Sunday Science Pics

Here is another installment of science eye candy.

We are aware of the original Mandelbrot set and its famous two dimensional image. It is generated using a complex number polynomial ploy where the way we choose c, defines the plausibility and complexity of the Mandelbrot set. Two dimension and complex numbers are fine, what is it for three dimension. Quaternions perhaps. And so on. For the past twenty odd years, Rudy Rucker, first imagined the concept behind the potential three dimensional Mandelbrot set, called the Mandelbulb and has ever since attempted to create various improved versions. Here is a low resolution 8th power 3D Mandelbrot, rendered by Paul Nylander

2009 Madras Music Season: Manda Sudharani

There is a large section of concert going rasikAs – especially youth of my age group (ahem) – who opine carnatic music is that and only that which comes out of the mouths of five or six popular artists of our times. The rest is rust. Such popular subjectivity has been around, perhaps since a kutcheri structure was created for popularizing the art form. Unfortunately, critics, that unbiased creed who could critique (criticise for progress), also take sides. A section of those critics, who write in popular media, propagate what they feel subjectively about carnatic music and promote their favourite musicians, avoiding possible objective evaluation.

Art anyway is subjective and more so, its appreciation. However, enough objective norms exist through which one can evaluate the calibre of a Carnatic musician, vocalist or instrumentalist, male or female, and importantly, popular in a region or not. In a contemporary artist name-list, prepared through such objective evaluation of excellence, those five or six popular artists may still be featured (after all, they should have some basic talent in the art for becoming popular). But the list is bound to include some not so familiar names. Like Manda Sudharani.

2009 Madras Music Season: RTPs of Pantula Rama and Sowmya

I have earlier listened to Ragam Thanam Pallavis set in two or three ragams in “live” live and “recorded” live concerts from masters of this genre like Balamuralikrishna and Seshagopalan. Similarly, I look forward to be treated with RTPs in rare or not commonly heard ragams and generously offer my patience and praise even if such attempts falls short of expectations. As a listener, if we can’t have patience and support artists when they try something different, we will be provided with what we deserve – the drab standard fare of a ten-song-safety-first-sangeetham-next concerts.

This music season 2009 I listened to RTPs in both the above genres – the one set in multiple ragams and the one set in a rare ragam.

First, the multiple raga pallavi by Pantula Rama.

2009 Madras Music Season: Mukharis of Sikkil Gurucharan and Prasanna Venkatraman

Musiri Subramania Iyer used to revel in mukhAri rAgAm. The madhyamam of rAgam mukhAri is a special one. It is neither that of bEgadA or that of shankarabharanam. Nedanuri Krishnamurthy has an exemplary understanding of this madhyamam, when he sings. One can listen to him speak about this rAgam and the special madhyamam in his interview with Ravikiran for the commercial album Karunyam – Mukhari – Volume 1 – Ragam Tanam Pallavi. Here is a good discussion on mukhAri archived in the Carnatica newsletter.

This music season 2009 I was fortunate to listen to this rAgam in two instances, both from young musicians who had good voice and caliber and took this rAgA for AlApanais (expositions).

2009 Madras Music Season: rAgam nIlamani in nagaswaram and veena

rAgam nIlamaNi  has its scale delineated as S R2 M1 P D1 N3 S in the ascend and S N3 D1 P M1 R2 S in the descend. It is the janya (child or derivative) rAgA of the  27the mElakarthA rAgam sarasAngi (which has all the seven notes within an octave of its scale in both ascend and descend as S R2 G3 M1 P D1 N3 S – S N3 D1 P M1 G3 R2 S)

Here is a short recording of rAgam nIlamani played in the nAgaswaram. The moving piece was recorded by me in 2006 (with the permission of the artist who shall remain unnamed) at the kEsava perumAl kOil in mylapore, Chennai, during a music season flop concert, (which I walked out).

This 2009 music season, I listened to ennakavi pAdinAlum, the standard (Tamil) song in nIlamani, played by Revathy Krishna on the veena, as a thukkadA (short songs at the tail end of a concert). Although the concert I attended was not one of her best, I was amazed at the voice like felicity she wielded her veena on this song – which, unfortunately, one can appreciate if only one can comprehend the Tamil lyrics. Even otherwise, enjoy the instrumental.

Podcast on Open Access Publishing

With growing criticisms about journal impact factor and associated peer review and closed access publishing and the advent of article level metrics, the necessity for FREE open access publishing with the web as (possibly) the (only) publishing medium is imperative.

Here is my fifteen minute podcast introducing open access publishing. Let me know of your thoughts. Thanks.

The transcript of this talk is available if you prefer reading.

2009 Madras Music Season: Parassala Ponnammal at Music Academy

Each time you enter the Madras Music Academy you suspect if it defies the law of mass conservation – there are more cars outside than people inside the concert hall. You dunk your iddly vadais at the canteen with the usual apprehension that the single most ethereal melody would have been delivered by the artist in your absence. From experience you know your concern is applicable for certain musicans. If not ethereal, at least their better effort begins and ends within a quarter hour. For Parassala Ponnammal, fostering such thoughts in your mind is a sin.

You know from your listening experience her singing portrays a laid-back bygone generation that we will forever loose in our Carnatic-for-ring-tone times. You are delighted she – a direct disciple of Harikesanallur Muthiah Baghavathar – was invited again by the Music Academy this season.

2009 Madras Music Season: Concert List

The Madras Music Season spans more than a month, with at least ten prominent sabhas holding at least five concerts per day, spanning their schedule for about twenty days. This adds up to easily more than a thousand concerts performed in over a month all around the city. In 2008 I attempted assimilating all the attended concerts to prepare one exhaustive (and exasperating) essay. For 2009, I shall write my notes, impressions and opinions as and when I finish hearing a few concerts.

Unlike a few music critics, I promise I’ll write about a concert only after it is actually performed in my presence.

The remainder of this note will contain the list of concert I sampled. Links to my notes in English and Tamil are provided for each concert. The list will grow during the season.

Simple Scientist

How to do Science? I attempted a summary on how to do research earlier. And perhaps failed to bring out the essence with ease.

Suppose, as you grow older (this is important, as you would realize soon) you want to be this (under-water) explorer, (marine) biologist, scientist, writer. A complex job description as it is, which, you would agree, will only get muddled further with age. So, how to go about it?

Get your job description in five easy steps below, first-hand from one such aspiring fellow Earthling. At six, the description stays true to the quintessence of a scientist job.

Sunday Science Pics

This series carries five to six science images appeared on the web with news snippets that lead you to read more. Take a lazy Sunday plunge into eye candy science, if you will.

1) SEM of a synthetic drug coated with co-polymers.

It looks computer-generated but not.

Saturday Songs

Here are some music videos I like for their music. Most of them are hosted in YouTube and embedded here. The relevant links are provided, in case the embedding doesn’t work.

Tom Petty is one of my all time favorite rock musician. He pens his lyrics, comes up with groovy tunes and sings with an ever-fresh voice for the past 30 years or so. Here is a rehearsal by Tom Petty and co. of the song Saving Grace – from his recent album Highway Companion.

Direct Link

Blood: Clot, Flow and Slip

By 2020 seventy percent of the heart patients of the World, a study suggests, would be in India. The cause seems genetic. The gene that codes the enzyme called PON1 is defective in Indians and predisposes them to heart ailments and diabetes. Coupled with degenerating lifestyle – eating habits – leads to such a dire prediction. For more details, read the papers in reference [1] and [2]. This note is not on PON1.

Coronary artery diseases are a result of formation of plaque in our arteries that block blood transport. To know more on this one would first need to know more on how movement of blood flow is affected by relative movement of what it contains – red blood cells, for example. This essay is on blood flow and in particular, the shape of the red blood cells.

Blood is a connective tissue made of cells in an extracellular matrix. The extracellular matrix of blood is blood plasma, formed mainly by water (90 percent) and plasma proteins. The main proteins are albumins, globulins and fibrinogen. Fibrins primarily help the blood to clot. Cells and platelets found in blood are called forming elements. Red blood cells (RBCs), also called erythrocytes, occupy approximately 45 percent of the blood volume. These cells are round, about 8 micro-meter in diameter (90 micro-m³ in volume), with concave sides. They have few organelles, no nucleus, or mitochondria. With no nucleus, RBCs cannot divide. They normally live 120 days.

Here is a close-up view of a blood clot from a recent paper in Science. It is taken using a scanning electron micrograph from the coronary artery of someone who had a heart attack.

Solar Flowers and Solar Trees

Yes, I know, in principle, all flowers and trees are because of the Sun. But here is what technologist call as a solar flower.

Learning and Bloom’s Taxonomy

Today I learnt something new on how to learn. I got introduced to Bloom’s Taxonomy and how to apply it to the teaching-learning process that wins my bread and that of my students, in their future. As teachers, we use a gamut of methods – from friendly discussion to rote learning to mental bullying – to convey our course content. As students, we receive and learn the course content in different routes including expedient mugging, hands on experience with guidance and recalcitrant self-study.

Bloom’s taxonomy classifies such learning methods into neat boxes with fuzzy demarcations to promote realistic measurable.

Visualizing Polynomial Roots

A fascinating picture of all the roots of all polynomials of degree ≤ 5 with integer coefficients ranging from -4 to 4.

Click on the picture for bigger view. Roots of quadratic polynomials are in grey; roots of cubics are in cyan; roots of quartics are in red and roots of quintics are in black. The horizontal axis of symmetry is the real axis; the vertical axis of symmetry is the imaginary axis. The big hole in the middle is centered at 0; the next biggest holes are at ±1, and there are also holes at ±i and all the sixth roots of 1

For more, head to The Beauty of Roots by John Baez

Quantifying Research Quality using Article Level Metrics

Quantifying research quality is a buzz-activity in academia for the last two decades. The irony is lost in the paper work. For reasons best left out in this essay, this activity has come to stay in our academics. One such quantifying-quality measure (QQM) evolved recently is the Impact Factor (IF) of journals [1] that publish peer-reviewed research. Another QQM is the number of citations a peer reviewed research article begets in time. The major difference between these two is, while the former is a journal metric, the latter is an article level metric.

Research articles should be evaluated on their own merits. On that assertion, there could be universal agreement in scientific community. Obviously, more ways to judge the quality of individual research articles is welcome over judging entire journals. This is where introduction of more article level metrics (ALM) – like the number of citations – show promise. We recount the introduced ALM indices [2] in the following section.

The beginning of the end for impact factors and journals, a neat online article by Richard Smith [3], explains the newly introduced ALM indices with examples. Another recent article published in PLoS by Cameron Neylon and Shirley Wu [4] discusses the pros and cons of the newly introduced ALM indices. But both these articles leave out in their discussion, certain key journal requirements for proper functioning of the proposed ALM and their related shortcomings.

Also, journal impact factor is being seen as a very poor measure of article impact. One distinction is essential in such generalization. Because we are able to debunk the efficacy of impact factors, we are not debasing the reputation earned by research journals.

In this article, we discuss the efficacies of the proposed ALM indices, journal impact factor contrasted with the prevailing journal reputation and related issues in detail. In the summary, we provide possible rectification measures for ALM.

Why do Toucans have large bill

What can one do with the nose? If one were Cleopatra of Egypt, she could rule Rome. If one were the unfortunate Sphinx of Egypt, his form minus the nose could become the wonderment of the World. If one were Tycho Brahe, he could remove the nose, for polishing amidst a heated debate or duel, to distract his opponent. For, he lost his original nose in a duel and had a metal one fixed. If one were the Tamil Detective Sambu created by Devan, he could run his thumb and index finger over the nose to make a deduction that is often wrong. If one is a proboscis monkey inhabiting the island of pulau pulau bompa, it endures the ignominy of its nose looking similar to Rastapopulous, the villain of Tintin comics.

What can one do if one is a toco toucan with its nose and mouth wrapped into one big bill? Of course, it can use the bill for quick thermo-regulation by exchanging heat with the environment.

In fact, in a matter of minutes toucans can release upto 400 percent of their metabolic heat through their bill. In a study I liked very much, Prof. Tattersall and team have measured the temperature of toucan bills in several surrounding and body conditions to arrive at such conclusions. These results were published in July 2009 issue of the Science magazine [1]. Several webs news services [3 - 6] briefed on these findings before the paper was actually published. This note is to discuss the published results in some detail.

Research Result

Drenching and indulging in such droplets from the ocean of knowledge, what is the use of my research to humanity? Parents remain oblivious of it, faces of kith and kin remain nonplussed. Conclusions from my research don’t reduce the auto fare of my next city travel. So is the unbudging gasoline fare. Global warming continues unabated. My research doesn’t promise a cooling for the top of the World or me. Such elitist polish my intelligence generates name me a scientist. But feeds only me. World remains hungry. Accomplished loneliness elevates and relegates.

Pennes Bioheat Transfer Equation

It can be argued that one of the most influential articles ever published in the Journal of Applied Physiology is the Analysis of tissue and arterial blood temperatures in the resting human forearm by Harry H. Pennes, which appeared in Volume 1, No. 2, published in August, 1948. Thus begins Prof. Wissler, his 1998 revisit to this classic paper by H. H. Pennes. In that 1948 paper, he proposed what can be identified today as the first analytical Bioheat transfer model with experimental validation from temperature variation data in human forearm. Many later models have refined what he proposed but his basic insight that blood is a carrier of heat, adding a distinct perfusion term to the the standard heat equation, remains a major contribution.

Where should that new store or temple be?

Where should a business set up its new commercial store – chain or single – to maximize its profit? There may be a demand for the store in a sparsely populated region but it may be wiser to locate the store in a densely populated region for more profit. Is there a definite correlation between population density and commercial facility density?

Similarly, if the government or citizen group wants to locate a public facility – temples, toilets, grocery store, fire station – where should that be? It is not for profit, but should be easily accessible by many. Is there a suggestive correlation in this situation?

The answer to the above two questions is yes.