The Plague: historical, biographical and current: a brief roundup
Globalization is not a new thing. The Indo-European empire of the steppes was perhaps the first one. In addition to having a serious component of our genetic ancestry and most of our memetic...
View ArticleSnatches
Vidrum had called on his friends Somakhya and Lootika on a quiet afternoon to accompany him for a climb on the trails of Vidrumavistāra that lay beyond Viṣṭhaparvata. The fierce fighting arising from a...
View ArticleThe culmination of Galtonism or pandemic days-1
While many thoughts crowd our mind we have hardly felt the drive to put them down on a more visible medium. Such is the nature of the times when things happen reminding you of the inexorable turning of...
View ArticleThe culmination of Galtonism or pandemic days-2
Ensconced in the apparent safety of the 4 walls the mind looks out into the completely silent streets with hardly a soul or even a passing ratha — a mere 120 days have made the world look and sound...
View ArticleThe culmination of Galtonism or pandemic days-3
We saw a list of famous elderly people whom the virus has already placed in the abode of Vaivasvata at the time of writing. We recognized at least two names: (1) Robert Carroll the paleontologist,...
View ArticleNotes on miscellaneous brāhmaṇa passages from the Yajurveda
The upasthāna ritual is performed to let the sacrificial fire remain in residence after the primary oblations are complete. In the triple-fire śrauta rite this is done at the āhavanīya altar with...
View ArticleChaotic behavior of some floor-squared maps
Consider the one dimensional maps of the form: , where is the fractional part of What will be evolution of a under this map when or ? We can see that for it will tend converge. However, the behavior is...
View ArticleRāsabha-nyāya-śikṣā
Vrishchika had been seeing several kids of patients affected by the chemical leak that had happened sometime ago. While she saw some purely for routine clinical practice, she was also particularly...
View ArticlePandemic days-4: viruses get new hosts
That we have come to be in these pandemic days evokes some wonderment or even disbelief among laypeople. The general thinking of a large section of the populace is that this event is something...
View ArticleViṣṇu, the Marut-s and Rudra
This note might be read as a continuation of the these two earlier ones: 1) The Aśvin-s and Rudra 2) The roots of Vaiṣṇavam: a view from the numerology of Vedic texts In the Ṛgveda (RV), the Marut-s...
View ArticleA simple second order differential equation, ovals and chaos
In our youth as a consequence of our undying fascination with ovals we explored many means of generating them. In course of those explorations we experimentally arrived at a simple second order...
View ArticlePandemic days: the fizz is out of the bottle
Just this morning our brother remarked that the fear of the virus has inverted this month with respect to the actual infection. We literally hear this: in the past few months, while home-bound, we at...
View ArticleGeneralizations of the prime sieve and Pi
PDF version for better reading Eratosthenes, the preeminent yavana philosopher of early Ptolemaic Egypt [footnote 1], composed a hymn to the god Hermes of which only some fragments have come down to...
View ArticleConic conquests: biographical and historical
PDF file of same article Studying mathematics with our father was not exactly an easy-going experience; nevertheless, it was the source of many a spark that inspired fruitful explorations and...
View ArticleMatters of religion-4
Pinakasena was visiting Somakhya and Lootika. He was seeking instruction on the Sadyojāta-mantra from his hosts: “O Ātharvaṇa and Śāradvatī, I wish to learn the rahasya-s pertaining to the deployment...
View ArticleAn arithmetic experiment and an unsolved problem
We realized that a simple arithmetic experiment we had performed in our youth is actually related to an unsolved problem in number theory. It goes thus: consider the sequence of natural numbers Then...
View ArticleWinners and Losers
Somakhya and Lootika were visiting the Śūlapuruṣadeśa for work reasons. Unlike their ārya ancestors, they did not like being on the move much. It was a rare occasion that both had been able to travel...
View ArticleRuminations on meteorites, organics and water
In our times the Christian Anglo-Saxons were famous for their “war on drugs”. However, in the 1800s, when they lorded over India, they were famous as global drug dealers. On the morning of August 25,...
View ArticleThe tale of the dolmen-dweller
The exams were over and the last semester of toil was all that stood between Vidrum and the dim glimmer he saw at the end of his metaphorical tunnel. He finally had some free time that he wished to...
View ArticleCounting pyramids, squares and magic squares
Figure 1. Pyramidal numbers The following note provides some exceedingly elementary mathematics, primarily for bālabodhana. Sometime back we heard a talk by a famous contemporary mathematician (M....
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