Music

I don't have many regrets but one of the biggest is not learning music.

Around the age of 8, and by quite an accident, I discovered I had a mellifluous voice. In fact I was one of the best singers in the school! It was during those days that I tried my hand at my first instrument - harmonium. For the uninitiated Harmonium is a ancient Indian wind-powered keyboard, similar to an accordion. Then my attention was hijacked by percussion instrument, tabla. That did not last. I was soon fascinated by the Hawaiian guitar instead. Which was followed by a few weeks of acoustic guitar lessons.

No matter what the instrument, I leaned it intently for a few weeks but before I got actually good at it I moved on...Somewhere along all this cavorting around, puberty happened. Vocal chords cracked up, and I was kicked out of the choir. And as a final blow to the musician inside of me I switched to a school where there was no music teacher. No choir. No music.

In college I picked up violin but Gods willed otherwise.... Whenever I practiced violin in my room (which mostly meant in the evening), a stupid bat would enter my room and start circling around. I am not making this up! It used to be hot in Kanpur so typically our doors and windows were kept open. This stupid bat (all right I don't know for sure if it was the same one every time but still..) would invite himself. This was bad enough but one fine day the shit hit the fan. I mean literally, the bat hit the ceiling fan. Broke his wing and fell on the floor. My room mate, Devvrat, tried valiantly to cure him using antiseptic cream but the bugger did not survive the night. And that ladies and gentlemen was the last day I played violin. The end.

Now why after all these years am I boring you with the sissy story. For one it is funny (I mean seriously, a bat!). Secondly I heard an interesting fact. Because it is a tonal language, Mandarin speakers are more likely to have a perfect pitch. Perfect pitch, considered to be the preserve of only talented musicians, is the ability to

"differentiate a musical note of a particular pitch without the benefit of a reference note. The visual equivalent is calling a red apple "red". While most people do this effortlessly, without, for example, having to compare a red to a green apple, perfect pitch is extremely rare in the U.S. and Europe, with an estimated prevalence in the general population of less than one in 10,000."

Imagine the ability to reverse engineer a song it its constituent notes by just hearing it. Even more magical than deciphering the ingredients by sampling a dish, isn't it?

Of course the highest level of excellence is to not just recreate but invent - the talent of composing a brilliant new piece of music. Or is it?

Listen to this man. He not just composing music, he is extracting it from random chatter that most would consider noise. Notice the beauty here, he recreates an orchestra using weights, bottle caps, duct tape and ping-pong balls !!

Hauschka at NPR: Improvisation from NPR on Vimeo.

Hauschka at NPR: Mount Hood from NPR on Vimeo.

Difference Between Insanity & Genius is Sucess

Or in this case the difference between "World's dumbest videos" and "World's top daredevils" is walking away alive.Watch this jaw dropping compilation of stunt jumps. If you are short of time watch the rank #1 at least.

Human Body

Watched a very moving BBC short on human physiology. My words can't do it justice, so I suggest you experience it yourself.

Fossilized Rain Drops!

Today I read an intriguing study about fossilized rain drop impressions and how they can be used to measure earth's atmospheric pressure 2.7 billion years ago!

(Image: Verrisimilus/CC BY-SA 3.0)

Firstly, it is pretty amazing that something as delicate as a rain drop impression can fossilize and survive for 2.7 billion years! All you need are perfect conditions - ground is covered with a fresh covering of volcanic ash and rainfall is not too heavy or too light but just the right size. The impressions may then harden into into stone, preserving them for present day scientists.

The second and more beautiful aspect is the implication. It turns out that size of a rain drop is strongly correlated with surface tension, force of gravity, and most importantly atmospheric pressure. By careful measurement of the indentations and some simulation, the atmospheric pressure seen by the earliest microbial lifeforms can be extracted. The value of atmospheric pressure is also useful to extract the amount of insolation the young earth received.

While geologists did have some idea about the gas composition of the ancient atmosphere, before this study almost nothing was known about the pressure. The full paper is under peer-review.

Immortal Game

Recently I have picked up Chess with mild enthusiasm. I have started learning about all the standard openings: Roy Lupez, Sicilian defence, King's Gambit, etc. Caught up on the history of the game, e.g. did you know that Chess comes from an ancient Indian game of caturaṅga(Sanskrit: four divisions [of the military] – infantry, cavalry, elephants, and chariotry, represented by the pieces that would evolve into the modern pawn, knight, bishop, and rook, respectively)?

Looking at historical games, it is hard to find a more audacious version of King's gambit than the "Immortal Game". German chess master Adolf Anderssen, while playing Lionel Kieseritzky, sacrificed the Queen, both Rooks and a Bishop, but still managed to checkmate his opponent with only three minor pieces!

While I agree that this happened in an era when chess defenses were not that well developed but it still is brilliant game play.

"Hope is a Thief"

Dying and Dinner Parties from ThinPlace Pictures on Vimeo.

It is hard to find anything wrong to say about hope! It makes a hard life worth living, keeps the society motivated and productive, allows us to tide over a bad day. For a more convincing defense, I advise you to watch Shawshank Redemption.

However, I also have Buddhist leanings. In fact among all the religions/philosophies I have come across, it is the one that makes most sense. Buddhism values only the present. Past or future are beyond ones control so no point worrying about them. In that perspective, hope isn't a positive feeling. By definition hopefulness betrays a yearning for future and should be avoided.

Personally, I am still on the fence. Can't really decide... Can you?

Molyneux's question

Frankly I had never heard of either Molyneux or his question before today morning. In brief, Molyneux wondered whether a man who has been born blind and who has learnt to distinguish and name a globe and a cube by touch, would be able to distinguish and name these objects simply by sight, once he had been enabled to see.

The question has been debated by philosophers for 300 years, and lately neuroscientists have become interested in it as well. According to Dr. Pawan Sinha of MIT, the question relates to how perceptions are formed in brain [1].

"Do the different modalities, or senses, build up a common representation, or are these independent representations that one cannot access even though the other modality has built it?"

While there has been some indirect evidence, no one was able to perform a direct test because of lack of test subjects. In rich countries, curable congenital blindness is identified and cured in infancy. Dr. Sinha realized that this was not the case in developing countries. In 2003 he conducted a study in India where he identified 5 young adults with curable blindness. By measuring their ability to discriminate between shapes first using touch and then sight, he was able to experimentally recreate the conditions posed by Molyneux.

The short answer, it turns out, is no. Although after restoration of sight, the subjects could distinguish between objects visually as effectively as they would do by touch alone, they were unable to form the connection between object perceived using the two different senses. So we do not have a central memory where information from all the senses in stored.

This makes me wonder how does brain cross-reference data from different senses in form one coherent version. Maybe the versions are not coherent. What if one version dominates over others and so we end up with a less than true version of reality!


[1] http://www.news.com.au/technology/sci-tech/molyneuxs-question-gets-answered-after-300-years/story-fn5fsgyc-1226037177460
[2] Held, R.; Ostrovsky, Y.; Degelder, B.; Gandhi, T.; Ganesh, S.; Mathur, U.; Sinha, P. (2011). "The newly sighted fail to match seen with felt". Nature Neuroscience. doi:10.1038/nn.2795