thescian | February 8, 2010
Silence the expression of two pesky genes, and hey presto! you've got a tomato that stays fresh for as long as a month or more. Clearly this is a very useful trait for fruits and vegetables in India where Things Fall ApartTM--even when they are inside the freezer. Kudos to the scientists at National Institute of Plant Genome Research in Delhi.
thescian | February 7, 2010You get a square! More exciting mathematical thoughts in the latest edition of Steven Strogatz NY Times column.
thescian | January 31, 2010Steven Strogatz is beginning a column in NY Times aimed at you and me. Not to be missed.
I have a friend who gets a tremendous kick out of science, even though he's an artist. Whenever we get together all he wants to do is chat about the latest thing in evolution or quantum mechanics. But when it comes to math, he feels at sea, and it saddens him. The strange symbols keep him out. He says he doesn't even know how to pronounce them.
In fact, his alienation runs a lot deeper. He's not sure what mathematicians do all day, or what they mean when they say a proof is elegant. Sometimes we joke that…
thescian | January 29, 2010You may know that a while ago the swiss voted to ban any new minarets from being built. And now comes this. A local court in Switzerland has upheld a basketball headscarf ban. From the beebs:
A Muslim woman has failed to overturn a ban stopping her from wearing a headscarf during league basketball matches in Switzerland.
Sura al-Shawk, 19, was told she could not wear a headscarf by the basketball association (ProBasket) in August 2009.
A local court in Lucerne has upheld the ruling on safety grounds. ProBasket also argued the sport needed to stay religiously neutral.
Personally, I will…
thescian | January 20, 2010 "Brain 'entanglement' could explain memories"[New Scientist] is a bit of a hyperbolic title. Oh, what's in a title, you ask. Quite a lot. For instance, you can be mislead into thinking that there is a connection between quantum entanglement and the phenomenon of human memory. Aforementioned New Scientist article co-opts quantum mechanics terms for a neurological process (which is fine in itself, of course.) However, neural firing described in the article has nothing to do with quantum entanglement--this hasn't been made clear (in fact, the opposite seems to have been done with phrases like "…
thescian | January 18, 2010Chesnut School Lane, Amersham.
A few days back when England was covered in a bit of snow, an image on the television screen caught my eye. An aerial camera was showing a highway from above--for a moment the snow covered trees and houses looked like they were engulfed in thick white clouds. Snow looks like clouds: this is so obvious that I thought nothing of it until later, when I started having a nagging feeling that it wasn't so obvious.
Why should snow and clouds look the same to us? I mean, is there a way to find some way to measure the two on some aspect and say, right, this is why they…
thescian | January 13, 201014 Jan 2010. Seven die in India temple festival stampede
Previous stampedes.
Sep 30, 2008. Atleast 100 dead at Chamunda Devi temple in the city of Jodhpur.
August 3. 140 dead. 40 children. Stampede at the Nainadevi temple, Himachal Pradesh.
July. 6 dead. Stampede at Jagannath temple, Orissa.
March. 10 dead. Stampede at temple, Madhya Pradesh.
January. 5 dead. Stampede at Durga Malleswara temple, Andra Pradesh.
thescian | January 13, 2010I am reading "Einstein, a life", by Denis Brian. The book is remarkable--a two decade long labor of great love and reading. Quoted in the book is a dinner conversation where Einstein is asked about his religion by someone at the dinner:
"What?" exclaimed Kerr. "It isn't possible! I must ask him right away. Professor! I hear that you are supposed to be deeply religious?"
Calmly and with great dignity, Einstein replied, "Yes, you can call it that. Try and penetrate with our limited means the secrets of nature and you will find that, behind all the discernible concatenations, there remains…
thescian | January 11, 2010Seems it does. I hear a distinct change of sound outside now that there is a lot of snow covering up things.
thescian | December 28, 2009
First the name. Avatar--if you play computer games, you may know this very well--is a character you use inside an unreal world. The word Avatar has its origins in Indian mythology. An Avatar (ava-tara in Sanskrit) is god's visit to earth to fix something that is broken. Vishnu, one of the three gods who protects creation, by necessity visits earth often. Vishnu, the puranas declare, is dark-blue in color (the original story teller was inspired by blue oceans, blue sky?). To go with the name Avatar, Cameron has also decided to paint the aliens blue, possibly inspired by Hindu mythology. The…
thescian | December 18, 2009See here for more.
In other news: I've gone quiet over the past weeks due to complete absorption in a few personal projects (TheScian SF Book is one of them). Regular blogging should resume next year.
Seeing Avatar movie tomorrow (3D). There would probably be a weekend post if the movie is very good (or very bad).
Happy holidays! The weather is cheery today here in England. Here's the view outside my window.
thescian | December 8, 2009A passionate and poetic talk by Brain researcher Jill Bolte Taylor about the nature of our brain and what it entails. She describes her very own perception of a stroke she had. Quite extraordinary. Here's an old post about split brain for some more background.
thescian | December 2, 2009Suketu Mehta writes of greed and irresponsibility over Bhopal. :
Union Carbide and Dow were allowed to get away with it because of the international legal structures that protect multinationals from liability. Union Carbide sold its Indian subsidiary and pulled out of India. Warren Anderson, the Union Carbide chief executive at the time of the gas leak, lives in luxurious exile in the Hamptons, even though there's an international arrest warrant out for him for culpable homicide. The Indian government has yet to pursue an extradition request. Imagine if an Indian chief executive had jumped…
thescian | December 1, 2009at TheScian.com. Enjoy. The authors would be glad to see your comments and--am sure--would happily respond.
The stories are a break from the past. They are uncompromising, and hence, I hope, will give the reader the rare satisfaction of a thoughtful discussion, rather than superficial entertainment.
TheScian SF book is in the works. More illustrations have been done. Here's one done recently for the story 'Live and exclusive'.
thescian | November 22, 2009Congratulations to the winners and thanks to all the participants. The stories will go online at TheScian.com within a few days.
First prize - "Stalker" by Shuchikar (author's penname)
Second prize - "On board the Ark" by Ankit Bhardwaj
Third prize - "Dropping Off" by Ramanand
I am pleased to say that all three stories have a darker theme than most of the earlier years' stories. This is good. We are moving beyond the initial awe-and-wonder phase of SF into more mature and adult themes. More on these later after I get them online. The work on the SF book is proceeding at a steady pace. As of…
thescian | November 19, 2009My 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…
thescian | November 18, 2009I 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…
thescian | November 14, 2009Folks, the SF contest results will be delayed by a week. Unforeseen travel has intervened. I'll get the results out next Sunday, 22 Nov.