The Scientific Indian

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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TheScian SF Contest 2009 - Closed for submissions

Mon, 05 Oct 2009 10:03:57 -0500

Congrats to all the participants who took the critical first step by courageously sending your baby into the wild. The number of submissions this year is eleven which is not too many. I hope to provide good feedback to authors as I can spend more time with fewer stories.

The book preparation is coming along fine. An illustrator living in NY is doing the illustrations for the stories. The site logo has been re-designed and it'll go on the book cover as well. Here's a draft (there are a few other variants of this theme):

I'll share the illustrations when they are ready.

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Pablo Neruda at Kings Place tomorrow

Sun, 04 Oct 2009 18:00:15 -0500

There's a reading at Kings place tomorrow. See here for details. You'll have to buy tickets. If you read Neruda, I don't have to tell you it will be worth the money. I hear there will be a screening of a reading by Neruda himself.

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Dinosaur eggs in Tamilnadu

Fri, 02 Oct 2009 06:06:54 -0500

Loads of them reports the Beebs. Quite a remarkable find and it seems already some information has been gleaned of their past.

"The leader of the team, MU Ramkumar, told the BBC the finding is significant and could help to unravel the mystery about the extinction of dinosaurs.

The important finding is that these eggs have been found in different layers that means the dinosaurs came to the place over and over year after year," he said.

"The second important thing is that we have got volcanic ash deposits on the eggs which suggests that volcanic activity could have caused their extinction.

"The other thing we have found is that all these eggs are unhatched and infertile. So what made the eggs infertile? We need to carry out further studies to learn more from the findings."

Would an enterprising film maker please make a South Indian version of The Flintstones...

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If you have a void that was filled with an imaginary friend

Thu, 01 Oct 2009 07:39:24 -0500

Saw a post on the crazy-dangerous-pathetic-dude on Pharyngula. One comment(#8) stood out as an answer to the question "When you get rid of God, what do you fill the void with?" :

Earth..:If you have a void that was filled with an imaginary friend, its still a void.

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Keeping files on your computers synchronized

Thu, 01 Oct 2009 03:21:11 -0500

Dropbox works very well. To keep notes and to keep them synchronized, I use Tomboy + Dropbox. LifeHacker has pointers on this.

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TheScian SF Contest deadline extended to Sunday, October 4

Mon, 28 Sep 2009 13:14:02 -0500

Alright. Now, you have no excuses. Send it in before I come and snatch it. Here is the link to go to, if you have not heard about the contest.

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