How cyanide kills?

I was wondering how cyanide kills so fast.

I did some google search and found that it kills by depriving organisms of ATP and oxygen. 

CN ions bind to cytochrome enzyme in mitochondria and turns off production of ATP. Cells die without energy [which include heart and brain cells]. It also deprives cells of oxygen by preferentially binding to Heamoglobin over oxygen, so it ends up transporting CN

It explains quite a bit of details:

http://publications.drdo.gov.in/gsdl/collect/defences/index/assoc/HASH016b/2155e82b.dir/doc.pdf

 

Google transliteration in Google search!

It is beautiful!
Now google search supports google transliteration. Apart from being amazing innovation, it is a great service to people in countries like India speaking Tamil, Malayalam, Hindi etc.
e.g. if you type a it shows அம்மா etc.
You have to change your locale to Tamil or appropriate language for this to work.
Great job, Google - hats off!

கூகிள் தேடலில் இப்பொழுது ஆங்கில மொழியில் டைப்பிங் செய்தால் தமிழ் வார்த்தைகள் வரும்!
கூகிள் நல்ல வேலை செய்துள்ளது!

ഗൂഗിള്‍ സീര്ച്ചില്‍ ഇംഗ്ലീഷില്‍ ടൈപ്പ് ചെയ്താല്‍ തമിള്‍ വാക്കുകള്‍ സജ്ജെശന്‍ വരും!
മലയാളത്തില്‍ ഇന്നും തുടങ്ങിയിട്ട് ഇല്ല! വേഗം തുടങ്ങും എന്നും കരുതാം.
ഗൂഗിള്‍ എക്ഷ്സെല്ലെന്ട് പണി ചെയ്ദിട്ടുണ്ട്!

Most irrational number

Yes - there is such a thing as most irrational number.
Here is a nice article from american mathematical society:
http://www.ams.org/featurecolumn/archive/irrational1.html
You will be even more surprised to know it is none other than golden ratio. As you may already know it has relations to fibonacci numbers.

Jefferson and Sally

http://polaris.icmb.utexas.edu/CH391L/Handouts/Jeff2.pdf

Interesting story about the love affair between the president and His african american slave and its proof 2 centuries later.

Amazing power of DNA!

Also a lesson on human frailities of even Great leaders,

Isn't it obvious all races are equal? [That is a man of different race could make Sally a mother!]

Emphatic proof, Human races are not sub species or anything!

That doesn't mean there are no cultural differences, though - there are enough differences between even South and North india, or even Kerala and Tamil Nadu.

So it could be very hard for an African or European [or descendants - like in America] girl to live for life with me or for me to live with an European or African girl! It is because culture shapes us much more than for other animals. Given that either side has a lot of choice, I wouldn't be willing to risk an experiment [Even leaving aside the fact I am in love with my cousin].

Add to that nutritional differences! With 1.75 m I am not in serious danger of being followed by African or European Girls!

For human height, With 1.65 m average in India and 1.78 m in US! For females it is even worse, with 1.52 m and 1.64 m respectively.

In fact my cousin is only 1.55 m and I am already too tall for her:)

Dr.Watson's recent comment about Africans not being as Intelligent and similar views are totally BS! Aren't we all Africans in a way?

Is he saying we are not that intelligent, then? Maybe there is some truth in it, given world wars, hitler, religious fanticism, spiritualism etc.!

That said, His views on something doesn't take away anything from his Greatness - He discovered DNA.

But I don't like him the way I like say Newton.

But I would still respect him. He is entitled to his opinion. But his organisation [Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory] did the right thing in removing him from a position, where he would be expected to make an impartial, race neutral decisions and given his views it would be impossible for him to do that.

[I am reminded of many Indian brahmin scientists who still cling to brahmin supremacy in intelligence!]

Dirac equation for electron in layman terms!

What Great Dirac simply did was to take the square root of

He did this simply by assuming this to be equal to square of this

which could only be solved if A, B etc. are matrices because AB= -BA and so on!

more over we can get 4 such matrices only if we go to 4 dimension. There are not enough matrices to go in lesser dimensions.
that's it - it is just a matter of finding these 4 matrices of size 4x4.

But implications are amazing - we get electron spin as well as anti - electron!

Pure beauty of mathematics!

Why we see in visible light?

I was wondering why we see in visible light?

By that I didn't mean why we see in "visible" light instead of "invisible" light! Whatever we see is visible light, by definition.

What I mean is why we see in the range 380 to 750 nm?

for example, our eye could have been sensitive to another portion of Electro magnetic spectrum For example, infra red could have been red, red could have been orange etc. and we don't see violet at all or the other way around.

That is the spectrum could have been 450 to 820 nm.

so what is special about visible part?
it is something special for we earth dwellers.
1. Sun's temperature being close to 6000K its blackbody radiation peaks at this range.
2. Earth's atmosphere has some set of Electromagnetic radiation windows with optical window with this same range being one of them.
This link explains more:
http://www.iop.org/EJ/article/0031-9120/42/1/002/pe7_1_002.pdf?request-id=274078a3-1121-4070-893f-5aabf8d9e489

A cute little fact is rattlesnakes have "eye" to see in infrared - to catch animals like us who radiate in infrared.
So if our sun were to peak in different wavelength range and our earth were to be atmosphere-less [or of different composition] we would be seeing different visible light!
Of course we would be seeing only visible light, by definition!

A beautiful equation

e^i pi + 1 = 0
What a beauty of an equation is this - connects so many fundamental mathematical constants - 0, 1, pi , i and e.
It says all profound concepts in mathematics is fundamentally interconnected.
But I don't like Euler because of his God's existence "proof".

Tragic Logarithmic spiral

Path of an insect flying to a candle is a logarithmic spiral.
It's defining property is angle to the line from centre [candle] and tangent of insect path [instantenous direction of velocity] is constant.
r = ae^bt
t - is an angle.
The reason is they are used to doing this from old times when only sun and moon was there, in which case it led to straight line path.
Unfortunately not anymore, after this species called homo sapiens usurped the planet.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Logarithmic_spiral

prepare this blank disc in vista

I got this irritating prepare blank disc message with DVDs.
This link solved the problem for me. Goto device manager -> uninstall and 'scan for hardware changes'
http://www.copadata.it/forums/showthread.php?t=239

Nice Daniel Dennett video about consciousness

I don't generally read or listen to philosophy if I can avoid - as I would very much prefer something actionable [a.k.a useful]- science or mathematics.
But this one is Good:
The Magic of Consciousness
It seems Daniel Dennett and John Searle [of chinese room fame] are changing by idea of philosophy.

standard model of particle physics

To me standard model looks so ugly. It looks like so many things thrown around with no conceptual coherence.
Compare this to something like newton's gravity, maxwell equations or relativity.
It makes me stop reading physics, if this is the real explanation for things.
It looks like the Mendelev's periodic table without the explanation in terms of electron orbitals.

layman intuition of finite automata [regular expression]

A finite automata [or regular expression proper] is one which has no notion of 'n' with in it
it has no memory.
the things it solves can't be f(n) -
e.g aaaa ... ntimes followed by bbbbb ... n times
a^n b^n
can't be recognized by Finite automata - because it has no 'n'. it can understand only a constant notion in some sense.
It has to represent all the info. with in its state which should be finite [but can be very huge]. hence finite automata - compared to a machine with a stack [Pushdown automata] or general memory [turing machine].

So remember regex [proper - what is called regex in say C# is not regex proper]- no 'n'

how to play flv files

that is outside browser - I had to do this to play a video at

http://www.mindscience.org/OxfordDebate.html#videos

fullscreen.

http://www.afterdawn.com/guides/archive/how_to_play_flv_files.cfm

in summary install a codec and a splitter

Google books

It is a great effort from Google.
The other day I read "einstein's - relativity special and general theory" from Google books.
Also it is easier to read from screen sometimes than holding books.
I can watch say bbc news on the side in the same screen.
I don't know what they gain from this.
But a great effort nevertheless.

flash player fullscreen slow

To fix this right click to goto settings and uncheck the box saying "enable hardware accelaration"

Real numbers!

Or dedekind complete ordered field - yes that is the mathematical definition of real numbers!!
This link is very good and explains it very beautifully in accessible fashion:
http://www.math.vanderbilt.edu/~schectex/courses/thereals/
It explains the contents of Robert Bartle's real analysis book in a single page. Author has some talent in explaining hard things to people!
Real numbers are not so real after all. They are mathematical constructs as much as say complex numbers.
So we have no reason to expect real riemannian manifolds will explain the universe [spacetime] - In my thinking it should be discrete.

strange maps!

http://strangemaps.wordpress.com/

very nice website! contains interesting maps, giving perspectives big articles won't give! Some funny too!

281 - Holmes, Sweet Holmes: A Floorplan of 221B Baker Street

286 - The New World Order (1942)

etc.

America, the great!

Detention Camp Remains, but Not Its Legal Rationale
By WILLIAM GLABERSON
Published: June 13, 2008

Despite the Supreme Court’s decision stripping the legal premise behind the Guantánamo Bay detention center, it will not close today or any day soon.

Gives very big reason to be proud of America and its people!

They have the backbone to stand up to the administration's abuses.

what is the use of [pure] science?

and mathematics?
OK - what is the use of Music? I can see no material benefit out of it. So why do people spend so much time listening to it?
1. It brings happiness
2. It fills time in nice way
3. It is really beautiful and sublime
4. It helps to attract mates, if you have [or pretend to have] musical talent

Well, Mathematics and science [physics and biology - not bogus science like psychology, social science] brings these benefits in a much higher level and plane except probably 4). But atleast in today's knowledge economy any modern mathematician can get a job [say as software engineer] and perform better than most of those professionals. So even 4) is true but in a non obvious way through the money it brings.
But forgetting 4), it serves first three in a much better way and in a much higher level.
1. I jumped for joy, when I learned integral calculus, because now I had a way to calculate the length any curve [not easy to integrate it even for simple cases like Ellipse though:)] , area of figure and volume of an object - That one of the time I was most happy in my life.
2. It takes a lot of time to learn Mathematics and physics. Try learning things like Complex numbers, Topology, relativity.
3. Euler's theorem of e^ix= cosx+isinx - isn't this beautiful? it connects things which look so unrelated. what has sides of right triangles have to do with power of something? That to complex power.
or look at maxwell's derivation of c - speed of light purely from constants of coulumb's law and ampere's law. That is simply too beautiful.

And over and above, that is the only useful pursuit in the ultimate sense. Everything [useful] else is done for money and what is the point of money when I die? If Darwin's theory of evolution was not there [and Prof. Dawkins' selfish gene], I would still have been hurting my head doing sujud to a non existent entity following a 7th century liar [or mad?], trying to find meaning of life in Bullshit called Qur'an.
So before someone says science and mathematics is waste of time, say that a trillion times to Music and then you can say that a trillions times again to Music and then ...

Unsung heros and heroines of Kerala!

I am referring to the men who work in Gulf and their wives who live in Kerala [TamilNadu and other places - but mainly it is a phenomenon in Kerala]. Although local society looks at them with derision [mainly due to jealousy] for their alleged wealth - I think they live a very hard life. Thye are married and there for officially can't love anyone else and their loved ones are far away. Each dealing with their problems in a lonely way. They have to keep their emotions and biological instincts in artificial check, there by becoming psychologically stressed to say the least.
But because their pain and stress is mostly psychological, society has a hard time understanding it. But it doesn't make it any less real.
My parents have been this way for 17 years! So I know what I am talking about.
They are heros [and heroines] because they have the mental fortitude to bear this and work for their family. How many men runaway or don't care about their family? How many are actually abusive [mainly due to drinking]?
BTW, alcohol is something in which we would do well not to emulate western society - it is a drug and worse than many other drugs like LSD, cannabis etc.
Only reason western society accepts it is for the same reason, most of our societies accept religion - history. But just like passing of years doesn't make Muhammed's [or any other "prophet" like Smith, Saibaba] lies truth, passing of years doesn't make Alcohol less harmful.
But we tend to make fun of western society for their alleged immorality in things like sexuality and materialism, I would argue western society is surely advanced in terms of morals as to accept all races and religions [atleast grudgingly] compared to our untouchability among our own religion. As for sexuality I would be uncomfortable with their culture [due to my upbringing], but it is more closer to human nature than our expectation of perfect monogamy for life. As for materialism [in the form of science at least] is removing the suffering of lot of people in the form of agricultural revolution, electricity, medicine and positively gives happiness to atleast some people like me in the form of mathematics and physics - [I would ]. Our mysticism and spiritualism [euphemism for superstition] didn't do anything for humanity and did some harm by making people neglect their family [malayalees remember the movie, Chinta vistaya shyamala?]

We would do well not to follow westerners in Alcohol and they would do well not to follow us in spritualism and religion!

world population!

http://www.census.gov/main/www/popclock.html

It feels so great to know I am one in 667,04,82,626 !! I feel so great and significant to feel I am one in 667 crores!

Equation in Microsoft Word

I wrote the equation in my post using MS word 2007. It is very very useful. I will recommend it. But has still long way to go.

circumference of an ellipse!

Somehow I never thought about the circumference of an ellipse.

Oh what is there to think about? It is one of the "kid" curves our ancestors figured out, right?Although I am an Indian, most likely my ancestors too - not just Greeks - at any rate it is not as complicated as exponentials and logarithms which form the basis of decimal system - anyone remember having problems with carry in addition in their second standard? [include me as your brethern]

Of course figuring out length of the curve is the most simplest thing taught to me 13-14 years ago at which time of course I sort of cursed myself, that I didn't figure such a simple thing myself - it is just pythogoras thorem

dr^2 = dx^2 + dy^2
and of course I want to find r from dr just integrate over it, so simple ah?
Anyway to come back to main story - Yesterday after reading about classical mechanics and then just to relax I was reading Dawkins' God delusion - [A very good book BTW to give to your religious friends] and somehow my attention turned to earth's orbit and I was thinking why would people think orbit should be circle, especially if it is very improbable configuration among all ellipses. Then I wondered what is the average velocity with which we fly through the space.

It is simply our [earth's] orbit length divided by 365 days! But I didn't know orbit length.

But I knew it is an ellipse - So I wanted to calculate the circumference of the ellipse.
So I duly wrote the equation
x^2/a^2+y^2/b^2=1
and started integrating
sqrt(1+(dy/dx)^2) dx
I didn't even have a hint of what is coming. So I got a nasty expression in terms of x and y s and I thought converting into parameteric form may be easier to solve.
I set x= acos(theta)
...
to cut a long story short
I ended up at

and whatever I do I couldn't solve it. Then today I came and looked on the net [cheating] for circumference of ellipse and sure enough they stop here too and call it 'complete elliptic [obviously] integral of second kind'

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ellipse

it has only an infinite series solution and an approximation by Ramanujan!
Sometimes things we take for granted turn out to be so complex!

what the heck is [electron] spin?

This is the kind of thing which drives me nuts in quantum mechanics.
What is this spin with values like h*/2?
electron doesn't rotate on its own axis, right? So what is the meaning of this angular momentum? I know only the I x W
why it behaves like angular momentum if it is not one?
and the misnomer spin totally trips me off.
Really if someone claims he understands QM, what is this thing? [forget uncertainty principle etc.]

principle of least action

Actually principle of extremal action - why should it be true?
Meaning in the ultimate sense - why should universe follow it? not in the sense we can derive newton's 2nd law from this.
what is this thing called action?

I can [sort of] understand energy, force, displacement etc. What is this? It looks like ultimate cooked up thing.

atleast hamiltonian H [in conserved case], I can think of as energy.

But what is this Lagrangian?
[I know QM generalises it to all the paths. So least action is just special case - but still what is it, that it is generalising?]

தமிழ் unicode mapping

தமிழ் எழுத்துகளின் UNICODE எண்கள்!

http://unicode.org/charts/PDF/U0B80.pdf

man's unique trait!

I was thinking about religion and belief in supernatural.

I think hope and fear and this belief in supernatural is what I would define as the distinguishing feature of man.

No animal [other than man!] has this supernatural hope and unexplainable, meaningless fear bordering on paranoia.

More than rationality, I think irrationality and supernatural belief defines us as human beings!

[That is my reason to think, robots will never be human beings - they will be too perfect and too intelligent to be irrational - our brain makes "us" .

I am my brain. rest is appendage.

- Sherlock holmes

Our quest for spirituality defines us as human beings. In a sense our limitation in bruteforce arithmetic differentiates us from computers.

We are a product of our unique evolution! Even if another alien consciousness has evolved somewhere in the universe, it may not necessarily have these traits, because our "limitations" [spirituality etc.] may be very unique to us. It is very unlikely it traces the same evolutionary path, particularly with respect to flaws - I am sure it will evolve eye. But I am not so sure it will evolve religion!

I am not advocating belief in sai baba and all that nonsense. I would rather have knowledge than happiness! I am fine being Atheist but I don't think I am happy as one [exactly because of my evolution, I would think!].

That is not to say religion is harmless. How many poor people commit suicide bombing in the belief there is heaven and hoories! Sai baba and other exploitations are due to that too. Galileo faced all the problems because of religion.

A world full of hard rational atheists may not be very different from intelligent robots and not very intersting!

DONT install IE8 beta

It is very hard to get rid of [you will want to almost as soon as you install it]
It is very unstable and crashes and once took the OS with it.

The worst thing is IE is now integrated into vista it is stupidly complex to replace IE8 with IE7. you can't delete files in IE directory because so many processes seem to load it.

I wasted so much time because of it.

This link might help, if you installed it anyway
http://www.mydigitallife.info/2008/03/07/how-to-uninstall-windows-internet-explorer-8-ie8-in-vista/

Article about food and global crisis!

He discusses about how biofuel and excessive meat in developed countries is screwing people around the world.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2008/apr/15/food.biofuels

Food crisis!

Grains Gone Wild
By PAUL KRUGMAN
Published: April 7, 2008
How did the food crisis happen? The answer is a combination of long-term trends, bad luck — and bad policy.

BTW, in india [as in many other countries] inflation is going up as well!

Note that bio ethanol actually screwing things up!

Frobenius series!

The other day I learned about frobenius series method to solve differential equations.
It was like flying in heaven! Nice and common sense way to solve.
Try solving one of legendre or lagurre differential equations with this method. You will absolutely love it.

http://www.physics.miami.edu/~nearing/mathmethods/ode.pdf

Why animals die, but plants live forever?

I am just wondering what is it that makes animals die while plants seem to live forever. Why doesn't plant have "lethal genes"? Why don't they age [in the negative sense - wrinkles, menopause etc.] -
For example, is it hearts and brains - which are worth having despite them being prone to failure? Plants don't have either of them - their vascular system works through specialized cells passing on materials up and down [like construction workers passing bricks as opposed to water flow through pipes]. If they are prone to failure why are they so in the first place? Why can't heart cells and nerve cells be replaced [like the cells of trees "year rings"]? Or is it due to clogging of pipes [blood vessels]?

Particularly menopause as standard behaviour [instead of recessive] is very confusing! Why would evolution evolve this behaviour? Particularly see the effect it has on highly career oriented women - [not in any derogatory sense - it is their choice, although I would never marry such a woman myself]!

Why I like US!

I won't mention obvious differences due to it being a developed country compared to say India or Egypt with its infrastructure, freedom, democracy etc.

Following are I think pretty unique to US in no particular order:

1. Best people from a lot of countries are here - Atleast they had the energy to getup and take the struggle of immigration, compared to average TV watching, easy go population and at best they are really the very best of the countries like India, China etc.
2. It has no [single] identity called american - which leads to easier integration into american "identity" and unbelievable tolerance [compare the situation in India where 2 villages fight with each other, 2 castes fight with each other, 2 religions fight with each other etc.]
3. People here, really work hard [but not as crazy as Japanese] say compared to Europe. If all countries were like EU countries - [breastfeeding the populace, 30 hours work, killing the enterpreneaurial spirit and competition - (we can't run so we will penalize you for running fast)], humanity will stagnate and die away in a few generations.
I think US strikes right balance here.
4. US companies provide employment for a lot of world population compared to any other country directly [Most of the other countries are overwhelmingly dominated by natives] or indirectly [how many have been lifted out of poverty in China through say walmart goods]
5. It has world's best universities - Science and technology is easily humanity's single most important achievement - for example that feeds burgeoning population in India and explains how I am here through Evolution - art, literature etc. comes in long after essentials are met.

Only country I can think of matching US in a small scale is Britain.

The Pleasure of Finding Things Out

The Pleasure of Finding Things Out

by Richard Feynman!

Nice video - light non-technical!

Mathematics education!

Lockhart's Lament

Nice article by a mathematician!

Lasik Surgery

Lasik Surgery: When the Fine Print Applies to You
By ABBY ELLIN
Published: March 13, 2008
After undergoing Lasik sugery, most patients are quite satistfied. But all surgery carries a risk.

Relative harm of various drugs!

Yes - Alcohol is #5 on the list compared to LSD, cannabis or ecstasy!

Why complex vector space inner product is defined with conjugate symmetry?

If you don't use conjugate but simple symmetry it will produce a contradiction with the axiom X . X >= 0

assume X.Y = Y. X

X.X >=0

=> c1 X . c1 X >= 0 [where c1 is a complex number with an imaginary part]

=> c1 (c1 X . X) > = 0 by linearity

=> c1 (X . c1 X) > = 0 by symmetry

=> c1 . (c1 ( X. X) )>= 0 by linearity

=> (c1 . c1) . (X.X) > = 0 by associativity of complex numbers

which is a contradiction.

to see this, if you take c1 = i [square root of -1]

=> -1 (X.X) >= 0

=> (X.X) <= 0

cool, right?

Ceasarian section video!

Evolution videos in Google videos

There are nice set of videos in Google videos about Evolution - MUST see:

Evolution - Episode 3 -- "Extinction"

PBS Nova Evolution Episode number three (3), maned "Extinction" Documentary. (3rd out of 7)

what is it that curves?

in space-time, if it is curved?

http://groups.google.com/group/sci.physics.relativity/browse_thread/thread/58b7fdd4c2fe76a7/df5523c610dade45

helicopter costs 18M dollars!

Didn't know helicopter is this expensive!
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AH-64_Apache

Uninstalling visual studio quickly!

I needed to reinstall it:
It helped [because normal uninstall is very slow]:
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/907965

WHAT HAVE YOU CHANGED YOUR MIND ABOUT?

This site has nice answers to this question by eminent thinkers of our time.
http://edge.org/q2008/q08_1.html

God Created The Integers

God Created The Integers: The Mathematical Breakthroughs That Changed History

Edited by Stephen Hawking

it is one of the most beautiful books [or rather collection] I read. It has great works from all the mathematicians! you really come to understand what people like Euclid, Archimedes or Descartes did!

what is the big deal about drawing to straight lines at right angles and calling them x and y respectively, right?

You will really appreciate how intelligent ancients [India, Greece etc.] were.

Must have for every mathematics or science enthusiast!

Vista system restore!

Vista system restore works like charm!

I totally screwed up my tablet by fooling around with registry using autoruns.exe from sysinternals to cleanup unwanted startup programs.

afterwards my display got totally screwed up. Reinstalling video driver won't solve the problem.

I simply used vista system recovery -> system restore to restore the version earlier to my screw up.

Lo and behold - everything came back to normal!

Great lecture for kids by Richard Dawkins!

If I were to have a girl I would show this to her as soon as she can understand:

'Growing Up in the Universe' Ep 1: Waking Up in the Universe