Heartcrossings

On a walk through a charming old downtown recently, was stopped by the ethereal sound of someone playing glass harp. We paused for a while to listen to an old man play some popular tunes. Seeing our level of interest, he was glad to show what else he could play.  We heard snippets of Haydn, Beethoven and Mozart. He played beautifully and his face glowed with happiness as he told us about the music and the labor of love that it had been to gather the full set of glasses he needed to play.  As we walked back we talked about the fragility of love - his love of his chosen musical instrument. It had to be loved and cared for or it might shatter. We wondered if he may be heart-broken if that happened and if anything else in his life held as much value and these fragile glass receptacles that held water and made such heavenly music from his touch. 

P is my cousin and like a baby sister even though the complications of family on both sides have us semi-estranged for a long time. We used to be thick as thieves growing up and still carry fond memories from those early years.  Yet the extended drift from each other's lives makes it difficult for us to be there for each other at our age, life circumstances. She is coping with a loved one being seriously ill and my efforts to reach out and be present seemed to fall flat. While I tried and she acknowledged the effort, she cannot find a way to include me in her grief. There may be others in her life who may offer her more solace or so I hope.  Reading this essay about how grief is a unique and personal experience made me think of P. She seems to be the type that wants to be brave and soldier on. Reminding her of her troubles is not the way to go - it is not what she wants. She wants to be alone in her pain and act like all is well. That is her in the rest of her life too - she

Another day, another story about online privacy not being a realistic expectation anymore. This one has to do with A siphoning data or their own use and then sharing with B to gain further insight from the usage signature of the person. The author sketches out a scenario in his essay: Google Analytics has a “User Explorer” tool, in which you can zoom in on the activity of a specific user. Suppose that someone at Wacom “fingerprints” a target person that they knew in real life by seeing that this person uses a very particular combination of applications. The Wacom employee then uses this fingerprint to find the person in the “User Explorer” tool. Finally the Wacom employee sees that their target also uses “LivingWith: Cancer Support”. Remember, this information is coming from a device that is essentially a mouse. This example is admittedly a little contrived, but it’s also an illustration that, even though this data doesn’t come with a name and social security number attached, it

Reading this story about growing dates from 2000 year old seeds , reminded me of a packet of peony seeds my friend A gave me more than two decades ago. I carried them with me through my life's many upheavals and they sit in a drawer in my office now. Never thought to plant them because that was responsibility I did not want to take - caring for plants and pets was well beyond my capacity back then and probably still.  After the first decade, that packet of seeds came to acquire symbolic significance. I would plant them when I knew the home I was in was my last and final stop - there would be no further changes in my life that needed me to uproot and move. In my heart, I wanted to join the ranks for people who are lucky to live in the same town, the same house for generations though that would never happen to me. That is the kind of unshakable stability I craved for but it remains out of reach even today.  Ofcourse, those who have such unrelentingly secure lives often crave to b

Interesting analysis on the decline of positive sentiment in pop-music over the years To try to understand why song lyrics have increased in negativity and decreased in positivity over time, we employed the theory of cultural evolution to see if the pattern can be explained via social learning biases. There seems to be no conclusive reason for why this pattern has occurred but there are some likely contributors identified. There was another study on the decline of positive language in the US over time .  "..there are various social psychology research findings that show that the mere exposure to positive words or negative words can change your mood. Also, depending on our mood, we tend to use more positive or negative words. So very generally, this is an indicator that happiness may be on the decline in the U.S." If there is a general decline in societal happiness, should be no surprise the pop-music lyrics mirror that same slide towards negativity.

A small business that shows in the second page (or worse) of Google Search is as good as dead . They can make cute Loretta commercials and all but the truth is Google being the only search game in town makes it very hard for the average person running their small business to live - remembering the dead only comes after that.  There is something deeply broken about on large corporation controlling the online visibility of everyone who is trying to run a business. You don't like that answer you can see if you fare better with a couple of other large corporations that can just as easily have you dead on second page if it serves their needs. If you are so bold as to say that your answer is None of the Above then you are likely already dead as a business. You would be lucky to find your online self even at the end of the internet.  A few years ago, I was trying to help a friend with  creating online visibility for their small business and learned first hand how amazingly difficult

Wisdom from NF talent management by way of HBS in this article on how and why not to hire a culture fit. Makes sense from a company's perspective - diversity of talent, ideas and opinions can only help. But there is the matter of the new hire needing to feel like this company could be their new home. When they meet the team they will now be part of, the person should be comfortable, welcome and excited. That is a bit harder if the new entrant is not a "cultural fit". Something will feel ever to slightly off. All the right things were be said and heard and yet there will be this gnawing feeling that this job might be a mistake. That is is the kind of thing that is hard to understand and about impossible to explain. Something nags and feels off. You ignore those signs and plunge right in because its a great company and a fantastic opportunity. Sometimes that nag blooms into a bigger discomfort and makes that once dream job feel like a thorn on the side. That is where c

Just watching Vasu do her thing in Pushpavalli is enough reason to stick with the show. It filled me with a great nostalgia for Bangalore of my childhood. Her creative use of English accented with Kannada made me crave oota Mrs S used to serve us kids if we showed up uninvited to her house on Sunday mornings . If you have spent any time in Karnataka you know a couple just like Nikhil's parents. The casting could not be more perfect.  Hyperbole runs through the whole show and will likely make many a desi woman stop to think about where in the Pushpavalli scale of crazy her own "normal" might fall. The contribution of our mothers in how we turn out, the mistakes we make and the men we let into our lives. Speaking of mothers,  Pushpavalli 's is a force of nature but completely believable. I have friends whose mothers are much like her, speaking in mysterious metaphors and playing crazy mind games to retain control of their girls. My own mother is very complex creature

The narrator in Olga Tokarczuk's Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead says of a descipable character who winds up dead early in the book: In my view he should have received several Punishments by now, or even been sent to prison. I don’t know how he got away with it all. Perhaps there were some angels watching over him; sometimes they turn up on the wrong side. Many among us  know someone in our lives whose streak of good luck seems infinite even though they constantly and needlessly hurt others. We watch in awe and dream of schadenfreude that never does come. Do the mills of God grind at all  we wonder ? Will the process be done in our life-times ?  Though the mills of God grind slowly; Yet they grind exceeding small; Though with patience He stands waiting, With exactness grinds He all. I like how Tokarczuk likens this inequity to angels watching over a person after turning up on the wrong side. That is exactly how it feels to those watching from the outside - it i

It had been a very intense couple of weeks and almost no alone time. Then one week-night the house was quiet and the work-day had ended approximately when it should. That was also the evening I watched Next in Fashion - all ten episodes of it. I used a technique I learned from J some years ago. Catching the first and last few minutes of each episode of the show after you have sized up the cadence watching the first one or two in full. This one followed the very predictable rhythm and the whole thing took me three hours to get through.  I thought about my overall experience after I was done. Did I get anything out of it and was it even enjoyable. It was nice to see very talented people bring their creativity to life and it was a complete escape from my own daily grind. That is likely the whole point of such shows. But I got all that value without investing the time that it would take to actually watch the whole thing. This was a lot like scoring well on a test after perusing CliffNot

I like this blog post about how product x is the real deal whereas the wannabes y and z are distant also-ran. The analogy with the self-driving car made me want to read it to the end. While the author does a great job describing how to spot a wannabe, the distinctions between real and unreal blur a bit when he transitions from self-driving cars to the problem at hand - his product vs those of the competition. An average reader would track just fine as long as the talk was about cars. Once we go to data and analytics, the story falls short. We believe him when he says: It’s true others are trying to add search to their platforms as a feature or through acquisitions, but when it comes to analytics, search is not a side hustle.  It is the same analogy. Just like it’s easy to add a radar and camera in any old car, but very hard to make it truly self-driving, it is easy to add a search box on your UI and show demos, but very hard to make it work in real life. The real question that doe

Today, there comes a time a person's career when they need to manage money or people or both if they want to make progress, get promoted etc. For some, this is not a transition they are looking forward to. They may be perfectly happy doing their job and doing it very well but they don't want responsibility for money or people. That is recipe for attaining a career plateau with no place to go but down because your job can be done for a lot less by people less than half your age.  It was interesting to read this article on robots making manager obsolete in the future . My first boss was likely the best I ever had. That was a long time ago and yet, he was one of those a robot could never replace. He showed us how we could improve ourselves individually and function better as a team. He left us much better than he found us.  There will be fewer managers because they won't be able to evolve as administrative, project and team management and direct report development tasks

It was fun reading about the economics of the all-you-can-eat buffet . While most of us already know the broad concepts, details matter and make the story interesting.  They use larger than average serving spoons for things like potatoes, and smaller than average tongs for meats.  They frequently refill water and use extra-large glasses. Then there are the numbers for what it takes to beat the buffet. Reminds me of the story my grandpa used to tell about his youth. They had a kid in the group who was small and scrawny, looked like a baby compared to the much bigger teen-aged boys. Once the group of them went to their village eatery that offered an endless thali-meal. Refills were free until the customer was full.  The "baby" was a huge eater and they managed to get him on a kids eat free deal based on how small he looked. The dude out ate everyone else and the furious owner threw the whole group out at some point. Grandpa's face always lit up with with mischi

Nice blog post by a high-school student about what is wrong about school itself. The striving for grades and other forms of academic and extra-curricular perfection only serves to create a large set of variables which will be used to winnow kids out at college admission time. Two or three variables are no longer good enough, because it forms too coarse a filter. If the ask is to filter over ninety-percent of qualified applicants out then the filter must be very fine. To that end, kids must strive and as the blogger correctly points out, such striving does not lead to any actual learning.  Back in my day in India, the process was more brute-force. You took a very hard entrance exam on a designated day and your score in that test decided if you were in or out. The only other condition of satisfaction was having passed the 12th grade board exam. And the vast majority of the applicants did not make the cut and had to work through the more involved process of getting into liberal arts co

Reading this exchange with Prudie made me think about what keeps people monogamous. Seems like several factors have to been in place. Both parties should be relatively risk averse to begin with. Their relationship should score average and slightly better on most things so they can deal with what is less than average. The network of family and friends must be one that both value and wish to keep intact. The kids should be an equal priority for both. Each should bring some tangible value to the relationship that would be hard to replace. Finally, there should be some shared values whatever those might be. When all these factors are in place, more likely than not people will stay faithful to each other simply because it is not worth anyone's while to stray. Considering what it takes, it does not appear to be that hard but it is still a very complex and delicate balance. If one of more factors start to fall out of tolerance, the equilibrium is challenged. And even in a perfect equil

Sad reading this Inc. essay about how millennials prioritize being debt-free over love and career. Millennials, more than any other generation so far, report that their debt disrupts their daily life, leading to things like such as "relationship tension, misleading family and friends about their financial situation, worrying at bedtime, and stressing about everyday financial decisions." When long term goals appear completely unattainable, it would be natural to focus on smaller things here and now. Giving up the avocado toast for good is not going to turn into a down-payment for a house. So there is a strong argument to do things that help improve the quality of the moment. When successive generations defer solving their problems to another day, at some point those problems start to hurt like a long untreated ailment now bloomed into a terminal disease  ..the average cost of a house in the U.S. hasn't doubled, tripled, or even quadrupled. It is  5x as much  t

Interesting essay on the psychology of Silicon Valley and the notion that there is no problem technology cannot solve. One therapist, who worked in-house at a large tech company, described the attitude as one of ‘unaware exceptionalism’: the perception of doing something new and radical was often accompanied by a sense of hubris and, in extreme cases, almost an expectation of worship. Positive feedback loop reinforces this: companies, the media, and the public exalts these individuals, further encouraging others in the industry to mimic the behaviour.  I had opportunity to immerse myself for a very short-while in one of these large tech companies. The experience was quite educational for someone who is very far removed from that eco-system. Everyone is on company kool-aid to make for an immersive work experience I suppose. When these folks come into contact with an outsider, they want to make sure you have a healthy appetite for the said kool-aid. If not they have very little use

I have not read American Dirt and after reading a full essay on who has the right to write and review such a book, I am not sure if I belong to the in or out list. I am plenty brown so that might get me in but I have no credentials whatsoever to validate if the plight of Mexican migrants was done justice to in this telling of their story.  Following the same logic, I should have probably never read Premchand's Godaan . Other than being Indian, I did not have any business reading a story about matters I knew nothing about. The fact this story remains to this day among my favorite pieces of literature might be problematic too. The likes of me could be accused to fetishizing the suffering of peasants in rural India.  The world has become a strange place lately. Apparently, it is no longer okay to read or write about what you don't have direct experience with. Used to be that was entirely the point of literature. To give the reader a chance to explore worlds they would never

On of the best gifts of working from home (for me) is being able to replenish my one cup tea-pot many times a day. Generally, the day starts with a strong breakfast tea like a Nilgiri. Mid-day, I might switch to a Darjeeling. Late afternoon and evening to Oolong and Green teas maybe. Based on the criteria for this research , I would be a habitual tea-drinker. It takes under ten minutes to start from boiling water to tea in my cup but it provides a great reset each time I start the new pot of tea. Often, I feel grateful that it is possible to fit such a rhythm into may day - that was not always the case. The tea-break serves as a reminder of the years lived, the milestones crossed and hard-won solace. I have started to appreciate my older relatives needing to have a place to sit undisturbed and enjoy their cup of tea.  In childhood, I remember my mother asking everyone around if they needed anything from her for the next half hour before she made herself tea. We learned not to bother

Down the street from where I live, there is a shuttered toy store. The mall across from it has struggled to revitalize itself but nothing seems to work. Stores come and go by turn and the parking lots remain bare. This used to be the most happening part of town a couple of decades ago. The toy-store is a far sadder sight for all of us who knew it in it's in heyday.  The place was full happy kids and the wonderful energy they bring. Now the place is a ghost town. J learned to drive in its big and empty parking lot - a far cry from the chaos and bustle of her baby life. This s tory about an old mall getting a second lease of life in a different avatar is heart-warming.  Maybe it is a trend that will catch on outside Maine as well. It could help contain the needless suburban sprawl, painful commutes to work and allow people to live in self-contained communities once again.

Nice essay on the subject of surveillance capitalism tracing its roots to Pokemon Go. A convergence of behavioural surplus, data science, material infrastructure, computational power, algorithmic systems and automated platforms produced unprecedented relevance and billions of auctions. Click-through rates skyrocketed. Work on AdWords and AdSense became just as important as work on Search. With click-through rates as the measure of relevance, behavioural surplus was institutionalised into a new kind of commerce that depended upon online surveillance at scale. The use of telemetrics to adjust auto insurance rates in real-time is one of the examples of such economy the author cites. That reminds me of a recent conversation I had with my friend B. He turns on the telemetry app for one segment of his drive everyday and turns it off for everything else. He aims to get the system confused but still collect his minimally guaranteed discount for using the app. B is gleeful about how the me

Reading this Fast Company article reminded me of the Chinese fairy tale about a boy with a magic paint-brush that could bring his drawings to life. In life, the child's dreams are made to come true by an adult and in the fairy tale the roles are revered but dreams do come true there too. Not all dreams are worth bringing to life, some are not even worth sharing with others because they would be boring or weird .  Yet, one father decided to make a real object out of his six-year old's scribble, creating a permanence such a thing would not otherwise have. In the mountain of childhood artwork this one will stand out as one of kind, a whim that came true, the art of possible, the stroke of a magic paint-brush. Something, the kid  may ponder every-time he walks past the dresser.  This is the more elegant, thoughtful and artistic version of the refrigerator magnet that most of us parents have mail-ordered to be created from our children's kindergarten piece de resistance. 

The oldest memory I have of Uncle T is of him picking me up from kindergarten. I remember flying into his arms and complaining bitterly about my "no good horrible bad day" at school. He would commiserate some and then I would hop on his bicycle to ride home. Once I was reunited with the neighborhood kids to run around like wild, the memories of my awful day faded magically. We repeated this ritual every day of his stay at our home when he came to pick me up from school. Then it would be time for him to leave. We saw him off at the train station and I would remain forlorn for days after.  Uncle T was a lot of fun to be around. He was excited about things that adults no longer cared about. We would rope him into our silly games  all the time. He was a hit with all my friends, never tired of our antics and always a great sport. Uncle T's only child is getting married end of this year. I have seen this kid maybe a couple of times in my life and that was in his infancy.  U

I often start my day reading the daily poem from Paris Review. Some days, the experience is like opening a fortune cookie after a Chinese takeout dinner and feeling like the message could only be meant for me. Maybe there was a divine purpose to craving hot and sour soup on that cold winter day. So it was reading this poem. It is one of those where being able to create intent that makes sense to the reader is deeply fulfilling. I found myself interpreting these few lines a different way upon each reading, drawing upon a myriad of life experiences. While they all felt approximately right, not one was the perfect fit. That is the secret the lines hold in them and make them so magical. Love by Radmila Lazić I sharpened knives All night. To welcome you In the brilliance of their blades, And among them, My love sparkles For your eyes only. —Translated from the Serbian by Charles Simic

Interesting essay on the l iberating qualities of the artificial womb . The use cases are fairly intuitive - becoming free of the biological clock, being able to bear children when prone to miscarriages and other risky conditions and to enjoy motherhood without the physical labors that are needed to get there. The author says: The very idea of using artificial wombs to replace some or all stages of gestation reflects, for instance, an assumption that foetuses and gestating persons are in fact separable. While this doesn’t mean that artificial-womb technology necessarily entails the foetal container model, current rhetoric within this debate captures the spirit of the view well: for instance, by likening the uterus to what the reproductive biologist Roger Gosden calls a ‘clever incubator’ in Designing Babies (1999). Once you separate "foetuses and gestating persons" then there is little to differentiate the two contributors male and female that went into making that foetus

Reading the stories about the Vaporfly ban made me want to try these shoes. I am not a devoted to Nike or even sneakers in general and I am not a runner. The controversy got me curious and through my readings, I discovered Spira - another shoe brand I had never heard about. The marketing here is great except for a bit of a last mile problem. I am sure Nike has got many a random person just like me engaged and curious about these shoes. These folks have spent a few minutes of their day reading about the controversy and checking out picture and prices of the shoes.  But it's likely, the ones who end up buying will be type of customers who are already buying high-end sneakers (even if not Nike) and also likely run (at least some). The rest of us would have become more aware of the brand and its offerings - that has monetary value. The Spira campaign to get attention was fun to read about too - goes to prove that the very similar tactics can lead to very different outcomes for brands

Very interesting story about loaning iPads to help save a print newspaper: Hussman, whose newspaper has distributed 27,000 iPads in the project, is encouraged by the results so far, with an over-all subscriber retention rate of 78 percent. The Democrat-Gazette is nearly done converting the Little Rock area, delivering a print newspaper only once a week – on Sundays – while lending subscribers an iPad for free so they can read a daily replica edition. As Hussman loses a modest fraction of his subscribers, he is banking on the idea that those who remain will be fully engaged. He is determined to “smother these people with customer service,” to truly move from ad-revenue dependency to a focus on the readers. Particularly love the idea of smothering with customer service. It reminds me of is a local business that performs some pretty mundane services for me. They are hardly the only game in town, but the customer experience they deliver would be the envy of much bigger and better orga

Over the years, I have spent a lot of time thinking about the practical value of college education - mine and that of others. The vast majority of people I have worked with over the decades, did not require any of their fancy degrees to do the work they were being paid to do.  For the most part a bright eight-grader with the benefit of life experience, emotional intelligence and situational awareness could have done the work just fine. Maybe this hypothetical eight-grader would even bring greater creative spark to the job than much older, experienced people are able to.  Yet, the degrees do look nice on the resume, the brand of the college acts as a social signal and in some circles and some jobs that confers advantage.The use case for college education has not existed for many for a long time now. Perhaps the value proposition is collapsing  for even more people now as this Atlantic article suggests.  There is still plenty of work that requires specialized education and many ye

Every few weeks these days (or so it seems) there is news about families getting devastated by what their DNA tests reveal - specially that people discover the truth about their paternity. This story about results variation in results between DNA testing companies is yet another cautionary tale. ..Gravel says consumers should take the results generated by these tests with a grain of salt. People need to understand these tests are not subject to the same standard as diagnostic medical testing. They are more like a "recreational scientific activity," he said. The stories of things that can go wrong with such recreational activity, abound. Bizarre discoveries are apparently made for which there could have been no need “ I discovered that I have some of the highest known neanderthal DNA, more than 99% users and over 4% of my total DNA. 3 tests submitted and a flight provided to a university in Australia for a testing. Was cool at first, an then not."