[Goanet] [Photo Blog by Rajan Parrikar] Comment: "Catch of the Morning"

[Rajan Parrikar]

Regarding the Goan predilection for fish, poet-laureate Bakibab Borkar said
it best:

Please Sir, God of Death
Don’t make it my turn today,
not today
There’s fish curry for dinner.

Seen the other day in Miramar, Panjim. Plucked from the sea right behind
her.

https://blog.parrikar.com/2023/08/07/catch-of-the-morning/

Rajan Parrikar

[Goanet] [Photo Blog by Rajan Parrikar] Comment: "Saree on the Beach"

[Rajan Parrikar]

Monsoon mood.

At Rajabaga beach in Canacona, South Goa.

https://blog.parrikar.com/2023/08/12/saree-on-the-beach/


Rajan Parrikar

[Goanet] Kokum Curry Panjim - impressions

[Rajan Parrikar]

(I left this review on Tripadvisor and Google Reviews.)

The Best of Goan Hindu Cuisine

The cuisine of Goa may be divided into two sub-genres. Broadly speaking
there is the Goan Hindu cuisine and the Goan Catholic cuisine, representing
the main two communities. There is overlap between the two but there are
also significant differences. Even within the category of Goan Hindu
cuisine there obtain variations.

Kokum Curry specializes in and celebrates the cuisine of the Goan Gaud
Saraswat Brahmin community. It is run by the epicure Sapna Sardessai and
her crew.

The premises in the Panjim branch are elegantly conceived, the visual
themes carrying subtle, warm touches of Goa. The halls are spacious and
airy making it a pleasant dining experience.

The highlight is, of course, the food. This is authentic Goan Hindu food,
no different from what one would find in a Goan home. The written word can
scarcely do justice to the offerings, but the care in preparation and the
finesse in presentation earn this restaurant the highest grade in the
culinary business.

I was already impressed by their branch in Candolim established in 2021.
The Panjim location kicks it up another notch or two. Clearly the
enterprise is a product of the love, devotion, and effort put in by the
team.

On this monsoon morning, we had the vegetarian "Shravan thali," specially
curated by Sapna to mark the Hindu holy month. It was marvellous. For those
inclined towards non-vegetarian fare, there was much on offer, too.

This is currently the finest restaurant in Goa.

Rajan Parrikar

[Goanet] SUNDAY SPECIAL: Meagan Alphonso Pandian is the first and currently only pedal harp player in India

[Frederick Noronha]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vibzj0e6SMw

This is a very short recording from her performance at the MoCA (Museum of
Christian Art) this evening, Sunday, Aug 13, 2023 at Old Goa.   More about
Meagan Alphonso Pandian (who traces her roots to the Goan village of
Aldona): She is mainly self taught having completed the ATCL diploma from
Trinity College London in pedal harp performance within four years of
learning the instrument. She has also studied with harp virtuoso Olga
Shevelevich in Germany as well as given harp recitals at the Jehangir Art
Gallery and NCPA.   At the Harp School, the first of its kind in India,
Meagan trains her students in both pedal and lever harp as well as meeting
the harp needs of her students and visiting artists. She has collaborated
with maestro A.R. Rahman, singer Arijit Singh and many other artists. Solo
performances at NCPA (Mumbai), The Bangalore School of Music (Bengaluru),
The Wandering Artist (Chennai) and Chai 3:16 (Bengaluru) have ensued.
Meagan also plays the piano, violin and viola. She has completed the
Licentiate of the Trinity College London exan (LTCL) and Dip. ABRSM on
piano. She won The Young Musician of the Year 2014 award in piano
performance allowing her to give piano recitals in India and France. She
has also performed with The Bombay Chamber Orchestra (BCO), Indian National
Youth Orchestra (INYO) and Indian Youth Orchestra (IYO) in association with
the Canadian National Youth Orchestra (CIYO). Recorded by the Goa Music in
School WhatsApp group to build awareness about music and talent.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vibzj0e6SMw
-- 

FN * +91-9822122436 * 784 Saligao 403511 Bardez Goa

Re: [Goanet] [Goanet-News] Rosary in Portuguese * Sunday, Aug 13, 2023 at 9.30 pm IST

[Eddie D'Sa]

Will someone please explain the point of this Euro devotion called the 
Rosary?

How does it help Goans??

Eddie
-- Original Message --
From: "Frederick Noronha" 
To: "Goanet" 
Sent: Saturday, 12 Aug, 23 At 21:32
Subject: [Goanet-News] Rosary in Portuguese * Sunday, Aug 13, 2023 at 
9.30 pm IST
*Graca Costa (a Goan from Mozambique, now in Portugal) sent in this 
invite.

Just sharing it with anyone interested. It might not be a big thing, but
for old timers Goans in Goa (and other non-Portuguese speaking parts of 
the
globe), this is an opportunity to pray in the language they once used. 
If

not of interest, kindly overlook*
Join the Rosary in Portuguese (online)
--
Invitation: Rosário Agosto 2023 @ Sun 13 Aug 2023 9:30pm - 10:30pm (IST)
Aug 13, 2023 Sun
Rosário Agosto 2023
When Sun 13 Aug 2023 9:30pm - 10:30pm (IST)
Join with Google Meet
Meeting link
meet.google.com/fwm-bkvp-ygo

Envio este convite para nos juntarmos na recitação do rosário. Aqui vai 
a

sequência das dezenas:
Sending you this invitation for the recitation of the rosary. Here is 
the

decade sequence:
1 - Paula Fernandes
2 - Susan Fernandes
3 - Marçal + Viola
4 - Mervyn Maciel
5 - Claudio Cardozo

Further details from: gpfco...@gmail.com
NOTE: Timing above is IST (India time).
--
FN * +91-9822122436 * 784 Saligao 403511 Bardez Goa
*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-
Join a discussion on Goa-related
issues by posting your comments
on this or other issues via email
to goa...@goanet.org
See archives at
http://lists.goanet.org/pipermail/goanet-goanet.org/ 


*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-

Re: [Goanet] Manipur

[Eddie D'Sa]

Agree.
This Guju fanatic called Modi must be kept out of any Manipur 
discussions


Eddie

-- Original Message --
From: "john menezes" 
To: "goanet@lists.goanet.org" ; 
"lopednelson...@gmail.com" 

Sent: Saturday, 12 Aug, 23 At 03:59
Subject: [Goanet] Manipur
Manipur is an alongside colony and no longer a part of Índia and should 
be taken charge of by the United Nations Trusteeship Council unless, 
constitutional, administrative and security parity with other states can 
be restored immediately. JM

Sent from Yahoo Mail on Android

[Goanet] {Dilip's essays} Birds, cats and evolution's way

[Dilip D'Souza]

Aug 13

Cheetahs have been on my mind, and I suspect I speak for a lot of people.
India imported several cheetahs from Namibia and South Africa starting a
year ago, in an effort to regenerate an Indian population of these
exquisite animals. Sadly, six have died, as also three cubs born here
earlier this year.

Hummingbirds, I would venture to say, are always on my mind.

Anyway, the physical strain these two creatures put on their bodies
routinely always puzzles me. Hummingbirds beat their wings incredibly fast;
cheetahs run incredibly fast, if for short spells. How they do it is one
question worth asking. But I also ran across humminbird research suggesting
that some species have evolved ways to avoid some of this extreme physical
exertion. And those species have evolved generally shorter beaks.

Intrigued, like I was? Take a look: Birds, cats and evolution's way,
https://www.livemint.com/opinion/columns/the-evolution-of-extraordinary-exertion-how-cheetahs-and-hummingbirds-sustain-their-remarkable-abilities-11689273734603.html

cheers,
dilip

---


Birds, cats and the way of evolution


Something has always intrigued me about cheetahs and hummingbirds. No, it
isn't as if I sit here all day wracking my brains over both gorgeous
animals. But every now and then, I do. Like when I began writing this, when
there came news of a seventh death among the cheetahs we imported from
Africa last year.

Tragedy aside, this is what I wonder about cheetahs and hummingbirds: how
do these animals sustain the exertions they put their bodies through?

Take the cheetah, first. It's a beautiful animal no doubt, but it's also
one of the fastest on the planet.

How do we know this? As far back as 1965, a tame cheetah in Kenya was
trained to run behind a moving car. Well, the car had a piece of meat tied
to its back as an incentive for the animal. Over three such runs, she
averaged 102.5 kmph. That remains the fastest speed ever recorded by a land
mammal.

In the wild, cheetahs don't necessarily have to go quite that fast, for
their prey is usually slower than they are. But for me, the interesting
question is not about that remarkable speed, but how, and how long, the
cheetah can sustain it. After all, even the best conditioned human athletes
can maintain a flat-out sprint for no more than about 30 seconds. World
sprint records tell that story: among men, the 100m record is 9.58 seconds
and the 200m, 19.19 seconds - just about twice the 100m record. So
top-flight athletes can sprint at their fastest for at least 200m. But the
400m? 43.03 seconds, which is well over twice as long as for the 200m.
That's already a sign that over distances longer than 200m, athletes can't
do a full sprint. Instead, they must pace themselves.

What about the cheetah? Well, about the same maximum time for a flat-out
sprint: 30 seconds. In that time, at its top speed of about 100kmph, a
cheetah can cover a few hundred metres. Any more, and its heart - pumping
at about 250 beats per minute (bpm) by then - will probably buckle under
the strain. Of course, often enough a cheetah will catch up with its prey
within 30 seconds. But if it doesn't, the big cat will have to give up the
chase and take a rest, let its beating heart slow down to its normal
resting rate of about 120bpm.

What about hummingbirds, then? They don't run, of course, so what is the
connection to cheetahs?

Their exertions and metabolism, that's what. There are times - freezing
nights when there's nothing to be gained by flying about - when these
little creatures become semi-comatose. In that state, their pulse rate can
be as low as 75 beats per minute, comparable to a healthy human being at
rest. But when they are flying from flower to flower during the day, that
rate can rise to over 1200 bpm.

Why so? Consider what the hummingbird is doing as it flies - flapping its
wings frenetically. That makes enormous energy demands on the bird.
Besides, being so small means it loses body heat faster than larger
animals, more quickly using up the oxygen in its blood. So just to keep up
the oxygen supply, a hummingbird's heart has to pump faster than in other
birds. The heart has also evolved to be larger in relation to the bird's
body than in other animals: about 2.5% of its body weight, compared to
about 0.3% for humans.

All due to beating wings. In normal flight, hummingbirds average about 50
wing beats per second (bps). That's already too fast for the human eye to
see. But with some of these birds, there are times when that can rise to 80
bps. If you do the arithmetic, that's one beat of the heart for every four
beats of the wings.

Naturally, like with cheetahs breaking into a full-tilt sprint, this rapid
wing action cannot sustain beyond a certain length of time. I don't have an
idea of how long that is. But even though we know of hummingbirds from
their hovering and flitting from flower to flower, we also know that they
spend a large part of the day at rest, perched somewhere.

Still, the bi

[Goanet] {Dilip's essays} Ms Granville and our Moonshot

[Dilip D'Souza]

August 14

India's second mission to attempt a (soft) landing on the Moon,
Chandrayaan-3, is orbiting that celestial rock as I write this. Having
written about Chandrayaan-2 (2019) before, I wanted to find a different
angle to take in writing about this one.

So this column (July 21) is my tribute both to an ambitious space mission
and to the late Evelyn Boyd Granville.

Ms Granville and our moonshot,
https://www.livemint.com/opinion/columns/chandrayaan3s-journey-to-the-moon-a-tribute-to-the-unsung-calculations-of-evelyn-boyd-granville-11689875974299.html

Look forward to your thoughts!

cheers,
dilip

---

Ms Granville and our Moon shot


As Chandrayaan-3 wings its way towards the Moon ... well, the first thing
to remember about that is that it's not strictly "towards" the Moon right
now. For reasons I explained in an article about our previous Chandrayaan
mission, in 2019 (
https://www.livemint.com/opinion/columns/opinion-chandrayaan-2-last-15-minutes-are-the-longest-1564069569286.html),
the spacecraft is actually orbiting the Earth for a while.

But its orbits get more and more elliptical, and Chandrayaan ranges further
and further from its home planet. Until it effectively slips out of the
Earth's gravitational grasp and, slingshot style, is dispatched towards the
Moon. At some point, the Moon's gravity will "capture" Chandrayaan. Then it
will start orbiting the Moon, getting less and less elliptical with each
orbit. Eventually, the mission will attempt a landing on the Moon.

That's the operation that "failed" in 2019. (I don't believe it did.)
That's what millions of us hope will work to perfection this time. We will
know, of course, in about a month.

It's not that I mean to reduce a complex, intricate mission to just a few
phrases in this column. My column from 2019 speaks of these manoeuvres in
more detail. Here, I'd like to use the excitement and anticipation about
Chandrayaan to pay tribute to a woman who died a few days ago, who had
nothing to do with Chandrayaan, except obliquely.

In 1956, IBM recruited Evelyn Boyd Granville, among the earliest Black
women to earn a mathematics PhD in the USA. Soon after, she was assigned to
IBM's collaboration with NASA on space missions. By 1962, she was working
on the Mercury programme, which would carry John Glenn, the first American
to orbit the Earth. Granville's job was to write programmes that calculated
various parameters for the mission.

And what were these calculations? I don't know exactly, of course, but
let's take a look at some calculations that spaceflight requires, the kind
that Granville must have been working on.

To start, we're talking about a spacecraft orbiting the Earth. Why does
that have to happen out in space, meaning a substantial distance off the
surface of the planet? Why can't the Mercury craft orbit the Earth at a
height of, say, 1km? Or 10km? Of course, there are other airborne objects
at those heights - Air India and Air Madagascar flights, for example - and
a Chandrayaan zipping along at that same altitude might result in some
disastrous accidents, enough said. But is that the only reason a spacecraft
can't be found at a height of 10km, racing around the Earth?

No, there's another and more scientifically considered reason. At an
altitude of 10km, friction with the Earth's atmosphere is a huge drag on
any flying object, and particularly one that needs to fly as fast as
Mercury or Chandrayaan do. The atmosphere thins out as you get higher. It's
only at about 150km off the surface of the Earth that this frictional drag
is no longer a significant factor. This is why orbiting spacecraft are
invariably at least that high. The International Space Station (ISS), for
example, orbits at an altitude of about 400km.

But even at those heights, the Earth still exerts a gravitational pull on
spacecrafts. Why don't they simply fall back to Earth? The right answer is
that, in effect, they are indeed falling back to Earth. That's a good way
to think of their flight paths.

Let's say we took a spacecraft up about 200 km and simply left it there. It
would promptly start falling back down. That's why it has engines that
actually give it a nudge, analogous to how a gun fires a bullet. But even
bullets fly for a while, their altitude getting steadily lower, and then
fall to the ground. That's what gravity does and that's what will happen
with our spacecraft too. Making the nudge steadily more powerful just means
it will fly farther before it hits the ground.

Until ... the engines fire so forcefully that in effect, the craft "falls"
all the way around the Earth, shooting past the opposite end of the planet
- the North Pole, for example, if we had fired the engines directly above
the South Pole. Then it "climbs" back up to its 200km altitude by the time
it gets back above the South Pole. The process then repeats. That is, the
craft is now in orbit. If you think about it, the orbit is an ellipse: it
is closer to the Earth's surface (the orbit's "

[Goanet] {Dilip's essays} Oppenheimer: grim calculus of war

[Dilip D'Souza]

Aug 14

Opparently like most of you, I went to see "Oppenheimer" in late July. Late
night show, so I actually fell asleep through part of the film, so I went
to see it again a few days ago. Lots to think about in this portrait of a
complex, fascinating man.

It also got me thinking about war. My family may groan at the three shelves
I have filled with books about war - but I can't get enough of the subject.
In this case, I found myself wrestling yet again with the calculation that
went into dropping atom bombs on Japan in 1945: that the death toll would
have been far worse if the US had had to invade Japan.

Some of that prompted my Mint column for July 28: Oppenheimer: grim
calculus of war,
https://www.livemint.com/opinion/columns/oppenheimer-grim-calculus-of-war-11690529461039.html

What do you think?

yours,
dilip

PS #1: I cannot recommend Eugene Sledge's book enough.
PS #2: Seeing "Oppenheimer" also pushed me to read (again) John Hersey's
stunning "Hiroshima" (New Yorker, August 31 1946):
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/1946/08/31/hiroshima

---

Oppenheimer: grim calculus of war


In his devastating memoir "With the Old Breed", Eugene Sledge writes of the
American campaigns on tiny Pacific Ocean islands during World War II. A
young United States Marine who fought the Japanese long, hard and bitter in
those campaigns, Sledge witnessed first-hand the brutality of his enemy,
and so had ample cause to hate them. Nevertheless, he also describes, in
unsparingly revolting detail, atrocities his own colleagues committed.

I could quote some of that, but that's not the point I want to make. The US
entered the war on 7 December, 1941, when the Japanese attacked the Pearl
Harbour US Navy base in Hawaii. For nearly four years after that, the
campaign was essentially an American westward push, across the Pacific,
aiming for Japan.

A map shows that the Pacific is a vast expanse of water, dotted here and
there with tiny outcrops of land. There's Midway and Wake, Okinawa and
Tarawa, Peleliu and Guam and more: all so small that on a scale that fits
the entire Ocean on a page, you won't even see most of these islands. But
for the US to drive west to Japan, each had to be wrested from Japanese
control.

This meant some of the War's most brutal, bloody fighting. For on each
island, the Japanese set up big guns and dug themselves into heavily
fortified concrete bunkers. American soldiers had to attack and overpower
each of these one-by-one, then repeat on the next island.

Peleliu, where Sledge fought, is about 10km long and 4km wide. The
Americans began their assault there in mid-September 1944. The battle
lasted till the end of November. Of a Marine advance across an airfield
there, Sledge writes:

"To be shelled by massed artillery and mortars is absolutely terrifying,
but to be shelled in the open is terror compounded beyond the belief of
anyone who hasn't experienced it. [This attack] was the worst combat
experience I had during the entire war."

Some numbers, to offer a flavour of what Sledge went through.

In two months on Peleliu, the American troops suffered 9615 casualties,
1656 of those killed. All to win control of a speck of land. If that was a
high price for victory - the Americans certainly thought so - the Japanese
paid far more in defeat. They had nearly 11,000 casualties - but almost all
killed. When the guns fell silent on Peleliu, there were just 19 Japanese
soldiers left alive to take prisoner.

Or consider Tarawa. This is actually an atoll - a thin strip of sandy reef
around a lagoon, about 30km across, the reefs rarely more than a few
hundred metres wide. In November 1943, American forces came ashore here.
Waiting for them were nearly 5000 entrenched Japanese troops, well-prepared
to fight.

The battle lasted from 20 to 23 November, 1943. 1000 Americans were killed
and 2100 injured. But think of this: just 17 of the Japanese were taken
prisoner. 4690 others fought to the death. A later history of the battle
remarked: "The heroism of both attackers and defenders was worthy to stand
beside the most renowned in the history of warfare."

Or take Okinawa, where Sledge also fought. A 100km long island about 600km
south of the Japanese archipelago, it was much larger, and also much more
populated, than Tarawa and Peleliu. All through the war, American military
planners saw it as a potential base for the final invasion of Japan.

On 1 April, 1945, the US threw at Okinawa its largest amphibious assault of
the war. About 200,000 troops eventually landed. Defending Okinawa were
about 115,000 Japanese troops. What followed was nearly 3 months of what
both sides came to call a "typhoon of steel", referring both to the
intensity of the battle and to the ships and planes that bombarded Okinawa.
The result was, again, an American "victory". But the cost? 12,500 US
troops killed, and over 36,000 wounded. Yet again, most of the Japanese
fought to the death rather than surrender: 110,000 were killed. Estimates
ar

[Goanet] {Dilip's essays} Re: Rose by another name goes extinct

[Dilip D'Souza]

PS: There are references to both Shakespeare and Monty Python in this
particular column. Let me know if you catch them.

d.

---

Rose by another name goes extinct


A few days ago, I alerted a friend to the excellent news that her name,
Shormishtha, was the 4,213,784th most common name in the world. Eight
people, presumably including her, are called that. Of those, six are in
India, with one each in Canada and the USA.

I don't necessarily believe these numbers. Well, maybe I do believe
4,213,784. Still, that's not important. What I was particularly intrigued
by is that somebody has actually compiled information like this and made it
available for public consumption on a website (https://forebears.io/). This
is how I now possess the invaluable information that my surname is the
11,680th most common in the world, that my first name is 399th, and that
there is one person in the Netherlands with my late maternal grandfather's
surname, which is 1,727,723rd most common.

I actually know that person in the Netherlands. She is married to my cousin.

So anyway, I spent a happy half hour or so checking out various names and
surnames. (You can too.) At some point, almost inevitably, I began
wondering about names that might vanish. Now my late maternal grandfather
had one son, my uncle. But let's say he had none (this is a thought
experiment, after all). In our family's genealogical tree, that name would
have ceased to exist with the death of my grandfather in 1990. It would
have been an ex-name.

In our largely patrilineal world, most names are passed on via the males of
the species - father to son. In fact, you could say most names live on via
the males of the species. In which case, what if males going by some
relatively rare name - like my grandfather's - don't have male offspring?
In our case, the name would have disappeared from our family tree. Of
course, there are others outside our family who have that name, so it would
live on, as it does. But take this thought process to its logical
conclusion: there must be names that have altogether ceased to exist
because there are no males left to carry them forward.

Not only is that true. There are mathematicians who have investigated the
propagation and possible extinction of family names. There is a
mathematical process, the Galton-Watson process, that models this, and can
suggest when extinction is a possibility. This specific patrilineality - a
father passing on a name to his son - is effectively the same as passing on
the Y (male) chromosome. No partiality here though - mitochondria are
passed on matrilineally. Either way, this process is a good way to model
what are known as haplogroups, or populations of humans that share a common
ancestor.

The model has its roots in the 19th Century, when aristocrats in Victorian
England became worried that some of their names - ones that spoke of
aristocracy - were vanishing. Responding to this concern, Francis Galton, a
man of many interests - including less savoury ones like eugenics and
racism - investigated the phenomenon. In 1874, he and a Reverend HW Watson
published their findings in a paper titled "On the probability of the
extinction of families".

The basic idea goes like this. Start the process with a single individual,
the future patriarch of his progeny. He gives birth to a certain number of
children, and they produce children of their own, and so forth. For
simplicity, let's assume all fathers pass on their surnames to their male
children. Of course any particular father can have one or more sons, or
even none. For the whole population, we can calculate the average number of
sons born per father.

If that average is less than 1 - meaning, fathers have either one male
child or none - then the surname will almost certainly die out eventually.
If it is more than 1, there's a good chance the surname will live on for
generations.

Real life is, of course, slightly different. Family names might disappear
for other reasons too. Here's one: the spelling could change. What if all
Narayans, for example, followed a certain splendid West Indian cricketer
and started spelling it "Narine"? On the website I mentioned above,
"Narayan" would eventually show zero adherents. We might mourn its
disappearance, but actually it lives on in another avatar. Or take Iceland,
where the surname is derived from the first name of the father. Thus my
daughter, were I Icelandic, would have the surname "Dilipdottir". If there
were no other Dilips in Iceland, that would be the last instance of that
surname.

Still, the extinction of surnames is not just a 19th Century Victorian
concern. Chinese surnames have been widely studied, especially because they
have been used and recorded going back for hundreds of years. A 1991 paper
asserted that "the total number of Chinese surnames collected from
literature [is] over 11,000" ("Chinese Surnames and the Genetic Differences
between North and South China", Du Ruofu et al, Chinese Academy of Sciences
I

[Goanet] {Dilip's essays} Frozen worms and the cost of sex

[Dilip D'Souza]

August 14

If my previous column mentioned a book by a Eugene, this one mentions a
book about a Eugeni.

Read on to know more about that. Though this column is really about certain
tiny worms that lived tens of thousands of years ago and have been brought
back to life, to the extent that they have reproduced.

Though as you will find, they did so by "evading the cost of sex". Whether
that's a good thing, or even a good characterization, I'll leave for you to
answer. (But tell me, please oh please.)

In Mint on August 4: Frozen worms and the cost of sex,
https://www.livemint.com/opinion/columns/when-a-worm-wriggles-back-to-life-after-46-000-freezing-years-in-siberia-11691089845893.html

cheers,
dilip

---

Frozen worms and the cost of sex


Indulge me while I begin a second consecutive column with memories of a
book. In this case it's Richard Ben Sapir's novel "The Far Arena", which I
first read as a teenager. It's the story of Eugeni, a gladiator from Rome
of the first century.

But get this: it is not set in the first century, but in contemporary
times. No, Eugeni is not a Methuselah twice-over, an old man who has
somehow lived close to 2000 years. He's in the prime of his life, but finds
himself situated in the modern world. How does this happen?

Now of course this is science fiction. The premise of the novel is that
Eugeni was frozen in ice in the first Century. Nearly two thousand years
later, an oil company finds his frozen body. Comes a scientist interested
in cryonics - the preservation of human body parts at low temperatures,
with the intent of resurrecting them in the future. The scientific
establishment today dismisses cryonics as pseudo-science, but this is a
novel, after all. So while clearly Eugeni was presumed dead back in the
first century, this scientist assumes that actually, his body went into a
kind of indefinite stasis. He decides there's a chance to revive Eugeni.
That's just what happens. Eugeni returns to life in the late 20th Century.
As you can imagine, what happens to him afterward makes for a gripping
story, not least because he and his modern-day acquaintances have a hard
time relating to each other.

Though of course I'm not trying to tell you that story here. Instead, what
interests me is the idea of life being frozen for so long, and then
revived. Eugeni is a fictional character and cryonics is viewed with
serious scepticism. But leave that aside, stop reading the novel and think
for a few moments of this: is this kind of suspension and later
resurrection of life possible at all? If not with humans, what about
plants? Other animals?

Amazingly, the answer seems to be "Yes".

Scientists have known for a while about what they call "cryptobiosis", in
which organisms will slow down their body metabolisms to near zero. Doing
so, they enter what is essentially a deep sleep. They do this to survive
extreme weather conditions that might otherwise kill them. The "hope", not
that I'm suggesting they necessarily have one, is that they can come back
to life - or be brought back to life - when conditions improve.

In 2014, for example, some scientists looked at moss ("Millennial timescale
regeneration in a moss from Antarctica", Esme Roads et al, Current Biology,
17 March 2014). Mosses, they observed, "have well-developed stress
tolerance features permitting cryptobiosis." Till then, the longest period
of cryptobiosis observed had been 20 years. But these scientists found
"small moss clumps" that had been covered in ice on Antarctica for 400
years. They were able to successfully regrow that moss.

At the other end of the world a few years later, a team of scientists
recovered "bdelloid rotifers" - not some exotic cousin of Rottweiler dogs,
but microscopic multicellular animals - from Siberian soil samples that had
been below freezing point temperatures for about 24,000 years ("A living
bdelloid rotifer from 24,000-year-old Arctic permafrost", Lyubov Shmakova
et al, Current Biology, 7 June 2021). This was, they commented, "the
longest reported case of rotifer survival in a frozen state." Survival,
because they recovered "numerous living rotifers".

They then subjected these microscopic creatures to what more modern cousins
might endure in the course of their lives: freeze them and attempt revival.
This showed that there was no significant difference in the
freeze-tolerance of ancient species and contemporary ones. In other words,
it was not just that the rotifers that had been frozen for 24,000 years
could be revived. It was also that, unlike Eugeni, they could live pretty
normally in these modern times.

Still, you wonder, what about slightly larger animals? What about, say,
worms?

Glad you asked. Last month, still other scientists published a paper that
reports on a species of nematode - a roundworm - that was originally
collected from Siberian permafrost in 2002 ("A novel nematode species from
the Siberian permafrost shares adaptive mechanisms for cryptobiotic
survival with *C. elegan

[Goanet] {Dilip's essays} Rose by another name goes extinct

[Dilip D'Souza]

August 14

My first name is the 399th most common in the world. Yours?

But more interesting than that is that some names vanish over time. Why and
how? As often happens - as you might guess - that's a phenomenon that's
attracted the attention of mathematicians. And there are links to entirely
different phenomena, even to Oppenheimer and the bomb.

Take a look at my Mint column for August 11: Rose by another name goes
extinct,
https://www.livemint.com/opinion/columns/rose-by-another-name-goes-extinct-11691690402396.html

Take a look, that is, and do some digging about your own name(s) and report
back to me, especially if yours is the 398th most common name in the world.

cheers,
dilip

---

Rose by another name goes extinct


A few days ago, I alerted a friend to the excellent news that her name,
Shormishtha, was the 4,213,784th most common name in the world. Eight
people, presumably including her, are called that. Of those, six are in
India, with one each in Canada and the USA.

I don't necessarily believe these numbers. Well, maybe I do believe
4,213,784. Still, that's not important. What I was particularly intrigued
by is that somebody has actually compiled information like this and made it
available for public consumption on a website (https://forebears.io/). This
is how I now possess the invaluable information that my surname is the
11,680th most common in the world, that my first name is 399th, and that
there is one person in the Netherlands with my late maternal grandfather's
surname, which is 1,727,723rd most common.

I actually know that person in the Netherlands. She is married to my cousin.

So anyway, I spent a happy half hour or so checking out various names and
surnames. (You can too.) At some point, almost inevitably, I began
wondering about names that might vanish. Now my late maternal grandfather
had one son, my uncle. But let's say he had none (this is a thought
experiment, after all). In our family's genealogical tree, that name would
have ceased to exist with the death of my grandfather in 1990. It would
have been an ex-name.

In our largely patrilineal world, most names are passed on via the males of
the species - father to son. In fact, you could say most names live on via
the males of the species. In which case, what if males going by some
relatively rare name - like my grandfather's - don't have male offspring?
In our case, the name would have disappeared from our family tree. Of
course, there are others outside our family who have that name, so it would
live on, as it does. But take this thought process to its logical
conclusion: there must be names that have altogether ceased to exist
because there are no males left to carry them forward.

Not only is that true. There are mathematicians who have investigated the
propagation and possible extinction of family names. There is a
mathematical process, the Galton-Watson process, that models this, and can
suggest when extinction is a possibility. This specific patrilineality - a
father passing on a name to his son - is effectively the same as passing on
the Y (male) chromosome. No partiality here though - mitochondria are
passed on matrilineally. Either way, this process is a good way to model
what are known as haplogroups, or populations of humans that share a common
ancestor.

The model has its roots in the 19th Century, when aristocrats in Victorian
England became worried that some of their names - ones that spoke of
aristocracy - were vanishing. Responding to this concern, Francis Galton, a
man of many interests - including less savoury ones like eugenics and
racism - investigated the phenomenon. In 1874, he and a Reverend HW Watson
published their findings in a paper titled "On the probability of the
extinction of families".

The basic idea goes like this. Start the process with a single individual,
the future patriarch of his progeny. He gives birth to a certain number of
children, and they produce children of their own, and so forth. For
simplicity, let's assume all fathers pass on their surnames to their male
children. Of course any particular father can have one or more sons, or
even none. For the whole population, we can calculate the average number of
sons born per father.

If that average is less than 1 - meaning, fathers have either one male
child or none - then the surname will almost certainly die out eventually.
If it is more than 1, there's a good chance the surname will live on for
generations.

Real life is, of course, slightly different. Family names might disappear
for other reasons too. Here's one: the spelling could change. What if all
Narayans, for example, followed a certain splendid West Indian cricketer
and started spelling it "Narine"? On the website I mentioned above,
"Narayan" would eventually show zero adherents. We might mourn its
disappearance, but actually it lives on in another avatar. Or take Iceland,
where the surname is derived from the first name of the father. Thus my
daughter, were I Icelandic, wo