Self Certified Genius of the World

20th Jan, 2030 I woke up today feeling invigorated. Maybe it has something to do with the excellent mattress I recently bought. Never thought it could make a big difference. Me and wife had a healthy discussion about work today at breakfast, we both work on similar things. Anyways, it had been a long time since we worked on any diseases, so we decided to design a drug for a disease. Seems like amoebiasis is back in a big way. Back when I was in school, I was suspected to have it so well, there is a personal connection. So, like good scientists, me and the wife started our computer, and pulled down all papers published between 2000 - 2030 on amoebiasis. Well, there is a lot going on, which we never come to know. Fortunately, we had a fairly generous grant from Bajaj Research Foundation couple of years ago, so we went ahead and bought ourselves a SynopsisMaker. Damn, my core nano 10 is so slow. Only 36 cores.... well, its time to upgrade. Anyways, I guess by tonight the synopsis ...

This is a test blog to see if image alignment etc is fine or not in the blog. These are files generated by OKDMol, a program I am writing since I am not very happy with the available softwares for viewing PDB files. This is a work in progress, and the final version will have all the features that I have been wanting in a PDB viewer. As of now, OKDMol is dependent on POVRAY, but I plan to write my own renderer soon to make things easy for me and also discard all the extraneous stuff that POVRAY has which I will not be using. Now, on to what I have done so far. The first one is a standard VDW view : Fig 1. VDW view of a PDB file showing the colors used for various atoms. C (grey), N (Blue), O (Red), H (White) and S (Yellow). I think the VDW view has more depth than images drawn in other softwares. I will work on improving it further. Next is a VDW with a HETATM (Cu) shown exaggerated. Note the copperish appearance of the HETATM. I plan to do that for all HETATM, and make it even more coo...

      I have always wondered how a person gets an ‘interest’ in any profession. In most cases, it is peer pressure, and in other cases, it could be personal trauma which is the catalyst. I don’t think I can answer the question even if I have access to all the thoughts of any one person (as a matter of fact, I do have access to all of one person’s thoughts). The curious thing is, we don’t live in isolation. We are constantly interacting with other people, reacting to them, reacting to the non-people things, so it’s complicated.       Now, as far as I am concerned, I have always wanted to be a scientist. I cannot recall any time when I did not want to be a scientist. So even when I did not know what exactly being a scientist means, I have wanted to be a scientist. I find that very weird. It is not what an intelligent person would do. It smacks of the byproducts of the backmasking circuits of the mind. So, anyway when I was in six...

      I had earlier posted my views on atom theory of atma, and I have been asked to modify it by several people. Most found the reference to non-philosophical matters (RSS/VHP etc), gratuitous, and I agree with them. I do try to be objective about my posts, but I guess I cannot help being a human. Maybe a post about that later. Anyways, the modified post is given below:       Well, as in many of my posts, let me start by asserting that I am a scientist (a thumpin good one too). So, I will share my thoughts on re-inventing the ‘atma’ theory of hindu philosophy in modern terms. I will briefly sketch the ‘atma’ theory as I am aware of it and then try and explain it in modern context.       Atma or soul is present in everybody. It is indestructible and will ‘live’ forever even if we die. The atma comes from the ‘paramatma’ or god. So in a way, all of us have paramatma in us. This is how I understand the atma ...

      I am sure you have heard this topic discussed endlessly. Free will versus everything we do being pre-destined. I am going to write about it from a scientific perspective. It may not be right exactly but well, what’s the harm in imagining it. So, what is destiny? Destiny is the prior arrangement of what might happen in the future. In the divine sense of the word, God takes a huge book in the sky and peeps over the book whenever a child is born, and scribbles on the book what is going to happen in the poor chap’s life. This is not my version of destiny. My version of destiny is dependent on whether the laws of physics are probabilistic in nature or not. I will give an example.       Suppose you take a beam of electrons and pass it through a narrow slit. It will diffract and form an interference pattern. A priori one cannot predict where a single electron is going. Hence we think of the electron beam as a probabilistic wave which, in...

All of us know the now famous quote of Abraham Lincoln at the Gettysburg address about democracy “Govt of the people, for the people and by the people”. The circumstances which made it necessary for such a form of governance no longer exist. At that time, monarchs were reigning over the world. And the need of the hour was a system wherein common men (and much later women) could rise and take over the administration of a country. The monarchs, it was felt could become lazy, careless and unconcerned and disconnected about the welfare of society at large and hence the need for one among the common men to take charge of the administration. Almost 150 years later, I think it is time we have a new address, one which proclaims “Govt is the people”. Let me explain. First of all the system, which we follow these days, called democracy was relevant for the people of the 1800's who were oppressed by the presence of larger than life kings and queens. So, in order to rectify the situation, th...

Let me say at the earliest possible opportunity that I am an atheist. I do not belive that the mess we see around us is the creation of a supreme being. The responsibility of the chaos is solely ours as a species. This is more an examination of the monotheistic beliefs and its repercussions on our behavior towards our fellow human beings. I am not against any religion because for me religion is the reason why we are not cannibals and have a working society. So, the central question here is, can we ensure within the monotheistic framework, the well being of mankind as a whole. That is the question I will try to examine here. Since, I am a very good scientist, what I say will be based on solid reason and logic. The first line of thought is dependent on Milgram’s experiment which was done around the time of Adolf Eichmann’s trial. Adolf Eichmann was a NAZI war criminal and in his defense, he proclaimed that he was merely following the orders given to him by his superiors. ...