A Digital Garden of Things That Interest Me
Time you enjoy wasting is not wasted time - Bertrand Russell Russel’s quote is something that I often think about each time I spend time reading stuff that I barely understand and more importantly that is of no practical use. When Dave Edmonds biography of the philosopher Derek Parfit started getting rave reviews, I decided … Continue reading Parfit
We live in an age of dwindling attention spans. The rise of Instagram and the clickbaity nature of the links that we encounter each day is proof of this. The advice given to every aspiring writer is to catch the readers attention before they wander away and to cleverly deploy images to mold their opinions. … Continue reading Beyond the Lamp: Florence Nightingale’s Statistical Legacy
When something sounds too good to be true, always be suspicious. The incoming revolution in the transport sector heralded by Musk revolutionizing EVs - by making them an object of desire – has been touted as the best thing to have happened to mankind. While the energy to power these vehicles will someday be ‘clean’, … Continue reading The Underbelly of the EV Revolution
Look around yourself and observe all the objects you see. Every one of them will one day be categorized as waste and either end up in a landfill, get decomposed, broken down, recycled or end up in the oceans. Everything we touch was created by generating waste; and will some day end up becoming waste. … Continue reading Thinking about Waste
Earlier this month, while traveling to Bhopal, I was served this powdered concoction by the Indian Railways. Though it looked like chalk powder, the ‘food’ item in question was Knorr Instant soup and is a classic example of what goes as Ultra Processed Food aka UPF. According to the NOVA classification, processed food is categorized … Continue reading Ultra Processed Food
In my line of work, I attend (often, forced to) a lot of panel discussions, workshops and conferences. Most of these have a set pattern. It’s usually around a global issue or something that affects at least a few hundred million people; and the respondents in 3 minutes pontificate on how the problem needs to … Continue reading A Conflict of Visions
Thomas Hobbes, was born in the year of the Spanish Armada and lived through the English Civil War. When Charles I lost his head, he lived in exile in France and only returned after the monarchy was restored under Charles II. (I had written a bit about this period here). To understand his political philosophy, … Continue reading The Narrow Corridor, the Cage of Norms and the Red Queen Effect
Last month, I had two ‘elevating’ experiences in Bombay. The first was my vertical descent from the third floor of a building to the ground floor. No, I didn’t fall from the balcony. I took an elevator – the only catch being that this happened to be the world’s largest. (I’m still trying to wrap … Continue reading Elevators as Mass Transport Systems
China used more cement between 2011 and 2013 than the U.S. used in the entire 20th Century. Yes, you heard that right! Now, with this knowledge, it’s not unnatural to imagine China importing lots of crude oil, heavy machinery or vehicles. But the fact is that China’s largest category of imports is an entirely unrelated category … Continue reading The Chip Wars
China has 1100. South Korea 86, Malaysia 61, Indonesia 48 and India a paltry 24. What am I referring to? If you guessed ‘billionaires’, the answer is wrong. It’s the number of skyscrapers taller than 200 meters! Why is India an outlier in this otherwise pan-Asian phenomenon? One answer to this is the low Floor … Continue reading Order without Design