Vegetarianism - Ecological reasons for being one

I read this article today in NYTimes. This article talks about emission and the resultant global warming due to increased meat consumption. About a year or two ago I read another article (I have not been able to locate the link) that went into the details of meat production and the costs involved. Roughly it takes 15lbs of corn to make 1 lb of meat (give or take a few pounds). In other words, one could feed an order of magnitude (techie speak for 10 times) more people if we were all vegetarians. In yet other words, it means there is an order of magnitude more carbon emissions than in growing plant based food.

When I mention this as my reason for giving up meat, quite a few find it amusing and some even snigger at this. Of course if this were the only reason it may not sound compelling. I already knew that I could get my proteins from a vegetarian diet. I lived on such a diet for my first 21 years and still stand 6 feet and 185 lb. There is enough documentary evidence about some of the inhumane treatment of animals reared for meat. Most of you may have seen these videos. I have too. Further more the unsanitary conditions of many of the places and the frequent outbreak of E Coli, Mad Cow, Bird Flu, Swine Flu and other diseases should have convinced us to change our dietary life style. It did not convince me. Lots of vegetarians feel that it is just plain cruel in this day and age to kill an animal just for the benefit of our taste buds. I argued about man being a carnivore although it is no longer an issue of mere survival.

For me, for some reason, it was the ecological cost of eating meat that was the tipping point. I guess that makes me an environmental vegetarian.

Caveat: You will not see me hesitate if the only item available on the menu is chicken soup. I do not believe in starving myself to save a chicken.

PS: Jannavi found the link and this article has been updated.

She wears a shirt!!

Manama, my 4 year old likes to wear and prance around in a princess costume that some one gave as a gift for Christmas. These dresses are frilly and generally bright colored. She likes it so much sometimes during weekends we cannot get her to change into any other clothes and it is a trial getting her into street clothes come Monday morning when it is time to go to school.

Last week she came down walking down the stairs and exclaimed "Am I not the most beauuuutiful girl you ever saw!!". Needless to say she is well known for her modesty.

Much as I love her, I could scarcely agree since that would mean facing the wrath of two other girls in the household.

So I told "You are very pretty, but I know two other pretty girls. Do you know who I am talking about?"

She thought very quickly and came up with two of her friends. I agreed with her that her friends were very pretty. I explained I was referring to her amma (mom) and akka (older sister). Ignoring my reference to my older daughter Manama focused her thoughts on my wife. Something clearly was wrong here.

"She is not a girl, she is a women"

So?

"She is a mom!!". The tone was clear. Dad, you don't get it do you?

She clinched the deal with this

"She wears a shirt!!"

Sorry honey I batted for you.

Concert by Shobana Vignesh

Shobana Vignesh gave a Classical Carnatic music concert yesterday at the Mahalakshmi Temple in Hockessin, DE. She was accompanied on the violin by Sandhya Srinath, a well known artist from the DC Metro area Rajana Swaminathan on the Mridangam.

The concert started with Saraseeruha Sanapriye in Raga Nattai followed by a piece in Raga Atana. The second half of the concert was devoted solely to crowd pleasers such as

Kurai Ondrum Illai by Rajaji
Chinnan Chiru Kiliye by Bharatiyar
Bho Shambo by Svami Dayananda Sarasvati

There were only three songs that I would rate as more serious or heavy. The first was in Raaga Lalitha, the second was in Raaga Dharmavati and the last was Raaga Thodi, although the last is a popular concert raaga. She closed out her concert with two songs in Raaga Madhyamavati and Raaga Kurinji.

Shobana has a crystal clear voice. They ranges effortlessly in the upper ranges of the scale (tarastayi) where she shows no signs of stress. In fact I told her after the concert that it felt as if she had a whole octave to spare. I did feel that she did not dwell a lot in the lower ranges (mandarastayi), but that I feel is not surprising. In general I think male singers fare better in the lower scales whereas women seem more comfortable in the upper reaches. Overall, she was keenly aware of the pulse of the audience and picked her songs very wisely. This was not a crowd of hard core Carnatic music connoisseurs besides there was a decent sprinkling of children. So typically the songs contained a brief alapana and short svara kalpana. The bulk of the time was spent rendering the Kriti itself.

Click here for a complete list of songs.

Genome - Matt Ridley

Two years ago Raji introduced me to Matt Ridley by lending me a copy of the book Genome. This is a book that should be read in one sitting. I did. This is a book that should be read many times. I have. Three times - so far.

The book consists of 23 chapters and each chapter focuses on one of the 23 chromosomes in our species. The author goes about with his description in an interesting manner. He takes various topics that are important or interesting to humanity and weaves a story about the chromosome using that topic. The author credits this approach to a similar approach by another famous author, the late Primo Levi. In his book, The Periodic Table, Primo Levi described the elements of a periodic table by relating them to various stories, some of them taken from his own life and experiences.

Without revealing too much details, let me describe some of the chapters that were very good, the rest being merely good!!

Chapter One sets the tone for the book with a grand title Life!! It deals with several important topics, RNA, DNA, 5S gene on chromosome, and surprisingly a Turing machine!! What on earth does a central concept from computer science have to do with biochemistry? Well you have to reach this chapter for that. Trust me it is not incidental. A brief digression - Alan Turing was a genius. If Noble Prize could have been awarded for outstanding work in Computer Science, he would have easily won one or two.

Chapter Four is Fate. Religious people and others who are not aware of advances in biochemistry generally misrepresent or misunderstand how genes work. They imply a determinism to genes - if you have this gene then this bad thing (put a suitable disease) will happen to you - that does not exist. First of all, genes do not exist to cause diseases. They exist to serve a purpose. It is when a mutation occurs in a gene that bad things could happen. The key here is could. Second, genes are no more deterministic than the weather is, both being examples of nonlinear systems. Just as weather man never gives absolute answers but couch their prediction in probabilities of certain weather patterns occurring, so does a geneticist.

Chapter Seven is about Conflict. This chapter was really scary - at least for men. Men may rule the world, but out in the world of gene, it is the women who have the men on the run!!

I will just list the titles of a few more chapters that I loved; Stress, Immortality, Sex, Memory, Politics, Free Will, and Death.

If there is one message I took away from this book, it is this - Genes are not there to cause diseases.

Dubya's affliction with The Foot In the Mouth Disease

George W Bush has a well documented affliction with this disease. In fact the store of inanities attributed to Dubya, or Bush-isms as they are called, is so large this site has indexed it by the year it was uttered. Here is a short list of my personal favorites.

1. See, in my line of work you got to keep repeating things over and over and over again for the truth to sink in, to kind of catapult the propaganda.
2. I'll be long gone before some smart person ever figures out what happened inside this Oval Office.
3. Rarely is the questioned asked: Is our children learning?
4. There's an old saying in Tennessee -- I know it's in Texas, probably in Tennessee -- that says, fool me once, shame on --shame on you. Fool me -- you can't get fooled again
5. Too many good docs are getting out of the business. Too many OB-GYNs aren't able to practice their love with women all across this country

Note - In case you wonder about the phrase Foot In the Mouth Disease, it is a play on Foot and Mouth Disease that typically afflicts domesticated animal. I thought of this phrase, but I am sure I was not the first to come up with it. I googled the phrase but could not find a definitive answer as to who came up with it first.

Prince And I

You all know the maxim - If at first you don't succeed, try try again. The spider at the center of the legend surrounding King Bruce required eight attempts to succeed.

But George W Bush succeeded in only his second attempt!!

4-5 months ago it was finally clear that Dubya, as the former President is affectionately addressed, had done it. I mean he had succeeded in ruining our great economy. The economy is now officially in recession. Over 10 trillion dollars of wealth has evaporated!!

It is such a large number, that it makes no sense to ordinary folks like us who need a calculator to compute 15% tips at the restaurant. So I tried various ways to put it in perspective - if you counted one dollar a second you would need nearly 30000 years to count it all!! I am sure that leaves you as clueless as before as to the sheer enormity of this number. Don't worry. I am in your company. I am no more capable of comprehending 30000 years as I am of 10 trillion dollars. It leaves you with a feeling of helplessness.

So I stopped my attempts at getting a handle on how someone could evaporate this large an amount of money and I did the next best thing. I decided to refinance. I had a more aggressive 15 year mortgage and wanted to move to a easier 30 year loan in case one of us loses our job.

I searched for one and found a lender named Prince Aurora. When I met him, I was not able to place him accurately. He was tall; over 6 feet, of wheatish complexion, smart looking, well dressed and generally presented an air of quiet confidence.

The phrase wheatish complexion is a familiar one in Indian matrimonial circles. When used on a man it is complimentary; a man who is neither too dark not too fair. God forbid if it were used to describe a girl; it means she is dark. And Indians discriminate very well on the basis of color!! The Hindi word गोरी pronounced funnily enough "gory" means fair maiden!! Not for nothing is our caste system called वर्ण (varna); it means color.

Back to Prince. Now I am a curious fellow and my curiosity takes the form of trying to figure out origins of names. His first name, Prince, gave me no help and his last name Aurora had a Scandinavian sound to it; Aurora Borealis. Prince did not look like he was from Norway or Sweden. So I caved in asked where he was from. I was pleasantly surprised to find that he was from India and was raised in West Delhi quite close to where I used to live as a child. So I asked him how did he get the name Aurora and it turned out his father when he became a naturalized American, changed the Punjabi name Arora to Aurora to make it easier for folks in the good old USA.

My curiosity was now sated. I could now sleep well at night.

Sporophyte and Gametophyte - When is a human a human?

Alternation of Generation - I remember reading about this in 9th grade and not paying much attention to it. But it is very interesting. In simple terms, there are two phases, the haploid when the cells of the plant have one set of chromosomes and then the diploid phase where the cells have two sets of chromosome. The former is also called gametophyte and the latter sporophyte. The diploid form is produced by fusion of two haploid and the haploid form by meiosis of the diploid form. In most higher forms of plants (the word higher is not used in a pejorative sense) the dominant phase is mostly diploid and the haploid form is restricted typically to flowers. But in Bryophytes such as moss the dominant phase is the haploid phase.

Well humans and also most animals are diploid, that is, the majority of the tissue contains two sets of chromosomes. The haploid phase is restricted to the gametes, namely the sperm and the ovum.

What does this all mean?

Think of it this way - the broyophyte is either made of all sperm like tissue or ovum like tissue. I do not mean in physical appearance.

Why is it all important to us?

It is a question of when a human being is a human being. Is there some humanity in the sperm? How about the Ova? People use the 24th week of pregnancy as a magic mark, as the line that differentiates a human from what is euphemistically called a fetus. We use that word fetus so we can be objective when decisions involving termination of pregnancy is being made. But is that obvious? Not to me. In certain creatures the entire life is made up of sperm and ova like entities and the diploid form shows up for only a few days during spore formation!! As I see it, the sperm, the egg, and the fetus have as much humanity as does the individual that reads this post. There can be no individual without the sperm, the egg, or the fetus.

Despite all this I still am Pro-Choice. Why?

I am opposed to the Church, which means Men, controlling the womb.

But I also hope we could have an educated conversation on this topic. Abortion after all should be a means of last resort and not a form of birth control!!