30 Mar 2014
Experience is impossible without numbers.
Unless one goes beyond the realm of experiencing the known world. Spirituality is not discussed here.
All of us are emotional (social) animals, with an innate instinct/tendency to describe all that is experienced in words and shared with others/self.
One cannot live without exercising the skill of describing any experience, from the minutest to indescribable experiences.
The only thing that makes one’s descriptions sensible and comprehensible is their words filled with numbers.
We are now in an era where numbers not only shape our daily life, they are actually irreplaceable as long as we live within the space-time realm.
Our most fundamental experience of space and time is impossible without numbers. The top right corner of this post when I trial-published it on Medium.com showed “2 min read.” A Number.
It is not any recent metamorphosis in our thinking. The first human, Adam, might have begun his exploration by counting one among many apples on a tree, or eating them one by one, when he first experienced hunger.
Ideas once thought as Utopian are, in the course of time, found as common sense.
Once upon a time, numbers, the so-called mathematics, were regarded to be a topic for an elite class scholarly debate among intellectuals. When giants like Pythagoras said, all things are numbers, it was corned into philosophy, labeling it as his quote, rather than imbibing it into our natural breath.
This is the world we live in, a world of numbers.
For instance, contemporary revolution in the name of Data Science, extraction of knowledge from data, is an indispensable sidekick to ensure our 24 hours is seemingly in an order. While data in this science might describe a lot of non-numerical variables, the science part of it is not complete without assigning numbers to those categorical variables.
Every system, be it political, educational, geographical, technological, ethical, social or even a domestic family system cannot survive any longer, without this radical science.
An illiterate homemaker begins her day calculating the amount of milk necessary to run her family that includes a pet. Geese, without PhDs, follow perfect timings of seasons, enabling their periodic migration. An entire country’s leader can be judged worth another chance or not with a booklet of numbers that illustrates his performance in his last tenure.
Data, or in other words, numbers can make all difference. Mythologies, random event predictions, religions, calendars, businesses, ants, everything benefits from data science of numbers.
Survival depends only on the sense of numbers.
When do numbers make sense?
When things are put in perspective.
The language of perspectives is numbers.
30 Oct 2013
Of Misleading Mind.
Written 30 Oct 2013
These are my mental vibrations after I read a recent article that says, “Mind misleads.”
If you can’t explain it simply, you don’t understand it well enough. - Einstein.
If only looks could kill…your eyes deceive you!. Minds Mislead Us!
What do you think this stuff is? Do you really think so? Or, don’t you really think so?
Let me try!
I have heard somewhere. The colors that we can see through our eyes, are not visible to cows. They can only see black and white. Who is mislead now, cows or us, about the reality?
This is like a paradox. Everything is, perhaps!
I strongly think there is a set of opposite minds in all our (human) brains. One wants you to do and the other wants you not.
Without introducing this complexity, there seems to be no better way of simplifying the fact, mind misleads you. But I take it anyway.
There is another catch to it. When we say our mind misleads us, we are essentially claiming that we are fully aware of what is leading and what is otherwise. Or what is right and what is not. And also, leading in which direction and misleading in which one. Are we, really?
What about the problem of left and right brains? Is this what I was unconsciously reinforcing in my first couple of thoughts in this scribble, the opposite minds in a brain? Ultimately, it all boils down to what exactly is misleading?
I wish I were a neuroscientist, I could have cracked it by now with the sort amusement I find in knowing things like this about mind. But who knows, perhaps all neuroscientists are already mislead, do they know? And they focus on those micro, really micro, things that layman has no interest in. After all, who is interested in how a mind works, when none of us have ever seen whether it exists in reality?
Yeah, I am talking sense. I mean, why do we always struggle with understanding mind, when we could have spent that time and energy in understanding brain which physically existing? Mind and soul are two concepts people should avoid blabbering on. See, I am already misleading a huge bunch of people with my baseless thoughts. But’. I don’t know.
Oh right, this is probably why we got scholars like Karl Popper, Wittgenstein, etc. We always have to accept that we are like stuck in the maze of language. We are stuck with words, in a way, perceptions. What we think we know is what we actually perceive that we know. Ehem, I am sorry, I actually started this out to bring in some funny science, but it all ended up in some sort of philosophy. Not too far though, science and philosophy, are they?
I am not trying to create or support some elegant, meta-exploration theories. But I am just saying, are we really sure of what we always say when we say, some mind is right and some other is not. I don’t want to spoil the grace and virtue of being able to contemplate on such powerful ideas, by simply giving you answers to all the questions I shot at you here, ruthlessly. (Ehem’ I actually don’t know any answer, but that’s a secret, I don’t want to share it with anybody! ;-)) Alright, we may have to explore the possibility of hunting that mind thing down somewhere and rip open it to see what it consists of and the machinery and mechanisms inside. Let us hope we will soon have a scientist who has the know-how of this highly analytical experiment.
See you next time with something more meaningless!
06 Oct 2013
Written on 6 Oct 2013
Time is education! Wherever we see, the revolutionary progressing world is under constant transformation. In such a world of continuous changes, it is nowhere possible in our biosphere to maintain the same state of affairs all the time. It is well understood that if energy behaves in and exhibits uniformity, the disorder in the universe increases. As the most intimate, almost indivisible siblings, science and technology began to rule human’s day-to-day life. The global warming, an offspring of climate change has been challenging us with its growth at an unfathomable pace, probably faster than our world’s development. However, at the same pace is our visions and actions in search of an alternative and promising method of overcoming the issue of global warming. It is no exaggeration that the same duo of science and technology alone can transform this hope into a reality. From a time when humankind was making all the possible attempts to understand nature, it is now royally walking on the red carpet - made of science and technology - towards a time when it can control nature. Time is ticking only towards more science and more technology, more and more!
Religions worship nature as a divine phenomenon. They also not only unpretentiously support the idea of understanding divine, but certainly also formulated several ways to achieve it. Accepting this as a hard earned responsibility, science contributes its sweat in the industry of understanding, and perhaps very soon in controlling the same nature, while it modestly persevering all its concentration in performing this task. Pioneers such as Ken Wilber, one of the modern spiritual integrationists, press on the fact that nature promises that science, technology and religion have been waiting to welcome us with all their humility and humbleness, while all three of them being very vital parts of nature. Chinese were the first to inquire and comprehend whether it was an egg or a chicken that came in existence first. From a time when human race were only inquiring, today, we are eagerly standing heads-up at the verge of answering many such questions. Time is ticking only towards science and technology for many divine (nature) answers!
It is undeniable that science and technology played their role majorly in a variety of aspects in the global status-quo, whose list cannot be complete here. From the time when we had no awareness of what life was, we have long journeyed and arrived at a junction where we can clearly look through almost all parts of our body; and find the minutest errors and realize the miniature life-machines in our body at nano-scale and beyond, which strongly influence our living system. It has always been a surprise to learn the history of Egyptian and Mexican pyramids which were built almost during the same time when there was no possibility of transport between the two countries. It seems impossible to believe that several thousand years ago, there were Indians and Chinese shuttling between their home and Europe. Today, we have made communication so much more unbelievable that it takes not more than a second to send a message from the North Pole to the South Pole. The conventional and contemporary airplanes fly at a height of about sixty thousand feet and at a speed of almost seven hundred kilometers per hour with a high level of precision. There was once a time when light was thought to be a wave. The it was a time when we surprised ourselves by understanding its particle nature. In the process of eliminating such conundrums about light’s behavior, at last, we are now in a position to control the light and make it behave as we want it to behave, either a wave or a particle. (Does it seem like the diffraction of X-ray waves and laser photons contrasting with each other?). Certainly, time is ticking and taking all of us deep into science and technology!
While they seem evolved from an origin called natural philosophy, they also seem capable of uniting us all with the ultimate eternal wisdom. All it takes is the ticking time, which pleasantly depends on science and technology again.
08 May 2013
Tailored for us.
Written on 8 May 2013
This article is strictly for those non-biologists who have no idea about Omics/Genomics/Genetics etc.
Omics is a field of biological science that deals with subjects like genomics, proteomics, metabolomics, etc.
I participated in a recent webinar Genomic Sequencing in the Clinical Laboratory by a staff scientist of Illumina Inc., well-known genomics company, known for its pioneering works in the field of bioinformatics and biotechnology of clinical genomics. The talk showed some compelling facts which convince audience that the process of establishing consumer genomics is getting into a comprehensive, strategic shape. The entire WWW is filled with petabytes of information, discussion forums yelling for the voices to be heard, advancements of industries with their noise full of pride, career aspirants wandering through the enticing mazes of high-pay-claiming genomic companies, investors getting excited about the emerging revenue-generators, seemingly lucrative business opportunities, researchers contemplating on bringing related dreams into realizable reality, philosophers speculating on where this is all going and so on.
Anything that you do with a gene, genome, DNA, RNA, transcriptome, protein, or proteome is considered to be a sacred activity promising unending rewards and unbelievable upgrades in our current critical life. The federal agencies and stakeholders who are in support of the ongoing debate on climate changes derive colossal amounts of statistical information on at what risk we humans are living in, considering the rate at which world population grows, the rate at which we humans are contributing to the fast draining of energy reservoirs and resources, and they also worry about extinction of several species and the causes. This cult community of scholars also warn us with numbers such as: we need 70% of more food for survival by 2050 based on the estimated population growth by then; or the amount of electricity we need by 2050; or many documentaries use the metaphor,
“The earth is already at the verge of what it can provide for life to continue on it.”
Midst of all this haze and deluge, one form of science steps forward to say, “I am your hope!”
That is gene-related science. Wherever you see a gene in this write-up, you can replace it with words such as the ones mentioned at the start of the last paragraph, or any other thing that is ‘sequencible’ using next generation technologies. This field is promising, with its strategic contributions, broadly threefold. Studies of genes are expected to blow away the conundrum of food security, involving deep into the crop analysis and yield, and livestock production development endeavors. These studies have been making their unremitting efforts in twigging the whole set of pros and cons of single-cell enigmatic phantom-like pathogens and bacteria. Biology concluded long ago that some bacterium that is lethal for a human can be medicinal for a plant, poisonous for an organ can be savior for another, or its presence in one medium can be detrimental, while its absence can be the same in another medium. And the third but the most important application is for fellow humans!
In terms of plant genomics, consider you have a farm field of wheat and you found that something went wrong with it. This year’s production is, say, less than the last year’s by about 10% (very significant and dangerous). Now you take a sample from your field to a genomics lab nearby, rip open it to catch hold of the cells, and take one genome out of it. Now slice the genome into pieces because it can be too wildly long for you to hold it. Now leave it to the lab owner to determine where on those pieces was the problem (called mutation), that was causing lower production. Then the lab techniques can be used to repair the mutation, or give the right drug which can nail the problem down in your field. That’s it, crop production is done! Although my non-technical description somewhat meaninglessly simplified the real procedure, I bet this science is giving lot of techniques to raise crop yield in many countries already. This work might involve to a great extent the genomic study of bacteria, fungi, virus, etc. Because in some case, including in the case of animals, it is perhaps this bacterial and viral matter which might cause severe diseases. On one of the recent prolific science communication articles on Wired by the “Digital Life” columnist, David Rowan, there is a point on how humans are already robotics-driven, if we are feeling uneasy without a smart phone in our hands. If Rowan plans to write on genomics, I am sure he might call all organisms on this planet are born robots, super computers and data-flyers.
The entire conglomerate of world literary population is fervently awaiting the opportunity to see and experience the chronicles to be written by the field of DTC Genomics, Direct-to-Consumer. Imagine the day when you caught sever cold and call a medical doctor over the phone for an appointment, and his first question is, “Before I can help you, can I have your genomic ID please?” or “Before I know what the problem is, would you please tell us what species you belong to?”, etc. According to the stalwarts in the field, this day is not too long.
How would you react if you come out of your house for the first early morning walk of the day and find a van standing at the corner of your street? The van’s body is covered with graphical designs, flashing colors, a huge double helix winding its body starting from the right rear tire to the left, and huge cartoon-like star on a window where you get to read, “Know Your Ancestors @ Your doorstep” kind of loud-speaking jargons. This is not in Utopia, it’s happening in New York. The huge van/truck in New York is called Health Street, providing you on-the-spot DNA testing for paternity information and your health analytics. Genomics technology is going to metamorphose the entire conditioned lifestyle, particularly while modeling the personalized medicine concept in a shape that is stranger than any fiction.
If your tummy is still not content with such examples, let us look at totally unanticipated possibilities by Genetic engineering. What would you say if I tell you that you can design the kind of baby you want to have in, say, the next summer? Alright, go ahead and tell the doctors that you like a baby girl with milky white complexion, big round eyes, long thin nose, lips like Monica Bellucci, height like the father, brains like Einstein, etc.
[Yeah, I know! The combination I mentioned here is really odd [lips like Monica and brains like Einstein? !What the ….! Hell no.]
But genetic engineers can make your baby as per your choices and product-deliver it in the womb. You think I’m going to make a sci-fi movie with this concept? No possibilities, because the concept was already used in several movies as fiction before 2004, the year in which the term “designer babies” was added to Oxford Dictionary. Setting the jargons and my exaggerations aside, the science behind this is called In vitro fertilization of children or Pre-implantation Genetic Diagnostics. In simple terms, it is to design a baby with some of the genes representing functional characteristics engineered to be present or absent in it; thereby anticipating a baby with the traits that the parent wants.
Gosh….too much! I remember when I was a kid I used to ask my father an impossible question just to tease my lovely mother, “Dad, why didn’t you seek for my advice on who to marry before zeroing in on mom?” This is only a speck in the entire sand-mass of what the aggressive Omics science can do to us. As a science follower, I am excited and you can see it in my writing.
07 May 2013
Written on 7 May 2013
Not sure why I ended up with this kind of sudden silent outburst in my mind. It’s definitely not me, somebody else is sitting in my brain and forcing me into these thoughts and scribbles. Perhaps, Johnnie Walker!
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Adrenaline of life consists of two things. They are seeking and feeling. Keep saying these 2 words a zillion times. Now let us calculate how many times the former word followed the latter and the latter followed its former. You end up getting almost an equal number of times they followed each other; like in a set of curved lines placed on a circle, which curve comes first? That’s pretty much about life. You seek for something and in the process of attaining, you end up feeling. Your new feeling leaves you with a new thing to seek for. And you go on and on and on!
The question is that if there is a stop. A significant stop that shows you the labyrinth of life in a plain and simple two dimensional viewpoint! The problem is that there is certainly a stop but it has to be initiated by the seeker. Most of us do not. At least I do not. We think there is no time. We have set our benchmarks. We need to run, in fact, run almost unstoppable. Until the running consumes us to breathlessness, we do not realize we need a stop. When we stop, what if we found that all the long way that we had been running so far was wrong?
This reminds me of a cartoon on Vedanta. There is a hilly-curvy path on which a man has been walking from quite a distance. The cartoon shows the man currently who just crossed a landmark where the signpost says “the last Guru before Nirvana’, who he just met and walked forth. And now he is nearing another landmark where the signpost reads, “Wrong way. Go back!”
What on earth could it mean?
- The eminent invincible Guru was wrong?
- Or our understanding of that Guru’s direction was wrong?
- Or our ambition of reaching Nirvana was wrong?
What exactly went wrong?
Osho, the principal authority among contemporaries on this kind of egresses, will take you for a ride if you ask him what went wrong. He twists and turns your malleable mind, repeats sentences in his own chaotic patterns. By the time you came to his 5th minute sppech, you already lost track of what he aactually meant in the first 4 minutes.
The Buddha, the one who needs no introduction, will smile and close his eyes if you ask him what went wrong. It could mean as cruel as, “Do what’s necessary!” or as frustratingly simple as, “I would rather preserve my time for some meaningful things.”
Krishna, someone full of divine lineament utterly incomprehensible for the man, shows you, to find the answer, a most undivided simplest path that you will never be able to accept. His paths cannot be simpler and we are not used to such simplicity ever since we started growing up. We are born simple, but we are forced to be complicated to be eligible to live in this society.
Socrates, the supreme teacher who does not know how to teach, will ask you so many more questions in the attempt of enabling you to find the answer all by yourself, because all he knows is to make people think.
All of them indicate that they cannot help you. With same rigor and sternness, ask your father what went wrong; he will use a language that’s heavily coated with the prejudices of his experiences. He can surely lead you somewhere but not exactly where you want to go.
Sounds patriarchal? Mothers and women are not taken here because they are pretty much like the Buddha, although not in its complete sense. Women would never entertain you if you ask them these futile questions; they are at the continuous service of this reality world where nothing matters except for a generative product. They do not waste time on these philosophizing conversations. We are not touching the exceptions though!
Then who helps?
They say, you went on asking so many others, but why have you not ever remembered one person more real than all of them? It is that one person who can show you the life not in the usual baffling kaleidoscopic view, but resolved into a very extraordinarily straightforward one dimensional way. From a legion of dimensions, we will regress to the original single point of view to deal with anything in life. This one person is theoretically capable of interpreting all-things-life using that single point of view. A person with one-track mindset! Who is that one person? The answer is, YOU!
But at the end, the YOU cannot be created, shaped, and made alive unless we arrange for a focused meeting with all the above men and many more. Prerequisites and steps to the glory! Meet them to find YOU! Once the YOU is found, keep conversing with that one person.
They say, you will eventually get to a point in your conversations with YOU, where you may discover something perplexedly natural. That is, even this YOU does not matter as it exists not in reality.
What’s remaining then? A point of no conversations, no logic, no queries, no substance, no vacuum, no birth, no loss, no god, no living, no thing, nothing!
Are we alive once we reach there and dealing with the usual daily activities and disputes anymore? Yes, we are, very much! That’s what they say.
Who are they? Where is you?