There are no real friends in the social web. In the social web the word friend has come to mean ‘one who does my information filter’.
Twitter, FriendFeed, Facebook; in all such social web hangouts, you are more likely to follow or subscribe to ‘friends’ who give you the information you want, mostly from the web. That is, unless you already are acquainted with that ‘friend’ in your daily life. Compare here actual persons from your life to ‘friends’ like feed updates from Scientific American or a reliable online source. Such ‘friend(ly)’ filters are necessary to dim the bright lights of information supernova to render our useful stuff visible to us.
In Indian mythology Sage Viswamitra is known for his tapOpalam – prowess from penance – and temper. There is a household story from the Ramayana – as a kid, I have heard this from my grandma – that narrates a super-humanly feat of Sage Viswamitra that led to his name nUthana srishti karthA or creator of new worlds. There is an astronomical phenomenon couched in this story. Read the essay further to see if you agree with the offered interpretation.
A recent article in the Nature wonders whether science blogging would replace science journalism. Lack of a revenue model for science blogging would still keep science journalism alive. Perhaps confined to a much reduced, and thereby hopefully, more capable representation of journalists. On the other hand, the two activities can retain their distinction. For instance, if a discussion section is added, wouldn’t the existing internet science journalism also become science blogging? Not always. Primarily because science blogging, can be done by those who do the science in the first place; Scientists.
Blogging is another way of writing. Writing in the internet in a site in reverse chronology, allowing readers to respond in real time. Science blogging is writing, apart from other things, mostly science in your blog. Whether every scientist should blog is a matter of choice. Just as it is the reader’s choice to read it, even when scientists blog.
In the three years I have been blogging after enough deliberation, I keep wondering why I don’t see many Indian scientists pursuing this activity as a default pass time choice. Looking within India for scientists who blog [*], from the top of my google reader-list I could cite Abi, Guru, Anant, Madras Giridhar, Rahul Basu, Sunil Mukhi, Suvrat Kher, Niket, the contributors at Materialia Indica, Rahul Siddharthan (thanks Anant). Granted, I have a growing enthusiastic list there. But it is not enough. ScienceBlogs.com, a single US portal hosted by the SEED media group, has more than 100 blogs all addressing one or other aspects of Science, most of them authored by academics.
So why are science blogs not growing in India? In a recent discussion a colleague gave a succinct response. You want me to be elite and oblige, but I am just elitist. By definition then, I can’t write or blog science for the public.
That is a picture of the typical front yard of a village temple in Tamil Nadu, South India. See if you can relate to what I observe in those marked parts (more…)
In the earlier notes Avenue de Henri Benard and Turbulence in Flow around Bodies we have discussed von Karman vortices in flow around solid bodies. Here is a nice video of computer simulation of vortices behind a bat in flight.
The video is part of extensive bat research of Dan Riskin of Brown University.
Looking carefully at the vortex that forms approximately at the center of the wing span behind the bat body, the spin direction seem to abruptly change from anti-clockwise to clockwise. I suspect this could be due to removal of computational frames for certain in between period, to squeeze short the video running time. Still the reversal of spin is intriguing.
This blog primarily collects my micro-muse, laughs, occasional rants and motley web stuff I fancy. Lengthier (and hence, refined and possibly useful) content are collected in my website (see below).
