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
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