Free online documentaries

Recently I came across a site called Top Documentary Films which has documentaries on a variety of topics. This will keep me busy for a long time. Some of the videos that I saw were:

1. Jim meets… Sir David Attenborough
2. Parrots, the Universe and Everything - a talk by Douglas Adams. Coincidentally, I heard the mating call of the male kakapo a few days ago on Animal Planet, a ritual that Adams describes in hilarious fashion.
3. Ethics Without Religion
4. Adventures of an Urban Astrophysicist
5. The Evolution of Confusion
6. Morality: From the Heavens or From Nature?
7. The Death of the Oceans
8. The Genius of Charles Darwin

The redesigning of this blog is done by Sujit. He was bored by the old look.

Rajesh Khanna, 1942-2012

Rajesh Khann, the first superstar of Bollywood films died a few days ago. He had a distinctive style that is parodied by Govinda in this song. Following my usual practise, I will link to some of my favourite songs picturised on Kaka.

1. zindagi kaisi hai paheli
2. kahin door jab din dhal jai
3. aate jaate khoobsoorat
4. zindagi ek safar hai suhana
5. mere sapnon ki rani
6. o mere dil ke chain
7. yeh shaam mastaani
8. chala jaata hoon
9. ek ajnabi haseena se
10. zindagi ke safar mein

Statements that are wide off the mark

During sales training in Wipro Infotech, we were taught that it is better to under-promise and over-deliver than to over-promise and under-deliver. This a good rule to be followed in all circumstances. But it is a custom more honour'd in the breach than the observance.Many people seem compelled to make tall claims that many listeners take as more than empty verbiage.

This is especially common with quacks. I came across a concept called Hype Cycle. Many people seem to go through the the first 3 stages of the cycle but seem unable to make the transition to the 4th stage. Come the next quack and the same cycle is repeated. It is natural for desperate people to feel hopeful after hearing of various miracle tales. Quacks know this. I remember reading that how you speak is more important than what you say and quacks take full advantage of this idea. You can make any statement you like and many people will believe it if you say it confidently enough. As Carl Sagan said in The Demon-Haunted World:

Tellingly, pseudoscience and superstition tend to recognize no constraints in Nature. Instead, "all things are possible." They promise a limitless production budget, however often their adherents have been disappointed and betrayed.

Sometime back, Jaya was asked to talk to a guy who it was claimed could cure any paralysed person in 6 months. To observe social niceties, Jaya called up the person. He was horrified to hear that I had been paralysed for 13 years. He said that I should be brought immediately to him and he would cure me in 6 months. Jaya asked him if he had treated any patient who had suffered a brain stem stroke. He replied that he had treated plenty of them. Jaya made some polite noises and hung up. The incident reminded me of a story that Feynman related in this speech:

One time I sat down in a bath where there was a beautiful girl sitting with a guy who didn't seem to know her. Right away I began thinking, "Gee! How am I gonna get started talking to this beautiful nude babe?" I'm trying to figure out what to say, when the guy says to her, I'm, uh, studying massage. Could I practice on you?" "Sure," she says. They get out of the bath and she lies down on a massage table nearby. I think to myself, "What a nifty line! I can never think of anything like that!" He starts to rub her big toe. "I think I feel it, "he says. "I feel a kind of dent--is that the pituitary?" I blurt out, "You're a helluva long way from the pituitary, man!" 
They looked at me, horrified--I had blown my cover--and said, "It's reflexology!" I quickly closed my eyes and appeared to be meditating. That's just an example of the kind of things that overwhelm me. 

Many people make statements that don't square with reality. People who care deeply about a particular situation or outcome insist vehemently that they don't give a damn about it. The most argumentative types will say that it is better to keep quiet rather than get into unnecessary arguments. People who boast a lot and seem to often behave arrogantly keep saying that it is important to be humble. (Talking of boasting, this is awesome. And what about this?) Shakespeare was aware of this tendency: 'To thine own self be true' and 'Brevity is the soul of wit' were said by a character ('that Polonius guy') who was a scheming windbag.

Very privileged people keep cribbing about their troubles. They don't seem to realise that luck has played a significant role in ensuring their success. I keep hearing about talent and hard work but never about luck ('god's grace' is the place-holder term I hear). In her convocation address to Harvard University, J.K.Rowling says that humans alone among all species are capable of imagining themselves in others' shoes but some don't seem capable of it.This leads to bizarre situations. For eg., if the watchman asks for a 200 rupee raise, there will be a 1 hour discussion about it but the same people will spend the same amount casually on ice-creams during an evening walk. (I don't know what to make of this disturbing story. Those people seem to be training to become Snakes in Suits - it is a book that I have not read but I love the title, although I suppose it is being uncharitable to snakes.)

Inside Nature's Giants

Inside Nature's Giants is a British science documentary telecast by Channel 4. The documentary shows experts performing dissection on some of nature's largest animals. I was not sure whether to watch it because  dissections are not the prettiest sights in the world. I don't have the stomach to watch all the blood and gore. Even in nature documentaries I watch with fascination say, a cheetah chasing a gazelle but often look away at the climax of nature red in tooth and claw. As Sam Keen says in the foreword to The Denial of Death:

Mother Nature is a brutal bitch, red in tooth and claw, who destroys what she creates.  We live, he says, in a creation in which the routine activity for organisms is "tearing others apart with teeth of all types -  biting, grinding flesh, plant stalks, bones  between molars, pushing the pulp greedily down the gullet with delight, incorporating its essence into one's own organization, and then excreting with foul stench and gasses the residue. 

But when I did start watching the programs, I didn't get the feeling of revulsion that I had expected. There were some yucky scenes but that can't be avoided in a dissection.  The episodes are on Elephant, fin Whale, Crocodile, Giraffe, Great White Shark, Big Cats, Giant Squid, Polar Bear, Camel, Leatherback Turtle, cassowary, python, sperm whale, kangaroo, hippo, baboon, racehorse  and a jungle special. It was especially fascinating watching the dissection of the laryngeal nerve in giraffe.

Different reading habits

After my stroke, I got books on religion and spirituality. For eg., there was a book called 'How to find God everywhere'. I wonder how people read these kinds of books from cover to cover and bawl for more. (To be fair, that is also what many people say when they see the kinds of books that I do read. They are hardly bookspam but peole seem to be underwelmed.) I would be more interested in reading about The Most Astounding Fact About The Universe than God's blog.

For the first couple of years after my stroke, I used to listen to the budget speech of the FM. This was because I was supposed to nod and smile intelligently when people talked to me about taxes, duties and stuff.(MBAs are required by law to listen to the Budget speech and pontificate about it afterwards.)  The papers will be full of acronyms like GST, DTC (apparently it is not Delhi Transport Corporation), MODVAT etc. I gradually lost interest in these things.There used to be lively discussions even in my halcyon days about how much I really knew about these things. I am now more interested in things like NS, RGD, PE, etc. Take that you finance freaks!

(Using acronyms is a good way to illustrate profundity. For eg.:

1. Ads use them all the time. Some paint has no VOC while some drink has DHA. What do they mean? Your guess is as good as mine.
2.  When I was in Bajaj Auto, I was told that 'RTZ' in the bike name Kawasaki RTZ  doesn't stand for anything. It just sounds cool.
3. I was looking at a problem in Sujit's notebook regarding congruent triangles when I was baffled by the last line - 'By c.p.c.t.c.' I found the explanation in his textbook - 'The Corresponding Parts of Congruence Triangles are Congruent is represented in short form as c.p.c.t.c. Hereafter this notation will be used in the problems.'
4. You often come acroass internet acronyms like LOL, IMHO, FOAF, etc. (Have you heard of this study on LOLcats?) IHTOASMTIATCOTYHABYWABOL.)

My heroes these days are not guys like Bill Gates or Steve Jobs. They just do normal things a bit better than others. Now it is people like The Man Who Dreamed He Was A Beetle or Al Gentry:

Al Gentry, a gangling figure in a grimy T-shirt and jeans frayed from chronic tree climbing, was a botanist whose strategy toward all hazards was to pretend that they didn’t exist. At one point, a tree came crashing down beside him after he lost his footing on a slope. Still on his back, he reached out for an orchid growing on the trunk and said, “Oh, that’s Gongora,” as casually as if he had just spotted an old friend on a city street.

I just completed reading The Making of the Fittest by Sean B. Carroll and I loved the tales about the icefish, fossil genes, convergent evolution, etc. I like reading about say, the chicken-eating cow. Or about why manta rays need forests.  Or about how snails cross continents by flying inside birds. (At this point, I am sure you are thinking, 'Of course that is the way snails get around. What was this guy thinking?') Here are some things I find interesting.

The kiwi has the largest egg relative to body size among all birds, being abouta quarter oj the female body weighht. (This will end soon, I promise you.) In Bully for Brontosaurus, Stephen Jay Gould writes:

A study of the general relationship between egg size and body size among birds shows that average birds of Kiwi dimensions lay eggs weighing from 55 to 100 grams (as do domestic hens). Eggs of the brown kiwi wigh between 400 and 435 grams (about a pound). Put another way, an egg of this sixe would be expected from a twenty-eight-pound bird, but brown kiwis are about six times as small.
The obvious question, of course, is why?

This the kind of essay I like to read while many people will think that I should spend more time pondering over Pascal's wager. What to do, I am like that only (sic)! Perhaps they didn't whisper enough into my right ear. Or do you think it is the fault of a parasite?

PS: While on the subject of eggs, I can't resist quoting from The Canon by Natalie Angier:

The largest egg in the world, and thus the largest cell in the world, is the ostrich egg, which measures about eight by five inches and weighs three pounds with its extracellular shell, two pounds without. (Interestingly, the ostrich egg is also the smallest bird egg relative to the size of its mother, amounting to only 1 percent of the female ostrich's body mass.  The she-birds most deserving of every mother's pity are the kiwis and hummingbirds, which lay eggs that are 25 percent as big as they are - the equivalent of a woman giving birth to a thirty-pound baby.

You must be getting 'eggsasperated' with my 'eggcentricity' so I will sign off without delay.

Hospitals as corporate entities

There was a program in Satyamev Jayate regarding medical malpractices. It reminded me about various such stories that I had heard.

1. When I was admitted to the hospital following the stroke, we had to purchase medicines and consumables like cotton from the hospital medical shop. When I was discharged, Jaya found a wholesale shop nearby which sold the items at upto 1/3 of the hospital prices. We could make out no difference in quality. I don't know the costing and obviously retail prices will be higher than wholesale prices but  will it be 3 times as high?
2. It seems that in some hospitals, the doctors are given revenue targets so they have to prescribe various irrelevant tests in order to meet those targets. Doctors who meet their revenue targets are close to the management. Doctors who are uncomfortable with such practises and don't meet the targets run the risk of being transferred to a department that they don't fancy, akin to the punishment postings that bureaucrats get when they don't toe the line of their political masters.
3. When I had been in hospital for about 6 months, a doctor friend told us that I could have been discharged 2 months earlier and that whatever was being done in the hospital could also be done at home. When Jaya asked the hospital management about discharge, she was told that it would be better to continue in the hospital since any emergencies can be dealt with easily. We were offered a room at concessional rates to continue to stay in the hospital. We finally bit the bullet and got discharged and there has never been an occasion where we felt that we would have been better off in a hospital.
4. When in the hospital, I used to hear nurses talk about how low their pay was, from 1000 to 1300 rupees per month which was low even by the standards of the day especially considering that they had 12 hour shifts. And I was hardly admitted to a hospital renowned for charity work.
5. Rs. 50-60 lakhs have to be paid as donation for a seat in many private medical colleges. (I heard that in PSG Medical College this year, it is 70 lakhs.) If that kind of money has to be paid for getting a seat, doctors will obviously charge more when they set up practise in order to recoup their costs. They will set up practise in the richer sections of cities thus leaving many areas under-served. Also, in their quest for turnover, doctors don't spend much time with the patients. 
6. Apparently, there is something called a 'basin test' - a perfectly normal person is asked to do a blood test and is charged for it. He is given a normal report and the blood is thrown into a basin.
7. Since ICU charges are higher, I heard that a dead patient was kept in the ICU and the attenders were only informed the next day.
8. I heard that the  head of some hospital conducts pujas to get more patients if there were unoccupied beds in his hospital. Can you beat that for hypocrisy? 

The problem is that the increasing healthcare costs will not affect a person like me who can afford to pay the bills, who has access to different sources of information and who is probably looked at through a different lens by many medical personnel compared to other people who have not had the same privileges. As it is explained in this post, there are 3 major reasons why patients are not consumers:

1. Health care is generally not a refusable or elective service.
2. There is an asymmetry of information
3. Purchasing power is concentrated in the hands of a very small number of "consumers".(I don't know the figures for India.)

The widespread distrust of doctors means that self-medication is widespread. People consume antibiotics as a preventive thus exacerbated the problem of antibiotic resistance. I saw in the news that doctors were demanding Aamir Khan's apology for some inaccuracy in the program. They are missing the wood for the trees. The perception of medical malpractice is widespread and if I  had got the idea of writing this post a couple of years ago and kept notes about everything that I had heard, I would have had a much longer list of malpractices. Why blame the mirror when the face is ugly?

PS: A TED talk by Atul Gawande: How do we heal medicine?

I am a credit risk

The older members of my family tend to mention my stroke to everybody while Jaya picks and chooses to whom she can speak about it.  I am temperamentally more inclined towards the latter approach but there is a practical reason for this apart from the one I had mentioned earlier.

When people first hear about my  stroke they are shocked.  Then, if there is a business transaction to be concluded (say, a house to be taken on rent or an item to be purchased on credit), the person will switch to a more practical mode and start wondering how we will settle our obligations if no one is working .

A recent incident illustrates this point. My mother was staying in a rented house not far from here. When she had initially negotiated the rent, the landlord had said that she could stay as long as she liked, she just had to renew the agreement every year   and that the increase in rent will be marginal. After a couple of years, the landlord asked her if she could vacate the house as he had decided not to give the house on rent any more. He said that he had built the house for his son who had now decided to settle down in Coimbatore and was going to stay in the house. So my mother took another house on rent nearby.

Jaya immediately told me that this must be some tall story designed to get my mother to vacate the house. Perhaps the landlord was feeling awkward about increasing the rent. Perhaps he had doubts about her ability to pay if he did increase the rent. Anyway, it was no surprise when he let out the house to someone else after a month, presumably for a higher rent.

This is why Jaya prefers not to bargain using my name. Being a privileged guy, I have not faced major problems because of this line of thinking but it must be causing problems for people a lot less lucky than me.