Swine Flu, Bird Flu etc. Is it time for some of us to switch to vegetarian food?

Many Indian cultures treat non-vegetarian food as taboo, but permit the consumption of dairy products. This seems to be a reasonable compromise between vegan diet and non-vegetarian diet. It is widely believed that humanity is slowly evolving to a time when non-vegetarian food would be an exception rather than the rule.

Several epidemics like Swine flu and bird flu are believed to be associated with unhygienic conditions in which pigs and chicken are raised in huge farms. Visit
Article in the Guardian

Pollution, parasitic infestation and bacterial contamination are problems associated with fish and seafood.

Apart from the above concerns is the question of how much water is required to produce meat and poultry. With increasing consumption of these products, can we really sustain current farming practices? Visit 
https://www.peta.org.uk/blog/10-shocking-stats-about-water-and-meat-eating/

Given all this, it seems worth asking: Is it time for some of us to avoid or reduce consumption of non-vegetarian food?

Srinivasan Ramani

Avoiding mouth-to-mouth spread of germs

There are prohibitions in a few cultures, including Indian cultures, that seemed to be related to the notion of ritual impurity. Sharing a cup, vessel or cutlery while eating or drinking beverages is one such prohibited habit. Tasting food using a spoon and putting it back into food being cooked is another. Ordering a dessert and sharing it with everyone around the table dipping their spoons into it is yet another. Many Indians who have spent some time in Europe or in the Americas have “learnt” to overcome these prohibitions. In fact, they find it amusing when they see some of their compatriots show inhibitions to be “westernized”!  

In a world in which virus diseases are threatening to become pandemics, the old cultural practices may be valuable to prevent saliva-borne infections. Comments are invited, particularly from medical doctors and microbiologists. Actual prevention of the spread of infections is one thing, and creating awareness of undesirable practices is another. A clear unwillingness to practice habits that could possibly harm others helps both ways.

In this context, it is worth reading about how mumps spreads and what damage it can do.

Srinivasan Ramani

Say Goodbye to the Welcome-Handshake!

Conscious change in social habits is not very common in the human race, but it is time for one such change now.  These are times of the Covid-19 or the Corona virus epidemic! Visit https://fortune.com/2020/02/13/singapore-air-show-coronavirus-handshake/ The Singapore Airshow 2020 is enforcing a no-contact policy!

I would go further.  The handshake is as out-of-date as wearing a sword to work! However, don’t dismiss handshakes as insignificant. They play a vital role in meetings. Meetings between people are more than substitutes for a bunch of emails! They build working relationships and trust. Handshakes play a very important role in this!

The challenge is how to replace the handshake with something equally effective. Bowing and Namastes are candidates, but the best seem to be words of welcome thought out in advance. “We have been waiting for this day!”, “Our team has been looking forward to this visit”, or something like that! These words do not really indicate that you are softening your negotiating position one bit! These are words with warmth but no commitment. They are what the blockchain people call a zero confirmation transaction.

Are they unethical? No, unless you don’t really mean any of what you say. Meetings start with an expectation of possible positive results.  If you are sincere about that, warm gestures to start off the meeting are fair. They are no more unethical than handshakes! Besides, the substitution of handshakes by well thought-out words of welcome could reduce the chances of your being hauled off to the quarantine ward!  

Srinivasan Ramani

   

Fragility of life in the 21st century

It is strange how we take our life for granted and make plans for weeks and months ahead as if we will continue to roll on during that time just as we are doing today.  I got another lesson why I should not do that, last week. It was a cold starting on Sunday the 9^th Feb. It took its usual course of four days and thoroughly messed up my plans for these four days. What if it had been a flu? Well, it would have been worse. Whatever I read seemed only to say it would have been more severe than a cold, but otherwise more of the same. The one distinguishing mark might have been that flu would have had a fever associated with it. 

Well, what if I had gone to one of those conferences in one of those exotic countries/regions? I could have been accidentally caught up in one of those “plagues” of modern times, an acute respiratory illness, like Covid-19, also known as the corona virus disease. The one difference would have been the quarantine! An exotic land would suddenly turn into a frightening dystopia where one would have to play the 3:97 dice game with death, in isolation. What does that mean? Everyone is cagey with numbers, but the mortality rate among Covid-19 patients seems to be 3%. It seems absurd to hear when sane doctors tell you, “Well! We have confirmed to you that you have it. Unfortunately, if you insist on knowing it, the mortality rate is 3%”. Consolation, it doesn’t sound as bad as the death rate! Unless, you have the pesky patient’s habit of looking it up on the web. You don’t even need to know that a thesaurus lists synonyms of words. You need not know anything more to type “mortality death” into the box on Google!

Well, that is a fact of life. Life is as fragile as that: 97:3, 99:1, or 99.5:0.5 sometimes, week after week. It is always a dice game. sometimes safer, sometimes not. A fellow passenger wearing a mask, on the next seat on the plane. Sometimes it is the engine problem you had read about, on that model of plane! It is sometimes those VIP kids in their crorepati cars! I now know who a human being is! He/she knows a few dozen facts of life like this, but keeps going all the same, week after week!

लगे रहो, इनसान!

Incidentally, every pandemic is a chain reaction. In a nuclear weapon, an exploding atom causes one or more other atoms to explode. The result is a rapid release of an enormous amount of energy as a whole lot of atoms explode in a very short time. For a pandemic to continue spreading, all that is needed is for one case to trigger one or more cases in turn. As population densities increase and airlines carry millions of people around, pandemics are inevitable. New forms of healthcare preparedness are necessary. Major hospitals proudly announce that they are ready with a 30-bed isolation ward! What do they plan to do if a pandemic reaches 300 cases a day in that city? We need a national task force to prepare a plan for coping with all eventualities and to monitor the progress of the disease in India. This task force need not even meet; it can do its job over the Internet and submit its report in a week followed by weekly updates. If the Chinese can build a hospital in ten days, can’t we organize a task force in ten days? Can’t we announce an emergency fund to fight the disease and review its size regularly in consultation with the task force?

Srinivasan Ramani

Self Defence for Indian Women

There is an uproar about crimes against women. One Member of Parliament has gone as far as suggesting the lynching of criminals involved. No court would approve of such a drastic practice, but discussion of the topic and coming up with practical solutions is necessary.

Part of the problem is the Indian concept of women as helpless people who cannot defend themselves. At a time when women are taking on the job of combat pilots, this patronizing view of women is harmful. I would argue that at least one or two percent of women who use two-wheelers or cars for risk-prone commuting should get trained in self-defence, and carry licensed pistols. There are 37,000 rapes per year in India. Assume that about 40 or 50 rape attempts end in the attacker being shot. That would send a very powerful message to all brutes. The woman need not shoot to kill. Good self-defence training can tell them what they should do.

There is a tradition of demanding that the government should take responsibility for implementing every suggestion. I would disagree. All I would ask for is that people who run good gyms be encouraged to set up training units to offer self-defence training as a business, including the safe use of pistols. Rigorous selection and careful regulation of these training units is what the police should do.

Srinivasan Ramani  

Have you seen the International Space Station (ISS) traveling in the sky?

Do you want to know when the ISS will pass over your city? Please sign up
at this site: https://spotthestation.nasa.gov/sightings/index.cfm

You will get an email giving you this information. Visit this site to read
about this amazing vehicle https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Space_Station

What is special about watching the International Space Station pass over
our heads?

In the past, many people believed that the planets are gods. They
believed that the fate of  humans is decided by the location of planets in the sky at the time of their birth. 

Now, we can build a space station out of steel and aluminum, like we make
airplanes. We can launch it to roam around the world. It will appear to people
like a fast-paced planet. These stations are generally big enough for six people
to travel in space for something like a year.

The space station will make a trip round the Earth in about 90 minutes. Therefore, in a year, astronauts can orbit the Earth more than 5,000 times.

India has decided to launch its own space station within two or three years.
This would be a valuable place from where scientists would be able to study
the Earth.
( This article is avaiable in Hindi at HindiMeSTEM@blogpost.in )

Shri Kamalakar S Kane (1934 – 2019), Computer Pioneer - note by Minoo Dosabhai, Ms VK Joglekar and Srinivasan Ramani

Shri Kamalakar S Kane (1934 – 2019), Computer Pioneer

KS Kane passed away on 6^th July 2019, after a short period of hospitalization for a heart problem. One of the first few Indians to learn computer programming and, to master its uses in engineering, KS Kane played a key role in the Computer Group at Tata Institute of Fundamental Research. He had studied engineering in Sweden and returned in 1959. He joined the TIFR Computer Group headed by Dr DY Phadke and was assigned to head computer programming activities. Later, he worked for a couple of years at the Atomic Energy Establishment Trombay, as Bhabha Atomic Research Centre was then called. 

A large number of Indians who entered the field in the 1960’s learnt computer programming from Kane and his colleagues, C Natesh Kumar, Mythili Rao, VSN Reddy GT Redkar, and P Sadanandan. The TIFR Computer Group served hundreds of institutions all over India, welcoming them to share the TIFR computing facilities, teaching them introductory courses, and offering them help in coping with program development and debugging efforts. These were exciting days when many fields of science and technology were making rapid progress with the new computing tools and techniques they were developing. For instance, revolutionary insights were coming out of analyzing x-ray crystallographic data. Some of the bridges, flyovers and buildings were designed during that period using computers for structural analysis for the first time.

Kane collaborated in software development with Prof R Narasimhan, who had headed the effort to design and build the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research Automatic Calculator (TIFRAC). This was one of the very early computers, which was dedicated to the nation by Jawaharlal Nehru, the then Prime Minister, in 1960. Narasimhan and Kane had together designed and implemented a three-address assembler for TIFRAC, the earliest instance we know of an item of system software developed in India. Three address codes gained importance years after the TIFRAC was commissioned because optimizing compilers used them as an intermediate representation. However, the TIFRAC team seems to have chosen a three-address system for other reasons. Computer memories of those days were amazingly small, by today’s standards. TIFRAC had a 2000-word memory, words being 40 bits in length. 11-bit addresses were enough to address the whole memory and 40-bit words could accommodate an instruction code as well as three addresses.     

The TIFR Computer Group later acquired a CDC 3600 (1964), vastly increasing its computing capacities. Kane stayed on as Head of Programming till 1977 when he left TIFR to set up his own software activities. One of his sons, Shridhar, joined him in 1985 when the activity was converted to a Private Limited Company.

Kane is fondly remembered for his human qualities as well. He was a soft-spoken and friendly person. He was highly approachable and very helpful at a time when so many people were scrambling to learn computer programming, for use in science and engineering.

While we knew of Kane as a computer pioneer and a senior colleague, he was also playing an important role in maintaining his family’s institution in Mumbai that has set standards in excellence and popularity in serving ethnic food – Mama Kane’s Swatchha Upahar Gruh in Dadar. This institution had been founded by Kamalakar Kane’s grandfather in 1910. Kamalakar Kane showed equal zeal and passion for his busy computing/software activities and for this family business. He was always on the look-out for innovative ideas to implement in his ethnic food business too.

With great humility, he mingled with ease with a broad spectrum of people ranging from leading scientists to the lowest rung of workers in his business. A very generous and helpful person, he always enjoyed the respect and affection from all sections of society. He was usually referred to as Bapusaheb in Dadar.  

Prof PVS Rao recalls that in the early sixties when a computer engineer from abroad was struggling to teach a course on FORTRAN for users at TIFR. Rao requested Kane to take over and solve the problem, which he did very successfully. Dr SG Wagle recalls meeting Kane at his residence a few weeks before his death and listening to his memories of the days TIFRAC was being built at TIFR. Dr Mathai Joseph recalls the work he did with Kane on a time-sharing system to run on CDC3600. He also recalls that Kane did his Master's in Sweden and worked on the first Swedish computer, BESK. In Dr Mathai Joseph’s words, “Kane was the person people went to when their programs did not work as desired. He had an acute eye and could often spot faults very quickly. Many large TIFR scientific programs owed their successful operation to Kane's insight”. 

We would like to say in conclusion: A kind, thoroughly civilized, sincere, and dedicated person like Kamalakar Kane is rare to find. He enriched the lives of all of us who worked with him.

end