Blog Post #77 - Mystery behind Chemistry and Wonder of periodic table - you are made of carbon.

1. My Chemistry - your chemistry - Organic Chemistry and Inorganic Chemistry - What are they?

2. What chemicals make up your body?

3. Peoples names in Periodic table - Do you know Nobel and Einstein have elements named after them and so is the person who created Periodic table .(His name is ??? and he is from?? - read along - Element 101 is named after him)

4. How can you teach Chemistry in the internet era to your kid and the kid in you?



1. My Chemistry - your chemistry - Organic Chemistry and Inorganic Chemistry - What are they?

I want you the reader to be smarter than a 5th grader (or 8th grader) .

 #STEM #CHEMISTRY

After watching a lot of Indians movies and interviews from actors and directors the only chemistry I know is between the Hero and the Heroine!


The new focus for kids in America is STEM - Science, Technology,Engineering and Math .

Kids learn a lot and that is their full time job and a boring one. We as adults have real full time jobs and for some it is a boring one too. Why not trade ours to the kids and start learning!

This time it is chemistry. Yes. the Chemistry which have equations,chemical reactions, atoms,elements and test tubes. Bunsen Burner - my favorite - the only fun companion for me in my chemistry class other than  - yes you got it Pipette and Burette.

I am not sure about you but I have drank a lot from these little instruments and became chemically active while inducing burns to my friends with our Bunsen Burner!

Chemistry is a branch of science which was very boring so boring that even today I wonder what was the purpose of this?

I spent quite a bit of time trying to find the  difference between organic and inorganic chemistry. While I never understood the real difference here is what I found

If something has carbon and hydrogen then it is organic chemistry.
If not inorganic chemistry.

Diamonds with carbon - inorganic. Why? I understood now that it has to have Hydrogen along with Carbon .It has to be Now I assumed all living things are part of organic chemistry.

Think-

Do you eat vitamins?

Vitamins ("vita" = life and "amine" = containing nitrogen) are organic (containing carbon, which is an element found in all living things) compounds (containing atoms of one or more different elements).

Minerals are pure inorganic elements (containing atoms of the same element), meaning they are much simpler in chemical form than vitamins.
All vitamins are essential or required by our bodies, whereas only some minerals are essential nutrients.

When you have bacteria which is a living organism you fight them using chemistry - yes. All paracetamols (for Americans - Tylenol For Indians in India - Chrocin ) are nothing but chemistry to fight biology!!!

If your body needs hormones it can be supplied from outside as chemicals into your body and fool your body it is part of its own!

BioChemistry is a branch which deals with this complexity.

Physics - When you walk fast and if you are fall down because of your carelessness then it is physics which governs gravity,mass,acceleration and your poor eyesight which can be associated with speed of light.

Who cares about speed of light and speed of sound and how these are different in water,air and in vacuum!

2. What chemicals make up your body?


Chemistry - Explains can explain What your body made up of?
From http://www.livescience.com/3505-chemistry-life-human-body.html

Roughly 96 percent of the mass of the human body is made up of just four elements: oxygen, carbon, hydrogen and nitrogen, with a lot of that in the form of water. The remaining 4 percent is a sparse sampling of the periodic table of elements. 

I was talking to my sister in India who teaches Math and was appalled to know the kids still use log tables.

Wow - Log tables and periodic tables . Do you remember them?

That bring us to Periodic table.




This is why we call it periodic table? Same periods for all elements in same row (Same number of electrons)

Currently there are only 7 rows in periodic table.

3. Peoples names in Periodic table - Do you know Nobel and Einstein have elements named after them and so is the person who created Periodic table .(His name is ??? and he is from?? - read along - Element 101 is named after him)


From about.com the following 13 elements were named after people

• bohrium (Bh, 107) – Niels Bohr
• curium (Cm, 96) – Pierre and Marie Curie
• einsteinium (Es, 99) – Albert Einstein
• fermium (Fm, 100) – Enrico Fermi
• gallium (Ga, 31) – both named after Gallia (Latin for France) and its discoverer, Lecoq de Boisbaudran (le coq, the French word for 'rooster' translates to gallus in Latin)
• hahnium (105) – Otto Hahn (Dubnium, named for Dubna in Russia, is the IUPAC-accepted name for element 105)
• lawrencium (Lr, 103) – Ernest Lawrence
• meitnerium (Mt, 109) – Lise Meitner
• mendelevium (Md, 101) – Dmitri Mendeleev
• nobelium (No, 102) – Alfred Nobel
• roentgenium (Rg, 111) – Wilhelm Roentgen (formerly Ununumium)
• rutherfordium (Rf, 104) – Ernest Rutherford
• seaborgium (Sg, 106) – Glenn T. Seaborg

Ever wonder any other type of periodic table - the one below is of all of the presidents in USA.Contains  44 at the time of creation (which includes Obama). Gw- Gerorge Washington to O - Obama.(from the site http://mentalfloss.com/article/48677/9-periodic-table-parodies)

Now this is a periodic table that I like.
Colors blue for yes democrats and pink (not sure why they didn't make it red - it is always easy to criticize other people's work and not appreciate the effort!)

I grabbed a book from library titled
The Periodic Kingdom; A Journey into the Land of the Chemical Elements
by P. W. Atkins

Atkins does know how to explain Chemistry's Periodic table different from other teachers. Written a long time back this book has only 90+ elements - not that I care. Now we have 118.

He discusses the elements as though they are new countries that were discovered from time to time and each region in periodic table assigned regions like western desert ,lake and other geographic analogies.

When I read more I will post more on this approach.

I also have another book on this subject that I am reading

The disappearing spoon : and other true tales of madness, love, and the history of the world from the periodic table of the elements / Sam Kean.

Sam kean knows his stuff - he starts with elements and write stories about people . The People who worked on these elements! Take this woman - Lisa Meitner for example - she refused to work on atomic bomb!!

A 1997 Physics Today study concluded that Meitner's omission was "a rare instance in which personal negative opinions apparently led to the exclusion of a deserving scientist" from the Nobel.[9] Element 109, meitnerium, is named in her honour.[10][11][12]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lise_Meitner


In the meantime what did the Russians do for chemistry?

Wiki Quotes about this specific Russian as

The Russian chemist and science historian Lev Chugaev has characterized him as "a chemist of genius, first-class physicist, a fruitful researcher in the fields of hydrodynamics, meteorology, geology, certain branches of chemical technology (explosives, petroleum, and fuels, for example) and other disciplines adjacent to chemistry and physics, a thorough expert of chemical industry and industry in general, and an original thinker in the field of economy." Mendeleev was one of the founders, in 1869, of the Russian Chemical Society. He worked on the theory and practice of protectionist trade and on agriculture.

For his predicted eight elements, he used the prefixes of eka, dvi, and tri (Sanskrit one, two, three) in their naming. Mendeleev questioned some of the currently accepted atomic weights (they could be measured only with a relatively low accuracy at that time), pointing out that they did not correspond to those suggested by his Periodic Law. He noted that tellurium has a higher atomic weight than iodine, but he placed them in the right order, incorrectly predicting that the accepted atomic weights at the time were at fault. He was puzzled about where to put the known lanthanides, and predicted the existence of another row to the table which were the actinides which were some of the heaviest in atomic mass. Some people dismissed Mendeleev for predicting that there would be more elements, but he was proven to be correct when Ga (gallium) and Ge (germanium) were found in 1875 and 1886 respectively, fitting perfectly into the two missing spaces.[13]

By giving Sanskrit names to his "missing" elements, Mendeleev showed his appreciation and debt to the Sanskrit grammarians of ancient India, who had created sophisticated theories of language based on their discovery of the two-dimensional patterns in basic sounds

4. How can you teach Chemistry in the internet era to your kid and the kid in you?

There are several ways to learn about periodic table today (inspired by http://waterhouseguild.com/seven-ways-to-the-wonders-of-chemistry/)

1. Videos  about every element
http://www.periodicvideos.com/videos/003.htm

Read this link to learn how to learn Periodic table elements

2.Video about specific experiments 

Gummy Bear Sacrifice at

https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=Pr1UYivhTfE

3. Flash cards - available in amazon.com and other internet retailers 

4. Great books other than the boring academic ones (I have quoted 2 in this blog)

5.Posters - large one and kid friendly ones

6. Actual lab work and lab experiments at home including washing dirty dishes and hands (which can help how soap can clean dirt!!)

If you any suggestions or comments on other ways to teach or learn chemistry or any interesting fact about chemistry please let me know.


Keep Learning chemistry
Sivakumar Manikanteswaran

Blog Post #76 - White Bear,Stale Popcorn,Choclate &Radish, Basket Ball game - 4 experiments that are commonly referred in books

Most of the books I read about will power,habits and other useful topics that involves how our mind works keep pointing to few specific experiments so I thought I will share 4 of them

1. Don't think about a white bear

Daniel Wegner  and his fellow researchers told people not to think about white bear. Yes - a white bear. Did you think about a white bear now? 
Ironic Process Theory as it is called is a way to induce a thought . Your mind has to first think and visualize what it should not think and you end up thinking about it.

It is like I am trying to pick up trash. You are either picking up thrash or not picking up thrash. Trying is our way of saying I am in the process of picking up - that means you are picking up and thus not doing the act of not picking up.

Sounds complex. What else did you think it should be? These people do research for ages and you think it is easy to understand their study?

Now don't think about pink elephant and do support breast cancer awareness.

2. Stale Popcorn study -
Large portions push people to overeat -- even to overeat foods they don't like.
This famous experiment proves that the container matters!
These movie goers were served stale popcorn and both medium and large containers with 5 days old popcorn were eaten by the participants without their knowledge (and it didn't matter which movie either - started with payback and they have tried this with lots of movies and in different cities - the results are always the same)

Next time in a movie theater if any one offers free popcorn be aware that it might be a case study!!

Read about this at -
http://www.news.cornell.edu/stories/2005/11/big-portions-influence-overeating-much-taste-even-when-food-tastes-lousy-cornell

3. Roy Baumeister - The Chocolate-and-Radish Experiment That Birthed the Modern Conception of Willpower

One set of Participants were given freshly baked cookies and the other set was asked to just smell them and eat Radish. After this there were given hard unsolvable puzzles to solve and the participants who ate Radish performed poor. So Radish is bad for brain ? -no. These participants who wanted to eat and liked cookies who were also hungry were using their willpower to resist cookies and so when it came to hard puzzles after that they couldn't use these 'muscles'

His theory  can be translated as - you have fixed will power for a day. When you use it for one task you don't have it for another task. 

Example - Politicians who work hard and decide on hard issues and use tactics/other persuasion 'means'  to meet their end have low will power at the end of the day that they end up as client 9(google for client 9 to read about Eliot Spitzer)

This details about this case study is available at 
http://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2012/04/the-chocolate-and-radish-experiment-that-birthed-the-modern-conception-of-willpower/255544/

4.  Basket ball game

Do you like basket ball?
Really?

Watch this video and make sure you count the passes between the team with white shirt only and not the black shirt.White only.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vJG698U2Mvo

How many passes did they do? 13? 14?15?

So you counted the passes. 
Were you close?
If you were close to the answer which is 15 you will be asking not be able to answer this question ' What did the Gorilla do in the video?'

Selective attentiveness is the subject of this study. When you zoom in you miss the big picture. When you zoom out you lose the details.

You count the passes and I will see the Gorilla!!! - is how one author referred to in a book called 'Now you see it"

Paying attention is a problem.

I know that is why you didn't pay attention when you were in your calculus class. Atleast did you see the Gorilla? Did I tell you about the monkey in my class when we were taught advanced calculus ?- If I did good for you , if I didn't good for you. 

Now read about this study at 
http://www.theinvisiblegorilla.com/gorilla_experiment.html



Keep Learning
Sivakumar Manikanteswaran

Blog Post #75 - Do you know Prime Numbers - God may not play dice with the universe, but something strange is going on with the prime numbers #primenumbers

Babies can ask questions about primes which grown [wo]men cannot answer.
Paul Erdos, quoted in In Code by Sarah Flannery and David Flannery.

1. Demo visualization  of prime numbers and who was Ulam ?

2. Euclid's elements - did you read this book yet?(Math in Greek!)

3. Prime numbers keep us safe and saves life (note not human life!)

4. Zero and 1 are they prime?

1. Demo visualization  of prime numbers

First click here  and click play on the top of the page

http://www.numbersimulation.com/

This is the first time you are seeing prime numbers!!! You have read them ,written them never seen them draw and generate patterns. When Stanislaw Ulam attended a long and boring lecture he started 'doodling' . Remember before googling there was doodling - where folks used to use a plant based product called paper and a 'lead' pencil / pen. This was when apple was still a fruit and you never held an apple for more than few minutes. Now I see apple(or Samsung) in most people's hand googling!(messaging,facebooking,tweeting.. you know the drill).

So what happened he created this....

He wrote 1 in center and started created spirals.. and observed the diagonals were prime....

2. Euclid's elements - did you read this book yet?(Math in Greek!)

Before 300 Jesus Christ was born Euclid wrote a book that is referred even today .

Euclid's Elements .

This book has sold more copies than any other book in human history and stands at second place in maximum copies of book published.

The first place - most published book goes to - Holy Bible. 

What did Euclid talk about Prime numbers in 300 BC in Alexandria? Something about prime numbers.

Euclid believed there are infinite number of prime numbers. Why? Do you think the answer is simple. we have infinite numbers so I am surprised why he had to discover that there are infinite prime numbers?

To understand that you need to understand something basic about prime numbers and composite numbers.

Define prime numbers - A prime number can be divided, without a remainder, only by itself and by 1.

How can you tell if a number is not prime -

Simple

• 2 is the only even prime number in number system . Every other even number is divisible by 2. So no other even number can be a prime. 8090908092 is not a prime number. 
• A number that ends with 5 or 0 are not prime. They can be dived by - yes 5. 979989779885 is not a prime.
• Take square root of the number and divide from 3(if it is even number you know it when you see it)  to that square root of that number. square root of 103 is close to 11. so divide by 3,4 5,6 7,8,9,10  or 11 (i will tell you soon only to use only primes- wait) and we know 103 is prime.37. Square root of 37 is close to 6 . so divide by 3,4 and if they cannot no one can. Also 4 is not a prime . Use only prime numbers and in case of 103 use only 3,5,7,11 . 5 can also be eliminated .So use this further refined process and just check for 3,7,11. Any tricks for division by 3- see next?
• If the sum of a number's digits is a multiple of 3, that number can be divided by 3. So Islam's holy number 786 is not prime. 7+8+6 = 21.  "786" is the total value of the letters of "Bismillah al-Rahman al-Rahim" - "In the name of God, most Gracious, most Compassionate".How did characters below which represent this phrase become 786. Google it.

Every other number that is not prime - composite numbers can be written as multiples of prime.

100 = 10*10= 5*2*2*5

2 and 5 are primes.

Euclid used this principle and wrote the following 300 years before Jesus christ was born (do you find this sentence boring - 300BC sounds simple? BC= Before Christ. Most history books now refer to these dates are BCE - Before Common Era and After Common Era whatever it means!!!)

Assume there is a finite number of primes. We then multiply all these primes together. The resulting number will be a number divisible by every single prime. Now add 1. We now have a number that, when you divide it by any prime, will have a remainder of 1. That means we have just discovered another prime number.

3. Prime numbers keep us safe and saves life (note not human life!)

Prime numbers keep us safe when we use computers - In modern world cryptography uses prime numbers. From your computers talking to your bank to your bank talking to government agencies prime numbers are everywhere.

Life as we known it has nothing to do with humans. 8.7 million species inhibit our planet. When I write prime numbers save life - people mistake it for human life. I want to remind the reader that planet earth is home to 8.7 million -1 species if you take away humans. 

In real time the most commonly citied example is of a small insect which knows prime number can save its life Wikipedia has this simple example elaborated 

Inevitably, some of the numbers that occur in nature are prime. There are, however, relatively few examples of numbers that appear in nature because they are prime.
One example of the use of prime numbers in nature is as an evolutionary strategy used by cicadas of the genus Magicicada.
 These insects spend most of their lives as grubs underground. They only pupate and then emerge from their burrows after 13 or 17 years, at which point they fly about, breed, and then die after a few weeks at most. The logic for this is believed to be that the prime number intervals between emergences make it very difficult for predators to evolve that could specialize as predators on Magicicadas.^[ If Magicicadas appeared at a non-prime number intervals, say every 12 years, then predators appearing every 2, 3, 4, 6, or 12 years would be sure to meet them. Over a 200-year period, average predator populations during hypothetical outbreaks of 14- and 15-year cicadas would be up to 2% higher than during outbreaks of 13- and 17-year cicadas.^[42] Though small, this advantage appears to have been enough to drive natural selection in favour of a prime-numbered life-cycle for these insects.

4. Zero and 1 are they prime?

The reason for my post is thanks to my round rock library book 

The mathematical universe : an alphabetical journey through the great proofs, problems, and personalities / William Dunham.

The author had a knack of introducing me back to arithmetic and i have only read 4 pages and now i write a post..

He rekindled my quest about knowing and understanding prime numbers at the prime of my life!!(if you can consider 38 as a prime age for Asian Male in US)

From http://mathforum.org/library/drmath/view/57036.html

Zero is not a prime or a composite number either. Zero has an infinite
number of divisors (any nonzero whole number divides zero). It cannot
be written as a product of two factors, neither of which is itself, so
zero is also not composite. It falls in a class of numbers called
zero-divisors. These are numbers such that, when multiplied by some
nonzero number, the product is zero

1 is not a prime number. 

By definition a prime number is a number greater than 1 that has no divisors other than 1 and itself.

1 is also not a composite number as 1 cannot be expressed by any prime number (remember Euclid above - of not re-read section 3) .You cannot express 1 as product of any other number that is not 1. Your question might be what about (-1)*(-1).  Yes. Good question . 

I will ask you a question - do you know negative prime numbers?

Prime numbers were discovered first and so negative numbers did not exist at that time. So most text define prime numbers as positive numbers except 0 and 1. 

There is no harm in thinking about negative prime numbers as any prime number both positive and negative will still be governed by the same rules - divide by itself and 1.

1 is not a prime nor a composite number.So what do we call 1 in math. 1 is called a unit.

One is neither a prime nor a composite number. A prime number is one 
with exactly two positive divisors, itself and one. One has only one 
positive divisor. It cannot be written as a product of two factors, 
neither of which is itself, so one is also not composite. It falls 
in a class of numbers called units. These are the numbers whose 
reciprocals are also whole numbers.

So now you know your numbers.

Eat fruit,nuts and Veggies (okra for Math - According to Quora.com Okra is relatively high in nutrients deemed important for brain function like Phosphorus and Vitamin A. It is also relatively high in Omega-3 and Omega-6 and other antioxidants.)

Keep learning

Sivakumar Manikanteswaran

Blog Post #74 - 10-10-10 What was that book all about?

Decision making is a fascinating  subject to me. 

How we decide and why we decide one way or another is a topic that is so interesting to me that I struggle to decide on the right book to read.!

We all think we make rational decision. Next time when you step out of a restaurant think if you ate what you wanted to eat or did you overeat? Did you buy more items than what you need from a grocery store?

How about time?  - Every day do you decide on how to spend the day , analyze or check during the day if you are spending the way you are supposed to spend it and finish up the day understanding if you spent the day the way you decided to spend it. 

Try this experiment for a day and you will be surprised.

Now to the book 10-10-10. When I read it I slept half way through driving - i didn't find the book interesting.

When I am listening to another book Decisive they refer to 10-10-10 . Apparently lot of genius like this book. 10-10-10 is referred in a lot of literature. No wonder I don't know how to decide. Instead of asking you to read the book for yourself let me tell you the shortest summary of this book.

What is 10-10-10?

When you have a decide on anything important think how you will feel 10 minutes from now? How about 10 months from now? Then 10 years from now? and you will be surprised .

Do I need to buy that latest gadget from amazon that is onsale for 80% ? Do I want these clothes that look nice in this store? What about this new job offer?  

The answer is to think - How will I feel 10minutes from now with this decision? Will it make me happy? 

Most things will never make you happy but everything  can make you unhappy (Swamy Sivananda! - me!)

Pros and Cons approach , Rational thinking ,Irrational thinking, Collecting information and all other process works in conjunction with ensuring we distance ourselves from the process.

Put another way - What will you ask your friend to do? is a strategy which also helps to distance you from the decision that needs to be taken.

Forget the tamil song - 5-5-5 go for 10-10-10

Keep Learning
Sivakumar Manikanteswaran 

Blog Post #71 - Triangles and Circle of Life – Math fascination

1. Triangles in movies

2. Math refresher on triangles

3.Triangles in religion

   - 3a .  How the hindus relate om to triangles

  -  3b.   What is the meaning of Srichakra (or sriyantra)

   - 3c.    Ancients and Triangles

  -  3d.   Start of David Jews and Triangles

  -  3e    Christianity and Triangles

  -  3f      Islam and Triangle

4 Bermuda Triangle

How do we communicate to a tiny satellite in space and get pictures back to us ?

Religions love triangles - have you seen them?

Can the words you speak create triangles?

What does your GPS have to do with triangles?

The other day my friends daughter showed me this picture and asked find ‘x’.

Anjali's Question

Before I answered I thought I will collect all my thoughts about triangle and post (for the sake of mankind womenkind and be kind!)

1. Triangles in movies

I was thinking about movies and triangle love stories. As a professional movie goer and watcher of magic on screen I am a self declared expert in triangle love stories - 

2 heros 1 heroine - kill one hero or make him a swamiji (no premananda                                    nithyananda style but a real one like Osho?)

2 heros 1 heroine - get an extra heroine in the middle of the story or  twin                                   sister

1 hero   2 heroines - let them marry (hi - Rajini movie veera and other 2                                          wife/lover movies)

1 hero   2 heroines - obvious kill 1 heroine at the hands of the villain

1 hero   2 heroines - ask her to die while delivering a baby which the hero and                               heroine will raise and name her the dead heroine name                                 making this a movie worth a sequel

1 hero   2 heroines - introduce a brother or twin brother 

Always remember triangle love can be solved not the math Trigonometry problem though!! (What is trigonometry? - answer below) 

2. Math refresher on triangles

My red marker showed the answer and she was disappointed as I was supposed to say 5!. If she had marked this on any shaped other than a triangle I would have tried to calculate. The problem is - i have already read this question and lot more useless stuff about triangles and how we over analyze triangles for what it may or may not be! Let the journey begin on these knowledge....  

Basics

(From  http://home.avvanta.com/~math/triangles.html) 

Right angled triangle: Has one 90 degree angle 

Equilateral triangle: All angles are the same (60 degrees)

Isosceles triangle: Has two angles the same and two sides the same

Scalene triangle: Has all three angles and all three sides different

Obtuse triangle: Has one obtuse angle, greater than 90 degrees

The sum of all angles in a triangle is ___________ degrees. 

Answer = 180

Right Isosceles Triangle

Has a right angle (90°), and also two equal angles

Can you guess what the equal angles are? (from http://www.mathsisfun.com/triangle.html) 

Another way to remember

Equilateral - all 3 sides equal

Isosceles - 2 sides equal

Scalene - nothing is equal

Triangles can also have names that tell you what type of angle is inside:

Acute Triangle - all 3 sides have angles less than 90

Right Triangle-Has a right angle (90°)

Obtuse Triangle- Has an angle more than 90°

Right angle triangle form the basis of much useful and much dreaded field of Trigonometry.

How will you send instructions to satellites taking pictures of saturn from earth - use trigonometry. Out in the space the tiny spacecraft can be located anytime from earth using the magic of triangles. You can run but can't hide - I meant from trigonometry. Here are some more info from Wikipedia

Trigonometry (from Greek trigōnon, "triangle" + metron, "measure") is a branch of mathematics that studies relationships involving lengths and angles of triangles.

The field emerged during the 3rd century BC from applications of geometry to astronomical studies.
The 3rd-century astronomers first noted that the lengths of the sides of a right-angle triangle and the angles between those sides have fixed relationships: that is, if at least the length of one side and the value of one angle is known, then all other angles and lengths can be determined algorithmically.
These calculations soon came to be defined as the trigonometric functions and today are pervasive in both pure and applied mathematics: fundamental methods of analysis such as the Fourier transform, for example, or the wave equation, use trigonometric functions to understand cyclical phenomena across many applications in fields as diverse as physics, mechanical and electrical engineering, music and acoustics, astronomy, ecology, and biology.

Trigonometry is also the foundation of the practical art of surveying.
Trigonometry is most simply associated with planar right-angle triangles (each of which is a two-dimensional triangle with one angle equal to 90 degrees). The applicability to non-right-angle triangles exists, but, since any non-right-angle triangle (on a flat plane) can be bisected to create two right-angle triangles, most problems can be reduced to calculations on right-angle triangles. Thus the majority of applications relate to right-angle triangles. 

Triangles in religion

3a - How the hindus relate om to triangles

My obsession with triangles started a long time ago and specifically with Srichakra.

My house always had this - srichakra and that and that is = Kubera kolam 

Magic square - all squares add to 72 .

7+2 =9 to start with sounds good for a number associated with money but let us turn to science for fun (what else will be turn science for? we use powerful iphones and samsungs which are more powerful than computers that sent man to moon to play angry birds!)

According to wikipedia

In degrees Fahrenheit considered to be room temperature.
The average number of heartbeats per minute for a resting adult.
Percentage of water of which the human body is composed.
The life duration of the ovule is 72 hours.

The axis of the earth moves of one degree every 72 years compared to stars and to the vault of heaven.

Me being a hindu (Whatever it means – the religion was supposed to be Sanatana Dharma now they made this word sound like the hardcode militant hindus instead of the religion- another post later) one of the first places I observe this is in srichakram.

Dr Jenny invented a machine called a Tonoscope which allowed a human voice to vibrate the plate directly.  He had a voice sing 'OM' into a microphone and the result can be seen in mandala image . (according to http://www.unitedearth.com.au/sound.html)

Om Sound creates this image!!!!

 This mean when you say 'Om' you create triangles in sound waves whose final vibrations produce the image above!!!

3b - What is the meaning of Srichakra (or sriyantra)

Inside Homes

Outside Temple 

Cool 3D 

Four isosceles triangles with the apices upwards, representing Shiva or the Masculine.
Five isosceles triangles with the apices downward, symbolizing female embodiment Shakti.

Total 9 triangles

4 up 5 down but looking symmetrical forming 43 triangles

If number of triangles pointing up and down are equal then there is no fun (4 and 4 or 5 and 5) - Balanced means static.

It has 4 for male and 5 for female Imbalance makes this yantra dynamic.
Bindu is the center which is Jive(self),Soul,Spirit or atma (which reminds me of this song http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hcCzEuNqD6g )


Great Ramana Maharishi pointed to srichakra as a symbol of how mind must be brought back using boundaries.  Adi Shankara wrote Soundarya lahari in which he describes how to create and workshop goddess in this shape. According to Shankara goddess is Srichakra and Sri Chakra is the goddess.

The five downward pointing triangles are Shakti triangles representing senses

SoundSightSmell
TasteTouch

Five sense organs

EarSkinEyesTongueNose

Five Organs of action

HandFeetMouthGenitalsAnus

Five Elements of body

SkinNerveFatBonesFlesh

Upward triangles are Shiva triangles or male energy

Being – ChittaBuddi  IntellectEgo  - AhamkarManas – Mind

Now it makes sense to have people brought back to earth – I told you women are always down to earth!!!

3c- Ancients and Triangles


According to ancient beliefs, an upright equilateral triangle, with one point at the top and two at the base, is a male and solar symbol representing spirit, divinity, fire, life, prosperity and harmony. In contrast, the reversed triangle is female and lunar, representing mother earth, water, rain and grace. 
(Sound familiar male and female theory - Ancients were everywhere the babylonians, mesopotamians, indus folks,greek ,romans and native tribes)
In magic it was seen as representing the element fire (with a downward meaning water)

3d - Star of David Jews and Triangles

When upright and downward triangles are put together, they form the Star of David and symbolize balance and knowledge. 

3e - Christianity and Triangles



Christianity's basic philosophy involves trinity . The God The Son and The Hold Spirit. To represent this concept the following symbol is used thus giving rise to an equilateral triangle. 

3f Islam and Triangle
(According to http://www.salaam.co.uk/themeofthemonth/march02_index.php?l=3) 

In islam - the circle, and its centre, are the point at which all Islamic patterns begin and is an apt symbol of a religion that emphasizes one God, symbolising also, the role of Mecca, the center of Islam, toward which all Muslims face in prayer.
The circle has always been regarded as a symbol of eternity, without being and without end, and is not only the perfect expression of justice-equality in all directions in a finite domain--but also the most beautiful parent of all polygons, both containing and underlying them.

From the circle comes three fundamental figures in Islamic art-
the triangle, square and hexagon.

The triangle by tradition is symbolic of human consciousness and the principle of harmony. The square, the symbol of physical experience and the physical world-or materiality-and the hexagon, of Heaven. Another symbol prevalent in Islamic art is the star and has been the chosen motif for many Islamic decorations. In Islamic iconography the star is a regular geometric shape that symbolizes equal radiation in all directions from a central point. All regular stars -- whether they have 6, 8, 10, 12, or 16 points -- are created by a division of a circle into equal parts. The center of the star is center of the circle from which it came, and its points touch the circumference of the circle. The rays of a star reach out in all directions, making the star a fitting symbol for the spread of Islam.

  



4. Bermuda Triangle

I am not planning to use this post and say I have cracked the mystery of bermuda triangle even though there is a program in netflix which claims to have done it and is in my instant queue to watch. This dreaded triangle has fascinated humans and the lots of people and property have been lost. While the scientist will uncover what Newton and Einstein didn't let's not forget all triangles are not friendly to humans!

Time to stop this post and start using triangles in visio and other microsoft tools.

Triangles are everywhere .. keep looking upward,sideward and onward.

Keep Learning

Sivakumar Manikanteswaran