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
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