Speak. Don't hold your peace!

To add to the importance of speaking out:

“It is absurd to hold that a man ought to be ashamed of being unable to defend himself with his limbs but not of being unable to defend himself with speech and reason, when the use of reason is more distinctive of a human being than the use of his limbs,” - Aristotle.(ht)

It is a civic duty; wait, that is what I wrote about in the Statesman Journal, back in 2002 (?) aahh, the older we get, the repetitive we get ... aahh, the older we get, the repetitive we get ... :)

If only I can convince my faculty colleagues about this importance, eh!

So, why haven't bald men gone extinct?

Years ago, back in California, I asked a colleague--a biologist--why we don't have a greater variety of colors when it comes to hair on our bodies.  The thought was triggered by the daily sights of students, almost always women, with so many colors on their heads, thanks to the dyes humans have developed.

Her reply didn't satisfy my curiosity.  Or, perhaps, I was too stupid to understand her answer?

A few months after that thought, I was shocked at a more personal revelation--I was beginning to develop the typical male bald patches.

A course that I taught had students in the same classroom and students at another off-campus site. The class was held at a television studio-classroom, and images and sounds from the studio were sent in real time to the off campus, and the video and audio from there were beamed back as well.  The off-campus room had only one camera, while the classroom where I was had a camera turned towards the instructor (me) and another from behind me to capture the students.

There was a monitor in my view where I could see the images from the cameras.  And that is when I caught the image from the camera that was behind my back--it showed the back of my head with the (then) thinning hair where the scalp was beginning to shine through.

It was so much a shock that I remember commenting right there something along the lines of "wow, I am going bald!"

Since then, the hairline in front has receded a lot.  The back has become a lot smoother.  When raindrops fall, as they do for nine months of the year here in Oregon, there is very little hair on top to act as shock-absorbers, and I can feel every drop falling like a pebble.

Over the years, the question about hair, in terms of colors, has, therefore, and understandably so, morphed into why there is baldness at all.  Does it serve any evolutionary purpose?  If it does not, and if baldness is a disadvantage, then can we expect bald people to become extinct?

Robb Dunn comments on the question of "why haven't bald men gone extinct?" in the New Scientist.

The hair on our heads may protect us from the noonday sun, maintain body heat when it is cold, and even attract a mate. If so, men who lose their hair are at a disadvantage, and you would expect natural and sexual selection to have weeded them out. So why haven't bald men like me, or at least our versions of genes, gone extinct?

Turns out that it is a teaser essay, without any real explanations; the mystery continues :(

It seems like the rate at which I am balding is far from steady but increases every single day. 

A couple of weeks ago, I wondered how I might look like if (when?) I become fully bald.  So, in a typically scientific approach, I headed (pun intended!) to the barbershop, and came out looking like this:

A few more steps to satisfy my curiosity, and I became:

I don't know about all the bald people, but I am well on my way to extinction :)

Life is what happens when you are busily planning for it!

The last few days have been yet another reminder about the unpredictability that life is.

Strange events have made me stay in, and familiarize myself with, Seattle.  Not some suburb, but Seattle.  The city from where Frasier pontificated after returning from Boston.  With the little I have understood the city, it seems like I am not too far from where Frasier's fictional home might have been located.

That is life.

The summer sun finally broke through on a wonderfully sunny and pleasant Fourth of July.  I walked over the nearby lake/park.  Under the mid-afternoon sun, there was so much of life all so sudden that it was quite overwhelming.  Older adults taking in the sun while making sure they don't harm their skins.  Young women feeling immortal and warming up under the glorious rays.

And, of course, the kids.  They were having fun like nobody else could.  The best part: without any unnecessary shrieking.  Perhaps because it is the Pacific Northwest?

I spotted a number of toy sail boats whizzing by in the fountain/pond.  It was a pleasant sight--the simple toys and their "owner" kids rushing around with their remote controls.

A kid with his head overflowing with blond hair eagerly pointed out to me his boat.  And then added, "you see that blue one there?  That is a monster.  It keeps hitting other boats."

As much as I love interacting with kids, these days, when I walk around as a single man in a public place, I am increasingly worried that paranoid parents might think that I, with my strange appearance, am one with whom kids should not even talk.

So, I merely "aha"d, which didn't make the kid all too excited to share his joys with me.  Soon, he rushed somewhere else where, I suppose, he could find people who would be animated along with him.

That is life.

Not what I had planned for.

It is another day, and it continues to be sunny and pleasant.  I am glad I brought along my hat with me.  Surya, my friend from the Neyveli days, who is always delighted with photos of me in a hat, and keeps referring to Indiana Jones, will be happy if I had taken a photo of myself, I suppose.

I walked the ups and downs of the city under the warming sun.  I saw a steep series of steps going somewhere.  I climbed them. Panted quite a bit after reaching the top.  I kept walking.  I crossed the bridge when I came to it.

It was a lovely scene.  Cars and trucks whizzed past.I wondered whether the drivers even knew how lovely the world looked.  Did they care?  Were they bored with the cityscape already?

I looked at the other side, past the traffic in between.

"Suicidial?" asked a sign, and included a hotline number.

Not me. I am curious to find out what other surprises life has in store for me, even as I develop plans for the rest of this summer, the rest of the year, and the rest of my life.

Quote of the day, on intellectual humility

[There] seems to be a certain arrogance toward nature that people develop. These people have had great insights and made profound discoveries. They imagine afterwards that the fact that they succeeded so triumphantly in one area means they have a special way of looking at science which must be right. But science doesn’t permit that. Nature has shown over and over again that the kinds of truth which underlie nature transcend the most powerful minds.

As much I was excited to read that, it was especially neat because of who said that: Subramanyan Chandrasekhar

The quote is from this essay on intellectual humility (ht)

It is a good thing, I suppose, that he left India and came to the US; else, he might have been pushed into the corners of obscurity a la S.N. Bose!

Dilbert on college education

Yep, for those looking at education as nothing more than a trade school, well, they fail to understand that college education is not a guaranteed investment, but a highly risky one.

On the other hand, for those who go to college for goals that are larger than mere return on the investment, yes, college is phenomenally worth it.

Higgs-Boson. Frankly, my dear, I don't get it!

As much as I was a physics nut through high school, slowly I drifted away from that field.  All the brouhaha from CERN has, yet again, reminded me of that old love.  I suppose intellectual love affairs are more difficult to get over than the love affairs we usually refer to!

In the news coverage of the CERN event, we got to see, or read about, Higgs getting emotional at the event and wiping his tear drops away.  It is way beyond my imagination as to how exhilarating his love affair with physics would be.

In the few minutes before the idiot box, I didn't notice a single newscaster even remotely comment anything about the second part of the Higgs Boson.   Yes, I refer to the boson.

Perhaps boson has stayed in my head forever because I am from India?  The connection is this: "boson" is named after the mathematical scientist, S.N. Bose.  Bose's life story is like the mother of all "I don't get no respect" stories.

Despite Bose's huge contribution to science, the only lasting legacy is the SN Bose National Centre for Basic Science that was established by an Act of Parliament in 1986. Though honoured with the Padma Vibhushan in 1954 and appointed National Professor in 1959, the scientist failed to grab the imagination like Swamiji, Gurudev, Subhas Bose or even Sourav Ganguly. Known to worship its heroes, the city let down one of its most brilliant sons.

Not even to the level of Sourav Ganguly!

Tagore dedicated his only book on science Visva-Parichay to Bose. "What's remarkable about Bose is that he was a self-taught scholar with a wide range of interests - physics, mathematics, chemistry, biology, mineralogy, philosophy, arts, literature and music. He did his best to promote science among the people by translating scientific papers into Bengali. Bose's contribution to the world was as much as the more celebrated heroes of Bengal," said Satyaki Bhattacharya, yet another scientist at SINP who has been associated with CERN.

So, why the neglect?

C N R Rao, who heads the scientific advisory council to the PM, says Bose had been historically ignored, both in India and abroad. "Maybe because he was so outspoken. I remember a function addressed by Jawaharlal Nehru, where Bose disagreed with a point Nehru made," says Rao. Bose would have been more popular had he lived in the US, he says. 

I can easily imagine that Bose would have made it big time had he lived in the US, and perhaps become the only Bose that Americans would have heard of, making this guy's life a tad less golden!  As for the "god particle" itself, the intellectual aspects of it are way, way over my head.  I agree with Robert Wright:

I personally continue to have no idea what the Higgs boson is. And I think the physicists who 'understand' what it is can do so only because they don't have the layperson's compulsion to think about the world in ways that are ultimately metaphorical. Or, at least, these physicists have dropped the idea that to truly understand something is to have a crystal-clear metaphor in your mind, a metaphor that doesn't break down at any point and doesn't contain internal contradictions. For them, apprehending a purely mathematical description of something is tantamount to comprehending it.
For the rest of us, I suspect, the Higgs belongs in the same category as various other parts of modern physics: It is yet more evidence that the human mind, to the extent that it was designed by natural selection to truly comprehend anything at all, was designed to comprehend the macroscopic world, not the microscopic world. 

THEY know what you read. The e-book publishers, that is!

It's no secret that Amazon and other digital book retailers track and store consumer information detailing what books are purchased and read. Kindle users sign an agreement granting the company permission to store information from the device—including the last page you've read, plus your bookmarks, highlights, notes and annotations—in its data servers. 

That's right--everything from where you highlighted to what kind of notes you scribbled along.  Aren't you thrilled! Not just Amazon, but any e-book version (ht). 

Book apps for tablets like the iPad, Kindle Fire and Nook record how many times readers open the app and how much time they spend reading. Retailers and some publishers are beginning to sift through the data, gaining unprecedented insight into how people engage with books. 

Downright creepy!

Some privacy watchdogs argue that e-book users should be protected from having their digital reading habits recorded. "There's a societal ideal that what you read is nobody else's business," says Cindy Cohn, legal director for the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a nonprofit group that advocates for consumer rights and privacy. "Right now, there's no way for you to tell Amazon, I want to buy your books, but I don't want you to track what I'm reading."
Amazon declined to comment on how it analyzes and uses the Kindle data it gathers.

I am shocked, shocked, that Amazon declined to comment :)

EFF has pressed for legislation to prevent digital book retailers from handing over information about individuals' reading habits as evidence to law enforcement agencies without a court's approval. Earlier this year, California instituted the "reader privacy act," which makes it more difficult for law-enforcement groups to gain access to consumers' digital reading records. Under the new law, agencies must get a court order before they can require digital booksellers to turn over information revealing which books their customers have browsed, purchased, read and underlined. The American Civil Liberties Union and EFF, which partnered with Google and other organizations to push for the legislation, are now seeking to enact similar laws in other states.

 Oh well ... between all these gadgets, Facebook, and the government, and all the security cameras all over the place, the only thing that is a secret for now is when exactly I shit. I am sure that soon the toilet manufacturers will come up with a smart toilet that might even give me a digital examination, in more ways than one, when I am on the mighty throne!

How do we figure out intelligent life out there?

Stephen Wolfram responds to this question (ht): How do we figure out whether there’s intelligent life in the universe that doesn’t share our terrestrial history?

[In] the past we assumed that complicated signals from the cosmos must have been produced by civilizations that were about as advanced as we are. What the principle of computational equivalence tells us is that this isn’t true. You can get complicated sequences and patterns from simple rules that don’t require billions of years of evolution. A famous example is when Marconi and Tesla detected weird radio emissions from space and said, “the Martians must be signaling us!” The radio had just been invented, so they assumed that we had reached a technological threshold and were suddenly able to communicate with extraterrestrial life forms. It turns out that the signals came from the magneto-hydrodynamics of the outer atmosphere. When pulsars were discovered much later, scientists were also really excited because the signal was so periodic and seemed too intentional. In both cases, there was a confusion about the underlying cause. For me, the realization that we cannot really talk about abstract intelligence had an important personal consequence: I realized that artificial intelligence doesn’t require us to build a brain-like thing that we can later program, but that we can start with simple computation.

Now, if only I can detect intelligent life on college campuses.  Oh, wait, Wolfram has a comment on that, too:

I was an academic for a while, but I really like energetically doing projects. What I tried to do is build a very efficient mechanism to turn ideas into things. Right now, entrepreneurial companies seem to be the best way to do that. I look at my friends in academia and think: “Wow, things moved so slowly there in the last 25 years!” When we hire academics to work on WolframAlpha or Mathematica, the biggest shock for them is always how quick everything moves. We sit down, and an hour later we have decided what we are going to do and moved on. We can do crazy projects! If you want an immediate impact on the world, that’s what you need.

Granted that his life as an academic was quite a few leagues above my pay-grade.   But, whatever the level, things move too damn slowly in academia!  That, surely, is not a sign of intelligent life :)

My Lost Youth. Oh, what is a youth?

Came across this Longfellow poem, while reading something way less profound, and the wonderful lines there:

A boy's will is the wind's will,
And the thoughts of youth are long, long thoughts

Advance to 1:16, if you are not patient enough, for a verse from the poem:

There are things of which I may not speak;

      There are dreams that cannot die;

There are thoughts that make the strong heart weak,

And bring a pallor into the cheek,

      And a mist before the eye.

            And the words of that fatal song

            Come over me like a chill:

      "A boy's will is the wind's will,

And the thoughts of youth are long, long thoughts." 

So, how about wrapping it up with this:

Academia is only one step away from a degree in basket-weaving!

A few years ago, when enrollment was beginning to rapidly increase at the university where I work, my fellow faculty got excited enough to begin to offer bizarre courses, and academic majors and minors.  After I realized that the "process" to review proposals was nothing more than "you scratch my back, and I will yours," and more so after learning the hard way that raising questions only made me the enemy, I started disconnecting, as much as possible, from the campus committee processes.

A tragic contrast to such an approach to crazy curriculum?  Way back, when I was still involved in the committee "process," I argued that we needed to offer courses for students to understand Islam and the Middle East.  We had practically nothing on these, even a couple of years after the events of 9/11 and the wars we had launched.  One would think that these topics are far more important than "sports management."  Yet, "sports management" sailed through, while my proposal was severely criticized and shot down even within the Social Science Division!   

If one is willing to overlook the ideological framework of the host-source, then it will be difficult to disagree with the following comments:

Degrees in sports administration and pop culture? Higher education seems to have drifted so far from its fundamental charge that, today, apparently anything can qualify for degree status.

What an injustice this is to students, who innocently believe that if a university thinks a subject important enough to make it into a degree, then they will be well-served by enrolling in it. There are those who blame such students for their bad choices. I am not one of them. I taught in universities for many years and I know the deference paid by most students to the standards articulated by their institution. After all, these are still kids, for the most part; offering them degrees in “pop culture” is perilously close to child abuse. Any academic or administrator who truly believes in both the employability and intellectual respectability of a degree in pop culture is both deceived and deceiving.

There was a time, not that long ago, when universities had a proper reverence for the life of the mind, a reverence that would have made them ashamed to offer such empty-headed degree programs to their students.

Apparently, that time has passed.

Faculty, who are in charge of the curriculum, cook up whatever fancies them, and most administrators do not care to raise tough questions as long as there is enrollment.  Nobody cares whether any of these shenanigans serves the cause of educating students.  For way too long, students have come to be treated as ATMs, and finally the public is beginning to wake up.  The unfortunate part though: as far as I can see from the inside, well, it is business as usual :(

Drones, Defense, and Deficit--Part II of the alliteration

As I take a break from events that have taken over my life, I bet I could have spent those moments on plenty of things better than catching up on news, which included this:

A drone missile struck a house in the Shawal Valley where militants were reported to be hiding in the North Waziristan tribal region near the Afghan border.
"Two missiles were fired on a house. Eight militants were killed," said a local intelligence official.
Several of the men killed were loyal to Hafiz Gul Bahadur, a top militant leader in North Waziristan, the official said on condition of anonymity.
Bahadur, a commander who is believed to be allied with the Haqqani network and to support attacks against NATO forces in Afghanistan, is said to have an unofficial non-aggression pact with the Pakistani military.
Last week, Bahadur's group said it would act against anyone conducting polio vaccinations in its area, a direct threat to Pakistanis who collaborate with the United States.

The phenomenally expanded drones program fuels the anti-American feelings in countries where the Nobel Peace Prize recipient, President Barack Obama, seems to zealously use them.  Should we, therefore, be surprised to read that drone attacks are equated to terrorism?

Terming the US drone attacks terrorism, Punjab Chief Minister Shahbaz Sharif has called for sharing with the nation the number of terrorists killed in the unmanned plane bombings.
“There is no difference between terrorism and drone attacks because both are killing innocent people and the nation must be told about the number of terrorists killed so far in the US campaign,” the chief minister said while addressing the distribution ceremony of E-Bars documents among the Punjab bar associations at Alhamra Hall on Saturday.
“We have to give up the habit of getting charity from foreigners and break beggar’s bowl to get such drone attacks seized,” Shahbaz maintained.

So, in adding to this earlier post, here is more to think about:

or, how about this:

 Hail to the Nobel Peace Prize recipient Warrior-in-Chief :(