Face the Book

Face the Book

Don't look for a black cat in a dark room, especially if it is not there... ~Confucius

This short blog is written on these assumptions: Irresponsible and hopeless sharing - posts are not an exact mirror image of your exact self - controlled paradox.

Facebook has 1.1 billion active users and 95 billion friendship links. Facebook users have potentially tremendous reach in a quick time; any shared content only needs to pass a few steps across the network to reach a substantial fraction of the world’s population. As it has no peer-reviewing system in place, we need to think a second before posting anything.

Facebook users enjoys several advantages, it makes productive, boosts self-esteem, improves your love life etc. (all these taken from acceptable sources). One immediate advantage comes to my mind is that you can peer others content from a secrete vantage point and feel perfectly eudaemonistic. I would like to take on two interesting stuff, one is our own identity when doing an act on facebook (to like or to comment, here) and the other is hopeless oversharing.

“To Like” is an action you perform with a computer mouse, rather than our own state of mind. Facebook is an imaginary world where we believe a mere act of like is complete endorsement of our state of mind by others. So the act of “To Like” on facebook is not an accurate way of reflecting our agreement with something being posted, so don’t get mislead. Different people have different way of saying things; a novelist would say he might need 500 pages of heavy prose to express an emotion more precisely. Instead of living a social life we rely on likes and comments for being socially alive.

We live in the age of hopeless oversharing, firstly what’s likely to happen with this oversharing is…..nothing. This oversharing on facebook is getting to a point where nothing substantial and genuine can be distilled out of this never ending and dubious information overload. We are extremely in a helpless situation to judge what is accurate and what is not. Heaps of random baseless stuff going viral, are we taking a second to believe and share it.

What we need is substantial efforts from people on ground level, rather than “facebook warriors” sitting on their couches liking and sharing endlessly with no tangible outcome. Remember your status on FB is neither an indication or a measure of your responsibility on particular issue, nor a measure of your patriotism, nor an indicator for your commitment toward solving a social problem. Those exchanges of empty words only will get you nowhere.

Instead of this endless sharing of religious and political nonsense, think beyond that. Come up with actual solutions, think about how to breed creativity, redefine how we operate in democracy so that big/small, rich/poor all are counted, ideas on how you can impact society with what you have studied all these years, inspiring ideas for masses to respect woman or atleast this (which I believe to the core) helping someone in your own family instead of a pointless philanthropy.

Fill the world with good will and happy feelings.

How Easy to Fall in Love in Chennai? A Statistical Perspective.

Straight to the point, no honey and cream at the beginning as usual.

I recently came across a mathematical equation called Drake Equation, which is originally proposed to calculate civilizations that could possibly exist in our galaxy. And elsewhere, a mathematical genius applied to calculate number of singles in a given city and others to different purpose. I tried to twist a bit and applied to calculate probability of a guy to fall in love in Chennai city, it worked. As now it’s clear that this is not my own idea. But what exactly I have done is used this equation for a different case in study, which in turn is a new thinking.

Here we go.

Adopted and slightly modified Drake Equation

G = N * F_w * F_l *F_a *F_v  *F_b

G = Number of available women for a potential act of Love in Chennai who will qualify for your criteria.

N = Population in Chennai

F_w = Fraction of population who are women in Chennai.

F_c = Fraction of potential women who belong to your own community.

F_a = Fraction of women in appropriate age group you like.

F_v = Fraction of women who are educated with an engineering degree.

F_b = Fraction of women who you find as attractive.

N = Population in Chennai:

A quick Google search gave me a figure of 5.9 million in 2009, so I will stick to it without either any argument on its accuracy or looking into a more recent figure. This will do for the case in question. So a million have six zeros? (Correct me if I’m wrong). Then we have 5.9 ×10⁶ is the total population of Chennai.

F_w = Fraction of population who are women in Chennai.

No Google search this time, I roughly assume 50% of the population is women. So 0.50 of total are women.

F_c = Fraction of potential women who belong to your own community.

For safer side, if you like your girlfriend to be within your community this applies. Roughly, say 5% (0.05).

F_a = Fraction of women in appropriate age group you like.

Assuming you are 27 year old and looking for someone around that age group, between 22 and 28. Let’s assume 25% (0.25) fits in that bracket.

F_v = Fraction of women who are educated with an engineering degree.

Let’s say you prefer a girl who has an engineering degree. To add few words, Engineering is the most preferred course in Tamil Nadu. There are about 400 Engineering colleges in Tamil Nadu and each can host roughly 500 students per year, eventually 2,00,000 a year. Half are women between 22-24, so one lakh women for a given year fit in your condition. If you are 27/28 get all the girls in last 6/7 years who finished engineering 7×1,00,000. Discontinuing the calculation further, I roughly assume 10% (0.10).

F_b = Fraction of women who you find as attractive.

This is very easy to assume since, “most of the guys like most of the girls out there” and most of the Chennai girls are beautiful. I arrive at 50% (0.50)

Applying all the numbers

G = 5.9 × 10⁶ × 0.50 × 0.05 × 0.25 × 0.10 × 0.50

= 1843 women fit into your category.

So now you have 1843 women with whom you can potentially have an affair, who are in Chennai, belong to your community, in your age group, with an engineering degree and you find as attractive.

Now, we didn’t include their choices/preferences. They should also like you, which is “the biggest of all conditions”. Now it’s tricky to assume what fraction of women will like you. I am being generous here, say only 10% like you. We will end up with 184 women.

We can also take this further, like what is the probability to see one of the 184 women on a given weekend in a given month and so on. I think better I will stop here. Final comments: I neither encourage nor discourage anyone to fall in love desperately. When you are in a mood to fall in love, use this equation to know the probability. No philosophical ending here.

Maths, Love & Selfishness

Maths, Love & Selfishness

”Money can’t buy love, but it improves your bargaining position.” - Christopher Marlowe

Love is a complicated beast; you neither can generalize not idealize it. There are many theories on the physics, chemistry, biology and philosophy of love, but none of them convincingly answer any real questions about love. There are different dimensions to love, I would like to take up this argument based on my conscience rather than facts, I’m of the belief that love is always selfish. Which many will agree and equally many will disagree, I have slightly tweaked few cool mathematical equations to support my argument here.

(Warning before you proceed: Presence of advanced mathematics-unsuitable for liberal arts and biology majors. You may either love or hate this blog, depends on whether you are in love with someone or not)

At first, I have slightly alter a three-body problem to suit my argument. (for more see: For models of love affairs based on differential equations, see Section 5.3 in Strogatz, S. H. (1994) “Nonlinear Dynamics and Chaos.” Perseus, Cambridge, MA.)

Let’s say Romeo was in love with Juliet possessing money (m) and beauty (b).

Romeo’s behavior will be transformed to the differential equation dR/dt = mbJ.

This equation above describes how Romeo’s love (represented by R) changes with time (represented by dt). The amount of change (dR) is a multiple of money (m) and beauty (b, which is a constant here) and of Juliet’s current love (J) for him. This equation idealizes that Romeo’s love goes up and stronger when Juliet loves him (m) money and (b) beauty. It says that Romeo’s love increases in direct linear proportion to how much Juliet loves him (in multiples of money and beauty). The inference is that all human love is conditional it is often packed with influence, limits, and contingencies.

Let’s look into another interesting formula by a Sydney (my favorite place on earth) based Professor Tony Dooley.  

A₀ = p + 0.368 (n-p)

n = oldest age by which you want to get married.

p = earliest age at which you'll start to consider a potential spouse.

A₀ = optimal proposal age

 

 

 

 

 

 

For example, when you want to get married at 30 and at 20 years you start considering your potential spouse, your optimum proposal age becomes 23.68. I am taking this further to support my argument that, at 23.68 you are neither selfish nor selfless. But…….but above 23.68 you turn selfish with respect your love, where you take almost everything you can take into consideration. Anything below 23.68 is selfless love, where you don’t anything into account except love (or mutual attraction).

Below I modified Beckhap’s law to suite my argument, here the equation is bit crude since its devoid of any time points.

The girl equation:

Rating (amount of love/hate) = Money × (Look ± Intelligence)

The Guy equation:

Rating (amount of love/hate) = Looks × (intelligence ± money)

So again these equations votes against selfless love. Some philosophers have actually argued that parental love is the purest form of love and I too agree with it. Love for God, I will leave that to you to introspect. Let us stick here to unconditional love between two opposite sex homosapians. In general, we love others because of something, whether their beauty, goodness, because they belong to our families; or because they rich and powerful. We these days have a long check list in mind before falling in love, and the predominant reasons being beauty and money as represented in the differential equation above.

If you are in an unconditional love, you are less likely to be worried if you occasionally fall in and out of love with them, and less likely to scare them off by expecting their love to be of superhuman strength. Just because you love somebody unconditionally, doesn’t mean you don’t care about what they are or what they do. Possibly, if you love them, you want them to be their best self. You might even hope and believe that your love will help them become that. The “unconditional” part of unconditional love doesn’t guarantee that you won’t withdraw love when things go badly, if you can’t it’s an emotional-trap like situation.

So, love is always a function of something. You cannot love someone just for the sake of it, always there are untold-hidden-reasons guide your decision. In my theory, the very early in your age you fall in love the less selfish you are in your love. You got to redefine how we can love someone “in different ways” which is selfless, true and everlasting. I hint at “friends without benefits” where companionship, friendship, a pinch of lust, trust or benevolence rules rather than the designer-trap with full of selfishness.

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When “You” become “He”

When “You” become “He” 

I recently tweeted (@ahdchem) that “I am becoming a coffee dumping bin” and after a few days also as “Coffee is my new red wine”. A curious follower asked what sort of coffee? what he means is, it’s a long black, flat white, espresso or anything out of blue and importantly why? That might look trivial at first sight, but when you have a close look, that is a serious question. I am drinking coffee because I like it or influenced by someone or else the very culture of drinking coffee? The answer is partly all.

So the larger question here is how much we are influenced by others (or by a culture or trend). I think to an extent, what we are is not because of what are we, but because of what others are. And again, how much we are what we are not and how much we are not, what we are? I am not talking about the famous disguise “the wolf in sheep's clothing” thing here. But how much of true sense of ourselves retained in us over time and how much we polish it or tarnish it in order to be part of the larger community and not being truly what we otherwise be. Singularly, we become a third person to ourselves as we are being dictated by someone outside us and we too listen to it. Whenever you feel as if all or part of what you do is not your real actions but just a masquerade, then you are reading the right thing and I am sure most of you will agree here.

I know it’s not a heinous crime to secretly borrow or rob a character and use it on our template. I am trying here to clearly see that, are we what because of solely what are we or what others around us are. Hypothetically, we imagine and see things clearly through the eyes of someone else or from somewhere else than through our own. Here we become a character to ourself and we are more confident on that character than on ourself.

I won’t talk here why we are doing this, since it’s more complex for me to deal with it. But I will take the help of Kelman’s conformity theory say in simple terms, how we adopt this. There are three broad characteristics, firstly, in public we accept the views of the majority but in private we maintain your own ideas. Second category is that, We Agree to the ideas of the group and you respect them. This may not be permanent as the group changes your ideas will change. Last category is that: A true conversion which last over time and even when group members change. But I doubt that the last one ever exists, as atleast at some point of time, in seconds, in hours, in days or in years definitely we should be influenced by someone.

So ok, what’s a big deal now when we get influenced by an external factor and shape ourselves for good? Well nothing wrong in it, but the true sense of individuality will go missing over sometime and we will all end up in “cut-copy-paste” individuals. And hence I vaguely reason why trends and culture exist and disappear over time.

How strong you are as a person and your own originality depends upon comparing what you wanted to do 10 years back and what you have done now. The degree of deviation from your original interests and ambitions shows how much you are influenced by external factors. (Though I don’t have solid foot on this statement, but I vaguely believe that is what it is on my own experience). People argue that there is an element called “necessity” in everyone’s life, which forces us in a direction which is completely undesired. But if you argue with the “necessity” element, you are not true to yourself and your deceived yourself on the long run and therefore negatively influenced.

The Massss Media

The Massss Media

Tell me, why is the media here so negative? Why are we in India so embarrassed to recognise our own strengths, our achievements? We are such a great nation. We have so many amazing success stories but we refuse to acknowledge them. Why?
~ Abdul Kalam

Journalism is literature in a hurry ~ Matthew Arnold

Frustrated at the media, don’t ask me why (we all need some reasons to get frustrated and here I need a reason to write). I spent this evening at my favorite local pub with the ghost of avaiyar (a famous Tamil poet from my home town, lived 1^st century B.C), an identity crisis and my favorite Belgian beer. We were equally familiar with the idea of mass media, mass-generation of rubbish stuff which can’t be resisted by captive citizens.

Obviously we all agree that there is much information which are accurate and thought provoking. But equally there is tons of flashy-unwanted-sensational-biased stuff with less or no accuracy. We are forced to digest news which is not in our interest, say something about Dirty vidya, plump aishwarya, ditched deepika, kitten with a whip poonam or awkwardly ridiculous celebrations (with or without political gain) for winning “something” which is a mother of nothing. The receptors of tolerance and silence are getting overexpressed in an alarmingly high rate in our system, rather than causing aversion these news feeds are fast becoming a necessary daily dose.

When it comes to inaccuracy in news publishing, this is how it gets twisted as mistaken homonym “peas loving nation instead a peace loving nation”. And retwisted like this, For example, a well-known judge X sates that “smokers in public should be punished”.

Media next day:

Media 1- smokers in public should be severely punished- Judge X;

Media 2- Smokers deserve punishment in public – Judge X;

Media 3- Judge X supports Saudi-style of punishments for smokers.

After few weeks, it will be a headline that Judge X was charged for biased and derogatory statements.

What we were concerned is that these superman or superwomen like creatures are/were proudly in the limelight supported by our masss media. Our infamous leaders going to government sponsored long vacations (or we can incorrectly call it as “lodged into jail as punishment”) and quite predictively coming back home as famous heroes. It’s a holy fun for an extent, but if something of this magnitude dominates everyday and everywhere then something isn’t seriously quite right.

On the other hand when it comes to movies, though there are few awe inspiring movies but mostly you got see a trend, a defined recipe of repetition. Here is the template.

The hero will be a symbol of extremity, either an expert or a fool. There will be a villain, mostly projected as stupid-powerful-disloyal-misbehaving beast. The hero will have a close group of loyal and incapable friends/family. The hero must fall in love with an arrogant or beautiful girl (usually both). Two or more in the close group will fall in love….likewise two or more will die. If the director wants sensation, he can always kill a girl/lady. The villain and the hero will live till end to do battle again in the sequel, and obviously hero triumphs.

I’m not alone here lamenting about media, I found few (in fact many, but a couple of examples are enough to support my togetherness) big guns as well doing the same. A former Supreme Court judge M. Katju, recently fired at the media “to educate themselves more”. Economist and Nobel Laureate Amartya Sen also joined the list of critics, you should able to find his articles elsewhere on the web.

Cursing at my own captiveness and inability, I decided to sink myself (best or not the best thing to sink yourself when in uncomfortableness?) deep into “De Nederlandse Bierfles” and ordered one more drink, as blink synchronicity everyone too ordered a drink to make it a perfect drink-synchronicity.

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Intraoperative tumor-specific real-time fluorescence imaging

Intraoperative tumor-specific real-time fluorescence imaging

This is exactly I decided not to do, blogging about science or in general anything serious such as to educate readers. Please don’t be skeptic here, im more comfortable writing hardcore-rubbish (with a downright tendency, I was told) stuff you seen in my last few post.

So why a clear deviation from my normal course? You see love surgeons; they are bright meritocrats with a great eye and a skillful fingertip. They often take bad decisions; leave out tumorous tissue (during surgery) and the tumor tissue left behind after surgery can cause all the bad you can imagine.

Removal of brain tumor by surgery is the common preliminary treatment and is usually followed by radiation and chemotherapy. Surgeon aims to remove the maximum amount of the tumor mass without sacrificing the patients’ neurological function and importantly without an aggressive surgery on brain. The great-naked eye can’t always distinguish between a tumor and normal brain tissue, making it difficult to completely remove a tumor and sometimes more brain tissue is removed than necessary as I said earlier.

Fluorescence imaging is an optical technique where chemical compounds that absorb in the near-infrared (NIR) region, 700–1000 nm, can be used to visualize and investigate in vivo molecular targets because most tissues generate little NIR fluorescence. Fluorescence imaging offers superior resolution, sensitivity and convenient for visual inspection and palpa­tion during surgery. The combination of accurate real-time imaging with tumor-specific fluorescent agents has the potential to revolutionize surgical procedures. Real-time imaging can shift the paradigm of sur­gical inspection by enabling localization of lesions that are difficult or impossible to detect by visual observation or palpation.

Healthy tissue should not show any fluorescence signal either in vivo, ex vivo or on histopathological validation, in other words the probe should be highly tumour specific. Image processing speeds should be much faster than real-time, otherwise making this application unfeasible for use in surgical applications. The mean duration for capturing in vivo intraoperative fluorescence images and video is 10 min (range: 4–36 min). Images need to be presented in an interactive and 3D format to the surgeons and they also should be able to integrate and manipulate these images during the surgical procedure.

Radiological modalities like PET (Positron Emission Tomography) is impractical for use in the operating room due to their size, cost, operating complexity, and performance. Recently, an advanced intra-operative magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) scanner and an image guided surgical system were developed. Although it does provide surgeons with real time images during surgery, it has several disadvantages. The first is its cost, at $9.2M it is impractical for many hospitals to acquire. Further, several challenges arise when working in close proximity to a magnetic field including surgical objects.

 Wait, how about specific binding, washout time, image to background ratio, toxicity, binding affinity, blocking experiments?  I am not an expert in this fascinating area of research, please refer to reliable journals.

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How to fail in PhD in a grand way; An advanced guide to beginners

“Failure is success if we learn from it”
--Malcolm Forbes

PhD is a great gamble, I recently finished my PhD right at the middle of a grand failure and a fabulous success. I mean Failure-wise it was not a success and success-wise it was not a failure either. I am still newbie at failure, many of my friends have failed in a spectacular fashion, some changed careers and some disappeared very quickly from the scene than you can imagine.

Do you think Sachin Tendulkar’s cover drive is really as easy as he makes to look? You know what exactly it is. Effortless failure never exists, you got to master it, secrets to be learned and here is this blog which I think can help you since I am an avid learner of the failure theory.

Picking a potential supervisor: This is very important when planning for a perfect failure, two things I can suggest here. One is that always go for a supervisor who is almost well established in his research so that you become a perfect “pair of hands” to him nothing more than that. He won’t listen to your ideas, no time to guide you when you have some problems, will never allow you to do anything on your own, which in a way is a hidden failure of a PhD. Other important criteria is that always go for people with Ivy league degrees harvard, caltech or even higher which has enabled them have a desperate research career and they will surely take their arrogance on you.

Extreme specialization: One of my friends is doing his PhD back in Australia in a crazy research area called “nano-bio-neuro-photonics”. Extreme specialization is indirectly proportional to chance of getting a job, the more specialized you are the less likely you find a good job. Its not a good idea to choose “extreme specialization” if you want a sudden failure, but it will make sure that you will enjoy the tax-free PhD income for about 4 years and unemployed thereafter. Also, choosing it is a good sign towards a long term-moderate failure.

Keeping yourself out of focus: At this point seeing yourself focused and strong again can get you back on your feet and keep yourself going despite all these planned setbacks, so it is very important that you keep yourself out of focus during your PhD all the time. Here is what I can suggest you, intense facebooking and tweeting all day, 3 trips every month (you can do 5 per month if you are in Europe), learning a foreign language, attending beer/cocktail making classes. Or writing a rubbish blog like this will ensure you are completely out of focus.

Partying whole night and going for a meeting with your mentor at 10 am next day is a nice way to irritate him as well as it will make him realize that you are out of focus and out of your mind.

Writing Thesis: What if you succeed in all the above and manage reach until this point. Don’t worry, there are few sudden failure tips. Here we go.

Tips for immediate failure: The whole point about this blog is failing in a grand way. I don’t want to elaborate here; instead I will give few tags you can work your way to immediate failure. Professional jealously, plagiarisms, sexual harassment, questioning the worthiness of a good project with your PhD supervisor (Conflict of interest) are all worth a try.

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Disclaimer: This is a parody. None of the quotes are real. Happy April.