Heartcrossings

Its no surprise to read that schools kill the creativity inherent in young children . So they end up becoming lesser, duller more conformist versions of themselves over time. According to George Land, based on all the studies he has conducted and all the brain scans he has looked at, we must learn how to judge less, and look to understand more. We must criticize less, and be curious more. He also cites fear and anxiety as being extremely counter productive The TEDxTalk on the topic is worth listening too as well. It would be interesting to see and take the test that the speaker refers to. Its not surprising to hear that 98% percent of 5 year old kids are genius grade in terms of imagination. And things go south after that. Only 2% of adults come close. That is a phenomenal amount of human potential lost.

One of the best pizza places in my town is a hole in a the wall, under a bridge. Locals swear by it and I was introduced to it when I first moved here many years ago. Never a regular but I have been there several times. Then there was a decade long hiatus. Today we had my favorite pizza from there for dinner. It was nothing like the old times though qualitatively the pizza was just the same and just as good. Time has apparently done its work with my sense of taste ,  Maturity brings more grown up (and healthier) eating habits, with an appreciation of robust flavours like game, sour cheese and anchovies. However, whether or not this is a sign of a sophisticated palate is moot. Some argue that because our tasting senses dull with age (especially if we smoke or scald our tongues often), we are simply more tolerant of pungency. I am definitely very tolerant of pungency. Turning into my grandfather I suppose who ate slices of raw ginger in the morning to kick start his appetite....

I got around to reading Becoming recently and could not make it past half of the first section - Becoming Me. The prose reads well and there is a good flow to the story Michelle Obama is trying to tell but after about page thirty seven, I had to admit there was simply no way to get to end of the book running over four hundred pages. Every human life can make for a novel if the story is told well - or atleast that is the theory. In this case, the telling is certainly not at fault and the person who the book has by all accounts lived a remarkable life, so her story is unique.  Yet, something about the telling as polished as it is, fails to connect to Everyman and an universal level. Obama comes across as aloof and sharply centered in herself. She narrates experiences without giving us insights that transcend the narrow confines of one human life no matter how unique. There is also a sense of pervasive airbrushing that makes for a two-dimensional, politically correct sort of narrati...

I have been on MeFi for as long as its been around and occasionally browse the AskMetafilter question. Found this one about uneven power in marriage and its impact of the relationship very insightful. The whole thread is worth reading but one of the responses stood out for me It wouldn’t surprise me at all if the lack of sex is due to her not feeling like a partner and being insecure as to where the relationship is at. This doesn’t mean I think you should hand over half but I think these issues are all intertwined. It’s hard to be intimate with someone if you think they have one foot out the door - and you’ve as much said that you’re hanging onto the house because you’re not sure the relationship will last, so there’s truth to that. There is much truth to this observation I think. If one of the two feels like they are less equal by every material measure, they take their turn to wield power in intimacy. It is a valid way to level the playing field. However, a time might come wh...

Interesting reading about farming for bird nest soup . The soup is expensive and has many purported health benefits; it is made out the nest of swiftlet birds. One of the factors cited in getting a swiftlet farm to thrive is : The locals believe that abundance is related to charity. The more charitable and kind they are to the community, the more the birds will come to build nests in their houses. Also another piece on the topic with some fascinating insights - including this one about renting to humans is not the most profitable for a building owner In the southern Thai town of Pattani some building owners have found that it is more profitable to allow bird's nest swiftlets to occupy their buildings than to rent the spaces to humans. One hotel owner told the New York Times, “With people, you need to have someone to manage the buildings. But with birds, there's no management, no maintenance, you just wait." Reading all this reminds me of the Netflix documentary Ro...

Over the years, Amazon made it too easy to buy and return stuff.  Add to that an assortment of products that feels infinite. Given those two factors, the listing of banned, bad and otherwise questionable products (featuring Amazon's Choice sometimes), is likely to be a bit of an irritant and just that.  I have been a long time shopper on Amazon and believe that I know how to navigate the maze.  Most regulars I am sure have their own methods and feel they could manage. It is customers like us that make Amazon complacent - they don't feel any need to take responsibility . It is easier to find legal arguments to pin the blame on the third=party seller and focus on making a friction-less shopping experience for the customer. That is what keeps us around.  In July, the federal Third Circuit Court of Appeals disagreed with Amazon’s arguments. It held that the retailer is a seller and, in Pennsylvania, which has strict product liability laws, can be sued for items sold...

Have been reading some essays by Betrand Russell recently and ran into this little gem I had first read in my teens  - the opening lines of  An Outline of Intellectual Rubbish: Man is a rational animal—so at least I have been told. Throughout a long life, I have looked diligently for evidence in favour of this statement, but so far I have not had the good fortune to come across it, though I have searched in many countries spread over three continents. On the contrary, I have seen the world plunging continually further into madness. I have seen great nations, formerly leaders of civilization, led astray by preachers of bombastic nonsense. Every line of this essay feels universally true of all humanity at all times. That was the feeling that hit me upon that first reading in high school and not much has changed in all these years. Nice essay here that shares that very sentiment where the author describes "expressive rationality" - a kind of rationality that does appear to e...

Read and interesting paper about hair and and legal rights related to it. In conclusion, the authors state Legal scholars have long argued that people have an interest in their extra-corporeal body parts.Hair, however, has seldom been considered in arguments asserting that people should have a property interest in their bodily materials to preserve individual autonomy and dignity.Despite the social and historical significance of hair and the dehumanizing effects of forced hair-takings, hair is often considered a mere waste product that can be used for various forensic and medical analysis with a minimum of intrusion and pain. Moreover, courts continue to ignore the social meaning of hair and decline to hold that individuals have an absolute right to assert their identity and reveal personal information through hair rituals or grooming Opinions abound on women and short hair - what some of the drivers for that maybe. This article posits that it is the societal expectation that mid...

I am reading John Cheever's Falconer side by side with Salman Rushdie's Golden House . Not sure why I would choose such a mis-matched duo but I struggle to stay on one story-line these days. A combination of age, access to technology, multi-tasking as a way of life and survival are likely to blame. But this makes for such a strange back and forth - Cheever and Rushdie. I would not recommend it.  For one thing, I am definitely not interested in magic realism anymore. There was a place and time for that in my life decades ago. I feel like Rushdie failed to grow up as a writer - continue to appeal to the tastes of an older, more frazzled, more impatient readers who in their youth had the time and energy to dissect his complex prose and thought process. I crave the elegant beauty of his Haroun and the Sea of Stories . That is magic realism done right to my taste. Read the book first in college and then again after J was born. Did not love it one bit less.  Cheever stays very ...

Wonderful essay on death and how modern America deals with it.  The last paragraph says it all: The bodiless obsequy, which has become a staple of available options for bereaved families in the past half century, has created an estrangement between the living and the dead that is unique in human history. Furthermore, this estrangement, this disconnect, this refusal to deal with our dead (their corpses), could be reasonably expected to handicap our ability to deal with death (the concept, the idea of it). And a failure to deal authentically with death might have something to do with an inability to deal authentically with life. There is something to be said for experiencing funerals, the loss of someone's loved one even if they had not been particularly close to you. Watching others cope is a great and sobering learning. Those who have had very limited exposure to such events in their lives may have correspondingly limited ability to deal with big pain and loss that may not...

In her book Heartland: A Memoir of Working Hard and Being Broke in the Richest Country on Earth Sarah Smarsh writes What I did hunger for sharply, what my life lacked most sorely, was in my mother’s heart—which had been scarred by the traumas of monetary poverty but carried a feeling of perpetual lack and discontent that knows no class. The poverty I felt most, then, was a scarcity of the heart, a near-constant state of longing for the mother right in front of me yet out of reach. She withheld the immense love she had inside her like children of the Great Depression hoarded coins. Being her child, I had no choice but to be emotionally impoverished with her. I offered to rub her back every day so that I could touch her skin. That feeling of perpetual lack and discontent Smarsh describes could come from any number of traumas but it leaves the person feeling unreachable to those who seek their affection. It could a mother who is mentally distant because her marriage is empty and l...

I picked up this book from a used book-store recently, attracted by the title.  A big fan of rural innovation, I was excited to read about ingenious inventions where cleverness, thrift and enterprise lead to great outcomes - and was not disappointed. The book starts with the story of MittiCool which is jugaad at its finest. And that is only one of many dozen examples culled from around the BRIC countries.  The authors describe western innovation as doing more with more - throw money and resources into R&D and expect it will produce results, pay for itself. They point to evidence that such has not been the case and the ROI for innovation investment has fallen woefully short. The jugaad style is all about doing more with less and while it may not be the most optimized for scale, it does deliver an amazing amount of value. So there is a great deal to learn from the masters of jugaad.  I remember first stepping into a Michael's upon my arrival in America. It was u...

The only time I watch TV  is in a hotel room while on a business trip if I am truly exhausted and simply cannot do anything else. Such events are few and far between - there is almost always something else that needs my time. Each time I feel a tremendous sense of disconnect from the world that is playing out there in news, talk-shows, movies, cop-shows, commercials and what have you.  The commercials are particularly interesting for me - because I have no prior exposure to them. From watching detergent ads for example, I concluded that the target market is predominantly of one ethnicity. It was unclear to me why the rest of the population did not need to edified as to the benefits of these products. Overall TV watching for me is like being on a roller-coaster and trying not to throw-up.  I wonder if they have ever done longitudinal studies on sets of people exposed to TV a few hours a day every day controlled against a group of folks like me who have not had a TV at ...

Nice essay on our collective addition to speed . The author says: The fast pace of society has thrown our internal timer out of balance. It creates expectations that can’t be rewarded fast enough—or rewarded at all. When things move more slowly than we expect, our internal timer even plays tricks on us, stretching out the wait, summoning anger out of proportion to the delay. Those of us who remember life in pre-internet, pre-cellular times can perhaps attest to the change they have undergone themselves. If you were a love-lorn teen back in the day, you waited for the mailman every afternoon and sifted feverishly through the mail to see if that very special person had replied to your last letter.  The unit of time this kid was willing to wait to be gratified (or not) was a day. So they had the luxury of moping about the lack of a letter, wondering if the object of their interest had fallen out of love or if the mail was stuck somewhere in transit or perhaps their own letter ha...

Reading these lines in the very first page of The Sympathizer by Viet Thanh Nguyen made me pause After all, a talent is something you use, not something that uses you. The talent you cannot not use, the talent that possesses you—that is a hazard, I must confess. Many of us have such talents that they pose a variety of hazards. Those who are able to master, control and use their talent achieve greatness of some kind. In the workplace for example, there are so many who are great at what they take pleasure in - the mastery of their craft. Almost always, these talented individuals find themselves scraping the bottom of the the totem pole - while all around them others are getting promoted to the level of their incompetence.  The presence of such masters in the craft within an organization enables the rest of the population to float up the food-chain simply because they cannot do the "real" work. In fact in the absence of mastery, consultants would be hired to fill the void...

San Francisco leaves me feeling like I am made of denser substance than the ethereal, cheerful and smiling locals. How they manage to be all of that in a city so hellishly expensive boggles the mind. Maybe they have found connection to their larger purpose in the universe and are not moribund like us folks peeved and anxious about bills, savings, college tuition, retirement and old age. Almost allegorically, at a used book store I overheard this middle aged couple discussing the purchase of a book light. One of them had thirty dollars in their bank account, the other had less - he did not name a number. They needed four dollars and were trying to see if that could be shared - or maybe half debit card and half cash. He had five dollars and change but did not want to spend it all. They were both readers and she was also crafty. He was explaining to her how this book light would be perfect for both of them. She was doubtful at first but came around quite enthusiastically. If I ha...

Every time, I read a story like this I wish the alternatives to Google could provide us noisy information without bias, filter or personalization. Just dump content on the user and allow them to figure out if any of it is useful. Could be a lot more work to get what you are looking for but we would not living in the Fahrenheit 451 world. Today they try to provide meaningful results and often miss the mark. This is definitely one of those cases where perfect is the enemy of good enough. When J was in elementary school, she failed her vision tests a few times. Instead of getting her glasses, we decided to have her always sit close to the blackboard so she would see things clearly. The plan worked out fine and for the most part no one knew her vision was not the best. Even when she finally got her glasses in middle school, we decided the best strategy would be not to use them all the time - as a dancer she loved having such choice.  Last few times she's had her vision tested, t...

As J gets ready over the next few years to go out into the world and live her own life, she is full of questions about the true value and purpose of college education and how best to use her time there. We are very different people with life goals that are about as far apart as they can possibly be. So it is hard for me to be in her shoes or advise her on the way forward beyond what commonsense might allow. Once the discussion goes into specifics, it gets all but impossible for me to contribute. Recently, I referred her to Clay Christensen's milkshake marketing as framework to use to understand what she wants out of college and everything else to follow. What job was her undergrad education hired to do for her? Once she answers that question, perhaps she should try to find out how that job might get done by her college? What would it take? The milkshake as we know had a certain viscosity, came in the right sized cup and was dispersed through a straw that allowed it to last the l...

Great essay on the psychology of money . Many nuggets of wisdom abound and its worth reading all the way through. I loved these lines in particular Accepting that everything involving money is driven by illogical emotions and has more moving parts than anyone can grasp is a good start to remembering that history is the study of things happening that people didn’t think would or could happen. This is especially true with money. One of those moving parts could be trading algorithms that have not been "trained" to scan for typos and adjust decision making accordingly. To that end some stock of some very random company could sky-rocket for no reason as this recent news story reported .

An anti-surveillance shield would be more interesting than such a mask . The very notion of privacy has been long gone. What is left is the degree of difficulty in obtaining the zinger insights from it. The data is out there and can be used to learn everything about everyone that does not live off the grid. The question is whether it is worth anyone's while to invest the resources to surveil all of us all the time and plumb the depths of our individual souls. We are all "safe" until such time as there is no benefit to the investor in doing so. Research rooted in group or individual psychology that can now scale up using abundant data feels lot more worrisome. Reading the conclusion of this paper suggests to me a large number of monetize-able use cases that can put our illusory "safety" at risk In this paper we have highlighted the importance of using big data to comprehend complex psychological constructs such as nostalgia. We have also discussed some method...

I am bug and mosquito magnet. They seek me out with a vengeance any time they can. making it hard to stay outdoors as much as I would like. Strong repellents applied to my skin do work but it is not a good solution. It is good to read that a better alternative may be possible some day First, the ultra-thin material creates a physical barrier that the proboscis—the appendage mosquitoes use to acquire their "blood meal," as the researchers put it—can't puncture. More surprisingly, their experiments also showed that graphene might be responsible for blocking the chemical signals mosquitoes use to sense where their next meal is in the first place, essentially acting like a kind of "force field" against the pesky, disease-carrying insects.

Under other circumstances, a book like Brotopia would not have held my interest for too long. The thesis is thin and the author belabors it to death. In the first few pages we get the point - there is an original sin in how Silicon Valley was founded by a certain type of white male who then only hired men just like them. That gene pool propagated to the exclusion of every other kind of human being. Beyond that the book is about evidence to support the position. The author's high-pitched gossipy tone only serves to hurt her credibility But I have a daughter that will join the work force in a few years and some of the horror stories  even if they are remotely true feel very important for both her and I to read and discuss.  “He said, ‘I’m offensive, I bet I can offend you,’” Holmes remembered. Because she was “trying to be one of the bros,” she decided to play along. “He gets close to my face and says, ‘You’re so fucking dumb, and you don’t know shit. The only thing you’re goo...

I read A Beautiful, Terrible Thing by Jen Waite recently and it made me think hard about the person I had been when I decided to walk out of marriage with a three-month old J. Like Waite, I did things that would sound absolutely absurd to the average person whose life was not imploding.  Like her, I was surrounded by people who allowed me to behave how I did and even encouraged it; they assumed it was expected of them and that they served a good cause. Instead of a personal catharsis, I had turned my situation into a public restroom where just about anyone could barge in for relief. Unlike Waite, I never got closure on what drove me to do what I did. Even though I never regretted the decision, it was never possible to articulate "Why?" to others quite as clearly as Waite does in her book. As a result, my decisions ended up looking more like those of a hormonal woman with post-partum depression most likely. Many assume  I made them on account of feeling "entitled...

While waiting at my hairdresser's recently, my thoughts turned to unit price of a haircut and that of cutting the grass in one's yard. The frequency of the two events are not the same, but the price per unit could come close depending on the quality of the haircut and the size of the yard. There is a point where these two lines in a two axis graph could meet. So as I sat there flipping through old fashion magazines, I wondered what that point of intersection signified. Say that number is $X/unit then should we also consider how long it takes the job to be done. If approximately the same time, then it's even more interesting.  Your yard guy takes a blunt instrument to hack overgrown grass into shape and a chatty young lady works with finer things like combs and scissors to shape your hair. They make about same money per hour of labor. When you are skilled at either job, the process is fairly mundane. Some hairstyles could be challenging in the way that some yards might be ...

Nice essay on aging and how that is evolving even as a concept. If  you don't feel and act your age, then could you actually be aging? What then happens to societal expectations of people acting their age. If people are staying healthy and active for longer and remaining in the workforce past retirement, they are also taking away room from younger people who will need to wait their turn. The opportunities that they deserved in their 30s and 40s may now come decades later. You have to wonder if that might breed resentment against seniors. Its like a guest overstaying their welcome or a comedian thrashing out lines long after the applause has ceased.  Our social systems are designed for a certain level of life expectancy with some amount of elasticity. It would be a challenge to have that exceeded when being a centenarian turns more norm than exception. Add to that if people past seventy and fully active in the workforce - not only would that depress wages for younger people ...

Beautiful, thought-provoking essay about race and America. These lines summarize the central thesis but could be transferred by a reader to other contexts too My father knew exactly what he was doing when he raised that flag. He knew that our people’s contributions to building the richest and most powerful nation in the world were indelible, that the United States simply would not exist without us. It could be about the dogged pride some people take in their work that neither showers them with riches nor accolades. Yet they give it their best very everyday not expecting anything in return. Perhaps like the author's father, they see some indelible connection between what they do and some larger cause or purpose they hold dear.  Reading this made me think about such people I have encountered in my life. In my youth, I have been scornful that they toil away in oblivion and should know better. But not anymore. Time has taught many lessons - I have observed how life turned o...

What a truly awful idea to have professional photographers follow children around at a summer camp. The best part of being away is the complete disconnect from the world outside and immersion into the here and now. So many people (adults and kids alike) are completely dependent on their devices and connectivity that they have long forgotten who they were or could be - if fully disconnected. The article quotes Lenore Skenazy: "If you were tormented at school, or even just misunderstood, camp was a place you could become another self, even your true self. Why? Because you were AWAY, unshackled from the person everyone 'knew' you were. Camp was like a chrysalis, where you metamorphosed." How true and what a sad thing to happen to these kids. Skenazy says of their plight  "like the panopticon at prison – there is nowhere to hide. Nowhere to grow." 

Such a heart-warming idea to bring seniors and students together in a common living space that helps both. One of J's daycare centers back in the day was right next to an assisted living facility. The seniors lived a solitary existence there and there was never any signs of life. In sharp contrast there was this playground full of squealing, running, jumping kids right next door. So much life and such an absence of it so sharply juxtaposed. It always made me wonder why no one was getting these two groups together. I don't think I ever asked anyone about it and assumed it had to do with liabilities that neither side wanted to expose themselves to. But it always stayed in my mind as a remarkable example of lost opportunity. So it was great to see someone doing the right and logical thing at last. Maybe change will come to my community too - in time. 

Wise words from the new head of Nasscom Debjani Ghosh about what the IT world needs today   “These new jobs are not about technical skills alone. The requirement is for bilinguals and trilinguals. You need a coder who is brilliant in communication, who has project management skills, who understands design, and is able to put it all together. Then, you need domain expertise,” She is entirely right. Interestingly enough hiring managers tasked with finding such employees do not have the skills to understand the what makes up " bilinguals and trilinguals". They are still looking at people as a sum total of their work experience with a certain key-word density in the resume. The screening process is such that it definitely eliminates the best people for the job.  An employer may do better looking at the reject pile of candidates than pursuing the ones that make the screening cut. Assessing the humane skills of a technologist and how that would translate into excellence...

Interesting reading this David Foster Wallace commencement speech . The lines that stood out most for me: ..learning how to think really means learning how to exercise some control over how and what you think. It means being conscious and aware enough to choose what you pay attention to and to choose how you construct meaning from experience. Because if you cannot exercise this kind of choice in adult life, you will be totally hosed.  Reading this reminded me of my father and traits I have inherited from him. We are both guilty of extreme tunnel vision at times and overthinking some small and random thing to death. Its never clear what will end up sticking in our head like a burr but once it does we do pay disproportionate attention to it. I started to see my father in myself about a decade ago and have since fought to pay to attention to things that are of actual use and value in my life, so I tend to agree with Wallace "  if you cannot exercise this kind of choice i...