An Almanack

The Harish-Chandra Research Institute is located on the banks of the Ganga, within sight of where the Yamuna flows into it. From its magnificent gardens you can see the sand bank that marks the confluence of the two most sacred rivers of Hinduism. Everyone-mythical figures such as Rama and Krishna, poets such as Kalidasa and Gurus like Vivekananda- has been at the Sangam. Today I got to see it up close. After a trip to the city of Prayag that has existed at this point a few thousand years.

Allahabad, as it is now known, is a small city but with an exceptional influence on India’s history. Half of its Prime Ministers are from here. Of course, three of them are lineal descendants of Nehru, whose house here we visited today.

This is in the heartland of India. And people here are large hearted. If you can avoid the moneygrabbing priests at the makeshift temples, everyone is laid back and seem generally happy. A few dollars go a long way. We saw no tourists, unlike at Varanasi. This ancient land exerts a pull, a yearning to reconnect with the past that is not rational and all the stronger for it.

Finally I post something about physics. Here are notes from lectures on mechanics to freshmen at the IISER-TVM. I didn’t have time to edit it. Any corrections ( spelling mistakes, algebraic errors etc.) are welcome. It usually takes me a few iterations to get everything right.

There are three kinds of chick flicks.

Type A often has Meryll Streep and always involves a disease. There is no way to watch this type. Run. Don’t walk. May be there is a hospital fire somewhere that only you can put out? Doubly beware if the name of the movie ends in cutesy symbols such as `XXOO’ or makes inscrutable references to metallic flowers and/or green fruit.

Type B usually has Meg Ryan, Kate Hudson or lately, Ann Hathaway. These are quite watchable, in small quantities.

Never see a chick flick at a theater. Does the phrase captive audience mean anything to you? Always go for Netflix or a DVD at home. Do not hog the remote control. Just for once.

The first hour of the movie is the hardest. Read the rest of this entry »

Hat tip Public D

Publisher’s Note
The original author of this photo-cartoon remains anonymous. I took it from a post on Daily Kos and added the following speech explaining Andre’s fate. The photo has since appeared on many websites. The second speech below is a totally unfair parody of one by the CEO of Beth-Israel Medical Center. I blame our staff member Richard Saunders for the biting tone of that parody. Richard has been properly chastised. His only excuse is temporary loss of sanity from performing experiments on the nature of electricity.

Hello everyone. Thanks for taking the time to get together today at an actual work site. How is everyone feeling in those work overalls? Thought it would be a nice change from the eleventh floor.

I’m not going to waste your time or mince words. The reason for getting together is to bring you up to speed on the company’s status. Unfortunately, it’s not as good as we all would have anticipated even 6 short days ago.

There are several issues.
Read the rest of this entry »

As soon as I saw a picture of Rod Blagojevitch (back during the Dem Primaries) I knew he was up to no good. This judgement, now vindicated, did not come from deep knowledge of IL state politics. I just knew that someone with such a lush growth of hair on his head had to be a bounder. This would be true even if the hair were fake. Donald Trump. Gary Hart (in the eighties, not now). Bill Clinton. Elvis. All talented people, all got in trouble. What do they have in common? Hair where it is supposed to grow, not on their ear or back.

IL has a second chance now with Patrick Quinn. He is different from Blagojevitch in every possible way.

“He’s the anti-Blagojevich, for sure,” said State Representative Jack D. Franks

You have got to love the guy: NYTimes

Mr. Quinn, 60, can be so unassuming that he watched the inauguration of President Obama in Washington crunched down on his knees so that people behind him could get a better view. When prone to boasting, which is not very often, it can be about miserly stuff, like staying in budget hotels and eating discount meals.

More to the point I am making,

And with a hairline more John Lithgow than Elvis, he does not even look the Blagojevich part.

Read the rest of this entry »

Ever since the Salman Rushdie incident, the word Fatwa has had a negative connotation. Perhaps no word has been as misunderstood, with the exceptions of jihad and madrassa.

It turns out that a fatwa is a kind of judicial opinion from an islamic religious authority. In nations that have adopted the Shariah as part of the legal system, a fatwa could have the force of law. But mostly, it is guidance for the faithful. Because Islam does not have a hierarchy like the Catholic Church, each religious authority has to rely on its own reputation as the force behind its fatewa.

Outside of the Middle East, the most respected school of Islamic studies is Darul Uloom, located at Deoband near Delhi in India. It was founded in 1866 after the defeat of Indian forces by the British. The school played an important role in the Freedom Struggle of India. It opposed the creation of Pakistan, and asks its followers to participate peacefully in Indian democracy. Its influence extends well outside of India. The mainstream of Islam in Pakistan is historically of the Deoband school. After Partition, certain logistical difficulties clearly exist and Saudi Arabia is playing an increasing role in providing support to the madrassas. Read the rest of this entry »

A parable, possibly of Buddhist origin:

The baker dangled the freshly made bread under the Bodhisatva’s nose. He knew it was overpriced, but the smell still enticed Him. So He breathed in deep. The baker, knowing he had lost the sale, said

“Hey, if you are enjoying the smell of my bread, you have to pay for it”
Read the rest of this entry »

Perhaps the most spectacular early prediction of quantum mechanics was tunneling: that particles can do things that are forbidden in Newton’s mechanics, although with a small probability. Read the rest of this entry »

Thermodynamics is the study of heat. Originally developed to understand steam engines and such, it led to a revolution in physics. It showed that time has a preferred direction. Also, that physics is not fully deterministic: the best we can do for large systems is to predict averages of physical quantities and probabilities of events. But with the even greater revolutions of quantum mechanics and relativity that happened soon after , thermodynamics lost some of its original wonder. Nowadays it is thought of a staid old field, barely taught in physics departments anymore ( except as a preparation for a Stat Mech course). This is a pity, because thermodynamics is perhaps the most remarkable of all physical theories. We have none other than Albert Einstein vouching for this¹: Read the rest of this entry »

Earnest Rutherford used to say that all science is either physics or stamp collecting. This could have been a dig at the biologists of his time, who were still collecting samples and classifying species. He probably would have thought more highly of modern molecular biology, which is a lot like his physics in outlook: everything is determined by the DNA. It is said that Rutherford’s worst insult for a student who had done something stupid was–Chemist. The chemists had the last laugh though: Rutherford was awarded the Nobel Prize not in Physics but in Chemistry for having achieved the transmutation of elements.

Should we understand the world bottom up or top down? Which is the proper scientific view? Read the rest of this entry »