Sentient Science

Last week, yet another business trip to Bangkok, one of hundreds so that now Bangkok is somewhere between a second home and paradise. Anyhow, this time it was a gruelling one as I was part of a team of R&D professionals trying to solve a mysterious problem in one of our products. I spent quite a few days prior to the visit boning up on past work, and there were plenty of old R&D reports I could lay my hands on. Boss informed to ensure we could reproduce the problem i.e illuminate the problem so that the causative factors can be identified. I thought that was Catch 22, if I knew what the causative factors were, we could at least plan technical approaches to solving the problem. This is the funny thing about science. In some ways, it touts to rely on facts, facts and facts, but too often we have hypotheses or correlating factors. These are not root causes. In an industry like ours, the correlating factors are many, facts fewer to identify. This is not because there is not enough science, there is plenty but the systems are hard, non-equilibrium structures that cannot be tested non-destructively. Anyhow, so armed with hypotheses , I did a square dance with other R&D folks. We brain stormed and found some vague solutions. In the afternoon, we met up with business and we managed to push all the right buttoms , ask the real leading questions which miraculously shed light on some unforeseen issues - something about how we transport the products , store them, the chugs and halting stops and delays in a long, unpredictable supply chain...and viola we had a much smarter solution strategy than just "science" could suggest.

We dont know if it works but in some sense the skies cleared a bit.

I think over my career and life as a scientist engineer, I am always humbled by how simple solutions can be if we shed the flab and examine the lucid details and look at problems holistically - if we only shed the pomposity of jargon and hiding behind strained constructs.
Same true of life, I suspect, though I am much too warped in my cloudy veil of unawareness: If Life can be viewed as series of "quality" problems that can only be solved when one views these in a context. These can be overcome and a more chiselled chapter of life can reveal itself if we realise how astonishingly simple thought should be.

Googling Yourself

You have to admit it: We all google ourselves. The reaction ranges from embarassment (I wrote THAT?) to pleasure (I wrote that!) to surprise (I wrote that?!). More often than not, I always learn something new. For instance, I went through a phase in graduiate school where I loved liqueurs - Bailey's, Grand Marnier, etc. Not being able to afford these, I hunted down the recipes to actually make them at home. I perfected the recipes and posted them on the fledgling online community at Carnegie Mellon called usenets. Over the years, these recipes have been used and reproduced at a million sites, all without permission of course! So here is one for Kahlua, that delicious coffee liqueur:


Ersatz Kahlua

Source: Yashodhara Pawar (yp02+@andrew.cmu.edu) <--- Note the expired student email Id!
6/12/92

Ingredients:

3 ounces, medium to dark roast coffee, finely ground
2 3/4 cups, Vodka, 80 proof
3/4 cups, Brandy, 80 proof
4 teaspoons, Good quality instant coffee
1 tablespoon, Vanilla extract
1 teaspoon, Chocolate extract
1 teaspoon, Glycerine (at most pharmacies)
1 drop, Red food colouring (optional)
7/8 cups, Distilled water
1--3/4 cups, Granulated sugar

Procedure:

Place the ground coffee in a large wide-mouthed glass bottle. Add the
vodka and the brandy. Allow the mixture to sit approximately 18 to 20
hours. Use coffee filters to remove the coffee from the alcohol --
discard the spent grounds. Add the instant coffee, the extracts, the
glycerine, and the food colour to the mixture. Set aside.

In a scrupulously clean pan, boil the water. Add the sugar, stirring
rapidly. When the sugar is dissolved, remove from heat. Allow the sugar
syrup to return to room temperature.

Add the syrup to the alcohol mixture. Store in a tightly capped glass
bottle. The liqueur is better when aged for 3 or more months.

John Updike, March 18, 1932 – January 27, 2009 - Rest in Peace

Perfection Wasted

John Updike

And another regrettable thing about death
is the ceasing of your own brand of magic,
which took a whole life to develop and market —
the quips, the witticisms, the slant
adjusted to a few, those loved ones nearest
the lip of the stage, their soft faces blanched
in the footlight glow, their laughter close to tears,
their tears confused with their diamond earrings,
their warm pooled breath in and out with your heartbeat,
their response and your performance twinned.
The jokes over the phone. The memories packed
in the rapid-access file. The whole act.
Who will do it again? That's it: no one;
imitators and descendants aren't the same.

The Neurology of the Etymology of Everything or, Meaning of Life

As a serious, committed and fundamentalist athiest, I am always looking out for the neuro-something explanation for everything. Not that we non-believers not believe in the quotidian, the joyous, the inexplicable sorrows, the FEE-EElings, you know. Often times when I drum, I enter a zone - a space, hard to describe, what a line of cocaine must feel like? what sleep feels like? a transportation where only fingers and sound matter. Mind you, I am not a great drummer but I have rhythm inside me. But, out of an inexplicable fear, I retract from this endless space and enter a drone and then stop entirely and wrap up the drumming. I found this interesting piece of news by Dr Barry Bittman (see Here), a neurologist practicing alternative healing medicine together with traditional medicine. He and his colleagues conducted several clinical studies on drummers and measured plasma stress hormones - cortisol. He found drops in cortisol, as well as heightened immune responses with no change in normal parameters (Inetrleukin 2, etc.) But, this describes "wellness", what a good run would do. What I experinece is something, well, more profound, a trance like state.

But, if I put on my scientist hat, does even this wellness thing really mean much? As a previous boss used to say: "Absence of Evidence is not evidence of absence". To paraphrase it, "Evidence of Presence is not presence of evidence". So, now even findings by Dr. Bittman are doubted by Steven Pinker. (see Here)

I am quoting Dr. Pinker entirely:
None of that impresses MIT's Steven Pinker. "I think people who argue that music is an adaptation have confused theeveryday meaning of the term - meaning something that is beneficial or salubrious - with the biological meaning of the term,which is something that causally increases the rate of reproduction or survival," he says. "Now, it's not enough just to showthat something is correlated with reproduction. Wearing a linen suit or driving a Porsche might help you find a sex partner,but that doesn't mean it's an adaptation. What you need to do is show, on sheer engineering grounds and in terms of causeand effect, that some particular trait would lead to an adaptive outcome".

The "trance state" on drumming is beautifully described in a non-scientific book - but a beautifully written experiential book, The Shamanic Drum , by Michael Drake, now on Google Books. It describes the altered states adrummer can enter, allowing her to be malleable, transform and experience a state rarely touched upon, all this with no faith or belief chnages. This I can relate to.

A geeky comic

http://imgs.xkcd.com/comics/im_an_idiot.png

Check this one out...any others. site's great!

Colour Red

Red used to be my favourite colour. I have red shoes, red handbags, red skirts. Many red lipsticks. Red stone ear rings. But now I am living in China, where red is an auspicious colour and dominates the landscape. At this particular time of the year, the Chinese New Year, the urbanscape grows the red fungus in barely varying hues of gold, black, green but always the bull-angering-blood-infra red. And so, well, I find myself...conforming uncomfortably and blending into the masses of humanity everywhere, the subway, shopping, office. What a shameful juncture for one who seeks to be different, add her own truffle to the soup, brush that different stroke, strike a drum note to their violins, etc etc.So, I am now on a prowl - for a different colour to call my own. A colour that says Me, and unequivocally calls out my name. Red did and still does, but not when owned by a billion people. This hunt for a new Colour is not so easy because pretty soon I realized that the entire visible wavelength spectrum is already owned by entities , some revered, some crackpot. The Orange is called Saffron and owned by the hindu fundamentalists. The yellow is owned by the Thai monarchy. The green is owned and paraded by Islam - on its mosques, on its prayer books, on their leaflets. The blue is owned by the United Nation disunited in their shared blues. The colour pink is owned by feminists and 'women's issues' type people. White is owned by the clergy and the Catholic diocese for which I have deep childhood-coerced regard. So, there you go. No colour is available. In fact, I soon realized I am not the only one. Several people, persons or organizations realized the limitations of the rainbow coalition. So...they started co-opting the colours. So, now environmental NGO's have adopted green, the colour of Islam. The Red has been adopted by the Red Cross. The colour pink has now been adopted by those who prefer comradeship amongst their own gender. Or, those who have cancer. The colour white is also the colour of peace organizations.

All this leaves the colour Black.

Black is good.

Black is New York.

New York is good.

Black is absence of colour. Absence of colour speaks volumes for who you are - or not.

So, 'my' new colour is Black.

Except that I am brown.

Hindustani

All languages evolve. Continuously. Sometimes they evolve with time. Or they evolve with human migration. The etymology and history of the English language and the Hindi language are endlessly fascinating. The Hindi language more so. Consider this: The land of 'Hindustan' once panned from Eastern part of present day Iran all the way to Burma. After the Seleucid Greeks over-ran the northwest part of it, the Turks migrated, partly for trade and in search of the famed wealth. They brough the Turki language and then later adopted the Farsi or the Persian language. This remained the language of Northern modern India and morphed with successive movement of the Afghan and Mughal emperors. It then merged with the ancient Sanskrit language of India into Urdu sometime in the 16th century. How Hindi emerged is not as certain and linguists actually classify both Hindu and Urdu similarly. Hindi differs primarily in its script, being Sanskrit/Devanagari driven while Urdu continues to use the Persian script. Hindi, one may argue, has differences emanating from a colloquial link to the dialects of North India, mainly Braj and avadhi. Yet, viewed from the to they are similar languages. Simply put, all Bollywood movies contain strands of both languages, with movies made in earlier part of the century much more Urdu.

So, one is always amused how language continues to be used as a tool of us vs them dialogues politically and personally. Consider today's news on http://www.dailytimes.com.pk/default.asp?page=2009\01\07\story_7-1-2009_pg1_12.

According to the Daily News of Pakistan, the lone terrorist held by India was interviewed in Hindi and gave his deposition in Hindi and not Urdu. So, the paper argues, he must be Indian and not Pakistani. This must be of curious satisfaction to the Pakistani readers looking for reasons that India is bluffing and all the terrorists in this heinous act, were, in fact, Indian.

Pick any language: the story is the same. The English of the Irish vs the Queen's English. The Filipino tagalog, derived from the Spanish, vs the Spanish. The magnificient Catalan language now banned from Spain for formal teaching though linked historically to the Spanish language.....