I was reading up on Pi (the ratio of circumference to diameter of a circle) – in a book by Alex Bellos – and realized how little I knew about this number and how fascinating it is.

For one, all my life, I never realized that Pi can be expressed by this simple formula. Frankly, my first instinct looking at the series was that it does not converge – let alone add up to exactly one fourth Pi !

Ramanujan – who I had heard a lot about when I was growing up in India apparently created a famous formula for Pi – which I did not know either. I was aware of the Ramanujan numbers but not of his work on Pi. The remarkable part of the formula is that right at the outset if you put n=0, it gives an accurate value of Pi to the sixth decimal place! If you put n=1, it will add another eight digits of accuracy to the value of Pi and so on!!

Fairly scary looking formula though:

Modern computers have calculated Pi to – hold your breath – 2.7 trillion places!! To put this in perspective, if we used just 39 places, we can calculate the circumference of the circle that can circumscribe the whole known universe to the accuracy of less than an atom of Hydrogen!!!

And yet, no patterns of repetition (of any set of numbers – two-digited, three-digited…. million-digited …. and so on) has ever been found in that sequence. Thus we know one thing – Pi is NOT a rational number.

Another interesting data and I will let you go… If you start narrating the digits of Pi, you will not encounter a zero in the first 10 digits… or 20 digits… or even in 30 digits. (It comes as the 32nd digit – and yet, the first 200 billion digits in Pi have been studied for distribution – all of them occur in very similar numbers!!)

This is data on Covid spread in India. Fascinating data.
1. 70% of Covid patients did not spread the virus to ANYBODY. On the other hand, 10% of Covid patients caused 60% of the spread of virus.

2. The second one is even more fascinating. It is the young adults who are spreading the virus most (I assume that is because they tend to be more social and gather in groups?). And people tend to spread to other people of similar age as their own (I assume because people tend to congregate with folks of similar age group)

(Source: The Economist)

The other day, the weather forecasters warned us that Storm Zeta will be going thru where we live. Which got me thinking how many storms have we had this year? US storm naming has an interesting pattern. Every year we start with the letter A (first storm is named starting with A – it was Arthur this year) and then go thru B, C … The names alternate between male names and female names. The starting name alternates between male and female every year. Did you know you can submit your own names to NOAA?

Back to the count. There are no names with Q, U, X, Y, Z any year. So, there are 21 names every year. What happens when we have more storms like we did this year? Turns out, we give up all pretensions to innovation and go straight for Greek Alphabets – Alpha, Beta etc etc.

Back to Storm Zeta. The Greek letter (upper case) for Zeta is “Z”. This is where my confusion started… Did we have 45 storms this year? (21 English names and then 24 letters in the Greek Alphabet).

It was Sunjay Talele who reminded me that “Z” is only the sixth letter in Greek Alphabet. Which, in turn reminded me that, once upon a time (my ninth grade to be precise), I had found all the Greek letters enumerated in a page in the back of the Oxford Learner’s Dictionary my dad had bought for me. I had even learnt them by rote.

I figured, 40 years later, might as well learn once more the letters and how to write them in lower case and upper case. After four days, I can now write all the letters backwards (omega to alpha) and can ace all the quizzes on Greek Alphabets – at least the ones I could find on the internet.

Will see how much recall I have a week from now…

The confusing letters for me included eta (“H”), zeta and xi (cannot write the letters in English script). And I always get confused with “o”. Tend to think of it as omega rather than omicron.

In the words of the poet Firaq Gorakhpuri…

“Aaye the hanste-khelte
Maikhaane mein Firaq
Jab pee chuke sharaab toh
Sanjeeda ho gaye”

The other night, Avi, Sharmila and I were discussing what would your mom’s aunt’s daughter be to you. (See here). As I had explained to them that would be first cousin once removed.

Some time back, curiosity had gotten the better of me in terms of what are the rules of this nomenclature. Turns out there are some fairly nifty rules. The biggest shock I had was that generations way before you can also be your cousin! I always thought cousins are at your own generation or maybe below your generation.

The following chart (thanks to Alice Ramsay) is a neat way to picture it in your mind. If you are more of a rules based person (which is the way I think), this is what I have boiled it down to…

Let say you are trying to find the relationship of person A to you.
Keep traversing up the tree (your parent, A’s parent) till you find a common ancestor.
Let’s say you had to jump “x” steps and A had to jump “y” steps.
Take the minimum of x and y. Let’s say it is “w” (w=x or w=y). Take (w-1)

If (w-1) is at least 1, then A is your (w-1)th cousin. Now take the difference in your generations – which is (x-y). The absolute value is the difference in your generations. Let’ say, that is “d” (x-y=d).

Then A is your (w-1)th cousin, “d” times removed!!

So to calculate your mom’s aunt’s daughter… You have to jump to your mom’s mom’s mom to find a common ancestor. And the other person has to go mom’s mom to get to the same point. Minimum of 3 and 2 is 2. 2-1=1. So the person is your first cousin. Now you had to jump three times to get there and she had to jump twice. Which means the difference in generation is one. (3-2 = 1)

So, she is your first cousin, once removed.

In short, jump from either side till you get a common ancestors. The minimum value in jumps less one is the “what”-eth cousin. The difference in the jumps is the “how much” removed.

What if (w-1) was not at least 1? Then they are siblings (at same generation level) or uncles/aunts at higher generation and nephews/nieces for lower generation. For every generation jump you go Great, Great Grand, Great Great Grand, 3rd Great Grand and so on.

Of course if the jump up and down goes thru you (all points are common ancestor/descendants) then they are your child or parent – with the same Great, Great Grand, Great Great Grand, 3rd Great Grand rule…,

See if the picture makes it easy..

This very lamp has witnessed so many different memories at this table. Six years back, it was witness to many a glass of wine imbibed by father-in-law and son-in-law. Sometimes talking about general precepts of life, sometimes specific aspects like his grandson in Kharagpur or the time he was a guard in a train (that was his career for some time).

The lamp has witnessed many an expostulation from the mother-in-law on the short hop from a sip of wine to full blown “matlaami” (drunkenness) and many a short shrift given to those aforementioned arguments by the father in law – no doubt deriving confidence from the fact that we were two versus one. Three, if you count the time the drunken daughter of theirs would also trudge by.

Two years back, on this day – Aug the 23rd – one lamp was put out. For ever. I was in Chicago. Sharmila was driving Nikita to school. We got the news that my father in law was no more.

His is a life to be celebrated. What I feel most happy about is that I got to see him every three months for nearly a decade. Those long trips to India and then the drive from Kalyani to Durgapur… it was all worth it. In fact, the best thing was to convince them to visit us in 2014 – when even Sharmila was not sure. Over a few glasses of wine in Peerless Inn, no less!

If I were to pick three men I would want to be like most (that are at least 40 years old) – undoubtedly, they would be my brother, first, my father in law second (and a Mr. Dubey, third – of whom, I have not written enough). All three of them share a few admirable qualities that admittedly I do not have. First, the ability to keep calm and not be judgmental under pressure. Second is to offer opinion only when asked. Third is to prioritize others’ needs over you own.

I remember even asking him about these things one night sitting by this same lamp. He shooed me away saying – “With age, you will get what you are looking for”.

Sitting outside by the pool this evening, the lamp and I – we miss him.

Seeing what my dad is going thru, I feel happy for him that his departure was a relatively painless one. But I miss his presence.

Sometimes. life is all about not saying anything and just quietly enjoying a glass of drink together.

Wherever you are today, Mr. Ghose, I raise one for you this evening.

Wish you were here.

But I am glad you were here as long as you could.

And those around him who are perhaps going thru worse…

In the words of Firaq Gorakhpuri…

“Kam se kam maut se aisi mujhe ummid nahin
Zindagi tu ne to dhoke pe diya hai dhoka “

“At least I had no expectations from Death…
Life… you have just dealt one lie after another”

If you have a stressful job or are suffering from stress for whatever reason, this is an amazing book that explains how stress affects different parts of the body and exactly the process by which it happens.

Written by Robert Sapolsky (the author of “Behavior”), it is a little dense. Probably less dense – but since I am not a medical student, I am taking more time to sort out the various actions, names and organs he is talking about. I am ploughing at a rate of about 15-20 pages per hour, right now.

As of now, I am studying (and making a lot of notes) on Type 1 and Type 2 Diabetes. Reading up on Juvenile Diabetes (Type 1), my mind floated back to a really bright young gentleman – Ronit Ganguly – one of the most amazingly smart and well balanced kids that I have ever come across (we will not count his rooting for New England Patriots against him though 🙂 ) who was suddenly diagnosed with this. I got a better understanding – thanks to this book – what his body went thru. The frustrating part is that medical science has not yet fully understood why this happens and how to prevent it.

I am encouraged though that smart kids like Ronit (and his friends) will crack the problem sooner than later!

It was three months back that I had floated the idea of not cross posting from my blog to Facebook. Was soundly denounced by all commenters not to do any such thing. Not exactly of sound mind or body, I went ahead and did it anyways. Actually took Parijat’s advice of “try out for some time”.

I thought I will try it out for a month. It has been three months now. That itself says something. Here are some learnings…

What I gained:
a. A lot of time and self control: It was preposterously difficult in the beginning – missing out on all the comments and counter comments and likes and a rewarding engagement model with the readers and commenters. But over time, I realized what a time waste it had become for me. Now I check Facebook for 15 minutes in the morning – usually there is nothing for me – so, I scroll thru updates of others, smile at the furious points and counterpoints on mask versus no mask, virus versus hoax, Democrats versus Republicans, BJP versus Congress and log out of my laptop screen.

b. Focus on the quality of my blog: With that extra time, I have started focusing on my blog. The writing is still as bad as before but I have started working on how the blog looks. That – and some great encouragement from Larry – led me to learn HTML and CSS (and now I am learning PHP) to make all sorts of tweaks to the blog. You remember how the first time a kid learns fonts and colors and soon the whole document is filled with all the colors of rainbow and all font styles and sizes possible? Yes, I am that dangerous now.

c. Learnt to tweak the model: Over time, I learnt how to mix and match for best results. I still post once in a while directly to Facebook (like this one). After requests from folks like Kenneth, I started a email subscription to my blog (initially I was against it). Instead of immediate email notifications, there are weekly digests that go out. And then somebody suggested – why not send the digest to Facebook with links. Which is what I do now. I am also getting good tips – from folks like Milind, as an example, how to make a lot of things in my blog still better.

I would have missed all this if I had not “tried” out this experiment, that I am afraid is here to stay with me.

What I lost:
d. What I miss most is all the random updates of friends. I had to ply thru a lot of political and other opinions to get those posts, but usually I would get one or two interesting updates every week. Spending 15 minutes on Facebook does not get to that.

Net net, I think Facebook had become an addiction. I think I have been able to get myself back to where I wanted – it is a tool and I will use it as I deem fit and not the other way around.

This goes back a few weeks when Sharmila and I had this debate about distilled water. She had bought distilled water to make coffee at home. We get our water from our well and it can sometimes clog up small appliances because of very small debris.

I was arguing the case that we should not be drinking distilled water. Any water we drink needs to have some amount of minerals etc. Which is why all the cities process the water and add certain elements before it is sent out to the house taps. I also have very severe doubts if the water she bought is truly distilled – that would make the water very costly. It is probably super filtered or something.

Yesterday, when picking up water at the Kroger near our hotel, I noticed “Distilled Water” was the only thing left in the shelves (in the big size container I was looking for). What caught my eye was the marketing twist the label had.

It did state that it is produced by steam distillation. I can’t still fathom the costs of all the energy required to boil the water and then cool it back again after capturing the vapors.

But what made me laugh was mentioning that the source was “Deep Wells”. I suspect to give you a sense of pure and cold water?

My question was – How does it matter? You are distilling the water. The source can be from anywhere in this world – the output will be exactly the same. It is DISTILLED water. It will have no other molecule than H₂O. You can boil dirt water and distill it and get exactly the same product.

But I guess these are the days of marketing. We have seen Smart Water, Vitamin Water … Why else would we pay exorbitant prices for tap water put in a bottle rather than have it from a tap?