@rooftop

Chai on a Sunday evening after a good, long nap, and followed by a stroll is one of those things that makes a Sunday, well, Sunday (and the following week bearable :) . I skipped the stroll, and went to our rooftop today. The building I live in is quite tall (eight stories) and naturally, terrace affords a good view. Once there, I located a short stump of a pillar and made myself comfortable.

The view is obstructed by a number of buildings in every direction, but mercifully a fair amount of vegetation is still seen. I located three or four kites in the sky, which rather amused me. Birds were returning to their homes, and as they were travelling at right angles to my spot, and due to the distance, the up-down motion of their wings was not visible; they appeared like a bunch of black marbles gliding across the sky. The sun was setting steadily, going behind one cloud after another in its course and illuminating their edges in ever more beautiful patterns, to reemerge a moment or two later, only bigger and redder. Now this happens every day, but it is also new every day. Did you know that the Deccan plateau (on which most of you are standing right now, just like me) was created by the volcanism ensued by the asteroid strike which also ended the age of dinosaurs 65 million years ago? That was what came to mind when I cast my eye towards the distant mountain ranges. But forget distant things, even the road in front of the building, on which I travel every day, looked different. Maybe I never noticed the suru trees by its side before. There is a mangal karyalaya nearby, and I would not have missed the band had it been absent, but curiously, all the songs being played were at least 20 years old, say from Don or Ashi hi banwabanawi. The patch of highway had started glowing against the backdrop of the nearby hill. Sat there till the sun was invisible, strolled for a few more minutes, and came down.

Now Playing

Jeevan ke safar me raahi..
Milte hai bichad jane ko...
Aur de jate hai yaadein..
Tanhayee me tadpane ko...

[A sad song (if you look at the lyrics) but sung in a cheerful voice. Was it this attitude towards life that Kishorda hinting at?]

Fred Hoyle's universe

I was fortunate to get my hands on Jayant Narlikar's science fiction books as a schoolboy. Narlikar, as you might know is a cosmologist of international repute, and also a well known popularizer of science (he has won the Kalinga prize given by UNESCO for popularization of science). In preface of one of his books (Yakshanchi Denagi I think) he expounds his views about science fiction, what it should be, and how he came to it. He tells us that his idol in this field is his mentor, who is also a well known astrophysicist and science popularizer. That's how I came to know Fred Hoyle.

Fred Hoyle was one of 20th century's great astrophysicists. He is remembered today for the B²FH paper (named after the initials of its authors, Geoffrey and Margaret Burbidge, William Fowler and Fred Hoyle) which explained how heavier (than helium) elements get formed inside stars. He was also a co-founder of steady state cosmology, which was a chief rival of big bang theory in its earliest days. According to this theory, universe is expanding, and the intervening space gets continiously filled with new matter, so universe always looks the same (so called 'perfect cosmological principle'). Interestingly, it was Hoyle who gave the name 'big bang' to what was then known as 'evolutionary cosmology'. Critics later claimed this to be an attempt at ridicule, but Hoyle said he was just trying to be vivid. And the name stuck. He did for science popularization on Radio what Sagan later did on Television. But in later life, Hoyle came to champion a host of unpopular, and deemed by many to be unscientific, ideas. I will quote just one, that disease causing bacteria are being bombarded on earth from space, and these are the main source of mutations. He went as far as to claim that interstellar clouds are swarms of bacteria. He was ridiculed and criticised but he never compromised on things that he considered right.

But why this post today? Well, because I recently finished reading a biography of Hoyle (Fred Hoyle's Universe, by Jane Gregory). Good points first, the book is well researched, and quite extensive. It is light on technical points (too light I think), but that may be considered a plus by some. My main complain is that the author spends a disproportionate amount of time on the beurocratic details of things in Hoyle's life, e.g. details like the names of all the people who formed a comittee when Hoyle was leading an effort for building a large telescope. Such details might be important from a scholarly point of view, but too much of it wearied me down. Reducing this coverage might have shortened the book by 1/4th, and made it much more readable. This is the first biography of Hoyle that I read, so I am not sure if this is the best one. Hoyle's life itself remains worth knowing about at any rate.

Meri Kahani, tags ki Jubaani..

I will keep this one short. When I added tags to my blog, I said something like 'the number of tags, number of posts in each category, and such are insights to you about yourself'. Taking that to be true, the tags that I use (and miss if any) these days will reflect the changes that have occured in the meantime. So here we go. 'WeekendPosts' and 'TVShows' are totally out of use. 'WeekendPosts' was my way of using some of the ample time available over weekends to make a record of that ample time. Not anymore. 'TVshows', I don't watch any. Not even TBBT. 'GudLink' has mostly moved to buzz, and 'Movies' to the movie blog. 'ApparentlyTechnical' has gone into shadows, but I sincerely wish it returns. 'MyOwnRantAKAPersonal' sees an occasional post here and there, and 'Books' is thriving. 'GhumnaFirna' - nil. The posts here were mostly a product of the office group, and not surprisingly, it has dispersed somewhat in this year or two. That leaves us with 'AboutBloggersAndBlogging', and I was going to put a 'nil' there too, but then I realized this post itself will come under it.

So we come to the big conclusion, 'variety' has gone down. Probably it's high time to start looking for some new tags.

Your Inner Fish

I spent a sizable chunk of this weekend reading Your Inner Fish by Neil Shubin. I had assummed (when I bought it) to be a detailed account of the Tiktaalik story, to which I was familiar from Remarkable Creatures (a wonderful book, but to which I never got around to writing a review). Tiktaalik was a big story in 2008, whose fossils were then uncovered in Arctic. It's name literally means 'large freshwater fish', and it lived around 375 million years ago. What makes it distinct is the fact that it is major transitional form (so called missing link, which can now be considered found) between water and land dwelling animals. It shows features of both, e.g. it's a fish but with a neck, and it's fins show primitive hand like limbs. It has been described as 'the fish that could do pushups'. Neil Shubin was the leader of the team that made this discovery.

As I was saying, I was looking for a story, but the book offers more than that. It is a book about evolution without explicitly saying so. The main focus is on the unity of life, by reconnecting our bodies with our ancestors. These include fish, reptiles and even microbes. To quote an example, take the mammalian ear. One of the three bones that make the inner part is a repurposed (and reduced in size) jaw support bone found in Sharks. And the other two bones have been repurposed from the multi-boned-jaws of our reptillian ancestors (in process, giving us a jaw with a single bone). Take another example, our teeth. The machinery used to make them has been reused in making hairs and breasts. The book ranges over a wide variety of topics, including how embryos develop, when did we acquire color vision (about 55 million years ago) and why single celled creatures who had dominated the earth for billions of years started body-building (became multicellular) about a billon years ago (it was the rise in oxygen levels that allowed synthesis of large amount of colagen, the protein which holds bone tissues together), without getting dry and in a remarkably compact form. A fruitful and enjoyable read!

Delight

My school library had a somewhat strange policy, there were these green and gray shelves filled with books, but we were not allowed to touch them. Instead, there used to be this moderate sized pile of books on the librarian's table from which we were to select. Predictably, the pile replacement period was measured in years, so if you liked to read, you ended up reading the same book many times over. I have cherished memories from this time, Edison's biography has etched itself on my mind (coincidently, it's his birthday today. Thanks VR), similarly a book about fishes with color plates. But like every other schoolboy, adventure stories were my favorite.

Fast forward to yesterday. I was strolling through Crossword when a book caught my eye, King Solomon's Mines. The name Solomon is there in so much fiction that it was bound to seem familiar. It looked intersting and I ended up buying it. Later at home, I was browsing through it when a came across these words: 'evil witch gagool'. And then it suddenly came to me. It is the same book (well, a translation, to be precise) I had devoured in school, so much so that I can still recall phrases from it. I can still recall the sketch of the map where the action took place. Apparently the name 'gagool' had left its mark deeper than others. It was like meeting an old friend. Delight, pure and simple.

Naturalist

A wonderful book I finished reading today, E.O.Wilson's autobiographical memoir, Naturalist. Wilson is world's leading myrmecologist (one who studies ants. You are welcome.), and a world class scientist who also has a gift for lucid prose. And you don't have to take my word for it; he has won Pulitzer, twice. The book is about his journey from a boy with a deep love for nature to a world class scientist and beyond. Wilson contributed to our understanding of many things insect, and in later years became an important conservation activist. The thing that I liked most was the simple, straightforward tone in which Wilson talks. He will say I did this, without mincing words. Excessive modesty is a burdern really. And he will say I did not see this, or felt insecure at this point, also without mincing words. Such writing touches the heart directly. His passion for his field shines throughout, and is something a young mind can learn a lot from. A genuinely good read, I think for everybody. I am glad that I joined the library where I found this book, because it is not seen in bookstores and I would certainly have missed it. Certainly worth rereading.

Enjoy!!