The Deep Cut

The legal system back home in India has gone bonkers over the recent furor raised by some lame sexist comments made by a supposedly sexist scientist at a conference in South Korea. Taking cue from the swift judgment in this case, lawmakers are seeking to sign MOUs with the respective CEOs of Facebook, Twitter and Tinder to fast-track the much needed improvement in the justice system of the country. Bright days ahead for the states, won't you say? As those connected to my Facebook profile and worldwide Twitter feed know, life took a darker turn recently for celebrated biochemistry researcher and failed stand-up comedian, Dr. Tim Hunt. But considering that he has bagged a Knighthood and the Nobel Prize in this lifetime, they say that this dark turn is perhaps only a couple shades darker in the array of all the 50 different shades of Grey. He would now retire and dedicate the rest of his life to growing quince trees in his backyard English garden. Or gingers, for the much-neede

English, the lingua franca of modern world, has definitely done it's share in improving our knowledge of science. But does it also draw a divide and restrict those who do not have access to it? In this post, I'd like to sum up few interesting things  that I've come across, on the topic: numerous POVs, a TED talk , a few scientific letters and a couple of articles, a few lessons in history, but mostly my bit of some loud-mouthed thinking as usual. At the heart of this chain of thought is actually a trivial conversation in my office, where Andrew - who was peering into his laptop otherwise - made a comment on how easy we have it with most research papers being published in English. Me and Stefania chimed in, in agreement. To my knowledge, this group of casual chit-chatters had a cumulative knowledge of at least seven languages: Hindi, Bengali, French, Spanish, Italian, Sanskrit (at least in principle) and of course, English. (But even though we mutually tease each othe

Seriously, who the fuck is Charlie? And why the fuck am I being asked to be him?! I think I'm offended. You want me to say je suis Charlie..  ça me fait chier! The journalists at Charlie Hebdo - cartoonists, artists, media, idealists, provocateurs, obnoxious, anarchists and say what, in some ways -  extremists? As the publication is now being celebrated as heroic, and the slain journalists as martyrs on behalf of the apparent freedom of expression, the whole world rallies behind them in solidarity. One thing is factually clear in everyone's mind: "Cartoonists at Charlie Hebdo published some piece of art, however beautiful or enraging, and that they were brutally murdered for precisely that." Before I actually write about it, I should clarify one thing - there is no speech so hateful, no piece of art so offensive, no tweet so provocative and no music so enraging that it somehow would legitimize or justify the use of violence against them. And it also stands

BE ADVISED, CONTAINS SPOILERS. CRAZY BAT SHIT OF THEM! You can tell I was super excited when I learnt that Christopher Nolan has picked up on the idea of black holes and wormholes in his next venture. Unfortunately, he made Inception earlier and ruined everything for me. While Inception was a huge leap in science fiction, it raised the bar for the kind of movies the duo of Christopher and Jonathan Nolan can achieve. Inception was worthy of all the hype it has ever got, because not only was it a brilliant movie, it was also a refreshingly cerebral idea. It was something new. With Inception having set the stage to welcome Interstellar to the movie theatre, it was the sense of expectation that undid everything.  To list a few scientific inaccuracies  (or shall we say) inconsistencies that I personally found with the movie, I would have to start somewhere here: 1. How did the wormhole - the one near Saturn - came to be in the first place? It takes an enormous mass to

These days, I find myself providing strange and quirky examples to elucidate certain   concepts in  molecular biology  to a classroom of 50 sleep-induced, hungover and relatively withdrawn young minds. "Imagine you want to murder someone.. and you want to do it with a knife. Why a knife? Well, because knives are slow and painful and you can see the fear in your enemy's eyes as life slowly drains away.." (Here I paused, to give theatrics a chance)  "..but then I go and hide all your knives away! You come into the room to face the person you want to kill. But suddenly you can't kill him - or her, not to sound sexist - because I took away the only weapon you ever had!" I paused, to let them try to figure it out a little by themselves before I give away the final conclusion of the elaborate example - "that's what EDTA does. It takes away the cation cofactors that the nuclease needs, in order to cleave the DNA. Get it? Get it?" Sometime

Last few weeks have been such a whirlwind that I've been all like Whaaa-?! Okay, so I really dunno and I'm also kind of clueless about what to fill you guys in with.. except.. that suddenly one day I decided to pack up my things back in Kolkata, and shove everything to the back of that giant thing they call an aeroplane (and hop in to like 4 of them - connecting flights) to travel halfway around the globe to this place named Tallahassee, in Florida. Unlike back home in India, where a state-capital city is like a big bustling, marginally chaotic city (usually the biggest in the state), the quiet and slow college-town of Tallahassee is the state capital of Florida. Not Miami, as you'd have  perhaps   thought. Don't worry, same mistake was made there! Nothing could've prepared me for that REALLY LONG journey than perhaps the craziness of American college football (which you get only here, so there goes that plan)! It was something like this: Kolkata to Delhi (2:3

In the past few years, I have adopted academia as the way of living. And subsequently have I been clarified on a large number of presumptions regarding science and the people who practice it as a religion. For example, I had always thought that the people of science were a binary lot! The Yes-and-No kind of people. A chemist would pose wearing an apron, holding beakers and Erlenmeyer flasks in his hands, while a physicist would beat his head at the chalkboard that is repleted with complex equations of quantum mechanics. A biologist would be dissecting a lab-rat for nothing while a computer person would spend sleepless nights sitting in front of the glowing screen, punching codes and high on caffeine. That is the general image we have in our heads, right? But in the past few years, I have been let in on a secret, 'Things are not exactly that simple dummy!' And as we progress into the future with towering banners of discovery, invention and innovation, all the fields a

This sudden loss of faith is new to me. I think this past one week did it! I’ve been busy. And annoyed that I am by the incompetence of the word ‘busy’, I think they must develop a new term that signifies a far greater level of busyness that can drive people towards killer psychosis! And if such a word does exist and I don’t know about it yet, I’m totally failing my GRE test, due this December. God! As the final days of my graduate studies came to an end, I ended up with 3 project reviews – all theoretical, with lots of marks at stake. One may think designing a project in theory is easier than an actual wet lab project, you’re so wrong man! It poses different kind of problems: first, the subject of nanobiotechnology was absolutely new to me. Second, how do I know the expected results or parameters that may affect the system, without actually doing it? Anyway, as I successfully nailed that coffin yesterday, I finished all the reviews before the end of time. Next, 2 assignment

We discovered the Law of Parsimony together and ventured further into Systematics (its a pity Systems Biology isn't getting introduced next sem..), so anyway, Divya, this one is for you. And for all the others, yes, surprise surprise! I'm here to talk about philosophy, logic or the word that matters to you most  - study - yes, I'm here to talk about something related to studies. For a change.. William of Ockham William of Ockham (or Occam, as I've always known..) was an English Franciscan philosopher - a friar - who is believed to have been born in Ockham, a small village in Surrey. He is considered to be one of the major figures of medieval thought and was at the centre of the major intellectual and political controversies of the 14th century. He is believed to have given a particular form of philosophy or principle which is widely used in logic/physics/theology and as we've seen, in biology/medicine too. It is often summarized as - 'Other