Sunday, February 19, 2012

Would you stop to listen to the music?

Back in 2007, Gene Weingarten, a journalist from the Washington Post thought of an interesting experiment to study human behaviour. He managed to convince a world class musician to exhibit his violin expertise dressed as a homeless person in busy Washington DC metro. The idea was to observe how differently people would accept the same product outside its society-assigned place of belonging - the concert hall.
Joshua Bell, the musician, had just played for a fancy audience - each of whom had paid around $100 for a ticket - a few days ago.

This is what happened.


Bell managed to earn about $32 (excluding the $20 bill he got from a fan who eventually recognised him) from more than a thousand commuters who passed by during that 45 minutes.

How screwed up is that? Imagine how differently we would look at the world if we had no set notions.

There's 2 ways to interpret this.
1. It's possible to wonder if the talent in question is overrated. Maybe Bell is just a mediocre violinist who got a series of lucky breaks. If the crowd didn't listen, does that mean the music wasn't really good?
This is a very valid point, especially in this age where a video of a dog twitching in it's sleep can go viral.
There are so many chance happenings that serendipity has lost its charm today. How do you know if Justin Bieber would be where he is today even if Scooter Braun hadn't 'discovered' him? What is Braun had not updated his flash player or chose this guy instead?
I could go on...
It's all arguable i suppose, but maybe I'm being naive in saying that talents like Joshua Bell, AR Rahman and others are the few for whom luck might not have played as much a role as their gift and their hardwork did.
For them not to have been noticed would have taken life full of lousy luck and bad decision-making.
Which brings us to the second point of view.

2. Let's say these famous guys are really talented (Okay, excepting Snooki, the Kardashians, anybody in Bigggg Boss and Zayed Khan), so there's nothing wrong with a little bit of luck helping them out right?
But imagine if the same amount of luck was given to everyone. How many potential superstars are lurking in the world with no chance of recognition? The supremely overdone example ofcourse is 'How many Sachin Tendulkars might exist among the millions of galli cricket players'.

ACTUALLY

this was not even a point with which I began this blog entry. I meant to write about how shackled we are by our responsibilities and by perceptions of the society as a whole. How without realizing it, most of us form most of our opinions based on already formed ones.

Sounded really deep in my head, but like wannabe trash on paper. Will publish this still because I'm self destructive that way.

FAIL.

Tuesday, February 7, 2012

Cramped.

Some things in nature seem so unnecessary. Like menstrual cramps. As if it isn't enough that women give birth, we have to be reminded about it every 30 days. Knowing why it happens may not really make it worthwhile (hah!), it may even piss you off more, but if you're lucky it'll at least distract you for a few minutes.

Every uterus has a bloody lining
So us mammals have this thing called the uterus aka the womb and in lay terms that's where the baby hangs out for nine months. Unfortunately, even if you're not pregnant, things are still happening in there.
The protagonist in this violent story is a slimy fellow called the endometrium (ENDO-MET-RIUM). So the endometrium is the inner lining of the uterus which gets recycled every month since your first period - which is from when, as unnecessary as it sounds, a woman is ready to bear child. So every month, your body is (somewhat stupidly) prepping itself to get pregnant. And since pregnancy is signalled by the embryo (egg+sperm=zygote -> embryo) embedding itself on the uterus wall, the uterus wall needs to toughen up in anticipation of this happening at any moment. After about four weeks of waiting and no victorious sperm emerging even after ovulation (monthly release of eggs - best time to get pregnant, unless you're Monica and Chandler Bing), your uterus finally gets the hint and realizes it thickened the endometrium for nothing. And apparently, the endometrium has to be fresh to successfully embed the embryo so we can't just have it getting stale waiting for you to get pregnant. So now the body has to get rid of this tissue doesn't it. And what better way to do this than bleed through your privates! Hormone levels (in this case decreasing estrogen and progesterone) signal the endometrium to get swollen and begin shedding. That, in a nutshell, is what happens every month during your period.


'If suffer we must, let's suffer on the heights'
Pain, blood's loyal ally, has a good reason to be here too. As the old lining starts to weaken, chemicals called prostaglandins are released. Prostaglandins prod the old lining into actual disintegration. They do this by causing the uterus wall to contract (imagine flexed biceps) and thereby restrict blood flow and oxygen to the outdated endometrium. The endometrium, as a result wither away and die. To get it out of our system, the walls keep contracting so that the waste tissue ultimately gets squeezed out of the vagina. As you can imagine, this squeezing is nothing but the cramp that we love to hate, made further painful by clots of bloody tissue trying to escape the narrow cervical canal (that leads the uterus to the vagina).

That's all there is to it. Of course this is highly simplified and each step I've described is actually governed by dozens of hormones and regulatory mechanisms, some of which illustrator Wendy Bryan has described in a fun way here. A more detailed account can be got here.

Oh and there's this totally stoner menstruation video i found that's highly annoying but so damn funny I just have to share. It could be useful to visualize but i'm not entirely sure what that egg is doing there.
Oh, and I'm not a doctor so do let me know if i'm wrong or if any of you know anything I don't.