The Answer lies in The Genome

Socha hai, a scientific inquiry

2012-09-22T20:32:00.000+05:30

Time and again, i come back to this wonderful song penned by Javed Akhtar saahab and composed by awesome trio Shankar–Ehsaan–Loy :) This is one of the songs which, as Javed saahab himself puts it "Exuberance or any human feeling can also be expressed well and with depth.", and this one is of a genuine inquiry.

I will use Science (referencing Wikipedia mostly :) to answer the queries raised in the song. Why Science? Well as the http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/video/2012/sep/21/why-science-important puts it, it is one of the coolest ways of disciplined inquiry and since we all live in a technology driven world based on Science which works, probably it is a good idea to use it to explain things around ;) So lets get going:

आसमान है नीला क्यों ?
[why the sky is blue?]

Well it is not Blue all the time! The color of sky depends on what is the scattered and what remains :)

"Scattering is significant for light at all visible wavelengths, but it is stronger at the shorter (bluer) end of the visible spectrum, meaning that that the scattered light is more blue than its source, the sun. The remaining sunlight, having lost some of its short wavelength components, appears slightly less blue."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sky

पानी गिला गिला क्यों?
[why the water feels wet?]

Well it is not just water, it is property possessed by the things in their liquid state.

"Wetting is the ability of a liquid to maintain contact with a solid surface, resulting from intermolecular interactions when the two are brought together. The degree of wetting (wettability) is determined by a force balance between adhesive and cohesive forces."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wetting

गोल क्यों है ज़मीन?
[why earth is round?]

In general, a rotating body, wears and tears down to a spherical in shape because any rotating body in order to conserve energy takes the shape involving least tension [http://lasp.colorado.edu/education/outerplanets/giantplanets_whatandwhere.php#rotation]. But that said, Earth is not really round, it s more like an egg :)

"The shape of the Earth approximates an oblate spheroid, a sphere flattened along the axis from pole to pole such that there is a bulge around the equator.^[66] This bulge results from the rotation of the Earth, and causes the diameter at the equator to be 43 km (kilometer) larger than the pole-to-pole diameter.^[67] "
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earth#Shape

सिल्क मैं है नरमी क्यों?
[why silk feels soft?]

In general β-pleated sheets have this softy feeling to them and then it also textured in a way to give this nice feeling :) Silk is also used for making surgical sutures after chemically removing the irritant protein of silk, sericin .
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silk#Physical_properties

आग मैं हैं गर्मीं क्यों?
[why fire feels hot?]

Temperature of a substance depends on this amazing property of their molecular vibration. This accidental insight led to the invention of microwave oven which probably most of us use everyday :) Now coming to Fire, a rapid oxidation of a material in the exothermic chemical process, bound to feel hot.

दो और दो पांच क्यों नहीं?
[why 2 + 2 ≠ 5?]

Well this was proposed in Orwell's 1984 as an example of dogma one must believe.
Now coming to the why part, short answer is that it is based on the way addition operator is defined. More formally, http://tachyos.org/godel/1+1=2.html and if you are really into this, then check out http://quod.lib.umich.edu/cgi/t/text/text-idx?c=umhistmath;idno=AAT3201.0001.001 as proposed in the former link ;)

पेड़ हो गए क्यों कम?
[why the number of trees have decreased?]

If http://www.grida.no/graphicslib/detail/number-of-trees-planted-world-map-unep-billion-tree-campaign-may-2008_1110 is to be believed, i guess sheer number may not be decreasing? But i feel this question is more about deforestation, well that is dude to human lust, for space, food and money...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deforestation#Causes

तीन हैं ये मौसम क्यों?
[why there are three seasons]

I am not sure about this number, i mean India is suppose to have four, anyway the reason of having this phenomena is Earth's tilt, shape(as discussed in a previous question:) and ellipitical orbit.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Season#Causes_and_effects

चान दो क्यों नहीं?
[why don't we have two moons?]

Well some planets for have more than 1 natural sattelite / moons so to speak :) But why Earth does not have two moons, i guess the answer lies in its creation. Here http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v412/n6848/full/412708a0.html is one proposal :)

दुनिया मैं है जंग क्यों, बहता लाल रंग क्यों?
[why there is war in the world and unnecessary bloodshed?]

There are many reasons behind this depending on which war we are talking about :)

In Why Nations Go to War, by John G. Stoessinger, the author points out that both sides will claim that morality justifies their fight. He also states that the rationale for beginning a war depends on an overly optimistic assessment of the outcome of hostilities (casualties and costs), and on misperceptions of the enemy's intentions.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War#Motivations

सरहदें हैं क्यों कर कहीं?
[why there are boundaries every where]

Mostly it is about ownership, giving us this feeling of pride and security i feel. But "There has been a renaissance in the study of borders during the past two decades, partially from creation of a counter narrative to notions of a borderless world that have been advanced as part of globalization theory."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Border#Border_economics

सोच है? ये तुमने क्या कभी?
[have you ever thought of these things?]
सोचा है? की है ये क्या सभी?
[have you ever thought what is all this?]
सोचा है? सोचा नहीं तो सोचो अभी!
[have you ever thought? if not, then think now]

I have, many times, then asked people around me with no success... those were the days without internet. So glad that Internet happened while i am alive :)

बेहती है क्यों हैर नदी?
[why all the rivers flow?]

This try to take lower possible energy state. Now talking about flow or "A current, in a river or stream, is the flow of water influenced by gravity as the water moves downhill to reduce its potential energy."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Current_%28stream%29

but it may not necessarily be the shortest path. "Rivers flowing downhill, from river source to river mouth, do not necessarily take the shortest path. For alluvial streams, straight and braided rivers have very low sinuosity and flow directly down hill, while meandering rivers flow from side to side across a valley."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/River#Flow

होती क्या है रौशनी?
[what is light?]

"Visible light (commonly referred to simply as light) is electromagnetic radiation that is visible to the human eye, and is responsible for the sense of sight."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Light

बर्फ गिरती है क्यों?
[why does the snow fall?]

I guess the reason is similar to one of the previous questions about river-flow. Under gravity, things tend to move towards lower potential energy state.
Now coming to why Snow occurs in mountains, "In mountainous areas, heavy snowfall accumulates when air is forced to ascend the mountains and squeeze out precipitation along their windward slopes, which in cold conditions, falls in the form of snow."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Snow#Cause

दोस्त क्यों हैं रूठते?
[why friends get angry?]

This will depend of the type of friendship i feel. In general, i feel it is due to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cognitive_dissonance .

तारे क्यों है टूटते?
[what are falling stars?]

It is not really a star,
just some heavenly mass,
trying to make its way into the earth's atmosphere,
and in the process,
burning itself up

http://starchild.gsfc.nasa.gov/docs/StarChild/questions/question12.html

बादलों मैं बिजली है क्यों?
[why there is lightning?]

"Lightning is a massive electrostatic discharge caused by unbalanced electric charge in the atmosphere. Lightning can be either inside clouds (IC), cloud to cloud (CC) or cloud to ground (CG) and is accompanied by the loud sound of thunder."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lightning

---paragraph repeated---

सन्नाटा सुनाई नहीं देता,
[we can not hear the silence,]

"Silence is the relative or total lack of audible sound.", probably that is why ;)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silence

I feel more interesting aspect here is the relative part of above, for example, Auditory masking.
"If two sounds of two different frequencies are played at the same time, two separate sounds can often be heard rather than a combination tone. The ability to hear frequencies separately is known as frequency resolution or frequency selectivity. When signals are as a combination tone, they are said to reside in the same critical bandwidth. This effect is thought to occur due to filtering within the cochlea, the hearing organ in the inner ear. A complex sound is split into different frequency components and these components cause a peak in the pattern of vibration at a specific place on the cilia inside the basilar membrane within the cochlea. These components are then coded independently on the auditory nerve which transmits sound information to the brain. This individual coding only occurs if the frequency components are different enough in frequency, otherwise they are in the same critical band and are coded at the same place and are perceived as one sound instead of two.^[3]"

और हवाएं दिखाई नहीं देती!
[and can not see the wind!]

"Air is the name given to atmosphere used in breathing and photosynthesis. Dry air contains roughly (by volume) 78.09% nitrogen, 20.95% oxygen, 0.93% argon, 0.039% carbon dioxide, and small amounts of other gases. Air also contains a variable amount of water vapor, on average around 1%."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Air
These are colorless gases. "What distinguishes a gas from liquids and solids is the vast separation of the individual gas particles. This separation usually makes a colorless gas invisible to the human observer."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gas#Real_gas

सोचा है ये क्या कभी? होता है ये क्यों?
[have you ever thought why all of this happens?]

Programming a vibrational alarm for Android, HourlyReminder App

2012-08-29T02:03:00.001+05:30

I was looking for some cron like command in android to make google nexus 1 vibrate in certain pattern (GOD in Morse Code :) for certain time. After a lot of googling, i found many resources to make this happen :) But it was not as straight forward as i thought...

Basically one needs to use android's AlarmManager to make it all work. Difference being that cron executes a command, while AlarmManager broadcasts an Intent and it will make your code do the magic when the alarm goes off :). BroadcastReceiver registered in your manifest takes this and runs when you reboot the system. One tricky thing is that you have to make sure that AlarmManager wake up the device in anticipation of alarm... God knows why! But this can be done via the WakeLock using PowerManager system service (make sure to add it in manifest!). Also one other critical thing is to force the system not to use SD via manifest.

There are many threads on stackexchange talking about all this, from where i shamelessly mashed up my code. It is available in the src/xml files of http://code.google.com/p/clock-ticker/source/detail?r=e584bf27adc0b82ccbb89c30209dc949c48aed84. If you would like to check out the app, it has been loaded at https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=Clock.Reminder :)

Social order and intellect

2012-06-24T20:40:00.000+05:30

While watching a controversial Norwegian documentary i was wondering about the relation between intellect and social hierarchy. After going through Nisbett's and Lareau's chapters suggested by Prof. Duneier, it seems like:

1. Tacit difference in upbringing of children for different roles between high and low socio-economic-classes (SEC); low SEC tend to provide punitive and stressful environment damaging pre-frontal cortex, while high SEC providing discussion with better vocabulary and information content
2. Society's treatment towards different classes
3. Migration pattern of races
4. Medical care between classes
5. Nutritional differences (vitamins, breast-feeding amounts to ~ 6 point IQ difference) between food taken by different classes

Nisbett also points that probably hereditary arguments also address non-trivial part of genetics, things like gene linked to happiness and rewards. He writes about Moore's research "When the child was having trouble with a design, white adoptive mothers tended to diffuse tension by joking, grining, and laughing."

However i did get confused reading "The black adoptive mothers were more likely to frown and scowl. The white adoptive mothers encouraged the problem-solving efforts of their children (“Gee, that’s an interesting idea” or “You’re good at this”). Black mothers were more likely to express disapproval (“You know that does not look right” or “You could do better than this if you really tried”)." from Nisbett while Lareau writing "The working-class and poor parents viewed children's development as spontaneosly unfolding, as long as they were provided with comfort, food, shelter, and other basic support. This commitment, too, required ongoing effort; sustaining children's natural growth despite formidable life challenges is properly viewed as an accomplishment.".

Meditation

2011-05-10T21:52:00.001+05:30

Recent surge in scientific evidence for benefits of meditation has prompted me to share my secret of happiness, which otherwise, when told by me, is taken as bull shit ;)
The idea is simple and stated by Supreme Yogi Krishna in Bhagwat Gita as a "practice by offering the movement of the outgoing breath into the incoming, and the incoming breath into the outgoing", which can be broken down in following practical steps, a.k.a. protocol!
1. chose a place, a little isolated and available same time every day for at least 15 minutes
2. chose a position which is comfortable for you, remember you have to sit continuously for the above period...
3. use some kind of alarm to time you, and let it go
4. close your eyes, minimize sound or smell in the environment... idea is to reduce sensory inputs... YES close your laptop, mobile-phones and ... ;)
5. try to focus on your breath, feel it flowing out and then coming in, flowing out, coming in... if you are getting distracted too often, then start counting the inflow and outflow of each breath, practice it for couple of time and if still unable to focus, then try out some kind of mantra... still not working? then you can start with some kind of mental imagery which makes you feel relaxed, mountain-top, beach, ... still find meditation very hard? Just rinse and repeat, remember what this girl says :)

2010-12-10T19:32:00.000+05:30

"How can we understand the world in which we find ourselves?...Traditionally these are questions for philosophy, but philosophy is dead."

The Grand Design: Stephen Hawking and Leonard Mlodinow

2010-12-10T19:26:00.000+05:30

"many quantities expressible as proportions that satisfy Kolmogorov's axioms (e.g., proportions of length, time, mass, velocity...) but have nothing to do with probability"

Tackling Wicked Problems: Through the Transdisciplinary Imagination

Self Comes to Mind

2010-12-09T03:13:00.000+05:30

http://www.amazon.com/Self-Comes-Mind-Constructing-Conscious/dp/0307378756 seems to be an interesting book, any one out there who read it?

Free Will ?

2008-04-16T21:48:00.002+05:30

Thanks to Dilbert Blog [ http://dilbertblog.typepad.com/the_dilbert_blog/2008/04/free-will-debun.html ] I got hold of a recent article ( http://www.nature.com/neuro/journal/vaop/ncurrent/abs/nn.2112.html ) in Nature Neuroscience questions the existence of free-will, more on this article at http://www.wired.com/science/discoveries/news/2008/04/mind_decision .

clipped from www.nature.com

There has been a long controversy as to whether subjectively 'free' decisions are determined by brain activity ahead of time. We found that the outcome of a decision can be encoded in brain activity of prefrontal and parietal cortex up to 10 s before it enters awareness. This delay presumably reflects the operation of a network of high-level control areas that begin to prepare an upcoming decision long before it enters awareness.

A Mathematician's Lament by Paul Lockhart

2008-04-01T16:46:00.001+05:30

In this essay [ http://www.maa.org/devlin/LockhartsLament.pdf ] Paul argues that mathematics is arts, a highly creative process. A mathematician is a "poetic dreamer".
Few lines copied-pasted from the essay:

"I simply wouldn't have the imagination to come up with the kind of senseless,
soul-crushing ideas that constitute contemporary mathematics education."

"the mathematician's art: asking simple and elegant questions about our imaginary creations,
and crafting satisfying and beautiful explanations. There is really nothing else quite like this
realm of pure idea; it's fascinating, it's fun, and it's free!"

" If you deny students the opportunity to engage in this activity— to pose
their own problems, make their own conjectures and discoveries, to be wrong, to be creatively
frustrated, to have an inspiration, and to cobble together their own explanations and proofs— you
deny them mathematics itself."

"
SIMPLICIO:
Are you really trying to claim that mathematics offers no useful or
practical applications to society?
SALVIATI:
Of course not. I'm merely suggesting that just because something
happens to have practical consequences, doesn't mean that's what it is
about. Music can lead armies into battle, but that's not why people
write symphonies. Michelangelo decorated a ceiling, but I'm sure he
had loftier things on his mind.
"

"
SIMPLICIO:
But people need to be able to balance their checkbooks, don't they?
SALVIATI:
I'm sure most people use a calculator for everyday arithmetic. And
why not? It's certainly easier and more reliable. But my point is not
just that the current system is so terribly bad, it's that what it's missing
is so wonderfully good! Mathematics should be taught as art for art's
sake. These mundane "useful" aspects would follow naturally as a
trivial by-product. Beethoven could easily write an advertising jingle,
but his motivation for learning music was to create something
beautiful.
"

"You see kids, if you know algebra then you can figure out how old Maria is if we
know that she is two years older than twice her age seven years ago!" (As if anyone would ever
have access to that ridiculous kind of information, and not her age.)

"It is far easier to be a passive conduit of some publisher's "materials" and to follow the
shampoo-bottle instruction "lecture, test, repeat" than to think deeply and thoughtfully about the
meaning of one's subject and how best to convey that meaning directly and honestly to one's
students. "

"Why is it that we accept math teachers who have never
produced an original piece of mathematics, know nothing of the history and philosophy of the
subject, nothing about recent developments, nothing in fact beyond what they are expected to
present to their unfortunate students? "

"We have millions of adults wandering
around with "negative b plus or minus the square root of b squared
minus 4ac all over 2a" in their heads, and absolutely no idea whatsoever
what it means. "

As Gauss once remarked, "What we need are
notions, not notations."

"
SIMPLICIO:
But isn't one of the purposes of mathematics education to help
students think in a more precise and logical way, and to develop their
"quantitative reasoning skills?" Don't all of these definitions and
formulas sharpen the minds of our students?
SALVIATI:
No they don't. If anything, the current system has the opposite effect
of dulling the mind. Mental acuity of any kind comes from solving
problems yourself, not from being told how to solve them.
"

"
Compare your own experience of learning algebra with Bertrand Russell's
recollection:
"I was made to learn by heart: 'The square of the sum of two
numbers is equal to the sum of their squares increased by twice
their product.' I had not the vaguest idea what this meant and
when I could not remember the words, my tutor threw the book at
my head, which did not stimulate my intellect in any way."
"

On High School Geometry Proof
"Could anything be more unattractive and inelegant? Could any argument be more
obfuscatory and unreadable? This isn't mathematics! A proof should be an epiphany from the
Gods, not a coded message from the Pentagon.
No mathematician works this way. No mathematician has ever worked this way. This is a
complete and utter misunderstanding of the mathematical enterprise. Mathematics is not about
erecting barriers between ourselves and our intuition, and making simple things complicated.
Mathematics is about removing obstacles to our intuition, and keeping simple things simple."

ON LOWER SCHOOL MATH
"Children are expected to master a complex set of
algorithms for manipulating Hindi symbols, unrelated to any real desire or curiosity on their part,
and regarded only a few centuries ago as too difficult for the average adult. Multiplication tables
are stressed, as are parents, teachers, and the kids themselves."

On The Standard School Mathematics Curriculum
"Why Geometry occurs in between Algebra I and its sequel remains a mystery."

About the Author:

Paul became interested in mathematics when he was about 14 (outside of the school math class, he points out) and read voraciously, becoming especially interested in analytic number theory. He dropped out of college after one semester to devote himself to math, supporting himself by working as a computer programmer and as an elementary school teacher. Eventually he started working with Ernst Strauss at UCLA, and the two published a few papers together. Strauss introduced him to Paul Erdos, and they somehow arranged it so that he became a graduate student there. He ended up getting a Ph.D. from Columbia in 1990, and went on to be a fellow at MSRI and an assistant professor at Brown. He also taught at UC Santa Cruz. His main research interests were, and are, automorphic forms and Diophantine geometry.
[http://www.maa.org/devlin/devlin_03_08.html]

clipped from www.maa.org

After several years teaching university mathematics, Paul eventually tired of it and decided he wanted to get back to teaching children. He secured a position at Saint Ann's School, where he says "I have happily been subversively teaching mathematics (the real thing) since 2000."

Compiling GHC on Scientific Linux V5

2007-11-05T20:11:00.001+05:30

For a long time I wanted to go 'strictly functional' and what better way then to start with the beast, ghc. So about a couple of months back, I downloaded version 6.6.1 [ http://www.haskell.org/ghc/dist/6.6.1/rpm/rhel5/i386/ghc661-6.6.1-2.el5.i386.rpm ] and started reading YAHT [ http://darcs.haskell.org/yaht/yaht.pdf ]. Then the 'laziness' took over and my 'idea of being strictly functional' took a back-seat. The news of release of ghc Version 6.8.1 (3 November 2007) reignited the desire. This time I thought of compiling the ghc from source [ Main - http://www.haskell.org/ghc/dist/6.8.1/ghc-6.8.1-src.tar.bz2 , Extra Libs - http://www.haskell.org/ghc/dist/6.8.1/ghc-6.8.1-src-extralibs.tar.bz2 ]. Make sure you have 4-5 hours and 1-1.5 GB of disc space! Become 'root' and extract the above two files: tar xvjf ghc-6.8.1-src.tar.bz2 tar xvjf ghc-6.8.1-src-extralibs.tar.bz2 Both of them will extract in the directory ./ghc-6.8.1. For compiling there are some dependencies to be taken care of: 1. ghc [I already had v 6.6.1, http://www.haskell.org/ghc/dist/6.6.1/rpm/rhel5/i386/ghc661-6.6.1-2.el5.i386.rpm ] , it is interesting as the compilers compiles its next version [ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bootstrapping_(compilers) ]: rpm -ivhf ghc661-6.6.1-2.el5.i386.rpm 2. cabal, Common Architecture for Building Applications and Libraries, which can be downloaded from http://www.haskell.org/cabal/release/rc/cabal-1.2.2.0.tar.gz and installation instructions need to be followed [ http://haskell.org/haskellwiki/Cabal/How_to_install_a_Cabal_package ]: tar xzf cabal-1.2.2.0.tar.gz cd cabal-1.2.2 runhaskell Setup.hs configure runhaskell Setup.hs build runhaskell Setup.hs install 3. readline-devel, readline library which in turn has terminfo as dependence, so better to use yum for installation: yum install readline-devel 4. alex, A lexical analyser generator for Haskell, whose rpm can be downloaded from http://www.haskell.org/alex/dist/2.1.0/RH9/alex-2.1.0-1.i386.rpm and installed easily: rpm -ivhf alex-2.1.0-1.i386.rpm 5. happy, the yacc of haskell [I read on http://tritium.livejournal.com/ to compile happy you need old version of happy]. But for me simply getting the source http://www.haskell.org/happy/dist/1.17/happy-1.17.tar.gz and installation worked fine: tar xvzf happy-1.17-html.tar.gz cd happy-1.17 runhaskell Setup.hs configure runhaskell Setup.hs build runhaskell Setup.hs install We are all set for the ghc compilation: cd ghc-6.8.1 ./configure make make install Clean up ~300MB from the older ghc (v 6.6.1) installation, I went the brute force way: make a "list" using 'find /usr -name ghc-6.6.1' and clean 'rm -rf "list"' Now I have to dig deeper into the release note (http://www.haskell.org/ghc/docs/6.8.1/html/users_guide/release-6-8-1.html ), one thing which has really got me interested is the introduction of debugger to GHCi. --------------------------"The Answer Lies in the Genome"-------------------------- http://fuzzylife.org

clipped from www.haskell.org

Haskell is a general purpose, purely functional programming language featuring static typing, higher order functions, polymorphism, type classes, and monadic effects. Haskell compilers are freely available for almost any computer.

Writing a Poem is like Programming ...

2007-07-07T13:45:00.001+05:30

Clips from "THE PHILOSOPHY OF COMPOSITION" by EDGAR ALLAN POE [ http://www.eapoe.org/works/essays/philcomp.htm ].

In this essay, Poe present a theory about how poets compose their poems [may be writers in general?]. He uses his most famous poem, "The Raven" [ Raven — the bird of ill omen, http://www.eapoe.org/works/poems/ravena.htm ] to illustrate this theory.

Extent: If any literary work is too long to be read at one sitting, we must be content to dispense with the immensely important effect derivable from unity of impression — for, if two sittings be required, the affairs of the world interfere, and every thing like totality is at once destroyed.

Tone: Melancholy is thus the most legitimate of all the poetical tones.
Province: Truth, in fact, demands a precision, and Passion, a homeliness (the truly passionate will comprehend me) which are absolutely antagonistic to that Beauty which, I maintain, is the excitement, or pleasurable elevation, of the soul.

Artistic effects: I determined to produce continuously novel effects, by the variation of the application of the refrain — the refrain itself remaining, for the most part, unvaried.

Character of the word :

long o as the most sonorous vowel, in connection with r as the most producible consonant.

keeping with that melancholy which I had predetermined as the tone of the poem. In such a search it would have been absolutely impossible to overlook the word "Nevermore." In fact, it was the very first which presented itself.

Pretext for the continuous use of the one word "nevermore.": "Nevermore" should involve the utmost conceivable amount of sorrow and despair.

Structure: Less pedantically — the feet employed throughout (trochees) consist of a long syllable followed by a short: the first line of the stanza consists of eight of these feet — the second of seven and a half (in effect two-thirds) — the third of eight — the fourth of seven and a half — the fifth the same — the sixth three and a half. Now, each of these lines, taken individually, has been employed before, and what originality the "Raven" has, is in their combination into stanza; nothing even remotely approaching this combination has ever been attempted.
Location: that a close circumscription of space is absolutely necessary to the effect of insulated incident: — it has the force of a frame to a picture.

Introducing Raven: I had now to introduce the bird — and the thought of introducing him through the window, was inevitable.

Conclusion: Two things are invariably required — first, some amount of complexity, or more properly, adaptation; and, secondly, some amount of suggestiveness — some under current, however indefinite of meaning.

clipped from www.poemuseum.org

Installing FreeBSD 6.2

2007-06-23T20:26:00.001+05:30

FreeBSD is really really getting cooler with each release. Here is how it went, I downloaded CD1 of the FreeBSD (just for base and no ports) and then proceeded to install as follows. Chose 1 to BOOT, Select Country, Select Keyboard layout. Later the diskmanager comes, went to the partition on which I had installed 6.0RC1. I wanted to do a fresh install so I deleted it using 'D', then Create using 'C' and press 'Q' to save-and-quit diskmanager. The next screen is for slicing the newly created FreeBSD partition (with number 165), chose using up-down arrow keys and press 'A' for auto-slicing (works well for quick and dirty install like this), pressed 'Q' to save-and-quit slicemanager. Now comes the next screen for selecting packages, I chose the 'custom' and then selected 'ALL'. It also asks if one wants to install 'ports' tree with a cost of 440MB, since it is worthit, I say 'yes'.
Create the root password and a normal-user account as the installer asks.
Install the bootloader too at MBR. This will allow to boot any other OS you have.
My WinXP is coming as option F1 and FreeBSD as F2.
Now reboot. Chose F2 to boot FreeBSD and press enter... one more time to avoid 9 s lag!
Now I logged in as root and did the most important thing, getting the wireless card working!
I have this Motorola bcmwl5 card which does not have the FreeBSD driver. I repeated what I did for making it work in FreeBSD 6.0 [ follow http://dannyman.toldme.com/2005/01/05/freebsd-howto-ndisulate-windows-drivers/ and may be http://caia.swin.edu.au/reports/041221A/ ].
To enable my sound card, I had to edit /boot/defaults/loader.conf and replace NO with YES at the snd_drv_ich using vi and card worked like magic.
http://www.linuxhomenetworking.com/wiki/index.php/Quick_HOWTO_:_Ch09_:_Linux_Users_and_Sudo is a nice tutorial to enable SUDO [bob, bunny ALL=(ALL) ALL]
For autologin, I followed http://www.mail-archive.com/freesbie@gufi.org/msg00671.html
To install Fluxbox - http://www.pragana.net/short-commands.htmlFluxbox
http://forums.gentoo.org/viewtopic-t-291835-highlight-torsmo+tips.htmlhttp://www.tuxmachines.org/node/392
For xmms-wma - http://mcmcc.bat.ru/xmms-wma/
For mplayer, http://www.freebsdforums.org/forums/printthread.php?t=46698 the security vulnerability thing has to be closed.
For playing the DVD, I found ogle and ogle-guimplayer very good [remember to disable quicktime using make config in /usr/ports/multimedia/win32-codecs].
PS: I tried to install the Mintlinux [ http://www.linuxmint.com/ , Cassandra Light ] and Fedora7 [ http://fedoraproject.org/ ] live-cds, but seems like they are not meant for older pc anymore! I have 256MB RAM and PentiumIV, but it takes ages to boot these live cds!

clipped from www.freebsd.org

1905 - Annus mirabilis, Latin for 'extraordinary year'

2007-06-23T18:44:00.001+05:30

Einstein in 1905, while working in the patent office, published following papers:

1. "A New Determination of Molecular Dimensions" (Doctoral dissertation)
[30 April 1905] - download from http://lorentz.phl.jhu.edu/AnnusMirabilis/AeReserveArticles/eins_diss.pdf
• Buchdruckerei K. J. Wyss, Bern, 1906.
• Annalen der Physik, 19(1906), pp. 289-305.
Considered least interesting and most cited work amongst these papers!

2. "On the motion of small particles suspended in liquids at rest required by the molecular-kinetic theory of heat." (Brownian motion)
[May 1905; received 11 May 1905] - download from http://www.scribd.com/word/download/12989?extension=pdf
• Annalen der Physik, 17(1905), pp. 549-560.

3. "On the electrodynamics of moving bodies" (Special relativity)
[June 1905; received 30 June 1905] - download from http://www.fourmilab.ch/etexts/einstein/specrel/specrel.pdf
• Annalen der Physik, 17(1905), pp. 891-921.

4. "Does the inertia of a body depend upon its energy content?" (E=m*[c]^2)
[September 1905; received 27 September 1905] - download from http://www.fourmilab.ch/etexts/einstein/E_mc2/e_mc2.pdf
• Annalen der Physik, 18(1905), pp. 639-41.

Written as a brief follow-up to the special relativity paper, this short note derives the inertial of energy: all energy E also has an inertia E/c2.

5. "On a heuristic viewpoint concerning the production and transformation of light." (light quantum/photoelectric effect paper)
[17 March 1905] - download from http://dbserv.ihep.su/~elan/src/einstein05/eng.pdf
• Annalen der Physik, 17(1905), pp. 132-148.

Later after completing the theory of General relativity in 1916, he wrote a book on the Theory-of-Relativity. This can be freely downloaded [ http://www.gutenberg.org/dirs/etext04/relat10h.zip ] from Project Gutenberg [ http://www.gutenberg.org/wiki/Main_Page ].

[Source: http://www.pitt.edu/~jdnorton/teaching/2509_Einstein_1905.html , http://einstein-annalen.mpiwg-berlin.mpg.de/annalen/fulltexts , http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Annus_Mirabilis_Papers ]

clipped from nobelprize.org

Albert Einstein was born at Ulm, in Württemberg, Germany, on March 14, 1879. Six weeks later the family moved to Munich and he began his schooling there at the Luitpold Gymnasium. Later, they moved to Italy and Albert continued his education at Aarau, Switzerland and in 1896 he entered the Swiss Federal Polytechnic School in Zurich to be trained as a teacher in physics and mathematics. In 1901, the year he gained his diploma, he acquired Swiss citizenship and, as he was unable to find a teaching post, he accepted a position as technical assistant in the Swiss Patent Office. In 1905 he obtained his doctor's degree.

Science in India

2007-06-14T20:17:00.003+05:30

I was reading the latest Nature and saw this news article [Nature 447, 764 (14 June 2007) doi:10.1038/447764a; Published online 13 June 2007, "Indian scientists battle journal retraction", http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v447/n7146/full/447764a.html ] which says:

The arguments centre on a 2005 paper in the Journal of Biological Chemistry (JBC), which examined signalling pathways in the development of skin cancer (Rangaswami, H., Bulbule, A. & Kundu, G. C. J. Biol. Chem. 280, 19381–19392; 2005). It was authored by Gopal Kundu — 2004 winner of the India's highest honour in science, the Bhatnagar prize — and two colleagues at the National Centre for Cell Science (NCCS) in Pune. The journal retracted the paper in February 2007 after an investigation prompted by an anonymous email. The authors were told that the paper contained "data that was reproduced without citation and with different labelling" from a paper the same group had published in 2004 (Rangaswami, H., Bulbule, A. & Kundu, G. C. J. Biol. Chem. 279, 38921–38935; 2004). Journal editors claimed the errors amounted to "deliberate misrepresentation".

I don't know who is saying the truth? Very confused. As I flipped pages, I note the ENCODE [ http://computationalbiologynews.blogspot.com/2007/06/dejunking-genome.html ] consortium does not have any Indian or any Indian Institute as a member [ http://www.genome.gov/12513391 ].

The UNIXHATERS Handbook

2007-06-04T11:19:00.000+05:30

The UNIXHATERS Handbook [download] is a fun to read book. It introduces us to the frustrations of the 80's hackers who were exposed to UNIX of that time [it is presented as virus-with-a-user-interface in the book]. They were not quarantined in time so it simply spread...

Most of the stuff in the book is not valid literally [Now we have GNU/Linux and I must note that many of the bugs mentioned here have been fixed, so you can not replicate them. But the points of 'being-productive' is still context free :)] but some of the philosophy mentioned, still holds.

But listen to what Dennis Ritchie [Co-creator UNIX and C] has to say about the book:

Here is my metaphor: your book is a pudding stuffed with apposite observations, many well-conceived. Like excrement, it contains enough undigested nuggets of nutrition to sustain life for some. But it is not a tasty pie: it reeks too much of contempt and of envy.

Bon Appetite!

Enjoy,
Animesh
--------------------------"The Answer Lies in Genome"--------------------------
http://computationalbiologynews.blogspot.com/

PS: Few quotes from the book

To Ken and Dennis,
without whom this book
would not have been possible.

The original Unix solved a problem and solved it well, as did the Roman numeral system, the mercury treatment for syphilis, and carbon paper. And like those technologies, Unix, too, rightfully belongs to history.

"Two of the most famous products of Berkeley are LSD and Unix. I don't think that this is a coincidence."

—Anonymous

Unix was evolutionarily superior to its competitors, but not technically superior. Unix became a commercial success because it was a virus.

A century ago, fast typists were jamming their keyboards, so engineers designed the QWERTY keyboard to slow them down.

550 chiarell… User unknown: Not a typewriter
-sendmail error message

Sturgeon's Law, which states that 90% percent of any field is crap.

wc *.c
[A UNIX program 'wc' used here over C source files from the book: The Unix Programming Environment]
Yep. That's what much of this programmer's work consists of. In fact, today I spent so much time counting my C files that I didn't really have time to do anything else. I think I'll go count them again.

Yet somehow Unix maintains its reputation as a programmer's dream. Maybe it lets programmers dream about being productive, rather than letting them actually be productive.

If you drop a frog into briskly boiling water it will immediately jump out. Boiling water is hot, you know. However, if you put a frog into cold water and slowly bring it to a boil, the frog won't notice and will be boiled to death.

The noted linguistic theorist Benjamin Whorf said that our language determines what concepts we can think. C has this effect on Unix; it prevents programmers from writing robust software by making such a thing unthinkable.

bugs usually don't get fixed (or even tracked down), and periodically rebooting Unix is the most reliable way to keep it from exhibiting Alzheimer's disease.

Unix discovers this after spending a few hours to dump 2 gigabytes. Unix happily reports the bad spot, asks you to replace the tape with a new one, destroy the evil tape, and start over. Yep, Unix considers an entire tape unusable if it can't write on one inch of it.

Using crypt is like giving a person two aspirin for a heart attack. Crypt's encryption algorithm is incredibly weak—so weak that several years ago, a graduate student at the MIT Artificial Intelligence Laboratory wrote a program that automatically decrypts data files encrypted with crypt.2

always going on about how under real operating systems (ITS and MULTICS among others), one never had to worry about losing mail, losing files, needing to run fsck on every reboot… the minor inconveniences Unix weenies suffer

The Unix file system slows down as the disk fills up. Push disk usage much past 90%, and you'll grind your computer to a halt. The Unix solution takes a page from any good politician and fakes the numbers. Unix's df command is rigged so that a disk that is 90% filled gets reported as "100%," 80% gets reported as being "91%" full, and so forth.
Weird, huh? It's sort of like someone who sets his watch five minutes ahead and then arrives five minutes late to all of his appointments, because he knows that his watch is running fast.

So why do people believe that the Unix file system is high performance? Because Berkeley named their file system "The Fast File System."

By design, NFS is connectionless and stateless. There's only one problem with a connectionless, stateless system: it doesn't work.

God has a binary representation is just another clear indication that Unix is extremely cabalistic and was probably written by disciples of Aleister Crowley.

Unix teaches us about the transitory nature of all things, thus ridding us of samsaric attachments and hastening enlightenment. - Michael Travers <mt@media-lab.media.mit.edu>
[Now, I no longer have attachments to my processes. Both processes and the disappearance of processes are illusory. The world is Unix, Unix is the world, laboring ceaselessly for the salvation of all sentient beings.]

In a cryptic statement, Professor Wirth of the ETH Institute and father of the Pascal, Modula 2, and Oberon structured languages, merely stated that P. T. Barnum was correct.

Dennis and Brian worked on a truly warped version of Pascal, called "A." When we found others were actually trying to create real 308 Creators Admit C, Unix Were Hoax programs with A, we quickly added additional cryptic features and evolved into B, BCPL, and finally C. We stopped when we got a clean compile on the following syntax:

for(;P("\n"),R=;P("|"))for(e=C;e=P("_"+(*u++/ 8)%2))P("|"+(*u/4)%2);

God Delusion

2007-05-21T18:04:00.000+05:30

Below are the notes I have compiled from the Book God Delusion by Richard Dawkins [ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Dawkins]. The book starts with the thought why most of us continue doing a thing, despite we hate doing it and despite we all are endowed with the power to stop. He mentions his wife saying "I didn't know I could" (to atheist?). He talks about the how environment plays a role on which religion we choose "Victim of Childhood Indoctrination - Mutatis Mutandis". But he also mentions that "Same experience led people to different paths". He seems to be frustrated on the point of a child being labeled by folks; he says "Children are too young to be religiously labeled". He then brings and interesting point on how many scientist's quote has been taken out of context to prove there belief in God. For e.g., one of Einstein's most eagerly quoted remarks is 'Science without religion is lame, religion without science is blind.'

But Einstein also said, "It was, of course, a lie what you read about my religious convictions, a lie which is being systematically repeated. I do not believe in a personal God and I have never denied this but have expressed it clearly. If something is in me which can be called religious then it is the unbounded admiration for the structure of the world so far as our science can reveal it." [Source: Max Jammer's book Einstein and Religion] He describes the naturalist's attempt to understand nature as "As ever when we unweave a rainbow, it will not become less wonderful". Then he defines the terms:

Theist - Deity is intimately involved in human affairs. Deist - Deist God never intervenes after setting up initial laws governing the universe, and certainly has no specific interest in human affairs (People like Voltaire and Diderot fall in this). Pantheists - "God as a no supernatural synonym for Nature, or for the Universe, or for the lawfulness that governs its workings (People like Spinoza fall in this)." On the biased attitude towards religion, he cites example of United States Supreme Court allowing the use of hoasca tea (which contains the illegal hallucinogenic drug dimethyltryptamine) by members of church in New Mexico while ruling against the use of Marijuana as a therapeutic agent. Talking about religious irony, the book cites statements like 'Behead those who say Islam is a violent religion'! In an interesting manner when he starts talking about Old Testament, he brings out the famous quote of Ralph W. Emerson: "The religion of one age is the literary entertainment of the next." On evolution, his bottom line is "any creative intelligence, of sufficient complexity to design anything, comes into existence only as the end product of an extended process of gradual evolution." Something again which I can relate to Hinduism, he says "What impresses me about Catholic mythology is partly its tasteless kitsch but mostly the airy nonchalance with which these people make up the details as they go along. It is just shamelessly invented." In Hinduism I have seen that from recovered Four Vedas [where Indra is mentioned more often then Visnu] don't mention 99.9% of the ~330 million Gods. Later based on personal likings people brought their God forward and wrote treatises like Shivpuraan [Lord Shiva is Supreme here] while in Vishnupuraan [Lord Vishnu takes the center stage].

He brings out famous words of Nehru: "The spectacle of what is called religion, or at any rate organized religion, in India and elsewhere, has filled me with horror and I have frequently condemned it and wished to make a clean sweep of it. Almost always it seemed to stand for blind belief and reaction, dogma and bigotry, superstition, exploitation and the preservation of vested interests." which are still so relevant in India. On the question of the healing power in a Prayer, he quotes work of Galton: "He noted that every Sunday, in churches throughout Britain, entire congregations prayed publicly for the health of the royal family. Shouldn't they, therefore, be unusually fit, and compared with the rest of us, who are prayed for only by our nearest and dearest?" Galton looked into it, and found no statistical difference. His point is what Arthur C. Clarke puts as his Third Law ['any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic'] "The crucial difference between gods and god-like extraterrestrials lies not in their properties but in their provenance. Entities that are complex enough to be intelligent are products of an evolutionary process. No matter how god-like they may seem when we encounter them, they didn't start that way." Then he discusses the Thomas Aquinas' 'Proofs':

The Unmoved Mover. Nothing moves without a prior mover. This leads us to a regress, from which the only escape is God. Something had to make the first move, and that something we call God.
The Uncaused Cause. Nothing is caused by itself. Every effect has a prior cause, and again we are pushed back into regress. This has to be terminated by a first cause, which we call God.
The Cosmological Argument. There must have been a time when no physical things existed. But, since physical things exist now, there must have been something non-physical to bring them into existence, and that something we call God.
The Argument from Degree. We notice that things in the world differ. There are degrees of, say, goodness or perfection. But we judge these degrees only by comparison with a maximum. Humans can be both good and bad, so the maximum goodness cannot rest in us. Therefore there must be some other maximum to set the standard for perfection, and we call that maximum God.
The Teleological Argument or Argument from Design. Things in the world, especially living things, look as though they have been designed. Nothing that we know looks designed unless it is designed. Therefore there must have been a designer, and we call him God.

For point 1 to 3, he sees two problems:

God himself is immune to the regress.
Omniscience and omnipotence are mutually incompatible.

For the 4th point, he creates the 'peerless stinker'. For the 5th point, he quotes Darwin: "Evolution by natural selection produces an excellent simulacrum of design, mounting prodigious heights of complexity and elegance."

I feel Stephen Wolfram's work [Book: New Kind of Science] on cellular automata also brings in interesting pattern emerging from simples rules. Fractals are another good example.

He brings also mentions the ontological argument, proposed by St Anselm of Canterbury in 1078 "a being than which nothing greater can be conceived. Even an atheist can conceive of such a superlative being, though he would deny its existence in the real world. But, goes the argument, a being that doesn't exist in the real world is, by that very fact, less than perfect. Therefore we have a contradiction and, hey presto, God exists!" To mock this he quotes Australian philosopher Gasking who tried to prove a non-existent God on similar lines of thought! He points to the fact in the days of Michelangelo, making religious sculpts was practical. Given a task to paint for Science Museum, he would have come up with a thing different than Sistine Chapel! He points to the Pascal's wager, cowardly bet-hedging, which talks about practicality of being a believer! He mocks at this feigning belief in God by pointing to Douglas Adams in Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency, "where we meet the robotic Electric Monk, a labour-saving device that you buy 'to do your believing for you'. The deluxe model is advertised as 'Capable of believing things they wouldn't believe in Salt Lake City'." He then talks about Brain as a Internal Simulations software which takes sensory inputs and creats the picture of reality which might be an illusion [eg, Necker Cube]. "To simulate a ghost or an angel or a Virgin Mary would be child's play to software of this sophistication." "Constructing models is something the human brain is very good at. When we are asleep it is called dreaming; when we are awake we call it imagination or, when it is exceptionally vivid, hallucination." He talks about Hoyle's Boeing 747 gambit "the probability of life originating on Earth is no greater than the chance that a hurricane, sweeping through a scrap yard, would have the luck to assemble a Boeing". To answer this he brings in Darwin with the "Theory of Evolution by Natural Selection". He cleverly brings in phrase 'irreducible complexity', and 'the smooth gradient up Mount Improbable'. Darwin himself said as much: 'If it could be demonstrated that any complex organ existed which could not possibly have been formed by numerous, successive, slight modifications, my theory would absolutely break down. But I can find no such case.' He says one of the truly bad effects of religion is that it teaches us that it is a virtue to be satisfied with not understanding. "Creationists adore 'gaps' in the fossil record, just as they adore gaps generally. Michael Shermer has wittily pointed out that if a new fossil discovery neatly bisects a 'gap', the creationist will declare that there are now twice as many gaps!" He brings in to notice that "If the scientist fails to give an immediate and comprehensive answer, the creationist draws a default conclusion: 'Right then, the alternative theory, "intelligent design", wins by default.' Notice the biased logic: if theory A fails in some particular, theory B must be right. Needless to say, the argument is not applied the other way around. We are encouraged to leap to the default theory without even looking to see whether it fails in the very same particular as the theory it is alleged to replace. Intelligent design - ID - is granted a Get Out Of Jail Free card, a charmed immunity to the rigorous demands made of evolution." On the question of "What is the benefit of religion?" he mentions:

One arises from the theory of group selection [Different skill sets, one goal, get together]
The second follows from the theory that I advocated in The Extended Phenotype: the individual you are watching may be working under the manipulative influence of genes in another individual, perhaps a parasite. [Common Cold]
Third, the 'central theorem' may substitute for 'genes' the more general term 'replicators'. [Ideas want to propagate!]

In George Bernard Shaw's words, 'The fact that a believer is happier than a skeptic is no more to the point than the fact that a drunken man is happier than a sober one.' On faith healing "Homoeopaths may be achieving relative success because they, unlike orthodox practitioners, are still allowed to administer placebos - under another name. They also have more time to devote to talking and simply being kind to the patient." He asks "Is religion a placebo that prolongs life by reducing stress?" I guess, may be religion takes the load off from our shoulders to explain the universe! Or may be all religious people are suffering from a kind of obsessive-compulsive disorder? He suggests work by Michael Persinger and others 'that visionary religious experiences are related to temporal lobe epilepsy'. And 'Religion is a tool used by the ruling class to subjugate the underclass.' The he talks about an interesting phenomenon of Moth's self immolating behavior: "But the light compass relies critically on the celestial object being at optical infinity. If it isn't, the rays are not parallel but diverge like the spokes of a wheel. A nervous system applying a 30-degree (or any acute angle) rules of thumb to a nearby candle, as though it were the moon at optical infinity, will steer the moth, via a spiral trajectory, into the flame. Draw it out for yourself, using some particular acute angle such as 30 degrees, and you'll produce an elegant logarithmic spiral into the candle. Though is it fatal in this particular circumstance, the moth's rule of thumb!" The gullibility of child is put forth with "The child cannot know that 'Don't paddle in the crocodile-infested Limpopo' is good advice but 'You must sacrifice a goat at the time of the full moon, otherwise the rains will fail' is at best a waste of time and goats. Both admonitions sound equally trustworthy." He compares this with a computer which can not differentiate between a good and bad program. "The assignment of purpose to everything is called teleology. Children are native teleologists, and many never grow out of it." "It seems to me entirely plausible that the intentional stance has survival value as a brain mechanism that speeds up decision making in dangerous circumstances, and in crucial social situations." A connection between love-religion, "I made the comparison between falling in love and religion in 1993, when I noted that the symptoms of an individual infected by religion may be startlingly reminiscent of those more ordinarily associated with sexual love." The biologist Lewis Wolpert's point is that irrationally strong conviction is a guard against fickleness of mind: 'if beliefs that saved lives were not held strongly, it would have been disadvantageous in early human evolution. It would be a severe disadvantage, for example, when hunting or making tools, to keep changing one's mind.' He brings in the idea of MEME as a plausible explanation for existence of religion. "Most religions evolve. Whatever theory of religious evolution we adopt, it has to be capable of explaining the astonishing speed with which the process of religious evolution, given the right conditions, can take off." Why are we moral? He elaborates using the Darwinian model:

Being in group increases the chance of our survival.
Reciprocal Altruism of Robert Tivers['You scratch my back, I will scratch yours!'] - Symbiotic? "Reciprocal altruism works because of asymmetries in needs and in capacities to meet them." "Altruistic giving may be an advertisement of dominance or superiority. Anthropologists know it as the Potlatch Effect" [Norwegian economist Thorstein Veblen and Israeli zoologist Amotz Zahavi] Though we no longer live with close kins who can reciprocate, it has remained just like sexual lust. "It is a strong urge which exists independently of its ultimate rationale." "We can no more help ourselves feeling pity when we see a weeping unfortunate (who is unrelated and unable to reciprocate) than we can help ourselves feeling lust for a member of the opposite sex (who may be infertile or otherwise unable to reproduce). Both are misfirings, Darwinian mistakes: blessed, precious mistakes."

"The message of Harvard biologist Marc Hauser's book, to anticipate it in his own words, is this: 'Driving our moral judgments is a universal moral grammar, a faculty of the mind that evolved over millions of years to include a set of principles for building a range of possible moral systems. As with language, the principles that make up our moral grammar fly beneath the radar of our awareness.'"

"Immanuel Kant famously articulated the principle that a rational being should never be used as merely an unconsenting means to an end, even the end of benefiting others." "The main conclusion of Hauser and Singer's study was that there is no statistically significant difference between atheists and religious believers in making these [moral] judgements." Einstein said, 'If people are good only because they fear punishment, and hope for reward, then we are a sorry lot indeed.' [I guess a Twist to the word God-fearing!] "I suspect that quite a lot of religious people do think religion is what motivates them to be good, especially if they belong to one of those faiths that systematically exploits personal guilt." He also brings forth the wild stories from the Old Testament (reminds me of some stories from some well know Hindu Scriptures esp. the story of Noah looks like a direct lift off from story of Manu from Vishnu Puraan). "I am trying to establish for the moment is that we do not, as a matter of fact, derive our morals from scripture. Or, if we do, we pick and choose among the scriptures for the nice bits and reject the nasty." I guess this is coded into our genome itself! He talks about religious leaders [common people?] picking up certain lines from scriptures and leaving rest, "By what criterion do you decide which passages are symbolic, which literal?" Napoleon, who said, 'Religion is excellent stuff for keeping common people quiet,' and with Seneca the Younger: 'Religion is regarded by the common people as true, by the wise as false, and by the rulers as useful.' Voltaire got it right long ago: 'Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities.'

Nobel Prize-winning American physicist Steven Weinberg said, 'Religion is an insult to human dignity. With or without it, you'd have good people doing good things and evil people doing evil things. But for good people to do evil things, it takes religion.' To point towards Hindu-Muslim fight he quotes Salman Rushdie: 'What happened in India has happened in God's name. The problem's name is God.' "Sam Harris, as so often, hits the bullseye, in The End of Faith 'The danger of religious faith is that it allows otherwise normal human beings to reap the fruits of madness and consider them holy.'" He says "When a science book is wrong, somebody eventually discovers the mistake and it is corrected in subsequent books. That conspicuously doesn't happen with holy books." "We believe in evolution because the evidence supports it, and we would abandon it overnight if new evidence arose to disprove it. No real fundamentalist would ever say anything like that."

On the Consolation, he says "according to the Shorter Oxford Dictionary, is the alleviation of sorrow or mental distress. He divides consolation into two types:

Direct physical consolation. A man stuck for the night on a bare mountain may find comfort in a large, warm St Bernard dog, not forgetting, of course, the brandy barrel around its neck. A weeping child may be consoled by the embrace of strong arms wrapped around her and reassuring words whispered in her ear.
Consolation by discovery of a previously unappreciated fact, or a previously undiscovered way of looking at existing facts "

"Is the imaginary-friend phenomenon a higher illusion, in a different category from ordinary childhood make-believe?"

"the power to comfort, and provide a vivid sounding board for trying out ideas." "If you take religion away, people truculently ask, what are you going to put in its place? What have you to offer the dying patients, the weeping bereaved, the lonely Eleanor Rigbys for whom God is their only friend?"

But here we are seeking truth here and not a reason for existence of religion :) "I think we all know people who enjoy the idea of religious faith, and resent attacks on it, while reluctantly admitting that they don't have it themselves." Very common in Hinduism for sure, otherwise I won't be seeing so much immorality around! He mentions "They believe in belief." Reminds me of a line from a very famous Indian film, 'Guide', where the hero is asked whether he beleives in God and he replied "In logo ko mujhpar viswaas hai, aur mujhe inke viswaas par viswaas hai [village people believe in me and I 'believe in their belief']!" .

More Quotes from the book and othewise

Adams (on the idea of relegion):

'Here is an idea or a notion that you're not allowed to say anything bad about; you're just not. Why not? – because you're not!'

Carl Sagan:

'if by "God" one means the set of physical laws that govern the universe, then clearly there is such a God. This God is emotionally unsatisfying . . . it does not make much sense to pray to the law of gravity.'

Phillip E. Johnson:

'Darwinism is the story of humanity's liberation from the delusion that its destiny is controlled by a power higher than itself.'

Robert M. Pirsig, author of Zen and the Art of Motorcycle:

'When one person suffers from a delusion, it is called insanity. When many people suffer from a delusion it is called Religion.'

Albert Einstein

I don't try to imagine a personal God; it suffices to stand in awe at the structure of the world, insofar as it allows our inadequate senses to appreciate it.

Steven Weinberg

Some people have views of God that are so broad and flexible that it is inevitable that they will find God wherever they look for him. One hears it said that 'God is the ultimate' or 'God is our better nature' or 'God is the universe.' Of course, like any other word, the word 'God' can be given any meaning we like. If you want to say that 'God is energy,' then you can find God in a lump of coal.

Bertrand Russell

"The immense majority of intellectually eminent men disbelieve in Christian religion, but they conceal the fact in public, because they are afraid of losing their incomes."

Blaise Pascal

"You'd better believe in God, because if you are right you stand to gain eternal bliss and if you are wrong it won't make any difference anyway. On the other hand, if you don't believe in God and you turn out to be wrong you get eternal damnation, whereas if you are right it makes no difference."

Thomas Jefferson

"The priests of the different religious sects . . . dread the advance of science as witches do the approach of daylight, and scowl on the fatal harbinger announcing the subdivision of the duperies on which they live."

Marek Kohn

To an evolutionary psychologist, the universal extravagance of religious rituals, with their costs in time, resources, pain and privation, should suggest as vividly as a mandrill's bottom that religion may be adaptive.

Einstein & Faith Thursday, Apr. 05, 2007 By WALTER ISAACSON

http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1607298-3,00.html]

"What separates me from most so-called atheists is a feeling of utter humility toward the unattainable secrets of the harmony of the cosmos," he explained. In fact, Einstein tended to be more critical of debunkers, who seemed to lack humility or a sense of awe, than of the faithful. "The fanatical atheists," he wrote in a letter, "are like slaves who are still feeling the weight of their chains which they have thrown off after hard struggle. They are creatures who--in their grudge against traditional religion as the 'opium of the masses'-- cannot hear the music of the spheres." "Schopenhauer's saying, 'A man can do as he wills, but not will as he wills,' has been a real inspiration to me since my youth; it has been a continual consolation in the face of life's hardships, my own and others', and an unfailing wellspring of tolerance." "I know that philosophically a murderer is not responsible for his crime," he said, "but I prefer not to take tea with him." Scientists aim to uncover the immutable laws that govern reality, and in doing so they must reject the notion that divine will, or for that matter human will, plays a role that would violate this cosmic causality.

VICTOR HUGO

There is in every village a torch - the teacher: and an extinguisher - the clergyman.

Aa Jaana Na Jaanaa

2007-05-14T13:25:00.001+05:30

Song is on the way to completion but I want comments in mid-way thus posting.

Lyrics:
A a a aaa jaaaana
Na na na naa jaanaa

Madhosh raatein hain
Khaamosh baatein hain
Jaane man khoya hoon kahaan....

Bridge to:
Kehta to hai meri main tera
Par na jaane tu gayi kahaan
Koi jaane naaa

Again I ask for comments from you guys for the version 2 of this song!

Talaaash

2007-05-14T13:21:00.001+05:30

Mere Dil Ke Paas ...

A song I have been writing for sometime now, part of the lyrics comes from few lines I thought while trekking sandakhpu [http://sandakphuvisit.blogspot.com/]. Here it goes:

Mere dil ke paas
A
Chupa ek raaz
E
Jize dhoonde tu
D
Hoon main wohi hooon
A

Wo anmit kaahaani
A
Baatein Nayi purrani
E
Jize dhoonde tu
D
Hoon main wohi hooon
A

Saanson main jo naheen
Aankhon main kho gayee
Main tera rahaa
Najaane tu kahaan gayi

Mere dil ke paas
Chupa ek raaz
Jize dhoonde tu
Hoon main wohi hooon

Wo anmit kaahaani
Baatein Nayi purrani
Jize dhoonde tu
Hoon main wohi hooon

G E A
Hoon hoon hooooooooo
G E A
Hoon hoon hooooooooo

Food, a thought...

2007-03-24T00:37:00.001+05:30

Guys I admit, I am feeling hungry! But I am stuck at a place where I do have internet but no food in sighting... so I got to cook myself and it better be something whose taste is alien to my buds otherwise it will be hard to swallow! So I decided I will check out which websites offering exotic recipes. I hit upon channels like http://www.kiplog.com/food/, http://cookingwithamy.blogspot.com/, http://www.foodblogblog.com/, http://www.foodportfolio.com/blog/, http://foodmuseum.typepad.com/, http://www.foodnetwork.com/, http://food.rediff.com/, http://www.asianfoodchannel.com/index.php, http://uktv.co.uk/index.cfm/uktv/Food.homepage/sid/566, http://www.foodtv.ca/, http://www.foodchannel.com.au/ and http://www.foodchannel.com/. But the one which really attracted me is http://www.ifood.tv/.
iFood.tv is like Youtube+Orkut+Google+FoodChannels rolled into one! It turns out to be the best one in the lot for several reasons. It is well designed; probably the only site which has kept young users in mind and it has got great videos! Look and feel is Web 2.0 with expanded shot on mouse-over, a class apart. Anyone can register and upload their recipe (youtube for food?). I liked browsing via the Featured-Blogs section and since the videos are rated by the user, I could easily guess which one to check out (keyword are really helpful)! The whole visual appeal is tempting, believe me, you guys will drool while browsing this channel. I am settling for Baked-Potato-with-Onions (http://www.ifood.tv/node/1794) as it sounds easy (?) and I am not aware of how it will taste!

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Beginning Bioinformatics with MySQL, PHP, phpMyAdmin, PERL (for CGI) on IIS (Quick and Dirty Way!)

2007-01-03T20:15:00.000+05:30

Beginning Bioinformatics with MySQL, PHP, phpMyAdmin, PERL (for CGI) on IIS (Quick and Dirty Way!) Guys I need to switch from FreeBSD to Windows for a while and thus I am trying to run MySQL with PHP on Windows IIS (Yes it is possible!).Here are the steps: 0. Make sure IIS is installed and working in your Windows machine. Otherwise follow the instruction. 1. Install MySQL and put the mysql-install-dir/bin/ in the Windows PATH Variable. Instruction available at php site . To test installation open command-prompt and type "telnet localhost 3306" [without quotes]. This should dump something like the following junk in the console: 7 5.0.14-nt#UpU;dh[n,?8i.CJ(&'1_m( Press ENTER and get rid of it, your MYSQL is working!If this fails, then you might need to start the service of mysql by tryping "net start mysql" [without quotes]. Then try telnet as earlier. Remember the password you have set up for the root login of mysql, we will need it in step3. 2. Install PHP in C:/PHP folder by downloading MSI from http://in.php.net/get/php-5.2.0-win32-installer.msi/from/www.php.net/mirror and then download http://in.php.net/get/php-5.2.0-Win32.zip/from/www.php.net/mirror and extract into the C:/php folder as well (Yes it will overwrite many files, let it do, because we need the files in EXT folder). Download and extract the dlls from http://in.php.net/get/pecl-5.2.0-Win32.zip/from/www.php.net/mirror in c:/php/ext if you plan to use those extra PHP Dll's (not needed for our job though).Make sure that C:/PHP/ext directory has the php_mysql.dll otherwise download this specific dll from http://dev.mysql.com/downloads/connector/php/ (Direct link) and extract the dll into C:/PHP/ext .Add PHP to PATH as explained in http://in.php.net/manual/en/faq.installation.php#faq.installation.addtopath . Now to test PHP installation create a file phpinfo.php inside the C:/Inetpub/wwwroot and type just the following one line and save:

<?php phpinfo(); ?> Now open the browser and type http://localhost/phpinfo.php and you should see the PHP Version and other details about your PHP Installation. Enjoy :) 3. Now to manage MySQL, there is a cool tool called phpMyAdmin which can be downloaded from this link. You need to extract this in a folder. For me it is C:/phpMyAdmin.Now you need to do certain tweaks to make it work.Create a file config.inc.php inside the C:/phpMyAdmin and type the following: Save the config.inc.php file. Now open the C:/WINDOWS/php.ini file and search for

"extension_dir ". Replace the line with: extension_dir = "C:/PHP/ext/" Also uncomment the line saying extension=php_mysql.dll in the C:/WINDOWS/php.ini . Now save the C:/WINDOWS/php.ini file. You need to give 'web share' access to C:/phpMyAdmin directory by opening it in explorer and right-click on the C:/phpMyAdmin directory and go to 'properties' now in the pop-up window go to 'web-sharing' tab and select the share-this-folder radio button and this will pop-up (I know it is windows and this sounds like pop-up-video of VH1). Write phpMyAdmin in the ALIAS Text Box of pop-up and select on WRITE and SCRIPT SOURCE ACCESS box. In APPLICATION PERMISSION choose SCRIPTS radio button. To test phpMyAdmin open http://localhost/phpMyAdmin/index.php in browser and you should see "localhost phpMyAdmin - 2.9.1.1". You are done with this now :) 4. For PERL. you need http://www.activestate.com/store/activeperl/download anyways, so click and download it first. Install this in C:/PERL directory then use the instruction at http://www.visualwin.com/Perl/ . To test the PERL - CGI installation, create a file called test.pl inside the directory C:\Inetpub\wwwroot\cgi-bin and type: #!/usr/bin/perl $time=time; $len=80; print "Content-type:text/html\n\n"; @base=qw/A T G C/; print ">Seq$time $len random bases\n"; while($c<$len){ $c++; print "@base[int(rand(4))]"; } Now save the test.pl in C:\Inetpub\wwwroot\cgi-bin. Open the link http://localhost/cgi-bin/test.pl in browser, this should generate a random DNA Fasta file of 80 bases.

In the next tutorial I will lead you into creating a bioinformatics database of sequences and then using it to align using muscle and store back in MySQL db... till then bye!

Code to get GenBank file using Bioperl

2006-12-29T16:54:00.000+05:30

#!/usr/local/bin/perl -w # Modified by sharma.animesh@gmail.com using # "How to retrieve GenBank entries over the Web" # by Jason Stajich # Downloads E. dispar WGS sequence from

# AANV01000001:AANV01018095 # and invadens: AANW01000001:AANW01015173 # Just for Info:

# Histolytica: AAFB01000001:AAFB01001819 # Avoiding get_Stream_by_batch so that

# individual file can be written use Bio::DB::GenBank; use Bio::SeqIO; use strict; #for dispar getGB(1,18095,"AANV010"); #for invadens getGB(1,15173,"AANW010"); sub getGB{ my $start=shift; my $end=shift; my $common=shift;

for(my $c=start;$c<=$end;$c++){

$c=sprintf('%05d', $c); my $accession_no=$common.$c; my $fname=$accession_no.".gbk"; print "Writing $fname\t"; my $seqout = new Bio::SeqIO( -file => ">$fname", -format=>'GenBank');

my $getseq = new Bio::DB::GenBank;

my $seq = $getseq->get_Seq_by_acc($accession_no);

$seqout->write_seq($seq);

} }

2006-05-11T12:19:00.000+05:30

Song Ik Onkar from Rang De Basanti ( http://www.geocities.com/drinsilence/IkOnkar.mp3 ) Simply amazing... you can feel the words creating a matrix around you... Music: A R Rehman Vocals: Harshdeep Kaur ek onkar satnam kartapurakh nirmoh nirvair akaal murat ajuni sabham guru parsad jap aad sach jugaad sach hai bhi sach nanak hose bhi sach soche soch na ho wai jo sochi lakh waar chhupe chhup na howai je laai har lakhtaar ukhiya pukh na utari je banna puriya paar sahasyanpa lakh woh hai ta ek na chale naal ke ve sach yaara hoi ae ke ve kude tutte paal hukum rajai chalna nanak likheya naal Hope you enjoyed :)

Life is a highway... a thought

2006-04-20T15:50:00.000+05:30

Life is a highway... a thought for a Game! The title reminds me of Tom Cochran's song "Life Is A Highway ..." and Bhagwat Gita Verse 2.22: Vasansi jeernani yatha vihaya navani grunhati naroparani, Tatha shareerani vihaya jeeranyanyani sanyati navani dehi. which essentially means "As a person puts on new garments, giving up old ones, the soul similarly accepts new material bodies, giving up the old and useless ones" [Taken from Srila Prabhupada's GITA translation]. I have a weird idea for a game, I have been thinking this quite often, making a game, Life is like a highway, with Soul being the Traveller in time, Body being the carrier, several distractions with their sign boards and exits (Like millions of McDonald's sign and the exits to them on US highways!). The journey starts with soul coming out of the super-soul due to its Karm vector changing its score from NULL to NOT NULL (Discussed below). The highway it has to go through is also based on Karm vector (Like say, the super-soul reads the Karm verctor and decides that the soul has to ride Highway 911!). The purpose is to reach back the super-soul (but you are not allowed to travel backwards, it is a one way road!). There are various short cuts (Like various Yog [Karm, Gyaan, Raaj, Bhakti]) and long cuts (the distraction exit, some of them just prolong the length and some of them take you on a circle!). While you are on the way, based on your behavior (with other travelers [material and non-material] and yourself) your Karm points go up (Good behavious) or down (Bad behaviour) on various dimensions (Karm score is a multidimensional vector, so the counter of specific Karm increments). You can reduce the time of journey by either Moving FAST (Better tools of journey eg, making the mind and body efficient) and/or Taking SHORTCUTS and/or Avoiding LONG-CUTS. The body and other material things might time-out but you will again get a new body based on your latest Karm vector. By the time you reach the Final Destination, your Karm vector should be a null vector too, to get in union with Super-soul, the time when your game ENDS. I have avoided the complication of having Enemies... I feel the LONG CUTS are enemies anyways! I wish I could do some game programming too... like the way GOD does... Lets see what is humanly possible first... I guess everything is possible though!