Heartcrossings

There used to be the notion that if you were smart and worked hard, there was room at the top for you in America. Many of us immigrants came to the country believing this to be true - there were success stories that illustrated this as possible.  One of my elderly relatives was toiling away is an obscure banking job in India back in the 60s with no prospects of growth or change. He had great attitude and hustle but that would not get him anywhere in Kolkata back in the day.  He immigrated to the States. Started out as a bank teller, worked a large number of side gigs including catering, event planning and owning some fast food franchises over time. He also moved up in his bank job and retired a senior executive. Both his kids went to highly selective colleges and are doing well for themselves. P had lived the American Dream and was an inspiration for family and friends in Kolkata. Just about everyone who had a relative in America could tell you such a story. For kids like us ba

What the father of AI said in 1978 may not be that far from the truth even today Near the end of the research stage of his career, in 1978, McCarthy had to give up on his purist idea of ​​artificial intelligence: “To succeed, artificial intelligence needs 1.7 Einsteins, two Maxwells five Faradays and the funding of 0.3 Manhattan Projects,” he resignedly recognized. Instead of harnessing the prodigious intellect of the luminaries John McCarthy listed there, in today's world we throw the Amazon Mechanical Turk to prepare large volumes of test and training data so the AI may become smarter over time. It's not hard to see why that does not end up happening. We are not quite solving the need equation that McCarthy had so succinctly proposed. Instead we are hoping a million monkeys at the piano pounding away will wrap up Schubert's Unfinished Symphony one of these days. Our brute force efforts at teasing intelligence from machines have certainly lead to hyper targeted mar

In his book How to Stop Time Matt Haig writes  "‘People believed in witches because it made things easier. People don’t just need an enemy, they need an explanation. And it’s often useful, in unsettled times, where ignorance is everywhere, for people to believe in witches . . . Who do you think believed in witches?’ We live in rather unsettled and arguably ignorant times. We are definitely looking for explanations and finding an enemy to frame. How much further does society need to unravel before we need witches to ease our troubles? If not witches what will stand in for them in challenging times to explain hard things away?  Haig tells a clever story and uses time to shine light on our collective stupidity as human beings. We were looking for witches once, in more enlightened times people who failed to fit the accepted mold were referred to the mental asylum without further ado. Most recently, we have made political correctness and identity labels the way to project our im

This blog has a Facebook page but I do not. Over the years, I have played around with the privacy options, joined and left groups, clicked and ignored ads and videos - always randomly. I take perverse pleasure in seeing what FB thinks I want to consume in terms of content and what persona it tries to assign me. It has been a fascinating experiment and the results have been interesting to say the least. Ad Nauseum takes a simple and clever brute force approach to achieve very similar results with Google. Instead of doing random things, it just clicks all ads and makes it impossible to profile the person. They have to be placed in an out-group for any persona analysis to make sense. I would consider myself very averse to being marketed to and definitely targeted for relevant ads.  Yet, I always read the Trader Joe's Fearless Flyer when it shows up in my mailbox. There is no targeting of me and none of the content was written with me in mind. But I do read the whole thing, sometim

Computer science being counted as math credit sounds like a bad idea. Where is the equivalence between proving theorems and solving riders and being able to code something by calling a few APIs to make some stuff happen? Recently, I met a young man working on his PhD in physics at a top university. As we waited on the tarmac, we chatted a bit about life and career from the vantage point of my age and his. Despite his extensive education, he did not have a plan - not yet atleast. Which is not the worst thing for someone still in their 20s.  But when he talked about having picked up data analysis and programming along the way, I felt a twinge of disappointment. He seemed to value those skills as real and tangible - something that could get him a job in an investment bank. Yet, he persisted with physics as long as he did because he loved the subject.  Was it that such love does not convey into material things like a job or was it that coding has become equivalent of everything scienc

The hikikomori lifestyle sounds like the far end of the spectrum of what would be considered a solitary way of life. For a person who is not particularly social, the modern world allows them to create a safety blanket and live as isolated as they would like.  Life can be completely digitized and all need for human contact eliminated. It used to be the awkward and unsocial among us, were pushed out of their comfort zone continuously. They had to go out to work, meet people along the way and at the place of work even if they chose to remain mostly silent. Buying essential goods and services required a conversation with the seller. Complete isolation in the manner of hikikomori would not be compatible with survival in the past. Presumably, under those conditions a person would learn to cope and over time develop a working relationship with the world. Today it is very much within the realm to survive comfortably in total isolation making it that much harder for those with social anxiety

These scheduled black-outs in California are reminiscent of what they called "load-shedding" back in Kolkata when I was a kid. It was a fact of life, the schedule was predictable so no one acted surprised or offended. We rolled out the kerosene lamps and candles, got on with our lives.  If the mosquitoes got too out of hand, there was the mosquito net to get under. Typically, kids who wanted to lazy out of doing homework were quick to get under the net and into bed, call it a day. And at the appointed hour, the power would be turned back on. This was decades ago, in a city that was once called the "Dying City". Yet the present day ordeals of the hapless Californians sounds significantly worse The outages could last days. That’s because turning the electricity back on is no small task—every mile of power line that’s been shut off needs to be inspected visually, by foot or vehicle or air. The winds that caused the shutdown could have knocked branches and shrubs in

Unusual things happen when flights are cancelled in a strange country and instead of an hour layover you are out looking for a place to live overnight and even longer. By the time the night was done, I had walked a few miles in rain and wind with some strangers I had met in the plane, chilled to the bone. One of whom lent me a jacket she had to spare but it was no match for the weather.  Yet another had an apartment near my hotel and invited me over for dinner. I was grateful for the warm food after the ordeals of the day. We talked about our woes and how poorly the airline had managed the mess. My neighbor on the flight had not been able to find a hotel and was sent to a nearby military base to camp for the night. She appeared to be shaken by this turn of events but had no choice.   As we waited to find out if we were going to stay one or more nights here, we also learned about each other's lives - places people had traveled to in years past, kids back home who may or may no

I found this book Setting Limits With Your Strong-Willed Child in a used book store and decided to buy it for my friend A who has very challenging teen to deal with. Was not sure if the book was aimed at teenagers or younger children but thought there could be some useful learning anyway. I was not disappointed as I started to browse through. By the end of chapter one, the author gets to the core of the problem. When the child is strong-willed and just about impossible to manage or bring into compliance it is a reflection of the emotional style and temperament mismatched between the manager and the managed.  More importantly, the distress on the part of the parent stems from their disappointment over their strong-willed child not being the ideal they had hoped and dreamed of. They struggle to let go of that image of perfection and accept reality. All actions they take therefore only worsen the parent-child relationship.  The advice is quite simple "Letting go if your ideal pict

I never had any problems with my Amazon returns and have made a fair share  of them over the years.  So when they started offering a drop-off at Kohl's as an option, I was surprised I wanted to try it. The local UPS store closer to me than the Kohl's and printing the label and pasting it on the box is not such a great hardship. Arriving at Kohl's I was surprised to find that the Amazon return area was the busiest in the store - it had sucked the air out of the room.  Copious amounts of paper and was being wasted by printing large return receipts with a 25% store discount for each item returned. I had a bag full of these labels by the time I was done. Despite all of us getting these great discount labels no one seemed to stick around to shop at Kohl's. I did stay back to see how this experiment was turning out for the store. People were visibly happy to get their discount coupons with their return. Likely the reason they will continue to come back. But in trying to use

Clever idea to make your TV screen double up as as art display on the wall. I will take the Gizmodo reviewer's word that the product is not quite all that it claims to be . The criticism is reasonable  I can see how the Frame might be wonderfully appealing for the lobbies of fancy office buildings or as incognito sports-watching installations at nice restaurants. In those instances, the TV as an object is more of a business expense anyways. It almost looks good, too. From a distance, the effect of Art Mode on the Frame was somewhat uncanny, as if you were looking at a weird print in a shiny package. Once you get close up, however, the illusion completely falls apart. Would be great to bring the museum experience home using such a TV.  So you get to tour the best galleries from around the world and learn about the works on display as you do. Could be a wonderful way to get kids engaged in art and culture from a young age. Definitely a step in the right direction - for a TV to

J is an avid thrifter and takes pride in being able to find wonderful items of clothing on the cheap. Over the years, I have learned to enjoy our thrift store outings and looking for needles in haystacks.  Definitely love the element of surprise and the off-beat provenance of some of the clothes. And every once in a while J will find something that fits so well that it might as well have been tailored for her. It makes up for all the trouble. Both J and I have friends who absolutely swear by thrift. Many of mine have not bought clothes from a department store or even on-line for decades. This is a community of people who want to spend their money sensibly while doing the right thing by the environment.  Thrifting is a sustainable way of life and that is a big part of the appeal apart from the wicked good deals. It may not quite as hi-tech as plankton based shoes but still helps the world a bit.

Such tragedy - the story of every teacher this Time magazine article covers. I have been fortunate to see some of the most amazing people teach J, root for her success and love her. My kid owes much of who she is today to those that taught her. There was brilliance, kindness, humor and compassion in those teachers - some of whom have completely transformed lives of kids they came into contact with, including J's.  Teaching has long been dominated by women, and experts say the roots of its relatively low pay lie in sexism. “The ‘hidden subsidy of public education’ is the fact that teachers for many years were necessarily working at suppressed wage levels because they really had no options other than teaching,” says Susan Moore Johnson, a professor of education at Harvard and an expert in teacher policy. It may also be true that the best most tenacious teachers love their job so much that they are willing to bear a great deal of hardship to keep teaching kids. In a sense we are

Nice article that explains the connection between simple or simplistic language and authoritarianism .  Could also be considered an attempt to infantalize the citizenry. People have to deal with a lot of complexity and knotty problems in their personal and professional lives. This naturally reduces their capacity or even eagerness to hear complicated arguments on larger topics of the day that impact society and the world. The Cliff Notes version is usually all we have energy for at the end of a long day. So when that is delivered with great predictability we may find ourselves shying away from a long from intelligent argument. The downside of such simplicity is outlined clearly: “Well, I think the big downside is that it’s false. The world is a complex place. It’s not a simple environment. There are many interacting forces simultaneously that really elude simple explanations or simple solutions" We all know these things to be true and yet when laying down the law for a fus

On our way to a musical recently, while waiting for the walk sign at the intersection, noticed a woman in a wheel chair. She was double amputee and holding up a sign about having served in two wars and now homeless. Most people tried to avoid eye contact with her and some gave her money. Just about everyone who passed her on their way to the theater was visibly uncomfortable. That image stayed with me for days. It called to mind many other instances of social apathy and failure to act. Having grown up in India, never had to look to hard for that.  In-fact, there was such an overload of signs that pointed to us having given up on those who needed the most help, were all around. The levels well over the threshold of compassion fatigue. To assuage our guilt, we may offer free food and clothes to the poor on festivals, but look the other way as they continued to suffer for the rest of the year. No matter what we did was only going to be a drop in the ocean - the unmet need was so big. I

My local farmer's market is very small but it never disappoints. As I was baking the eggplant I got from there recently, it occurred to me that the level of satisfaction that the whole experience affords, cannot be measured just by cost. The said eggplant was time and a half more expensive that what I could get the grocery store. But I wanted to savor the finished product for longer because it had taken effort to procure and maybe just for that reason tasted so much better.   Enjoying the humble eggplant bake reminded me of this interview with the former editor of Vogue India about how to be less consumerist in fashion and clothing. She talks about how clothing should inspire some sense of nostalgia and we would be less likely to discard pieces that have value because they are tied to story close to your heart. Such was my eggplant too -  it was different, chosen with deliberation, paid for in cash and there was human touch in the transaction between buyer and seller. Spending th

Watched The Color Purple recently and came away feeling sad despite the relatively upbeat ending to the story. Comes a point when so much needless pain, suffering and humiliation has been endured by the protagonist that no redemption can make her whole. The story-telling in the movie was so stark that it leaves a hollow two-dimensional feeling. The women in the movie are victims of the very men who are supposed to love and protect them. The violence that awaits them in the world outside is an extension of that awful misery they live at home every day.  Even love comes in this story from a particularly hopeless place - in the forming of the odd  ménage à trois    between Celie, her abusive husband and his lover Shug. The story of the supremely suppressed and abused woman finding her salvation is an universal one. There are many in vernacular Indian literature that I am familiar with. For any woman who has had the good fortune of "emancipation" and has the ability to live th

Fact is stranger than fiction sometimes as is this news about workman's compensation set in France . According to Aurélien Boulanger, a lawyer at Gide, an international law firm based in Paris, the Court of Appeal’s decision was not entirely surprising. “There are even more extraordinary cases like that of an employee stung by a wasp while driving a car, considered as a work accident,” Mr. Boulanger said in a telephone interview. Once it was established that the accident had happened at a place of employment or during time spent on business, it was up to the employer to prove that the event had nothing to do with work, which could be very difficult, he added. This on one hand and employers being able to monitor their employees almost non-stop makes for a very strange combination of facts to co-exist. Such is the world we live in.

Sad but logical this Slate essay about who will win because of climate change . Here is one example of a "winner" who just happened to get lucky “Nobody’s celebrating climate change, and I’m certainly not celebrating climate change, but I’m almost careful to say it’s had a positive effect on our wines,” says Darryl Brooker, president of the Mission Hill Family Estate in the Okanagan Valley of British Columbia, Canada. “We are definitely growing varietals that we couldn’t have grown 20 and definitely 30 years ago.” Brooker’s own high regard for his wine, he says, has been validated by the recent recognition Mission Hill has received in international wine competitions and the higher prices that consumers have been willing to pay for it. Would not be surprised at all if schools started to offer degrees in Restoration Economics, so kids could out into the climate changed world we leave behind and make the most of it.

I read A California Story by Namit Arora while traveling and it kept me company through flight delays, rainy weather and jet-lagged sleeplessness. This is an important detail because it has to do with the atmosphere of the story. It invokes a great nostalgia for things past, a time of innocence and the end of irrational exuberance that was 2003.  For those of us who lived in America in the years the protagonist, Ved speaks of, we could relate to this story many different ways. If you had been a cog in the wheel, doing your meaningless part to advance the mission of one of the many technology over-lords of the day, like Ved, you would recognize the emptiness you found where your soul should have been.  He asks himself why he lives a life that does feel genuinely his own. You hear his angst in his conversations with Liz when they go on dates - both in the good and bad phases of their emotionally tentative relationship. You can agree with a lot of what he says and think about what yo

While having cup of Cafe du Monde coffee chicory blend with milk and sugar (any other way felt plain wrong), it crossed my mind that this is not so different from Madras Kaapi that I remember very well from childhood. It is not an aroma to forget. My concoction made in a rickety French Press was not quite the decoction that defines good kaapi, but it brought back memories. There was a  grandma in my neighborhood back when I was a kid that made some seriously good coffee. She started by roasting the coffee beans. You knew the best was yet to come - such was the delicious smell of anticipation. Then came the grinding - one step closer to the magic drink. We watched her but from respectful distance. And finally when all was done and it showed up at the table steaming in it's small tumbler, you hesitated to drink it. It was hot for one thing and then it would be rude to ask for a refill. This was something to enjoy in a small portion. So you did not want to be the first to finish

This one is a story about nothing but pretends to study our souls as driven by the draining iPhone battery . For the longest time, I had such a phone myself and was always found close to a wall outlet. My best friend gifted me a phone charger to put me out of my misery. Life has been just normal since then.  That is how easy it is to fix the problem or if you want to spend a bit extra - not impossible to replace the battery either. A team of researchers spending time on analyzing the behavior of low battery iPhone owners seems wasteful and pointless. Better things could be studied in the world. “The methods we used are basically anthropological,” says Robinson. “[We] get a complete understanding of respondent’s motivations, mapping out their life world.” And as a big part of that understanding, his lab confirmed that “from the moment you get up in the morning, to the moment you go to bed, [energy concerns] are there all the time.” Spending time on pointless research leads to find

This sounds like a truly awful way to "improve" customer experience in airplanes .  From the time it takes a flight attendant to respond to a call button, to preferences for prosecco versus chardonnay, to which bathroom gets the most use—the information can help optimize all aspects of flight. “You can make the service more attentive,” said Ronald Sweers, an Airbus cabin-products director. While the digital doodads are expected to simplify flight attendant workloads, their true value may lie in giving airlines more insights about what happens in the cabin. Much smaller things would go way further to help us poor souls traveling economy and cramped for many long hours. How about free and working wifi for one?  Maybe a way to prop your feet up a bit even if under the seat in front of us? Presumably the passenger can choose to stow their bag there or give their feet a break. If you are going to sell me food then how about making that food edible?  The low or no (God forbid

Love the boldness of this idea so much, showing off your acne-scarred face instead of hiding it. The odds that this experiment will work are pretty slim but it is commendable all the same. A new startup called Starface wants us to radically rethink our relationship with acne. Rather than spending all our energy hiding it, the brand invites us to decorate our faces with little yellow stars that cover our zits, helping to clear them while simultaneously drawing attention to them An idea ahead of its time perhaps. The pervasive culture of air-brushed perfection cannot be overcome in one fell swoop to decorate an acne-ridden face with so many yellow stars. Maybe the first step is to make being make-up free the new normal. No teen will want to celebrate their acne if everyone else is caking on the concealer to look flawless.  I grew up in a time and culture where people could walk up to a young person and ask them why they had so much going on on their face. It was expected that you

Such a sad and poignant set of photographs of people with their smart-phones edited out . Its about being trapped in our own bubbles while with people we love and care about.  With children, it is specially hard as they mimic our behavior and escape into their device only because we are absent from them in the real world.  They would have much rather spent their time with us, doing things together instead of separately. In my own experience, I have been more guilty than J of distraction by way of phone. There was a no-electronics rule at dinner time instituted to make sure there would be actual conversations had everyday.  The quality and depth of our relationships with just about everyone likely suffers from our constant distraction. Over time we may socially accept that as the new base-line with no expecting or deserving better. These thoughts crossed my mind when  I watched five old ladies at my neighborhood cafeteria sit and knit together, drinking their coffee and chatting. Th

Its no surprise that employees cannot escape surveillance by their employers. But the depth of monitoring begs the question - to what end? When does this collection of data cross the line into voyeurism ?  Email monitoring that once flagged predetermined keywords can now scan every message for emotional cues, giving bosses a heads up if someone's likely to quit, or if they seem to be considering corporate sabotage. I can understand the part about corporate sabotage though even that is a bit over-zealous and could be subjective and rife with false positive alarm signals. But being likely to quit is another thing altogether. Would it not make more sense to incentivize the boss to keep up retention rates and employee satisfaction numbers?  I once worked for a company where this was done and it fostered a very healthy competition between peer-level managers to keep their ranking on the leader-board. If you were one of the top-ranked managers, you were likely to attract the best

This was a fun documentary to watch about a museum of things rescued from trash ,  Would be interesting to learn the history of these pieces - particularly, the more offbeat ones. At what point did it lose value to the owner and get tossed, were they victims of family feuds, property division, inheritance, down-sizing and divorce. Items of great value to one person but none to the next. Maybe some original owners if they are still around could share the stories of the objects that ended up in trash. I once found a beaten metal painting of the Goddess Durga in dumped outside a trash can. It was a desi family I knew and was a bit surprised to see it there.  I asked the lady of the house if it was okay for me to take it and she was fine with it. Once I brought the spurned goddess home and cleaned her up, I was not quite sure what may be the best way to install her back in a way that would be fitting. It is not upto a mere human to rescue a goddess, so I decided that would be over-steppi

Excellent essay on Lolita and much more. The author very rightly points out: The housewife who married for money and then fakes orgasms, the single mother who has sex with a man she doesn’t really like because he’s offering her some respite: where are the delineations between consent and exploitation, sex and duty? The first time I traded sex for material gain, I had some choices, but they were limited. I chose to be exploited by the man with the resources I needed, choosing his house over homelessness. Lolita was a child, and she was exploited, but she was also conscious of the function of her body in a patriarchal economy. Philosophically speaking, most of us do indeed consent to our own exploitation. Even if not a housewife,a woman has to fake their interest in their husband in intimate and non-intimate ways to keep his self-worth up; to ensure he has enough motivation to do this part for the marriage and the family they have built together. It is the cost of doing business in m

Watching this movie All I See Is You gave me a lot to think about. In the absence of truly magical grade love or earth-shattering chemistry (some people are blessed to have both) in marriage, the system is held in place by the opposing forces of power and control. The party with the greater power generally cedes a bit of control to keep the forces in balance, create parity. The controller must in turn relinquish there desire for increased power (money, social status, business and family connections etc could all be sources of power) to retain their controller-ship (being the key decision-maker in the family - the PTA parent, the one that decides where the next vacation will be, which relatives are welcome home and which ones are not, who is invited to the backyard BBQ, curfew rules for kids and so on are all about control of the family unit).  In the movie, it would be easy to see the husband as a villain - he will stop at nothing to keep his wife disabled and dependent on him. If he

The awkwardness of the teen years meets technology in the sex-ed chat bot . There is no real way for a chat bot to talk to a teen about their emotional readiness for intimacy. That takes conversations that can happen at the most random even inopportune times - with someone they trust. If that person is older and possessed of life experience even better. Given so many alternate ways to get answer to be the more tactical questions of the day - such as this bot may answer quite well, there is no incentive to get into awkward territory.  This effort to meet teens where they are is well-intentioned but comes at the cost of human communication and mental growth. When an elderly relative talks to a teen about the mistakes they made when they were young, their stories stick. Maybe the bot could be the best of both worlds - take the tactical questions and continue to nudge the kids to talk to adults in their lives too.  

Watching this  Daily Show segment featuring Greta Thunberg  made me think about people who don't fit the mold. Thunberg has plenty of fans and  critics . This particular objection to the fuss over her is a rather popular one Out of all the 16-year-olds in the world, why is it that just one features in the media worldwide? There are other kids who care as much, are just as articulate, just as concerned. If you think the world focussing on this one young girl was just some happy accident you are plugged into a faulty socket. Even greatness needs help if we can agree that a kid who is able to make news around the world no matter why and how she does it might be "great" in some way. Maybe there is something there is something about her that stands out and gets get attention. And if that attention does the world any good why fight it? Maybe best to seek collaborators and amplify her impact. An interesting piece on  genius and collaboration  with great examples of