Snaps

Death Without Pain

I guess I am happy today. Today I stumbled upon a BBC documentary on ‘How to kill a human being’ and seemingly my search for painless methods to die is over. I think if the question is why you want to die, the answer would be very simple purely based on logic and personal choice.

Surely, there is no absolute truth (there is nothing called a fact),even the fact that electron’s mass is 9.18 times 10^-31 Kg is not a fact because I could devise another story in which I could assume the presence of a person wanting to forge facts in all the experiments done since Millikan to make the whole community feel that it is true(maybe no such experiment was ever done, maybe everyone including Millikan plotted a conspiracy just to convince you) and the fact is you would never know.

There is no purpose of life, since if it was there, it would be clearly stated in objective manner which I have never seen anywhere. Getting a PhD would make you more money, good food, good sex, good life but you will die. So you achieved nothing more than the beggar who died last night having no money, food or sex. Hence there is no point of living life, it’s sort of a burden, if you don’t have anything to do, coz it gets boring.

There is no need to live since you don’t have to do anything which is a pre-requisite for dying. People die each day. There being no real reason to live, and having so much time at hand, and having the control over the choice of living or not, it makes sense to die.

Now coming to point that if you wanna die, how would you make sure you do. Enter the documentary.

The movie starts with the pursuit of author trying to find a humane method of killing prisoners in which he tests methods like hanging, the electric chair, poisonous injection etc and then realises that nothing of the conventionally used killing methods are humane. Here humane can be taken to be same as painless. Here a snapshot of where they decide the height of fall while hanging based on the weight of the person(these charts are highly inaccurate as the parameters are quite less).Note that the heads is joined to the body using a metal rod.

Here’s what happens when the height is increased by just 2 feet in the above case.

 And now the cool fact, the charts of hanging heights based on weights is different in the Britain and US, which comes to close to 2 feet. So if you are hanged in the US or Britain could make a difference whether your head would be intact or not. Cool, isn’t it?

Now coming back to the main topic. So this narrator tried different methods of killing prisoners in which he found none was good. So he came to bio lab (ultimate solution to every question). Lab rats are regularly killed in labs for various experiments as a result of which the so-called ethics committee found new painless and humane way of killing animals that is Hypoxia. Hypoxia being  the condition in which the oxygen does not reach the brain in proper amount as a result of which the person feels unconscious and dies in a minute or so. It is a common condition experienced by pilots at high altitudes in which the g-force pushes the body blood down as a result of which blood(and hence oxygen) does not reach the brain in proper quantities. This is also the same thing which happens when you turn on the heat in the car and close the windows, carbon monoxide can form due to incomplete combustion and enter your blood through air pipe, and we know CO binds to haemoglobin competitively over oxygen and hence depriving brain of oxygen leading to death. A couple of unintentional deaths like this have happened a lot of time in Jammu and in Japan, probably America as well. Now the method to induce Hypoxia could be painful but then we have got the choice to decide which method is the least painful. Let’s design an experiment.

Objective: Finding the least painful method of inducing hypoxia.

Available options: An gas which prevents oxygen from circulation like CO2, CO, N2,Ar etc.

Leaving the experimental approach, some Indian born British researcher at University of Bristol has found that the combination of pure nitrogen and argon which being odourless are the most easy way of inducing hypoxia and hence death. Without 15 seconds of inhaling pure nitrogen, the body is unconscious and death comes a minute later (of course, the numbers not being very trustworthy).

But ultimately we have a tool, don’t we in delivering painless methods of death to people like me who don’t wanna live.

Just for fun, I am putting up some common methods of taking life.

1.       The lethal injection given to a patient tied to the bed with three types of drugs

a.       First to induce unconsciousness by anaesthesia

b.      Second to induce muscular dystrophy.

c.       Third to induce cardiac arrest

1.       The classical hanging method I already talked about. The aim being to break the stem joining the spinal cord to the brain to lose the coordination of the brain over the heart muscle, breathing etc.

 The old method of electric chair still in use in some American states which actually passes 2500V of current across the body with the intention of messing up the cardiac activity but there’s no real research behind this and it can go terribly wrong as classically shown in the movie ‘The Green Mile’.

1.       The gas chamber in which the subject breathes HCN which causes asphyxiation. In the below pics, the subjects were two rabbits.

The supposedly best method of inducing hypoxia by inhalation of pure nitrogen/argon mixture.

But in all this, I find the list being incomplete. While I was working in the neuro lab of some prof after my 12^th standard, their standard method of killing birds was quite easy.

They used to put a lot of chloroform on the bird as a result of which the bird was seemingly unconscious and then used to get the bird out from the cage and simply chop off its head. The bird would never know because it would be dead in sleep. Ain’t that cool?

And some pics of that stuff.

On a romantic wind

I knew the day I saw her. I knew that she was made for me. She was the most beautiful creature I had ever seen and deep down in my fumbling heart, I knew that she acknowledged my intention.

I met her during the breakfast of 18^th of April while we was hastily slumbering over the food at the buffet. I had all the time in the world to observe her, and to feel my heart overpowering me in the covertness of her beauty. I had not yet decided how I would introduce myself to her, but that I knew, if I didn’t, I would never forgive myself. As the old saying goes, “It is better to have loved and lost than to never have loved at all”.

“May I join you?” I asked with timid shyness.

“Sure”, came the reply.

“Normally I would start the conversation by introducing myself and then getting to know you, but today, I cannot do that”.

“Why not?”

“I never did have this feeling, which is strange but also nice which overpowers me when I see you. I think you are the most beautiful women I have ever met and I would really love to be your friend”.

“Are you drunk?”

“No, why do you ask?”

“I think you are crazy”

“Why so?”

“You realise what you said about a minute ago, that I am most beautiful and everything, I have never heard that sort of thing. Is it supposed to romantic and stuff?”

“I don’t know, it’s your call?”

“Would you like to hear a joke” I asked as was my idea to save a situation from going bad.

“With great power comes great difficulty in factorizing the polynomial” bloated my mouth. As always, I knew she wouldn’t understand me. But anyways, she laughed.

“Hello, I am a mathematician, you are so beautiful, you must be a biologist “chuckled I.

And she laughed. And it was so beautiful that I could have given everything to just watch her like that.

And so our friendship began. We met every day at the breakfast, dinner and lunch. I told her my dreams during breakfast and my work during lunch and my stories and jokes during the dinner, not necessarily in the same order every day. She started liking me or so I would like to belief.

One day I invited her to my office to have a look at my cabin and see my work on “Theory of Elliptical Forms” coz that’s the only thing I knew. And then she talked about her work. Being a young assistant professor of 23 obviously have some perks and coming from grad school ,I still had some adventure left in me.

“Do you drink, I asked”.

“Occasionally”.

“Well, would you like to have wine with me”?

“Errrrrr...”

“It is 1990 edition straight from Bordeaux in France”.

“Sure, I would give a try”.

“Want an exotic place to add to the backdrop”

“Sure, why not”.

And so I took her to top floor of the building I used to work in, which was practically empty with windy weather and couple of pigeons hanging around. It was not the greatest location on earth but given the panoramic view of the lake and the hills, it sure added to the beauty of the backdrop. Taking out the two glasses I usually used to store in my cabinet, I popped open the red wine and poured two glasses out of it. Taking out the cork was hell of a trouble and since I took it out all by myself, I have started believing in god.

“Cheers, I said”.

“What for”?

“Our new friendship”

“Oh, ok!”

And then I had the most amazing time of my life, drinking wine with the lady of my dreams and pondering in her dark crystal eyes in which I dived every now and then to reach new depths, to find new treasure every time, to remind me that there was a purpose of existence.

We emptied the bottle in no time. And the last few drops were squeezed by her parched throat.

“Want to have some adventure?”

“Sure”.

“Is this the only word you know to speak “Sure” “?

“Sure” “Oh I am sorry, hell, no, it’s just that you asked all the questions and I answer them in agreement. So yes, I would like to have some adventure”.

I pondered and replied “In my college days, I used to be against the notion of authority and hence I used to do all sorts of crazy stuff to oppose the administration. Me and my friends used to leave whisky bottles in front of the Deans office. And since they could not trace them back to us, we always used to have the last laugh.”

“Where are you going with this? “She asked anxiously.

“How about we drop this bottle from the 6^th floor and as you can see, it will land straight in front of the entrance of college and the administration would of course be offended. Isn’t that something cool to do?”

“What if it hits someone?”

“Come on! Its 5 pm, everybody leaves at 6 .nobody is around and they will never find out”

“Eh..Ok” said she in a very low tone.

“C’mon, it’s not a big deal. Haven’t you had any adventures in college”?

And looking at the right spot with the right precision, I let the bottle relieve my hands. Speaking of physics, it would land at the surface after 2.76 seconds (as I mentally calculated) of course, not taking into account the air resistance which must be quite huge up here.

Manilal was the errand boy who used to get us our reimbursements, Xeroxes and stationary stuff from the store. He was talking on his cell, maybe to his wife, who was terminally ill due to breast cancer or maybe to his only son, Sonu who was studying in the 8^th standard in the local municipal school. Manilal got out from the lift and started marching towards the entrance and as he reached the mattress in front of the entrance, a loud smashing sound came along with the scream.

Manilal was dead.

My face turned from blushing red to ghost white as I watched the whole seen from above. Divya was too traumatized to scream, let alone speaking. My body was paralysed, I could not move. My hands were frozen and my mind refused to be believe what happened. While I was looking at the whole scene, and as the shout came out from Manilal, the bus driver looked up (to find the source of bottle) and saw me. Obviously, he could not recognise me from that height but he knew someone was there. And I was turning to my sense, the driver was coming to the 6^th floor. I knew the basic advice of my father, not to panic in dangerous situation. Divya was still like a corpse and she had tears in her eyes and I knew she was never going to forgive me. But that was not the important question. We had to save ourselves in the limited time we had.

I came to my panicked senses and supported Divya by her shoulders to the lift. There were two lifts and one was coming to the 6^th floor. It was on the 3^rd floor and lifts pretty sure move fast. The other lift was on the 3^rd floor as well.

“You are going to get both of us in jail, you killed a man, you murderer” said Divya sobbing and she knew that the moment of danger was near as the lift was treading up floor by floor. We took to the stairs and ran down the three floors in no time (I was pushing Divya while she was sobbing), pushed the lift button, and I could hear the lift opening on the 6^th floor by the sound of it. As the lift opened and we went inside it, the driver was coming by the stairs. I pushed the ground floor button, reached the basement in 3 seconds, 1 second to open the gate, opened my Santro which used to normally parked near the terminal pillar and us, me and Divya, smuggled inside it in no time. We sat laid back in the Santro in the backseat with our heads lowered and car motionless. As Divya smuggled into my arms, she must have hated me the most but she had no choice. The driver did come into the basement, as I could see from the side-view mirror of the car.

Driver stood there looking for sign of motion as to determine if the culprits ever came this side. I stopped breathing and looked Divya into the eyes to motion her to stop crying. If there was ever a real emotion in me, it was at that moment when my eyes were filled with fear, trauma, kindness, and apology all towards one women. As the minute passed, the driver went back to get help for the dead man. We laid there for another ten minutes without any exchange of words, without any crying and without the heart to believe what I had done. I came to my senses and we went back to my office to prove the point that we did not know whatever happened. That day, I took the rest of the wine glasses from my office to home and destroyed them and also destroyed all my wine bottles. I knew in my heart, as did she, that we were well past comprehension of each other and must cease to meet, which happened eventually.

I could never forget that incident. Manilal had a family to support and I couldn’t do anything about it. I was so frustrated with myself, that here I am writing this confession, while I stand on the 6^th floor balcony. Divya, please forgive me. My will has been made to transfer all my money to Manilal’s wife.

And now I must say goodbye.

(Whistling sound of wind followed by a loud thump).

Snaps

Random pics i clicked today.

Figuring out my life -2

Things have changed since I joined college. Life has become more comfortable and also beautiful. The consequence of my actions in my juvenile years still haunts me and I plan to undo them someday. Although some part of me knows that I will never do that. The months I spent doing stuff has had a great impact on me, positively or negatively I don’t know, but it has given me more sense of aloneness and developed in me a sense of knowing the consequence of action(and hence inaction). It was not completely my folks fault, although to large extent it was and whatever preceded it but it was also my fault and my determination which carried me through. That led me to topping the exams in high school but I knew it had ruined me. The fact that now I could not stand a moment of inaction and the fact that I couldn’t think properly and also the fact that I was a rebel and I had anger in me, lots of it, against my parents, my friends, teachers, and most importantly me-self. It was the strangest thing that happened to me and continues to ruin me, inch-by-inch every day. I became a self-hating sadistic man full of pessimism, not by need, but by choice. So that, I could never get disappointed. And I knew I day it would pay me in full. I would be in rags, tatters, close to death on some street, not asking for help, and if that is situation which could not be worse, I would be there, happy, content and death would do me good.

The anger against myself led me to be angry against everyone else, seriously I dream of killing people. I dream of killing friends and what not. Now I have to study so that I have something to pass my time with. And when I get stuck, I know, somewhere from beneath, that I was never made for this stuff, and maybe it’s not true because I am better than some people in doing that, but I know that I am getting close to my end every day. Every hour, every passing second. The moroseness has increased, the anger has increased, my pervert-ness has increased, and self-hatred has increased. And I ask myself, what is this life for?

Has it ever done anything good to you? What is the purpose of life? Not because I am inept at doing my duties but why you do have to do it. People live and people die. Species rise and falls. Humans won’t be on earth, say 200 years from now. They will be wiped by self-hatred. But what is the point? 

Why is life so long? Insects die in a day, why do we get to live long. Why .And what would I do with so much time. The guilt of inaction rises every second and it has done me no good or so I believe. Prevent me killing myself, being my own enemy and judging myself every second by the heavy standards I have set. Maybe I am not making a point. As the teacher in American History X used to say, ‘You did not get any answers, because you were not asking the right questions’. What is that supposed to mean. In research, yes, asking the right question is a meaningful question but what about life. When will I have peace? Maybe I know the answer, perhaps, the day I could be able to say, ‘it couldn’t be more bad’. I don’t know if I want to be around for that day. I don’t believe in god, which normally serves as a motivation for people to do so-called good stuff. I don’t believe in love, which allows people to connect to friends, family and dogs. I don’t believe in social norms, which I believe are just something which is transient and makes no sense, it’s just that we happen to live in this generation where the rules are this. I don’t believe in absolute truths, coz there aren’t any. What is the purpose of life and why should I worry about mine. I have no fear of death coz I know it’s coming and it is coming fast and I would know when it would take me. If this is the depression, I would object. This is the normal state of affairs ever since I started living. I don’t know if anything could change me now, or even if I want to. I want to be sad, unhappy, depressed but it does not give me pleasure. I don’t want pleasure. What do I want?

Uncounted Joys

There are certainly many features in life we remember just certain ones which we don’t which are as important or perhaps more than anything else. Since they are so fundamental and ingrained in us, we fail or refuse to appreciate the pleasure we derive from it and also the despair in its absence.

One such activity is the phenomenon of excretion or shitting or pooping or dispensing. Choose the word you like depending on the level of obscenity (if it is) you are allowed to tolerate by your conditioning. I choose shitting.

The joy of shitting is incommensurable to any other activity which brings immediate joy and also the desire to look forward to getting rid of more of it. It becomes a daily routine and hence people refuse to realise its fundamental importance in our lives so as to realise it only when the mechanism goes bad or perhaps they lose out to sorrow of age. If we may analyse which exact part of shitting brings joy or peace, we would have to go through the whole process in a thought experiment. The first part is initiation when you sit on the commode and prepare yourself to start the activity, what follows is the mind getting prepared for it and since the muscles from the concerned region become voluntary and also conditioned to your biological clock, you would start losing out digested material from the very body of yours. It is this very process which brings pleasure which many people might like to classify as peace or the fact that it was burden to you and you got rid of it which gave you peace (which I maybe interpret as pleasure) but that is not really so. We carry shit every time in our time except that we are not really prepared to lose it other than the normal biological time we would want it to. The muscles of the anus are conditioned to open when you want it which is pretty much the same time of the day. Hence it is the joy in the sense of adding positive to zero and not decreasing the negativeness already present of which a case might be the situation when you wear really tight shoes and you are dying to get it off all through the day while you can’t, when you are able to do it, removing the shoes allows you to relax your toes which is pleasure in sense of decreasing the negativeness but shitting isn’t one of them.

The style of shitting has influenced lot of people in their classification of it as a necessary or a pleasurable activity. While the western world has the notion of sitting while shitting, the notion of Indian toilet (if they really belong to India) is of shitting while crouching. Crouching helps to lose out the body waste more quickly that what you would do while sitting because the physiology permits a quicker path for the shit to emerge being accelerated by the influence of gravity which would not happen for the horizontal path shit would travel while sitting. Which seems to suggest that Indians (or the people who shit that way) think of it as a useless activity which also suggests that they are busy or poor enough so as to not waste time on such a time.

Figuring out my life-1

There has been an extensive notion about what young men should or should not do, like drinking is bad,sex is bad, education is good and making money is good. Here I am at a stand where I don’t know what to do. Like I was doing this book called ‘Applied Linear Algebra’ which seemed to give sense to my life, make my life peaceful,enjoyable and something I could look forward to, each day I went to study. Since I reached the seventh chapter,I have started ignoring that book, it feels that I must complete it. Out of necessity or of the joy of completion, I must complete it but the problem is I can’t . IT has taught me so much that I feel like devoting my life to the study of vector spaces and linear transformations although I still don’t know Jordan Canonical Form which came in the fourth chapter about which I seriously feel sorry. Now I need to start some new mathematical text and complete it or at least manage through a few chapters which will give me something new to learn or perhaps improve my understanding of what I already know. In hope of that, I started reading single variable calculus from many books and also multivariable calculus from a book and also a book on polynomials another on algebra and one on analysis. I really don’t know what to do. It is like I acknowledge that I don’t know single variable calculus to its intricacies and definitions and perhaps I know more of multivariable calculus that single variable one. But what exactly should I do? Should I solve problems or should I read some other text on the same subject or should I study something else. From my reading of the book on linear algebra of Sadun I came to realise that you can learn the old stuff in the better way by doing advanced stuff that uses the old stuff .That way you also get an appreciation for why the old stuff is important as well. And I also think that extensive problems at the end of each section are a big turnoff for me like Tom Apostol does in his book . You get so much involved in the problems itself that you lose the flow of writing. Like the definition of open ball and closed balls are merely to be an extension of the idea of open and closed set in the field of reals .But then you start giving problems like Prove that every empty set is an open set and also prove that every empty set is a closed set? And couple of other such problems in addition to lot of numericals. What are they if not a turnoff. A given section must always test the understanding of the reader but not at the cost of losing the touch of the following material or also demotivating the reader so as to not let him proceed further. Hence any section must always be followed with excersies but not so less but certainly not so many. Learning mathematics is a process in which the reader’s intuition gets better and better by reading more and more. Its not like other subjects where you could be a master of advanced stuff and still gets minute details of your fundamentals wrong which is of course a consequence of them not being consistent or maybe topic about which not much is known.But mathematics forms a self-consistent body of knowledge, you can never be write about the advanced stuff if your basics are wrong. Hence the basics are built over and over again as you keep on doing the advanced stuff provided you already have a knowledge of the preliminary stuff. That’s what happpend to me in reading that book on linear algebra. But you never know, I could be wrong because maybe that book was way to easy or something llike that. So the question comes to what must be the right book for studying any subject.The pre-requisities must be that the section are smooth and with optimum number of excersice which wont be too hard to decide,depending on the audience for which you are writing , If I were to write, I would do it for a self-reader.

SO what really are the topics I am considering to start now or probably redo or something like that.

1. Analysis by Terence Tao
2. Calculus 2 by Apostol
3. Calculus 1 by Apostol
4. Linear Algebra 1 by Gantmacher
5. Statistical Inference by Casella and Berger
6. Quantum mechanics by Brandsen and Joachain
7. Quantum mechanics in matrix formulation
8. Algebra by VInberg
9. I don’t know some other random books I keep on hitting upon in the library.

If I were to learn mathematics in my life properly the natural order of things would be as follows

1. Analysis
2. Single Variable Calculus
3. Linear Algebra
4. Multivariable Calculus
5. Second course in linear algebra
6. Algebra and Group theory

If only I could do all of these I would die in peace.

Mathematics is a guy or girl who gives me a hard on when I really understand something or sometimes a cold strange look when its like who the hell let this guy let in college.

The state of affairs suggests and I assert that I am not going to give up whatever happens . I know biology perfectly well and that;s the reason I wont do it. I have taken up mathematics as a challenge and also a way of clear thinking and reasoning.i don’t care what happens to my grades as long as I stick. Even if I am not successful at it, at least I would know why. I had this generic notion that I was inherently bad at things compared to anyone else. I would be happy if it is true but I knows its not . The only reason I would not be able to learn it could be my lack of will power and nothing else.

The peak of abstract thinking and clear reasoning is what makes gods.Able to see everything clearly and precisely without a blemish of doubt. How could that day would feel.