Letter From An Angry Millenial

Prepare for a rant.

“Today’s fickle youth are masters of their own. God knows where the world is leading to!” is an absurdly common statement coming from almost every household where we, Millenials, thrive. They just can’t seem to tire from ranting and rolling their eyes upon us with our Snapchat filters or distressed shorts. Yes, the world is changing and while we were lucky enough to be a part of this transition amassing different cultures, thoughts and opinions, all our elders do is frown and raise their eyebrows in contempt.

Well, here is what I, a Millenial, think of you.

Bertrand Russell’s Message

As a part of the prologue of his autobiography:

“Three passions, simple but overwhelmingly strong, have governed my life: the longing for love, the search for knowledge, and unbearable pity for the suffering of mankind. These passions, like great winds, have blown me hither and thither, in a wayward course, over a great ocean of anguish, reaching to the very verge of despair.

I have sought love, first, because it brings ecstasy – ecstasy so great that I would often have sacrificed all the rest of life for a few hours of this joy. I have sought it, next, because it relieves loneliness–that terrible loneliness in which one shivering consciousness looks over the rim of the world into the cold unfathomable lifeless abyss. I have sought it finally, because in the union of love I have seen, in a mystic miniature, the prefiguring vision of the heaven that saints and poets have imagined. This is what I sought, and though it might seem too good for human life, this is what – at last – I have found.

With equal passion I have sought knowledge. I have wished to understand the hearts of men. I have wished to know why the stars shine. And I have tried to apprehend the Pythagorean power by which number holds sway above the flux. A little of this, but not much, I have achieved.

Love and knowledge, so far as they were possible, led upward toward the heavens. But always pity brought me back to earth. Echoes of cries of pain reverberate in my heart. Children in famine, victims tortured by oppressors, helpless old people a burden to their sons, and the whole world of loneliness, poverty, and pain make a mockery of what human life should be. I long to alleviate this evil, but I cannot, and I too suffer.

This has been my life. I have found it worth living, and would gladly live it again if the chance were offered me.”

Stats in the Courtroom

The legal system is often associated with dusty papers, conflicting testimonies, and long drawn-out hours of reviewing hazy evidence. But with technology at hand, science conveniently broke into the scene by introducing concrete data and accurate predictions to foretell the judgment of a case. When cases got too complex to pursue, new tools like sequential analysis and DNA profiling came to the rescue and changed the face of modern crime trials. Scientific paradigms have since been a favorable alternative for legal proceedings as the best way to arrive at a judgement.

But bring statistics in the courtroom, and suddenly eyebrows are raised.
Statistical analysis often gets a bad reputation when it comes to law as judges and policymakers are usually inclined to numerical data as opposed to vague percentages and confidence intervals. What they fail to realize is that this is a much more powerful tool of decision making based on pure scientific data analysis.

An Ode to Baroque

Right at the edge of the Renaissance, music was changing in long lean strides, evolving, adapting, improving. Artists and performers all over the world were unfurling their talents into a wide conflagration of creative impression which fuelled the eras predominantly from the 1500s to the 1800s. With the birth of chamber music, sounds were given a new direction, musicians a new outlet. One such era spanned the whole of Europe, called the Baroque period.

Cooking is a matter of Thermodynamics

Let’s just all agree that thermodynamics is profound stuff.

It weaves right through intricate physical and chemical processes into the deep, uncertain nature of things, the universe, chaos and structure of the very fibre we were born with. It allows life to flow into everything around us, and everything as well as anything we cannot fathom to behold in our existence. As you’re reading these very words, thermodynamics is into play, altering your body, your emotions, nature and time.

And while you might just shrug and turn the page, there’s no denying the fact that while so many theories – Newtonian mechanics, breaking the sound barrier, indivisibility of atoms – could be refuted with enough empirical evidence, the laws of thermodynamics are so dear and starkly set for centuries that they lay the foundations of modern science into our hands.

Art Restoration – Part I

Works of art have never failed to give aesthetic delight to the beholder’s eyes. Be it the Sistine chapel, the Acropolis, the famous Mona Lisa, these beautiful works have stood the test of time – although not withstanding the changing courses of environment. But while one might praise these works of art to be timeless in all their glory, they actually go and in hand with various scientific processes to look just as they remain today.

Natural calamities, changing seasons, manhandling and many other factors contribute to change the appearance and alter the composition of an artefact or a painting. But then, man has the means and science has the answer. In fact, It wasn’t before the 19^th century that Faraday began studying the effects of environment of works of art which gave a deep insight in preserving and restoring the marvels – and that’s how the concept of art restoration fortified itself into a full-fledged profession.

Five Lessons from Howard Roark

“My philosophy, in essence, is the concept of man as a heroic being, with his own happiness as the moral purpose of his life, with productive achievement as his noblest activity, and reason as his only absolute.”

Thus spoke Ayn Rand as she held the world in a mindless fervour when one of her most popular novel, The Fountainhead, was released. Most of you have probably read it once in your life, and you’ve either come to absolutely devote yourself to it or to completely abhor it. Of course, they were not just novels but Ayn Rand’s own potpourri of Objectivism – her philosophy. While she might not come across as a philosopher, she does have a cult following. And so does one of her most celebrated protagonists – Howard Roark. So what falls so different about Howard Roark? For one, he is the ‘supreme ideal’ of her philosophy in human form, or so she says. To start things off, he is an architect. But he is a Modernist in a world of Renaissance columns and curvy staircases and chunky doorjambs. She describes his face as being the ‘most unpleasant’, and he has no family, no close friends – except for a few good friendships he forms over the course of the book, and his view of the world is far from normal. And that’s precisely why he has thousands of people gazing at him and his work in admiration. Aside from the philosophy which she projects, there are a lot of things we can actually imbibe from this curious individual – and while I spent this week re-reading The Fountainhead, I present to you, Howard Roark – in his own words.

Depression and Vitamin B6

Most of us can relate to the feelings of being tired, lonely and lethargic. We all have bad days, don’t we? But depression is different. It is like a gaping void entrenched in darkness, which goes on forever, beyond which you can’t see anything, and the very air sucks all hope and energy out of you. Depression is not just sadness. Depression is dangerous. Depression is lethal.

The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM) describes a depressive disorder wherein there is a loss of interest or pleasure in daily activities for more than two weeks, coupled with other symptoms like observable weight loss or gain, change in sleep patterns, feelings of guilt and worthlessness, loss of concentration – anything that can be significant enough to cause a dysfunction in your social, academic or work life. It is also usually coupled with anxiety. It can happen to anyone, although, before we begin to delve into the psychological aspect of depression, there are a few biological factors that might contribute.

For instance, depression can be a result of an underlying chronic illness, a deficiency, or even the effect of medication. One such factor is an insufficiency of B Complex vitamins. It’s no surprise that the intake of vitamins is indispensable for our good health. In fact, their very name suggests their importance involved in helping us grow both physically and psychologically. Since they play a major role in an individual’s normal growth and development, it is imperative that our body receives them in proper amounts – although not in abundance – in order to ensure fitness of the mind.

Mathematics in Cryptography

If we spare a glance all around us, we will find that information is everywhere. It is in the papers we read, the music we listen to, the news we hear, the billboards we pass by on our way home. For every minute of our lives, we are constantly being assaulted by information – and it is a dangerous thing to possess. For it is a tool powerful enough to change the very course of history.

Ever since the dawn of time, man has been striving to find means so that he could conceal this information. The Spartans did it with batons, the Greeks did it with checkerboards, the Italians used secret disks, but it wasn’t until the Middle Ages when cryptography started developing and branching out as an independent and important method of encryption.

Usually, encryption was done in the form of character code equivalents and substitutions. The most well-known use of cryptography in the ancient times would undoubtedly be the Caesar cipher, which involved shifting of the alphabet to the next one to encode the message. But there was always the fear of information getting leaked out or being deciphered by someone.

Perhaps the most famous case of cracked codes would be attributed to the Bletchley Park code breakers during the World War II – a British intelligence cell – for breaking the Enigma code, a secret method of communication by the Germans generated through code machines. It was so brilliant a feat that it managed to trigger a massive chain of events eventually culminating into the end of the war. It was then the real impact of cryptography was finally realised.

The Life and Times of Michelangelo

Pietà

And no, I am not talking about the Ninja Turtle.

Michelangelo Buonarotti was perhaps one of the greatest artists and sculptors of all time. With a comparatively small portfolio, he’s managed to enthrall audiences across the globe for centuries, and people still sing his praises. But beyond all of that, a part of his work also remains unfinished, leaving us to wonder how the world would’ve been shaped had they been completed, after all.

He was born into a family of stone-cutters. And life was hard. Michelangelo’s mother died when he was only six; he barely knew her. His father, on the other hand, who was mostly unemployed and overtly proud of himself, was a constant source of embarrassment for him. Early family tensions soon carved their way into his life as he discovered an escape – art and sculpture.

By thirteen, he was already learning to paint frescos and displaying his visual and artistic talents as an apprentice of Davide and Domenico Ghirlandaio – two famous Florentine painters, much to the wrath of his father. According to him, Michelangelo was only wasting away the benefit of precious formal education. He would be punished for his art. Alternatively, money flowed in.