Entropy…

All that matters is Love & Work.- Freud

I usually refrain from reading books about alleged business Management and autobiographies of success stories.  Most of them are self styled, self congratulatory, recipe manuals packaged with toxic doses of marketing.

Nevertheless, instinctively I bought Simply Fly -A Deccan Odyssey by Captain Gopinath which is refreshing, unpretentious, candid and animated story of his life. He writes with amazing candor and grace, without preaching any heroics, management/ leadership Mantras & sermons. The narratives have R.K.Narayan- like simplicity and ease. This is a story needs to reach every concerned Indian, especially the youth..

This is the journey of a boy born in a remote village, who went from riding a bullock cart to owning an airline, a journey of an entrepreneur who built India’s first and largest low-cost airline. Filled with rich anecdotes of everyday struggles and joys, this is the awe-inspiring story of Captain G.R. Gopinath.

This autobiography narrates in gritty detail Captain Gopinath’s incredible journey: quitting the Indian Army in the late 1970s with a princely gratuity of Rs 6500, going back to his farm land inundated by the river, converting a piece of barren land to set up a farm for ecologically sustainable silkworm rearing, winning the Rolex award for it, his loves and passions, his extraordinary determination to launch an airline, in the process rewriting aviation history.

in⋅er⋅tia
Noun
1.– Inertness, esp. with regard to effort, motion, action, and the like; inactivity; sluggishness.
Physics.
2. The property of matter by which it retains its state of rest or its velocity along a straight line so long as it is not acted upon by an external force.

” Fix’d like a plan on his peculiar spot, to draw nutrition, propagate, and rot.- “
From An Essay on Man a poem by Alexander Pope- 1733-1734.

Read this wonderful essay on Inertia by K.C. Cole, a long time science writer and author

Falling for Inertia

By now, it’s probably become pretty clear that you’re not going to keep most of those New Year’s resolutions. Lack of willpower is certainly part of the equation, but so is inertia. Inertia is my favorite force, even though some people like to call it a pseudo-force, because it’s really just the tendency for things to keep doing what they’re doing, a resistance to being pushed around. Nobody who’s ever been thrown forward by a sudden stop would call inertia “pseudo” however; if it walks like a force, well, you decide. (Gravity, among other familiar “forces,” are also “pseudo” in the sense that whether you feel them or not depends on your frame of reference. But that’s another story.)

We tend to blame inertia for keeping us stuck in ruts, and it does, but it’s also often the only thing that keeps us going. Inertia keeps planets in their orbits, roller coaster riders in their seats,clouds attached to the sky. It certainly saves gas; imagine how much your gas bills would be if you had to use energy merely to coast!

People tend to forget the power of inertia. Everyone knows it takes energy to get a car moving at 60 mph–but forget that it will take just as much energy to slow it down. In fact, it’s relatively easy to blast your way to a distant planet compared to what it takes to slow down when you get there.

The same is true of anything, whether it’s moving journalism from print to on-line or resisting the temptation to pay bankers huge bonuses. It was even inertia, some argue, that resulting in the bombing of Hiroshima. With everything necessary for the bombing already set it motion, it would have been unbelievably difficult to stop. In terms of energy required, there’s not much difference getting up to speed, and stopping.

That’s why fighting inertia is so hard, and so frequently generates heat.

At the same time, there’s something to be said for a force that keeps change from happening too quickly. That might seem like a bad thing when your side is in power and you want change to happen fast. But it’s a good thing when the other side is in power, and inertia stops them from pushing through policies you find odious. Democracies tend to be stable in part because inertia works so well.

I first fell in love with inertia when I heard about the late Ernst Mach’s idea that inertia was due to the fact that everything in the universe was gravitationally connected to everything else. Every heavy sofa is connected to every flower, every star. So you can’t push one without tugging on the whole tangled web. Should you walk into a wall and come face to face (so to speak) with the wall’s unwillingness to move out of the way, well, you can comfort yourself by remembering you’re running up against all the matter in the universe.

Mach didn’t get it entirely right, but he was a big influence on Einstein, who followed the surprising equivalence between gravity and inertia to the discovery that gravity was actually the curvature of space-time caused by the presence of massive objects. (And if you don’t think that equivalence is surprising, do drop a crumpled piece of paper and your keys at the same time, and do be amazed–I always am–that they hit the ground at the same time. Yes, gravity pulls harder on the keys, but the keys also have more inertia–exactly the right amount to make the two objects fall at the same rate.)

Today, physicists are looking for the source of inertia at the Large Hadron Collider in Europe; well-tested theory suggests that particles acquire sluggishness (and therefore mass) as they move through the vacuum because they have to slog their way through something called the Higgs field, which pervades empty space. If the LHC can collide particles with enough oomph, perhaps the energy produced will briefly create a Higgs particle–a “chip off the old vacuum,” as physicist Frank Wilczek described it to me years ago.

Now that would be almost as exciting as pulling on stars.

By K.C Cole © NPR.Org

Linda Pastan’s poems follow this humble equation that from nothing or little comes much to those who look closely and perceive. Pastan’s poems are based on close observation that results often in profound expressions of truth from the human heart.

What we want
is never simple.
We move among the things
we thought we wanted:
a face, a room, an open book
and these things bear our names–
now they want us.
But what we want appears
in dreams, wearing disguises.
We fall past,
holding out our arms
and in the morning
our arms ache.
We don’t remember the dream,
but the dream remembers us.
It is there all day
as an animal is there
under the table,
as the stars are there

~ Linda Pastan ~

Each Other — Where We Are

The recent Time magazine cover feature Why Genes Aren’t Your Destiny lead me to post this feature on epigenetics by Ecologist, author, poet and cancer survivor, Sandra Steingraber, Ph.D. is an internationally recognized expert on the environmental links to cancer and reproductive health. May seem long to read on net , nevertheless illuminating..

If Darwin didn’t rock your world, this should

“Steingraber uses her poetic talent, biological erudition, and personal experience to tell a tale about living with a cancer that may have developed from environmental toxins.”

In the early 1990s, I taught a seminar on Charles Darwin to nonscience majors at an urban community college. We read Darwin’s writings closely—often out loud to each other—along with commentary by scholars. We looked at the evidence that Darwin amassed for his theory of natural selection, and we looked at the evidence amassed in subsequent years.

At the beginning and end of each semester, I asked students if they themselves accepted Darwin’s ideas, and every semester, predictably, about half said they did, and half said they did not—a ratio that did not budge much over the course of the term. Mostly, those who had come into the class believing that humans had evolved continued to so believe, and those who came in hewing to a biblical account of the origins of life still hewed to it when they left.

One hundred fifty years have now gone by since the 1859 publication of On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, an anniversary that has prompted new scholarly reflections on Darwin’s legacy. Many of these speeches and papers have focused on the bombshell elements of his theory—how it blew the human race away from the center of creation, generating psychic aftershocks that reverberated for decades. Even the Victorian novelist Thomas Hardy marveled at the consequences to ethics and altruism posed by “the establishment” of a common origin of species.

That was 1910. And yet there are still plenty of people blithely walking around in a pre-Darwinian world, admitting shared origins with no one whose last name is not sapiens. According to the Pew Research Center, polls conducted over twenty years reveal little movement in the percentage of the public who accept evolution. In a one-to-one ratio that echoes my own classroom findings, about 40 to 50 percent of Americans say they believe in it, and a slightly smaller percentage say they do not. Those who believe that natural selection is the driver of evolution (Darwin’s keynote point) are firmly in the minority at 14 to 26 percent.

With numbers like these, I am unsurprised that the findings emerging from an obscure field of study called epigenetics have not yet rocked the world. They are rocking my world, though, and they are also mounting a profound challenge to the traditional systems of environmental regulation, which presume that toxic chemical exposures create health risks primarily through the accumulation of genetic damage (mutations) and that people can be categorized as inherently vulnerable or resistant. (“Genetics loads the gun; environment pulls the trigger.”) Moreover, in the way that it upends our understanding of heredity, epigenetics offers a whole new way of appreciating Darwin.

Epigenetics is the study of gene expression. Genes, of course, are made of DNA and are strung like beads along the chains of our chromosomes. Each cell in our bodies has a complete set. We humans have more than two hundred distinct kinds of cells, and they all contain the same number of genes. What makes a prostate gland cell so different in form and function from, say, a salivary gland cell is not the genes contained within them but the activity of those genes. During prenatal life and infancy—and again in puberty—immature cells become differentiated when long strings of genes that are not needed for the specific tasks of, say, semen production or saliva production are silenced. The rest are allowed to express themselves. Epigenetic regulation of the genome is what makes development possible.

Unlike the human genome, which has been exhaustively sequenced and mapped, plans to decode the human epigenome are still in the planning stage. What we know about it now is that the epigenome exists, in part, within various bobbles attached to our chromosomes. Previously ignored by cell biologists, these ornaments play a key role in regulating genetic activity. Some are simple methyl groups and others are proteins called histones. Together, they hush the genes whose messages are not needed at the moment. Methyl groups and histones are highly sensitive to messages streaming in from the outside world. In other words, the epigenome guides the genome and, in turn, responds to environmental signals.

Consider this: identical twins are epigenetically unique; attached to their identical chromosomes are nonidentical patterns of methyl groups and histones. Moreover, in a phenomenon called epigenetic drift, twins become more different with time. As revealed in a 2005 study, younger twins are more alike than older twins. As twins age and have different environmental experiences, their genetic expression diverges. Twins who spend more of their lives together in the same environment have gene-expression portraits that are more similar than twins who go their separate ways.

As an adoptee, I can’t help wondering if the reverse process might also be true. Growing up together in the same environment, do adopted siblings experience epigenetic convergence? Is this why, as girls, my genetically unrelated sister and I suffered from the same allergies, developed identical digestive problems, and wore the same eyeglass prescription? More generally, might it be possible that the longer people share a common environment, the more their genes act like each other? Do we carry on our chromosomes a kind of extra-genetic memory of all of our past habitats?

There is reason to think so. Environmental epigenetics examines how environmental exposures influence gene expression. What the results of this nascent field of study reveal is the vulnerability of early life. When epigenetic regulation is disrupted early on, the process of differentiation can be thrown off course in ways that may raise the risk for many diseases, including cancer. We already know that Inuit people in Greenland who acquire high body burdens of persistent pollutants have fewer methyl groups attached to their chromosomes than their lesser-exposed compatriots. This is not good. In the laboratory, hypomethylation is associated with chromosomal instability. We know from lab experiments that certain chemical exposures in prenatal life can alter developmental pathways and lead to altered architecture of adult structures (such as breasts). But our current system of environmental regulation—with its narrow focus on identifying chemicals that cause mutations—does not screen for chemicals that trigger changes in development. And our current system of genetic testing—with its narrow focus on identifying carriers of certain genes that bestow notably higher cancer risks—does not consider the regulation of genes by environmentally mediated signals either.

Perhaps most astonishing of all, epigenetic changes can be inherited. This means that the environmental exposures we experienced as children can have consequences not just for us but also for our descendants. More philosophically, it means that, contrary to current biological dogma, the nineteenth-century idea that acquired traits can be passed down the generations may not be so wrong-headed after all. And this brings us back to Darwin, who developed his ideas before we had a working understanding of genes and who was agnostic on the subject of the heritability of acquired characteristics. The reality of epigenetic inheritance hardly overturns natural selection—indeed it shows us another route by which species can adapt. Finally, it shines a spotlight on one of Darwin’s lesser-appreciated insights: that all of life is interrelated—not only by our common origins but also by our common ecology.

Via © Orion Magazine

Explore Sandra Steingraber’s work here.

The discipline of economics is not what it used to be. Over the last few decades, economists have begun a revolutionary reorientation in how we look at the world, and this has major implications for politics, policy, and our everyday lives. For years, conventional economists told us an incomplete story that leaned on the comfortable precision of mathematical abstraction and ignored the complexity of the real world with all of its uncertainties, unknowns, and ongoing evolution.

What economists left out of the story were the positive forces of creativity, innovation, and advancing technology that propel economies forward. Economists did not describe the dynamic process that leads to new pharmaceuticals, cell phones, Web-based information services-forces that fundamentally alter how we live our daily lives.

Read this evocative essay by David Brooks

The Protocol Society

In the 19th and 20th centuries we made stuff: corn and steel and trucks. Now, we make protocols: sets of instructions. A software program is a protocol for organizing information. A new drug is a protocol for organizing chemicals. Wal-Mart produces protocols for moving and marketing consumer goods. Even when you are buying a car, you are mostly paying for the knowledge embedded in its design, not the metal and glass.

A protocol economy has very different properties than a physical stuff economy. For example, you and I can’t use the same piece of metal at the same time. But you and I can use the same software program at the same time. Physical stuff is subject to the laws of scarcity: you can use up your timber. But it’s hard to use up a good idea. Prices for material goods tend toward equilibrium, depending on supply and demand. Equilibrium doesn’t really apply to the market for new ideas.

Over the past decades, many economists have sought to define the differences between the physical goods economy and the modern protocol economy. In 2000, Larry Summers, then the Treasury secretary, gave a speech called “The New Wealth of Nations,” laying out some principles. Leading work has been done by Douglass North of Washington University, Robert Fogel of the University of Chicago, Joel Mokyr of Northwestern and Paul Romer of Stanford.

Their research is the subject of an important new book called “From Poverty to Prosperity,” by Arnold Kling and Nick Schulz.

Kling and Schulz start off entertainingly by describing a food court. There are protocols everywhere, not only for how to make the food, but how to greet the customers, how to share common equipment like trays and tables, how to settle disputes between the stalls and enforce contracts with the management.

The success of an economy depends on its ability to invent and embrace new protocols. Kling and Schulz use North’s phrase “Adaptive Efficiency,” but they are really talking about how quickly a society can be infected by new ideas.

Protocols are intangible, so the traits needed to invent and absorb them are intangible, too. First, a nation has to have a good operating system: laws, regulations and property rights.

For example, if you are making steel, it costs a medium amount to make your first piece of steel and then a significant amount for each additional piece. If, on the other hand, you are making a new drug, it costs an incredible amount to invent your first pill. But then it’s nearly free to copy it millions of times. You’re only going to invest the money to make that first pill if you can have a temporary monopoly to sell the copies. So a nation has to find a way to protect intellectual property while still encouraging the flow of ideas.

Second, a nation has to have a good economic culture. “From Poverty to Prosperity” includes interviews with major economists, and it is striking how they are moving away from mathematical modeling and toward fields like sociology and anthropology.

What really matters, Edmund S. Phelps of Columbia argues, is economic culture — attitudes toward uncertainty, the willingness to exert leadership, the willingness to follow orders. A strong economy needs daring consumers (Phelps says China lacks this) and young researchers with money to play with (Romer notes that N.I.H. grants used to go to 35-year-olds but now they go to 50-year-olds).

A protocol economy tends toward inequality because some societies and subcultures have norms, attitudes and customs that increase the velocity of new recipes while other subcultures retard it. Some nations are blessed with self-reliant families, social trust and fairly enforced regulations, while others are cursed by distrust, corruption and fatalistic attitudes about the future. It is very hard to transfer the protocols of one culture onto those of another.

It’s exciting to see so many Nobel laureates taking this consilient approach. North, the leader of the field, doesn’t even think his work is economics, just unified social science.

But they are still economists, with worldviews that are still excessively individualistic and rationalistic. Kling and Schulz do not do a good job of explaining how innovation emerges. They list some banal character traits — charisma, passion — that entrepreneurs supposedly possess. To get a complete view of where the debate is headed, I’d read “From Poverty to Prosperity,” and then I’d read Richard Ogle’s 2007 book, “Smart World,” one of the most underappreciated books of the decade. Ogle applies the theory of networks and the philosophy of the extended mind (you have to read it) to show how real world innovation emerges from social clusters.

Economic change is fomenting intellectual change. When the economy was about stuff, economics resembled physics. When it’s about ideas, economics comes to resemble psychology.

By DAVID BROOKS © New York Times

In the words of Carl Jung - “Life has always seemed to me like a plant that lives on its rhizome. Its true life is invisible, hidden in the rhizome. The part that appears above ground lasts only a single summer. What we see is the blossom, which passes. The rhizome remains.”

At New York City’s Columbia University, students are experiencing a novel approach to medical training. Besides, the scientific charts they keep on patients, the students are writing about their encounters and emotional reactions in ordinary language. This program in “narrative medicine” includes lectures on medical ethics and guest lectures by writers such as Susan Sontag, but the core of the program is writing and reading from these parallel charts.

Pl care to read the feature by Gina Kolata in NYT .. This subject matter has always been close to my heart

Narrative Medicine

DR. RITA CHARON, professor of clinical medicine at the College of Physicians and Surgeons of Columbia University, is well aware of the power of storytelling. She has a Ph.D. in English — training that changed her medical practice. Through literature, she learned how stories are built and told, and translated that to listening to, and better understanding, patients. She could let them tell their own stories without interruptions and see how people described their symptoms as part of the larger story of their life.

Dr. Charon was not the first to connect literature and medicine, but she has become the leading advocate of the emerging discipline known as narrative medicine, which aims to treat the whole person, not just the illness. The British Medical Journal and other professional publications have run articles on the approach, and medical schools have added writing seminars and reading groups.

Dr. Charon had spent several years teaching workshops on developing “narrative competence,” but she feared participants weren’t prepared enough to return to their schools to start programs. There was no comprehensive training in how to practice it.

She proposed something new to Columbia: a Master of Science in narrative medicine. The one-year program — two if pursued part time — began this fall at its School of Continuing Education.

“We hoped to get 8 to 10 people willing to pay the $50,000,” she says. The program ended up with 28 students, most of them midcareer professionals — doctors, nurses, social workers, lawyers, literary scholars. Others included recent college graduates headed toward medical school.

Courses this semester focus on philosophy, literary theory, psychoanalytic theory, autobiography and the close reading of literature involving experiences of illness. Dr. Charon says there’s no obvious job market for people with a Master’s degree in Narrative Medicine. But with new programs starting all the time, she says, “our graduates will be particularly well prepared to join such efforts.”

Some who enrolled, like Dr. Susan Ball, say they hope to become better doctors. Dr. Ball, associate professor of medicine at New York Hospital Cornell Medical Center, says she also would like to start a narrative medicine program at Cornell for resident physicians and older doctors.

By Gina Kolata © New York Times

I leave, with these thoughts for you to mediate & reflect..

It’s a human relationship, not a relationship between an expert and a problem.
I was certainly not trained to be a fellow human being.
- Dr. Rachel Naomi Remen