The 2011 Madras Music Season throats; so does the reviews from critics. A breather on the light side of Carnatic music Of concert lists and rasikas’ quirks penned by yours truly has appeared in today’s The Hindu [The local Chennai edition should carry the article on Page 2].

That Mr. Keshav chose to elevate the readers with a cartoon oozing his inimitable style and humor, is my honor.

Thanks to two friends who after just a one-off meeting on- and off-line, liked my music criticisms and light-heart-ed musings and worked to have one of it in the print media.

Enjoy.

The Academy or the Sangitha Vidwath Sabhai is a lodestone for Carnatic music with a hoary past. Every connoisseur in the city wants to be a patron of the Academy. It is a status symbol. Every musician aspires to sing there. It is a success symbol. Every rasika wishes to enter the hall wielding a blue punched card. It is an elite symbol. Every Chennai car wants to park itself inside the Academy. Every auto-rickshaw, outside. No cop wants to man the Academy traffic signal(s).

The Academy facilities are superb. It houses the best music tradition, knowledge, archives, auditorium, acoustics, aesthetics and toilets. Plush chairs with well-placed Bose speakers, soft lighting and pleasant air conditioning with an elegantly decorated stage, housing centrally a jamakAlam clad podium. With the mundane receding in the soft lights, the listening experience is undeniably ethereal. Until a child aurally seeks her father or a recalcitrant mobile enquires “Why this kolaveri di”. Chitraveena Ravikiran asked his listeners to switch off their mobiles or set their caller tunes to varAli. In the Academy you can express your annoyance, politely.

The Academy concert slots can trace a musician’s successful career: in an appropriately young age, it would start with the ‘junior’ slot around lunch time, when, to turn the thirukkural around, the rasika’s ears feast only after the stomach is full. It progresses to the next best slot between 2 and 4 PM. This ‘afternoon’ or ‘senior’ slot coincides the post-lunch siesta time. There is enough crowd inside the hall. Their bobbing heads could equally be the effect of music or food. Ideally, by sheer performance in the ensuing years, the musician is then promoted to the two ticketed ‘super senior’ slots between 4 and 9 PM. And there it should stay for enough years until the sangItha kalAnidhi is conferred. After this, now a stalwart, the musician could ascend to the morning slot between 9 am and noon.

The Academy does promulgate excellence in skill. But it is a necessary not sufficient condition to successfully complete the career cycle. Musicians have experienced rude surprises. From diplomacy to the throat, faltering in any of the performing requirements could hamper the kAlapramAna of their academy career cycle. It could become chaotic, caught in the factional winds. Or hit the doldrums due to lackluster performances and run to a standstill. Or worse, restart, as in Snakes and Ladders.

The Academy clocks, from the mechanical to the digital, keep their time. So do the concerts. Performers hop skip and jump from their pallavi rAgamAlika to mangalam, before the curtain descends. Along the way, a thirty-two avartha kuraippu on the percussion solo would have been reduced to two avarthams. Musicians promptly apologize even for off-stage delays like traffic snarls. Even musician who never fail to be late at other sabhas, keep their time at the academy.

The Academy strives to showcase talents from Tamil Nadu, Kerala, Karnataka and Andhra Pradesh. R. K. Srikantan, Rudrappattnam Brothers, Dr. Omanakutty, Srivalson Menon, Nedanuri Krishnamurthy, Dr. Pantula Rama, Manda Sudharani; the recent list of invited artists portray the kaleidoscopic cultural diversity of Carnatic music.

The Academy morning (early morning, for some) lecture demonstrations are a treasure trove. In 2006 when Sri T. N. Seshagopalan was conferred the kalAnidhi and hence the presiding person, the mini Kasturi Srinivasan hall was primed and brimmed. More than the lecture itself, many of us, including performers, were present to listen to his introduction and conclusion of the discussions with his trademark wit, knowledge and music. I could remember a similar hallowed experience from 1983, when Dr. Pinakapani presided the music conference.

The Academy canteen resonates with the music, dishing over the years both the sublime and the ridiculous. Cryptic remarks and caustic reviews about the concerts go well with the milagai bajji at the canteen. Gossip, like coffee, is hot and galore. Sometimes it substitutes the music. Often one gets to meet and eat with the musician one just listened to or with one in mufti in his free time. Such meetings provide the required contrast to reveal the human side of the musician.

The Academy, despite its music tradition and dedicated patronage, silk attires and diamond baesaries, NCC cadets and clean toilets, makes me uneasy. It generates in me, a feeling of not belonging in spite of my vivid interest in Carnatic music. That someone of the stature of a Plato or Aristotle in music would catch me perambulating the groves of the music Academus, chastise my inappropriate presence and evict me anytime. In fifteen years of attending Academy concerts, encountering occasional officious fragrance, I have not been evicted yet. But the middle-class me is convinced my uncomfortable feeling is not by accident.

Are nuclear power-plants dangerous? How many died directly due to the harmful radiation from the Fukushima accident? How many died due to the tsunami that caused the accident? Are the annual deaths due to nuclear power plant blasts and leaks more than those caused by road accidents and smoking? A Tamil weekly claim there is no safe limit for radiation; is that correct? Isn’t the distance from the source of such radiation a matter of concern at all? Is IGCAR Kalpakkam the sole reason for the handicaps in the children residing in the villages? As a preliminary proof for this, do we have evidence that the number of handicapped children in the villages surrounding Kalpakkam is significantly more than that in villages afar? Do we have medical evidence from other parts of the World that such handicaps can only be caused and have occurred by nuclear radiation? Does nuclear radiation, akin to Godly justice, ensure slow death? Continuous exposure is the sole reason for the harmful effect of nuclear radiation? Does that mean, continuous exposure to any radiation could be harmful for us? Exposure to radiation from fluorescent lamps? Television? Laptop screens? Sunlight? Do these mosquitos die by breathing in the repellant smoke? Do they have noses? How would the mosquito eyes perceive the smoke? Would it be harmful if we breathe that smoke? How to know the safe limit? What is the difference between “split-AC” and the ordinary room air conditioner? Does the “split-AC” repeatedly cool only the same air circulating in the room? What is the normal room temperature we should maintain with the AC for our comfort? Is there a suitable air temperature that warrants proper functioning of our body? Do we require endosulfon pesticide for crops? Are those crops harmful when consumed? Is the profligate cellphone menace the sole reason for the dearth of the local sparrow? Are the bees next in the line of fire? Are our brains harmed by cellphone radiation? How does the touch screen of an iPhone function? Why aren’t we “shocked” when we touch it? We could see what is behind that touchscreen; what material is it made of? How does Anacin know the place of my headache? Would it work in dogs? Would dogs get head ache? Does wearing white dress during summer comfort us? Why then do Bedouins wear black dress in the desert sun? Do the white hairs due to my aging have a connection with the thermoregulation of the body? She is leaving to offer milk in the anthill for snakes; do snakes drink milk? Then why have they not evolved as marsupials? Offering milk to snakes yields what direct use for us? How to conclusively prove the causality of that use? The “boom-boom” bull with the beggar at my doorstep keeps nodding its approval for all that is said; would it nod if I ask “would you like to eat this bitter-gourd?”

No, I am not going to answer these stream-of-consciousness-like questions in this essay. You would bless me for that.

Am considering a related question and its possible answers.

Could I satisfactorily answer all these ordinary questions that arose on an ordinary day to me with the Science and related subjects that I learnt in my school? Could you?

If we haven’t undergone Science education in college or graduate school, how many questions can we answer using our high school science education? If we cannot answer most of these questions, why? What do we then mean by we are educated?

It is not that the Science we got as education must provide answers immediately to all these questions. In fact, some of the questions require facts that we need not remember. Importantly, some other questions may not even have a unique answer. That understanding should have stemmed from our education.

Years of Science education should prepare us to generate such questions as routine thinking. It should have enabled us to seek the answers through a scientific approach. Temporary solutions should be discerned and discarded, ascertained and generalized. We could have forgotten the facts and information from our Science education. We should have imbibed the scientific temper.

Science education may not entirely be the outcome of daily experience but it should not remain within tomes to deny the thinking required to conduct daily life.

The plight of an educated individual bereft of insight and confidence, chided in every other life instances for the fallible education, has several reasons. We shall strum one thread.

During the BCs, when Ptolemy, one of the generals of Alexander the Great, ruled Egypt, Euclid constructed Geometry. One of the prospective student wondered openly to Euclid, what is the use of his new found Geometry. Story goes, Euclid turned to one of his students and asked him to fetch some coins from his home and gave it to the doubter. “Here is the use you sought,” Euclid said to the doubter, “and good bye”.

Be it Science or Mathematics or such fields, getting educated in them is not for just earning wealth. This has been understood in the past as a basic tenet of education. Pichai puginum karkai nandre, better it is to learn by any means, even begging; what Avvayar, the Grandmother of Tamil, promulgated by that is not the education that promises monetary wealth.

What we could understand is our hoary past exemplifying the true value of education is not the cause for its present state.

The present form and function of education is the outcome of what was prescribed during the Raj; education system is to train than to learn, to inculcate submission than discern, to remain the generic accountant and succeed than to pursue creativity as a way of life. That even today we approach our school education as a means for direct monetary gains only seeks to promote education as training in expedient technologies sans scientific thinking required to promote perceptive life in Nature. It is not wrong to gain a livelihood through ones education. But such a link between education and livelihood is only recent and it indirectly perpetrates a dangerous idea. If education is for livelihood then learning whatever knowledge doesn’t yield wealth is a waste for humans. Get educated (trained) in expedient knowledge fields to get a good job; that would do. Rest of human knowledge is a mental exaggeration. Archaic tomes. Time wasters.

What is defeated is the real use of education.

Science education is basic. It promotes scientific thinking. Scientific thinking is a mental state. To learn that is not to become only a scientist. Its basic provision is to inculcate a scientific temper in all of us and by exercising it, to get clarity and mental poise in our daily life.

Here is an example of scientific thinking applied in daily life.

El Greco is an Italian Renaissance painter. The humans and angels in his paintings usually were elongated than in reality. An example is the Adoration of the Shepherds. Observing these paintings, several decades back, a British ophthalmologist proposed that El Greco suffered from an eye disease that made him see people this way, elongated and stretched. Hence, he painted that way.

If we are alert, we could spot the fallacy of such an argument. Such mental agility is what we identify as scientific thinking; agility our school education should have inculcated.

Do we have the smarts to become a scientist? If we could catch the flaw in the above ophthalmologist argument, we might have it. If we don’t get it even after it was explained, we perhaps don’t have it in us to become a scientist. Thus said Sir Peter Medawar, discussing this example, in his Advice to the Young Scientist.

For argument sake if we agree with the reasoning of Ophthalmologist. Let us say one such eye ailment makes the painter see all in double. Following the reasoning of the Ophthalmologist, if this painter is commissioned to paint a Mono Lisa, he would paint a Duo Lisa. Now, if the painter happens to see his handwork, with two Lisa, due to his ailment he would see them as four. He would obviously realize his mistake. This reasoning holds for El Greco too. If he had seen reality as stretched and painted them as stretched, when he looks at his painting again, the already stretched images would look even more stretched. He would realize he had drawn them stretched, not the way he saw them. El Greco painted figures as stretched, not because of any eye ailment but because he wanted to draw them that way. Period.

No I couldn’t spot it immediately. I could only understand the flaw upon reflection. Reflecting for a while on any such claims makes most of us realize our scientific thinking.

For cultivating such a scientific temper and thinking, we don’t have to constrict ourselves into a niche and claim I am an artist, a scientist, an El Greco or an ophthalmologist. Suffice it to appreciate the World with a discerning scientific spirit.

Education and exams, schools and scholastics, geared towards degrees and jobs, propelling towards a material end with such knowledge marginalized as text book lessons hinder the development of scientific thinking in the young.

Learning science is difficult. One should do such learning straight-jacketed and serious, leaving humor outside the classroom along with our footwear. Peppering the learning of science with other creative human endeavors and examples from life experiences would only result in its dilution and distraction. In the end it would prove even more difficult to learn science. Such presumptions, like the pictures of Gods on our exam pads, have proven hard to be unglued from most practicing academics. Damage to the academic fabric is inevitable while freeing the practitioner from such presumptions.

To understand and discern science and such academic pursuits, one should gain confidence by learning the field, learning to do it and doing it. Let me teach and you listen often proves authoritarian scorching curiosity and free-spirited thinking. Education is futile on a brain devoid of wonder.

On the other hand, the difficulty in biting shouldn’t deter us from tasting the rock-candy of science. The fundamental of scientific thinking is our questioning mind that continues to doubt and discern the answers as provisional. It is a mind that is in peace with insecurity; insecurity about the impermanence of the answers, the provisional layers of understanding of an onion reality. To gain this mental state – a continuous process requiring constant effort – a major want is to strip what is said off who(ever) said it; strip a thought free of authority, to its nascent state and question its merit. If Nature includes all of us, understanding it is possible for all of us. Is it not possible for a part of Nature to interact with the rest of it? As Badal Sircar in his Evam Indrajith play alludes to, only Question remains. How big it is depends on the mental capacity of one who asks it. The answer could then be what remains.

To learn a subject is to reflect upon its concepts for enough time, with the resulting clarity augmenting our self confidence, which in turn directs us to lead a discerning life, realizing all along such an education is a joy in itself. Has this objective been forgotten or has its necessity faded?

The discerning temper and no nonsense thinking that should have resulted from our science education, we have often observed in our village old lady. Even as we feed her through free television, goading advertisements for using “turmeric and Ayurvedic herb based” cream to get as shining a face as the lotus petal, she is already aware that instead she could directly apply turmeric paste on her face while bathing.

Be it a “split” AC or the regular one, using it to cool a room means, the heat taken from the room has to be added to the world minus the room. To cool us we need to heat others is a scientific understanding that if explained, is easy to grasp for that old village lady who hasn’t undergone any “useful” education.

***

[The Tamil version]

Recently, I was invited to write a review article on the role of porous medium modelling in biothermofluids for the IISc Journal, a quarterly with exclusive invited reviews on special topics chosen by guest editors. The journal website is here: http://journal.library.iisc.ernet.in/ and the current issue contents can be accessed as pdf files.

Out of the six reviews that have appeared in the current special issue (vol. 91) on Biofluid Dynamics, guest edited by Prof. Jayawant Arakeri, The Fluid Dynamics of Swimming Microorganisms and Cells by Ganesh Subramanian and Prabhu R. Nott (pages 283-314) is the one I found extremely interesting. I should be writing more on this soon.

My review presents an overview of the post-2002 research on the modelling aspects of several biothermofluid processes based primarily on the porous medium approach.

Here is some teaser content from the review:

The porous medium modelling approach, now an established methodology in other engineering disciplines, has made forays into biomechanical modelling over the past two decades. Many biological systems involving multi constituents can readily be approached as porous media for simplified analysis. An obvious example of mass transport in biological systems that can be modelled as porous medium is the diffusion of nutrients and other macromolecules (drugs etc.) across and within biological tissues. An earlier review by Khaled and Vafai [1] describes studies carried out prior to 2002 on porous medium models used in specific biological and biomedical applications such as tissue generation in scaffolds, transport in brain tissues, MRI applications, liquid chromatography, transport of macromolecules in aortic media, blood flow through muscles, and interstitial fluid flow in axi-symmetric soft connective tissue.

The review begins with a definition for porous medium suited for analysing transport phenomena, concepts of volume averaging, momentum and energy conservation statements are briefly discussed to motivate the ensuing review discussions. Porous medium modelling of several biomedical processes pertaining to human physiology is then discussed under two broad categories of bio-mass and bio-heat transport. The bio-mass transport section discusses LDL transport in arteries, drug delivery, drug eluting stents, functions of organs modelled as porous medium, porous medium modelling of microbial transport. Under the bio-heat transport section, porous medium approach based bio-heat equations are described accompanied by a literature review. A final subsection discusses non-Fourier type bio-heat conduction phenomena. Requirement of analysis and computational efforts in the future using the generalized porous medium momentum equation and the local thermal non-equilibrium based two energy equations are highlighted.

While seeking simplifications for biological processes through porous medium models is an exciting and useful multidisciplinary pursuit, a note of caution is also in order. As Francis Crick, one of the giants of biology having moved to it from physics, learned (to quote from [2]), “you have to adjust from the elegance and deep simplicity of physics to the elaborate chemical mechanisms that natural selection has evolved over billions of years.” A related point recently [3] made by Walter Gratzer is worth mentioning: “physicists, along with chemists and engineers, are surging into biology. This has rejuvenated both the biological and the physical sciences, even if the leading physics journals now publish a profusion of poorly refereed papers whose authors have not followed the excellent precept not to think what one wants to think until one knows what one ought to know.”

Biology is primarily governed not by fundamental physical laws — few and rigid — but by an evolutionary process of adaptation (as implied by Bio, which means life). Seeking modelling simplifications from physical principles for such complex and myriad processes could often result in incremental progress – with particular solutions of limited range of utility or general solutions to approximations that has oversimplified biological reality.

The reference list (about 90 references) compiled on the topic with BibTeX and DOI links in place is provided as a keyword-searchable, standalone HTML file:

View or download this HTML file (click to open the html file in your browser and save it).

Write to me if you need a pdf of any of these reviews.

Arunn Narasimhan (2011). The Role of Porous Medium Modeling in Biothermofluids Journal of the Indian Institute of Science, 91 (3), 243-266

References

[1] A.-R. Khaled, K. Vafai, The role of porous media in modeling flow and heat transfer in biological tissues, International Journal of Heat and Mass Transfer 46 (26) (2003) 4989 – 5003. doi:10.1016/S0017-9310(03)00301-6.

[2] H.-X. Zhou, Q&a: What is biophysics?, BMC Biology 9 (1) (2011) 13. doi:10.1186/1741-7007-9-13.

[3] W. Gratzer, Biophysics – whence, whither, wherefore – or hold that hyphen, BMC Biology 9 (1) (2011) 12. doi:10.1186/1741-7007-9-12.

Simplistic models are not sufficient to model and understand the physics and outcome. One earliest attempt is the Pennes bio-heat transfer model, which lumped the convection (cooling or heating) effect of blood flow as a perfusion effect.

Chen and Holmes in their 1980 paper proposed a detailed model, worked out from first principles, that is capable of modelling all types of bio-material regions (tissue and blood combinations) in the circulatory system. We can approach what they proposed from the transport in porous medium perspective. Here are some preliminary notes.

Chen and Holmes Bioheat Transfer Model — [ PDF Download ]

More notes on this, in a while. Meanwhile, check also this note on the Role of Porous Medium Modelling in Biothermofluids.

Main Reference Discussed

Chen, M., & Holmes, K. (1980). MICROVASCULAR CONTRIBUTIONS IN TISSUE HEAT TRANSFER Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences, 335 (1 Thermal Chara), 137-150 DOI: 10.1111/j.1749-6632.1980.tb50742.x

1) Country/Rock music guitarist Derek Trucks has a lineage from the mainstay of Allman Brothers Band and versatility to open for and play with Eric Clapton in the yearly Crossroads shows. In my opinion, he is one English guitar player attempting Indian (Hindustani and/or Carnatic forms) music who understands very well, the concept of gamaka (embellishment of individual notes of a scale) unique to Indian music. Not only understands but delivers it on stage. Here is one of his popular “Indian” tune, performed live.

Sahib Teri Bandi, which appears in his Song Lines (2006) album.

2) Here is one tune from Native American Indians.

Akua Tuta by Kashtin (Canadian folk rockers), is also featured in Native American Odyssey, one of the collections in the popular Putumayo Presents World music series.

Akua Tuta means Take care. According to DiiMentedDii, the English translation of the lyrics goes:

Be careful what you do with the thing that has given to you
Be careful what you do… the way you were raised
Be careful what you do with the thing you protect
Be careful what you do with the thing which has helped you
Take care of our land
Be careful what you do – the way you were raised
Take care of our grandfathers
Take care of our grandmothers too
Take care of your children and your brother and sister’s children too

3) Native African music, rich in unique rhythms, has several legendary musicians and even choirs. For instance, in the late nineteen eighties the group Ladysmith Black Mambazo came into World prominence (of course, they were already popular in Africa) after they performed in the Graceland multi-Grammy winning effort of Paul Simon.

For contrast, here is an acoustic effort from Africa. Sori by Diogal from Senegal. Again found this in one of the Putumayo presents World music series.

4) Renaud Garcia Fons is one of the all time great bass players. Here is one tune, called Berimbass, from his band.

Don’t get deceived by the opening refrain played on the guitar (which feebly resembles A. R. Rehman’s refrain for thillana thilla song from Tamil film Muthu); wait until he goes solo.

5) To end this installment, here is one of the better fallouts of a weird fusion effort between Michael Brooks and Mandolin Srinivas. The piece is Dance, from their album Dream; Of course, Srinivas is playing Karnatic rAga Abheri and trying to obfuscate it; and Michael Brooks is helping about with all other sounds…

Of course, Srinivas wouldn’t dare to do this for Abheri in one of his Carnatic music concerts. But you may get to hear these ‘foreign’ refrains from him, during the December Season in Madras.

Before internet and weblogs, during my high-school days, I used to jot short notes about books I read, in a one quire ruled notebook. What had started as a catalogue of books that I owned soon transformed into a list of books I had read and not necessarily owned. I don’t know what motivated my urge to make such lists — I didn’t even gather courage to boast of the notebook with my girl friends.

But the book list had a self serving purpose; the more I was aware of the list, the more it made me grow it, by making me read more books. By the mid nineties, when I abandoned the ritual, the notebook not only contained a list of about five hundred odd books, fiction and non-fiction, science and plays, but also carried short reviews of some of the books.

In time, the book list begot a meta list. The notebook sprouted lists of new words I encountered in a book, with its meaning transcribed from a black hefty nondescript dictionary I had owned for good from my friend.

Years and life intervened to transmogrify my reading self into a Hydra of multiple interests, distractions and profession. I still retain that notebook and although a few tempting tarnished pages beckon, I have stopped writing in it. In fact, I seldom write with a pen any more.

Two decades back, when I started attending live Carnatic music concerts, I learnt to make lists of the concert repertoire. Although I could again profess no excuses for doing it, I am neither first nor unique in conceiving concert lists. The first one should be by Ariyakudi Ramanuja Iyengar, when he conceived the present concert format — as a list.

Nowadays, almost all of those who attend Carnatic music concerts, including the accompanists and sishyas on stage, seem to make these lists.

The Carnatic music concert list contains unique nomenclature. For instance, each song apart from the raga, tala and composer, would also be accompanied by letters R, N, S, T, i.e. if the list is in English. The R denotes whether the song was preceded by a raga alapana; the N signifies a neraval at an appropriate juncture, an elaboration of a suitable lyric section, during the exposition of the krithi; the S tells us whether the particular song had swara-kalpanai or creative extempore of raga swaras; the T means thani, the percussionist solo usually rendered as a tail section of the main piece of the concert. When a separate pallavi section is delivered, it is marked as RTP, the Ragam Thanam Pallavi, in our concert list.

These concert lists are useful when comparing notes with fellow rasikas during the Madras music season. Taken over a few seasons, these lists uncannily reveal hackneyed ragas, krithis and even tukkadas and also limitations in the repertoire of some overworked popular singers. Of course, there are musicians who maintain lists of what they deliver over the years, to avoid becoming outmoded, if not outdated (after all, the Carnati music kirthis are timeless).

I now have five notebooks of different sizes, containing these music concert lists. Flipping through these lists is a way to relive those concerts, although most of the music have receded in memory. Few instances, awkward and wayward, undeniably linger, with terms like bulb, tso-tso, standard fare, yawn, scribbled around the lists offering the associated quintessential moods. Certain hallowed concert halls of the city are perambulated by dothi-clad, bespectacled, ancient rasikas with sheaves of their antediluvian concert lists stashed inside a yellow cloth bag that is a return gift at their wedding that happened, ironically, right after the Indian independence. Glancing at your recent concert lists, they can wax nostalgia on how it resembles a certain sixties concert of Madurai Mani or how a sequence of ragas in your current list reminds to them a certain Semmangudi concert in late seventies.

The urge to make the Carnatic music concert list is to be seen to be denied. Over the years I have witnessed septuagenarians, practically deaf, religiously documenting the concert repertoire in squeaky glyphs that elevate by contrast, a doctor’s prescription to a model of comprehensible clarity. Friends have plucked my notebook during a concert, to hastily make a thorough list of songs, their ragas and composers, only to discard the notebook with me at the end of the concert. Complete strangers would tear sheets from my notebook and when denied such luxury by xenophobic notebooks, would settle to use their left palm.

There will be a buzz in the concert hall while the singer is about to begin a krithi. Either she would have already elaborated the raga with an alapana ably supported by the accompanist, which reduces the possible krithis to a few tens, or she would directly hum the beginning strains of a krithi. This would send paroxysms of enlightened activity amongst those rasikas who could identify the krithi, its creator and chief proponent, who then proceed to jot it down in their list, whispering helpful remonstrations to their neighbours who were as yet clueless.

Certain musically mediocre rasikas, undaunted by their ignorance, remain upbeat in creating the list. Armed with a printed booklet of few thousand krithi titles sold at the concert hall, these nouveau rasikas wait until the singer begins the krithi, fervently flip through their booklet to identify the krithi details and proceed to record it in their notebook with alacrity. While the completeness of their list is due only to their musical diligence, the incompleteness is squarely due to the cheap booklet. Having served The List, they turn around and complain to you about the pointlessness of the same thodi raga they hear for the umpteenth time that season.

[The longer and more jokes per sentence Tamil version]

Recent posts and comments at popular blogs wonder how it works.

The original version of this illusion was devised in 1995 by Edward H. Adelson, Professor of Vision Science at MIT. We had blogged about this last year. Here is a snapshot of the illusion.

Here is the explanation on why it works (the last paragraph is instructive), proof by images that the colors marked A and B are indeed identical and more ways to convince yourself (I particularly like the “print and cut the ‘different colored’ squares” method).

Here is an entire set of such “same color” illusions demonstrated by Edward Adelson.

A professor is one who talks in someone else’s sleep.

– by W. H. Auden | seen as tagline here

Interestingly, over decades, speculations about these crop-circles blamed them on the then unknowns that caught the imaginations of the populace – animal activity, devil himself, aliens, UFOs and so on. Also, the crop-circle patterns in respective times morphed to reflect objects of then modern scientific fancy – starting with simple patterns of circles and squares, they moved on to straight lines (tougher to explain as due to natural causes) and even the fractal Koch curve, Julia and Mandelbrot set.

It is one phenomenon where the hoax and science kept upgrading their side to keep the mystery of their origins and cause frustratingly on balance between outright hoaxes and genuinely unexplained.

Here is one such anecdote from the recent article by Richard Taylor in Physics World (free registration required):

As the debate raged, some scientists continued to seek alternative natural explanations. One of the most prominent was Terence Meaden, then a meteorologist and physicist at Dalhousie University in Canada. In 1980 Meaden [...] proposing that the curvature of hillsides in southern England affected the local airflow, allowing whirlwinds to stabilize their positions long enough to define circles in the crop fields.

Such scientific speculations received a severe blow in 1991 when, to the glee of the British media, two unassuming men in their sixties declared that they had been creating crop circles for more than 25 years. Their hobby had begun one summer evening in the mid- 1970s, when artist Douglas Bower recounted a story to his friend David Chorley about an Australian farmer who had reported a UFO rising into the sky and leaving behind a circular “saucer nest”. As Bower and Chorley strolled home from the pub through the English countryside, they created their first imitation nest.

In the process, the pair unintentionally triggered a 15-year duel between art and physics. Bower and Chorley were trying to start a UFO hoax, so when Meaden’s meteorological theories of crop-circle formation showed signs of catching on, the pair increased the number of circles in their formations, hoping to demonstrate that they were not weather-related. Meaden, however, proved an inventive (albeit unwitting) opponent. By the time Bower and Chorley went public, Meaden had moved on from mere weather patterns to an electromagneto-hydrodynamic “plasma vortex”, which purported to explain not only the elaborate multi-circle designs, but also the flat farm tractor batteries and eerie lights that coincided with their formation!

Such embarrassing encounters between crop-circle ‘art’ and ‘science’, other conspiracy theories and the secretive nature of circle-makers have hampered serious studies of crop circles.

Richard Taylor argues in his Coming soon to a field near you (free registration required), why scientists should nevertheless take these crop circles seriously as finding out how these crop-circle artists create their most complex patterns could have implications for biophysics.

The biophysics connection comes this way: Eltjo Haselhoff, a medical physicist, after a scientific investigation, proposed in his published research that the elongated “pulvini”, the visco-elastic joints that occur along wheat stalks of crop-circles, were a result of superheating from electromagnetic radiation. He found that pulvini on bent stalks within a 9 m-wide circle were elongated compared with undamaged crops in the same field. Although other factors could have caused this swell, they couldn’t explain the magnitude of the increase, and the symmetric fall-off from the circle’s centre to its edge.

In his 2000 paper (see reference 1 and 2 in the list below) he discusses also about the experimental data published in an earlier paper by Levengood and Talbott (1999) about the pulvinus length in these crop circles.

He conjectures from the circular symmetry of many of the crop formations and several eye-witness reports, mentioning the involvement of ‘balls of light’ (referred to as ‘BOLs’ throughout his paper) during the formation of a crop circle (Van den Broeke, personal communication, and Meaden 1991), the nature of the electromagnetic ‘point source’, rather than a plane wave (as suggested in Levengood and Talbott (1999)).

He goes on to calculate the location of the point source above the ground, to cause the extent of damage in the crop circle. From Fig. 2 of his paper, we gather, the BOL was set at a height of 7.8 m above the centre of the circular imprint, for best fit of the data.

Eltjo Haselhoff reaffirms that the pulvinus length expansion in crop circles reported by Levengood and Talbott (1999) is a thermo-mechanic effect, possibly induced by a kind of electromagnetic point source. Simple hand-made formation of the same crops (i.e. hand-flattened area of crop), he points out, did not reveal the same characteristics.

So, biophysicist interpretation of swollen stalks is that during formation the crops were exposed to microwaves – from portable magnetrons or microwave ovens. Once superheated with this source, the stalk orientation could be readily sculpted, speeding up circle creation.

Scientists have remained reluctant – perhaps due to the obvious gullibility and hoaxes that encircle these crop-circles — to take these crop-circles seriously. For them existence of these circles are not outside of scientific explanation and hence doesn’t pose a scientific challenge or advancement that require sustained investment of mental faculties and resources.

It seems, if not their existence, the how and why of these circles could offer genuine problems of scientific merit. For instance, scientific investigation into the methods of crop-circle creation could, as Richard Taylor suggests, lead to patented techniques for accelerated crop growth!

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Reference Discussed:

1) Haselhoff, E. (2001). Opinions and comments on Levengood WC, Talbott NP (1999) Dispersion of energies in worldwide crop formations. Physiol Plant 105: 615-624 Physiologia Plantarum, 111 (1), 123-124 DOI: 10.1034/j.1399-3054.2001.1110116.x

2) Richard Taylor — Coming soon to a field near you (free registration required)

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Read more (Disclaimer: I claim no authenticity about the info in these pages):

1) Comparison of two leading crop circle formation theories

2) The Deepening Complexity of Crop Circles Scientific Research & Urban Legends by Eltjo H. Haselhoff, Ph.D.

3) Opinions and comments on Levengood WC, Talbott NP (1999) Dispersion of energies in worldwide crop formations. Physiol Plant 105: 615–624 Eltjo H. Haselhoff – Online version

4) Crop Circle Index — contains links to wealth of data and analysis available on the web.

5) That crop formations possess a fundamental geometric harmony analogous to musical chords has inspired musicians to use computer algorithms to convert formations into melodies. Paul Vigay has samples of his music at http://bit.ly/lbUJQq.