Skip to main content

Bradbury Firemen

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, the numbers have improved quite a bit. This unconventional method of dealing with vision issues for a young child came from an ophthalmologist with very contrarian views who wrote a blog. I used to read him regularly and subscribed to his newsletters. In our case, the "questionable" medical science worked out quite well. J's school-work did not suffer and neither did her eyes. I am not able to find the good doctor via Google search today. His science does not align with Google's view of the world so they must have decided no one of us need to be subjected to his views. What a loss.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Cheese Making

I never fail to remind J that there is a time and place for everything. It is possibly the line she will remember me by when I am dead and gone given how frequently she hears it. Instead of having her breakfast she will break into a song and dance number from High School Musical well past eight on Monday morning. She will insist that I watch and applaud the performance instead of screaming at her to finish her milk and cereal. Her sense of occasion is seriously lacking but then so is mine. Consider for example, a person walks into the grocery store with the express purpose of buying detergent because they are fresh out of it and laundry is only half way done. However instead of heading straight for detergent, they wander over to the natural foods aisle and go berserk upon finding goat milk on sale for a dollar a gallon. They at once proceed to stock pile so they can turn it to huge quantities home-made feta cheese. That person would be me. It would not concern me in the least that I ha...

Part Liberated Woman

An expat desi friend and I were discussing what it means to return to India when you have cobbled together a life in a foreign country no matter how flawed and imperfect. We have both spent over a decade outside India and have kids who were born abroad and have spent very little time back home. Returning "home" is something a lot of new immigrants like L and myself think about. We want very much for that to be an option because a full assimilation into our country of domicile is likely never going to happen. L has visited India more often than I have and has a much better pulse on what's going on there. For me the strongest drag force working against my desire to return home is my experience of life as a woman in India. I neither want to live that suffocatingly sheltered existence myself nor subject J to it. The freedom, independence and safety I have had in here in suburban America was not even something I knew I could expect to have in India. I never knew what it felt t...

Under Advisement

Recently a desi dude who is more acquaintance less friend called to check in on me. Those who have read this blog before might know that such calls tend to make me anxious. Depending on how far back we go, there are sets of FAQs that I brace myself to answer. The trick is to be sufficiently evasive without being downright offensive - a fine balancing act given the provocative nature of questions involved. I look at these calls as opportunities for building patience and tolerance both of which I seriously lack. Basically, they are very desirous of finding out how I am doing in my personal and professional life to be sure that they have me correctly categorized and filed for future reference. The major buckets appear to be loser, struggling, average, arrived, superstar and uncategorizable. My goal needless to say, is to be in the last bucket - the unknown, unquantifiable and therefore uninteresting entity. Their aim is to pull me into something more tangible. So anyways, the dude in ques...