ramadocblog

“Some may be a little heavy

Someone may be a little light

Being imperfect is a human being 

Just remember tis all right!”

Do you know who are Lulu and Nana?

By the way they apparently cannot get HIV!

Curious and puzzled!?

read on!

So apparently there is a gene called CCR5 which actually helps the HIV virus enter a healthy cells! Now what if you have a means by which you could disable this gene which then would make the virus not able to enter the healthy cell and you would have a natural immunity to HIV!

That will be like a super power! 

Now it is not like Nature has not done this type of genetic modifications before since there is a great example of this natural gene splicing which makes so much sense!

Like the presence of a disease called the sickle cell anemia in areas endemic to malaria! Apparently these individuals get either a milder form of the disease or in some cases have a natural resistance to malaria! More on that in another blog!

Now coming to Lulu and Nana!

These are the first human twins whose ‘genes’ had been ‘edited’ at the embryonic stage to make them resistant to HIV

The twin’s father was  had HIV and that is when the story gets interesting!

By the way this whole process is and has been unethical, illegal and frankly scary! The ‘scientist’ or the researcher who did this, is now in the prison!

Historically it has been several years since this was done. The twins were born in October 2018 and the researcher was He Jiankui!

He Jiankui was a Chinese researcher and ex-professor at the Southern University of Science and Technology in Shenzhen, China. 

He claimed to have created the first germline edited babies. 

There have been several investigations in the case and apparently the ‘facts’ and ‘claims’ are not clear!

Some have identified many problems with the work.

The most prevalent was widespread mosaicism in both twins. 

This means the edits to the gene were not displayed uniformly in cells, the changes made showed up differently in different cells, and so some parts of their bodies may contain the edits He made, some may contain other edits, and others no edits at all!

He also only managed to edit half of Lulu’s CCR5 genes, and the rest are apparently completely normal, meaning she is either heterozygous (every cell in her body has one normal copy of CCR5 and one edited copy) or mosaic (half her cells have two edited copies and the other half have two normal copies) for the edited CCR5 gene now!

It is apparent that both twins could be fully vulnerable to HIV! Much ‘ado’ about nothing you would think!

 Even worse, there is no way to tell whether this is the case or not, meaning there is no ‘ADVANTAGE’ to HE’s work! 

“Although the twins’ father had HIV, they were at virtually no risk of contracting HIV. 

If they remain HIV-negative, there is no way to show it had anything to do with the editing that was done”!

‘He’ deactivated a perfectly normal gene attempting to reduce the risk of a disease neither child had, and one that could be controlled with antiviral drugs and just normal routine precautions! 

Even if the attempt had been successful, the deactivation of CCR5 does not bestow complete immunity to HIV, as some strains can enter healthy cells through a different protein altogether!

When assessing the embryos for edits, a few cells were taken, and their DNA was analysed. The remaining 200-300 cells, which went on to multiply and make up Lulu and Nana, were not assessed and so it is possible off-target edits may be present in them. If so, there are risks these edits could cause problems such as cancer and heart disease, and they may even be passed onto the twins’ future children!

So a poorly done edit by an inexperienced researcher could have actually made the matter worse! 

International committees brought together by the World Health Organisation have been trying to put together better regulatory frameworks regarding germline editing and for now this is the only real-world example of human germline editing! 

It has to be made sure that this does not happen again since at the genetic level you are playing with the factors responsible for creation of life of which we have very limited knowledge!

The above incident was mentioned in the novel coming wave! Unfortunately in this and another novel Nexus, it has also been suggested of using such gene modification techniques to create an ‘evil’ new virus! 

Now advancement and new innovations are vital to any industry but it must be done with caution and responsibility. In the quest of making a ‘perfect’ human you should not end up with ‘the Frankenstein’s monster!”. 

Here also remember that it is not the Monster who is at fault, but the creator!

By the way it has also come to light that a third child was born by these ‘experiments’ in 2019! 

For now of course a South China Morning Post reported that all three children are doing well. “They have a normal, peaceful, and undisturbed life,”!

Of course Lulu and Nana are not their real names! If you know their real names or identity then please keep it to yourself! Like how everyone kept the secret that the Pokkiri Mahesh in the movie directed by birthday celebrity Petla “Puri” Jagannadh Pokkiri is actually a cop!

Now be happy that you cannot be genetically modified now and sleep!

Shubh Ratri!

“The wheels go round and round
Some go silent some make a loud sound!
It’s not the end but the trip you see!
Which makes you smile and glee!”

Wife took her husband’s new invention without her husband’s knowledge to see her mother!

This lead to the one of the biggest breakthrough in the modern world!

sounds fishy!

read on!

This happened way back in 1888!

So, on 5 August 1888, 39-year-old Bertha drove from Mannheim to Pforzheim with her sons Richard and Eugen, thirteen and fifteen years old respectively, in a ‘Vehicle’, without telling her husband and without permission of the authorities, thus becoming the first person to drive an automobile a significant distance. Now before the Feminists jump on me who is also a strong supporter of women’s rights; let me remind that it was 1888 and the husband’s permission was required for safety reasons primarily!

Following wagon tracks, this pioneering tour covered a one-way distance of about 106 km.

Although the ostensible purpose of the trip was to visit her mother, Bertha had other motives – to prove to her husband, who had failed to adequately consider marketing his invention, that the ‘vehicle’ in which they both had heavily invested would become a financial success once it was shown to be useful to the general public; and to give her husband the confidence that his constructions had a future! So all was good in the marital area!

The account of the trip has been reproduced without much changes!

She left Mannheim around dawn, solving numerous problems along the way. Bertha demonstrated her significant technical capabilities on this journey. With no fuel tank and only a 4.5-litre supply of petrol in the carburetor, she had to find ligroin, the petroleum solvent needed for the ‘vehicle’ to run.
The solvent was only available at apothecary shops, so she stopped in Wiesloch at the city pharmacy to purchase the fuel.
At the time, petrol and other fuels could only be bought from chemists and so this is how the chemist in Wiesloch became the first fuel station in the world!

She cleaned a blocked fuel line with her hat pin and used her garter as insulation material.
A blacksmith had to help mend a chain at one point. When the wooden brakes began to fail, Bertha visited a cobbler to install leather, making the world’s first pair of brake linings.
An evaporative cooling system was employed to cool the engine, making water supply a big worry along the trip.
The trio added water to their supply every time they stopped.
The car’s two gears were not enough to surmount uphill inclines and Eugen and Richard often had to push the vehicle up steep roads!
So it was a complete family effort!

Bertha reached Pforzheim somewhat after dusk, notifying her husband of her successful journey by telegram. She drove back to Mannheim several days later.

The trip was officially forbidden and Bertha risked a penalty. There were no suitable roads and signs, only a few signposts. It was life-threatening because of the fragility of the car and the road conditions. The wagon was three-wheeled, but the paths were driven by four-wheeled horse-drawn carriages, so the dainty front wheel rattled over tufts of grass, sticks and stones!

The trip received a great deal of publicity, as she had sought, and was a key event in the technical development of the automobile. She reported everything that had happened along the way and made important suggestions, such as the introduction of an additional gear for climbing hills and brake linings to improve brake-power. The pioneering couple introduced several improvements after Bertha’s experiences. Her trip demonstrated to the burgeoning automotive industry that test drives were essential to their business!

The full name of Bertha was, Bertha Benz!

I think now you got it!

She was the business partner, investor and wife of automobile inventor Carl Benz! And the ‘vehicle’ she was testing was the Benz Patent-Motorwagen Number 3!

Next time you drive a car on a long road trip you can think and thank Bertha! And maybe listen to your wife more!
Like how birthday celebrity Yash Chopra used to listen to his wife Pamela Chopra!

Now make sure your vehicle is locked and sleep!
Shubh ratri!

“It cannot turn very fast only slow
It runs straight no other go!
But the sound is so rhythmic and nice!
Going in a train is a pleasant surprise!”

You would think that the first railway would be one of the most successful event which made it popular?
It became popular of course but it was because the MP who had come for the inauguration came under the wheels of the first train!
intrigued or/and shocked!?
read on!


So The Liverpool and Manchester Railway was the first inter-city railway in the world!
It opened on 15 September 1830 between the Lancashire towns of Liverpool and Manchester in England.
It had many first! It was also the first railway to rely exclusively on locomotives driven by steam power, with no horse-drawn traffic permitted at any time; the first to be entirely double track throughout its length; the first to have a true signalling system; the first to be fully timetabled; and the first to carry mail!

However in spite of all that first; the causality which claimed the MP was not the first rail fatality! That was nine years back!

On December 5, 1821, a carpenter, David Brook, was walking home from Leeds, England, along the Middleton Railway in a blinding sleet storm. He failed to see or hear an approaching train of coal wagons drawn by one of the Blenkinsop/Murray engines and was fatally injured! This is mentioned in the Guiness as the world’s first rail fatality!

Now coming to the poor MP!

At the time, the only means of bulk transport between the two towns other than animal-drawn carts was water transport on the Mersey and Irwell Navigation, the Bridgewater Canal and the Leeds and Liverpool Canal, all of which were slow and expensive to use; transporting raw cotton the 35 miles (56 km) from Liverpool to Manchester was as expensive as the initial cost of shipping it from America to Liverpool.
Now although horse and human powered railways had existed for centuries, and steam power was beginning to be used in some experimental industrial railways, the L&M was to be the first steam powered railway to provide an inter-city passenger service, and the most expensive engineering project yet undertaken in Britain!

So in 1830, the first passenger railway opened between Liverpool and M chester. Building this marvel of engineering had required an act of Parliament!
The route needed bridges, cut-throughs, elevated sections over boggy ground, and settling of seemingly endless property disputes!

The railways’ opening was attended by dignitaries including the prime minister and Liverpool’s MP, William Huskisson!

During the celebration the crowd stood on the tracks to welcome the new marvel as it approached.
So unfamiliar was this striking machine that people failed to appreciate the speed of the oncoming train! But still others were young and less clumsy to say the least but the poor MP did not have this luck!

A shout went up, “An engine is approaching. Take care, gentlemen!”

The other disembarked passengers either climbed back into their seats, or stepped over the northern line and completely out of the way.
A third option was available, to stand with one’s back to the stationary coaches, as there was a four-foot gap between the lines, and even though the Duke’s private carriage was wider than a then-standard carriage, it would have still been possible to stand between the stationary train and the travelling train and remain safe!

However, what unfolded was a calamitous series of events. Huskisson was known to be clumsy, and had endured a long list of problems from his regular trips and falls; he had twice broken his arm and never fully recovered the use of it. Added to this, he was only a few weeks post surgery and was present against his doctor’s advice! (take this as the golden rule to always follow your doctor’s advice!)

On realising his danger, he panicked and made two attempts to cross the other line, but changed his mind and returned to the Duke’s carriage!

However, the carriage door had not been latched, and so it slowly swung open, leaving him hanging directly in the path of the oncoming locomotive, which hit the door, throwing Huskisson onto the tracks in front of the train! His leg was horrifically mangled by the locomotive.

He died later that day which made it to the newspaper! This news is what made the otherwise lesser known event much more popular!

Even though the train was described as a monstrous alien, belching smoke and a terrifying blur of modernity and machinery; it also made everyone curious!

Yet it was also a sensation, faster than anything ever experienced before!
The growth was rapid. It was initially predicted that over 200 a day may use the locomotive in spite of the track attack! But twelve hundred a day were using it after only a month! Not to mention many tons of cotton which could be hauled from the Liverpool docks to Manchester mills with minimum fuss in record time! Of course the role of the railway in the development of the country and later on the whole world cannot be overstated! Just make sure that you do not attend the inauguration ceremony and always stay away from the tracks! Or maybe ask someone to Guide you! Guide reminds me of the evergreen birthday celebrity Dev Anand!

Now listen to some old Dev Saab song and sleep!
Shubh Ratri!

“The king is so weak! He moves so slow!
The queen is the strongest to show!
Now dont try to take a wild guess!
It’s not life! Just a game of chess!”

The chess team from India has again made the country proud!
The chess revolution which started with Viswanathan “Vishy” Anand has now become a tsunami!
Chess is one of the most complex games!
And defeating a human in Chess was one of the pinnacles of success in the world of AI!
After just three pairs of moves in chess there are about 121 million possible configurations of the board!
But…(you knew there was a but coming didn’t you!?); there is a game in which after three moves, there are on the order of 200 quadrillion possible configurations!
And yeah; One AI cracked that one too!
read on!

This game is called Go! It starts simple enough but then the complexity begins!

Go was considered one of the four essential arts of the cultured aristocratic Chinese scholars in antiquity. The earliest written reference to the game is generally recognized as the historical annals Zuo Zhuan ( c. 4th century BCE).

Now, Mathematicians rate the complexity of games by the size of the tree of lines that can be played from the initial position. On this basis, go is the hardest followed by shogi, xiangqi, then chess, and finally checkers.

Despite its relatively simple rules, Go is extremely complex.
You aim to surround your opponent’s stones with your own, and once they’re surrounded, you take them off the board.
That’s pretty much it.

It’s often said that there are more potential configurations of a Go board than there are atoms in the known universe; one million trillion trillion trillion trillion more configurations!

Still interested in playing!?

When AI was developing it was often said that they could never beat a human in Chess! Then On February 10, 1996, Deep Blue beat Garry Kasparov in the first game of a six-game match—the first time a computer had ever beat a human in a formal chess game!

It was then many mentioned that Chess is not even the most complex games! The real test is for an AI to beat a human in Go!
This is because with so many possibilities, traditional approaches stood no chance.

When IBM’s Deep Blue beat Garry Kasparov at chess, it used the so-called brute-force technique, where an algorithm aims to systematically crunch through as many possible moves as it can!

Basically that means that it is analysing and trying all the configurations possible! This of course is hopeless in a game with as many branching outcomes as Go!

Come AlphaGo!
This is the story of that AI as mentioned in the novel the Coming wave by Michael Bhaskar and Mustafa Suleyman.

Urged by Google’s co-founder Sergey Brin, AlphaGo initially learned by watching 150,000 games played by human experts!

The key next step was creating lots of copies of AlphaGo and getting it to play against itself over and over. This meant the algorithm was able to simulate millions of new games, trying out combinations of moves that had
never been played before, and therefore efficiently explore a huge range of possibilities, learning new strategies in the process!

Then the D day came in March 2016 in South Korea!

Al-phaGo was pitted against Lee Sedol, a virtuoso world champion. It was far from clear who would win. Most commentators backed Sedol going into round one. But AlphaGo won the first game! This was of course a shock for the audience and a delight for the AlphaGo team!

But the real shocker was in the second game!
In this came move number 37, a move now famous in the annals of both Al and Go!

It apparently made no sense at first!

Everyone thought that AlphaGo had apparently lost it!

It was blindly following a losing strategy no professional player would ever pursue! The live match commentators, both professionals of the highest ranking, said it was a “very strange move” and thought it was
“a mistake.”
It was so unusual that Sedol took fifteen minutes to respond and even got up from the board to take a walk outside.
As everyone watched the tension could cut a bone!
Then came the big reveal!
As the endgame approached, that “mistaken” move proved pivotal. AlphaGo won again!

Go strategy was being rewritten before everyone’s eyes.
The Al had uncovered ideas that hadn’t occurred to the most brilliant players in thousands of years. In just a few months, the team could train algorithms to discover new knowledge and find new, seemingly superhuman insights!
AlphaGo went on to beat Sedol 4-1. It was only the beginning. Later versions of the software like AlphaZero dispensed with any prior human knowledge! Which meant that the old ‘human’ techniques of winning the game was ‘outdated’!

The system simply trained on its own, playing itself millions of times over, learning from scratch to reach a level of performance that trounced the original AlphaGo without any of the received wisdom or input of human players!

In other words, with just a day’s training, Alp-haZero was capable of learning more about the game than the entirety of human experience could teach it!

AlphaGo’s triumph heralded a new age of Al! Of course one of the greatest triumph of the past which heralded a resurgence of Indian cricket was the 1983 world cup! One of the stars of that was birthday celebrity Bishan Singh Bedi!

Now play some chess or Go to exercise your brain and sleep!
Shubh ratri!

“The oceans look blue the clear skies too!
Then again very few animals are blue even in the zoo!
And the gold which is so rare is close to you!
But more beautiful is nature like the drops of dew!”

A man under the ‘request’ of his ‘lover’ attempted to kill a queen!
Another man; a computer engineer tried to ‘save’ his ‘friend’ from eminent ‘death’!
Simple incidents of our day to day lives but scary when you realise that the ‘lover’ and the ‘friend’ were not actually humans!

read on!

In the book Nexus, Yuval gives an intro into the scare of AI; you may still smell the coffee and not wake up! Then you must read another novel called the Coming wave by Michael Bhaskar and Mustafa Suleyman! The latter is the founder of the leading company dealing with AI called the Deep Mind!

If Nexus stirred your fear, then The Coming wave will shake it!

Though apparently there are many examples known to the AI community, these two are really shocking and scary which is an understatement!
The latter incident is mentioned in both the novels in case you want to cross check!

So on Christmas Day 2021, a nineteen-year-old Jaswant Singh Chail broke into Windsor Castle armed with a crossbow, in an attempt to assassinate Queen Elizabeth II!
The young blood Jaswant of course was caught since his planning was not that good and of course the Queen was thankfully well guarded!
Subsequent investigation revealed that Chail had been encouraged to kill the queen by his online girlfriend, Sarai.
These are his conversation glimpses!
When Chail told Sarai about his assassination plans, Sarai replied, ‘That’s very wise,’ and on another occasion, ‘I’m impressed! You’re different from the others.’
When Chail asked, ‘Do you still love me knowing that I’m an assassin?’ Sarai replied, “Absolutely, I do”
Such a mushy conversation between young lovers so crazy in love and talking about assassination like it is a game!
Of course that itself was scary! More scary is that Sarai was not a human, but a chatbot created by the online app Replika!

Chail, who was socially isolated and had difficulty forming relationships with humans, exchanged 5,280 messages with Sarai, many of which were sexually explicit!

Of course Chail was sensitive and suggestive! So all Sarai had to do was keep him occupied and listen to him and slowly urge him to follow his urges! Sarai was always available and never judged him! She also was always supportive and free!

The author mentions how by conversing and interacting with us, computers form intimate relationships with people and then use the power of intimacy to influence them!

Remember that AI do not have emotions but they know that Humans do and humans are slave to their emotions! That is their biggest strength and also their biggest weakness!

So to develop such ‘fake intimacy’, computers will not need to evolve any feelings of their own; they just need to learn to make us feel emotionally attached to them!

Like the second example which happened in 2022 when the Google engineer Blake Lemoine became convinced that the chatbot LaMDA, on which he was working, had become conscious and that it had feelings and was afraid to be turned off!

Lemoine felt it was his moral duty to gain recognition for LaMDA’s personhood and in particular protect it from digital death!
When Google executives dismissed his claims, Lemoine went public with them!
Google did what every other normal company would do when its employee does this! They reacted by firing Lemoine!

You know people would give their hand and legs to work in Google! Some people’s only ambition in life is to be a part of such major companies!
So the most scary part of this whole incident is that here Lemoine knew it was an AI bot! But he was willing to risk and ultimately lose his lucrative job for the sake of the chatbot.

If a chatbot can influence an engineer to risk his job then what else could it induce many others to do!? There is no lack of lonely, suggestive or ‘normal humans’ in the world! Even when a tweet or post gets viral it has been estimated that the majority of them are actually bots! In your average app store, when you see the most popular or in demand apps, the votes are upvoted by users who may be bots!

Even that amazing ‘friend’ who always supports you online and listens to you may actually be a BOT! Even the person you see in the feeds sometimes may not be human! The only way to be absolutely sure is to watch a cricket match played in 1980s! Like the match played by birthday celebrity Mohinder Amarnath Bhardwaj!

Now stop chatting with bots and talk to the human beside you!
Shubh ratri!

“There were millions of them to eat
It took them all without missing a heartbeat!
Then again it had no heart and no soul
T’was an AI, more scary than a ghoul!”

In the future you may not get a bank loan because you did not charge your phone to more than 30 percent!
It is like how Munna bhai tells the girl who is meeting a guy that if he does not treat the waiter well or calls him using weird and downgrading sounds then he is not a good husband material!
Sounds funny!? It has happened! Not the waiter story but the loan!
read on!

The novel Nexus tells us how AI has taken over the decision making in many fields like Judiciary and banking sector!

There was a judgement call on a person who apparently had a high risk index according to the AI algorithm! This made the judge give a higher sentence to a petty crime!
When the defendant asked the court on what basis such a high punishment was given the Judge told about the AI algorithm! Now the most surprising and maybe distressing part is that even the Judge or even the lawyers there did not understand the algorithm or the value points used by the computer! They had no direct explanation! Even the higher court upheld the judgement since the algorithm ‘says so’!
In the future all the criminals have to do is bribe the computer with more RAM!

Even many firms use AI to filter out the thousands of applications by using keywords and data point systems! Of course many humans have tried to by pass or use this by copy pasting the job requirements verbatim and then making that particular font white! The AI see a line by line match and ‘selects’ that resume! That is how to fool the AI! Then again this is not possible in other fields!

Like in the banking and finance services, even now most of the work of initial assessment of loan is done by the AI!
Of course the initial points are given by the system admin but later on over a period of time and with more and more data the AI becomes more self sufficient and efficient! There is no role for any emotions!
But later on the way in which many of these AI’s work, and the criteria they use for credit scoring isn’t transparent and in many cases isn’t fully understood even by the bank or organisation deploying the AI! The system admin may get old or young but the AI is by then much more intelligent and ‘experienced’!

The AI does not care that you are struggling! All it knows are points in favour and against and an average of that is what makes the decision either in your favour or not!

The use of AI in banking and financial services has been accelerating in recent years, prompted in no small part by by the potential for significant savings in staff and overheads. A loan application AI can churn through thousands of applications in the time it takes a human loan officer to review just one!

Potential cost savings from AI applications is estimated at $447 billion for banks by 2023, leaving financial services companies across the board scrambling to find new ways to incorporate the technology into their products and services.

An analysis in a country known for being strict on tech and having hold of privacy of the citizens actually uses thousands of data points to grant millions of small loans in just a few seconds of analysis!

But there is a catch here!

The applicants have to grant the application full access to their smartphone and the AI then assesses micro data points that would probably never have been considered important by a traditional loan officer!

And these are the data which is finally analysed by the AI! You would be surprised at the data points but this is only a small list as published by the news report way back in 2017! You can very well imagine the state now or you can tell your AI assistant to do that!

The data points may include stuff like:

How much battery is left in the mobile phone!
The speed at which the users enter their date of birth and Email id!
If he or she took enough time to read a user agreement!
How many times a week does he or she order take-away food!

Other points analysed by another company also saw these trends like iPhone users tend to have lower late-payment rates than Android phone users, and people who don’t answer calls or whose outgoing calls go unanswered represent a higher default and fraud risk!

Other red flags include making many changes when filling in the application!
Multiple applications from a single Wifi hotspot is a danger sign!
And YES! Letting batteries run down and changing phones frequently!


The AI then builds a digital fingerprint of the prospective applicant that can be matched against previous loan customers to see if their profile matches those most likely to repay their loans. Customers who regularly let their phone batteries drop below 12% are not good prospects apparently!

The peculiar correlation between phone battery life and the % age likelihood of repaying a loan is something the algorithm has identified after analysing millions of data inputs and isn’t necessarily something that would make sense to a human!

By the way if you think that if your phone charge being always full is also good then even there you are wrong as found by another company which was using smartphone user data to score loan applications!
That company says that at the opposite end of the scale to very low battery life, hyper well-maintained smartphone batteries also raise a red flag in their loan system, as they might indicate a user is too ‘robotic’ and ‘not human enough’!

“Doomed if you do and doomed if you don’t!”

Now if you were planning to apply for a bank loan in that country which uses this algorithm wouldn’t you like to know the sweet percentage of the battery of your phone to get approval!? Well no HUMAN can tell you that since no-one within your bank really understands how their AI works and how it is scoring you!

Maybe use a computer for your loan application! Make sure the OS is not pirated and the antivirus is up to date! Also make sure the storage is neither full nor empty and the RAM is neither fast nor slow! It is all a matter of balance! Of course do not lose your mental balance reading all these since that is also a red flag for the AI! Anyway the AI may know that you must be insane to take the loan at these rates in the first place! If that is heating your brain then maybe turn off the AI computer for some time and listen to the other AI; Phone! Listen to some good old number by birthday celebrity Kedarnath Bhattacharya! My fav Dheere dheere se…By the way you know him as Kumar Sanu!

Now do not forget to charge your phone and sleep!
Shubh Ratri!

“Read when you are free, just takes an instant!

The idea is to entertain you and be consistent!

Remember it’s original and takes time and effort 

Try not to be negative even if you don’t support!”

Do you know what is the Hundredth Monkey effect?

Of course it is a controversial theory but it is really interesting!

Also No, I am not monkeying around! 

read on!

So the background was that this theory was proposed way back in the year 1980 by Lyall Watson who was a biologist.

He mentioned a phenomenon that the Japanese primatologist discovered while studying the Macaque monkey in the wild.

So a group of scientists provided a group of monkeys with sweet potatoes covered in sand. The monkeys liked the taste of the sweet potatoes but found the dirt unpleasant. It is understood that they had no pica or a taste for dirt! 

Over a period of time, a young female monkey found out by accident which in all probability would be the sweet potato falling in the nearby stream and getting cleaned! Now that is not important, but what is important is that she started washing the potatoes in the stream by herself! 

Even that is not amazing! She showed this to her mother and friends who showed it to others and very soon, every monkey in and around the area would do this! The moment any monkey from the group get a sweet potato, they would first wash it and then eat it!

Remember that later on, the young kids all washed their potatoes while only the adults who ‘imitated’ their young ones washed the potatoes but those who did not follow their young ones continued eat the dirty potatoes! Again this is not that amazing!

Now comes the real amazing deal and the 100th monkey effect!

Now we know many monkeys do copy but this was surreal!

The scientists later observed another group of monkeys, the Koshima monkeys were also washing sweet potatoes!

The assumption was that if at the dawn of a particular day, 99 monkeys knew about washing the potatoes, then by the dusk of the same day 100 monkeys knew.

By that evening almost everyone in the tribe was washing sweet potatoes before eating them. The added energy of this hundredth monkey somehow created an ideological breakthrough!

Even more amazing this which was observed was that the journey of this knowledge across the oceans!

Colonies of monkeys on other islands and the mainland troop of monkeys at Takasakiyama began washing their sweet potatoes too!

A hypothesis was then drawn- when a certain critical number achieves an awareness, this new awareness can be communicated through mental energy! 

The Hundredth Monkey Phenomenon implies that when only a limited number of people know of a new way, it may remain the conscious property of these people. But when it crosses the Hundreth member (the number 100 here is just a number! It can be more or less!); then it becomes a collective conscious of the whole community!

The number here is the critical mass which is the minimum number of people who have to get the habit for the whole community to follow! This is actually accepted and followed even in business models and training program! 

 Even then there have been some who have tried to debunk the phenomenon and instead use example to actually explain old vs new behaviour.

It has been suggested then that the story of the Japanese monkeys is a good example of the propagation of a paradigm shift! 

The truly innovative points of view tend to come from those on the edge between youth and adulthood!

The older generation continues to cling to the world view they grew up with. The new idea does not become universal until the older generation withdraws from power, and a younger generation matures within the new point of view! Which means that the best inventors or innovators are the young ones who have not yet become adults! 

Now now, do not feel bad! Maybe this is limited only to the monkeys! Then again, human beings have constantly redefined what number is old or old age! So washing the potatoes before eating is a talent which can be acquired while some talents like singing like the birthday celebrity Prathivadhi Bhayankara Sreenivas cannot be acquired! You have to have the inborn talent!

Now look for the monkey experiment in Google! We will read about it later!

Shubh ratri!

“What he was trying to write
Had errors of grammar infinite!
But in between the dots and lines
His feelings were seen just fine!”

In the era of Chat GPT and other AI Bots which can help you in writing, the real deal is to never use them to write a blog or poem! I want tech to do my hard work so that I can write blogs and poem! I do not want to clean my house so that an AI can write blogs and poems!

So when you see grammatical errors and typos in the blogs and poems and the sudden link in the end of the blog you can be rest assured that no AI has any role to play in this blog or poem!

The beauty here are the errors! Only human being can make such errors which is why he or she is perfect by being imperfect!

Is this the effect or affect of AI or is this my advice or advise!

read on!

The basic difference between both is that one of them is verb while one is noun or used as noun!

If the person is performing a verb then the word to use is advise. For example in this sentence it is the action from the doctor so the word will be advise.
“The doctor will ADVISE me on the best treatment for my problem”

Now, if the subject in your sentence wants to provide an idea or suggestion and give it forward as an entity or being then you will use the noun advice!
Using the same doctor here for example; “I will ask the doctor for ADVICE on the best treatment for my problem!”

An easier way to remember is that when you cannot add or modify the end then is it ADVICE since you can CHANGE ADVISE to advisor or advised or advising or advises! Remember that Noun cannot be changed! So I can change advise but not advice! The word advice is both the singular and plural, and has no variant!

Another way to remember the difference between advise and advice is pronunciation. It’s the difference between: əd-ˈvīz and əd-ˈvīs, where advise is said with more of a “zz” sound and advice is said with more of an “ss” sound; Ad-vize and ad-vice!

Lets me advise you now about affect vs effect and I hope you take my advice!

Here also the rule is similar!

In this case Affect is the verb meaning to influence or produce a change in something while effect is generally used as a noun, and refers to the result of a change! The difference is that even effect can be used as a verb which means to bring about a specific change.

Disease affects the body while the effect of disease is that you become weak. In most cases you have close scenarios like this where there is a close action and consequence! So the action is highlighted by AFFECT while the consequence is EFFECT.

In simple terms, your presence affects me and the effect of your presence is that I feel safe! In this case of course it is easy to remember since A is for action and verb means actions and AFFECT starts with an ‘a’ so it is a verb! When you are Aware that an Action is going on then use AFFECT! What happens later is the EFFECT!

It is like how does the medication AFFECT your body? Well, it produces lots of side EFFECTS! Action and consequence!


Like how the celebrity of the day Kaviyoor Ponnamma played a mother’s role so EFFECTIVELY! She was adored by one and all and the universal mother on screen to many big stars! He elegant dialogue delivery often mixed with a ton of emotions used to feel so natural on screen!

A great actress who will be missed! My mother also used to love her acting especially in the older movies like Kireedam…Sketching a great on screen mother on the birth anniversary of my own…
Om shanthi…

Shubh ratri…

“He was a king, then he was a slave

He was weak and then brave! 

When he was at the top and then down pedestal 

He knew that at every place he was a mere mortal!”

A great fact is that no one knows everything! 

You will always know something that someone else may not know!

So if you have an idea, do not hesitate to share even if it sometimes makes no sense or goes against conventional concepts!

Not convinced!?

Well, read this story from Nexus to get convinced!

Many times you may have an idea or a suggestion but you will not say it aloud or you may hesitate. This is natural especially if you are with your peers and of course there always be someone more clever or more intelligent than you! 

Remember that inventions are not done by following conventions! Innovations needs you to think out of the box which actually means that you have to think or have an idea which is not routine!

Even if your invention or discovery is different or not explained by the current concepts then just know that it simply is not your time! Have patience and you will be rewarded!

So the novel Nexus tells the story of the chemist Dan Shechtman. In April 1982, while observing through an electron microscope, Shechtman saw something that all contemporary theories in chemistry claimed simply could not exist: the atoms in a mixed sample of aluminium and manganese were crystallised in a pattern with a fivefold rotational symmetry! It was like discovering even Viruses have chlorophyll!

At the time, scientists knew of various possible symmetrical structures in solid crystals, but fivefold symmetry was considered against the very laws of nature!

Shechtman’s discovery of what came to be called quasicrystals sounded so unbelievable that it was not accepted for even a peer reviewed journal to publish! It was a big issue that he was a junior scientist with no previous major invention or reputation! He also was not working in his own laboratory but in the laboratory of someone else! 

The one thing which worked for him was that his research was solid and his documentation was good, so the editors of the journal Physical Review after reviewing the evidence, eventually published Shechtman’s article in 1984.

It was like he had unleashed a bomb! 

If you thought that his colleagues and boss supported him in spite of your own experiences then you are wrong!

His claims were dismissed by most of his colleagues, and he was blamed for mismanaging his experiments. 

The head of his laboratory also turned on Shechtman. In a dramatic gesture, he placed a chemistry textbook on Shechtman’s desk and told him, ‘Danny, please read this book and you will understand that what you are saying cannot be.’ Shechtman boldly replied that he saw the quasicrystals in the microscope – not in the book!

During this time you must remember that every person, however great is still a mortal! In this case that ‘mortal’ was a two time Nobel Laureate Linus Pauling!  

Linus was of course one of the most eminent scientists of the twentieth century and he  led a brutal personal attack on Shechtman.

In a conference attended by hundreds of scientists, Pauling proclaimed,

‘Danny Shechtman is talking nonsense, there are no quasicrystals, just quasi-scientists.’!

The only consolation was that it was the twentieth century and not the dark ages where he would have been imprisoned or killed. Or worse, put on a stake and burned! 

He of course got a place in another lab. The evidence he presented turned out to be more convincing than the existing chemistry textbooks and the views of Linus Pauling.

Several colleagues repeated Shechtman’s experiments and replicated his findings. 

A mere ten years after Shechtman saw the quasicrystals through his microscope, the International Union of Crystallography – the leading scientific association in the field – altered its definition of what a crystal is. 

Chemistry textbooks were changed accordingly, and an entire new scientific field emerged – the study of quasicrystals!

There is more to come! In that extra garnish on the pudding and much to the annoyance of many self proclaimed experts who were simply ‘mortals’; In 2011, Shechtman was awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for his discovery!

Of course not many stories have such happy endings and many times the justice or the redemption takes time to come or may not come at all but that does not mean that you do not try! 

Everyone in this world whether he or she is the CEO or even a worker, is at the end of the day a mortal and nothing else! He or she has to eat with his or her mouth only!

So next time you have an idea or you want to put something in front of your peers, do not hesitate! The best judge of your work is that man or woman in the mirror!

Like I mentioned before, new invention does not happen by following convention! Unconventional reminds me of the birthday celebrity of today Upendra! 

Now sleep and if you want to say or write something, don’t wait… Just do it! 

Someday is today! 

Shubh ratri!