Self Certified Genius of the World

I have been doing some thinking recently on the corruption rampant in India. Why is nobody doing anything about it ? It is not that we lack the infrastructure to deal with it. Far from it. What we lack is in my opinion the will to police it. So, the real question is why are we not policing it ? After much thought on this matter, I have come to the conclusion that till now corruption was in the National security interest. Till now. Recent events tell us that it has lost that quality and hence, corruption will become punishable once again. Let me explain. Fig 1. Fictitious 'National average bribe taken' around the time of 1993 Bombay blasts. Imagine you are responsible for finding out terrorist or insurgency activities. How would you go about it ? You cannot have information about all the citizens of any country at your disposal. So, the easier way out is to have some kind of statistical test which will predict if terrorist activity is going to happen soon. How would you do that ...

      I submitted my thesis today, and strangely I feel sad. I do not feel happy or even relieved. When I started my PhD, I thought by the end of it, I will feel like Norgay or Hillary and be on top of the world. I thought it would be a great success, and something never attempted before. But alas, all I feel is what Andy Dufresne might have felt like after escaping the Shawshank prison. My whole PhD has been nothing but a prison for my scientific spirit, incarcerated for all the wrong reasons. The writing of the thesis has been nothing less than Andy's escape from prison, crawling through 200 metres of sewerage. At the end of itall I feel is, "Well... I am free, now I have to bathe and cleanse my system to start afresh". Those are my thoughts exactly. At this end of the PhD, I feel like a fool undergoing all the stupidity and mediocrity. What meaning is left in PhD, I wonder.       I am sick and tired of it, and I do hope the damn thing gets accepted. Well, even if it i...

Hmmm, this has been a long time coming. At first I thought I will call this as “Was Jesus Christ an Atheist ?”. But then decided that maybe he was not. Maybe there is more than that to it otherise people would not follow him so blindly. So, before we go on, I would like to quote some guy on the internet who describes Christianity as: Christianity, noun: The belief that a cosmic Jewish Zombie who was his own father can make you live forever if you symbolically eat his flesh and telepathically tell him you accept him as your master, so he can remove an evil force from your soul that is present in humanity because a rib-woman was convinced by a talking snake to eat from a magical tree Ahem ahem. Well, when told in that way it does seem pretty stupid, and that is the important thing here. For example, what if I were to tell you, that I am the son of god, and ask you to rub Vicks vaporub on your chest, drinking neat scotch whiskey every night praying to me and you will ge...

       I guess there is a time in everyone's life when they write one or two poems. This phase is usually seen around teenage when the filmy hype surrounding poet romantics grips your imagination and you want to join the bandwagon. I had my own disastrous romance periods. In one of my fantastic failures, I tried to come up with a poem for my school time crush Meenakshi while travelling in a bus towards her home on her birthday. I did manage to cook something up but well, it was not upto the mark. I hope no copy of such a disaster remains today. In another, I tried to justify my crush on her and tried to philosophise about it, and predict the future of our romance. This work was done in utmost secrecy and I do not remember any of it, except something about chariots of passion, love, infatuation and some such bull crap. Remembering them has the curious effect of turning my ears scarlet red even today.        But, there is one poe...

20th Jan, 2030 I woke up today feeling invigorated. Maybe it has something to do with the excellent mattress I recently bought. Never thought it could make a big difference. Me and wife had a healthy discussion about work today at breakfast, we both work on similar things. Anyways, it had been a long time since we worked on any diseases, so we decided to design a drug for a disease. Seems like amoebiasis is back in a big way. Back when I was in school, I was suspected to have it so well, there is a personal connection. So, like good scientists, me and the wife started our computer, and pulled down all papers published between 2000 - 2030 on amoebiasis. Well, there is a lot going on, which we never come to know. Fortunately, we had a fairly generous grant from Bajaj Research Foundation couple of years ago, so we went ahead and bought ourselves a SynopsisMaker. Damn, my core nano 10 is so slow. Only 36 cores.... well, its time to upgrade. Anyways, I guess by tonight the synopsis ...

This is a test blog to see if image alignment etc is fine or not in the blog. These are files generated by OKDMol, a program I am writing since I am not very happy with the available softwares for viewing PDB files. This is a work in progress, and the final version will have all the features that I have been wanting in a PDB viewer. As of now, OKDMol is dependent on POVRAY, but I plan to write my own renderer soon to make things easy for me and also discard all the extraneous stuff that POVRAY has which I will not be using. Now, on to what I have done so far. The first one is a standard VDW view : Fig 1. VDW view of a PDB file showing the colors used for various atoms. C (grey), N (Blue), O (Red), H (White) and S (Yellow). I think the VDW view has more depth than images drawn in other softwares. I will work on improving it further. Next is a VDW with a HETATM (Cu) shown exaggerated. Note the copperish appearance of the HETATM. I plan to do that for all HETATM, and make it even more coo...