3/20/2016
Both India and the US (also included is Canada) have a very strong environmental movements.
Environmentalism is principally a product of and reaction to the Industrial Revolution.
The Industrial Revolution was actually 4 revolutions in 1:
1. The revolution in industry
2. Concomitant revolution in agriculture (huge augmentation in productivity).
3. Revolution in transport and communication.
4. The demographic revolution meaning rapid rise of population due to advances in health and sanitation.
Two more revolutions can be added to these:
5. Advent of democratic and socialist ideas in Europe.
6. Massive expanse of the resource catchment areas of the Europeans due to colonization and political conquest of the world.
The scale of devastation of forests and habitats and the fouling of the airs and the waters brought about by industrialization was unprecedented!
For the first time in human history, there was a perception of almost generalized, civilizational environmental crisis.
Thus was born the "environmental movement".
May be, many of you feel that I can afford to think about the environment because I have a full belly, secure profession and no children.
I, on the other hand, think that the onus must be far greater on the individuals who have reproduced to have greater consideration of our environment and the natural resources like clean air and drinkable water.
Good night mon ami.
3/21/2016
Environmental movements in North America took emergence in a postindustrial society (in contrast to Indian which is still essentially rural and even in urban, the industrial gains benefits a tiny fraction).
The mass consumer society of North America has enlarged opportunities for leisure.
Time taken off the work can but to diverse uses.
Nature has been made accessible through the automobile, now no longer a monopoly of the elite but an artefact in almost everyone's possession.
The car, more than anything else, has opened the world of the wild, so refreshingly different from the world of the city.
Thus, in a curious paradox, the car, the "most modern creation of industry", becomes the vehicle of anti-industrial impulses.
These gas guzzlers can take you to distant adventures, to "homey little towns, enchanting fairytale forests, far from stale routine, functional ugliness or the dictates of the clock."
Herein lies the popular support for the protection of the wilderness in the United States.
Nature is no longer restricted to the privileged few but available to all.
And what a nature!
As compared to tropical ecologies, the temperate ecosystems are far more welcoming to an ordinary city dweller.
There are far few troublesome creatures such as leeches, cobras and malaria and dengue infested mosquitoes.
As Aldous Huxley pointed out, the worship of nature came easily to those who lived "beneath a temperate sky in the age of Henry Ford."
In the tropics, nature is fearsome, manifesting itself as "vast masses of swarming vegetation alien to the human spirit and hostile to it".
In the North Atlantic world, nature is a "chaste, mild deity" that could so easily be "enslaved to man."
In ways more than one, America is truly blessed.
Good night mon ami.
3/22/2016
In contrast to North American, the Indian environmental movements is related directly to livelihood and survival.
These movements are centrally vehement protests against the encroachment on the natural resources of a particular community by the urban-industrial complex.
Here there is an immediacy to the environmental protest that is somewhat lacking in the American context.
In India, the environmental movement has in fact drawn upon the struggles of marginal populations - hill peasants, tribals, fisherfolk, dam oustsees - neglected by the main stream parties.
The peasants, the tribals and the villagers are actually defending their local ecology and their natural resources from the nation.
The classic example being Medha Patkar and the issue of Sardar Sarovar project on river Narmada.
Most people would think that concern of the environment is a game for people with full stomach like say Californians.
But in nations like India, Brazil, Indonesia etc, it is the villagers, the tribals and forest dwellers that are most affected when a dam is constructed across a river or mountains are blasted to construct train tunnels.
A story teller like me in Bombay city would be least affected.
Good night mon ami.
3/22/2016
Hah
Keeps getting better
3/23/2016
Budding neurosurgeon
3/23/2016
Contrary to popular belief, India's first major industrial revolution occurred much before it's independence.
That watershed moment was the year of 1853, even before the sepoy mutiny of 1857 and the education revolution of the same year (1857) where the major Indian universities were set up.
In a famous minute of 1853 the Governor General of India, Lord Dalhousie (they were nothing less than our gods), wrote of how railway construction was both the means for creating a market for British goods and the outlet for British capital seeking profitable avenues for investment.
Between 1853 and 1910 more than 80,000 kilometres of track was laid in the subcontinent.
The early years of railway expansion witnessed a savage assault on the forests of India.
Great chunks of these were destroyed to meet the demand for railway sleepers, over 1,000,000 (one million) of which were required annually.
Thousands of trees were felled which were never even removed for use.
The British were at this time unquestionably world leaders in deforestation, having burnt or felled hundreds of thousands of acres of woodland in Australia, southern Africa, north eastern United States, Burma, and of course, India.
This is the price of industrial progress which as you will understand is bound by ecological constraints.
Each future child will ever be more demanding, requiring multiple ever advancing computers, smarter and smarter phones, clothes, books and more importantly gallons of clean water, may be not only for drinking and bathing and washing but also for swimming.
We are all aspiring for more and more.
Good night mon ami.
3/24/2016
There is a fact, or if u wish, a law, governing all natural phenomenon till date.
There is no known exception to this law.
It is exact so far as we know.
The law is called the conservation of energy.
It states that there is a certain quantity, which we call energy, that does not change in the manifold changes which nature undergoes.
It is an abstract idea yet very mathematical;
It says that there is a numerical quantity which does not change when something happens.
It is not a description of a mechanism.
Just a strange fact that we can calculate some number and when we finish watching nature go through her tricks and calculate the number again, it is the same.
It is important to realize that physicists have no idea what energy is.
There are precise formulas for calculating, but which tell nothing of the mechanism or the reasons for it.
Good night mon ami.
3/25/2016
Australia today is a modern, "open", democracy with a GDP per capita income higher than even UK, Germany and France.
It came into existence on 1st Jan, 1901 when 6 separate British self governing colonies of Queensland, New South Wales, Victoria, Tasmania, South and Western Australia agreed to unite and form a federation.
Fiji and New Zealand were originally part of this process, but later backed out.
As soon as it came into existence, the nation implemented it's White Australia Policy (now both forgotten and suppressed).
The Barton government with full backing of its people passed the Pacific Island Labourers Bill and the Immigration Restriction Bill.
Prime minister John Curtin even as late as in second world war insisted:
"This country shall remain forever the home of the descendants of those people who came here in peace in order to establish in the South Seas an outpost of the British race."
This idea ran "contrary to the general conception of equality which have ever been the guiding principles of British rule throughout the empire."
After all, the brown Indians and the yellow Burmese and the black South Africans were as much the Queen's subjects as were the white Australians.
So how did Australia get over this hurdle?
One thing you must admire about British; they had an obsession with law.
Every act was under its ambit.
So the Barton government in 1901 very cunningly conceived of the "language dictation test", which would allow the government, at the discretion of the minister, to block unwanted coloured migrants.
They were forced to sit this test in "any European language".
Ingenious!
More on it later.
Good night mon ami.
3/26/2016
Life is precarious and truths are often bleak
3/26/2016
If you were to close your eyes now for two minutes, you would know what it feels like to be absolutely blind (which differs a lot from being legally blind.)
You would also feel what it would be like to live in a world without electricity after sunset.
Nothing even closely impacts our every day and every aspect of our lives as do electricity and electronics.
And yet, such was the world in 1600s and even 1700s; it was both literally and figuratively dark.
Religions, superstitions and ignorance ruled over every aspect of the lives of our forefathers and foremothers (it does to a very little extent now, even for those who claim to be very religious and faithful.)
In 1600s, Sir Isaac Newton in those dark, plague ridden Europe showed that if probed delicately and astutely, nature was ready to reveal her secrets.
From then on, there was no holding back this naked ape.
He began to probe and experiment on everything; nothing was sacred or divine.
Some of these began to probe a very strange phenomenon which was known since millennia.
The phenomenon of amber being able to pick up tiny papers after being rubbed or the comb able to raise human hairs.
This is a fascinating story which needs to be unfolded with great care and over several nights.
Good night mon ami.
[12:51 AM, 3/27/2016] Navin: At school the mild mannered Calvin transforms into stupendous Spaceman Spiff
3/27/2016
Let me begin with something very simple.
What happens at their surface interface when two objects come into contact with other?
Let us say your palm is resting on a glass sphere.
Let us zoom in and go from organism level to organ level to tissue level to cellular level to cell organelle level to molecular level and finally to the atomic level.
Here a chemical bond is formed between atoms of different materials which we call adhesion. (This bonding is felt as friction by us when our hand rubs across the sphere).
It is something very close to a chemical reaction but not exactly that.
There will exist or may exist an electrochemical potential between them depending on which 2 materials are in touch.
Electrons will move across from one surface to the other.
When separated, some of the bonded atoms keep extra electrons and some will give it away.
What do we have now?
We have electrically charged bodies!!
Voila!!
We have created a static charge or an electrostatic energy (energy is just a fancy name given to anything capable of doing work including energetic doctors).
This whole process of getting charged up bodies by rubbing is known as the triboelectric effect.
Tribo is the Greek for rubbing.
John Carl Wilcke published the first triboelectric series in a 1757 paper on static charges.
A material towards the bottom of series when touched to a material near the top of the series will acquire a more negative charge.
The point I wish to emphasize here is the explanatory power of the atomic theory.
This phenomenon was known since two millennia or more but never understood.
Most people consider the term "theory" to be a very weak, vague or unsubstantiated idea that has no basis.
Some night I will dedicate to this very topic of "theory" itself.
Good night mon ami.
3/28/2016
Biggest lesson of life. Never mess around with girls.
3/28/2016
Somewhere in Germany during the times of Newton (1600s) was a man named Otto Von Guericke.
Around 1650, he had developed an odd devise.
It was a sulphur ball that rotated on a shaft.
When Guericke held his hand against the ball and turned the shaft quickly, a static electric charge built up.
This was the first electrostatic generator that generated static charge using the triboelectric effect (friction).
In fact, they are commonly known as friction machines.
This simple sulphur sphere set the ball rolling for greater, larger and ever more sophisticated electrostatic generators.
Substances like rubber, plastics, glass etc which are insulators are good both at generating and holding charges.
You see how humans were gradually emulating nature which were once considered the acts of gods.
These men could demonstrate a lightning discharge with their little humble experiments.
Down came crashing all the thunder gods whose list include Thor, Zeus, Indira, Jupiter, Baal...
The total list of the thunder gods alone of different regions of different eras exceeds 150.
Such is the power of experiments that in the end, a believer is left with just one option to justify his irrational beliefs.
That is denial.
Good night mon ami.
3/28/2016
U have a tougher job
Thinking a quick innovative reply
3/29/2016
To survive be prepared
3/29/2016
If there is one cell, just one cell in our bodies to whom we could blame for all the ills of the society, it would be the interstitial cells of Leydig.
These cells are named after a German zoologist Franz Leydig who happened to be son of a keen gardener and beekeeper.
Leydig studied medicine in 1842 at the University of Wurzburg.
In 1850 he described these cells in his book: Textbook of Histology of Man and Animals.
These cells are nestled snugly between seminiferous tubules (the site of meiosis) and capillaries of the testicles.
These fine cells are quiescent till the boy reaches puberty.
Once this age is attained, some specific genes within the Leydig cells get turned on (u recall my story on E. coli and Jacob and Monod).
Using the enzymes in its mitochondria and endoplasmic reticulum, these cells start converting 27 carbon cholesterol to 19 carbon androgens like androstenediol and finally to testosterone!
Once these hormones are released into the blood, they create havoc!!
U have seen and I have personally experienced that!
Besides everything sexual, these hormones hit the brain real real hard.
Testosterone has the powerful effect of masculinizing the brain.
It makes the males aggressive, highly competitive and strive for dominance.
No wonder almost 99.9% of males make the kings, the emperors, the warriors, the presidents and the prime ministers.
It would not be too far fetched to put the blame for all the wars waged for territories, murder and crime for amassing wealth and access to women to this single hormone and this tiny interstitial cell.
Good night mon ami.
3/29/2016
Nothing can beat this moments!
Nothing!
Except perhaps a Nobel for a fundamental discovery
3/29/2016
Ha ha ha
Yes.
Heard about it.
3/30/2016
After the end of the first world war, the vanquishers set up a grand assemblage to set the rules for the new world order.
It goes by the name of the Paris Peace Conference, 1919 at Versailles.
It was dominated by the "Big Four", viz. United States, United Kingdom, France and Italy.
There were delegates from 30 other nations too including the losers Germany and Japan and Australia.
The Japanese had 2 basic demands:
1. Racial equality
2. Territorial claims to Pacific island north of the equator.
The Australian delegation lead by the prime minister Billy Hughes had one primary purpose.
To scuttle and reject the Japanese racial equality proposal in cahoots with the big four.
Hughes stated in unambiguous terms that he would never permit the yellow race to enter Australia.
Hughes lobbied hard with the British PM David Lloyd George to defend Australia's white policy.
US president Woodrow Wilson with sophisticated deviousness, just before the voting on racial equality proposal was called for, declared that a unanimous vote was required.
As you can see, the big four had rigged the show right from the start.
The racial equality proposal was defeated.
Humiliated, the Japanese delegation headed by Marquis Saionji Kinmochi walked out of the conference.
This insult to the Japanese would prove to that proverbial butterfly effect of the chaos theory.
The flapping of its wings can cause a storm thousands of miles away.
Do stay tuned.
Good night mon ami.
3/31/2016
It seems all religions promise women in their respective heavens
3/31/2016
Pieter Musschenbroek was born in Leiden, Holland at the end of 1600s (1692 to be exact).
His father was an instrument maker such as microscopes and telescopes (a curious profession for those dark days).
This boy turned out to be a professor at the Leiden university who got interested in charges and charged bodies.
He along with his lackey Andreas Cunaeus devised an interesting experiment.
They devised a rotating glass sphere which would be rotated with Musschenbroek's hands rubbing against it.
This would generate static charge with now well known triboelectric effect.
This charge being produced by the rotating glass sphere was conducted by a metal chain through a suspended wooden bar (insulator) to a water in glass vessel held by Cunaeus.
After some period of interval, when Musschenbroek touched the wire dipping in the water, he received a powerful shock!!
He was literally struck by the bolt from the blue!
How could he explain this?
Well...
He had managed to transfer the the charge that was being produced by the electrostatic generator (sphere and his hands) into the water which was impure and hence a conductor.
It was kept inside an insulator (glass).
This was a revolution in electronics!
Finally the charge could be stored.
It was akin to change from hunter-gathering to agriculture where you could produce extra and store for later use.
Thus came to existence the first capacitor (previously known as condenser).
I will send you the picture of this wonderful experiment.
Stay tuned.
Good night mon ami.
3/31/2016
The person shown here is Andreas Cunaeus
4/1/2016
No sissy girls on our ship is a big problem
4/1/2016
Just consider a master class surgeon.
His surgery is a work of art; a wonder to behold.
The precision, the timing, the details of the depth, position, the knots, the incisions...
But think about where this springs from.
The madness of commitment, the obsession with perfection and the years devoted to it to will the fine muscles of the hand to follow the commands of the brain.
Think of the monotony.
Think of the life without diversion.
Think of the capacity to sit attentively patient after patient, surgery after surgery.
The master class surgeon has power because it questions the opposite concept of life based on endless novelty and choice.
Imagine visiting such a man.
Any visitor if honest, will be bored by his work, even frightened.
What the surgeon has is excellence, an activity he executes supremely well and that occupies him over all other things.
The work orients his whole life.
Thoroughly neurotic, the work is embedded in him like a habit.
This is why it is frightening.
The life of a surgeon, which is rated very highly, is constrained and to a visitor, even oppressive.
This raises an important question about life.
Is the life of novelty and choices antithetical to the life of excellence?
Does excellence come at a price which very few are willing to pay?
Stay tuned.
Good night mon ami.
4/2/2016
A very unique show and tell
4/2/2016
Luigi Galvani was born to the fourth wife of his father in 1737, Bologna, Italy.
He had nearly destroyed himself by planning to take religious vows and enter the darkness of church.
His parents dissuaded him from doing so.
Instead he attended a four year course in medicine and surgery.
This surgical skill would later on prove to be very useful for his experiments.
He became a lecturer of surgery in 1762.
In 1776, he moved on to become a lecturer of theoretical anatomy and member of Academy of Sciences.
As legend goes, during this period Galvani was slowly skinning a frog at the table.
Previously, on that very table he had been conducting experiments with static electricity (What a fascinating doctor!)
His assistant touched an exposed sciatic nerve of the frog with a metal scalpel that had picked up a charge.
At that moment, they saw sparks and the dead frog's leg kicked as if in life.
The experiment had, for the first time, connected a non living electrical energy to an organism, albeit a dead one.
It was a landmark moment both in the history of electricity and biology.
4/2/2016
Ha ha ha
Brilliant!
[12:27 AM, 4/3/2016] Navin: Returning home is fraught with dangers
4/3/2016
Some of the greatest biologists like Malthus, Paul Ehrlich, Garret Hardin and some obscure ones like yours truly are obsessed with the population problem.
People like us identify human population growth as the single most important reason for environmental degradation.
Industrialization, free market capitalism, insatiable appetite for consumption of all sorts and human greed are the compounding factors (as we see it).
In 1969, Paul Ehrlich published a bestseller:
The Population Bomb
Do read it if you enjoy to read.
If not, just stay tuned to my bed-time stories.
This is how the first chapter starts and I quote:
"I have understood the population explosion intellectually for a long time.
I came to understand it emotionally one stinking hot night in Delhi a couple of years ago.
My wife and daughter and I were returning to our hotel in an ancient taxi.
The seats were hopping with fleas.
The only functional gear was third.
As we crawled through the city, we entered a crowded slum area.
The temperature was well over 100, and the air was a haze of dust and smoke.
The streets seemed alive with people.
People eating, people washing, people sleeping.
People visiting, people arguing and screaming.
People thrusting their hands through the taxi window, begging.
People defecating and urinating.
People clinging to buses.
People herding animals.
People, people, people, people."
Of course, if you were born in Delhi, Bombay, Calcutta or Howrah and never left it, you would not notice or emotionally feel anything wrong.
Trouble starts only if you happen to travel to the developed world or get to hear from those who did.
Stay tuned.
Good night mon ami.
4/4/2016
Never read a secret note
4/4/2016
To have a unit of something as fundamental as electric potential named after you, in my view, is the ultimate honor a scientist can be bestowed with.
Just to keep it simple, electric potential is a type of potential energy.
It means that a certain amount of charge moves, it is capable of performing certain amount of work.
V = potential energy/charge
Alessandro Volta lived during the French Revolution, the French Revolutionary Wars and the Napoleonic Wars (late 1700s to early 1800s).
It was a period of tumultuous upheaval and bloody carnage that by conservative estimate claimed more than 700,000 (7 million) human lives in and around France alone.
Volta had a major professional disagreement with Galvani who interpreted his experiment to mean that his frog was the source of electrical energy; he had labelled it as animal energy.
Volta argued that the Galvani's frog was not the generator but merely the conductor of electricity (an electrolyte).
To substantiate his argument, he began to experiment with pairs of different metal electrodes separated by electrolyte.
Like dipping zinc and copper rods into salt water or diluted sulfuric acid.
In this way he discovered the electromotive force and the electrochemical cell.
He could convert chemical energy into electrical energy!!
Just imagine what a sensational discovery that was!
He did not stop there.
What if he could make a series of these electrochemical cells, more compact, working in tandem, producing far more energy?
He devised his famous Voltaic Pile which is merely a series of alternating zinc and copper coin like discs with a thick card paper soaked in salt water.
He had devised the first solid battery!!
All this in the times of war, revolutions, killing and savage butchery that would make the tragedy of India's Partition seem a miniscule event.
Stay tuned.
Good night mon ami.
4/5/2016
The squealer trying to act too smart
4/5/2016
Today, almost anyone who does not worship Allah (and even many who do) will accept or agree that Islam is facing a major crisis.
Most will also agree that the disease lies within than without.
What some would want to say but for sake of political correctness will keep from mouthing it out:
"They take Qur'an a bit too seriously and literally, at least the Orthodox types".
Yet, it is important to know that Christianity had gone through such a violent phase through most of its history, almost till mid or the end of 1600s.
A case in point being (just one bloody example amongst several).
It started in 1618 when the Holy Roman Empire in Central Europe was at its apogee.
Yet, inside it were rumblings of dissent for the Protestant Reformation in the form of Lutheranism (by Martin Luther) and Calvinism (by John Calvin).
Both these characters are prophets of Christian Protestantism; their prophet Mohammed if you will.
Between the thirty years of 1618 to 1648, you can divide the war into 4 phases:
1. Bohemian (modern Czech republic).
The Kingdom of Bohemia was an imperial state within the Holy Roman Empire.
2. Danish: Netherlands had a Protestant Lutheran king
3. Swedish phase: also a Lutheran Protestant nation.
4. French phase: a Roman Catholic country but playing the game of crafty Politique of deciding the issue of the balance of power in Europe.
It will take some time to digest the truth of it.
So I shall be slow on you.
Stay tuned.
Good night mon ami.
4/6/2016
The privilege of having delicate heinies
4/6/2016
So what started this bloody thirty years' war in 1618 within the Holy Roman Empire?
You would be very very surprised to hear.
Just some tiny minuscule differences between two sects of Christians like holy water or not, pope or no pope, fancy cathedrals or not, saints or no saints, nuns or no nuns!!
Almost sounds restarted, right?
So the Holy Roman Empire tried to impose uniformity of religion in its domains just like our current government has imposed beef ban almost all over the country.
Ferdinand II was a staunch Catholic and very intolerant (the intolerant debate is quite a happening thing in our current India).
The Bohemia which was a dominion of Habsburg Austria which in turn was a part of Roman Catholic Empire was largely Lutheran Protestants.
These Bohemian Lutheran Protestants got seriously and menacingly wild (Just imagine imposing beef ban in Kashmir valley and you will get a fairly good idea).
Some Catholics who came to meet them for reconciliation were thrown out of the windows.
This event is known as the Defenestration of Prague.
Eventually it led to the battle of White Mountain where the Catholics decisively won against the Lutheran Protestants.
So after the round one the score board read:
Catholics 1
Protestant 0
Does this not remind you of the Shia Sunni schism of Iraq and Iran?
So think twice before you criticize Islam or its followers.
More human foolish is on the way.
Do stay tuned.
Good night mon ami.
4/7/2016
Mild mannered Calvin finds himself transformed
4/7/2016
After this first Protestant defeat, the other Protestant powers namely Denmark, Sweden got very worried.
They felt Ferdinand II, the Holy Roman Emperor and the king of Hapsburg dynasty a threat to Protestants all over.
So the king of Denmark Christian IV jumps in and goes to war against the Roman Empire.
France, a Catholic nation financially backs Denmark.
Why?
It is playing the game of Politique of balance of power.
France sees the powerful Hapsburg dynasty a greater threat than the growing Protestant influence.
Even England being a Protestant nation sends some of its troops.
To counter this powerful allies of foe, the Empire retaliates with a massive force under the mercenary Wallenstein who is a Bohemian Catholic.
He hands the Empire a crushing win and once again the Protestants are routed.
The score after the round two is:
Catholics 2
Protestants 0
You must understand that I am giving you an extremely concise version of the events.
I write under high pressure of getting my facts correct, keeping my time schedule intact and keeping my reader (that is you) hooked to the show.
Stay tuned.
Good night mon ami.
4/8/2016
Dreaded spankings
4/8/2016
After two major losses, the Protestants all over the Europe were seriously scared.
Ferdinand II had reclaimed the lands in the empire belonging to the Catholic church that had been acquired and secularized by Protestant rulers.
Afraid of where the Empire and the Hapsburg might strike next, in 1630 Sweden, another Lutheran Protestant nation decided to go on the offensive.
The Swedish army led by their king Gustavus Adolphus entered Germany.
Once again, Cardinal Richelieu, the chief minister of Louis 13 of France playing fiendish Politique funded the Swedish army.
The Swedish army got assistance from many German Protestant states.
This Swedish King Gustavus Adolphus is known as the father of modern warfare.
For the first time he planned and orchestrated mobile artillery or the cannons.
The 1631 Battle of Breitenfeld turned out to be the first major Protestants' victory of the Thirty Years War.
This battle alone led to the slaughter of 27,000 Christians;
Both sides fighting and killing for same Jesus, same Virgin Mary and the same Trinitical god.
In 1632, Swedish King Gustavus Adolphus was killed.
By 1635, the Swedish heroism ended and in 1635 Peace of Prague was signed.
If you think this is the end of the human stupidity, you are badly mistaken.
The last and the most bloody phase of the Thirty Years War was yet to come.
Stay tuned.
Good night mon ami.
4/9/2016
To school by proxy
4/9/2016
The last phase, the French phase of the Thirty Years War in contrast to previous three was totally political (in contrast to previous slaughterous religious wars).
France feared encircled and cornered after the continuous Hapsburg's success.
France in May 1635 declared war against Spain and against the Holy Roman Empire in 1636.
Sweden too joined it.
At this, nearly entire Europe was at its most messy and bloody war.
It was so disastrous and ruinous that all the major parties after 12 years of incessant madness decided to negotiate and end it.
The Peace of Westphalia was signed in 1648 ( these were a series of treaties).
So great was the devastation brought about by the war that the population in the German States went down by 25 to 35 percent.
Pestilence of several kinds raged due to massive civilian population, overcrowding among refugees and famine.
Even worse, a major outbreak of witch hunts started due to crop failures, famines and epidemics of diseases.
Burning people specially women on stakes, torturing them in dungeons whose walls were adorned with Biblical verses became routine.
But one great thing happened though after this carnage.
It finally dawned upon Europeans to let people pray as they wished and both Lutheranism and Calvinism were accepted.
Religion, from hence forth, would feature less and less in the future wars within Europe.
The Holy Roman Empire was greatly weakened so much so that Voltaire commented:
"Holy Roman Empire is henceforth neither holy, nor Roman nor an Empire".
Another important fact which is my favourite.
After the massive and brutal depopulation, the living standards of the survivors improved.
Now tell me, what does this bed-time story tell about us humans?
Stay tuned if you wish to be a thinking or a thoughtful ape.
Good night mon ami.
4/9/2016
The number of human apes who were killed and slaughtered in these 30 years numbered 8 million (some claim it to be as high as 10 million).
The population of Europe (excluding Russia and the Ottoman Empire) was roughly around 78 million.
That comes to the reduction of European population of slightly more than 10%.
Most find it hard to believe, but the current time we live in, despite how gloomy it appears to us, is the most peaceful time in human history.
Such is our plight.
[11:49 PM, 4/9/2016] Navin: In the end it is all about the Master's degree
4/10/2016
No nation in the world consumes like America does.
Americans worship the Great God Growth and are convinced that the production of consumer goods has no limits.
Even after Rachel Carson's landmark book "Silent Spring", the American Environmental movement did not address the consumption question.
In fact, it led to creation of fabulous natural parks, attempting to keep parts of nature untouched by civilization.
In fact, nature itself became another good to be consumed by the affluent society.
There is a perverse paradox among the nature lovers of America who drive hundreds or thousands of miles, using up scarce oil and polluting the atmosphere, to visit these national parks and sanctuaries.
Rather ironical to see such grossly anti-ecological means to marvel the beauty of forests, swamps, glaciers and mountains protected as specimens of "pristine" nature.
The birth of one child in America has the same impact on the global environment as the birth of, say, 80 to 90 children born in Indian slums.
A Bangladeshi made this case whenever he could, in the United Nations and elsewhere.
But, after a visit to an American supermarket, he was obliged to modify his argument.
Since then, his claim has been instead that the birth of an American dog or cat was the equivalent, ecologically speaking, of the birth of a dozen Bangladeshi children.
This is not to criticize America since I have myself had a taste of this extravaganza for a brief three year period;
And it was delicious.
Stay tuned please.
Good night mon ami.
4/11/2016
Another great pioneering Frenchman who was honoured in having a fundamental unit named after him is Charles-Augustin de Coulomb.
1 Coulomb or 1 C is the SI unit of electrical charge.
- 1 C is roughly equal to 6.242 X 10^18 electrons.
He too lived through the late 1700s, a period of tumultuous upheaval in France.
His greatest feat was the construction of a devise known as torsion balance or pendulum.
It is a remarkable devise when I read about it now and the experiment that he performed with charged metallic spheres in it even more so.
I will be sending you the picture of this remarkable devise; what is remarkable about it is its sensitivity to detect torsion produced on the thread due to interaction of spheres carrying very small charges.
Through the hole in the lid of the cylindrical glass case, he would introduce a sphere of no charge and then with various charges.
This sphere is shown in blue in the picture.
He would bring it close or touch it to the brass sphere (shown in yellow in the picture).
If these two spheres had the same charge, they would repel each other thereby inducing a twist in the torsion fibre.
The twist could be read from the scale on the cylindrical glass case.
After series of tedious and careful experiments with various charges for various distances, in 1785 he published a series of reports on electricity and magnetism.
On page 754 of the first report is the statement:
Two balls electrified with the same kind of electricity exert a repulsive force on each other which follows the inverse proportion of the square of the distance.
On page 579 of the second report is a statement:
Attractive forces between two oppositely charged spheres is proportional to the product of charges on the spheres.
You all know of this remarkable and classical experiment simply as the Coulomb's Law.
Do stay tuned my fellow cousin ape (we are all cousins, I mean ALL of us!)
Good night mon ami.
4/11/2016
Coulomb's torsional balance
4/12/2016
How to handle a hungry brat
4/12/2016
In 1800, when Alessandro Volta invented his voltaic pile and thereby the first battery, it inspired a Danish physicist and chemist to ask questions on the nature of electricity.
This Dane was Hans Christian Oersted.
Oersted developed his interest in science while working with his father who ran a pharmacy in a beautiful town of Rudkobing in the island of Langeland in Denmark.
The population today of Rudkobing is a mere 4500 or so (remember my obsession)!
His early education was mostly at home through self study.
It was on April 21 of 1820 while giving a lecture he noticed a compass needle deflected from magnetic north when an electric current from a battery was switched on and off.
Mind you, this was not a serendipity or a happenstance;
He had been looking for a relationship between electricity and magnetism for several years.
The eye sees only what the mind is prepared to comprehend.
He began more intensive research and came to the conclusion that as current flows through a wire, it produces a circular magnetic field.
He had for the first time connected electricity to magnetism and stirred this new field of electronics into action.
Oersted is also believed to be the first modern scientist to explicitly describe and use the term:
Gedankenexperiment or
Thought Experiment.
These are the men whose work has led to development of devices which you are currently holding in your hands to read my bed-time story.
Stay tuned to the voice of reason, logic, understanding and clear thinking.
Good night mon ami and my fellow cousin ape.
4/12/2016
Hah
Brilliant as always
4/13/2016
Something is always amiss when the brat calls up his father in office
4/13/2016
An ampere is one of the 7 basic set of SI units.
All the other SI units are derived from these 7.
The ampere is a unit of electric current, meaning the flow rate of electric charge.
So one ampere is equivalent to one Coulomb of charge (or 6.241 X 10^18 elementary charge) flowing in 1 second.
The great honour has been bestowed upon the French physicist and mathematician Andre-Marie Ampere.
Born in Lyon, France in 1775 to a wealthy businessman who was a huge fan of Jean-Jacques Rousseau and to his idea of education.
Rousseau believed that young boys should avoid formal schooling.
Ampere's father sincerely actualized this concept by letting his son educate himself in his well stocked library.
This was indeed what this prodigy needed.
By the age of 12, he began to teach himself advanced mathematics of the great Leonhard Euler and Daniel Bernoulli.
Being a polymath, science, history, travel and philosophy went along with mathematics.
At the age of 25 in 1999, he got his first job as a maths teacher.
Remember, his nation was undergoing violent revolution in those very years.
Inspired by the work of Oersted (notice how these great men inspired each other in succession like a nuclear chain reaction), late at the age of 45 he began to develop a mathematical and physical theory of understanding electricity and magnetism.
(Note again the word Theory;
So please stop saying this: "It is just a theory".)
Advancing on Oersted's experiments, he showed that two parallel wires carrying electrical currents attract or repel each other, depending on whether the currents flow in the same or opposite direction respectively.
More importantly, for the first time ever mathematics was being applied to the experimental findings.
Not to forget that the first love of Ampere was mathematics.
In 1827, at a senior age of 52, Ampere published his magnum opus:
"Memoir on the Mathematical Theory of Electrodynamic Phenomena, Uniquely Deduced from Experience."
Thus was created the new science of electrodynamics and foundation laid for the modern electrical science.
All this from a hairless ape who was not sent to school.
Stay tuned for the voice of enlightenment.
Good night mon ami and my fellow cousin ape.
4/14/2016
It doesn't always work
4/14/2016
Georg Simon Ohm was born in Brandenburg-Bayreuth in 1789, then a part of the Holy Roman Empire.
(Remember my bed-time stories on the 30 years war).
His father was a humble locksmith but had educated himself to a high level.
So much so that he gave both his sons excellent education.
(The family had 7 children out of which 4 died, reason being medical science was non existent. Only quackery which we know today as alternative medicine).
The locksmith brought his son Georg to a high standard of learning in mathematics, physics, chemistry and philosophy.
(This reminds me of my father who demonstrated the formation of hydrogen from diluted sulphuric acid and zinc granules in our basement lab.)
Ohm's first job was a teacher of mathematics in a very poor quality school.
Over there he wrote an elementary textbook on Geometry.
This helped him get a far better position at the Jesuit Gymnasium of Cologne in 1817.
The physics laboratory was well equipped where he began experimenting with the newly invented electrochemical cells, Galvanic cells and Voltaic Piles.
He was a prolific writer unlike me and in 1827 he published his famous book:
The Galvanic Circuit Investigated Mathematically.
In it he gave his complete theory of electricity.
Remember, electrons or the atomic structures were yet to be discovered and Ohm believed electric current occurred due to "contiguous particles."
It was in this book that he stated his famous law:
The electromotive force between the extremities of any circuit is the product of the strength of current and the resistance between them.
V = I.R
Very aptly, the SI derived unit of electrical resistance has been named after him.
Had he been alive today, it would have fascinated him to know that today the definition of Ohm is expressed from the quantum mechanical version of the Hall effect.
What is Hall effect?
That would be the topic of another bed-time story.
Stay tuned to the voice of reality.
Good night mon ami and my fellow great ape of the family Hominidae.
4/15/2016
Though most religions and tribal folklores have a vague concept of tree of life, it actually forms the organizing principle of the science of biology.
Again, most tribes and nomads believe that humans are part of nature, biology specially the field of phylogenetics proves that not only are humans are just another ape and cousins to chimpanzees, bonobos, gorillas and orangutans but we are distant cousins to any living organism currently present on planet earth.
This should shock you into either of the two form of cognitive dissonance or mental stress/discomfort:
First, the most common being complete denial of the fact to reclaim your internal consistency.
Secondly, to change your cognition, that is, changing your world view and marvel at our insignificance as it frees you from that excess baggage of ego and self importance.
In 1956, Leon Festinger came out with a book:
When Prophecy Fails.
In it, he describes with examples the most common method how the human mind deals with cognitive dissonance, that is, when human mind is confronted with information that is inconsistent with belief held.
One example was that of an orthodox Jewish group (you can substitute that for anyone of inflexible mind, including me) who believed that their highest ranking Rabbi was a Messiah (which i certemente am not).
When this Rabbi died of stroke, instead of accepting that he was a mortal hairless ape, they chose to believe that he would soon be resurrected from the dead.
Hmmm...sounds extremely familiar, doesn't it my dear fellow cousin ape?
Stay tuned to the voice of biology.
Good night mon ami.
4/16/2016
I am in a predicament as to where to place Gustav Robert Kirchhoff.
It seems to me that his experiments on spectroscopy most assuredly overshadows his work on electricity and electrical circuits.
Anyway...
He was born in Konigsberg, East Prussia in 1824.
Yes Sir, the same Konigsberg of the notorious unsolvable Konigsberg Bridges Problem proposed by the great Leonhard Euler in 1736.
At the age of 21, while still a student, he formulated the circuit laws much before Maxwell.
The first law is essentially the principle of conservation of charge and second the principle of conservation of energy (the most powerful principle in nature till date).
I think his greatest feat was the development of a highly systematic experimental procedure for the detailed examination of the spectra of chemical compounds.
Working with who is now a legendary chemist, Robert Bunsen on a spectroscope, he or they established the linkage between the chemical elements and their unique spectral patterns.
They were ignorant about the energy levels in atoms, but this work of theirs would go on to construct our understanding of atoms by the likes of Bohr and later on to open up the whole new bizarre world of quantum mechanics.
He coined the term "black body" radiation in 1862.
Imagine, this hairless ape who contributed so much to both our understanding of nature and to the progress of technology is a virtual unknown figure in today's population.
What chance do I stand?
Stay tuned to the knowledge of contributions of the greatest of ape minds.
Good night mon ami and my fellow cousin hairless ape.
4/16/2016
Look how parsimoniously KCL can be represented with integral equations
4/17/2016
Why ask in the first place
4/17/2016
Mathematicians are a strange breed of people, to put it very euphemistically.
They are acutely aware of their special innate gift of unique intelligence, yet they make little effort to gain popularity.
They hardly expect to be heard or written about, whatever may be their contribution.
They do not even expect other people to know what mathematics is, and are generally happy to be left alone.
But Alan Turing was not even allowed that much.
In fact, for more than two decades after his death, (June 7, 1954) very little was revealed to the nation about his decoding work at the Bletchley Park.
Forget this decoding.
The questions this brilliant mind was asking himself in 1930s when even the telephones were very primitive staggers the imagination!
Is a mind a complicated kind of abstract pattern that develops from vast network of neurons?
If so, could the neurons be replaced be substituted for something else, say ants, giving rise to ant colony which thinks as a whole and has an identity, that is to say, a self?
If the nerve cells be replaced with transistors would the resulting machine of artificial neural network give rise to a conscious mind?
In short, can thinking and feeling emerge from patterns of activity in different sorts of substrate - organic, electronic, or otherwise?
Could a machine communicate with humans on unlimited topics using human language?
Can we differentiate a genuinely conscious and intelligent mind from a cleverly constructed but hollow language using facade?
Could a machine take decisions?
Could a machine have beliefs?
Could a machine erroneously attribute free will to itself?
Could creativity arise or emerge from a set of fixed rules?
Could machines be attracted to each other, fall in love?
These are the sort of questions that burned in the brain of Alan Mathison Turing, the great British mathematician.
Atheist, homosexual, eccentric, marathon running genius of an ape who was finally redeemed on 25 May 2011.
On this day, Barack Obama addressing the parliament of the United Kingdom, singled out Newton, Darwin and Alan Turing as the greatest British contributors to science.
We are all apes but something sets apart the mathematical apes from the rest.
Stay tuned to the voice of thinking and questioning ape.
Good night mon ami.
4/17/2016
Compare the area of Bombay with any other major city in the world. A meagre 437 square kilometers.
4/18/2016
Slimy hideous octopus under the chair
4/18/2016
No matter how much criticisms I hear about America or what defects I may point towards it, I strongly consider America to be a model for the world.
In many respects if not most or all.
Within its borders America is far and away the most democratic of all countries that claim membership of the United Nations.
Over my three years of stay in States, I have often been stuck by the dignity of labour in America, by the ease with which high-ranking Americans carry their own loads, fix their own fences and mow their own lawns.
This, it seems to me, is part of a wider absence of class or caste distinctions that is unthinkable in Europe and India.
In the USA one can travel from the log cabin to the White House, as evident not just from Honest Abe in the 1800s but also from Dishonest Bill in the late 1900s.
Left-wing intellectuals have tended to downplay these American achievements - respect for the individual (this one I admire most about this great nation), the remarkable social mobility (like moving up from Baltimore, Maryland to Orange County, California), the searching scrutiny to which public officials and state agencies are subjected.
If America is evil, then all I can say is that within a national boundary, it is best of all the evils.
Stay tuned to this unpatriotic blasphemous infidel ape.
Good night mon ami including my fellow lucky ape who made it to the land of milk and honey.
It is important to emphasize though that apes are apes and they generally behave and think the same, no matter where they are.
Priority is survival, mate seeking and reproduction and then safety of the progeny.
4/19/2016
So far I have been speaking those remarkable hairless apes who transformed our understanding of nature and our own selves.
Tonight I shall speak on my own research on apoptosis which I had conducted between 2008 to 2010 in Dr. Kenney's lab.
It got accepted for publication a couple of days ago.
Dr. Kenney has been studying a disease called age related macular degeneration (AMD) that affects the central part of retina known as macula in geriatric group of humans.
The idea of the study at the cellular level was to closely see the affect of environmental toxins on the apoptosis cascade.
The retinal visual system primarily consist of three types of cells:
1. The ganglion cells whose long axons from the beautiful shiny nerve fibre layer of the retina and later the optic nerve.
2. The bipolar cells which join the ganglion cells and the photoreceptors.
It is believed that the visual processing of the image we "see" begins right here.
3. The photoreceptors rods and cones which all of us are taught in our class 10 biology.
All other cells in the retina are called glial cells whose primary function is to nourish and support these core visual processing cells.
My work was on Muller cells which is a specific type of glial cells.
So how do you study cell death?
A dying cell at its early throws of death sends out specific signals which we apes are able to assess with some very smart biotechnological assays or experiments.
My own work utilized 5 of such assays.
I will narrate more about it later.
What pleased me most after the paper got accepted was a remark from the reviewer:
"Very well written".
I am not a proud ape but I take immense pride in my writings as it could be the only thing close to talent which I may be possessing.
Stay tuned to the voice of not a very talented ape.
Good night mon ami and my fellow cousin ape.
4/20/2016
Dad with low ratings from a poll of one
4/20/2016
Johann Carl Friedrich Gauss is referred to as Princeps mathematicorum in Latin , meaning the foremost of mathematicians.
He was born in Brunswick, in 1777 then a part of the Holy Roman Empire to poor working class parents.
His mother was illiterate and never recorded his date of birth, only remembering that it was Wednesday, eight days before some feast of some Ascension (silly story of Jesus rising from dead).
Gauss being Gauss solved the puzzle of his birth date and along with it derived methods to compute the dates of all the Easters, of the past and that were to come in the future.
In one of my bed-time stories I devoted to an example of his genius as a child (hope u have not forgotten).
Here tonight, I wish to stress on his work on electricity.
In 1831, at the age of 54 (when we silly apes plan to retire), he started working with the physics professor Wilhelm Weber.
It was then that he established his famous law which describes the distribution of electric charge to the resulting electric field.
The net electric flux through any closed surface is equal to 1/epsilon times the net electric charge within that closed surface.
Epsilon being the permittivity of the material.
Now if you find it hard, don't worry.
At Yale, they devote an hour a lecture on this law alone and it may take a semester for the student apes to understand it.
This Gauss's law or the Gauss's flux theorem would later go on to become one of the four Maxwell's equations, the basis of the entire classical electrodynamics.
Gauss along with Weber constructed the first electromechanical telegraph in 1833 which is another fascinating tale by itself.
Remember, telegraph is merely a controlled transmission of electricity to various distances using some form of code.
I hope u are seeing how quickly things are snow balling from Cunaeus and Musschenbroek, Coulomb, Galvani, Volta, Oersted, Ohm and now to transmission of messages by an ageing mathematician, albeit the princeps mathematicorum.
These are the hairless apes that shaped the history only to be forgotten among the names of monarchs, kings, presidents and superstars who exploit their devises mostly to our detriment.
Good night mon ami and my fellow cousin ape.
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