Random Musings

I was showing David the final copy of all my results on a project I had done on modeling an athlete's run profile.

"So you see David, this model basically shows that all top athletes running the 100 m dash have a similar run profile.
The reason Usain Bolt has created so many records is not only because of his body weight
(it is true that the bigger an animal is and the smaller its diameter, the faster it moves)
, though that is a primary factor, but also because of his perfect staging of the race by the adjustment of NOT only the dynamical factors but also the kinematic parameters!"

David, being my god father, allowed me to rave and rant in this strain for some more time. And then he told me some interesting things.

For people of the same age group and similar fitness, the person who has a long fourth finger (starting to count from the thumb)actually runs faster. There was even a paper published to this effect.

Now I'm not quite sure, how much of this is true or whether I have laid down the correct postulated conditions, but this assertion made perfect sense to me.

You see, I am currently reading 'The Origin of the species," and right at the beginning Darwin touches upon the subject of inheritance. He has remarked how certain traits go hand in hand. For example people who suffer from albinism have prickly hair and so on and so forth.

Could it not be possible that people who run faster have similar traits be they ever so imperceptible as the possession of a longer index finger?

I then realized what a complex study, a bio mechanical analysis really was. Not only did the kinematic and dynamic parameters come into play but also so many other genetic factors. Can a comprehensive, all encompassing theory ever be reached??


After talking about athletes for some more time, my conversation with the old flesh and blood took on another turn. We started talking about an alternative term to really measure a country's stature in the globe. All this time we've been using GDP. But hey! China's GDP >USA, but yet most of the population in China lives in poverty while I don't even have to talk about an average US citizen!

We then talked about GDP per capita and whether that was a good enough estimate. But David told me that the government of Bhutan had jumped one step further and had actually developed a happiness quotient for their citizens. I was really skeptical when I heard this and wondered how such a quotient could be measured.

David defended himself like this.

"Well Hinduism has actually defined the terms-Maya and Brahma. Maya is a term for everything that can be measured while Brahma is a term for everything spiritual. I can tell you how tall I am, but I can't measure my soul.

Humans, however, have always tried to come up with parameters to measure qualities. Initially IQ was a considered a good enough estimate as to how clever a person was. But now that has been replaced by EQ. Slowly and steadily we actually are coming steadily closer to characterizing our world.

Now, lets come to 'Beauty'. Is Beauty subjective? Yes? Well actually no. Even beauty has an element of objectivity to it. My students and i decided to test this. We had with us hundreds of photographs of people. These photographs spanned over 200 years (well since the time cameras came out). There was nothing special about these photographs. They were simply portraits of all these people with the same boring flat lighting.

Assume there were infinite of these photographs (you know the gaussian sample space and what not). We showed all these photos to many( again assume infinite) people and asked them to tell us which people they found beautiful. We saw that photographs of people like Denzil Washington were found universally beautiful!

Now many of the people we showed these photographs too probably had not heard of Denzil Washington. So you can't expect me to believe that they picked his profile because they knew of him. No!

Everyone picked profiles like Denzil Washington because they found his profile universally appealing. Do you know why? it's because his profile is SYMMETRIC! This is very rare. Most of our profiles are assymetric!"

David then dashed over to a beautiful huge old shell he had.

"Do you know why this is beautiful? This shell is acclaimed to be universally beautiful because it is a fractal! And what's the first thing that pops into your nut when you hear the word fractal?Yes!! It's the Fibonacci series! The golden ration. This shell's varying spirals follow this golden ration. And for some reason humanity en masse finds this enormously attractive."

I was amazed!! I had always assumed "qualities" like Beauty to be entirely subjective.

We went on to speak about other things. I wanted to know whether weed actually allowed you to visualise things better and so on and so forth.

"We-ell true, the Beatles composed some of their best work after Dylan introduced them to weed. But though this weed business has been hyped up, there were other factors that made them compose better. For one thing they went to their Maha Rishi. Meditation is another way of being able to transcend the materialistic world and think on a higher dimension.

Even a simple exercise like breathing enables us to perceive things more clearly. For instance, the air we breathe in is cooler than the air we breathe out. And we don;t even realise this! But if you sat all day and actually tried paying attention and focusing on our perceptions, we'd actually realise the difference in the temperature of the exhaled air and the inhaled air. We'd also realise that we breathe through one nostril at one point in time and later through the other nostril. This keeps oscillating. So basically this meditation or focusing allows us to perceive things more clearly and to be more aware of ourselves.

Every perception is impermanent, transitory, ephemeral. If a mosquito bit you and you just left your skin alone. For some time you'd experience pain and then after some time that sensation would depart.

Weed and meditation both make you transcend the physical world. They work in different ways though!! :D
"

David then asked me some questions on how I perceived the world. He wanted to know the difference between Illusions and Reality.

For instance, as I'm typing on this computer, the laptop screen appears some distance away from me. But actually that's false. The image of the laptop is on my retina!! And the image on my retina is in black and white! I've got the world on my retina!! And its only my brain which allows me to perceive things differently. Everybody perceives things differently because no body thinks in the same way.

After this conversation I was secretly wondering how anyone reached a consensus at all!! :D

David is a photographer. He's my uncle and also happens to be my god father. i love listening to him talk. he always has an interesting opinion on everything and a knack of telling you interesting things until you just don't want to leave!!

Well unfortunately that conversation had to end and here I am, with all these thoughts buzzing around in my head. I wanted to set them down so that you would buzz too. happy buzzing!! :)