Heartcrossings

J is very attached to her first car which was bought very cheap and had an abundance of quirks and maladies. But it was her pride and joy, gave her the independence she dreamed of. When she left to college, we initially thought to sell the car but on second thought decided to keep it for a while in case she came home for holidays and wanted to use it. The pandemic happened and indeed J was home for longer than expected and the car came very handy. Then she returned and is unlikely to come back anytime soon. Yet, the car remains here and is being used.  Recently we changed the radio on it to an Android device. With a bit of tinkering, the technology on this old car is now state of the art and stands in remarkable contrast to the rest of the vehicle. The firmware being open-source, the possibilities are endless if someone has the time to make things happen. The quality of driving experience in this car has improved remarkably for a very little incremental spend. This is all on the d...

Watched Garden of Eden recently and it made me want to read the book. While looking around found this review by John Updike which made for excellent reading. He gets to the heart of the matter rather quickly once he starts to opine on the book at hand: In the trim published text of sixty-five thousand words, a daily repetition of actions remains (wake, write, drink, lunch, siesta, drink, eat, make love, sleep), but the dialogue never covers exactly the same ground and the plot advances by steady, subliminal increments, as situations in real life do. The basic tensions of the slender, three-cornered action are skillfully sustained. The psychological deterioration of the heroine, Catherine Bourne, the professional preoccupations of the hero, the young writer David Bourne, and the growing involvement of the other woman, Marita, are kept in the fore, interwoven with but never smothered by Hemingway’s betranced descriptions of the weather, the meals, the landscape, the chronic recreations. ...

Seniors in assisted living had an isolated existence even before the pandemic hit but things only nose-dived after that. Great to see some young people come up with a creative solution to the problem . Video platforms such as YouTube contain tons of 360-degree video content. But without VR goggles, viewers don’t get the full immersive experience. We would partner with the content creators to give their videos free exposure on our app, which we would pitch to retirement communities in the Austin area. Residents could download the apps on their smartphones, then watch the videos with VR goggles we’d supply. I can imagine how much the seniors in my life would enjoy such an experience. Being home-bound with no end in sight coupled with doom-scrolling and the infinite cycles of bad news has made their golden years perfectly miserable. Being able to immerse in experiences they never had in their lives and this point can only dream of what may have once been possible.

Microsoft jumping in to help kids with math problems is wonderful. Something for other big companies to learn from. There is plenty of room for lessons in science, language, social studies and more. Brands could create their niche by teaching what they know best. Would be cool to see publishers teaching kids to write well, pharma teaching biology and chemistry and so on. So many opportunities to do good in the world by way of impacting a child's life positively.  Many companies already offer tuition reimbursement and post-secondary education opportunities for adults if they are already employees of these companies. This would be a logical next step and it would be great to see the Microsoft setting a trend here. There is such a dire need for help and the pandemic made it even more so. Keeping students at home and engaged in their education is a monumental challenge and parents are burning out .  To say parents are struggling is an understatement. Sixty-three percent say the ...

Last month there was a lot of news about of tech companies acting in concert to ban Parler.  It will be interesting to see how this ends up for all concerned. Commonsense says that tech companies cannot be the arbiters of free speech. For them to presume that they can decide what to allow and what to curtail seems over-stepping of authority. The argument about boundary of responsibilities can arise. Are they required to police content that rides on their platforms. Are they supposed to do that only if they stand to profit or not from said content. As this author says : Private companies or not, Facebook, Twitter and the rest face exactly the same problems a governmental agency would face in establishing consistent, principled — and universally accepted — criteria for what to allow and what to forbid. Not even 21st-century artificial intelligence can succeed where Supreme Court justices have tried, and failed, for decades. Such decisions are bound to invoke mixed reactions. Some amo...

The gratuitous buzzwords made this story hard to read but the concept is nice - a bespoke lipstick that is perfect for the person. "  Utilizing artificial intelligence-based algorithms, the cloud-connected app analyzes a photo of the user's face. ." Not all that complicated really. The face has characteristics that can be easily isolated and tagged, add user preferences to that, may check for occasion, season and time of day to generate a color that would work perfectly. Would be nice to see personalized make-up go mainstream.  Once is a great while, a woman will find something that is just perfect for her skin and before long it's no longer available. So if you need to resume your search. As J grew older and started to clear out my make-up bag, I found myself needing less and less. It was too much work to find and replace. Instead, it was easier to scavenge through J's discard pile and find the few things I could use. Now that she does not live with me anymore, ...

If you are dealing with an insolent teenager daily, chances are sometimes you run out of the reserves of patience. My friend M is the mother of a teenaged boy. All days are hard but some days specially so. The child in question does not think high-school is something he needs to do, college is irrelevant and somehow he has all the answers. In his mind at eighteen something magical will happen and he will be out in the world, free and living a good life his own way. The adults are all idiots and need to stay out of his business - that is only way they could possibly contribute in his life. He is rude, cuts people off mid-sentence to express his ignorant and unintelligent perspectives, acts like whatever he does not know (which is just about everything in the world) is irrelevant. Some days, M finds her patience worn to the bone.  Last time I talked to her happened to be one such evening. He said something more than usually asinine and uncultured to her and she totally lost it. She t...

Learned a new word reading this article about a rare brain condition . Aphantasia is strange ailment: For such individuals, literature may produce facts but not visual representations. Arrakis isn't a planet of vast deserts but vast emptiness, Gandalf the Grey a colorless, featureless blob. Sunny beaches can't be visited in their imaginations but must remain on the office calendar until summer vacation. And while memories exist, they cannot be visually recalled except between scrapbook cellophane. It made me wonder if there could be degrees of difficultly in producing visual representations for people and even for the same person over a period of time. As a child and young person, it was incredibly easy for me to escape into world of the book I was reading, be able to see myself as a character in the story as it unfolded. It used to be a full immersive experience. Today, it is orders of magnitude harder for me and I envy my peers who still have access to this wonderful escape. ...

In J's senior year at high school we watched Le Grand Voyage together. This was one of the rare occasions where she recommended something to me - it used to be disproportionately the other way around. It was an amazing movie and the experience remains of the brightest moments of J's pre-college life with me. I remembered this event recently on a day that was not nearly as bright.  There is no way for J and I to meet in the foreseeable future. I am grateful she is well where she is and her mental state is as good as can be expected under the circumstances. So much has changed so rapidly. On most days I believe it is for the best. J will have learned to be independent a lot faster than she would have otherwise, she would have learned to draw on her on inner resources to make it through difficult times when being physically around friends and family is impossible. I hope these hard lessons serve her well for the rest of her life, that they bring clarity about what is worth pursui...

Lot of insightful comments on the fate of businesses in 2021 . The pandemic would have lasted long enough for even steady habits to break. People will compare what they were doing before to what they are able to do now and decide what is better going forward. The movie theatre example is a good one in that regard. Not the most optimal or cost effective to begin with and after a couple of years of sitting on the couch as an alternative, chances are the allure would completely fade.  My friend D finally fulfilled her dream of having a second home on the beach. This is a tourist hot spot and in any other time, she would have done swimmingly well on Airbnb. But the past year has been a challenge to say the least and this summer may not be all that normal either. So she is stuck with paying for her primary home and this dream that is starting to look a bit like a nightmare.  But the pandemic put a hard stop to D's business travel which had the wonderful benefit of bringing her clos...

After watching The Insider recently, read a bit about the back-story, the controversies, the allegations by the ex-wife of the protagonist and more. How you feel or are supposed to feel about the story gets muddied rather quickly after that. Adding dramatic flourishes to a real-life story makes for a good movie but the truth is no longer the centrally important. Such is perhaps the case with The Insider too. The wife was depicted as someone who is not an equal partner in the marriage - happy to partake the benefits of being a Big Tobacco wife but unable to take the heat when things sour for the husband. For people outside the situation, it is just another job.  I knew someone who worked for Big Tobacco a long time ago - a minor cog in the wheel unlike Dr. Wigand in the movie. He got free cigarettes once a month and gave it to friends and family who smoked. I can't recall anyone being appalled that he was given this stuff free - they were glad to accept it as a gift. His job was ge...

A really clever way to promote a book about aliens . No way to prove or disprove the theory unless the person is well-qualified and understands the science but for the lay-person in a time of deep despair and hopelessness such as these days are, a Harvard professor claiming alien visitation is the perfect antidote Loeb also said that hydrogen icebergs are expected to come from giant molecular clouds, not parts of space like Carina or Columba. And he reiterated that no hydrogen iceberg could survive the trek from the nearest giant molecular cloud. Asked if there is a clear leading candidate explanation for 'Oumuamua's acceleration, Loeb referred Live Science to a not-yet-released book he authored called "Extraterrestrial: The First Sign of Intelligent Life Beyond Earth," due for publication in January. Sounds like a great way to create buzz, have your name rise in SEO rankings and get some readership along the way. Something for writers, agents and publishers to learn....

Nice essay about the escalator and what it did for urban spaces. Lot of history and a bit of a long read for those interested in detail. The flow of people in an unbounded space that an escalator provides is unique: Before the escalator was invented, commerce and transportation were largely one-dimensional. Stairs and elevators were for the committed and purposeful, their limitations constraining vertical expansion, above and below ground. Stairs require patience and effort. Elevators have a unique, precise, and tightly constrained mission. The invention of the escalator changed everything: suddenly, a constant flow of people could ascend into the air, or descend to the depths. The escalator modified architecture itself, creating fluid transitions into spaces above and below. Now, in commerce and transportation, neither the sky nor the ground would be the limit. Being able to see the surroundings as you move around in an open space, makes the experience somehow more joyful. You are su...

I needed time to process the events of Jan 6 and all that followed since that time. Friends and family overseas said we were no better than a banana republic. There was pity more than there was surprise - for great things falling apart, watching the end times. Closer to the action, I found myself unable to overcome the numbness. I know a lot of folks who are ardent supporters of the president in question. Many don't hide their affiliations. When I came across this poll , I could not help wonder if the sentiments are representative of these people I know as well. Political differences can place people who are otherwise friendly to each other and have things in common, very far apart. The results of the poll are a stark reminder of how far and apart those universes have come to be. There is no place to meet in the middle anymore. Many of my Bengali friends and relatives were ardent communists back in the day. My parents were not. I recall the adults having heated political debates wh...

Read this beautiful essa y about regeneration after betrayal and abandonment. In the author's case life returns to her in the form an exuberant garden that is not meant to look pretty for others: I cultivated the way I wanted, without attention to decor or decorum. I let my garden run wild in a way that horrifies most landscape designers. Over the years, I made an effort to replace decorative elements with plants that had a function. I kept the roses because their flowers are edible. I pulled out rhododendrons and camellias and planted yerba mate and cherimoya trees in their place. I took down a twenty-year-old trumpet vine and replaced it with grapevines. This garden was no longer for other people. It had become, as my daughter calls it, “a fairy garden”—messy to navigate, but full of wonder and treats .  This reminded me of my father's way of gardening when I was growing up. For as long as I remember there was a patch of land somewhere in the houses we lived where he could gr...

Good article about how algorithms are making decisions that their human front end does not understand and cannot explain. By the time these decisions result in a lawsuit enough time would have passed between a specification being provided to the vendor to create an algorithm and conditions of satisfaction to have changed enough to render it flawed. So when the human representing the contested decision says don't blame me blame the algorithm they are creating an impossible situation.  No one in the mix can understand what that algorithm does and even if that were to be unpacked and made comprehensible to the lay person it will still not answer the question if it delivers correct results. When it does not, how and why does it fail. What percent of the populated served is affected by the bad results. None of those questions can be answered without an informed, educated and engaged customer - in this case the powers that be in a government agency. It sounds like they would rather not ...

Reading Heart Berries has been a magical experience. I love how Terese Marie Malihot plays with words. It evokes the feeling of turning out baked goods where the magic happens mostly unseen but the feeling permeates the experience from start to finish. On falling in love, Malihot says: I wondered if maybe falling in love looked like a crisis to an observer.. Falling in love felt fluid. It snowed when we fell in love, Everything reminded me of warm milk. Everything seemed less real. I thought my cup was overflowing. I found myself caressing my own face.. And that is only one of the many luminous lines in this book. Of the idea of self-esteem, she makes an interesting observation for instance: I think self-esteem is a white invention to separate one person from the another. It asks people to assess their value and implies that people have worth. It seems like identity capitalism On forgiveness she says : I think it is dangerous to let go of a transgression when the transgressor is n...

I met C and his wife for the first time when I was in middle school. They were friends of my parents but we had relocated from their town a while back so I had no recollection of them prior to that meeting. Mrs. C was quite the character - fashionable, loud and colorful. They had no kids at that time presumably because she was not ready to settle down quite yet. C had acquired himself a trophy wife and was willing to bide his time. The next time I met C, I was divorced and living alone with little J in an apartment here in America. My parents were visiting us at the time. C and his son (a college student at the time) were in the area and they stopped by. The meeting was enjoyable and gave my parents much to reminisce about given how far they go back. The kid was a bit bored because he had no shared history and there is only so much he could play with little J.  Since then C and I stayed in touch. He visited us if he was in town which was not too often, I was invited to visit his fa...

I read this beautiful Charles Simic poem To Boredom and it took me back to a time when my grandmothers were still alive. In particular I remembered my paternal grandmother who carried with her a book of Bengali ghost stories for children when she visited us. There were some primitive illustrations in the book to aid better comprehension of the spectral action. For the duration of her stay at our home which was usually during my summer holidays, she would read these stories to me like clockwork after lunch. I could not read Bangla but I knew to look for the illustrations to follow the plot line.  If the stories were meant to scare, they missed the mark by a mile but there was entertainment value and grandma read them in a serious voice to imply that this could be real. I generally proceeded to nap after the story. Those afternoons like the days of Simic's poem were forever. Nothing changed from one to the next. It is as if the clocks are stopped ticking. What I would give today for ...

Feeling lonely became so familiar over the last year. If you had known what that feels like, that only intensified and those who were lucky not have felt lonely often got a taste of it - often much more than they were ready for. As can be expected, extroverts and introverts respond differently to this time of forced social isolation . Social and household structure would have their impacts as well. Students in college have been doing their best to preserve what they can of their life - being independent, living with friends and not parents, often away from home. Interesting read about what makes people feel lonely - why some are more susceptible to it that others.  Lonely people tend to use their imagination, memories, and hopes more, contend the researchers, in an effort to manage their isolation. The more vivid this created world is, the better it helps the person escape reality. I know a few people in my life who have been able to do that and make living alone seem natural and e...

 Learned the phrase Hedonistic Treadmill reading The Price of Civilization Americans are running very hard to pursue happiness but are staying in the same place, a trap that psychologists have christened the Hedonic Treadmill. This article offers a simple explanation of the concept The theory of the hedonic treadmill states that regardless of what happens to people, their levels of happiness will eventually return to their baselines. Take this theory with a classic example: say you get married, move into a new house, get a promotion, lose a job, suffer an accident, etc., over time, you’re likely to return to your set point of happiness.  After some time passes, you’ll be back at the level of happiness at which you were before. An interesting idea for sure that we are programmed with certain level of attainable happiness and no matter what good or bad life brings, we will return to that in time. It also makes sense that this set point is personalized Personality traits play a ...

In The Price of Civilization , Jeffery Sachs explains how it comes to be that the employee is left holding the bag in the new globalized economy: In the ensuing competition among governments, capital benefits from a “race to the bottom,” in which governments engage in a downward spiral of taxation and regulation in order to try to keep one step ahead of other countries. All countries lose in the end, since all end up losing the tax revenues and regulations needed to manage the economy. The biggest loser ends up being internationally immobile labor, which is likely to face higher taxation to compensate for the loss of taxation on capital. Post pandemic, maybe that could change for the better for many types of labor including those ones that were once immobile. Telehealth and telemedicine are becoming more mainstream now than ever before. So the immobile labor associated with providing healthcare will perhaps fare better now. But these are not the hardest hit employees to begin with. As ...

Nice analysis of what's next for IoT . The author points out to one of the many flaws in thinking that caused this business to be over-hyped Many believe that the real value of IoT is in the data, but conveniently ignore the fact over 80% of that data is processed in the devices themselves. The accuracy and duration of hardware such as sensors is a critical factor in IoT applications, and undervaluing it is a key reason for so many IoT projects falling at the first few hurdles. I’m all the more puzzled by this ignorance of the importance of hardware when looking at IoT projects in air or water quality, the next big verticals in environmental IoT. Where projects are deployed there, IoT devices are closer to expensive meteorology equipment, with the added capability of analysing and integrating data in the cloud. This brings to mind conversations I used to have with clients 7-10 years ago. Everyone was talking data monetization as if it were magic and pixie dust to sprinkle over that...

Interesting concept about psychological inflexibility in this Inc article: The authors found a strong link between psychological inflexibility and weaker family ties, less satisfying relationships, more shouting and insecurity, and less effective parenting. Being mentally rigid is bad for all kinds of close relationships, it seems. Psychological flexibility helps them all thrive. Conceptually, this flexibility seems to be derived from a person having a system of values they live by. So no matter what stressors life brings on them, they are able to draw upon them. As a result they deal with the issues at hand in a constructive way instead of spinning out of control. Seems rather self-evident but it is unclear how a framework of values can be superposed upon an adult - this needs to have been done much earlier on.  While the conclusion is reasonable and logical being able to improve in this dimension for an adult seems rather wishful. Maybe instead of a value system, an adult can le...

Creating things of beauty from what would otherwise be thrown in trash is wonderful for many reasons. One of them being that it makes the viewer consider ( in this case a used tea bag ) in completely different light. See potential manifested where they may have thought none existed. I could not help correlating this to believing in people who look up to us and count on us.  When an adult in a position of authority or influence in a child's life sees a hidden, buried spark in them and takes the time to kindle it, that act is not so different than creating art on used tea bags. Specially when that child is viewed as a lost cause and a failure by most others. That one person's faith makes all the difference, it creates meaning out of nothingness.  I had a teacher in eight grade Mrs. G who was that person to a couple of kids I went to school with. They were in the discard pile and no one had much hopes for them including their own parents. But Mrs. G saw something and she told the...

I learned to make Skyr at home recently. After a few iterations, it has all the qualities of taste and texture of the real thing. The most satisfying part of the process is predictability. If I follow all the steps, the results are the same every time. Last thing before going to bed, I set the bowl inside the oven with the light turned on. The following morning, the Skyr is ready.  I made yogurt for years much the same way so there is no great novelty here but it was fascinating to see how using a different starter yielded a very different taste. Since the success with Skyr, I have ventured into Kefir and want to try coconut and soy-milk versions next. In a world where so much feels out of control, unpredictable and random there is something deeply comforting about knowing that the Skyr or yogurt in my oven will taste exactly as expected in the morning.  Overnight, nature does the same magic over and over without failure or surprises. It is one thing that can be counted on. If...

Great life lesson from the story of a pottery class . Of the group of the group of students who were to be graded by quality not quantity of their work the author says: "..   sat theorizing about perfection, and in the end had little more to show for their efforts than grandiose theories and a pile of dead clay." Such is the fate of any group of people who are tasked to deliver something exceptional while being observed, scrutinized and critiqued for their efforts. The group gets into stasis mode very quickly, unable to function at their full capacity. Good enough does not satisfy anyone and yet they cannot agree on what best looks like. I have seen this scene replay more times than I can count in the workplace over the years.  The end product of such a team is uninspiring at best. What is ironic that in real life, these rules of grading are neither published nor public. It is only implied which makes things that much more complicated. It takes a combination of being thic...

The story about online proctoring of children made for pretty sad reading. While some kids will suffer from anxiety being constantly watched, others will find ways to hack the system to they proctoring system does not work. Either way students will be wasting time away from education and learning. As the spokesperson for the county says in this story about a hacking operation carried out by a sixteen year old : “It’s a cat and mouse game. So when you put something in place, they’re just trying to figure out how to get around it.” The question is why do we need to play such games with our kids.  Would it not be more interesting to think about assessments that do not need proctoring because it is open book and allows days instead of a hour to complete. Challenge the student to apply the learning not just regurgitate it. Make it so that they get credit for using as many resources they can find to help them do well - online and offline. Even better provide incentives for collaboratio...