Food, Sex and Pain.

NO! This is not going to be a piece about the usual fixed points in a human being's trajectory mentioned in the title. Instead this is going to be about C. elegans (CE from now on) and it's possible connection to those.

Today we had a speaker Greg Stephens from Princeton over at our department who works in Bio-Physics to talk about his work on identifying basic components of motion for CE (He categorically refused to pronounce the 'C' in CE BTW!).His abstract had the very attractive "Eigenworm" (!) word to describe the 4 basic real space shapes that apparently account for most of the observed configurations of CE when photographed while executing motion on a 2D agar plate.(He went on to describe a lot of other work of which I understood only a little , but that does not take away anything from the remainder of this post.)

I have always found talks that encompass two different branches of research turn out to be interesting battlegrounds for the respective practitioners. Also because these talks are generally delivered at a lower technical level than to normal professionals of the art the audience often finds avenues for intellectual mischief.It probably is also a very humbling experience for everyone concerned. Something akin to the realization that there are other religions out there with followers equally fervent?

The speaker gave a very well prepared talk , speaking as he was as part of the interview I believe for one of the faculty positions in biophysics in our department. As part of the introduction we came to know that the CE was a multicellular organ of ~1000 cells of which 302 are neurons giving it a brain about a third of it's body and making it brainier than us!The basic experiment involves photographing the free wriggly motion of CE on an agar surface while confined to a certain region by a copper annulus of R=51 mms , copper being used since copper repels CE and so it keeps to only the insides of the region.It's motion in this region is videographed using high frequency video and then the frames analysed for the geometric shape of the creature.

As part of modifications of this basic setup sometimes a laser light is used to provide "Pain" to the creature and then the effect seen on the subsequent motion.This was the point latched onto by a very meticulous Prof. Gerd Bergmann who very benignly asked "Is it true that to sense pain a minimum number of neurons are required, is 302 above that mark?for eg. some insects don't feel pain!!!!" At which point the speaker changed the label of the stimulus to "Acute Thermal stimulus " adding further that he was not sure whether the stimulus was pain enough for the creature or not but the proceedings sure were for him.

More than an hour into the talk ,a very pertinent question arose which is quite fundamental actually ? -left to itself ,devoid of any stimuli why did the CE move? This point being brought up by someone at my back all I could hear in the darkened room was something like:

"So do you sprinke food in the inside region"

"NO."

"So No food.!"

"No, No Food"

"Ah, No food."

at which point a professor right in front of me quipped "Just Like this seminar" !!! 

The asker continued :

"So why do they move?"

"I don't exactly know or want to hypothesize, but may be to mate"

"Do you use only males or hermaphrodites too!"

"If they want to mate, they must be males"

And so this was another instance of an interesting cross disciplinary talk.

यारों के नाम

 

 

बड़े दिनों की यारी थी अपनी,
                                      फिर आशियानें अलग बना लिए|

यार सब अपने तो अब भी एक हैं,
                                      मिलने के ठिकाने अलग बना लिए!

 

मैं राही|

पेड़ों पे खुदे नामों से,
                          संसार बना बैठा|
सराये के मुसाफिरों को यार,
                           हर बार बना बैठा|

शामों की महफ़िलों में ,
                           अब रेहता हूँ बेकरार|
के अपनी ज़िंदगी को उजाले का,
                           इंतेजार बना बैठा|

रोके नहीं रुकते पैर मेरे अब,
                           आगे दश्त या बागे बहार|
जब रास्ते को ही मैं अपना,
                            मज़ार बना बैठा|

किस काफिले का था?
                     क्या पता, कहाँ वो रुका?
अकेले चलना है खुद को,
                      तैयार बना बैठा|

छीनेगा भला क्या मुझसे,
                      दिखाकर कोई तलवार|
के अपनी हंसी को ही मैं,
                       हथियार बना बैठा|

मैं लिख नहीं सकता |

अपनी भाषा में कुछ लिखे अरसों बीते|अब  लिखता हूँ तो अक्षर सीधे नहीं आते,रेखाएं टेढ़ी मेढ़ी, मात्रा गुल|वाक्यों से वाकये का पता नहीं चलता|लेखनी लेखक के खिलाफ मोर्चा खोल चुकी है|लेख का शीर्षक लेखनी के जीत का सूचक है|
पर कभी की माशूक सी, कलम अब भी, कभी कभी दिल की सुन लेती है |कभी कभी लिख लेने देती है कुछ पंक्तियाँ|
ब्लॉग का यह सत्र और आगामी कुछ एक, लेखनी की इजाज़त से अर्ज़ हैं...

|। भारत बंद ||

आज भारत बंद है |
न सूरज उगा,
न चाँद ढला,
रात के बाद न सुबह हुई|
क्यूँ के, आज भारत बंद है|

पक्ष किसी की नहीं सुनता |
कल दाल के दाम बढ़ा दिये!

विपक्ष ने भी सर पर अपने

(और कइयों के)
सादे-काले कफन चढ़ा लिए|
बात मर्यादा की है |
दाल की नहीं ,
टमाटर की नहीं ,
रातों रात कम ज्यादा की है |
दो रुपये किलो बढ़ गए,
अगर खरीदो थोक,
बंद न होता आज जो भइये,
कौन यह सकता रोक?

गर दो का सिक्का
सीधे किसान को जाता,
धूप में सिंके उसके,
अभिमान को भाता|
पर यह सिक्का तो भाभी,
काफी
घूम घूम कर जाएगा-
अंततः किसान ये शायद,
एक चवन्नी पाएगा|

इसीलिए ,
विपक्ष उतारू है |
सड़क पर सदस्य सभी ,
चलें हैं कपड़े उतार,
नर नारे मार रहे ,
नारियां करतीं हाहाकार|

जश्न के माहौल में ,
प्रश्न खो से गए हैं |
पर जनता को न कोई आनंद है,
सो,
आज भारत बंद है!


इति|

Grrr-aduation!!!

It is graduation time and people all around cannot stop 'celebrating'.(Just a puny 'r' in 'celibate' creates so much of a difference!)
Would-be-graduates immerse themselves in alcohol and/or walk around in wet skimpy clothes on campus(depending on whether it's a he or a she). They wear strange apparels and stranger head gear and harbor hopeful illusions about the future-Theirs and others'.Their parents put up 'College-Grad' stickers on their cars and float cartoon-graduate balloons from their car tops.Mother earth simply cannot keep up with their gargantuan lust for roses,daisies, germinis,orchids and what not. Having spent much of their last 4 or 5 or 6 or...n years, as the case may be, in college learning (and often preaching!) responsible use of earth's resources they go berserk and their unabashed display of floral fetish is but quite disconcerting. Some hang Olive ,alpine and what not coronas around their neck like Olympians or victorious gladiators.
They throw parties and want everyone to know that someone they know has arrived. That the world will be a better place for it and that had their graduation been a bit earlier our world would not have had Dec,2012 as it's tentative expiry date.
Too much gaiety around me disturbs me. I don't know exactly what feeling it is though. I don't suppose it could be called jealousy or contempt or resentment . Not that I don't want the show to go on.By All means it should , it must- for me to make such sullen observations about it!Indeed, I have found it central for my general way of existence that there be people or events or places -entities really- that have done nothing against my well being materially or morally - but those that I could lampoon and critique for no fault of theirs. You must pardon me my idiosyncrasy if you are reading my blog. I get restless if I don't find something to lambaste at regular intervals of time. Politics, Politicians, free style poetry, Cliched jokes, humorless acquaintances, state of High Energy Physics....you name it and no amount of money will suffice to keep me from lambasting it.Perhaps the closest dictionary 'abstract' noun that I can classify my feelings into is cynicism :
"An attitude of scornful or jaded negativity, especially a general distrust of the integrity or professed motives of others"
As I sit now at a south facing window of Leavey library there must be atleast a couple of thousand people in festive attire holding balloons and wearing garlands and leafy crowns and photo-oping away in the McCarthy quad adjacent below.Their caps and gowns bright black , red sashes fluttering in the air.From my vantage point inside sealed windows high up on the fourth floor, they are mute characters on a television screen and myself - a deaf and grumpy cricket reporter covering the Indian team performing at West Indies recently.All I can think of producing is grump and yet more grump.
Can a possible explanation (why do we even need one?!) of the source of all this grump be that I never got to attend my college graduation that was postponed to a date I wasn't in India anymore and the day of my high school graduation I was away in Patna (unsuccessfully attempting the Indian National Chemistry Olympiad).
Who is to say ?
Why something is,
The other 
or 
The One Way!

Godmen-1

I am enumerating the title as I intend to followit up later....for now you might wanna watch the following video from 2.58 to 4.55.


and we wondered how come astrology became a honors course during his tenure as MHRD. Oops i missed the 'Hon'ble' outfront.

Kaprekar's Pattern

Just a little Saturday Afternoon fun.
Take a three digit number and arrange it's digits in ascending number. Call the three digit number that you get N1.Arrange the numbers in descending order and call the three digit number you now get N2.Now subtract N1 from N2. Call this whole procedure iteration one.The resulting three digit number will be 495 (Kaprekar's Constant) after a certain number of iterations.It is 495 since applying the process to that number brings it back to itself.So 495 is the Kaprekar fixed point.(for three digit numbers)
One can start with single and double digit numbers by appending zeros to the front.Infact during the iterations if the result of subtraction comes to be a two digit number then zeros have to be appended outfront to keep the number of digits 3.Not doing that can lead to zero and not the constant (consider the result 99).The process obviously fails for multiples of Nelson.
One can ask if the number of iterations required would be periodic(or have some pattern) in the natural number argument to start the iterations.Rather than work out the algebra (which to me seemed to involve a lot of conditional routes if analytics of the process is possible) I wrote a matlab program (but blogspot does not let me upload it here!) to plot number of iterations required against a user fed limit,N.The maximum number of iterations required for any number is 6 and the least is 1(By definition). (Kaprekar's constant itself needs to be processed once to get back to itself.)
Here's the Graph:

May be connecting the dots would be more appealing (though mathematically absurd since the process requires natural number input and cannot be interpolated).But here it goes:

Is this periodic? Is there any symmetry?what is the period if there is one?

Do four digit numbers settle to such a value ?Yes they do!!! The K constant in this case happens to be 6174.which I discovered reading here. More on this later.
P.S: Just discovered that people at mathematica beat me blue long long back...they have something called the Generalized Kaprekar Routine .(Aagh!!!)

Ads/CRT (Not to be confused with Ads/CFT)

Ads on TV can range from irritating to the ridiculous. A case in point being the Snuggly ad:


Do I need say how many Spoofs of this ad you can get among the related videos on youtube?!!!
But sometimes I find them useful in a way the sponsors hardly intend them to be.
They have over the years often introduced me to some of the bands I hear most!!!
This blog is prompted by a very recent discovery of a band called "The Heavy" through the Kia Motors Ad for Sorento.
The catchy background score got me searching for it as it must have many others who had searched for it before me on youtube:


Check out Set me Free and Colleen from the same guys.

Sometime ago through a Lincoln Car Ad I came to know about the "Under the Milky Way Tonight" by Church.

It's a pretty good track except it gets me queasy when she says exactly what the title says "under the milky way".....makes me feel the earth dropped out of it's place in the saucer's plane!!!
Lest you think I run off in search of western tracks only, here's a piece that adult swim plays in the background of it's program schedule.It's a groovy mystic Asian(Indian Sounding) piece:


Another piece that plays against the ad for Sony Bravia is a soothing acoustic piece by Jose Gonzalez:

Once it so happened that I already knew the track that was playing in the background!!!(Of the very few things I know before I am supposed to know.)It was a HTC phone ad.The track being Sinnerman by Nina Simone that I had researched for after watching The Thomas Crown Affair.I find the piece unbelievably exhilarating.

For an interesting discussion of the piece read here.

Finally,to come back to car ads there is this Audi Separation Offical Extended Version, that the creator of the piece says he had to create just cause there was so much enthusiasm for the part that played with the actual commercial.Here's the whole thing:


Having read this far I hope one is able to figure out what the Notation "Ads/CRT" stands for then!Go Figure:)