Hyper-Hypo Dichotomy

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 That is a 'ten-dollar' title as Hemingway would put it.

The first hyper I met with was at the impressionable age of 15. It was from a horrendous book by Loney in the Chapter on Conic Sections.

It is called Hyperbola. 

Quite a cute figure to look at for an adolescent...reminded me of the hour-glass figure of certain heroines in our movies when they started their careers. Later on, of course, they tended to enter politics, and became MLAs, MPs and CMs, by when they no longer retained their hyperbolic figures...rather.

The opposite of hyperbola ought to be called Hypobola, but it is somehow called Ellipse, continuously bulging and closing ;-)

Take mirrors for instance. Everyone knows that parabolic mirrors are used in the headlights of Madras Mail. You may not have read about it, but elliptical mirrors too had their field day in the earliest lasers...like the one IIT KGP wanted to build in 1965...folks claimed it was a success, but other folks said what they were getting was not a laser beam but a feeble good old luminescent light...it hardly matters. Then there are hyperbolic mirrors...you may not have seen them, but they do find application in holography. I know you think I am bluffing as usual; but here it is by yours truly:

 http://ajp.aapt.org/resource/1/ajpias/v47/i2/p194_s1?isAuthorized=no

Coming to lenses, the concave is hyperbolic, the convex hypobolic, while the plane glass is flat-chested...we used to call such of them ManChesters.

Lens aberration is discussed nicely in the other horrible book by Jenkins and White...folks asked me why can't I write a good book on Optics instead of calling every other book names...well I did, with RSS,...Sid Santra must have bought a copy if he didn't filch his senior's copy...neither me nor Harrys made profits out of it.

There was this Barrel Distortion and its opposite...Pin-Cushion Distortion. Truly they are hyper and hypo...we have seen barrels above but pincushions have no nice anthropomorphic  applications. 

Coming to the human eye and its defects...other than the 'roving eye'...the long sight is rightly called hyperopia, but its opposite, the short sight, ought to be called hypoopia...but since it has a smelly 'poop' within it, it is called myopic (not youropic). There is this middle age sight defect called presbyopia...the defect exhibited by a reluctance to read fine print. Nature doesn't want us to read fine prints after the age of about 45 but we never care for nature and buy bifocals and can never be really be happy with them...ask KK.

We now come to the topic of the day...there is this nuisance thing called hypertension. The GP gave me a stiff dose of medicine to reduce my BP and bring it down to normal.

But, of course, as per the dictates of Murphy's Law, it went right below normal and I became hypotensive.

Curiously the symptoms of Hyper and Hypo-tension are similar...like those of Superiority Complex and Inferiority Complex...the patient who bullies in one case turns a sucker in the other...I have to see my GP tomorrow and get it set right.

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Supratimspeak

Dear Sir,

I don't know how  you do it, but you have managed to turn something as drab and boring as a doctor's advise into a hilarious three piece essay.  Incidentally, the "father william" poem is my favourite from the Alice series.

Jokes apart, I do hope you are feeling better and the dizziness is gone and the BP is under control.

best regards
Supratim

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As you can see, he is now capitalizing (on) his 'I's...but the British-Canadian Effect persists and he still writes: "favourite" instead of "favorite" like me. I like American spellings because I am too lazy...

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Auto-psy 

As I said earlier, 

see:  

http://gpsastry.blogspot.in/2011/09/1-something-vision.html

the nasty old-age eye defect called "cataract" is hard to diagnose. Others looking at your eye think you are faking since your eye looks absolutely normal. You yourself can't detect it too since its onset is slow enough that you get used to it.

Here is an auto-diagnostic test, called the "gps test", by which you yourself can detect its onset; provided you drive your automobile in Hyderabad, where everyone switches on his high-beam headlight all the time in the night, although it is illegal. Ask any young ones if they don't get blinded by the headlights of oncoming vehicles and they admit they do. But when asked why they too switch on their own high beams they would say: "Saalae ko sikhadenge!" 

But suppose you are driving and following a sedan at night. And its red brake-lights suddenly glow.  

And blind you completely.

Then you have cataract for sure.

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