Prime Stream
thescian | August 27, 2008How would you explain digital computation and binary math/logic to someone who does not have a mathematics or computer science background? I had about two minutes to think when my brother-in-law asked how computers work. I went with the first useful thought that came to my mind.
Explain what's counting, since counting is where all mathematics begins. Then explain positional representation of numerical values. (As an aside, I should mention this: Until zero and positional representation of values reached Europe through Arabs, clerks in Venice were sullen and bitter as they had to write shitty…
thescian | August 21, 2008Suvrat Kher, a geologist, has given answers to questions from a muddled engineer and wannabe astrologer. Suvrat Kher is a patient bloke. Instead of hitting the questioner on the head repeatedly with Sagan's Baloney Detection Kit, he has done the nicer thing.
Why do so many seemingly educated people - people who have been trained in the scientific method - have a soft spot for astrology in India.
thescian | August 19, 2008How does one deal with those who do not understand the rational way of living, those who follow unreasonable dogma like religion and give in to superstitions?
There are two different approaches marked by the diametric positions that they take. One is to shame the irrational person so that they are persuaded or forced to go into hiding. They other is to engage with them in conversations about agreements and disagreements and try to win them over to the side of rationality. There are other approaches besides these two, most are usually a varying mix of these two contrasting approaches. (We will…
thescian | August 15, 2008Leaping Shampoo Fascinating effect. Even more fascinating is how the experimenters are able to produce a cascade effect (towards the end of the video).
[via reddit]
thescian | August 14, 2008LiveScience has a nifty list. From an artificial hippocampus - the part of the brain that helps with short-term memory-, to Retinal Prosthesis or bionic eyes - electrodes implanted in the eye that help people who've lost some of their retinal function see again.
thescian | August 6, 2008A Screensaver of moving dots. Sure you can see it, but can you hear it? [Mo at Neurophilosophy]
What do you think is the sate of science? More important, do you like iPhone 3G, MacBook Air or 40GB Apple TV? Take this Seed/Sb survey.
Family is all one has got. That goes for all primates. Photos of Western gorillas [Brian Switek at Laelaps].
So, what does global Warming lead to? Flooding, famine, mayhem. We can survive that. But, more religions?! How does one survive a lunacy pandemic....[Razib at Gene Expression]
thescian | August 5, 2008 Shakespeare really does something to our inner reality, making me feel more alive in more unpredictable mental ways when I read or see his work. I am also getting a sense of an underlying shape to experience, as though the syntax in front of my eyes were keying into mental pathways behind them, and shifting and reconfiguring them dramatically in the theatre of the brain.
Thus concludes Philip Davis in Literary Review after some studies of how the brain responds to Shakespeare's extraordinary play with the English language.
A few days back, wife was flipping through a book of quotes. She…
thescian | August 1, 20083D printing is here. Try RepRap, Shapeways, Fab @ Home. I've been messing around with Blender and PyTopMod to make some designs for printing off at Shapeways. Worth learning these two if you are into things like this (I love this stuff), although PyTopMod may be too mathematical.
RepRap
Darwin: Optoswitch bracket timelapse build from eD Sells on Vimeo.
Fab @ Home
Shapeways
thescian | July 30, 2008Read an article about Glass at NY Times. It seems to have coalesced some scattered thoughts between my ears (the word coagulated probably fits too, you decide).
Some weeks back I was looking through the window at the sky. An airplane was gliding slowly across my field of vision from right to left. When it reached the edge, it vanished. Although one part of my mind anticipated it, in another part, at a quiet dark corner, a little spark flashed. Why! If the window was not made of glass, I'd be staring at a blank wall and there would be no airplane! Or, if the whole room was made of glass I'd…
thescian | July 28, 2008I'd love to see us stop the suffocating Vedic flatulence. Among my country men and women, there's a tendency to inflate the past beyond reasonable limits. If someone can draw a thread from Vedic literature, Vedic mathematics, Vedic astronomy, Vedic quantum mechanics and Vedic levitation it's considered a mark of distinction - or so it is assumed. So, let me call it what it is: Bullshit.
I am not an iconoclast. Past casts a long shadow. Without respect for history, without empathy for those who lived before us, we'll never understand the present. However, getting irrationally and romantically…
thescian | July 21, 2008How well Benjamin Cohen Rachel Carr captures the sentiment! If I could write half as well....
thescian | July 17, 2008Priya Shetty writes at New Scientist.Why? For a start, research published in international journals might not be relevant to the needs of individual countries. For example, academics specialising in mental health, such as Vikram Patel at the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine, have argued that India's cash-strapped mental health services should offer access to community health workers and not just specialised psychiatrists and psychologists, but such debates seldom make it into the pages of international journals.
Furthermore, by developing the research culture, local health…
thescian | July 10, 2008From New Scientist... rings are often a sign of being chronically worn out, stressed and run-down - tiredness rather than sleepiness. Tired people don't just need more sleep, but a better and more agreeable lifestyle. This is easier said than done, of course. They may even find that they have difficulty sleeping despite their tiredness, but resorting to sleeping tablets is not the answer.
As for the anatomy of these rings and whether they are due to blood pooling, skin-thinning through dehydration or something else, no one really knows.
thescian | July 7, 2008 There are numerous occasions when one has to consider the lifetime of the software one is using or developing (or maintaining, that awful dark side of software). Fortunately or unfortunately, business considerations (budget, in other words) dictate what problems get solved and what's left ugly or forgotten, and how existing software gets repackaged into grotesque forms (isn't this is exactly how a Flounder evolved!). The parallels between software and biological evolution are obvious (and as you would expect, there is an academic area of study - Genetic Programming).
It seems we are we at…
thescian | July 4, 2008I was watching David Byrne + Daniel Levitin at The Seed Salon yesterday evening and heard Daniel Levitin (the professor dude) talk about how ironic that the brain, which receives sensory inputs from all over the body, does not itself have sensory nerves. He further added helpfully that you would not know if your brain is poked. It's a nice bit of detail to draw a non-biologist into conversations about biology and brain.
I suppose evolution did not have a good case for the brain to have sensory nerves. It had, after all, already floated the brain in a fluid and surrounded it with a thick skull…
thescian | July 1, 2008What happens when you split your brain in the middle? By splitting I mean the surgical kind where the corpus callosum (the connecting neural tissue between right and left hemispheres) is severed. Why would anyone do that, I hear you scream. Well, there are instances when this may be the only possible option for someone to survive their ailment (like severe epileptic seizures).
Back to the question. So, what happens? Back in 1950s Nobel laureate Roger Sperry assisted by his colleagues and his able protege Michael Gazzaniga tested a patient - before his brain was split and after his brain was…
thescian | June 26, 2008Over the long run income is more powerful than any ideology or religion in shaping lives. No God has commanded worshippers to their pious duties more forcefully than income as it subtly directs the fabric of our lives. -Gregory Clark in A Brief Economic History of the World.
thescian | June 25, 2008"I remember once going to see him when he was lying ill at Putney. I had ridden in taxi cab number 1729 and remarked that the number seemed to me rather a dull one, and that I hoped it was not an unfavorable omen. "No," he replied, "it is a very interesting number; it is the smallest number expressible as the sum of two cubes in two different ways." - G H Hardy on Ramanujan.
Let me leave you with a brief note on Hardy. Hardy was an ardent atheist that he once made a new year resolution to prove the nonexistence of God (and to murder Mussolini). His collaboration with Ramanujan and Littlewood…
thescian | June 24, 2008At the Beebs:A group of Indians are planning to present a statue of the revered Indian monkey God, Hanuman, to Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama. The group decided to order the idol after they read a magazine report saying that Mr Obama carried a good luck 'monkey king' charm.
Let me paraphrase: Primates present magic potion to alpha male (to be fair, they would've done something similar if it was an alpha female).
Charming monkeys? I don't think so. They are so transparent. It is an embarrassment to share genetic heritage with them.
thescian | June 20, 2008I was looking for some information on the intertubes and google dropped me onto a website that it thought would help. I found a large block of ad content on the site that said "Add emoticons to your emails!" with a collection of the ever-stupid animated gif images that wink, grin, clap, and do all the other idiotic things that invariably attract the clueless. I started wondering what sort of business model would these folks - the ones who put these ad out - have. So, I clicked on the ad (I am on a Mac using Safari, which is important to note). And, no surprises here, it downloaded a windows…