There’s a video from Postcard News doing the rounds, showing a lady demonstrating the ability of a cow-urine-based substance to purportedly detoxify the human body. It does a fabulous job of making a mockery of itself given that it is only a few minutes long – and I’ve reached the point where I know I can draw a line and say debunking this is, at long last, beneath me.
What truly irked me about the video is its viewership: I’m not sure if Postcard News cares about whether the video is being shared by people poking fun at it but it’s bound to be pleased that, on Facebook, the clip’s been watched over 83,000 times in the last 80 hours, with lots of engagement. Throw in on-site views and WhatsApp and I can easily imagine 200,000 views in the same period. Thus far, these figures have been impossible to achieve with legitimate videos showing bona fide science at work, at least without a little paid push. (I’m not counting videos celebrating ISRO.)
I think this viewer behaviour confirms something I’ve been suspecting for about a year now: that people on the political left are more adhesive and those on the right are more cohesive vis-a-vis their reactions to ideas from across the aisle. To use the USGS’s language of hydrology:
Right → “Water is attracted to water”
Left → “Water is attracted to other substances”
Of course, such characterisation seems morally desirable, at least as the left would look upon the right and see protectionism and xenophobia, and the right will look upon the left and see exclusion and degeneracy. However, the same self-conception has put science journalism in an uncomfortable place: appropriated by a faction whose appreciation is passive at best and disappropriated by a faction that promises to celebrate it in exchange for some amount of debasement.
For example, I would contrast Postcard’s video about cow-urine-based detox with one on black holes from The Wire‘s stable, and the latter will brook no discussion – even one motivated by antipathy – in left or right circles, nor will the general populace of the left actively defend further its message. However, have a person on-screen prescribe cow piss for, you know, holistic wellbeing and you’ve got people on the right standing up for what they think is right and pushing it in the left’s face, and people on the left circlejerking off to how dumb they think others are.
I’m happy to note that The Wire has made space for a science section but beyond my colleagues and writers themselves, it certainly feels like a passive installation – the hosting of a science section for a science section’s sake. If it was not, I should be seeing higher engagement from one side of the spectrum; I’m not, whether I’m going by offline engagement or online. While this bodes quite well for being able to have a bipartisan audience that can be engaged if journalists and editors are persistent as well as didactic enough, it doesn’t bode well at all for the leftist’s oft-righteous claim to be on the side of reason.
From my POV at least, it seems like most pro-left people I engage with have taken for granted some second-hand assurance that they’re on the side of reason without knowing what a significant chunk of the architecture of reason actually looks like.
There was no post on July 11 because whatever I wrote on that day was for the article below. I couldn’t share it on that day itself because the embargo for the scientific papers it was based on lifted at 8.30 pm on July 12.
I. Prologue
Before Earth was born, a supermassive black hole far, far away shot a catastrophic jet of radiation into space. It was so powerful that one piece of that radiation was able to travel for 4.6 billion years through the universe and reach Earth, where it terminated in a quiet ping inside a detector buried under Earth’s south pole last September. Just like that, a potentially major finding was on humanity’s cards.
Meanwhile on Earth, scientists working at the same detector, called IceCube, reported a curious finding in 2013. They had identified 28 high-energy variants of particles called neutrinos between 2010 and 2012 coming from a source outside the Solar System. They were of such high energy that they couldn’t have come from the only two extraterrestrial objects we knew were capable of emitting them: the Sun and a supernova known as 1987A, about 168,000 lightyears away.
The higher the neutrino’s energy is, the higher the energy of the natural phenomenon that produced it. At very high energies (upwards of ~10,000 GeV/c2, where 1 GeV/c2 is about the mass of a proton at rest), we’re looking at natural and colossal particle accelerators whose energy efficiency makes the Large Hadron Collider look like a spinning keychain. What do these behemoths look like and how do they work?
Neutrinos are commonly called “ghostly” but “snooty” might be more apt. They are particles that flood space but very rarely interact with normal matter, as if they refuse to acknowledge matter’s proletarian presence. There are 100 billion neutrinos passing through your body every second and one of them will interact with you in your lifetime, two if you’re lucky.
They are emitted by many high-energy events. A nuclear reactor generates trillions of neutrinos per second, and the Sun trillions upon trillions. They are also born when cosmic rays from outer space collide with Earth’s upper atmosphere, showering neutrinos towards the ground.
We already know of some candidates capable of emitting very-high-energy neutrinos; black holes and supernovae are two of them. However, although “IceCube has been detecting neutrinos of astrophysical origins for the last six or seven years, none of those events have been associated with any known source,” Debanjan Bose, a physicist at IIT Kharagpur, told The Wire. “Follow-up observations for those events by other telescopes found nothing either.”
We’re also yet to unravel the precise mechanism of their production. In 2013, when IceCube didn’t have the wherewithal to say whether the 28 neutrinos were from a common source or where they where coming from, it did know these neutrinos were much more powerful than those from the Sun or 1987A.
A part of the answer lay in that quiet September ping, which scientists have announced today with great fanfare.
§
II. Two sides of a mystery coin
In this artistic composition, based on a real image of the IceCube Lab at the south pole, a distant source emits neutrinos that are detected below the ice by IceCube sensors. Credit: IceCube Collaboration/NSF
According to announcements on July 12, the black hole that produced the ancient flare is possibly a blazar. A giant galaxy with an active supermassive black hole at its heart – guzzling interstellar gas and belching heat and light – can sometimes focus these emissions in a beam in Earth’s general direction. These systems are called blazars.
“As sources of high-energy neutrinos and cosmic rays, blazars have always been among the most promising candidates from the theoretical side,” Chad Finley, a physicist at Stockholm University, told The Wire. “However, recently it had started to seem that we should be seeing evidence of neutrinos from blazars by now, if they were the main sources.” That evidence, at least the promise of it, is finally here.
The neutrino detected in September has an estimated energy of 290,000 GeV.
A blazar is defined by the laser-like beam of high-energy radiation that it sometimes shoots out along its poles, travelling at near lightspeed towards Earth. The supermassive black hole at the centre of a blazar is thought to be the source of these beams, called relativistic jets. When a blazar emits a relativistic jet, it is said to be flaring. Scientists don’t fully understand how these jets are emitted, although they are thought to arise from super-hot matter falling into the black hole.
The blazar currently in the limelight, designated TXS 0506+056, is located 4.6 billion lightyears away from Earth. The discovery is exciting for multiple reasons. One is that this blazar produced relativistic jets so powerful that the neutrinos in them had enough energy to travel 40,000 billion billion km and reach Earth to give the precocious field of neutrino astronomy its first pièce de résistance.
Yet another is that this blazar may have been one of the sources of those 28 high-energy neutrinos spotted at IceCube before 2012. However, Finley clarified, “We don’t yet know what fraction of the total high energy neutrino flux” at IceCube or at other detectors “might be due to blazars”. This is an important unanswered question at the moment, he added.
Most of all, we now know of a source of high-energy neutrinos outside the Milky Way galaxy that can be studied by neutrinos. According to Finley, who is a member of the IceCube research collaboration and was involved in processing the new finding, “This has been the goal of neutrino astronomy for decades.”
However, Roger Romani, a physicist at the Kavli Institute for Particle Astrophysics and Cosmology, Stanford University, struck a more cautious note: “I’d rate it as interesting enough to deserve some careful thought and study of the implications, but not secure enough to bet one’s career on.”
An artist’s rendering of a distant blazar emitting a relativistic jet in the direction of Earth. Credit: IceCube/NSF
The first step towards producing neutrinos is to accelerate protons to a high speed, giving them more and more energy. Supermassive black holes can do this when they consume matter, belching radiation that energises the matter around it.
The energised protons then decay to neutral and charged pions. Each neutral pion further decays to photons (electromagnetic radiation) that ‘conventional’ telescopes can detect. Each charged pion decays to a muon and a muon neutrino. The muon finally decays into a muon neutrino, an electron and an electron neutrino. So for each proton, there are three neutrinos: two muon neutrinos and one electron neutrino. The more powerful the process that accelerated the protons, the more energetic the neutrinos will be.
Axiomatically, that the blazar TXS 0506+056 emitted neutrinos is a sign that it accelerated protons. An important implication of this “is that at least some blazar jets accelerate protons or other baryons,” Romani said. “This is a big deal.” Bose agreed, and called this implication what made him go “wow” about the discovery.
Energetic protons and atomic nuclei are the primary components of cosmic rays – radiation streaming in from outside the Solar System and, since their discovery over a century ago, of unknown origin. As with high-energy neutrinos, TXS 0506+056 might be able to resolve this conundrum as well.
“Most studies of light from blazars find that they are adequately explained by jets whose particles are primarily electrons and positrons,” Romani explained – and this explanation provides a sense of the amount of energy in the jets. However, protons are over 1,800-times heavier than electrons, which means the jets will have to be that much more energetic to accelerate them. He believes most blazars still emit jets dominated by electrons and positrons and that among a few others, “a proton component” is present in some flares. But “until we gather more such neutrinos from several sources, it’s very difficult to say how widespread the phenomenon is.”
For now, we think we know where some cosmic rays come from, and “we can study this blazar in detail,” Bose said, alluding to TXS 0506+056 as a natural laboratory of “physics under extreme conditions”.
§
III. The multi-messenger way ahead
(L-R) The HESS II gamma-ray telescope (Credit: Klepser/Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 3.0), the Fermi gamma-ray telescope and the MAGIC telescope at night (Credit: Robert Wagner).
Being able to study an object using the neutrinos it emits is a privilege. If a body emits charged particles like protons or electrons, their trajectories through space become warped by numerous magnetic fields in their path. Neutrinos, on the other hand, don’t interact with electric or magnetic fields, not even with gravity, enabling them to shoot out in straight lines and travel unhindered for billions of years, especially if they’re high-energy neutrinos. If a neutrino streaks through IceCube in a particular direction, physicists simply have to look back along the same line to find the direction of its source.
This is why, as Bose says, “neutrinos are the only tool to probe our universe beyond a certain energy.” Bose worked with the IceCube detector from 2009 until last year. And thanks to their abundance and longevity, they could help us understand how our universe was when it was very young and why it is the way it is today.
Astrophysicists were alerted to the existence of the blazar source when, on September 22, 2017, they received an alert from an automated program running inside IceCube data looking for the signatures of high-energy neutrinos. The strength of the signal corresponding to this neutrino was too weak to count as evidence.
Fortunately, there was a way out. On the day the program alerted physicists to the presence of a high-energy neutrino in IceCube’s midst, astronomers using various ground- and sky-based telescopes had observed a gamma-ray emission from the same patch of the sky. The odds of a coincidence were small enough to suggest that the physicists and the astronomers were looking at a common source of the gamma rays as well as the high-energy neutrinos. Blazars are expected to release energetic gamma rays as well.
This corroboration, Finley said, gave physicists the confidence they needed to go back through archival data and search for signs of its activity in the past.
And there it was: between 2012 and 2015, they found stronger signs of high-energy neutrinos impinging within the IceCube detector. The data was good enough to breach the statistical significance required to claim evidence (not discovery), and they have claimed it. To paraphrase Finley, it was a sign that “there was something here rather than nothing”.
This phrasing is closer to how Romani put it: “As with any discovery hinged on a single event” – the one in September 2017 – “or even the mild excess” – between 2012 and 2015 – “one should be somewhat cautious. There have been statistical claims of neutrino-blazar associations before that have fallen by the wayside. This result looks better, but it is not of overwhelming significance.”
Finley agreed. “There are large uncertainties given the data we have so far,” he said, “which means it will be possible to extrapolate in many different directions.”
The reconstructed event flagged on September 22, 2017. Source: IceCube
A question automatically arises: why wasn’t the 2012-2015 data flagged earlier?
Even though neutrinos almost never acknowledge the presence of matter, detectors like IceCube designed to log their interactions have recorded over “half a million” events. “A very tiny fraction of these come from space,” Finley continued, “and the rest are created in the atmosphere when cosmic rays arrive at Earth. Only a few neutrinos per year are so high energy that they stand out from this background on their own.”
The September 2017 alert was one such case, and it was made possible by physicists knowing where to look. “Otherwise it, is hard to identify the rare neutrinos from space within this large background of neutrinos from our atmosphere.”
That the blazar was tracked down with both neutrino and electromagnetic data has focused attention on a big takeaway from this affair: blazars are now the subject of multi-messenger astronomy. In this form of astronomy, astrophysicists study cosmic objects in more than one channel simultaneously. The two channels here are radiation and neutrinos. This can yield more information about a cosmic object than just one channel would – as we all found out with the discovery of the neutron-star merger.
“It has long been hoped that neutrinos could join the panoply of astrophysical messengers,” Romani said, “and the hard work by IceCube and the other neutrino teams place us at the threshold of this era.” Bose in turn called it “a tremendous boost for astroparticle physics”.
After the September 2017 alert was shared among a wider circle of observers, multiple telescopes on ground and in space sprung into action and began observing this patch, quickly establishing that the blazar was the most probable source as well as further characterising it. These included the Fermi Large Area and AGILE telescopes (both in low-Earth orbit), MAGIC (Canary Islands), HESS (Namibia), HAWC (Mexico), Subaru (Hawaii) and VERITAS (Arizona), among others.
“Five-ten years from now we may look back and say ‘they really caught the first wisps of the cosmic neutrino sources’ or we may look back and say ‘Too bad, another statistical fluke’,” Romani said. “But I hope for the former, particularly since with several more years’ observation, we could collect enough signal to probe how these blazar jets might get” protons and atomic nuclei “into the act.”
The studies (this and this) were published in the journal Science on July 12, 2018.
The most curious thing about moving to Delhi – little anxiety, lots of a seemingly deep-rooted melancholy that I will no longer have a scientist roommate. It was one of the most fun things about my time living in Chennai, and unexpectedly so.
My roommate there was a physicist. He’s mentioned what exactly he does a few times, only keywords have stuck with me: string theory, gauge theories, supersymmetry; his PhD thesis is something about black hole event horizons and information tunnelling. More importantly, on days we were both home, he would make coffee and I’d help him drink it, and we’d chat in the living room about physics, science education and whatever else caught our fancy that day.
He was a good roommate but it seems the thing I’ll miss most about him, more than his being a roommate itself, is him. He was (and is) a kooky fellow, an opinionated physicist – rare as they are! – given to baroque pronouncements and verbose guilt about having too good a time on this planet, a penchant for losing at Monopoly and, of course, following the completion of every scientific paper with lots of whiskey.
My first day there, we bonded over inspecting a bug stuck in resin leaking from the washing machine. I once asked him why exactly QCD is so messed up, he fished out his iPad and smart-pen, launched into a well-ordered, articulate lecture, annotating his words with equations as he was speaking. He was adept at killing winged cockroaches but not so much at getting the salt right when he made fried fish.
He embodied the rejection of chaos with an eccentricity I’ve seen no one else muster. It is for roommates like him that everyone hopes. Goodbye, Mr Soufflé.
The Higgs boson has finally been observed decaying into the particles it most often decays to – six years after it was discovered. The reason for this delay was noise.
The Higgs boson is a scalar boson: it has spin 0. To preserve the value of this spin quantum number, it decays into pairs of a fermion and an anti-fermion. Fermions have spin +1/2 and anti-fermions have spin -1/2; their combined spin is 0. Moreover, the Higgs boson is likelier to decay into a heavier fermion than a lighter fermion because the boson couples stronger with the former.
The heaviest fermion is the top quark, but it is too heavy itself for the Higgs to decay into. The next is the bottom quark – and theoretical calculations suggest the Higgs should decay into a bottom quark and anti-quark 60% of the time. The third is the tau particle, which weighs almost half as much as the bottom quark and to which the boson decays only 6% of the time.
Now, the problem is that hadron colliders – Large or not – also produce an abundance of bottom quarks through other mechanisms. The rules of quantum chromodynamics (QCD: the study of quarks and gluons) enable three in particular – flavour excitation, gluon-gluon fusion and gluon splitting – that produce lots of bottom quarks.
As a result, physicists couldn’t tell if bottom quarks detected during a collision at the LHC were from Higgs boson decays or due to QCD processes… until now. The physicists were able to isolate the bottom quarks produced by decaying Higgs bosons (from the data) as well as, according to an official blog post, compare the values of “other kinematic variables that show distinct differences between the signal and the various backgrounds”.
By combining calculations across all the data collected by the machine in 2015, 2016 and 2017, the results had a significance of 4.9σ – just shy of the 5σ threshold to claim a discovery. The significance does breach the threshold when other data filters are applied but more data-taking and analysis will be necessary before the official declaration comes through.
You learn something everyday.
Featured image: Event display for the H→bb decay analysis with the ATLAS detector. Credit: ATLAS Collaboration/CERN.
Fracture mechanics theory in college was never my forte, whether that was because it was taught by a particularly dull professor who thought he had a loud voice or because it was just a dry subject. Rule 1: If a crack forms in a solid material, it’s because the material is stressed, and the crack will propagate in the direction that reduces that stress. Rule 2: Cracks will move towards each other. This sounds simple enough; it’s when you try to show simple things in math that they get both complicated and boring.
Now, what would happen when a material is stressed such that two collinear cracks form (with a small offset) and move towards each other? You’d expect the cracks to meet, form one even bigger crack and break the material in two if need be. That’s exactly what doesn’t happen: as the two cracks meet head-on or nearly head-on, they briefly repel each other – as if they were electric charges – move some distance away and then resume their attractive relationship. Fracture mechanics theory doesn’t account for this behaviour, although it accounts for a lot otherwise, and it’s been an outstanding problem in mechanical engineering.
Physicists from France and Russia have found a potential way out in the form of scale-dependent interactions. They created computer simulations of cracks and then deployed finite element analysis – a technique that divvies up a material into really small constituents, individually measures the forces acting on each one of them and then integrates them all to generate the big picture. They found that the repulsive behaviour was a product of mechanical forces that depended on two numbers only: the length of the cracks before they entered the repulsive mode (called L) and the distance, or offset, between the cracks (called x and y for the respective axes).
The repulsive mode comes into play if the distance between the cracks as they approach each other becomes smaller than 1% of L. At this point, how much they repel each other by, represented by an angle θ, depends on x and y. Using their predictions, the physicists were able to model cracks with θ up to 18º – a good sign in case anyone was wondering whether the scale-dependent interactions they’d found actually worked, although independent experiments will have to verify it. Nonetheless, that fracture behaviour depends on the scale across which interactions occur and not on the overall size of the cracks is fascinating because one can now explain features both very large and very small using the same theory.
… our analysis could help in understanding why spreading centres observed in geological situations and involving hundreds of kilometres long ridges interacting on a scale of a few hundred meters, commonly exhibit a repulsive deviation of their trajectories before overlapping [9,30,31]. The ability to model at small scales the attraction-repulsion transition during propagation of en passant cracks is especially relevant for industrial applications that involve a control of cracking behaviour such as in mechanical sensors [28] or stretchable electronics [27].
The study was published in the journal Physical Review Letters on June 20, 2018.
I could find this paper on arXiv, which doesn’t happen often, so thanks to Sci-Hub for getting me covered!
Terracotta handicrafts and vessels, bamboo trinkets, organic grains, herbs and pulses up for sale. Children running around playing with natural stick and wheel toys made using Palmyra palm leaves. An array of fresh and dried herbs displayed along with lemon and betel leaves on a table to welcome guests. Green flex boards made of cotton and paper welcoming guests and announcing the wedding set to take place. Logeswaran and Geetanjali Ritika’s wedding on Thursday in Tirupur came with a twist – it was 100% green, right from the decorations to the plates used and the gifts given to guests.
What does it mean to be green? In this couple’s wedding, lots of single-use products were replaced with those made of organic, presumably recyclable, materials. This is admirable because the substitution is bound to have cut down on a lot of waste without diminishing the wedding experience. However, was it ‘green’?
The ongoing geological period is actually the Holocene, but a portion encompassing the last seven or eight decades has been dubbed the Anthropocene for the drastic ways in which humankind has modified Earth’s surface, atmospheric and ecological characteristics. One major driver of this change has been in the form of a non-equitable consumption and distribution of resources, perpetrated equally by colonialism and capitalism.
In this world, weddings have come to signify an important form of status-signalling, especially in India. The bigger the wedding, the more the materials purchased and consumed, the higher the social status of its organisers. Perhaps the most gross display of such wealth was in 1995, when J. Jayalalithaa’s nephew V.N. Sudhakaran wedded Sivaji Ganesan’s granddaughter Satyavati.
The purportedly ‘green’ wedding described above is no exception either. While various paraphernalia were constructed with organic materials, there was still all of the consumerism on display. Going green doesn’t demand that we substitute non-recyclable synthetic assets with recyclable organic ones; instead, it demands that we cut down on our consumption.
Without doing so, ‘going green’ is simply a band-aid, a very near-term solution to a problem whose consequences will be playing out, as well as will be ameliorable, only on the geologic timescale. In fact, I doubt it is a solution at all because the cost of our actions as consumers must be calculated along the entire value chain instead of at specific points on it, and battling the effects of climate change certainly entails that we focus on and evaluate our impact in the long-term.
The good news is that such behaviour begins with the individual; the bad news is that it is never confined to the individual. For example, consider the following excerpt:
“We harvested rainwater to serve drinking water to guests and for the food prepared for the wedding. Over 10 varieties of vegetables – from carrots and onions to chillies – were used to make the wedding feast, all of which was cultivated organically in the houses of Vanathukul Tirupur members itself,” [the bride’s father] adds.
Kumar says that even the food that was prepared conformed to the organic theme of the wedding and a vast array of herbal teas, organic gravies and homemade traditional sweets were served.
“We ditched ice-creams and beedis (paan), and instead served herbal tea for dessert. The wedding menu included maize potato bonda, mini banana blossom vadai for starters and idly, horse gram sambhar rice, tomato sambhar and other preparations for mains. The dessert spread had palm sugar dry ginger milk, herbal tea, mint lemon juice, wild banana, betel nut and slaked lime,” Duraisamy adds.
All of these products must have been grown, diverted off the market, transported to the location, cooked and served. The value chain stretches from the growing to the serving, not simply to the serving. Fixating on the latter only produces spectacles, and gives us a false sense of accomplishment because what we have accomplished is not environmentally friendly. If it had to be, then a register marriage would have sufficed.
(Curiously, the bride’s father appears to have gifted the groom with a cow and a calf “instead of the usual luxury car or bike”. Ergo this patriarchic ritual is firmly in place, only that vehicles have been switched out with cattle. And we all know the patriarchy restricts our ability to adapt to a warmer world.)
Of course, the ritualisation and celebration of culture is a very important part of being human, and what the ‘green wedding’ described above has essentially done is played a balancing act between zero consumption and the adherence to one’s traditional values. This is why my complaint begins and ends with the labels. Do what you can to protect the environment but don’t call it green unless you’ve brought consumption down to zero because only that, eventually, is green.
The awareness that weddings and similar events are hubristic is laudable but it is also expected of all of us as we plod through the 21st century. We must move past expecting laurels for every little and/or fragmented act of such ‘green-signalling’ and we must move past valorising such acts unless they go all the way. Until then, the Anthropocene will only be the Narcisscene.
Good fantasy fiction – rather simply fantasy fiction – is defined not by a freewheeling re-imagination of reality but one that is re-imagined as much as contained in a self-consistent, coherent and substantive framework that is logical, cultural, political, aesthetic or a combination of some/all of them.
With that in mind, I’m going to take a look at the regulations in India concerning the construction and situation of helipads. This came up as a topic of conversation between two friends and myself yesterday morning over tea, after one of them wondered aloud about what it would be like to have his own helipad. The other person replied saying perhaps one could be constructed at the end of a boom extended from the top of a building, dangled on chains of steal.
If you read this in a fantasy fiction book that claims to be serious, would you believe it? The reason good fantasy has to be situated in some system of self-consistent, and preferably generalisable, rules is so that (a) the physical consequences of the world-building paradigm don’t distract from or conflict with the book’s principal narrative and (b) the aesthetic spirit of the world’s (natural and synthetic) infrastructure isn’t out of place vis a vis the tone and tenor of the book.
So what kind of world would it have to be where helipads and landing sites for VTOL aircraft in general are hung from overhanging structures on tall buildings? (I’ve always thought this is a useful perspective on world-building exercises: to ask yourself what you can tell about the zeitgeist of a fantasy world based on what it looks, smells and feels like. The most fruitful world-building exercises are those that axiomatically give away the story as well.)
In our real world, here are some of the more important rules that apply apropos helipads (quoted verbatim from here):
The site to be used for temporary helicopter operations should be a level piece of well-drained ground, either good grass or solid surface free from loose stones, debris.
Before undertaking any such flight, the helicopter operator and/ or his pilot must satisfy himself by his physical inspection on ground/ air and/ or obtaining required information from district authorities that surroundings are free from obstacles and the site suitable for operations of type of helicopter being operated and there is sufficient open space to force land, if necessary.
At least one 12 kg [dry chemical powder] fire extinguisher shall be available at the landing/ take-off area, clearly marked and situated so that it can be used quickly in case of fire. A first aid box shall be placed within easy reach and clearly marked. The box shall be maintained in accordance with the instructions and its contents shall be supplemented whenever used.
While manoeuvring the helicopter in a low hover, helicopter should be manoeuvred in such a manner that its centreline is not closer to any objects/building than 1.5 × rotor diameter or 30 metres, whichever is the greater.
Approach and departure shall be performed within sectors which as far as possible shall be in direct continuation of the take-off and landing directions, respectively. The sectors shall be without obstacles in the entire width and in a vertical distance of at least 35 ft from the approach and departure surfaces.
Approach and departure shall be performed in a way that forced landing can be carried out on a suitable emergency landing area at any time, unless a helicopter with one engine out of operation is capable of clearing any obstacle in the sector with a clearance of at least 35 feet.
The minimum dimensions of the TLOF [touch-down and lift-off area] shall be 2B × 2B, where B equals the wheel base or the side base of the helicopter whichever is more, of the helicopter used. A TLOF shall be capable of supporting the weight of the helicopter intended to be used.
TLOF shall be encompassed by a FATO [final approach and take-off area]. The minimum dimensions of the FATO shall be 1.5A × 1.5A, where A equals the maximum overall length of the helicopter used. This area shall be without obstructions. The surface shall be suitable for forced landings and free from loose objects, which may endanger the safe performance of the flight.
With these rules in mind, it would still be possible to go with the boom-borne helipad idea but it would be a remarkably silly-looking thing, installed that way either because… actually I can’t think of anything other than ‘because’. The mind that came up with that must be truly remarkable.
I’ve been in Delhi for three days, and for the last two of which I’ve been house-hunting and then buried in office work. While I was trawling through dozens of Facebook posts and items on Magicbricks and 99acres looking for advertisements of 1 or 2 BHK apartments fitting my budget, a voice in my head kept reminding me that I should prepare for a notorious weeks-long hunt.
Too many people have told me that house-hunting in Delhi can be particularly murderous. I remember when two of my colleagues were forced to back out from multiple offers when they were house-hunting last year – one because he didn’t belong to the right caste and the other because she was a journalist. What if I was going to find the perfect place only for an asshole of a landlord to enquire if I was a Brahmin or not? Alternatively, what if a landlord was going to okay my application because he had inferred my caste status from my name?
In light of these barriers, I asked various people for the cumulative number of houses they checked before finding one they liked as well as for which they were, somehow, “qualified”. Based on responses from seven people who’d been house-hunting in Delhi between 2012 and 2018, the average seemed to be eight houses.
But as fate would have it, my count is one: the first house I visited yesterday ticked all the boxes, including proximity to the house of a colleague with whom I can carpool to and from work. I have my fingers crossed that it works out and that I’m able to move in sans hassle by the month’s end.
I’ve made two mistakes – both concerning Orson Scott Card’s quadrology and both nominal – in today’s post, and which I have now rectified. I ask that you revisit/refresh that post to read the updated text. The book I first quoted was Children of the Mind, it was actually Xenocide; the two characters I’d made references to were Han Qing-jao and Si Wang-mu, they were supposed to be Han Fei-tzu and Han Qing-jao. Apologies and thanks.
I’ve missed writing my posts for three days straight. 🙈 I don’t know about you but I’ve certainly let myself down. I have a trove of excuses but I’m sure none of them qualify.
Today is Higgs Day. I’m not sure the name is fitting: the discovery of the Higgs boson was announced on this day in 2012; the particle itself had been discovered in late 2011, while further experimental confirmation concluded in January 2013. Perhaps designating a single day as ‘Higgs Day’ serves to write and share popular articles about the goddamned particle, but it pays to remember that particles are not discovered on one day. In fact, one of the foundational premises of the Large Hadron Collider was to provide the long-overdue experimental data of the Higgs boson’s existence, and it took over a decade to plan and build the machine.
I asked @AboutTheSouffle yesterday whether anything had transpired in the last six years concerning this particle that was worth writing home about, or in fact in the last one year: for the five years before, there have been clockwork articles every 12 months about what physicists need to do next. The reason such an impetus exists is known semi-popularly as the nightmare scenario: wherein more elusive particles that physicists had expected the LHC to find haven’t shown up in the data. As a result, they have had to confront the theory of fundamental particles they have been working with for decades – the Standard Model – and look for deformities in its metaphorical façade.
Why is this a nightmare? Because the Model has been picture-perfect since the 1960s, or at least the physicists who built it and continuously use it have thought so. Imagine crafting a singularly awesome sculpture over a whole year and then, one day, becoming convinced that there is an imperfection somewhere that you must find… It can be maddening.
This state of affairs often reminds me of the opening scenes of Xenocide, the third book in Orson Scott Card’s Ender’s Game quadrology. They describe the life and penance of Han Qing-jao, who, under the tutelage of her father Han Fei-tzu, is tasked every day with following numerous linear markings that traverse the floor and walls of her room from start to finish, without losing track. If she does lose track, she must start over. Qing-jao does this over and over again over many, many days, with no end of the torment in sight.
In Card’s conception, Qing-jao and Fei-tzu are both members of a rigid caste system concerning the class of people known as the ‘godspoken’. These people possess great intelligence – whose provenance the inhabitants of the world of Path trace to gods – as well as an acute form of obsessive-compulsive disorder. It is later revealed that all the godspoken are the children of a devious government experiment that sought to create exceptional minds and then control them by programming any rebel tendencies to trigger debilitating OCD behaviour.
Like Qing-jao and Fei-tzu, some ‘godspoken’ (a term I use à la Card) physicists obsessively trace the sinews of the Standard Model, filament by filament and strand by strand, from start to finish in the hope that they will find that one blemish they are sure exists. Even others – in a tenuous parallel to Fei-tzu’s evolution – are not so obsessed with preserving an older system and have already set out on the path of alternative theories, some quite brilliant (although that’s not a comment on their plausibility). While Xenocide sets the stage for Card’s series to wind down in an explosion of happy endings (in Children of the Mind), it seems rather futile to hope that that will be the case in reality.
