads to condition wherein either the iris tissue is reduced, defective or even absent.
A similar gene has been found in the fruit fly which has been labelled as the eyeless gene.
So named because mutation of this gene results in that fly not developing an eye.
The very same gene has been found in mice and has been labelled as small eye gene.
Why so named?
Yes, you guessed it right.
Mutation of this gene results in either a reduced defective eye or a complete absence of eye formation in these mice.
And it also goes the other way as well.
When the eyeless gene was manipulated so that it was turned on in other parts of the fly (yes, such genetic experiments are quite routine), eye tissue was induced on wings, legs and other parts of the fly body.
This Pax-6 gene has been found to be associated with eye formation throughout the animal kingdom.
The Pax-6 gene also encode for proteins which bind to DNA like our lac repressor protein of E coli.
They are called homeodomain proteins.
Now why are they so critical?
Because just like the lac repressor, they act like switches for gene to be transcripted or not.
It is these switches that control our development right from the moment the embryo is formed after the union of the sperm and the egg.
But the sheer elegance and awesomeness is that the basic gene tool kit for building the essential body parts has been conserved throughout the evolutionary history.
It means once the Pax-6 gene had evolved by necessary selection pressures and chance, it kept on getting selected to build eyes for species branching out even hundreds of millions of years later.
Thus we carry the legacy of E. coli, fruit flies, rodents and worms in us.
Next time when u see our distant cousins, do have more respect for them.
Good night mon ami.
2/28/2016
Si senior
Off to open the shop
Got to make a living
2/28/2016
Ha ha ha
Will read your link from there
My shop is also my university
Or better, my universe
2/28/2016
Ha ha ha
God-fearing-atheist
Love that one
shaadi = abaadi = barbaadi
2/28/2016
What a guy this Abdul Malik!
I hope he does not fuck up his life by a big fat desi wedding and reproducing
2/29/2016
When one should not tempt the fate and the gods
2/29/2016
"Ask yourself whether you are happy and you cease to be so."
John Stuart Mill
After 250,000 years of human existence, 2500 years of philosophy and 25 or so years of internet, you would think humans would at least have agreed or come to consensus on what it is to be happy.
After all, the smile is universal.
However, the history of happiness is a sorry saga.
There have always been optimists: the hedonists, who equate happiness with pleasure.
They believe in maximizing the pleasures and keep upping the stake.
But we all know, that excessive pleasure is hard to keep up.
Besides excessive pleasure can lead to pain and death.
And then there were the opposites. The stoics.
They believed that avoidance of pain is pleasure.
And taking the logic to extreme, the only way to avoid pain is to terminate life, meaning suicide.
It is true that suicides did relieve many kamikaze from pain.
But it gave grave distress to the tutors and relatives of the dead.
I will end today with a formidable quote from Bertrand Russell:
The only way to be happy is to know that the world is a horrible, horrible, horrible place.
So remember mon ami, never to ask anybody this question:
"Are you happy?"
If you desire not to make him unhappy.
Good night mon ami.
.
3/1/2016
Why we need twelve years of schooling
3/1/2016
Another very deceitful perception of happiness comes from technological progress and it's subtle but ubiquitous insinuation into our minds through tactical but mostly through obvious and boisterous marketing and advertising.
(Do beg your pardon for such a long sentence).
But progress has little to do with happiness.
In fact, it can undermine the later in following three ways:
First, progress rests on factors such as markets and competition which gravely increases our anxiety.
Succeed or perish!
Second, it feeds desires, such as acquisitiveness, which very commonly leads to dissatisfaction.
Just look at the persistence craving for better and better cars or phones or houses.
Third, it creates and raises expectations which leads to serious persisting restlessness and disquiet.
Look what Jean-Jacques Rousseau observed centuries earlier:
"In the midst of so much philosophy, humanity, politeness and sublime maxims we have merely deceitful and frivolous exterior.
Honor without virtue, knowledge without wisdom and pleasure without happiness."
As much as science gives me truth about the nature or the reality, I have to keep returning to philosophy to give a meaning to our farcical existence.
Good night mon ami.
3/2/2016
It was sneaky, fiendish, vicious, treacherous, grim and ruthless
3/2/2016
Paul Broca was a surgeon, a neurologist and an anthropologist in mid 1800s in France.
He performed distinguished work on cancer pathology, treatment of aneurysms and made a lasting contribution to understanding the origins of aphasia.
He was both a brilliant and a compassionate man, a rare combination.
He was concerned for the medical care of the poor.
He was the founder of the modern brain surgery.
He loved mainly serenity and tolerance.
In 1848, he founded a society of "freethinkers".
Among the French great, he almost alone was sympathetic to Darwin's idea of evolution by natural selection.
He was quoted to have said:
" I had rather be a transformed ape than a degenerate son of Adam".
Broca had encountered great difficulty in establishing a society of anthropology in France.
The state considered science to be a subversive or an anti national activity against the society, religion and the government.
The Roman Catholic party was complete against teaching anthropology as well.
Thankfully, today France has changed thanks to the Enlightenment.
He is one of the most respected scientists of the French.
As a tribute, his brain is respectfully preserved in the Musee de l'Homme (Museum of Man) in Paris, very close to the Eiffel Tower.
Good night mon ami.
3/3/2016
But finally the sheer greed turns him into a believer
3/3/2016
Today I am going to quote few sentences of Einstein.
Why?
One thing, it appeals to me senses and thinking.
Secondly, I can relate to it as a lover of solitary, peaceful life, as a thoughtful introvert though lacking any original or brilliant thinking.
Here it goes.
I quote:
"My passionate interest in social justice and social justice has always stood in contrast to a marked lack of desire for direct association with men and women.
I am a horse for a single harness, not cut out for tandem or team work.
I have never belonged wholeheartedly to a country or State, to my circle of friends or even to my own family.
These ties have always been accompanied by a vague aloofness, and the wish to withdraw into myself increases with the years.
Such isolation is sometimes bitter, but I do not regret being cut off from the understanding and sympathy of other men.
I lose something by it, to be sure, but I am compensated for it in being rendered independent of the customs, opinions and prejudices of others.
I am not tempted to rest the peace of my mind upon such shifting foundations."
These words almost echo my deepest inner thoughts.
Good night mon ami.
3/4/2016
Euclidean mathematics has dominated most of our civilization.
Almost 2200 years since 300 BC.
Even to this day, it plays a dominant role in the High School text books that we were taught and that will be taught to our children.
His entire structure of mathematics is founded on 5 simple postulates.
Let us look at them closely:
1. There is exactly one straight line connecting any 2 points.
2. A straight line may be extended in a straight line in either direction.
3. About any point a circle of any specified radius exists.
4. All right angles are equal.
Implicit in these assertions are the 'facts' that space is unbounded, continuous and homogeneous (same properties everywhere).
The fifth and the most infamous postulate is rather cumbersome:
If a straight line falling across two straight lines makes the sum of interior angles on the same side less than two right angles, then the two lines intersect, if sufficiently extended, on that side.
In other words, through a point outside a given line, one and only one line can be drawn to that given line.
Looks so nice.
So sweet.
So benign.
And so self-evident.
Till came the giants of 1600s and 1700s to rock the boat.
More about it later.
Good night mon ami.
3/5/2016
Of course, besides these five postulates, some even more basic non-geometric axioms were required.
For example:
Things equal to the same thing are equal to each other.
Or:
A whole is greater than any of its parts.
But these did not raise any eyebrows (at least not till some giants began to challenge of classifying the truly infinite in 1800s).
The first actor in our story would be an Italian Giovanni Saccheri who in early 1700s tried to prove the fifth parallel postulate.
He could not prove it yet so convinced was he on the correctness of the postulate rather than his own proof that he ended up producing a flawed 'proof' of the fifth postulate from the other four.
Another player in our story is none other than the great Gauss.
He wanted to prove that the angles of a triangle must add up to 180°.
So, for the sake of argument, he assumed they did not.
From this, this great mathematician derived a seemingly bizarre geometry, which, however, appeared to contain no logical inconsistencies.
The more he pursued it, the more he began to sense that the new geometry was a true alternative to that of Euclid.
And yet, for some reason, he failed to publish any of his findings.
Some feel that because of the controversial nature of the work, his famed reputation was at the risk of getting jeopardized.
We shall discuss more of this story later.
This story is full of forgotten geniuses who have made a great impact on our everyday lives without us ever realizing it.
This should tell you that even being a genius does not guarantee either fame or wealth which I think most of us consider our prime objectives of our fleeting existence.
Good night mon ami.
[12:02 AM, 3/6/2016] Navin: The greatness of a religious festival is measured by the extent of frenzied sales and materialistic consumption
3/6/2016
The next character in our story is a young Russian
Nikolai Ivanovich Lobachevsky (1793-1856).
It is virtually impossible to have a story of mathematics without a Russian.
He, like Saccheri and Gauss, set out initially to prove the fifth parallel postulate.
In this endeavor, he not only convinced himself that the fifth postulate could not be derived from the other four, but that is not necessary (and may not even be true) in any strict sense.
Lacking the diffidence of Gauss in this matter, Lobachevsky published his results for all the world to see.
The year was 1829, and in first article on the subject he created a whole new and self consistent geometry that did not contain the parallel postulate.
He thus became, in a sense, the 'Copernicus of geometry', liberating the subject from the shackles imposed by the parallel postulate.
It was not that Lobachevsky denied that Euclidean geometry did work admirably.
But what he did establish was the fact that an equally noncontradictory, consistent geometry could be constructed with a fifth postulate very different from that of Euclid.
Lobachevsky's fifth postulate was as follows:
Through any point outside a given line, more than one line can be drawn parallel to any given line.
This geometry gave rise to very bizarre findings like:
1. The interior angles of a triangle add up to less than two right angles.
2. The ratio of circumference of a circle to its radius is greater than 2 pi.
3. No similar figures of different areas can exist.
Indeed, Lobachevsky referred this geometry as "imaginary".
History would go on to show that it was anything but that.
Good night mon ami.
3/6/2016
I love your website
The story of mathematics
Next best thing after Marcus du Sautoy video documentary
3/6/2016
I think one can and should lead a monastic Epicurean life without needing to dress or flaunt like one or even claim like one.
You yourself are the prime example.
3/7/2016
The wrong planet
3/7/2016
Along with the great Lobachevsky comes in another original mathematician Janos Bolyai (1802-1860).
He was living at the margins of the Hapsburg empire in the mountains of modern Hungary.
His father, Farkas Bolyai was also a mathematician and an associate of Gauss.
Farkas had tried to get his son under the mentorship of legendary Gauss.
Gauss simply declined finding the young Bolyai not worthy enough.
Janos Bolyai, against his father counsel, became obsessed with the parallel postulate.
His father warned him that this problem will break him and take away all his happiness.
But do young men ever listen to their fathers?
He persisted and like Lobachevsky but very independently came to the same conclusion:
That the Euclidean geometry had a perfect viable competitor.
He, too, was amazed by it's bizarre yet very consistent propositions and wrote to his father:
"Out of nothing, I have created a strange new universe".
He published his work in 1832 (Lobachevsky did it in 1829, but in Russian which went unnoticed in Western Europe) in a 29-page appendix to 2 thick volumes of rigorous expositions of geometry.
Even Gauss downplayed it when his father enthusiastically sent a copy to him.
Both these geniuses, Bolyai and Lobachevsky largely went unrecognized in their life times and died poor and unrewarded.
As I had said, even to be a rare genius among the average millions is not a guarantee for fame or fortune.
May be, that is why, as a weak compensation, I must tell their stories.
Good night mon ami.
3/8/2016
The new non-Euclidean geometry remained at the fringe of mathematics for a decade or two.
Then entered a very sickly, shy, introvert, scared of public speaking young German Georg Friedrich Bernhard Riemann (1826-1866).
He was a true mathematical prodigy displaying his genius at a very young age.
Gauss, Lobachevsky and Bolyai had all focused on a geometry for which the sum of interior angles of a triangle is less than 180°.
The opposite was not thought by these three giants.
Why not?
Because the opposite possibility of having the angles of a triangle add up to more than 180° would lead to a logical contradiction in the limit that the sides of such a triangle would have to infinitely long.
But what is it really so?
Riemann said no.
Euclid's second postulate stated merely that straight lines could always be continued, but this was not the same as asserting that they had to be of infinite length.
Riemann could imagine lines which were have finite length but had no end. Example a circle.
He examined geometry under the assumption of finite yet unbounded lines and came up with his radical and yet consistent fifty postulate:
"Through any point outside a given line, NO line can be drawn parallel to the given line."
This gave rise to fascinating results like:
1. The interior angles of a triangle add up to more than 2 right angles.
2. The ratio of the circumference of a circle to it's radius is less than 2 pi.
3. No similar figures of different areas can exist.
4. A straight line cab always be continued but is never of infinite length.
This was a revolution in the world of geometry!
I shall try to tell more about his work in as much simple terms as possible.
It is not easy as I am not a mathematician but just a humble story teller.
Good night mon ami.
3/9/2016
The 1600s is know as the Age of Reason.
Though, to me, there was nothing reasonable or enlightening considering how the events were being played out.
More of it later.
One of the greatest scientific revolution that happened in science but that is vastly underplayed is the work of John Napier published in 1614.
The book was called:
"Description of the Wonderful Rule of Logarithms).
The book contained 57 pages of explanatory matter and 90 pages of tables related to logarithm to the base of the mathematical constant e.
Now e is an irrational and a transcendental number whose value is something like this:
2.718 281 828 459...
One should ask the question:
What is natural about it?
This aside, even if 1600s was an age of reason, there were no less wars, butchery and famines in the world at that period.
The Europeans were killing each other so much so that historians have named the period The General Crisis (1618-48).
Europeans started colonizing the Americas with earnest exploiting the wealth of Peru and Mexico.
China lost 30% of it's population famously known as the demographic collapse under the Ming Dynasty.
The Russian famine of 1601-03 kills perhaps one-third of Russia.
The Ottoman empire was rising with series of battles, wars and butchery as usual.
Plague is common in Europe.
Famine in France in 1692 kills 2 million.
Famine in Finland in 1696 wipes out one-third of Finns.
The thing which affected me was the establishment of the Honourable East India Company on December 31, 1600.
That is why today I write to you in impeccable English.
Good night mon ami.
3/10/2016
This is how we honorable earthlings conduct our business
3/10/2016
At the time of independence, as I had narrated earlier, there existed more than 500 princely states.
Most of them did not want, at least willingly, to be a part of the independent India.
At one end of the scale were the massive states of Kashmir and Hyderabad, each the size of a large European country.
At the other hand were tiny fiefdoms or jagirs of a dozen or less villages.
These states owed their shape and powers - or lack thereof - to the British.
Starting as a firm of traders, the East India Company gradually moved towards a position of overlordship.
They were helped here by the decline of the Mughals after the death of Aurangzeb in 1707.
Indian rulers were seen by the company as strategic allies, useful in checking the ambitions of their common enemy, the French.
Do not forget that just as your emperors and dynasties kept battling and butchering each other within India, something similar had always been happening within Europe since centuries.
The Company forced treaties on these states, which recognized them as the 'paramount power'.
Keep this lesson in mind.
To conduct successful international business, an empire or a superpower always needs guns.
Today, the only reason the US dollars has power and respect is because each dollar is backed by a powerful gun.
US naval flotillas of powerful carriers and it's accompanying fleet of ships safeguard all the major sea routes on which US business interests sail.
Specially the crucial middle east and the oil route through Suez Canal and then the whole of African coast line.
At the heart of these powerful weapons lie the mathematics and physics which had unfolded in the minds of such forgotten geniuses like Napier and Riemann.
Good night mon ami.
3/11/2016
This was a masterstroke by the company.
While legally making the Nawabs and Maharajas the rulers of their territories, the British retained the right to appoint ministers and control succession.
They would also extract a large subsidy for the provision of administration and military support.
It was no accident that nearly all the princely states, with a few exceptions, had a coastline.
The political dependence was made more acute by economic dependence relying for raw materials and industrial goods on the British India.
The Crown had allowed some larger states their own currency, railway and stamps.
Few had any modern industry and still fewer had any modern form of education.
The princes of these states behaved like our present Vijay Mallaya.
They were feckless and dissolute, over-fond of racehorses and other men's wives and holidays in Europe.
Both the Raj and the Congress party held this view.
In 1940s, all these princes and maharajas faced a common problem: their future in free India.
One should not be excessively critical of British.
All empires behave in this manner; may it be French, Dutch, Soviet or modern America and China.
The idea is to weaken smaller states, making them dependent on the empire and then exploiting their resources, both natural but specially the human.
I will leave you with a picture of India at its independence and how a very huge chunk of it were the princely states who at that time began to luxuriate in wild dreams of independent power in an India of many partitions.
Good night mon ami.
3/11/2016
Buenas Noches noble doc
3/11/2016
They all wanted to go the Pakistan way
3/12/2016
The gift that the best buddies share
3/12/2016
Newton's Principia, (of which I own the Latin version and hence unread), is remarkable not for the specific laws of nature that he had discovered.
It was the very idea that such laws exist and that they could be represented mathematically with differential equations.
Now, the differential equations are of two types:
1. Ordinary
These equations describe an unknown function y of a single variable x.
Y = dy/dx
2. Partial
These partial differential equations describe an unknown function say y in terms of 2 or more variables say x, y and t.
With this powerful mathematical, powerful minds began to describe physical entities such as vibrating string, vibrating drum, oscillating pendulum, and even fluids, heat, light and sound.
D'Alembert was probably the first person to use a partial differential equation to describe a vibrating violin string in 1746.
Euler was already dabbling in them but it was d'alembert who first framed it for a vibrating string.
This equation is now famously known as the wave equation and is one of the most important in mathematical physics as you know waves arise in nature in many different circumstances.
Good night mon ami.
3/12/2016
Thanks Monish
Will read
3/13/2016
Planet with a tilted axis
3/13/2016
In the early universe, at temperatures above about 3000°K, the universe consisted not of the galaxies or stars that we see in the sky today, but only of the ionized and undifferentiated soup of matter and radiation.
The ratio of photons to the nuclear particle has been between 100 million to 20,000 million photons per neutron or proton.
The differentiation of matter into galaxies and stars could not have begun until the time when the cosmic temperature became low enough for electrons to be captured into atoms.
Today, at the temperature of 3°K black body radiation, most of the energy is in the form of matter, not radiation.
When the temperature was about 1,300 times higher than present, or about 4000°K, it was a "radiation-dominated" universe making it's transition to the present "matter-dominated" universe.
This enormous energy density of radiation in the early universe was lost by the shift of the photon wavelengths to the red due to the universe expansion.
This allowed the electrons to join the nuclear particles to form atoms.
With the disappearance of free electrons, the universe became transparent to radiation.
Thus dropped the radiation pressure allowing the clumping of matter to form galaxies.
Good night mon ami.
3/14/2016
On of the major factors that leave us humans dissatisfied and even embittered is the cost-benefit at work by the bosses of the company or a hospital or a corporation.
A capitalistic economy is based on calculations; Calculations where people (the staff) is treated as pawns.
There is an ignorance of the fact that people are people and should be nurtured for their own sake.
In other words, it is the lack of human sympathy in the decision making of the economists that alienates people and has much to do with modern unhappiness (modern being post industrialization).
In a world defined by commerce and competition, delivery is merit.
People are remunerated for what they do, not for who they are.
Qualities that make someone praiseworthy like being an intelligent and diligent mother are likely to be simply ignored or take second place.
This results to alienation at work and makes people very unhappy.
That is why I try to talk to my staff about their lives, their problems and their views on life.
I know I will never pay them adequately enough and to compensate for that guilt, I try to give them a sense of belonging to our work.
(I myself have worked for pathetic salaries all my life which is why I decided to stop depending on salary for my living).
I am not sure how successful I am at it.
Only time will tell.
The guilt is always there to haunt me, in one form or the other.
Good night mon ami.
3/15/2016
What is intelligence?
Well...just like life, it has been impossible to define it.
Intelligence has it's root in the Latin verb intelligere, which means to comprehend or perceive.
One of the basic traits of intelligence is learning, keeping it in memory to make "smarter" decisions for surviving and adapting to the changing environment.
It thereby automatically involves problem solving and pattern recognition.
We humans often consider ourselves supremely intelligent but going by the above definition, animals, plants and microbes aren't too far behind.
In fact, the microbes generally seem to be one step ahead of us as do most of the arthropods.
The way things are unfolding in the world, the answers about intelligence seems likely to come from the world of computer scientists rather than neuroscientists.
And then there are people like Demis Hassabis who are both.
His most cited paper published in PNAS argued that patients with damaged hippocampus (seat of long term memory) besides suffering from amnesia also were unable to imagine themselves in new experiences.
This study established a link between the constructive process of imagination with the reconstructive process of episodic memory recall.
Hassabis developed this idea into a new theoretical account of scene construction.
This child chess prodigy is now the CEO of DeepMind Technologies, acquired by Google in Jan 2014 for 625 million USD.
It is always fun to end a bed-time story with such massive display of wealth, even if not mine.
Good night mon ami
3/16/2016
Pondering on the meaning of true happiness
3/16/2016
We higher primates or apes have a large number of distinct visual areas.
They are specialized for different aspects of vision, such as colour, shapes, movement, face recognition etc.
A good example is middle temporal area or the area V5 in the cortex.
It is an area concerned with perception of the movement.
How do we back up such an statement?
1. Single cell recordings of cells of this area showed that these cells fire when moving object is displayed to the experimental ape but no response with stationary colours and shapes.
2. When microelectrodes stimulate these cells in an experimental ape, the ape starts hallucinating motion.
The ape starts to move his eyes around tracking imaginary moving objects.
3. In human volunteers under fMRI (functional MRI), the V5 area lights up when they are shown moving objects but no response to static pictures, colours or printed words.
4. When neurons of V5 area are briefly stunned with a transcranial magnetic stimulator, creating a temporary brain lesion, they stop perceiving motion.
Falling water seems like a static icicle!
Remember, this is just one of the sensation processing area;
The beginning of the logical algorithm processing which allows us to use the incoming data to learn and adapt to the environment.
As done by all the biological systems.
Good night mon ami.
3/17/2016
You will be amazed to see how frequently metaphors pop up in ordinary speech.
"Pop up"-see?
Poets and great writers are specially good at using metaphor.
On the one hand, a metaphor isn't literally true, and yet on the other hand a well turned metaphor seems to strike like a lightening, revealing the truth more deeply or directly than a drab, literal statement.
Read this one.
It is a classic one from the bard as Macbeth's soliloquy in Act 5, Scene 5:
"Out, out, brief candle!
Life's but a walking shadow, a poor player
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage,
And then his heard no more.
It is a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
Signifying nothing."
Nothing he says is literal.
He is not talking about candles, stagecraft or idiots.
If taken literally, they sound like ravings of an idiot.
And yet these words are one of the most profound remark about life that anyone has ever made.
Good night mon ami.
3/18/2016
Staying on the topic of metaphor, I would like to quote you today my all time favourite.
Isaac Asimov is my Carl Sagan. Always has been.
I have not read a single work of his fiction writing. Just science.
This one Asimov self-labelled it as the bathroom metaphor.
He had given this reply off the cuff to a question from Bill Moyers in a televised interview in 1989 (27 years ago).
Bill Moyers raised the question:
"What happens to the idea of the dignity of human species as our population continues to grow at this rate?"
To this, Asimov gave this most thoughtful reply:
"It will be completely destroyed.
I like to use what I call the bathroom metaphor.
If two people live in an apartment, and there are two bathrooms, then both have the freedom of bathroom.
You can go to the bathroom anytime you want, stay as long as you want, for whatever you need.
And everyone believes in the Freedom of Bathroom; It should be right there in the Constitution.
But if you have twenty people in the apartment and two bathrooms, then no matter how much everyone believes in Freedom of the Bathroom, there's no such thing.
You have to set up times for each person, you have to bang on the door, 'Aren't you through yet?'
And so on.
In the same way, democracy can not survive overpopulation;
Human dignity cannot survive;
Convenience and decency can not survive;
As you put more and more people into the world, the value of life not only declines, it disappears.
It doesn't matter if someone dies.
The more people there are, the less one individual matters."
Most individuals in overpopulated third world nations are subconsciously aware of it and do their best to flee to developed optimally populated nations.
Good night mon ami.
3/19/2016
In contrast to the metaphors, puns are based on superficial associations.
Schizophrenics, who have miswired brains, are terrible at interpreting metaphors and proverbs.
Yet from anecdotal folklore, they are very good at puns.
This seems paradoxical because, after all, both metaphors and puns involve linking seemingly unrelated concepts.
So why should schizophrenics be bad at former but good at later?
The answer is that even though the two appear similar, puns are actually the opposite of metaphor.
A metaphor exploits a surface-level similarity to reveal a deep hidden connection.
A pun is a surface-level similarity that masquerades as a deep one - hence its comic appeal.
Example.
What fun do monks have on Christmas?
Answer: Nun.
Perhaps a preoccupation with "easy" surface similarities erased or deflects attention from deeper connections.
Use of metaphors tell us something about a rare neurological condition called synesthesia.
It is a cross-wiring of senses, where for example a note on a piano may give a synesthete a visual perception of colour.
More about it later.
But bear in mind that our language and it's different aspects reveal a lot about our brain neurology.
Good night mon ami.
3/19/2016
My 2 cousins
Employed with NHS
One pediatrician and one psychiatrist
The pediatric one is a kind of expert on Asperger's in kids
3/19/2016
No probing
No questioning
No listening to my side of the story
3/19/2016
Yes
I also call it the world full of chutiyas
3/20/2016
walk?
3/20/2016
No no
With father and Nitin
We had a luncheon with a friend of father
3/20/2016
It is too difficult to be good
3/20/2016
Both India and the US (also included is Canada) have a very strong environmental movements.
Environmentalism is principally a product of and reaction to the Industrial Revolution.
The Industrial Revolution was actually 4 revolutions in 1:
1. The revolution in industry
2. Concomitant revolution in agriculture (huge augmentation in productivity).
3. Revolution in transport and communication.
4. The demographic revolution meaning rapid rise of population due to advances in health and sanitation.
Two more revolutions can be added to these:
5. Advent of democratic and socialist ideas in Europe.
6. Massive expanse of the resource catchment areas of the Europeans due to colonization and political conquest of the world.
The scale of devastation of forests and habitats and the fouling of the airs and the waters brought about by industrialization was unprecedented!
For the first time in human history, there was a perception of almost generalized, civilizational environmental crisis.
Thus was born the "environmental movement".
May be, many of you feel that I can afford to think about the environment because I have a full belly, secure profession and no children.
I, on the other hand, think that the onus must be far greater on the individuals who have reproduced to have greater consideration of our environment and the natural resources like clean air and drinkable water.
Good night mon ami.
3/21/2016
Environmental movements in North America took emergence in a postindustrial society (in contrast to Indian which is still essentially rural and even in urban, the industrial gains benefits a tiny fraction).
The mass consumer society of North America has enlarged opportunities for leisure.
Time taken off the work can but to diverse uses.
Nature has been made accessible through the automobile, now no longer a monopoly of the elite but an artefact in almost everyone's possession.
The car, more than anything else, has opened the world of the wild, so refreshingly different from the world of the city.
Thus, in a curious paradox, the car, the "most modern creation of industry", becomes the vehicle of anti-industrial impulses.
These gas guzzlers can take you to distant adventures, to "homey little towns, enchanting fairytale forests, far from stale routine, functional ugliness or the dictates of the clock."
Herein lies the popular support for the protection of the wilderness in the United States.
Nature is no longer restricted to the privileged few but available to all.
And what a nature!
As compared to tropical ecologies, the temperate ecosystems are far more welcoming to an ordinary city dweller.
There are far few troublesome creatures such as leeches, cobras and malaria and dengue infested mosquitoes.
As Aldous Huxley pointed out, the worship of nature came easily to those who lived "beneath a temperate sky in the age of Henry Ford."
In the tropics, nature is fearsome, manifesting itself as "vast masses of swarming vegetation alien to the human spirit and hostile to it".
In the North Atlantic world, nature is a "chaste, mild deity" that could so easily be "enslaved to man."
In ways more than one, America is truly blessed.
Good night mon ami.
3/22/2016
In contrast to North American, the Indian environmental movements is related directly to livelihood and survival.
These movements are centrally vehement protests against the encroachment on the natural resources of a particular community by the urban-industrial complex.
Here there is an immediacy to the environmental protest that is somewhat lacking in the American context.
In India, the environmental movement has in fact drawn upon the struggles of marginal populations - hill peasants, tribals, fisherfolk, dam oustsees - neglected by the main stream parties.
The peasants, the tribals and the villagers are actually defending their local ecology and their natural resources from the nation.
The classic example being Medha Patkar and the issue of Sardar Sarovar project on river Narmada.
Most people would think that concern of the environment is a game for people with full stomach like say Californians.
But in nations like India, Brazil, Indonesia etc, it is the villagers, the tribals and forest dwellers that are most affected when a dam is constructed across a river or mountains are blasted to construct train tunnels.
A story teller like me in Bombay city would be least affected.
Good night mon ami.
3/22/2016
Hah
Keeps getting better
3/23/2016
Budding neurosurgeon
3/23/2016
Contrary to popular belief, India's first major industrial revolution occurred much before it's independence.
That watershed moment was the year of 1853, even before the sepoy mutiny of 1857 and the education revolution of the same year (1857) where the major Indian universities were set up.
In a famous minute of 1853 the Governor General of India, Lord Dalhousie (they were nothing less than our gods), wrote of how railway construction was both the means for creating a market for British goods and the outlet for British capital seeking profitable avenues for investment.
Between 1853 and 1910 more than 80,000 kilometres of track was laid in the subcontinent.
The early years of railway expansion witnessed a savage assault on the forests of India.
Great chunks of these were destroyed to meet the demand for railway sleepers, over 1,000,000 (one million) of which were required annually.
Thousands of trees were felled which were never even removed for use.
The British were at this time unquestionably world leaders in deforestation, having burnt or felled hundreds of thousands of acres of woodland in Australia, southern Africa, north eastern United States, Burma, and of course, India.
This is the price of industrial progress which as you will understand is bound by ecological constraints.
Each future child will ever be more demanding, requiring multiple ever advancing computers, smarter and smarter phones, clothes, books and more importantly gallons of clean water, may be not only for drinking and bathing and washing but also for swimming.
We are all aspiring for more and more.
Good night mon ami.
3/24/2016
There is a fact, or if u wish, a law, governing all natural phenomenon till date.
There is no known exception to this law.
It is exact so far as we know.
The law is called the conservation of energy.
It states that there is a certain quantity, which we call energy, that does not change in the manifold changes which nature undergoes.
It is an abstract idea yet very mathematical;
It says that there is a numerical quantity which does not change when something happens.
It is not a description of a mechanism.
Just a strange fact that we can calculate some number and when we finish watching nature go through her tricks and calculate the number again, it is the same.
It is important to realize that physicists have no idea what energy is.
There are precise formulas for calculating, but which tell nothing of the mechanism or the reasons for it.
Good night mon ami.
3/25/2016
Australia today is a modern, "open", democracy with a GDP per capita income higher than even UK, Germany and France.
It came into existence on 1st Jan, 1901 when 6 separate British self governing colonies of Queensland, New South Wales, Victoria, Tasmania, South and Western Australia agreed to unite and form a federation.
Fiji and New Zealand were originally part of this process, but later backed out.
As soon as it came into existence, the nation implemented it's White Australia Policy (now both forgotten and suppressed).
The Barton government with full backing of its people passed the Pacific Island Labourers Bill and the Immigration Restriction Bill.
Prime minister John Curtin even as late as in second world war insisted:
"This country shall remain forever the home of the descendants of those people who came here in peace in order to establish in the South Seas an outpost of the British race."
This idea ran "contrary to the general conception of equality which have ever been the guiding principles of British rule throughout the empire."
After all, the brown Indians and the yellow Burmese and the black South Africans were as much the Queen's subjects as were the white Australians.
So how did Australia get over this hurdle?
One thing you must admire about British; they had an obsession with law.
Every act was under its ambit.
So the Barton government in 1901 very cunningly conceived of the "language dictation test", which would allow the government, at the discretion of the minister, to block unwanted coloured migrants.
They were forced to sit this test in "any European language".
Ingenious!
More on it later.
Good night mon ami.
3/26/2016
Life is precarious and truths are often bleak
3/26/2016
If you were to close your eyes now for two minutes, you would know what it feels like to be absolutely blind (which differs a lot from being legally blind.)
You would also feel what it would be like to live in a world without electricity after sunset.
Nothing even closely impacts our every day and every aspect of our lives as do electricity and electronics.
And yet, such was the world in 1600s and even 1700s; it was both literally and figuratively dark.
Religions, superstitions and ignorance ruled over every aspect of the lives of our forefathers and foremothers (it does to a very little extent now, even for those who claim to be very religious and faithful.)
In 1600s, Sir Isaac Newton in those dark, plague ridden Europe showed that if probed delicately and astutely, nature was ready to reveal her secrets.
From then on, there was no holding back this naked ape.
He began to probe and experiment on everything; nothing was sacred or divine.
Some of these began to probe a very strange phenomenon which was known since millennia.
The phenomenon of amber being able to pick up tiny papers after being rubbed or the comb able to raise human hairs.
This is a fascinating story which needs to be unfolded with great care and over several nights.
Good night mon ami.
[12:51 AM, 3/27/2016] Navin: At school the mild mannered Calvin transforms into stupendous Spaceman Spiff
3/27/2016
Let me begin with something very simple.
What happens at their surface interface when two objects come into contact with other?
Let us say your palm is resting on a glass sphere.
Let us zoom in and go from organism level to organ level to tissue level to cellular level to cell organelle level to molecular level and finally to the atomic level.
Here a chemical bond is formed between atoms of different materials which we call adhesion. (This bonding is felt as friction by us when our hand rubs across the sphere).
It is something very close to a chemical reaction but not exactly that.
There will exist or may exist an electrochemical potential between them depending on which 2 materials are in touch.
Electrons will move across from one surface to the other.
When separated, some of the bonded atoms keep extra electrons and some will give it away.
What do we have now?
We have electrically charged bodies!!
Voila!!
We have created a static charge or an electrostatic energy (energy is just a fancy name given to anything capable of doing work including energetic doctors).
This whole process of getting charged up bodies by rubbing is known as the triboelectric effect.
Tribo is the Greek for rubbing.
John Carl Wilcke published the first triboelectric series in a 1757 paper on static charges.
A material towards the bottom of series when touched to a material near the top of the series will acquire a more negative charge.
The point I wish to emphasize here is the explanatory power of the atomic theory.
This phenomenon was known since two millennia or more but never understood.
Most people consider the term "theory" to be a very weak, vague or unsubstantiated idea that has no basis.
Some night I will dedicate to this very topic of "theory" itself.
Good night mon ami.
3/28/2016
Biggest lesson of life. Never mess around with girls.
3/28/2016
Somewhere in Germany during the times of Newton (1600s) was a man named Otto Von Guericke.
Around 1650, he had developed an odd devise.
It was a sulphur ball that rotated on a shaft.
When Guericke held his hand against the ball and turned the shaft quickly, a static electric charge built up.
This was the first electrostatic generator that generated static charge using the triboelectric effect (friction).
In fact, they are commonly known as friction machines.
This simple sulphur sphere set the ball rolling for greater, larger and ever more sophisticated electrostatic generators.
Substances like rubber, plastics, glass etc which are insulators are good both at generating and holding charges.
You see how humans were gradually emulating nature which were once considered the acts of gods.
These men could demonstrate a lightning discharge with their little humble experiments.
Down came crashing all the thunder gods whose list include Thor, Zeus, Indira, Jupiter, Baal...
The total list of the thunder gods alone of different regions of different eras exceeds 150.
Such is the power of experiments that in the end, a believer is left with just one option to justify his irrational beliefs.
That is denial.
Good night mon ami.
3/28/2016
U have a tougher job
Thinking a quick innovative reply
3/29/2016
To survive be prepared
3/29/2016
If there is one cell, just one cell in our bodies to whom we could blame for all the ills of the society, it would be the interstitial cells of Leydig.
These cells are named after a German zoologist Franz Leydig who happened to be son of a keen gardener and beekeeper.
Leydig studied medicine in 1842 at the University of Wurzburg.
In 1850 he described these cells in his book: Textbook of Histology of Man and Animals.
These cells are nestled snugly between seminiferous tubules (the site of meiosis) and capillaries of the testicles.
These fine cells are quiescent till the boy reaches puberty.
Once this age is attained, some specific genes within the Leydig cells get turned on (u recall my story on E. coli and Jacob and Monod).
Using the enzymes in its mitochondria and endoplasmic reticulum, these cells start converting 27 carbon cholesterol to 19 carbon androgens like androstenediol and finally to testosterone!
Once these hormones are released into the blood, they create havoc!!
U have seen and I have personally experienced that!
Besides everything sexual, these hormones hit the brain real real hard.
Testosterone has the powerful effect of masculinizing the brain.
It makes the males aggressive, highly competitive and strive for dominance.
No wonder almost 99.9% of males make the kings, the emperors, the warriors, the presidents and the prime ministers.
It would not be too far fetched to put the blame for all the wars waged for territories, murder and crime for amassing wealth and access to women to this single hormone and this tiny interstitial cell.
Good night mon ami.
3/29/2016
Nothing can beat this moments!
Nothing!
Except perhaps a Nobel for a fundamental discovery
3/29/2016
Ha ha ha
Yes.
Heard about it.
3/30/2016
After the end of the first world war, the vanquishers set up a grand assemblage to set the rules for the new world order.
It goes by the name of the Paris Peace Conference, 1919 at Versailles.
It was dominated by the "Big Four", viz. United States, United Kingdom, France and Italy.
There were delegates from 30 other nations too including the losers Germany and Japan and Australia.
The Japanese had 2 basic demands:
1. Racial equality
2. Territorial claims to Pacific island north of the equator.
The Australian delegation lead by the prime minister Billy Hughes had one primary purpose.
To scuttle and reject the Japanese racial equality proposal in cahoots with the big four.
Hughes stated in unambiguous terms that he would never permit the yellow race to enter Australia.
Hughes lobbied hard with the British PM David Lloyd George to defend Australia's white policy.
US president Woodrow Wilson with sophisticated deviousness, just before the voting on racial equality proposal was called for, declared that a unanimous vote was required.
As you can see, the big four had rigged the show right from the start.
The racial equality proposal was defeated.
Humiliated, the Japanese delegation headed by Marquis Saionji Kinmochi walked out of the conference.
This insult to the Japanese would prove to that proverbial butterfly effect of the chaos theory.
The flapping of its wings can cause a storm thousands of miles away.
Do stay tuned.
Good night mon ami.
3/31/2016
It seems all religions promise women in their respective heavens
3/31/2016
Pieter Musschenbroek was born in Leiden, Holland at the end of 1600s (1692 to be exact).
His father was an instrument maker such as microscopes and telescopes (a curious profession for those dark days).
This boy turned out to be a professor at the Leiden university who got interested in charges and charged bodies.
He along with his lackey Andreas Cunaeus devised an interesting experiment.
They devised a rotating glass sphere which would be rotated with Musschenbroek's hands rubbing against it.
This would generate static charge with now well known triboelectric effect.
This charge being produced by the rotating glass sphere was conducted by a metal chain through a suspended wooden bar (insulator) to a water in glass vessel held by Cunaeus.
After some period of interval, when Musschenbroek touched the wire dipping in the water, he received a powerful shock!!
He was literally struck by the bolt from the blue!
How could he explain this?
Well...
He had managed to transfer the the charge that was being produced by the electrostatic generator (sphere and his hands) into the water which was impure and hence a conductor.
It was kept inside an insulator (glass).
This was a revolution in electronics!
Finally the charge could be stored.
It was akin to change from hunter-gathering to agriculture where you could produce extra and store for later use.
Thus came to existence the first capacitor (previously known as condenser).
I will send you the picture of this wonderful experiment.
Stay tuned.
Good night mon ami.
3/31/2016
The person shown here is Andreas Cunaeus
4/1/2016
No sissy girls on our ship is a big problem
4/1/2016
Just consider a master class surgeon.
His surgery is a work of art; a wonder to behold.
The precision, the timing, the details of the depth, position, the knots, the incisions...
But think about where this springs from.
The madness of commitment, the obsession with perfection and the years devoted to it to will the fine muscles of the hand to follow the commands of the brain.
Think of the monotony.
Think of the life without diversion.
Think of the capacity to sit attentively patient after patient, surgery after surgery.
The master class surgeon has power because it questions the opposite concept of life based on endless novelty and choice.
Imagine visiting such a man.
Any visitor if honest, will be bored by his work, even frightened.
What the surgeon has is excellence, an activity he executes supremely well and that occupies him over all other things.
The work orients his whole life.
Thoroughly neurotic, the work is embedded in him like a habit.
This is why it is frightening.
The life of a surgeon, which is rated very highly, is constrained and to a visitor, even oppressive.
This raises an important question about life.
Is the life of novelty and choices antithetical to the life of excellence?
Does excellence come at a price which very few are willing to pay?
Stay tuned.
Good night mon ami.
4/2/2016
A very unique show and tell
4/2/2016
Luigi Galvani was born to the fourth wife of his father in 1737, Bologna, Italy.
He had nearly destroyed himself by planning to take religious vows and enter the darkness of church.
His parents dissuaded him from doing so.
Instead he attended a four year course in medicine and surgery.
This surgical skill would later on prove to be very useful for his experiments.
He became a lecturer of surgery in 1762.
In 1776, he moved on to become a lecturer of theoretical anatomy and member of Academy of Sciences.
As legend goes, during this period Galvani was slowly skinning a frog at the table.
Previously, on that very table he had been conducting experiments with static electricity (What a fascinating doctor!)
His assistant touched an exposed sciatic nerve of the frog with a metal scalpel that had picked up a charge.
At that moment, they saw sparks and the dead frog's leg kicked as if in life.
The experiment had, for the first time, connected a non living electrical energy to an organism, albeit a dead one.
It was a landmark moment both in the history of electricity and biology.
4/2/2016
Ha ha ha
Brilliant!
[12:27 AM, 4/3/2016] Navin: Returning home is fraught with dangers
4/3/2016
Some of the greatest biologists like Malthus, Paul Ehrlich, Garret Hardin and some obscure ones like yours truly are obsessed with the population problem.
People like us identify human population growth as the single most important reason for environmental degradation.
Industrialization, free market capitalism, insatiable appetite for consumption of all sorts and human greed are the compounding factors (as we see it).
In 1969, Paul Ehrlich published a bestseller:
The Population Bomb
Do read it if you enjoy to read.
If not, just stay tuned to my bed-time stories.
This is how the first chapter starts and I quote:
"I have understood the population explosion intellectually for a long time.
I came to understand it emotionally one stinking hot night in Delhi a couple of years ago.
My wife and daughter and I were returning to our hotel in an ancient taxi.
The seats were hopping with fleas.
The only functional gear was third.
As we crawled through the city, we entered a crowded slum area.
The temperature was well over 100, and the air was a haze of dust and smoke.
The streets seemed alive with people.
People eating, people washing, people sleeping.
People visiting, people arguing and screaming.
People thrusting their hands through the taxi window, begging.
People defecating and urinating.
People clinging to buses.
People herding animals.
People, people, people, people."
Of course, if you were born in Delhi, Bombay, Calcutta or Howrah and never left it, you would not notice or emotionally feel anything wrong.
Trouble starts only if you happen to travel to the developed world or get to hear from those who did.
Stay tuned.
Good night mon ami.
4/4/2016
Never read a secret note
4/4/2016
To have a unit of something as fundamental as electric potential named after you, in my view, is the ultimate honor a scientist can be bestowed with.
Just to keep it simple, electric potential is a type of potential energy.
It means that a certain amount of charge moves, it is capable of performing certain amount of work.
V = potential energy/charge
Alessandro Volta lived during the French Revolution, the French Revolutionary Wars and the Napoleonic Wars (late 1700s to early 1800s).
It was a period of tumultuous upheaval and bloody carnage that by conservative estimate claimed more than 700,000 (7 million) human lives in and around France alone.
Volta had a major professional disagreement with Galvani who interpreted his experiment to mean that his frog was the source of electrical energy; he had labelled it as animal energy.
Volta argued that the Galvani's frog was not the generator but merely the conductor of electricity (an electrolyte).
To substantiate his argument, he began to experiment with pairs of different metal electrodes separated by electrolyte.
Like dipping zinc and copper rods into salt water or diluted sulfuric acid.
In this way he discovered the electromotive force and the electrochemical cell.
He could convert chemical energy into electrical energy!!
Just imagine what a sensational discovery that was!
He did not stop there.
What if he could make a series of these electrochemical cells, more compact, working in tandem, producing far more energy?
He devised his famous Voltaic Pile which is merely a series of alternating zinc and copper coin like discs with a thick card paper soaked in salt water.
He had devised the first solid battery!!
All this in the times of war, revolutions, killing and savage butchery that would make the tragedy of India's Partition seem a miniscule event.
Stay tuned.
Good night mon ami.
4/5/2016
The squealer trying to act too smart
4/5/2016
Today, almost anyone who does not worship Allah (and even many who do) will accept or agree that Islam is facing a major crisis.
Most will also agree that the disease lies within than without.
What some would want to say but for sake of political correctness will keep from mouthing it out:
"They take Qur'an a bit too seriously and literally, at least the Orthodox types".
Yet, it is important to know that Christianity had gone through such a violent phase through most of its history, almost till mid or the end of 1600s.
A case in point being (just one bloody example amongst several).
It started in 1618 when the Holy Roman Empire in Central Europe was at its apogee.
Yet, inside it were rumblings of dissent for the Protestant Reformation in the form of Lutheranism (by Martin Luther) and Calvinism (by John Calvin).
Both these characters are prophets of Christian Protestantism; their prophet Mohammed if you will.
Between the thirty years of 1618 to 1648, you can divide the war into 4 phases:
1. Bohemian (modern Czech republic).
The Kingdom of Bohemia was an imperial state within the Holy Roman Empire.
2. Danish: Netherlands had a Protestant Lutheran king
3. Swedish phase: also a Lutheran Protestant nation.
4. French phase: a Roman Catholic country but playing the game of crafty Politique of deciding the issue of the balance of power in Europe.
It will take some time to digest the truth of it.
So I shall be slow on you.
Stay tuned.
Good night mon ami.
4/6/2016
The privilege of having delicate heinies
4/6/2016
So what started this bloody thirty years' war in 1618 within the Holy Roman Empire?
You would be very very surprised to hear.
Just some tiny minuscule differences between two sects of Christians like holy water or not, pope or no pope, fancy cathedrals or not, saints or no saints, nuns or no nuns!!
Almost sounds restarted, right?
So the Holy Roman Empire tried to impose uniformity of religion in its domains just like our current government has imposed beef ban almost all over the country.
Ferdinand II was a staunch Catholic and very intolerant (the intolerant debate is quite a happening thing in our current India).
The Bohemia which was a dominion of Habsburg Austria which in turn was a part of Roman Catholic Empire was largely Lutheran Protestants.
These Bohemian Lutheran Protestants got seriously and menacingly wild (Just imagine imposing beef ban in Kashmir valley and you will get a fairly good idea).
Some Catholics who came to meet them for reconciliation were thrown out of the windows.
This event is known as the Defenestration of Prague.
Eventually it led to the battle of White Mountain where the Catholics decisively won against the Lutheran Protestants.
So after the round one the score board read:
Catholics 1
Protestant 0
Does this not remind you of the Shia Sunni schism of Iraq and Iran?
So think twice before you criticize Islam or its followers.
More human foolish is on the way.
Do stay tuned.
Good night mon ami.
4/7/2016
Mild mannered Calvin finds himself transformed
4/7/2016
After this first Protestant defeat, the other Protestant powers namely Denmark, Sweden got very worried.
They felt Ferdinand II, the Holy Roman Emperor and the king of Hapsburg dynasty a threat to Protestants all over.
So the king of Denmark Christian IV jumps in and goes to war against the Roman Empire.
France, a Catholic nation financially backs Denmark.
Why?
It is playing the game of Politique of balance of power.
France sees the powerful Hapsburg dynasty a greater threat than the growing Protestant influence.
Even England being a Protestant nation sends some of its troops.
To counter this powerful allies of foe, the Empire retaliates with a massive force under the mercenary Wallenstein who is a Bohemian Catholic.
He hands the Empire a crushing win and once again the Protestants are routed.
The score after the round two is:
Catholics 2
Protestants 0
You must understand that I am giving you an extremely concise version of the events.
I write under high pressure of getting my facts correct, keeping my time schedule intact and keeping my reader (that is you) hooked to the show.
Stay tuned.
Good night mon ami.
4/8/2016
Dreaded spankings
4/8/2016
After two major losses, the Protestants all over the Europe were seriously scared.
Ferdinand II had reclaimed the lands in the empire belonging to the Catholic church that had been acquired and secularized by Protestant rulers.
Afraid of where the Empire and the Hapsburg might strike next, in 1630 Sweden, another Lutheran Protestant nation decided to go on the offensive.
The Swedish army led by their king Gustavus Adolphus entered Germany.
Once again, Cardinal Richelieu, the chief minister of Louis 13 of France playing fiendish Politique funded the Swedish army.
The Swedish army got assistance from many German Protestant states.
This Swedish King Gustavus Adolphus is known as the father of modern warfare.
For the first time he planned and orchestrated mobile artillery or the cannons.
The 1631 Battle of Breitenfeld turned out to be the first major Protestants' victory of the Thirty Years War.
This battle alone led to the slaughter of 27,000 Christians;
Both sides fighting and killing for same Jesus, same Virgin Mary and the same Trinitical god.
In 1632, Swedish King Gustavus Adolphus was killed.
By 1635, the Swedish heroism ended and in 1635 Peace of Prague was signed.
If you think this is the end of the human stupidity, you are badly mistaken.
The last and the most bloody phase of the Thirty Years War was yet to come.
Stay tuned.
Good night mon ami.
4/9/2016
To school by proxy
4/9/2016
The last phase, the French phase of the Thirty Years War in contrast to previous three was totally political (in contrast to previous slaughterous religious wars).
France feared encircled and cornered after the continuous Hapsburg's success.
France in May 1635 declared war against Spain and against the Holy Roman Empire in 1636.
Sweden too joined it.
At this, nearly entire Europe was at its most messy and bloody war.
It was so disastrous and ruinous that all the major parties after 12 years of incessant madness decided to negotiate and end it.
The Peace of Westphalia was signed in 1648 ( these were a series of treaties).
So great was the devastation brought about by the war that the population in the German States went down by 25 to 35 percent.
Pestilence of several kinds raged due to massive civilian population, overcrowding among refugees and famine.
Even worse, a major outbreak of witch hunts started due to crop failures, famines and epidemics of diseases.
Burning people specially women on stakes, torturing them in dungeons whose walls were adorned with Biblical verses became routine.
But one great thing happened though after this carnage.
It finally dawned upon Europeans to let people pray as they wished and both Lutheranism and Calvinism were accepted.
Religion, from hence forth, would feature less and less in the future wars within Europe.
The Holy Roman Empire was greatly weakened so much so that Voltaire commented:
"Holy Roman Empire is henceforth neither holy, nor Roman nor an Empire".
Another important fact which is my favourite.
After the massive and brutal depopulation, the living standards of the survivors improved.
Now tell me, what does this bed-time story tell about us humans?
Stay tuned if you wish to be a thinking or a thoughtful ape.
Good night mon ami.
4/9/2016
The number of human apes who were killed and slaughtered in these 30 years numbered 8 million (some claim it to be as high as 10 million).
The population of Europe (excluding Russia and the Ottoman Empire) was roughly around 78 million.
That comes to the reduction of European population of slightly more than 10%.
Most find it hard to believe, but the current time we live in, despite how gloomy it appears to us, is the most peaceful time in human history.
Such is our plight.
[11:49 PM, 4/9/2016] Navin: In the end it is all about the Master's degree
4/10/2016
No nation in the world consumes like America does.
Americans worship the Great God Growth and are convinced that the production of consumer goods has no limits.
Even after Rachel Carson's landmark book "Silent Spring", the American Environmental movement did not address the consumption question.
In fact, it led to creation of fabulous natural parks, attempting to keep parts of nature untouched by civilization.
In fact, nature itself became another good to be consumed by the affluent society.
There is a perverse paradox among the nature lovers of America who drive hundreds or thousands of miles, using up scarce oil and polluting the atmosphere, to visit these national parks and sanctuaries.
Rather ironical to see such grossly anti-ecological means to marvel the beauty of forests, swamps, glaciers and mountains protected as specimens of "pristine" nature.
The birth of one child in America has the same impact on the global environment as the birth of, say, 80 to 90 children born in Indian slums.
A Bangladeshi made this case whenever he could, in the United Nations and elsewhere.
But, after a visit to an American supermarket, he was obliged to modify his argument.
Since then, his claim has been instead that the birth of an American dog or cat was the equivalent, ecologically speaking, of the birth of a dozen Bangladeshi children.
This is not to criticize America since I have myself had a taste of this extravaganza for a brief three year period;
And it was delicious.
Stay tuned please.
Good night mon ami.
4/11/2016
Another great pioneering Frenchman who was honoured in having a fundamental unit named after him is Charles-Augustin de Coulomb.
1 Coulomb or 1 C is the SI unit of electrical charge.
- 1 C is roughly equal to 6.242 X 10^18 electrons.
He too lived through the late 1700s, a period of tumultuous upheaval in France.
His greatest feat was the construction of a devise known as torsion balance or pendulum.
It is a remarkable devise when I read about it now and the experiment that he performed with charged metallic spheres in it even more so.
I will be sending you the picture of this remarkable devise; what is remarkable about it is its sensitivity to detect torsion produced on the thread due to interaction of spheres carrying very small charges.
Through the hole in the lid of the cylindrical glass case, he would introduce a sphere of no charge and then with various charges.
This sphere is shown in blue in the picture.
He would bring it close or touch it to the brass sphere (shown in yellow in the picture).
If these two spheres had the same charge, they would repel each other thereby inducing a twist in the torsion fibre.
The twist could be read from the scale on the cylindrical glass case.
After series of tedious and careful experiments with various charges for various distances, in 1785 he published a series of reports on electricity and magnetism.
On page 754 of the first report is the statement:
Two balls electrified with the same kind of electricity exert a repulsive force on each other which follows the inverse proportion of the square of the distance.
On page 579 of the second report is a statement:
Attractive forces between two oppositely charged spheres is proportional to the product of charges on the spheres.
You all know of this remarkable and classical experiment simply as the Coulomb's Law.
Do stay tuned my fellow cousin ape (we are all cousins, I mean ALL of us!)
Good night mon ami.
4/11/2016
Coulomb's torsional balance
4/12/2016
How to handle a hungry brat
4/12/2016
In 1800, when Alessandro Volta invented his voltaic pile and thereby the first battery, it inspired a Danish physicist and chemist to ask questions on the nature of electricity.
This Dane was Hans Christian Oersted.
Oersted developed his interest in science while working with his father who ran a pharmacy in a beautiful town of Rudkobing in the island of Langeland in Denmark.
The population today of Rudkobing is a mere 4500 or so (remember my obsession)!
His early education was mostly at home through self study.
It was on April 21 of 1820 while giving a lecture he noticed a compass needle deflected from magnetic north when an electric current from a battery was switched on and off.
Mind you, this was not a serendipity or a happenstance;
He had been looking for a relationship between electricity and magnetism for several years.
The eye sees only what the mind is prepared to comprehend.
He began more intensive research and came to the conclusion that as current flows through a wire, it produces a circular magnetic field.
He had for the first time connected electricity to magnetism and stirred this new field of electronics into action.
Oersted is also believed to be the first modern scientist to explicitly describe and use the term:
Gedankenexperiment or
Thought Experiment.
These are the men whose work has led to development of devices which you are currently holding in your hands to read my bed-time story.
Stay tuned to the voice of reason, logic, understanding and clear thinking.
Good night mon ami and my fellow cousin ape.
4/12/2016
Hah
Brilliant as always
4/13/2016
Something is always amiss when the brat calls up his father in office
4/13/2016
An ampere is one of the 7 basic set of SI units.
All the other SI units are derived from these 7.
The ampere is a unit of electric current, meaning the flow rate of electric charge.
So one ampere is equivalent to one Coulomb of charge (or 6.241 X 10^18 elementary charge) flowing in 1 second.
The great honour has been bestowed upon the French physicist and mathematician Andre-Marie Ampere.
Born in Lyon, France in 1775 to a wealthy businessman who was a huge fan of Jean-Jacques Rousseau and to his idea of education.
Rousseau believed that young boys should avoid formal schooling.
Ampere's father sincerely actualized this concept by letting his son educate himself in his well stocked library.
This was indeed what this prodigy needed.
By the age of 12, he began to teach himself advanced mathematics of the great Leonhard Euler and Daniel Bernoulli.
Being a polymath, science, history, travel and philosophy went along with mathematics.
At the age of 25 in 1999, he got his first job as a maths teacher.
Remember, his nation was undergoing violent revolution in those very years.
Inspired by the work of Oersted (notice how these great men inspired each other in succession like a nuclear chain reaction), late at the age of 45 he began to develop a mathematical and physical theory of understanding electricity and magnetism.
(Note again the word Theory;
So please stop saying this: "It is just a theory".)
Advancing on Oersted's experiments, he showed that two parallel wires carrying electrical currents attract or repel each other, depending on whether the currents flow in the same or opposite direction respectively.
More importantly, for the first time ever mathematics was being applied to the experimental findings.
Not to forget that the first love of Ampere was mathematics.
In 1827, at a senior age of 52, Ampere published his magnum opus:
"Memoir on the Mathematical Theory of Electrodynamic Phenomena, Uniquely Deduced from Experience."
Thus was created the new science of electrodynamics and foundation laid for the modern electrical science.
All this from a hairless ape who was not sent to school.
Stay tuned for the voice of enlightenment.
Good night mon ami and my fellow cousin ape.
4/14/2016
It doesn't always work
4/14/2016
Georg Simon Ohm was born in Brandenburg-Bayreuth in 1789, then a part of the Holy Roman Empire.
(Remember my bed-time stories on the 30 years war).
His father was a humble locksmith but had educated himself to a high level.
So much so that he gave both his sons excellent education.
(The family had 7 children out of which 4 died, reason being medical science was non existent. Only quackery which we know today as alternative medicine).
The locksmith brought his son Georg to a high standard of learning in mathematics, physics, chemistry and philosophy.
(This reminds me of my father who demonstrated the formation of hydrogen from diluted sulphuric acid and zinc granules in our basement lab.)
Ohm's first job was a teacher of mathematics in a very poor quality school.
Over there he wrote an elementary textbook on Geometry.
This helped him get a far better position at the Jesuit Gymnasium of Cologne in 1817.
The physics laboratory was well equipped where he began experimenting with the newly invented electrochemical cells, Galvanic cells and Voltaic Piles.
He was a prolific writer unlike me and in 1827 he published his famous book:
The Galvanic Circuit Investigated Mathematically.
In it he gave his complete theory of electricity.
Remember, electrons or the atomic structures were yet to be discovered and Ohm believed electric current occurred due to "contiguous particles."
It was in this book that he stated his famous law:
The electromotive force between the extremities of any circuit is the product of the strength of current and the resistance between them.
V = I.R
Very aptly, the SI derived unit of electrical resistance has been named after him.
Had he been alive today, it would have fascinated him to know that today the definition of Ohm is expressed from the quantum mechanical version of the Hall effect.
What is Hall effect?
That would be the topic of another bed-time story.
Stay tuned to the voice of reality.
Good night mon ami and my fellow great ape of the family Hominidae.
4/15/2016
Though most religions and tribal folklores have a vague concept of tree of life, it actually forms the organizing principle of the science of biology.
Again, most tribes and nomads believe that humans are part of nature, biology specially the field of phylogenetics proves that not only are humans are just another ape and cousins to chimpanzees, bonobos, gorillas and orangutans but we are distant cousins to any living organism currently present on planet earth.
This should shock you into either of the two form of cognitive dissonance or mental stress/discomfort:
First, the most common being complete denial of the fact to reclaim your internal consistency.
Secondly, to change your cognition, that is, changing your world view and marvel at our insignificance as it frees you from that excess baggage of ego and self importance.
In 1956, Leon Festinger came out with a book:
When Prophecy Fails.
In it, he describes with examples the most common method how the human mind deals with cognitive dissonance, that is, when human mind is confronted with information that is inconsistent with belief held.
One example was that of an orthodox Jewish group (you can substitute that for anyone of inflexible mind, including me) who believed that their highest ranking Rabbi was a Messiah (which i certemente am not).
When this Rabbi died of stroke, instead of accepting that he was a mortal hairless ape, they chose to believe that he would soon be resurrected from the dead.
Hmmm...sounds extremely familiar, doesn't it my dear fellow cousin ape?
Stay tuned to the voice of biology.
Good night mon ami.
4/16/2016
I am in a predicament as to where to place Gustav Robert Kirchhoff.
It seems to me that his experiments on spectroscopy most assuredly overshadows his work on electricity and electrical circuits.
Anyway...
He was born in Konigsberg, East Prussia in 1824.
Yes Sir, the same Konigsberg of the notorious unsolvable Konigsberg Bridges Problem proposed by the great Leonhard Euler in 1736.
At the age of 21, while still a student, he formulated the circuit laws much before Maxwell.
The first law is essentially the principle of conservation of charge and second the principle of conservation of energy (the most powerful principle in nature till date).
I think his greatest feat was the development of a highly systematic experimental procedure for the detailed examination of the spectra of chemical compounds.
Working with who is now a legendary chemist, Robert Bunsen on a spectroscope, he or they established the linkage between the chemical elements and their unique spectral patterns.
They were ignorant about the energy levels in atoms, but this work of theirs would go on to construct our understanding of atoms by the likes of Bohr and later on to open up the whole new bizarre world of quantum mechanics.
He coined the term "black body" radiation in 1862.
Imagine, this hairless ape who contributed so much to both our understanding of nature and to the progress of technology is a virtual unknown figure in today's population.
What chance do I stand?
Stay tuned to the knowledge of contributions of the greatest of ape minds.
Good night mon ami and my fellow cousin hairless ape.
4/16/2016
Look how parsimoniously KCL can be represented with integral equations
4/17/2016
Why ask in the first place
4/17/2016
Mathematicians are a strange breed of people, to put it very euphemistically.
They are acutely aware of their special innate gift of unique intelligence, yet they make little effort to gain popularity.
They hardly expect to be heard or written about, whatever may be their contribution.
They do not even expect other people to know what mathematics is, and are generally happy to be left alone.
But Alan Turing was not even allowed that much.
In fact, for more than two decades after his death, (June 7, 1954) very little was revealed to the nation about his decoding work at the Bletchley Park.
Forget this decoding.
The questions this brilliant mind was asking himself in 1930s when even the telephones were very primitive staggers the imagination!
Is a mind a complicated kind of abstract pattern that develops from vast network of neurons?
If so, could the neurons be replaced be substituted for something else, say ants, giving rise to ant colony which thinks as a whole and has an identity, that is to say, a self?
If the nerve cells be replaced with transistors would the resulting machine of artificial neural network give rise to a conscious mind?
In short, can thinking and feeling emerge from patterns of activity in different sorts of substrate - organic, electronic, or otherwise?
Could a machine communicate with humans on unlimited topics using human language?
Can we differentiate a genuinely conscious and intelligent mind from a cleverly constructed but hollow language using facade?
Could a machine take decisions?
Could a machine have beliefs?
Could a machine erroneously attribute free will to itself?
Could creativity arise or emerge from a set of fixed rules?
Could machines be attracted to each other, fall in love?
These are the sort of questions that burned in the brain of Alan Mathison Turing, the great British mathematician.
Atheist, homosexual, eccentric, marathon running genius of an ape who was finally redeemed on 25 May 2011.
On this day, Barack Obama addressing the parliament of the United Kingdom, singled out Newton, Darwin and Alan Turing as the greatest British contributors to science.
We are all apes but something sets apart the mathematical apes from the rest.
Stay tuned to the voice of thinking and questioning ape.
Good night mon ami.
4/17/2016
Compare the area of Bombay with any other major city in the world. A meagre 437 square kilometers.
4/18/2016
Slimy hideous octopus under the chair
4/18/2016
No matter how much criticisms I hear about America or what defects I may point towards it, I strongly consider America to be a model for the world.
In many respects if not most or all.
Within its borders America is far and away the most democratic of all countries that claim membership of the United Nations.
Over my three years of stay in States, I have often been stuck by the dignity of labour in America, by the ease with which high-ranking Americans carry their own loads, fix their own fences and mow their own lawns.
This, it seems to me, is part of a wider absence of class or caste distinctions that is unthinkable in Europe and India.
In the USA one can travel from the log cabin to the White House, as evident not just from Honest Abe in the 1800s but also from Dishonest Bill in the late 1900s.
Left-wing intellectuals have tended to downplay these American achievements - respect for the individual (this one I admire most about this great nation), the remarkable social mobility (like moving up from Baltimore, Maryland to Orange County, California), the searching scrutiny to which public officials and state agencies are subjected.
If America is evil, then all I can say is that within a national boundary, it is best of all the evils.
Stay tuned to this unpatriotic blasphemous infidel ape.
Good night mon ami including my fellow lucky ape who made it to the land of milk and honey.
It is important to emphasize though that apes are apes and they generally behave and think the same, no matter where they are.
Priority is survival, mate seeking and reproduction and then safety of the progeny.
4/19/2016
So far I have been speaking those remarkable hairless apes who transformed our understanding of nature and our own selves.
Tonight I shall speak on my own research on apoptosis which I had conducted between 2008 to 2010 in Dr. Kenney's lab.
It got accepted for publication a couple of days ago.
Dr. Kenney has been studying a disease called age related macular degeneration (AMD) that affects the central part of retina known as macula in geriatric group of humans.
The idea of the study at the cellular level was to closely see the affect of environmental toxins on the apoptosis cascade.
The retinal visual system primarily consist of three types of cells:
1. The ganglion cells whose long axons from the beautiful shiny nerve fibre layer of the retina and later the optic nerve.
2. The bipolar cells which join the ganglion cells and the photoreceptors.
It is believed that the visual processing of the image we "see" begins right here.
3. The photoreceptors rods and cones which all of us are taught in our class 10 biology.
All other cells in the retina are called glial cells whose primary function is to nourish and support these core visual processing cells.
My work was on Muller cells which is a specific type of glial cells.
So how do you study cell death?
A dying cell at its early throws of death sends out specific signals which we apes are able to assess with some very smart biotechnological assays or experiments.
My own work utilized 5 of such assays.
I will narrate more about it later.
What pleased me most after the paper got accepted was a remark from the reviewer:
"Very well written".
I am not a proud ape but I take immense pride in my writings as it could be the only thing close to talent which I may be possessing.
Stay tuned to the voice of not a very talented ape.
Good night mon ami and my fellow cousin ape.
4/20/2016
Dad with low ratings from a poll of one
4/20/2016
Johann Carl Friedrich Gauss is referred to as Princeps mathematicorum in Latin , meaning the foremost of mathematicians.
He was born in Brunswick, in 1777 then a part of the Holy Roman Empire to poor working class parents.
His mother was illiterate and never recorded his date of birth, only remembering that it was Wednesday, eight days before some feast of some Ascension (silly story of Jesus rising from dead).
Gauss being Gauss solved the puzzle of his birth date and along with it derived methods to compute the dates of all the Easters, of the past and that were to come in the future.
In one of my bed-time stories I devoted to an example of his genius as a child (hope u have not forgotten).
Here tonight, I wish to stress on his work on electricity.
In 1831, at the age of 54 (when we silly apes plan to retire), he started working with the physics professor Wilhelm Weber.
It was then that he established his famous law which describes the distribution of electric charge to the resulting electric field.
The net electric flux through any closed surface is equal to 1/epsilon times the net electric charge within that closed surface.
Epsilon being the permittivity of the material.
Now if you find it hard, don't worry.
At Yale, they devote an hour a lecture on this law alone and it may take a semester for the student apes to understand it.
This Gauss's law or the Gauss's flux theorem would later go on to become one of the four Maxwell's equations, the basis of the entire classical electrodynamics.
Gauss along with Weber constructed the first electromechanical telegraph in 1833 which is another fascinating tale by itself.
Remember, telegraph is merely a controlled transmission of electricity to various distances using some form of code.
I hope u are seeing how quickly things are snow balling from Cunaeus and Musschenbroek, Coulomb, Galvani, Volta, Oersted, Ohm and now to transmission of messages by an ageing mathematician, albeit the princeps mathematicorum.
These are the hairless apes that shaped the history only to be forgotten among the names of monarchs, kings, presidents and superstars who exploit their devises mostly to our detriment.
Good night mon ami and my fellow cousin ape.
4/21/2016
We all remember the class bully
4/21/2016
One can never write on electricity, magnetism, electromagnetism, electrochemistry, electromagnetic induction, electrolysis and modern electronics without invoking the name of perhaps the greatest experimental scientist ever; the one and only Michael Faraday.
He was born to a man who was a humble apprentice to a village blacksmith in 1791.
Furthermore, the England he was born in was worse than any third world country of today.
Napoleon was waging his crazy fanatical wars in Europe and had even planned to invade England in 1805.
The defeat in the Battle of Trafalgar (naval engagement) in 1805 ended his dreams of making English French.
The housing of the working class was appalling, not very different to our Bombay slums.
There were no building regulations and builders built as they pleased trying to cram as many houses as possible onto every piece of land.
The toilets were usually cesspits which were infrequently empties and sometimes overflowed.
The urine and sewage would seep into the ground into well from which people drank.
The poor were treated as harshly as possible to dissuade them from taking any help from the state.
The industrial revolution in the beginning brought much suffering and misery.
Children and women were made to work very long hours (12 hours a day or longer) in the newly built textile factories.
Trade unions were illegal and workers were not allowed to demand higher wages.
It would only be in the middle of 1800s that England would start building up its empire by conquering South Africa, Australia, New Zealand, Singapore, Burma (India was already conquered for exploitation by then).
In such a miserable country and to such a lowly family was Faraday born that he managed to get the most basic school education.
By and large he educated himself by becoming an apprentice to George Riebau, a bookseller and bookbinder in Blandford Street, London at a childish age of 14.
It was this bookbinder Riebau who had arranged, through one of his customers, for Faraday tickets to hear Humphrey Davy lecture on chemistry at the Royal Institution.
My dear fellow cousin apes, I urge you to cherish and nurture books, specially on science and mathematics, but also on literature, poetry and what not.
May be one of you will give rise to a Faraday in the remotest and the most parched village of the worst of the third world country.
Good night mon ami.
4/22/2016
Generally speaking (meaning exceptions aside), the greatest of the scientists and mathematicians are very poor Messiah of science and scientific method.
Take for example Newton.
A total reclusive devoted completely to his studies with very little or no cravings for social interactions.
As usual, people have diagnosed him with Asperger's.
I am very skeptical since I too have been diagnosed the same by a few.
His landmark book:
Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica
Is a series of definitions, axioms, description of his experiments;
Hardly a stuff to entice a lay person of late 1600s.
Take another example Darwin.
He had established and was certain that all species of life have descended over time from common ancestors.
By 1837 he had very well formulated his ideas but refrained from publishing his original and seminal work for two decades!!
Can you wonder why?
So as not to offend people and specially his wife, a diehard believer of a silly Adam and Eve story.
Hardly a person to inspire confidence into young minds to do science.
On the other hand, there exists and have existed eloquent and thrilling expositors of science like Carl Sagan, Isaac Asimov, Neil de Grass Tyson who dazzle young minds when they speak or write on science.
Yet these men have contributed little original or significant to our scientific knowledge.
Michael Faraday was a rare prodigy who straddled both these worlds with a remarkable and painless serenity.
From 1827 onwards, he started delivering his famous Christmas lectures at the Royal Institution in London for the general public.
The lectures were joyful, juvenile and demonstrative.
Faraday on his art of lecturing wrote:
"A flame should be lighted at the commencement and kept alive with unremitting splendour to the end."
I hope I can achieve a fraction of this for my friend through my bed-time stories.
Stay tuned to the voice of Faraday wannabe.
Good night mon ami and my fellow kin ape.
4/23/2016
In a perfect world, I would expect James Clerk Maxwell to be a household name.
I would expect a father to be talking to his children the far reaching affects the work of Maxwell head not only to the physical sciences but the world at large.
Maxwell was everything which Michael Faraday was not.
Born in 1831 to an advocate of comfortable means at 14 Indian Street, Edinburgh, Scotland he was a single son who received almost perfect education and devoted attention of his parents.
Moreover, he was born in England which was soon becoming a mighty colonial power gobbling away all the lands that came into its way.
By 1850s, the British Empire was the largest and richest empire in the world.
Interestingly, Ireland was the first serious attempt by the British Crown and Parliament to begin the process of colonization.
The colonies would become a source of cheapest labour ever for capitalism.
The slave trade was a very strong factor that made capitalism "work".
The colonies also provided resources for the capitalism and the same colonies provided a market for trade to flourish.
So convenient.
All these factors cemented the emergence of capitalism and Britain's preeminence as a world power.
Have u ever stopped to think why Capitalism has failed to show its charm in all over Central and South Americas, whole of Africa and East Europe and Russia, and of course our dear old South Asia?
South Asia which has cheap labour, lots of young men and yet...
The magic of capitalism fails to surface.
Always question what is taken for granted.
I am sorry I digressed from Maxwell.
But hell...
It is my story.
Let me tell it the way I want to.
Let me set the rules which is simply this:
"There are no rules."
Yet, in the end I wish to point at the irony that the criticism of capitalism is coming from an ape engaged in running a private eye shop setting his own rates to cure desperate people in misery.
Stay tuned to the voice of introspection.
Good night mon ami and my fellow cousin ape.
4/24/2016
In 1707 the Mughal empire was at its peak under the reign of Aurangzeb.
It included almost whole of current India, Pakistan, Bangladesh and parts of Afghanistan.
But by 1761, it had weakened considerably by the rise of the local powers who began to assert their independence.
What or who were these local powers?
Let me name them:
1. The province of Bengal under the governorship of Murshid Quli Khan from 1717.
2. The autonomous kingdom of Hyderabad founded in 1724 by Chin Qulich Khan.
3. The third state which freed itself from the shackles of the crumbling Mughal empire was the state of Awadh (current Uttar Pradesh and Haryana) under the governorship of Saadat Khan.
4. The Marathas were rebelling against the Mughals and was initially founded as a small kingdom by Shivaji in early 1700s.
5. The Sikhs under the 10th guru, Guru Gobind Singh in 1699 transformed themselves into a military organization by establishing the brotherhood of Khalsa.
(Guru Nanak started Sikhism in 1480s when Babur was founding the Mughal empire).
6. The Jat kingdom of Bharatpur in the Delhi-Mathura region under Suraj Mal. (The Jat state collapsed in 1763).
7. The Afghan state (small one) founded by Ali Muhammad Khan in Rohilkand near the Himalayas.
(The Afghans operated as fluid ethnic group of mercenary soldiers in the military labor market of North India).
8. The principality of Rajput kingdoms around Marwar under Raj Singh
9. The principality of Mysore or Travancore under Hyder Ali in 1761 and later his son Tipu Sultan.
So the Indian subcontinent in mid or late 1700s was a hodge podge of working Mughal empire along with political powers dispersed all over.
Was this not the perfect stage for all the European powers like Dutch, Portuguese, French and British already butchering and slaughtering each other to look for resources outside their tiny countries.
And they had guns and steel and thanks to men like Cunaeus and Musschenbroek, Coulomb, Ampere, Galvani, Volta, Oersted, Ohm and many more, they were on their way to developing powerful technologies.
Our fates were sealed.
(Though it terrifies me even more to think or imagine if the British had not come and these 9 powers were battling it out by themselves).
Do u see how so many thousands of chance events have went on to lead to our being here.
Chance events rule our lives and we silly apes find it extremely hard to digest it;
or in order to digest it we create gods to give ourselves false comfort that we have some control over our lives.
Stay tuned to the voice which explores history in an enchanting manner.
Good night mon ami and my fellow helpless cousin apes.
4/25/2016
Misdirected advice
4/25/2016
James Clerk Maxwell was fascinated with geometry at an early age.
At the age of 13, he won his school's (prestigious Edinburgh Academy) mathematical medal.
He wrote his first scientific paper at the age of 14.
(Mine first came at a suspended age of 37).
In it he described the mechanical means of drawing mathematical curves with a piece of twine, and the properties of ellipses, Cartesian ovals and other curves.
(A whole story could be done on the subject of Cartesian ovals.
Just to interest an ophthalmologist, Cartesian ovals are used in lens designing).
His paper "Oval curves" was presented to the Royal Society of Edinburgh by his professor James Forbes as Maxwell was deemed too young to present it by himself.
Maxwell was extremely fortunate in that his mother recognized the potential of her son and both his parents took over in educating this brilliant mind at home.
At the age of 16 in 1847 Maxwell joined the University of Edinburgh.
After the classes he would immerse himself in private study.
He would experiment with chemical, magnetic and electric apparatuses, focussing primarily on the properties of polarized light.
At the age of 18, Maxwell came out with two papers that were presented at the Transactions of the Royal Society of Edinburgh.
One was on the equilibrium of elastic solids. In this process he discovered photoelasticity (another top for bed-time story).
The other paper was "Rolling Curves".
Once again he was considered too young to stand at the rostrum and present it himself.
His tutor delivered it for him.
The most amazing about Maxwell was that his country or his society was backing his each and every contribution.
Most other societies at that time were not favourable for accommodating or nourishing such great minds.
No wonder the greatest of the great from India like C.V. Raman, Chandrashekhar, Ramanujan to name a few, had to leave India.
I am sorry to say, but the trend continues till this date where even today original thinking and creativity can easily be crushed and remain unrewarded and unappreciated in our society.
Specially if it concerns fundamental research like mathematics and basic sciences.
Stay tuned to the voice on greatest of minds that have arisen from the family of Hominidae or the great apes.
Good night mon ami and my fellow cousin ape.
4/25/2016
Souless is priceless.
Time to turn in.
With Alan Turing.
4/26/2016
No match
4/26/2016
In 1860 at the age of 29, the young Scotsman eventually moved to King's College in London.
Between 1861 and 1862 Maxwell published a paper in four parts titled:
On Physical Lines of Force.
Pretty ordinary name I dare say.
In it, he proposed a generalized model of Faraday's experiments.
(He would meet Faraday at the Royal Institution Lectures.
Faraday was 40 years his senior.)
He showed through 20 differential equations using 20 variables how electricity and magnetism could be or are related.
It was another forgotten brilliant mind Oliver Heaviside who reduced these 20 differential equations to just 4 using just 4 variables:
B magnetic flux
E electrical field
J electric current density (current per unit area)
Rho Charge density (charge per unit length or surface area or volume)
Maxwell had expressed his 20 equations in the algebra of quaternions.
Oliver Heaviside however presented these equations (beside reducing them to 4) in modern vector format using the nabla operator devised by William Rowan Hamilton.
Maxwell used a concept called "sea of molecular vortices" thus implying a medium in which there occurs transverse undulations of electric and magnetic phenomena.
Maxwell was in fact making an analogy of electric and magnetic phenomena with sound.
As you can see, if you scrutinize the paper deeply, there were some things which he got wrong.
But it was what he got right changed the way we perceived reality for ever.
He was predicting an oscillating electromagnetic wave.
He was predicting its speed.
And the speed of these waves was approximately the same as that of the light!
In one of his lectures at King's college he commented:
"We can scarcely avoid the conclusion that light consist of transverse undulations of the same medium which is the cause of electric and magnetic phenomena".
That, mon ami, was history being made.
This paper ranks along with outstanding and landmark papers in science like Einstein's Annus Mirabilis (extraordinary year) papers and Newton's Principia Mathematica.
These men are the few on whose shoulders we can sit and claim that we have risen higher than our fellow cousin apes.
Rest of us live just as other great apes do.
Eat, breed and die.
Good night mon ami and my fellow humble ape.
4/27/2016
Maxwell had used a very strange mathematics in his original 20 equations in his 4 part papers of 1861-62.
This mathematics is called the quaternions.
Now quaternions are a number system very different from what we have been taught.
This unique system of mathematics has been devised by an Irishman William Rowan Hamilton who was born in the filthy and primitive Dublin of 1805 (few years after Faraday).
Now just look how a mathematician ape thinks.
This ape was wondering how to represent complex numbers in a three dimensional plane.
Isn't it crazy?
How would attacking this problem help him acquire wealth and power to seduce a female ape and breed?
Yet, this is what mathematicians are.
And in a poor overpopulated society, they are a burden with no utility value.
Yet, the Trinity college at Dublin had developed enough to support and fund such a mind (to feed him, house him and enable him to breed).
But what are complex numbers?
A complex number is any number that can be expressed in the form:
a + bi where
a and b are the real numbers and I is the imaginary unit that satisfies the equation:
i^2 = - 1
To represent a complex number on a three dimensional plane was done.
He actually failed in this mission.
However, in working with four dimensions he created the quaternions.
It was on the 16th of October 1843 as he was walking on the stony Brougham bridge in Dublin that in a flash of genius he discovered the fundamental formula for quaternion multiplication
i^2 = j^2 = k^2 = ijk = - 1
Hamilton promptly carved this equation using a penknife into the side of this bridge.
Today the carving has been eroded by the elements of weather and time.
But a plaque on the underside of this bridge still stands to mark that spark of intuitive genius.
Stay tuned to the voice of fascinating numbers which have been dulled and sullied by rote education.
Good night mon ami and my fellow ape.
4/28/2016
Heinrich Hertz was born in 1857 which was now the German Confederation.
These were loose association of 39 German speaking countries trying to forge out from the already weakened Roman Catholic Empire.
He was a very bright boy who took a strong liking towards sciences and languages.
At the age of 29 in the year 1879 he began to pursue his PhD from the University of Berlin under the great Hermann Von Helmholtz.
(Helmholtz has made great contributions to my own field of ophthalmology, optics and visual science).
Helmholtz suggested that Hertz should do a doctoral dissertation on testing Maxwell's theory of electromagnetism.
If you have been reading my bed-time stories scrupulously, you would know that Maxwell's papers were largely theoretical.
In fact, Maxwell was largely converting Faraday's experimental data into mathematical equations.
Yet, from those equations, he was coming to earth shattering conclusions and making testable predictions.
This, mon ami, you must realize is what makes scientific truth so special.
Let not post modern cultural relativists fool you into believing that there can be multiple cultural or religious versions of truth.
Once again I digress... But at times it is essential.
Helmholtz meanwhile being a scientific pezzonovante had proposed the Berlin Prize problem that year at the Prussian Academy of Sciences, Berlin (today it houses the Berlin State Library).
This award would be bestowed to anyone who could experimentally prove an electromagnetic effect in the polarization and depolarization of insulators, something predicted by Maxwell's theory.
Helmholtz in fact wanted Hertz to win the prize.
But Hertz did not know how to build an apparatus that would enable him to perform this experiment.
He gave this problem a rest and instead began to work on electromagnetic induction.
Let us take a break now mon ami as did Hertz.
Stay tuned to the voice of great experiments.
Good night mon ami and my fellow experimental ape.
(Yes, we all learn our way through this big bad world by trial and error).
And trust me on this one;
This is one hell of a bad world if not hell itself.
4/28/2016
Hah
Good one
4/29/2016
The protector in the closet
4/29/2016
Ever since Faraday had discovered the induction, several induction coils came into play.
The induction coil is a type of electrical transformer used to produce high voltage pulse from a low voltage DC.
We had left last night with Hertz getting stuck.
In 1886 while experimenting with with a pair of Reiss spirals (spirally wound conductors with metal balls at their ends) he noticed that discharging a Leyden jar into one of these coils would produce a spark in the other coil.
This was the spark he needed to set up the apparatus required to clinch the Berlin prize of Helmholtz.
He set up this induction coil that would be the generator of his electromagnetic waves.
Then he constructed a receiver which was a near circular metallic ring, their ends separated by a few millimeters.
This would be the world's first half wave dipole antenna.
His assistant switched on the transmitter or the induction coil.
Hertz himself holding the circular metallic ring edged closer towards the receiver observing carefully the separated ends under a magnifying lens.
The room was kept dark.
At a distance of about 2 meters, sparks began to jump across the gap between the ends of the receiver's conductors.
And Hertz knew exactly why this was happening.
His first half wave dipole antenna was receiving power from a radio or an electromagnetic wave.
How the power in the antenna is generated by an electromagnetic wave is a whole new topic for bed-time story.
When Hertz reported this Helmholtz, the reply was:
Bravo!
4/29/2016
Between 1886 and 1889 between the age of 29 to 32, Hertz would go on to conduct a series of experiments.
He wrote to his father:
"I an working like a factory hand repeating my every step a thousand times over.
I spend hours on end drilling one hole after another."
This meticulous and voluminous scientist never even remotely understand the significance of his work.
This is what he had to say on his radio wave experiments:
"It is of no use whatsoever [...] this is just an experiment that proves Maestro Maxwell was right.
We have these mysterious electromagnetic waves that we cannot see with the naked eye. But they are there."
Asked about the ramifications of his discoveries, Hertz replied,:
"Nothing, I guess."
Sometimes the greatest of the great apes are too humble to see the significance of what they did.
Stay tuned to this awesome frequency of discovery and reeducation.
Good night mon ami and my fellow cousin ape.
4/29/2016
Must be a pun I guess
Though not certemente
4/30/2016
Some animals don't have to go to school
4/30/2016
When an electric current passes through a conductor, heat is generated.
The heat (H) generated is proportional to the square of the current I.
H ~ I^2 . R. t
R is the resistance
t is time
This awesome relationship was discovered independently by two great men:
Heinrich Lenz - a Russian of Baltic German ethnicity born in 1804 in Estonia which was then under the Russian Empire.
and
James Prescott Joule - an Englishman born in the United Kingdom of 1818 which was on its way to becoming a powerful colonial power.
Just to let you know, the Russian Empire has been one of the largest empires in the world history, stretching over three continents.
In terms of landmass, it has only been surpassed by the British and Mongol empires.
Yet, like India today, the Russian empire was predominantly a rural society (80% Russians were peasants) spread over vast spaces.
The empire, just like today's Russia, was in a continuous state of financial crisis.
While revenues rose, the expenses always grew more rapidly.
(This reminds me of today's America and India whose both central and state governments are forever in debt.
Debt from or to whom?
To the future.
So any child born in America or India is born with a debt on his or her shoulders... Along with scarcity of water, space, jobs, seats in good colleges and resources in general).
The empire was spending excessively on its large and glorious army, super large and complex bureaucracy and a splendid court to rival Paris and London.
The empire was living far beyond its means while the United Kingdom kept on scavenging for territories and resources around the world.
Again I digress.
But digressing is a luxury I have since I am not educating for exams, college seats and entrance exams which is a tyranny in the name of education.
Stay tuned to the voice of learning from history.
The lesson that men will always screw up.
Good night mon ami and my fellow apes who live within their means.
5/1/2016
Ask an eye doctor what is the normal pupillary diameter, and they will rush to scream out 2 mm (photopic) to 4 mm (mesopic).
But ask him the question:
"What is the cause of blurry vision in a dilated pupil?" and you will see head scratching and eyes looking skyward.
The fact is that our eyes are a highly flawed spherocylindrical optical devises that instead of generating a sharp focal point generate a conoid of Sturm.
The propagation of light in biological optics is often studied using the principal of wavefronts (besides ray diagrams).
These wavefronts are obtained using both Maxwell's equations and Huygens principal (a full topic for a bed-time story).
When light passes through our pupils and lens, the wavefronts generated are full of lower order and higher order aberrations.
The lower order aberrations include the common refractive errors like myopia, hyperopia and astigmatism which are nearly universal in us apes.
The higher order aberrations are much subtle and are calculated using the mathematics of Zernicke polynomials (a whole topic for a bed-time story series).
Besides these, there are some specific aberrations that are caused by the fundamental properties of light or in fact, any electromagnetic wave as demonstrated and proved by the brilliant Heinrich Hertz.
They are:
1. Spherical aberration in which light from the periphery of a biconvex lens comes to focus before the central rays.
2. Chromatic aberration in which light of different colours or wavelength comes to focus at different points.
3. Diffraction (as shown by Young and a whole new topic you know for what...) which is bending of light or any electromagnetic wave at edges.
So armed with knowledge, let me pose another question:
Why did the nature select our pupil size to be in the range of 2 to 4 mm?
Let me give you a hint.
Nothing in biology makes sense unless except in the light of evolution. (Theodosius Dobzhansky).
I shall probably answer it soon but the point is to make you think.
Stay tuned to the voice of evolutionary biology and optics.
Good night mon ami and my fellow evolved cousin ape.
5/1/2016
Just a small correction.
Theodosius Dobzhansky's exact words were:
Nothing in biology makes sense except in the light of evolution.
5/2/2016
Optically speaking, pupil is the eye's aperture and iris is the aperture stop.
Nearly all animals with eyes have evolved pupil, though of varying shapes depending on the type of evolutionary pressures their environment and life style demands.
Pupil besides regulating the light quantum entering the eye is a powerful tool of minimizing the optical aberrations, specially the higher order aberrations (HOA) like spherical aberration.
As the pupil dilates, more and more of the rays coming from the peripheral lens come into play.
This shifts the focus forward as the rays refract far more from periphery than in the center.
Myopia is nothing but focusing of rays from the lens in front of the macula (of retina).
What makes the pupil size even more critical is that the spherical aberration increases as the fourth power of the pupillary diameter.
So doubling of pupil size even from 2 to 4 mm increases spherical aberration 16 times.
You can imagine the havoc in the visual acuity caused by our iatrogenic pharmacological dilation.
But what happens when pupil becomes small or smaller?
That should be good right?
You would expect greater depth of focus as in a camera (meaning more objects lying at various distances from eye staying in focus).
True. It happens.
But this gain is offset by diffraction which sets in as soon as the pupil slit size becomes comparable to the wavelengths of light.
In fact, all optical systems including the eye have a fundamental limitation to their resolving power due to diffraction.
(This limit is given by
d = lambda/2n sin theta)
This a complete topic by itself.
So nature has found this golden mean.
Of course you do realize that when I say nature had "found" or "selected" or "chosen", it is just me anthropomorphising nature.
Nature is indifferent to our living or dying, least of all well being.
So, in the African savannahs, those apes which had the pupil sizes of 2 to 4 mm statistically survived, mated and bred better than those with outlying pupil sizes.
Stay tuned.
Time to hit the bed mon ami and give my evolved retina some rest.
5/2/2016
This is by far the best repartee!
Most impressive
5/3/2016
A sweet little boy looking for a special Valentine bouquet
5/3/2016
The greatest fundamental breakthroughs in the world of electronics happened in primitive Europe which was constantly involved in warfare.
Later the reign of progress was taken over by the United Kingdom with astonishing discoveries.
Remember, always remember, that these advancements were made by a handful few; the masses on the other hand were involved solely in eating, mating, breeding.
Now the engine of progress would shift further west across the Atlantic.
In 1750s, the United States or the North America (there was no US, Canada or Mexico then), was essentially a colony of three European powers France, Great Britain and Spain.
When the Europeans first came to the Americas in 1600s, they brought in horses, cattle and hogs.
Also came with them the germs of small pox and measles to which the Native Americans had no immunity.
The germs did for Europeans what normally guns and steel do - wipe out the whole of native population paving way for the settlement of white man.
But even as the white men settled along the east coast, often known as New England, they began to exploit each other.
They were the colonies of Britain just like India and again provided the empire with tremendous resources to boost capitalism (This is generally how capitalism works. Its unseen cost is never spoken or explained).
So in 1775, the Thirteen Colonies on the east coast of North America rebelled against the British rule.
Unlike our peaceful Gandhi, American Revolutionary war or the war of Independence was a protracted world war of 8 long years from 1775 to 1783.
France, Spain, Netherlands and the Kingdom of Mysore in India became allies of the United States of America which the Thirteen Colonies began to call themselves.
Great Britain had German auxiliaries and some Native allies.
This world war claimed over 120,000 lives over 8 years 4 months and 15 days.
So it was in 1783 that a nation was forged which would take the science of electronics to unprecedented heights.
Remember my fellow apes, no one will serve you your rights and dignity on a platter.
You will have to battle it out and earn it in ways more than one.
Stay tuned to the voice of dignity and earned respect.
Good night mon ami and my fellow cousin ape.
5/4/2016
Interestingly enough, commercial telegraph happened to be launched nearly simultaneously both in England and the United States, a newly born nation.
In the year 1837, William Cooke and Charles Wheatstone patented a telegraph system which used a number of needles on board.
These needles could point to letters of the alphabet.
By the way, Sir Charles Wheatstone is popularly known to all of us through his Wheatstone bridge, a devise used to measure an unknown electric resistance.
In the United States, it was Samuel Morse who had independently developed and patented an electrical telegraph in the same year of 1837.
With the invention of telegraph arose the need for codes and encryption.
Let me briefly tell you what these terms mean:
1. Encoding is done to transform data so that it can be properly and
safely consumed by a different type of system.
Example: Binary data being sent over an email.
The goal is not secrecy.
2. Encryption is the transformation of data to keep it secret.
It uses a key which is kept secret.
3. Hashing is done to preserve the integrity of data.
Its characteristics are:
Same input should always produce same output.
Multiple disparate inputs does not produce same output.
4. Obfuscation is transforming a data to make it harder to understand or to be replicated or to be reverse engineered.
The sophistication and cat and mouse game will only get tougher.
Stay tuned to the voice of decoding the nature of reality.
Good night mon ami and my fellow genetically coded apes.
5/5/2016
Little do we eye doctors realize how strongly we are dependent on complicated mathematics (it may well be that the term simple mathematics is an oxymoron) and the works of mathematicians for our income and livelihood.
One of them is a very little known man by the name Philipp Ludwig von Seidel, born in the German empire in 1896.
You would recall this from my bed-time stories that this was a brief interlude phase after the dissolution of the Holy Roman Empire in 1806 and the German November Revolution of 1918 with the creation of Weimar Republic or the German Reich.
Seidel as a mathematician is known for his work in uniform convergence.
It was based on a proof published by Cauchy that a convergent sum of continuous functions is always continuous.
The proof turned out to be incorrect though the topic became of immense interest for the leading mathematicians since then.
More important for me as a eye doctor, Seidel decomposed the first order monochromatic aberrations into 5:
1. Spherical aberration: difference in focal lengths between paraxial rays and marginal rays emerging after refracting from lens.
2. Coma:
A defect by which points appear as comet-like asymmetrical patches.
Its magnitude is again determined mathematically using the optical sine theorem.
3. Astigmatism:
Wherein the image of a point forms focal lines at the sagittal and tangential foci.
4. Curvature of a field:
Which arises when the image instead of lying on a flat plane falls on a curved surface.
Example images falling on our retinas.
5. Distortion:
Which can be barrel or pincushion type.
These are the five Seidel aberrations based on series expansions (more mathematics) which plague the workings of every optical devise including the eyes of apes and non apes.
This is a fascinating topic and I have to keep coming back to it.
Stay tuned to the voice of least distortion.
Good night mon ami and my fellow cousin ape.
5/6/2016
Frits Zernike was born in the Amsterdam, Netherlands of 1888 to Carl and Antje, both teachers of mathematics.
His father though a teacher of mathematics had a strong passion for physics which he infected his son with (religion too works in the same way).
The tiny European nations of 1880s were surging ahead with imperialism.
I believe it was a natural outcome of industrialization and capitalism and thereby the default need for resources, cheap labour and markets.
(Though imperialism is as old as humanity itself.
We can safely be called the imperialistic apes).
Zernike studied chemistry (his major), mathematics and physics at the University of Amsterdam.
By the age of 32 he had become a full professor of theoretical physics at the University of Groningen which ranks 75 in the world today.
(Number one being Harvard).
His main interest was physical optics on topics like spectral lines, diffraction, aberrations of optical imaging systems and coherence.
For reasons unknown to me, he was also working on pure mathematics on a subject called polynomials.
We have all solved polynomial equations which involve variables and coefficients like:
x^2 - 4x + 7 or
x^3 = 27
and drawn graphs for polynomial functions like
The graph for the function
f(x) = 0
is the x axis
Zernike worked on polynomials that were orthogonal on a unit disc (disc around point P where the set of points from P is less than 1).
Quite remarkably, this abstract mathematics of orthogonal polynomials on a unit disc seemed to describe the wavefront data of optical systems quite well (much better than Seidel's representation).
Since the 1960s, Zernike's polynomials are widely used in optical design, optical metrology and image analysis.
Of course, as an eye doctor we are not required to know the mathematics or even basic polynomials except for passing exams, I will give a brief picture of how Zernike represented the optical aberrations through his orthogonal polynomials on unit disc.
Stay tuned to the voice of polynomials.
Good night mon ami and my fellow ape who has risen to do mathematics higher than addition.
5/6/2016
Dobroi nochi veliki vrach!
5/6/2016
Zernike's orthogonal polynomials
5/7/2016
The class bully for a friend
5/7/2016
One of the big leaps in the world of electronics after telegraphy was the invention of the vacuum tubes.
If telegraphy was the control of electromagnetic waves by the upright ape, vacuum tube would be the control of electric current itself.
One oddity of this vacuum tube or the electron tube is its discovery preceded the detection of electron itself.
Quite a few people contributed to the origination of this revolutionary devise.
John Ambrose Fleming
William Crookes
Nikola Tesla
Thomas Edison
Eugen Goldstein
Johann Wilhelm Hittorf
to name a few.
They all worked on it in 1860s and 1870s, an era of inventions upon inventions, seminal discoveries after discoveries.
A vacuum tube is based on a phenomenon called thermionic emission.
In 1873, Frederick Guthrie, a scientific writer noticed that a red hot negatively charged iron sphere would loose its charge as if somehow discharging it into thin air.
This did not happen if the sphere had a positive charge.
Thomas Edison in 1880 while working with his lamp filaments and bulbs discovered that if he added a positively charged filament and heated another filament by an external power source, he could get a significant current.
The more he heated the negatively charged filament, the more the current.
Like a true American, he filed a patent for this voltage regulating device without even knowing why it behaved so.
The US patent 307,031 was given to this device on November 15, 1883 and it would be the first US patent for an electronic devise.
The Thirteen Colonies that on July 4, 1776 had declared themselves to be the sovereign nation of the United States of America was now really coming of age.
This vacuum tube is a fascinating topic as it offered multiple ways to manipulate an electric current and more has to written on it.
Stay tuned to the voice of a bright lamp.
Good night mon ami and my fellow ape who controls electric current every day of his life.
5/8/2016
So what exactly is a vacuum tube?
Well, the simplest tube is a glass tube from which air has been sucked out.
One one end is a heating filament which on getting heated up electrically from external source starts emitting electron.
This is due to thermionic emission as discovered by Edison but who himself had no good explanation then.
On the opposite is a plate which is maintained at a positive charge once again by an external source.
So u see, to operate a vacuum tube you need 2 power sources.
When it operates, the electron discharged from the heated filament starts to flow towards the positive charged plate.
This simple vacuum tube is called a diode as it has just 2 elements.
This simple device can convert an alternating current to a direct current and hence as a rectifier (you can watch on YouTube how simple it is).
This simplest vacuum tube or the diode was patented by John Ambrose Fleming in 1904.
If you add a grid between these two elements, you get a triode.
Now, if this grid in between will have a positive charge, it would attract more electrons and hence triode can be used an amplifier of electric currents.
Fitting in 2 grids would result in tetrodes and 3 grids in pentodes capable of more sophisticated manipulation of currents.
But keeping the vacuum inside the glass bulb was paramount.
Why so?
Well...
Gases (other than inert) would get ionized due to electrons bombardment would in turn affect or rather disrupt this linear unidirectional flow of electrons.
Now just imagine, with this simple devise in your hand, could you ever have thought of building a computer?
Forget computer.
Even a machine capable of making logical decisions?
But what is logic?
What is computer?
Who did thought of it?
Could a homosexual atheist who was NOT god fearing have thought or conceived of such a machine?
Behind this simple vacuum tube lies a story exciting and fascinating and tragic that must be to narrated very carefully and delicately mon ami.
By the way, thanks to my very best mom ami, I have seen with my very own eyes this wonderful history of computing who actually was gracious enough to have walked and talked this average ape through all the exhibits at Mountain View, California.
As you can see, it was not in vain.
Stay tuned to the voice of Pan narrans, the storytelling chimpanzee.
Good night mon ami and my fellow cousin ape.
5/9/2016
Nobody has described love better than our learned Hobbes
5/9/2016
Thomas Flowers also known as Tommy was born in December of 1905 to a bricklayer (meaning nobody).
While undertaking an apprenticeship in mechanical engineering, he took evening classes at the University of London in electrical engineering.
In 1904 the phones were connected by manual switchboard exchanges.
Manual means humans particularly young women stuffing the plugs in and out on the switchboard connecting one speaker to another.
It was Tommy who explored the use of electronics for telephone exchanges and by 1939 was convinced that an all-electronic system was possible.
It was also being realized that these vacuum tubes can be used as switches and thus making electronic computing possible.
Then came the dreaded world war 2 with Hitler unleashing his highly efficient and ruthless Wehrmacht all over the Europe, Soviet Union and Britain.
This Wehrmacht was communicating and coordinating among themselves using Lorenz SZ cipher machines that were developed by an electrical and electronics firm called C. Lorenz AG.
Flowers first contact with the wartime codebreaking effort came in February 1941 when his director was asked for help by Alan Turing who was then working at the government's Bletchley Park 50 miles north west of London in Buckinghamshire.
Flowers was convinced that he could build an electronic system using these same humble vacuum tubes and a paper tape.
This colossal idea turned out to be the Colossus, the first programmable electronic digital computer.
In fact, Colossus was not one but a series of computers that were built between 1943-45 by the British codebreakers.
All this from a son of a bricklayer who pursued his degree of electrical engineering in the evening classes.
This is a ape who fills me both with pride and humility at the same time.
Stay tuned to the voice of Pans narrans, the story telling chimpanzee.
Chimpanzees have been classified under the genus Pan just like humans have been put under the genus Homo.
Both come under the same family Hominidae.
I disagree.
We both should have shared the same genus as well.
Good night mon ami and my fellow 24-hour computer holding ape.
5/10/2016
We saw Tommy Flowers build a computing machine with vacuum tubes or the diodes.
But what did he exactly build?
What did these vacuum tubes do?
At the very heart of the theory of computing or the computer science lies logic.
Yes, mathematical logic and more.
(something I strongly intuit that is lacking in the brain of human apes).
The two men who lie at the core of the devices that you are holding are:
1. Alonzo Church an American mathematician and logician born in 1903 in Washington D.C.
2. Alan Turing an English mathematician, logician and a theoretical biologist born in London in 1912.
Both of them were strongly and deeply interested in the work of Kurt Gödel (he and Einstein became good friends at the Institute for Advanced Study {IAS} at Princeton).
Thus you see mon ami, at the heart of the devices that you hold is electronics.
But still deeper to electronics lie the mathematics of men like Kurt Gödel that shook the very edifice on mathematics stood in early 1900s.
Just at the age of 25, Gödel published his two incompleteness theorems.
In these papers he proved that for any logical system powerful enough to characterize arithmetic will contain statements that can neither be proven true not false within that system.
This can be supposed to be Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle of mathematics.
It set a fundamental limitations on what mathematics can prove or how rigorous it can be.
It also has direct application to theoretical issues relating to the feasibility of proving the completeness and correctness of software.
I shall slow down as this is heady stuff.
It is actually a shocker to anybody who cares even a teeny weeny bit on the logical foundations of mathematics.
The term Q.E.D. or quod erat demonstrandum (which is what had to be proven) just got a bit more elusive.
Stay tuned to the voice of Pan narrans, the storytelling chimpanzee.
Good night mon ami and my fellow story listening ape.
5/10/2016
Hah
5/11/2016
Coming home to a hungry tiger
"How can dead dumb vacuum tubes achieve logic when millions of neurons in a brain generally do not?"
Well...
It once again boils down to arithmetics, algebra and a man born to a shoemaker in 1815.
His name is George Boole.
A self taught man, by the age of 16 he was the breadwinner for his parents and three younger siblings (makes me crawl under ground) by teaching at a high school in Doncaster in South Yorkshire, England.
By the age of 19 he had established his own school (What a guy!) in those dark ages.
He started studying algebra on his own.
In 1854 at the age of 39 he published a monograph titled:
"An investigation of the Laws of Thought on which are founded the Mathematical Theories of Logic and Probabilities."
This manuscript contained the starting elements of algebraic logic though it is very different from the modern Boolean algebra.
Yet, for the first time in human history, he was giving a mathematical foundation to logic.
Boole had reduced the 4 propositional forms of Aristotle's logic to formulas in the form of equations.
His work yet in the abstract setting was worked upon by men like Jevons, Schroeder, Huntington etc until the modern conception was achieved.
It was Claude Shannon, an American who as a 21 year old M.S. student at MIT in 1937 wrote his thesis showing that electrical circuits could be made to perform the logic of Boolean algebra.
By the way, Alan Turing met Shannon in 1943 when he was posted to Washington.
Turing showed him his 1936 paper that defined what we now call the Universal Turing machine.
Shannon was very impressed.
It would not have impressed an average mind like mine at the time when the entire humanity was bent on killing each other on all the continents.
In the Indian subcontinent then, two groups of apes same in all respects were butchering each other for the sake of some crazy belief in some crazy gods.
Stay tuned to the voice of Pan narrans, the chimpanzee who will put things in their proper perspective to demonstrate both our greatness and stupidity.
Good night mon ami and my fellow cousin ape who operates Boolean function and logic gates everyday in total ignorance.
5/11/2016
Just briefly on Aristotelian logic.
All propositions consists of 2 terms.
Propositions are of 4 types:
1. A-type
Universal and affirmative
(All doctors are good surgeons)
2. I-type
Particular and affirmative
(Some doctors are good surgeons).
3. E-type
Universal and negative
(All doctors are bad surgeons).
4. O-type
Particular and negative
(Some doctors are bad surgeons).
5/11/2016
Good night noble syllologist, there shall only be 10 kinds of people those who understand logic and those who don't
5/12/2016
Driving with a demon
Is there a mechanical procedure for separating mathematical truths from mathematical falsehoods?
This innocuous sounding question was a challenge posed by the mathematician David Hilbert in 1928.
It is also famously known as the 'decision problem' or the Entscheidungsproblem.
In other words, is there an algorithm that takes as input a statement of first-order logic (which by itself needs a lot of explaining and thinking) and can answer "yes" or "no" whether that statement is universally valid?
Kurt Gödel had first worked on it creating his recursive functions.
Church and Turing independently came to the conclusion that a function of natural numbers is lambda computable (as defined by Church) if and only if it is Turing computable (on a Turing machine) if and only if it is general recursive.
This is a very very very powerful statement which till this day is a area of intense study and scrutiny by men in different theoretical fields.
Doctors of course would be least interested.
Nurses would throw this thesis into garbage as rubbish.
Stay tuned to the voice of Pan narrans, narrator of rubbish and useless stuff.
Good night mon ami and my fellow cousin ape.
5/12/2016
Computer science department of Princeton 1930s
5/12/2016
Yes yes
Have read this effect several times
Though keep forgetting these eponymous names
5/13/2016
If Albert Einstein became the poster boy of a genius in theoretical physics, it was John von Neumann (pronounced as Noiman) who represented the genius in computer science in 1930s and 1940s.
He could be thought of as the Hungarian Ramanujan whose ability to perform complex operations in his head stunned other mathematicians.
In fact, his closest friend was Stanislaw Ulam, another brilliant mathematician from Poland-Austria-Hungary (these political borders are meaningless for great minds).
He was born in 1903 in Budapest, Kingdom of Hungary (which was a part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire) as Neumann Janos Lajos to wealthy Jewish parents.
By the age of 8 he was familiar with differential and integral calculus (and I am still unfamiliar with them)!
At the age of 15, he began to study advanced calculus with the renowned analyst Gabor Szego (made fundamental contributions to orthogonal polynomials. Remember Zernike?).
On their first meeting, Szego was so astounded with the boy's mathematical talent that he was bought to tears.
When he moved to the University of Berlin in 1928 as privatdozent, he began to publish papers at a rate of nearly one per month!!
Stan Ulam described Neumann's mastery of mathematics as follows:
1. He had the gift with symbolic manipulation of linear operators.
2. An intuitive feeling for exam the logical structure of any new mathematical theory.
3. An intuitive feeling for for the combinatorial superstructure of new theories.
Stay tuned to know more on this legendary human ape.
Good night mon ami and my fellow cousin ape.
5/14/2016
Learning grammar with Hobbes
5/14/2016
What Euler was to 1700s and Gauss to 1800s, von Neumann was to 1900s.
They were mathematicians that would be the envy of other great peer of their leagues.
Hans Bethe of Cornell (remember him?) remarked:
"I have sometimes wondered whether a brain like von Neumann's does not indicate a species superior to that of man".
Still, let us stick to computing for a while.
Von Neumann was a founding figure in computing.
While consulting for the EDVAC (the first binary computer with a stored program), he described a computer architecture in which the data and the program are both stored in the computer's memory in the same address place.
This architecture to this day forms the basis of modern computer design.
The earlier computers, the Colossus series and the Bombe (more of an electromechanical device) were "programmed" using a separate memory device such as paper tape or plugboard.
Then in his pioneering 1953 paper he first described stochastic computing.
The word stochastic signifies assumptive, speculative, something vague or random.
Stochastic computing is a highly technical idea and tool for which I am incompetent to explain well.
He created the whole new field of cellular automata with his universal constructor or a self replicating machine.
Just like Turing, von Neumann was also interested in biology particularly evolution.
He stated the problem as follows:
How is the complexity growth and evolvability of biological organisms possible?
In his unfinished work he considered conflict and interactions between replicators.
All this is just a tiny fraction of the output of this great mind in the short span of 53 years.
I will probably devote a bed-time story in describing his superhuman cognitive abilities which dazzled even the brightest minds at the IAS, Princeton around him.
Stay tuned to the voice of Pan narrans.
Good night mon ami and my fellow cousin ape.
5/14/2016
Only his science books
4 of them
Co authored with mathematician Ian Stewart
And Cohen
5/14/2016
Will do
" the essence of the blog is that every weekday I read a computer science paper which I find interesting for some reason or other and write up a summary on the blog. The way I kind of stumbled into this actually began when I started working more in the center of London and with the commute on the train, it was one hour each way, and I figured a couple of things: one is that if I do not do something productive with this commute time I am really going to come to resent it. And I was kind of looking around the carriage and observing and, as you could imagine, there were many people there reading the morning paper, being The Times, The Guardian, The Telegraph or other papers that we have here in the UK.
I am not really that interested in reading that kind of paper, but I could read more useful papers, ie. research papers and on Hacker News there are always stories like “The top 10 papers that every programmer must read” and I am sucker for that stuff. Have I read all those ten papers? I do not know. Let me find out. So I started reading them on the train and then I thought “Oh, this is kind of fun. I am reading a morning paper and they are reading a morning paper. Let me just put the 'Morning Paper' in the paper title” and it kind of snowballed from there. That is how it all began."
5/15/2016
I strongly contend that a powerful memory (specially long term but also short term working) is an essential prerequisite to high intelligence among human apes.
It does NOT follow that a brain endowed with powerful memory would by default be intelligent or logical.
By intelligence, I specially refer the ability of performing higher abstract mathematics (but not exclusively that), as that is one of the few modalities of thought that elevates a brain higher than other animals.
(Most humans 99.9% behave almost 99.9% times like their cousin chimpanzees).
In this respect, von Neumann was remarkable; he had the gift of absolute recall.
On once reading a book or article he was able to quote it back verbatim; even years later without hesitation.
His friend Herman Goldstine (one of the original developers of ENIAC) tested this ability by asking Neumann how "A Tale of Two Cities" started.
Whereupon, without a pause, Neumann immediately started to recite the first chapter until asked to stop after about 10 to 15 minutes!
His teacher George Polya, another Hungary-American mathematician said that Johnny was the only student he was afraid of.
If in the course of a lecture at ETH Zürich, Switzerland (currently ranked 5th best university in the world for engineering with 21 Nobel prizes), if he ever stated an unsolved problem, chances were that Neumann would come at the end of the lecture with the complete solution scribbled on a slip of paper.
I will end today's bed-time story with this one incident.
Neumann was given this problem to solve.
2 cyclists 20 miles apart are heading towards each other at a speed of 10 miles per hour.
A fly who flies at 15 miles per hour starts
from the front wheel of one cycle and flies to the front wheel of the other one.
Then it turns around and flies back to the front wheel of the first one.
It continues to do so until it is crushed between the 2 front wheels.
Question:
What total distance did the fly cover?
One quick smart way to solve this is that that the cyclists will cover 20 miles in 1 hour.
And since the fly does 15 miles in 1 hr, the answer must therefore be 15 miles.
Neumann when asked this question solved it instantaneously and thereby disappointed the questioner.
The questioner said:
"Oh, you must have heard the trick before!"
Neumann replied:
"What trick?
All I did was sum the geometric series."
So if you are gifted with a superior high quality memory mon ami (unlike me), pray use it well.
Stay tuned to the voice of Pan narrans.
Good night mon ami and my fellow cousin ape.
5/16/2016
I, the Pan narrans, briefly narrated to you how the humble and rather a simple device called the vacuum tube or a diode opened the flood gate of implementing logic and mathematics electronically.
But there is another fascinating side to these much maligned tubes (they blew off rather frequently).
The vacuum tubes provided a way for a handful of very intelligent apes to investigate the very essence of matter, the atoms.
The story of the atom almost runs parallel to the drama of computing, logic and mathematics.
On this stage of the play, the role of the lead actor among the dramatis personae was played by the English physicist Sir Joseph John Thompson whose atoms lie buried close to those of Sir Isaac Newton.
He was born in 1856 in Manchester, Lancashire to a man who ran an antiquarian bookshop.
Interestingly enough, his first degree was BA in mathematics (a society that can encourage its brightest minds to go for mathematics rather than civil services is a rarity) in this world of power hungry apes.
Again he did his masters in mathematics receiving the prestigious Adams Prize from the University of Cambridge (Maxwell had earned it too).
And yet surprisingly, in 1884 he was chosen to become Cavendish Professor of Physics at the University of Cambridge.
The first Cavendish professor was again James Clerk Maxwell, who then was relatively obscure.
Just like Faraday, he started he started tinkering and dabbling with the vacuum tubes which were then also known as Crookes tubes and cathode ray tubes.
Stay tuned to the voice of Pan narrans, the narrator of landmark experiments.
Good night mon ami and my fellow cousin ape made up of atoms just like anything else in the universe.
5/17/2016
A true friend
5/17/2016
To be honest, many men including William Crookes (invented Crookes tube) and Heinrich Geissler (invented Geissler tube) had observed the electrical glow discharge much before Thomson in 1850s and later.
But none could explain it.
Some speculated it to be a kind of wave.
J. J. Thomson was in the league of Newton and Faraday.
He had to investigate these magical aura like surreal light emanating out from these vacuum tubes.
Let us see what experiments he did without going into their mathematical calculations (which were critically important as well).
1. He placed magnets over and below these cathode rays (then known as Lenard rays after Philipp Lenard) and noticed they got deflected (using fluorescent screens).
2. He placed an electrometer (another fascinating device worth writing a story on) near the Cathode or the Lenard rays.
The electrometer registered a charge only when the cathode rays were deflected to it.
3. To study if Lenard rays could be affected by electrical fields, he constructed Crookes tube with higher vacuum (earlier experiments had failed to show this due to ionization of residual gas atoms).
The rays were sharpened to a thin beam by 2 metal slits, first one having a positive charge and second being earth neutral.
This beam was made to pass between 2 parallel aluminum plates which when connected to the battery produced an electrical field between them.
And Voila!
The rays got deflected and their deflection changed when the polarity of aluminium plates were reversed.
4. His fourth experiment is the classic.
He measured the charge to mass ratio of these rays by measuring the deflection by magnetic and electrical field and solving the 2 equations algebraically.
It was a transforming moment!
Just read the conclusion of Sir J.J. Thomson in his own words:
"As the cathode rays carry a charge of negative electricity, are deflected by an electrostatic force as if they were negatively electrified, and are acted upon by magnetic force in just the way this force would act on a negatively electrified body moving along the path of these rays, I can see no escape from the conclusion that these are charges of negative electricity carried by particles of matter."
Beautiful!
Logical, precise with no exaggeration.
So u do not have to see an electron to believe it exists mon ami.
Stay tuned to the voice that may often sound negative but nonetheless always seeks truth.
Good night mon ami and my fellow cousin ape.
5/18/2016
J J Thomson was a remarkable man not merely as a scientist making seminal contribution to our understanding of nature.
He could easily have rested on his laurels as the Cavendish professor of physics and doing world tours giving lectures.
He was a highly gifted teacher.
Just let me name a few of his notable students:
1. Ernest Rutherford
2. Max Born
3. Niels Bohr
4. J. Robert Oppenheimer
5. William Henry Bragg
6. Francis William Aston
7. Charles Barkla
8. George Paget Thomson
And many more.
Eight of his students went on to win the Nobel in either Physics or Chemistry.
The last name in the list is his son!
The father proved that the electrons were discrete particles which he called corpuscles (quite a popular name those days. Newton used it for photons).
Ironically enough, his son George Paget got the Nobel for demonstrating that the electron undergoes diffraction and behaves like a wave.
Thus he proved the de Broglie hypothesis.
Louis de Broglie in his 1924 PhD thesis had theoretically postulated the wave nature of electrons.
He went further to suggest that all matter has wave properties (at subatomic levels).
Thus J.J. Thomson set of a chain reaction quite literally if you know what I mean (J. Robert Oppenheimer is among those who are called the "father of the atomic bomb").
And all this started from a humble vacuum tube!
Stay tuned to the voice of Pan narrans.
Good night mon ami and my fellow cousin apes living in the planet ruled by electrons.
5/19/2016
Louis de Broglie was born in 1892 in Dieppe France in a royal family called the House of Broglie.
His first degree was BA in history as he planned to pursue humanity (being wealthy he had no financial stress).
Later for some reason he started studying mathematics and physics and got his next degree BA in sciences in 1913 and then PhD in 1924.
All from the University of Paris metonymically known as Sorbonne.
(Other example of metonymy as a figure of speech is the Wall Street which signifies US financial and corporate sector).
De Broglie in his 1924 thesis wrote this:
"The fundamental idea is following:
The fact that, following Einstein's introduction of photons in light waves, one knew that light contains particles which are concentrations of energy incorporated into the wave, suggests that all particles, like the electron, must be transported by a wave into which it is incorporated...
My essential idea was to extend to all particles the coexistence of waves and particles discovered by Einstein in 1905 in the case of light and photons."
Again so beautiful, so elegant and on hindsight, so simple.
To join a particle of mass m incorporated into a wave of velocity v of wavelength lambda, he brought into existence this exquisite equation:
lambda = h/mv
where h is the Planck's constant named after Max Plank
(6.626 x 10^-34 J.s)
So u see mon ami, physical science started with the waves of Faraday and Maxwell.
Then came the idea of particles thanks to Sir J J Thomson.
And now we are stuck with the messy wave-particle duality which I find very unnerving.
De Broglie was the first high level scientist to call for establishment of a multi national laboratory like CERN.
De Broglie never married nor reproduced.
Stay tuned to the voice of Pan narrans.
Good night mon ami and my fellow cousin ape.
5/20/2016
Bell Labs, today known as Nokia Bell Labs, is an American research and scientific development company owned by Finnish company Nokia.
It is today located in Murray Hill, New Jersey.
It was started in 1880 by the money given by the French government to Alexander Graham Bell in the form of Volta Prize (remember him?) of 50,000 francs (equivalent to 250,000 USD of the year 2005) for the invention of the telephone.
This 50,000 francs of 1880 could not have been put to any better use.
This single lab has made more contributions to science, understanding of reality and technology than all the nations of South Asia, Middle East and South Americas combined in these last 135 years.
I hope you remember my bed-time story on Arno Penzias and Robert Wilson who discovered CMB cosmic microwave background radiation, the first direct evidence of the Big Bang.
Yes Sir, it happened right here with the shoe horn antenna of the Bell Labs!
Tonight I wish to tell you about similar 2 bright young men named Clinton Davisson and Lester Germer.
Now these two young men were simply studying the surface of a piece of nickel.
Not a very attractive piece of work by any standards.
But as I said, a society should be judged by the amount of support it can give to such rare men who can do either abstract mathematics or basic fundamental useless investigations.
This is probably the single reason why I worship the American society.
I digress too much too frequently.
Let me return with the story tomorrow night.
Stay tuned to the voice of the storytelling chimpanzee.
Good night mon ami and my fellow ape.
5/21/2016
Most of us, even as "learned doctors", are not aware of Koch's postulates which are critical to linking a disease with a specific microbe.
Koch's postulates go as follows:
1. Isolation of suspected pathogen from all cases of a disease.
2. Successful culture of the pathogen in vitro (meaning on culture mediums).
3. Reinoculation of the pathogen in a host (like mice, rabbit) to cause the disease.
4. Lastly, reisolation of the pathogen from the host.
Today an important step that precedes these 4 steps is the PCR or the polymerase chain reaction.
PCR is a molecular photocopier.
The basic principle of replicating a piece of DNA using 2 primers was first described by Hargobind Khorana in 1971, an American citizen.
(His home country would not have been able to exploit his diligence and central processing abilities).
PCR however was perfected to its current form by Kary Mullis in 1983, again an American.
It is a test of an extremely high sensitivity (remember we discussed the 2 terms sensitivity and specificity with respect to the LIGO gravitational waves experiment?).
Even as low as 10 to 100 genome of a virus or bacterium can be detected by PCR.
And just as in the case of the LIGO, such a super high sensitivity can lead to lot of high false positives.
PCR is also a highly specific test.
Which means that the adenoviral genome will show up largely as an adenoviral genome and not as an Herpes Simplex Virus (HSV).
But then, it might also pick up dead colonising flora or some probable contamination.
In my own work, PCR has found great usage in the diagnosis of infectious uveitis, specially viral but also other germs like chlamydia, Toxoplasma gondii, acanthamoeba, a protozoan and many many more.
So u see mon ami, how various disciplines unite and come to join to aid us "learned doctors".
Stay tuned to the voice of Pan narrans.
We need to go back to Davisson and Germer very soon.
Good night mon ami and my fellow replicating cousin ape.
5/21/2016
I never knew Alan Turing had met all the greats of his time
Alonzo Church
von Neumann
Claude Shannon
5/22/2016
In 1921, just after the end of the horrendous first world war, after the Russian Bolshevik revolution and during the Chinese Civil War, Davisson and Germer were studying nickel surface.
At the Bell Labs.
They were directing a beam of electrons (discovered just 20 years ago) on the nickel surface and how they were bouncing off.
Let me explain this in slightly more detail.
They used a heated filament as the source of electrons which they named fancifully in the true American fashion as the electron gun.
These thermally excited electrons were then accelerated by applying a potential difference giving them a certain kinetic energy.
To avoid the collision of these electrons with other molecules, these 2 men evacuated the chamber and created a vacuum inside (just like J J Thomson had done).
To detect how the electrons were scattered, a Faraday cup electron detector that could be moved on an arc path around the nickel piece.
Davisson and Germer in their experimental historical data found that at certain angles there was a peak in the intensity of the scattered electron beam.
An accelerating voltage of 54 volts gave a definite peak at a scattering angle of 50°.
Mind you, this was not one but a series of experiments started in 1921 and continued through 1927; Six long years for just one simple stupid sounding experiment!
Such was the freedom and funding given by Mervin Kelly, the chairman of the board, to his researchers.
The scientists were given so much autonomy that the board was unaware of their progress until years after he authorized their work.
This is a kind of society I dream about which can let great minds do useless tinkering and dream abstract mathematics.
I shall get back to the Davisson Germer experiment tomorrow night.
There might be some equations to solve, so beware.
Stay tuned to the voice of the storytelling chimpanzee.
Good night mon ami and my fellow cousin ape.
5/22/2016
Hah!
Arch as in arc.
Good one
5/23/2016
So how exactly is a PCR done?
The sample of interest is first heated to 95°C.
This is done to denature the double stranded DNA to single stranded DNA (bonds are broken).
Then specific known synthetic DNA strands that are 15 to 20 nucleotides long are added to this soup of single stranded DNA.
These are called primers and during this time temperature is lowered to allow or facilitate complementary bonding (if complimentary sequence to the primers exist in the separated DNA strands).
This is the basis for the high specificity of PCR.
If the primers find their compliments, they are called annealed primers.
Then an enzyme called DNA polymerase is added and the temperature of the machine (Thermocyler) is raised to 72°C.
DNA was originally isolated from the bacterium Thermus aquaticus and is thermostable.
This is the step of actual photocopying.
30 to 40 of such cycles when repeated over and over can lead to more than 10^10 amplifications of the starting DNA material which is a colossal number.
End products of PCR assay are seen by subjecting then to electrophoresis on a 2% agarose gel and then staining with dyes like ethidium bromide.
I have been very lucky to have learnt and perform this neat trick at the Wilmer Eye Institute.
Stay tuned to the voice of this storytelling chimpanzee.
Good night mon ami and my fellow cousin apes constituted out of the same genetic code as any bacteria.
5/24/2016
Most people are aware that correction of myopia surgically is done using a specific type of laser called an Excimer (EXited DIMER).
In this procedure, this particular laser removed minute bits of middle layer of the cornea called the stroma.
This tissue destruction is fancifully called ablation. (Doctors and scientists adore fanciful technical terms to add to the sophistication when none is needed).
But even many learned eye doctors would not be aware of tissue sparing Lasik procedure.
How does it differ from the conventional older Excimer stroma ablation?
Well...
The older machines made cylindrical punches of 2 mm diameter circles.
As you can imagine, this left a lot of irregular untreated areas between adjacent laser punches.
To smoothen these irregular left over tissues in order to prevent higher order aberrations (remember the Dutch mathematician Zernike?), these stromal tissues had to be removed.
So not only the amount that was needed to correct the myopia was removed, but also additional planar tissue were removed.
Modern Excimer ablation machines use Gaussian profile (Man, this mathematician Gauss is everywhere) ablations of smaller diameter.
The amount of tissue removed is dramatically reduced.
Today, ablation of about 13 microns of stroma is good enough to correct 1 diopter in the central 6.5 mm optic zone of cornea.
Lots of tissue spared these days by us tissue destroyers.
Stay tuned to the voice of the story telling chimpanzee.
Good night mon ami and my fellow cousin ape evolved with stroma containing collagen matrix in the eyes and everywhere else.
5/25/2016
As we saw earlier, Davisson and Germer were perplexed with the data they were getting from the pattern of electron scattering from the nickel surface.
Yet, they went ahead and published these diffraction curves in the journal Science in 1923.
Even as late as 1926, they had no clue on why they were getting this data.
Those were the ages where the world was still ruled by nationalism, wars, colonialism and racism.
This also reminds me of Wilson and Penzias who were unable to make the sense of the noise they were getting in the background.
In an extraordinary similarity to the CMB story, Davisson happened to attend a meeting at Oxford in the summer of 1926.
Davisson was surprised to hear Max Born at the lecture using his diffraction curves and data as a confirmation of the de Broglie hypothesis!
What a fascinating moment!
This set his heart beat racing!
Returning to the United States, Davisson made modifications to the tube design and detector mounting.
Then he started applying different voltages to the electron gun, imparting different kinetic energies and momentum to the accelerating electrons.
He got a peak on the detector at an angle theta = 50°, at voltage of 54 V, giving electrons a kinetic energy of 54 eV.
This he could now explain.
The nickel crystal surface acted like a 3-D diffraction grating.
The angle of maximum constructive interference from an array is given by the Bragg's law (student of Sir J. J. Thomson).
The experimental outcome of Davisson and Germer matched with the predictions and mathematical equations made by de Broglie and Bragg (whose equation I will be sending shortly).
This was the first direct evidence confirming de Broglie's hypothesis.
Davisson's attention to detail, Bell Labs resources for conducting research, expertise of his colleague Germer and luck, all contributed to this experimental success.
Stay tuned to the voice of the storytelling chimpanzee.
Good night mon ami and my fellow cousin ape.
5/26/2016
William Henry Bragg was born in England in the year of 1862.
England by then was a full fledged colonial superpower thanks to the industrial revolution and its naval might. (Remember the Battle of Trafalgar of 1805?).
(Always remember, those who control the sea trading routes shall rule the world like today's America does and today's China trying to).
At the age of 23 in 1885 William Henry Bragg was appointed the Elder Professor of Mathematics and Experimental Physics in the University of Adelaide.
(Remember that Australia by 1750s was in the pocket of the British Empire even as the empire was losing its North American colonies if you recall my stories on the American Revolution).
Bragg was a skilled mathematician and he had a limited knowledge of physics.
But he was a great lecturer encouraging both the students and teachers.
His interest in physics developed when in 1895 he was visited by Ernest Rutherford, en route from New Zealand to Cambridge;
This was the commencement of a lifelong friendship.
Friendships are more often built on shared interests and love of subjects and ideas rather than on personalities as I have myself learnt from the few rare precious friends that I managed to make in my life inspite of my taciturn disposition.
Bragg was strongly impressed with the discovery of Wilhelm Roentgen.
On May 29, 1896 at Adelaide, he called the local doctors and gave them a demonstration of "X-rays to reveal structures that were otherwise invisible".
He had used a Crookes tube (remember?) attached to an induction coil and a battery.
Electric spark generated short bursts of X-rays.
Guess what was the subject of the test?
His hand.
Which revealed an old injury to one of his fingers sustained when using a chopping machine on his father's farm in Cumbria, England.
Stay tuned to this story of a very fascinating Englishman in Australia.
Good night mon ami and my fellow cousin ape.
5/27/2016
While in Adelaide, William Henry Bragg reproduced.
Along came William Lawrence Bragg, his son in the year of 1890.
Bragg junior showed an early interest in science and mathematics.
At the age of 5, Bragg junior fell from his tricycle and broke his arm.
His father, Bragg the senior, who was deeply impressed with Roentgen's experiments used the newly discovered X-rays and his experimental equipment to examine the broken arm.
This is the first recorded medical use of X-rays in Australia.
Both father and son returned to England in 1909 where Bragg senior occupied the Cavendish chair of physics in University of Leeds.
Bragg junior entered the Trinity College, Cambridge in the same year receiving a major scholarship in mathematics.
After initially excelling in mathematics, Bragg junior shifted to physics in the later years.
By 1912, when Bragg senior was 50 years old and Bragg junior was merely 22 years of age, both father and son began to work together on a very new field of X-ray crystallography.
Must have been amazing (working next to your own genetically coded product on the same project)!
(Just for your information, their work on proteins and DNA proved critical for the discovery of the structure of DNA in 1953 by Francis Crick and James Watson).
This father and son duo proposed the Bragg formulation of X-ray diffraction in response to their discovery that the crystalline solids produced surprising patterns of reflected X-rays.
More about it later.
Stay tuned to the voice of the storytelling chimpanzee whose DNA was discovered thanks to these unknown X-rays.
Good night mon ami and my fellow cousin ape.
5/28/2016
On November 11, 1912 (the year Republic of China came to be and Titanic sank), William Lawrence Bragg aka Bragg junior, then just 22 years old made a presentation at the Cambridge Philosophical Society.
He explained the results of his X-ray scattering experiments by a crystal.
He did so by proposing a model of crystal as a set of discrete parallel planes separated by a unit distance d.
Now if 2 rays of x-rays are incident at an angle theta, they will have a path difference of 2dsin theta. (U can derive it by simple geometry).
The important thing that I must tell is that the wavelengths of X-rays, and waves of neutrons or electrons are comparable with inter-atomic distance which is around 150 picometre or pm.
Most atoms are between 62 and 520 pm in diameter.
A typical carbon-carbon single covalent bond is 154 pm long.
Wavelengths of X-rays are in the range of 10 to 10,000 pm.
This makes neutrons and x-rays (essentially photons) an excellent tool for probing or investigating atoms.
Now what this Bragg junior stated in that meet is that these 2 rays with a path difference of 2dsin theta will undergo constructive interference if and only if the path difference is either equal to the wavelength or an integer multiple of it.
Now see how mathematics can convert all this to an elegant equation of pithy.
2d sin theta = n lambda
n is a positive integer
all other terms already explained.
Of course, in a real crystal the effect of the constructive (or destructive) interference gets intensified because of the cumulative effect of reflection in successive crystallographic planes of the crystalline lattice.
For this, both father and son were jointly awarded the Nobel prize in physics in 1915 (when the madness and mayhem of the first world war was in full fury).
This has been the only father-son team to jointly win this prestigious award.
Stay tuned to the voice of this storytelling chimpanzee.
Good night mon ami and my fellow cousin ape quite oblivious to his world and happenings of picometre.
5/29/2016
Ernst Abbe was born in 1840 in Germany, the year British Empire pocketed New Zealand and was raging opium war against Qing Empire in China.
His father was a poor man and his schooling was supported by his father's employer.
By the time he finished his schooling, both his scientific talent and strong will power had become obvious.
Despite financial constraints, his father supported his higher education at the University of Jenna and Göttingen (world ranking 100).
While at school, he was influenced by the great mathematician Bernhard Riemann.
At the age of 30 in 1870, he was accepted as an associate professor of experimental physics, mechanics and mathematics at the University of Jenna.
In 1873, just 3 years later, he defined the term:
Numerical aperture (number without any dimension that characterizes range of angles of an optical system).
He also discovered that there is a limit of resolution for any optical system that is defined by the wavelength of wave.
As we saw in the last night bed-time story, to study atoms we need rays of very small length (in picometres).
To study smaller and smaller objects, we need to use light or waves of shorter and shorter wavelength.
A light with a wavelength lambda, travelling in a medium of refractive index n, and converging to a spot with angle theta will make a spit size of radius d such that:
d = lambda/2nsin theta
The term n sin theta is called the numerical aperture (NA).
Hence d = lambda/2NA
In modern optics like our microscopes, the NA can reach about 1.4 to 1.6.
So the Abbe limit becomes lambda/2.8
Which for a green light of wavelength 500 nm would be 250 nm or 0.25 microns.
This resolution is enough to see most biological cells (1 to 100 microns) but definitely not the atoms (60 to 500 picometre diameter).
This should make u think on the relative sizes of atoms and cells.
Stay tuned to the voice of this storytelling chimpanzee.
Good night mon ami and my fellow cousin ape.
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