Random Conversation: I... Can't Argue With That

"The blue of the sky is colour."
"Come again?"
"The blue of the sky is colour."
"I... can't argue with that."
"What is the spelling of colour?"
"C-O-L-O-R."
"In American, yes. But in British?"
"Oh... I see what you mean. By the way, you do know they're no longer really Britain... they are called the UK."
"Yeah, but you can't make UK into an adjective. United Kingdomians? Nah. Plus we knew them as the British when they invaded us, that's our memory of them."
"Well, they could be called the English."
"No, that wouldn't work! Imagine the confusion. English English, versus American or Australian English? Nah, that sounds weird. British is better."
"Okay..."

"British. Britney. Brittany. Britannia. There's a company in India called Britannia. They make biscuits. Wish I could have a biscuit right now. I'm hungry."
"Biscuit?"
"Biscuit."
"What's a biscuit?"
"Oh... that's cookie, in American."
"How does one keep that sort of thing straight?!"
"Heh heh. It gets funnier. You see, international trade has brought in multinational companies, a lot of them are American. And they bring in Americanisms. So we have both Britishisms and Americanisms."
"Like what?"
"Chips. We call 'em chips too. Britain calls them crisps. And fries, we call them fries too, but Britain calls them chips. Imagine a Brit chap trying to get fries in India. He asks for chips, and he'll get chips and he'll walk away with a chip on his shoulder. Too bad he can't eat that one! He won't be chipper for the rest of the day!"
 
"Are all Indians like this?"
Shrug. "Well, you know Rahul. He's fairly normal."
"Yes. Yes, he is!"
"I, on the other hand, am a lucky snowflake."
"What does that mean?"
"Snowflake, coz I'm unique. And when I say lucky I'm being sarcastic. Actually I could be serious. It depends. Maybe I'm both."
"How can you be both?"
"The principle of superposition. From quantum mechanics."
"Superposition."
"Mmm-hmmm!"
"Isn't that only for subatomic particles, and not really for people like you and me?"
Frown. "Well... maybe. But I'm going to ignore that and just say I'm both serious and sarcastic until you collapse the context function to observe which one I am!"
"Are you kidding?"
"Nope! I'm seriously sarcastic. Just like Schrodinger's cat! Except I'm alive. And a lucky snowflake."
"At any rate, that's a good expression. Where'd you hear that?"
"I just made it up."
"Well, you deserve credit for that one."
"I also thought of another one - I'm the only flower with nectar left for the bees."
"What???"
"Well, something like that, I'm still thinking about that one."
"Yeah... that one needs some work."

"I just thought of another expression I could use. It's quite a bit more colorful though."
Silence.
"It's probably not appropriate to say at work."
"Then you probably shouldn't say it."
"I'm the one out of millions of sperm that was successful in swimming to the egg!"
"Wait. What? You can't use that! You're a girl!"
"Well, I was made from two times X, but not two eggs! I had to have a sperm. Otherwise meiosis would toss and turn and cry in its grave. Or its bed or hammock or whatever."
"Amen for meiosis."
"I'm the one out of two thousand eggs and two million sperm that was successful!"
"I... can't argue with that."

The Sugar Detox

My mind is not crazy or rigid any more, which means I often have the inclination, often on a whim, to try a bunch of crazy experiments. The latest one in this series is the sugar detox diet. I got a flyer on Thursday last week which talked about doing the sugar detox, which basically entails going cold turkey on sugar, and I thought I would give it a try over the weekend.

The premise of the diet is to reset the way your body reacts to sugar. You go off sugar completely for three days - and completely means no carbs (which break down into sugar in the body), no dairy or fruit (which contain natural sugars) and no alcohol (which also break down into sugar). After the three days are up, and all existing sugar has left your body, kicking and screaming, and your body has forgotten the taste of sugar, you will re-introduce sugar into your system, albeit only the natural types of sugar, and over time. Starting with an apple per day (which keeps the doctor away).

But the diet itself does strange things to you. All of this serves to show you how dangerous the sugar addiction can be. Here's what happened to me.

I started craving food, to the point where I was almost hallucinating about it. Weird things started going through my mind: daydreaming about stealing my beloved's Coca Cola, remembering the taste of some of my mother's homemade sweets, and arguing with myself about which foods contain starch and sugar and which don't.

I started feeling hungry. All the time. All the time. All the effing time. I mean, for the second day, I made myself a vegetable mixture of cabbage and carrots with oil and spices, and I made a full wok's worth of it. A full cabbage and eight long carrots. I ate the entire thing throughout the day. And invariably, each time, after eating a full plate's worth of it - I was still hungry.

The hunger led to headache and weakness by the third day. My legs were physically tired, moving was painful, and the headache did nothing to help my resolve to get through this stupid diet. Of course, this was expected and the article had warned about this; but I myself was amazed at how I felt. I had zero energy, even though I was eating eggs and vegetables nearly all the time - I ate nine eggs in two days. I could deal with starvation much better as a kid - but then, kids should never have to starve or experiment with starving. My adult body did not take kindly to the carbohydrate deprivation.

Even my poop looked different - after the second day, I saw whole pieces of carrot come out, as though they had not been processed at all. What a horror I felt to see that - my body was just processing all the plain sugar I was consuming from candy, cake and Coke, and using that for my energy supply, and meanwhile all the good stuff was just passing through my body almost untouched.

I finally gave in on the third day in the afternoon. I went to a Thai restaurant, and had a small amount of rice with my curry. But another learning was in store for me - how different the food tasted. The flavor with this particular restaurant is always good, but this time the flavors were beautifully intense. My tongue had not tasted sugar in three days, so I could appreciate the food better, in a way. Interesting theory.

This diet was torture, and since I had done this as an experiment, I had learned the lesson. While not as bad as some other people I know, my body is definitely addicted to sugar, and it is not healthy. Going off it was good as an experiment, though probably not one I want to repeat in a long time. I had originally thought to do it first myself, then force my beloved to do it, but I don't think I have the heart to do that. 

Instead, we will do the bean diet. Hopefully that will be more fun than the sugar detox; I have had good feedback about it.

Alien Thoughts

Much has been written about the structure of the universe, of nature, of matter itself. And a lot focuses too on the nature of life and whether it exists outside the earth we know and love. Through all these discussions and debates, it's pretty remarkable how our theories are tinged with a self-righteous sense of arrogance. 

Early religious cosmologies held that the earth was the center of the universe, because what arrangement could be more perfect? It was religious heresy to argue otherwise. Copernicus, who suggested that a heliocentric solar system made sense with our observations as opposed to a geocentric system, published his ideas in secret. Galileo, who used a telescope to observe that moons orbit other planets (and not the earth), was forced to publicly recant his theories. Kepler was luckier and supported heliocentrism openly, though he was careful not to step on too many religious toes. Through all this, note the intense resistance to the idea that we are not at the center of the solar system and the universe. 

We dropped this idea and replaced it with the general theory of relativity. And the next hot topic is who else exists in the world with us. It's a topic that has gained a lot of treatment in movies, TV shows, comics, cartoons, novels and short stories. And incredibly, we see the same arrogance in all these media, wherever the idea is expressed. 

One prime example of this arrogance is how all these creatures are depicted as being humanoid, with human attributes. Why would we ever assume that alien creatures will be humanoid? Probably because we think that life elsewhere in the universe would develop the way it did on earth. Is this reasonable? Maybe. There is an inherent bias towards the idea, because it's the only way of developing life that we know of. But how probable is this?

How did life develop on earth? It started with the primeval soup, from which arose self-replicating organisms, which diversified and consolidated to form the several kingdoms of life we see today. Conditions had to be just right for life to rise and survive - distance from the sun, composition of the atmosphere, the presence of water, the speed of light, laws of physics, so on and so forth. With the billions of stars and star systems that exist in the known universe, it's quite feasible that one of them will have conditions exactly like our primeval soup, with all the right conditions to produce life. But why assume this is the only initial state that will lead to life? If there is a different initial state that can lead to life, that life form could be very different from what we (carbon-based and self-replicating) are.

Even if a primeval soup existed elsewhere which gave rise to self-duplicating creatures like we are, why assume that the "humans" on that planet are the ones who will ultimately survive? Through the ages, an incredibly wide variety of species have developed within each kingdom. Our species wasn't even the top dog until between 2 and 3 million years ago (compared with 4.6 billion years of earth's existence). Reptiles dominated for a long time, chiefly the large-boned, muscular variety whose brains couldn't develop much beyond "eat food, catch meat". They were mostly killed off 65 million years ago, which paved the way for mammals to diversify and become dominant. 

If aliens are humanoid, are we trying to say that whatever planet they come from also went through all these developments? That they too had dinosaurs who died out and allowed humans to flourish? For all you know, it could be the fish or the mushrooms who are the dominant species. 

The next idea is of course, such humanoids exist, and they have developed technology far more sophisticated that what we've produced. And that these alien humanoids will want to kill us and take over our planet.  

Of all the thousands of species that have lived and died out through the history of earth, only one has developed enough self-awareness to study the laws of physics. How likely is this to have happened on some other planet? Remember, they have to first survive ice ages, dinosaurs and asteroids. 

The fear of conquest by aliens arises, I think, from our observations of our own species. Human civilizations have battled each other, conquered one another, with devastating consequences for the losers of the war. Hence we imagine that an alien civilization would want to do the same with us, if they won the war against us. This is essentially us attributing human tendencies to aliens, who may or may not have developed the capacity for such things. Bacteria don't have emotions. Why would aliens?  

An alternate idea suggests aliens are among us, shape shifting to blend into the crowd, mating with our kind, essentially mingling in. How this might actually work is never discussed. There is also a huge market for horror movies showing humans as incubatory vessels for alien babies. 

Our earth produced carbon-based life-forms. Carbon works because with a valency of four, it is tempted neither to gain nor to lose electrons, but to form perfectly covalent bonds between atoms. Structure-wise, the tetrahedral shape formed by the four bonds per atom is pretty stable. Silicon has the same general properties, being just below carbon in the periodic table, which is why it works well for artificial body parts and implants, with the added advantage that it's easier to manipulate than carbon. It would make sense that alien civilizations are either carbon or silicon-based, but why would they have the exact same anatomy as us, allowing for mating or incubation? We can't even mate with other primates from earth. 

My personal opinion? Any aliens that come to earth will probably be some kind of virus. They will probably be as weird as, if not weirder than, mushrooms. And they will probably end up killing us, but not because they want to; it will just be a by-product of their existence.

Boyle's Law

I remember my high school chemistry teacher, Dr. T. S. Lakshmi.

She is the one that insisted we use logic. The most important lesson we ever learnt - use logic to determine the answer, and you will know the answer. From a high school lecture, that lesson has diffused into every aspect of my being, and defined my personality. One that I am proud of.

She is the one that made us all wake up, no matter how sleepy we felt. I remember feeling drowsy and tired through the day, but the moment the bell rang for the Chemistry period, I'd wake up instantly. Because I knew everyday that today I would be drafted to answer a question.

She put us through the Socrates method of teaching. Ask questions. Of course, there was a twist to it - we'd get asked questions as well, so that we would be forced to think. Her lessons demonstrated who were truly the smart kids in the class.

She taught us the value of examples. No answer in the exam received points if there wasn't a good example attached to it. It seemed purely pedantic at the time, but so ingrained is that attitude, it persists today, eight years later. And it has served me well. I attach working examples to as many customer questions that I answer as possible, and I receive back a lot of very grateful comments and effusive surveys.

And every time that I boil anything on my stove, I remember her. The reason being that I always boil liquids in a vessel that's covered, because that will make them boil faster.

What happens is, when you heat a liquid, it will create vapours that diffuse into the air above the liquid. By covering the vessel, you trap those vapours and leave them with nowhere to go. Thus trapped, they will build up and generate pressure, which gets exerted back on the surface of the liquid, causing it to heat faster (Boyle's law) and create more vapours. If you leave the vessel uncovered, the vapours are free to escape, so they will not exert as much pressure on the liquid. Covering the vessel thus leads to faster boiling. I remember she mentioned this specifically in our lesson that day - to go home and ask our parents if they had ever observed faster boiling when leaving the vessel uncovered.

Thusly did she teach, with meaning and relevance, and thusly do I remember most of my chemistry lessons, though I have never had to touch the textbooks in eight years.

I observe Boyle's law every day, when I cook. And every day, I remember that lesson from 9th grade, and my gratitude towards my dear teacher increases.

Random Thought: Centre of the Universe

They looked at me like I was crazy.

"Wow, you're centre of the universe, aren't you? The world just revolves right around you."

"Well, I wouldn't say the world revolves around me. But you're right, I am the centre of my universe." They stared. "It's logical." They stared more.

"Logical."

"Yup."

"Would you like to elaborate on that?"

"Sure. If the universe is infinitely large and expanding fast in all directions to boot, from my perspective, in the limit to infinity, the edges of the universe are equidistant from me. And if they are equidistant, then no matter what the shape of the universe, I am at its centre.

"So there you go, I am most certainly at the centre of my universe."

The senior ones smiled. "Well, can't argue with that."