The Scientific Indian

Dr. M. S. Swaminathan on drought in India

Fri, 20 Nov 2009 05:17:57 -0500

My father recalled sometime back the terrible drought that happened when he was a child: since the grains were running low, my grandfather would go out and dig tubers from surrounding fields, my grandmother would make something out of it for the kids. It is an experience that is far removed from my own. My father's occasional re-telling of this episode of his life affects me deeply, more so, because, although the effects of drought on rural p[oor has been minimized by the work of Amartya Sen, Dr Swaminathan and many others in the past decades, the effects have not been minimized to a level where extreme hardship and deaths don't occur. Here's a video I watched recently where Dr Swaminathan explains some of the connected issues that are caused by draught and what must be done about it:

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Pranav Mistry's SixthSense

Wed, 18 Nov 2009 10:20:21 -0500

at TEDIndia. Astonishing vision and execution.

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Bible and blood in my backyard

Wed, 18 Nov 2009 08:49:06 -0500

I often go to a small woods near our home in Amersham with my daughter. Recently, I came to know a bit of history about the place that gave me a rude awakening and bought home the evil that pervaded societies in the form of Catholic Church in the past centuries (the evil still is there, in a more muted form, but it is there nevertheless). From Special Trees at Chiltern Project:

In the 15th Century, it was the execution site of a group of Lollards - a religious branch with beliefs that were similar to current Protestant doctrine - who wished for the Bible to be translated into English, were opposed to a wealthy church, and who clashed with the Catholic church over the sacrament. At the time, this heresy was a capital offence and the group were sentenced to burn at the stake within the woods.

Whilst most of the group were given a death by fire, the ringleader is said to have met a more gruesome end, being rolled down the hill in a barrel full of tent pegs and stakes, into the river Misbourne.

These religious martyrs are now remembered on the Martyr's memorial, near the entrance to the woods. The inscription names the executed as William Tylsworth, Thomas Barnard, James Morden, John Scrivener, Robert Rave, Thomas Holmes and Joan Norman. It also records the cruel nature of these executions - the pyres that killed William and John were lit by their own children, who were forced to cooperate.

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TheScian SF Contest Results on 22nd

Sun, 15 Nov 2009 03:56:23 -0500

Folks, the SF contest results will be delayed by a week. Unforeseen travel has intervened. I'll get the results out next Sunday, 22 Nov.

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If your parents don't like Ubuntu

Fri, 13 Nov 2009 10:54:17 -0500

I loathe tech support so I switched my parents to Ubuntu a while ago. But, you may not be so lucky. Your parents may not like Ubuntu. I can't imagine why they wouldn't, but, if they don't and they must absolutely have Windows, then use Windows SteadyState. It's free. [via this /. thread]

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Entangled Reality

Sun, 08 Nov 2009 11:11:29 -0500

Read an interesting interview with Roger Penrose at Discover Magazine. Found this part fascinating:

So Schrödinger himself never believed that the cat analogy reflected the nature of reality?
Oh yes, I think he was pointing this out. I mean, look at three of the biggest figures in quantum mechanics, Schrödinger, Einstein, and Paul Dirac. They were all quantum skeptics in a sense. Dirac is the one whom people find most surprising, because he set up the whole foundation, the general framework of quantum mechanics. People think of him as this hard-liner, but he was very cautious in what he said. When he was asked, "What's the answer to the measurement problem?" his response was, "Quantum mechanics is a provisional theory. Why should I look for an answer in quantum mechanics?" He didn't believe that it was true. But he didn't say this out loud much.

You would probably know that Einstein was involved in a long running debate about the completeness of Quantum Mechanics. Quantum Mechanics posits that if we measure a particle's position precisely then we can never measure/know (even theoretically) it's momentum. Reality is fundamentally fuzzy, said QM. Einstein didn't like this idea of QM's stubbornness. QM suggested that Reality is what QM says it is, that Reality is essentially unknowable in its entirety. Einstein's objection in his own words: "I think that a particle must have a separate reality independent of the measurements. That is an electron has spin, location and so forth even when it is not being measured. I like to think that the moon is there even if I am not looking at it."

Anyho, Einstein and two other physicists worked out an experiment that would supposedly show that QM was incomplete. It's called the EPR Paradox. To test this paradox a mathematician named John Bell gave an inequality (the inequality said: if both position and momentum of a particle have an absolute value independent of measurement then the equation's 'not equal' condition will hold). Long story short, Einstein was proved wrong. There are all sorts of implications arising from this: physical, metaphysical, spiritual and financial (ok, not the last one). Non-locality is a good one to begin with (Non-locality is the phenomenon predicted by QM that Einstein called 'spooky action at a distance' .)

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A matter of Life and er... Matter

Sat, 07 Nov 2009 01:38:45 -0500

As I was stuffing my face today, I wondered if the Universe cared. The short answer is no. The slightly longer and more depressing answer is: my existence is more marginal than a speck of stray DNA on a grain of sand staring at vast oceans (that's literally true, oh the irony...). Clearly, there's no point to existence except amusement. So, here's some:

On average, each of us human beings from birth till death consume about (2000 per day x 365 days x 70 years) calories. That is a pretty big number (51,100,000 calories).Big, of course, is a relative term. The big calories translates to about 0.00002 milligrams of matter. In the scheme of things--compared to, say, the amount of matter Sun converts to pure energy per second--, the amout of matter we manage to process in 70 years is stupefyingly underwhelming. Sun converts about 4,000,000,000 kilograms of mass to pure energy every second compared to our biological knickers-in-knots process*. Still, we are here and we can point a resounding finger at the Sun. That's quite something, isn't it? Life is an extraordinarily strange and fragile business whichever way you look at it (the strangeness includes the looking-at-it part too). Perhaps, in a thousand years, we may climb up the energy ladder, sit alongside stars and have a proper material breakfast of a few hundred tons of hydrogen. It would be way more amusing than what we do with the less-than-nothing we consume today. Of course, we've got to survive to do that.

*The comparison is sort of fudged. Sun does atom crushing, we don't do that. Sun literally converts the mass to energy. OTOH, we do a lot of very very minute electrochemical energy extraction. The comparison aims to show the scale of energies involved, which differ by orders of magnitude. Physics savvy readers please pitch in and clarify my muddle if needed. Read the comments on this post...

Things Fall Apart, in India

Mon, 02 Nov 2009 23:27:26 -0500

So, I am in India for a short trip and was in Coimbatore yesterday. A truck almost collided with the autorickshaw (three-person tincan with an engine strapped on) I was riding in, then a bus gently nudged me as I was walking on --what I thought was clearly marked--a pedestrian path.

Things fall apart: this is a generally known in scientific circles as the second law of thermodynamics. In India, even the laws are subject to this law. Everything --including rules and laws--slowly reduce to a state of lawless equilibrium. After a while, someone or something explodes, and then things start to fall apart all over again. We probably have a scientifically accurate description of India in two sentences here...

A loud (as in loud speakers) Christian prayer was on at a gathering near the hotel. In another part of the city, the temple organizing committee was conducting its annual review over public air waves via speakers strategically placed to generate as loud a sound as physically possible. The throb of life-affirming commerce was all pervasive along with a stench that I am quite scared to contemplate again. Television burns bright with manic energy of young men and women doing pelvic thrusts, the cricket bat rules the lives of many who have a stake in its success, and the same bat rules the lives of many more who have absolutely no stake whatsoever in it. Life is great, life is terrible, life is full of meaning, life is meaningless, life goes on.

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Raymond Carver: On Writing

Thu, 29 Oct 2009 11:00:32 -0500

Read On Writing by Carver if you harbor ambitions, then print the good lines and stick it on your wall. I came by this piece via an article in Guardian by Stuart Evers.

I am going to skip what Stuart said and point you to what interested me most in Carver's essay.

Ambition and a little luck are good things for a writer to have going for him. Too much ambition and bad luck, or no luck at all, can be killing. There has to be talent.

Without clear-headed self-appraisal and awareness of one's own level of skill and talent, we ain't going nowhere. Reminds me of a quote that's an old favorite of mine:

Like all young men, I started out to be a Genius, but mercifully laughter intervened. -- Lawrence Durrell

Another bit that struck me in Carver :

Every great or even every very good writer makes theworld over according to his own specifications. It's akin to style, what I'm talking about, but it isn't style alone. It is the writer's particular and unmistakable signature on everything he writes. It is his world and no other. This is one of the things that distinguishes one writer from another. Not talent. There's plenty of that around. But a writer who has some special way of looking at things and who gives artistic expression to that way of looking: that writer may be around for a time.

Cervantes is still around because--even with all the cheap tricks he uses in Don Quixote, (I don't know what Carver may have thought about Cervantes and his tricks)--he succeeds immensely in creating the uniquely crazed and uproarious world of Don Quixote.

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Pollution in China

Fri, 23 Oct 2009 19:22:51 -0500

This is and will be a burden on the World's conscience, the dark continent of our time. The images are devastating.

Xuanwei (宣威) in Yunnan province is a cancer village. Every year there are more than 20 people die of cancer. 11-year-old student Xu Li (徐丽) is suffering from bone cancer. May 8, 2007

"Pollution in China" - a documentary project of Lu Guang, a photographer from People's Republic of China.

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Gin and Tonic

Thu, 15 Oct 2009 16:37:41 -0500

Something to read while having it. Why do people still drink it although there are no malarial mosquitoes where it is now had (such as, by me right now in Amersham)? Well, what can we say except that history is arbitrary and it has the advantage of being in the past and hence unquestionable.

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Higgs Bosons from the future are messing about at LHC

Tue, 13 Oct 2009 05:31:00 -0500

They are already here, they are amidst us, they zip through our heads affecting LHC funding, they come from future and cunningly prevent their production at LHC by affecting the present. Meet Bosons from the future.

So, this in short, is the paper by two physicists discussed in this NY Times article.

Dr. Nielson said of the theory, "Well, one could even almost say that we have a model for God." It is their guess, he went on, "that He rather hates Higgs particles, and attempts to avoid them."

This malign influence from the future, they argue, could explain why the United States Superconducting Supercollider, also designed to find the Higgs, was canceled in 1993 after billions of dollars had already been spent, an event so unlikely that Dr. Nielsen calls it an "anti-miracle."

You might think that the appearance of this theory is further proof that people have had ample time -- perhaps too much time -- to think about what will come out of the collider, which has been 15 years and $9 billion in the making.

And that last sentence speaks of truth. The paper smells a lot like an elaborate hoax. You can read a take down with the nutty bits from the paper quoted at A Quantum Diaries Survivor.

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Bladeless fan

Tue, 13 Oct 2009 04:34:15 -0500

The nifty Dyson's Air Multiplier. Air multiplier, molecule mover...

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Could Evolution Stop?

Fri, 09 Oct 2009 07:20:43 -0500

Let's see if we can figure this out from first principles. Limiting ourselves to biological evolution, evolution needs a few things to work in practice:-
-a mechanism of inheritance. Genes in our case. Consider stones. Stones don't have genes. Stones don't evolve (biologically, that is. I know a pebble back in my village river that somehow manages to accumulate little pebbles around it that are more smooth. I think it's cheating.)

-one or more heritable characteristics. For instance, Lactose tolerance. Our ancestors couldn't stomach milk--until about 30,000 years ago. Lactose tolerance evolved, multiple times in various groups. Most of us can now digest milk because we have inherited the necessary genes from our ancestors. Some of us have't inherited the gene and suffer from indigestion when milk (lactose, to be precise) gets in.

-selection pressures. For instance, marginally better survival of babies with milk tolerance (this is presumably how we evolved lactose tolerance)

Take away one of these pre-conditions and biological evolution will hit a wall. So, it appears to me that evolution could stop if one of the above conditions is not met.

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The Boy Who Harnessed The Wind

Thu, 08 Oct 2009 16:11:29 -0500

Inspired and inspiring young man from Africa William Kamkwamba. Watched him on The Daily Show just now.

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