Of an epic saga, and a cosmic blip

I have finally decided to uproot my life from the USA and head over to U.K. - to take a shot at my much dreamt Ph.D. I am not sure, if I am going to regret this decision, or if this decision is going to become the most epic success story of my life. But I am taking a leap of faith, and with me, my beautiful soul mate, my wife.

But this post is not about how difficult things are or how adventurous and heroic our decisions are when we are shunning the "luxury" of the STATES, "the land of freedom and opportunity", etc. I had never felt any attachment or attraction towards ANY country for that matter. Countries are the most laughable concepts, devised by men of power, who are arrogant enough to hope that they can draw lines on a piece of paper that doesn't even represent the real geographical snapshot of earth, and carve the planet a little more amongst themselves. It's laughable, because it is as permanent as early morning dew drops on leaves. The era of humans as they call it, is only a blip, on the timeline of mother earth. 

I think I am digressing, so more to that later. 

This post , as I was saying, is about how each and everyone of us, is after writing his own epic saga with their lives. I observed this fact when I had to finally sell my first car, because of the move across the pond I mentioned earlier. This car, which I bought three and a half years ago, was the first car I ever owned (or my family ever owned), and it was bought entirely using my own money. 

The buying of the car had several directives attached to it. It had to serve as the car that my wife would use to explore this country with me, the car that my mom would proudly call her own and take a tour of America in,  a car that my wife's parents would enjoy and finally a car that projects an image a self reliant and successful Sagar. 

The last point is as important as all of the former combined. That is because for the world and for me,  this car marked a beginning of a chapter in the saga of life of Sagar. It represented the material props, required, to show the world and the people around, that this saga is going to be good. And above all, it acted as a point on the graph of life, all of us are trying to plot, which inevitably marked an upward trajectory. The act of plotting just starts as a side chore when we were in school, but has now become this obsession, which is the center of our lives. Comparing graphs is also a thing, and it brings up depression, sorrow,  joy, jealousy and in some cases happiness. 

This obsession about writing a great life story, has made us creatures that scare too easy. We are afraid of starting a new chapter. All this for a story that is merely a blip, on the blip, we call history of "the era of mankind". 

The sheer insignificance of our decisions should make us free, alive and hopeful. But somehow it is not easy. It is not easy, to stop writing your sagas, and plotting your graphs. It is not easy to stop comparing your graphs with others. I wist it was, I really do. 

Well, in a nutshell, stories and sagas are great to read, lives are great to live... 

ciao, 

Whatever happened to GOD ?

Hello folks. Ever wondered what has god been through for all these years since he has created man?Well every thing needs a background. So let me create one. 50000 years ago when the first homo sapiens walked the earth and invented language and ways of cooking food and hunting, there was another concept budding inside this curious mind of the first "thoughtful" human. A concept which evolved out of his ever raging questions about his existence, about the existence of the food he eats, of the fire he lights and of the air he breaths. No matter how simple yet beyond his reach these questions were, his thoughtful brain devised relations between his questions and some arbitrary supernatural powers of this universe that intervened in the way the world functions. He articulated these relations in forms of tales in his nascent language to convince his tribesmen about the answers of his questions and to bring them under one faith. This was the first "GOD" and his tribesmen were the first followers of his "Religion"

Well as it is quite clear from the above text, the early religions were quite simple. These were merely manifestations of answers of mans questions about his surroundings. Every element, every emotion, every phenomenon had a GOD associated with it, so that he/she can be held accountable for. To give some examples we can peep back into history and see some cultures like Egyptians (Worshiped SUN "RAH" as it gave them rain and crops), Greeks (worshiped every element of nature along with human emotions), Hindus (Quite similar to Greeks apart from the fact that emotions and qualities were given forms ) Sumerians (also worshiped Sun) , Mayans and Incas which flourished and followed religions on these lines.

But there was something missing in these religions. Some thing so important that it avoided these religions to grow beyond the demographics of its natives. It avoided these religions to propagate. None of these religion were about propaganda. None of them imbibed a sense of superiority into its followers. Religion was all about being grateful about what you have.

But by the turn of 3 rd millennium BC there emerged a group of people of common faith believing on a single supernatural power behind every phenomenon happening in this universe. Now known as Judiasm, it was the first of the three Abrahmic religions the world has witnessed (Christanity and Islam being the rest). It had a two tier hierarchy with respect to levels of faith. The topmost object of faith was this single supernatural power which was an abstract GOD with no form or character. Yet it was a single answer for all the questions that one may have about the mechanics of universe. It was the second level of faith that mattered. This was a common man, who had emotions and a character and who happened to listen to GOD (which happens in all three abrahmic religions) preach about this particular religion. Generally what he listens is the way of life a follower should follow and the way a religion should be practiced . The major difference in these new and nascent religions was that it imbibed the charachter of the prophet. Propaganda was a major motive of the religion's preaching. Religion was not about being grateful anymore. It was more about uniting and organising people. It became more demographically independent so that more people over the world can join in. At a point the second level of faith contributed more to the policies of the religion than the first level there by giving GOD a humanly form in terms of ambitions, motives and expectations.

World changed as these religions grew. Religion became a weapon, an excuse, a single and sufficient reason behind taking lives.

The bottom line is religion has nothing to do with god. As it evolved, religion has taken humans away from god and not close. The pure sentiment of gratitude is now replaced with something that is larger than GOD. I am sure if we think deeper about the way religions have evolved, we will find GOD lost long back into history. Where is he now? Guess he has left us alone :)

Sorry... You are Listening on a wrong line!!!

A question always haunted mankind... And me since I have become a man :P... "Are we Alone in the Universe?".

A question has been asked a million times, probed into a million times and abandoned in dissapointment a million times. But yet , we have not found any valid, concrete and tangible answer for this.

Since the advent of radio communication, Search for Extra Terrestrial Intelligence (S.E.T.I.) has pointed its radio telescopes to the heavens and has been listening to every minute regular signals, that may be from an intelligent source. But none has yet arrived. Many signals from natural sources like Cephids, pulsars and quasars were misinterpreted. Many were straighaway scrapped to be noise.

But I think is that we are missing a huge link. Picture a scenario when we are blind ants living in a world full of ants :) . We are quite advanced for ants an we think that we are smart enough to search for life on worlds other than this Ant-o-lia the ant planet :). But we are blind as I said. The most advanced mode of communication we have is scent trails and sound. "We" think that this is the highest level of advancement any life on the universce can have. So we set out on a search of ET life.

We put scent sensors and sound sensors in space (which obviously wont work) and we wait for an intelligent detection.

But any human can say that this is a useless attempt. Humans, which are ET life for ants try to communicate to them using light and radio waves and optical signals. But no use, they are not capable to interprete us and neither are we because we have evolved beyond the stage where smell was a mode of communication. They are simply waiting for our call on the wrong line. This is what I think is exactly happening to us.

We are like ants in this universe, proud of our technology and capabilities to think beyond our planet. But we forget one thing, that cultures both above and below our advancement benchmark, may miss our call. The cultures below our technology threshold may not be in a condition to listen to us, and those above us may have entirely scrapped our present technology. For them the mode of communication may be far advanced than what we have right now.

All we can do is that hope that we are on the same line as them.

Some Clarifications of ASTRONOMICAL scale

Hello friends,

I have been replying some queries and some "updates" from my friends, about particularly 2 "once in a lifetime" kind of astronomical phenomenons which would be sighted by our "Lucky" generation.

Yes I am talking about the two hoax mails that talk about

• Mars being closest to earth and being the size of the moon in sky,
• Some stupid asteroid coming 35.5 million miles close to earth and being as bright as SUN

So my reply to every question was with an exclamation and then a 15-20 min casual lecture describing our solar system, and the facts about why planets seem to be the size and brightness in the sky.

So lets go step by step in reasoning this.

• When it comes to Mars, the average distance from earth varies between 0.6A.U. to 2.6 AU. 1 AU is the mean distance between earth and sun standardised to be approximately 150 million kilometers. Now this fluctuation of distances is due to differences in time taken by each planet to complete one revolution around sun. This asynchronous movement creates two specific cases called as opposition and conjunction. (see Diagram).

• Opposition is the state when the planet and the sun are on the opposite sides of earth. This is the point when the planet can be the closest and brightest. Now in case of Mars this happens roughly every 1.8 years.. Reason : Earth is 1.8 times quicker around the sun than Mars.Now this shows that Mars being close to earth is not at all an uncommon fact. But the distance when Mars is in opposition really varies.

• Now comes the question of how close can it really come. The answer is that the closest ever recorded distance is roughly 56 Million Kilometers or roughly 0.35 AU. Now why is this discrepancy? Reason is simple: Earth and Mars orbits are eccentric. Hence even the distance between the orbits vary. For a better understanding of earth and mars dance around sun go to this link.
• The closest possible position would be seen on date near to 31st Aug 2003. This was when mars was closest ever. Now this is what is really once in a lifetime kind of situation. But again... even if this is a rare event , it is not as spectacular as the mail says. I have seen it, mars does look bright but not as big as the moon. Again lets reason it out.
• Moon is roughly 300 thousand kilometres away and its size is roughly half a degree or 0.5 degrees. Now if I give you distance of moon from earth and diameter in kilometers, you can easily find its angular size using simple trigonometry. Using the same logic if I give you distance of Mars as 56000000 km (closest ever) and size as 6800 km (diameter of mars) what you get is 0.007 degrees which is 70 times smaller than moon. You can try it out yourself by using this link. Evaluate for Angle. Put distance as 56 million and size as 6800 see wat you get. Then put distance as 300 thousand and size 3500 km (moon dia) and compare what you get :).

So now that the Mars hoax is solved... we can use the above procedure to calculate the size of an asteroid that comes 35 million km close (hardly possible number as it breaches danger levels and we would know about it atleast a decade before). Largest asteroid known till now is CERES which is about 1000 km on its biggest axis. Put this size and distance as 35 million in above link and see what you get. Sun's angular size is also around 0.6 degrees {thats why moon can eclipse Sun :) } and Ceres is now way close to it.

I hope my blog was simple to understand. Do give me a feedback. Lets be aware of our universe and stop such hoaxes from spreading. I will post some fun facts about universe shortly. Keep reading :) .

Sagar

Genes Learn Physics

Ever wondered about how did the Laws of physics got encoded in the very genetics of life on earth? We have chameleons who change color according to background... How does he know what wavelength exactly to reflect so that he actually blends into the background.


We have eggs whose shape allows efficient distribution of pressure along its major axis so that during hatching the weight of the bird wont crush it. Also its shape is mechanically designed such that, given the weight and density distribution on the embryo inside, if the egg starts rolling on a surface, it will automatically decelerate and come to a stop.

The explanation of all these creations in nature needs a deep understanding of the theory of evolution. Plainly saying that evolution is a phenomenon of chance will not suffice. In that case we can extrapolate life on a planet with g of 10 instead of 9.8 and we see shape of eggs flat instead of ellipsoid, and bones made up of a heavier element than Ca and average size of life decreased by fourfold. Physics has governed and regulated the evolution on earth and has deep presence in the very DNA of life.

Riddles of Mother Nature

Well this was a weird question I had when I was on a trek in konkan. A butterfly which falls into the buck-eye species are found in plenty there. Please see pic

So this is how these butterflies look like, an the reason behind these eye-like designs on their wings is that they tend to confuse their predators. Now this is one of the many creations of evolution. And such tricks do still work in nature and hence the genome of these species perpetuate and we are seeing these species thriving. So this triggered a question in my mind.

There are several protocols followed in nature which convey specific messages to their predators, e.g.
1) bright colors: I am poisonous... Don't you dare eat me.
2) eye-like, head-like designs: I am trying to fool you by misplacing my eyes/head

Besides these common signals, there may be many more tactics of self defense. Naturally these tactics didn't suddenly come out of the blue. It took several generations of species and several mutations and sub mutations to come to a exactly working combination. So we can assume that the poison arrow frog (see the image) had several mutations tried out before settling down to a bright colored skin which was recognized amongst the group of his predators that its not safe to eat.

Now here goes my confusion/question/anomaly whatever you may call it.
How does the frog informs his habitat that bright colored skin means "Dont eat me, you will die", because even if the predator eats him both of them die and invariably the frogs bright color did not help him and neither did it helped his mutated genes pass over to the next generation, so that his decendents may wear the same skin. If we think the other way round, How did his predators come to know that this new design is what we should not eat. Cos any way post eating, they are dying, forbidding their learnt lesson to be passed on to their descendents in form of mutations.

So in a broader meaning, my question is : How does a mutation in a specie attain equilibrium with its habitat and what is the process of the same to avoid failure of the mutation?

The Flying thoughts

My dear readers,

Welcome to my blog. And thanks for clicking onto that URL. Am new to this world of blogging, but I have desired to be apart of it since long.

For those who know me , I am a curious guy constantly in search of myself.

In this constant endeavour of finding "ME" inside me, I tend to , and I am sure so does many of us, explore different possibilities in our life. Each possibility is an outcome of a path or choice done at a particular juncture in life. My life isn't something great, to write a book on. But certainly the experiences and the knowledge that I have gained from some of my trysts, are worth sharing and exploring.

I have been using blogs by different people, including researchers in different fields, for my work. I thank them all every time I click a link and get a hint to move forward

So what should you expect from my blog ??

Well as you can see, the title of the blog is "Flying thoughts" , you may expect all sorts of wierd(flying) stuff around here. As they come directly from my mind... they may vary from my thoughts on something weird to something that may prove useful for your work. I may write on my passions like Astronomy, music or my career interests like DSP , Image processing , Robotics or something absolutely abstract. I hope you guys like it. For more info in what I am and what I do, please visit my site.

So welcome again... to my flying thoughts :)