Self Certified Genius of the World

Hmmm, this has been a long time coming. At first I thought I will call this as “Was Jesus Christ an Atheist ?”. But then decided that maybe he was not. Maybe there is more than that to it otherise people would not follow him so blindly. So, before we go on, I would like to quote some guy on the internet who describes Christianity as: Christianity, noun: The belief that a cosmic Jewish Zombie who was his own father can make you live forever if you symbolically eat his flesh and telepathically tell him you accept him as your master, so he can remove an evil force from your soul that is present in humanity because a rib-woman was convinced by a talking snake to eat from a magical tree Ahem ahem. Well, when told in that way it does seem pretty stupid, and that is the important thing here. For example, what if I were to tell you, that I am the son of god, and ask you to rub Vicks vaporub on your chest, drinking neat scotch whiskey every night praying to me and you will ge...

       I guess there is a time in everyone's life when they write one or two poems. This phase is usually seen around teenage when the filmy hype surrounding poet romantics grips your imagination and you want to join the bandwagon. I had my own disastrous romance periods. In one of my fantastic failures, I tried to come up with a poem for my school time crush Meenakshi while travelling in a bus towards her home on her birthday. I did manage to cook something up but well, it was not upto the mark. I hope no copy of such a disaster remains today. In another, I tried to justify my crush on her and tried to philosophise about it, and predict the future of our romance. This work was done in utmost secrecy and I do not remember any of it, except something about chariots of passion, love, infatuation and some such bull crap. Remembering them has the curious effect of turning my ears scarlet red even today.        But, there is one poe...

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...