by Jonathan Kujawa

Everyone learns about Pascal's Triangle when they are young. But I, at least, didn't learn all the wonders contained in the Triangle. Indeed, we're still discovering new things!

To construct the Triangle is easy enough: you start with 1's down the outside edges and each interior number is gotten by adding together the two numbers just above it. So the third number on the sixth line is a 10 because that's the sum of 4 and 6.

Warning! Actually we will say that 10 is the second number in the fifth line. For reasons which will soon become clear, we will choose to start with zero when we count rows and columns of the Triangle. For example, the second number of the fourth line is a 6.

With the addition rule in hand it's off to the races: the Triangle goes on forever and you can calculate as many rows as your patience allows.

The first 10 rows of the Triangle [1].

Pascal introduced the Triangle in 1653 in Traité du triangle arithmétique as part of his investigation into probability and counting problems. Questions like “If I want to choose two people out of a group of four, how many possible pairs are there?” or “What's the probability of drawing a full house when dealt five cards from a well mixed deck of cards?”. Indeed, Pascal and Fermat essentially invented probability in a series of letters they exchanged around this time. You can see the Pascal's original triangle here.

What does the Triangle have to do with probability? Well, if you want to choose k objects out of a group of n possibilities, then the number of possible choices is precisely the kith number on the nth row of the triangle. Remember, for positions in the Triangle we always count starting from zero! Using this rule we see that there are exactly 6 ways to choose two people out of a group of four. And since 84 is the third number in the ninth row of the triangle, it must be that there are 84 ways to choose three people out of a group of nine. Once you can compute these numbers it's a short step to computing all sorts of probabilities.

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by Jalees Rehman

Research institutions in the life sciences engage in two types of regular scientific meet-ups: scientific seminars and lab meetings. The structure of scientific seminars is fairly standard. Speakers give Powerpoint presentations (typically 45 to 55 minutes long) which provide the necessary scientific background, summarize their group's recent published scientific work and then (hopefully) present newer, unpublished data. Lab meetings are a rather different affair. The purpose of a lab meeting is to share the scientific work-in-progress with one's peers within a research group and also to update the laboratory heads. Lab meetings are usually less formal than seminars, and all members of a research group are encouraged to critique the presented scientific data and work-in-progress. There is no need to provide much background information because the audience of peers is already well-acquainted with the subject and it is not uncommon to show raw, unprocessed data and images in order to solicit constructive criticism and guidance from lab members and mentors on how to interpret the data. This enables peer review in real-time, so that, hopefully, major errors and flaws can be averted and newer ideas incorporated into the ongoing experiments.

During the past two decades that I have actively participated in biological, psychological and medical research, I have observed very different styles of lab meetings. Some involve brief 5-10 minute updates from each group member; others develop a rotation system in which one lab member has to present the progress of their ongoing work in a seminar-like, polished format with publication-quality images. Some labs have two hour meetings twice a week, other labs meet only every two weeks for an hour. Some groups bring snacks or coffee to lab meetings, others spend a lot of time discussing logistics such as obtaining and sharing biological reagents or establishing timelines for submitting manuscripts and grants. During the first decade of my work as a researcher, I was a trainee and followed the format of whatever group I belonged to. During the past decade, I have been heading my own research group and it has become my responsibility to structure our lab meetings. I do not know which format works best, so I approach lab meetings like our experiments. Developing a good lab meeting structure is a work-in-progress which requires continuous exploration and testing of new approaches. During the current academic year, I decided to try out a new twist: incorporating literature and philosophy into the weekly lab meetings.

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by Tamuira Reid

Sunlight slices through the window, hitting her where she sleeps. Neighborhood kids, already going hard, squeal and play happily somewhere in the distance.

I've been sitting on a cedar chest at the foot of her bed, waiting. I know better than to nudge MK to consciousness; she has a nasty right hook and isn't afraid to use it. It's the one thing her ex-husband, Frankie, a boxer turned philanthropist made sure to teach her before he left with a younger woman. Hit hard and fast. Keep the thumb outside so you don't break it. She remembered that when she slugged him on his way out the door, suitcase in hand.

The lump shifts under the heavy quilt, silver hair peeking out from the top. “Get me some water, will you love?” She doesn't look at me exactly, just gestures in my general direction.

And so our visit begins. Requests for water. For aspirin. For a foot rub. Anything to take the throttle and pain away. I can almost hear her brains sloshing against the side of her skull, eyeballs threatening to eject themselves out of socket. Fog filling the room.

Mary Kelly is no stranger to the Hangover of the Gods.

She lives most days in this fog, not, however, restricted to just her bedroom but to most areas of her life. A heavy, dense fog that moves in and around people until they eventually disappear altogether.

Rumor has it she came out of the womb thirsty.

Not for the sweet, dewy breast milk most babies cried for, that poured freely from the aching breasts of their mothers. Not for the powdery formula that dissolved quickly and easily into water. Milk – natural, manufactured, fresh from the body or out of a canister – did not interest her. MK (as her friends would come to call her) wanted something harder.

This unquenchable thirst sent her into the throes of what would be named, for convenience, or to spare her well-meaning but severely in-the-weeds mother from certain judgments, Gas. Her face all red and scrunched. Arms and legs flailing about like some demonic force had overtaken them. Gas, the doctors would confer proudly and leave the room.

Her mother wept and paced the kitchen and prayed to all the Saints she could remember by name. Help this child. She knew how to cook and sew and even talk about boys but this. She did not know what to do with this.

The local barmaids would insist that a little Guinness should do the trick. “Needs some iron pumping through the veins. Babe's damn near shriveled up.”

Beer into bottle. Bottle to mouth. MK drank. And drank. She drank with a fierceness that frightened her mother and dazzled the other, more seasoned drinkers in the room. “For the love of God, would you look at that!”

Two pints later and mother and child, huddled together on a barstool, breathed in the sudden peacefulness that had, until then, been eluding them both.

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by Madhu Kaza

At a Christmas gathering at a cousin's house in Maryland I mentioned to my five-year-old nephew that I don't own a television. I was sitting on a couch with him paging through a book about whales and dolphins for the sixth or seventh time. The men in the family were playing gin rummy around the coffee table; the other children were playing video games on their parents' cell phones, and the women were in the open kitchen off to the side making a succession of meals. At that moment and the whole weekend long the flat screen TV that hung above the fireplace was lit and muted. Images of CNN commentators discussing the murder of two NYPD officers, Red Wing hockey and young men singing love songs in music videos formed the backdrop of the holiday. “What's that?” my nephew asked. I looked down at the creature on the page and said, “Some kind of dolphin, I'm not exactly sure.” But I had misunderstood the question. He spoke again: “What's television?”

*

*

“Look at this. This looks like a city. Like a little model of a city. And all the houses, which are here. And streets. This is maybe an elevator to go up, up there. And here are all the wires. These wires, they really take care of all the electrons when they come through there. They take care that they are powerful enough to get all the way through to here.” This is how the musician Björk, describes the circuit board and wires of a television in an old video. She has opened the back of the television, she says, because it's Christmas time and she's been watching lots of television and is curious about how it works to cast its spell on her. She sits at a kitchen table affectionately close to “the beautiful television” and says she wants to understand “how it can put me in all sorts of situations.”

In her quest to understand how television works Björk posits a tongue-in-cheek cultural battle between her native Iceland and its former colonizer, Denmark, framed as a battle between poetry and science. She describes how an Icelandic poet explained to her that television was different from film: “This is millions and millions of little screens that send light, some sort of electric light, I'm not really sure. But because there are so many of them, in fact you are watching very many frames when you are watching TV. Your head is very busy all the time to calculate and put it all together into one picture. And then because you're so busy doing that, you don't watch very carefully what the program you are watching is really about. So you become hypnotized. So all that's on TV, it just goes directly into your brain and you stop judging if it's right or not. You just swallow and swallow.” Björk says that the Icelandic poet's explanation caused her to become so frightened of television that she began to get headaches while watching it.

The cure for poet-induced headaches, she suggests, trying to remain deadpan, is science: “Later on, when I got my Danish book on television, I stopped being afraid because I read the truth, and that's the scientifical truth, which is much better.”

She concludes,”You shouldn't let poets lie to you.”

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by Aditya Dev Sood

This is the fourth in a series of brief pieces written from the deep and dark of Startup Tunnel, a new incubator based in New Delhi. You might also want to read dispatches one, two, and three.

We’re fully in the fog of it now. It’s not only the startups that are stumbling and searching and feeling their way forward. The tunnel metaphor would seem to apply to me and the rest of my team as well. Where once we felt clarity and purpose, we’re now lost in detail. Every startup is different, at a different point along the path, and with such different needs. We’re scrambling to serve them all in ways that do them justice.

The initial shock of arrival and feedback taking is over for startup teams. They now have real work to do in building out their product or in making it better. This is a multivariate problem solving process that can overwhelm founders if they don’t have the tools to organize and isolate the challenges they face. It’s with a view to supporting and enhancing their ability to conceptualize, articulate and prototype their product that we led them through two exercises: First a ‘product tour’ and then a ‘customer journey map.’

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