Self Certified Genius of the World

Science magazine has an online feature asking readers to send their ideas on how they will be communicating science to readers in the next fifty years. Now, they gave me only 250 words to vent all my frustration, so I have not done so.  But, I thought this might be a good platform to introduce my feelings. Of course, a lot of what I feel is already on the blog, so I will only touch upon the essentials here and write about what I wish would be true fifty years from now. So, to begin with let me state as clearly as possible for me, what I think is wrong with the system we have right now: Should peer-review reflect the consensus view?        Now this is a contentious issue that needs to be addressed. This issue also lies at the heart of the entire debate. On one hand, crackpot theories like the ‘gyre theory’ should ideally be weeded out. But then again, history is rife with cases of people thinking ahead of their time, most recent example being...

   One of the earliest essays I wrote on the co-translational folding concept. This was for a course on protein folding that Prof Balaram takes at IISc. I am reproducing it in full, with missing punctuation marks added. At one point, I say that I have not been able to find out why it is assumed that refolding is a good substitute for in vivo protein folding. I did know even then, but I chose not to talk about it. I did so, since I cannot talk about the topic without calling everyone involved an idiot. Also, I have omitted the references as I cannot bring myself to format them properly. Rest assured that nothing I said in the essay is without literature support. Co-translational folding Introduction    Protein folding is one of the major unsolved problems of molecular biology. The problem is as follows : given that a gene encodes a unique structure (which performs a unique function), how does this information conversion take place ? it is assumed (barrin...

   Here I was, engrossed in my work (well mostly), and planning the months ahead with crystallization and other things related to a drug that I want to develop in the current lab. And suddenly, I hear that my father had a stroke. His earlier cardiac problems in some sense gave some reason to be afraid for his life. So, abandoning all plans, I came rushing back only to realize that almost all was well. As in any stroke, it is not the near future that is affected. It forces you to think about the far future, and what faculties of the brain have been lost and things like that. I guess everyone copes in their own way with what happens after a stroke. We had our fears and doubts about what may or may not have been lost. I dont have scans of the actual MRI, but it looks very much like this one taken from some sciguru web-site on singing after stroke ( http://www.sciguru.com/newsitem/10176/Singing-after-stroke-Why-rhythm-and-formulaic-phrases-may-be-more-important-melody ) . My fat...

 This is the true and untold story of how a planet very like ours became the world of the ultra-rationalist Vulcans. Perhaps there is something to be learnt in this story and maybe even implement it on our own planet. So, here it goes....   Once upon a long long time ago (clever amalgamation of two of the most common starting lines in fairy tales, dont you think ?), there was a planet called XM234. It was inhabited by intelligent beings very similar to us. They had two hands, two legs and pretty much everything we have, including round ears. There were a multitude of religions on XM234, and each held their own belief to be supreme. There were wars and famines and floods and corruption and all manner of evil that we see in our own world. In this world, was born a boy named Zara Vulcan. He was peculiar in having slightly pointed ears, not too noticeable though. Just a small tapering which you could discern if you looked closely at his photo for a long t...

    PZ Myers the Saint of Atheism has started a nice little regular column on his blog called "Why I am an Atheist" ( http://freethoughtblogs.com/pharyngula ). There have been so many people writing to him, and him posting them, that the original post is now lost in the sands of time. Anyways, I thought since I am an atheist too, why not chronicle my journey into atheism. After all, whats the point of calling myslef a self-certified genius and not acting narcissistic ? So, here we go :     I am Krishna Dev Oruganty, and I was born and brought up in India. My first experiments with the deity began around the age of 7 or 8. My grandmother had died around the time. I had not had much contact with my grandma, since we were in Delhi and she was in A.P, miles away. I remember that my mother and father were upset when they got the telegram (remember those?), and my father even booked an airplane ticket to go to A.P. I envied him for flying like that, an...

    When we were in school, we had to study both English prose and poetry. I found the poetry part quite boring, as I could not really understand any of it. Some people, I guess, get so engrossed in making things rhyme that they lose track of what the heck they were trying to say. That was my opinion of most poetry. The only guy I kind of liked at the time was Ogden Nash. But wait a minute, a quick search in google reveals that "am I a child or an adult" was actually written by Margaret Lawrence. OK, forget everything I said about Ogden Nash. BTW, Margaret Lawrence apparently wrote that poem when she started an illicit affair with her teacher at the age of 14. Some people have all the fun in the world. Forget about that too, because this post is all about science, thats right, fooled you didnt I ? Or maybe I harmed my own blog by twisting my own arguments, hmmm needs some thinking...    Anyways, the actual content of the post is not so much the poem, but t...

   Was reading a Scientific American article on 15  answers to creationist nonsense ( http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=15-answers-to-creationist ). Nice article, but since it was published by reputable publishing house, they could not use words like Bullshit, which are slightly more appropriate for the subject. But, the article got me thinking about creationists and other things. The article goes on to say why doubts raised by creationists are not valid science. For example, macro evolutionary processes are not  understood, but the fact of macro evolution or speciation having occurred is beyond doubt. The article goes into greater details about these things. The final answer is on the "Paley principle". Simply stated it goes as follows : "a watch is a complex thing and tells time by a specific arrangement of a lot of smaller parts. Somebody must have put them into place otherwise it would not work. We work (or...