balancing life

Travel writing

2011-08-10T18:16:00.001-07:00

Not quite a return to blogging just as yet, but here is a recent travel article I wrote for Mint:

A slice of Americana

What’s next, Balancing Life?

2010-09-06T09:32:00.000-07:00

I started blogging five years ago without knowing what blogging was. This blog started as a place where I could put up essays I wrote about various topics that interested me, and I hoped that some of them would be read, and I would get some comments and feedback that would help me clarify my own thoughts. But the experience has been way more enriching than I had ever imagined it would be. It has helped me develop my writing skills, improved my ability to think cogently and write concisely, and helped me explore complex topics. Often, diverse and contrasting opinions on the same topic have helped me reshape my own views. This blog has also strengthened my passion for writing about the various sciences, particularly about the natural world. It has been a fun ride. But I haven’t written anything on this blog for a couple of months. That’s not because I don’t have anything to write, but because I think the blog has served its purpose well. Now I’m left with the “what next” question. I don’t know the answer to that, and am still thinking about it.

The blog and its archives will remain here. And at some point of time I’ll probably start writing essays and articles on this blog again. Till then, sign up for email updates (top right side bar), and you’ll know when I start writing again. Thanks for all the fish.

On Cretaceous beds, dinosaur fossils, the formation of the Indian subcontinent and geology in India

2010-04-17T13:08:00.000-07:00

Some weeks ago I had a wonderful discussion with Suvrat, who has rapidly uplifted the quality of discussion on geological/earth sciences, paleontology, evolution and whatnot. My own interest in the geological sciences came through an interest in paleontology which comes from a serious interest in and study of evolution. So it is an absolute pleasure to discuss "naive" questions on geology, different type of deposits and beds and fossils with someone who actually knows what he is talking about, and Suvrat is exactly that. For my simple (and sometimes simplistic) questions, Suvrat patiently wrote back in magnificent detail explaining and clarifying broad questions in geology (and research in those areas in India), filling his answers with personal perspective. I thought snippets of the whole thread would be of significant interest to readers of this blog who cannot but have been fascinated by dinosaurs and moving continental plates and changing worlds.

The discussion started when I wrote to him about this discovery of some fossils in India, which showed a prehistoric snake devouring dinosaur eggs. A spectacular finding, it gave a new perspective on snakes millions of years old, and how they evolved over time. Now, the fossils were discovered in Gujarat, in what are called the Lameta Formation beds. These beds were formed over 67 million years ago, in the late Cretaceous era, amongst the oldest such formations still around in south Asia. I knew nothing about this region itself, and in general the state of paleontology and geology in India and other parts of South Asia, and this piqued my interest so I asked Suvrat:

".....are there any parts of south Asia where they've found fossils and deposits from Paleozoic (particularly Cambrian) or even Precambrian eras? I'm guessing, particularly because of the climate (and geology) it might be hard to find remains and fossils from those eras. But is there anything like the Burgess shale in south Asia?........also, parts of China and Mongolia have yielded spectacular remains of Cretaceous as well as Cenozoic stuff. Do you think parts of south Asia (like the Lameta beds) might hold some treasures like those parts? Finds from here might help piece together evolutionary bits, particularly since the Indian subcontinent split off from Gondwanaland somewhere in the mid Cretaceous. So presumably (and if you're very lucky) you could find some really interesting fossils and look and see how they compare with fossils on either side of Gondwanaland and Laurasia, and stuff in between. What do you think?"

To this Suvrat patiently came up with a beautiful bite-sized "dummies" post about Cambrian and pre-Cambrian sediments in India:

".....Throughout much of the Paleozoic the Peninsular Indian continent was part of Gondwanaland, surrounded by what would become Antarctica, Australia, Africa. So there were no marine incursions and no marine sediments were deposited. So (there is) no chance of a Burgess type deposit in S. Asia. There is Cambrian sediment northwards in the Himalayas but that is crumpled and metamorphosed, so if it did contain exceptional fossil beds like Burgess, they have been destroyed.

There is plenty of Precambrian sediment all over the Indian continent. The most promising for animal fossils is the Vindhyan basin. There is Proterozoic sediment there but the Neo-Proterozoic where early animal evolution unfolded is not very well represented and has not yielded too much in terms of animal body fossils. Some tracks and trails have been found but their significance is debated. So there is some scope for further surprises there. This post give a flavor of the controversies regarding the Vindhyans.

As Gondwanaland began to split up the eastern margin of the future Indian continent rifted earlier. Here continental interior basins developed filled by fluvial sediments (a lot of India's coal is from these basins). These contain abundant plant fossils which have Gondwanaland affinities i.e. they are similar to ones found in Antarctica and Australia. So the plant fossil record does tell us about this ancient geography and evolutionary relationships of floral groups. Later the western margin of the Indian continent rifted from Africa and marine basins developed in Rajasthan, Gujarat and M.P. There is a thick Jurassic marine fill and thinner Cretaceous marine sediment. There is Cretaceous sediment is south India on the eastern margin. These deposits have been studied quite extensively and their fossil record is being studied as part of the larger paleo-geographic framework."

Coming to the spectacular fossil finds in Gujarat that the paper discusses Suvrat continues "...the Lameta are mostly marginal marine and terrestrial deposits ...the last stage of deposition in western India before the Deccan volcanism. Being terrestrial deposits the fossil record is not as rich as marine sediments since the chances of fossils getting destroyed in terrestrial settings is higher. However as the recent find shows, freakish events like mudslides, floods, river banks caving in and so on can preserve spectacular examples. So while the background rate of fossil preservation is not that good, there is always a chance of a catastrophic event entombing entire horizons.

In a sense we are lucky to have the Lameta at all. These deposits are quite thin, just a few meters of so and would have surely been completely eroded away by now. But the Deccan volcanics over much of Cenozoic have encased them in a protective shell and saved them from destruction. So a Chinese basin type preservation (in the Lameta) is not out of the question. We need to conserve whatever good localities are available for further study. "

His last lines were obviously a red flag for more questions from the ever curious and persistent schoolboy (me). So I asked:
"...........Is anything like that ever likely to happen in India? For all its faults in other spheres, China has done spectacularly not only to preserve its fabulously rich geological basins (which are fossil treasure troves), and has also developed a strong community of Chinese paleontologists and geologists who are making some spectacular contributions to science. Paleontology or geology are hardly significant professions for anyone in India.....it is a "no scope" profession. Similarly, there are so many sites in the US (from the badlands in the Dakotas all the way down south to sites in Oklahoma and Texas) that have not only been reasonably well preserved, but where American geologists and paleontologists have been given unrestricted access and lots of funding to carry out their research. I'm pretty sure a researcher in India will struggle to carry out any field trips in these fields, and the Indian government can sometimes make it very difficult for foreign scientists to carry out field research in India (for various reasons). So how do you see things in India, and where do you see things going towards?"

Suvrat comes up with even more perspective, and ends on an optimistic note:
"........Over in India we have strong social pressures to take up Medicine, Engineering, MBA ...but not pure science and certainly geology ranks lower in the sciences as well. China probably has suffered less of that historically and so plenty of really bright Chinese students take up geology and the result combined with adequate government support is the world class research coming out of their labs. There may be another economic angle to this. Historically, salaries in China were more equitable across all professions (that has changed recently) ..and so a doctor in practice probably did not make that much more than a geologist teaching at a State Univ. In India there always have been great differences in income, based on profession. Geology jobs for long until recent were with the government and salaries modest. On the other hand a doctor or a lawyer or a MBA always made more money. I wrote a post sometime back speculating why Bengali geologists published more in top class research journals in sedimentary geology than other ethnicities in India, outlining some of these issues."

But then there is the key question of site preservation. Most of us know how abysmally historic sites are protected in India. Geologically/Paleontologically spectacular sites unfortunately aren't necessarily breathtakingly beautiful forests or mountains, but are often what look like "waste/fallow land". Secondly, there is a massive construction boom in India which demands both land and material (for bricks, stone etc). All of this obviously encroaches on these lands. Here is Suvrat's perspective on those sites in India:

".....those kinds of geology parks do exist in India but enforcement is non -existent. I have had two bad experiences. One in Jabalpur, coincidentally in the Lameta beds. That was during college a couple of decades ago and the outcrop already showed signs of being worn away by human activities and the threat of encroachment from slums. The second is at Gilbert Hill (Andheri) Mumbai which is a great example of columnar jointing in basalts but also is the de-facto toilet of the surrounding slums. Both sites are officially geology heritage sites but neglected. Recently there was a report on how Jurassic rocks containing fossils from the Rajmahal hills in Jharkhand are being used for construction purposes despite pleas from geologists for protecting at least part of the site. So that awareness and political clout to protect these sites as national monuments and for science just does not exist in India for now." Think about that. A magnificent and rare geological formation right in the middle of Mumbai, which, with some vision could be made into a national monument type public park! But even before that happens, the site may be lost for ever by a city with a voracious appetite.

But Suvrat ends with on an optimistic note. " ..........the good news is that geology salaries are going up. A lot of private companies in mining and petroleum are setting up shop and geologists make a good income both in production and in R and D. Add to that because of environmental concerns and groundwater in particular the need for good geology expertise is being recognized. So "saving the earth" or "save India from climate change" may be a good theme to use to educate people about the importance of geology and chip away at the age old social reluctance to see geology as a top profession and encourage bright young students to pursue it as a career."

I share some of Suvrat's optimism in that private stake holders (including big oil) have made some spectacular finds in geology, and have often worked to protect it. But will it happen in India, or will those geological and paleontological scientific treasures be lost even before they are found and studied?

Eating high fructose corn syrup makes Yogi bear.......

2010-04-01T20:52:00.000-07:00

.......fatter than the average bear.

Apologies for that awful title that I couldn't resist.

If you are fond of sweets, chocolates, candy, cookies and ice cream, and have ever read the label for the ingredients, you must have noticed one of them, called high fructose corn syrup (HFCS). You might have wondered about it a little, or just thought that fructose is sweet like glucose, and gone on with your indulgence. HFCS has now largely replaced table sugar (or sucrose) as the main sweetener in most confectioneries sold in most stores. A huge reason for this has been the easy availability of the vast quantities of corn grown in the US, from which high fructose corn syrup is extracted, making it cheaper than sucrose. While there has been speculation for a while (and increasing correlative data) suggesting that HFCS may increase obesity or other health problems related to sugar, much of this has been decried by the food industry.

However, the data is slowly shifting towards the adverse health effects of HFCS. A recent paper in Pharmacology Biochemistry and behavior (Bocarsly et al, http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.pbb.2010.02.012) now suggests that HFCS causes the characteristics of obesity, from increases in body weight to increased triglycerides in the blood.

Let's take a look at what this study shows.

The researchers studied the effects of HFCS in captive rats. Their experiments were simple. They fed groups male or female rats, either normal rat chow, or rat food mixed with sucrose (sugar), or rat food mixed with equal amounts (and calories) of HFCS (and each sample size was ten rats). They varied their experiment so that the rats could eat HFCS with every meal, or HFCS was provided only for 12 hours during the day. They carried out these studies over a short time frame (two months) as well as a longer time frame (6 months). Here is the rationale behind this experiment. The experiment not only tested if HFCS could cause increase in weight, but compared it directly with consuming table sugar, sucrose. Now sucrose is a compound that is made of one molecule of glucose and one molecule of fructose. So when sucrose is broken down, it breaks down to fructose and glucose. Secondly, the process by which glucose and fructose are broken down are similar, and the amount of energy they each can release is the same. HFCS has around 55% fructose and 45% glucose. So the food industry has always claimed that using sucrose, or using an equivalent amount of fructose would be biologically very similar. However, when rats were fed either regular food, or food + sucrose, or food + HFCS, the results were quite different.

Here is what the experiment unambiguously revealed.

The male rats fed HCFS gained more weight than mice fed with regular chow or chow supplemented with sugar even over a two month period. Over a six month period, this weight gain in male rats was very significant when compared with rats eating regular chow. In male rats, after 6 months of these diets, the rats on HFCS weighed on average a 100g more than rats fed on regular food. Female rats also gained weight eating HFCS, but at a lower rate than males. After a 7 month duration on these diets, the rats fed with normal food weighed 177% over baseline. However, the rats with continuous access to HFCS were ~200% heavier than baseline. There were a few other interesting observations, indicative of the effects of HFCS on obesity. In both male and female rats, the increase in body weight was accompanied by an increase in actual abdominal body fat, as well as increased triglycerides. So if the same effects hold for humans, the weight gain would primarily be around the abdominal region.

There remain some limitations in this study. The dramatic increases in body weight as well as abdominal fat was observed in rats that had food + HFCS available continuously. In female rats that had access to HFCS only for 12 hours during the day (for a long duration) did not show those dramatic weight increases. However, male rats even with controlled access to HFCS showed this increase in abdominal fat accumulation. Since we care about human consumption of HFCS, does human consumption of HFCS reflect tightly controlled access to it, or a constant availability of HFCS with any meal? Secondly, there will be some differences in the rates of metabolism of glucose and fructose between humans and rats. However, the broad processes of absorption and breakdown of these nutrients are very similar in us and in rats, so it is quite likely that this general phenomenon will hold true in humans. But doing these experiments in humans (where a long term study could be five or ten years) would be extremely difficult to control. Secondly, the experiments were done in rats kept in cages in a laboratory. One could argue that there is clearly nothing in common between laboratory rats and humans. These rats exercise very little and are largely sedentary. They don't run around as much as they should, are already somewhat obese even before feeding on HFCS, and have fairly unlimited access to food and can eat whenever they want to, and as much as they want to in one sitting. Surely that can't be the way humans live. Oh but wait a minute!

The authors in their discussion speculate on why HFCS might cause increased body weight gain when compared to regular food or even food supplemented with an equivalent amount of sucrose, but their discussion only briefly touches on aspects of sugar metabolism that could explain this. So I'll elaborate a little more, and add some of my own speculation based on how these sugars are metabolized. In short, it all comes down to the body's way to regulate sugar levels, sense how much is there, and feedback to control the effects of these sugars.

Firstly, glucose and fructose are absorbed very differently. Glucose is absorbed early in the small intestine, while fructose is absorbed later. But the big difference comes in how and where the two sugars, as well as sucrose itself are metabolized. Sucrose has to be broken down in the stomach into glucose and fructose before it can be used. Glucose can be used by just about every cell in the body through a process called glycolysis, to break it down into usable energy. The process of glucose breakdown is a very tightly regulated process called glycolysis. In this process, a key regulatory step happens when glucose is converted to another sugar called fructose-6-phosphate, and then to another sugar called fructose-1,6-bisphosphate, which is then broken down into triglycerides and then energy. Now, the enzyme that does this conversion to fructose-1,6-bisphosphate is called phosphofructokinase and it is highly and exquisitely regulated by multiple inputs, including other co-factors as well as other modifications. This allows the cell to tightly and precisely control how much glucose is broken down. Fructose however is broken down not in all cells but largely only in the liver through a process called fructolysis. Here, instead of fructose being converted to fructose-6-phosphate, and then being tighly regulated in its conversion to 1,6-bisphosphate and later triglycerides, it is converted into a similar (but biologically very different) sugar called fructose-1-phosphate. This small change in the position of that single phosphate group makes a huge difference biologically, since the breakdown of this sugar into triglycerides happens very quickly and easily, and is not tightly controlled by many inputs. The result of this is that fructose is very rapidly and easily broken down into triglycerides which can then be used for energy, or be converted into glycogen or fats for storage. While the eventual outcome of glucose and fructose is similar, the way the two are regulated and controlled is very different. In other words, the body has much more control over how fast glucose is broken down, but far less control over fructose breaking down.

So this phenomenon, combined with the fact that HFCS has over 55% fructose, and 45% glucose means that the body is dealing with a much higher ratio of fructose to glucose when compared with just plain old table sugar (sucrose). The difference is small over a few meals, but over a long period of time, this adds up to quite a lot. Also, what this difference in circulating glucose (that is regulated and not tightly broken down) does is change the way the body responds to feeding. Glucose controls insulin release, which in turn controls a hormone called leptin, which controls apetite and satiety in the brain. Now, this small but continuous difference in fructose/glucose ratios (comparing HFCS to sucrose) alters how much circulating glucose remains in the blood, which can alter leptin levels as well as leptin sensitivity, and this finally alters the brain's ability to be satiated after a meal. Over time, HFCS could change the satiety achieved by eating, and also finally alter eating patterns. All this put together could cause the increase in body weight seen over time.

Of course, there will be people unsatisfied with these data. But the data is suggestive, and this idea is compelling.

Miriam E. Bocarslya, Elyse S. Powella, , Nicole M. Avenaa, and Bartley G. Hoebel (2010).
High-fructose corn syrup causes characteristics of obesity in rats: Increased body weight, body fat and triglyceride levels Pharmacology Biochemistry and Behavior

Some changes

2010-03-30T17:31:00.001-07:00

....expect quite a few changes in this blog over the next few days/weeks.

How buying “local” produce can have a very high carbon footprint….

2010-03-29T16:20:00.000-07:00

.....and other such thoughts.

Buying “local” food and supporting local farmers and their local produce is one bullet point mantra often touted to be far more sustainable than buying food at a supermarket that belongs to a big company. The main claim for this is that local produce has very low transport costs (from the farm near by to the market), so the carbon footprint for this produce is extremely low. This then would mean that it is far less energy consuming and in the long term far more sustainable.

For a while I thought this was a compelling argument, and sometimes pondered over how guilty I should feel for not heading out to the local farmer’s market to buy “local” produce. But then, ever the skeptic, I decided to actually see if this was true.

First of all, at least in most of the US, local food now means food grown not necessarily 10 miles from the city, but within the state. Obviously, there are many cities near which there is no significant farming/agricultural land growing wheat, corn, fruit and vegetables. While Dallas does have farms a hundred miles or so from it, “local” predominantly means within the state of Texas. But since Texas is almost three times the size of France with most of the population in the four large urban centers (Dallas-Fortworth, Houston, San Antonio and Austin) it is very likely that a significant portion of the “local” food is being trucked across hundreds of miles from various rural, agricultural parts of the state to the cities. So that immediately weakens the distance and high energy consumption argument.

But could it still be possible for me to be more energy efficient (and our food more sustainable) if I shopped at a farmers market and not at a supermarket chain? Here is what some simple but rigorous calculations suggest:

Dallas has a lovely farmers market as well as other stores that sell local produce extensively. All of them are located around 8-10 miles from home. So a return trip is about 20 miles by car, through significant traffic. In addition, these stores only sell produce, so if I need a toothbrush or soap or any other daily use produce, I need to head out to a pharmacy or a general store to buy it. So if I get my food from a farmers market my gas consumption will be about gallon of gas a week (or over 50 gallons of gas a year). It also is a significant investment of my time.

In contrast, we live about 500 yards from a supermarket owned by Safeway/Tom Thumb, which is at the end of the street our house is in. It is the typical big American supermarket which sells everything from food and produce to kitchen towels and brooms. In our case, shopping is done on the way back from work without any detour, and on occasion I walk down to the store to pick up stuff. The total extra annual gas consumption for our shopping is zero gallons. In addition, it also saves a lot of time during the week since there is no need to make additional shopping trips for items of daily use that is not food or produce.

All of this only considers individual energy consumption (which can be quite significant), and does not go into the significant energy efficiencies brought about by economies of scale achieved by larger supermarket chains.

There is tremendous value in local food and local crops, and there should be a significant space for it. But even a simple hard look suggests that it is not necessarily a more “sustainable” and energy efficient method of food production. The more I research these issues (and those around “slow food”), the more it seems like they are largely seductive rants against corporations and globalization. Where there remains much value in these ideas, and they should be encouraged, they will not meet any rigorous analysis of sustainability and energy efficiency unless one uses similar eyewash metrics that large, inefficient corporations use.

(For a fascinating and rigorous information on a host of these issues, Just Food is an excellent read).

Revisiting “Inherit the wind”

2010-02-20T12:09:00.000-08:00

Stanley Kramer made “Inherit the wind” way back in 1960. It is remarkable that the movie remains as relevant and powerful today as it was back then. “Inherit the wind” was an adaptation of a play by the same name that was a parable of the famous Scopes “monkey” trial , and when it was made in 1960 also became a critique of McCarthyism. As the old quote goes, the more things change, the more things remain the same.

“Inherit the wind” was a thinly veiled fictionalization of the Scopes trial, a case in 1925 that tested the Butler act which prohibited the teaching of the theory of evolution, or any theory that denied creation as told in the Bible in schools. John Scopes, a high school teacher in Tennessee, was charged with teaching evolution in schools, and put on trial. It became a battleground between fundamentalists who believed in an absolute and literal version of the bible, and modernists, reformers and thinkers; people like Spencer Tracy’s fictional Henry Drummond (based on the real life Clarence Darrow) who thought that an idea was bigger than any monument man could build.

Watching “Inherit the wind” today, fifty years after it was made; one is struck by both the power of the screenplay and story, as well as the ability of the director to confront a serious issue head on, with no punches spared. The Scopes trial itself was fought by two of the best lawyers and orators in America at that time, three time presidential candidate and staunch Presbyterian, William Jennings Bryan, who prosecuted, and Darrow, who fought for the defense of Scope. In Kramer’s movie, Durrow becomes Spencer Tracy’s Henry Drummond, and Fredric March’s Matthew Brady is strongly based on Bryan. The first few scenes of the movie suggest for a few moments that the characters will all be painted with a broad brush of stereotypes, with Brady entering the town to rousing chants of “some old time religion”. But everything changes once Drummond appears on screen, and the entry into the courtroom. The sheer ferocity of the courtroom drama and the power of each argument make you forget those early moments of awkwardness, and suck you right into the battle. The sequences of incidents in court that lead Drummond to utter frustration in the courtroom are built brilliantly. First Drummond is not allowed to call upon any experts in anatomy or geology, anthropology, archeology or astronomy, with his pleas being dismissed as “irrelevant” to the case. The case was about trying Cates (the character based on Scopes) for teaching evolution, which was against the law. It was as simple as that. Nor was Drummond allowed to read out passages from “The origin of species”, even as Brady proudly declares that he has not read the origin, and has no need to read any work of paganism and the work of Satan. Drummond’s moments of frustration can only be described as masterly. Finally, Drummond has to fight the case using the Bible itself as the sole reference.

Putting Brady on the witness box, Drummond systematically hammers away at passages from the Bible, which if taken literally can only be absurd. If the earth was created in seven days, asks Drummond, and the sun and the moon and stars were only created on the fifth day, then before the fifth “day”, what would a day be? Would it just be a day, or a year, or a million years? To these and other pointed thrusts, Brady remains unperturbed, and only remarks that he did not think about it, because the Bible didn’t talk about it. Drummond leaps upon this point and says that it is precisely the problem, that people here did not think, and the only person who thought about it and talked about it has been put on trial, only for his “right to think”. As Drummond builds his argument, and the single minded fanatism of Brady (and the townsfolk) comes more into prominence, Tracy’s firm, crisp voice almost seems like a thunderous shout as he says fanatism and ignorance always remain busy and need feeding. The entire movie is a masterpiece of courtroom drama, with actors and script rising spectacularly above the merely good to elevate this movie towards true brilliance.

Even between these extended periods of stupendous drama from Drummond and Brady, there are little moments to cherish. When Mrs. Brady is confronted by Rachel Brown, the torn, tormented fiancé of Cates, on why her husband, who Cates trusted and confided in, twisted her words in court to make Cates appear diabolically evil, Mrs. Brady snaps back that at least she believes in her husband, and believes in something, and that makes it her basis for living. What did Rachel believe in? And could she stand for anything at all? In another lull between courtroom storms, Drummond and Brady spend an evening chatting about old times, and Brady asks Drummond why they moved so far apart, and Drummond responds that perhaps Brady had just stood still while he himself had continued to move forward. And while having dinner with Mrs. Brady, Drummond says that he would still perhaps have voted for Brady for president, but if Brady did indeed become president, he would have been his loudest opponent shouting from the opposition bench. The contradictions and complexities of human emotions stand out between, during and within the intense moments in the courtroom.

And then there is Gene Kelly, as the caustic “Baltimore Herald” reporter E.K. Hornbeck, who covers the case, and whose newspaper pays the entire cost of the defense as well as Drummond’s expenses. His character is a throw back to a time when journalists still had names with two initials (are there any left today other than A.O. Scott?), who fought with their words as if they were bare-knuckled fighters, who confronted issues head on, and cowered before no one. Cynical, terse and sarcastic. In a last scene with Drummond, Drummond snaps back at Hornbeck’s cynicism, saying he would die alone, and that no body would mourn for him or appear at his funeral. Hornbeck smiles and says he knows that even if no one came, Drummond would be there, and would fight to the last for his right to be alone. The right to think, the right to speak, the right to question authority, and to stand for the truth. All powerful ideas, yet ideas that have shaped this nation unlike any others.

In the very last scene, we are left with Drummond picking up his copy of “The origin of species”, and then the Bible, smiling, and clasping them together. What does he mean by that? Is it a reconciliation or a preparation for battles to come?

The adventures of Ibn Batutua

2010-02-12T12:42:00.000-08:00

"Ibn-e-batuta ta ta
Bagal mein joota ta ta
Pehne to karta hai churrr"

Through those lyrics from Ishqiya, Gulzaar's zany mind conjures up an improbable road song, full of carefree spirit and an imagery of freedom and lust for travel. Yet who was Ibn-batuta, what was his story, and why is he remembered even today (at least by a few) in distant India?

Now somewhat forgotten by history, Ibn-batuta might well have been one of the greatest travelers of all time. A few years before Marco Polo set off on his memorable voyage to Cathay, Ibn-Batuta, born in Morocco in the then backwater trading town of Tangier, set upon a voyage which took him almost his entire life, and by the end of which he had travelled across north Africa and Asia all the way to China and back. A staggering distance, more than twice that of what Marco Polo accomplished, and all because he wanted to see all places on earth that comprised of "dar-ul-Islam", the lands where Islam had spread and where Islamic law took prominence. At the end of his journey the ruler of Morocco told him to write the story of his travels to the very ends of the earth, in the form of the classic travel chronicle of the time in Arabic, the Rihla. And the result is a rollicking adventure across the lands that were the richest and most prosperous in the world at that time, in the early 14th century.

While his story remained unknown to the west until the last couple of centuries, his rihla had been widely read in the wider "Islamic world" which covered most of Asia. Since then, translations into English and French brought his story to the west. Reading Ross E. Dunn's version of Ibn-Batuta however puts his story into marvellous perspective. Dunn uses his considerable knowledge of medieval Islamic civilizations across the world to describe the Sindbad like adventures of Ibn-Batuta, while simultaneously describing the conflicts, rulers and political climate of the time in the various lands travelled by Batuta. Through the story of Ibn-batuta Dunn is able to describe how even very diverse lands would have been easily traversible by a muslim of learning. Ibn-Batuta was an educated muslim, trained from childhood in arabic, Islamic law, religion and practice. So when Ibn-Batuta set off on his first journey (ostensibly to perform his "haj", his pilgrimage to Mecca), his knowledge of Arabic and the quran alone would have sufficed for him to be sure to be welcomed (or at least offered shelter) in all the lands he travelled through. Yet, the time of his journey was also one of the most remarkable times in human history. A few centuries earlier Islam had spread rapidly, through both trade and the sword, across Asia, North Africa and a large part of Europe. This was partly because the Arabs were intrepid travellers and traders, and sat right at the middle of a great trade network that connected Europe from ancient times to the wealth of India and China. The Arabs ruled both the land (through their horse and camel caravans) and sea routes (with dhows that plied across the Indian ocean and Arabian sea). Yet, at that time, various events had taken place to make the world a place of great innovation, trade and prosperity as well as political turmoil. The Al-mohads had lost their hold on Spain and Iberia (al-Andalus), and the caliphate had collapsed. In Asia, the hurricane-like forces of Genghis Khan and his vast Turko-mongol armies had swept down the central Asian steppes and overrun the lands of the Khwarizm, Babylon and Persia. After his death, Genghis' descendants squabbled (while still ostensibly under a great Khan), and the empire split into many smaller pieces. Many of these, in Central Asia, came under the strong Persian and Arabic influences, and under these influences converted to Islam. Meanwhile the Mamluks remained strong in Egypt and parts of Arabia and held off the mongols, so while Baghdad had been destroyed by the mongols, Cairo and Damascus and Shiraz remained (and grew) as great centers of Islamic learning. With the fall of Islamic Spain, muslim scholars and men (women, unfortunately, got the short end of the straw in those days) came to these cities, helping their growth as vibrant places of culture. At this same time, the great trading cultures of Venice, Genoa, Florence and what was left of the Byzantine kingdom sent fleets across the Mediterranean, and central Asia, the heart of Islam, became the great melting pot of people and ideas. And finally, even though there were so many kingdoms, it was a rare time of relative peace. The Mongols were still somewhat united under the great Khan, they had made peace with the Mamluk rulers of Egypt, Arabia and Syria, the mongol invasion had made peace possible between Christian Europe and the muslim Arabs, and India itself was largely united under the new Islamic Delhi Sultanate. It was across these lands that Ibn-batuta travelled.

Of course, Batuta dictated his rihla when he was old, at the end of his travels, so some of his dates are slightly off, or the precise place where he met certain people of that time a little skewed. Yet, his accounts remain amongst the best and most descriptive of all the lands he traversed through at that time. Batuta perhaps did start out only to complete his haj, but as he went from what was then a provincial town (Tangier) into the magnificent metropolis that was Cairo (perhaps the largest city in the world then), and then Damascus and into Persia, there was no stopping his wanderlust. For a man of some learning, these places were the wonders of the world. Ibn-Batuta was also an odd mix of scholar, pilgrim, muslim puritan, sufi believer, curious traveller, rogue, yet person of the pleasures of the world. Thus, his descriptions contain an amusing, sometimes conflicting mixture of all these attributes. Yet what made him such a great traveller was undoubtedly what must have been an engaging and friendly personality. He made friends, often with eminent people of the region, with ease. And while imagining himself to be very proper and correct, Batuta appeared to have an extraordinary ability to flatter persons of importance, who were often so pleased with him that they showered him with generous gifts. Through his traveling acquaintances, he was also able to meet most of the rulers of the realms he passed through. And with each subsequent destination, his renown as a great traveller increased, thereby enabling him to command even greater respect. An indication of his abilities particularly with flattery is seen even in his rihla, when the ruler of Morocco asked him to name the great kings of the time. Without blinking an eyelid, Batuta clubbed the relatively minor kingdom of Morocco with the great kingdom of the Mamluks in Egypt and Syria, and the grand Sultanate of Delhi and the Khanate of Mongol China. Similarly, when he met the Chagatai ruler (then one of the smaller Mongol Ilkhanates), he told him that all these kings were equally great, and all were magnificent, earning himself great rewards.

Through his version of Ibn-Batuta's tale, Ross points out that though Ibn-Batuta travelled through so many different lands, it would have been so easy for a learned muslim to make those travels without knowing any of the local languages or customs. Batuta's background as an arabic scholar of sharia (Islamic law) made him a particularly valuable visitor to those lands where muslim kings ruled over vast majorities of non-muslims (such as the Sultan of Delhi, in India), and where learned muslims were in great demand. And, like most travelers across unknown or dangerous lands, Batuta jumps from situations of great fortune to great misfortune, but emerges out of them only with the desire to see more lands. In his travels he acquires gifts, great wealth, horses and camels, slaves, friends and many wives, only to loose them or abandon them and then promptly acquire new ones or reacquire old ones. Batuta's stories of India were of particular interest to me, and Dunn also does a wonderful job of describing Delhi as records say it was when Batuta landed up there after years of travel in Central Asia. A vast part of the Indian subcontinent, from the fabled Khyber pass through the Gangetic plains all the way down south to the deccan were ruled by the sultans of Delhi, and the current incumbent was Mohammad-bin-Tuglaq. Tuglaq ruled at a time when the Sultanate was at it's zenith, and yet was on the verge of collapse. His kingdom was vast (the largest it would ever be under the Delhi sultans), rich with resources and people, and was bursting at the seams. Tuglaq was an eccentric of the strangest sort; a visionary, a tyrant, a petty ruler, a scholar, a reformer and a deeply religious man all at once. All these qualities were in conflict with each other, so it wasn't a surprise that his rule was becoming increasingly schizophrenic. Much of Batuta's colorful descriptions of the Delhi court have come to us from other historical sources, and there remain so many descriptions of Tuglaqs eccentricities that the word "tuglaq" has become a common noun to describe odd behavior in many Indian languages. The sultan would one day befriend or reward a scholar, and the very next day decide to behead him. Having decided that he couldn't trust anyone around him, Tuglaq decided to appoint only unknown foreigners in his court, and it was here that Batuta presented himself. Tuglaq made Batuta the qadi/kazi (judge) of Delhi, gave him a great salary and set off to suppress some revolt in the Deccan. Batuta paints a colorful picture of the intrigue in the Delhi court, where everyone was unsure of his fate, yet tried to outdo the other in outward pomp, so everyone raked up huge debts. Finally, unable to take it any more, Batuta tries to escape, is prevented from doing so, and then is sent with some visiting Chinese ambassidors to the court of China. So he makes his way to the south Indian coast of Malabar, gets robbed (escaping only with his trousers and nothing else), encounters numerous wars and conflicts between the local chiefs, gets shipwrecked, then makes his way to the Maldive islands. Here he is immediately appointed judge, marries multiple local women of influence, complains about the local customs, tries to overthrow the small kingdom there, fails and still escapes. His writings portray wonderfully the confusion and intrigue that existed amongst all the smaller Indian kingdoms, and the conflict between Islamic lords and smaller Hindu chiefs and the greater population, even though he remains true to himself in his travelogue, and only talks about everything from his own perspective. Even though Batuta cares little about the common population, his occasional references to events involving commoners portray a rare picture of medieval India.

As he continues his travels all the way through south east Asia to China, all the while being welcomed into muslim communities in each of these lands, it becomes increasingly apparent to modern readers like us just how vast, prosperous and powerful the Islamic networks of those times were. And more than just the sword, it becomes increasingly clear how much of a role trade (and trading guilds) played in the spread of this faith. Also, unlike the historians of any particular kingdom (say those of the Mamluks or the Delhi Sultans) Batuta was just a traveler through these lands, and so his own accounts provide a different perspective (sometimes more accurate at least for some aspects) than do official court historians. Yet Batuta is also infuriating as a travel writer, since he remains so focused on the muslim world alone, and ignores the diversity of customs and other cultures he passes through. The various Christians, Buddhists and Hindus he must have encountered remain inconsecuential to him, so we miss out on eyewitness accounts of all these other peoples. Throughout it all though is a rare love for travel and the sights of new lands, which make his accounts all the more readable, and also gives us a glimpse into a vibrant time in human history, enabling us to realize how closely interconnected the world always has been. Dunn's book is particularly readable because it puts all these events in perspective and provides this wonderful picture of the world as it was then.

Book Review: Atul Gawande’s “The checklist manifesto: How to get things right”

2010-01-13T06:17:00.000-08:00

Ever thought about how healthcare could be improved? How doctors could reduce errors or complications during serious operations? Almost everyone has a theory on why hospital errors always occur. But Gawande, in his latest book “The checklist manifesto: How to get things right”, suggests that a major part of the solution lies in an innocuous and mundane a checklist. The book’s point is very simple. No mater what you do, checklists can help you do it better. This applies to the usual suspects (like the airline industry which pioneered checklists) as well as what would seem improbable; a hospital.

He sets us up well, starting with typical medical almost horror stories, of near misses and tragedies in the operating theater, and lays out what he calls “the problem of extreme complexity”. Medical cases are astounding in diversity and complexity. Problems can arise at any time during a medical procedure, and quickly go out of hand. So what can be done to improve this? Aren’t doctors and nurses doing their best already? And then, right away, he throws at you a solution so startlingly simple that you almost laugh it off. A checklist. Checklists work and are widely used in a whole range of professions (who sometimes don’t even call it a checklist). Gawande first describes a few cases in medicine that he came about during his academic research, which intrigued him because they achieved improvements that were way above the typical average in those settings. Piecing together the facts, he realizes that what works here is a little list of things that doctors and nurses run through before, during and after every medical procedure, as part of a defined yet flexible and adaptable checklist.

Digging deeper, he starts to explore checklists in a diverse range of industries. The airline industry is an obvious place to start, and Gawande draws us into the process by taking us to testing facilities at Boeing, starting from the first checklists the airline industry drew up in the 30s and 40s. But from there he starts seeing and then describing checklists in a whole range of industries, from the building industry to investment bakers, top chefs and Walmart. The story on the response to hurricane Katrina, the government bungling and incompetence, and the emergence of Walmart as an unlikely hero in New Orleans thanks to its superb enforcement of checklists is as amazing as it is inspiring. By the time he gets into specific studies in the medical profession, you already know that checklists make a huge difference. Then comes the studies he helped carry out in hospitals across the world, from rural Tanzania to crowded urban India through the UK and America. In every case enforcing these checklists dramatically improve hospital performance. And the items on the checklist are simple, obvious things. Check antibiotic, wash hands, change gloves, change tubing, that sort of thing. But in the heat of a critical operation, or when overwhelmed by huge patient numbers the obvious is often skipped. By setting up the checklist, giving nurses the authority to enforce them, and making medical teams work like a team the checklist becomes a staggeringly effective weapon, taking little time to enforce, but packing a massive wallop of effectiveness. The errors that come up can be quickly spotted and fixed, the entire medical team becomes more effective, and the doctor’s ego can be kept in check.

Regular readers of Gawande’s books or articles on healthcare in The New Yorker know that he is a consummate writer. He combines a doctor’s thorough knowledge of the healthcare system in America with the rigors of a scientist and the vivid imagery of a fantastic, old fashioned story teller. In his books you’ll find bits of the old sage, and the thriller writer, and the writer of a whodunit. The checklist manifesto is no different. With every old medical war story he brings up, and with every other profession he dives into, you are sucked into the details of that story, even while you shout out the solution; “a checklist!”. He draws you into the story, makes you feel involved in the process, and you gasp with him when checklists work, or scowl when medical professionals resist them, and smile when a great victory is won thanks to an error the checklist caught. Whether he overstates his claim or not, time, the clinical and hospital review process and accumulating evidence will tell. But he certainly does a fantastic job of convincing you that checklists can make a big difference in medicine. While medicine will remain a highly specialized skill requiring years of study and training, the adoption of a simple, rigorous, adaptable checklist is not only possible in medicine, but works magnificently.

Some might think that something as simple as a checklist does not deserve a whole book dedicated to it. By the end of this book though, even a seasoned skeptic will accept defeat. Through the book and this one simple point Gawande is able to give the reader a vivid description of the range of errors or complications in medical science, the immense complexity of modern medicine, and a whole host of issues doctors and nurses face in hospitals in every corner of the world, developed and developing. Some problems are not as disparate as one might assume. By the end of the book, it becomes obvious that some aspects of medical practice isn’t that different from any other complex (as opposed to complicated) field of work, and when checkpoints work so well elsewhere, there is no reason for it not to work as well in medicine. Even smart, intelligent, highly trained people can make mistakes, and checklists can help reduce them. And this is a smart, intelligent, simple book that is well worth reading.

Back to blogging with Darwin, India and scientific peer review

2009-12-02T12:57:00.000-08:00

It has been a nice long break away from the blog, but hopefully regular weekly programming will resume shortly.

Till then, I'll leave you with these.

First up, a lovey article by the always excellent Vikram Doctor in the Times of India (yup, even the Times sometimes publishes something worth reading) on Edward Blyth, a self trained zoologist and contemporary of Charles Darwin, who was the curator of the Asiatic Society Museum in Calcutta at the time. He corresponded extensively with Darwin, and his exchange of letters with Darwin reveals much about the lives of fortune seeking scientists of the time who weren't from the privileged upper class. The article is well worth your time.

Also, here is an excellent writeup by Suvrat Kher digging deeper into Darwin, Blyth and Alfred Russel Wallace.

Finally, in lieu of an apology for being away from the blog for so long, I'll leave you with this hilarious spoof video of scientific peer reviewing, circa 1940's.

2009 Nobel for telomeres and ribosomes: answering basic questions in life

2009-10-07T10:24:00.000-07:00

It’s fair to say that there were few surprises when the Nobel prizes in Medicine and Chemistry were announced. Chemists might again quibble, since the prize again went to biophysicists/biochemists for their work on a biological problem, but other than that, the prizes deservedly recognize magnificent work in two areas of basic biology that reveal very important ways by which life, literally, goes on.

Also, for the first time, there are three women scientists winning the prize in the sciences. While the prizes themselves are “gender neutral”, it remains a fact that (at least until recently), women have been massively underrepresented in the sciences, and only a handful of women have won Nobel prizes (a reflection of that underrepresentation). If not anything else, these prizes will at least inspire many more women scientists (and the winners have all been great role models, not just for women but all scientists).

Now to the prizes themselves.

The medicine prize went for discovering how one of biology’s most important processes is enabled by a quirky unit called a telomere. People realized early that DNA, which encodes all our genetic information, was packaged into chromosomes inside cells. Later, proteins called DNA polymerases were discovered, and these proteins were responsible for making copies of DNA, which would allow the DNA to replicate and be propagated. Scientists observed very early that there would be trouble with this copying process, cine the polymerase would leave tails of DNA at the ends, and that chromosomes would slowly shorten. But if that happened, how could all the genetic information be passed on correctly over generations? And then, was there a relationship between this chromosome shortening and the lifespan of the organism? Over the years, the winners of the medicine prize, Elizabeth Blackburn, Jack Szostak and Carol Greider went on to show how all of this was made possible by telomeres, the capped ends of chromosomes. Telomeres were shown to stabilize the ends of chromosomes, and proteins called telomerases synthesize chromosome ends inside the cell. The Nobel website has an excellent short summary on the discoveries.

Here are two general comments. The first is that all these discoveries were made in two organisms that seem as different from humans as possible; the humble yeast, and a common fresh water microscopic protozoa called tetrahymena. Though some people often question the purpose or use of studying these organisms, basic biological processes (like chromosome maintenance and telomere function) are perfectly conserved across evolution, from these simple bugs through humans. So the findings that came out of these organisms were directly relevant to human and mammalian cell function. Model organisms have taught us a tremendous amount of biology that has been directly applicable to humans.

The second general comment is that when Blackburn, Szostak or Greider started working on these organisms, there was no “application” for their research. At the time, telomeres weren’t known to cause any disease, nor could any “product” be made from studying them. The work was done in tetrahymena and yeast, and there was no “utility” in studying them. But the researchers followed their noses, pursuing questions in basic biology. Now their discoveries might play key roles in developing new therapeutics for cancer, ageing or hereditary diseases. When chromosomes shorten too much (and the telomeres shorten beyond a point), the cell stops dividing and goes into senescence. Normal cells don’t divide too much, so don’t need too much telomerase activity. Yet cancer cells divide incessantly. But they still preserve their telomeres, and don’t go into senescence. It has now been observed that cancer cells have high telomerase activity, and people now believe cancer can be treated by removing telomerases from cancer cells (and thus forcing the cells to go into senescence). There is a ton of work being done now to develop therapeutics against cancer targeting telomerases. Yet when this process was being studied, none of this was apparent.

The chemistry Nobels have gone to Venki Ramakrishnan, Tom Steitz and Ada Yonath for their pioneering work revealing the structures of yet another of the fundamental enabling units of life, the ribosome. This prize also recognizes the third act by which the process of how DNA encodes the units of life is completed. All three discoveries were seen at the level of the chemical atom using the same technique, called X-ray crystallography. Something that can only be described as an atomic photographic snapshot of biological molecules can be obtained using this technique. In the first Nobel Prize awarded way back when to Watson and Crick, X-ray crystallography revealed the famous double helical structure of DNA, which showed how DNA could be easily copied and replicated. Crick was later able to devise the triplet code, which allowed us to understand how DNA, with just combinations of four nucleic acids, could encode all the information for proteins, the building blocks of all life. This DNA was faithfully copied out to another form of nucleic acid, called (messenger) RNA. mRNA is made by a complex of proteins which form the RNA polymerase units, and the precise molecular details of this process were also largely revealed by X-ray crystallography. This work was recognized in the 2006 Nobel to Roger Kornberg. But there remains the third step, the extremely complex process by which this RNA is made into the actual functional units, the proteins of the cell. This work is done by the massive RNA-protein complex within the cell, called the ribosome. Primarily using X-ray crystallography (with other structural and biophysical methods) Ramakrishnan, Steitz and Yonath revealed the structures of the ribosome, first with different sub-units of the complex, and later with the structures of the entire complex itself. The Nobel website has a good, simple summary of the process here. It is a pity that only three Nobel prizes are awarded at a time for a discovery, because Harry Noller has made just as many pioneering contributions to ribosome structure and function. It is too bad that he missed out (and it must have been a close call between Ramakrishnan and Noller).

Most of the work on ribosomes was also done on the most obscure of organisms, mostly microbes that live in harsh environments, like Geobacillus stearothermophilus or Haloarcula marismortui (which lives in the Dead Sea) or Thermus thermophilus. Much of the basic mechanisms of ribosome function are conserved right from bacteria through eukaryotes (of which humans are also a part of). Yet, there are also many differences between bacteria and eukaryotes (and the microbial yeast, a eukaryote, has ribosomes more similar to humans than to bacteria, a fellow microbe). Yonath, Steitz and Ramakrishnan soon had structures of ribosomes with various antibiotics bound to them, showing how these antibiotics could block the ribosome and hence kill bacteria. Their work now gives us a fantastic snapshot to ribosome function, and provides a platform for chemists to come in and make new antibiotics against harmful bacteria.

All in all, the prizes have gone to recipients without any major surprises, and their work has tremendous impact, and is a celebration of research in basic, fundamental biology.

I’ll leave you with this video of the ribosome from Tom Steitz’s lab. I never thought the ribosome looked like a death star, but with the music playing I see it in a different light.

Book review: The missing manual – Living Green

2009-09-15T06:43:00.000-07:00

(Posted on Desicritics)

Over the past few years “sustainable living” has suddenly grown in importance in the more developed and affluent countries of the world, and most people are at least curious about it. Yet it isn’t always easy for people to know if their lifestyles are green or not. An easily readable yet comprehensive and enjoyable resource for green living would be of great value to everyone, from the die hard eco-warrior to the gently curious citizen. Nancy Conner’s Living Green is just that much required reference to fill that void.

A well written book that can be read as a serious reference or a quick pointer for specific questions, this book (from O’reilly’s missing manual series) addresses most questions anyone could have about living green, and what all it involves. Living green isn’t just about replacing a few light bulbs or occasionally bicycling to work, but is about a comprehensive lifestyle change where the consequences of all our actions are considered from an earth perspective. The book also does well in suggesting that we do have choices, and by living green we do not have to abandon all the comforts we have become accustomed to.

This book is organized in chapters that deal with changes we can make in our homes, all the way through green business and getting involved towards sustaining a greener planet. If you are just starting with small changes in your life, and want to see what little things you can easily do around the house, the first section addresses these questions. You will easily be surprised by the number of toxins you are exposed to routinely, from harsh detergents to cleaners and solutions commonly used in bathrooms or kitchens. Importantly, the book provides low cost, simple alternatives that are far less harmful to our own health as well as the health of the planet. Taking just one example, it was most useful to hear that the ultimate all purpose natural cleaner is white vinegar and boric acid powder, which can be used to scour sinks, clean bathtubs, wipe countertops and clean floors. With a few modifications, it can also be used as a garden pesticide. The book then builds towards reducing unnecessary consumption (going for quality over inexpensive quantity is an easy first step), and reusing and recycling. It then goes a level higher, and provides outstanding resources and ideas towards building houses that are green as well as energy saving, talking about everything from simple design solutions to LEED certification for buildings.

The next section talks about a complete lifestyle change, from raising a green family (ever thought about how many landfills a baby’s diapers could fill up?), green eating and cooking, raising kids who are sensitive towards the environment, through responsible shopping, and another big cause of pollution to the earth, daily transportation. The book provides a handy reminder of the different transportation options (from walking and biking to car pooling) to the costs of air travel or hotel stay, and how easy it can be to offset these effects for little or no extra cost. There are excellent resources for example on hotels or automobiles that take their environmental costs seriously, and are trying hard to improve energy efficiency and environmental stewardship. So, given a choice between two hotels or two cars of similar quality, this book makes it easy to choose the one that does a better job in protecting the environment.

The final section goes in depth into green business, and how it is possible to actually make a profit or create substantial savings by actually being green. Much of it is just simple improvements in efficiency. Using less paper or office recycling programs are low cost efforts that result in big “green” savings. There are significant energy savings offices can obtain by simply allowing more natural light in, or opening windows (as opposed to cranking up the air conditioners all the time). There are choices that can be made for the source of energy (and the differences between renewable and non-renewable energy choices, as well as how one can buy and use more renewable energy resources). Finally, the book goes into different ways by which one can be involved, from activism to socially responsible investing.

There is little doubt that the book is comprehensive, and provides information to someone curious about green living at every level. Yet, there are some caveats or limitations in this book.

For one, it is certainly true that many people have tried various eco-friendly/green choices around the house, and it just didn’t “work as well” as the regular choice. This book, while providing excellent choices for green options around the house, does not acknowledge that there can be some limitations with green products. From my own personal example, we’ve tried just about every single green dishwashing solution out there. But none of them work as well as conventional dishwashing gels (which do have phosphates in them) while cleaning dishes that have been used for spicy, sometimes greasy, and often heavily cooked Indian or Thai food, though they do work satisfactorily for more standard “American” cooking. So, after much trial and error, we had to go back to conventional dishwasher detergents, after experimenting with a dozen natural ones that claimed to be just as “hard on dirt” but gentle on the environment. On the other hand, many other green products work satisfactorily (green laundry detergent with a little bit of hydrogen peroxide added to it works fine for lightly soiled clothes, but perhaps not as well for the rare, heavily soiled garment). Future editions of the book would do well to acknowledge some limitations of green products, and perhaps compare the two, saying where the green product is perfectly adequate, but where it might fall short. Acknowledging some limitations of green products is not necessarily a weakness, and makes it easier for the average person to make better choices while stepping towards green living.

Then, there is an extensive (and overall good) chapter on food, which oversimplifies the “organic is good” mantra, unequivocally casting all fertilizers, pesticides and genetically modified food as the great evil. However, the argument is far from that simple, since it is a very complex area that is grey and not black or white. Yes, pesticides can be harmful, and overuse of fertilizers has ruined land. But it is also true that careful and controlled use of fertilizer (along with suitable crop rotation and mixed cropping) can yield more food (at no nutritional disadvantage) than simple organic mono-cropping alone. Nor are all genetically modified foods dangerous. It remains a fact that every single food crop we eat today has been modified, over years of crossing and creating “hybrids”, except that the methods used have been different. There certainly are issues with proprietary seeds and over aggressive patents, but casting all genetically modified food as bad is simplistic at best and false at worst. There is no doubt that sustainable (including organic) food practices are excellent for the earth, but by avoiding nuance, this book might put away some people who aren’t blindly gung ho yet about everything green.

The book has been written from the perspective of a person living green. So, perhaps, the tone does not fully reach out to people across the aisle. Living in Texas has taught me that direct confrontation (about lifestyle) rarely works. In a place where say people often leave their lawn sprinklers on during three hour thunderstorms, or where cities still don’t have recycling programs (and where one has to collect and cart recyclables to a recycling center oneself), finding middle ground is a starting first step. Perhaps this book can do more to address that.

However, overall the book is superbly written, and provides a single stop for the reader to find out anything about living green. A more than useful manual, it should be the book of choice should one want any reference towards green living. It is a worthy addition to any household, and lets you start making those small steps towards green living.

Living Green: the missing manual

The bat and the moth, and the ant and the butterfly

2009-08-14T13:47:00.000-07:00

What better way to resume blogging after a break than with a couple of fascinating stories from the natural world, about predator and prey, defensive arms races and survival cues?

Bats invoke a variety of emotions from people, ranging from disgust and (unfounded) fear to “they’re cool”. At least the Batman sometimes did some good in helping kids get rid of their fear or paranoia of bats. But while bats might look like silly rats with wings, they are indeed supremely efficient hunting machines. While some bats eat fruit, a majority of them hunt flying insects in the dark, and eat vast quantities of moths, locusts, flies, mosquitoes and any other bug that flies. In order to do this efficiently in the dark, they have a fabulously developed system of “echolocation”, a better sonar system than most battleships. This is great for the bat, and allows them to locate flying insects with pin-point accuracy. But what about the insects? Obviously, they have a pressing need to survive and need to escape bats. Therefore many insects have evolved remarkable ways to evade their hunters.

Some insects have developed evasive flying maneuvers, others just taste bad and the bats learn to avoid them, while others yet have evolved a neuronal auditory system that can detect the bat sonar frequency and allow them to escape. So there is this constant fight between bat and insect in evolving better sonar or ways to evade it. But, taking a cue from standard defense technology, do any insects actually jam or disrupt bat sonar? It appears that a certain species of tiger moth can do precisely this.

The tiger moth is a perfectly edible snack for the echolocating bat. But some tiger moths emit specific ultrasonic clicks in the presence of attacking bats. These clicks could potentially serve as a warning sound, or perhaps be used to startle bats (thus giving the moth time to escape), or perhaps affect the bat sonar. A group of researchers decided to investigate this phenomenon in a tiger moth species called B. trigona, and used an ingenious test to determine what role these ultrasonic clicks were playing. They pitted moths against bats in a closed chamber and precisely observed what the bats did. If the click was a warning sound (for say a poisonous or distasteful insect), the bat would at first attack the insect, but drop it or spit it out, and then learn to avoid the insect. If it was a startling sound, the bat would at first be startled, but would learn to avoid it. If the click was indeed a sonar jamming sound, the bats would continue to be confused by the clicking over time. In their experiments, the researchers used a bunch of juvenile or adult bats and presented them with either the clicking moths, or other moths of the same size that didn’t click, or just a different type of edible, non-clicking moth. What they found was fascinating. The bats indeed did eat the clicking moths. However, the bats were 400% more likely to eat a non-clicking moth than the clicking B. trigona. But what if these clicking moths just tasted worse? To make sure that this wasn’t the case, the researchers disrupted the clicking mechanisms of these moths, and then let them out with the bats. This time, the bats hunted them down as well as the other non-clicking moths. It became very apparent that the moths used the clicking sound in order to disrupt the bat sonar.

As far as the moths go, the evolutionary race for survival is pretty simple. Out in the wild, they don’t need to develop a fantastic sonar jamming device to completely disrupt the bat sonar. All they need to do to get a huge survival edge is to be able to disrupt the bat echolocator just a little bit (but more than any other insect around), so that they can get away and the other insect gets eaten. To do this, they only needed to develop a simple tymbal structure, and this structure is now widespread amongst some tiger moth species. And by doing that, they haven’t evolved to escape all bats, but have just enough to gain that much needed survival edge over other bat prey.

(Original reference: Corcoran, A., Barber, J., & Conner, W. (2009). Tiger Moth Jams Bat Sonar Science, 325 (5938), 325-327 DOI: 10.1126/science.1174096)

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This next story is just as fascinating, though more incomplete and raising more questions. Plants obviously are under constant risk of being eaten by some herbivore or the other. So some plants have a very effective defense strategy. They secrete sugars onto their stem or leaves so that they can attract ants. These ants then stay on the plant, and serve as a nice, natural defense against other plant eating insects or animals. Butterflies, on the other hand, are insects that plants share a love-hate relationship with. On one hand, the butterfly pollinates the flowers, allowing the transfer of genetic material from one plant to the other, thus enabling reproduction. On the other hand, butterflies lay their eggs on plant leaves and the caterpillars then devour the leaves. And for the butterfly itself, the last place it wants to lay eggs on is a leaf full of predatory ants which would eat up the eggs or caterpillars.

But can a butterfly, a mere non-thinking insect, know not to lay eggs on leaves with ants? The answer, surprisingly, is yes. In this little paper in The American Naturalist, some researchers devised ingenious experiments to see if butterflies would distinguish between leaves that had ants, or didn’t have ants on them, in order to decide which leaves to lay their eggs on. In their experiment, the researchers took dead specimens of three species of ants, two of which were predatory (and would eat the eggs/caterpillars) and one of which was a bug of a similar size and shape, but a harmless herbivores. Then, they pinned these ants on different leaves, and let the butterflies decide where they laid their eggs. What they saw was surprising, to say the least. The butterflies not only avoided the leaves with the predatory ants, but also didn’t mind laying eggs on the leaves which had the harmless bug on them. So it wasn’t as if the butterfly was just laying eggs on leaves with no ants on them, but actually seemed to know that laying eggs on leaves with the herbivorous bug wouldn’t hurt their eggs and so ignored the innocuous bug. Clearly, it appears that butterflies can use visual clues and decide where to lay their eggs.

What is particularly fascinating to me though is not the fact that butterflies can distinguish between predatory and non-predatory ants, but the fact that they know how to do so without any prior “training”. After all, butterflies are far away from animals or birds which care for their young and potentially teach them about predators or food. Butterflies aren’t even social insects, to have groups to collectively “learn” from. So what is the internal wiring they are born with that tells them some ants are dangerous, while others aren’t? What neuronal and signaling pathways do visual cues of predatory ants activate, while those of innocuous bugs do not? And how does that happen? Do other things, like smell, also influence the butterflies? There is a whole world of questions out there, waiting to be answered.

Original reference: Sendoya, S., Freitas, A., & Oliveira, P. (2009). Egg‐Laying Butterflies Distinguish Predaceous Ants by Sight The American Naturalist, 174 (1), 134-140 DOI: 10.1086/599302)

Graduate junction

2009-07-03T12:53:00.000-07:00

I recently found out about yet another "social network", with a difference. For all the readers of this blog who might be graduate students or post docs, here's a new resource for you.

The graduate junction is a networking resource for early stage researchers, who might be doing their masters, Ph.D. or post doctoral research work in Mount Doom (or whatever else you call your research group). It seems to be a nice, focused resource, with sharing of resources,a good discussion forum, indexing by category of your research, a database of conferences around the world, useful resources (particularly useful writing resources), some fun (a crossword), and much more.

If you are a young researcher still working on your thesis or a postdoctoral fellowship, you might find this useful. It is still work in evolution, but I think it does serve a specific need, and there aren't too many resources for young researchers out there. So go check it out.

Iran on my mind

2009-06-23T14:20:00.001-07:00

I've been trying to follow all the incredible happenings in Iran right now on blogs and twitter, with all those protests, rallies and much more. These are chilling times in Iran, and though I don't think anything will change there, I'm sincerely hoping it does. Good luck to all of them.

Meanwhile, since Iran is on my mind, I couldn't help but remembering my old room mate. So, its time to revisit an old post of mine about my friend and Iranophile Brian.

I wonder what he's upto now, and hope he is well. Where ever he is, he must be following Iran closely, wearing green, and hoping his friends there are safe. And if he cares to know, I've taken great care of his movie collection, and enjoyed watching all those movies.

A peace corps for India?

2009-06-06T14:56:00.000-07:00

One of the most remarkable organizations in America that is rarely talked about is the Peace corps. Many of my friends have actually never heard of it. But it has perhaps done more for America’s image abroad, in some of the poorest, most underdeveloped regions of the world, than most other organizations or groups. So what is the Peace Corps? Reading from their website, the organization has volunteers who “…..serve in 74 countries in Africa, Asia, the Caribbean, Central and South America, Europe, and the Middle East. Collaborating with local community members, Volunteers work in areas like education, youth outreach and community development, the environment, and information technology.” Effectively, they are agents of change, education and empowerment in distant parts of the globe, and a part of America’s tremendous soft power. I don’t know if JFK actually visualized the impact the Peace Corps would have around the world, but in my opinion, forming the Corps was one of his greatest and most lasting achievements.

I’ve been fortunate to hear about the work the Peace Corps does from friends who have served in the Corps. So, these are the kinds of things the Corps volunteers do. One friend, immediately after graduating college, joined the Peace Corps and went off to Tanzania. There she lived in a medium sized village, and taught the local school kids Chemistry and English, and also found time to make some great friends, learn about Tanzanian culture, share her ideas of American culture with Tanzanians, climb Kilimanjaro, and meet her (now) husband who was another Corps volunteer teaching science and something else to some other kids in Tanzania. After two years and a fabulous experience, she came back to do her PhD in the molecular biosciences. Another friend worked in my former lab as an undergraduate, and once she graduated joined the Corps and headed out to Gautemala to work with village communities, on health, natural resource management and other issues. The way the program works is simple. It recruits mostly from fresh college graduates (or sometimes even current students, who are allowed and even encouraged to take “a year off”). These kids then express their areas of interest, and the region of the world they’d like to go to. And then, they are sent there (almost on a “paid” work/vacation), and work there for a year, or two, or more. What, you might ask, do they get out of it apart from the experience? Isn’t the experience itself everything? No, they get much more, including tangible benefits that help their own careers. They get college credit, a big boost if they want to come back and join masters or PhD programs, they learn new languages, student loan deferments, and also become a part of a network that now has thousands of successful people in all walks of life. They are extremely valuable to corporations who would love to have people with these diverse experiences. The learning is also a two way process, and they learn a tremendous lot while, at a ridiculously low cost, act as informal ambassadors of the United States in places where people have only fuzzy ideas on what the country is about. More often than not, all parties (the Corps volunteers as well as the communities they work with) benefit and learn a lot from this.

So where am I going with this? Well, the concept of “volunteerism” on a larger scale in India is still nascent, and it is rare to find people, especially young people, volunteering for too many community activities. Their lives are understandably busy, with getting through school, and then getting admission into a program in college that will lead to a “good job” (engineering, medicine or the like), and then getting on with lives. And then, every now and then, there will be some story in the media wondering why the educated youth never go and serve in rural, deprived areas, and why much of the country remains underdeveloped. It is well known that few (if any) college graduates in India would even consider starting up enterprises or serving in rural, remote and/or underdeveloped areas. The government, it its typical heavy-handed approach, has occasionally mandated things like requiring medical students to serve for a year in rural areas (where doctors are much needed). Most of these efforts have flopped miserably. One big reason why these schemes don’t work is because they are coercive, and the student perceives little or no benefit from this. So this is where I think the government could spend a small amount, set up something like the Peace Corps, and gain a huge return on that investment.

Here’s how it could work. The organization can provide streamlined avenues for freshly graduated college students to go and stay/work in some rural/underdeveloped area of their choice, in a subject of their choice. This could range from working with government schools (with poor teachers, often absent), to rural health centers, to the forest or agriculture departments and so on. This provides an avenue for students of different backgrounds to work in. This can come with “official” recognition (say from the education department or the science and technology department), and a significant stipend (I’m thinking of something like rupees eight thousand/$150 per month), as well as options for local accommodation (there is no shortage of government places to stay across the country). As additional, significant incentives, the experience of the students can be considered credit to apply for masters/MBA/MD programs, with the provision of educational/college scholarships for these kids if they decide to continue their education at the end of their fellowship term. In particular, if this program can give significant credit to doctors for admission to specialization/MD programs (say a 20% bonus on their entrance tests or direct admission into certain specialties), this can serve as a serious incentive for doctors to serve in rural health centers. For students who work on engineering projects, projects in agriculture, environment, social issues, water issues and so on, thy could similarly get credit for education. Undoubtedly, this work experience would be very valuable indeed to corporations looking to recruit individuals with diverse experiences, as well as to business schools for their MBA students. In addition, it is possible that students who do take this up realize that there are tremendous economic possibilities in rural India, and perhaps they might themselves then go on to start their own organizations that work in these areas.

Of course, most of this has been about incentives for students to join such a program. The reason the government should/could do this is because it is the only entity that has its reach in every corner of the country, and the authority/ability to implement such a program. But the potential problem is that even if the government does this, it might do this in a typical heavy-handed, bureaucratic, top-down approach, and that will fail. So what they need to do is to support the concept, but leave the complete implementation and execution to a board with people who are good at putting grassroots organizations together, and promise never to interfere in that work. All they should do is provide unconditional grants. Given how Indian governments work, with their maai baap attitude, this is bordering on fantasy. But such a concept can work (and has worked, remarkably well, with the Peace Corps). So now, does any one have the drive and will and reach to put this together and get the government to do something like this?

How gardening helps scientists

2009-05-29T15:50:00.000-07:00

(Sorry for a long absence. Numerous reasons have kept me away from the blog, but now it should be back to weekly essays on Balancing life).

Arabidopsis thaliana is a distinctively unremarkable plant. It is small, scraggy, has few leaves and very modest flowers. It has no dietary value, nor does it look particularly pretty on a bouquet. It is possible that even goats don’t care much for it.

Yet the plant has served mankind over the past few dozen years like no other. It is the chosen plant genetic model for hundreds of researchers around the world, who take advantage of its short lifespan, relatively easy growth, adaptability and small size and do wonderful research. It also has one of the smallest genomes any plant has, and research from Arabidopsis has not only revealed much of the working mechanisms in plants (of profound use in agriculture and whatnot) but also in general biology. Many findings from Arabidopsis has applied to all living cells, from bacteria to mammals.

But when I say “model plant organism of choice”, I don’t mean it is as easy to do experiments with Arabidopsis as it is say with fruit flies or yeast or bacteria. It is much harder, and graduate students pursuing their PhD with Arabidopsis on average have to work 6-7 years before they’ve done enough to get that PhD.

So I was stunned when a Chinese colleague of mine told me about his friend and old university mate. His friend had worked with Arabidopsis for his PhD, and had produced a prodigious amount of work, finishing his PhD in a mere three years. This was a record almost unheard off in the Arabidopsis community. My friend was just as surprised when his friend told him this story. So he asked his friend what the secret to his success was.

His friend grinned and said “Most researchers are pretty smart and know a lot about biochemistry or genetics or development, but they don’t know plants. I’m smart and I know plants. I’m from a family of peasant farmers, and my family used to grow vegetables back in China. I know more about growing and caring for plants than the rest of my lab put together. They spend their time learning how to grow the plants, and I spent all my time just designing and doing experiments.”

Now you tell me there isn’t value in rustic wisdom.

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That said, there’s something more in this story. I’ve met lots of Chinese researchers who have come from very humble backgrounds. Many of them grew up in rural areas, and were from families of farmers. But they all got to go to school, and those who shone academically got scholarships to study in top colleges in Beijing or Shanghai or other cities. While there is much that I don’t like about China (particularly politically), I think they’ve done very well in educating a massive population. India and China had similar class conscious, massively illiterate populations some 50 years ago, and China has done far better in educating its people, and giving more chances to the “underprivileged”. Many of my Indian friends here in the US are researchers. But they all come from urban, middle class, “white collar” backgrounds. I don’t know a peasant yet who has done a PhD in an elite institution, or pursued a career in research. Some food for thought, this.

Urban wetlands

2009-03-29T05:41:00.000-07:00

In a fairly recent post, I had mentioned how many of Bangalore’s lakes are being killed. But nature is extremely resilient, and given the slightest chance it will bounce back. And some of Bangalore’s lakes are wonderful examples of urban wetlands that are priceless treasures.

I’d recently visited the Hulimavu lake, a fairly large lake just half a kilometre from Bannerghatta road, one of the busiest roads in the city. This road is filled with apartment complexes and office blocks, with traffic that usually moves at 5 miles an hour on good days. Not surprisingly, this lake is under severe stress. There is plenty of legal and illegal construction all around the lake, and much of the lakebed has been encroached. Many of the other construction sites nearby use the lake as a convenient dumping ground for excavated earth. Along one channel, untreated sewage is slowly being discharged into the lake. A whole lot of people seem to use parts of the lakebed like a public toilet. And there are roads running all around the lake, on what clearly was the lake’s spillover bed. As is sadly the case in most Indian cities, the local residents are either unaware or unable or unwilling to do anything about this.

In spite of this, there remains an incredible diversity of life in and around the lake. We decided to take our binoculars and see what birds still inhabit the lake. I was more than pleasantly surprised at what we saw. There were plenty of brown pariah kites, and a few magnificient copper and white brahminy kites (and we were also able to follow a couple of them to their nest, on a nearby eucalyptus tree). There were also plenty of cattle and little egrets all around the lake. In addition, we saw a couple of grey herons in statuesque stillness, waiting for their next fish or frog to swim by, and a good number of moorhen pottering around the wetland. In the lake itself there were a good number of Eurasian coots swimming around, as well as a few snake-necked darters out hunting. These were just the confirmed sightings in a span of about 15 minutes of standing by the lake with Salim Ali’s indispensible handbook, which makes it more than likely that many more waterfowl inhabit the lake.

Urban wetland management unfortunately is not much of a concept in most of India. Yet this lake is just one example of the kind of diversity and richness of life in lakes around the city. It is also a fine example of a lake that could easily be made into a city nature park. To do that, only a little needs to be done to protect the wetland. Obviously, preventing encroachment around the lake would be a priority, as would be stopping the flow of untreated sewage that is choking the lake would be an obvious other step. In addition, the usual mismanagement of “lake development” that most city authorities eagerly embrace should be avoided. Usually, the city decides to build a big “garden” around lakes, which means manicured lawns, paved paths, lots of flowers and trees that don’t usually grow in wetlands, and a complete destruction of the wetland around lakes. This usually ends up slowly killing the lake. Most of these birds live and nest amidst the reeds that grow in lake wetlands, nurturing a rich ecosystem that supports frogs, breeding fish, small reptiles and small insects. Unfortunately, “beautifying” or “developing” lakes by building parks only breeds mosquitoes (by killing off fish and dragonflies that eat them, and breed in the reeds). The Yediyur lake in Jayanagar was a thriving lake that was killed off by just this effort of “development”. First came some lawns, and then there were motor boats and motor scooters, and now it is just a little swamp that breeds mosquitoes.

Instead, if the city could declare some of the lakes of Bangalore protected wetlands, and then spend a pittance on preserving the wetlands, we would be left with wonderful city parks where children and adults alike could spend evenings or weekends observing a diversity of birdlife and plant life (in addition to perhaps small amounts of regulated recreational fishing). It would be a chance to educate and enrich our own lives, and reconnect with nature in the heart of a stressful urban environment. A fond memory of mine is the environment around Lake Washington, in Seattle, right by the magnificent Husky Stadium. The wetlands around the lake are now carefully protected, and there is a beautiful little nature trail, with a description of the flora and fauna around the lake, as well as the importance of wetlands for human survival. People relax here now on weekends, paddle in little canoes, or walk around the unpaved nature trails, or spend lazy sunday afternoons trying to fish (with a permit). Yet this wasn’t always so, and the lake and wetland had nearly been killed in the sixties, and a massive restoration effort of over twenty years revived it. Here, we have wonderful living lakes in the midst of a massive metropolis. Do we need to sacrifice them in the name of “development”, or can we learn to live with them, and allow them to make our lives so much better?

A scientific temper

2009-03-05T03:53:00.000-08:00

Jawaharlal Nehru, for all his numerous follies, strongly believed in two wonderful concepts; freedom of speech, and a concept he had coined, a nation with a “scientific temper”. That term, a “scientific temper” is a wonderfully succinct way to describe a broad concept. By speaking of a nation with a “scientific temper”, he wanted to speak of the people of a nation who would be able to think independently, understand and practice the scientific method in their daily lives, analyse and not take statements at their face value, and avoid simplistic reasoning. Of course, it has been easier said than done to create that atmosphere in a nation where superstition, religion, rumor, myth and innumerable beliefs abound. Interestingly, I was reminded of the concept of a “scientific temper” by an unlikely source.

One of the pioneering biochemists, science advocates and science policy advisors of our time, Bruce Alberts talked about this concept in a talk of his recently. While talking about science policy, research and much more, he also talked a bit about some of his efforts with City Science, an effort to improve science education in schools in San Francisco, which he hoped would not just improve science education, but would get kids to think about everything. Now, this effort isn’t just about getting kids to learn their science books better, but it is about bringing about a fundamental change in their way of thinking, enabling them to question, analyse and reason better in all aspects of their everyday lives, making the scientific method a part of it. He used a simple example of just one of the types of lessons that the kids learnt which illustrated the concept beautifully. I thought it would be just the kind of story to share on this blog.

This was a lesson for five year old kids in kindergarden, showing how this concept can be inculcated in kids very early in life. A bunch of five year olds were allowed to run around and play in their schoolyards wearing clean white socks. When they returned, each kid was told to collect all the little black and brown bits of dirt, grass, seeds and whatever else from their socks. The kids were then asked to sort out the dirt, separating the seeds from the dirt. At this age of course, the kids knew that seeds were something plants grew from, but couldn’t easily tell seeds from just regular, largish specks of dirt. But they were allowed to come up with their own ideas of what would be a seed and what would be dirt, and they created their own little piles of “seed” or “dirt”. Now, at this stage, you would think the teacher would just come in and correct the kids. But no, the exercise was taken further. First, the kids were asked to look at their seeds and dirt under a 5$ “microscope”, where they could get a clear idea of the shape and dimensions of their dirt or seeds. Then they could draw out the different patterns they saw, making their own guesses for dirt or seed from this, and perhaps intuitively looking for a regular pattern into which all seeds could fall into. Finally, in order to prove their hypothesis, the kids were asked to plant their “seeds” or “dirt” in seed free earth, keeping a record of what they planted, with a small drawing of what each speck planted looked like. If their separation was correct, the dirt would never grow into grass or a plant, but a majority of the seeds would grow in a few days into grass or sprouting plants. Then, the kids could see for themselves which specks were dirt, and which were seeds. So, with this fun little experiment, the kids were introduced to the concept of forming a hypothesis, and then testing the hypothesis. They could easily have just been shown seeds, and dirt, and told which was what, ending the lesson. But by allowing them to go through this process, it enabled them to understand that just an idea, however appealing it might sound, wasn’t necessarily true. It inculcated the idea of the “testability” of a hypothesis, and the concept that a statement that couldn’t be verified or tested wouldn’t fall under the scientific domain. It also showed them something about “falsifiability”, the fact that if something convincingly failed the test (say all pieces of dirt classified as “seed” not growing into plants) could suggest then that the idea could be false. Of course, this didn’t go into the limits of falsifiability and suchlike, but this is pretty good for five year olds isn’t it?

The broader idea here is that by doing this early in a child’s life, it would enable the child to understand the scientific method better, better enable the child to question simplistic statements or “theories” (thereby differentiating scientific theories from popular “theories”), and would help the child grow up into someone more rational and someone less likely to be swayed purely by emotion or passion.

So, coming back to Nehru’s scientific temper, I think these are the type of initiatives that we need, starting with kids at a very young age. There certainly are small efforts here and there, by wonderful NGOs or other organizations, but most of the efforts are few and far between. With education in India itself, most of the effort (or argument) appears to be for better colleges or research institutes or more IITs, but the biggest hole lies in our schools. It is a white elephant no one wants to touch. But only when that hole is plugged will terms like a nation with a scientific temper mean anything.

Only a memory

2009-02-23T06:54:00.000-08:00

The first time I heard about “urban planning” was from some friends at the School of Architecture and Planning in Chennai, when I was still in college. That was what some of them were planning to study when they went to the US for their masters degrees. I wondered aloud if that was something ever practiced in India, and was greeted with a unanimous laugh, and a witty quip about urban non-planning. Anyway, now that I’ve visited Bangalore after nearly four years, I can only nod in agreement. That the city has changed rapidly over the past ten years, there is no doubt. But the callousness and utter mismanagement of what should have been good urban planning has only left me deeply saddened.

The mismanagement has been at every level, resulting in the chaos that is now almost descriptive of the city. The city has, expectedly, grown rapidly. Unfortunately, it has grown with common-sense defying haphazardness, and has massively misused or mismanaged resources. The most important resource completely mismanaged has been water. There has understandably been a proliferation of new layouts, and an explosion of apartment complexes. Interestingly, some of the biggest growth has come in areas like HSR layout and Whitefield. These areas are apparently close to major technology centers, hence the growth. However, while the apartments have come up, promising ultra-luxurious living, the single most important thing you need for survival has been overlooked. Water. These areas have precious little of it. These areas have the lowest water table in the entire region, and try as you will, it is hard to strike any ground water here even at depths of 300 feet. Which then makes one wonder why or how such large residential complexes have been sanctioned in these areas. Typically, residents here shell out in the range of rupees five thousand every month for just their water needs, provided in part by tankers supplying water, and in part by depleting the little ground water that is left. How exactly this is sustainable eludes me. The presence of consecutive weak, apathetic governments in the states hasn’t helped. I cannot but help comparing the city to Chennai, which also had acute water problems. Years ago, they started enforcing rainwater harvesting, made it mandatory, and actually enforced the rule. The water situation in Chennai dramatically improved over the years. In stark contrast, the city of Bangalore “recommended” rainwater harvesting at least in large apartment complexes years ago. This was poorly implemented, with only a fraction of the larger complexes setting up rainwater harvesting systems (which don’t really cost much), and fewer actually utilizing them. In some belated form of realization, the city now plans to enforce a rule they passed four years ago.

Given the fact that Bangalore lies in a dry region, one would imagine that the administration would at least want to preserve the few sources of water around the city. Yet, instead of making the few lakes that still remain into city or state parks, they are now viewed as prime sources of real estate for buildings. Here’s how the system apparently works. There is plenty of construction happening all around town. There is obviously a lot of earth that construction digs up. Obviously, the easiest way to get rid of that earth is to take it to the nearest lake and dump it in there. If you visit some lakes like the Gottigere, Hulimavu or even Madiwala lakes (to name just three), you’ll see this happening all around them. Soon, a few acres of lake will disappear, and then in a year or two, the local authorities (or a local politician) will announce the creation of a new layout in that very former lake bed. The next thing you know, there will be a new “ultra-luxury American style” condominium complex coming right up. If this scheme doesn’t work, there’s an easier one. Just build a small temple in that reclaimed lakebed. Illegal or not, within a few months, crowds will start thronging to the temple, thereby forcing the temple to expand. Before you know what’s happening, a few acres of former wetland would have disappeared, all in the name of god.

A third strategy seems to be to cut off all sources of water for the lake, by allowing construction (residential and commercial, there isn’t much of a difference between the two) on all sides of the lake, up to the very lakebed itself. In a few years, all rainwater that should have fed the lake won’t make it there anymore, and then you’ll have a few feet a year of new construction land.

Finally, the greedy administrators in collusion with the land mafia seem to have another trump card to acquire lake land for buildings. Bring up the bogey of development. Clearly, if you want an “international” city, the best places to build a new technology park with an associated residential layout have to be on a reclaimed lakebed. And anyone who raises an objection to this is naturally anti-development.

The city (that once apparently had over 300 lakes in it) is being ruined by masterful mismanagement. For all the glitzy technology complexes with gleaming glass facades, a city can’t live without water. It remains unfortunate that the residents of the city don’t care too much about the issue, but when faced with water shortages clamor to the government to get more water from the Cauvery (miles away, passing through Mysore), potentially stroking inter-state disputes. To top the utterly callous mismanagement of water, the proliferation of residential and commercial buildings has been random, haphazard and mostly unregulated. A number of buildings have exceeded the number of floors they are legally allowed (on the specified area), or have come up without any parking space, or else commercial complexes have come up in ostensibly residential neighborhoods.

What is now left is a city that is monstrously large, and in utter chaos. Any changes the administration would now want to make can only be cosmetic. In comparison, Delhi and Chennai have also grown, but the authorities have at least managed to maintain a semblance of logic in this growth, resulting in cities which are, if not admirable, at least functional. Bangalore used to be one of the most attractive cities in India, because of the lovely climate, tree-lined avenues, quiet, organized suburbs and a cosmopolitan population. Now only the cosmopolitan population remains, under immense regional chauvinistic pressure. I think I can safely say that the city of my growing years can only be a memory.

Muddling through chaos

2009-01-28T23:06:00.000-08:00

For the past few weeks, I've been getting used to the chaos that is India. Our return to the US has been temporarily delayed, but we hope that issue is taken care of soon enough. Till then though, I'm having as much fun here as possible, while shuttling between Bangalore and Chennai. It has been a few years since I last visited India, and all I can say is that years of pathetic administration continue to run down Bangalore. Chennai, while also bursting in its seams, seems to have better order within the madness. Exchange the bus drivers and climate of Bangalore with Chennai, and you end up with a city that wins hands down over Bangalore. It is amazing how quickly weak administrations can ruin something that is good.

******

While I try to get back to regular blogging (with perhaps some observations from India) here's a story I'll leave you with.

I happened to sit in an autorickshaw in Chennai that was being driven by an extremely chatty driver. Never someone to resist conversation, I probed him on with questions, which he was only too happy to answer. Now, there are thousands of autorickshaws in Chennai ferrying passengers across town, and fleecing them without ever bothering to turn on that meter. I usually consider them to be rogues and thieves. But there are stories behind their lives as well. Only some of the autodrivers actually own the auto that they drive, with most of them renting the auto from auto owners for a large sum. The ones that do own their own autos though don't have it easy. This driver was particularly happy that day because he had just finished paying the entire cost for the auto, and was now an independent auto owner. To prove it, he showed me his freshly minted receipt of payment.

So I asked him how he could afford to buy me an auto, and he told me his tale. He used to be a vegetable seller (as proof we whizzed past some vegetable vendors, he yahooed them, and then told me that was his brother-in-law and family, who still continued the family trade), and then decided to buy an auto. He first wanted a bank loan, so opened a savings account in the bank. He had some 5000 rupees in it, and thought that was good enough to get a loan. But the bank wanted collateral (or at least a minimum savings balance of rupees 60000). So he said goodbye to the bank, and found a money lender, who willingly gave him the money (with the auto itself taken as collateral). Now this poor guy has to pay some ridiculous amount as interest. He didn't know the exact percentage, but said that his total loan was about rupees 120000, and he would have to pay around rupees 175000 back to the money lender, over a period of some 5 years. That was his scratchpad calculation, though if he didn't pay that up in 5 years, even that sum would skyrocket.

No wonder, he said with a smile, that he would never ever put that meter, but charge me whatever he thought I could pay (which, apparently, was quite a bit). I wonder though, can't there be any better way for someone like him to raise capital to buy an auto? I understand the banks have a need for collateral, but if money lenders can lend the money (and I'm sure they are more careful with their money than banks are), can't banks do it? Economic gurus, what ideas do you have?

That said, auto drivers in Chennai remain thieves, and I curse them all with a lifetime of indigestion for their dishonesty.

Empowering educators to improve education Part II

2008-12-24T13:45:00.000-08:00

In the previous post, we talked about Sikshana’s efforts in empowering teachers and educators, thus enabling them to improve school performance in India.

But all this is of course, anecdotal, and we only had Mr. Ramamurthy’s words for it. Does Sikshana have concrete, quantitative results to show for this? Indeed they do. At the end of each year, Sikshana again carries out tests for all students in the school (using the Premji foundation tests), and evaluates them. This then gives them a very concrete metric to measure improvement. The results thus far have been very encouraging, with anything between 10 – 50% improvement in the scores of kids in just one year. And more interestingly, a majority of the schools have met their own self-defined target for improvement. When asked how, the teachers usually say that they really appreciate the freedom Sikshana gives, and the trust it places in them, so feel obliged to work hard.

A lot, in Mr. Ramamurthy’s words, can be done with very little.

These seemingly simple interventions appear to have had a major effect in improving education in these schools. Yet, this method may not work everywhere. When asked for examples where this method doesn’t work as well, Mr. Ramamurthy unhesitatingly said this system didn’t work as well for them in urban schools in Bangalore. This is why they thought it didn’t work as well in urban schools. This system works a lot on faith in the teacher, and his general observation that in Indian rural areas, communities still work substantially on trust and honor. And “loss of face” by failing to make a commitment is still looked down upon in the local community. Rural school teachers are usually a close and highly respected part of the rural community. They are a part of the village elite, who are looked up to. With this status, they usually also feel obliged to work hard when trusted with resources, since they are praised and valued for work done well. So this system has worked in over a 100 schools in rural Karnataka. However, this seems to be lost in the anonymity of an urban setting. Teachers in urban schools are not really integrated into the school community. In fact, there isn’t really a school community, since kids come from different neighborhoods, economic backgrounds and communities. The teacher is just another anonymous person in a city of millions. So, teachers and staff (with exceptions of course) usually treat teaching as just a job that gives them a salary, and they usually want to get the best out of the job that they can. Only a few rare, dedicated urban teachers want to really improve the condition of their students. The local communities and parents of students will never feel that the school belongs to them, and is an integral part of their daily lives. In Bangalore, there is sometimes a second reason as well. An occasional problem of plenty.

A number of companies based in Bangalore now try to do their bit for the community, by supporting schools. Some of them do so by giving grants to schools, sometimes as a once in a year thingy, and with little expected in return. For example, to get some good PR, a company might donate a hundred thousand rupees, or send in some computers. But most of these companies do not ask the teachers/principal if they need it, what they would do with it, and how they will ensure that the children improve their performance. This means some urban schools have access to funds which they can spend, but without the expectations that the Sikshana model sets. So, in cases where Sikshana has approached some urban schools in Bangalore, and offered to provide (the limited) resources, with expectations set at the start, the teachers/staff are hostile, and say “there are other people giving us a few lakh rupees and they don’t ask questions, why do you want to set expectations, and then expect us to meet them?”. So, Sikshana largely burnt its hands with its forays in urban Bangalore, and now keeps most of its focus in rural/semi-rural schools.

Aniket, in a comment in the previous post, asked pertinently, “what happens when Sikshana goes away”. The beauty of this type of model though is that many of the improvements are carried out with very little monetary investment (their costs right now are about $1000 per school, and they cover over a 100 schools). A major emphasis has been on building the confidence of the teachers, and getting the community involved. With greater community involvement, there automatically are significant improvements at least in the basic functioning of the school. This is partly independently sustainable. Long term though, this type of system can become sustainable only through policy action of the government. One problem with the government though (particularly in India, but true mostly) is that it is a rigid, top-down approach, mandating specifics from teachers and staff (for example, requiring 30 students/year to take the board exam), as opposed to this model, expecting results, but giving the teachers the freedom to use resources as they see fit. Also, government policy will not make teachers owners of the resources, and thus teachers will not be inclined to responsibly utilize it. So, it is a bit of a chicken and egg question, and the answer (after all this hand waving) is that I don’t know. Sikshana though wants to collaborate with the state government (which does support it significantly here) and expand this program across the state (as well as take this model to other states which have expressed interest, such as Maharashtra and Tamil Nadu).

Finally, I’ll touch upon a topic that is an elephant in the room that every one pretends doesn’t exist. Education in India is a lucrative business, backed by powerful patrons. Everything from setting up a school to obtaining a license to growing costs money, and lots of money greases the wheels. Which means there may be almost a subtle incentive for governments to keep government school standards modest at best, and encourage (or at least wink at) the proliferation of private schools (which charge fees). Any attempt at government school reform will be at best half-hearted, with roadblocks along the way. Do I see a solution through this? Nope. Do you?

And yes, Sikshana does have a blog, reasonably well updated, and is great to read. So do check it out.

(I’m headed the India way next week, for a few busy days, so there may be a few travel posts from a bedazzled almost-tourist visiting the cities he grew up in, but will probably not recognize anymore. Enjoy the festival season and a happy new year to you).

Empowering educators to improve education (Part I)

2008-12-22T16:23:00.001-08:00

Let’s talk about education in India for a bit.

Most of us will agree that while some of us have received an excellent (mostly private school) education, the overall condition of the government run state schools are a mess. Educational standards remain abysmal and students go through classes barely learning to read, write or count, and drop out to go and work in their fields or graze cattle (or worse, work in stone quarries or textile mills). Many of us look at the problem superficially, declare that government schools suck, and then state that the solution lies in privatizing education. Yet, that argument is at best simplistic (and at worst dangerous). While there are tens of thousands of private schools in India, from schools run in a backyard to outstanding elite, exclusive, expensive private entities, the vast majority of children in India (particularly rural and semi-rural India) still study in government schools. This number is in the hundreds of millions of children (think the entire population of the United States). A majority of these children are poor, and their parents will struggle to afford private schools (some of you may now say the solution is in education vouchers, and that is a whole different story we won’t talk about here), so the primary educator will remain the government of India.

So, here’s the status quo. All of us will readily agree that a majority of government schools suck. However, the reasons we attribute this to varies, from teacher absenteeism to social structures to lack of motivation to whatever else. Most solutions to “fix” or improve these schools have largely been some top heavy, one size fit all approaches that have mostly failed. But there are some wonderful examples of government schools that have shown dramatic improvements. Often this has been enabled by the efforts of some Non-governmental organization (NGO) or the other. I thought I’d talk a little about one such group, Sikshana, and what they have achieved. A couple of weeks ago, I got to meet and hear the founder of the group, Mr. Ramamurthy, talk about Sikshana.

Their goal is to empower educators and bring about quality education. The group wants to create sustainable models to improve government schools across the country, and ensure that government schools do a decent job in providing a sound basic education to kids. This of course sounds cliché, and is easier said than done. Sikshana realized early on that the usual top-heavy approach requiring schools to enforce some standards hasn’t worked too well. Instead, Sikshana decided to use a mostly carrot, little stick approach, implicitly believing that most people want to do something well as long as they are not forced to do it and do it on their own, and that small incentives can be a strong motivator to do this. So their model seems almost laughably simple, yet when you look at it closely is brilliant. So here is their multi-pronged strategy to improve schools.

Sikshana has currently adopted about 100 schools in the Kanakapura district (which is a semi-rural district not too far from Bangalore). This they did with the full support of the government. But by adopting the school, they did not take up all running responsibilities (that responsibility still lies with the government, which should not be allowed to wash its hands of all responsibility). So the government continues to run the schools, provide the basic mid-day food, employ and pay the teachers, provide the school building etc. Sikshana steps in though and only acts as a facilitator or provider for small things. But even this they decided not to thrust upon the school in a typical charitable organization fashion. Here’s what they do (and they do it slightly differently in each school, based on the nature of that school). They first get together and meet the school principal, teachers and staff, and sit down for a chat, to get an idea about the school. They find out if the teachers are really keen on improving the school (and try hard to get an honest feedback). Then they conduct a test for all the students in the school (using material from the Premji foundation), in order to gauge the level of comprehension of all students. After that, they discuss the results with the school staff. Usually, levels are abysmal (and usually the staff, when shown the results, are rather apologetic in typical rural Indian fashion). At this stage, Sikshana asks them if they think things can be improved with small investments, and if so, how much of an improvement the staff think they can guarantee. Here’s the clincher, Sikshana doesn’t ask the schools for a laundry list of equipment or needs (which is the usual procedure followed by charities or NGOs), but says they will provide a small amount of resources to the school, and the school staff have full control over those resources, to be used as they feel fit. Usually this elicits a startled response, since the teachers are usually only told to do something, but are rarely given any discretionary authority. But now, they are given the full power to do whatever they think is necessary to improve things. Different schools and teachers now react differently, and do different things with it. Sikshana usually knows that all teachers usually do only a few things (from their studies and data), but don’t insist that the teachers do it, instead allowing the teachers to come up with ideas themselves. This, it seems, is a strong motivating factor for the teachers/principal to put in a serious effort. After all, it is almost as if they will be spending their own money for something and not just use a hand-me-down. They implicitly accept personal responsibility, and surprisingly take it up as a challenge to improve performance. So the teachers often jump in and tell Sikshana they’ll make sure that things improve by 10% or 20% in a year!

Thus, the resources the school gets are used for a wide variety of things. Here are some examples. Some schools spend all the money to organize an annual day celebration. While they do this, Sikshana encourages the school to involve the local community (the parents of the kids). Initially, for some schools, this was a challenge since the parents had never been involved with the school before. But over a few years, this changed. The first annual day celebration might have attracted only a handful of parents, but the next few showed increased participation. Slowly, as the parents saw their kids win prizes at the event, or saw them perform (in a dance or play or sporting event), they became more enthusiastic supporters of the school. So much so, that in some schools now, the entire annual day celebration has become some kind of a community event, with some parents now putting up tents for the event, others sponsoring mikes or loudspeakers, and others organizing food or treats for the kids. With greater parental enthusiasm about the school, the kids themselves start becoming more enthusiastic, and the attraction of winning a prize in front of the entire village during the annual day function starts becoming a big incentive to excel in school. Sikshana then started another little program. It started to conduct some annual quizzes and other such events and selected one or two students from each school it supports, to take them on a field trip to Delhi. Now, Bangalore itself remains a dream for most of these kids, and Delhi might as well be Mars to them. So the kids who make it to these trips become some kind of village heroes or celebrities. In some cases, the entire village comes together to send off the kid on the trip, or collects a few hundred rupees for the kid to spend “when you go to Delhi and see the red fort”. These kinds of things again become huge incentives not just for the children, but for the teachers as well, as it becomes a question of pride as to which school sends more kids on the field trip.

That is community involvement. Sikshana provides (or “enables” as they put it) more concrete educational aids as well. For example, some schools asked for some computers for the kids, which they got. Sikshana keeps costs of computing software low by using open source software (Ubuntu/Red Hat etc), so they are able to meet many of these requests on their budget. But then, additionally, Sikshana then provided the kids of the schools with USB thumb memory drives. This enables the kids not just to play with the computer but to store their work, something that almost all schools completely overlook. The kids were given full, unrestricted access to the computers, and were allowed to just figure things out on their own. The results have been startling and amazing. Some kids, on their own (and with no computer training) have come up with fantastic little projects, using flash and animation in their creations. Many of these kids don’t speak a word of English, and some of them had paid little attention in class ever. But something in the computer (and the freedom they had with it) sparked something in the kids, and soon, they even started showing more involvement in class, as their confidence grew, and their work on the computer was appreciated.

In the next part of the post (which I’ll post in a day or two), we’ll talk a bit about success measures, and what didn’t work.

The hardest, most satisfying thing I’ve ever done

2008-12-16T15:45:00.000-08:00

Regular programming should hopefully resume now at Balancing Life. The past few weeks have been hectic, and quite eventful. I ran and completed my first marathon this Sunday, when I survived the Dallas White Rock Marathon.

Why did I do it? Well, I really wanted to run this marathon for a great charity, and wanted to raise ~2000$ for them. To do that, I had to do something challenging, and believe me, the marathon was more than that. But by doing this I’ve learnt so many lessons.

The marathon itself was an incredible experience. There were nearly 20000 runners of all ages, shapes and sizes who ran either the full, half or relay marathon. I thought the weather was good, since it had suddenly become warmer. But there were very strong head winds and a humidity of nearly 85%. At the start we felt fine running, but as the miles wore on, the conditions began to take their toll. I had trained hard over the past 2-3 months, and hoped to run at a 9 – 9:15 min/mile pace, which I kept up for the first 17 miles. But as we reached the lake, the wind became increasingly nasty, and though I kept hydrating at all water stations, I was beginning to feel the effect of the humidity. We had some hills to run at mile 19-20, and soon after I negotiated them, my left leg started cramping. A friend of mine (who wasn’t running the marathon) met me at mile 20 and decided to run the last 6 miles with me. As the cramps got worse, I had to slow down dramatically, but he kept talking to me, encouraging me to keep moving. I did, and finally we saw that finish line and the huge crowd that was there. Running across that finish line was amongst the most exhilarating moments of my life. I was so exhausted at the finish, and could barely walk up to where they were handing out the finisher medals, but boy, was I happy to grab that! Along the way, as I ran, I saw so many incredibly inspiring sights.

There was an old woman (in her eighties, the oldest runner in the race) running a half marathon. Her T-shirt read “a model in 1932, and still running”. There was another man who ran the half marathon. He had no legs, but ran with prosthetic limbs. There was a small group of 5 people, mom, dad and 3 teenaged kids, running the half marathon with T-shirts saying “A family tradition for 10 years”. Up to mile 19, a gentleman in his early 60s kept pace with me, and then, as he couldn’t keep up any more said “you’re not too bad, are you”. And I am a good thirty years younger than him! The crowds that came by to cheer the runners as we ran around Dallas were fantastic, and made every runner feel special. And of course there were those elite international runners from Kenya and various other African countries running up in front at blinding speed. One can only look at them in awe and wonderment.

All this running has also brought so much discipline in my life. Long runs take a lot of time out of the day, so one has to be more efficient and organized with all other work. Of course, I’m incredibly sore after the race, but overall this running has dramatically improved my health (and helped me get rid of that little paunch that was embarrassing me). My diet has subconsciously changed, and I can’t bear even the sight of fried food any more. There are lots of carbs and protein in my diet now, and lots of fruits and vegetables as well. While I still indulge in some sweets, my body now demands only good, wholesome food. The only occasionally acceptable alcohol any more is a rare glass of red wine. And the best part of it all is that after a long run I can pretty much eat whatever I want to (each mile run burns about 100 calories), but only want to eat healthy stuff.

Most important of all, thanks to incredible support from friends and family, I was (more or less) able to reach my charity fundraising goal, and know that it has made a small contribution in helping a bunch of kids read (and I know the money goes there, because I make it a point to visit and spend time in those projects ever time I visit India). If this doesn’t give a sense of satisfaction, nothing will.

Impossible to categorize?

2008-11-06T15:24:00.000-08:00

While a bookstore might be a favorite place for me to “hang out”, a constant grouse remains that in many bookstores far too many books are mischaracterized, and live on shelves they have no business being on. And that can make navigation around the bookstore a little inconvenient, to say the least. I’m never sure how books are categorized in different sections, and who does the categorizing, but far too often it just doesn’t make sense.

Science books are often a serious casualty. The science sections in many bookstores are poorly organized, and some books that should actually be there end up in other sections. I remember once looking for The Selfish Gene in a bookstore, and it wasn’t in the popular science section, or the biology section. Now this book is as good a book on genes and natural selection as can ever be found. Puzzled, I asked the person at the counter, and he finally tracked it down…..in the religion section. Dawkins has certainly written other books (like The God delusion) that could, conceivably, end up in the religion section, but The Selfish Gene? On the other hand, some exceptional science books end up in the “gardening” or “fishes and aquariums” section, so go figure.

The casualties very often spill over to some of my favorite authors. It doesn’t help much that many of them are British, and some of them are now dead. In a blink-and-you-are-a-forgotten-author American world, ambiguously delightful, dead British authors are bound to cause confusion. A particular favorite author of mine remains Gerald Durrell. Now, I can understand Durrell being hard to categorize. He wrote hilariously insightful autobiographical books, non-fiction and some fiction, with animals and natural history forming a backdrop. But to classify My family and other animals under “pets” does a grave and severe injustice to the author. In a bookstore we recently visited, his books were scattered across “pets”, “birds”, “animals”, “dogs”, “cats”, “animal psychology” (yes, honestly) and more. This we discovered, but only after a futile search through literature, autobiographies and natural history. It is so much easier to find the far more boring books of his brother, Lawrence, right under literature. But my very first encounter with bookstore cluelessness started with another favorite author of mine, that old master of English prose and humor, P.G. Wodehouse. Now, Wodehouse remains extremely popular in India (through some strange colonial legacy), and you can walk into any bookstore there, go straight to the literature/fiction section, and find a few dozen of his books neatly arranged. Assuming it would be the same here, I walked into a half-price bookstore years ago, strode confidently to literature, made my way down to “Woolfe”, and….no Wodehouse. A little disturbed but still calm, I shimmied like Jeeves would have down to the “fiction” shelves, and it wasn’t there either. Worried, I went up to the counter and asked. A bored clerk told me to go look for Wodehouse in the comics/humor section, and indeed I found a bunch of them there, resting unhappily between Bill Watterson’s Calvin and Hobbes collections.
At least another favorite British author of mine is easier to find, though (in my opition) grossly miscategorized. James Herriot wrote some fantastic semi-autobiographical books on his life as a vet. They really can only be classified as literature. But, while most bookstores here don’t do that, at least the books are easy to find if you walk to “veterinary science” and “animal behavior”. Finally, there is yet another fantastic author who is actually impossible to categorize. Terry Pratchett, the author of (in his own words) a series of inexplicably successful books, is usually categorized in different bookstores in these parts under “fantasy” (very reasonable), “fiction” (for want of anything better), “science fiction” (o.k, maybe), “literature” (I’ll go with that) or “comics and humor” (what can I say). While making it hard to search for his books, it at least ensures that I spend an hour in the bookstore, going from aisle to aisle. (And for those of you who don’t know, Terry Pratchett was recently diagnosed with early stage Alzheimer’s. Do read what he has to say about it in his own hilariously inimitable way, here).

But then, the very best authors are indeed hard (if not impossible) to classify. They do not remain within crudely drawn lines, but always flow across boundaries. This is why I miss the little independent but superbly stocked used bookstores that were almost as common as Starbucks coffee shops in Seattle, with Twice Sold Tales a perpetual favorite. Yes, there might be cats around, but you couldn’t ask for more knowledgeable bibliophiles at the counter, who loved the books they had, knew about them, and always ready to chat about books, authors, and how they could (or couldn’t) be categorized.

Goodbye, Anil

2008-11-02T09:00:00.000-08:00

One of my all time favorite cricketers retired yesterday.

Goodbye Anil, and thanks for all those memories. For all those years in the '90s, and then the 2000s, you defined the best that was possible from an Indian cricketer. Polite, gentle, confident, untiring, committed, competitive, resolute, determined, and finally, magnificent.

I had written an article about Kumble a couple of years ago. Here it is again, for you to read. It still reads well, except now he retires with 619 wickets. Phenomenal.

Life in the center of the earth (almost)

2008-10-15T14:57:00.000-07:00

It really is remarkable how little we know about life on earth, even with scientific data pouring in constantly. This is particularly true for the smallest forms of life; microbes and organisms that are only a little bigger than microbes. But since we are used to seeing and hearing things, we rarely even think of life that is smaller than say an insect. Yet over 90% of all life is microbial, and we don’t even know how many species of mammals there are on earth, leave alone microbes.

Microbes though couldn’t care less. They have always ruled earth (though we would love to think we rule this planet) and will, in all probability, continue to do so. It is easy to forget that the earliest forms of life were microbial, single-celled organisms capable of only the simplest functions: survival and reproduction. And it is in these two functions that microbes have excelled. In places where you would think life would be impossible, you are more likely than not to find some microbes chugging along. Put it this way, if there was a hell, there probably wouldn’t be any humans there, but there would be plenty of extremophiles having an orgy. It is always fascinating to see what creature can survive where no other can, and every now and then there is a discovery of yet another creature (usually a bacteria or archaea) that defies all probability of life and thrives.

So, let us say there was a world without light, where the temperature was over 60 degrees centigrade (140F), where the pH was over 9 (an extremely alkaline environment), and there was little or no oxygen. Would you think there would be life possible? Apparently, if you literally dig deep enough, the answer to that is yes. So what kind of life is it?

Some researchers collected fracture fluid from a depth of almost 3 kilometers within the earth’s surface, from a South African gold mine. Within it, they surprisingly found a single dominant species of bacteria, which they called Candidatus Desulforudis audaxviator (link). Now, it looked like these bacteria were perfectly happy living all alone in a vent where there was no light, and therefore no photosynthesis, as well as next to no oxygen, and an extremely alkaline and hot environment. Everything about its life seems wrong. Yet it lives, doing all things that living things need to do. It fixes nitrogen and carbon. It divides (albeit all so slowly, taking a few hundred years to divide). All life needs energy to drive it. Yet there is no light here, so this bacterium actually gets energy from the radioactive decay of uranium. This allows the generation of an electrochemical gradient from hydrogen to sulfate. It was thought that for all life you need a diverse ecosystem (which provides nutrients for each other, or helps break down compounds and so on). And here we have this bacteria happily being an ecosystem of one, in true US Army style. Yet, this bacterium is not all that different from other bacteria, or just all other living cells in general, and has all the genes used to make amino acids, or metabolizing carbon and nitrogen, with a few tweaks here and there.

This story is probably best told by one of the people who discovered it and then analyzed its genome, in this absolutely fascinating podcast. If life fascinates you, this podcast will amaze you.

Hear here.

If we do some day travel in space, and explore new worlds, we probably will not see any four eyed green web-fingered aliens. If we do find something, it will probably be closer to this bacterium.

Run Forest, run

2008-10-06T15:45:00.000-07:00

Side note: As you all have no doubt noticed, posts here have been rather infrequent recently. I have a good reason for that. It is because a lot of my free, do-anything-you-want time is being spent on my latest passion, running. A few months ago, I decided to train for and run the Dallas marathon, with a mission to raise money for my favorite charity. There is much more about that (and what you could do to support that effort) here. Rest assured that if you wanted to pick an excellent charity to contribute to, this would be one of them.

I’m a newbie runner, and started running only about six months ago. But these six months have been a fantastic learning experience (thanks largely to some friends I run with, and the Dallas running club). Before I started training, my idea of distance and endurance running (and endurance athletics in general) was quite like the idea many, many people in India still have today. So this post is a little bit about running, my own running efforts, and some thoughts on attitudes towards running in India.

Running is not much of a sport in India. The last time someone from India won an Olympic running event was way back when India was a British colony, in 1900, by a British-Indian gentleman by the name of Norman Pritchard. Even that was in a sprint, and he wasn’t even brown. Indians don’t run. They become computer engineers or doctors or run motels. And on an athletic field I was what can only be described as average. Recognizing that, I never bothered to understand the finer nuances of endurance running. Running marathons was something my crazy white friends and colleagues here did. But then white people also liked getting burnt in the sun. They’re crazy. A marathon is 26.2 miles. In my book that’s called a road-trip. I had done some jogging on a treadmill before, and 3 miles was about my limit. So for a number of years I had decided that it was just one of those things white people did to make us brown people look bad. (Ok…just ignore all those Moroccans and Algerians and whatnot winning bagfuls of Olympic running medals. They live in the Sahara desert, so they don’t count). That feeling was reinforced by none other than Tom Hanks. Someone yelled “Run Forest, run”, and he set out to run all across the United States of America. And he was on crutches, goddamit. On the other hand, if you saw some random Indian on crutches and yelled “run Raju, run”, he’d probably turn to you and ask why he should run, was there a fire/communal riot/flood in the area, would his child get admission in college if he ran, and if not, would he get free electricity if he ran. It wouldn’t work.

And then I discovered that brown people ran as well, but were mostly closet-runners. In fact, a bunch of my Indian friends turned out to be closet-runners (particularly back in Seattle). Oh the shame! To top things, they ran marathons for charity, and were doing more to do good on earth than I was by just using grocery bags for shopping, avoiding plastic and feeling smug. There almost seemed to be some underground movement of Indians actually running. Finally, apparently one didn’t have to be born with running ability. Running is an art and a science, and just about anyone can do it. So, six months ago, I started running. I’m still surprised at how quickly I have transformed into one of those Gatorade sipping, technical T-shirt wearing runners who will never run in street shoes again. This brings me to running in India.

Recently, the fine Indian city of Chennai hosted a half-marathon. Apparently, it was a huge success, and lots of celebrities and politicians showed up for photo-ops. Their intentions were excellent, with the proceeds going to some charity. And in all that excitement, people forgot about the running part of it. In almost true Indian style, amidst the inevitable chaos thanks to the crowd (all Indian events, even sporting ones, have crowds associated with them), one of the runners died of exhaustion.

It is a terrible shame. What is also a shame is that most people in India think about marathons the same way I used to a couple of years ago. Comments from various people varied from "What better way to get fit and run for a cause (assuming that one just woke up one day, ran a marathon and miraculously became fit) to “Many believe it underscores the need for participants to check their levels of fitness before taking up such strenuous exercises.” If you are missing the irony here, let me explain. You can go to a doctor and check your fitness level and be declared perfectly fit. A fit person might be able to climb a flight of stairs. Or even ten flights of stairs. But he or she is unlikely to be in shape for a marathon. Nor is it as simple as running every day, and increasing your distance constantly. You might finally make it through a marathon that way, but it won’t be easy, and it might end up hurting your body permanently.

Distance running requires a combination of many things: speed, endurance and strength (both physical and mental). Miss any of these, and you are in trouble. So, in order to build speed, you train using track workouts (running distances of say 800 meters, in sets) and interval running (where you run in fast bursts during sections of a run). To build endurance, you train on long distance runs regularly. And for strength, you combine running on hills with active cross training and strengthening exercises in the gym. As your strength and endurance increase, so does your mental strength. Finally, during and before the run, a runner needs to think of hydration and salt balance (which is why runners drink Gatorade. And I thought it was just an American aversion to water), and eating a sensible diet (particularly the night before a run) rich in carbs (with some protein thrown in), without too much fat or sugar. During the process of training, your body metabolism itself changes (becomes more efficient, and burns more calories, even while resting). Now throw in proper running form (running with your head held up, hands unclenched, without crouching your shoulders and with your back straight, leaning slightly forward) and good running footwear (no, regular sneakers don’t do the job), and finally you’ll be on your way towards becoming a runner.

There was a time, long ago when I was still in high school, when I did a little bit of running. During our annual sports day, the school would also organize a 5k “road-race”. It used to be great fun, and a bunch of us would show up and run. Here’s how it went. We’d all show up, wearing the stipulated stiff white cotton shorts and white vest, and white canvas shoes (terrible for running). The whistle would blow and we’d be off, tearing down the route. In about two kilometers, a bunch of us would be out of steam, while others would soldier on. The few really fit students (mostly boarders who spent their time playing soccer, hockey and basketball) would then soldier on and win the race. There was some potential there, with many of them (particularly those students from the North Eastern states, or Nepal, or the Himalayan states, used to higher altitudes) being natural runners. Most of that potential was wasted. Imagine the possibilities if the physical education instructor had even the slightest idea about distance running (instead of just yelling “run up, run up”), or if the kids had used proper running shoes instead of the thin soled canvas shoes (which always left your feet in pain after hard exercise). All these kids were from affluent families, and could easily afford good running gear. Most of them though would never even think of becoming runners.

For the few who actually discover running in a scientific way, it is usually too late. They are by then in their late teens or much older, and far too old to take up athletics seriously. And of course, competitive running is one thing. But running for fun (which can be a fantastic way of being fit) itself will take a long while to catch on in India. I cringe when I see people heading out for a fast walk/jog in the mornings, with the best intentions of getting fit, wearing sandals and thick cotton clothing. Or heavy sneakers that might look nice, but do nothing to support the feet (or the heavy impact on the body that running brings with it). But there’s potential there, and I’m dreaming of the day when the Mumbai (and other) marathons become a serious event with thousands of Indians running it, because they are passionate about running.

Opportunities lost

2008-09-17T15:14:00.000-07:00

My introduction to the American education system was only at the graduate school level. That still exposed me to some of the systems in place for undergraduate education, and the university system in general, and I marveled at the choices and sheer flexibility that the students had during their education. So, even though I had no exposure to the school system here, I made the assumption that the school system would be as flexible and innovative and accommodating as the university system. I thought a school student here in the US would have as many choices, options and variety that a college student had.

It turns out though that while the university system here remains the envy of the rest of the world, the school system is a far cry from the university system. It is as bureaucratic, static, dogmatic, rigid, uninspiring or banal as any other system anywhere else. This is a story I recently heard from an acquaintance I run with. She studied in one of the (better) public schools in the Dallas area. Now, my friend was a pretty good student, and what is quite atypical is that she really liked math. She wasn’t exceptional at it or anything. She just liked it. It was her favorite subject. Usually, in most schools (especially in the US) it isn’t cool to actually like math or science. She did, and so did another friend of hers.

Anyway, somewhere in 7th or 8th grade, they had to take some tests, which would determine if they took some more advanced math classes, which would then introduce them to calculus and high school AP math. Both she and her friend did only modestly in that test, and were marginally below the required score to be allowed to progress to AP math in high school. But they both liked math so much that they wanted to take those advanced courses over the next few years, including AP math.

They actually wanted to take those courses.

So it seems perfectly reasonable (to me) that they should have been encouraged to take those courses, or at least been given some option to retake that 7th or 8th grade test (to see if they could qualify for AP math later on). Usually, students are forced to learn something. Here they wanted to learn something themselves. Anyway, her then math teacher flatly told the two of them that since they hadn’t made the required grade in that standardized test (which they had missed by a whisker), they would not be allowed to go on and take calculus in high school. These two begged and pleaded, and even had their parents write to request that they be allowed to take those math courses and study more, or at least be retested in order to see if they could qualify for those courses.

Close, but no cigar. The teacher stuck to her guns (and rules) and declared that they would not be allowed to take those math courses in high school, since that is what the rules said. So finally the two of them had to go sleepwalk through “simpler” high school math curriculum without calculus, which were too boring and too easy for them, and did not challenge or inspire them in anyway.

Finally, when this girl ended up in college, she thought she’d try to take more advanced math courses. Because she hadn’t taken AP math and science, she didn’t get into her first choice colleges, and had to settle for a “lesser” state university (which was a good one though, in my opinion). But still, she thought she could now take some more interesting math courses. She registered for a few, only to find that the college curricula assumed substantial prior knowledge of lots of math that she’d never had (and not for lack of interest). She also found that most of the other students in that course had taken AP math/calculus in high school. So she spent a frantic semester trying to work twice as hard to learn things that the rest of them found quite basic. In the end, it turned out to be too hard to catch up. She didn’t want to take a big hit on her GPA. So instead of finally majoring in chemistry/biochemistry with a math minor (what she wanted to do, and which required quite a bit of math and calculus), she ended up with a developmental biology major. The story of her friend from school is a little different. He also struggled with some math courses in college, but he was more resolute (and loved math more), so stuck it through some very tough courses. After a few tough semesters, he finally became good at it, and eventually majored in mathematics. He loved math so much that he even went on to get a masters in math, and now works as an analyst for some company.

So the decision of a bureaucratic, uninspired teacher from 7th or 8th grade possibly changed the entire career of this girl, who now feels bitter at being denied the opportunity to learn and do what she wanted to and liked to do. Had she just been encouraged to retake a test in 7th or 8th grade, or had been allowed to take calculus in high school, it is quite possible that she would have gone on to a college of her choice, or at least majored in the subjects she wanted to, and liked the most. One single decision not made by her potentially changed her life.

And while this is a story of one particular teacher, it apparently is quite reflective of a lot of the school system here. An excessively bureaucratic, rule-obsessed system, with a huge amount of pressure on teachers to make sure the maximum number of students go through high school and get their diplomas, even if they do not learn as much. What this is doing though is two things. (i) It produces a number of students who go on to college (and are interested in college), but are ill equipped to handle a lot of college courses (which they might be interested in) and (ii) it also potentially produces an even larger number of students who, thanks to diluted educational standards, will never be able to go through college at all.

It is a shame though that a university system that is exceptional overall has to be fed by a school system that really leaves so much to be desired. The university system (particularly advanced or graduate education) is therefore partly forced to rely too much on imported foreign students (the school system alone isn’t responsible for so many foreign students, but I believe it does play a big part in it). Secondly, it isn’t fair to burden the university system (which by definition should strive for excellence) with teaching students basic subject concepts that should have been handled in high school or earlier.

And if we flash to the current presidential election, both candidates have only given lip-service to the educational system, and promoting “science and math”. Look deeper, and both of them have no ideas or real desire to really try to fix anything (or perhaps Barak does, but then focuses too much of his plan on hiring more teachers, and very little on educational standards and educational choices themselves).

Remembering Zion

2008-09-04T11:55:00.000-07:00

The Zion national park in Utah is breathtaking, by every definition of the word. The red cliffs and mountains rise rapidly all around you, and the Virgin river looks placid enough, but was in fact responsible for those massive canyons and “narrows”. The place is absolutely perfect for some spectacular hikes, on trails that cling tightly to one side of a mountain, while on the other side there is a few thousand foot vertical drop. This place is not for those with an uncontrollable fear of heights.

The hikes were fantastic, the river was wonderful, the water icy cold, the rocks were picturesquely jagged, and the wildlife plentiful. And the place is far out in the southwest, with the nearest decent airports hours away in Vegas or Salt Lake City. So it was a little surprising to find the place filled with visitors. Sure, it was Labor day, and there were plenty of Americans, and plenty of adventure seeking foreign nationals who live in America (such as yours truly). But what really surprised me were the number of European and Japanese tourists in the park. On the trails, the languages most frequently heard were German, German, German, English, Japanese, more German, Italian and Spanish. The Germans (and I’m including the Austrians, Swiss and sundry here) were everywhere. Break out a few kegs, and you could have early Oktoberfest.

Why Zion National Park, and why not any place else? Is there some tourism agency somewhere in Berlin or Munich or Frankfurt telling all Germans to head out to America, and while there, to make it a point to get to Zion national park?

And not surprisingly, at the more scenic view points at Bryce and at Zion, away from the harder hikes, there were plenty of Indians around, as we discerned voices in Hindi, Tamil, Telugu, Kannada, Bengali and Punjabi as cameras clicked away.

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Zion and Bryce canyon were very contrasting in many ways. Sure, Bryce had some more impressive geological formations that ice and water (and some wind) had carved out, not least the abundance of hoodoos and natural bridges, but to me Zion had a more “intimate” feel to it. Hiking up steep peaks or wading through the river towards the narrows seems like a timeless pleasure. But after a while of looking at gargantuan grand natural amphitheaters or massive canyons, you can actually tire of them. I love the Grand Canyon, and was suitably impressed by it, but have tired of it after a couple of visits. Bryce gave me the same feeling. But I cannot say the same of Zion. It is a place well worth visiting repeatedly, with something new to discover each time.

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The National Park Service was at its best at Zion. The park was as well maintained as could be (given the sizeable number of tourists), and the shuttle service around the park was great. I can only imagine the nightmare the cars that crisscrossed the park before the shuttle service was established must have caused. Now all you need to do to get around the park is to hop on a shuttle and head out towards the next sight or hike. But what was really impressive was the design of the visitor center. It blended perfectly with the mountains all around. Importantly, it had been designed to minimize its energy requirements and consumption. The building had large cooling towers on all sides, which would cool air as it brought the air in, hence keeping the building cool (and it can get pretty hot down there). For heating during the cold winters, the long, south facing roof panels could trap solar heat, and warm the inner rooms. And the building maximized natural lighting as well. The landscaping around the park avoided lawns and water-pools and instead used only native plants. That meant that most of the landscaping around the visitor center needed little or no care or watering, but the plants thrived in the unique climate of the region. “Appropriate” can be used as a dull and boring adjective. But in this case, the visitor center was appropriate, and anything but dull. Since conservation is at the core of the park service, it was gladdening to see the message being implemented, and so elegantly at that.

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We discovered that great pizza can indeed be found in pizzerias in the unlikeliest of small towns, even if they are not called Papa Del’s or aren’t located in Urbana, Illinois. The little town of Springdale, right outsize the park entrance, is about as touristy as it can get. There are some delightfully eclectic stores or historic inns amidst a mix of outrageously overpriced restaurants and souvenir stores. While wandering around looking for some decent and affordable food, we came across the uninspiringly named Pizza & Noodles (a pizza and pasta bar), and entered it expecting pizza mediocrity. Instead, we found an outstanding assortment of gourmet pizzas, and our taste buds exploded as the crust and toppings touched our tongues. The pizzas were superb, and there were more vegetarian options here than I had ever seen (perhaps catering to those eco-conscious vegetarian Germans?). It was well worth our time and money (cash and check only, no credit cards please).

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This is more a general observation than anything else, but why are national parks filled with people who are mostly white or Japanese (with a smattering of Indian or Chinese visitors)? In most national parks I’ve visited across the country, there seem to be a few Hispanic visitors, and fewer African-American visitors. Any conspiracy theories out there?

Book review: Illustrated Guide to Home Chemistry Experiments: All Lab, No Lecture

2008-08-15T07:43:00.000-07:00

Warning: This book might be dangerous. It has the capacity to make the reader think.

When I was a kid growing up in India, it was some sort of dream of mine to have my own little secret chemistry lab. There were all these stories in books about kids having their secret dens in their basement, where they made fascinating discoveries or invented cool compounds. Except there were two small problems; we didn’t have a basement (or too many extra rooms) and, more importantly, there was no such thing as a “home chemistry set” to be found in any store in India. So it was with absolute wonder that I imagined every smart or curious kid in the US to be working away into the night in his or her own little lab.

Of course, I learnt that it wasn’t really true. But it certainly was true that at least till the eighties many, many kids in the States got a home chemistry set as a Christmas or birthday present sometime in their lives. And many of them had the time of their lives creating colorful solutions, horrible stinks or flashing explosions, even as they learnt the scientific method and gained a love for chemistry. Somehow, this love for “do-it-yourself” science died in the US in more recent times. Perhaps it was because companies became too worried about liability issues that could come from some kid getting injured. Perhaps it was because the state became a big nanny, and people live in constant fear about the next potential chemical weapons attack. Perhaps because of this it became harder to get chemicals. Or perhaps it was because of all these reasons and more. Anyway, the concept of home chemistry kits was slowly lost, and that sadly might have killed the potential scientist in many a kid.

But it looks like there have remained some die hard enthusiasts of home chemistry experiments, and Robert Thomson, the author of the “Illustrated Guide to Home Chemistry Experiments: All Lab, No Lecture” must be amongst the foremost enthusiasts of those. In writing this book, he has thought through every little detail to help anyone, from a high school student to the adult diehard, in establishing a complete, very effective home chemistry lab.

In a world where everything comes in a nicely over-wrapped package, Thomson doesn’t expect you to rely on any kit. On the contrary, he points out how most of the kits out in the market presently have been dumbed down to ridiculous proportions, and also avoid selling any chemical that could be slightly toxic or dangerous (which pretty much leaves only salt and sugar to sell). The book starts with the very basics; the equipment you need, the space you’ll need, and the source for chemicals, and goes through seventeen comprehensive chapters of chemistry. There are simple chapters on making and separating solutions, chapters covering important chemistry basics like redox reactions or acid-base reactions, chapters on chemical stoichiometry and then electro and photochemistry, qualitative and quantitative analysis and finally even a pure fun chapter on forensic chemistry. In all of these chapters, Thomson has been very meticulous in explaining basic chemistry concepts (using simple definitions and very effective examples), providing details on the equipment, and finally, some excellent experimental details. The first chapter draws you right into the book, as Thomson explains how he became interested in home chemistry. He describes how to convert anything, from a kitchen to a garage, into a suitably safe and convenient chemistry lab. And then he provides plenty of information on obtaining equipment and reagents that are surprisingly extremely cheap. I was very surprised not just at how many chemicals I could get at the local pharmacy or hardware store, but at how pure many of them were. Many of them were an order of magnitude cheaper than the stuff my own lab buys from Fisher and Sigma-Aldrich, but just about as pure. Perhaps I should tell our lab manager to get our stuff from the retail market. Home chemistry can be very effective and very cheap. And he also makes sure to tell you how you can get stuff that is safe, and will not get you into trouble with paranoid agents. Importantly, Thomson tells you how to avoid serious trouble by avoiding any discussion of making stuff that could blow up (which is a little bit of a pity, since some of the most fun science experiments start or end with a pop and some nasty smells sure to amuse kids).

Thomson also is very clear in telling you how easy it is to hurt yourself (or someone else) by not taking the right precautions at home, and then goes on to tell you the precautions you should take for a safe working environment. Home science is a serious pursuit, but while you have to be careful, you can and should have fun doing it. Thomson remembers that throughout the book. I was particularly pleased with his emphasis on good book keeping, and the importance of a record notebook. Without carefully recording experimental detail and results, science quickly deteriorates from reproducibility and substance to entertaining but irreproducible anecdote.

This book is almost a must have for a high school chemistry enthusiast (any AP Chemistry major), but will work just as well for any kid with a love for experiments, or the adult who has time for a hobby and a passion for science. There’s a lot of learning to be had by doing experiments yourself. This is a book that should be whole-heartedly recommended, and is something I hope many high school chemistry teachers will adopt enthusiastically in their classes. It is also my dearest hope that this book reaches India, and at least some school teachers there get their hand on it. It is a book that can actually make you think.

If you are one of those closet home chemists, this is the book for you. Go get it. Meanwhile, I’m off to observe some copper turning turquoise blue due to oxidation.

Postdoc personalities

2008-08-06T14:48:00.000-07:00

Life in science isn’t a bed of roses, and being a postdoc is hard enough as it is. So it is important to keep one’s spirit up, particularly during the long phases of hard work without successful (read “publishable”) results. As in any other workplace though, your general contentment level is influenced by the people around you, especially your peers. Postdocs come in all shapes, sizes and characters, but there are a few character types you want to avoid hanging out with (even if you are one of them), in order to remain sane and content. Surprisingly, like most normal people, postdocs too fit into some characteristic groups (including those you want to avoid). So here are some of the classes of postdocs whom I do my best to avoid (and hope never to become).

The arrogant prick: Unfortunately, this class of postdoc isn’t too uncommon.
This class has two subtypes, (a) the “publication snob” and (b) the “research snob”. The publication snob is the person who thinks anything published in journals other than Cell, Science or Nature is worthless, and tells you exactly how worthless it is every time you see them. This is even if you have just published a very nice piece of work in a “lesser” journal, and (s)he knows about it. Yet, worse than journal snobs are research snobs. These people think the only interesting/important/cool/spectacular research in the world is being done in their lab, and more importantly is being done by them. Everyone else is just wasting taxpayer resources and chemicals. The research snob talks to you with a condescending sneer, and feigns politeness when you talk to him/her about your work, pretending to listen, and then shrugging in a knowing manner while asking you what the big deal is. There is only one person worse than a research snob. That person is a journal AND research snob, and, unfortunately, there are plenty of those as well.

The radiator of negativity™: This class of postdoc must be avoided at all costs. If you see one of them, turn and run the other way. If they see you turning and running, pretend you have forgotten something or have to get back to an experiment (use a timer), and still run. Because, if you spend any time conversing with them, they will effortlessly leave you suicidal. These people ooze out negativity, making everything around them miserable even if you’ve been feeling perfectly happy before seeing them. Here’s a hypothetical sample conversation with a radiator of negativity™.

“Hey, what’s up? Things going well? How’s research and the job search?”

“Not really. I’m stuck working on some papers for publication”

“Isn’t that good?”

“No. They aren’t going to be Cell papers, which means they won’t get me a job, which means I’ve wasted the past five years. This area of research has no future.”

Now you get defensive and worried and say “That’s not really true, is it? You can do good work that isn’t published in Cell and still find a job”, and wonder about that postdoc’s area of research (which you think is pretty hot).

“Not really. Even if the work is good, it doesn’t matter. The system sucks, and there aren’t any jobs out there. Anyway, no one here helps you get a job. What’s the use of working for a famous PI if I can’t find a job. But they don’t help you find a job at all.” moans Negativity, thus in one single stroke making you feel your work is useless, hate your chosen job, your research area, your boss, your institution and also filling your mind with dark thoughts for the future. You are convinced that there is no future and you should have become that doctor your parents always wanted you to be. Meanwhile, Mr/Ms. Negativity walks away without the slightest hint that those words have left your mind in a maelstrom.

The irrevocably depressed: This class of postdoc is only a little better than the radiator of negativity. This person has a naturally depressive personality, and is him/herself easily depressed. It hasn’t helped his/her cause that the past 3 years of ceaseless toil have yielded poor rewards. Which means this person is perennially suicidal. A conversation with this person will be something like this:

“Hey, what’s up? How’s work?”

Deep sigh. “It’s tough. This project isn’t going anywhere. But the boss wants this work done right now. But what’s the use of doing this? It’ll get me nowhere. It’s too late for me now. I don’t know what I’ll do. I can never get a job.” Pause. Another deep sigh. “But you’re ok. You are still young.”

You are left feeling absolutely terrible for that person, and then panic sets in as you start worrying about yourself.

The insane workaholic: This class of postdoc is pure intimidation. This postdoc works 16 hour days seven days a week, juggling 6 experiments every day. His/her eyes are bleary, with dark circles around them. You don’t know when (or if) he/she eats or sleeps. Wears the same sweatshirt almost everyday. One day he/she mentions to you that his/her weekend was very relaxing. It was the first weekend in three years that this person had taken off.

And you wonder if that is what’s needed in order to succeed. Is life as a successful scientist really that hard?

There’s plenty of pressure as it is in being a postdoc. There’s no need to be in any of these classes, making every one around you unhappy. Some people hate happy campers, and wonder how some people can remain reasonably happy always, through ups and downs at work. But I love them, and wish more postdocs were like that. A dash of positivity, a little bit of humility, the ability to laugh off mistakes, and finding time to relax. Just give me enough of that and the postdoc life will remain a lot of fun.

Wall-E thoughts

2008-07-10T15:46:00.000-07:00

This isn’t a review, but there are some spoilers here. Hopefully nothing here will hurt your movie experience, but perhaps give you some food for thought.

I’ve often thought that the best thing George Lucas did was not making Star Wars or Indiana Jones, but setting up a dedicated “special effects” computer group. This little group would go on to become Pixar, the studio that redefines animation and graphics while still telling great stories. With every movie of theirs you wonder what could be better and yet (almost) every time they manage to deliver cinematic classics. From monsters in the closet to lost fish, wannabe normal superheroes, rat chefs and now an amazing robot, they continue to spin visually incredible yarns that defy imagination and dare you to expect more in the next installment. With Wall-E they’ve done it again, and have really gone where no robot has gone before. The movie is breathtaking, brilliant and pushes the boundaries of what is possible on screen when you have a great story, scriptwriters and brilliant animators.

Now, one of the great things about Pixar is that along with the story, they take serious pride in the thoroughness of their research, and their content is impeccable. Where ever there is some actual science or detail involved, they invariably try to get it right. This was on particular display in Nemo, and every frame of every scene at the bottom of the ocean was painstakingly created to real detail. It wasn’t just the general feel of it, but Pixar had taken the effort to determine exactly which species of fish or crustacean or mollusk or coral or anemone could exist in that particular ecosystem, and then the drawings of each of those were perfect. It wasn’t just the sharks who were drawn right.

There were plenty of brilliant bits in The Incredibles, but that was a superhero flick, so there could be plenty of liberties with science (while trying not to break all the laws of nature at once). But with Wall-E, Pixar has gone back to its Star War roots, and classic science fiction. Here’s the movie in a nutshell. Humans have made the earth uninhabitable, so they leave and live somewhere in distant space on a giant starship. The earth has robots (Waste Allocation Load Lifter Earth-Class, or Wall-Es) to clean it up, but all of them have now been inactivated. All except one, our hero Wall-E. He is some kind of self-teaching and constantly learning robot whose primary job is to pick up trash, compact it and pile it up. 700 years after humans have left the planet, a scout robot (Eve) comes to earth looking for signs of recovering life, meets Wall-E, sparks (literally) fly, and we have a delightfully eccentric intergalactic robot love story. But even as I left the cinema thoroughly satisfied, the scientist in me started talking in my head. Had there really been a robot named Wall-E left behind on earth, while people spent their time on a starship in space, what would things be like? Could it really be like the movie?

First, the earth itself. Now, in the movie the random abandoned city on a plant-less earth is depicted in dusty reddish hues (perhaps a little tribute to Tatooine, and a somewhat Martian landscape). There are plenty of dust storms to go around. But here’s my thought. If the world is good enough for cockroaches (as the movie says it is), it may not be good enough for us or other large animals, but it certainly will be good enough for microbes. Gazillions of them. And where there’s life on earth, there will be some photosynthesis. This means even if there aren’t too many plants around, there will be photosynthetic microbes. This in turn means the world wouldn’t just be a dry, dusty brown, but would have some shades of green, with polluted water all around. Wouldn’t it?

Then there’s Wall-E himself. I loved the way the creators of the movie made little things about Wall-E plausible. He needs energy, and the sun is the obvious inexhaustible source, so he has nice retractable solar panels (much like the Mars rover) to charge up when he’s running low. And the city is littered with tons of decommissioned Wall-Es, so Wall-E can go to any of them for spares or repairs (from new “eyes” to new caterpillar tracks). Obviously, he’s going to have wear and tear over 700 years. But how does his memory/cpu work perfectly for 700 years. My desktop has a habit of dying every couple of years, so clearly Wall-E wasn’t made in some low-cost mass fabrication plant. Either that, or Wall-E needs to be able to repair and replace his own memory or cpu by himself, figuring out a way to backup and retransfer all the data (so that he remembers he’s the Wall-E and not just some generic wall-e). How does he pull that off?

The world of instant gratification on the starship had massively obese people shuttling around on their little pods, and communicating exclusively through the virtual screen. Obviously, centuries of living without any walking would result in massive obesity. What was far more delightful was the description of massive bone loss and bone shrinkage from the limbs of these people. But how much bone would we loose if we don’t walk for 700 years? Will we (as the valiant captain of the ship does) even be able to lift our body mass, leave alone walk? And, ahem, if people never physically interact, how do babies come? And here’s a question for you. Can you use a fire extinguisher in outer space to propel yourself forward? And how long will a plant survive in the frigid temperatures of outer space?

Finally, most of the imaginary technology on display in the movie was brilliant. The details on the starship were spectacular, and those little pods which the people lived on were fantastic. But why did Wall-E, back on earth, have a betamax VCR and a cassette (Hello Dolly!) from the 60s? Wouldn’t he have an abandoned DVD player or something instead? There must be some story behind this, so will one of the creators of the movie tell us?

There are only a few movies out there which have scenes in them filled with such lush detail of imaginary worlds, but Wall-E enthralls you in almost every scene, leaving you to ponder a thousand little questions. Perhaps that’s why it isn’t surprising that this is the first movie in a long time that left me with so many thoughts after the movie.

If you haven’t seen it yet, go see the movie, and come up with your own questions.

A fortune in the attic?

2008-06-20T15:57:00.001-07:00

When I first came to the land of liberty, I discovered something rather quickly. There is a ton of “junk” here in this country that is perfectly good and useable, and which would be very valuable to lots of people around the world.

This astute observation was made on my second day in the States, when I was in the balcony of my apartment, observing the trash dumpsters visible from there. Two college kids were moving out of their apartment, and by the time they left, they had left behind an old (but working) television set, two excellent lamps, an old (and working) microwave, and some still useable furniture. I was astounded by the fact that these seemingly useful things would just be left behind. No one threw away furniture or *gasp* a television set. If you had an old TV and wanted a new one, you took the old one to the store, and the store owner would take your old one and give you a new one with a 15% discount. That was how you upgraded electronics.

And that was when I learnt one of the first rules of living in a consumer paradise. In order to live the American life, one had to buy lots of stuff continuously, but remember to upgrade constantly, and get rid of the old stuff. There is a sequence to getting rid of the old stuff as well. First it goes into the closet, then it moves into your garage, and finally it goes into the dumpster.

Not too long after that, I learnt that there was a corollary to this rule. If you happened to forget to clean out your garage, and kept your old stuff really long (say till you had grandkids), that stuff (actually useless in the modern world) would suddenly become valuable.

Only, instead of calling it junk, you would now call it a “collector’s item”, and you could sell it on eBay for a small but tidy fortune. What’s more, you can pass of just about anything as an antique or even better, a classic, on eBay. There are actually people here who will pay m-o-n-e-y to buy your old trash.

And this means there is a slim chance that I might have a fortune in my hands. And I have to thank my dad for this. Here’s why. My father had always been an enthusiastic adopter of technology, and eagerly bought the latest and best in electronics in the ‘60s and ‘70s. In his possession are 30 year old typewriters made by Brother, or a fine collection of LP record albums, or better still, an 8 mm and 16 mm film projector (and 8mm films), or a spool audio recorder. And all of them have been used but stored in perfect working order in their original packaging. The last time I looked, people were selling “vintage” 8 mm film projectors for $125 or thereabouts. The typewriter sold for $50 or more.

Add all of these together, and there’s a small fortune waiting for me, all tucked away in some shelf somewhere in our home back in India.

There used to be a time when I made fun of my parents storing their old and used electronics. I take all of that back, and hope they keep it safe and sound so that I can sell them all after another 10 years, by which time they will be absolutely and completely useless, and worth a fortune.

Where fanatism takes us, and a new SciFi story contest

2008-06-13T16:25:00.000-07:00

For your viewing pleasure, a video from one of Carl Sagan's shows.

While some religions pretend today that there was never any wanton destruction of knowledge or (different) thought because of their "peaceful" message (and other religions still continue to unleash violence in the name of eternal peace), ALL organized religion has always been guilty of fanatism. There is much for us to remember in Sagan's words here.

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And here's an announcement. Selva, who blogs at The Scian has announced the Scian Science Fiction short story contest.

Go on, take up that pen (or keyboard) and start working on your SciFi masterpiece.

Another edition of Pragati out

2008-06-02T14:00:00.000-07:00

The June issue of Pragati, the excellent monthly Indian National Interest Review, is out. There's plenty of outstanding reading material there. Amongst the articles is a book review by me, adapted from an older post of mine, on the traditions of recording history in South India (the book is "Textures of Time"). This present version is more polished and concise (and adapted to a magazine format), and might be more entertaining reading.

Anyway, go here to download and read the latest excellent issue from Nitin Pai and co.

Mind reading, big pictures and little details

2008-05-21T14:59:00.000-07:00

The one thing about being a postdoc is that you’re no longer green behind the ears, and have developed somewhat of a decent bullshit detector. You’re also a little less in awe of your boss or most other independent investigators. And hopefully most postdocs become rather good at reading between their lines when discussing projects or experiments with their bosses. At least, when the boss says “this won’t work”, or “just go and do this”, you don’t just take their word for this.

Here’s my thumb rule for those statements. If your boss has this really nice but far fetched idea, and is really excited about it, he/she will say “these experiments are easy, you need to go for it. All you need to do is purify a couple of proteins, throw in some reaction mixtures and read your data”, you can almost be sure that the experiments will involve about two years of backbreaking work involving 16 hour workdays that go on for months, and plenty of labor in the 4 degree cold room. On the other hand, if you go up to your boss and discuss a proposal/idea you have come up with and the boss says “that’s way too hard, and I don’t think it’s going to work”, it means (a) the boss isn’t really interested in that idea but wants you to work on his/her crazy idea (see above) or (b) hasn’t really thought much about it since you are the one who has come up with the idea or (c) both.

One sometimes wishes for those early days as a rookie graduate student, in awe of the boss, naïve, gullible and completely willing to try the most insane or undoable experiments possible as a thesis project, only because the boss is such a famous scientist, he/she has to be right.

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On a related note, you can safely assume the thumb rule that any senior investigator who is exceptionally creative with big picture ideas (and who hasn’t done benchwork for 20 odd years) is going to propose the maximum number of “that’s easy” experiments that hang on a slender thread of a hypothesis (the kind that goes “if this were true, then this and this and this will be true, and so this story will be awesome”. Except that the very first “if this were true” is a big if). You’re also certain to be doomed to some years of crazy and hard experiments that are going to tell you that the first “if” is false.

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The phenomenal growth of molecular biology through the nineties and now the past ten years has made many biological experiments amazingly easier, and I’m very grateful for that. But I think it has done enormous damage to good, quantitative biochemistry (and biology in general).

The beauty about a lot of modern molecular biology is that it is carried out using kits made by companies, which the average trained monkey can execute. You don’t need to know most of how it works. Also, the reagents and kits have been made so good that you don’t even have to worry too much about being quantitative in your experiments. They’ll usually work (somewhat). You can throw in a little bit of an enzyme or lots of it, or a little bit of salt or lots of it, use approximate concentrations and approximate conditions and still the experiment works. Here’s a real example. Set up a PCR reaction with a Taq polymerase kit, good primers and a plasmid template. Now spit into that reaction tube, double the volume of the reaction with your saliva, and then start the reaction. I can pretty much guarantee that the reaction will still work.

What this oversimplification of molecular biology has done is it’s created (or is creating) a pretty large number of extremely sloppy biochemists. I see far too many undergraduates or graduate students who (a) don’t really understand the concept of molarity, normality, salt concentrations, pH, metal or buffer effects and (b) also think that just because they think it doesn’t matter, it really doesn’t matter. For example, they think that they can purify a protein on an ion-exchange column using either a 100 mM sodium chloride solution or a 200 mM sodium chloride solution and it won’t matter much. Or their buffer can be at a pH of 6 or 7 or 8 and their protein will show the same activity. And most of them don’t think pH meters need to be calibrated (and don’t know how to calibrate it anyway).

All of this, combined with the extreme confidence of today’s kids, makes for very interesting presentations in student seminars where they show rubbish experiments, and then authoritatively state “I think our hypothesis is wrong” followed by “this company that supplies us with X reagent sucks. My experiment didn’t work because I think the reagent has gone bad”.

If you’re going to make a statement like that, you need to back it up with data. But who needs data these days?

We need some more hardass investigators, who won’t be scared to crack the whip.

Enjoying science podcasts

2008-05-16T15:26:00.001-07:00

Ok, I've been very slow to jump onto the podcast bandwagon, mostly because I rarely use my mp3 player these days. I also didn't think I'd be able to pay attention to the podcasts while doing other things, and thought I'd hear about important science breakthroughs anyway, and would rather read the paper.

I'll have to eat those thoughts.

The podcasts from Cell, Science and Nature are superb. I've just come to the conclusion that they are a great way to find out about some of the latest breakthroughs in diverse areas of science. I used to be very good at at least scanning through the latest issues of all three magazines, and a few more, but sometimes it is hard to keep up with them all. The podcasts compile some neat work not just from the main journals, but also from other "family" journals (for example, the Cell podcast includes some interesting stories from Molecular Cell or Cell Metabolism etc).

And they are perfect to listen to in the lab, while number crunching on the computer, or catching up on email, or while doing trained monkey experiments like plasmid preps.

I'm hooked.

This week's Nature podcast in particular is fascinating, with everything from PZ talking about squid eyes to economist Jeffery Sachs and the "crowded planet challenge". Go read.

The beauty of compromise

2008-05-14T13:15:00.001-07:00

Too many things have kept me away from regular blogging, so apologies to you all. I prefer posting essays, all of which take time to write (and so often remain unwritten, and unposted). Perhaps a better strategy would be to post shorter (but hopefully still sufficiently interesting posts), trying to post longer articles when time permits. Lets see how that goes.

*****

Meanwhile, here's a superb essay by one of India's foremost contemporary historians, Ramachandra Guha. Here he explores some of South Asia's well known conflicts; in Kashmir, in Nagaland, the formation of Bangladesh, the Narmada movement, and the Sri Lankan civil war, and shows how inflexibility and dogmatism of contending parties have dragged on and amplified disputes. Here's an excerpt:

Now, a group of engineers based in Pune advocated a compromise solution. Given that the dam had already come up to a height of about 260 feet, clearly it could not be stopped. But its negative effects could be minimized. Thus, the Pune engineers had designed a model of a dam smaller than that originally envisaged. The reduction in height would greatly reduce the area to be submerged, yet retain many of the benefits that were to accrue from the dam. The drought-prone regions of Kutch and Saurashtra would still get water. At the same time, many fewer families would be displaced.

Unfortunately, the compromise was rejected both by the Gujarat Government and by the NBA. The former insisted that the dam had to be built to its originally sanctioned height of 456 feet. The latter insisted that the dam must be brought down. As the Andolan's slogan went, 'Kohi Nahi Hatega! Baandh Nahin Banega!' (No one will leave their homes, for the dam will not be built). But a good chunk of the dam had already been built. Hundreds of tons of concrete had already been poured into its foundations. And thousands of families had already been displaced.

While the ability to compromise will certainly not guarantee results or solutions, it is often undervalued by too many policy makers or leaders. Anyway, get your cup of coffee, sit down and read the complete essay here. It is well worth your time.

Book review: HomeSpun

2008-04-30T21:21:00.000-07:00

It is hard to resist the lure of a sepia tinted book cover with a black and white photograph of a couple with that glazed, nostalgic look on their eyes. The cover almost suggested something vintage, perhaps timeless. That was more than enough for me to start reading HomeSpun, by the debutante novelist Nilita Vachani.

The book starts with the death of Nanaji, and a scene of mourning. And just like that, you plunge into the lives of different families, and a story of different ideologies, of conflict and reconciliation, love, relationships, marriage and death, all narrated by Sweta Kalra, while the characters slowly emerge as the chapters roll on. Parallel stories develop, all of which you know are interconnected through Sweta. And while the book starts with tragedy, and has plenty of tragedy within, it takes us for a ride without plunging into darkness or depression.

The book is part coming of age, part exploring the complexities of human relationships, part conflict, and part exploring the idiosyncrasies of human nature. There is the story of Nanaji, and his struggles as a revolutionary and freedom fighter fighting against the British for an independent India. He tries to live an extremely principled life, following the idealistic example set by Mahatma Gandhi. The problems of the world and day-to-day life remain somehow esoteric to his mind. Yet his wife, Naneeji, is a polar opposite. She loves her jewellery and silk, and she wants herself and their kids to lead a good, comfortable life, the life she believes that a senior government official (which is what Nanaji becomes after independence) should live. Their lives are spent in open conflict, sometimes bitter, sometimes petty. You know their every relationship is strained. Yet the book starts off with Naneeji wailing and bemoaning the loss of her “wonderful” husband.

Then there is the story of the Kalras, most importantly Ranjit “Ronu” Kalra. His father is a sub-inspector of police. Sub-inspector (later superintendent) Kalra could be described with clichés like conscientious, simple, earthy. The apple of inspector Kalra and his wife’s eyes is their son, Ranjit. A chance encounter with a film producer, who happens to adore Ranjit’s curly 5-year old locks, changes Ranjit’s life forever. He goes on to become the greatest child star of the black-and-white era transitioning between silent movies and sound dubbing. And while Ranjit’s brief celluloid career takes off, the author gives us a hilarious and fascinating view of the film (“phillum”) industry of the time, filled with histrionics and glycerine, political sensitivities, charlatans and bigger-than-life characters. Ranjit’s career as India’s favorite kid ends abruptly with him growing up, but his childhood stardom stays with him for life, and in a strange way directs his fate as an adult. In this mix enters Anamika (Anu) Reza, a spirited teenager, Ranjit’s first girlfriend and true love. Their lives entwine, and they go through passion and longing and separation. Both characters are immensely likeable, yet as different as chalk and cheese. Ranjit is almost immediately endearing. He has the burden of having to grow up as a former child star, and yet remains shy and simple. He’s one of those people who may have dreams, yet lives by avoiding conflict, and trying to keep everyone happy, never confronting tradition. Just by being with the fiery, modern and liberal Anu throws him into a cauldron of thoughts and conflicting emotions. When the time comes for him to make his decisions, he is unable to go with his dreams. His father decides his future, and soon Ranjit heads off to join the air force to become a pilot he would never have become on his own. In contrast Anu’s life, just like her, remains turbulent and feisty and fiercely independent, and she lives on her own terms without holding regrets.

In between all these stories is the pivotal subplot of a small but important character, Ranajit’s friend and fellow officer, Dusty, and the war with Pakistan. And then there is Sweta herself, mostly as a frumpy, slightly overweight but bright and curious girl, with usual and atypical growing up problems. There is her relationship with her beloved Nanaji, and Nanaji, or her mother, and most importantly, Anu.

The author, Vachani, takes us through a whole panorama of events and emotions, and the story progresses beautifully through the last days before independence, the turbulent fifties and sixties, and more contemporary India in the seventies or eighties. We start with tragedy and the death of Nanaji, and as the book progresses, the different stories interweave, interspersed with gentle or dramatic twists. “Homespun” is almost a perfect title for the book, the elaborate plot weaves through a post-independence middle/upper middle class India, and the lives of characters you understand and empathize with, or often relate to. And every one of the characters is beautifully developed and utterly believable. In between the characters, the author explores the myths and stories that we hear about the freedom struggle, or the war with Pakistan (through Anu); myths that are almost always rosy. What lies beneath those tales? Who actually won the war? How many people died? And how did they die? My only complaint with the book was the way the relationship of Anu and Sweta develops, and the slightly predictable direction it heads towards. But that is just a minor quibble with what was a thoroughly enjoyable read, and just the kind of story that will make a terrific movie.

Encouraging women in science

2008-04-11T15:16:00.001-07:00

There’s been plenty of talk about difficulties women in (academic) science face, and how there are very few women scientists at senior positions in academia in most universities. Most major research universities now admit that there are difficulties women face in research that have nothing to do with their scientific abilities. Subsequently, most universities now say they are actively trying to rectify this, and look to hire more talented female faculty. Departments try to have career workshops for female graduate students and postdocs to encourage them to stay in academia, there are endless efforts to recruit more female students and so on.

All this is well and good, but are there some really simple things that universities could do to rectify this that aren’t in the spotlight? From what I can see, at least in the greater biological/biomedical/biochemical sciences there are plenty of female graduate students (approximately a 1:1 male: female ratio). This more or less remains when you start off as a postdoc (a few years of postdoctoral work is pretty much required before you can get that assistant professor position). But by the time you look at senior postdocs or junior faculty (3-4 years down the line from a starting postdoc), there are far more men than women. Of course, it doesn’t take a genius to figure out that most women have kids between their late twenties and mid thirties. That’s when they are most likely to be in the early-middle stages of their postdoc. There’s nothing new in this statement, we all know it, as do most universities. So a number of universities now say that they are working towards policies that make it easier for women postdocs or junior faculty to have kids.

But I was quite unaware of how bad the present policies are though until recently, when I was chatting with a postdoc friend of mine who is pregnant. Now, the three things that will make it easier for a female postdoc to have a baby are (1) the ability to easily take time off/maternity leave (2) the financial means to afford a baby (those things are expensive) and (3) a good medical insurance policy that would cover most of the massive medical expenses having a kid incurs.

Unfortunately, apparently most major research universities still have lousy policies for all three of those. Here’s how it works. Most institutes have a policy stating that a female employee cannot be fired if she decides to have a baby, and also that she will be allowed to take the required time off post childbirth. That’s the good part. But here’s how the fine print goes. The only paid leave the person is allowed to take is the leave that she has accrued over the year. Postdocs (at least here) are technically allowed to take 12 days of vacation time, and week of sick leave a year, and there’s no roll-over policy for holidays not taken during previous years. So that gives a grand total of less than three weeks off. There isn’t a concept of overtime/leave accrual for working weekends; all you can get credit for is if you work on public holidays (probably half a dozen for the year). That’s it. Subsequently, if you need more time off, you can take unpaid leave for a maximum of 12 weeks.

You might argue that the option of taking unpaid leave for 12 weeks should be sufficient; after all, you shouldn’t be paid for not working. That’s ok, except that the salaries/fellowships of postdocs aren’t that high in the first place (some might call it unreasonably low). So, since you’re paid a pittance for endless hours as it is, the least you might hope for is continuing to get that salary while having a baby, so that you can take care of points (2) and (3), the financial details.

Which leads to point (3), medical insurance. A lot of postdoc researchers in the greater biological sciences work in premier medical schools/centers across the country. An outsider might be tempted to assume that medical costs for an employee of a medical center would at least be subsidized. Invariably that isn’t the case at all. Students and postdocs usually are offered a mediocre insurance policy, fine for minor ailments, but not that great for extended medical care. Most postdoc policies pay only about 75% of the medical costs (and the remaining 25% runs into thousands of dollars). Students or postdocs don’t get any benefits even if they choose to get their treatment from the same medical center they work in.

Sucks, doesn’t it?

These seem like rather obvious reason why a lot of women decide against plunging into academic scientific research careers, when just about any job in industry or even teaching offers better policies and benefits. Here’s one suggestion for NIH. Come up with a policy that states that all female postdocs who have their salaries paid by NIH grants must get 12 weeks of fully paid maternity leave, and flexible work-hours for 6 months after returning to work. And universities can start coughing up a little bit of money on better health insurance policies. Finally, it makes no sense for universities with major medical centers not providing any subsidized health care to their own postdocs and students in their own medical centers.

Obviously, this alone isn’t going to create a flood of female scientists wanting to spend their lives in academia, but I think it certainly might help.

Now these suggestions are fairly simple and easy to implement. So, if it is that simple, why hasn’t it been implemented yet? And I’m familiar with policies only in a handful of universities in the US. What’s it like in other schools? Other countries?

Rejection letter

2008-04-09T15:40:00.001-07:00

(Hopefully this will be a prelude to more regular blogging)

I just got back from an excellent seminar by Randy Sheckman. Before he started talking about his research, he commented on how some people react angrily upon receiving rejection letters from editors of journals who decide not to publish their research (Sheckman is now chief editor of PNAS). And then he put up a slide with what must be the ultimate response to an unfavorable review, and had us in splits.

Sheckman attributed this priceless quote to George Bernard Shaw (though I googled it to discover that it was Max Reger who wrote this letter to a music critic). Anyway, here’s the quote, the all time best response to a rejection letter.

“I am sitting in the smallest room of my house. I have your review before me. In a moment it will be behind me.”

Goodbye Arthur C. Clarke

2008-03-20T17:01:00.000-07:00

(Apologies for the infrequent posts, and this may continue for the next couple of months. But I’ll post when I can)

Arthur C. Clarke’s death yesterday didn’t really come as a shock or surprise to me. The man was over 90 years old, so it was time. But his death did trigger some fond memories of his books, and the influence they had on me.

I got introduced to science fiction probably in my very early teens. But that was mostly through the “classic” science fiction writers, like H.G. Wells and Jules Verne. Verne in particular was (and remains) a huge favorite of mine. His stories were all about adventure, and to a teenager with an over imaginative mind, little could be more exciting than going off to the center of the earth or crossing oceans in a sea-monster shaped submarine. But somewhere around then, I decided that I wanted to read some novels where there was more science. At the time “cool” science meant space, so I wanted something to read that had space in it. Science fiction used to be hard to come by in those days, but luckily for me my school had a library well stocked with fiction. While rummaging through the shelves of books there, I came across a hardcover book which had a picture of a meteor and some planets in the background, with the irresistibly intriguing title of The Hammer of God. Pretty soon I was devouring the story, and I vividly remember being rather taken in by the Indian theme that ran in the background. A meteor named Kali bound to destroy earth seemed particularly apt. But I was more struck by the fact that many of the characters seemed to be of Indian origin (the hero of that novel was Robert Singh). That was perhaps the first time I had read a book by a non-Indian author where important characters had Indian names, but more importantly, their nationality didn’t matter. In other books by western authors, if at all there was a character with an Indian name, that character would be particularly Indian and often pander to some stereotype. But here the nationality or ethnic origin didn’t matter. The person just happened to have an Indian name, and it wasn’t the least bit odd. I thought that was just the way it should be.

That said, when I finished reading “The hammer of God” I wasn’t particularly overwhelmed. It was an interesting book, and kept me engaged through its pages, but nothing more. Still, it had been sufficiently exciting for me to want to read another book by Clarke. Rendezvous with Rama followed, and that book left me far more interested in the genre. From there it was but a few steps to exploring the worlds of Clarke, Asimov, Franz Herbert, Philip K. Dick and so many more. Science fiction became a wholly enjoyable part of my reading habits, and sometimes a valuable source of knowledge and information. And yes, I realized there was more to space than warp-speed, Captain Kirk and death-stars.

Of course, writing about Clarke without mentioning “2001: A space odyssey” is futile. Surprisingly, I’ve never read the book. Through high school and college I filled my head with trivia about the book and the movie, and the naming of HAL and whatever else, but some how never got around to reading the book. But I did see the movie in a most atypical way. Roger Ebert, the noted film critic, hosts what he calls “Ebert’s overlooked film festival” in the little college town of Champaign-Urbana, Illinois. In the year 2001, I actually went to this gem of a film festival, and was treated to a superb selection of films of Ebert’s choice. One of the highlights of the festival was, yes, a screening followed by a discussion of Kubrick’s “2001: A Space Odyssey”. “Odyssey” and Urbana of course had the deepest of connections, as in the book the computer, HAL 9000, becomes operational in the HAL plant in Urbana, Illinois (don’t ask me how I know that without reading the book. It is essential Odyssey trivia). I watched the movie, mesmerized, almost hypnotized by the surreal rolling colors and visuals of the movie, and the hypnotic voice of HAL 9000. In between I remembered scenes from “2010” (which I had seen earlier) and wondered about how Chandra, the Indian scientist who creates HAL, became a white dude in the movie. The discussion that followed the movie was unsurprisingly fascinating, since the room was filled with movie buffs and science and SciFi geeks, a dozen computer scientists who felt possessive about the movie (because Chandra and HAL were fictionally from Urbana-Champaign), and a benignly portly Ebert lording over all proceedings.

That was the last time I saw or read something by Clarke. I hadn’t read a book of his since then, and the only other time I thought about him was when I was with some friends and the conversation meandered towards the utility of space flights and then to how satellites (in a geosynchronous orbit) changed our world for ever. My only contribution in that discussion was that the geostationary orbit of satellites are in what is now called the Clarke belt. The man, like all great science fiction writers, was a visionary.

Today Arthur C. Clarke is dead. But thank you for playing a little role in nurturing and directing my fascination for science.

Saying it as it is

2008-03-07T12:14:00.000-08:00

I’m trying to figure out which system is better.

Growing up in India, I realized the "educational" system had a wonderful way of killing any semblance of self-esteem and confidence in most kids. A very large fraction of the teachers out there had an uncanny ability to grind a student’s opinion of oneself into dust (tossing in a whack or two on the head as a bonus). Except for a chosen few in a class, most students were reminded in numerous way of how utterly incompetent they were. Every child was certainly not “gifted”, except in the eyes of their extremely adoring parents. Even there, a number of parents would publicly state how worthless their kid was. In college, you’d routinely be reminded that you were no better than an earthworm lost in the sand, ready to be crushed under some heel. Professors would look at you with an expression that read “you are a state topper and this is the best you can do?” (or would sometimes even actually say that). Most of our grades in college weren’t artificially inflated too much. If you sucked, you flunked the course, simple as that. And then you’d be clearly told that you sucked, and you’d have a better future selling peacock feathers at the railway station. A majority of the students’ grades were what the majority should be, average. In the end, you came out of the system typically underestimating your own abilities. You either were resigned to a life of mediocrity, or would strive insanely hard to be that much more successful. I’m not sure how many people have come out of college in India with such low self esteem that it took years to undo. Unless of course you went to an IIT. In that case you really believed you were special even if you flunked half your courses while you were there.

At least, I think it was mostly like that.

Anyway, when I came to America years ago for grad school, I learnt pretty quickly that things were quite different on this side of the pond. Most kids seem to have gone through school and college generally being told that they were wonderful and unique, or “gifted”. Grades in courses seemed hugely inflated, and students seemed particularly prone to what can only be described as whining. A’s seemed to be handed out like free seminar pizzas, and the rare professor who really spread his/her grades out over a median distribution was labeled a hardass. This extended to how you spoke to students as well. A lousy student could never be told that he/she sucked, and had chosen something he/she had no aptitude for. Extreme PC is the rule here. Early in grad school, we had to spend a couple of quarters being teaching assistants. Half my students did poorly in the quizzes I set (strictly from the material at hand). I didn’t give them any freebies. I got lousy ratings as a TA. That taught me a lesson. The next time I was a TA, I handed out soft quizzes, played “pharmacology jeopardy”, brought Halloween candy to class on Halloween, and told my class that they rocked. That won me rave reviews and an insanely high score of 4.6 out of 5 as a TA. While most undergrads would go away to get a real job, some of them would actually come to grad school. There some would discover that they were utterly incompetent, had no lab skills, couldn’t plan an experiment, and even if they did, couldn’t execute it. This would drive their mentor nuts. In my case, while supervising some particularly incompetent rotation students, I’ve learnt to just walk out of the room, take deep breaths, rip a sheet of paper, and come back and smile. And then a few of them might ask you for your “honest opinion of their abilities” at the end of their stint in the lab. “Honest opinion” means anything but that. You’re supposed to be smiley and polite and say how they really have great potential, and their flaws (if any) are so minute that they were practically perfect. If you say they sucked, they’re guaranteed to go about ensuring your reputation as an unreasonable a****le. After all, they came through college with straight A’s and no one had ever told them they sucked ever before.

The good in all of this is the great amount of self-confidence and ambition most students have. But the flip side is a serious confusion of ambition and ability. They aren’t the same. There aren’t any pretty gold stars for doing something, making a mess of it, not trying hard to get it right (or correcting your mistakes) and then whining about how tough it is.

So, having written down these thoughts, I’m still trying to figure it out. Is it better to go through a system without any mollycoddling, to come out of it diffident, overcautious, sometimes insecure, or entering the world full of ambition, but being sometimes incapable of facing reality?

Seminar thoughts

2008-02-28T16:53:00.000-08:00

RPM had a delightful post about the people you’d see at a departmental seminar. A good part of any academic’s life would have been spent listening to someone give a seminar on some topic. RPM clearly enjoys observing the people in the seminar, instead of paying attention to whatever was being said by the speakers. But it is just as entertaining to observe and form (exaggerated, biased or irrelevant) opinions of the seminar speaker. There are different types of speakers and most of them probably fall somewhere in one of these categories.

Animatedly excited (a.k.a. “This is so cool”) speaker : Lets face it. Most scientists are inordinately fond of their research. Everything else in the world (global warming, tsunamis, earthquakes, Paris Hilton) is less important. But while giving a seminar, they try to control their excitement. Not so the “This is so cool” speaker. Every sentence of theirs ends with an exclamation! Every little gel they run or PCR they do is fantastic! Good lord, why are we even listening to their talk?! We should just give them that Nobel!

Data? Pshaw! Here’s a schematic: There are some speakers who think actual data isn’t worth showing. So their talks are filled with impressive conclusions, schematics (called “cartoons”, not to be confused with Bugs Bunny), predictive models, and an animated PowerPoint movie with impressively shaped molecules flying around. They would have completed an entire one hour seminar showing only one real graph/gel/microscopic image/structure. An argument could be made that the work is already published so we can go and look up their papers to read about it. But why would I sit in a seminar if I wanted to read about something? If the work is still unpublished, all I have to do is go back to my computer and spend the next 6 months searching PubMed everyday hoping those grand models have some data behind them.

You want more data? Here you go: In stark contrast is the data masochist. This speaker decides to smack the audience with every published, publishable and unpublishable result his/her lab would ever get. This means you are subjected to six slides showing the same result tested in a dozen ways. At the end of the seminar you have no idea what the big idea behind the work was. But you might have caught up on your sleep.

I’m so good I can fit four seminars in one: This is data masochist version II. In this case he/she doesn’t talk about fifty ways to do one experiment, but decides to talk about every single project going on in his/her lab. Since the audience typically consists of rookie grad students who want to learn but have attention deficit disorder, veteran grad students who come only for the free food, a scattering of students, postdocs and faculty who just want to hear one cool story, and precisely 2.1 diehards who want to know everything, their effort only serves to annoy. Half the audience is comatose after story number three (at 40 minutes) and will willingly part with their firstborn when the speaker starts story number four, just to get him/her to stop. When the final story (number six) starts, at breakneck speed, there is almost an audible sigh of relief from the audience as the slides whiz by fast enough to make Roddick’s serve look geriatric. Sometimes, somewhere in between the seminar, the irritable grand old scientist of the department walks out, leading to a massive audience efflux and much embarrassment to the speaker and his/her host.

My other job is singing lullabies: This is the speaker who probably dreamt of being an NPR radio host, but ended up in academia instead (every one knows the surest way of putting a baby to sleep is turning on National Public Radio). You enter the seminar hall, the lights are dimmed, and then the soothing monotone starts. There isn’t the slightest hint of emotion, the slightest blemish or stammer. The volume is just perfect. You fight to stay up but the force is too strong. You leave the seminar hall and your red-eyed colleague asks you what you thought of the seminar. You’re forced to answer “It was pretty good….what did you think”, and aforementioned colleague will be forced to answer “Oh yeah” and then look at his watch and pretend to have to be elsewhere.

We discovered everything: Seminar speaker gives long introduction. Seminar speaker cites earlier known work, ALL of which was done in his/her lab. Seminar speaker gives talk about the great breakthroughs that are currently coming out of lab. Heck, as far as seminar speaker goes, his/her area of research has just one lab doing research on it. No one else exists. When questions are asked at the end of the seminar, all answers begin with “we’ve shown that….blah….” and end with “….we are currently doing that…blah.” The rest of us should just roll over and become technicians. The speaker probably discovered gravity and the moon as well.

I’m so famous I can make up anything: This kind of seminar speaker is sometimes outrageously entertaining. They show a little piece of data (or sometimes hypothesize that data), and then draw a very long line to an outrageous claim. Something that just about everyone in the audience (except some naïve, gullible, wet-behind-the-ears first year graduate student) knows is bovine excreta but no one calls it, because speaker is “Mr. famous scientist”. Then naïve, gullible first year graduate student writes a qualifier proposal based on “Mr. famous scientist’s” BS, and his/her committee rips it to shreds, leaving the kid in tears.

Any more speaker types?

Alumni and their institutions

2008-02-16T18:25:00.000-08:00

It is hard not to be impressed by the philanthropic contributions of alumni to the universities they have attended, particularly in America. Most universities routinely raise millions of dollars from former students, who contribute towards setting up new ventures, establishing resource centers or labs, endowing professorships or scholarships and so on. In addition, the various alumni associations remain in close contact with the parent university, being involved in just about everything from football and basketball games to campaigns and expansion efforts. In contrast, the involvement or philanthropic contributions of alumni to academic institutions in India remain relatively miniscule. There certainly are a number of bureaucratic or legislative reasons for that, as is typical in India. But I think there might be something more (at least for me).

I started thinking about it after I received an email recently from the center for alumni affairs from my old undergrad institution. It was a typical email written in the typical style of an Indian bureaucrat. It started by calling the present vice chancellor of the university a “great visionary”, and then claimed how wonderful an education and research institute the university was, and then pointing me towards an effort to get the alumni more involved with their contributions towards the university.

There’s nothing wrong in that. Except that, upon a little reflection, I don’t think I would particularly want to do anything for my undergraduate college. In stark contrast, if I do reach a stage in my life when I can make a philanthropic contribution or contribute otherwise to my old high school, or to my graduate school or any other institution I’ve been associated with, I am very likely to do so. But why is that?

I have fond memories of college. I didn’t love every moment of it, but it certainly was a fun time during some very important years in my life. While growing as a person, I made some good friends, found a few good faculty mentors, and managed to acquire some knowledge in the process. But, as I think about it now, those were things I would have had in any university. Those friends or the handful of faculty who influenced me remain important, but while I associate them with my time in the university, I don’t associate the university itself with them. Somehow, as I thought about this email I received, I started to realize why.

Let me explain. Those college years are very important to most people. They are right in those formative years, where knowledge is acquired, horizons and perspectives broadened and important life and career choices are made. Students have just emerged from high school, and are now young adults with the government given right to drive, drink or vote in the next general election, using their own discretion. They are full of energy and purpose, looking for encouragement and direction. At least that was how I looked at it.

But unfortunately, at least in my old institution (which was typical of most government/state institutes in India, which are the “top” universities in the country) provided everything but that. Instead of a world of knowledge and ideas, I went to a world of rules and bureaucracy, full of petty minds and narrow thoughts. The general attitude of a large section of the staff and faculty was largely unhelpful, and one of extreme hierarchy and authority. To get the smallest of jobs done, one would have to beg, flatter and plead repeatedly over weeks or months sometimes. Instead of giving the students the freedom to attend the classes they wanted to, there was a strict, mandatory attendance policy (of 90% of the classes each year). This was irrespective of whether the student learnt anything in class or not. Failure to attend class (even if you aced the tests) would mean having to repeat the course. That of course had nothing to do with class participation, since many faculty hated students who dared to question. Many courses were extremely uninteresting, and were taught by incompetent lecturers incapable of thinking beyond the textbook (or with lecture notes that hadn’t been updated for 20 years). What’s more, some faculty remained particularly narrow minded, and the rules would put some military schools to shame. These rules would range from attempted “dress codes” through faculty taking offense at students chatting outside their classes in the hallway, to “bans” on cell phones or rules discouraging people of opposite sex from any sort of interaction (yup, in college), or denying use of university computers or the internet. At the end of the college years, students would have to run from pillar to post to get their academic transcripts (sometimes pleading with the staff to issue them one), and would be required to get this ridiculous document called a “character certificate” (which is still required when applying for graduate school or government jobs in India. The purpose it serves remains a mystery). At the end of four years of college, the student receive everything but a broad, liberal education, in spite of being amongst the brightest and most self motivated students in the country. While most students would miss their college friends and life, I think only a few would actually miss their college itself. There may even be a slight feeling of bitterness against the college as they leave.

Cut to ten or twenty years later. Many students who have passed out are now extremely successful. Some have managed to reach fairly enviable levels of affluence. At this stage they are quite ready to make some philanthropic contributions. But even if they do want to support students in their old institutions, they know that they will have to go through that wall of bureaucrats or faculty who will continue to treat students like little children, throwing about their rules and ideas. The very thought of interacting with those old staff or professors who made their lives miserable years ago is distasteful (at least for me). I wouldn’t want to, say, contribute to a research center knowing that it would be under the control of these people. So, while it may seem a little petty on my part, those are my thoughts. I just wouldn’t want to be associated with them in any way, and many of these reasons remain intangible.

But perhaps I’m completely mistaken, and this reason, this subconscious holding-back, isn’t really a common factor at all. Any thoughts?

An illusionary sense of superiority

2008-02-05T19:35:00.000-08:00

In a utopian world science would be perfectly egalitarian, and only the quality of the science itself would matter. But of course, human nature takes its toll on most things, and our inherent tendency to proclaim or feel superiority on the silliest of premises sometimes takes over. So, just like in almost every other profession, pedigree is (unfortunately) awarded what I think is a very high premium. But sometimes some small minds with bloated egos take it one step too far.

A few little incidents I witnessed reminded me of an interview of an extremely pompous Indian politician (I cannot remember his name) by the prominent (and pompous) Indian television commentator Karan Thapar which I happened to see (a year or so ago). I don’t remember the exact context where this topic came about, but the politician somewhere in the interview declared that he was “much better” than Thapar. Thapar, incredulous that anyone could conceivably be better than him, asked “how so”? The politician asked Thapar where he had been educated, and Thapar, with the glint of old boy pride in his eyes, said he’d studied in Doon school followed by degrees from Cambridge and Oxford. Pompous politician whose name I can’t remember says “Aha! I am better” and then says he studied at “some other prestigious school” followed by degrees from Harvard and Wharton or some such, and therefore he was better than Thapar.

That was just about the silliest argument I had ever heard.

But coming back to my little world of science, it seems there isn’t a significant shortage of such similarly bloated egos either. Here are some select stories:

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A very bright graduate student friend of mine told me this incident. Some years ago, while interviewing for graduate school, she had interviewed at some of the top schools in the US. For various reasons important to her, she turned down some big name schools like Stanford, Berkeley, Yale, Johns Hopkins and a few others to decide to come here for her PhD. That was her choice. A year or so ago, she runs into another student who is now in Hopkins at some meeting. Now this student had interviewed in Hopkins at the same time as my friend, and they remembered each other. So their conversation naturally goes towards what they are doing. That girl asks my friend where she decided to go for her PhD and my friend tells her that she’s in Texas.

The other girl, in all sincerity, says “Oh, I’m so sorry. I didn’t know you didn’t get into Hopkins”.

Friend rolls eyes in astonishment and walks away.

(I wonder how much this story would hurt some of the big egos here in Dallas, since after all, by some measures, this place ranks as the “number 1 research institution in the US” in some disciplines. These egos aren’t exclusive to “big name schools” in the east coast, though there seems to be a little bit more out there).

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If you’ve decided that it was just an immature graduate student with some air of superiority, here’s a good story from faculty.

Another friend was doing a PhD in a small but respected school in the US. Her own graduate school efforts, by all measures, were exceptional. Most students in big name institutes don’t have the quality of publications my friend managed in a small school. While interviewing for postdocs, my friend also wrote to some researcher Y in a very big name institute on the North East coast (Yale). X was still in grad school at the time. Anyway, Y decides to call my friend up at some 8 am in the morning (anyone with brains would know that 8 am is a terrible time to call a grad student), on friend’s cell phone. Naturally there is no response. So, bloated ego Y decides to call my friend’s PhD advisor Z up to converse. Z at first politely talks to Y, and then Y starts asking Z if Z even knew whether my friend ever came to the lab, what kind of student my friend was, whether my friend was the least bit interested in research and so on. Z somehow managed to speak politely, and then Y goes on to question Z’s research credentials. Y goes on and says something about how people in “small schools” don’t know what research is all about, and then offers to fly down my friend for an interview just so that my friend can “visit Yale, and see how real research is done at a real research institute”.

Luckily that was the last straw for Z, who (still) politely but firmly put Y in her place, and told Y to take a hike, because there was just about no way my friend would ever do a postdoc with Y anymore, or bother to “visit” Yale.

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There are many more such stories of course. In my more naïve past I might have been guilty of one or two such moments of snootiness myself (and I am thoroughly ashamed of those moments now). More recently, I’ve been at scientific meetings, where some people from “big name institutes” only talk to others from what they deem to be suitably equivalent institutes. The silliness often permeates to the job market as well, and it can be easier for an absolutely incompetent idiot from Harvard to find a job than it is for a very talented student from a small Midwestern institute (ahem…..Bush went to Yale and then Harvard). And a person might retain this attitude for years or even decades after passing out of the “famous institute”.

I know a few IITans read this blog. No offense buddies, but perhaps its time to get over it.

(update: it wasn't a pompous politician in that interview with Thapar. It was pompous businessman Rahul Bajaj. Thanks bala)

Barber shop

2008-01-28T20:35:00.001-08:00

Getting a haircut used to be something I’d look forward to as a kid growing up in the then sleepy town of Bangalore. It was the main event of a lazy Sunday. You’d go to the barber shop, and settle down on a bench while waiting your turn. The place would be typical, surrounded by mirrors, with a display of rather exotic looking colored liquids in bottles, and plenty of colored bottles with water in them, with a siphon-spray attached. And the barber shop would have its clear hierarchy. You’d know in a moment who owned that establishment. Usually middle aged, with a dash of white amidst mostly black hair, a bristly moustache and an air of satisfaction as he’d carry out conversation with his customers, pass judgment on the happenings in the country, and manage to subject the barbers working for him to some of his strong opinions. Meanwhile, a TV (which was black and white when I was a little kid, but soon became color) would have either the news or a cricket match on, while my turn would finally come, and I’d be treated to delightful splashes of water, the steady snipping of scissors as they removed a load off my head, and finally the all relaxing head massage (“champi”). Born again, I would return home delighted with the proceedings of the day.

Those seem like distant memories, and many years have gone by, with a haircut becoming something of the mundane. TGF or Supercuts are fine, and my haircuts are satisfactory, but somehow it had become too much of a sterile routine. Go, put name on the waiting list, wait for name to be called, get a “number 3” haircut, pay, tip, and leave. Sure, there was nothing bad about it. In fact, it was a streamlined process, and rarely took more than 25 minutes (from the time I reached the store and put my name down on the list, to the time I left).

I had almost forgotten what those days in the little barber shop at the corner of my street was like.

A few months ago, after moving to Dallas, I think I might have rediscovered something. There was this little barbershop unimaginatively called “Barber Shop” a block away from my former apartment. Now, never a person willing to go great distances to get my hair cut, I decided this was well worth a try. So one fine day I decided to walk in and get my hair cut. The moment I entered the store, I knew it was something a little different. There wasn’t any nice waiting corner in the store, just a long bench in front of a seemingly endless mirror. About half a dozen people were waiting their turn, and I sat down besides them. There was nothing resembling a wait-list, we just sat, and the place slowly began to seep into me. The music was Spanish pop. The proprietors seemed to be big fans of gangster movies. There were vintage posters of Pacino and De Niro (from their Scarface and Godfather days), in black and white, right next to a poster of the real Al Capone (and not De Niro). The TV was on, but in some almost invisible corner, on mute, showing a Spanish channel. Having become a little used to the unisex salons of TGF and Supercuts, I was a little startled to rediscover a “guys only” barber shop. But there were guys of all ages, from slightly obese kids munching on bags of chips to middle aged men waiting their turn as they flipped the pages of a Sports Illustrated printed after the previous year’s Super Bowl. Most of the customers were either Hispanic or black, and there was a new atmosphere of relaxation and enjoyment in the barbershop, as some kids ran around in some improvised game of “pull the shirt”. I noticed an old poster hanging in a corner that read “for colored only”, in mock jest.

I looked at the barbers. They’re all Hispanic, rather well built, and many have some extremely artistic tattoos on their forearms. I noticed that they almost always stuck to clippers and rarely (if ever) used the scissors. A couple of them have tattoo tears, and looked like people I wouldn’t be comfortable running into in a dark alley.

And then I got my haircut. I’m usually not a talker while getting haircuts, but I couldn’t help striking a conversation with the barber here. He was a delightful chap, and while his English had a typically strong Hispanic tinge to it, it was more than fluent. I’m not sure who owns the place, but he said a couple of them had been convicts once, but had long since reformed, and now had families and kids to take care off, and enjoyed their jobs as barbers. I of course didn’t press questions about tear-tattoos, but was almost tempted to ask if that was why they used only clippers and not scissors. Many of the customers around me seemed like regulars, and there was plenty of interesting banter about their lousy jobs, or wives/girlfriends, or the latest in cars. One kid said something about wanting to drop out of high school, only for a barber to call him an idiot, and tell him to “stay out of trouble and in school”. One customer was complaining about the inmates of a halfway house located next to his house, and his wife wanted them to move to another place, but he liked it there!

I didn’t realize that my haircut itself had taken nearly half an hour. And that seemed to be the average time, as the hair of each customer was cut and shaped to perfection. My hair had never felt that good since I moved to the states.

It’s been many months now since that first visit, but you can bet your bottom dollar I make it a point to visit every few weeks, when I decide my hair needs some grooming.

I only wish they’d learn to offer a champi.

Book mini-review: Landing a Job in Academic Biology

2008-01-23T19:53:00.001-08:00

An enduring memory of most Indian cities are the book sellers on pavements. They’d usually set up shop at any convenient street corner, and spread out their collections of used and new books for sale, including an enviable collection of pirated “ammonia prints” of the latest bestsellers, some textbooks (engineering, medicine, MBA) and, surprisingly, a collection of “self-help” books. These would be on everything from improving English to becoming a salesperson, to inspirational books like Lee Iococca’s biography. I’d always look at them with more than a mild sense of amusement, and never thought I’d ever read a “guide book”.

But I’m taking all those thoughts back, since I now feel those books might have immensely benefited numerous readers. The reason for this rapid reversal of thought is that I recently came across The Chicago guide to landing a job in academic biology by professors Chandler, Wolfe and Promislow (from different universities in Georgia). This is a slender little book, a mere 150 pages thick, and can easily be read in a couple of hours, or packed on a flight (hopefully not the flight taking you to your job interview though). But in those two hours, you’ll pretty much know every little thing you want to know about the process of getting a job in academia.

While this is titled “academic biology”, I think it is equally valuable for someone who’s looking for a job in academic chemistry, and there’s plenty for just about any academic who has dreams of climbing up the academic ladder, but first needs to get that very competitive assistant professor position. Most of us spend years in graduate school getting PhDs, and then often grind it out as postdoctoral fellows for a few years. We’re told that (or it appears as if) the only thing that matters for getting an academic position is your research and publication record. Except that while the research and publication record are indeed of paramount importance, there are dozens of other things that can determine the success rate of finding a job. But most students emerge out of these years of training with little knowledge of all the little things that they need to work on, in order to be successful in getting that job.

This is where this book comes in. The authors have a breezy writing style, filled with humorous anecdotes and personal examples, through which they go through every little aspect of getting a faculty position in academia. No detail is considered too trivial. They start out by stressing how competitive the academic job market is, and begin by saying how important it is to choose the right graduate program. They distinguish between the different types of positions in academia (from extremely research intensive institutes, to exclusive private schools with a focus on teaching), and how different the application packets to any of these should be. There is a whole chapter on writing the correct type of resume for a particular job opening (generic resumes just will not do), and give valuable tips on the things search committees look for in teaching/research statements. They dwell at length on the type of experience you need to gain as a student or postdoc while preparing for any of these positions, and then jump into the details of preparing for the interview, the all important job talk itself, targeting the job search, all the way down to your clothing and the statement it makes, and how to negotiate the best deal with the institute if an offer comes your way. And they also have tremendously useful tips for problems that are increasingly common; the “two body problem” (where couples, both academics, are looking for independent academic positions), potential problems while raising a family (during the stressful tenure track years), issues women might face in science and how they can best overcome them, and many more little details most of us would not even think about.

If you are an aspiring assistant professor in the greater biological sciences (from pure biology to the physical and chemical sciences), I think this book is a must have. At a price of ~12 dollars, it is an absolute steal.

Now that I have most other things covered, all I need to do is to crank out some fantastic publications, and I think I’ll be on my way.

The Chicago Guide to Landing a Job in Academic Biology.

The last cookie

2008-01-17T20:07:00.000-08:00

A big part of academic life is spent in seminars, listening to speakers talking about their latest and greatest research. It is that place where one goes to expand horizons, learn about new science, keep up with breakthrough research, and stuff of that kind. (That’s the official version. It is also a great place to catch up on sleep).

Yet there is one overlooked but critical driving force that draws us to seminars, like the proverbial moths to a flame. The cookies and coffee. The quality and profile of a seminar, in scientific terminology, is directly correlated by the quality of food provided in it. An average department seminar with an invited speaker will have cookies and coffee. The difference sometimes is in the quality of the cookie. Large chocolate chunk cookies are satisfactory, but anything less than large M&M cookies would be absolutely unacceptable. Oreos or Chips Ahoy? Naaah! And a seminar with only coffee is as good as worthless. No coffee? Fuggetaboudit. If the seminar offers cheese and crackers and a fruit platter along with the cookies and coffee/coke, you can almost be assured of a superb talk. And one should always be weary of decoys, such as presentations by graduate students that are accompanied by pizza. More often than not, greed draws you to that seminar. But the quality of that seminar is suspect, with a few good ones making stray appearances between lots of mediocre ones. Pizza is almost always bait the department throws in for a seminar that otherwise may not be very well attended. Attend the talk at your own risk. Almost every department has an individual or two (likely profile: senior PhD student, male, highly sociable) who has a reputation of surviving on free seminar food alone. That person is rumored to spend breakfasts at a morning seminar, lunch at the early afternoon ethics lecture and dinner at the evening physics workshop.

When it comes to the real biggies (annual endowed seminar named after someone or the other with super-famous person speaking), you can expect the real deal. Brownies, fruit tarts, fruit platters and cheese and crackers, perhaps some tasty baked treats, or perhaps even some wine and a catered spread. Those seminars come with the cardinal unwritten commandment; thou shalt not miss the seminar that provides a grand banquet.

Here’s the thing though. I attend only a couple of seminars a week, and don’t really plan my day around them (I no longer fit the profile of the department legend surviving on seminar food). But when I do attend a seminar, I want my free food. As the popular misquote goes, "cookies are my birthright, and I shall have them" (original quote). Unfortunately, I make it to most seminars just as they begin, and not 5-10 minutes early. This means more often than not someone, someone, would have eaten the last cookie.

I can see you all gasp in utter shock and horror. Who would eat the last cookie? Isn’t it just like the last piece of cake? Isn’t it something you desire but do not eat because it is embarrassing to be seen taking that last piece away and denying the next person his/her share? Is there no code of honor left in this world?

Every time this happens (and this happens almost every week), I look around the room and see the satisfied faces of people clutching two or even three cookies in their hands.

They do not realize that it is not cookie dough but blood that they have on their hands. They have all, yes all, committed the crime of stealing the last cookie, and denying me my right. I’m sure there is a special place in science hell for all of them. May their experiments never work.

Dinosaur hunters

2008-01-13T11:08:00.000-08:00

The 19th century was perhaps the last century of the true adventurer-scientist. It was a time when the earth had largely been charted, but there were still large swathes of unexplored land. It was also a time when we were beginning to understand a lot of things about the earth, moving beyond simplistic religious versions of the creation of the earth, to a complex geological and biological understanding of it. The work of Charles Lyell and many others had revealed that the earth was in fact millions of years old, and slowly but constantly changing. The 19th century was also the last era of the amateur “gentleman” scientist. The scientist would almost always be male, invariably would be a person of moderate to affluent wealth, and would dazzle society with his wit and wisdom, or amuse society with his eccentricities, or both.

The 19th century was an exhilarating time for paleontology and (in my mind) a great time for fossil hunters.

While reading about these stories, I recently came across the story of a remarkable person whom I’d hardly heard about, Mary Anning. Mary was one of the great pioneers of fossil hunting, and her work laid some of the foundations for understanding early life, and actually helps explain the fact that animals DID actually go extinct (and the world has not remained unchanged for ever, with all the species intact). Mary was just twelve (or thirteen, depending on the story) when she discovered her first fossil on cliffs along the English Channel. She discovered the fossils of a giant sea-monster called the Ichthyosaur. She spent the next thirty odd years unearthing fossil after fossil, including those of the first plesiosaurus and a nearly complete skeleton of a pterodactyls, (more popularly known as those flying bird-like reptiles in Jurassic Park).

Not surprisingly, she lived a life of relative poverty, without any support from the famous Royal societies (and only managed an honorary membership of the Geological society of London a little before she died). So much for being a woman in science.

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But the most engaging story of the time (purely from a public entertainment perspective) in the world of paleontology came from this side of the Atlantic, in the highly cinematic bone wars. Edward Drinker Cope and Othniel Charles Marsh ruthlessly drove a most improbably rivalry; of finding fossils. They seem to have been petty, ruthless, jealous, extremely mistrustful, and perhaps changed the world of paleontology for ever. Think of just about every famous dinosaur you’ve heard of (except the T. Rex). Diplodocus, triceratops, Stegosaurus, Dimetrodon……all of these fossils were discovered by Cope or Marsh. But their stories are far more engaging.

They started off (in true storybook style) as bosom friends and admirers, but somehow something went wrong between them. They then spent the next thirty years as proverbial archenemies, trying to outdo each other in finding fossils, while simultaneously destroying or sabotaging the work of the other. Their personalities were suitably different. Marsh was a supremely rich individual, but was incompetent. Some historians said that he couldn’t spot a pile of bones lying right in front of him. But he could buy just about anything he wanted. Cope was also born wealthy, but pursued extremely risky projects, like raiding Native American lands during a time of intense rivalry and war between the natives and the white settlers.

The rivalry between them reached ridiculous proportions. Diggers from one team would sometimes throw rocks at the other team, and each accused the other of serious sabotage. Apparently, Cope and his men were once caught using crowbars to open crates that belonged to Marsh. They publicly insulted each other, accusing each other of incompetence, treachery, and fraud. In between they managed to discover well over a hundred species of now extinct dinosaurs.

There is one story that might be the reason why Cope and Marsh became archenemies. Cope discovered the fossil of a species called Elasmosaurus. He proudly displayed it to his (then) friend Marsh, who told Cope that the vertebrae (backbone) were backwards. This was an almost direct insult to Cope, and another pioneering paleontologist, Joseph Leidy was called to determine who was right. After all, one of them had to be wrong. Leidy, it is rumored, took one look at the specimen, and then took the head off the assembled fossil, and placed it where Cody thought the tail was. Cody embarrassedly tried to cover up his errors in some published manuscripts, but Leidy exposed the cover up in the subsequent meeting of the Academy of Natural Sciences. The friendship of Marsh and Cody was toast.

Meanwhile, Cody lost his entire fortune by investing it in the “next big thing” of the time, silver (any one want to buy an oil well, please write to me). But in his last years, Cody came up with a rather novel obsession. He decided that he wanted to be the “type specimen” for Homo sapiens, that is, his bones would be the official specimen for the human race. Even though it was a rather crazy wish, there really wasn’t any ground to oppose it, since there wasn’t any official type specimen for humans. So, Cope willed his bones to the Wistar Institute. Unfortunately, when he died, they found that he had the early stages of syphilis, so with that his dream of his bones being immortalized died for ever.

Interesting times, to say the least. Here’s almost perfect material for the script of a Hollywood blockbuster (and an opportunity for Hollywood to move beyond sequels and comic books). There’s real Indiana Jones style adventure here, and drama and quixotic characters and action with fights and raids. Throw in a (fictional) love interest as the reason for their rivalry, and here you go, a potboiler is ready. Now, whom would you have playing the main cast?

The museum on the sixth floor, and history for the public

2008-01-03T10:14:00.000-08:00

(Here's wishing you all a very happy 2008)

Just before I moved to Dallas, a friend told me to let him know when I “visited the spot where JFK died”. That visit was long overdue, but we finally decided to go downtown and take a look at The sixth floor museum, coincidentally timed a day before Pakistan’s Benazir Bhutto was assassinated.

Not unsurprisingly, the museum turned out to be a treat for a history buff. The museum, like the name suggests, is on the sixth floor of the infamous Dealey Plaza, from where the assassin Lee Harvey Oswald shot the most charismatic world leader of that time. I didn’t expect too much as I entered the museum, and probably would have been content to look at a few black and white JFK photographs, a description around the window where Oswald stood, and then step into the souvenir shop. But it takes American ingenuity to make sure that you feel the visit is worth the ten odd dollars you pay for entrance, and come out having learnt something.

As you enter, you pick up one of those audio-tour players which guide you through the exhibits on the third floor. Initially, I used to feel that the audio-players dictated every moment of these kinds of tours, sometimes injecting urgency when you want to just amble through exhibits. But that, of course, was before I discovered the “pause” button. Since then I’ve been a convert to these devices, which can (when made well) make a visit to a museum that much more informative and enriching. The museum itself had an excellent collection of documents and pictures from John. F. Kennedy’s life, up to his assassination, and tried to present a balanced view of his legacy. This ranged from becoming the youngest elected president of the United States, to his Catholic religion in a strongly protestant nation, the Cuban missile crisis, his Bay of Pigs invasion fiasco, and the beginnings of the Vietnam war. But the highlight of the museum, of course, was his assassination itself. This is nicely chronicled right from his arrival in Dallas, and snippets of newspaper ads that appeared in some Dallas newspapers, that said JFK was a traitor, or a communist or a servant of the Pope, and suchlike. These little snippets allow the visitor to step back into that time. The museum then goes on into details of the assassination, through the famous Zapruder film which caught the assassination on tape, and to the aftermath of JFK’s death. Oswald morphs from being just a name to a real character, and we can allow ourselves to enter the mind of the former Marine who defects to the Soviet Union and then comes back to the States retaining strong communist sympathies. There are photographs of Jack Ruby, who shot Oswald. And then there is the investigation of the assassination itself, and the many conspiracy theories around it, which the museum does not completely ignore, but tries to address using the facts and evidence at hand.

The “magic bullet” that killed Kennedy of course makes an interesting tale. This bullet supposedly not only went through Kennedy’s neck, but then continued to go through the hand of the Texas Governer John Connally, and then go on to embed itself in Connelly’s thigh. This bullet was not found on Governer Connally stretcher, but on another one in the hospital, and looked almost intact (after all this traveling). The Warren commission investigation the assassination claimed that the evidence that this was the bullet was “persuasive”, but thousands of Americans probably said what I did. “Aw, come on, you’ve got to be kidding me.”

I love the conspiracy theories. I was pleasantly satisfied to see some diehard conspiracy theorists standing outside the museum, with their pamphlets and booklets and posters of “evidence”. Only in America, and all part of the great things about this country. Sidetrack: to me the best conspiracy theory was picturized in Oliver Stone’s often historically inaccurate but thoroughly entertaining film, JFK.

Which brings me to some tangential thoughts that came to mind as we left the museum. There are no shortages of memorials (“samadhis”) of Indian political leaders in India. Some of these leaders died natural deaths, while others (like Mahatma Gandhi, or Indira or Rajiv Gandhi) died at the hands of assassins, not unlike Oswald. All of these leaders have monuments erected in their memory. And when you visit them, you encounter somewhat sterile, architectural monstrosities (or delights, perhaps, if you like that kind of architecture) in the midst of some pretty gardens. The events leading to and following their deaths aren’t depicted. There is little (or nothing) about the legacy of these leaders, or the incidents and controversies behind their lives and deaths. The identities, and more importantly the lives of their assassins remain outside the purviews of these monuments. And the visitor comes and leaves without having learnt anything about the dead or those who caused their deaths. There is no feeling that a sense of history or legacy ever existed. Is it too much to expect that the legacies (however flawed) of the leaders who shaped the modern destiny of a nation with a sixth of the world’s population, are remembered, at least at the monuments which mark their death?

Recycling woes

2007-12-27T20:10:00.001-08:00

I try hard to minimize my carbon footprint (according to the calculator, my footprint is 5.5 tonnes, compared to the US average of 20 tonnes per person, pat pat). The years in Seattle ensured that recycling would always be on my mind, and that city is a wonderful example of what is possible, where there is a constant effort to maximize recycling and reduce waste and consumption.

Anyway, after having moved to Dallas, my efforts to conserve and recycle have run into a number of challenges, and plenty of amusing incidents.

Most of Dallas city itself still doesn't recycle (though there is some recycling in Dallas suburbs). Which means if you want to recycle, you need to collect whatever you can at home, and then drop it off at the nearest recycling center. Luckily for me, I managed to find a recycling center just a couple of miles from home, and started collecting and sorting trash out at home (into the usual, paper, plastic, glass and cans). The problem though lies in taking that trash in a timely manner to the recycling center. More often than not, I end up with a small mountain of recyclable trash, which eventually makes entry into the laundry room impossible. Loading all of that into the car ends up being quite an ordeal. But it’s also led to some embarrassing situations.

On one occasion there I was, standing by the apartment elevator, with two large trash bags and two smaller bags full of cans and bottles, and on my way down, the inevitable happened. One of the bags ripped open and there were cans rolling all over the corridor. As I was chasing down one of the fugitive cans, one of my neighbors stepped forward to help, and with a twinkle in his eye asked me if I was collecting trash for a reason. Perhaps I wanted to sell them on eBay!

On another occasion I had so much trash that the trunk of our little car wouldn’t close (damn those humongous plastic milk containers). As I huffed and puffed under the warm Texas sun, another neighbor who was driving out in his truck took one look at me and said “that’s why you need a truck”, smiled and drove off. On a third occasion, I almost made it to the car intact, when I tripped on the curb by the parking lot and splattered cans and bottles across the lot. But I soldier on.

Grocery stores sometimes provide even more entertainment. I was used to taking a shopping bag to stores in Seattle. Anyway, most stores there give a choice between paper and plastic bags, and also have drop-off points for store plastic bags. But only a few stores in Dallas have drop off points, and none (at least the affordable ones) offer paper bags. So, we try to take shopping baskets with us when we shop, or try to minimize plastic bags. Often when I say I don’t want a bag, the store attendants shrug incredulously but sometimes ask ”no bags?”, as if to ask if we plan to teleport the groceries. But today, when I said we’d like to put stuff in our own shopping basket, the cashier looked at them for the first time and said “Oh sorry, I thought they were your laundry baskets”, and burst out laughing. Clearly, there couldn’t be a funnier sight in town.

The hardest part of living in Dallas though is that the city is not built for people who like to walk. The pavements are bad, most people in their cars don’t notice pedestrians, and pedestrians are a rarity in most streets (bicycles are an even rarer species). I’ve often wanted to walk the 3 miles to work (on days when the weather is reasonable), but the streets aren’t particularly safe after dark, there isn’t any one else walking (except some homeless people), and at every third intersection the pavement disappears into the street.

Living the green life in Dallas sure is challenging. It’s almost as if every possible obstacle has been placed in your way, and it just might be easier for me to train and run next year’s city marathon.

But what’s life, if it isn’t challenging.

Newsmaker of the year: Rajendra Pachauri

2007-12-19T16:40:00.000-08:00

Nature has announced its newsmaker of the year. It is Rajendra “Pachy” Pachauri.

For those of you who ask “Rajendra who?”, he’s the chair of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, and the director of The Energy and Resources Institute (formerly Tata Energy and Resources Institute). The IPCC shared this years Nobel peach…uh…peace prize with the Goracle.

His profile in Nature is both entertaining and inspiring (particularly for Indian scientists, who should read the bit about his work ethic). From a slightly controversial selection, to being called a “feet dragger” or worse, Pachauri systematically overcame all critics and helped the IPCC forge ahead with its findings and getting global leaders to agree on something.

“On his way to collect his own medal, Gore stopped to shake Pachauri warmly by the hand. Patchy and Al, as they call each other, get along famously. It is all a far cry from the situation in 2002, when Pachauri beat Gore's favoured candidate to run the IPCC in a bitterly fought contest. Immediately afterwards, Gore lambasted Pachauri in the pages of The New York Times as the “let's drag our feet candidate”, a patsy put in place to weaken the IPCC as one of various “acts of sabotage” by the new Bush administration. Pachauri had fought back with a letter of his own to the Times . “In a 1991 speech, Mr Gore [referred] to my 'commitment', 'vision' and 'dedication' … Will the real Al Gore please stand up?”

You can read the entire profile here, on the Nature website. It is an excellent article to read.

(And if Nature decides this is subscription only, and you want to read it, send me an email and I’ll send you a pdf)

If this story sounds familiar....

2007-12-17T20:50:00.000-08:00

......to many of you, it will probably be because you’ve seen or experienced something exactly like this.

Here’s the story, and you just might be able to replace the situation and the people without changing a single incident.

The wife goes down to her alma mater for the graduation ceremony of some of her friends. Now, graduation ceremonies are a rather grand celebratory affair, especially when someone is getting the doctoral “hood”. Two of her friends were being hooded, and so she was given the job of being their official photographer and cheerleader.

Like almost everyone else, she was at the auditorium early, and quietly seated herself at the back, where there was seating. When it was close to the time her friend was going to be hooded, she quietly went up (going unobtrusively from the side), found a corner where she could stand without disturbing anyone to take a picture, and got her camera out. The American couple who were seated besides her (likely waiting for their son or daughter to graduate) saw her, and asked if she’d like to come to their spot in order to get a better picture. Everything was as it should be, joyous and celebratory.

And then these two Indian students walked, or should I say, swaggered into the front aisle without a care in the world. While every one was perfectly well behaved, these two behaved as if they ruled the world. They walked right up, obstructing as many views as humanly possible, all while talking happily. One guy whips out a camera, and stands akimbo right in the middle of the stage taking a picture. They decide to stand right there and turn back and wave or call out to their friend (who was walking up on stage). You know…..the “hey, look here, we’re here” kind of voice that was hardly congratulatory. While this was going on, and everyone else in the hall was getting pissed off, one of their cell phones rang (with a suitably colorful ringtone). Instead of switching the damn thing off, he turns back, grins and says “sorry, bad timing” and continues, incredibly, to click pictures without shutting off that phone, even as some of the audience looked at him in disbelief. This, right after a clear message from the organizers requesting the audience to shut off their cellphones. Now, to top things, after clicking the pictures he wanted, he proceeds to whip out his (still ringing) phone and yell “do minute me phone karna, main thoda busy hoon” (call me after two minutes, I’m a little busy right now). Two minutes later, almost on cue, the phone rings again! This time, an American gentleman sitting in front couldn’t take it any more, and asks this guy to take it outside, which he reluctantly does, talking away on his phone as he’s leaving the hall.

Meanwhile, my wife gets ready to quietly take her friend’s picture. Just as she’s about to take a short video, this same guy and his friend walk right back in, and stand right in front of her (as her friend is hooded), shutting off her view. She now has a delightful video of the back and head of this guy for posterity, with some of his running Hindi commentary to boot.

And this was hardly the only incident of the day, but a single sample from many such. Here’s yet another one. In the aisle behind where she and her friends were seated were yet another group of Indian students, talking away as if they owned this world (while all others in the audience were quietly seated, listening to the names being read out, and clapping politely). The all important topic of the discussion of this group of loudmouths was cameras. The conversation goes thus:

“Hey, check out my camera phone, it’s got 1 megapixel resolution”

“That’s nothing, mine’s got 3 megapixels. Shut up and smile.”

Few more loud words exchanged in a few Indian languages.

Click. Click. What fun.

The wife was understandably furious with all of this, and was talking to her friends at the end of the day (two of them were European, the other Canadian). Since she had initiated the discussion, the others said they didn’t want to say this in her presence, but in numerous public places (from places on campus to airports or restaurants) they had all experienced some extremely boorish or downright rude behavior from Indians. Most times they were too stunned to respond (I’ll avoid details here).

This is hardly surprising to most of us. Anyone who has gone to a movie hall screening an Indian movie, or an Indian concert, must have experienced this and much more. Cell phones ring constantly. Kids run berserk, yelling at the top of their voices as their parents let them be, oblivious to the disturbed crowd around them. Conversations continue in loud voices (talking is bad enough, but if you have to, whisper). People stand up and obstruct everyone’s view of the stage/screen, without a care in the world, and certainly don’t put in any effort to get out of the way. Others answer loudly ringing cell phones and engage in long, loud conversations within earshot of everyone else. Still others don’t bother to stand in line, but walk right up to the front of the counter without even acknowledging the existence of others in line, or jostle for space using painfully bony elbows. An endless list.

I’ve been reluctant to admit it (or usually have been defensive about it when some non-Indian friends bring it up), but I think, after viewing a rather large sample size, I’m compelled to say that we’re a country of rude, inconsiderate boors. And unfortunately, most of us haven’t even heard of the saying “when in Rome, do as the Romans do”, and don’t behave as well as most American audiences would.

And it doesn’t matter who you are or what you do or how much money you have.

It NEVER hurts to be polite and considerate.

Ethics, plagiarism, eTBLAST and déjà vu

2007-12-08T11:27:00.000-08:00

(It has been an eventful week, with moving apartments and lots of boxes to pack and unpack, but there are some interesting blog posts stored in my mind, and they’ll be up as soon as I get typing)

Abi and other Indian researchers have written extensively about a couple of cases of plagiarism in research from India over the past year or so. There have been two major recent examples of what can only be called blatant and unacceptable cases of plagiarism, which have rightfully been panned by Abi and many others.

But here’s the thing which perhaps hasn’t been discussed enough. Sure, there have been a few researchers who resort to plagiarism or make dubious ethical decisions to steal research or duplicate their own work and present it as different work. But at a larger scale, within the broader education system, there is no understanding or even recognition that this is a problem, nor is there any effort to educate all students about ethics, plagiarism and the importance of citing one’s sources.

The simple concept of citing references should start at a very early stage, in junior school or middle school. I recall numerous science, history and geography projects that we did starting late in junior school. The charts and reports were always something I looked forward doing, and for projects in my 9th and 10th grade, I spent many wonderful hours in the library of the Indian Institute of World culture, looking up their terrific collection of history books. Thankfully, we had been told to cite our references by our history teacher, and I meticulously made a list of all my references and added that to a bibliography. But I remember many more examples from school and even college where students would come up with reports without a single reference, or in other cases copy large sections of text from textbooks or other sources, verbatim. They were never once told that they were wrong, and that was unacceptable. In one instance, for a social studies class project, a teacher proudly announced to the class that one such project was “outstanding” and “beautifully written” (a comment more pertinent to this student’s elegant artwork and layout, but nothing about the content). This project was copied out faithfully from a textbook, which wasn’t even cited in the non-existent reference/bibliography section. In stark contrast, when I moved to the States some years ago, I was pleasantly surprised when I found that most school kids here were required to cite their sources in their class projects and essays. The lackadaisical approach towards ethics in research often continues through college in India, and the student learns of citing resources or ethical issues only when he/she is a graduate student, or in some cases never at all. I’ve hardly been surprised to find some international students here in the States (this malady isn’t restricted to India, but may be widespread across parts of Asia or Africa) who aren’t exactly sure what is acceptable and what is not. There is an urgent need to educate educators in India, and make an ethics and plagiarism course a serious part of the curriculum at least in the freshman/sophomore years of college. (And when I say serious, I mean that if a person “flunks” this course, that person should not be allowed to progress to the next year in college).

That said, here’s an interesting second part of this post. A month or so ago, Dr. Harold “Skip” Garner, a researcher here, talked about some of his latest research. He, amongst other things, is a bioinformaticist, and his group came up with the eTBLAST resource. Now, most of us researchers are used to searching for other researchers’ work using databases such as PubMed and SciFinder. What these do is allow us to find research publications or resources typically by topic or author. But eTBLAST is a more sophisticated tool since it is capable of searching large sections of text. So, let us say you put in an entire summary of a research paper, and you want to find more research similar to this entire topic, eTBLAST in its results section spits out a list of researchers/authors who have worked on topics similar to what you have queried, with a listing of the details of the work/publications (if it isn’t all clear to you, give it a try here). This allows the user to do a number of things. It allows the user to identify leading researchers in a certain area, or identify the most appropriate journals for a particular type of research. It is popular now with journal editors or grant funding agencies to identify appropriate reviewers for papers or grants. In short, if used well, this can be an extremely powerful tool for bibliographical data mining.

Skip and his team built eTBLAST primarily for this purpose, but found that eTBLAST had a potentially very useful “side effect”. It turns out that his tool was extremely good at finding duplicate citations.

Yup, this tool is extremely useful in finding published work which are very close replicates of already existing published work.

Skip and his team used a sample of about 60000 citations that they drew from Medline, and used eTBLAST to analyze them. What they found were a couple of dozen cases of citations with no shared authors, i.e. cases which were very likely to have been completely plagiarized. Some of the examples Skip gave were hilarious, with one particular example that had me in splits. There was this researcher in England (and I couldn’t help but thinking that his name seemed suspiciously of subcontinental or middle-eastern origin) who had published a paper, and then decided that this paper was so good that he would publish the entire thing again, practically verbatim, in a different journal. What’s more, not satisfied by this he published this paper yet again, an incredible third time, without changing much more than a few numbers, in a third journal! He must think his work is so good that it need to be published the same way three times. In addition to these examples, there were many hundreds of cases where the same author had published “very similar work” in different journals, without having bothered to change the text, title or references too much.

The utility of eTBLAST was incredibly apparent in this live demonstration that Skip put together. I’m just hoping that along with an increasing awareness of ethics in research, there will be more such tools that not only help research and bibliographical mining, but also can be used effectively to find and expose these “researchers”.

The details of using eTBLAST to find duplicate citations have now been described in an excellent publication in Bioinformatics. Here’s the link to the research paper from Skip’s group in Bioinformatics, titled Déjà vu – A Study of Duplicate Citations in Medline. This second link is to the aptly titled Déjà vu database, a “repository of duplicate citations” from numerous databases.

Desserts and places

2007-11-28T15:47:00.001-08:00

I’ve been on a constant eating binge since Diwali, a couple of weeks ago (and that’s a reason for not blogging much. Honestly). This thanksgiving was spent consuming unimaginably large quantities of food, with tons of sweets and desserts thrown in. And somewhere over the past few weeks, we drove by the little Czech town of West, Texas, and gorged on their famous kolache (which were rather good, I must add) (note: kolache itself is a plural word, so “kolaches” would be incorrect, though people popularly use kolaches as a plural for kolac). That, and a visit to one of the large Indian sweet stores here somehow led to a discussion on Indian sweets, and places in India that were famous for their sweets.

The insatiable sweet and dessert gourmand in me was delighted with the travels through Indian dessert land.

As far as Mysore pak goes, the name automatically and correctly suggests Mysore as the origin, and there are terrific Mysore paks to be had there, but I would argue that they can be just as good in Bangalore, or in Coimbatore’s Sri Krishna sweets. But there’s another uniquely Kannadiga sweet called Chiroti, flakey, layered and ideally eaten soaked in almond-milk. Bangalore and Mysore rule for this.

When it came to the delicious, milky peda, we were evenly split on our verdict. I’m partial to the tiny, dark Dharwad pedas that melt in the mouth, but the strong claim to supremacy from Mathura’s pedas could not be easily brushed aside.

Some sweets are almost synonymous with towns or cities in India. Apart from the just mentioned Mysore pak, there are the super-saccharine pethas from Agra (which I never really fancied). The little town of Tirunelvelli in Tamil Nadu is probably best known for its unique halva, quite different from the more common types of halva (such as those made out of semolina or carrots) found across India. Laddus (ladoos) are perhaps the most popular sweet across India. While I don’t particularly fancy them, the laddus from Tirupathi have made it to song and legend. On the other hand, a trip to Uttar Pradesh just to sample my favorite mothichur laddos there is long overdue. Some day I hope to complete a UP-laddu pilgrimage, starting at Haridwar, and steadily working my way across UP, through Muzafarnagar, Lucknow and finally to Kanpur’s Thaggu ke laddu.

While still in UP, I’ve been told by authoritative sources that the best gulab jamuns in the world are to be found in a little Podunk town in UP called Orai. In fact, as far as I can tell, this is the only claim to fame of this town, at least according to the omniscient wikipedia.

Sweet sojourns in India cannot be complete without indulging in Bengali sweets. There are two things that remain etched in my memory from numerous childhood visits to Calcutta (Kolkata); incredibly slow trams, and absolutely delicious varieties of Sandesh. And if you want to really go off the beaten Indian dessert track, go to Hyderabad and eat the absolutely sublime double ka meetha.

For some classic Indian sweets, we were hard pressed to say if some places were better known for them than others. I’ve had terrific jalebis in many places, as well as their South Indian counterparts, jangris, and cannot think of any place that can stake a claim on them. There are special types of kheer that each region claims to make better than others. And while the best Shrikhand I’ve had was in Pune, I’m sure a good chunk of Maharashtra and Gujarat will claim to make better Shrikhand.

I’m many of you guys have favorite desserts not just from India, but from across the world (a Florentine colleague told me Fritelle di riso was to die for, so I made it a point to eat some when I visited Florence some years ago).

Go ahead, educate me so that we can plan our next dream holiday accordingly.

Animate this!

2007-11-21T14:12:00.000-08:00

It almost seems unreal, but the first presentation I saw that was done completely on PowerPoint was only about seven years ago. Before that, almost all talks I heard used a combination of overheads (with the old fashioned transparency on an overhead projector, sometimes with a few impromptu scribbles along the way) and slides (and an old fashioned slide projector). But we were mesmerized by the power of the PowerPoint dark magic and the neat little graphic animations. At the time my unequivocal opinion was that PowerPoint was the most advanced and sophisticated tool ever created to enable effective presentations.

Of course, like most things, perspectives change over time.

While I haven’t quite classified PowerPoint presentations as the great evil, I’m slowly coming around to the point that PowerPoint, in most hands, can do more to damage talks than to enhance them. It has taken time, but by closely observing the really good speakers and their presentations and trying to learn from them, I’ve put together some thoughts on the pitfalls of PowerPoint, and what needs to be done or avoided in giving good thoughts (putting them to practice seems to be a completely different ball game though).

Perhaps because of the ease of making slides due to PowerPoint, many of us have forgotten what talks are all about. There is an auditory component in talks, and there is the visual component. Striking a balance between the two is essential. But what PowerPoint seduces us to do is to go overboard on the visual component. This means it is easy to overload the slide with data or words or to throw in too many bells and whistles. I remember a couple of occasions when I (shamefully) “winged” through some journal club style presentations, because I thought I could easily create some slides with a lot of verbal and visual content which I could use as a crutch to work through the talk. This ability to put a lot on the slide can easily allow laziness to creep in, and by not planning through the talk well enough, one becomes too reliant on what is on those slides. Almost always, the talk suffers, since you haven’t done enough homework on the content, or have put in so much information on the slides that the audience zones out due to a visual overload.

The second thing PowerPoint does (which sometimes takes a while to undo) is make you create slides that dictate the content of the talk. Instead of planning a careful outline of the talk, and systematically outlining the flow of the talk in your head, one might easily succumb to the temptation of making slides on the go. Traditionally, one would sit down and carefully outline all parts of the talk (usually on paper or a document), but the very ease of making and deleting slides might make you avoid that. Interestingly, PowerPoint does have an “outline” option which most of us don’t use but probably should.

Sometimes, when you make a really neat presentation with plenty of nice bells and whistles or cool pictures, you are tempted to use it no matter what, and end up recycling too many slides regardless of the audience. This goes back to the previous point of not planning through your talk well enough, which goes back to the ease of making slides (or reusing old slides) on the go. Sure, a lot of this comes from laziness, but hey, aren’t we all lazy?

Powerpoint also seems to take away the dynamic nature of talks. Talks are very personal, and the nature of the speaker really dictates the quality of the talks. But if the audience is forced to stare only at a large white screen and visually overloaded PowerPoint slides, the dynamism of the speaker and the interactions of the speaker with the audience are often lost. Also, if the speaker has this “eureka” moment during a talk, or thinks of something connected to his/her talk; it is really hard to incorporate that into the talk easily, since the slides dictate the content of the talk. Unfortunately, most lecture halls have lost the overhead projector, screen and transparency (which can so easily and effectively be used to illustrate a point or a tangential thought during a presentation). It’s a pity, since some of the very best talks I’ve attended were by speakers who almost completely used transparencies (with some writing and illustrations thrown in during the talk) while presenting their own thoughts very clearly in their words. The big screen with the PowerPoint slides also sometimes tempts the speaker (I’m certainly guilty of this) to hide behind the slides, as opposed to stepping up and making the talk his or hers, using the slides only to illustrate the point.

So essentially the effort has to be made by the speaker to use PowerPoint effectively to communicate with the audience, and that fact should never be forgotten. This starts with making a good outline of the presentation, and using dynamic headings on the slide (making statements, instead of stating detailed facts in the titles). Illustrations with fewer words whenever possible make life much easier for an audience (a picture does speak a thousand words, usually without putting the audience to sleep). But finally, the presentation must be made personal and about you. Every conscious effort needs to be made to avoid making the presentation glossy-generic (which PowerPoint almost automatically does). Presentations should be about standing and delivering, and avoiding the crutch of slides whenever it can be avoided. And every possible effort should be made to avoid slipping into slide mediocrity, and forgetting the fact that presentations are about the speaker communicating with an audience.

Have a good thanksgiving all, and pitch in with your opinions about the evil magic slide maker ^TM.

Mirror neurons, phantom limbs and the Capgras delusion

2007-11-15T17:01:00.000-08:00

I first heard about phantom limbs in a journal club some three years ago. I don’t know any amputees or people who have lost their limbs, so when I heard that a very large percentage of amputees experienced “phantom limbs” I was more than surprised. If a limb is amputated, it is gone, finis. But apparently many amputees can still feel their amputated limb moving. What is more, this is accompanied often by excruciating pain which they cannot control. Even more bizarre is the Capgras delusion, which is something practically taken out of Bollywood movies, except it is imaginary. Here, the person with Capgras delusion absolutely believes that some acquaintance (a friend or family member, say) has been replaced by an identical looking impostor. To the delusional patient, the impostor looks the same, sounds the same, feels the same, but is an impostor!

V. Ramachandran, at the center for brain and cognition at UCSD is one of the pioneer researchers of these phenomena. Almost more importantly, he is an engaging, eloquent and charismatic speaker. Not long ago, he gave a talk at TED, which is more than well worth your time.

Take 20 minutes off whatever you are doing, and enjoy the talk. (If the video doesn't work from the browser, you can view and download it here).

Where’s the science section?

2007-11-05T17:51:00.000-08:00

A small, unexpected windfall in the form of a gift card made us go down to the nearest Barnes & Nobles bookstore for some bookshopping. It has been a while since I visited a large bookstore. While in Seattle, I’d always walk down to any one of the half dozen used bookstores all around campus, and delight in browsing through their collections amidst the irresistible aroma of old books. But once I moved to Dallas even that became a novelty, since there aren’t too many used bookstores around in these parts. Anyway, I do most of my bookshopping online, thanks to the wonderful choice of Amazon, Half.com, Abebooks and the likes. Essentially, it had been years since I had last stepped into a large bookstore like Barnes & Nobles.

So a good hour or more was spent browsing through the collections at Barnes & Nobles. There were impressive fiction and non-fiction sections and aisle after aisle of the latest bestsellers. There was an excellent section on history, from US through world history, and there were also excellent collections of books on travel and places. The religion section was, not unexpectedly, massive. There were three full aisles for bibles alone, and four or five more aisles for all sorts of books on religion (mostly Christianity). Clearly, the demand for such fiction knows no bounds here.

But I was looking for the science section. So I searched and I searched, and finally found it. There it was, one single shelf, tucked in between “oversize books” and “atlases”, with a tiny collection of books, most of which were on astronomy (stargazing, actually). I couldn’t believe that was it, so looked around some more, and finally found two more shelves, one with books on physics, and another shelf with books on chemistry and biology combined. In the biology section was a pitifully small collection of books, a couple on Darwin, three of Richard Dawkins’ books, and Michael Behe’s “Edge of Evolution”, which should rightly have been in the speculative fiction section and not in the science/biology section.

That was it. A whole massive bookstore with a gazillion books, and three small shelves devoted to all of science. If that isn’t disappointing, tell me what is.

I managed to pick up Bill Bryson’s “A short history of nearly everything”, which has been on my reading list for two years now, as well as a nice book (with superb pictures) on lost cities (great metropolises of the past that lie in ruin today) as what claims to be “the 30 best drinking games from around the world”, and all of this left me reasonably satisfied.

But talk about slender pickings! Sticking to Amazon might just seem better. I wonder if the store collections are similar across the country, or if different regions have slightly different collections, reflecting the demand and tastes of local readers?

Walking with dinosaurs

2007-10-28T11:37:00.001-07:00

When I moved to Texas, I did so with trepidation. I was used to the welcoming, green outdoors of the Pacific Northwest, and spending many summer weekends enjoying the crisp air of the North Cascades or the Olympic rainforest, walking on soft pine needles. So the extreme harshness of the Texas climate, which rarely says “come out and play” didn’t appeal too much to me.

That said though, I found that Texas has a range of natural terrains and wildlife, from complete, arid desert to rolling hills with rivers and lush forests. And what’s more, some of them are surprisingly close to the Dallas-Fortworth urban sprawl. A week ago, we spent a day in one of these often overlooked jewels just a stones throw from Dallas, the Dinosaur valley state park, where some of the world’s finest collections of dinosaur fossils, prints and tracks had been discovered.

When we reached the park, the tiny visitor center disappointed me, but only for a moment. The little display room was surprisingly superbly informative. I knew that a long time ago, the region that is now the gulf coast was part of the ocean. But I didn’t realize that what is today Dallas (and hundreds of miles from the coast) was once part of a large, shallow sea, or lagoon. Now fossils usually are hard to find, and it is even harder to find prints or tracks left behind millions of years ago. The tracks found in this park were mostly made about 150 million years ago, in the Cretaceous era. The majority of the tracks found here belong to two different types of dinosaurs, three-toed meat eating theropods called Acrocanthosaurus, and huge prints of giant sauropod herbivores called Pleurocoelus. Interestingly, outside the park visitor center are life-size sculptures of the more celluloid friendly Tyrannosaurus rex and the giant brontosaurus. A serendipitous combination of soil and rock compositions of the region and climate allowed the prints of the dinosaurs to be preserved. Limestone, sandstone and mudstone gradually deposited in the region, where the theropods and sauropods perhaps migrated through, or came for food or prey. They left their prints on this limey mud, which was gently covered up by different sediment. Millions of years later, the Plauxy river (a tributary of the Brazos) flowed by, and slowly disloged some of the other sediment, revealing the dinosaur tracks for all of us to see, while other tracks were found later, by human excavation.

The visitor center nicely explained how these tracks were formed, how they were discovered, and also outlined the various timelines as well as a description of the formation of continents from pangea through gondwana to present times. In addition, the visitor center described the geology of the region, and the types of fossils found in the region, including those of ancient marine life. All of this should be a part of all school curricula in geography and natural history, but unfortunately, I don’t think much of this is taught anymore. At least, some of the visitors there (particularly the kids) seemed surprised to read this. It seems like a huge amount of irreparable damage has been done by the Flintstones, misinformative Hollywood movies and persuasive religious brainwashing.

The “fall” weather was perfect for the park, since after a long summer the river was just a gentle stream. Most of the dinosaur tracks were found along the river, and the shallow water meant that we could see the prints beautifully through the slightly muddy water (though I don’t know how good my photography skills are in that shot). The water in the rivers deepest point was at best waist high, so it meant the setting was perfect for splashing about in, or standing perfectly still to watch curious tadpoles nibble your toes. Along the bank of the river, you can look at both the sauropod and theropod tracks, as well as a few points where the tail drag of a sauropod has been preserved. While looking at a print in a photograph hardly inspires awe, staring at a real footprint many times the size of my oversized, ugly feet was more than sufficient to put things in perspective. I’m pretty glad humans weren’t around when the dinosaurs were. I’ve seen elephant dung, and if these beasts produced ten times that amount in a single sitting, I don’t even want to imagine how the Cretaceous era must have smelt. Of course, there’s also the possibility of mistaking a little hole in the soil as a dinosaur track. But the little pamphlets at eh visitor center explain how to distinguish them, and once you see the real tracks, it is easy to distinguish them from natural erosion, with the clear absence of any distinct features. There’s some nice hiking to be done in the park as well, and if you’re lucky you might catch a glimpse of some of the endemic birds of this region as you walk on trails along the river or on the little wooded limestone hills. I also stumbled upon some gorgeous lizards along the trail that were so well camouflaged amongst the rocks that I would never have spotted them had they not been startled and run for their lives.

Last and certainly the least, being in Texas, it was hardly surprising that a few miles before the state park itself there was a little “creation evidence museum”. Here's a picture of it, that little building no bigger than a little barn, without a single car in the vast parking lot. I’m sure the devil came by one night and planted the fossils and prints all over the park, along with traces of marine creatures, not to mention the limestone soil itself, to fool us all into thinking this region was underwater centuries ago.

Book review: Textures of time: Writing History in South India

2007-10-18T07:05:00.000-07:00

(Apologies for being a bit irregular on the posts. Work has been rather busy the past week, but things are back to normal now)

As an avid amateur historian, reading about the history of kingdoms and cultures (and their influences on religion) has been a long standing hobby of mine. So my interest was more than piqued when I obtained a copy of Textures of time: Writing history in South India 1600-1800.

The main focus of the book is rather novel. It has been postulated often, by numerous historians, that India did not have a tradition of recording and preserving history. It has been said that history in India is a mixture of fact, legend, myth and popular belief. The Arab polymath, Al-Biruni, observed way back in the 10th century that “the Hindus did not pay much attention to the historical order of things.”

A substantial section of historians conclude that a historiographical tradition came to India with the Europeans coming and establishing themselves in India. It was they who brought with them the dry, “factual” style of recording history. This assertion usually crumbles under the mountain of historiographical literature the Delhi sultans, and subsequently the Mughals and their feudal nobles left behind. But two questions immediately raise themselves; the first being that perhaps the Indian historiographical traditions were borrowed from the well developed Persian and Turkish systems of recording history, and two, what about South India? Did the literary traditions of South India not have a historiographical tradition at all, but only had facts blended into stories and myths.

The authors of this book, Velcheru Narayana Rao, David Shulman and Sanjay Subrahmanyam, decide to investigate this assertion, and also see if they could bridge the somewhat artificial divide between “Hindu” and “Muslim” writing, by digging into a vast collection of resources from the 16th to the 18th century. They draw on primarily Telugu sources, along with a collection of Tamizh, Sanskrit, Marathi, Kannada and other sources of the time. Using an approach where the authors combine story-telling (of events from those times) with a systematic and rigorous analysis of those works, the authors steadily set about disproving that hypothesis.

For their material, the authors draw upon various court writings by scribes in the courts of various rulers; the songs and works of ballads and poets of the times, folk epics, as well as prose narratives of the time. Early on in the book, the authors point out that any choice of genre for writing history isn’t a constant, but has changed over time, as the society changes its preferred literary style. So, over time, a historical work ends up becoming a “literary work”. In the course of the book, as they explore four major historical incidents between the 16th and 18th century, based in what is today Andhra Pradesh and Northern Tamil Nadu, the authors subtly but elegantly point out that any history is invariantly written in the dominant literary genre of a particular community at that particular time (something that is quite intuitive, yet overlooked). For example, if puraana is the dominant literary form of the time, history would be written in puraana style, or kaavya style when kaavya is the dominant literary style. Obviously, this means that in any style, you will find both history and literature, and the trick is in distinguishing the two. But there are definite textual markers, syntax and expression styles, metrical devices and other indicators that distinguish literature from history. It is these that the authors try to distinguish and point out through the book.

The key question is how can they distinguish historical work from non-historical texts. The authors say that the answer lies in adopting a new way of reading the text. The “texture” of historical writing is substantially different from literature, though the style used may be the same. Part of the reason that this difference has been lost is because, to modern historians, the context has often been lost. In any story, the relation between the teller of the tale and the audience is of paramount importance. But if their connection is displaced, confusion is but inevitable. Literary traditions are easily broken, particularly when the audience for that text is “fragile”.

In this book, the authors explore stories which many of us would consider lesser-known, yet were well known (at least in South India) at the time. The major incidents explored in this book were recorded by numerous writers of the time (or even a little later) in the karanam style. Karanams were primarily accountants or court scribes of the time, and the authors describe their collective style of writing as the “karanam” style. Karanam scribes had been well established all across Telugu lands for centuries, and there exists a vast mountain of their recordings, from before the time of the Vijayanagara empire, and their traditions continued to evolve and develop long after Vijayanagara had fallen.

The authors start with the battle of Bobbili (which took place in 1757), of which detailed recordings and folk ballads were composed in Telugu. It essentially was a battle between two small-time warrior velama kings (who were both technically under the rule of the Nizam of Hyderabad). One of them decides to usurp the lands of the other (the “valiant” ruler of Bobbili, Pedda Bobbili Raju), and does so using the help of a confused, clueless French general, Bussey. The beauty of this tale is that it had distinct chronicles written by various sides; the admirers of the Bobbili Raju, or the rival treacherous king of Vijayanagaram (later Vizianagaram, and not to be confused with the earlier Vijayanagara empire).

In all these chronicles, while the characters may be described in different hues, and the valor or cowardice of one character might be exaggerated or diminished, the major facts of the story remain remarkably consistent. What’s more, the “dry, historical” recordings of a few English of French sources who were present match exquisitely with the facts in the Telugu sources. Similarly, later the authors explore the tale of the Desingu raja, in Senji, in the Arcot region of (present) Tamil Nadu. This minor chief rose up agains his lord, the Nawab of Arcot. Here too diverse sources, from karanams to folk singers, to Jaswant Rai, who chronicled history for the Nawab of Arcot, have remarkably consistent details. Jaswant Rai was a munshi, the north Indian equivalent of a karanam, who chronicled the life of the then Nawab of Arcot (who fought the king of Senji fort). As the authors take us through these (in themselves fascinating) tales, they consistently point out aspects of the narrative that shift from fact to fiction and to eulogy. The distinctions are subtle, but clearly consistent and significant.

By the end of the book, you are certainly convinced that there was a historiographical tradition in South India, which was very mature long before the establishment of European presence in India. However, like most academic books, this one too left me with many thoughts.

One question that immediately comes up is that a main intention of this book was to show a substantial and well developed histographical tradition in South India that was thriving before the establishment of European colonial rule in India. So, would the earlier literary and historical traditions of the preceding South Indian empires (Vijayanagara, the Kakatiyas, the Pallavas, Cholas, Chalukyas etc) not be a better choice of material to show this? Those sources distinctly preceded the arrival of the Europeans, and were possibly less influenced by Mughal, Persian or Turkish histographical traditions as well. A related but obvious question would be to ask how well developed the historiographical traditions of those times were in South India. Could Al-biruni have been right, and did even the karanam style develop after the Mughals came to India? How different was the style of recording history in the 8th century versus the 16th?

A particularly interesting question would be to ask if there were similarities in the style of writing of Indian muslim writers (who went beyond the traditional Persian style of historiography) and other Hindu writers (of the karanam tradition). How much did each influence the other’s style? Was there an effort made by writers of each style to remain true to their chosen literary styles, or was there a strong influence of each style, and co-evolution? After all, by the 16th century, at least the northern parts of South India were strongly under the influence of the Mughals or the Dakkani sultans etc.

Of course, as the old saying goes, “history is written by the victors.” Even the most hardened skeptic will agree to some truth in that saying. The authors perhaps expect only South Asian historians to read this book, and therefore much of the book remains only of academic interest for the hardcore historian. But their engaging writing style, and admirable choice of thoroughly entertaining ballads and stories with which to make their points, actually makes the book rather readable. Through their systematic and nuanced analysis the authors go a long way in demolishing the idea that there was no concept of recording history in South India.

(Crossposted from Desicritics)

Gaping dorks in vendor shows

2007-10-04T13:40:00.000-07:00

All major campuses around the country have major product/vendor shows every few months. Here companies big and small, from Invitrogen and Sigma to little-unknown-biotech all have their tables and flyers and product displays of the latest and best in lab technology.

But what's hilarious is that most of us scientists are such loser dorks that what attracts us most to the displays aren't super-efficient pipette displays, but bouncy stress relieving squeeze balls, fluorescent orange pens, permanent markers that have caps and tips on both ends, and the lure of the odd T-shirt. We're like kids in a candy store.

That, and the attraction of free food. Nothing can bring together a bunch of graduate students and postdocs better than tables filled with donuts, cookies, bagels or more.

There I was, bright and early this morning, lining up to collect my supply of utterly useless items, and gawk at freebies. I ended up with about a dozen pens, a floaty for eppendorf tubes, a weird box to keep "suff" in, and a T-shirt (yes! I will advertise anything for free).

And then there was the highlight of my day. I got the most fascinating freebie of them all, a ball point pen that has a transparent liquid gel at the other end, filled with little floating balls, and a little on-off switch that turns on an led that changes colors.

Life couldn't be better.

The value of failure

2007-09-28T16:33:00.001-07:00

It is an interesting life being a postdoc. One big difference from being a graduate student is that you do start to look at life in science a little differently. Contrary to what many people accuse me of having, life as a postdoc isn’t all fun and games, and there are plenty of stresses to cope with. Sure, you have a PhD and aren’t worried about graduation, but there are plenty of other things to worry about. The postdoc time is supposed to be that transition towards a “real job”, and while it used to be a road taken only for people interested in a future in academia, it no longer is so. The past two decades have seen a surge in science spending and growth in departments across universities, but more recent numbers are depressing. While the numbers of postdocs have increased many fold, the number of faculty positions haven’t. So, there are far fewer jobs that a postdoc has to compete for in universities. This leaves industry and startups (small biotech companies) as options for many of us.

Which brings us to the point of this post. Now, particularly in these ultra competitive times, a postdoc requires a substantial amount of high profile work in order to get that coveted faculty appointment. “High profile” can mean a couple of things; the first is work in an extremely “hot” field of research. Something like stem cells (and if you can throw in some more hot topics there, like micro RNA expression regulating ubiquitination that in turn controls histone methylases, all of which controls cell fate, then you are golden). But these areas are obviously ultracompetitive, and often become “hot” when the field has matured a little bit. So, if you enter it at the top of the wave, you are most likely to have to compete with too many people in the field, and may not be able to carve out a successful academic career. However, working in “hot” fields do sometimes give the postdoc the (illusionary) security of believing that even if her work isn’t pathbreaking, a couple of solid publications and mastering of some techniques will be sufficient to land a job in industry.

But there is a second road some postdocs choose to take (and I like to think of myself as one of them), to work on extremely challenging projects that ask questions that aren’t in the mainstream. In this case, all the experimental tools needed may not exist (or may exist but will have to be adapted from something else), but more importantly, the “field” itself does not really exist. The hope is that the hypothesis turns out to be correct, and you will make a discovery that will open up new areas of science. Perhaps this could be described as vertical as opposed to horizontal or incremental research. The problem lies in the possibility that the hypothesis could be completely wrong. Sometimes even if the hypothesis doesn’t hold up, the findings are modest and incremental enough to be publishable. Other times, it is all or nothing, and you could be left with absolutely nothing.

It is sometimes interesting to see how things work in industry. Sometimes with (say) startup companies, the people starting it up have a good idea(s), are extremely competent and take up significant challenges, but for various reasons the company does not take off, and eventually folds. Failure to make the company take off isn’t necessarily viewed negatively. Many people have failed in their attempts to start up companies, but are still highly valued by the industry for their experience and knowledge (of the process of building a company). They remain eminently employable and sometimes also desirable.

Unfortunately, I think life in academia may be a less rewarding for similar situations. Sometimes postdocs (or principal investigators) work incredibly hard on a potentially breakthrough hypothesis for years, only for the results to be unremarkable, or even go against the hypothesis (that could have resulted in a major breakthrough). Usually, you can predict that the person is in store for more hard times in the future, since the lack of any substantial publications means that there’s no chance of being offered a faculty position (or perhaps being denied tenure for a young investigator). It is also unlikely that this person would easily find an industry job, since jobs are relatively few, and industry itself has no clear metrics to measure you by (unlike failing in a biotech startup venture). The way things are set up presently, it is hard to impress someone by showing that you disproved a hypothesis. Most of the postdocs who decide to go down this road are pretty smart, technically competent, and think they can handle hard projects, hope they have some vision (in addition to the vision of their bosses), and are usually aware of the risks. But they are willing to spend the 3-4 years trying. If they fail, then they spend two more years doing something “safe”, which they usually are quite successful in doing, and so manage to get a job in industry after a painfully long postdoc.

So, just using this comparison with industry, can there be any ways to measure the value of a postdoc who has worked on some extremely risky projects which have failed? Is a postdoc who has worked on some extremely challenging projects (which haven’t worked) more or less valuable than a postdoc who has managed a couple of publications, but done so using well established methods and a well established system? Can risk takers become valuable in academia? After all, they’re extremely valuable to investigators who need postdocs willing to go after the most challenging ideas the investigator has, but how can that value carry over to the job market?

Sleep, the final frontier

2007-09-26T17:15:00.000-07:00

Sleep is something (most of us) spend a third of our lives doing, though we hardly give it a second thought. Yet sleep is absolutely essential for all vertebrates, and if an animal is completely deprived of sleep, it will die. Rats that are sleep deprived die in a matter of days, and in the past, when it was still possible to do crazy human experiments, humans have been kept awake for as long as 72 hours, within which time they would descend into psychosis. The few human sleepless anomalies who exist remain with numerous mental and metabolic problems, and the reason why they remain alive are unanswered (warning: do not try to avoid sleeping completely for days on end in order to discover that you are a natural anomaly. You WILL die).

One of the most fascinating questions that still remains somewhat unanswered is “why did sleep evolve in animals”? Now, single celled organisms (like bacteria or yeast) don’t sleep. They continue to grow, and constantly divide at a certain rate. More interestingly, our own cells, when isolated and grown independently in culture, don’t “sleep”, but continue to divide and grow constantly. Sleep itself is a complex phenomenon with distinct physiological, neurological and psychological features. Evolutionarily, one could reason that it could even be advantageous for an animal to evolve to avoid sleeping completely. This would give that animal twice the amount of time needed to forage for food, or reproduce (compared to other competitors), and could even be considered a huge survival advantage. But that has not happened, suggesting that the evolutionary need for sleep is far greater than any benefit a lack of sleep could allow.

Sleep remains essential for all animals, and there remain a number of reasons why that could be so. One reason is that as organisms became more complex (and evolved into multicellular organisms from single celled ones), the need to adapt to a day-night cycle on earth became stronger. This is what’s known as the circadian clock. Much progress has been made in understanding the molecular mechanisms of the circadian clocks, and identifying master-regulators of this clock (like the clock, period and BMAL genes). The subsequent consequences on the cell cycle and metabolism are slowly being unraveled. Yet, the circadian clock does not answer the need for sleep (though understanding the clock allows us to understand many aspects of basic metabolism and growth), since some single cellular organisms that don’t “sleep”, like cyanobacteria, exhibit a robust circadian clock.

Other researchers look at sleep and the circadian clock itself from a metabolic perspective, and from the basic metabolic needs of the body. During sleep, some dramatic processes occur, starting with the basic metabolism of the animal, which shifts from catabolism (or breakdown of molecules, and the release of energy) to anabolism (the active consumption of energy, and subsequent growth and building). So, sleep is in some ways the opposite of a “resting state”, as energy is being consumed, in order to let the body grow or build or recover.

All these details are slowly being unraveled. Yet understanding the very fundamental question of “why we sleep, and how sleep evolved” remains one of the great unanswered questions of science. In a recent post, I described Dan Koshland’s concept of discovery; Charge, challenge and chance. Understanding the fundamental need for sleep, and the evolutionary reasons for it will remain one of the great science questions which will perhaps be answered by “charge”, or “challenge”.

Oh what a good time for miracles

2007-09-19T17:38:00.000-07:00

I had spent a lifetime thinking the wonderfully superstitious and gullible folks back home in India held a monopoly on natural “miracles” in these modern times. What with people drinking sewage filled seawater that had turned sweet or wasting perfectly good and nutritious milk on Ganesha idols which lapped the milk up (and that is just a select sampling of wonderful “miracles” to pick from).

But nooooooooo, I couldn’t be more wrong. There are no geographical boundaries for gullible folks searching for that next miracle to happen, so that they can reinforce their irrationality and allow their ability to think to atrophy. I discovered that the land of free thinkers, the United States, has a long and proud tradition of miracles as well. In fact there is a veritable cornucopia of miracles here, happening all the time. From the virgin Mary on tortillas to the NunBun in Nashville, there’s a fine collection of miracles all around.

So I was hardly surprised when I read today’s Dallas Morning News, which proudly reported the story of the holy “weeping tree”, which is loaded with “supernatural ice”. Here’s the deal; an old woman dies, and is buried. Soon, a tree that belonged to her starts to collect yellowish-white froth, and bits of liquid started accumulating under the tree.

Family members said they noticed the yellow-tinted froth and the puddles of liquid around the trunk a day after they buried the 92-year-old matriarch…The tree has been "weeping" ever since, they say.

Here’s more; “her daughter, Mary Lou Sanders, said. "Where it's coming from, I do not know. It is something I cannot explain."

Sure, you can’t explain it, therefore it must be a bonafide miracle. And so the faithful flock towards it, in docile submission and hope for more miracles, like restoring the health of a wheelchair ridden child.

If it wasn't true, it would be so funny.

They kneel before it and pray. They stand, patiently extending their open palms or clutching Styrofoam cups with hopes of getting some of the "holy water" drops.

I’m sure that holy water tasted good. After all, it has a wonderfully miraculous source.

Insect spit.

Yup, bonafide insect drool produced by the infamous spittle bug. Or, to quote the Dallas morning news article:

“Not likely, say insect and tree experts who viewed photographs of the substance. They said the "miracle ice" is probably nothing more than a spittlebug nest.” link

Oh well, at least they weren’t drinking sea water. Not much seems to have changed since the dark ages, or so it seems.

(I might as well point towards a guest essay I had written for The Scian, titled The joy of questioning, for those of you who missed reading it earlier. It’s my futile effort to resist the relentless forces of ignorance).

Charge, challenge, and chance

2007-09-15T13:00:00.001-07:00

A few weeks ago, a giant in the world of science passed away. Daniel Koshland left behind a legacy in science. Daniel Koshland left his mark on many aspects of science. As a pioneering enzymologist, he proposed the “induced fit” model of protein-ligand interactions, which now forms one of the foundations of enzymology and most protein-ligand interaction studies. He also had a number of other outstanding discoveries in a long career as a pioneering biochemist, which won him many awards and honors.

In addition, he was perhaps the best known editor of the premier scientific journal Science, which he transformed from “a good journal” to one of the highest impact journals out there. Most scientists strive to publish their best work in Cell, Science or Nature.

Of course, I never knew Dr. Koshland, but my present boss did, and he had the greatest respect and regard for him. He once told us about one of his own major scientific breakthroughs in the late eighties/early nineties, which he had sent to Science and which the reviewers had rejected (the findings seemed too speculative and out of the mainstream for the time). Dan, who was the editor then, overruled the reviewers, published the paper anyway, and the reported findings were proven to be absolutely right, and my boss went on to do many wonderful things in his scientific life.

Anyway, just a couple of weeks before he died, he wrote a perspective in Science called The Cha-Cha-Cha Theory of Scientific Discovery (subscription may be required). In this, he insightfully categorizes scientific discoveries into three groups; charge, challenge and chance, that he calls the “cha-cha-cha” theory. He describes “charge” discoveries as those where the discovery itself is obvious (the movement of stars and gravity, the laws of heredity, causes of heart attacks), but the way to solve to problem, or describe how it happens, is not clear. Everyone has seen it, but the discovery is in thinking of something no one else has thought about. Challenge is where there is a slow accumulation of facts or concepts that don’t quite fit with the existing scientific ideas of the time. The classic example of this would be quantum mechanics, which went beyond classical Newtonian mechanics. Finally, chance discoveries are those that the “prepared mind” encounters. The classic examples here are X-rays or Penicillin.

This succinct group pretty much describes how almost all major discoveries are made. I thought this was a tremendous little article particularly for young scientists. From these examples, it is obvious that waiting around for chance discoveries is unlikely to lead to a great career in science. For that you need to be at the right place at the right time, and most times are not those times. But “charge” could define a majority of everyday science. Even for small findings, the scientist takes charge and attempts to find a solution to an already existing problem (however small it might be). So, the key is to keep working on problems that exist, and to constantly work towards new solutions or explanations for them. Along the way, there may be times when solutions to “challenge” problems might arise.

So far, some of my most enriching moments in science have come from reading or listening to thinkers like Koshland, who help put things in perspective, while simultaneously inspiring scores of scientists around them.

Some further reading/resources:
The nine lives of Daniel E. Koshland (Randy Schekman, subscription may be required).
Interviews with Daniel Koshland (audio).
Lasker award.
A retrospective of Koshland’s life in Science magazine.

Mendel's garden at Balancing life

2007-09-09T18:29:00.000-07:00

Welcome to the September 10, 2007 edition of Mendel's garden, and apologies for the late posting. Mendel's garden #18, hosted here at Balancing life. Mendel's garden is a blog carnival devoted to genetics, featuring some of the best science blogging focused on genetics, from the past month.

Speaking of Mendel, one of the "founding fathers" of modern genetics, too many people think Mendel was just a simple monk pottering about in his garden, where he accidentally observed the inheritance of traits in peas, from which the laws of inheritance (classical Mendelian genetics) were formed. Little could be farther from the truth. Mendel was a very well trained scientist, and systematically applied statistical methods (more typical of the physical science then) to biology. After his schooling (gymnasium) he went on to study for two years at the Philosophical Institute in Olmutz, as preparation for University. Since he was too poor to go on to University, he joined the monastry of St. Thomas in Brunn, and the abbot, an enlightened man who wanted to create an intellectual center at Brunn, strongly supported Mendel's research and education. He even sent Mendel to the University of Vienna to study for two years, where Mendel studied as much physics, statistics, probability, chemistry and biology as he could. His subsequent work with peas, which laid the foundations for the understanding of how attributes of parents are inherited by their offspring, took over seven years of meticulous research.

Anyway, that was a little aside. One with the carnival!

Larry Moran has an excellent post titled Identity of the Product of Mendel's Green Cotyledon Gene posted at Sandwalk.

Hsien-Hsien Lei, PhD takes some time off to visit the Wellcome collection exhibits, and writes about Genomes at the Wellcome Collection at Eye on DNA. This looks like a must see exhibit, if you are in the neighborhood.

Bevelopment

I had a running joke with some of my friends in grad school (who used to study the wnt signaling pathway) that wnts were responsible for everything. Chris Patil now writes A hazy shade of Wnt over at Ouroboros.

Evolutionary genetics

CAD writes about Evolutionary Solutions to the Hairy Back Problem posted at VWXYNot?, mostly describing primarily evolutionary genetics, with a touch of development and gene expression! This post summarizes recent research that explicity links multiple microevolutionary changes to a novel morphology in the larvae of a Drosophila species."

Luigi Guarino has a few posts on iron, and writes a little more on iron at Agricultural Biodiversity Weblog> at the Agricultural Biodiversity Weblog, saying, "We've had a couple of posts on the human genetics of iron metabolism and the role of agricultural biodiversity in fighting iron malnutrition"

RPM has an excellent post titled "Promoting Intelligence" over at evolgen, describing promoter differences between humans and chimps which reveal that brain genes and nutrition genes may have changes in expression.

Gene expression

Eric Michael Johnson has a well written post called Shamanic Visions of Selective Sweep at The Primate Diaries where he discusses the evolution of schizophrenia and the nature of contingency.

Fun stuff

Sandra Porter has a little DNA puzzle for us to solve over at Discovering Biology in a Digital World, and it should be quick, enjoyable and entertaining for most biochemists to figure out.

More fun stuff

Andrew Fox has some DNA you can wear! posted at Sexy Secularist!, blogging about a jewelry maker who is fashioning custom Double Helix bracelets with messages spelled out in genetic code.

GrrlScientist says why Pretty Boys Have All the Chicks at Living the Scientific Life. She says "Everyone is familiar with sexual dichromatism in birds; you know, the gorgeous, colorful male who is paired with the drab female or two. It has been observed in birds that, when males and females differ dramatically in appearance, the females are preferentially mating with a few "pretty boys"; those that have elaborate plumage colors or ornamentation. As a direct result of female breeding preferences, these "pretty boys" sire more offspring than those males with less colorful plumage, thus driving the evolution of sexual dichromatism in the population. This behavior concurrently drives evolution of a polygynous breeding system in the population. But what about those birds that are monogamous yet still show strong sexual dichromatism? How did they get to be that way?"

Finally, in case you need some good reading material, and are looking for good general science history, I have a review of John Gribbin's "The Scientists", which I quite enjoyed reading.

That concludes this edition. Apologies if I missed any submissions, but do send that post over to the next Mendel's garden next month. Submit your blog article to the next edition of Mendel's garden using our carnival submission form. Past posts and future hosts can be found on our blog carnival index page.
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Some entertaining mind control

2007-09-05T17:01:00.000-07:00

(This blog certainly has been neglected over the past week, and has been crying for some attention. So, even while weekdays leave little time for active blogging, here’s a little post saying I’m alive).

Most of the time, the SciFi channel on TV kills the mind with some awful movies or Star Trek reruns. But every once in a while there’s something really enjoyable. On top of that group must be Mind control with Derren Brown. In case you haven’t heard of Derren Brown, he’s a “psychological illusionist”, doing stage hypnosis and that kind of stuff. And he’s also a terrific entertainer, who sometimes reveals some secrets, just to keep all of us really intrigued, and wondering how he does it.

I particularly enjoyed a show where he had different groups of people in rooms, and asked them all to draw out an outline of their hands, and put a personal item in an envelope. He then went on to give them all detailed typed up accounts of their lives, and their inner desires. They all swore that the statements were 90% accurate, and most of them thought he had psychic abilities. He then showed them their typed documents. ALL of them were the same!

Anyway, for your entertainment, here are two videos of him, one of them where he plays chess with 9 opponents simultaneously (a bunch of British Grandmasters, International masters and FIDE masters), coming out on top, and a second one with the inimitable Stephen Fry.

Terrific entertainment, and while I don’t know how he does it all, he certainly keeps us lapping it up.

What's with the accent?

2007-09-01T10:56:00.000-07:00

Every once in a while, I switch off from NPR and tune into one of the Indian radio stations that you can catch here in Dallas. Just so that I can pretend to be up to date with the latest music in Bollywood, or listen to oldies (or occasionally even catch some Tamil songs that they air on weekends).

Anyway, while I have no complaint with the content, here's something that doesn't cease to puzzle and annoy me. What's with the language of the RJ's and hosts on these shows? I perfectly understand hosts speaking in English with an American twang. We're in America, and many of the hosts were raised here, so that's fine with me. I can also tolerate some hosts who speak English naturally with an Indian accent, but try to put on an American drawl (usually failing miserably, resulting in something that is neither here nor there, but mostly unintentionally funny). That's fine too, you're trying to assimilate or whatever.

But what I really, really cannot stand is hosts who try to speak Hindi (or Tamil or Telugu or whatever else) with a ridiculous anglicized accent, and a terrible vocabulary. What's the deal there? Why murder a language which you obviously are a native speaker of, by putting on a terrible accent, and killing all semblance of grammar, just to sound "cool"? If we're having a show in Hindi (or another language), why can't that show be in Hindi (or what ever language), with a reasonable diction and without an overuse of English?

I'm almost tempted to call some of those shows and tell the hosts what I think.

Or maybe I'll just go back to listening to NPR, and my cds and mp3s with Indian music on them. I'm probably just a fusspot, that's all.

Bah!

Tangled bank #87

2007-08-29T21:59:00.000-07:00

Welcome to another edition of the Tangled Bank, the blog carnival broadly about the natural sciences. My original idea was to get creative, and trace the history of logic while threading through another edition of the Tangled Bank. But these are busy days, so we’ll keep it short and sweet (and please excuse any typos or errors, this was put together rather quickly).

Here goes.

Critters everywhere:
Starting with archer fish, Andre at Biocurious writes about animals that intuitively know and use very advanced concepts in physics, but then, can they write equations? And I had absolutely no idea that those garden destroying squirrels were immune to rattle snake poisons. Read all about that, infrared body temperatures and tail flagging over at Grrlscientist’s. She also has another post on the deadly Marburg hemorrhagic disease, which is incurable and is transmitted by a virus. Apparently the the source of this virus is a fruit bat. At the Invasive Species Weblog, Jennifer writes about the common periwinkle snail, which we first thought was an invasive species, then were told that it has been in North America for 8000 years, and now it is back to being an invasive species. And what’s a “tangled bank” without mention of the Galapagos islands and the fabled finches? Mike of 10,000 birds writes about the unique birds of the Galapagos. That island has such an amazing concentration of diversity, it even has four endemic mockingbirds (and there’s just one in all of the rest of North America).

Pure, unadulterated science:
Veo Claramente has an excellent post on the damage response framework of microbial pathogenesis. That’s some very good science writing on a fascinating topic. At the wonderful world of Archaeozology there is a post on the diversity and origins of cattle. If you ever wondered how and when the wild, cud-chewing bovine was domesticated, here is your answer. In some more excellent science writing, Aaron at Synapostasy has a three part mini-review on the evolution of X and Y chromosomes, so here are links to Part I, Part II and Part III. At Cotch.net, Joe, writing about evolution and cancer, neatly summarizes a review on DNA check points, tumors and the loss of apoptosis. And over at Ouroboros, there is an interesting post on delayed aging via increased Arf and p53, discussing if tumor suppressor genes are beneficial or detrimental with respect to ageing and lifespan.

Religion and science:
There’s surprisingly little about religion and science this week. But there’s still some good stuff. At the Primate Diaries, Eric lucidly explains The feeling of what happens: Science, faith and Nature’s error. He also has an excellent post on sexual equality, double standards and social scale.

Odds and ends:
Andrew the Sexy Secularist is making a sales pitch for some rather nice looking jewelry. Except that these are DNA double-helix bracelets! Go buy some.

Its midnight, and you can’t go to sleep? Do you look at those early sleepers and early risers with utter disbelief? Don’t worry, you aren’t an unnatural freak. You fall into the group Paddy K calls the B-team, and your tribe is large.

Sharp brains links to a number of research articles on “Computer based cognitive training (or “brain fitness”), and some of the links are fascinating. Also worth reading are the ten habits of highly effective brains. I’m going to practice positive, future oriented thoughts everyday, starting now.

From Omnome comes the story of an inventor who claims to have invented injectable heat generating nanoparticles which will cure tumors. Omnome doesn’t think a cure for cancer is going to come from here. Finally, from my own blog, here’s a little bit of history, on standing on the shoulders of Giants.

That’s it for this edition of the Tangled Bank. The next edition will be in two weeks, at The behavioral ecology blog.

Book review: The scientists

2007-08-27T20:49:00.000-07:00

I have to start off by admitting that it had been quite a while since I read any book that was over 500 pages long, with the words neatly typed in a small font size. The Harry Potters don’t count, and their pleasing illustrations and tween-friendly, reassuringly large, bold font and plenty of action make them rather easy to read. But when I saw the exquisite cover of John Gribbin’s The Scientists: A History of Science Told Through the Lives of Its Greatest Inventors I knew it was a book I had to read.

Gribbin, of course, is a formidable science writer, and his In search of Schrodinger’s Cat once taught me more about quantum physics than high school and college did together (admittedly, even after reading the book, I still knew next to nothing about quantum physics). So, when I noticed that he was the author, I expected The Scientists to be creative as well as highly readable. This book sets out to do much more than describe the history and facts behind one (or even a group) of discoveries. The book attempts to describe the past 500 odd years of scientific discovery, starting during the later part of the European renaissance, where a burst of human creativity eventually laid the foundations of the modern scientific method, and progresses to the present times of frenetic scientific activity and discovery by the minute.

Any book that sets off to describe 500 years of discovery takes the risk of being excessively descriptive or tedious, burying the reader in scientific fact or jargon. Constantly talking about great discoveries can effortlessly kill any interest the reader has in science, a fact neatly attested by my own high-school science text books (which were well meaning, but failed to capture our attention). But Gribbin beautifully weaves a tapestry of the stories of the discoverers, the scientists themselves, and through these stories brings out the great scientific discoveries that ushered in the modern world of science. Everyone likes reading stories about people, their lives, their problems, their inspirations, their animosities and their transgressions. But a purely historical account of the great scientists of the past, without describing their discoveries, is meaningless. Gribbon manages to perfectly balance both aspects, and walks through the lives of the scientists who shaped modern science, while beautifully describing (in considerable detail) their contributions not just to that aspect of science, but to scientific thinking and future discoveries as well.

The first chapters of the book are aptly titled Renaissance men and The last of the mystics, starting with the likes of Copernicus, Bruno, William Harvey and moving quickly to Tycho Brahe and Kepler. It is both fascinating and incredible to read about the times in Europe then, in a world deeply clouded by superstition, and where religion (in Europe it was the Catholic Church) had a vice-like grip on all knowledge. The earliest scientists weren’t really called “scientists”, and most of them did quite a bit to ruffle the feathers of those in authority, particularly the church, for which many of them suffered. It is equally interesting to read about their lives, and how many of them were themselves deeply influenced by the church (or were clergymen themselves). While here, Gribbin describes Galileo as the “first scientist”. While describing these early giants, Gribbon subtly but surely brings out the concept of the Scientific method, which was slowly beginning to develop and starting to leave an imprint. In the first few chapters, Gribbon devotes much of the space to a description of the times and the lives of these pioneers, rather than their discoveries alone. This allows him to elegantly establish a historical context from where the modern scientific schools of thought were allowed to emerge from.

It also allows Gribbon to steadily build the pace of the book. The fascinating stories of these scientists draw the reader deep into the book, and allows the reader to paint a picture of these people and their times (the only annoying thing is that I keep picturizing Pope Urban VIII with a bald head, sunken jaws and gleaming schrew-like eyes, while Galileo describes his Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems, and I just can’t get that out of my head). By the third chapter you are engrossed in the book, and are ready to jump into the world of the “founding fathers”, Descartes, Huygens, Boyle and the subsequent “Newtonian revolution” (while Newton was undoubtedly a giant amongst giants, it is without doubt that numerous pioneers like Halley and Hooke played almost as significant a role in ushering the scientific “revolution”). Gribbon also points out that the “scientific revolution” didn’t really happen the way we think “revolutions” happen (giant rumbles and the falling of the Bastille), but slowly churned and grew, with each generation of scientists building upon the work of the preceding one. And from the era of Newton, there was no looking back for the world of science.

After Newton, the face of science changed for ever. The foundations laid by astronomy and classical physics (culminating in the Principia allowed scientists (or “gentlemen scientists”, as they were in those days) to start thinking of simple laws by which the universe worked. The steady discoveries of astronomy and geology meant that geologists and biologists would have to confront the fact that the earth was far older than traditional Biblical interpretations, something that would have substantial ramifications on society. By the time Gribbon finally describes Charles Darwin and his life, he has already described the prior foundations that helped Darwin formulate his theory of natural selection; the substantial work on understanding the age of the earth, the work of Charles Lyell, the earlier work of Hooke and Leeuwenhoeke in describing biological cells (and their similarities), the superb work of Carolus Linneaus (who classified organisms based on similarity, breaking them down from species all the way to phylum and kingdom), and finally the brilliant work of Alfred Wallace, who independently proposed a theory of natural selection, which prompted Darwin to complete and publish his own (more well developed) theory. Given this complete historical context, we understand how it was but inevitable that Darwin (or someone else like Wallace) would naturally have to put all the pieces together.

As the book nears modern times, the pace dramatically starts to increase. After all, by the late 19th century, science was poised to explode. It was the end of the amateur gentleman scientist, and the beginning of the professional scientist. The fields of chemistry, physics and biology started to become distinct. And then with the discovery of radioactivity and the beginnings of quantum physics, the world of science pretty much changed for ever. The chapters describing the work of the likes of Thomson, Rutherford, Plank, Pauli, Heisenberg, Schrodinger and the innumerable contributions of Albert Einstein, all move along at a frenzied pace. There are now too many characters around, and Gribbin can no longer linger on the lives of one or two alone. Yet he manages to squeeze in little anecdotes or stories that keep us, the reader, lapping it all up. Nuggets, like Rutherford being greatly amused when awarded the Nobel prize for Chemistry (since at the time the atom was under the purview of chemistry), since Rutherford thought of himself as a physicist and didn’t think too much of chemists, or the story of the Curies, and Marie Curie’s notebooks are to this date still so radioactive that they are kept behind a leaden safe (both Marie and Pierre Curie suffered seriously due to radiation, something they didn’t know about then. So they literally died because of their science). Near the very end, we reach the spectacular discoveries of genetics, DNA, the genetic code and finally, the realm of outer space.

I can only describe this book as a superb effort. It is one of those books that appeals at different levels. A reader can open any chapter and read it independently, enjoying the stories in them. The writing is tight and vividly descriptive, and is simultaneously written for scientists, amateur scientists, science aficionados, historians and everyone who likes a good yarn. The book serves as an outstanding reference for the past 500 years of western scientific thought. There are some books we never buy (but sometimes “borrow”), others we buy just to read once and then forget. But some books are keepers, which we keep going back to again and again, discovering or relishing a new nugget each time we dig into it. This is one of those books.

The joy of questioning

2007-08-23T08:09:00.000-07:00

Selva, who publishes TheScian.com and blogs as the Scientific Indian on scienceblogs had asked me to write a guest essay for his publication, TheScian.

My essay, titled "The joy of questioning" is now online on TheScian. What's more, Selva has taken the effort to make an audiocast out of it, with some snazzy background music to boot.

Quite flattering.

Read or hear the essay here.

A history of Indian mathematics

2007-08-21T16:44:00.001-07:00

As many readers of this blog know, I’m fascinated by the history of discovery. While you certainly can be a good scientist without a knowledge of the history of discovery, there is much to learn from not just what is known, but also how it was discovered. Usually the stories behind discoveries are almost as fascinating as the discoveries themselves. Additionally, reading about the stories behind the discoveries also sometimes are humbling experiences; and makes you realize how much work might have gone into some findings, or how much some other discoveries was based on a collective work many individuals preceding the discoverer.

Additionally, reading about the history of discovery also makes you realize that knowledge or discovery was never restricted to one group or place alone, but different civilizations at different times had bursts of creativity, resulting in important discoveries. From there you can begin to understand how some societies progressed more rapidly than others. For example, Jared Diamond in his Guns, germs and steel uses this knowledge to understand how western societies managed to reach their current level of domination.

Anyway, coming to this post, I have always been a little disappointed in the way Indian history was taught to us in our schools. This is particularly true about the history of discovery (in science and mathematics) in India. There was the old colonial school of thought (which some people still have) that the foundation of all knowledge came from the west (starting with Egypt, Greece and Rome). Yet any historian knows that in the ancient world, there were thriving civilizations in Persia, India and China, and more importantly, there was not just trade, but well established and vibrant exchange of ideas and practices across these regions. This automatically suggests that there must have been some good ideas and discoveries in all these regions, in order for them all to be advanced (for the time) societies. There’s also the opposite (and rather amusing) view that comes from an excessively Indian nationalistic prism, which more or less states that all knowledge that exists in the world was discovered in India first (come on, tell me you’ve heard this one). Again, given the evidence (about vibrant civilizations in contact with each other across Europe and Asia), this isn’t likely to be true either. That said, there was nothing worthwhile that was ever taught to us about Indian science and mathematics.

As I read more about Indian mathematics in particular, I was fascinated by how rich the field was, and how much it has contributed to the field of mathematics in general. Some contributions are quite well known; and many of us are aware of the modern numeral system and the use of zero, first developed in India. This number system was later adopted (and improved) by the Arabs and Persians, from whom it reached Europe, and is now called the Hindu-Arabic numeral system. Some other contributions, like the development of the decimal system are also well known.

Anyway, here is a fantastic article by J.J. O’Connor and E.F. Robertson, on the excellent Mac tutor, on the history of Indian mathematics. This briefly mentions contributions like the numeral system, but also describes (or links to more articles about) major contributions and discoveries in algebra, trigonometry (including an independent discovery of the Pythagoras theorem at about the same time as Pythagoras), quadratic equations, the invention of the “Taylor” series, the value of pi, and much more, all of which makes absolutely fascinating reading.

I found it well worth my time to read more about it here (Indian mathematics, The sulbasutras, Indian numerals). Fascinating.