New photos of T

Laughing
Originally uploaded by sharathbs.

I have finally figured out a way of posting photos of T online. I do it through 'Flickr.com'.

So, I hope to keep the photos flowing from now on :)

Thesis Seminar

Almost there, my thesis seminar date is now fixed :) 31st of Dec 2004, I guess its a good way of ending the year :). Its in some ways hard to believe that I am finally there, I feel like I have spent forever waiting.

If anyone cares about the nitty-gritties, I will be submitting my thesis sometime towards the end of Jan, at least thats the hope. And my papers should all be going out sometime soon.

'Brain Facts' Primer

Quick post about a neuroscience primer-book that from the Society for Neuroscience that can be downloaded here. 'Brain Facts' is a 52-page primer on the brain and nervous system that serves as a starting point for a lay audience interested in neuroscience. It's beautifully illustrated and has explanations on most major areas of research in Neuroscience. If you're interested in how the brain works, its a great place to start.

The "Why" Question

Its an event I had heard a lot about, parents talk about it in almost hushed tones. Its the start of the dreaded "why" phase of talking. I got my first why question yesterday, "papa, why did you eat too much?". Every parent wants to explain the world to their children, perhaps make things easier or simpler for them to understand. With the hope that they have fewer pains learning and growing up than he did.

So answering "why's" are pretty imperative, but the "why's" are supposed to be unending and for every answer given another "why" follows. A friend of ours told us how she once went through a series of 17 "why" questions before her daughter was finally done. Scary :)

Picture of everything

Check out this really interesting webpage The Picture of Everything. Hard to describe, it has cartoon characters, artists, philosophers, etc.

Firefox vs. Opera

A friend of mine asked me to compare using Opera with Firefox, so I used both for a few hours of browsing to see how they compared.

Upsides
1. Its as fast as Firefox is or vice-versa
2. If you download email onto your computer, you may find the opera mail feature useful but I cant tell how good it is as I didnt use it.

Sorry, but I couldn't find more.

Downsides
1. I find the interface too cluttered, big contrast with firefox which is as minimalistic as things get.
2. The ad window (in the free version, paid costs $39) is also annoying as my pages have gotten smaller, very annoying. You'll really notice this when you switch between Opera and FF, very obvious.
3. Search feature isnt flexible, firefox lets you search hundreds of sites from within the broswer, literally and you can add your own :)
4. Its ad blocking is nowhere close to ad-block, not even close....
5. No extensions, for me this is a big deal, it really makes my browsing better.
6. I dont understand the way it handles RSS feeds or why it does what it does. My impression is that its using a default system used to handle emails/messages to handle RSS, very clunky.

Minor Cribs
1. Extensions again, no music control from within the browser. You may find this more important that I do.
2. Another extension i didnt write about but you may like is "blog this" on right click, it takes the text to a new window, redirects to blogger, signs you in, and gives you the edit post page with the correct URL hyperlink in place. As ever, try it..

Bugmenot

Bugmenot is a great site that allows you to bypass compulsory web registration that many sites require. It provides usernames and passwords only to free sites and works pretty well most of the time. Putting this for anyone who is irritated by the link on the previous post that goes to NYTimes (which requires registration).

Who has 460 terabytes of data?

Walmart does. Here's an interesting article about Walmart and their obsession with collecting data. By the way, 460 terabytes is more than twice the size of the internet! Among its other uses, all that data let Walmart predict that people in Florida would buy more beer and strawberry pop-tarts before the hurricanes hit. Go figure..

Firefox

It suprises me that people still use Internet Explorer. I have been using the open source browser Firefox for about a year now and its finally reached the version 1.0 milestone. A good reason I think to write about why its slowly replacing IE and why I hope everyone who reads this will at least give it a try.

One of the first things you notice using Firefox is its speed, it has a clean interface and uses few resources. Also, it has tabbed browsing - all your browser windows actually live inside a single window, each demarcated by tabs that you can click in and out of easily, which allow you to keep track of them. If you haven't used this feature before, try it. You'll wonder how you ever lived without it.

Searching via Google is built into a search box in the upper right hand corner. Nothing special you may say, but the "add more search engines" option lets you do so much more. This allows you to search many sites/engines directly (eg. Dictionary.com, Wickipedia, Amazon, Pubmed, etc.; you can get a full list here) from your browser.

Firefox also has a number of themes that change the way your browser looks, very important if screen space is at a premium and you are looking for a minimalistic user-interface. My personal favorite is Pinball. Pop-up ads are also easily blocked and all this is very customizable, which brings me to another really cool feature - Extentions.

Extentions are basically add-ons that different users and groups have created that add functionality - extend Firefox. Not all the extentions are useful to everyone but I use 4 extensively:

Ad-block - very powerful ad-blocker, can block flash ads too
Foxy Tunes - allows you to control your music player (supports most of the major players) from within firefox, adds a small control bar to the status-bar
WeatherFox - weather updates from weather.com, again built into the status-bar
Fire-FTP - add on FTP engine
QuickNote - a Post-it like note-taking extention

Another new feature that I have just begun to use is called live-bookmarks, which cuts down on time spent checking sites you read regularly. Its based on using RSS feeds that many websites are now serving up as a way to give frequent readers an easy way to keep track of new stuff they've just published.

So if you're reading this in IE, give Firefox a spin for a day.

Search Google for Jet Airways

As I was blogging on airlines, here's something funny. Search google for 'jet airways', the second result reads "Lizard found in Jet Airways food- The Times of India". Try it please :)

And finally Indian Airlines

The last leg of my journey home was the flight from Singapore to Bangalore with Indian Airlines (IA). I had travelled with a friend who had regaled me with scary stories about his flight on IA to Bangkok and back, Indians who got drunk (common feature on all airlines I think), who fought with air-hostesses, who took 20 free apples as he had 'paid' for them. So I got on wondering what this was going to be like.

The real story as it turned out weren't the people but was the airline. Some of the flaws were just flabbergasting. For example, my seat wouldn't stay upright, everyone knows 'keep your seat upright, we are landing/taking off', mine wouldnt. If I leaned on it even a bit, it would sway backward like an old tree, I dont know if there is some safety issue regarding keep your seat upright, but I hated it.

What food would you like sir, Veg or Non-veg?

Non-veg please

Sorry sir we have only veg

Huh?

The reading lights wouldn't work, the guy sitting next to me asked the air-hostess and then they came on. Come on, its not like you're saving on an electricity bill at 36000 feet. And to top it all off, we were half an hour late without any assistance from the weather or other external factors. Its things like this and other small stuff that really put me off. My wife travels IA within India and claims they are pretty good; maybe, maybe not.

Changi Airport

I really need to talk about this as Changi International Airport at Singapore is such a nice airport. After having passed through what felt like a million airports, Changi was a really nice change. I was stuck there from about midnight till 7 the next morning, when I had to catch my final flight home.

Its a very modern airport with what looked like very good duty-free and some rest areas where you can actually catch a longish nap. They have these massive plasm display TVs placed in many places showing news or movie channels and it also has a number of computer terminals with free internet access (sadly, no free WLAN). I mention these things in particular as one of the things that ailed me at most airports where we stopped was lack of things to do apart from staring mindlessly at passers-by.

So if you have a choice of which airport you are going to rot in, Changi is pretty good :)

Common Loos and Naked Men

Staying at the cheapest place in town is bound to have its downsides. One of the features of the dorm-style accomodation at HI-San Diego is common bathrooms. Call us Indians a prudish lot, but I draw the line at bathing in a common bathroom with the shower-curtain open.

A feature of using the loo at the hostel was the naked german. He refused to close his shower-curtain while bathing and would psychotically stare at everyone who entered or left. That was ok in some ways as you didnt have to look at him unless you wanted to, but it felt much worse when we spotted him at one of the posters during the SFN meeting...

I'm Back

Sorry about the long silence, I got back about a week ago but I have been caught up doing stuff at home and the lab. I have lots to blog about and will do so soon.

The SFN meeting

BIG... thats the first thing you realize when you get here. The convention centre is huge, to give you an estimate, there is one large hall about a mile in length, the hall hosts about 4000 posters a day, probably more. Apart from that, there are 33 meeting rooms, each of them have slide presentations/symposia going on throughout the 5 days of the meeting. I didnt know there was so much neuroscience research in the world, and this isnt even 25%.

I have on the average about 40 posters to see a day and maybe 4-5 talks I want to attend. By the time you get all that done you are exhausted, both physically and mentally. I feel like a long-distance runner, you are constantly walking somewhere and nothing is close by. I can see why people who attend every year are so jaded by the entire experience.

Its amazing just how well organised all of this is, though there are thousands of people here at any given time, its never crowded, you still have place to sit, even if its on the floor. The most impressive thing for me, especially after my airport WLAN debacle was that there are hundreds of plug-points scattered all over the convention centre - in the main poster halls, in the corridors and in common areas, where people just plonk themselves (like I am), plug in their laptops and access the internet over the WLAN.

Its pretty impressive being here and seeing all of this work as well as it does and I'm happy to be here for the science and for the experience.

Hi SAN-Diego

I am staying at a dorm in downtown SanDiego, whats called the gaslamp quarter. Its a very nice and lively part of town to be in, there's always something happening here. We're on Market street, which I absolutely love, there a ton of restaurants and its just very alive all the time. I'll try to steal/borrow a camera from someone soon and post photos. We're staying at probably the cheapest rooms in SD right now, its basic with bunk beds and common loos but it works and its cheap, highly recommended if you arent fussy and are looking for a deal.

I hate quarters

Anyone who has been to America for even a short while will know what I am talking about. I'm sitting in LAX, the international airport at LA waiting for my next flight to San Diego and I can make calls from any of the 100 payphones around here (I'm not exxagerating, there are probably 100 here) because I dont have quarters. This is I think uniquely american, anything here, whether its a bus-ride, a wash of clothes, a phone call, all need a quarter. And you just cant find them. Sometimes if you are very lucky, someone gives you change or you find a change machine - a machine that changes dollar notes of different denominations into quarter-dollar coins. Well, I haven't been lucky today, not enough change to make a call back home to R, she'll be spitting mad by the time I get enough change to call.

Airline Puke-bags

Apologies to all for this post, but I just have to... airline-pukebags, they actually work. I was unfortunate enough to use one on the flight from Tokyo to LA, asian food disagreeing with my intensely Indian stomach I think.

Wireless Internet on the go is dead

I left India assuming that I would be able to access the net from different airports along the way. The hope was to not only do things like check mail but also to post blogs alogn the way, how cool would that have been :)

In any case, the hard reality that slapped me everywhere is that its almost impossible to get a WLAN connection on the go at airports. Bangkok International Airport and Narita are both supposed to have free WLAN access for people passing through, thats what their websites claim and they even have details of how to log on. The catch is that these airports are huge. Let me explain, the average WLAN point, the actual hardware that connects your device to the net has a short footprint, about a 100 feet on the average. We walked 1200 feet to get from one terminus to another or within termini to get to our next connecting flight.

Unless you have some kind of meter that can detect WLAN or precise and tell you signal strength, or precise directions about where to look, you're as good as dead. I mean where do you search? I had precise directions for Narita, go to Satellite 2 of Terminal 1, good enough? Actually not really, my flight left from Satellite 3, Satellite 2 was pretty far off and I simply didnt have the time to go wandering about an airport I didnt know looking for a WLAN signal I couldn't see.

You have to turn on the comp each time and search for networks. I have just about given up on all this, the SFN meeting I am going for is supposed to have WLAN access, we'll see how that goes. I hope I can post this from there.

The Nobel prize in Physiology & Medicine 2004

Working in the field of Neuroscience and not commenting on this year's Noble Laureates would be heresy. I will not be covering their Nobel prize in the same way as popular press, ie. CNN or BBC. Instead, I'll tell you a bit about what I found out about the background behind their Nobel.

Linda Buck and Richard Axel recieved their Nobel prize for their work on olfaction - the sense of smell. I got curious about where they stood in the overall field of olfaction. The original paper which discovered the genes for Olfactory receptors came from their work. That original paper was published in the journal 'Cell':

A Novel Multigene Family May Encode Odorant Receptors: A Molecular Basis for Odor Recognition
Linda Buck and Richard Axel
Cell, Vol 65, 175-187, 5 April 1991

There was an account from Linda Buck somewhere in popular press about how hard those original genes were to clone and identify. I can fully understand why, in the 1990's cloning a family of genes was still a heroic task, much unlike the routine task it has become in today's genome age. If you go back and look at her publication record during that period, there's a paper in 1987 followed by a 4 year lull, after which is the now famous paper in Cell. 4-years is a really long time in research to work on one project. If you look at Linda Buck's publications in recent years, she's really prolific, again restating how hard that original set of experiments must have been. Both of them in the years since have worked extensively in the field of olfaction, making many exciting discoveries about how olfaction works.

I guess anyone in Science wishes that at some point in their career, they make this fundamental discovery that opens up new areas of research, I know I do. There is some irony in all of this though. A lot is known about the patterns in which olfactory receptors are expressed and the wiring up of these receptors to the rest of the brain. There is some understanding of how olfactory signals or smell is processed in the brain, but surprisingly people still dont understand how olfactory receptors sense/recognize odours.

Update

I'm starting what I hope is the last week of experiments (more specific than last set :)). If all goes well, I should be done before I leave for San Diego. Yup, I'm off to the sunny shores of California for 10 days. I will be presenting poster - at the annual meeting of the Society for Neuroscience.

Thanks to the glory of cheap tickets, I will be flying to Bangkok and Tokyo before heading to sunny LA before reaching San Diego.. my final destination on this leg. I think I will be flying/waiting for about 36 hours each way, and you thought train journeys are bad. Return leg is equally torturous but with other stopovers :). At least I can say I have visited more countries that I have really visited. On my way back I spend 2 days visiting San Francisco and then back through Tokyo and Singapore. One of those flights is supposed to be 20 hrs including the stopover at Tokyo... aaaahh... I will die sitting in that cramped seat for that long, how I wish it were a train.

Growing Up

Its funny, in how many ways growing up can be defined. My nearly 2-year old son was cribbing about how he didnt want to go to the creche. He came up to me and said "Papa no creche, no.no..". He's been that way off late, ever since he's gotten smarter and come to realize that its going to be a regular feature of his life.

Not knowing what else to tell him, I told him how Papa and Mama needed to go work to make money and the money was what bought new clothes, mmam (food) and toys. If we didn't go to office, there wouldn't be money. He listened intently to the entire spiel and then almost as if he understood it all, kept quiet and talked about something else. I dont know how much of what I said he understood, the concepts I spoke of - money, buying things with money, new toys/clothes and going to office for work are all things he understands independantly.

Whether he put all of that together or not, I will never know, but in that one instant my son grew up far more than I ever wanted him to.

UP-78-Q-????

This is to the owner/driver of the blue Maruti Zen whose registration number is the title of the post. Thanks to your idiocy, stupidity, brainlessness, irresponsibility and overall lack of common sense, I spent 2 hrs last night (10th October 2004) waiting in the parking lot off Commercial street in Bangalore. Let me clarify, you had parked your car in such a manner that 6 other cars parked in the same lane were unable to get out. Your'e very lucky that the Bangalore Police tow-truck was unavailable last night and that none of us were around to greet you when you got back.

What makes this entire thing scarier is that you are in the Indian Air Force (assumption based on all the IAF stickers on your car). God save India and its defences if idiots like you are flying our figher aircraft or even vaguely associated with them. I dont know if it was sheer stupidity or arrogance that made you this way but you owe me 2 hrs. I dont see why the government spent all that money training you if you lack the basic common sense to even park a car correctly.

I hope we never meet again and I hope you read this sometime in your lifetime.

VIP Motorcades

There is something innately discriminatory and rude about how a politician's car zips by on an empty road while hundreds of common folk wait in the bylanes. Just last night I spent 20 mins waiting for Vajpayee's motorcade to pass by. While I like him as much as one can like a politician, I resent the fact that politicians get to inconvenience the very people who elect them to such an extent.

I dont think the average minister in the karnataka government needs to worry about getting attacked or blown up by terrorists. They are just not important enough or worth it. Yet they block traffic, snarl at other road users and act self-important. I think its just about showing off - a 'mine is bigger than yours' fest to show the rest of us how important they are. If I cared about the public as they often claim to, maybe they would start with avoiding travel at peak hours and work at those times instead.

Sadly, I think its a nearly impossible expectation from an Indian politician.. to care.

Using the railway waiting room

More on my trip to Chennai, my friend and I decided to patronize the waiting room at the Chennai central railway station. Quite a unique experience. We got there at about 5 AM and the place was already full and humming. Not surprising as entry to the waiting room wasn't restricted to ticket-holders as it was supposed to be. In any case, we finished brushing our teeth and got ready to have a bath. The bathrooms are attached to the waiting room and seemed to be one of 2 places in the entire station (which gets probably tens of thousands of visitors each day) where you can have a bath.

As I got into the line and waited for my turn, I got a sneak preview of the bucket (no luxuries such as a shower or anything other than a tap here). It was an old trash-can, one of those foot-pedal operated things which had sometime in its unfortunate life lost its cover. A bad start wouldn't you say, but it gets worse. The bathroom had two more things going for it - no water mug.. fill up the ex-trashcan and pour all the water on your head - a bath in its most elemental and best of all no lock/latch on the door. That's when I lost my nerve.

I quickly decided that I couldn't handle bumming it any more and decided to look for a cheap hotel somewhere close by where I could hire a room for a few hours to take a bath, change and get going. Its kind of strange how you cant handle slumming it any more. I could do these things when I was doing my MSc in Baroda. Hell, this bathroom reminded me of the common bathrooms we had there. But all these years later (5), I couldn't get myself to go back there...

Getting a US visa

Its strange how getting a visa to the USA has become this torturous and traumatic process filled with uncertainity. People worry about it for weeks before going for the visa interview and one is constantly worrying about what to do and more importantly what not to do. People take with them their entire life histories, proof of all the money and land they own to prove that they have adequate reason to return to India.

That said, this was my second visit to the consulate and both sets of visa interviews have been very pleasant. This time, the consular official asked me what I worked on, when I told him I worked on chronic stress, he said "does interviewing 120 people for a visa everyday qualify as chronic stress". In that instant, I felt immense sympathy for him and the rest of the 'firangs', it cannot be an easy job talking to a hundred people everyday and trying to figure out who have legitimate reasons for going and who don't.

In a country like India going abroad, especially the west is often considered to be a status symbol. I've heard of people commanding higher dowries as they are US-returns :( or Non-Resident Indians (NRIs). The last time I was in the US for a course, my parents had gone to their hometown in north-Karnataka and someone there congratulated them on my rise to fame in going to the US. I bet I could have gotten a really large dowry (thankfully I am happily married and dont believe in the practise of dowry - more about that some other time).

Its kind of strange as its not like living abroad gives you something special as a human being apart from maybe a greater exposure to the rest of humankind. Strangely enough, most of the NRIs I know are as orthodox and conservative in their views as they were before they left, in many cases more so. I think being far from home makes them hold on to their culture even harder.

I guess one good way of restarting this blog is to put something mundane like my life into it for now, so that at least some of my friends take a look.

So here goes, my wonderful Phd still putters on... I am in the middle of what I'm hoping are the last set of experiments I need to do, but one never knows as I have learnt painfully in the past. I'm trying to write my thesis in the middle of trying to write papers in the middle of trying to get experiments finished. Will keep you posted on that.

Women on Motorcycles

Nothing arouses the passion of bikers the way a woman on a bike does. Love them, others cant stand them... do we sense some insecurities ;)

Its not often that you come across a woman who rides a bike and well at that (no chauvinism intended, I just have seen many). So when one does cross lanes with someone who can ride well, it has rather unexpected consequences. Just the other day, I came across someone like that on Bellary Road (one of the highways running out of Bangalore).

Its funny how any guy on a bike wanted to overtake her, even if meant riding really badly (though thats not unusual around here either).My friend who was riding with me at that time was completely taken by her. We happened to be riding the same way for a while and he even managed to talk to her along the way. In his own words, "I really appreciate her attitude". Given a chance he claims he wouldnt mind proposing to her either :).

So if you are out there and were on Bellary Road on the 8th of March 2004 riding a Yamaha RX135, do get in touch with my friend. He is really pining away....