Sunday, March 23, 2014

Skill circuits



Skill circuits, demonstration quality for the students to see and emulate us. I've watched the videos and paid tried to pay attention to all the instructors during their classes. I think I'll be good for most, if not all, of them. Yet, whether I get an average 3 or a superb 5 my little ghost is all I want to mirror. The same way it effortlessly, in a real life situation, grabbed the belt, turned left and secured it. 

Ah to have that ghost haunt me again.

Monday, February 17, 2014

Phantoms in the Brain

My journey began today. A test that I thought I'd surely fail - didn't seem that hard when I finished. I was excited, I was happy and I high-fived a phantom. Not a 5 like you did - but am damn freaking proud I could do it!

I looked at the students around me. A bit nervous but mostly really thrilled at taking their first breath under water. The smile I smiled inside me wasn't really for me - at least not all of it. The specter that travels with me smiled back - it understood what that smile meant. It made my smile brighter. 

Mask removal, regulator recovery, the big OKAY - all the little moments that my apparition saw me struggle through. A stern word or two about dangling consoles surfaces up into my consciousness - I immediately look to see it secured to my BCD and wink a sarcastic wink to the empty space. 

Everyone's out of the water. "Thank you, Mehul" - "You're very very welcome! So excited for the deep water next week?". "I can't wait" said a haunting memory. 

Saturday, January 5, 2013

Difficult to see....always in motion, the Future is.

The Mayans weren't completely wrong. 2012 didn't end it all for everyone - but it took a large chunk of my world away. 

Two marriages didn't happen, one didn't work out, we lost an aunt and a mother and I lost the love of my life. Its hard for me to live with my own words sometimes - but it's almost impossible to live in the moment or even in the near future. These are the times when you live anywhere but in the present. You live in the happy times in the past and in the fantasy world of 'hoped' times in the future. Time heals all and that...yeah sure. But what about now. There's no bandaid for this. Just an open festering wound that will take its time to heal. 

Difficult to see...always in motion, the Future is
.

Sunday, September 4, 2011

Now it's all done

Now that I'm done with the 'most honored' of degrees and have an honorific either pre- or post- my name, how do I feel? What do I feel?

I certainly don't feel superior, perhaps a little more knowledgeable (atleast a miniscule amount in my own field), but certainly I've acquired more than perfect vision when it comes to hindsight. There're many things that I've learnt along the way - going to try and list a few


  1. Microsoft Word is great - now that I've learnt the hard way to write large documents the correct way. But of course until I put that very last full stop I didn't know this.
  2. I've certainly become more organized. When you've got to do experiments that take a month, planning is important. 
  3. Collaboration and team work is extremely important. But more important than that is a pat-on-the-back (frequently)
  4. Though I didn't realize it myself until lots of people congratulated me - it really was hard work coming to this point. You'll feel down and you'll feel high and when it's all done you won't feel a thing. It really is an anti-climax. 
It's back to work as usual for me. I had a few drinks after the defense and the next day it was back to the lab after a standard routine in the morning. 

Hopefully things will change for the better - I'm going to miss my student days :)

Wednesday, July 14, 2010

Has biology disproved free will and moral responsibility

I've copied this in its entirety from the latest issue of PNAS July 13, 2010 vol. 107no. 28 E114





Has biology disproved free will and moral responsibility?

  1. Henrik Anckarsäter1
+Author Affiliations
  1. Department of Forensic Psychiatry, the Sahlgrenska Academy, University of Gothenburg, 422 50 Hisings Backa, Sweden
In his Inaugural Article entitled “The Lucretian swerve: The biological basis of human behavior and the criminal justice system,” Andrew Cashmore suggests that penal systems based on moral responsibility have to be reformed because science has refuted the notion of free will (1). Brain imaging and other functional neuroscience methods have indeed been used not only to map neuronal covariates to behaviors but also to detect action potentials for simple movements hundreds of milliseconds before the conscious decision to act (2). Genetic factors have been shown to explain at least one half of the interindividual differences in the liability for criminality in different types of epidemiological study designs (e.g., adoption, twins, and family) (3), whereas molecular genetic studies indicate that no single genetic mechanism accounts for more than a couple of percentages of the variance in crime-related phenotypes (i.e., that the existence of one or a few “crime genes” can be discarded) (4). These facts are very useful. We now know that the chances to refrain from criminality are unfairly distributed and partly under the influence of constitutional susceptibility factors. Some of these, such as childhood hyperactivity and lead poisoning, have been identified in population-based epidemiological or clinical studies and may guide preventive efforts. Hopefully, this is just the beginning of a scientific endeavor to establish explanatory models and evidence-based, acceptable treatment for people at increased risk of aggressive antisocial behavior. Does it, however, have a bearing on moral responsibility and penal law?
The answer is given by considering the preconditions of science. Covariation does not equal causation. One half of the population variance does not equal one half the crimes or one half of all crimes. The proportion of variance that remains after subtracting genetic effects is by default ascribed to environmental effects, but these cannot be distinguished from randomness or a potential influence of free (i.e., noncaused) volition. As long as the total variance in criminal behaviors has not been explained or a sufficient cause of a crime demonstrated experimentally, all that modern science has shown is that there are constraints to human freedom, which was already recognized in ancient writings.
Nor is Dr Cashmore's stance new. It is rather pre-World War II modernistic, the era when Sweden's first professor of forensic psychiatry, Olof Kinberg, gained the attention not only of a wide international readership in criminology but of Swedish legislators, who eventually dismissed the notion of accountability (referred to by Kinberg as “transcendental rubbish”) and introduced psychiatric treatment as a form of sanction (5). After legal, societal, and ethical drawbacks, legislators still try in vain to disentangle the resulting confusion of science, medicine, and justice, the roots of which are the same as those behind the notorious sterilization campaigns. To the extent that data are interpreted rigorously by the hypotheses they test, science holds unique promise as provider of knowledge about the aspects of the human that may be studied by quantification and models of causation. If abused to address issues that may not be answered by its methods, science becomes scientism, a mere candidate of a worldview.

Footnotes

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    Thank you visitor # for wanting a part of my thoughts..