When does a day begin? When does it end? Does dawn arrive with the distant blush of the dark sky? Or does it set in when a young sun hesitatingly appears at the horizon? Does the dwindling warmth announce a day’s demise, or does it linger till the last light is sucked out? Day is imperceptibly born in dawn and dissolves as furtively in dusk. Autumn unhurriedly begets winter. Winter disappears in spring. Spring after a protracted labour births summer that unbeknownst metamorphoses into autumn. When does life begin? Does the beat of foetus’ heart announce a new life? What about the three-day old embryo or a single-celled zygote after fertilization of the egg? Or each of the ova and the millions of sperm? Each of these throbs with potential of bringing forth a new life. Nature goes on cycling in its rhythm, ceaselessly and imperturbably. These relentless revolutions, pursued over eons, give rise to variations. Newer elements born with their unique cycles mingle in the grind of unive...

Reverend Thomas Bayes of Tunbridge Wells in Kent, England, was a Georgian gentleman scientist. These wealthy, independent, male citizens practiced science as a passionate hobby and not a profession. Many were priests. Church provided easy and respectable means of an ample income and vast spare time to indulge scientific queries. By most accounts, Bayes was a hopeless preacher, but an ingenious mathematician. At some point in his life, exactly when is not known, he devised a formula to work out various probability distributions of an uncertain event. And then; he forgot about it. Richard Price, Bayes’ friend, submitted this formula to Royal Society in 1763, two years after his death, under the title, 'An essay towards solving a problem in the doctrine of chances'.  Bayes’ theorem, as the formula came to be called, had no utility in Bayes’ lifetime. Today it is considered a landmark in the history of probability science and is used for: spam filtering, weather forecasting, DNA ...