CULTURAL QA 04-2022-13 BEING A COMPILATION THERE MAY BE ERRORS
Q1 Evolutionarilyspeaking, why do flea bites itch? Wouldn't it be better for them if they wentunnoticed? A1 Ken Saladin Formerprofessor of histology (microscopic anatomy)Tue Yes it would, and someectoparasites have indeed evolved such a protective adaptation—leeches and vampire bats, for a couple of examples. Bothhave a salivary anesthetic that locally numbs the host so the animals they feedon may not even sense that they’re there. Profile photo for Gopalkrishna Vishwanath Q2 What is that one thingthat you remember doing on your last day at work? A2 GopalkrishnaVishwanath Lived 69 years so far. No regrets. Look forward to the best yearsnow. Updated Apr 6 I remember that day clearly! I typed a farewellemail to all my professional contacts. It was not a standard messagethat was copied and pasted to many people. I wrote individually to all andeach mail was customized for the person receiving it. Here is a picture of me doing that. I then personally cleaned up my room, closed the windows, switched offthe lights after having this last picture taken by one of my staff and left theoffice with a heavy heart! This is a picture of my room as Director and ownerof my company which I vacated. The company was sold and is today a much bigger company. The new ownersinvested massively and expanded it and the turnover is now several times mysmall turnover. When I founded the company in 2004, I had 15 employees. It nowhas over 150 employees and has offices in a few other cities too and has alsogot ISO 9001 certification. Take a look at the company’s website if you are interested to know moreabout it.(TESLA). My note- Pictures not added. Q3 Why don’t humans havethe natural ability to swim like other animals? A3 Rod Samper Waterman,Lifeguard, Surf/Swim coach. Science enthusiast 8mo There are some misconceptions regarding this topic that as a swiminstructor for 30 yrs I run into and deconstruct every season. Infants DO NOT have a naturalinstinct to swim. They dohowever have an instinct to seal the airway for a short time that persists forabout 5–6 months post birth. this was probably useful in the liquid environmentof the womb. This gets you your pictures of submerged floating/gliding babieslike the Nirvana album cover photo. But swimming must be defined asactive propulsion. Infanthumans have none of this. You may see some spastic limb movement but it is notsufficient for propulsion. The babies in those cool photographs glidingunderwater can hang out there for seconds briefly but will die unless they arecaught and lifted from the water immediately thereafter. Under optimal conditions I have managed to get children swimming with anactively propulsive kick as early as 12–13 months but this takes months of workand it is certainly not instinctual. The reason a lot of animals have more useful instincts for swimming isthat mostly they are quadrupeds. Thegait a quadruped uses for locomotion on land basically works ok in the water.Think of a dog or horse doing a “dog paddle”. Not the most efficient orgraceful thing in the world but it’ll get you across a river. This style allowsthe animal’s breathing apparatus to remain above water so no special aquaticbreathing is needed. But a humans vertical bipedal gait doesn’t work in the water. If you’veever seen a total non swimmer fallinto a body of water they try to deal with the water in an upright verticalfashion. An active drowning victim bobs up and down in the water until theysink and become passive victims. Humans have to learn to get horizontal in the water and this necessitateslearning to be comfortable with the face submerged. And that necessitateslearning to control breathing and to learn a particular pattern of breathingfor swimming. Without that breath control the best a human can do is swim with the headup and do our own version of the dog paddle. This is among the least efficientways for humans to swim. It is so bad that the youngest children cannot even doit. But even to dog paddle a human must position the body more horizontally. Those two adaptations we humans make to the water in order to swim,namely to adjust our body position to the horizontal and to learn theappropriate breathing patterns must be learned. They arenot innate. Q4 What was your smartest decision ever and did you realize howimportant it would be when you made it? A4 Gopalkrishna Vishwanath Lived 69 years so far. No regrets. Look forwardto the best years now.7h Not one but several. Here are a few. To accept the offer ofAdmission at BITS Pilani, in 1967. It changed my life. I had failed to get into IIT. BITS Pilani offered me a seat in Civil Engineering. It was not afancied subject. My parents weren’t too happy but they left the decision to me.My friends tried to persuade me to turn down the offer. I rejected their adviceand decided to accept the offer. It changed the course of my life. To marry my present wife in1975. I have described in detailin a previous post the full story of how my marriage was arranged. Thisdecision too was one of my smartest decisions and changed the course of mylife. I postponed buying cars andscooters and instead, borrowedheavily and built a house in Bengaluru, at an age when my peers were busyenjoying life and spending on consumer durables, holidays, and other luxuries. To reverse my decision to havenot more than one child (my daughter) and expand my family. My son was born nine years after the birth of my daughter.He turned out to be a Rhodes Scholar, and a top intellectual and walked intoOxford University and got his graduate, Masters and Doctorate degrees beforethe age of 29. I didn’t spend a pie on his higher education. Today he teachesat Cambridge University. If I had not reversed my decision, this great scholarwould not have been born. To resign from my Public Sectorjob after 28 years of loyal and happy service and venture as an entrepreneur. While I enjoyed both job security andjob satisfaction for 26 out of 28 years, the last two years were miserable. I had to resign.This too was a smart decision. I have described elsewhere all that went intomaking this decision.To decide it was time to call it off, 10 years later andsell the company and retire, at the right time. This too was a smart decision.I have not regretted it. All these decisions have provedcorrect in retrospect. One moredecision taken recently is to leave Bangalore after 44 years and move to aretirement home at a place called Devanahalli, near the Bengaluru Internationalairport, 40 km from Bengaluru. It is too early to say how good a decision thisis going to be. Ask me again after 5 years and I will be able to tell. I was fully conscious of theimportance of all these decisions when I made them Q5 Does snow make dryfirewood become wet? A5 DavidThomasProfessional Engineer, Civil, Alaska Mar 2 It only wets the surface andwicks in between the cells. If the wood has seasoned for a year, most of themoisture in green wood (which is inside the cell) will have migrated out. It is that intracellular moisture that requiresmany months to be lowered. Knock the snow off, leave it inside the house for 2 days and it will bedry enough to burn IF it had been seasoned. If it was green wood, it will stillbe green wood a few days later. Q6 Are there any animalsthat we should try to kill off completely? A6 Donna Fernstrom Reptilekeeper and breeder, wildlife observation and ecology hobbyist. Sun There are some individual species whose absence would cause relativelylittle upset to ecosystems, but would dramatically reduce misery in the world.While they do have a role to play, the role they fill would be readily filledby other species without any significant overall impact. These species include: Mosquitoes:40 species of genus Anopheles mosquitoes, especiallythe Anopheles gambiae complex….. Ticks: Genus Ixodes Amblyomma americanum Dermacentor variabilis The ecological servicesprovided by these animals are largely confined to the very reason we would likethem gone - they spread diseases. Diseases are part of population control for species, but there areother ways populations can be balanced without tick-borne and mosquito-bornediseases. These specific arthropods spread diseases to humans and pets, andsome are responsible for taking millions of lives each year by spreadingmalaria, Dengue fever, yellow fever, Lyme disease, and West Nile virus amongmany others. Only specific species spreaddiseases to humans, and in evaluating which ones should be eliminated, it’s a good idea to take into consideration howhigh the risk is. If the animal is only rarely a vector of something serious tohumans, then it shouldn’t eliminated. If it poses a threat to endangeredspecies and human life in high numbers, then it should be. Not all mosquitoes are a problem - the vast majority of them are not(even ones that may bite humans don’t all spread dangerous diseases). The sameis true of ticks. Animals that eat mosquitoes aren’t specialists - they feed on a widevariety of other insects, so the absence of some mosquito species would have noreal impact on their populations. Other insects would fill the gap left behind.With only a few types of ticks targeted, there should be very little effectfrom their absence, either. In addition to the above, the world can also readily do without rodentfleas capable of transmitting Yersinia pestis. Not only would this eliminate bubonic plague inhumans, but it would also protect prairie dogs in North America, which aresuffering slowly declining numbers due to their lack of defense against thisdisease (which was introduced here by humans and the rats that accompaniedthem). Pediculus humanus can go away.It is the human louse - humans are its only host.Likewise, the world is betteroff without Pulex irritans, the human flea. Hear me out - it’s not just because these arthropods spread diseases thatkill humans or make them miserable. To perhaps an even great degree, it’s because human actions tocontrol and try to eliminate these animals typically impact massive numbers ofother species. Spreading poisons and trimming grass for fear ofdangerous diseases transmitted by these parasites causes tremendous ecologicaldestruction. Therefore, their eliminationwould have enormous benefits to the world’s ecosystems, rather than beingdetrimental. All the above QA are from Quora website on 13-04- 2022. Quoraanswers need not be 100% correct answers Compiled and posted by R. Gopala krishnan on 13-04-2022 -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Thatha_Patty" group. 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