Project … hunted !

When you think like ‘how-to-do, when-to-do, why-to -do’ before ‘what-to-do’, you’re in a total mess. Gotta venture first with something in mind, and then only you see new avenues opening up one after another.

My one-and-a-half-yr long project seems to be settled. By a very happy turn of events, it’s the ‘deadly’ combination of me and Tamoghna, a fellow bio-olympiad  camper, currently in the Kolkata medical clg, on something called microchimerism. In the gestation period, through the placental barrier some cells from the mother’s body get transferred to the baby, and vice-versa, and what is astounding that some of them always flout the stringent immune barrier of the host body and survive and divide for the host’s whole life. It has been seen to be ( positively and negatively ) linked to various immunological diseases, cancers etc. It’s a very new area in biological/ medical research, currently extensively worked upon. There are still huge gaps to be filled in the concept. We intend to focus upon the role of microchimerism in type-1 diabetes and cancer. Of course we won’t get any human subjects, have to work on lab animals.

The idea is still in preliminary stage, conceived only on Saturday (!?), after I ‘recommended’ an article on it to Tamoghna and he liked it. Getting a lab won’t be a problem, but getting the animals will be, … and of course, getting mentors. This is the time to utilize our connections. Especially need to consult  specialists in Immunology, Endocrinology and Oncology.

It’s a long journey, with many a barriers that lie in the unknown road. But most importantly, the journey has begun, and we’ll reach somewhere. I am no longer fretting  over the pros and cons of this and that, that’s th good thing.

The project hunter

” Think of a project and do it.” -

very easy to say, eh ? But, to think of a subject that might be of interest, without knowing the background and the amount of work already done on it, it is quite tough. “And also, preferably, you shouldn’t go to a professor and ask him to choose it for you”, that makes it more of a headache. So now, i am frantically searching for a project that i can do in the coming months. Maybe, some ideas are looking of interest ( priority-wise ) …

1. They say the probability distribution of human blood pressure ( both systolic and diastolic ) is lognormal ( i.e. log of the dist. of b.p. is normal. ) what is the cause for such a distribution ?

2. Splines look an interesting topic in numerical methods. Is there any possible project on splines ?

3. The class of functions called singular functions also seems interesting.

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Also, for summer, in bio, apart from some lab experiments have got an idea, but don’t know that is something profound or not … has a very high probability of being something silly, naive idea !

Horse of the Water, or WHITE ELEPHANT ?

Yes, I am talking about the warship INS Jalashva, the second largest ‘warship’ to the Indian Navy’s arsenal. How on Earth we still think of ourselves inferior than the powers-that-be, when we claim to be an emerging superpower in the world, with ‘astounding growth rates’? Was it really necessary to buy ship that has long been decommissioned by the US navy, that also on literally unacceptable terms, ‘can’t use the ship in warfare’, and the permission to the US to use it as and when they wish ? If we can make the INS Viraat, the largest warship in the navy indigenously, then why should we buy a literally ‘abandoned’ ship with backward technologies ? Surely India is not that technologically backward. Logic defies this move, and it seems some vested personal interests are involved, when you know it was bought after only a hasty visual investigation.

An alternative ending to the Long Bad Australian Summer, eh?

It’s long been sort of a ‘tradition’ of the Australian team, — every summer, bring foreign team, get them minimal acclimatization, with practice matches against lowly domestic teams, and before they get the hang of things even minimally, they are 1-0 down in the 4-test series against the ‘Gods-of-Cricket’ home team, losing cheaply in the Boxing Day test. By the time the test series ends, the confidence meter of the visitors runs in negative. And after routing in the prelim matches of the long ODI tri-series, the tired and shattered lot would have no desire to win left in the multiple ‘finals’, they would only want to return home. A well-planned arrangement to provide quality amusement to the summer-holiday home crowd, and to bolster averages of home players. And also, everyone knows that the Australian cricket board can NOT make such an itinerary, tailormade to their own requirements, without any bias from the ICC.

And behold, the tradition is broken. The indication was clear from the Indian team’s  last tour, especially in the test series, though they were outplayed in the ODIs. But this time, it’s win-win. Any rational person would call it a moral victory for the Indian team in the tests, after the Sydney test fiasco. And now, in the ODIs. Ours was the least experienced team of all the three teams, having only one of our famed batting quartet in it, and leading from the front a young gun with limited captaining experience at the international level. Still, the hosts were beaten on straight matches in the feared ‘finals’. All the ‘arrogance-personified’ players of the Australian team were hung their heads in shame after the last defeat. And the leader of the lot, Ponting, had to concede that they were simply outplayed in both the matches.
Now everyone down under is singing a different tune. The local media has at last understood that we people ARE tough nuts to crack. Now we do not just give the home team a chase for their money, we play to win, unlike the meek days of Azharuddin. Now India are the ‘Dada’. And hats off to the original Dada, of course, for he started all this ‘evolution’, … the controlled aggression bit, the passion, the exemplary team spirit in crisis, … everything.

P.S. Cricket Australia now accuses Bhajji called Haydos  a ‘liar’ and Gilly ‘no saint’, well, ‘an obnoxious little weed’ ( hayden said this of Bhajji ) is by no stretch of imagination more sober in calling names than ‘liar’.

Books et-cetera

At last, the Book Fair.

There has been much hullabaloo over it. The regular organizers are only a side-organizer this time. But the spirit is all the same. A considerable crowd on the second day, same old ‘adda’ on the fair grounds, same ‘jhari mara’, and importantly, all the big publishers galore.
It happened all of a sudden. A long drive to the fair on a sunny Sunday afternoon, then book-hunting, and ( of course ) book-shopping to heart’s content. One of my addictions. Anirban-daa, a 3rd yr medico ( a ‘gola’ guy and a die-hard potter fan ) with whom I was doing all the combing, bought a combined LOTR ( although he has the e-books, having a hard-copy is above everything. Especially reading all the LOTR on the comp is quite a herculean task! ) And on my ‘recommendation’ he bought the Bill Bryson book, ‘A Short History of Nearly Everything’. I think it is one of the all-time classics in popular science. For me, first of all, the book I was searching for a long time, ‘The Man Who Knew Infinity’, a nice biography of Ramanujan by Robert Kanigel. No doubt a collective book. Then the perennial ‘Selfish Gene’, and if you get it, then make sure you read Darwin’s ‘Origin of Species’ ( as advised to me by a RS in the insti ). And I bought a book I have no idea about, JD Watson’s ‘Double Helix’.

It was the fair’s second day only. Many stalls still incomplete, many books unpacked or unshelved. I didn’t find Amir Aczel’s book on Fermat’s Last Theorem. Instead I got the Simon Singh one. But it has very less technical info, suited best for the lay reader. Another book, Michio Kaku’s ‘Hyperspace’ caught my eyes.

And, to end it all, a long drive back home, with the late evening chill brushing your face, stopping by for dinner at a roadside dhaba. Just the stuff weekend dreams ( or dream weekends  ) are made of.