Nobel Prize Winners don't get fat

No, I am not joking. I was on a discussion with a professor and company on the Classical Sanskrit Diet and given my recent meeting with Nobel Laureate Prof. Brian Kobilka, the moniker 'Nobel Prize Winners don't get fat' emerged over the course of several conversations.

It is worth noting that the Classical Sanskrit Diet is not based on Classical Sanskrit. I don't expect anyone to learn Classical Sanskrit in order to go on this diet. The adjective 'Classical' is a modified for the noun 'Diet', not for 'Sanskrit'. The term is deliberately chosen to point out one of the problems with Sanskrit, namely, the fact that a lot of Sanskrit words have multiple meanings. The problem is a significant one because the plethora of meanings for even commonly used Sanskrit words makes it impossible to unambiguously parse even simple Sanskrit phrases. This problem exists even for phrases that people in India may commonly know about (such phrases as 'karmanye vaadhikaaraste') and even ones that have entered into government and corporate booklets (e.g. 'yogakshemam veahaamyaham'). For that reason, the discussion on the diet will be conducted not in Sanskrit but in English.

Now, for a comment on Nobel Prize winners. In face of the armies of Marketing people in the Twinkies Marketing department and the scads of Marketing people in the McDonalds French Fries Marketing department and the cohorts of Marketing people in the Pizza Hut Cheese Pizza Marketing department, you would think that these few - these solitary few - would have no chance. But these solitary few do well. They emerge triumphant in face of considerable odds and remain defiantly non-obese. I believe that the reason that they are able to do well is that they are able to quickly quantitatively sift out the Market-ese (spewed out by Marketers in various Marketing departments) from the truth in making food choices and are, thus, able to maintain their weight.

Anyway, if Frenchpeople and Francophiles can take pride in the fact that Frenchwomen don't put on weight, then why can't we as Americans celebrate these people who not only don't get fat but also win the Nobel Prize? Anyway, here is looking forward to more thoughts and ideas on diet. It will be over to Prof. Manikutty on this topic. He will joining us on this blog and will be making food- and nutrition- related posts.

P.S. Paul Krugman? Don't even get me started on Paul Krugman. Brad DeLong? Do not speak to me about Brad DeLong's diet.

Yes, but I have lost weight since

Yes, I have a few extra pounds on me in that picture but you ought to know that I have lost weight since. After my meeting with Prof. Kobilka, I was so inspired that I decided not to postpone my planned diet+exercise program any longer. I call my diet the Classical Sanskrit Diet. It is based on the idea that you only eat foods that have a name in classical and post-classical Sanskrit. Nope, you are not allowed to look in the dictionary.

In the Classical Sanksrit Diet, you end up eating lots of fruits and vegetables since in the beginning, all you are able to eat under the diet are a number of fruits like bananas and apples. This is because you learn the names of these foods very early or already know the names of these items. Also, specific vegetables like kale, broccoli and edamame are okay to eat since those have been added by me to the English-to-Sanskrit dictionary I have created for the diet. It is a primarily plant-based diet, and has a number of health benefits. Our motto :  "Learn Sanskrit, live well".

I am also on a walking program where I am doing a 5K walk every week for 50 weeks - rather, it is a 5K nearly every week for 50 weeks with a 5 week cushion for those extremely busy times. I call it "50 5k's in 55 weeks". Onward!

Ask The Delphic Oracle meets Nobel Laureate Brian Kobilka

A few earlier posts of mine (here, here and here) discuss a new writing system proposal for the Tamil language. In order to bring attention to the issues with the current Tamil writing system and in order to generate some measure of awareness for my Tamil writing system proposal, I sent an email to Prof. Brian Kobilka, Professor of Molecular and Cellular Physiology at Stanford, to ask if he would be able to meet some time. Prof. Kobilka has directed research resulting in many discoveries of great importance and these have led to many drugs in the field of Medicine. He also happens to have won the Nobel Prize for Chemistry this year.

Before I continue with the rest of this post, I should mention that Prof. Kobilka has requested that this post not be read as an endorsement of my writing proposal for Tamil, and I want to make sure that that disclaimer is there up front. I had come across Prof. Kobilka's work as part of my work for this blog, and his accomplishments are many, but I must say that meeting this man was a humbling experience for me.  In fact, one of the medications that I used to take targets GPCRs, one of the discoveries of Prof. Kobilka's that has resulted in his winning the Nobel Prize his year. And so, I was really quite excited. It was very generous of Prof. Kobilka to give me the opportunity to speak wth him. He struck me as very modest about his accomplishment. I consider myself very fortunate in having the opportunity to meet Prof. Kobilka.

The Scrooge of Internet debates

'Anand Manikutty Smackdown Watch' alert. As part of this blog's mission to provide only the best quality opinions, we have now decided to include a Blogger Smackdown Watch. The particular thread on the mailing list silklist linked to in my previous post on the Singularity on silklist turned out to be one where a bunch of people tried to do a smackdown on me. Thankfully, I was prepared. I will describe how I did it below - it is part of my short online lesson on Internet debating.

But first, as part of this blog's 'Anand Manikutty smackdown watch', I would like to alert you to a few facts : (1) the Singularitarian(s) on the list did not provide a set of hypotheses that could be taken as the basis of this theory. This was the case even after they were pressed to do so; (2) the 'innovation is not programmable'/'innovation requires humans' argument was never refuted; (3) each and every single counter-argument (*including* the procedural issue on not linking to the Wikipedia page) was demolished by me on the List that I used to maintain (linked here); (4) I am stingy (in fact, extremely stingy) in terms of the amount of intellectual capital I am willing to spend (that is, I won't spend any intellectual capital by agreeing that I am wrong in Internet debates unless I really am). As it happened, I refused to spend any intellectual capital in this particular debate, but still ended up coming out ahead.

In fact, thus far, although I have debated with a lot of people, even with Nobel laureates, not on a single occasion have they ever been able to prove me wrong. I almost always win debates. Except with the Nobel laureates and such where the debates are just a tie. So, I am just stingy, stingy, stingy all round. Also, note that despite what you might gather from just reading the thread on silklist, I was actually extremely nice to  all the people on silklist, even those who were not nice to me. The silklist is one of the few places left on the Indian blogosphere/forums where civil conversations on topics related to India can be had. You don't see any angry outbursts from me on this silklist thread and if you had read my List, you would have seen a lot of well researched and well thought out comments and, equally importantly, comments that were considerate and thoughtful.  Anyway, given that it is Christmas, I feel like calling myself the Ebenezer Scrooge of Internet debates would be appropriate. So in the spirit of Christmas, I will ask that you take everything I say in good spirit and that my comments should be taken in the spirit of 'giving' and 'shedding light'. I do intend to continue to remain the Ebenezer Scrooge of Internet debates since I believe I shed light on issues on many an occasion. Of course, I have been parsimonious in acknowledging defeat in Internet debates, and I believe that that is an excellent strategy. You should never have to apologize for any Internet comment as long as it was intended in the right spirit and as long as you are right.

The first rule of Internet debates is that there are no rules. The main problem is that in Internet debates, you just don't have that sense of organizational process that makes this sort of thing impossible in business settings. There is no phone number to call and no management hierarchy to resolve things via.   The other thing about Internet debates is that in game theoretical terms - and this is the most useful mathematical model here - they can be zero sum games. Once the debate has gone past a certain stage, one party must win and the other must lose. When a debate looks like a zero sum game, things dramatically change. You have to try really hard to either win or get your point of view across. It is almost like you have to be a sort of One Man Army. You can't rely on anyone else, you have to try hard to block everything and you have to improvise constantly based on what you subjectively see. Now, the big problem is this : if the debate is in a prominent source (also known as an Authority in technical circles) or is in a place that later becomes a prominent source, that particular debate from four years ago might start ranking very high on Internet searches. That may not seem fair, but then life isn't fair. (Just Google for my name and you will find that this particular thread that was practically inconsequential in terms of what I got out of it has only caused me a lot of pain. The benefit was zero.). Also, debaters are often not fair. Not only aren't debaters fair, time is also of essence. You can easily lose an Internet debate in a matter of minutes. Lose you might not only that debate but also your online reputation.

In fact, it is just like war in another way. Different strategies are called for in different situations. In a not-quite-fully-moderated mailing list-type forum like silklist (where there is at least some trolling and many, many of the discussions on matters of national policy go way off track notwithstanding the presence of at least one professor on the list), you are better off linking to your opinion from your own list because you can never control what other people say about you. All you can do is control your own reaction. Note that in this silklist thread, you need to read my comments in conjunction with the silklist thread. Otherwise, you are likely to make the same mistake as at least one person on the discussion did. He assumed that what I said on silklist was all there was to what I had said (but, of course, that was not true). The strategy I used was simple : realizing that there was trolling going on on silk list, I simply started linking to my own List from the first post on silk list (and it continued with every post from there onwards). This way, I prevented what could have been an utter disaster for me because moderators will sometimes moderate out your replies to a forum but not that of others. By maintaining control of what gets said about me, I got to control the outcome of the debate. And finally, one caveat : do not try this at home or at work. You might make people extremely unhappy. End of Internet debating lesson.

So anyway, Merry Christmas, people. Have a happy holiday season!

Update (Jan 3): Updated post a little to fix typos, etc.

MIT research shows new magnetic state, one that could aid quantum computing

From ComputerWorld (emphasis added by me):

Researchers at MIT and other institutions have demonstrated a new type of magnetism, only the third kind ever found, and it may find its way into future communications, computing and data storage technologies. 

Working with a tiny crystal of a rare mineral that took 10 months to make, the researchers for the first time have demonstrated a magnetic state called a QSL (quantum spin liquid), according to MIT physics professor Young Lee. He is the lead author of a paper on their findings, which is set to be published in the journal Nature this week. Theorists had said QSLs might exist, but one had never been demonstrated before.

Cellphone, GPS data suggest new strategy for alleviating traffic tie-ups

From Berkeley's Newscenter:

Asking all commuters to cut back on rush-hour driving reduces traffic congestion somewhat, but asking specific groups of drivers to stay off the road may work even better. 

San Francisco Bay Area freeways colored according to how popular they are as connectors between other roads (bc) and the number of geographic areas that contribute to traffic on a particular road (Kroad). 

The conclusion comes from a new analysis by engineers from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the University of California, Berkeley, that was made possible by their ability to track traffic using commuters’ cellphone and GPS signals. 

This is the first large-scale traffic study to track travel using anonymous cellphone data rather than survey data or information obtained from U.S. Census Bureau travel diaries. In 2007, congestion on U.S. roads was responsible for 4.2 billion hours of additional travel time, as well as 2.8 billion gallons of fuel consumption and an accompanying increase in air pollution.

A slight miscalculation

Time to look back at all the people who were busily preparing for the Mayan Apocalypse -- and laugh. The prediction that the world would end on Friday, December 21st, 2012 appears to have been a case of a slight miscalculation.

In Moscow 1,000 people who had packed into Josef Stalin's bunker were able to go back home after Armageddon was averted. 

Chinese authorities dismissed outright rumours that Jesus had reappeared as a woman somewhere in the middle of the country, and also denied that they had built an "ark" as a contingency plan. 

At Pic de Bugarach, the French mountain some had believed to be a place of salvation, the sun came out from behind the clouds and a flock of birds flew past as the official end of the world struck after 11am GMT. 

The mountain had been identified as an "alien garage" from where a vast intergalactic flying saucer would emerge to rescue nearby humans.