Random Thoughts

This blog is to share my thoughts on different topics. The topics range from the mundane to the exotic, from the serious to the humourous. Your comments are welcome !

These days, being on social media is a part of life for many.  People like me, who do not have any presence on the social media are deemed quirky.  When the social media "revolution" (if you can call it that) started, facebook was all the rage.  Everyone seemed to be on facebook and everyday you heard people extolling the features of facebook and their posts on the platform and the likes received. My nature is to avoid anything that is hyped about. Facebook was the most hyped of all and I steadfastly avoided it even though I received numerous invites through email (yes, I do use email).  In the initial days, when I told people that I did not have a facebook account, the reaction was one of disbelief. "What! Not on facebook?" and something along those lines. Now they have probably come to the conclusion that there are strange people who prefer to exist outside of the social media and that I am one of them.  So I am longer bombarded with invites, which is a relief. 

Facebook and other social media have, in my view, altered the social behavior of people. Now, if you happen to be on facebook and your best friend posts something online on his or her facebook page, you are expected to "like" his or her post, lest you offend him or her. Another nutty phenomenon is the way people gather or rather demand facebook "likes".  Statements like "Don't forget to like us/me on facebook..." has become normal.  There are even sites telling you how to increase the "likes" on your facebook page. I always thought it would be considered loony if you ask everyone around to like you.  I can never understand how one can demand to be liked, but apparently this is normal behavior for someone on facebook. Twitter, apparently is less addictive, but I do not know.  The craze for facebook seems to be waning of late, but the new craze is Instagram, which seems to be attracting more people.  facebook apparently is passé. 
For me, social media has no attraction.  The "charms" of facebook and other social media platforms do not interest me.  I feel that for most part, they have brought out the worst in people.  If something is posted by someone which is not to the liking of others, he or she is "trolled" by those who are opposed to it. The relative anonymity of the Net is convenient for such people to launch vicious attacks on the person. Such controversies over celebrities' (and others) social media posts have become fairly common.  In less developed nations, insensitive posts have resulted in violence.  I can hear someone saying "Ah, but you are looking only at the negatives".  There is no denying that good things have happened on account of social media posts, but these are not enough to balance out the negatives.  Sure, social media activity is one of the ways to keep the brain active in old age, which has been proved by studies. But that does not distract from the negative fallout of overuse of social media. It has security implications too.  These days many people put out their entire lives (probably with the exception of their bank accounts) on their social media accounts and one only needs to trawl through their posts to know almost everything about them. What can be done with all that info is anybody's guess.  The volume of data the social media companies have on their users is mind boggling and there have been controversies here too. Addiction is becoming a serious problem. Some people seem to live more online than in real life. The first thing they check on waking up is their social media accounts and it is also the last thing they do before going off to sleep. I prefer to live a "normal" (from my view point anyway) life untrammeled by all the rigmarole of facebook and other such platforms.  I have no use for them and nor am I willing to let some company build up data about me through social media usage.  I value my privacy more than anything else and therefore prefer to remain a "non-social (media) person" if I can use the term.  

Broken glass ceiling

Posted by  The Serene One comments (0)

There have been a lot of jokes about women drivers, politicians, business people etc.  The general idea behind all these innuendos is that the members of the fairer sex are scatterbrained.  Enough has been written about how women are breaking or trying to break the glass ceiling in different areas. I have no intention of writing another clichéd article on all that.  I just got curious about those women who were the first to go where no woman had ever gone before.  I left out most of the well known fields which have been covered threadbare by numerous books and articles and have attempted to write something about their role in other pursuits. 

Mountain climbing was as manly as it could get in the early days of climbing. But the women were not far off. The earliest mountain climbing women were from Britain. Margaret Jackson (right) was one of the earliest and well known climber who in her mountain climbing career between 1876 and 1889 made around 140 climbs, some in winter. Her days as a climber came to an end in 1889 after she suffered frostbite.  Another notable climber was Katherine Richardson who had 116 climbs to her credit.  Her main claim to fame was her speed.  Once, she reportedly had to spend nearly 45 minutes on the summit after a climb to allow her male guide to recover.  Then there was Elizabeth Le Blond who started the Alpine Ladies Club for women mountaineers.  More about these women and others like them here. 

We all know about Mary Leakey (left) and her husband L.S.B.Leakey who did pioneering work in Africa on the origin of man.  However, women were collecting fossils much before that. Ethelred Bennet who was born around 1775, was probably the first. Mary Anning lived around the same time [she was featured in a Google doodle] and had some rare finds to her credit.  It is said that the tongue twister "She sells seashells on the seashore" originated from her since she sold her fossils found near the seashore!  The earliest woman entomologist was probably Maria Sibylla Merian, a German who settled down in Amsterdam.  She published her findings on the metamorphosis of insects in 1705.  It was another matter that these women were never invited to any of the scientific academies' meetings nor were they allowed to become members though their work was cited by the male scientists in their own publications. 

My favorite topic though is about women in armed forces.  Throughout history, we have read of women who have governed kingdoms and occasionally led armies (Remember Joan of Arc?). We have also heard of the legendary Amazons in ancient Greek lore. However, the role of women in combat in recorded history is fascinating. The erstwhile Soviet Union in its war against the Germans in the period 1941-45 came the closest to creating all-women fighting units (the number of women in the Red Army was as high as 800,000 according to some estimates). It is another matter that most of these women left military service after the war and though women do serve in the armed forces all over the world today, the scale and magnitude is less compared to the Soviet women during the Second World War. In the Red Army, apart from their usual roles in the medical corps, women served as snipers, machine gunners, mechanics, pilots and a few even drove tanks. Their role is largely forgotten today and there are few authentic sources about their lives and times. After spending considerable time on the internet and trying to separate wheat from the chaff, what I found was fascinating.

The women volunteered in the armed forces but were not always welcomed. When they did join, they faced hostility from their male counterparts, who were uncomfortable with the idea of women soldiers.  But they persisted and finally had their way and even earned the respect of their male counterparts.  The life of a soldier is always tough and in those days, especially in the Soviet Union, they were short of arms and ammunition, planes etc.  And they faced an enemy who had superior weapons.  It takes real courage to serve on the front lines with bombs falling around you and bullets whizzing past.  But many of these unflinching women made a name for themselves.  Women snipers like Lyudmila Pavlichenko, Roza Shanina (in the picture) and Natalya Kovshova are known names, but there were hundreds of others in the Red Army.  

Among the pilots, Marina Raskova (at right, who was sometimes described as the Amelia Earhart of the Soviet Union) and Lydia Litviak (nick named as "The White Rose of Stalingrad") made a name for themselves in their short career.  Marina Raskova was instrumental in creation of three all-women squadrons in the Red Air Force. Inna Pasportnikova was the female mechanic who was assigned to Lydia Litviak.  She has described how difficult the work was and how her male counterparts sympathized with her, but could not help. The infantry division had its own heroines like machine gunners Aliya Moldagulova (below left) and Manshuk Mametova.

Of the female Soviet "tank men" the most well known were Aleksandra Samusenko and Mariya Oktyabrskaya (below right). The latter joined the army after her husband was killed in the war and had reportedly inscribed the words "Fighting Girlfriend" on her tank.
 
These are the ones who were noticed because of their exploits.  They (except Inna) were awarded the "Hero of the Soviet Union" medal, the highest honor. But there were many others who died unsung. Never again has history been witness to such large scale participation of women in war in different roles and I doubt whether this will change in future.  Many modern militaries do not permit women to fight on the front lines though they are permitted to fly aircraft. In a sense, it can be said that the participation of Soviet women in the war was a unique and short-lived experiment, which had mixed results. Many of the women perished in the war and some at a very young age (Roza Shanina and Natalya Kovshova were just 20 & 22 years old respectively when they died). 
I never cease to admire the tenacity of these women who braved bullets, bombs and male prejudice to prove themselves. Incidentally, a good book on some of these women is available here. I guess all these just go to prove that if you really want to, you can do almost anything. The amount of male prejudice that a woman encounters when she tries to enter a hitherto male preserve is something we cannot imagine today.  That these women overcame all that and went on to write their names in history is admirable.  It is unfortunate that the age of internet came too late to chronicle the exploits of these women.  I would have loved to read more about them.

     What did you have for lunch today? What about yesterday? And the day before? Probably the usual stuff with a bit of indulgence here and there, I guess.  That's normal, as most of us are conditioned to eat those foods which we are familiar and comfortable with. Even when we travel, many of us tend to stick to familiar foods and only a few are adventurous enough to venture into the realm of unknown and unfamiliar gastronomic stuff.  I am definitely not among those few.  But that doesn't stop me from admiring the bravery of Bear Grylls and his ilk who seem to eat almost anything that walks, runs, swims or crawls (Even though I go Yee-uck when I see them munching on sundry creepy crawlies). Yet I do sometimes wonder if our good old Mother Nature has enough in her bosom to feed the ever growing number of humans. If the numbers keep growing at this rate, the gap between the food produced and the needs of the population is likely to become unbridgeable. But this is true only if we continue to think about conventional food, vegetarian and meat.  What if we can find new food sources?  The brave souls who emulate Bear Grylls do exist.  

     Many years ago, before Grylls was even born, the intrepid adventurers led by Thor Heyerdahl on their epic journey from Peru across the Pacific on their reliable raft Kon-Tiki experimented on plankton.  Heyerdahl said that they were fascinated by the sight but repelled by the smell.  You can read his book on the voyage here.  Still, he opined that it was nourishing food and could potentially save ship wrecked people if only they had something to filter the plankton from the water.  His advice was to throw away the phytoplankton, which are tiny plants (described by him as inedible) and the tiny jelly fish (which according to him had a bitter taste) and consume the rest.  It is now known from documents that scientists in Britain tried to "farm" plankton so that the populace could be fed in case of food shortages during the Second World War.  In Spain, two species of phytoplanktons are cultured for consumption.  One danger of large scale harvesting of plankton would be a catastrophic disruption of the oceanic food chain.  Therefore, the Spanish model looks good.

     The other item on the list is insects. Entomophagy involves eating of eggs, larvae, pupa and adult insects.  This is fairly common in parts of Asia . And the 'fad' (if you can call it that) has spread to the West with many farms coming up in Canada and the US. These new-age entrepreneurs say that this is a way to avoid food shortages while eating healthy. And they try to reduce the 'yuck' factor by attractive packaging.  The girl in the picture is reaching out for an insect cheesecake and chances are that we would not be repelled as much as we would have been if we had been offered the insect without the cheesecake.  As some of us would be aware, there is a movement to popularize the eating of insects, which are a rich source of protein and have a low fat content.  An added advantage is the low carbon footprint. What is easier than rearing insects on the naturally available food sources? An ideal food you would think, but for the 'yuck' factor.  But then whoever thought that eating raw fish would be cool one day?  Yet, today sushi is popular in the West.  But the "eat-insects" movement seems to be catching on.  Here are a couple of articles, for the interested:


 However, all is not hunky-dory.  Even if people get over the 'yuck' factor, there are safety issues and Government regulations to contend with.  With the amount of insecticides that are being used, chances are high that the insects which are eaten have imbibed dangerous chemicals much above the limits which are safe for human consumption.  And there are regulations to be complied with, which makes the whole business difficult and cumbersome. But there has to be a trade-off somewhere. It is easy to visualize that at the current growth rate of population, it will become increasingly difficult to feed all the people on the existing sources: livestock and crops.  Alternate sources are needed and plankton and insects are the only ones left.  How durable a food resource  plankton would prove to be is difficult to imagine as this 'fad' does not seem to have caught on as much as the other one. I for one, would rather eat plankton however gooey it may look, rather than the creepy-crawlies.  What about you?

     Why is it that we are attracted to sad things?  The newspapers are full of negative news.This trend continues even in films - tragedy and violence dominate. As an inveterate online forum hopper, I have noticed that the assumed names and avatars of some members reflect the same trend.  We all remember the numerous occasions when we were in a group and how when someone brought up such a topic, everyone else was pitched in with their own stories, equally morbid. Tearjerker movies and stories have their own fan following. As someone said, bad news sells.  But why this fascination for the bad? 
     This is a question psychologists and sociologists try to answer. One possible answer is that bad news draws more attention due to the survival instinct inherited by evolution. Bad news attracts attention because we try to avoid such situation for ourselves. There are other theories, but none satisfactorily explains our fascination for the morbid.  
     Well, is that good or bad? Personally, I feel people who constantly feed themselves with bad news tend to have more negativity than others. This is my perception of course, and I cannot offer any proof of that.  But, I tried out a little experiment.  For a week, I completely skipped the negative news which usually takes up more than half the news (Consequently, I finished the morning newspaper much faster than usual) and refrained from watching the news on the television. The change was perceptible. I felt at peace and tended to get angry less often.  So I decided to follow the same routine on all days.  The changes have stayed and so has my new attitude towards news.  After all, why should I be interested in all the tragedies, scams and other news of the same genre?

Don't believe me?  Doesn't hurt to try it out, does it?

 

The Ordeal Called Math

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Like all kids, I despised math.  It was never one of my strong points, but things became increasingly difficult as I progressed to higher classes.  In college, I attended extra classes to make up for my weakness in math.  I was fortunate to go through with an above average grade but most of my class had a poor score.  Many either failed or just managed to scrape through.  Trig was a pain, with its unending proofs.  But Trig was not half as bad as Geometry. My pet hate was something called Analytical Geometry with all the talk of finding the locus of something or the other.  It had its own proofs even more terrible than Trig. I never understood why we had to do learn all the proofs.  As somebody remarked, "Why should we prove it? It's already proved!"  We were never told why we had undergo all this, except that if we wanted to graduate, we had to complete the course.  As a matter of fact, I liked and still like science. I never had this sinking feeling when studying Physics or Chemistry or the Life Sciences.  It was math alone which gave me nightmares.  When I look back, I still shudder when I remember the ordeal I had to go through.  Like all students then, I too asked the question, why should I study all this hideous stuff?  Am I going to find the locus of some geometrical shape as part of life or job?  Why did we have to solve the myriad Trig proofs, which we were never going to use in real life?  There were no answers - neither from the teachers nor from fellow students who genuinely (shudder) liked math. 


Now, years later, I try to find the answers.  Though they will never make me like math, I do find the answers satisfying to a degree:


Math is an essential skill.  At the very basic level, you have to know the concepts to survive in everyday life.  And at that age, it is easily absorbed and never forgotten since we keep using it everyday.  Beyond that, it is a skill aimed at improving our logical ability and analytical skills.  A growing brain requires such activity to sustain its growth. Higher sciences use maths to a large extent.  Imagine that everyone hated math and so there were no takers for it.  Would we have had all the engineering and scientific wonders that we witness today?  So somebody has to learn math and we should be glad that there are people who find it enjoyable because it is these people who lay the foundation for future engineers and scientists (I agree wholeheartedly with this line of reasoning as long as I am not asked to do math again).


Probably, most of the pain of learning math is because it is so abstract.  "These are the rules and formulas - memorize them.  There are the Sine and Cosine and Tangent and Cotangent - remember, they are not the same.  Then there is a shape called parabola and another called hyperbola - don't ask questions - just remember them and use the formulae appropriately."  And more on the same lines. No wonder that most people hate math with a passion.  I know a person who chose his field of specialization to completely cut out math. He is a medical professional now (Honestly, I find it difficult to accept the argument that even medical professionals need to know math. They never need to know more than the basic stuff). For such people the above logical arguments on the necessity of learning math will never appeal. He will probably carry his hatred for math all through his life and probably pass on the same to his kids.  If only earning math can be made more interesting.  I came across an interesting article here: 

http://www.maa.org/devlin/LockhartsLament.pdf


It requires real talent to explain a dry and abstract subject like math in a way the students will relate to.  So we will continue to see hordes of kids emerge from school who despise math and carry their dislike throughout their lives which is a pity. I myself wish I had been taught math in a practical way, instead of the maddeningly abstract way which I had to endure.  Maybe I wouldn't have acquired the intense dislike for the subject.  Not that I would have fallen in love with math and gone for a career in math, but at least I would have understood it better and applied myself to getting better grades.  Well, at least I don't feel the same way about math now.

You can if you wish, find out your computer's gender.  Surprised?

It's easy.  Just open up notepad and type or copy and paste the following code:

CreateObject("SAPI.SpVoice").Speak"Hello there"


Save the file with the extension .vbs, for example, somename.vbs.  Now you are all set.  Just double-click on the file and you will know if your PC or laptop is a "he" or a "she".

You didn't know this one, did you?




Tea?

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     We all know that tea contains caffeine, like coffee.  But, is drinking tea beneficial? There are divergent shades of opinion and every now and then we hear about some study conducted somewhere which either supports the view that drinking tea is harmful or debunks it.  If you are a tea drinker, no doubt you are confused about all this flip-flops. So am I, though I am not a habitual tea drinker.

      According to the Wikipedia, "Tea is the agricultural product of the leaves, leaf buds, and internodes of the Camellia sinensis plant, prepared and cured by various methods. "Tea" also refers to the aromatic beverage prepared from the cured leaves by combination with hot or boiling water, and is the common name for the Camellia sinensis plant itself." 

     Apparently, there are some benefits from drinking tea regularly.  But the benefits are  not the same for all types of tea.  That's right, types of tea.  Did you know that there are different types of tea and the level of benefit differs for each type?  Well, different types of tea arise from the use of leaves of different maturity and different methods of curing.  The most common variety which we usually refer to as "tea" is the black tea.  These are the fully oxidized leaves.  In contrast, green and white tea are not oxidized and retain many of their beneficial properties.  Both wilted (for black, white and oolong tea) and fresh leaves (for green tea) are used. White tea is rarer and consequently, more expensive, though it has been proven to be the most beneficial of all tea types.  Finally, there is this winter tea or "kukicha" which is made from stems, stalks, twigs and old leaves pruned from the tea plant during its dormant season and dry-roasted over a fire. It is a popular health food in Japan.  At times, the mere act of boiling different herbs in water has been termed as "making tea", for example herbal tea, hibiscus tea etc. 

     In case you are interested, here's a site which details the benefits of different kinds of tea http://www.teabenefits.com/.  Didn't know that there were so many varieties did you?


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