As I Please

Now where were those keys?

2012-02-02T22:55:00.011+05:30

This week sees the news of an important breakthrough in the study of degenerative brain diseases such as Alzheimer's and Parkinson's diseases.While it has been known that the diseases spread due to the spread of a distorted protein, (the tau protein for Alzheimer's ), outward from an area where memories are made and stored, the mechanism of spread was not clear. There were two possible mechanisms proposed for the spread. One, that the spread could take place from neuron to neuron, along neuronal pathways, and the other that there were neighbourhoods that were susceptible to the bad protein, and others that could resist it. It is now established that the spread takes place along neuronal pathways.

The experiments that establish this mechanism are ingenious, and involve genetically engineered mice that can create the human tau protein in a localised area called the entorhinal cortex. Cells in the entorhinal cortex of the mice started dying due to the tau protein. In due course, the disease spread to other areas via the neuronal network. Since other cells could not make the tau protein themselves, the only way the tau could show up in other areas was via transmission from nerve cell to nerve cell. It may then be possible to halt the diseases by preventing cell to cell transmission, e.g. by blocking the tau with an antibody. This might provide the key to the prevention of degenerative nerve diseases (and help find those elusive keys!).

This blog post is by Neelima Gupte and Sumathi Rao.

Presidency University

2012-01-13T23:09:00.017+05:30

The high point of last week was a visit to the oldest college in India. Presidency college, Kolkata, started life as Hindu college and was founded by Raja Ram Mohan Roy in 1817. In 1855, it was renamed as Presidency college, and has metamorphosed into what might be the youngest university in India, Presidency University, in 2010. Before this, the college was affiliated to the University of Calcutta, since 1857. The college shifted premises several times until it came to rest at its present location on College street in 1874, across the road from Calcutta University. The chemistry department conducted its first batch of practicals here in the next year, starting the venerable tradition of science departments, which train what turn out to be the best science students in the country, year after year, right upto now. Here is a picture of what the "new building" looked like last week.

You can see from the banners and the bunting in the photos that the college is presently conducting student elections, as well as the 41st reunion of the geophysical society. Over its life span, the college has boasted of a veritable galaxy of stellar teachers, J.C. Bose, and P.C. Ray being among the most notable. Here is a picture of the statue of J.C. Bose, sitting in the marble corridor outside the J.C. Bose auditorium, looking a trifle bad tempered. That's probably the black granite!

The college has now to negotiate the tricky path which will take it from its position as one of the most renowned colleges in India, to graduating to a full fledged university. It has a host of distinguished ex-students who will perhaps be only too happy to help along their alma mater in this endeavour, to say nothing of the good wishes of all of us, who have been sufficiently fortunate to have acquired numerous friends, and all our best students, from its alumni.

This blog post is by Neelima Gupte and Sumathi Rao.

The new year

2012-01-03T19:19:00.004+05:30

When the new year
came out of nowhere
and peeped into rooms
it was so flattered to find
all the tv's drinking its health
praising its innocent appearance
it responded with its warm
dark smile and went round
filling peoples dry hearts with joy

Rg Gregory, `When the new year', Young World, The Hindu, 03/01/12.

This blog post by Neelima Gupte and Sumathi Rao.

The Higgs at last?

2011-12-24T15:47:00.005+05:30

So 2011 runs out, and Europe and North America have shut down for the holiday season. Before CERN, its physicists and staff all left to make merry over Christmas and the new year, they called a press conference to tell us whether Santa had indeed visited CERN this year, and left a Higgs boson in their stocking. The upshot is that although it's too early to break out the champagne, it would not be unwise to place orders for next year.

The press conference announced that both the Atlas and the CMS experiments at CERN have seen signatures of the Higgs at a mass about 125 GeV. While the statistical significance of the data exceeds 2 sigma, it has not reached the 5 sigma level at which a new particle is announced (hence the postponement of the bubbly). However it is noteworthy that the signature of the Higgs is seen in both experiments, in two different decay modes ( Higgs to two photons, and Higgs to four leptons via Z, Zbar) and at essentially the same mass. It is also important that the Higgs boson which is seen is consistent with the standard model, but is seen at a mass which does not rule out supersymmetry. Santa may break out the goodies for our supersymmetric friends, next year, after all. It will be worth the wait.

On the flip side, this will have been the slowest Eureka ever.(The top quark was like this, but every pimple on the distributions wasn't under world-wide discussion instantly, those days). On the other hand, do we really want to see 3000 physicists jump out of their bath tubs in the altogether? The Armani suits (or whatever, we're no experts) of the webcast were better. That was also the slowest webcast ever, but we won't spoil the holiday season by complaining.

Merry Christmas, everyone.

This blog post is by Neelima Gupte and Sumathi Rao.

The Arab winter, breaking dawn in Myanmar, and what of back home?

2011-12-09T22:22:00.007+05:30

The Arab spring has given way to the winter of discontent, especially in Egypt. The military which looked like a resonable interim solution after Hosni Mubarak's forced departure, had to be forced into vacating the central space occupied by them. Meanwhile, the elections have given an alarming fraction of the vote to not just middle of the road Islamists, but to ultra-conservative parties. Die-hard optimists are still hopeful that secular elements will win the day, but a period with Egyptian versions of Khomeini might turn out to be inevitable. Well, who said democracy was an easy solution?

On a brighter note, the military junta seems to be loosening its hold on Myanmar. The charismatic Aung San Suu Kyi is contesting the elections with her National League of Democracy party, and, incidentally, exchanging bright smiles with Hillary Clinton. Cynics claim all this is in aid of Myanmar's pursuit of the Asean chair, and will soon be turned off since this objective is now achieved. However, as all despots from Saddam to Mubarak have had to notice, it's not so easy to put the genie back in the bottle.

Meanwhile, back home, the Indian government seems to be trying to do just that. The idea of trying to have guidelines for web-content is not bad in itself, but surely it is better to have this administered by a self-regulatory body? A Web Council of India, like the Press Council of India, seems to be a better idea than the government getting into the act. That might be as self-defeating as the government trying to run an airline. Is anyone listening?

This blog post is by Neelima Gupte and Sumathi Rao.

Song and dance

2011-11-29T20:01:00.014+05:30

So what is all the song and dance about? Well, it is about a song and a dance. The song has already gone viral all over You Tube. Yes, absolutely right, it is Kolaveri; how could a Chennai blog not write about the Chennai song that the whole world is writing and blogging about? Just in case you are one of the few who haven't seen it or heard about it, here is the link. Enjoy the simple song of our Chennai "soup boys".

Now for the dance. Did you think flash mobs could only be done in Grand Central station? No, siree, here is Mumbai CST, no less, and Rang de Basanti at that. This video hasn't gone viral yet, at the time of writing, but looks all set to do so. In case you wonder if it was all rehearsed, it was, and filmed at CST with due permission from the police, but that doesn't take the fun away. We wonder if it will set a fashion. If it does, there might be a Kolaveri flash mob in Madras Central station. Now that would be a song and dance indeed!

This blog post is by Neelima Gupte and Sumathi Rao.

Lest we forget

2011-11-26T21:14:00.008+05:30

They shall grow not old, as we that are left grow old;
Age shall not weary them, nor the years condemn.
At the going down of the sun and in the morning
We will remember them.

Lest we forget.

(Lawrence Binyon, "For the fallen").

26/11

This blog post is by Neelima Gupte and Sumathi Rao.

New physics? Not once again!

2011-11-20T18:17:00.004+05:30

Trackers of science news will have noted two new events in the physics world. The Opera experiment has carried out its time of flight experiment again with shorter bunches of neutrinos, spaced further apart, and reconfirms its results about the bunches reaching 60 nanoseconds before photons would have. This eliminates one of the objections to the earlier data, viz. the length of the bursts, although others still remain. The experimenters make a cautious statement, viz. `but it is not yet the final confirmation'. Critics retain their scepticism. Let's see if nonOperatics sing the same tune.

There's one more anomalous result under discussion this week.Decays of D mesons at the LHCb experiment in CERN have found evidence of CP (charge conjugation- parity) violation. The CP symmetry consists of replacing each charged particle by its antiparticle, and reversing all directions in space. Processes which obey the CP symmetry are identical under this symmetry, whereas those that do not, notably those mediated by weak interactions, do not give identical results. The D0 mesons decay into kaons and pions and so do their antiparticles. These rates of decay are expected to be identical under the standard model, but have turned out be not. For those who like the standard deviations, this is a 3.5 sigma result. Will it go away like all those we have encountered so far this year? Only time can tell. However, eventually, one of the "new physics" results will stand up to the test of reproducibility, and keep the next generation of physicists, busy, productive and happy.

This blog post is by Neelima Gupte and Sumathi Rao.

Hush, ladies!

2011-11-12T08:21:00.012+05:30

A sign from a temple.

No comment! For readers who don't read the Devanagari script, the sign says exactly the same thing as the title of this post. We don't know which temple this was from, but it could be anywhere! Incidentally, as many of the readers of this blog know, temples are not the only place where the ladies are told to keep quiet. That could be anywhere, too!

Thanks to Bala for the photograph.

This blog post is by Neelima Gupte and Sumathi Rao.

Faster than light? Maybe not

2011-10-26T09:10:00.013+05:30

While theorists have been sceptical about the faster than light neutrinos for a while, there is now a new experiment which casts further doubt on the results of the OPERA collaboration. The ICARUS experiment offers a rebuttal of the earlier claims of neutrinos travelling faster than light.

The ICARUS(Imaging Cosmic and Rare Underground Signals) experiment also collects neutrinos that travel from CERN to Gran Sasso, but measures the energy spectrum rather than the time of flight, as is done by the OPERA experiment, which is also located at Gran Sasso and reported superluminal (faster than light) speeds. ICARUS has shown that the energy spectrum does not show the signature of the Cohen-Glashow effect which is the analogue of the Cerenkov radiation emitted by charged particles. Charged particles such as electrons that travel in media with velocities greater than the velocity of light in that medium, emit radiation known as Cerenkov radiation, and lose energy in the process. If the neutrinos of the Opera experiment did travel with velocities greater than light, they would emit particles (electron, positron pairs and photons, mediated by a Z0 boson, as per Cohen and Glashow), and lose energy themselves in the process. There is a straightforward relation between the rate at which the neutrinos lose energy and the speed at which they travel. The average energy of the neutrinos that leave CERN is 28.2 GeV. If they actually travelled at superluminal speeds, they would reach Gran Sasso, where both OPERA, and ICARUS are located, with an average energy of 12.1 GeV. Instead, ICARUS reports that the neutrinos detected by them, have an average energy of 26 GeV, about what the neutrinos would have, if they travelled at the boring old speed of light!

By the way, ICARUS only has about 100 reliable neutrino events, whereas OPERA has about 16,000. However, the results of the ICARUS experiment rely on a straightforward measurement of the distribution of energies, and hence do not get mired down by issues like the synchronisation and slowing down of clocks that the time of flight experiments of OPERA do, and are being taken very seriously. As in all the other issues like the Tevatron bump, and the missing Higgs, which have come up recently, only more measurements, and further experiments by independent collaborations, can resolve the question. We look forward to more exciting results.

Tailpiece: Does E still equal mc squared? (The Corrigan brothers). We don't know yet, but that's the way to bet.

Happy Diwali, everyone.

This blog post is by Neelima Gupte and Sumathi Rao.

Three ladies (reprise)

2011-10-11T19:44:00.014+05:30

So here are three ladies in the news again, and no prizes for guessing which three ladies they are: Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, Leymah Gbowee and Tawakkul Karmen, two Liberians and a Yemeni, in that order, and joint winners of the Nobel prize for peace this year. Tawakkul Karmen is the first Arab woman to win this prize, and her prize is the Nobel committee's recognition of the Arab spring, as well as of the role of the Islamists and of women in the uprisings. The first, i.e. the recognition of the Arab spring, could have been foreseen, but given the number of people who have contributed to it, and could have been considered contenders for the prize, the choice of the actual winner is truly progressive, and not quite on expected lines. The other two winners, President Sirleaf of Liberia, and Gbowe who organised the Women for Peace movement, an organisation of Muslim and Christian women against the Liberian warlords, are perceived widely as reformers and peacemakers.

The citation of the committee is both explicit and heartening, "We cannot achieve democracy and lasting peace in the world unless women obtain the same opportunities as men to influence developments at all levels of society." Since this message of female empowerment will be heard round the world, it will have its desired impact, and perhaps one day reality may rise to the ideal in the song:

"As we come marching, marching, we bring the greater days,
The rising of the women means the rising of the race,
No more the drudge and idler---ten that toil while one reposes,
But a sharing of life's glories: Bread and roses! Bread and roses!"

This post is by Neelima Gupte and Sumathi Rao

The rise and fall of the Indian liberal tradition: A talk by Ramachandra Guha

2011-10-02T19:07:00.023+05:30

An Indian liberal visited Chennai a few weeks ago, and gave a talk on his perception of the state of the liberal tradition in India. In addition to being a liberal, he is a well known historian, a polemical writer in the grand tradition of George Orwell, a cricket enthusiast, and last, but not least, a Stephenian. Those who caught all the cues, (and read the title of this post), would have zeroed in on Ramachandra Guha.

It is not so easy to identify who qualifies as an Indian liberal, so Guha started off with the dictionary definition of a liberal, i.e. favourable to or respectful of individual rights and freedoms, favouring individual liberty, free trade, and moderate political and social reform, regarding many traditional beliefs as dispensable, invalidated by modern thought, or liable to change. Out of these the OED distills an overall definition, viz. willing to respect or accept behaviour or opinions different from one’s own; open to new ideas. To these, the Indian liberal added some additional qualities, viz. hopefulness about the future, and implicit patriotism as exemplified by Tagore's notion of nationalism. The nationalist movement in the 1900-s threw up liberals like Raja Ram Mohan Roy, and Gopal Krishna Gokhale,who tried to liberalise the backward and ossified indigeneous tradition using ideas brought in by the technologically advanced colonisers. It was pointed out that all of these violated the dictionary definition, as they did not believe in free markets, and liberals such as Mahatma Gandhi and C. Rajagopalachari accepted many aspects of traditional and religious belief. Despite this, the constitutional privileges, secular structure and multilingual polity that Indians take for granted arise directly from this liberal tradition. The second phase of liberalism was from 1940-1950 where the liberal tradition upheld by Nehru and B.R. Ambedkar led to the Hindu Code Bill, equal rights for women, anti-caste legislation and support for the disadvantaged segments of society.

The liberal tradition faced its moments of crisis. The first arose in the period 1947-1950 when Mahatma Gandhi was shot dead and the liberal tradition faced attacks both from the resurgence of right wing religious fundamentalism, and from the Marxist fundamentalism and support for armed insurgency by a leftist party like the CPM. However, the center held, despite these threats, thanks to the strenuous efforts of Nehru, Patel and Ambedkar. The second attack on the liberal tradition came during 1971-1977 due to Indira Gandhi's authoritarianism and attempts to make the Indian National Conference a family firm. This destroyed the decentralised democratic structure of the Congress and created a cadre of committed civil servants and judiciary.

Today's threat to the liberal tradition comes from illiberal tendencies that arise from all directions, the left, the right and the center. The left contributes Maoist extremism, fueled by political economy, tribes displaced by development, and isolated by geographical terrain. The parties of the center contribute to corruption and family feudalism. Right wing fundamentalist ideas have not lost their attraction for certain segments of the polity.

So what can liberals do, to fight off this attack? Guha's prescription for the liberals is to stand firm against all forms of illiberalism. These include Hindu theocrats who feed paranoia, sycophants of political families, political opportunists, apologists for the Maoists, emotional blackmailers, and supporters of vigilante armies. He deplored the pussillanimity of the liberals, and said liberals should not be timid. He quoted Orwell who said a writer can never be a loyal member of a political party. He said that institution building is hard work, to which no substitutes or short cuts are available. The internet can spread ideas far and wide, but can also contribute to incivility. The media can spotlight a problem, but it can only be solved by debate, dialogue and receptivity. Finally, steady, patient work, away from the glare of the media, alone can provide lasting solutions to the evils that plague society.

This lecture was delivered at the Institute of Mathematical Sciences, Chennai, on September 7, 2011, as a memorial lecture for Rahul Basu.

This blog post is by Neelima Gupte and Sumathi Rao.

Faster than light?

2011-09-23T23:32:00.018+05:30

An experiment where a beam of neutrinos was fired from Geneva (CERN), to Gran Sasso, Italy, a distance of 730 kilometers, claims that the neutrinos reached their target 60 nanoseconds faster than a light beam would have, thereby violating a fundamental principle of special relativity, viz. nothing can travel faster than light.

Physics would undergo a stupendous change if it were true. The scientists who analysed the data said, "Although our measurements have low systematic uncertainty and high statistical accuracy, and we place great confidence in our results, we're looking forward to comparing them with those from other experiments". However, no one seriously believes this one; earlier claims of neutrinos that travel faster than light have not stood up to scrutiny. Still, this news item will have its moment of fame, so here is its blog post!

For a very clear discussion of the details of the experiment, see this link.

Tailpiece: A battered photon totters into a police station and tells a cop, "A bunch of neutrinos just beat me". The cop says: "Did you get a good look at them?" The photon says: "Heck, no, it all happened so fast!"

This blog post is by Neelima Gupte and Sumathi Rao.

The case of the missing Higgs

2011-09-04T14:17:00.016+05:30

As physicists, and those who follow physics, know, the Higgs boson is the most sought after particle in physics. The fanciful have even called it "the God particle". They also know that it is proving to be even more elusive than the snark.

The hunters had turned hopeful last month, when data from the Large Hadron Collider at CERN showed a flurry of events that were consistent with the Higgs. Two independent detectors, the ATLAS and the CMS (Compact Muon Solenoid) saw an excess of W bosons, an event considered to be a precursor of the Higgs, in the neighbourhood of 144 GeV. It was hoped that the signal would strengthen, and that the Lepton Photon meeting held in Mumbai in August would announce the discovery of the Higgs. Unfortunately, the latest results which use about twice the data show that the confidence levels in the data have fallen from 2.8 sigma to 2 sigma, i.e. from 99 percent to 95 percent, as researchers have included the effects of other processes that could give an excess of W bosons. (Followers of this blog will remember that 5 sigma results are required before a particle is declared as being discovered). What has been stated with confidence are the energy ranges where the Higgs is not, viz. between 145 and 400 GeV, and patches between 146 and 466 GeV. The Higgs might actually lurk at the lower ends of the energy spectrum viz. between 120 and 140 GeV. More data is awaited, and maybe a result by 2012.

Tailpiece: Why is the Higgs so eagerly awaited? The following hoary chestnut tells it all (thanks, Ashutosh): A Higgs boson walks into a church. The priest says, "We don't allow Higgs bosons in here." The Higgs boson says huffily, "But without me how can you have mass?"

This blog post is by Neelima Gupte and Sumathi Rao.

Democracy and demands: The case against Anna

2011-08-25T18:32:00.004+05:30

Anna Hazare's reported call on August 24 for a "gherao" of Parliament deserves condemnation. Adequate consideration has been shown to Anna and his suggestions. He and his supporters ought now to allow Parliament to function. If they continue on their present path, they will be setting dangerous precedents.

Anna Hazare, howsoever well-intentioned, is functioning on the basis of certain fallacious propositions. The first dubious proposition is that elected representatives need to do the bidding of Anna, and the large number of people gathered to support him, on the principle of popular sovereignty. Even leaving aside the questions whether popular sovereignty vests in the venerable Anna alone and whether Anna's approach on the Ombudsman question is the only possible reasonable approach, there is another issue here. This is that there is a difference between being a representative of a constituency and being its "deputee". A chosen representative is entitled to the use of his or her own judgement about what is in the interests of the people. That is what they are chosen for. They are not meant to be attorneys doing a client's bidding.

The second dubious proposition which a large section of the media has swallowed is that Anna's tactics, strategies and activities are party-politically neutral and reflect no tacit political affiliations. They do. This is obvious from his selective political targeting and certifications. It is more than a little strange that He remains silent on the question of there being no ombudsman machinery in many states, including some states governed by the principal opposition party at the Centre.He appears to have got around this by suggesting that even in the states, the ombudsman machinery machinery ought to be created only through a parliamentary Bill, when his advisers are sufficiently well-informed on Constitutional matters to know that there would be questions here about Parliament's legislative competence to legislate on this subject in relation to individual states.

The third dubious proposition that Anna is implicitly playing with is that Indian parliamentary democracy may be challenged without limit even where it has given more than adequate space to Anna and his colleagues. I think Anna is inviting trouble that could put India's democracy and constitutional dispensation, painstakingly built up, back by several decades.

The fourth dubious proposition put forth by Anna is that there is a strong Gandhian element in his activities. This does not seem to be the case. Gandhi's struggles involved respect for his opponent. And whatever one of his religious associates may think, Anna needs to be reminded that Gandhi did not use fasts as a weapon during his civil disobedience campaigns. The fasts were usually on other issues, not in the course of mass activity. Anna's views on the death penalty are not quite Gandhian.

Even on the question of how long Anna would fast or remain at Ramlila Grounds there have been conflicting statements by Anna and his supporters. First it was to be 15 days. Then he said he would remain at Ramlila Grounds until the Bill was passed. Finally he said he would FAST until the Bill was passed. Now one of his associates has said that there must be written assurances before the fast would be broken. Anna needs to realise that he is now holding the country and its Parliament to ransom and that too for a cause on which his demands have been substantially conceded. I think this is most unfair and most un-Gandhi-like on his part. Now is the time to stop this tantrum before it goes any further. He may, if he prefers, think of suspending it indefinitely and re-examine the matter once the Parliamentary deliberations are over.

This blog post is by Anil Nauriya.

The issue of bringing the states under the Lok Pal bill seems to have been addressed today. There does seem to be a tendency to add on demands every day. However, this has not diminished the level of popular support that the movement has attracted. Do write in with your views. -Neelima.

Civil society again

2011-08-22T16:08:00.001+05:30

The Lok Pal bill and Anna Hazare are much in the news and our minds again. Even those who support the objectives of the agitation (i.e. as against corruption) are not quite in support of some of the ensuing rhetoric.

It seems not irrelevant to point to an earlier post.

As I Please: Civil society and its concerns

There is also a very current comment by Anil Nauriya on this post. We look forward to further discussion on this issue.

This blog post is by Neelima Gupte and Sumathi Rao.

`Uncle Eric'

2011-08-19T21:43:00.004+05:30

For a very sweet reminiscence of the writer of the original `As I Please', see this link.

This blog post is by Neelima Gupte and Sumathi Rao.

The arXiv is 20

2011-08-16T22:44:00.022+05:30

Twenty years ago, a particle physicist named Paul Ginsparg got tired of the way in which pre-publication research was circulated. After a paper was written, the author, or a secretary, in the case of fortunate authors, made many copies of the paper, a circulation list was typed, and copies were sent to those on the list. In the process, some copies went to those who had not that much interest in the subject, and many more, who would have been interested in the subject, but not on the list, would only find out when the paper got published. This obviously meant several months, which was a serious handicap to those who worked in fast developing fields. The particle physicists, always the quickest on their feet, had a partial solution to this, they sent the first copy to the SLAC (Stanford Linear Accelerator Center) list, which was widely circulated, and hoped the paper would catch interest, resulting in many preprint request cards in their mailbox (not the electronic version, the little pigeonhole in their department office!). Physicists in all other fields yawned, and didn't bother. Heaven knows what people in other disciplines did!

Then 20 years ago, in August 1991, things changed. Ginsparg, who worked then at the Los Alamos National Lab, decided to harness the technology of the internet, which was of course, itself the major revolution of the last decade of the 20th century, for this purpose. What could be neater and more efficient than uploading your paper at a central archive, neatly catalogued, and searchable by area, title, author names, and keywords, from where anyone with internet access could download the paper? An idea this good, had to be a thumping success. Usage of the archive snowballed from the initial 400 submissions in the first six months, to 75,000 a year in 2011. Over the same period, the number of distinct users who access the archive increased to 400,000 a week and an astounding download of 1 million articles per week. The areas multiplied from a cosy community of particle physicists to all areas of theoretical physics, and across all disciplines to include mathematicians, biologists and computer scientists, admittedly those with a physics bias. Fields like medicine started their own archive with the help of publishers, and called it PubMed. The surprise does not lie in the number of people who use the archive, the surprise lies in the fact that a fraction of the scientific population appears to manage without it, even now.

However, the most important thing about the archive was the way it levelled the playing field, at least for those interested in theoretical areas. One internet connection, and no place was a backwater any more. The dependence on exorbitantly priced journals was, if not gone, greatly reduced. Though archive submissions are unrefereed, their status and versions are updated post publication in regular journals, for ease of reference. Papers can be submitted to journals directly via uploads from the archive. Mirror sites of the archive increase efficiency and download speeds. Just as the archive was the result of Paul Ginsparg's individual initiative, much of the effort in setting up this amazing framework has come from the tireless work of individual scientists. This is a good place to acknowledge the unstinting efforts of Kapil Paranjape in setting up the Indian mirror site of the archive at the Institute of Mathematical Sciences, Chennai.

Finally, which way will the archive evolve further? It is really difficult to say. Ginsparg has said that better quality control may enable the archive to evolve from being merely a repository of information to a powerful and self-maintained knowledge structure. To see if this works, stay tuned in till the archive celebrates its silver jubilee in five years.

Tailpiece: Two tales from the late eighties.

A physicist named Joanne Cohn, an early pioneer in the field of matrix models,initially had a personal list of friends to whom she would mail all the preprints that she received. Soon, her reputation grew and even people who did not know her would send her their preprints hoping that she would circulate them to her friends. By the time Ginsparg took over, she had more than a hundred email addresses to which she would forward the preprints. This was not a small number then, so this was true public service!

There was also the time someone from industry came to talk to the physicists at Santa Barbara and suggested that scientists should charge something for their papers (intellectual property rights!) to be put up for public consumption. This provoked much merriment. Some one joked that most scientists would pay to have their papers read!

This blog post is by Neelima Gupte and Sumathi Rao.

For an earlier post on the same subject by Rahul Basu see here.

But what use is it anyway?

2011-07-27T17:17:00.021+05:30
Basic researchers of every stripe have to answer this question to every one from funding agencies to the neighbours' school-going kids. While all these enquiring minds have every right to ask this question, every right thinking researcher has to suppress, for reasons of politeness and practicality, the primitive urge to snap and say `does everything have to be useful?'. The Nature issue of 14th July has carried out an admirable job of answering this question. Peter Rowlett has produced seven tales, both little known, and well known, which provide the answer, viz. `theoretical work may lead to practical applications, but it can't be forced and it can take centuries.' The original link is here, but needs a subscription to Nature.
For those who don't have access to the journal, here is a quick summary: Mathematics displays the astonishing quality of being able to provide an effective toolbox for researchers trying to solve practical problems.The surprising thing about this, is that the mathematicians who invented the toolbox, sometimes centuries earlier, neither knew nor cared about the applicability of the results. The strength of the mathematical result lies in the fact that it is proven for all time, once a rigorous proof is provided, within its range of assumptions, unlike the physical sciences, which constantly need to be re-evaluated, in the light of new experimental evidence. Not only do mathematicians not worry about applicability, they push ideas to the limit of abstraction, with no particular regard for the constraints of the `real' world. The applicability of mathematics arises when suddenly, an abstraction provides an amazing fit to a practical situation.
Rowlett provides some interesting examples. These include the use of quarternions in applications to robotics, computer vision and graphics programming (Lara Croft, no less!); Riemannian geometries for cosmological models, the mathematics of sphere packing for modern communications, such as channel coding and error codes; the applicability of the Parrondo paradox to the Brownian ratchet which models directed molecular motion; the use of probability theory and the law of large numbers in actuarial mathematics; applications of topology, like knot theory for understanding DNA structure, braids for quantum computing, Mobius strips for conveyor belts; Hilbert spaces for quantum mechanics, and Fourier series everywhere. Practicing scientists and engineers will obviously find numerous others. The British Society for the History of Mathematics has asked readers to contribute examples known to them (see www.bshm.org). It would also be really nice if readers of this blog would share their examples here. We look forward to your response.
This blog post is by Neelima Gupte and Sumathi Rao.

One last time

2011-07-08T22:12:00.008+05:30
The space shuttle Atlantis is off on its last trip. It will carry 8000 pounds of supplies to the international space station, and will be back after two weeks. This will be the 135th, and the last, flight of the shuttle program, which was once both vibrant and useful, and managed to repair the Hubble space telescope. Budget cuts have forced NASA to cut down the shuttle program, to a point where NASA staff got demoralised and left in droves, making it difficult to find crews and support for the space shuttle.
Debates on the scientific utility of manned versus unmanned space programs, are heavily tilted towards unmanned programs, which are supposed to be more cost effective, and carry out better thought out science programs. Still, no one who has seen the speck on the TV screen expand out into a full fledged space craft will forget the shuttle, any more than they will forget that they once watched a man named Armstrong walk upon the moon.
Did anyone catch the classical allusion?
This blog post is by Neelima Gupte and Sumathi Rao.

Civil society and its concerns

2011-06-30T15:55:00.014+05:30
Civil society has been much in the news recently, thanks to the Lok Pal bill, Anna Hazare, Baba Ramdev and the rest. Members of the civil society have been, perhaps justifiably, taking pride in the fact that they have been successful in making their voices heard. Therefore, this seems to be a good point to discuss who actually constitutes civil society, and more importantly, who does it in effect, exclude, and how does the composition of civil society affect its concerns.
To argue this out, it is necessary to identify who is excluded from this collection. To take a few examples, the urban working class, the rural population, the middle and lower ends of the caste hierarchy, and for that matter, the political class, all clearly do not belong to the conglomerate defined above, and have an entirely different agenda. As a simple example of this, it is hard to imagine that the excluded collection would have the kind of interest in the joint entrance exam of the IIT-s that the included fraction does. After all, only about four lakh students take the entrance examination every year, out of our population of one billion plus (it's pointless even to discuss the statistical significance of the 16,000 who actually get in), however, discussions of the entrance exam, however well argued or otherwise, occupy an entirely disproportionate amount of newspaper space, as compared to the concerns of the dispossessed.
So what should civil society do? Maybe it could broaden its outlook. Its current agenda may be all right, but it is narrow, and might even turn out to be self-serving (any bets on which class of society the Lok Pal will come from, if ever we get one?). It is a pity that the agenda of the elite leaders of society is so limited. There was a time when this was not so, and the leaders of civil society looked outwards to the requirements and aspirations of the entire country, and not just to those of people like themselves. This time was before independence, when the elite spearheaded both social reforms, and political movements, and managed to carry the country with themselves. Is it a pipe dream to hope that such a time will come again?
Confession: This blog post was inspired by a recent article by P. Sainath in the Hindu. Do see the article. The Reds do occasionally get something right, especially on issues which are not of any interest to Beijing, and hence do not come with any predefined policy!
This blog post is by Neelima Gupte and Sumathi Rao.

Things that go bump in the data, and live computing

2011-06-10T19:22:00.023+05:30
It is time to report again on the bump in the Tevatron data at Fermilab. In April, Fermilab had reported that there was an unexpected bump in the total number of events that produce a W boson and two jets. This bump could not be explained by the standard model. The data was greeted with enthusiasm by some model builders, who rushed to build theories, and scepticism by others, who pointed out that it could be explained by a simple miscalibration of jet energies. However, it was universally agreed that the effect, which was a 3-sigma effect, needed further data before it could be supported or dismissed. Well, further data is now in from the CDF experiment at Fermilab, and the effect hasn't gone away. Instead, it is now a 5-sigma effect (well, 4.8-sigma, if you want to be picky). While the hard headed await further data from other sources like the LHC, phenomenologists have not found it too hard to come up with models that account for the bump. Some of the attempts include the proposal of a new vector boson Z', that needs to be leptophobic (i.e. not decay into leptons, but only into quarks). Aficionados of supersymmetry have come up with a sbottom decaying into a stop, but there are numerous other contenders. Here are the references for the technically inclined.
Theorists versus the CDF bump;
CDF: Wjj bump almost 5 sigma!!!
Meanwhile, at the other end of the spectrum, researchers at Caltech have managed to manipulate strands of DNA into computing a square root. There's a really cute video at
DNA takes square roots
It looks like there are exciting times ahead for scientists of varied interests. It makes for a pleasant change from the days of the doldrums.
Update (11/06/11): Whoops! This is a real roller-coaster ride. The D0 data at the Tevatron, now finds no bump at the earlier reported energies. More info on this when it comes out.
(12/6/11) Here is the way it pans out, as of today. The CDF data shows a clear bump in the distribution of events in the neighbourhood of 150 GeV. The D0 data, carrying out similar analysis shows no bump in this range. The clearest discussion that I found of this is here. The rest awaits further data and analysis.
This blog post is by Neelima Gupte and Sumathi Rao.

Three ladies

2011-05-19T21:34:00.019+05:30
The first two require no guesswork: Jayalalitha and Mamatadidi. Everyone is writing/blogging/tweeting about them. Here's a link or two to some recent posts about them.
The women who rule India;
`Amma,' `Didi' to double the number of women CMs.
The third one may come as a bit of a surprise. This is Jane Goodall, the celebrated primatologist, in the news this week for having two children's books written about her. Her pathbreaking studies in primatology started with a childhood gift from her father, a toy chimpanzee called Jubilee. Goodall is best known for her studies of the social behaviour of chimpanzees. She lived among the chimpanzees in Gombe National Park in Kenya, and is credited with the first observations of tool making in non-human primates, and for exploding the belief that chimpanzees were vegetarians. She also observed evidence of mental traits like reasoning, abstraction, symbolic representation and a sense of self among chimpanzees, which had been thought to be unique to humans upto that point. Jane's studies were criticised for not following the strict, impersonal norms of primate studies which were followed at that point, like giving names to the chimpanzees she observed, instead of numbers, as was thought to be more `objective'. This lack of `objectivity' was supposed to contribute to the `anthropomorphic' conclusions of her study. However, many of her conclusions have been validated by other studies.
In a recent interview, Dr. Goodall was asked a question on what she thought were the reasons for which women, by and large, stayed away from scientific careers. To paraphrase loosely, she said that this might be because science was thought to be a career where empathy and intuition, two traits which she said were pronounced in girls, were squashed out in favour of coldness which was equated with objectivity. She also said that scientists should be human beings first, and scientists next, and empathy and intuition should be taken advantage of, and the conclusions drawn using these traits should be tested out in the light of rationality. This is a truly unique message and surely worth thinking about.
Quote of the week: `If you have a dream as a child, follow it even if people laugh at you for it, as they laughed at me.'- Jane Goodall.
This post is by Neelima Gupte and Sumathi Rao.

An ode to the west wind

2011-05-07T07:07:00.014+05:30
Today marks the birth anniversary of one of India's most illustrious sons. Rabindranath Tagore was born on May 7th, 1861, a hundred and fifty years ago. The newspapers have written reams about his poetry, his novels, his world view, and his impact on the world. This post is about a very tiny aspect of his personality and genius, namely, the impact of western music on Tagore and how it influenced some of his work.
Most Bengalis are aware that Tagore was inspired by old English, Scottish and Irish tunes in his youth - the poet admitted as much himself. Such songs are termed bilāti-bhāngā gān. Tagore went to England at the impressionable age of seventeen, and heard the tunes of Irish melodies and Scottish reels. He returned full of high spirits and began composing songs for the evening entertainments that were a regular feature of his ancestral home; and many of these songs were inspired by his musical experiences abroad.
Tagore first used bilati airs immediately after his return from England in 1881 in the musical Vālmīki Pratibhā which narrates the metamorphosis of Ratnākar, a formidable bandit king, to Vālmīki, legendary poet-sage who wrote the Rāmāyaņa. Of this work, Tagore himself said `the tunes in this musical drama are mostly Indian, but they have been dragged out of their classic dignity; that which soared in the sky was taught to run on the earth. Those who have seen and heard it performed will, I trust, bear witness that the harnessing of Indian melodic modes to the service of the drama has proved neither derogatory nor futile.' Many of the tunes of this play were composed by Rabindranath's brother Jyotirindra. Two of the songs in the play were set to `English' tunes, viz. `Nancy Lee' by Michael Maybrick (who composed as Stephen Adams) and `John Peel'. `Nancy Lee', a rousing sea shanty in the original, metamorphosed to an invocation to the Goddess Kālī that the bandits sing in the forest in Tagore’s version.`D'you ken John Peel', a popular hunting song, has been surmised to inspire the song ‘tobé āy shobé āy’, of Valmiki Pratibha, which is similar in both melody and spirit.
Soon after this, Tagore stopped using bilāti tunes in his songs. Instead, the stream of ideas trickled underground, to emerge in his mature years in his great song offerings in the Gitanjali. Tagore's poems and music managed to break free of the rigidities of the classical Indian forms and achieved a brilliant fusion of both Indian and western sensibilities, and made him the Gurudev that we commemorate today.
This post is by Srovonti Basu Bandopadhyay. Srobonti is an accomplished Rabindra Sangeet singer. We hope to see her, her husband Arindam, and their friends, perform these songs one of these days. Incidentally, Srovonti is Rahul's cousin. -Neelima.

Tere bin laden (and millinery too)

2011-05-06T18:20:00.005+05:30
Just so as not to be the only blog that hasn't mentioned the topic of the week, here is a slightly skewed take on Osama bin Laden and his death. There will be arguments ad infinitum on whether bin Laden's death really changes anything, and whether Pakistan first concealed his whereabouts and then threw him to the wolves when the U.S. made things too hot; to say nothing of whether U.S. policy towards states which sponsor terrorism will change after this. This post is only to admire the classic intelligence legwork and tailing of small fry which led to the discovery of Osama's hiding place. It is to be hoped that no part of this success will get tainted by identification with the inhuman interrogation techniques of Guantanamo Bay (although one can't be sure at this point). If not, George Smiley would surely rejoice!
On the topic of last week, namely, the Will-Kate wedding, what hats!
This post is by Neelima Gupte and Sumathi Rao.

A starchild and the stuff of stars

2011-04-14T07:35:00.012+05:30
This week has been notable for two reasons, one for what it reminds us of that's past, the other for what it might bring in the future. It's fifty years since Yuri Gagarin blasted off into space in Vostok 1, on April 12, 1961, opening up a new era in exploration and human endeavour. He spent an hour and forty-eight minutes in flight and completed one orbit round the world before re-entry, ejected from his capsule and landed by parachute. The world goggled at this smiling, handsome superman (only five foot two, by the way, an inspiration to shorties) who stole the thunder from Alan Shepard who blasted off into space just about three weeks later. This is also a good place to remember the brave dog Laika, who was sent up in space four years earlier, with no expectation of her ever coming back. There are those who will argue that the thing to remember is the Sputnik programme, which launched the space era, the Cold war, and on the plus side, a whole generation of Sputnik kids into science.
This ushers in the second half of today's post. A recent analysis of the data collected at the Tevatron, the accelerator at Fermilab, shows what might be signature of a new particle, not predicted by the Standard Model (the established and accepted model for all elementary particles observed so far). The physicists are cautious, as the data is still not of the confidence level that declares a new particle and new physics. However, the buzz is around, and phenomenologists (the model builders) are licking their lips. More on this, if the bump in the distribution survives further data.
Tailpiece: A new song on Yuri Gagarin, tentatively called starchild, is being recorded by someone who is more than qualified to record a song like this. This is Brian May, who left incomplete a Ph.D. in astrophysics to become a guitarist for the rock group Queen. Incidentally, he finished his Ph.D., with a bona-fide thesis, on, as it happens, stardust, thirty years later.
This blog post is by Neelima Gupte and Sumathi Rao.

Ud gaya hans akela

2011-04-03T09:23:00.009+05:30
With deep regret, we announce the sad and untimely demise of Rahul Basu, the writer of this blog, on 5th March 2011. He came down with a serious respiratory infection in December, but was recovering well. However, a sudden relapse took him away from us, his sorrowing friends and family.
His non-blogging persona was that of a particle physicist. Many aspects of his professional and public persona have been described by his friends and colleagues on the beautiful memorial page put up by his institute, the Institute of Mathematical Sciences. He was quite different with his close friends and family. He was playful and affectionate, and enfolded those he loved in his tender care. Now he is gone, and we are bereft. However, we plan to continue this blog in his loving memory, with help from all his friends, and members of his family.
We hope you will read your blog, Rahul.
Ud jaayega hans akela/ jag darshan ka mela/ jaise paat gire taruvar se/ milna bahut duhela/ na jaane kidhar girega/ lageya pawan ka rela/ jab howe umar puurii/ jab chhuutegi hukum hujuurii/ Yama ke doot bade mazboot/ Yama se pada jhamela/ Daas Kabir Hari ke guna gaawe/ woh Hari ko paaran pawe/ Guru ki karni guru jayega/ chele ki karni chela/ Ud jaayega hans akela/ jag darshan ka mela...
(Kabir Bani-Sant Kabir.)
The swan will fly away all alone/ the world will merely be a spectacle like a fair/ As the leaf that falls from the tree /is difficult to find/ who knows where it will fall/ once it is struck with a gust of wind/ when the span of life is complete /then obeying orders, following others, will be over/ The messengers of Yama are very strong/ the tangling had to be with Yama/ the servant Kabir praises the attributes of the Lord/ he finds the Lord soon/ the Guru will go according to his doings/ the disciple according to his/ The swan will fly away all alone ........
(Thanks, Jogesh, for the Kabir bhajan and the Kumar Gandharva reference.)
This blog post is by Neelima Gupte and Sumathi Rao.

On listening again to Pachelbel's Canon

2011-02-20T16:16:00.003+05:30
Being condemned to forced leisure has meant listening to a lot of little heard music on my ipod. This brought be recently to Pachelbel's Canon of which I seem to have a number of versions.
It is not an exaggeration to say that it is one of the most beautiful short baroque pieces ever written. It's a piece that I find I can listen to over and over again, the beauty and joy that pervades this piece washes over you in soothing waves. It's such a pity therefore that the Canon (and the accompanying Gigue) has been relegated to what is derisively referred to as 'elevator music' and indeed one hears it mostly in malls, elevators and as background scores to documentaries.
A piece of music that has stayed with us for 300 years must have something going for it. (How much of our present day music will last that long?). In his time Pachelbel was a major baroque composer and its a pity most of his work has vanished. This work is in traditional contrapunctal style with three violins, with a bass continuo providing the background and is believed to have been composed on the occasion of the marriage of Johann Christoph Bach, Johann Sebastian Bach's elder brother.
Mozart and Bach will last for ever, but so will a little known Pachelbel's little gem, despite its fate at the hands of present day remixers.
Tailpiece: I realise many people will not share my opinion. Here is a very funny video about why a cellist could come to hate Pachelbel's canon.

Gandhi and Civilization

2011-02-19T10:56:00.003+05:30
I am always impressed at the reach of Gandhi's civil disobedience movement. More than 60 years after Indian independence, the Egyptian people used it to uproot a despotic ruler. Of course the army is still in charge and that is always a bad sign, but let us be optimistic.
Gandhi (along with Nehru) have been my heroes for long, as people who read this blog will know. However, before we get all misty eyed about Gandhi's methods, it's important to realise that they have serious limitations. Gandhi's suggestion that the Jews commit mass suicide to make Hitler see reason was received with derision then and would be received with derision now. The opposition needs to play by the rules (that is, the norms of civilised behaviour, hence the title of this post) for non violent movements to succeed. In that sense, British rule in India, despite its exploitative nature and the General Dyers, was overall marked by a certain respect for the rule of law. If the opponent has no principles, it's not possible for Gandhi's ideas of satyagraha to succeed.
This is now becoming clearer and clearer. The Chinese Government brutally put down the Tiananmen square demonstrations by the simple expedient of firing real live bullets at unarmed protesters. A metal bullet is no match for satyagraha. Today we see a repeat of this phenomenon -- a group of uncivilised countries (I use the adjective in the sense described above) have firmly and ruthlessly put down peaceful protests in Bahrain, Libya and Yemen (and earlier in Iran). The Israeli Army does the same with Palestinians. The US President has wrung his hands and expressed 'deep concern' but it has predictably had little effect.
So what does one do in such cases? Does one meet violence with violence? In the movie 'Gandhi' the Mahatma makes the observation 'an eye for an eye makes the whole world blind' . I have not been able to find this quote in any of Gandhiji's writings, but it's the kind of statement he could well have made. How many human lives must be sacrificed before the faint glimmerings of the conscience of a despot finally take over his actions? (Many many millions in the case of Hitler and Stalin and there is no evidence that they ever regretted anything). So clearly this is not a viable alternative. The only option is intervention by a foreign power which carries grave risks as we have seen in Iraq, Afghanistan and many such places. (The Balkan intervention could presumably be called a success).
To my mind, such an intervention has been successful once in recent history (I am obviously not going as far back as World War II) and that was India's intervention in East Pakistan/Bangladesh. Forced by the millions of refugees pouring in, and the genocide happening under its nose, it was the Indian Government's finest moment. We intervened firmly, helped the democratically elected Bangladeshi Government to take over power, and then, most importantly, withdrew completely. So much so, that we even watched helplessly as successive Bangladeshi Governments turned against their saviour and became distinctly anti-Indian and pro Pakistani. (This trend has now been reversed). But it proved that the Indian Government helped the birth of a new country and then allowed it to grow unhindered and uninfluenced by its large presence to the West. This is a rarity.
Moreover, this is not an event that can be replicated elsewhere. No only can it not be done in a large and powerful country like China, no country including the US is going to intervene in Bahrain, Libya or Yemen except through a couple of phone calls. This means the hapless populace will be left to their own devices to settle their problems with their medieval rulers the best way they can or, as seems clear now, put up and shut up. A depressing scenario, that should give us pause to admire our own set up, no matter how imperfect.

Tahrir today, Tiananmen tomorrow?

2011-02-13T11:50:00.002+05:30
How about it?

Bali, Indonesia

2011-02-08T12:20:00.019+05:30
Bali is not to be confused with Bali Hi (or Bali Hai) the mythical island in Rogers and Hammerstein musical South Pacific for those of you whose geography ain't too strong!! Or for the numerous exotic South East Asian restaurants that are named Bali Hai. Never quite figured out why.
We went to Bali in early December, one of the best times to go since the weather isn't too hot and humid. It's still somewhat warmer than say Chennai and it does rain a bit though (need I say it) there is no water logging! And I only discovered much later that that it is actually in the Southern Hemisphere (just about -- 8 degrees).
Indonesia, as most people might know, has the largest Muslim population in the world (India is next by most counts). Bali, one of the many small islands of the Indonesian archipelago, is however majority Hindu -- around 93% - in fact the only island to be so. (Indonesia itself, though, is deeply influenced by Hindu culture and mythology in its art, music, the Ramayana and the Mahabharata have a very important presence in their mythology, even its national airline is called Garuda.) The locals in Bali often asked us if we were Hindu, since the number of 'Hindu tourists' are minuscule, being limited to a small number of Indians who visit the island.
The influence of our epics is everywhere. There are innumerable dance dramas and puppet shows mostly based on the Ramayana (a few on the Mahabharata). Here, for example, is a picture from the famous Kecak dance based on the Ramayana and revolving around the monkey sena.

Many minor characters of the epics are important here. One traffic island has an enormous statue of Ghatotkac on an chariot, the botanical garden has a huge image of Jatayu in the centre.
We divided our time between two parts of the island. Sanur is the beach area where we stayed at the Puri Santrian a beautiful resort right on the beach.

Ubud is the cultural heart of the island and we stayed at the Tsampuhan resort .

The northern part of the island are the mountainous regions and are truly beautiful -- there are numerous resorts there

as are the botanical gardens

Despite being a very popular vacation spot, nobody tries to cheat in Bali. You could try and bargain in the shops but savings are not going to be very significant. Amazingly, even taxi drivers, notorious all over the world for fleecing tourists will at worst overcharge by say about 10% (which I think I is acceptable!!). The general culture of fleecing the tourists seems remarkably absent. (Compare with say a place like Goa).

We wound up our trip at the Indian High Commissioner's beautiful colonial style bungalow in Singapore (an old college friend) where we were treated like royalty by him and his wife, starting with being picked up literally from the aircraft's doorstep!

Do have a look at my complete collection of pictures of this trip (I will put in some videos later) here.

And...I am back!

2011-02-01T12:43:00.002+05:30
A bout with an undetected lung infection festering for some three months meant that instead of reporting on our wonderful Bali vacation (followed by a stay in the beautiful and welcoming house of the Indian High Commissioner in Singapore (an old college friend)) I ended up in hospital for a month (without, as you might say, passing Go and without collecting 200) soon after our return to Chennai. Recuperation apparently will take a month or two more, but at least I can read and type and so on, so I decided to slowly heave myself into the blogosphere.
I thought of starting off writing the much delayed description of our Bali vacation but that will take some time. In the meantime the air waves are full of what's happening in Egypt on which there is hardly anything I can say that would be original. However, there is something quite hilarious in this, and that refers to my usual bug-bear -- the Chinese Government and it's absurd predilection in seeing threats everywhere to its existence. So here we are -- demonstrators half a world away clamouring for democratic rights, and the Chinese Government is losing sleep. It has started censoring the web and blocked keyword searches like 'Egypt'. After all, what if their citizens start getting ideas from all that is happening in Egypt? Read all about it here.
In the meantime I shall marshall my thoughts about our vacation which seems now a distant memory, and give you some snippets along with some pictures.

Maxwell's Demon experiment

2010-11-30T11:55:00.004+05:30
Somehow, there has been very little exposure on the net about a really nice experiment that is an attempt at an actual realisation of a Maxwell's Demon scenario that we all learn in our undergrad years, and how to extract energy from the system using information about it.
A popular exposition is here where I first noticed it. The original Nature article is here (subscription required). If you don't have a subscription to Nature, look at the free arXiv version here.
You might want to see this Abstruse Goose :-)

App Store and Marketplace

2010-11-22T12:18:00.000+05:30
I am horrified to find that my last few posts were so serious, I find myself almost going into depression reading them. So here is an about-turn -- and on something that's loads of fun -- Apps from the App Store of Apple, and Apps from Google Android's Marketplace. Android phones and the iPhone are the two smart phones of the future (sorry, Nokia and Blackberry guys, you are history, even the new N8 again with Symbian can't stand up to either of the above two in the marketplace IMHO). The iPhone App store has some 250,000 apps as of last count and the Google Marketplace has far 'less choice', close to a mere 100,000 ! It's a measure of our expectations that these days a mere 100,000 apps are not considered good enough.
Few people around me have smart phones with smart apps -- why is that, I wonder? Laziness, techno-challenged abilities,... So, in this and the next post, I will give a few apps which I have found very useful, funky or just plain interesting. I start with the Android Marketplace since I have an Android phone (Motorola Droid or Milestone) and in the next post will discuss some Apps for the iPod Touch (I don't have the iPhone so some 'only for the iPhone' Apps will be missing). I know that many places, including the New York Times give lists of useful Apps, (for example here is Pogue's recent list) but many of them are less than useful in India. For example, Urbanspoon does not work in India (it gives a list of nearby restaurants, depending on your GPS enabled position) or live updates of Traffic conditions. Here we don't even get updates on new roads or one way streets!
So here goes (I am leaving out standard Navigation Software and stuff like Google Latitude which comes pre-bundled. These, by the way, are great fun and you should check them out at Google and get them if they aren't on your phone already). These are not in any particular order but I have tried to give the most useful ones first.
GPS Test: This is used with your GPS receiver built in the phone. It shows graphically all the satellites with which your phone is communicating, the signal strength, your Lat and Long and Elevation, speed of movement and your exact location on Earth (in case you didn't know that!). It also has a built in compass. However you can also download the stand-alone
Compass: This is a compass (:-)) and allows you to set the ring outside to align with whatever direction you find convenient. It doesn't do much else but is very useful as a compass. It work with or without GPS and also can point to the true North. It allows navigation using the compass points and allows you to make short notes.
Scientific Calculator: Android comes with an ordinary calculator (with some basic scientific functions but it's very clunky) but there are many scientific calculators in the Marketplace.
Google Sky:Hold your phone above your head and based on your GPS location and the date and time, Google Sky will show you the relevant part of the sky -- identifying the stars, the constellations, the planets, and other heavenly bodies. Of course it works during the day too since a view of the sky is not necessary!
The Weather channel: Get the weather in different parts of the world. Useful when travelling and about as reliable as the standard weather sites :-)
Google Goggles and Layar: This is truly a great piece of software. Point your camera at a book or DVD, or some landmarks like say the Qutb Minar, or some artwork, bar codes, business frontages and they will try to match it with their database and identify it. It works almost perfectly with book covers and artwork (particularly Western Art), a little less well with buildings in India unless they are really well known and fairly well with logos (the Coco Cola logo works instantly of course!). Layar allows you to switch on various layers which will tell you whether you are near some restaurant or spa or some park. It can work without the GPS but of course works really well when it is turned on.
Convert:This converts anything to anything else (of the same type) -- area, distance, speed, thermo electric units whatever. It even converts currency but you need your GPRS on for that purpose.
Taskos: This is a standard task reminder -- it could be birthdays (though I would use the calendar for that which is pre-bundled) but usually it's to keep a list of pending tasks with notes which you could look at and tick off -- of course you can prioritize them, set up alerts and all that.
Sound Hound: Truly a great piece of software. It identifies music. Turn it on, hold the phone in front of the music source and in about a minute it identifies the song and the players. I have even tried it in a restaurant with a lot of ambient noise and it has identified the background music. It identified the second movement from Beethoven's 6th, (no surprise that) but it even got the orchestra and the conductor right - that was impressive. The free version only allows five identifications per month, the unlimited version costs $5 -- well worth it in my opinion.
Internet radio: I listen to a lot of internet radio stations in my office, off my desktop. In fact some station or other is always on. However, this allows you to catch internet radio on your phone through your GPRS connection (3G is needed, 2G tends to break too often). The advantage? You can have it on in your car while driving. Connect the phone ear phone jack to the AUX input of your car audio system and you are done. Far more choice than the local somewhat mindless FM stations here. (Yes, you will pay 3G GPRS charges but BSNL charges very little). The two software I use are TuneIn Radio and Public Radio Live Stream but there are countless others.
Bar Code Scanner: Scans bar codes both the linear and the 2d ones (called QR codes) using the camera. Useful to get more information from a product label than just the price.
Send Contact: An incredible gap in the Android software is the ability to send a contact details to another contact. Even simple basic phones have a way to send, for example vcf cards (business cards) but not the Android. But fear not -- there is 'Send Contact' which does all this and I am told Android 2.2 will come with this feature (but surely it should have been there in version 0.1 !)
I invite you to send me your favourites for either the iPhone/iPod touch or an Android phone.

Cyclone and weather forcasting

2010-11-17T18:59:00.002+05:30
About 10 days ago we were warned that Cyclone Jal would hit North TN and South Andhra Coast. While the cyclone turned out to be a damp squib, what I found surprising is the extremely sloppy weather forecasting. As many people pointed out, the centre of the cyclone was already above Chennai sometime on Sunday 7th November afternoon. This was clear from the satellite picture. However the weather office kept predicting that the cyclone would cross the coast Sunday night. How could there be so much discrepancy? Or was the outline of the country wrongly superimposed on the cloud map.
Moreover consider the weather forecast. Here are a couple of samples.
Under its influence, rain/thundershower would occur at most places with heavy to very heavy falls at a few places and isolated extremely heavy falls (≥25 cm) over north Tamil Nadu and Puducherry during next 24 hours and at most places with isolated heavy to very heavy falls over Rayalaseema and South Coastal Andhra Pradesh during the same period.
Rain/thundershowers at most places with heavy to very heavy falls at a few places would occur over South Interior and Coastal Karnataka during next 48 hours. Isolated extremely heavy falls would also occur over south Interior Karnataka during next 24 hours
UNDER ITS INFLUENCE, RAIN/THUNDERSHOWER AT MOST PLACES WITH ISOLATED HEAVY TO VERY HEAVY FALLS WOULD OCCUR OVER SOUTH INTERIOR AND COASTAL KARNATAKA DURING NEXT 24 HOURS.

Apart from the completely arbitrary use of lower and upper case, it seems to me that the IMD has a simple algorithm of concatenation of phrases. These are of two kinds a) (light, moderate, heavy, very heavy, extremely heavy, isolated extremely heavy) rain and b) (few, some, many, most) places. Combine one phrase from a) and another from b) and you have got a prediction, even though in actual content it leaves the hapless residents in those places totally at sea (regrettably sometimes literally).
Surely Mausam Bhavan and our own Chennai weather forecasting stations under S. R. Ramanan are capable of somewhat more precise forecasting? A lot of it appears to be lazy thinking. If you say isolated rain in some areas, moderate in a few, heavy in isolated pockets, you have covered most possibilities and nobody can accuse you of having got it wrong. I think our weather men could try a little harder in this day and age.

Aung San Suu Kyi

2010-11-14T11:48:00.005+05:30
Today is Pt. Jawaharlal Nehru's 121 birth anniversary, celebrated in India as Children's Day. Nehru's moral position on many international issues were a cause of much irritation with India amongst the Western Powers who felt India's Prime Minister spent far too much of his time pontificating. Whatever be the truth behind those sentiments, there is no doubt that India's moral standing in the world, particularly amongst the newly independent or soon to be independent countries of Africa and Asia owes much to Nehru's uncompromising stand on freedom and democracy.
Aung San, the celebrated Burmese nationalist and freedom fighter, like many others of his ilk, was a close friend and admirer of Nehru. Today, Nehru's birthday, I cannot help feeling that he would have been deeply overjoyed that his friend Aung San's uncompromising daughter had been released from house arrest after a total of about 15 years. Nehru spent over 10 years in jail and became Prime Minister of an independent India at the age of 59. Aung San Suu Kyi is today 65, somewhat older than Nehru when he became Prime Minister, but considerably younger than Nelson Mandela when he was freed. Nehru's encouragement and blessings, had he been alive, would have been with her, as she continues to fight the corrupt and despotic military regime in her country. Unfortunately, present day India, as Shashi Tharoor put it (see my last post) no longer has the soul to consider this an important event. Not a single statement has emerged from the bureaucratic mandarins of the External Affairs Ministry.
A set of pictures and a couple of videos can be seen at the New York Times website.

Burma, China, India and all that

2010-11-09T11:46:00.005+05:30
It almost seems mandatory, given the press coverage of the Obama visit, to say something about it. However, rather than talk of Michelle Obama's Koli dance, I would like to speak about something that I have talked of before -- the military dictatorship in Burma. When I first wrote about it, some commentors asked why I was passing up on China -- equally a dictatorship, if not a military one, albeit with a far better record of governance (sans democracy) and economic growth for its population. (Well, I didn't quite ignore the issue but wrote a post on it but that is not the point here). I would like to quote President Obama too on this, in his speech to the Indian Parliament
Faced with such gross violations of human rights, it is the responsibility of the international community — especially leaders like the United States and India — to condemn it. If I can be frank, in international fora, India has often avoided these issues. But speaking up for those who cannot do so for themselves is not interfering in the affairs of other countries. It’s not violating the rights of sovereign nations. It’s staying true to our democratic principles. It’s giving meaning to the human rights that we say are universal.
Nicolas Kristof, one of the few Op-Ed columnists of the New York Times worth reading, comments on this on his blog. Since this is not part of his usual Op-Ed column, it hasn't found much exposure. I quote from the end of his piece
The truth is that the world needs developing countries as leaders on political and humanitarian issues, and India would be a natural. The U.S. and other developed countries can’t play that role, because we’re regarded as heavy-handed imperialists with secret agendas. China can’t play that role because it’s too authoritarian and is regarded with growing suspicion in Southeast Asia. Brazil can play it to some degree, and should, and so can South Africa. But India would be a natural leader as the conscience of the developing world, and it would be hugely important if it would speak out more forcefully about abuses in countries like Burma, Sudan, Zimbabwe. Given its experience and place in the world, India has credibility and moral and political capital, and it should use them.
I don't know how much credibility and moral capital we have, but if we do, we should indeed use it rather than pussyfooting on these issues. However, the question that was posed to me in my earlier post remains and is applicable equally to President Obama and Nicolas Kristof -- why is China getting a free pass in the comity of nations, despite its autocratic political system? The answer does not need a rocket scientist -- its the money, stupid. Nobody can afford to ignore China's economic might, but if we are going to bring in moral and political arguments, there is no excuse for letting China off the hook.
Update:See also Shashi Tharoor's article in the Times of India.

Sedition and the Roy

2010-10-31T13:13:00.007+05:30
Let me begin with putting my cards on the table -- I disagree with virtually everything that Arundhati Roy says or writes. I find her views infantile and polemical with no attempt at deeper analysis. She has no knowledge or understanding of context. Her 20,000 word diatribes are verbose and content-less. She criticises state sponsored schemes like Salwa Judum (and indeed she should) and defends the Naxals but has nothing to say about all the innocent people they kill regularly by blowing up railway tracks or buses or members of the police forces, including those not involved in anti-Naxal activities. Her most egregious, not to say outrageous statement was to blame the 26/11 massacre on Government policy towards Muslims in India. Not a word about the fact that it was engineered by the ISI in the friendly country across the border, nor the fact that those carrying out the attack were not Indian Muslims taking revenge on the state, but Pakistanis trained and brain washed in camps across the border. Her most recent claim was that Kashmir never acceded to India, ignoring the fact that Maharaja Hari Singh signed the instrument of accession. If this is not legally valid, as she seemed to imply, then neither was the accession of all the princely states or Hyderabad. Are we planning to undo those? She finds much that is wrong with Indian policy in Kashmir (regrettably here she is right) but finds nothing wrong with sharing the dias with Syed Ali Shah Geelani. Geelani is not just a separatist leader -- there are many in Kashmir. He is amongst the most morally and intellectually corrupt leaders of that movement. He incites young impressionable men to go and throw stones at the security forces thereby running the risk of facing a bullet. He, on the other hand, and in fear of his life stays safely indoors, unwilling to risk life and limb. His jihad involves sacrificing lives other than his own. He takes money for his 'cause' from Pakistan and yet, when he fell ill with cancer, got the Indian Government to pay for all his medical expenses in Delhi. (An average citizen of India, on the other hand, needs to depends on our notoriously ill equipped, ill managed and indifferent Government General Hospitals). And this is the man Ms. Roy sees fit to join common cause with.
And yet, is her speech worthy of a case of sedition being slapped on her? I am astounded that there has been so much discussion about this issue in the media. A couple of posts earlier, I wrote about China. Do we want to be like them? Are we like them? Do we want to put behind bars every person who says things that is against the official Government line? The BJP has of course gone overboard in asking for the death penalty for such people. But the BJP, far from becoming a mainstream right wing party, continues on its path of fascism. Does it mean P. Chidambaram must rise to the bait every time Arun Jaitley taunts him with being 'soft'? Does he or the UPA Government have no self confidence that they need to make common cause with the BJP? Where was the need to ask the Delhi Police to investigate? The Supreme Court has already ruled that freedom of speech, enshrined in our much beloved constitution by our founding fathers is not to be proscribed, except in cases where there is actual threat of war or rebellion to overthrow the Government, "Comments expressing disapprobation of the administrative or other action of the Government without exciting or attempting to excite hatred, contempt or disaffection, do not constitute an offence under this section".
Ms. Roy's statement(s) deserves indifference, not action under sedition laws. A mature democracy cannot afford to be sidetracked by irrelevant, uninformed and infantile criticism. Even the statements of Mr Geelani (a far more dangerous and contemptible person) deserve to be ignored. As I believe they have been this time. I hope this sense continues to prevail in the future and we will be spared the pathetic 'Pity the nation...' statement of our erstwhile Booker Prize winner. It is this pitiful nation that allows her the freedom to utter whatever drivel she takes a shine to.
Update:Classic Roy! Check out the last para.

Magical Moments

2010-10-23T23:06:00.001+05:30
At Railway Stations. From Nanopolitan.(Did they get the idea from the last scene in Slumdog Millionnare?)

The Nobel Committee Speaks up

2010-10-23T16:47:00.002+05:30
Thorbjorn Jagland, chairman of the Nobel Prize Committee explains why they awarded the Nobel Peace Prize to Liu Xiaobo.

The Evil Empire

2010-10-11T14:48:00.005+05:30
It is painful to call one of the most economically successful countries in the world an evil empire. But consider this
...freedom, equality, and human rights are universal common values shared by all humankind, and that democracy, a republic, and constitutionalism constitute the basic structural framework of modern governance. A "modernization" bereft of these universal values and this basic political framework is a disastrous process that deprives humans of their rights, corrodes human nature, and destroys human dignity. Where will China head in the 21st century? Continue a "modernization" under this kind of authoritarian rule? Or recognize universal values, assimilate into the mainstream civilization, and build a democratic political system? This is a major decision that cannot be avoided.
Thus speaks the apparently infamous Charter 08 penned largely by Liu Xiaobo (the 2010 Nobel peace prize winner) and signed by, by now, thousands of people. The complete text of the charter is here. It calls for more freedom and an end to single party rule in China. And for this, a document, nobody in India, Western Europe or the Americas would glance twice at for subversive ideology, the Chinese Goverment has jailed Liu Xiaobo for 11 years! Perhaps I have a small mind that cannot grasp big ideas -- but a 11 year jail sentence for penning this Charter? The perfidy and viciousness of the Chinese Government does not stop here. The New York Times reports
The wife of this year’s Nobel Peace Prize winner, Liu Xiaobo, was allowed to meet with her husband on Sunday at the prison in northeastern China where he is serving an 11-year sentence, but she was then escorted back to Beijing and placed under house arrest, a human rights group said...
Even private parties are not safe
On Friday night, the police detained 20 bloggers, lawyers and academics who gathered for a celebratory banquet at a private room in a Beijing restaurant. By Sunday night, 10 guests had been released, according to a prominent activist, Zhang Zuhua, another of Charter ’08’s main authors. Three were given eight days in detention for disturbing the peace, and seven have been escorted out of Beijing, Mr. Zhang said.
To me, these are the classic signs of an evil empire -- a powerful one, capable of doing great damage, to itself, to its people and eventually to the world. And yet, is China unique in this? Aren't there other countries equally intolerant of dissent? Then why does China get all the flak?
One of the favourite positions of the left liberal Indian establishment is to point out that we, or rather the Indian Governmemt is equally intolerant of dissenting opinions. They point to our practice of meeting unarmed protesters (or armed only with stones) with live ammunition, in Kashmir, the North East and elsewhere. And indeed, our policy (if indeed we have a coherent one) in this regard is seriously condemnable. But to compare Indian attitudes to dissenting opinions to the Chinese one, is to my mind, unadulterated balderdash. Government policy, not just in Kashmir but on everything from the economy to the National Rural Employment Guarantee scheme faces daily and virulent criticism, not just in the mainstream press but also in gadfly magazines like Tehelka. And while there are occasional half-hearted attempts to harass such agencies, nobody seriously tries to throttle free expression any more. Sixty three years of a free press (and a bad 2 years of emergency) has meant that dissent is firmly entrenched in the Indian psyche and a Government can only interfere with it at its own peril. Include opinions in non anonymous blogs and you see an even more extreme and at times hysterical level of criticism. I think a comparison with China is laughable and just plain odious. At the same time, strong publicly expressed public opinion has meant that frequently the Government is forced to take cognisance, whether on Kashmir or on the Right to Information Act or on the Commonwealth Games or on a hundred other subjects.
Th other issue is about China's unique position. After all, countries like Burma (Myanmar), North Korea, or even the tin-pot desert kingdoms living off their oil, aren't exactly epitomes of democratic governance. In fact to my mind, they are worse. China today has made enormous progress, in eliminating poverty, improving education and the material wealth of its people, in its infrastructure. Its economy is a challenge to the rest of the world, which is beating a path to its door, to do business with it. And that is what makes China so much more dangerous, than those countries I mention above. In their need to do business with China, virtually all countries from the US to India are willing to overlook China's by now abysmal record of human rights. China has the potential for setting the agenda with other countries, on its own terms, and that bodes ill for the future.
Update: If you think I am prejudiced about China, maybe this Op-Ed by Paul Krugman will convince you. He is talking of the Japan China 'tiff' but the idea is the same. If I am prejudiced, then at least I am in good company.
Update 2: The Pakistan Government has come out in strong support of the Chinese position on the Nobel Prize. How does the Government of Pakistan manage to be on the wrong side every instance? And amusingly, the only Indian newspaper to report on this is the Hindu :-)

Toilet Training

2010-10-10T16:31:00.002+05:30
Now that the noise (and noise it was) about our (un)preparedness for the Commonwealth Games has gone down, with news desks even predicting sone ki bauchar (rain of gold (medals)), I want to come back to a statement Lalit Bhanot, the Organising Committee spokesperson made, implying that Indian hygiene levels were in some sense inferior to those of Westerners. The wrath of a million or more Indians descended on his head, with Salman Rushdie, whose ghost permanently hangs around the Gateway of India, suggesting that he be spanked. Even the venerable New York Times which usually ignores all games where the US is not involved felt called upon to comment on it.
I would like to take a somewhat different perspective on this issue. I don't mean to imply that Indians are generally less hygiene conscious -- far from it -- though it is true that we have double standards as far as private and public cleanliness issues go. A person who would not dream of leaving even a shred of paper on his floor in his own house, will willingly sweep all the detritus out on the road and sometimes in front of his neighbour's house, or throw garbage on the road without thinking twice. Homes in India are regularly swept and swabbed daily (sometimes twice!), bathrooms are cleaned with gallons of water being poured all over. Most Indians in fact have a holier than thou approach towards these issues, particularly with regard to the West. We use water, they use toilet paper, how clean is that? -- is the common refrain. (Some Indians, after a stint in the West take to the Western way, considering it to be somewhat less messy. I even know a colleague who claims they have toilet trained their child to use water in Indian toilets and paper in Western toilet -- I think I am missing something here...).
But to return to my point. While the Bhanot statement was frankly stupid, there is an element of truth in it. Most Indian bathrooms, except the more modern ones, and despite the use of liberal quantities of water, would not appear clean to a Western eye. And the reason is precisely the use of water -- or rather the difference between a dry and a wet bathroom. Western bathrooms have a separate area (usually on one side) for a bath/shower. The rest of the bathroom is dry, and frequently does not even have a water outlet. In India, essentially the whole bathroom is a 'wet' area. A full scale bath/shower/bucket wash involves the liberal splashing of water in all directions, making the whole bathroom wet. (This is not helped by the fact that most Indian bathrooms are designed to have a bath area in the centre rather than a shielded off area to one side). The net result of all this is a generally higher humidity level causing mold and fungus to grow around cracks and crevices, to say nothing of water stains from the use of hard water. Most of these are tough to clean or even to prevent. Moreover, old Indian bathrooms had cement floors which are impossible to keep clean. In fact, this is the main reason why people are always asked to take off their shoes before entering a bathroom -- the danger of leaving muddy footprints, which would never happen if the bathroom were kept dry in the first place.
Overall, the idea of a dry bathroom is contrary to the Indian concept of a bathroom where liberal usage of water is considered the norm. Fortunately this is changing albeit slowly, and modern apartments do try and keep a separate area for a shower complete with shower curtain.
None of this excuses the fact that our use of public facilities is totally atrocious. We believe we have almost a right to pollute any and every public space -- assuming that there is always 'someone' to clean up after us. I am of the firm view that this attitude harks back to our old caste system. There always was someone to clean up after us, at least for the upper classes, and we continue in that mode. Which suggests that it will be a long time before these attitudes change.

Bt Egg(plant) on the Face

2010-09-29T16:06:00.008+05:30
Much has already been written about the Bt brinjal report fiasco by six of India's National Academies. If you don't know what I am talking about Nanopolitan has a nice summary including all relevant links. Yesterday one of the many distinguished fellows of INSA received a 'mea culpa' mail from the President of INSA. I am not at liberty to quote it since I was only shown it informally but the mail, if anything, makes things worse and carries traces of the same sloppy work of the main report.
To begin with, it even misspells the name of the Minister of Environment Jairam Ramesh as Jayaram Ramesh. You would think Jairam Ramesh has been in the news long enough for his spelling to register in most people's mind. Secondly after much talk about how this was the first attempt to bring six academies together (as if six academies together should be excused for sloppiness but one shouldn't), it actually admits that they could have done a better job and that the present report should be withdrawn and re-written. However, and this is interesting, the 'baby should not be thrown out with the bath water' meaning I suppose most of the conclusions should stand. I wonder why that should be so, since it also turns out that this is not an independent report but a rehashed version of a report by one Anand Kumar. Why should be assume that a genuine independent study by the academies would throw up the same conclusions?
The second interesting point is that the President of INSA chooses to present his defense to what might be called his biradari -- the fellows of the academy. Should not this mail have gone to the public in general and specifically to the media which mounted this campaign along with an advocacy group against GM crops. Why keep the justification within the family -- what purpose does it serve? Of course, one does not know if the President of the other academies have even sent a letter justifying a stand or they just hope if they wait this out, it will all blow over.
This is not an isolated incident. Many people will recall the episode of the Mashelkar report and accusations of plagiarism. Why do these things happen?
I really don't believe that these scientists are mediocre or are plagiarists -- far from it. Both the Presidents of INSA and IAS (Bangalore) are very distinguished scientists. However, there is a tendency in India to pass off work to a low level flunky, particularly if it is considered not so important (and definitely not a paper one is writing for a reputed journal). I suspect this is what has happened here too. The work was probably palmed off to some low level functionaries who used that well known research tool 'Google' to do their 'research'. The top bosses glanced cursorily at the result (surprisingly not noticing that a cornerstone of research papers -- proper referencing -- was non existent). There was, in other words, no serious oversight, no proper attribution, and yet, the heads of the academies were willing to put their reputation on the line by putting their names on the report. They presumably assumed that the report would just end up in some dusty cupboard in some government office never to see the light of day. Instead of which, it landed on the table of one of our most pro-active ministers!
Just as a comparison, here is the report on global warming by the American Physical Society. Click on the link to get the PDF version of the full report.
P.S. Just learnt from Nanopolitan again that the National Academy of Medical Sciences has dumped the report! Hmm....a case of rats deserting a sinking ship? Wonder what else will unfold in the next few days....
P.P.S.: Here is the letter of the President of INSA to the Fellows of the Academy, complete with misspelt name and all (courtesy a colleague).
P.P.P.S.: See also a recent letter by Gautam Menon and Rahul Siddharthan on this issue.

Speaking Paper

2010-09-21T10:07:00.005+05:30
This morning the venerable Hindu newspaper arrived, complete with an implanted chip on the back page that, in a disembodied voice, extolled the virtues of the Volkswagen Vento . Hapless souls like us who also subscribe to the Times of India, got the effect in stereo. Interesting, it would stop on closing the newspaper. Since we had two samples, I tore off one and here is what it looks like from the outside

And here is what it looks like on the inside, on tearing it off the page

No big surprise there -- a small chip with batteries and a small speaker. Apart from the sheer irritatingly repetitive yammering which is not going to win the Volkswagen Vento any friends, I got to wondering if this was going to be the wave of the future.
For example, one could think of the whole daily newspaper converted to audio and arriving with an implanted chip which would read out the news. This could be a boon to the visually impaired. Of course one can do the same I presume with the on line versions of newspapers but that involves having a computer, an internet connection, and other such paraphernalia. This, on the other hand, could be as easy as picking up the paper from your doorstep and then just listening to it. In its present form, you would have to listen to the whole newspaper which is a pain, since there are no user controlled functions on this object. But those could eventually come.
Small sound producing chips aren't new by any means. In the 80s I recall sending friends and relatives, from the US, greeting cards which played a song when you opened it, much to the excitement and amusement of the recipients. Compared to those, this one is surprisingly bigger in size. Also the cost of such an object, even though small, can hardly be included in the price of the newspapers, which typically are Rs. 3 to Rs. 5. So it would have to be ad revenue supported. But in today's world of the internet, SMS, cell networks, is there a genuine place for such a product? Are there some innovative uses one could put such a device to, other than the single one I mentioned above?

Teppanyaki Juggling

2010-09-18T16:07:00.005+05:30
A new restaurant has recently opened in Chennai called Teppanyaki as an addition to the old Thai restaurant Benjarong on TTK Road. Teppanyaki, as Wikipedia informs us stands for teppan (iron plate) and yaki (grill) and is a style of Japanese cooking which grills and stir fries on an iron griddle. It is usually done in front of the diners so that the chef can show off his prowess. Most of the food is of the stir fried style, but produced with great style and elan.
So here is our chef warming up, throwing his weapons around with great abandon, and rather worryingly, missing occasionally. (I apologise for the poor quality -- the light was insufficient, and I also couldn't find a way to turn some of the videos around).

Some tricks with a bowl

And then with eggs. Watch carefully how they land on his spatula and yet don't break - though there are a couple of mishaps as you can see. Can you figure why the eggs don't break despite landing on a solid steel spatula? (you will need to turn your head to see this video).

And finally, here is a generic one of him doing the actual cooking.

A set menu (soup, salad, main course, which is the teppanyaki, noodles/rice and a dessert bar) costs around Rs. 950 to Rs 1150 depending on which set you choose. There is also a la carte which will probably set you back a similar amount, though without as many items, but with more choice.
Overall an interesting experience, though regrettably the food gets a B. But that probably has something to do with it being Chennai :-(. The one in Hip Asia (Connemara) is better.

Foam Burst

2010-09-01T17:02:00.005+05:30
This is the third time. The can of shaving foam I keep in the bathroom cupboard burst sometime during the day. We returned home to find a part of the bathroom looking like it had been hit by a snowstorm. Most of it had subsided so it wasn't as dramatic (the earlier one was more impressive, perhaps because we caught the event earlier). But here it is There was much more foam but some it was washed away before I could take this picture. The poor can can be seen lying on its side on the right of the washbasin. It appears that all these cans rust in the bathroom in the presence of water and humidity and finally the joints give way.
One nice thing about this is how trivial it is to clean. A jet of water from say, a hand held shower and directed appropriately washes it all off.

Floods in Pakistan

2010-08-29T11:29:00.006+05:30
As of now a whopping 20 million people have been affected by floods that are still ravaging Pakistan. An estimated 5 million are homeless and the numbers continue to rise. The news is essentially off the radar for Indian news agencies. Both the Hindu and the Times of India run stories that are buried deep inside the newspaper.
As the primary 'enemy country' in the eyes of most Indians (just as India is, in the eyes of many Pakistanis), this is not very surprising though I am disappointed that main stream sober newspapers like the Hindu have not been more proactive at least in their reportage. However the poor, the homeless and the ravaged (like their counterparts in India) have nothing to do with terrorism, the Taliban, the al-Qaeda, or their many off shoots -- they are just trying to survive this horrific disaster made worse by a completely incompetent civic administration.
The Indian Government, in a remarkable pusillanimous move offered 5 million ~~rupees~~ dollars (a ~~rupee~~dollar per homeless!) with some promise of more at a later date. Our Pakistani counterparts in a even more churlish mood, asked the Indian Government to route it through the UN. Surely both countries can rise to the occasion for once and not let our past colour the accessibility of civilian aid. However, overall international aid has also been slow in coming, which some news agencies have attributed to Pakistan's "image deficit".
For those who have been living on Mars and don't know what is happening, you can check here and older stories available on the same page. The BBC has been running a series on Pakistan Floods on TV and the extent of the horror became apparent to me after seeing one of these. Here is a series of special reports from the BBC. The BBC also has a story on why external humanitarian assistance has been so tardy (no, terrorism and corruption are only two of many other causes).
Now I come to the main purpose of this post (it was not just to pontificate). Here is a list of donor agencies you can contribute to. If you are worried that your money may fall into the 'wrong' hands, try one of the international agencies like Oxfam . This is what they have to say
Oxfam works closely with partner organizations on the ground, which helps ensure that our response to emergencies like the Pakistan floods is swift, effective, and culturally appropriate. But we conduct careful checks before accepting any local organization as a partner. We have well-developed financial reporting procedures, and we monitor and assess the work we fund to ensure that aid is being delivered in a fair and responsible manner. Neither Oxfam nor its partners has allowed its resources to be diverted to extremist organizations.
I have not been able to find any Indian agencies involved in this. If you do know of one, please let me know -- it would be easier to contribute to those. But I suspect Indian aid agencies would have trouble getting visas to go to Pakistan for relief work.
There is now a Wikipedia page on the Pakistan Floods but it may not reflect the latest situation.
The Indian Government has commendably now hiked the aid to 25 million dollars, making it next only to the US and UK. Let us hope it actually reaches those for whom it is meant. Wonder what happened to all those oil-rich sheikdoms?

ICM reportage

2010-08-25T16:26:00.004+05:30
The best reports of the International Congress of Mathematicians is available at Tim Gowers' blog. He also has links to YouTube videos of the Field Medal ceremony.
He has some (non mathematical) interesting points to make. He comments on the tala that people keep with their hands in a Carnatic recital and the typical syncopated rhythm. He identifies the National Anthem to be in E major and the ending in as he put it "it was in a very clear E major — to describe it in Western terms — but strangely ended, in even quavers apart from a held last note, with E E F# F# G# G# F# G# A" - the Jaya Jaya Jaya Jaya He.
For a Britisher he is strangely ignorant of some very common Indian customs. He seems never to have seen anyone do a Namaste which is truly odd since it is so common, not only in India but many parts of South and South East Asia. Instead he calls it a gesture he has only seen in Indian sculptures "she greeted us by putting her two hands together, pointing upwards, a gesture I was familiar with only from Indian sculptures".
He seems never to have heard of biryani (he thinks it is billani) -- again odd given how popular Indian food is in Britain.
A faint air of superciliousness runs through the account which I found a bit irksome
the president (of India, not the IMU) told us once again what the ICM was, but after that unpromising start she moved into a speech about India’s mathematical heritage and various other topics, all discussed in a way that made it clear that somebody — I presume not her — knew what they were talking about. She told us of an old Sanskrit saying, “Mathematics stands at the helm of all sciences.” I think I prefer the “queen of” metaphor that is more prevalent in the west. She told us that the concept of zero originated in India, and that calculus was anticipated in India in the 15th century. I wondered before the opening ceremony started how many times Ramanujan would be mentioned.
and particularly that irritating crack about Ramanujan.
But I suppose a Fields medalist is entitled to his upturned nose....

Mathematics promotes a scientific temper?

2010-08-20T15:53:00.008+05:30
Our honourable President, Smt. Pratibha Patil while inaugurating the International Congress of Mathematicians (the largest and most prestigious congregation of mathematicians of the world, held every four years and for the first time in India) claimed that the study of mathematics leads to the development of a scientific temper.
To my mind this statement needs to be proved (though of course not in the sense my mathematician friends might want). Since neither she nor I are mathematicians, we are perfectly placed to comment on mathematics and mathematicians! The importance of mathematics is not in doubt. As a physicist, the "unreasonable effectiveness of mathematics" is obvious to all practitioners of the subject. However using mathematics as a tool is very different from doing mathematics itself which is what mathematicians do. And therein lies the rub.
Mathematics, to put it somewhat simplistically, is purely Platonic -- that is, complete understanding is to be achieved, and in fact, is achieved through pure thought. Pure mathematicians needs no knowledge of the physical world to prove their theorems. In fact, many of them (like G. H. Hardy) would be horrified at the thought that their work had any connection, dependence or relevance to the real world. Unlike physics, which is based on observation and experiment (leading to a theory) and eventual falsification (leading to a new theory, in Popper's famous description) a correct mathematical theorem is for eternity. No new observation of the physical world, no new insights into nature's working can have the slightest effect on its correctness. The only thing that can topple a theorem is a realisation that there was a flaw in its proof. 'Laws' of physics, on the other hand, are continuously falling by the wayside, replaced by new ones, based on newer and better experimental observations of the real world. (Even String Theory, the most esoteric and mathematical of all physical theories needs to pay obeisance to some fundamental symmetries of nature).
In the absence therefore, of a scientific principle or method, pure mathematics cannot be classed as a science. It is a pure art form, existing by and of itself with no supporting scaffolding from nature. It therefore requires no scientific bent of mind from its practitioners (in the sense that it does not require that its practitioners demand rational explanations of all natural phenomenon). A stone thrown into the air at an angle could well follow a parabolic path because God so decreed it, rather than the laws of physics. It would make not an iota of difference to any theorem past, present or future. (In recent years, this supremacy of mathematics has been partly dented by its somewhat intricate dependence on other branches of science -- Jones Polynomials and Chern-Simons theory, or the proof of the four colour map theorem which required the use of computers to eliminate a few remaining counter examples).
There is therefore no evidence, in my humble opinion, that the study of mathematics either promotes or even requires a scientific temper. This is also the reason why mathematicians as a community are far more religious (Ramanujan being the classic but by no means the only example) than their counterparts in the physical sciences -- not because mathematics promotes a belief in the supernatural, but because it does not require you to relinquish your belief in it. This has also been my personal experience, though I obviously do not have statistics to prove this claim.
Disclaimer: I do not claim that physicists are not religious -- many are, surprisingly. However it is a matter of statistics. As a fraction, fewer physicists in my opinion are overtly religious or believe in non-rational explanations of natural phenomena, compared to their mathematics colleagues.
Note added: Morris Kline discusses some of these issues and many more and twentieth century mathematics in his book -- Mathematics -- The Loss of Certainty. In particular he discusses what he calls 'The Authority of Nature" in the last chapter and in and around page 333. I thank Rahul Siddharthan for acquainting me with this book.

The Muslims in the Middle

2010-08-17T13:36:00.002+05:30
Op-Ed by William Dalrymple in the New York Times.

'Running' 64

2010-08-15T18:41:00.002+05:30
We have just completed 63 years of independence, or as Indians like to call it, we are 'running' 64. Can we at least stop firing on unarmed civilians, no matter how misguided they might be?

Tony Judt, 1948 -- 2010

2010-08-08T10:59:00.005+05:30
From the obituary in the New York Times
Tony Judt, the author of “Postwar,” a monumental history of Europe after World War II, and a public intellectual known for his sharply polemical essays on American foreign policy, the state of Israel and the future of Europe, died on Friday at his home in Manhattan. He was 62.
...
After he passed the entrance examinations to King’s College, Cambridge, he volunteered as an auxiliary with the Israeli Defense Forces during the Six-Day War, acting as an interpreter for other volunteers in the newly conquered Golan Heights. There he lost faith in the Zionist mission and began to see Israel as a malign occupying power whose self-definition as a Jewish state, he later argued, made it “an anachronism.”
...
His views on Israel made Mr. Judt an increasingly polarizing figure. He placed himself in the midst of a bitter debate when, in 2003, he outlined a one-state solution to the Israel-Palestinian problem in The New York Review of Books, proposing that Israel accept a future as a secular, bi-national state in which Jews and Arabs enjoyed equal status.
...
“Today I’m regarded outside New York University as a looney-tunes leftie self-hating Jewish communist; inside the university I’m regarded as a typical old-fashioned white male liberal elitist,” he told The Guardian of London in January 2010. “I like that. I’m on the edge of both, it makes me feel comfortable.”

Link

2010-07-30T10:31:00.001+05:30
A response to Arundhati Roy's fulminations...
The Reactionary

Shame!

2010-07-27T13:58:00.004+05:30
Senior General Than Shwe (the Senior is a self assigned appellation.) This is the man India is wooing -- an unrepentant autocrat and dictator, who has presided over the disgraceful state of affairs in his country Myanmar, banned elections and imprisoned Aung San Suu Kyi for almost 20 years. It's a measure of the depths to which our foreign policy has sunk that even George W. Bush's exhortation to us appears more reasonable -- [India and the US] must stand with reformers and dissidents and civil society organizations, and hasten the day when the people of these nations can determine their own future and choose their own leaders”. And here we allow him to visit Rajghat (in deference to Gandhi we are told he didn't wear his military uniform, how touching) and play host to him, arranging his visit to various Buddhist holy sites and hope he will do something to control various insurgent groups that use Myanmar as a base.
All in the name of realpolitik, as a mealy mouthed article by Siddhartha Varadarajan informs us, ending with this almost laughable sentence -- "it should tell the senior general that if he is prepared to liberalise politically, New Delhi will do its bit to help end Myanmar's international isolation."

Rahul's Recipes - a new blog!

2010-07-25T11:25:00.005+05:30
Some of you may know that I have a Eating Out Guide to Chennai and so I have a more than moderate interest in food. (No, I am NOT a foodie -- I hate that term which out here stands for a hack reporter poorly informed, making the rounds of the local restaurants at some newspaper's expense, and writing inane and pointless information free articles in bad English pretending to be a review.) Over the last almost 25 years (well, ok, never mind my age!) I have collected recipes from all kinds of sources -- parents, aunts, friends, restaurants, books, newspapers -- and have often written them up or cut and pasted (physically, not digitally) in my recipe scrap book. They date all the way back from the time I was thrown into the graduate student world of a US university and had to fend for myself. I have decided to share some of these with the rest of the world -- out of the generosity of my heart :-) but also as a convenient repository of this somewhat eclectic collection. Just to belabour the obvious -- this will not be a restaurant guide for which you will have to consult the site mentioned above, but just a recipe repository. (I will try to update about once a week). Do try them out and let me know how well they work. I should confess that I have tried out about 80% of the recipes (and those work!) but I won't tell you which 20% is untried and untested. Have fun! The link is here and on the right.
I should clarify that these will not be standard recipes copied from Tarla Dalals and Sanjeev Kapoors or even my favourite -- Madhur Jaffrey. Apart from copyright issues, most people have access to such sources and so I will only give you recipes that I have discovered in long lost magazine issues (with proper attribution if available) or out of print books or other sources or by word of mouth.

Who do you write like

2010-07-21T11:47:00.002+05:30
If you have low esteem, particularly with regard to your writing skills, despair no more. A site called I Write Like will statistically analyse your writing skills and tell you which famous writer you write like. (yes it is always some well known writer which is a comfort). It's an ideal site for a lazy Sunday afternoon or right after lunch, when the mind is wandering and you find yourself unable to concentrate on serious work.
Of course you are wondering who I write like. Well, it's no secret any more. I always knew I was talented. My Bhopal post is like James Joyce, my Shuttle post is like Arthur C. Clarke (not a surprise) and my Martin Gardner post is, surprise surprise, again like that of James Joyce (Jeez, I didn't know I was so unreadable). (I am not linking to any of these posts -- they are just below the present one).
Of course these are just some statistical black box results. The site does not explain how it does this analysis nor the algorithm used to reach its conclusions. It merely makes the cryptic claim that it's a site "which analyzes your word choice and writing style and compares them with those of the famous writers". However, if you are interested in the more technical details about how this Bayesian analysis works, there is some information here. But I doubt it will leave you any wiser about your talents as a writer!

Satish Joglekar -- in Memoriam

2010-07-13T14:32:00.003+05:30
Satish Joglekar of IIT Kanpur died last Saturday. He was feted as a great teacher, but he had also contributed significant papers on the renormalisability of gauge theories. Here is a little note I sent around:
I knew Satish Joglekar only marginally. We met in a few conferences and I was once on a thesis defence committee with him (where it turned out we both had very similar questions about the thesis, mostly regarding some Field Theoretical issues on which he was an expert!) . This note therefore deals not with him as a person, but with his work in Quantum Field Theory, the grammar of High Energy Physics, of which I came to know when I followed him years later to StonyBrook. A solid grounding in QFT was considered absolutely essential for working at ITP, StonyBrook, and it was not surprising that so many important field theoretical works emerged from that institute in the 1970s.
During his years in Stony Brook he had left his mark at the ITP (headed by C. N. Yang). He had written some seminal papers with his thesis advisor Ben Lee. He was much senior to su, so we never overlapped, but the mid 70s when he was in StonyBrook were the hey days of gauge theories and what we today call the Standard Model (and which was still called Weinberg Salam in those days). Most people know of Ben Lee from his famous review on Gauge Theories in Physics Reports (with Abers) which was the only reference at that time for learning about the structure of Spontaneously Broken Gauge Theories. But Ben Lee is also famous for his series of papers (some with Zinn-Justin) on various aspects of renormalisability of SB Yang Mill theories, some of which we struggled mightily to understand as mere graduate students.
Thus it was when Satish Joglekar joined Ben Lee to continue this work on renormalisability in the mid 70s. His first significant paper was titled appropriately "General Theory of Renormalization of Gauge Invariant Operators" and dealt with the crucial issue of non gauge invariant operators mixing with gauge invariant ones under renormalisation. Put briefly, they managed to show that it is possible to choose a basis in which the gauge non invariant operators decouple from the G. I. ones to all orders, which is crucial if one is not to have to calculate the full renormalisation matrix. Even though by present day standards of 'significant papers' this paper has few citations, a mere 172 (!), it was crucial for various aspects of renormalisation and gauge invariance.
His second set of papers which he wrote by himself were a couple on the renormalisability and gauge invariance of products of operators and their OPE. He considered here an unbroken non Abelian gauge theory and asked the question -- which subset of local operators have the property that their physical matrix elements are independent of the gauge parameter. I don't want to go into the details of these issues which may strike some people today as being too formal and esoteric. But the fact that we blithely use OPEs in our calculations is based on many theorems like those he proved, which clarified the issue of ghost mixing in covariant gauges, which in turn revolved around questions about the gauge invariant nature of the counter terms in renormalisation.
By then, Joglekar had moved to Fermilab following his advisor Ben Lee, from StonyBrook. Unfortunately their fruitful collaboration was to end tragically when Ben Lee died in a traffic accident in 1977. Subsequently he wrote a highly cited paper on Trace and Dilatation Anomalies during his post doc years in IAS, Princeton with Collins and Duncan (438 citations) but it appears that the shock of Ben Lee's death had a long lasting traumatic effect on Joglekar, affecting his steady record of publication for a long time.
Satish Joglekar continued to work on the more esoteric aspects of gauge theories. For many, the problems he tackled lacked relevance and topicality. But as a child of the golden era of the gauge theory revolution in Particle Physics of the 1970s to which he had contributed significantly, Joglekar's primary interest continued to lie in the formal nature of the structure of gauge theories of which he was a master practitioner.

The World's Youngest Profession

2010-07-12T12:05:00.002+05:30
We all know the world oldest profession (though I never figured why). But the world's youngest comes as a surprise. Robert Boyle financed his experiments out of his own pocket. Isaac Newton was paid to teach, not to research mechanics and gravity. Albert Einstein's famous three papers were written when he was a patent clerk in Berne. Charles Darwin was never paid to do science. The transformation of science from a calling to a paid job is a recent phenomenon -- developed mostly over the last century gaining momentum after World War II.
Stephen Shapin at Seed Magazine traces the development of the scientist over the last century or so, and presents some interesting facts along the way. His analysis concentrates on American science, and it would be useful to know how India fares. For examples, it appears only 9% of Americans feel that their tax dollars should be spent of science research which has no immediate technological or social benefits. Today almost two-thirds of all American science and engineering degree-holders are working either in the for-profit sector or are self-employed; only 9 percent work for colleges or universities. (There seems to be something special about this 9%).
Even pure science has long had a significant presence outside academia. At the origins of corporate research in the early 20th century, big companies such as General Electric, AT&T, Eastman Kodak, and DuPont were the dominant sponsors of industrial science, and although the great majority of their money went to applied research and development, government and academia then supplied so little funding for basic research that most of that too was done in industry. It is now widely said that the research laboratories of big industrial firms are on their way out: The decline and fall of Bell Labs and the so-called “crisis in innovation” in global Big Pharma have both made recent headlines. Yet, if anything, the place of science in the for-profit sector has become more secure due to the past four decades of growth by small, entrepreneurial high-tech and biotech firms, where the boundary between making things and making knowledge is increasingly unclear and even irrelevant, and by the burgeoning commitment to all sorts of scientific research by such companies as Microsoft, Intel, and, most visibly, Google. The commercial sector now does about 70 percent of all American R&D in dollar terms. And while the overwhelming majority of corporate R&D remains biased toward development and applied research, about a fifth of US basic research is still done in industry.
I have no numbers for India, but I think it is obvious that the extent of 'pure science' supported by industrial or other commercial enterprises is negligible. This is clearly the result of our many years of socialism, and, of course has its good side -- scientists have a certain degree of autonomy which might not exist if they worked for commercial labs. (I do not see any industry in India with the kind of vision for unfettered research that the erstwhile Bell Labs had). On the other hand, there are always questions about how far the Indian Government can go to support basic science (this is even more true in my field of High Energy where applications to industry or to society do not exist, at least any time in the near future). And even with generous funding, its nature is highly skewed in the Indian context. Research Labs, IITs, IISERs are generously funded, whereas universities are starved of funds for even the most basic needs. Is the solution to look for at least partial funding (this can happen and is happening in condensed matter and in biology) from private sources and perhaps put up with some kind of partial loss of autonomy? Whatever it is, the article provides some useful talking points about the changing nature of the scientific profession.

If you can't beat them, join them?

2010-07-11T16:33:00.005+05:30
The National Advisory Council of the Government of India has a galaxy of some of the most distinguished social activists, development experts, scientists and bureaucrats that it is possible to find. Aruna Roy and Harsh Mander are well known social and human rights activists, the former a Ramon Magsaysay award winner, Jean Dreze is a well known development economist and one of the early drafters of the NREGA scheme of the Government, apart from being the co-author with Amartya Sen of many books on developmental issues. Madhav Gadgil, Mirai Chatterjee, M. S. Swaminathan and others are equally distinguished in their own fields. The NAC is headed by Sonia Gandhi the UPA chairperson and therefore they may be said to have the ear of arguably the most powerful person in the Congress Party, and consequently the Government.
And yet...
Khap Panchayats and 'ordinary' middle class families in urban areas like Delhi bump off their sons and daughters (and sons-in-law and daughters-in-law) and all that a mealy mouthed Government can do is to set up another Group of Ministers. Unarmed stone throwing mobs (perhaps misguided, perhaps even led astray by separatist forces) are met with lethal force from poorly trained and perhaps trigger happy CRPF jawans instead of standard methods of non lethal crowd control. The Armed Forces Special Powers Act continues to prevail in J&K and the North East. The Government continues to dither about how to handle the Maoists in large parts of central India (where, in a classic reversal of roles, the same poorly trained CRPF force is regularly massacred by a determined and highly motivated adversary -- only in India).
Are we to conclude that the NAC is a purely decorative and toothless body that plays no role in actual Governance issues? In that case why do these people, most of whose commitment to their causes is not in doubt, continue to be in the Council? The Focus Areas that come under its purview strictly would exclude virtually all the above issues. Or does it take its role in the social security agenda so literally that no other issue in the social and political sphere matters to it? The fact that they presumably have Sonia Gandhi's ear should allow them to take a pre-eminent and activist role in the issues facing the Government today. And yet, they are ~~visible~~ audible mostly by their silence.

Comment moderation

2010-06-29T16:38:00.002+05:30
For all those avid readers and commenters of this blog -- you might have noticed that there has been a sudden explosion of 'Japanese' comments which are thinly veiled (or rather not veiled at all!) links to pornographic sites. It is therefore with much regret that I am turning on comment moderation. No genuine comment, no matter how critical, will be turned away from these doors, but spammers like the above will henceforth be denied entry.

Bhopal, 26 years later -- just a traffic accident

2010-06-08T10:21:00.004+05:30
And so it's come to this. Unlike Jarndyce and Jarndyce, judgment has been passed in what was the world's worst industrial disaster. But what a judgment. The Chief Judicial Magistrate awarded a two year jail sentence, immediately bailable and the case promises to meander its way up to the higher courts of the land. 26 years, an incompetent prosecution agency, tens of thousands dead (about 3000 immediately), many many more maimed for life, and this is what we have to show for justice. But the CJM is hardly to blame. The august Supreme Court of India, the final arbiter of the laws of the land, reduced the charges in 1996 to 'death due to negligence', the same that is used in traffic accidents.
The Bhopal activists have always been left to plough a lonely furrow. The mainstream political parties, the Congress and the BJP are too beholden to corporate interests to be really interested in seeing justice done, no doubt fearing the flight of foreign capital from India Shining. What is sad is that the Communist parties, who never tire of thundering from the pulpit about neo-liberal policies, about the Indo-US nuclear deal, about US retail giants like Walmart coming to India, never seriously took up the cause of the Bhopal victims. The Karats (both B and P) and Yechurys would rather protest about their right to call a bandh or a hartal. The various groups representing the victims have had little access to the political bosses in Delhi who could in turn pressurise the Government in power.
And so, yet again, a 'resurgent India' fails its most deprived, its most dispossessed and impoverished citizens.

End of the Shuttle Era

2010-06-01T10:53:00.003+05:30
So Atlantis has flown for the last time and very soon the shuttle program will be wound up after some 30 years. I recall the first flight of the shuttle Columbia and its return when I was a graduate student in the US -- it marked the beginning of an era of deploying re-usable spacecraft for various purposes. And while it lacked the excitement of the moon landing, it was the newest endeavour in space.
Did the shuttle program achieve any spectacular? As far as the International Space Station (ISS) goes, I am afraid very little. Right from the start it was never quite clear what the ISS was supposed to achieve except to keep a few humans in a weightless environment as a test for future space travel. The so-called experiments carried out in the ISS were mostly juvenile, and in fact a large number of them were designed by high school students -- for example germinating seeds in a gravity free environment and stuff of that sort.
To my mind, presumably because I am a physicist, the greatest achievement of the shuttle was the launch of the Hubble space telescope and the subsequent trips it made, first to replace a defective mirror and thereafter to fix various parts and extend Hubble's life beyond the expected span. Hubble has allowed astronomers to see deeper into space (and thereby further back in time) than would be possible by even the largest terrestrial telescope, and has been of immeasurable value to the physics/astrophysics community. Hubble is an optical telescope and it was followed by gamma ray and X ray space telescopes which have also very valuable, though these were not launched by the shuttle.
The space shuttle had another minor achievement, (minor in the larger arena of achievement) though it was of immense value to India. The first of the Indian communication satellites, INSAT 1B was launched in the early eighties by one of the earlier shuttle missions (Challenger) and was the first step in the revolution that finally swept TV broadcast and telecommunication in India. (INSAT 1A launched earlier barely lasted a year and had to be abandoned).
Which brings me to a related topic -- the manned exploration of space. The sight of Armstrong and Aldrin bouncing along on the moon surface has a certain indefinable charm and excitement that is impossible to associate with a moon rover trundling over the moon surface. However, I think in the long run, the Russians had the right idea. Human beings are delicate and fragile creatures. They require an enormous amount of fail-safe technology to keep them alive and in good health during the long times that would be involved even to travel to Mars, let alone further along the solar system and beyond. A robot would do it at a tiny fraction of the cost, and not be any less effective, other than the romanticism of human space travel.
Which is why it is particularly troubling to see both China and India entering into a race for a manned mission into space as well as a mission to the moon, when most of the moon's surface has already been mapped. It is the somewhat infantile 'me too' factor which drives both these countries towards this absurd quest, wasting resources that could well be funnelled into more fruitful ventures, even within the space program. The indigenous launch vehicle program of ISRO has been very successful and it would be more useful to develop that than to launch technologically more advanced and cheaper satellites or even exploratory robots. But a manned space program is hardly the kind of venture that countries like China and India should be getting into.

Martin Gardner - a personal tribute

2010-05-25T10:43:00.011+05:30
So Martin Gardner is no more. He died a few days ago, aged 95, having lived a full life, 'puzzling' and 'diverting' youngsters like me for decades. I discovered Martin Gardner in my undergraduate days, through a gift subscription to Scientific American that a kind soul in the US had sent me. (Scientific American also opened my world to myriad different things, including one of the first popular articles on Supergravity, written by two of its founders, Peter van Nieuwenhuizen and Dan Freedman from StonyBrook, where, though I didn't know it then, I was eventually to do my Ph.D -- but that's a different story).
Like many people, I have always had a fascination with puzzles but Gardner's Mathematical Puzzles were in an altogether different class. Some of them were not puzzles but just some quaint facts, mostly about mathematics, which were fascinating (sometimes called recreational mathematics, I suppose). He had a parade of characters, some fictional, some not (I think!). The Incredible Dr Matrix and the magician Sam Loyd, who apparently, like Gardener, was a 19th century mathematics dilettante. I was never quite sure whether he was real! He also introduced card games which we would play -- like Eleusis -- a game, as he called it, of trying to guess the mind of one of the players, who was the 'God'.
Some of his puzzles were quite unbelievable. In one of his numerous 'Mathematical Puzzles and Diversions' books, which were compendiums of his columns, he gives an ordinary division puzzle wherein neither the dividend nor the divisor is known, but the quotient is 80809. The number of long division steps were given but nothing else. It seemed almost unsolvable until I realised, to my great joy, that a little bit of thought could solve the problem and one didn't need to be an Einstein to do these things. One of those little things which showed that some thought, patience and concentration are often what is needed, not an IQ of 200 to solve many things - a salutary lesson for a young man embarking on a career of research in physics.
Martin Gardner was one of the first to annotate Lewis Carrol's Alice in Wonderland with scientific jottings. I remember though, that with so much analysis, his annotations completely spoiled the book for me!
Despite not being a professional scientist, Martin Gardner was also one of the first to take it upon himself to debunk pseudo-science. His Facts and Fallacies in the name of Science was such a book where he takes on everything from homeopathy to astrology, and that quintessential American obsession, flying saucers, long before it was fashionable to be a sceptic. I remember him antagonising many of even my scientist friends for his harsh judgment on homeopathy.
Martin Gardner was succeeded at Scientific American by Douglas Hofstader and his Metamagical Themas, (itself an anagram of Mathematical Games the title of Gardner's column) but even though Hofstader was a very bright computer scientist with a best selling Godel, Escher and Bach under his belt, the magic had gone out of the column and I soon stopped following it. It had lost that ineffable Gardner touch. (Douglas Hofstader charming personal reminiscences of Martin Gardner have been republished in the recent issue of Scientific American.)
I hope in his new and happier hunting grounds, he is providing as much joy as be gave many of us in our growing years. RIP, Martin.
Tailpiece: Readers of this post might want to read an interesting New York Times article on Martin Gardner when he turned 95.

I too now have a silicone implant -- in fact two!

2010-05-15T17:31:00.006+05:30
No! Not there, silly! . Recently I went through what is known as phacoemulsification surgery in both eyes. It's an impressive combination of micro surgery and physics. Under a microscope (with the patient under local anaesthesia) the surgeon makes a 2.5 mm incision in the cornea, through which he pushes in an ultrasound probe that, through a small cut in the lens, dissolves the cataractous inside of the lens and sucks it out (or aspirated as it is called), leaving the outer capsule intact. A foldable silicone lens is then inserted inside the capsule and allowed to open out, thus replacing the original lens with an new intra ocular one of suitable focal length. The new lens is usually chosen so that the patient has almost perfect distant vision, and is given glasses only for reading.
The surgery takes about ten minutes, (while the surgeon chats with you) though the preparation for the surgery takes another fifteen minutes or so. By far the most painful part of the proceedings is the injection of the local anaesthetic which mercifully acts instantly and shuts down the eyelid and also all feeling in that eye. One sees some bright lights and rather unnervingly the shadow of the triangular shaped scalpel that is inserted into the eye to make the initial incision. Bandages are removed the next morning, after which vision is normal though full recovery takes about two weeks.
The sudden perfect clarity of vision is uncanny. For me, who's been wearing glasses since high school, to be able to see every mark on a wall, every leaf in a distant tree, every blemish in the skin of a person sitting opposite can be quite unnerving and I still keep touching my face to feel my non existent spectacles. First thing in the morning, you no longer begin by groping for your glasses before getting out of bed. Everything is crystal clear -- in fact too clear -- the instant you open your eyes. The only problem is reading...since the new lens has a fixed focal length and cannot adjust, no amount of squinting helps you to read -- you have to use glasses for this.
It's possible now to get these intra ocular lenses which have the ability to change their focus, just as the lens you are born with. But they don't work quite as well, and most ophthalmologists advise against them. I suspect though, in a few years time, they will become the standard and it will be like having a zoom lens in the eye :-)
So do I now have a bionic eye?
Tailpiece: I hope this also explains my slightly longish absence from my blog.

Marauders' Map for Muggles

2010-04-21T12:31:00.007+05:30
Google Latitude, of which I was reminded because of a recent comment in one of my posts, is a remarkable piece of software that allows you to see where all your friends are. It assumes that you all have locational software on your phones (wireless or cell towers for rough estimates, GPS for more precise tagging). Then once you enable Google Latitude on your phones, and allow your friends to see your location, each one can see the others' location on a google map on your mobile. If you are on the move, your friends will see a little blue dot tracing your movements around the city or wherever else (exactly as in the marauders' map). If you find your friends are nearby, you could SMS them to meet you for a coffee at the nearest Starbucks, or in Chennai, the nearest Udipi restaurant!

As Mr Weasley often says, it's amazing how many things Muggles can do without magic :-)
Update: Some pedants, for such creatures, I regret to say, do exist, have pointed out that the marauders' map shows up all marauders whereas in Google Latitude, you have to allow the software and your friends to tag your position. You have the option of hiding your location. Indeed, I bow to superior wisdom -- Google Latitude is not quite the Marauders' Map. What would we do without these nitpickers....

Julie, Julia, Lobsters and all that

2010-04-18T23:11:00.005+05:30
Just finished watching the movie 'Julie and Julia'. Hadn't seen it in the theatre and was therefore condemned to watch it on a 13.3 inch laptop screen as an .avi file. And yet, despite this, it is difficult to imagine that any person with half an epicurean soul would fail to be touched by it.
For some of us like me, though, the movie has a resonance way beyond what most people might feel. I was never a Julia Child cook, leaning more towards the 'Joy of Cooking' (JOC) magnum opus and culinary bible by the Rombauer family (the legendary Irma Rombauer's character makes a brief appearance in the movie) but there are scenes in the movie which I could have penned with my eyes closed.
During my years as a graduate student in the US, I picked up a taste, if you will excuse the pun, for trying new recipes. We had a large American friend, whom I will only identify as David so as not to embarrass him, an amateur weight-lifter and a lover of good food (sometimes it didn't have to be good, as long as there was plenty of it). He along with a bunch of us Indians decided to try and cook the largest live lobster that money could buy along the south shore of Long Island and David finally, after many days of scouring up and down the coast of LI, succeeded in finding a seven pound monster which we all pitched in and bought, having starved ourselves for days to save up enough greenbacks to pay for this creature. David extracted a suitably large pot from his grandmother's garage and we all retired to one of our tiny grad school apartment kitchens in order to cook it.
It had already been decided by common consensus that David would do the honours -- apart from the fact that none of us knew how to steam a lobster, he seemed to be the only member of the party large enough to take on the lobster on its own terms. Water along with some salt, wine and some 'erbs was added to the pot, it was brought to what JOC would call a rolling boil, David grabbed the seven pound behemoth by its midriff, posed with it for numerous pictures -- I still have pictures of this event somewhere -- (those of you who have cooked lobsters in the US will know that their claws are kept shut by thick rubber bands so there is really no danger, except in that occasional instance where a band might spring loose and, to top it all, David did not deign to wear gloves unlike Julie) and then plunged the poor thing into the pot of boiling water and shut the lid. We all clapped and cheered lustily, David took a modest bow, the lobster in its dying throes gave a wild twitch, and the lid flew off and one claw emerged tentatively out of the pot. In an instant, the kitchen had cleared, us puny Indians having decided this was clearly David's baby (or rather lobster) leaving him slightly shell shocked but with enough presence of mind to grab the lid and bring it hurriedly down on the pot and hold it there for about a minute. There were no further surprises and the crustacean turned out to be big enough to satisfy 5 hungry graduate students.
Other scenes from the movie bring to mind, for example, attempts to poach an egg. I was not involved directly in this -- a fellow graduate student (who is now a very distinguished scientist and will therefore remain unnamed) tried his hand at poaching by boiling water in a tureen and dropping an egg in it ('egg drop soup'?) and stirring vigorously. At the end of this exercise, the only way the remains of the egg could be salvaged was by pouring out the water through a fine meshed strainer. The consistency - well, let us draw a veil over these unfortunate events.
When I first went to graduate school, I could barely make tea...having been molly coddled at home as the only child of my parents. However, strangely enough I took to cooking with great gusto, and over the years, while I may not have turned into a michelin starred chef, perhaps because I never went through the Cordon Bleu training Julia Child did, I learnt to follow recipes and turn out perfectly respectable meals. For the Indian part of my repertoire, I have Madhur Jaffrey and her Indian cooking books to thank, particularly her first --"An Invitation to Indian Cooking" -- her subsequent books being more glossy coffee table type ones, though still with that infallible Madhur Jaffrey touch.
'Julie and Julia' the movie therefore speaks to my deepest epicurean dreams.

Milestone and MotoNav

2010-04-16T14:11:00.005+05:30
I recently got a Motorola Milestone (aka Droid in the US). It's a mobile phone which runs the Android 2.0 O/S from google and like most 'smart' phones these days, does everything (music, GPS, GPRS, Mail, facebook, youtube, you get the idea) except make coffee. One of the nifty applications it has is GPS assisted navigation overlaid on Google Maps. (The Nokia phones have Ovi maps).
So as a test, a colleague and I took it with us for a short drive upto Adyar (just about 3 km from the institute) and back. It dutifully recorded the car speed and to our astonishment, almost all the roads and landmarks (including obscure details like Thiruvanmiyur HIG flats, 'going under the Adyar flyover'). It produced useful information like nearby restaurants (Pizza Hut, Adyar Ananda Bhavan....), and help areas like VHS (Voluntary Health Services) 300 metres down the road from where we were, and a bunch of other clinics we had never heard of. The wealth of detail available is truly impressive -- both regarding roads, as well as nearby landmarks, shops, restaurants and hospitals. Clearly someone, or some people have been at work, entering this information into the google database. Along the way you can even SMS your position to someone who might be waiting for you (it sends a http link to a google map) or you can email it (it uses gmail preferably or some other push mail interface through your GPRS connection).
Overall a very satisfying experience. Perhaps this is all standard for GPS assisted navigation, but since this was my first, I am allowed to get a thrill our of it :-).

Thoughts on a 'Planned City'

2010-04-09T19:33:00.002+05:30
I have been in the 'planned' city of Chandigarh for the last few days, teaching in a school for graduate students. Chandigarh, as most educated Indians have been taught, was designed by the architect Le Corbusier who was also responsible for various cities in Europe, Russian, North America and South America. The planned part in this case implies that the roads follows a Cartesian system of coordinates (nothing particularly unique about that -- so does Manhattan, except where it is broken by Broadway, and many other cities) which enclose identical sized sectors which can be confusing to a first time visitor since many of these sectors look completely identical. The other unnerving part is the habit of the residents to refer to Sector XX as if that is all that is needed for a visitor to find it. (I suppose that is true if you are taking a taxi or rickshaw but not if you are planning to find it yourself).
The first thing that strikes you when you reach Chandigarh is the traffic or rather the lack of it. Wide roads and avenues, flanked by trees and side walks where you can actually walk without being in danger of either getting knocked down or fumigated, with the occasional car zipping by is a familiar sight, totally alien from anything in any other part of India. Coming from a city where it now takes me about 40 minutes to traverse a distance of five and a half kilometers, this is as close to heaven as it is possible to get without actually getting run over ! Delhi also has wide roads, but every inch of space is taken over by all modes of transport. Which brings me to another aspect - auto rickshaws are few and far between, I never saw a bus, and few two wheelers. So here is my deeply thought out prescription for clearing Chennai roads -- remove MTC buses (ok, maybe keep 10 or 15), get rid of two wheelers (I am dreaming already) and cancel the permits of all auto rickshaws (I am drooling). Just cars and nothing else (perhaps pedestrians who are confined to Chennai's non existent side walks). The ultimate dream city of capitalist America (Los Angeles?) . How does it look?
And talking of cars, Chandigarh I am told has the highest standard of living in the country. This means big cars with few Altos and Maruti 800's . On my first day here, I counted seven Honda City's in the Physics Department parking lot in Panjab University (the rest were Maruti SX4, Ford Ikons and so on). Very different from a standard parking lot of an academic institution in the rest of the country. Presumably people have secondary sources of income since academic salaries are about the same everywhere. I also found out (yes, I like getting such information!) that these were all four to five years old which meant these were not the result of the largess of the sixth pay commission!
The other surprise is that motorists are regularly fined for traffic violations. This includes not wearing a seat belt, over speeding, jumping lights and other such infractions. As a result, traffic here, whatever there is of it is very organised and disciplined, and nobody tries to jump a traffic light even at night when there are no other cars at a traffic signal. (Am I really talking of an Indian city). The city is also full of parks, rose gardens, (the University itself has one) the famous rock garden, lakes, making quality of life distinctly a cut above the rest of the country.
The rock garden which most locals will tell you to visit is a concrete monstrosity, a park made up of the detritus of an upcoming city full of narrow tunnels with towering walls, the mandatory water fall and all kinds of items salvaged from garbage dumps set in formation with concrete. This is my second visit to the rock garden and I find it impossibly claustrophobic, with all that tonnage of concrete giving it a very hard and soulless character -- a three dimensional Jackson Pollock piece gone wild. I realise that this is probably a minority viewpoint but there you have it.
On the other hand the zoo, in the outskirts of the city is a pleasant surprise. There is a lion safari, a deer park and the usual collection of somewhat underfed lions, tigers, jaguars, leopards and so on. But it's spread over a huge area and it's easy to spend a couple of hours there, though I am told that the animal collection used to be much better earlier. I also had my first Rainbow Trout caught in the Beas at the 'Flamme Bois' in Sector 35B and it was excellent.
So is this utopia where most of us would like to move. There you have me -- one should perhaps ask those who live here -- including some of my colleagues who moved here recently. My guess is that it would come as a breath of fresh air (literally!) in the initial period. In the long run, though, I wonder if one would miss the bustle of a standard Indian city, the cultural life, the eating out places, the general chaotic richness of an Indian urban landscape. I leave it to readers of my post to comment. I am only a bird of passage, here for a mere 10 days.

The Gates Foundation

2010-03-29T13:49:00.004+05:30
There is a whole subculture out there which specializes in Windows bashing and I much confess I don't like the whole Windows culture very much, However, the work of the Melinda and Bill Gates Foundation is actually quite inspiring, even to cynics.
Do read it here in the Times of India or here in the Hindu, where the ubiquitous N Ram has to keep shoving his oar in and bring in his earlier interview with Bill Gates. However it's interesting to see a dyed-in-the-wool commie almost in awe of the contribution made by the Foundation and by Warren Buffet. Moreover they have “made a commitment that 50 years after the last of the two of us has died…all our money would have been given away.”

Oh! for a bit of charge

2010-03-27T17:15:00.002+05:30
This post is inspired by this article but I realise that one's woes don't end by reaching journey's end. Most of us these days travel with a) a cellphone, b) a laptop c) an iPod unless it is part of the cellphone d)a battery charger for your camera. Of these the last does not need to be charged too frequently unless you are a crazed Japanese tourist who takes 500 shots a day. However the first three need fairly frequent charging.
Unfortunately most guest houses in India have a severe paucity of plug points. (I am happy to report that at IMSc, we have consciously provided a large number of electric juice suppliers but we are an exception :) ). Most will have one, which if you are lucky will actually work. Often the only charging point I have found is in the bathroom, presumably placed there for people who use electric shavers. Surely the number of people who carry a,b,c,and/or d is far larger than those who carry electric shavers. Then why this discrimination? One could in principle, plug in one's mobile in the bathroom but that usually means you will never hear a call. Balancing a laptop gingerly next to the sink is not an exercise I would recommend to anyone, other than those who are trying to sabotage their laptop in order to by a new one. In a guest house of one of India's most prestigious institutes, I found all the plug points to be at floor level and usually just near the entrance to the bathroom. Apart from the mystery about why it should be so, here is the added risk of squashing your precious gadget while taking a nature call in the middle of the night.
But I am being unfair. Hotels, even in so called developed countries suffer from the same malaise. Charging any equipment usually means unplugging the bedside lamp which then means you can give up any thoughts of reading in bed. This is in addition, of course to having to carry one of these whacking big adapters for those alien sockets.
Here is a solution that works for me. If you have mobiles and ipods which have a (mini) usb port, then you can plug your laptop into the solitary plug point and plug in the other devices to the laptop through its usb port. However you cannot then put your laptop to sleep all night (poor fellow) for the charging to work.
For others, you just need to wake up a few times in the middle of the night to switch the device. Or stagger their use so that they don't all need to be charged on the same day. Who said technology had made our lives easier?

Whipping Boy Part II

2010-03-19T13:54:00.002+05:30
Success....Yay :)

P. C. Vaidya

2010-03-13T13:39:00.005+05:30
Professor Prahalad Chunnilal Vaidya passed away on March 12, 2010 in the early hours. He was 92.
Prof Vaidya is famous for his solution of Einstein's equations for a radiating star. Much of his life was also spent in trying to make mathematics accessible to school children in a way that made it interesting rather than just rote learning. A news link is here. A short half an hour movie on him by IUCAA in collaboration with Vigyan Prasar is available here.

Whipping Boy

2010-03-10T17:32:00.005+05:30
The other day, having bought a small packet of strawberries at the price of a small ingot of gold at a Chennai market, I summoned up enough enthusiasm to make a strawberry shortcake. In my younger days, as an amateur baker, I had quite a reputation for making cakes -- resulting once in four visiting friends demolishing a strawberry cake by the simple expedient of only making 90 degree cuts.
This time we decided that there being only two of us, and living in Velacheri, that too on a road which has the appearance of slightly beaten up Sea of Tranquility crater on the moon, with little chance of anyone visiting, we would slowly work through the cake over a period of a few days.
The first part was easy. The sponge cake, made from my old bible The Joy of Cooking (which had lost its last few pages which was the index) was a breeze. I realised that I had lost nothing of my original talent. :-) It was soft, spongy and beautifully browned on top.
The cream was the next hurdle. The only kind available in any supermarket nearby was the tetrapack version that Amul sells which it calls Fresh Cream. Having occasionally beaten a cream to death (in other words beating it till the butter came out in big clods) I bought a spare packet in case of disasters. I need not have bothered.
The whipping, with an electric egg-beater, started at 7.15pm on a weekday soon after we had returned from work. At 7.30pm, I gave up and my wife took it up. Around 7.45pm she gave it back to me. At 7.50pm the motor gave a small groan and gave up the ghost, a slight acrid smell of burning plastic testifying to the finality of the situation. And the cream? What about it -- it continued in its pristine state (it did not even turn to butter).
At this point I poured the cream qua cream over the sponge cake (which had been neatly divided into two layers in the hope that we would make a layered cake). I carefully decorated the top with cut strawberries and there it was - somewhat the worse for wear, the (unwhipped) cream having soaked right through, but it tasted quite nice. After all why shouldn't it -- sponge cake, cream, sugar, strawberries - all necessary ingredients for a successful dessert if not in the right format :)
Oh! Before I forget -- anyone know how to make a strawberry shortcake without running through a beater each time? It might help my finances a bit... (something tells me getting proper whipping cream might help....but in Chennai?)

The Tripos and us

2010-03-07T17:41:00.002+05:30
The Tripos was a venerable Cambridge institution -- an exam that mathematics students took to get their degrees and perhaps earn a scholarship.
It was impossibly arduous. Four days of problem solving, a break and another four more days of backbreaking labour that even future exceptional mathematicians found impossibly difficult. Most of the time the problems required a certain quickness in ability and the use of tricks to solve within the given time period. Mere aptitude in mathematics was not enough. It was and perhaps still is considered amongst the most difficult math exams in the world. (Some of us in the Indian system have a faint notion of the kind of problems that were set - what we called the S. L. Loney type - a sphere spinning on a needle that is balanced on an ellipsoid that is dangling from a pendulum or some such absurdity).
There was a certain caste system amongst those who succeeded. In the first class, the topper was the Senior Wrangler, followed by Second Wrangler, Third Wrangler and so on. The second class were the Senior Optimes followed by the Third Class, the Junior Optimes (yes, this is sounding more and more like Asterix). The last of the Junior Optimes was called a Wooden Spoon because tradition dictated that he (yes, always a he then) be given, by his friends a wooden spoon (actually a huge malting shovel lavishly decorated and inscribed in Greek) which the poor fellow was expected to take, hoist on his shoulder and carry it and himself out of the hall.
Senior Wranglers were God-like figures with all the attendant myth and mythology that would spring up around them. However they were not necessarily the best mathematicians, but, it was believed, would become the most influential one. After all, the Tripos stressed a certain knack in in solving problems fast rather than mathematical aptitude. Most future famous physicists and mathematicians were not Senior Wranglers (J. E. Littlewood was one notable exception). James Clerk Maxwell, J. J. Thomson, William Thomson (later Lord Kelvin) were all Second Wranglers. G. H. Hardy was, to his great consternation a Fourth Wrangler, Bertrand Russell a Seventh Wrangler.
Since the Tripos was impossible to 'max' without adequate practice, a whole alternate system of education cropped up around it. These were the coaching classes. Private coaches, for handsome fees, would coach you, not in the subtleties of mathematics but in how to take the Tripos. They would pour over old exams, make useful notes for solving problems, give you hours of practice all for the single minded purpose of taking the Tripos -- what someone called codifying mathematical knowledge into neat bundles. (Yes, yes, I know, it's familiar, but do bear with me, dear reader). The workload for students who took these mind numbing coaching classes was prodigious. For them, attending their usual lectures was a luxury they could ill afford. According to the famous mathematician J. E. Littlewood, himself a Senior Wrangler, one had to spend two thirds of the time practising solving difficult problems against time. Students frequently ignored the course material, in order to concentrate on the Tripos and hence the coaching classes. Hardy himself was coached by the legendary R. R. Webb, a 'producer' of many Senior Wranglers.
G. H. Hardy's aim was to eventually change this whole mind numbing examination system. His famous statement was that examinations (any examination, not just the Tripos) were necessary but only as an absolute minimum standard to get a degree. "An examination can do little harm as long as its standard is low", was his credo, instead of students and their tutors exhausting themselves to turn a comfortable second to a marginal first.
Hardy, despite his influence, succeeded in only marginally changing the system. On his pushing, a degree candidate still took the Tripos but was ranked only as Wrangler, Senior or Junior Optime, reducing somewhat the merciless pressure that the exam had created. The system had clearly more inertia than Hardy had bargained for, and he finally gave it to these minor changes.
The Indian analogy is obvious. The JEE is perhaps as stultifying, as mechanical as the Tripos (is or was). It stresses little knowledge of or ability in the subject, mainly a quickness of intellect and an ability to be able to use tricks to solve problems in the given time period. That is where coaching classes come in. It has today reached a stage where even the smartest students would not clear the JEE with a high rank without the knowledge of certain mathematical tricks in their kitty. Eventually all problems, even JEE problems can be solved without such tricks, but the race against time precludes a slow and methodical approach to any problem.
The Tripos system did produce some great scientists though few from amongst the toppers. Can the JEE boast of that? The numbers here are negligible and the names that spring to mind (for obvious reasons I don't wish to enter into a controversy about contemporary names who could be considered 'great') are hardly in the world class category of the Tripos toppers. More often than not, they end up in management, becoming CEOs or VPs of companies and only rarely a distinguished academic. The JEE is not a passport to greatness, not even as much as the admittedly flawed Tripos system. It's perhaps time for a significant change in the approach to this examination system -- though something tells me that that is not going to happen anytime soon. (It's also not in the interest of the coaching class companies to see it change). Like the British system which we inherited, the inertia in our system is large enough to neutralise even the most dedicated revolutionary.
Acknowledgement: As a product of the Indian and American education systems, I have little or no direct knowledge of the British Tripos system. Most of the stuff above is based on reading the literature, mainly the beautiful and fascinating account of the system in Robert Kanigel's masterful biography of Srinivasa Ramanujan.

David Hockney and iPhone Art

2010-02-07T17:37:00.004+05:30
The iPhone has been a game changing device but this is a new one.
In his seventies now, David Hockney has created a new kind of art using a iPhone app called 'Brushes' to draw on his iPhone. The drawings are done exclusively using his thumb and
Over the past six months, Hockney has fashioned literally hundreds, probably over a thousand, such images, often sending out four or five a day to a group of about a dozen friends, and not really caring what happens to them after that. (He assumes the friends pass them along through the digital ether.) These are, mind you, not second-generation digital copies of images that exist in some other medium: their digital expression constitutes the sole (albeit multiple) original of the image....
Lately he has been concentrating on the summer dawn and as he says:
After all, what clearer, more luminous light are we ever afforded? Especially here where the light comes rising over the sea, just the opposite of my old California haunts. But in the old days one never could, because, of course, ordinarily it would be too dark to see the paints; or else, if you turned on a light so as to be able to see them, you'd lose the subtle gathering tones of the coming sun. But with an iPhone, I don't even have to get out of bed, I just reach for the device, turn it on, start mixing and matching the colors, laying in the evolving scene...
Hockney, who has carried small notebooks in his pockets since his student days, along with pencils, crayons, pastel sticks, ink pens, and watercolor bottles—and smudged clean-up rags—is used to working small, but he delights in the simplicity of this new medium:
It's always there in my pocket, there's no thrashing about, scrambling for the right color. One can set to work immediately, there's this wonderful impromptu quality, this freshness, to the activity; and when it's over, best of all, there's no mess, no clean-up. You just turn off the machine. Or, even better, you hit Send, and your little cohort of friends around the world gets to experience a similar immediacy. There's something, finally, very intimate about the whole process.

More here, including examples of his work and a slideshow.

God, Haiti, Robertson and all that

2010-01-29T13:57:00.003+05:30
If you thought Pat Robertson was over the top (as always) believing the Haitians deserved the earthquake for their pact with the devil, think again. Dawkins in fact thinks that Robertson, if anything, is truer to the Christian faith and theological traditions than all the 'moderate' theologians, priests, preachers and others who are trying to disown him. Classic Dawkins' fire and brimstone. Love it....
Where would Hinduism stand on this....I guess you are just reborn as a cockroach for your sins rather than flattened by an earthquake. Wonder which is worse....

Jyoti Basu -- a mixed legacy

2010-01-20T17:34:00.002+05:30
Most newspapers and not just the Hindu have gone overboard in the coverage of Jyoti Basu's life and times, stressing mostly the positive features of his years as Chief Minister. Mr Basu's legacy is clearly mixed. After the initial years of land reforms and Panchayati Raj, the CPI(M) and Mr. Basu seemed to have lost their bearings allowing Bengal to fall into a morass, from which even today it finds it difficult to escape. Industry fled as trade unions became all powerful, infrastructure collapsed, the education system was not just politicised, it took a major hit with the decision to teach only Bengali (resulting in large numbers of students unable to function in a real and active world outside Bengal where Bengali would lead them nowhere). The poor work culture of Bengal today is another legacy of Mr. Basu's years as a Chief Minister. Three articles which try to present another side to his legacy, one very different from the hagiographical sketches that have appeared in the mainstream press:

Ashok Malik in the Times of India
Soutik Biswas in the BBC
Jug Suraiya is the Times of India.

As a recent settler in Kolkata told me -- Jyoti Babu had competence but no vision, Buddha has vision but no competence, the future Chief Minister has neither -- that is the tragedy of Bengal!

Fond memories of a no longer popular writer

2010-01-16T17:39:00.005+05:30
I recently chanced upon an article on the English children's writer Enid Blyton, by Amy Rosenberg. And suddenly the floodgates opened and I felt myself scrolling through my childhood years with Blyton. And along with them came memories of the years of growing up in Delhi, my family and friends from school and my vivid memories of devouring Blyton's books, so much so, that my parents warned me they couldn't possibly afford to buy books at that rate. But buy them they did gradually filling up all the space available on my bookhelf. In those days Enid Blyton was available in Armada Paperbacks which would barely last one reading. My father would help me stitch them together again so that I could read them a second time which I frequently did when I didn't have a new one to start on. And I had them with me for well over 30 years till we needed to move them to Chennai and they proved too much for our small Chennai flat.
My childhood memories date from my nursery and kindergarten years and as far back as I remember, my reading habits began with Blyton and her Noddy books, graduating from there to the Famous Five, The Find Outers, the Adventure stories, St. Claire and Mallory Towers (the last two were girl school stories but were devoured equally by boys and girls) to fairy stories involving wizards, fairies and goblins. Not only did the kids in them have a whale of a time, they ate what to me seemed like scrumptious food - scones, toasted muffins, potted meat sandwiches, ham and eggs. It helped of course that I didn't really know about any of these but those kids had so much fun eating. By the time of my senior years in high school I had moved to another fictitious British world -- that of Wodehouse and also of Dickens and many others. But my years of Blyton have always seemed special -- perhaps because it is where I picked up a love of books and a love for reading.
Enid Blyton's reputation, has, in the recent more complicated politically correct world, fallen on hard times. She has been accused of racism (think gollywogs), class consciousness (an unfair charge since most of the kids in her stories belonged squarely in the middle class and often reflected the difficult post war years in Britain), a bias against foreigners (Frank Richards shared this trait with her, a fact for which Orwell once chided him in one of his columns only to have the wind taken out of his sails by being told by Richards that foreigners are funny -- as in weird! ). The present generation has no use for her and her books, while still available, don't sell anywhere like they used to a couple of decades ago. Her books have been psychoanalyzed to death, mostly to their detriment and overall, she no longer has the same fan following.
But for a child growing up in Delhi in the 60s, with the British having left barely 20 years earlier, the terrific adventures of a bunch of spunky kids from the mother country, with no adults to supervise them, were just plain fun and I couldn't get enough of them. And I think this was true of many children of my generation, growing up in a similar milieu.
I can see many of my colleagues, and, I dare say, friends curling their upper lip, sneering at such juvenile reading habits. For them, Reading is for Improving the Mind and Expanding ones' Horizons. Thus they Read Socio-Political History of the Indian Ocean Islands or Contemporary Relevance of Aurobindo Ghosh, or Human Development and the Structure of Language. But while we have all moved on from Blyton to Dickens and thereafter to Marquez and Rushdie all the way to the Ishiguros and Murakamis, the habit of reading and the love of books I owe to a bunch of five plucky kids and a dog who set out with their picnic hamper to solve yet another mystery or get involved in yet another adventure in a far off island.

Partial Solar Eclipse Chennai 15.1.10

2010-01-15T19:32:00.004+05:30
On Earth

as it is in Heaven

(Part credit to Sanatan Digal and Vani Vemparala).
Many more here and here.
Nice little haul -- a Total Solar Eclipse in July 2009 and a Partial one in January 2010.

Auto drivers and honesty

2010-01-13T16:44:00.003+05:30
Living in Chennai one tends to forget that auto drivers and (dis)honesty are not in any way related. Though I have a theory of natural selection which says that auto drivers in Chennai have been over charging for so long that successive generations with specimens who could have been honest could not possibly survive and have got naturally weeded out along with their 'honesty' genes. This kind of genetic selection can of course be social rather than literal.
The unique perfidy of Chennai auto drivers was brought back to me forcefully by two incidents during my recent travels. In Pune I took an auto rickshaw back from Sancheti hospital. At the destination, the driver kept staring at his meter card (in Pune the meter reading needs to be converted to money units) and after some hesitation asked me how much I had paid on the way out. I told him it was Rs. 24 whereupon he said his meter was showing Rs 45 which he noticed was way too high for this distance. Of course in one place he had had to take a detour from the way in because of a one-way street, so we agreed to Rs. 30 and he was very happy.
In Ahmedabad, again recently, I was taking an auto rickshaw to the Physical Research Laboratory and wasn't sure of the way. The driver told me he would prefer if I gave directions, though he could find his way by asking people. However, in that case there was the danger that he wouldn't be taking the shortest route and I would end up paying more than the standard amount. Finally he did find his way and the fare was approximately what it would have been anyway via the shortest route.
In the two decades or so I have been in Chennai, I have encountered exactly two honest auto drivers (yes, two) by which I mean they agreed to go by the meter. This is of course no longer possible since meters have not been calibrated in a long while and most of them don't work anyway. A distance of about a kilometer typically costs anything between Rs. 25-30 which must surely count among the most expensive for this mode of transport. In a gesture of abject helplessness, the police here have now decided that auto rickshaw drivers who recalibrate their meters and use them honestly will carry a red (or was it green) label to signify their existence, in the fond hope that it will shame the others into following suit. How 'fond' can hope be?

Back to the Blog and a Step well

2010-01-09T20:26:00.007+05:30
A trip through parts of North India, covering Shimla and Delhi followed by Pune, and then again to Ahmedabad over the last month, coupled with flaky internet connectivity in most of these places has meant a long break from blogging. In any case, I have blogged already about Shimla and the Indian Institute of Advanced Study and there was nothing about Delhi and Humayun's Tomb and Qutb Minar (as part of a guided tour of Delhi that I took some colleagues on) that I could say which had not already been said before. Many of these sites have now become World Heritage Sites which means they are far better preserved and presented than earlier when I was growing up in Delhi. A repeat visit to these sites, if you haven't seen then recently, is worth the time and effort.
This post is therefore about something that is unfamiliar to most Indians except those who have visited and toured Gujarat since it is unique to that part of the country. Temples, mosques, mausoleums, forts are a dime a dozen in India, of every possible variety and ethnicity. However Step Wells or Vav (Baoli in Hindi) are almost unique to Gujarat (very few exist elsewhere) and are an interesting concept.
Step wells are deep tanks that reach down upto the level of the water in the ground, with stairwells to allow people to descend to the bottom of the well. Unlike an ordinary tank, step wells can be of great architectural significance with very complex architectural structures and carvings in the walls leading down to the water table below. It's common is Western India (mainly in Gujarat) but apparently also exist in Pakistan and is typical of dry and arid environments. It allowed the local populace to come down to the level of the water table and complete their washing and bathing rather than exert themselves to lift the water all the way to the top from such great depths.
One of the grandest of the step wells (and which we saw this time) is Rani ki Vav in Patan in Gujarat. This was constructed by Udaymati, queen of Raja Bhimdeva (of the Solanki dynasty) in the 11th century C. E. This is a massive structure 64m by 20m and is 27m deep constructed in a pillared multi storeyed form. The walls are adorned with beautiful sculptures depicting figures from Indian mythology -- the various avatars of Vishnu and other gods, like Ganesha, Surya and Kuber and numerou females figurines in the pose of apsaras and yoginis. It's one of the largest step wells of its kind in India and preserved remarkably well for all its 1000 year history, with not a little help I suppose from the Archaeological Survey of India.

The Adalaj ni Vav at Adalaj near Ahmedabad is another beautiful step well we visited. While much smaller in size that the grand Rani ni Vav it is nonetheless noted for its structure and carvings which are very intricate.

Pankaj Mishra is at it again

2009-12-09T13:58:00.003+05:30
Pankaj Mishra who has specialised in the art of blaming almost all, if not all the sins of the world on Indian policy in Kashmir is at it again. Mercifully this time not in the main New York Review of Books but in its newly instituted blog. His point this time is that there is no solution possible in Afghanistan without a solution to the problems in the Kashmir valley. Of course in the very large, super-large universal scheme of things, perhaps all effects are causally interconnected. But Mishraji has no such over-arching view of the world. His point, if I may simplify matters a bit, is that human rights violation by Indian forces in Kashmir (oops, I should say 'India-held Kashmir' the politically correct term) is more or less at the root of all evil and in particular, the evil at work in Afghanistan. In other words, Mishraji, who has specialised over the years in hurling unsubstantiated accusations against the Indian Army in Kashmir and elsewhere, is back to his old tricks.
The pathetic human rights record of Indian forces in Kashmir is not in doubt (though it is fashionable amongst the Mishra ilk to forget why they are there in the first place) but a correct statement of fact does not necessarily causally link it with another correct statement of fact. The problems with this leap of logic is of course beyond Mishraji. Rambling through a litany of Indian sins (which includes apparently the dismembering of Pakistan, conveniently ignoring or forgetting the actions of Yahya Khan's troops that precipitated that action) and some mind boggling connections like Hamid Karzai's education in Himachal Pradesh, his column finally and drearily makes its predictably way to the 'obvious' conclusion -- that the Kashmir problem is what is preventing a solution to the US's imbroglio in Afghanistan.
The issue that completely escapes his notice (after all, one can't think of everything, poor fellow) is the Pakistan Army's support of militants in Kashmir and elsewhere either directly or through the Inter Service Intelligence (ISI), its obsession with India as the enemy and finally the Army's desire to keep some of the 'friendly jihadis' in its camp to continue the so-called proxy war in Kashmir with renewed vigour at a later time. The obvious fact that has been underlined often even in the mainstream Pakistani press like the Dawn by its retired Army and Navy commanders that every single war India and Pakistan have fought was initiated by Pakistan (and more specifically the Pakistani Army) has also escaped Mishraji's notice. So the painting of India as the bad boy in the block, seems, to put it mildly, far-fetched, considering that we have been at the receiving end of the terrorist violence for the last two decades. Picking on one incontestible fact -- that of India's human rights record in Kashmir -- Pankaj Mishra has yet again concocted from the recesses of his mind a fantasy world of mischief, war mongering and insurrection, at the heart of which lies the Republic of India.

26/11 -- a year (and a day) later...

2009-11-27T14:17:00.003+05:30
The channels and the newspapers are naturally full of reminders of the terrorist attacks on 26 November last year, in Mumbai. Is there anything more to say than what has already been said many times over. The soul searching, the recriminations about poor intelligence continue, hand-wringing over actions not taken to prevent another such attack. The ubiquitous candle lights vigils have taken place. (I don't want to be cynical about such matters but what purpose does a vigil like this serve? Does it make us feel good, to just stand there with a candle in our hands? This is such a mechanical import from the West, I don't recall ever seeing these kinds of vigils in the past; surely we can have something more tangible to show our concern and our feelings. Gandhiji would probably have held a prayer meeting - for the secular liberal elite, that would be a no-no but can there not be something more meaningful, more eloquent than holding a candle?)
I have been wondering what it is about that day that has stayed in my mind. I can remember two events that made an impact (other than, of course, the sheer gruesome nature of the event). One positive, one negative. The story of Tukaram Ombale who pushed a mobile barricade into the street to stop the Skoda carrying Kasab and one other terrorist and taking them on with only his service pistol (I no longer remember if he was even armed). Ombale paid for it with his life but it snared for us the one surviving terrorist who has given us all the proof we need (if indeed it was needed) about Pakistani involvement (state or 'non state') in the plot.
The other news I remember is one of our 'captains' of industry Ratan Tata coming on TV looking exceedingly sour, whinging about poor infrastructure, poor intelligence, poor response, poor governance that led to this carnage. No word for the poorly armed Mumbai police doing the best they can under such circumstances, no word for the NSG. He commiserates with his guests, but spares nary a thought for all those who died at CST, who remain forgotten to this day. Three days later, as an afterthought he says his words should not be taken as a 'lack of appreciation for the various agencies that fought the terrorists'.
I have written about this earlier, but these thoughts come back to me -- how differently each of us reacts in a crisis.

And some good news

2009-11-21T20:32:00.003+05:30
BBC, The Guardian and other news sites report that the LHC is technically up and running, scientists having managed to circulate two stable counter rotating beams of protons in the tunnel.
CERN though seems to be taking it more ~~casually~~ cautiously this time -- there is no media hype that they engineered last year, a few days before the machine suffered a catastrophic failure. The CERN bulletin still blandly reports news from last weekend, that "during the weekend of 7-8 November, CMS also saw its first signals from beams dumped just upstream of the experiment cavern. " Having burnt their fingers once, CERN clearly doesn't want to draw too much attention to the (re)start up unless they are sure of stability and other issues.

Sixty hours of terror

2009-11-20T16:14:00.002+05:30
Reliving Mumbai 26/11 - a four part account of what happened during those hours...

Is organic food good for you? (aka The Farm Fresh Fetish)

2009-11-18T15:53:00.003+05:30
To continue on the theme of the previous post:
It turns out that during the Climate Change meeting next month in Copenhagen (which has already dashed hopes of an agreement after President Obama discounted the possibility of agreeing to definitive caps on emissions) Denmark has promised ecologically friendly fare -- tap water, fair trade tea and coffee and food that will be 65% organic.
Which brings us to the point of this post -- is organic food really the solution to the food problems of this planet? If it means recognising chicken as an animal and not a plastic wrapped package, no squeezable tubes of Go-Gurt, or granola bars 'fortified' with soy protein, omega-3, vitamin D and zinc, then the answer is yes. One doesn't need to get one's daily recommended dose of roughage in our coffee or all four food groups in our snack bars. It's enough to eat just normal 'real food' which includes mostly plants, not necessarily organic foods. Unfortunately, fears of bio-technology interfering with our food and a general distrust of the use of science and technology in agriculture has given rise to a fetish about the benefits of organically grown food. True, organic foods have slightly smaller ecological footprints but because of the present obsession with organic food, these are frequently then trucked to distant places, wiping out their ecological edge. It makes more sense to buy local foods but 'local' is frequently conflated with 'organic'.
Read about this and more here. And find out why there isn't -- and has never been -- anything natural about farming.

Is Bt brinjal good for you?

2009-11-08T12:28:00.003+05:30
The Genetically Engineering Approval Committee (GEAC) (can't we have more feliticiously named committees?) has approved the commercial cultivation of the humble brinjal, alias eggplant alias aubergine. Of course it still requires clearance from the Ministry of Environment and Forests (where decisions will be based as much on politics as science -- perhaps more so). But the knives are out already and the habitual pulpit-thundering anti-technology naysayers like Vandana Shiva and others of her ilk, including scores of NGOs have predicted the usual gloom and doom scenario for Indian agriculture, particularly those cultivating this poor unloved vegetable.
Before we get to grips on this issue, let's get some incontrovertible facts out of the way.

This is not the first genetically engineered seed to be sanctioned for commercial cultivation. So called Bt cotton was the first (in 2002) which at least superficially has been an unqualified success with 50% better yields and is also grown in US, China, South Africa and Australia. However, since nobody eats cotton, the issues in this regard are different from those of eggplant and have more to do with commercial, social and economic aspects. (For example, the ability of the farmer to harvest the seeds from his own crop for the next planting, rather than buying it again from the market). Consumption of genetically modified foods bring up totally different issues altogether, some of which I will discuss below.
India is by no means a trendsetter in this regard. The US has 62.5 million ha under cultivation, Argentina has 21 million ha, Brazil has 15 million ha. India is now fourth in this list with 7.6 million ha, mostly growing cotton, followed by Canada and China. The crops grown are also more diverse -- canola, maize, soyabean, sugar beet, tomato and of course cotton.
It is not just professional objectors like Shiva who are against transgenic crops. Even respected molecular biologist P. M. Bhargava has added his voice to this chorus.
As far as I understand, the main reasons for the worry are the following, some of them only relevant in the Indian context.

A general belief that fiddling with the genetic structure of any food must have adverse consequences. There is unfortunately no proof of this yet -- it appears more a matter of faith. There have never been any reports of adverse health effects from the consumption of GM foods and by now the numbers of such consumers are significantly large.
The clearance by the GEAC was done hurriedly and based on data provided by the company which markets this product -- Mahyco (Maharashtra Hybrid Seed Company) -- a subsidiary of the (evil?) multinational Monsanto. There was no independent verification of the field trials and even though Indian Governmental organisations like ICAR (Indian Council of Agricultural Research) and IIVR (Indian Insitute of Vegetable Research) were involved, the tests were superficial, the results rushed out in a hurry, and there was no transparency in the trial methodology. People like P. M. Bhargava have been particularly troubled by these aspects.
The whole GM food control, and therefore eventually all of Indian agriculture is coming more and more under the control of multinationals like Monsanto. This is an economic issue though, not a scientific one and in this post I want to address mostly the scientific issues.
So what are these scientific issues? (I am by no means an expert on this issue and most of the information in this post comes from an excellent article by The Harvard zoologist and biologist Richard Lewontin in the New York Review of Books. However that requires a subscription to the magazine though I could send you a copy on an individual basis to avoid copyright problems.)
Human beings have been genetically modifying organisms since the domestication of plants and animals. The usual way we have been doing it for tens of thousands of years is to selectively breed those variants of a plant which have desirable qualities like better productivity or resistance to pests. These are also only done between closely related species. Moreover, this kind of "mixing" can be a bit of a hit or miss affair and while improving one aspect (say disease resistance) one might also selectively propagate a low yielding variety of the plant. Modern genetic engineering instead selectively removes the DNA corresponding to a particular gene and inserts it into a recipient's cell so that it becomes part of the recipient's genome. The 'source' DNA can belong to a distant species and in that case the resultant variety produced is called a transgenic organism.
One of the most famous cases of genetic engineering (to which nobody seems to have ever objected) is the introduction of the human insulin gene into the genome of bacteria which, subsequently, after being grown in industrial quantities produce industrial quantities of insulin that keep millions of diabetics in good health.
One of the commonest uses of trangenic DNA is to make plants resistant to pests. The Bt protein is a powerful toxin made by the bacterium Bacillus thuringensis (hence Bt) and when the gene coding for this toxin is inserted into plants, they start producing these toxins and insects trying to feed on these plants ingest these and die. The obvious issue that exercises opponents of GM crops is the effect of these toxins on human beings when they eat GM varieties of fruits and vegetables. This, along with two other issues - the disruption of the natural environment of agriculture and the development of resistant pests are the three main problems with transgenic foods. (Incidentally it is a fact not often recognised that adverse toxic health effects can also arise during conventional breeding including crosses between species that normally do not cross in nature -- in fact there are several such examples in the history of agriculture referred to in Lewontin's article).
Large scale testing by independent agencies is the only way out of these problems. Unfortunately not just in India but even in advanced countries like the US, it is often true that the data on which 'safety assessment' is based are produced not by independent federal agencies but by the the very parties who are asking for approval to distribute the new variety. This is precisely what makes the propagation and large scale production of GM foods somewhat of a risky enterprise. Self-policing is hardly calculated to inspire confidence in the minds of the general public towards the safety of transgenic varieties of food. However it is also true that in the last two decades or so, there has not been a single proven case of adverse effects directly attributable to a transgenic crop. (A close call is mentioned in the Lewontin article). Hardened weed varieties are another undesirable by-product of this genetic manipulation.
If these were the only issues on which the GM crop antagonists were fighting the battle, it would be the action of a responsible opposition. Unfortunately the movement has almost taken on the contours of a belief system based on a hardened and pathological dislike for any technological intervention in natural processes. (It's not surprising that most of the opponents of the system are also opponents of the Green revolution in India that finally abolished large scalestarvation and frequent occurrences of famine in the country and allowed India to become self sufficient in food). The poster-person of this movement is of course the well known activist Vandana Shiva. Shiva, who we are told is a former physicist, blots her copybook by making remarks (in her famous book Stolen Harvest) that have nothing to do with science. For example, that seeds and biodiversity are "gifts from nature and their ancestors" and her opposition to genetic engineering is based on "a recognition in the Isho Upanishad that the universe is the creation of the Supreme Power meant for the benefit of all creation". Further on, in the book, she talks of "the smoke from the mustard oil used to light the deepavali lamp acts as an environmental purifier." (I should confess here that I have not read the book though the above are actual quotes from there. Perhaps she is being quoted out of context! And yet, if even her best arguments have to be buttressed by this kind of pseudo scientific mumbo-jumbo, it is not a surprise that people like her do not inspire much confidence amongst most scientists). As Lewontin reports, her book is full of unexplained claims about the nature of the farm economy in India, and how biotechnology destroys it and unanalysed or distorted scientific findings, some of which are explicitly referenced in the review. As Lewontin puts it, Stolen Harvest is an opportunity squandered.
And yet, many serious scientists have questioned the wisdom of hurrying through with the clearance for Bt brinjal in India, without conducting fully independent large scale field tests. GM crops if used appropriately can be of great benefit to poor farmers in countries like India but in order to be able to sell the idea to the people of the country the Government has to do more -- if not anything else, at least to make sure that field tests are not only done fairly but also seen to be so.

Ain't kiddin'

2009-10-26T16:28:00.002+05:30
All the students at Luolang Elementary School, a yellow-and-orange concrete structure off a winding mountain road in southern China, know the key rules: Do not run in the halls. Take your seat before the bell rings. Raise your hand to ask a question. And oh, yes: Salute every passing car on your way to and from school. And there's more where this came from.

The Indian Institute of Advanced Study

2009-10-25T10:51:00.007+05:30
The Indian Institute of Advanced Study at Summerhill, Shimla, is housed in what used to be the Vice Regal Lodge - the summer palace of the Viceroy of India. In keeping with its colonial origins, the building is a grand colonial structure, complete with manicured gardens outside, wood panelled walls inside, wall-to-wall carpeting everywhere and a grand staircase which leads to the upper floor where the offices are located.

The Institute is primarily a social sciences institute, set up by the second President of India, Dr S. Radhakrishnan, and has a large number of visiting fellows in disciplines ranging from political science to philosophy who are encouraged to come and use their time there to study and write a book or monograph or treatise. However the present Director is a very charming forward looking person who would like to bring the social sciences and humanities closer to the sciences (remember C. P. Snow's Two Cultures ?) and therefore encourages scientists to organise meetings there. Thus a meeting on Gravity was held last year and we are organising a meeting on Particle Physics Phenomenology during the teeth-chattering cold of December. Our interaction with the Director and staff there was extremely positive and they are keen to provide all the local facilities needed to host a meeting. They prefer if some general talks are given which are understandable by the social sciences Fellows of the institute. With a guest house capacity of about

35, small meetings are easy to arrange.
The place literally oozes history. Thus, one can see the table where the partition papers were signed during the tripartite conference between the Congress, the Muslim League and the British Government. (The table is also in two parts joined together!) An earlier meeting called by Lord Wavell in the same place and attended by Nehru, Patel, Azad, Jinnah, Liaqat Ali Khan and others had ended in failure, making India's partition a certainty and there is the historic conference room where this and many other meetings among the various delegates of the political establishment took place in pre-independence India.

Magnetic Monopoles and Magnetricity

2009-10-22T10:21:00.005+05:30
Magnetic monopoles have never been seen in nature which makes Maxwell's equations fundamentally asymmetric between electric and magnetic fields, since there is no magnetic equivalent of a single isolated electric charge.
Recently a Nature article by Bramwell et al. show that in a certain kind of magnetically frustrated material called 'spin ice' one can see evidence of 'magnetricity' - a flow of magnetic charges just like electrical charge flow, and understood in terms of a magnetic analogue of the theory of electrolytes. (The material in which this has been observed is dysprosium titanate pyrochlore). The experimentalists actually observe real magnetic currents and are hence able to measure the magnetic charge ('monopole'). This, I believe, is the first example of a system where there is perfect symmetry between electric and magnetic charges. (The popular press has occasionally reported the existence of flux tubes -- dipoles which move independently in certain magnetic materials -- as equivalent to magnetic monopole quasiparticles but the present effect I believe is different -- I would appreciate some comments on these from experts).
One should realise though that this does not change Maxwell's equations in free space. Magnetic monopoles in free space have not been observed yet, except in one un-replicated experiment by Blas Cabrera in 1982. Thus, electromagnetism text books don't need to be revised any time soon.

Are most Indian drivers retarded?

2009-10-05T17:09:00.006+05:30
I deliberately gave a provocative and non PC title, but do read on...and you can conclude for yourself.
The road I take to office daily is dug up, ostensibly to widen it. Nothing new about that in this city, and that is probably the topic of a future post. But, as a consequence, traffic tends to creep along, sometimes slowing down to a halt altogether. At this point, a bunch of vehicles (they range from MTC buses to autos to fancy shiny cars) decide to make a break for it by getting on to the lane for oncoming traffic in order to beat the jam. Not surprisingly, they immediately block the oncoming traffic and who in turn block these vehicles from going further. The result is a complete grid lock with vehicles unable to proceed in either direction.
Now I am certain that since this happens during rush hour, the people using this stretch are the same people who use it every day to go to work. In other words, the consequences of their actions are there for them to see, day after day after day. And yet, they just don't seem to get the message! Most living creatures, presumably from guinea pigs up, learn, by dint of repetition, to avoid getting involved in an inextricable situation. But clearly not so, Indian drivers.
So what are we to conclude from this?

Marathi Asmita and me

2009-10-04T16:22:00.004+05:30
A distinguished blogger in a recent post has deplored the attitude of some lumpen parties in Maharashtra like the MNS and Shiv Sena of trying to force-feed Marathi down the throats of unwilling residents of the state, using extra-judicial methods. In a Parthian shot he has accused me of being a fellow traveller and linked this blog to that statement.
When I clicked on that link it took me to my previous post on NCERT textbooks, leaving me totally mystified. Surely I had said nothing offensive in that post? I read it again carefully and could find nothing that would give offense to even the most thin skinned of non Maharashtrians in Maharashtra.
And then the penny dropped! (I have always been rather slow on the uptake, a trait commented on often by many of my friends and relatives...). He was referring to a long ago post of mine, which essentially defended the actions of local governments whether in Maharashtra or in Tamil Nadu, to promote the use of the local language in signage and communication. (Presumably out of laziness, he had just linked to my blog rather than to that particular post). This along with a couple of comments in the distinguished blogger's posts had been construed as defending the use of sticks and stones, fists and knuckles and other extra-judicial methods, (favourite of the above mentioned parties), as a means of forcing local culture and language on the hapless and recalcitrant non locals of the state ("North Indians" in their derogatory phrase). And it was this that had earned me the appellation of a "fellow traveller".
Tendentious reporting and conclusions are common amongst our numerous news channels and newspapers, and more so in the blogosphere, but it now seems to have affected some of our distinguished bloggers too.

NCERT Textbooks

2009-10-02T15:39:00.002+05:30
The Times of India, which most of us in recent years have associated with fluff and half naked women, can, when it puts its mind to it, run some wonderful stories -- leaving its nearest rival here, the Hindu panting way behind. On Gandhi Jayanti day, when N. Ram and his cohorts at the Hindu have been obsessing about China's greatness and its military might, the TOI has a far more relevant, topical and interesting story on the new NCERT textbooks.
The new set of books, designed by the NCERT's primary textbook committee, creates a culturally responsive mathematics curriculum, according to the chair of the committee Anita Rampal -- "(We) have looked at math through the prism of everyday life. Instead of teaching through abstractions, the books tell real-life stories of people so that the youngsters can identify with the characters."
Thus living examples of fish, their shapes and sizes, as well as the capacity of fishing boats off Chennai's coast to teach the principles of maths. Similarly, to make the connection of a map to the aerial photo of a place, they used a photograph of India Gate and Rashtrapati Bhavan by the celebrated photographer Raghu Rai who was only too willing to give them permission to print it.
One of those feel good stories when there is so much bemoaning about the state of our education system...

Coming soon to a theatre near you

2009-10-01T10:03:00.004+05:30
People who think of Dr. Strangelove as a satirical masterpiece on human folly will soon have another treat in store for them, something that will give Dr Strangelove's pre-eminence a run for its money.
The story goes something like this. In a country far far away, the Supreme Chairman, much loved by his people, decides to mount a celebration of his reign in all the pomp and grandeur that the country is capable of. A massive parade, a show of might is organised in the main square. However, the Supreme Chairman, keeping in mind the welfare of his beloved people decrees that people living on the route of the march should not come out into their balconies and verandahs for 24 hours before the march. They are 'advised' not to use binoculars and cameras during the march. (For good measure, and of course keeping in mind the welfare of his citizens, some houses along the route have been evacuated altogether). Then how will the people participate in this great show, which is meant, after all to symbolise the Republic of the People? Well, on television, of course! Students in large numbers, who love their Supreme Chairman deeply, will take part in the march (after being vetted carefully) but are asked not to post pictures of rehearsals, and not to use text messaging. Naturally, and in national interest, pigeons along the route have been exterminated (perhaps they could be used to carry subversive messages?), sale of knives banned, and beggars and the homeless (not that there are such people in this perfect society) have been, uh, 'cleared'.
The march itself, in its discipline and perfection, will put all other countries to shame. Distance between soldiers' noses have been carefully measured and fixed, and needles (yes, needles) fixed to participants' collars so that if a soldier's chin drops by even as much as half an inch, the jab sends it straight back up again. Nothing much be allowed to come in the way of discipline.
Even nature is to be bombarded into submission. If the rain-gods have the temerity to misbehave, planes are to be used to blast the clouds to disperse them. Our Supreme Chairman has left nothing to chance. And on this day, the image of a perfect society will be enhanced by the refusal of the local governments to grant divorces -- warring couples will be asked to wait another day.
So when is this sure-shot Oscar winning movie to be released? Today, Thursday at and around Tiananmen Square in Beijing. For more details regarding show timings and other information, see here, here, even here.

Aardvark

2009-09-23T17:53:00.002+05:30
This is a service I learnt about from one of David Pogue's columns in the New York Times. You can go read it but here is a description in brief:
If you have a question to ask, the usual step is to throw it at Google or to one of the 'answers' sites like 'Ask Jeeves' or answers.yahoo.com, and hope you get something back. In other words they are not targetted at any particular specialist group (except that you might occasionally send it to only a specialised site). As a result the answers one gets are frequently not quite what you want.
Aardvark works differently. (the site is vark.com and you need to register to use it). It works through Google chat or MSN or some other similar chat program. Once it gets a question (which you can ask through the chat window itself to aardvark) it sends it around instantly to all its registered relevant users who are online at that time. When a person registers with aardvark it asks for your expertise and that is how it makes sure that the 'right' users get the question. As a result, answers come very fast and usually from, if not exactly experts, at least those who know something about the subject. Aardvark claims that on an average it takes less than 5 minutes to get an answer from another on-line user. If you find the answer useful, you can even establish a direct communication with the 'expert' through aardvark for follow up questions.
In my experience, a lot depends on the questions and also the geographical location. Questions pertaining to say, something in the US are answered very fast since there are presumably large numbers of US users logged in at any given time, some of whom are well-informed. More esoteric questions (or exotic questions) take more time or are not answered at all. (At the time I tried it, I asked something about Durrell and Corfu since I was visiting Corfu (see my previous posts!) and never got a reply. However, aardvark did recognise that Corfu was in Greece and tried to send it to 'Greece' experts - presumably there weren't any!)
Similarly, if you stay logged into say gmail as I do, you will occasionally get questions based on your stated expertise through your chat window. You can choose to answer or 'pass'. If you think aardvark is asking you too many questions, you can set the frequency of that to something lower. I once got a question from a guy who asked how to cook a steak without a grill, since he didn't have one, but had an oven. I gave some instructions and later he thanked me (through aardvark) for helping him with his dinner! It's kind of spooky to be thanked by someone anonymous for helping with his dinner, halfway around the world :) But you can ask more serious questions. And hope to get some useful answer...and eventually provide a few too.
The only problem seems to be that aardvark does not keep the questions pending if they have not been answered, to be sent around at a later date or time. They are never sent around again. Their site has a list of unanswered questions but it's just too long to scroll through.

Tweets and Taunts

2009-09-19T10:47:00.010+05:30
The twittering facebook generation has come down like a ton of bricks on our poor humourless politicians for picking on Shashi Tharoor and his innocent 'cattle class' tweet. Given that most Indians lack the ability to laugh at themselves, why pick on the politicians who are just a mirror of our own selves? Despite that, I am afraid, knowing Tharoor as I do, I find it very difficult to sympathise with him.
Tharoor was a year senior to me in college. He would wander around with a band of hangers-on who, one day in my early days in college, kidnapped me and took me to the presence of the master. After some desultory 'tough' questioning to pretend that he was ragging me, Tharoor turned on the charm and his winning smile, introduced himself and asked me to vote for him in the coming college elections. As a trembling nervous fresher, terrified at the thought of what might befall me if I refused, I hurriedly agreed and was let off with some gracious patronising words. I didn't vote for him (I no longer remember why -- there wasn't much to choose between the various candidates) but he swept the elections with his ever ready wit and perfect turn of phrase for every occasion. In fact Stephen's then (and presumably now) was full of people who could discourse at length but without content, on any topic in the famous Mukherjee memorial debates and elsewhere in debating competitions in the country, where they usually swept the awards precisely for this ability -- form without content. Another 'great' debater was Ramu Damodaran who went on to become P. V. Narasimha Rao's Private Secretary when Rao was the PM. (While on this business of name-dropping, Amitav Ghosh was in my batch, Ram Guha a year later and Upamanyu Chatterji I think was the same batch -- not that I knew any of them personally being a lowly 'science-type'; and now it's too late to pretend to be on first name terms with them!)
Tharoor's felicity with the English language (and fluency in French) stood him in perfect stead in his years in the UN, where you are supposed to look good, speak well and interminably, be diplomatic and never upset the apple cart. I do not recall any particularly distinguished service record in any of the hotspots of the world in all his years as UN High Commissioner of Refugees. It allowed him to write a few books, fiction and non-fiction, which saw a modicum of success. Consequently, he was more visible in various literary festivals and authors' workshops than in any UN relief operations anywhere. However, what might pass muster in the halls and corridors of St. Stephen's College and literary gatherings, and even produce accolades, are not necessarily appropriate emanating from a Minister in the Government of India. Wisecracks are fine in their place and indeed 'cattle class' is more pejorative about the airlines which treat their passengers like cattle than about the class themselves, but it is surely obvious that what is fine for an ordinary member of the public self-consciously proud of his ready wit, is not necessarily fine as a Minister's public pronouncement, (albeit only on Twitter), more so in a overly sensitive self-important country like ours. If Shashi Tharoor still hasn't figured this one out, what's he doing in that position?
Update: Soutik Biswas on BBC refers to Tharoor's tweets as "harmless, constipated takes on cricket, traffic jams in Delhi, Patrick Swayze, Roger Federer...unexceptional, unexciting and largely irrelevant". Exactly.

Jinnah, Jawaharlal, Patel and others

2009-09-17T11:01:00.008+05:30
Revisionist history is now a flourishing industry and any book or article that attempts either to re-interpret past events (usually in the light of 'fresh evidence') or knock down idols from the past is bound to see a print run of tens of thousands if not more. In this category falls Jaswant Singh's recent book on Partition and Jinnah, Nehru and Patel's respective roles in that traumatic event. He may have lost his BJP membership but he is sure to turn a neat profit, if not from India, at least from Pakistan.
One of the issues that Jaswant Singh implicitly refers to but doesn't quite address is whether Jinnah really wanted partition or would have been happy with 'parity'. In a stroke of genius and repeating the allegation of Seervai before him, Jaswant Singh, while not revealing his position on the 'parity' viewpoint, has managed to antagonise both the Congress and the BJP by trying to knock down both Nehru and Patel from their pedestals without really addressing the above issue! For those of us quite confounded by the issue, I would recommend a meticulous and detailed analysis by Anil Nauriya, (a Supreme Court lawyer who has written earlier on this issue) in The Statesman.
And while we are on the subject of Jinnah, it might be interesting to see his views on the Khilafat cause, an issue where Gandhiji came under attack for taking a position on what was considered completely irrelevant to the Indian independence struggle. These accusations have most recently come from the RSS and in a classic case of the Devil quoting the scriptures (or perhaps here the other way around!) they quote Jinnah to prove the irrelevance of the Khilafat cause. These accusations are addressed in an article by Anil Nauriya in The Tribune.

Athens

2009-09-15T14:17:00.012+05:30
Athens is not the oldest continuously populated city in the world. That distinction belongs to Damascus, Varanasi, Cholula or any other depending on who or what you consult. However the thing about Athens is that driving or walking around, you find stones, ruins, building, baths, temples strewn all around. You can't throw a stone without it hitting another from the 4th or 5th century B.C.E. Athens is chock-a-block with ruins (the other thing it is chock-a-block with is traffic).

The Temple of Zeus which started off as a Doric structure in the 5th century B.C. finally turned Corinthian with its fluted columns 700 years later. One wonders if local constructions companies in India took some tips on how to delay projects from the ancient Greeks.

There is little to be said of the Acropolis that hasn't already been said. Representing the pinnacle both literally and metaphorically of the ancient Western world it is a structure that diminishes everything else around.

There are beautiful views of the city of Athens from the top.

Just before reaching the top where stands the Parthenon, you pass the Theatre of Dionysus, the womb from which all theatre in the ancient Western world is believed to have originated. Plays by Sophocles, Euripides, Aristophanes were performed here and it is still used for plays and concerts by famous artists.

What is more fascinating, though in a contemporary setting is the New Acropolis museum. Housing all the major finds -- statues, figurines, amphoras, clay tablets with paintings, coins found in excavations in and around Athens, everything that was not taken away by the British to their museums, the whole edifice is built over the in situ ruins of a Greek city dating variously from the 5th century B.C.E. to the 4th century C.E. The floor at ground level is made of glass allowing visitors a peek into this city, complete with the ruins of houses, walls, baths, temples and so on. It's a surreal and ultimately overwhelming feeling to be walking just above the ruins of a once flourishing culture.

Greece is a pleasant mix of the East and the West. It has the infrastructure of the Western world (well, almost) and yet, the people are warmer, friendlier, and just that little bit more chaotic than their Western and Northern European more individualistic cousins. I found them uniformly friendly and helpful, at least in my almost two-week long stay, though like many of our countries, taxi drivers try to fleece you as much as they can get away with. However, with Greece's headlong rush into the European community, I foresee that much that is intrinsic will change, and that will include substantially higher prices for tourists. This happened dramatically when they moved from the drachma to the euro and the trend will continue.
Update: All the Greece pictures are now here

Kanoni and Corfu Town

2009-09-11T12:07:00.016+05:30
Kanoni, where we stayed is at the southern end of the town of Corfu. It has a beautiful view of the sea, the mountains and the Albanian coast can be glimpsed in the distance. It also has a view of the Monastery of Vlacherna and Mouse Island, a scene that in all travel brochures seem to symbolise Corfu.

Durrell enthusiasts (yes, this will be a recurring theme) will recall how Theodore Stephanides was fascinated by the seaplanes landing on water, every Thursday evening when he came for tea at the Durrells'. The seaplanes are long gone, but there is still the thrill of watching planes take off and land (many times in the day now) on the narrow strip of runway of Corfu airport that runs parallel along and at the edge of the coast that is clearly visible from Kanoni. The enormous jet liners of today sweep down, barely missing the water and touch down at the edge of the tarmac. Even today it's a fascinating sight.

Corfu Town is a mixture of many different styles, representing the different powers that occupied it over the centuries -- the Venetians, the French, the English -- and evolved around the Old Fortress around the 14th century, though the beginnings date from the fortified Byzantine site of Corfu around the 6th century. In order to protect the town and its harbour from the Ottoman Turks, a New Fortress was built in the 16th century by the Venetians. The area between these two fortresses comprises the old town of Corfu and is a beautiful place to walk, to wander and to sit in a cafe next to the water.

Like many Indian cities, Corfu Town has its own Esplanade or Spianada. shown above, built in the Italian Renaissance style.
Between the Esplanade and the Old Fortress, is a garden, a recreational place for Corfiots to walk and relax. This is called the 'Bosketto' and running alongside it, true to Corfu's British heritage, is a cricket ground. The Bosketto was renamed Bosketto Durrell in 2006 commemorating the brothers Gerald and Lawrence Durrell. There is a plaque on the gate with the inscription "Lawrence Durrell and Gerald Durrell writers and Philhellenes lived in Corfu 1935-1939", and inside are two bronze bas-relief busts of the two writers.

There is also a Durrell School of Corfu which according to its web page "seeks to provide a learning experience steeped in the culture and history of the Mediterranean, and drawing on the issues important to the Durrells". I wrote to them and received a polite reply from their administrative head, inviting me to visit them in town and meet their Director. Unfortunately, by the time I got the mail, I had already left Corfu.
We sat for a time in a cafe near the waterfront, facing the old fortress jutting out into the sea. As the sun went down behind the mountains the moon rose over the water, and the fortress turned to gold. Despite being so close to the bustling town nearby, for a moment it was possible to imagine the idyllic world of Gerry's childhood that, though long gone, is immortalised for his readers.

Tailpiece: For those who would like to read a short and somewhat more contemporary account of Durrell's life see here.

Achilleio

2009-09-10T14:43:00.006+05:30
Corfu Island, unfortunately is best covered by car. The bus services either don't cover all the tiny little villages with secluded coves and beaches (immortalised by the Durrells) and ancient churches or are very infrequent. Thus my hopes of going in search of the Strawberry-Pink Villa, The Daffodil-Yellow villa or the Snow White villa were dashed.
We made a trip to Achilleio, a palace about 9 km from Corfu town, built at the end of the 19th century by the queen of the Austro-Hungarian Empire Elisabeth, known also as Sissy, after whom the Sisi Palace is named. It's a typical palace of a minor royalty of Europe, with beautiful gardens, grand staircases and exquisitely painted ceilings, filled with kitsch inside and a profusion of statues outside. The most notable of these is a wonderfully realistic one of a mortally wounded Achilles trying to wrench the arrow out of his heel.

There is an interesting postscript to this history of the statue. When the German ruler William II, the second owner of the Achilleio took over, he was displeased at this effete image of a dying member of a true Aryan race. He ordered the statue to be removed to a less prominent location, and in its place erected an enormous bronze statue of a 'Triumphant Achilles' in full Teutonic glory, one that he felt was more appropriate as an image of the powerful German race. An inscription celebrating this sentiment was removed by the French during Word War I but the statue remains in its place.

The natural beauty of the island is everywhere, and even though I couldn't visit the places I really wanted to see, this place has a charm all its own.