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Showing posts from April, 2012

'A Universe From Nothing' by Lawrence Krauss, AAI 2009

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Segre Lecture: How Did The Universe Begin?

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Dark Energy Rules the Universe

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Are We Ready For the Coming 'Age of Abundance?' - Dr. Michio Kaku (Full)

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Why Physics Ends the Free Will Debate

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Steven Pinker: Chalking it up to the blank slate

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Shawn Achor: The happy secret to better work: TED TALKS: documentary,lec...

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Class Day Lecture 2009: The Uniqueness of Humans

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Myth: You Have to be an Atheist to be a Scientist - MIT Prof. Troy Van V...

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Justice: What's The Right Thing To Do? Episode 01 "THE MORAL SIDE OF MUR...

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Justice: What's The Right Thing To Do? Episode 01 "THE MORAL SIDE OF MUR...

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Fritjof Capra: The Web of Life (excerpt) -- A Thinking Allowed DVD w/ Je...

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Fritjof Capra, The Systems View of Life

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frijof capra

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Tao_of_Physics
http://www.scienceandnonduality.com/

Robert Lanza on theory of Biocentrism

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Lawrence Krauss: Life, the Universe and Nothing

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The Psychology of Religion - Steven Pinker (I)

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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Synthetic_life
http://bigthink.com/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Upanishads
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swami_Vivekananda

chariots of fire...

Chariots of Fire is a 1981 British film . It tells the fact-based story of two athletes in the 1924 Olympics : Eric Liddell , a devout Scottish Christian who runs for the glory of God, and Harold Abrahams , an English Jew who runs to overcome prejudice. The film was written by Colin Welland and directed by Hugh Hudson . It was nominated for seven Academy Awards and won four, including Best Picture . It is ranked 19th in the British Film Institute 's list of Top 100 British films . The film's title was inspired by the line, "Bring me my chariot of fire," from the William Blake poem adapted into the popular British hymn "Jerusalem" ; the hymn is heard at the end of the film. [ 1 ] The original phrase "chariot(s) of fire" is from 2 Kings 2:11 and 6:17 in the Bible.

Chariots of fire - movie, we are all running towards......

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Richard Dawkins: An atheist's call to arms

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VS Ramachandran: The neurons that shaped civilization

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Michael Shermer - The Threat of Pseudoscience

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Deepak Chopra, Michael Shermer, Chapman University

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http://www.tedmed.com/home

Dean Ornish and Deepak Chopra at TEDMED 2009

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http://www.samharris.org/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atheism
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/carvaka
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advaita_Vedanta

craig venter institute

http://www.jcvi.org/

Upanishad Ganga : Trailer (Hindi)

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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bharat_Ek_Khoj
http://www.pbs.org/thestoryofindia/ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Story_of_India#Episode_2_-_.22The_Power_of_Ideas.22

codes:binary, ternary....so on

binary mode: 0,1 ternary mode:codons read in bases of 3.....ATC TGA GAT . . . higher modes:..? ...more complexity ....future of synthetic biology...what will be the properties of such a system
http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/the-new-brain/201204/religion-and-reason

evolution of human thought

evolution of human thought-human psychology/how the "mind" thinks-encompasses studying neuroscience i.e brain and behaviour and the various philosophies cultures, language ,religions, history of the world-these are all linked

ups and downs

success (what he expects) emboldens a person...fear of failure (what he does not expect) diminishes....until failure crops again....like a see-saw. only a person of steady thought process ( stithapragya-sanskrit-source-gita ) will be least  affected by this constant change. something inside one is not subject to change viewing the dynamism around and within.

climate and culture

do climatic differences...affect culture
http://thesciencenetwork.org/programs/the-science-reader/a-universe-from-nothing-why-there-is-something-rather-than-nothing

the science network site-thought provoking talks

http://thesciencenetwork.org/

systems perturbations

when a system is peturbed during a disease state some "interactions" get peturbed, others don't, i.e those that remain robust. inference: the disease state was caused/resulted in peturbed interactions. the peturbed interactions can be effective targets for drugs to restore the unpeturbed state.

Gandhi-quote

“Earth provides enough to satisfy every man's need, but not every man's greed”

continuity...immortality...consciousness..hu(man)s know thyself

how do we explain continuity...the fact that what i write on a machine is perceived by somebody else's brain on another machine. the fact that i emote when i read a book , which is actually a piece of printed paper.  an illiterate person will not experience these, because his brain does not know language or associations that come with it. An illiterate person perceives, tone of voice, facial expressions. This implies some sort of empathy, continuity mechanism in humans. I am different from my relative say a parent, yet when i am emotionally attached i experience pain when they feel pain. Do children deficient in social skills show the same type of empathy. ? What is the basis of this continuity...this feeling of connectedness with the whole of existence, and also separateness as an individual from the rest.. does the answer lie in our brains and which parts are related to emotion, reasoning and so forth... but then the next question arises what is the reason for "us" tha

EDGE

http://edge.org/

Positive well-being to higher telomerase: Psychological changes from meditation training linked to cellular health

Positive well-being to higher telomerase: Psychological changes from meditation training linked to cellular health

Randomness

What is the basis for random events ?

Cogitations regarding the "mind"

why do we selectively retain some memories not others ? To understand this we must understand  the physiological basis of memory itself. (The assumption is that memory is imprinted activity in the brain).Then determine why some of the physiology remains as an imprint and not others. Is the mind= electrochemical brain activity . or mind = interaction of brain with internal/external stimuli which results in electrical activity in the brain or there is something called the individual thought process and the cosmic thought process (for which evidence is required) which is separated by the physical body. Am reading Prof. Pinker's book "the blank slate".Brilliant effort and exceptionally thought out and argued. However the argument that "all languages are cut from the same cloth" p 37 is too simplistic a proposal based on the argument that any language can be used to convey any proposition.  For e.g the concept of shraddha in hindi cannot be translated to respec

Stop and Hear the Music-the joshua bell experiment

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<br><br>http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/04/04/AR2007040401721.htmlhttp://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/04/04/AR2007040401721.html

authors and scientists

The more one distances oneself from the situation, and moves towards objectivity the more one is able to get closer to the big picture. The more involved one is in the situation, biases inherent within the person will cloud reason and judgement.That is one of the underlying difference between the work of a scientist and an author.Ideally the scientist should look at the data and come up with the theory to fit the data. What happens really is that many have favourite ideas and search for patterns within the data to accommodate their ideas. However authors create plethora of characters each with their own unique characteristic and make them play out the drama, wearing a different hat (from ed de bono)while writing each characters role. Authors are not compelled to prove a point, they just tell a story from a third angle. One author who comes to my mind creating completely different detectives (Poirot versus Marple) is Agatha Christie. I think all our reasoning is not ab

Biology-an approach

reductionist versus systems biology OR reductionist and systems biology! Is systems biology reductionist biology in context ?

e.coli genome sequencing

http://gigadb.org/e-coli/

jstor

http://about.jstor.org/

why pubmed..?

http://database.oxfordjournals.org/content/2011/baq036.long http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/CBBresearch/Lu/search/

maths in hindi language-what a challenge

taught underpriviledged kids for 4 weeks (during thesis writing, 2 years ago) geometry in hindi language-imagine concepts of  trikon (triangle), kon (angle), parallel lines, corresponding angles...what a challenge! Whew! girl students-who otherwise take care of their siblings, and domestic chores in addition to going to  school... i wonder how such mathematical concepts would help them practically in life..left teaching and got back to writing my thesis..

interpretation of observations

one crucial aspect of "good" science-accurate interpretation of observations...be it a microscopic image or quantitative statistical data. this needs the appropriate controls interpretation! interpretation! interpretation

teaching..about tsunami

taught for 90 minutes, kids from shapur jaat (children of domestic helps, chauffers, vendors) an "english" lesson on "tsunami"...one kid asked-where does the fire, and sky come from :-))) i asked one kid-why do you come to study...she replied so that when we grow up we get a job, and can feed our families, and not marry early...  exact words "ghar ka kharcha chalane ke liye"

bad science

http://www.ted.com/talks/ben_goldacre_battling_bad_science.html
“If you’re not prepared to be wrong, you’ll never come up with anything original.” — Ken Robinson

one reason for our brains

http://www.ted.com/talks/daniel_wolpert_the_real_reason_for_brains.html

there are no scraps of men

http://www.ted.com/talks/alberto_cairo_there_are_no_scraps_of_men.html

polymath

A polymath ( Greek : πολυμαθής , polymathÄ“s , "having learned much") [ 1 ] is a person whose expertise spans a significant number of different subject areas. In less formal terms, a polymath (or polymathic person) may simply be someone who is very knowledgeable. Most ancient scientists were polymaths by today's standards. [ 2 ] The common term Renaissance man is used to describe a person who is well educated or who excels in a wide variety of subjects or fields. [ 3 ] The concept emerged from the numerous great thinkers of that era who excelled in multiple fields of the arts and science, including Leonardo da Vinci , Michelangelo , Galileo Galilei , Copernicus and Francis Bacon ; the emergence of these thinkers was likewise attributed to the then rising notion in Renaissance Italy expressed by one of its most accomplished representatives, Leon Battista Alberti (1404–1472): that "a man can do all things if he will." [ 4 ] It embodied the basic te

Amartya Sen — Nobel views on health, education, food, and water

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looking forward to revisiting sanskrit

the devnagari script is different...unlike mandarin where lines in various combinations are used, the devnagari script consists of the usage of the lines and circles in a single alphabet... alphabets are covered with a line, there are tables like multiplication tables for combinations of nouns and verbs...

the teacher student equation

the role of a "teacher"-an enabler who kindles  the inherent thought process  of a "student" the learning process is iterative as the "student" questions the "teacher" and stimulates his/her thinking  roles become reversed it is an ongoing  conversation, a dynamic interaction  between student and teacher

in search for meaning....

as the microflora residing in any part of the human body, or inhabiting any part of the biosphere is varied so are tumor populations characterized by heterogeneity.... varied species, human races, languages..... nature is showing us variety everwhere.. and we as humans are searching for underlying conserved governing principles....unity in diversity something in humans compels us to search for a reason , for a meaning in everything we should agree to disagree....because differing perspectives are drivers of human thought...

the future-one possible direction

quantitative biology

Cluster of differentiation molecules-CDs as biomarkers

How are we so sure that certain cell surface CDs can be used as definitive biomarkers... proof  is in the pudding... via previously published observations A cell  "population" exhibiting common cell surface CD molecules at similar concentrations could be a mixed population...

interesting hypothesis -EMT via gain of stem cell like properties

 Mani et al., 2008 Cell The epithelial-mesenchymal transition (EMT) is a key developmental program that is often activated during cancer invasion and metastasis. We here report that the induction of an EMT in immortalized human mammary epithelial cells (HMLEs) results in the acquisition of mesenchymal traits and in the expression of stem-cell markers. Furthermore, we show that those cells have an increased ability to form mammospheres, a property associated with mammary epithelial stem cells. Independent of this, stem cell-like cells isolated from HMLE cultures form mammospheres and express markers similar to those of HMLEs that have undergone an EMT. Moreover, stem-like cells isolated either from mouse or human mammary glands or mammary carcinomas express EMT markers. Finally, transformed human mammary epithelial cells that have undergone an EMT form mammospheres, soft agar colonies, and tumors more efficiently. These findings illustrate a direct link between the EM

hallmarks of cancer- observations

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Hanahan and Weinberg:Cell, 2000 We suggest that research over the past decades has revealed small number of molecular, biochemical, and cellular associated genes be tied to the operations of a cell. Our faith in such simplifcation derives directly from the teachings of cell biology that virtually all mammalian cells carry a similar molecuar machinery regulating their proliferation, differentiation and death... One day, we imagine that cancer biology and treatment- at present, a patchwork quilt  an endeavor that will depend on defining all of of cell biology, genetics, histopathology, biochemistry, immunology and pharmacology will become a science, with a conceptual structure and logical coherence that rivals that of chemistry or physics.  Fig:Acquired capabilities of cancer