Bits from Purple Passages of yesterday.

Taheyra recognized in me the connection we choose to ignore on tubes. She saw past my hardened exterior of the high pressure torch of urban living. It was not just her ability to open up to complete strangers and converse on the deepest levels of the human need for companionship, that made me sit there and listen to her long past sundown; it was the ease at which she made it possible. I was not trying to have a meaningful conversation, I was just having one; enjoying the excavation of my thoughts by a complete stranger, albeit an expert at uncovering layers of dust and mold from nine to five jobs, rush hours and frivolous indulgences.

The Leech's Segments.

Are all our noblest expressions of our spirit just the inevitable realisation of a program inscribed in our DNA?

Word play?

Just another spring Friday, another lazy afternoon coffee or two, gale force winds outside the café but only the sunshine peering through the glass washing up on my back. And the conversation steers to contentment; and why not? Isn’t it these small things, these small moments that define it? But peace of mind, now that is a whole new place to visit. Or so I think.
Are content people at peace with themselves? And are people who are at peace with themselves likely to be content? I think peace of mind is quite separate from contentment. Having peace of mind involves knowing your strengths, using them to improve yourself, surroundings and in general making a dent in the world perhaps. It is also knowing and working with your limitations to minimise their shortfalls. Contentment is being content with both. Not necessarily the same.
I do not understand the motivations of content people, but I see the beauty in being at peace with yourself. People who are content don’t get bothered by injustice, people who are content don’t see the place for change, people who are content don’t see opportunities aplenty. But people who are at peace with themselves know how to choose their battles, they know and understand the motivations to fight them, they take a stance because they are not fighting internal wars. They don’t let their fire burn them. They are at peace with themselves so they can look outwards and question, or appreciate or even; if luxury would have it theorise, improvise and invent. These luxuries are the cornerstones of progress. Contentment is based on this very progress.

Who's doing it?

I have discovered recently that most often what I call ‘lack of inspiration/motivation’ or plain old ‘block’ is a fear for lack of originality.
My thoughts take me to weird and wonderful places but then I come back down feeling that most of these thoughts must have occurred to someone else too, and what’s so profound about mine? More importantly what’s new? I wonder if this is because I spend more time reading others’ thoughts? But then, when I read good work by others I wonder why I don’t mark them down for repeatedness (if it’s punishment enough, I tend to flip a page if THE goes on and on about RAE and funding).
So I have decided (naively I suspect and hope) that instead of waiting for big original ideas, I should just go ahead and talk of the same old boring things that human kind has been banging on since probably Noam Chomsky came up with the new syntax theory. LET’S change a few words to the left or sometimes to the right of the first original sentence and just go on pretending. You know by now where I am going with this one? Yes to the neighbourhood DIY store.
Is it just me or plain old stupidity that is so common that we can’t see it like the smog? Add a bit of a catchy jingle and an inclusive word to the world’s most popular Swoosh tag line and what do you get? Still PLAGIARISM darlings. Well now you know why this blog takes such a while to get updated.

Susan Sontag On Photography.

Like a car, a camera is sold as a predatory weapon - one that is as automated as possible, ready to spring. Popular taste expects an easy and invisible technology. Manufacturers reassure their customers that taking pictures demands no skill or expert knowledge, that the machine is all knowing and responds to the slightest pressure of the will. it's as simple as turning the ignition key or pulling the trigger.

Like guns and cars, cameras are fantasy machines whose use is addictive. However, despite the extravangances of ordinary language and advertising, they are not lethal. The camera does not kill, so the ominous metaphor seems all bluff - like a man's fantasy of having a gun, knife or tool between his legs. Still there is something predatory in the act of taking a picture. To photograph people is to violate them, by seeing them as they neever see themselves, by having knowledge of them they can never have; it turns people into objects that can be symbolically possessed. Just as the camera is the sublimation of the gun, to photograph someone is the sublimated murder.

Eventually, people might learn to act out more of their aggressions with cameras and fewer with guns, with the price being an even more image-choked world. One situation where people are switching from bulllets to film is the photographic safari that is replacing the gun safari in east Africa. The hunters have Hasselblads instead of Winchesters; instead of looking through a telescopic sight to aim a rifle, they look through a viewfinder to frame a picture. Guns have metamorphed into cameras in the earnst comedy, the ecology safari, because nature has ceased to be what it always had been - what people needed protection from. Now nature - tamed, endangered, mortal - needs to be protected from people. When we are afraid we shoot. But when we are nostalgic, we take pictures.

Penguin Classics, 1977

Girly Science.

Does Science have a gender? Does Gender have a science?

Is this an uncool question to ask in today's political climate? In the days when when we have ample of evidence that girls do just as well in math exams as the boys? Why does the choice of a scientific career come and stall at something as mundane as a math test? what does that have to say about career choices anyways?

Gulab Devi (45) of Harmara village in Rajasthan’s Ajmer district comes across as the quintessential rural woman from Rajasthan. Dressed in the traditional ghagra-choli (long skirt and blouse), Gulab is the sole bread-earner for her four children and her ailing husband who hasn’t had a job in the 24 years of their marriage. Gulab is completely illiterate. Ask her what she does for a living, and she’ll tell you she makes electronic circuits and charges for solar lighting panels. And before you start wondering whether you heard her wrong, she’ll tell you that she also installs and maintains hand pumps, water tanks and pipelines. Not only is she running her household comfortably with her salary from this work, she is also one of the most respected members of her community.
Gulab is one of the many Barefoot Solar Engineers (BSEs) working across eight Indian states (Rajasthan, Bihar, Andhra Pradesh, Orissa, Uttaranchal, Jammu and Kashmir, Assam and Sikkim) to establish solar energy systems in areas where electricity supply is either non-existent or highly erratic. A majority of these engineers, mostly women, are illiterate like Gulab or semi-literate at best. But they talk of transformers, coils and condensers like other women would talk of cooking and sewing. Their dexterity with spanners and screwdrivers is impressive, to say the least.

Probably scientific enterprise is exactly what we in the 'comfortable' world forget to instill in our school children... the fun in exploration, the excitement in figuring out a problem, but most importantly everyday issues that get solved by ingenious scientific enquiry. Instead we keep on bickering about 'gender' representations in one field of science or the other...

Death by caffeine.

Among all media scares I think the 'Coffee dehydrator' scare is the most amusing.

A 30ml or 1.5 ounce shot of Espresso contains 68 - 77 milligrams of caffeine. Most research shows that up to 300mg of caffeine has little diuretic effect (R. J. Maughan, J. Griffin (2003) Caffeine ingestion and fluid balance: a review Journal of Human Nutrition and Dietetics 16 (6), 411–420). This means you would have to consume about 4 odd espressos to want to run to the loo. And that too only if you not are a regular caffeine consumer (read everything from chocolates, tea, cola etc) or else your system is habituated to the effects of caffeine anyways….

Here is another bit of news. If you are more sensible than me and drink a regular filter coffee rather than an espresso, risteretto or caffeine tablets; then you consume enough and more fluid (read water) with that same drink.

Disclaimer: This blog is applicable to Humans only. Spiders may want to conduct their own research and not depend on everything humans say or for that matter publish in peer reviewed journals.

An absolute gem of a debate.

http://www.newscientist.com/blog/environment/2008/01/rhetoric-of-climate-and-slavery.html?DCMP=NLC-nletterbanner&nsref=blogenv

Who are the true custodians of public opinions in Science?

When we think about the role and responsibilities of a scientist we think of rigorous research methods, answering questions about our world or systems that are yet unknown. It is this enquiry, inquisitiveness that runs common amongst us all who toil away in the dark hours. How much thought do we give about our responsibilities to our society? The common man on the street who knows nothing about our ways. How often do we actually take pleasure in ‘Dumbing down’ our complicated worlds? How often do we consider sharing our ‘eureka’ moments with those same people who ultimately matter, for whom we really work for.
Scientists have a certain culture of being incomprehensible and yet this very elitist attitude is what will eventually slow us down.
I recently participated in BA’s Media Fellowship scheme where for a few weeks I wore the hat of a science journalist. Yes those very journalists we love to call names, those sly people who always sensationalise science and who make all scientists look like Frankenstein monsters. I was as sceptical as they come; I had read stories about how the discovery of one gene was the panacea to all disease and headlines that claimed of a pill that would cure cancers, obesity and everything in between. I often wondered how easy it was for journalists to pick up a complex scientific paper and interpret years of hard work and collaborations and theories into a 200 word piece; until I actually had to do it myself.
And to serve perfectly that sceptic in me I was placed with the Daily Mirror! I found myself going to press conferences held by experts in various scientific fields explaining their complex studies in 20 min blocks. How could I not comprehend what they were saying? I do very similar statistics and apply similar methods in my work. Slowly as days went by I realised where the glass wall lay. From where I sat this time around it was the scientist who found it difficult to make things simple and tell about their work as if it were an engaging story, leaving the poor journalists very little to hold on to. But then when I sit at my desk with my molecules dancing about in perfect harmony performing the perfect ballet, I see the story, the melody, and the dance. That’s what the man on the street; the tax payer wants to see as well. Who are we to deprive them if this performance? Isn’t it that very resource of the tax payers’ money we all look to tap into in our next funding bid? And how can we ignore the same person who will benefit from the cures we so desperately search?
I have now resolved that if I can’t write up my own work in a simple jargon free 200 words, I will not go into the coffee room and talk about The Sun or The Guardian getting a story skewed. I will not complain about the general public being complacent in voicing their opinions on matters of public health, scientific research methods and trends and education policies. We the forerunners and perhaps the guardians of this entire debate do not do our bit to educate them and keep them abreast. And then when the lobby groups get to them quicker we only pucker up our noses in disgust.
Its probably time we all looked up from our spectrophotometers and participated whole heartedly to get our society talking about science the way it should be regarded.

Fictional little world.

I always seem to be living in a certain plane that is outside my life. I Don't know how that really works yet, but in someway its an outside perspective; but not quite. Almost like a chicken eye view to everything I do. It is quite possible that my thoughts seem to interrupt me getting on with my life.

A bit of fiction infused in the day to day reality is cool I think, but this seems to be getting out of hand at this moment. I seem to be deriving greater pleasure from my idea of my life rather than itself. Its not confusing in the least, just misleading.

I seem more happier in my head than I possibly could be. But then isn't everything about how it looks between our ears?
The problem occurs when I realise the discrepency or choose to see what other people seem to be percieving.

Should it bother me? I am not even sure if it does right now. I am sure if I dwell in this middle plane for long enough they will have to ship me somewhere where they know how to control other people's traffic jams in their brains.

Surpassing UN sanctions.... a workable solution.

"China is the puppet-master of Burma. The Olympics is the only real lever we have to make China act. The civilised world must seriously consider shunning China by using the Beijing Olympics to send the clear message that such abuses of human rights are not acceptable." Edward McMillan-Scott, vice-president of the European Parliament.

corporate responsibility?

http://www.night-driving.com/

"When was the last time I just went on a drive?" asks VW.
and I reply, " when petrol used to cost less per liter than the broadsheets."

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/politics/article2449120.ece

Kids will be kids.

Britain has the worst set of teenage kids in all of Europe, says a fancy survey. The news channels love shocking statistics’ such as these. Especially if 60% of the teenagers don’t spend time with their family at all. The survey mentions or rather explains that the kids are getting out of control by binge drinking and sexual promiscuousness because they do not have enough adult interaction. The teenagers interviewed on TV say they don’t know what to talk to their parents and they rather talk to their friends. Parents in turn are complaining that the kids don’t listen to them.

Obviously in today’s day and age if you are going to order around a young boy to come down and eat at the table you are not going to get any conformity. I hated it when I was a teenager and was just told what to do rather than when my dad explained the reason behind why he said what he said. It appealed to my intelligence. It made me feel that my parents think of me as an equal. In turn it increased my respect for them and I became more ‘manageable’. In that respect I have been a very tough person to bring up.

I don’t know how parents can turn around and blame the kids for being non communicative, it totally escapes me. These are kids born with a blank slate of a mind and you were responsible to write all the beneficial things on that slate. In turn you decide to order them around, when they go to their peers for the answers and then don’t bother with you…. You scream murder.

What’s even more shocking is that one news piece said that children these days don’t do family things. And by that apparently they meant playing board games!!! So in this technologically obsessed era parents want to improve family relationships by playing board games!!!! Am I the only one amused by such a comment?
The hard fact of this issue is parents are too bloody lazy to catch up with the type of life the kids are living today. Over half of them don’t even know how to use a computer and they expect their kids to have discussions with them? On what? The neighbour’s new car?

For a change if you want family relations to improve, instead of barking rules at your kids, learn how to play one of the smarter computer games from them and try having a good time their way.

Respect them and you will never need to bark at them ever again. They are your children not your show dogs.

Small gems.

The world of a comic strip ought to be a special place with its own logic and life... I don't want the issue of Hobbes's reality settled by a doll manufacturer.
Bill Watterson.

Today's wish.

I know what I want.

I want to be able to highlight interesting bits of lines on a web article I read and then email it to whomever I choose, all on the same web page I am visiting. That makes my email far more personal than just a text box that I can type into before sending the person the link.
Oh and to take it up a notch just in case the techies are yawning at my request, could I also have small pop up text boxes like little sticky notes (like “MS ONE PAGE”??) where I can type in my comments or analysis to the article and then email it all as a bundle and then the same link can be sent back and forth connecting the entire discussion. Well, it may help the website get far more hits as well.
I know someone is doing it already or someone can come up with it in 2 hours. Is that someone reading my blog page?

The Honeybee syndrome.

We dream of breaking loose, running away, starting a small company; a café perhaps in a small lazy town where locals have their own heroes, their own history and their own identity. But we only dream; paralysed by the fear of mortgage payments, the loss of subtle comforts of a feather pillow and sweet smelling candles. We don’t break the rut; we don’t turn our backs to all the other rats. There is comfort in quantifying that elusive concept of value of life. Even though deep down we know, this is that one thing that should not be quantified.

Today as I was having a cup of coffee with my friend and a few regular jokes later, he happened to mention an astute thought that most people are living through a decision they probably made decades ago, bored in their jobs wondering how they ended up there. What’s seemed like a smart idea, even enjoyable some 10-15 years ago is just plain humdrum now. We fail to acknowledge that it was a smart decision in those set of circumstances, in that mindset, in that era. And the more rapidly our world changes the more obsolete that decision will become, even sooner. Some people force the idea of discipline on themselves and live with the decision; many like me stay up awake and wonder what that heavy drone feeling is?

I don’t want my life to be a series of disciplined acts; I want my life to be a series of enjoyable experiences, fulfilling times. How am I to find that balance between being able to pay my rent and not labour the weight of an old decision? Most people in the world will applaud you for your sense of diligence, but who will recognise the creativity that flows from randomness? I want to celebrate the impulsiveness in me. I want to enjoy the inquisitiveness of my childhood all over again. I don’t want to beat myself up for not being as passionate about some thing I was very passionate about 10 years ago.
I look all around me and I dread ending up a sour middle aged person just coz I didn’t indulge in my core personality attribute. And least of all I so don’t want to lose that. I don’t want someone telling me that, losing it is growing up. Coz growing up is so much more than becoming boring.

Our Startrek reality.

Are we in an age where we can live with other human beings failing us rather than having our technology fail us. I feel I can cope with a friend not being able to keep her promise than me not being able to get through the phone line to talk to my mum. How inhuman is such a revelation. I am surprised at my dependence on technology. I have in a very private way always been proud at being empathetic to people around. But if this empathy sort of stems from my high expectation on technology instead, I think that is a backward move.

I don’t know if I am one of the few or we as a society are moving towards a bubble where we better prepare ourselves for the uncertainties of human moods and behaviours rather than accept that the technology we have come to rely on as a way of life will fail us unexpectedly. Why is it such a big deal in the day if the international phone lines seem to be jammed or the internet down for a couple of mins?

I remember when computers and mobile phones was just about getting popular no one minded that they failed to deliver all the time. People however took other people seriously and relied on ‘keeping a word’ and those things were such a big deal.

Why don’t we regard human relations as much now, just coz we have some fancy looking mobile phone or a 8Mbps internet connection?

Obesity excuses needs a paradigm shift.

Easington in Durham apparently is the best place to live in Britain if you would like to get nice and chubby and fat. This morning, in the news as they were covering a report on obesity trends, this place has its share of obese people and then some. The news report argues that it being a mining town and the mining industry moving away it gave rise to unemployment and boredom which was probably the cause of most people there sitting on their couch and stuffing the food in their mouths. I thought that could be a good plausible reason; until I heard this local complain on TV that they are fat because their town has no health shops or any such thing to help them keep healthy.
This is exactly the attitude according to me that gets people fat. What psychologists would probably call the external locus of control? How will the things that depend on your activity ever be sorted by addition of a few shops? Time and time again I have heard these excuses from many people when they ask me what a good way to lose weight is, and when I tell them “lifestyle choices” invariably they start complaining about the lack of facilities. If they have the facilities then their families are not helpful. If their families are supportive then the work pressure just kills them. If the workplace has conducive policies for health then an old injury nags… and I could go on and on and on.
I am the most controversial person in my office who thinks people on a general basis are obese today because they are lazy, bored and undisciplined. But that’s not what you ought to say. You ought to encourage people and tell them positive things, like make 10mins in your day for exercise, park your car 100 yards away, pick diet coke. Come on seriously does anyone really think that going from a BMI of 40 to 22 is a matter of drinking diet coke over regular coke?

Let’s do another survey nationwide and count the health shops in every town; I bet the ones that have the most branches of Holland and Barrett’s are still not the healthiest towns.

Forest fires.

The need for a sense of identity, belongingness, home, security are all valid; even basic to our existence and survival. But when God becomes a haggle and life a hustle, you wonder in moments of objectivity if religion, tradition, ethics, culture all amount to greater destruction rather than the forward direction every religion in its own right preaches. If our very own religion does not make us live better today, if our own history forces us to fight for and on the land of our ancestors then how is any of that serving its purpose of showing us the way? Which god wanted his men to fight on Jerusalem or Babel? What good is religion to us today when all it does is create power tangents that are only too steeped in political and economic interests?

I believe newspapers today have more space than thoughts. News rooms have more correspondents than news. Media is in many ways our modern day forest fires, which help burn valuable resources and plunge mankind into misery. Government censorships are as destructive as the over zealous media. The root of the flame still flickers in each individual and that’s what really needs arresting.

The Chinese government has always discouraged the belief in religion in their country. Today even though they have their own set of problems the one massive problem that the rest of the world has to deal with is absent there. They don’t have to deal with religious extremists hindering their progress. It is printing money around the same time Israel, Lebanon, Palestine, Pakistan, India, Turkey, Iraq, Syria, Iran are busy haggling over their gods, lands, culture. Not having a God doesn’t make Chinese people any less ethical, traditional, cultured, peace loving, empathetic, or passionate than the rest of the hot blooded nations.

When someone has a rock strong belief in their god and is ready to defend that conviction till death…. It worries me far more than some one admitting being confused and open to see some of the appalling things that a belief in religion today can cause. These lost souls will at least stop a moment before they shove a knife into someone’s gut. Who among these men will go to heaven, who among them will burn in hell?

How big is your world?

The more informed we get about our surrounding, our planet, science, genes and laws of nature the more isolated we get with that information. In today’s age of super specialization we know nothing about the expertise of our neighbours. It takes up so much energy for us to just gather the vast amount of information required to understand our core problem that we have lost the luxury of indulging our minds in the pursuit of an alternative concept in any appreciable depth.

When I was a kid in school, general science was fascinating, engaging, enduring and totally consuming. I was not only interested in the planets in the solar system, but how the light bulb worked and what was cross pollination. I wanted to know it all; I had the little bits of information that occupied my small childish brains. As I grew up, the amount of information required to grasp a particular interest of mine, started taking longer than I thought. I had assumed that as you know more about things, you will know more about more of it faster. But I was completely wrong.

Today, my one Ph.D. topic is all consuming. I am paranoid about my level of knowledge; it keeps me reading deep into the night, just to be able to grasp a few sentences mentioned in a peripherally important paper. However, interestingly, these peripherally important papers links up so many different streams of knowledge together that it is as fascinating today as it was 20 years ago in my general science text.
I had been complaining about my lack of time and inclination to read other subjects for a while now, but slowly it has made me realise that trying to go deep; also makes you go wider. It’s just the perspective we take.

This cross disciplinary understanding along with super specialization is what the current need in our world is. The value of a specialised expert almost exponentially increases if he or she has an understanding of aspects that may influence his work, but lies beyond his core understanding. With the emergence of a complicated society, furthered by a fast moving global community, cross disciplinary knowledge will provide many solutions to such a dynamic world. Therein lies many unsolved puzzles, therein may lay their answers. But if two scientists in adjoining rooms never ever pick up each others publications they will not be able to come together and use their intricately constructed worlds as levers for each other and we may get stuck in a traffic jam until someone steps out and decides to unweave the mesh of knowledge.

Before the motorways gets jammed, maybe its time to stop competing so hard and to look around and see the possibilities. Corporates should bring together such amalgamations, universities should set up fluid departments and individuals should de-cocoon-ize themselves.