Comment moderation

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

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

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

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!

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

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

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.