http://www.telegraph.co.uk/health/men_shealth/5426895/Men-live-longer-if-they-marry-a-younger-woman.html
I wonder how many journalists bunked the class when they were taught "correlation != causation".
03 June, 2009
26 April, 2009
The Dot Song
The Idea originated when Anne put Paul Klee's quote as her status message, and I came up with my line. Then I thought, why not start a meme and ask everyone to contribute the same kind of line. We got a lot of enthusiasm going for the thing, and the lines are brilliant. :)
So, here it is:
So, here it is:
The Dot Song
A line is a dot that went for a walk.
- Paul Klee (contributed by Bimal Bharath)
A curve is a dot that flew like a hawk.
- Rahul "Anonick" Dandekar
An icosahedron is a dot that didn't know where to stop.
A scribble is a dot not knowing what it sought.
A circle is a dot that just goes round and round,
A coil is a dot that keeps getting wound.
An exclamation is a dot with an erection.
-Bimal Bharath
An asterisk is a dot with hair.
A Buckyball is a dot that was out there to shop.
A doodle is a dot that dances a lot.
-Rahul "Anonick" Dandekar
A colon is a dot who found true love.
A knot is a dot that lost it's path.
(disclaimer: in a closed space)
-Ravitej U.
A star is a dot that's really really hot.
-Adi Sengupta
A tittle is a dot.
-Anandi Rajan
Z is a dot after too many drinks.
-Shivam Gupta
A bot is a dot, out of silicon wrought.
-Preyas P.
A semicolon is a dot taking a dump.
-Ranaji Deb
A division sign is a dot looking at the mirror in vain,
A curl is a dot that had too much champagne.
-Anisha "Anne" Zaveri
A comet is a dot with a wild streak.
A shooting star is a dot that can't be caught.
-Shatabdi "Express" Chowdhury
A squiggle is a dot that lost the plot
-Nikita Mehra
An O is a dot yawning.
-Bimal Bharath
A bulls eye is dot that is tough to spot.
-Preyas P.
A fuzzball is a dot with goosebumps.
-Rajani Rajan
A double helix is a dot that is entangled and can't get out.
-Anandi Rajan
A dot is not what you and I thought.
A dot is a dot is a dot.
-Nikhil Karthik (A Gertrude Stein reference)
(Period)
23 April, 2009
An ODE to Radioactivity
One fine day, the century before last,
Henry, a Becquerel, found himself aghast.
The photofilm that he hath so carefully shielded,
To some mysterious radiation had somehow yielded!
But he could protect it, he found, with some layers of lead,
The scientist began to think himself not too right in the head.
The clue lay in an adjoining drawer, a salt of the rare uranium,
Bequerel, satisfied to the core, thanked profusely his cranium.
Scientists soon pounced on the element, and happily played,
It emitted three rays, it seemed, and the emission decayed.
The three types were then baptised, alpha-beta-gamma.
Alpha was the heavyweight, but gamma did the harm-a.
(The radiation, though exciting, was indeed damaging,
Not all the researchers met their deaths by aging.)
The part of radioactivity that's most weighty
Is that you can write a very simple O D E
Although you have to reason a little bit
About the atoms per unit time go oblit.
It's random, jumbled, funbled, culled,
Poisson being the god of that world.
But watch! If there be more atoms,
More must undergo the swat-ems.
If there're fewer for the guillotine
Fewer than previous 'll be keen.
We lay down a new Law this day,
A law that decaying atoms obey.
The number that goes kaboom,
Every fleeting second of doom,
Is proportional to it's brethen,
The number that sec breathin.
And thus, more to see them,
Means more to disappear,
And The Law so ordained,
Is an exponential - swear.
And thus, the atoms die,
One after another, sigh,
Often the offsprings,
Atoms so produced
Decay themselves,
A Little bemused.
But in the end,
Every single
One mingles
With dust.
Or Strong
Henry, a Becquerel, found himself aghast.
The photofilm that he hath so carefully shielded,
To some mysterious radiation had somehow yielded!
But he could protect it, he found, with some layers of lead,
The scientist began to think himself not too right in the head.
The clue lay in an adjoining drawer, a salt of the rare uranium,
Bequerel, satisfied to the core, thanked profusely his cranium.
Scientists soon pounced on the element, and happily played,
It emitted three rays, it seemed, and the emission decayed.
The three types were then baptised, alpha-beta-gamma.
Alpha was the heavyweight, but gamma did the harm-a.
(The radiation, though exciting, was indeed damaging,
Not all the researchers met their deaths by aging.)
The part of radioactivity that's most weighty
Is that you can write a very simple O D E
Although you have to reason a little bit
About the atoms per unit time go oblit.
It's random, jumbled, funbled, culled,
Poisson being the god of that world.
But watch! If there be more atoms,
More must undergo the swat-ems.
If there're fewer for the guillotine
Fewer than previous 'll be keen.
We lay down a new Law this day,
A law that decaying atoms obey.
The number that goes kaboom,
Every fleeting second of doom,
Is proportional to it's brethen,
The number that sec breathin.
And thus, more to see them,
Means more to disappear,
And The Law so ordained,
Is an exponential - swear.
And thus, the atoms die,
One after another, sigh,
Often the offsprings,
Atoms so produced
Decay themselves,
A Little bemused.
But in the end,
Every single
One mingles
With dust.
Or Strong
Ol' Lead.
The end
result.
.
16 March, 2009
A first try @ Posterous
Posterous is a great site for posting anything to your blog via email... try it out! Videos, mp3s, whatnot, are hosted at posterous, for free! So, here I go, with one of my favourite (marathi) songs, and one of my own stories. Hopefully this'll work! :)
07 March, 2009
Science, God and Hinduism
Note: Long Post. When I say long, I mean long. But sadly, there is no getting around the necessity of a long post on such a deep subject. You deserve an apology.
Sigh, I know what you're thinking. But given my inclination towards philosophy, atheism and, well, science obviously, this one was in the coming for years, at least. So, why now? Well, this post on Anne's blog, and the ensuing discussion below it.
Well, me being an atheist, you know what viewpoint to expect. I just want to be clear that I don't mean to insult anyone. If I do, I'm sorry. (Yeah, I'm writing this before writing the post. It, ehm, might get rough.) If I commit ad hominem or create men out of strings straw, do point it out though.
Enter, stage West
I have read, and debated, a lot about the concept of God in Western civilisation. It all comes down to one thing: The concept of God is what you should take on faith. It is your personal choice. A lot of people might agree with you, but that does not make it less personal, or truer. The email that inspired Anne's post comes from this worldview, but counters by saying that if God is to be taken on faith, so is Science. (Sorry, if I capitalise God but not Science, all my physics Physics books will spring to life and kill me.)
Anne and I begged to differ, of course. The scientific method is a tested and sensible way to develop models of the world. Models which "work", and by work I mean, they are predictive and have be tested in experiments which are repeatable. More can be found at Anne's post, but I wanted to repeat this because we'll need it below. Of course, there are subtleties, and loads of them, in Philosophy of Science. But, in the final analysis, it makes sense, is self-consistent, and works. By works, I mean, you can apply it to the real world. Here I'm quietly assuming a realist philosophy, but please, lets stay with that.
The concept of God (still in the west here) does not predict any observable phenomenon which does not have a valid scientific explanation. God does not lead to many testable, repeatable predictions, of course. (But see prayer.) Besides, the concept of a real true existent God (still in the West here) conflicts with what is the current state of knowledge in Cosmology.
Stage Centre: Science
How do I view Scientific knowledge as a whole? I think all Science has are models, but they lead to testable predictions which have been tested, and although issues like theory-ladenness, underdetermination, the demarcation problem, etc crop up, I think the fact that my hard drive is currently using GMR, and that our satellites have to apply GR corrections, leads me to be pretty confident that even some the most esoteric of today's theories, which have been built on a foundation of older ones, have a direct connection to reality. We may hypothesise about infinite "fields" in four dimensions, but face it, we can accurately predict cross-sections that we actually observe in our backyard accelerators. Science is not just self-consistent, it's held to reality at many, many points by strong connecting wires. You just cannot argue that I take Electric Fields on faith, because every testable prediction made by Maxwell's equations has been borne out.
See, there are theories, and there are the predictions the theories make. You are free to argue with me that Electric and Magnetic fields do not exist, but if you say that an electron placed in a cyclotron will not behave exactly the way my theory of "electromagnetic fields" says it will, I will punch you in the face. I have never observed a magnetic field, and I know I cannot. But if I assume that there exists a "electromagnetic field" which obeys certain "equations" I hypothesise, maybe out of thin air, and if I indicate every point my theory connects to experiment, and if every experiment has agreed with me, you just cannot say I'm taking my theory on faith. Please.
Eastward Drift
And it is here that we enter the Eastern religions. Specifically, those of India. Now I confess at the beginning that I do not know much about Indian religious philosophy. So there are probably many objections you can raise. I will skirt around the actual topics that I know nothing about, and hopefully some of the commenters might illuminate them.
I want to be very clear about my points at the start. A human being cannot live without food. People cannot defy the laws of gravity by pure thought. And finally, today's science is not rediscovering what Indian mystics had discovered thousands of years ago.
[Of course, when I say "Indian religion", I actually mean "Ancient Indian Philosophy". Thanks to Wanderer's comment on Anne's blog, I googled for ancient Indian views on Physics, and I have taken the help of three such links to write the following: One, Two and Three. Actually, just the first two. The third one is laughably silly.]
About not being able to live without food: sadly, the myriad such cases in India are very poorly documented, and the bastardised version of such "practices" in the west is very silly indeed. I cannot give any criticism to this except vouching for common sense. Same for levitation, which I guess is held indoors in secret clubs throughout the subcontinent, because I haven't seen anyone not claiming to be a magician do it yet, and neither has anyone I know. And here I vouch for more than just common sense: I vouch for Schwarzschild, the graviton, and the derivative of the Einstein-Hilbert action with respect to the metric.
A little note about the "Law of Karma": I cannot find a lucid enough explanation of it. Will someone in the comments please enlighten me?
And now for what people claim the ancients knew of Physics. Firstly, let us define two things: Knowledge, and Philosophy. (As I said earlier, I'll be a realist throughout the post.) I'll define Knowledge to be a human conceptual model which accurately represents the "real" world. (I knew philosophers will sneer as that statement and use it for coffee table jokes. For them, I'll define knowledge as the set of all Justified True Beliefs. I'm not a philosopher, mind you, so please refrain from insults and enlighten me in the comments.) Now, let us define Philosophy. It is the set of all human conceptual models. Knowledge is then a subset of Philosophy.
I ask the question: Are the Physics ideas in Ancient Indian texts knowledge or philosophy? Hmm... how we can test if something is knowledge?
One way would be to compare it to existing scientific ideas: here many of statements of Hindu philosophy seem to make sense. But I claim it's all a matter of interpretation. Let's see:
(From link one)
Other universes/wormholes. I saw within [the] rock [at the edge of the universe] the creation, sustenance and the dissolution of the universe... I saw innumerable creations in the very many rocks that I found on the hill. In some of these creation was just beginning, others were populated by humans, still others were far ahead in the passage of their times. [6.2.86]
It's easy to interpret this as the idea of a multiverse (I don't know where he got the wormhole from). But this isn't exactly scientific fact: Physicists are still debating how useful and observable the idea of a multiverse can be, and even though the idea of wormholes connecting different universes might explain some stuff, but no wormholes have yet been observed. Indeed, to travel between universes is almost impossible for human beings. You can object that we haven't yet attained the knowledge that the ancients had, but then I say, they should've given the recipe for inter-universe or wormhole travel too, if they actually knew it (a la Contact).
You can also object that this may just be ancient science fiction. But I object. The presence of science is required for science fiction. I'll come back to this below in the "third way".
A second way to test if something is knowledge is to look for how people arrived at it. The ancients arrived at their philosophy through pure thought, it is claimed (by Raj). Now, although it might be claimed that I'm adopting a modern western viewpoint which is unfit here, I think that knowledge can only be ascertained through experiment. Even the General Theory of Relativity was philosophy until Eddington's legendary experiment in 1919. (Not totally, though. See below.) I find no evidence that the ancients tested, or could test, their "preliminary ideas of gravity" or even those of wormholes.
Besides, there is no evidence that they actually had mathematical equations to accompany their concepts. In the absence of such equations, concepts cannot graduate to knowledge, simply because they have no predictive power. In the spirit of thinking big, Indians came up with their grand conceptions, but they were not based upon reality neither were they tested to see if they agreed with it. They were concepts, pure and simple. They may have been accurate, and I do not claim that there aren't passages where the conceptions sound disturbingly modern, and I do not claim that this isn't a matter of chance. What I claim is, without mathematics and without experimentation, these concepts are philosophical constructs. Philosophy too aims for knowledge. It results in the birth of science. Indian Philosophy is deep and beautiful. But there was no effort made for it to be "true", in our modern scientific sense.
The third way is to analyse a philosophical system and look for where the concepts behind the statements. In Indian Philosophy, we do not find any reference to basic Quantum Mechanical ideas, or to the constancy of the speed of light, or to the spacetime ideas of general relativity. We do not find any reference to knowledge of the nucleus which corresponds to modern ideas; we find references to "worlds within the atoms". In the light of this, I claim, that we should classify the references to "A single projectile charged with all the power in the Universe", or to the multiverse ideas mentioned earlier, as philosophical fantasy, not science fiction. One cannot get to the concept of wormholes without having basic notions of GR. One cannot have nuclear weapons without knowing about the nucleus and its constituents.
I said earlier that I might be accused of taking a Western view when analysing Eastern philosophy, which I did. But common sense tells us that knowledge has to be compared with experience. It has to work. Almost by definition, it has to "be" out there. Science is a very complex process. Theories are built on top of each other. One cannot get to the peak without climbing the mountain, or without your ancestors having formed theories of aerodynamics which allowed you to built flying machines which operated on those experimentally verified principles, and allowed you to get to the peak. Einstein's GR was an accepted theory in the scientific world even before 1919 because it was a generalisation of the experimentally verified SR, and it reduced accurately to Newton in the sensible limit.
Exit: stage East
In conclusion, even if the Ancients had aquired their knowledge differently than experiment, the lack of mathematical expression for it, and the impossibility of putting the cart before the horse in science leads me to be a little skeptical when anyone classifies their philosophy are knowledge.
What about the Idea of God, which we began with? Disregarding the actual prevalent theological ideas in Ancient India (God, Demons, Heaven, Hell and Earth), even if we think of the Sages as thinking God was one with the universe, of him being above, beyond and in time and space, one can only speak of the God as a philosophical construct. Thus, even God in Hindu philosophy is subjective. (That said, not all philosophical constructs are subjective. But there is much more scope for differing concepts in Philosophy then in Science.)
Sigh, I know what you're thinking. But given my inclination towards philosophy, atheism and, well, science obviously, this one was in the coming for years, at least. So, why now? Well, this post on Anne's blog, and the ensuing discussion below it.
Well, me being an atheist, you know what viewpoint to expect. I just want to be clear that I don't mean to insult anyone. If I do, I'm sorry. (Yeah, I'm writing this before writing the post. It, ehm, might get rough.) If I commit ad hominem or create men out of strings straw, do point it out though.
Enter, stage West
I have read, and debated, a lot about the concept of God in Western civilisation. It all comes down to one thing: The concept of God is what you should take on faith. It is your personal choice. A lot of people might agree with you, but that does not make it less personal, or truer. The email that inspired Anne's post comes from this worldview, but counters by saying that if God is to be taken on faith, so is Science. (Sorry, if I capitalise God but not Science, all my physics Physics books will spring to life and kill me.)
Anne and I begged to differ, of course. The scientific method is a tested and sensible way to develop models of the world. Models which "work", and by work I mean, they are predictive and have be tested in experiments which are repeatable. More can be found at Anne's post, but I wanted to repeat this because we'll need it below. Of course, there are subtleties, and loads of them, in Philosophy of Science. But, in the final analysis, it makes sense, is self-consistent, and works. By works, I mean, you can apply it to the real world. Here I'm quietly assuming a realist philosophy, but please, lets stay with that.
The concept of God (still in the west here) does not predict any observable phenomenon which does not have a valid scientific explanation. God does not lead to many testable, repeatable predictions, of course. (But see prayer.) Besides, the concept of a real true existent God (still in the West here) conflicts with what is the current state of knowledge in Cosmology.
Stage Centre: Science
How do I view Scientific knowledge as a whole? I think all Science has are models, but they lead to testable predictions which have been tested, and although issues like theory-ladenness, underdetermination, the demarcation problem, etc crop up, I think the fact that my hard drive is currently using GMR, and that our satellites have to apply GR corrections, leads me to be pretty confident that even some the most esoteric of today's theories, which have been built on a foundation of older ones, have a direct connection to reality. We may hypothesise about infinite "fields" in four dimensions, but face it, we can accurately predict cross-sections that we actually observe in our backyard accelerators. Science is not just self-consistent, it's held to reality at many, many points by strong connecting wires. You just cannot argue that I take Electric Fields on faith, because every testable prediction made by Maxwell's equations has been borne out.
See, there are theories, and there are the predictions the theories make. You are free to argue with me that Electric and Magnetic fields do not exist, but if you say that an electron placed in a cyclotron will not behave exactly the way my theory of "electromagnetic fields" says it will, I will punch you in the face. I have never observed a magnetic field, and I know I cannot. But if I assume that there exists a "electromagnetic field" which obeys certain "equations" I hypothesise, maybe out of thin air, and if I indicate every point my theory connects to experiment, and if every experiment has agreed with me, you just cannot say I'm taking my theory on faith. Please.
Eastward Drift
And it is here that we enter the Eastern religions. Specifically, those of India. Now I confess at the beginning that I do not know much about Indian religious philosophy. So there are probably many objections you can raise. I will skirt around the actual topics that I know nothing about, and hopefully some of the commenters might illuminate them.
I want to be very clear about my points at the start. A human being cannot live without food. People cannot defy the laws of gravity by pure thought. And finally, today's science is not rediscovering what Indian mystics had discovered thousands of years ago.
[Of course, when I say "Indian religion", I actually mean "Ancient Indian Philosophy". Thanks to Wanderer's comment on Anne's blog, I googled for ancient Indian views on Physics, and I have taken the help of three such links to write the following: One, Two and Three. Actually, just the first two. The third one is laughably silly.]
About not being able to live without food: sadly, the myriad such cases in India are very poorly documented, and the bastardised version of such "practices" in the west is very silly indeed. I cannot give any criticism to this except vouching for common sense. Same for levitation, which I guess is held indoors in secret clubs throughout the subcontinent, because I haven't seen anyone not claiming to be a magician do it yet, and neither has anyone I know. And here I vouch for more than just common sense: I vouch for Schwarzschild, the graviton, and the derivative of the Einstein-Hilbert action with respect to the metric.
A little note about the "Law of Karma": I cannot find a lucid enough explanation of it. Will someone in the comments please enlighten me?
And now for what people claim the ancients knew of Physics. Firstly, let us define two things: Knowledge, and Philosophy. (As I said earlier, I'll be a realist throughout the post.) I'll define Knowledge to be a human conceptual model which accurately represents the "real" world. (I knew philosophers will sneer as that statement and use it for coffee table jokes. For them, I'll define knowledge as the set of all Justified True Beliefs. I'm not a philosopher, mind you, so please refrain from insults and enlighten me in the comments.) Now, let us define Philosophy. It is the set of all human conceptual models. Knowledge is then a subset of Philosophy.
I ask the question: Are the Physics ideas in Ancient Indian texts knowledge or philosophy? Hmm... how we can test if something is knowledge?
One way would be to compare it to existing scientific ideas: here many of statements of Hindu philosophy seem to make sense. But I claim it's all a matter of interpretation. Let's see:
(From link one)
Other universes/wormholes. I saw within [the] rock [at the edge of the universe] the creation, sustenance and the dissolution of the universe... I saw innumerable creations in the very many rocks that I found on the hill. In some of these creation was just beginning, others were populated by humans, still others were far ahead in the passage of their times. [6.2.86]
It's easy to interpret this as the idea of a multiverse (I don't know where he got the wormhole from). But this isn't exactly scientific fact: Physicists are still debating how useful and observable the idea of a multiverse can be, and even though the idea of wormholes connecting different universes might explain some stuff, but no wormholes have yet been observed. Indeed, to travel between universes is almost impossible for human beings. You can object that we haven't yet attained the knowledge that the ancients had, but then I say, they should've given the recipe for inter-universe or wormhole travel too, if they actually knew it (a la Contact).
You can also object that this may just be ancient science fiction. But I object. The presence of science is required for science fiction. I'll come back to this below in the "third way".
A second way to test if something is knowledge is to look for how people arrived at it. The ancients arrived at their philosophy through pure thought, it is claimed (by Raj). Now, although it might be claimed that I'm adopting a modern western viewpoint which is unfit here, I think that knowledge can only be ascertained through experiment. Even the General Theory of Relativity was philosophy until Eddington's legendary experiment in 1919. (Not totally, though. See below.) I find no evidence that the ancients tested, or could test, their "preliminary ideas of gravity" or even those of wormholes.
Besides, there is no evidence that they actually had mathematical equations to accompany their concepts. In the absence of such equations, concepts cannot graduate to knowledge, simply because they have no predictive power. In the spirit of thinking big, Indians came up with their grand conceptions, but they were not based upon reality neither were they tested to see if they agreed with it. They were concepts, pure and simple. They may have been accurate, and I do not claim that there aren't passages where the conceptions sound disturbingly modern, and I do not claim that this isn't a matter of chance. What I claim is, without mathematics and without experimentation, these concepts are philosophical constructs. Philosophy too aims for knowledge. It results in the birth of science. Indian Philosophy is deep and beautiful. But there was no effort made for it to be "true", in our modern scientific sense.
The third way is to analyse a philosophical system and look for where the concepts behind the statements. In Indian Philosophy, we do not find any reference to basic Quantum Mechanical ideas, or to the constancy of the speed of light, or to the spacetime ideas of general relativity. We do not find any reference to knowledge of the nucleus which corresponds to modern ideas; we find references to "worlds within the atoms". In the light of this, I claim, that we should classify the references to "A single projectile charged with all the power in the Universe", or to the multiverse ideas mentioned earlier, as philosophical fantasy, not science fiction. One cannot get to the concept of wormholes without having basic notions of GR. One cannot have nuclear weapons without knowing about the nucleus and its constituents.
I said earlier that I might be accused of taking a Western view when analysing Eastern philosophy, which I did. But common sense tells us that knowledge has to be compared with experience. It has to work. Almost by definition, it has to "be" out there. Science is a very complex process. Theories are built on top of each other. One cannot get to the peak without climbing the mountain, or without your ancestors having formed theories of aerodynamics which allowed you to built flying machines which operated on those experimentally verified principles, and allowed you to get to the peak. Einstein's GR was an accepted theory in the scientific world even before 1919 because it was a generalisation of the experimentally verified SR, and it reduced accurately to Newton in the sensible limit.
Exit: stage East
In conclusion, even if the Ancients had aquired their knowledge differently than experiment, the lack of mathematical expression for it, and the impossibility of putting the cart before the horse in science leads me to be a little skeptical when anyone classifies their philosophy are knowledge.
What about the Idea of God, which we began with? Disregarding the actual prevalent theological ideas in Ancient India (God, Demons, Heaven, Hell and Earth), even if we think of the Sages as thinking God was one with the universe, of him being above, beyond and in time and space, one can only speak of the God as a philosophical construct. Thus, even God in Hindu philosophy is subjective. (That said, not all philosophical constructs are subjective. But there is much more scope for differing concepts in Philosophy then in Science.)
By the way, if you came so far (without scrolling down quickly too much), you deserve a thanks.
18 February, 2009
Stuck in a shell
Physicsy poem... It mostly requires just a basic knowledge of atoms. I wrote it when I was bored in class. :)
Here it is...
Stuck in a shell
2n^2 - 1 electrons enjoying universality,
Were looking for a partner to complete orbitality,
They'd soon done a hole-in-one
A spin-down guy with mass 511
But they did not foresee reversal of parity!
"Oh crap," said one, "now our beloved shell,
Once bosonic, is under Fermi's spell.
To get back the fun,
One must transition,
But who it must be, how can we tell?"
"Life in a complete shell is anyway dull,
One of our number will thus, surely, cull."
And there was a bump,
As one tried to jump,
From this to the n+1 orbital.
But he came back, not losing any Joules,
And cried, "All of us, are silly fools!"
We are stuck with this n,
For if we jump, then,
We'll violate nature's selection rules!"
And they had learned to live with fight and bout,
When a photon came leapin' and knocked one out.
Here it is...
Stuck in a shell
2n^2 - 1 electrons enjoying universality,
Were looking for a partner to complete orbitality,
They'd soon done a hole-in-one
A spin-down guy with mass 511
But they did not foresee reversal of parity!
"Oh crap," said one, "now our beloved shell,
Once bosonic, is under Fermi's spell.
To get back the fun,
One must transition,
But who it must be, how can we tell?"
"Life in a complete shell is anyway dull,
One of our number will thus, surely, cull."
And there was a bump,
As one tried to jump,
From this to the n+1 orbital.
But he came back, not losing any Joules,
And cried, "All of us, are silly fools!"
We are stuck with this n,
For if we jump, then,
We'll violate nature's selection rules!"
And they had learned to live with fight and bout,
When a photon came leapin' and knocked one out.
- Anonick
N.B.: "Selection rules" are rules which forbid transitions between certain levels in atoms.
13 February, 2009
Limericks, again!
After a break of... I have stopped keeping count :( ... here are some lims I made up with Charmaine in a conversation a few days ago.
This needs context: Charmaine's status message was "speak only if you can entertain"... and limericks are the only way in which I can, really ;) ... so, here are the limericks that passed to and fro in the conversation:
there was a girl who, tongue-in-cheek
whenever bored, would entertainment seek
she told her friends
do make amends
and only if you can entertain, speak!
Me again (a quartet):
and now that you have, she spake
do keep me entertained, for heaven's sake
or stop wasting my precious time
and go away, offline, invisible, you slime!
Charmaine:
it's good i don't have to explain
you're only here to entartain
you're wasting my time
when you don't rhyme
and even then half the time you're so lame!
Me:
and now that I have to keep this up
I have to keep making up, making up
and the road I choose
to avoid the noose
is to use my cup to fill up my cup!
(ie, writing about writing to entertain, sigh, metaphor)
This needs context: Charmaine's status message was "speak only if you can entertain"... and limericks are the only way in which I can, really ;) ... so, here are the limericks that passed to and fro in the conversation:
there was a girl who, tongue-in-cheek
whenever bored, would entertainment seek
she told her friends
do make amends
and only if you can entertain, speak!
(some conversation)
Me again (a quartet):
and now that you have, she spake
do keep me entertained, for heaven's sake
or stop wasting my precious time
and go away, offline, invisible, you slime!
Charmaine:
it's good i don't have to explain
you're only here to entartain
you're wasting my time
when you don't rhyme
and even then half the time you're so lame!
Me:
and now that I have to keep this up
I have to keep making up, making up
and the road I choose
to avoid the noose
is to use my cup to fill up my cup!
(ie, writing about writing to entertain, sigh, metaphor)
(conversation, and then bye-byes...)
Tell me you liked them! :)
Tell me you liked them! :)
04 January, 2009
A Birthday Cake
Head over to Amar's to see the cake I cut at midnight on my birthday! It was a very special birthday, this (and not least because of the Einstein! :D ) .
17 December, 2008
'On Dentists': A Tribute to Jerome
Note: This essay is my tribute to the style and humour of Jerome K. Jerome, who is my favourite humourist. :) Do comment.
On Dentists
A lot is thought of dentists, mainly because they let you do nothing else while you are sitting on their couch and they are running a carpenter's workshop in your mouth. Sadly, not all that is thought is fit to be presented on paper, but I gather that dentists save the skin of our teeth, we ought to give them credit for atleast a few escapades we've all had in our young days.
I myself dislike dentists, but that's mainly because I don't take care of my teeth too much, and everyone hates an admonition. But I can't bear a toothache, and I have to run to one (a dentist, not a toothache) every time it starts paining so awfully.
“Oh, Mr. __, you see, you have two bad molars there.”
“Oh, is it?”
“Yes, and the plaque has gotten to your nerves there.”
“It sure has, Doc.”
“No, I mean... I mean, there are only two things you can do. You can have those teeth removed, or you can do a root canal operation on them.”
“What's a root canal?” The word is rather pornographic.
“It's a rather complicated procedure wherein we remove the nerves in your teeth, and...”
“Remove the nerves. Good riddance. I say, remove all of them in any teeth I have!”
I don't get the point of nerves in teeth, I don't. Why should a rock have nerves? Besides, all those little nerve-endings feel and pain and heat and cold. I don't know what the creator was thinking when he ordained that all teeth, tiny or big, molar or incisor, canine or human, should have those nerves in them. The only purpose they serve is letting us know when our tooth is in the final throes of it's existence.
And boy! Do they let us know? They could be subtle (the nerves, not the teeth), and maybe silently whisper in our ears to give tooth number this-and-this a decent burial. But no, they have to scream it in our head. You know how hard it is to concentrate when a beeper is going off? I once walked into a building where such a beeper was proclaiming the existence of what claimed to be a serious fire raging through the top floor and about to destroy the whole structure.
I knew of these things, and ignored the warning. But the guard who I walked up to was quite nervous and looked concerned, and there was pandemonium all round him.
“Is it a new alarm?” I asked him.
“Yes, sir, installed just four days prior.” He said beaming, while another gaurd tried to run behind him and got caught in his own legs.”
“Why is it wailing, the poor soul?” (The gaurd, not the alarm.)
“Oh, he joined just yesterday. He's not quite used to these things.” He answered as the guard got up and tried to jump over his head (Not his own head, you see, but that of the man I was talking to.)
“So, this isn't serious?” I screamed as I put the earplugs I gave in my ears.
“Oh, no Sir. If it were, this building would have burnt to the ground a thousand times over in the last four days.”
They are a real serious problem, these alarms. Our nerves could, if they wished, periodically sound an alarm to the brain, asking to to notice untoward behavious amongst the teeth. But to scream like that and try to put our brains on 24-hour tooth decay alerts. Gosh, those misbehaving nerves. I myself would be pleased with a set of plastic teeth any day instead of these bone-and-enamel ones we have gotten, if it weren't for the unfortunate fact that pulling a teeth our gives you the experience of what a concentration camp would be like.
It's quite painful, that moment where your teeth get pulled out. Or so I hear, because whenever my dentist presents the two options to me, I always go for the lesser evil of root canal. Put I hear that the lack of grace with which a dentist pulls out his teeth would make a carpenter shudder. They're regular carpenters, these dentists. I have been convinced that there is a carpentry class in every dentist colleges, with their miniature drills and little screws.
I was once on the dentist's couch while another patient was being treated by his assistant on another couch. My guy was pretty busy making holes in my teeth (which, by the by, he promised he would fill later), while all of a sudden, I heard a crash followed by a loud cry followed by the name of the lord uttered in vain enough times to make a pious man's heart explode. My guy ran to the other couch, and I heard bits of the conversation, the only printable one of them being: “Atleast now you know you don't need root canal, Mr. __ .” Then my dentist came back to me and told me that his assistant had slipped while drilling into a molar of Mr. __, and the drill was of no use anymore, it now having a tooth attached to it. I feel sorry for him, but Mr. __ finally calmed down and took the tooth home as a sovenier. My dentist afterwards assured me that accidents happen only rarely in dentist's clinics, and I believe it.
That is because dentists, I daresay, are also artists. The minute you open your mouth these skilled sculptors start looking for imperfections, blemishes, and proportions, and would love you to come again some other time and let them turn your 32-set into a marvel that would challenge the 32-piece chess sets of ancient Chinese emperors. The minute they begin drilling, you know that they are only trying to correct, modify and put away all the accumulated sins of your teeth, and give them a fine shape as they were they day they were born.
But they love to see a perfect model like any painter does. Hence, dear reader, let us brush and floss and mouthwash and brush once more, so that the next time you see your dentist, you'll not be the only one showing all your teeth.
On Dentists
A lot is thought of dentists, mainly because they let you do nothing else while you are sitting on their couch and they are running a carpenter's workshop in your mouth. Sadly, not all that is thought is fit to be presented on paper, but I gather that dentists save the skin of our teeth, we ought to give them credit for atleast a few escapades we've all had in our young days.
I myself dislike dentists, but that's mainly because I don't take care of my teeth too much, and everyone hates an admonition. But I can't bear a toothache, and I have to run to one (a dentist, not a toothache) every time it starts paining so awfully.
“Oh, Mr. __, you see, you have two bad molars there.”
“Oh, is it?”
“Yes, and the plaque has gotten to your nerves there.”
“It sure has, Doc.”
“No, I mean... I mean, there are only two things you can do. You can have those teeth removed, or you can do a root canal operation on them.”
“What's a root canal?” The word is rather pornographic.
“It's a rather complicated procedure wherein we remove the nerves in your teeth, and...”
“Remove the nerves. Good riddance. I say, remove all of them in any teeth I have!”
I don't get the point of nerves in teeth, I don't. Why should a rock have nerves? Besides, all those little nerve-endings feel and pain and heat and cold. I don't know what the creator was thinking when he ordained that all teeth, tiny or big, molar or incisor, canine or human, should have those nerves in them. The only purpose they serve is letting us know when our tooth is in the final throes of it's existence.
And boy! Do they let us know? They could be subtle (the nerves, not the teeth), and maybe silently whisper in our ears to give tooth number this-and-this a decent burial. But no, they have to scream it in our head. You know how hard it is to concentrate when a beeper is going off? I once walked into a building where such a beeper was proclaiming the existence of what claimed to be a serious fire raging through the top floor and about to destroy the whole structure.
I knew of these things, and ignored the warning. But the guard who I walked up to was quite nervous and looked concerned, and there was pandemonium all round him.
“Is it a new alarm?” I asked him.
“Yes, sir, installed just four days prior.” He said beaming, while another gaurd tried to run behind him and got caught in his own legs.”
“Why is it wailing, the poor soul?” (The gaurd, not the alarm.)
“Oh, he joined just yesterday. He's not quite used to these things.” He answered as the guard got up and tried to jump over his head (Not his own head, you see, but that of the man I was talking to.)
“So, this isn't serious?” I screamed as I put the earplugs I gave in my ears.
“Oh, no Sir. If it were, this building would have burnt to the ground a thousand times over in the last four days.”
They are a real serious problem, these alarms. Our nerves could, if they wished, periodically sound an alarm to the brain, asking to to notice untoward behavious amongst the teeth. But to scream like that and try to put our brains on 24-hour tooth decay alerts. Gosh, those misbehaving nerves. I myself would be pleased with a set of plastic teeth any day instead of these bone-and-enamel ones we have gotten, if it weren't for the unfortunate fact that pulling a teeth our gives you the experience of what a concentration camp would be like.
It's quite painful, that moment where your teeth get pulled out. Or so I hear, because whenever my dentist presents the two options to me, I always go for the lesser evil of root canal. Put I hear that the lack of grace with which a dentist pulls out his teeth would make a carpenter shudder. They're regular carpenters, these dentists. I have been convinced that there is a carpentry class in every dentist colleges, with their miniature drills and little screws.
I was once on the dentist's couch while another patient was being treated by his assistant on another couch. My guy was pretty busy making holes in my teeth (which, by the by, he promised he would fill later), while all of a sudden, I heard a crash followed by a loud cry followed by the name of the lord uttered in vain enough times to make a pious man's heart explode. My guy ran to the other couch, and I heard bits of the conversation, the only printable one of them being: “Atleast now you know you don't need root canal, Mr. __ .” Then my dentist came back to me and told me that his assistant had slipped while drilling into a molar of Mr. __, and the drill was of no use anymore, it now having a tooth attached to it. I feel sorry for him, but Mr. __ finally calmed down and took the tooth home as a sovenier. My dentist afterwards assured me that accidents happen only rarely in dentist's clinics, and I believe it.
That is because dentists, I daresay, are also artists. The minute you open your mouth these skilled sculptors start looking for imperfections, blemishes, and proportions, and would love you to come again some other time and let them turn your 32-set into a marvel that would challenge the 32-piece chess sets of ancient Chinese emperors. The minute they begin drilling, you know that they are only trying to correct, modify and put away all the accumulated sins of your teeth, and give them a fine shape as they were they day they were born.
But they love to see a perfect model like any painter does. Hence, dear reader, let us brush and floss and mouthwash and brush once more, so that the next time you see your dentist, you'll not be the only one showing all your teeth.
08 December, 2008
Iambic Limericks
I basically wrote these to practice the iambic pentameter (my regular readers will know that I don't know any metre... but I'm learning, learning, from Stephen's Fry witty and awesome "The Ode Less Travelled".)
(The middle two lines will, of course, be iambic trimeter.)
(And, I know normal limericks don't use iambs.These are just for practice. :) )
There was a clever girl from Kentucky
But ending with line two is not lucky
I write three more of them
Her name begins with M
I never knew more, she was too plucky!
My love, like light, but slow, descends on me
But I, nerdy, start feeling too physicsy
It does not slow, the light
Has constant time for flight
Be one too drunk, frenzied, despo or sexy!
I knew a potter living in a street
He'd make his pots with newly washen feet
But soon numerous fans
Discovered that ol' Hans
Often made them, employing both the hands!
The third one uses a phyrric substitution, and has an aabbb scheme... I know! ;)
Tell me if you like them! I'm writing lims after a loooong time! :D
(The middle two lines will, of course, be iambic trimeter.)
(And, I know normal limericks don't use iambs.These are just for practice. :) )
There was a clever girl from Kentucky
But ending with line two is not lucky
I write three more of them
Her name begins with M
I never knew more, she was too plucky!
My love, like light, but slow, descends on me
But I, nerdy, start feeling too physicsy
It does not slow, the light
Has constant time for flight
Be one too drunk, frenzied, despo or sexy!
I knew a potter living in a street
He'd make his pots with newly washen feet
But soon numerous fans
Discovered that ol' Hans
Often made them, employing both the hands!
The third one uses a phyrric substitution, and has an aabbb scheme... I know! ;)
Tell me if you like them! I'm writing lims after a loooong time! :D
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