Biology as you have never seen it before

It is animation, but an excellent depiction of cellular processes. Don't be critical of the few errors now. (Stating the obvious just fyi: It's a clip from Youtube and not my work at all! But I know something about biological mechanisms, and this illustrates somethings quite well.)

Understanding Structures and Systems - II

So, we have asserted that there are two different sets of systems and structures - living and non-living. There is something very interesting about the differences between these two sets. Living things generate structures which are arbitrary, in the sense that the rules which govern the living structures are entirely psychological, except for the limitations placed upon living structures by the laws of the non-living nature.
Entirely psychological? Seems to be true. But since the laws of non-living nature govern everything, including the living things, let us make the obvious assumption that there is nothing that living things can do (including creating systems), which can go beyond what the non-living nature can do. This is meant to suggest that it is the non-living nature's laws and operations of symmetry and energy which govern living structures - that living structures which may seem arbitrary are, in fact, merely different sets of laws of nature.
All living structures necessarily exhibit attractive forces between its average constituents.
All living structures necessarily exhibit repulsive forces between some of its constituents.
All living structures necessarily exhibit an average equilibrium space between its constituents - personal space for human beings.
All living structures necessarily exhibit atomic properties such as segregation, solution, vacancies, interstitials, dislocations, etc.
Thus, even while the living and non-living sets of systems and structures are apparently mutually exclusive, they share some fundamental mathematical similarities - such as the symmetry principles, the tools for creating order in chaos.
More later.

Really funny show on financial markets

Let's start a new session of blogging with some fun:

This is a clip from a British TV show called Bird and Fortune show / The Last Laugh - the irony (intended, I am sure) is that what these guys are saying IS true. They are not lying about anything! [Just posting one link - but there are more clips from them available on Youtube - some links are presented at the end of the clip.]

Understanding Structures and Systems

Now that we have learned the primary lesson (Of each thing, ask: What is it in itself?), we can move on to the method of understanding reality. My particular method (and every human being has his / her own method really), is through structures and systems. I define a structure as a static (or quasi-static) arrangement which is meant to direct some process, but doesn't provide any help (dynamism) to the process. (Any thing that "processes" somethings, be it materials or numbers, is a process). I can define a system as the sum total of a structure and the processes contained in it. So, a system is a dynamic quantity - it changes with time unless the inputs and outputs are in some sort of "equilibrium". A house is a structure, while a family living in the house would make the whole thing a system. The family provides the processes - motion, consumption, conversation, quarrels, studies etc. The point to see here is that the structure, even though it is passive (doesn't provide dynamism or force to anything), directs the processes still. The shape and feel of our surroundings dictate many if not most of our actions.
Now for a little bit of complication: humans (and living things) are different from non-living things. So, there are TWO sets of structures and systems on Earth - the living and the non-living. And these two sets are mutually incomprehensible. Almost. Life cares, but nature doesn't. By caring, I mean that life puts values on things which are utterly unconnected to the laws of nature. In a way, the laws of nature provide the structure for living things to operate in. But this is a structure that is inviolable - it cannot be broken or replaced or stepped out of. Life is limited by nature. Systems are limited by their structures.
So, what did life do to cope with nature? First of all, it spread far and wide and diversified - so that no single condition of nature can threaten it. It developed organisms with brains, parts of which could do calculations and figure out the laws of nature. Life is dynamism itself. It can adapt to a wide range of conditions. But it stays as fragile as it ever was in billions of years of its existence on Earth. (More on this topic in next post.)

Read Marcus Aurelius

This is a clip from a brilliant, but dark, movie called "The Silence of the Lambs".
I am putting it here as an introduction to Marcus Aurelius (or try here), a ruler of Roman empire before the Romans became Christians. Marcus Aurelius was a thinker, a philosopher and a wise ruler - all rolled up in one. He wrote a treatise called "Meditations" which deals with man, nature and all the things in between.
What this clip shows is Dr. Lecter (actor Anthony Hopkins) recommending to the FBI (USA's Federal Bureau of Investigation) agent Clarice Starling (actress Jodie Foster) that she read Meditations, in order to gain insights upon the nature of reality, which after all is one of our aims in this blog.
"Of each particular thing, ask: What is it in (and by) itself? What is its nature?"
(More quotes from Marcus Aurelius)
With that introduction to the method of Marcus Aurelius, here we go to the clip:

The Silence of the Lambs

(The good folks at Google have imposed restrictions on this particular video. Damn fascists! Hehe. Anyway, here is a longer clip (with some guy's interpretation of things in text interspersed. Ignore all the messages, and watch the movie clip for Dr. Lecter's discourse.)

Of each particular thing, ask: What is it in itself?
What is its nature?

Somethings personal

I thought that for a change, I would write something about human instincts, rather than about the nature of things. Here is a poem that I wrote many years back.

The First Need

- a poem by Brijnandan Singh Dehiya
(Copyrighted composition 2009)

In winter, I prayed for the spring,
In spring, I wished to find love
In love, I sought power over time,
Endless youth, a summer wind above
In summer, I tried to forget,
the pains and wounds of the past
The sun's heat, and the warmth of love,
Perhaps it was too good to last

The lights grew dimmer, silences longer,
when autumn descended like despair
The moon looked sad and hopeless,
starlights let down the longing stare
Where was that glorious life I wanted,
what became of my hope, my dream?
It lived still in pockets of my heart,
in each heartbeat, I felt it scream

I prayed to my Goddess in heaven,
"Change my fortunes, O great mistress!"
Her voice came down from the skies,
"But you are far from being in distress!
'My most precious gift is not life,
it is the company of ones you share it with."
I heard her words, but my heart
in defiance, kept searching for a life blithe

Ignored, my love left my life,
Wintry darkness entered my spirit
I became comfortable with gloom, and
even my feeble shadow drowned in it
My heart wanted to stop beating,
my eyes wanted to sleep forever
Mists of despair cloaked around me,
everywhere around, darkness seemed to hover

Wandering empty alleys at night,
my shivering mind began to roam
Two bright eyes and painful moans,
There was a small pup without a home
"Why not?", I said to myself,
as I sat down to pat the dog
That cold and fragile pup whimpered,
alone in a world of dark and fog

But I doubted that it knew,
the many perils that its life faced
And as it licked my hands,
my eyes moistened and heart raced
I looked into its soulful eyes,
and I felt my own soul probed
"What can I do for you?", I asked
and as if in reply, its eyes glowed

With both hands I cupped its face,
I saw trust pouring from its eyes
As it filled a void inside me, I felt,
a moment of rebirth, when despair dies
The intense and ethereal sensations,
when one's heart begins to thaw
They are like a soothing balm on wounds,
old and new, that are still raw

Tenderly, I picked up the pup,
and carried it away in my arms
I could feel its faint heartbeat,
through the wet fur on my palms
In my hand, I then realized
lay the answer to my old prayers
The first need of any life,
is to know that someone cares

I kissed the dog, and I knew,
the kind of bond that a mother grew
for the faint life in her womb, and
the trust that flowed with the blood it drew
I knew why a friendly hug
or the warm caress of a lover's hand
nourishes the body and cures the soul
like no food and no medicine can

I raised my eyes to the skies,
and sang aloud a song of calm joy
With closed eyes I thanked the Goddess,
with a laugh, a sigh and a surprised cry
Her voice came again, pleased and soft,
"Life is short, don't forget to love.
Give your trust with open hands,
and life shall fit you like a glove."

The fog lifted, the clouds were gone,
the cold darkness still lingered on
The fading stars foretold of a new dawn
and in that night, my dreams were reborn

What is real? How do we know what we know?

Two galaxies collide in a far off part of the universe resulting in violent collisions on a scale that is quite simply unimaginable to the human mind. Does anybody care? Nobody except maybe a few astronomers. A hot meteorite falls into a remote part of an ocean, and kills 10,000 fishes, and millions of microbial life forms. Is any human bothered by it? Not likely.
A brick falls from a building and injures a woman. Suddenly, everybody has an opinion about it, and even newspapers may report on the event.
Life cares about survival before it cares about reality. The magnitude of importance to life of an event is quite different from the magnitude of the event.
And that point makes living forms inherently biased in their study of nature and natural phenomena. Living forms may tend to even personalize nature - attributing to nature the same feelings which they have. Just like people used to believe that Earth was the center of universe and all other stars and planets moved around Earth, one of the fundamental instincts of living forms is to believe that the universe exists for them because they are alive to observe it. That instinct is the source of great pleasures when conditions of survival improve for a life form, and the source of great fears when such conditions deteriorate.
Either way, looking at reality becomes impossible for living forms. To observe nature in its true form, it appears, one has to stop caring about anything. And yet survive to make the observations. Quite a feat, if someone can accomplish it successfully. The observer-observed link has quite interesting aspects in Quantum physics - such as the Schrödinger's Cat, or the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle.


So, we come to the important question from the last post: How do we know reality? The truthful answer is that we really don't. We only build models of reality and then carry out experiments to test the validity of those models. That is all that we can do. Some people believe that coherence of various unrelated models should be evidence of the possibility that a bigger/deeper model can be constructed, which will subsume all the smaller scale models. That is, for the most part, what we call the pursuit of science. So, first we build a crude model, then we define its parameters (variables), then we test the model for success or failure, and after all this comes analysis, which gives us ideas about how to refine / reshape the original model of reality of a phenomena which we are interested in. Our approach to reality, therefore, is like a tangent trying to study a circle - the two may intersect, but the linear tangent will never know the reality of curved lines.

Unless a mind comes along which, for one reason or another, can do this modeling and refinement at speeds far faster than those of ordinary people. Such minds, called 'great' minds if they can articulate their perceptions well even mathematically, may even possess non-linear instincts which can relate better to the non-linear nature rather than to the linear thinking people around them. Solitude and silence attract such minds, while the linearly thinking people seem to aggregate in societies and build economies. Great minds could be mutually incoherent, while linear minds fall in step with each other.

It may be true that we need both kinds of people to run this world well.
Or to defend it against threats.

The Seed or the Plant

Which came first? The plant or its seed? Plants create seeds and seeds give rise to plants.
The reason I ask this, is to introduce a point about cause and effect. All that science is, is a study of the cause which produces an effect. I deliberately use the word cause instead of its plural 'causes', because in the theoretical sense at least, any uniquely defined effect must have a single cause, rather than a multiplicity of causes.
What is technology? A technology is an experimental verification of causes and their effects.
Given the definitions of science and technology as above, almost all people tend to assume that technology arises out of science - that inventions comes out of knowledge. That notion is false.
What nobody will tell you, because nobody really knows the truth (And no, this is not a brag. Really!), is that knowledge comes out of experimentation. Science arises out of technology, and not vice versa.
That much is true - and any possible exceptions to that rule have not come to my notice yet. But why is that so? We shall consider that question in the next post.

Two of the Most Beautiful Songs in the World

It always helps to know how to keep the mind in a positive frame.
Here are two of the very best songs in the world.

What a Wonderful World
by
Louis Armstrong



Downtown
by
Petula Clark

The big metallic egg / bean mirror sculpture in this video sits in a park in downtown Chicago.
It was designed by a British-Indian artist Anish Kapoor.

Operations

If a periodic (ordered) function operates upon a chaotic (random) function, is the resulting function ordered or chaotic?
If we choose a periodic function such as sin(x), and let x be a random (chaotic) number from -infinity to +infinity. Can a prediction be made about the result? Yes. The result will never exceed 1 in magnitude. But that's it. No other prediction can be made about the resultant numbers.
Now we can try the reverse, and try to choose a random function that takes its seed from a periodic function. Here, we run into a problem. A truly random function that is calculated using arithmetic does not exist. But we can get close to true randomness by proper choice of seeds for the random number generator. In principle, therefore, an operation of randomness on a seed of periodic nature, will produce randomness.
Thus, it appears that the operand loses its qualities to the operator. An ordered function operation produces limits to randomness, and a chaotic operation makes the periodic seed lose its predictability.

Order and Chaos

Is there any discernible pattern in this figure? (from http://www.mathpuzzle.com/)

What distinguishes order from chaos? In one word, symmetry. Symmetry implies predictability. Symmetry implies a lower energy configuration of the constituent units. Symmetry implies stability. However, stability and lower energy configuration are relative terms, and only stay true as long as the reference is to complete chaos.

Thus, to understand order, one needs to understand symmetry at the most basic stable level of organization in this universe - the atom and the molecule. There are structures at sub-atomic levels, of course, but we need not worry about those here for the most part.

Contrary to what most people might think, the atoms are not generally isotropic in their structures or properties. Atomic orbitals come in different shapes and sizes (see here). The other constraint to take into account while calculating atomic interactions (that produce symmetry configurations), is the nature of space. Only three directions in space are independent of each other (Cartesian geometry - expanded). How many freedoms does that leave the atoms (or any other unit) with, in order to form an inter-atomic structure?

[By the way, do read the life and works of René Descartes (1596-1650), after whom the Cartesian co-ordinates are named - his genius cannot be truly appreciated until you read his original and complete works, such as the nature of things.]

Surprisingly, although atoms can aggregate in a vast number of ways to form molecules (each new atom added changes the molecule), molecules can only aggregate in a fixed number of ways to form crystals (as do pure elements when solidified through crystallization). In three dimensions, there are only 14 shapes that a unit cell of a crystal can order itself in - these are called Bravais Lattices.

What does all this have to do with order and chaos? We will continue with this argument in the next post!