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.
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