October 28, 2017 Saturday
Bedtime Story
Learning to Accept the Futility
Just look at the letter that was sent to
Dawkins by an academic from New Zealand:
“When Lenin traveled through Germany
earlier this century (twentieth which means the last century), the Germans
permitted him only to travel in a sealed, locked train – on the condition that
he proceeded nonstop from the one border post to the other.
They clearly recognized his persuasiveness
and power of his ideas and their capacity to produce unhappiness.
I respectfully request you that you don’t
lend Dawkins’s book to anybody for the same reason.”
In short, Dawkins’s ideas and views are not
only radical but the reality is utterly pessimistic in the sense that there is
no higher purpose that human apes aspire for or there is no after life as they
wish for.
As Steven Weinberg puts it, “The more the
universe seems comprehensible, the more it also seems pointless.”
That is the brutal reality and we must
accept it and if sounds pessimistic, then so be it.
As grown up adults with reason and
intellect, one must learn to accept and handle not only the tragedies of
personal lives but also the futility or rather the pointlessness of our
existence.
Dawkins is reviled by a large swath of
population for his forthrightness but I on the other hand revere Richard
Dawkins for his direct and crystal clear writing and plain-speaking
documentaries.
Even my hero Isaac Asimov pales in
comparison, when it comes to candidness and unadulterated expression of
scientific views that calls for total annihilation of religious and
superstitious world view.
Thanks to the ideas of men like Richard
Dawkins, now we have fields such as computational biology that feed on using
genetic algorithms to imitate the effects of evolution on silicon chips, just
much faster.
At this point, I would like to slightly
digress from my primary story and tell you something about CRISPR/Cas system.
The reason for digressing to the CRISPR/Cas
system is to show you in complete detail how utterly and comprehensively digital
life is.
It will require a patient hearing and I
would like to start from the scratch.
This story begins in the Osaka University
of Japan.
Osaka University is one of Japan’s Seven
National Universities that ranks as the fourth best higher educational
institute of Japan.
In 1987 a molecular biologist by the name
of Yoshizumi Ishino published a paper in the Journal of Bacteriology with four
other co-authors.
The paper was titled “Nucleotide sequence
of the iap gene, responsible for alkaline phosphatase isozyme conversion in
Escherichia coli, and identification of the gene product”.
Stay tuned to the voice of an average story storytelling
chimpanzee or login at http://panarrans.blogspot.com
Good night mon ami and my fellow cousin ape.
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Another great educator and a teacher that I am aware of is
Professor Subhashish Chattopadhyay in Bangalore, India.
While I narrate stories, Professor Subhashish an electronic
engineer and a former professor at BARC, does and teaches real mathematics and
physics.
He started the participation of Indian students at the
International Physics Olympiad.
Do visit him here:
All his books can be downloaded for free through this link:
For edutainment and English education of your children, I
recommend this large collection of Halloween Songs for Kids:
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