Heartcrossings

Listening to this music brings to mind calm and pleasant things - known and unknown, all those times of peace and quiet. The world has missed a lot of that lately, lurching from one bad news to the next. In my own life as with most people I know, its been about uncertainty and disruption of many forms; learning to cope with change that had never been imagined possible. I had not even heard of the kora before this. Such a happy discovery to end the year. An eventful one for me losing three people I was close to and one that very much disliked me. I learned that I grieved for those who loved me just as much as for the one who did not - maybe even more because he had died without us having made peace.  Many times in the last few years, I thought I would reach out and try to heal what was so irreparably broken.  Each time the thought crossed my mind, I pushed it aside for another day when I would feel more ready for the challenge. That day never came. The living get to stay behin...

Meeting relatives for Thanksgiving after a pandemic hiatus was a bitter-sweet experience. The relationships are a bit frayed, everyone is worn out and trying to be brave and hopeful, kids are grown-up and have turned out to be way different than anyone would have expected. Lot of folks are talking about quitting their jobs - young and old alike. The conversations were not as free flowing in years past - no one was sure until the last minute if we were going to gather but we did. The hugs spoke of desperation for human touch that was missed for so long. Some of the kids in their 20s spoke of college being an escape from the world but how the dating life was quite desolate.  One of the kid's is going to work in NYC and will be living with a few others she went to school with which intersects with the folks she will also be working with. She is ready for work-life harmony with 12 hour work days and turning home to those same people. My thoughts turned to some other kids I know who wan...

After a long day, this was not an easy movie to watch but a very rewarding experience all the same. Dear Zachary is about many things - about a very brave couple who continue to strive against loss no human being should have to endure. It is also about a justice system and bureaucracy that failed spectacularly and also about a young man who had touched a disproportionate number of lives in the short lease of life he was granted. Finally it is about a beloved baby who died needlessly, killed by his own mother. It takes a tragedy of this scale for the deep flaws in the justice systems to become commonly visible. In the meanwhile, every day, it is a death by thousand cuts and children continue to be hurt, their pain unseen and unheard - and even when there is a cause celebre like Gabriel Hernandez , there is no lasting, durable change.  The presumption that a parent - specially a mother is somehow beyond reproach just because of the facts of biology is at the root of much of such tra...

Looking back, my cousin P was always a trend-setter in her quiet and unassuming way. Most people missed her fierce independent spirit under the unassuming exterior. I learned a lot about how to to live a meaningful life without needless attention - not sure if that was the right lesson to learn but it is one that has served me well for the most part. P was never one to make waves by her actions but the way she has lived her life has always been ahead of her times. When we were in our twenties and dreaming of marriage and kids, P was telling us she would never have kids because the world was a miserable place and there was no need to make someone suffer needlessly.  P is great with kids but has never had any of her own and has remained single because this choice was not commonplace back in our time. She was not able to find a man who was comfortable and even subscribed to her world view, in later life she says it too much work to adapt to another person and there are no guarantees t...

The scientific basis of why trying to attract a mate can age a person is interesting but this is self-evident. There is a lot of stress involved in finding the right partner no matter which way a person goes about it. That and the lack of a stable domestic life can wear the person out, make them age. In a stable partnership, those stressor fade away and people are likely to be happier and healthier leading to slower aging. Evolutionary biology predicts that investing in reproduction causes aging indirectly. Imagine that your body has protective mechanisms which can let you live longer, but that they’re energetically costly. Evolutionary theories of aging would say that there’s a trade-off between investing energy into those mechanisms, or into reproduction. Animals in the wild suffer high levels of mortality from things like predators and accidents, so are unlikely to live to late ages. So it makes sense for them to invest heavily in reproduction, even if that accelerates the aging pr...

We went on our usual walk through the old part of town on Christmas day. The weather acted confused going back and forth between glorious and gloomy like a metaphor for the year that it has been. There were glimpses of normal followed by bad news - sun followed by cloud and rain. Just as we got used to the whipsaw of our alternate realities and fortunes over the year, so we did to the weather. Many folks were out taking a walk - we did not exchange holiday greetings with anyone. I seem to recall there was a time when wishing a stranger Merry Christmas or Happy Holidays was no sacrilege, it did not take much thinking to do this. Now, the issue is far more complex and presumably no one wants to go there. Strangers ignored strangers no matter the holiday. Watching Don't Look Up later in the evening was a fitting finale to a day that had been remarkably different this remarkable year. The movie can be about different things to different people. For me it was about how hard it is to co...

This sounds like someone who believes they are God and manage their human subordinates accordingly .  .. email details the three steps managers should do when they're sent directions. Musk tells them to reply and explain why what he said was incorrect since he can occasionally be "plain wrong," to ask for clarification, or to execute the directions because "if none of the above are done, that manager will be asked to resign immediately." The more the likes of Musk are lionized the worse it is for the workplace overall. People in positions of power will feel the yen to be idiosyncratic, make bold leadership statements and come up with batty diktats like this one. What the richest man in the world can get away the rest cannot, but that won't prevent them from taking a cue from such behavior - its a short cut to perceived genius. 

This essay about Paul Rand and his iconic logo designs is engrossing read. Logo making has elements of magic to a lay person who does not understand what goes into the final product. I cannot imagine this process working just about anywhere else between a client and a consultant: A branding project would result in a 12″ x 11″ printed booklet (a visual square). The pages were Japanese fold-in style, ranging from roughly 18–40 pages, depending on the size of the project. In each of these individual booklets, Paul would explain his reasoning for his decisions in his typical cogent writing. Fifty copies of the presentation would be printed, one copy would be mailed to the client six months from the initial design date, along with the final bill. During that six months of intense work, there were no discussions with the client, and no final presentation made in person. Those of us who deal with demanding, temperamental and hyper-anxious clients every day, would salivate at the thought of b...

Reading these lines in Clive Thompson's Coders reminded me of my former colleague C and his phrase for the encasement strategy that is referred to here. C called it shellacking the turd. .. “It was the hackiest shit imaginable,” jokes Alan Williams, one of Guarino’s teammates. But if you spend enough time around complex old systems, “you realize that the fastest, shortest way to a deep, solid, elegant integration is just by putting another layer of dirt on top.” In the world of coding, this sort of fix is what’s known as an “encasement strategy”—fixing a hairy, complex system by boxing it in. But sometimes it is the only option you have.. When the legacy code is just about impossible to unravel never mind understand or improve it, you encase it or do as C would say more colorfully. Have seen this strategy work well on many occasions. The real trick is to get the client over the giant hump of denial and to the plane of acceptance that this is only option they have.  What is true for...

Michael Pollan's How To Change Your Mind was an impulse borrow from the library. I've liked everything I've read by Pollan so far so I was curious about this book. I listen to it on my walks and these days I often take them in the middle of the work-day so I can spend time in the sunlight for a couple of hours. The workday is endless and this pause keeps me from feeling worn out even after a long one. A sharp switch from my work mode to listening to Pollan talk about the mind and spirit altering effects of LSD and psilocybin is a dramatic shift and forces my mind to reconfigure itself entirely to engage with the book. This is so far and removed from anything that is part of my daily life.  A couple of hours later when I am back from work, I feel like I had a long mental holiday and feel more energized to pick up where I left off. The other thing the book is doing for me is making me think hard about stopping cold and restarting the next part of my life as no other way is l...

Got around to watching Bohemian Rhapsody finally. Had great expectations of the movie given who it was about. Almost seemed impossible to disappoint with the right cast of actors for the roles. And that was not a problem - Rami Malek is just about the perfect Freddie Mercury. Yet, it does not work, despite Malek and despite the fantastic music, it still does does not work.  It almost felt as if the film-makers picked a good cast, handed them a screenplay and then let them figure things out on their own. The directorial effort was greatly lacking to say nothing of the editing. It made a caricature out of the flamboyant character that Freddie Mercury was - over-rotating on depicting the personality not on the music making and failing to do justice to either. I stuck with the movie about three quarters of the way to listen to the music, many of the tracks I had not heard in a very long time.  It was wonderful to recall the times when I first heard the music of Queen - the early p...

Clive Thompson's Coders:    The Making of a New Tribe and the Remaking of the World makes for absolutely wonderful reading. Given my background in technology, I might me closer to the topic than those from other fields but Thompson's writing would be accessible to them to. I love how he explains what attracts a person to coding and what it takes to thrive in that line of work. And because the conditions for success are so specific, it naturally promotes a pre-dominant "type".  He also traces the rise and fall of women in the coding over the decades - while I was aware of most the data points he mentions, had not quite connected the dots to see how the surrounding culture of gaming, chatting with strangers on bulletin boards and such would naturally put the business of into unsuitable territory for young girls while their brothers could get away with potentially "bad" behavior.  I think it helps a great deal that Thompson has a programming background, he liv...

Reading this poem reminded me of the happy times in my kitchen and those of family and friends where I have helped cook meals and helped others bake. There is something joyful in the messy kitchen left in the wake of a feast with loved ones. It is not the mess of the lonely life where dishes pile up, leftovers remain unattended and chaos speaks to inner despair. Those need to be cleaned up in a hurry to help shore up the spirits. Not all messes are created equal: I want our summers to always be like this—a kitchen wrecked with love, a table overflowing with baked goods warming the already warm air. After all the pots are stacked, the goodies cooled, and all the counters wiped clean—let us never be rescued from this mess.

Such a cool idea to design your garden for pollinators so they can thrive so in turn we can as well. To bad the tool does not work for my part of the world: Pollinator Pathmaker  is not just about large public gardens: at  pollinator.art  you can use the algorithmic tool for free to make your own garden artwork. Simply follow the steps in the  algorithmic toolbox  to select your garden conditions and play with how the algorithm solves the problem of empathy. It then generates a garden design for you; each design created is a one-off edition of the artwork. Presumably without human interference, the land would look more like these pictures depict, kind to those that give it life. In our suburban lives when we plant our yards, we optimize for entirely different things .. planting to support the greatest diversity of pollinator species. The algorithm solves this problem, choosing and arranging from a curated palette of locally appropriate plants. Every garden it g...

Learned about live-shopping and how its going to be the way we shop in the future. Recently, I spent some time on Twitch trying to get a sense of how the medium works in preparation for a client meeting. To me it seemed like a headache inducing marriage of cable TV with a hyper-active Yahoo chat-room. In a sense the worst of all worlds and yet this is what draws folks in. I cannot imagine how live-shopping can be a personalized experience for any single shopper, you can join the throngs and become an active participant and share the shopping energy .. retailers are no longer competing only with the store next door. Instead, they’re competing with everything and everyone on the internet – with movies, music, and gaming. That’s why retail brands are now essentially media brands. What matters first is, can you capture users’ attention? And then: can you hold it? And, as Netflix noted when they called out sleep as one of their major competitors: can your audience stay awake long enough to...

The fact that influencer marketing exists speaks to our collective willingness to sign up to a Ponzi scheme. It's no different from pyramid selling schemes. It may feel a bit more direct with people are directly responding to the influencer's vote in deciding what to buy or not. But it has to be a bit more complex than that. The far away and remote celebrity influencer gets the status in a person's life because people much closer home that they look up to are signaling that this influencer is on-trend and someone to follow. They in turn might pick their cues from those that are level up on the social pecking order and so forth. In the end it is a pyramid scheme even though everyone down to the lowest level hears the megaphone equally loud. That could be misleading and it can lead to this false notion that there is some direct line with the influencer which may have lead to the tragedy at the Astroworld festival this story cites . That and as the author cites, the desire to ...

I bought a quince at the local grocery store a few days ago without any idea what to do with it,  When I saw there on the shelf, a limerick from childhood came to mind and I had to give it a shot with or without the runcible spoon . Once I had peeled and diced it, became evident that it would need work and could not be eaten sliced as Edward Lear had suggested. My version was cooked with maple syrup, fresh ginger and cardamon - felt like a good way to bring together home and abroad in the taste of a fruit I had imagined from childhood and never experienced until now. Turns out what I made up is close to an actual recipe . Cooking quince made me think about how we arrive at the same destination in life - for instance work at the same company, in very similar roles, or are part of a group that has some common interest or goal.  We arrive there not for the same reasons and rarely if ever traveling the same path. For me this quince on my kitchen counter top went a certain directio...

The hairdresser I go to is an neighborhood institution but I only learned about him the last couple of years. S has older clientele - I would be on the younger end of the spectrum. Kids and grandkids who come to S know him through their parents and happen to live close enough to avail his services. He owns the place and all the other hairdressers are women. Sadly they are an arrogant and unfriendly bunch but S is the exact opposite. If one of the ladies answers the phone, there is no way I am getting an appointment at a time that works for me in the next month. But if I walk in on a Saturday afternoon, ask for S in the sign-up sheet, he will fit me in. Between his appointments, he will squeeze in a bit of time for me. We exchange very few words, he knows exactly what to do and always delivers great results.  The waiting time at his salon is unexpectedly pleasant. S has understood the musical tastes of his clientele. There is a lot of nostalgic music going back to the 60s and 70s bu...

I am reading the shorts of Guy de Maupassant in those little snippets of time I would have otherwise spent catching the news or something else meant to be forgotten five minutes after because they have no lasting relevance. Some of these stories I had read in my high school years and it made quite an impression. After all these years and maybe because of reasons of nostalgia its still the same feeling reading Boule de Suif and Two Friends as it it been back then.  Ironically I am reading Valley of Genius in parallel among others. It's meant to a pean to Silicon Valley and the greatness it has produced being the crucible of genius. What an absolutely unreadable book. Great premise but terrible execution. Does this even be deserved to be a called a book? Adam Fisher had a chance to talk to a lot of important people and like a faithful scribe he transcribed the words of wisdom the spewed forth but he did nothing original after that. Just organized his content into chapters to cr...

The story of Flint and how the crisis was mishandled is about wanting problems to go away by wearing those down that complain about it. In this instance,  the people prevailed  but a huge and tragic cost.  Back in Delhi , the people are resigned lot as they have never experienced a win - they simply don't believe its possible, so an outcome even remotely close to Flint is impossible.  This paper about inaction in public policy breaks it down perfectly and distill it to a few root causes: Unconflicted adherence to the status quo, by selective attention to information about past, present or future conditions and selective interpretation and forgetting of information that conflicts with their benign interpretation of the status quo; Shifting responsibility (‘buck passing’) for taking a decision or acting on a signal to other people, departments or organisations; Bolstering decisions already taken in the past by rationalising away the need to reconsider them; Procrastin...

Pretty amazing to this production by NYT .  Would be great if more self-critical content like this would surface from both sides of the divide. The key takeaway - It's easy to stand for liberal values as long as you don't have to walk the talk while being very affluent. From casual observation we know that money and power change people - even when its not on the scale of the super-elite. Just moving up the social ladder a few rungs from where you started out is enough for that. No surprise that people would like to protect those gains and not want to careen down. Presumably the higher you make it greater is this fear and stronger the impulse to protect what was "won" or "earned". This is not to say everyone who arrives in life forgets where they came from and shove their values down the toilet but it change is quite common.  The discussion about the zoning laws in Palo Alto got me thinking about the refugee tenement flat my grandmother came to as new bride....

This story about statisticians doing pretty shady things reads like its waiting to be made into a movie. It begins with some rating evaluation data being selectively excluded: What began as an investigation into shady evaluations forms has grown into a major affair by the spring of 2020, with a divide running right through the Mathematical Institute as a result. The statistics team has lost all trust in the management team and the relationships within the institute have been so strained that the faculty feels obliged to appoint a mediator to bridge the gap between different employees. And it spirals from there to the self-destruction of a reputable institution: According to emeritus professor Richard Gill, it is an ‘eternal shame that such a good statistics team, one of the best in Europe, has now completely fallen apart. I don’t think people realise the damage this has caused to the reputation of the university both at home and abroad.’ Worth reading in its entirety for those who enj...

What's true about people in India dying due to lack of access to medical records must be true of any other part of the world as well if such access is a problem. Its great to see blockchain being used to solve this problem . The path to getting to the medical records business took some wide detours: Transcrypts began as a tool to combat resume fraud marketed to human resources professionals, before expanding into income verification for landlords. Now, the firm said that it views itself as a full service documentation service. The DWB partnership is its first foray into medical records. Previously Transcrypt had found that HIPAA and other compliance laws essentially barred blockchain as an acceptable method of storage for medical records within the United States. This proves the concept that every piece of data about a person could be part of a ledger and if they get to control who has access to what parts of their information and what price point, it would make the use of data fai...

Watching this video was an out of body experience for me . The devotees are immersing themselves in water that is covered in toxic foam from untreated sewer. Its not like they are unaware of the problem but they have no choice one woman explains - this is part of the religious observance. Maybe if a person has faith this unwavering then can dip into poison and come out blessed with eternal youth but its mind-boggling to see pictures of people playing around with the said foam .  There is plenty of blame to go around for the state of Yamuna but the saddest part of this disaster is the acceptance of fate by people who feel like they have to choose between faith and fear. If they are so easily afraid then their faith is not real or strong enough. Maybe this is exactly the reason there is no impetus for change - the powers that be know very well that people will scale back their expectations, accept their karma and move on with their lives the best they can. 

I know of K-Pop but never heard any. Sometimes I tune into random radio stations while driving and that has provided me any and all knowledge of music made in the last two decades. To say that I know very little about this subject it is an understatement. That said, reading this essay about K-Pop and some of lyrics has now got me curious. This is thoughtful and poetic: It’s hard to forget this one handspan of a memory Just because someone tells you to move on Time may keep passing but That place keeps me trapped where I am Under the orange sun we dance Together, throwing no shadows There’s no such thing as an inevitable goodbye I’ll see you there in our beautiful memories The things we miss out based on ignorance and resistance - for me in this instance the the poetry of K-Pop lyrics. Every time I complain about my parents being unwilling to accept new information, unable to change their ways even when there is evidence it does not serve them well, I take a moment to remind myself tha...

Travel in 2020-21 has felt unusual even if first blush the particular experience was no different than before the pandemic. The mood of fellow guests at a hotel for example was off. People stuck in their small groups - families, co-workers and such. Many kept to themselves. Public spaces in the hotel were empty and the few times I have traveled, there was no room-service for the duration of my short stays. I attributed it to the risks that it involved for the cleaning staff - no one was requiring proof of vaccination or a negative covid test to let the guests in. This article about the state of the hospitality business talks about pre-existing challenges and just spiraled out of control with the pandemic The hotel industry, with nearly triple the unemployment rate of the U.S. national average, grappled with staffing issues even before the pandemic. But the health crisis sent room demand into a nosedive and drove companies of all sizes to reduce staffing levels to a minimum last year w...

It's impossible to believe  Ursula Le Guin can ever be stupid even if after 8 pm  but her writing routine is something to be inspired by - for anyone who aspires to do meaningful work in life. The consistency of habit and the time to think seems to be the big themes. I love her science fiction even though I am not a particular fan of the genre. Le Guin gives it a thinking woman's masterful touch and it transcends mere science fiction in her hands. Not surprised by how she describes old women the only people to have “experienced, accepted, and enacted the entire human condition”. Going back to her amusing comment about after 8 pm, maybe the lesson there is to get our best work of the day done in the prime of our day - whatever that happens to be for the person. Knowing when that is may not such a trivial thing. The key to be prolific and cultivating whatever natural gifts we have maybe to discover when we do our best work and use that time to get better at it - every day.

Reading this Emily Dickinson poem made me think about meaningless days, weeks and years that just went by in pursuit of things that felt important in that time but looking back not nearly as much. When finally there is a moment to pause past the mid-life mark, it does feel like "a Funeral, in my Brain" And then I heard them lift a Box And creak across my Soul With those same Boots of Lead, again, Then Space - began to toll, And as you grow older and (hopefully) wiser, it becomes your turn to look at the young making mistakes and mis-steps you once made, pursuing shiny objects like you once did, preparing for disappointment without being ready for it. And yet there are no words to convey those lessons, no detour to get them to the better happy place. You just watch as their stories unfold knowing they too will get to the point where they will feel the funeral in their brain.

I had the misfortune of dealing with my internet provider recently after an outage at home. It took most of my work day to get some semblance of help from them and it was wasted time in the end. We were left to our own devices to solve the problem which we did. At some point one customer service rep recommended I go their official retailer and pick up new equipment that they can provision online. And so I did. Turns out the official retailer has exactly the same level of customer support as I do. Instead of me calling from home and wasting my day, I could sit across the desk from a guy wearing company tee-shirt doing exactly that with no guarantee of success.  I was dumbfounded by such business model - there was no way for this shop to be successful given the conditions. Reading this Vice story about Apple making iPhones just about impossible for outside repair shops to fix broken screens reminded me of my nightmarish customer experience with the internet provider who I cannot dum...

Reading this blog post around the same time I became aware of a rather big lie that was told by a close relative for years feels like an odd coincidence. This relative (V) has been telling anyone who cares to listen that her now ex-husband cheated on her with impunity for a couple of decades while she labored over domestic and work responsibilities being the good and dutiful wife that she is. We all sympathized with her outrage, her desire for a pound of flesh (truth be told it has been more than a ton and she is not quite done) and we excused her extremely unhinged behavior. After all the woman was blindsided by the man she trusted and dumped in her declining years - it has to be a shock to the system. Nothing about that is good or right.  Now we learn that she in fact had multiple lovers going back to the early years of her marriage. One of these characters is still a close friend and confidant. She was looking for her next husband for almost the entirety of her marriage - only ...

The story of 23andMe in terms of what it means to the customers whose DNA data it holds is reminiscent of Henrietta Lacks on grander scale as the author of this article notes as well: In some cases, after all, one individual can hold the key to a world of biomedicine. Take the famous case of Henrietta Lacks, whose family struggled in poverty for years after researchers turned her cancer cells into a critical research tool that made millions of dollars. With a far greater range of the human genome decoded, it’s easy to envision a Gattaca-esque future in which the DNA of the masses is mined for personalized miracle cures affordable only to the super rich. Wojcicki says that’s just not going to happen. “We’re not evil,” she says. “Our brand is being direct-to-consumer and affordable.” For the time being she’s focused on the long, painful process of drug development. She’d like to think she’s earned some trust, but she hasn’t come this far on faith. When the CEO of a company is found sayi...

The full paper is well above my pay grade but the summary article about zombie corporations was good reading. There are implications for which companies should receive stimulus money in a crisis such as the pandemic and who should not The congestion effects on non-zombie firms and the adverse effects on aggregate productivity also found by previous studies therefore probably not only capture the direct effects of zombie firms but also indirect effects through a growing number of weak recovered zombies. Finally, the results underline the challenge facing public authorities when taking measures to contain the impact of the coronavirus recession on firms. The delicate task is to seek to shore up companies that would be viable in less extreme circumstances while at the same time not excessively dampening corporate dynamism by protecting already weak and unproductive ones. A firm’s viability should therefore be an important criterion for its eligibility for government and central bank supp...