OPINION

Having just got back after a two weeks business trip to Paris, here are some of my rants against its public transportation system, especially the metro. I reached CDG on a Sunday evening. I went to the RER-B kiosk (Metro to the city), to discover the metro don’t run at that time. Did I hear it right? Metros don’t run on Sundays in Paris, at least on this airport line. There were some boards displayed that informed me that I needed to take “Roissybus”, presumably the name of a bus company, to the city. I needed to get the ticket first and I didn’t find any counter for this Roissybus. I then went to an information desk and they said the RER-B metro ticket would also work on the bus. At the RER-B counter, I chose the option “From CDG to Anywhere in Paris City” and got the ticket for 10.5 Euros. I then walked to the Roissybus stop. A bus came to Opera and I tried to validate the ticket. The machine won't accept my ticket! I was flabbergasted. After all, 10.5 Euros isn’t cheap. If RER-B...

I grew up in rural Kerala reading each morning ‘Mathrubhumi’-a Malayalam newspaper. Over those years, I remember seeing small box advertisements on top-corners of the front page; every day I would see different incarnations of similar ads. The ads would read like “scientifically prepared magic amulets to ward off evil spirits” and so on. Even after two full decades, similar ads can still be found in Mathrubhumi and other newspapers of Kerala (and presumably other states as well). The question here is straight forward, what is science? Simply put, science is an evidence-based pursuit of knowledge discovery. Let us consider the example of the previous advertisement, the amulet. The question is how effective the amulet is to ward off evil spirits. Before answering this issue, one has to ascertain the validity of a thing called ‘evil spirit’. Of course, this question evades a fundamental principle in science known as ‘falsifiability’, put forth first by the British philosopher of s...

This comment is in response to “ The march from yesterdays ” by Sundar Sarukkai, published on 10 th August 2017. I am surprised to read a comment from a philosopher colleague that suffer from the logical fallacy of ad ignorantiam in its entirety, that too in the same newspaper issue with an excellent politics article full of profound scientific insights from a non-scientist colleague ( When the Paradigm Shifts , Happymon Jacob). The ignorance stems in part from the author’s poor understanding of what construes the science and how it is different from non-science, erroneous science and pseudoscience- three totally unrelated concepts. Non-scientific disciplines like history, sociology, art, literature and so on are of course not pseudoscientific or erroneous science, and the author’s such a claim suffers from a logical fallacy known universally as ‘false dichotomy’. I am a scientist, and I also work on linguistics and evolutionary socio-politics, I have authored an English fictio...

Of course, I am not apolitical; I do not have, however, a lifelong allegiance to a particular political party. I also refuse to be someone like the one author Elbert Hubbard satirically idolises: “To avoid criticism, do nothing, say nothing, and be nothing.” I have been vocal about various policy-related decisions of successive governments at different levels in India, mostly through social media. Among the things that I appreciated include good governance by Delhi CM Arvind Kejriwal, effective managerial skills of PM Modi and his decision to replace flowers for books as souvenirs, austere way of life of Tripura CM Manik Sarkar, Yogi Adityanath’s decision to distribute backpacks with Akhilesh Yadav’s images, social welfare decisions of Kerala CM Pinarayi Vijayan, and so on. While I love the personal freedom, free economy and other libertarian policies of advanced capitalism, I also love pro-multicultural, pro-science and egalitarian policies of socialism.  In a way, the...

With a good brand value of Lenovo (I am a satisfied customer of their smartphone and tablet) and budget price tag (approx Rs. 1799 through phonepe- Flipkart offer) with one-year warranty I decided to give it a try (it looks way beautiful than Mi bands too, yet another reason). It came with heart rate sensor too, nifty! This is what happened: This band (and most of the other smartbands) support no biking; so if you are planning to do some biking as part of your overall fitness schedule, this band is of no use. HW01 lasts for a day with its heart rate continuous sensor (continuous doesn't mean full time, but one reading every 15 minutes). PLUS, it works on bluetooth, so it drains out phone's battery quite fast. That would mean you are caught up with a dying phone and a dying smartband most of the days . If you disable HR function of the band, it lasts for 2 days. (Compare this with Mi Band 2, which last for a week or so, but again, read the whole story; smartbands ar...

1. Install Philips GoGear Device Manager (Which is available inside your GoGear drive, use explorer to locate and then install) In case the device manager do not open, try other, older computer (I had this issue) 2. Second tab of device manager, repair, has all instructions. In summary, connect or re-connect GoGear in OFF position, while pressing and holding volume up key. It says + key, while no such key can be found, it is just volume up key . 3. The MIX will now start recovering/firmware updation 4. You may need to reformat the drive before you can use it; reformat it from windows explorer like how you reformat USB pen drives. Now try syncing!

A group of scientists from India and Austria have discovered that the red colored “blood” rain phenomenon sporadically happened at various locations across South India and Sri Lanka was due to the spores of terrestrial microscopic green alga, Trentepohlia annulata . Spells of weird red colored rain –the so-called “blood rain”- across South India had been reported since 1896; the latest one happened in Kerala during December, 2013. Rain droplets were so red that the sun-dried white laundry turns dark-red after drenching in the rain. Since then a number of purported causes for this mysterious phenomenon have been circulating, including divine spell and alien involvement. For example, an American newspaper The Huffington Post reported in 2012 that this was caused by extraterrestrial life (aliens). The present study compared microscopic morphology and DNA sequence data of locally abundant microalgae of the area where the red rain phenomenon happened and confirmed that it was a European s...

If you are a writer like me, you might have made the horrendous mistake of marking a common short word as an "index entry" and struggled for hours deleting them. Common words like YOU or LIFE makes no sense in a fiction work; or SEA/OCEAN in a marine biology science textbook. The only way to delete these entries is to go individual entries and delete them, including the braces, as per MS Office support . Here let me share a work around. Make sure all marks are shown (Ctrl+*) in the word.  Bring "Find & Replace" dialogue (Ctrl+H) in the Find What? box, add the term with ^d XE prefix. For example, the term you want to remove is "sea", find term would be ^d XE "sea".  Leave "Replace with" box as it is. Click "Replace All" radio button, and hurray, you are done!

Researchers from Centre for Biosciences, Central University of Punjab, have discovered a new bloom-forming species of a large endemic green seaweed off the West Coast of India. New species was named as Ulva paschima Bast , specific epithet in Sanskrit means “West”-indicating unique pattern in its distribution. Article, authored by Dr. Felix Bast, an Assistant Professor at Centre for Biosciences and two M.Phil. students working with him, Mr. Aijaz Ahmad John and Mr. Satej Bhushan, have been published in October 2014 issue of PLoS ONE , a major international journal. Researchers collected tubular Ulva species from various locations in West Coast from Goa, Karnataka and Kerala over a stretch of 600 km, and used morphometry and DNA sequence data to compare evolutionary legacy of this seaweed with other seaweeds in the world, and concluded that this is a new species. Bloom-forming algae like this newly discovered species are hot candidates for “Carbon Capture and Sequestration”, as it c...

Last week during my journey back from New Delhi to Bathinda in my favorite “Punjab Mail” I was eavesdropping conversation between a family and one lonely traveler.   The family want to exchange a seat of theirs, which is 5 compartments away, with this person so that they can all sit together. The lonely traveler is ready to help out, but with a condition that he don’t mind any berths other than Upper or Side Upper or Side Lower . Seat number the family want to exchange is “42” and they have no clue which berth this is. All were totally clueless to my utter surprise! I had been routinely confronted with this birth allocation problem, especially when tickets in “RAC” gets confirmed while checking the “PNR status”. I could help them out almost instantaneously (which is middle berth!) with a very simple solution. This is the berth allocation for Seat # 1 to #8 1 L 5 M 2 M 6 U 3 U 7 SL 4 L 0 SU Whatever your seat numb...

Direct banks (online banks) are very popular almost everywhere except in India. Of course you will see online banking aka e/internet banking versions of traditional banks here, but I haven't come across not a single online-only bank. Are we that much traditional not to trust anything which is online? There are indeed a number of benefits online banks offer over the traditional, biggest among them is low cost of maintenance, with minimal physical presence and absolutely no branches. A big chunk of interest rates that you get from traditional banks are eaten by their advertisements and operational costs across hundreds of their branches. Offline banks also have advantages, like depositing physical cash etc. Of course safety is a major concern but e-banking of traditional banks have been thriving in the subcontinent for the last decade and I haven't came across a single case where net banking got hacked leading to loss of money. Of the traditional internet banks, my preferen...

Dear World, There are a number of apps available for android that syncs two-way with Google calender (gcal) for offline use, but I could never get this thing done for PC. For example, neither Windows 8 calendar app, nor Outlook calender, will sync with G Cal. Is there any workaround? I'm using a PC-Tablet running Windows 8 and I want to see and create schedules offline that should sync with Gcal when ever I come online. Again, situation is same for maps. During the time of Microsoft Encarta, offline, installable maps were such an easy task, but not anymore. I used to use Gmap Catcher ultil recently when Google API changed such that catcher can not take maps offline. Is there a work around? I want high resolution maps (tiled) of selected cities (for e.g., places I'm intending to travel soon) for offline use in my Windows 8 PC. Thanks and love, Felix

A few months ago I visited local branch of IndusInd (Bathinda) for a credit card and the manager explained that it cost Rs. 3500 as a joining fee and nothing else; so I applied on the same day (primarily as an online payment mechanism for forthcoming overseas trip). Manager said it comes with complimentary Jet Airways ticket, but as I presumed, the so called "ticket" is a voucher code for Rs 1500 discount on the base fare. Base fare is normally Rs. 1 for domestic airlines in India (fuel surcharge comes almost 95% of the total fare); so in order to get that Rs. 1500, you gotta purchase 1500 airtickets! Sites like www.yatra.com have been offering this sort of deceptive tactics for such a long time! I received the kit with credit card in couple of months and I spent sometime to read "Most important terms and conditions" booklet (I am always alert with this sort of nondescript documents, easy to spot with its low font size, like EULA/Terms and Conditions of Mutua...