Being Heard

I was intrigued by the idea of Forgotify but the few times I checked their website was not working. Maybe that is their effort at self-preservation - must not become too popular of accessible or there will be nothing left to play. Not too hard to imagine a collection of bots going through and playing at songs in the list just once so there is nothing left to play. 

What purpose does a site like this serve was not clear to me. There could be case made for bottom 5% of Spotify to lend a helping had to struggling artists. But getting to the state where they would go to be invisible only after one playing of the song seems to do no one any good. The mission of the company sounds reasonable but the execution does not add up.

We love music. That’s why we were so shocked to learn that 20% (or over 4 million songs) had never been played on Spotify. Not even once. A musical travesty, really.  So we set out to give these neglected songs another way to reach your ear holes, and Forgotify was born. 

Acting Right

The concept of acting your wage is not new - its how most people who make too little money to warrant extra effort act. In my neighborhood the last shift on week-nights at the grocery store is manned by a bunch of retirees - not sure why the demographic is skewed so senior for this specific schedule. It is safe to assume people in that age bracket are not working these unpleasant hours for the joy and fulfillment. More likely than not they were not able to retire as planned, still have bills to pay and people they are responsible for. The wages they get are no different from the high school kids bagging groceries after school - maybe a smidge higher given the odd shift hours. 

If I ever happen to be there late in the evening near their closing time, these employees make sure they hustle everyone out the cash register and out the store a good fifteen minutes before official store closing time. In the last fifteen minutes all self-checkout machines are closed and no one can be found at the cash registers. Most doors are already closed except one. 

These folks are all acting their wage - they don't want to stay a second past close of shift and if that means the last dozen customers have to be rushed out, frustrated and unhappy with their experience so be it. There is also the inverse behavior of people not acting their wage - being over-paid and holding titles for roles that they are not qualified for. That leads everyone else to wonder how these folks were hired and why they continue to be employed and even get promoted. 

Being Boring

Loved this Wired story that talks about something I care about a great deal - stability over disruption in technology. Among the work I have done for clients over the years, I am most proud of things are the normal, boring and reliable. They could use it for years and not even notice the thing existed - it just hummed away in the background and improved what they did or allowed them to focus on their strengths rather than battle with non-core functions. 

The boring stuff lives on for ever, fads come and go in cycles of two to five years, the Kool-Aid of the day generates buzz, conference keynotes and such but inevitably the hype will fade and folks will turn to tried and true. I never saw the point of random new technology certifications - its like requiring a chef who went to culinary school for years and ran a restaurant for a decade to prove that they can follow a certain recipe. 

There is a level of stupid such requirement exceeds and I find it impossible to condone. Ask developers to learn foundational things that matter no matter what the current fad is - underlying all the new and shiny is the old and dull stuff no one wants to talk about:

The world of technology is infinite and exhausting, and everyone will tell you their giant thing is the real next thing. But you can always see the big, boring, true future of the field by looking at the on-ramps—the code schools, the certificate programs, the “master it in 30 days” books. One year everyone was learning Rails at coding boot camps. Then it was JavaScript. Then many of the boot camps closed, and now it's DevOps (software development plus IT operations). These are the things the industry needs right now, on a two- to five-year horizon. And stick around long enough and you'll find a lot of old Unix code and Java beneath the new stuff—dull systems, a stable stack of technologies so reliable that we forget them.

One Size

Good starting point with the 5 Whys here for Bed Bath and Beyond but it did not answer the question what was ailing in the first instance before the new guy from Target decided to replay what worked there and found it to be a mistake. 

The main miss in the story that that the strategy of pushing private labels was in response to problems that the store was experiencing when they brought in the new CEO. The article does not say what those problems were and how they came about. Perhaps that context would help one appreciate the desire to push out branded goods to make room for private label. 

BBBY should have hired someone like Hubert Joly -- who crafted a winning turnaround strategy for Best Buy by first listening to employees and customers. Before imposing a pre-packaged solution, make sure you are solving the right problem

Completely agree that identifying the right problem is key but the author is making the exact same mistake he is accusing the BBBY leadership of. His wants to prove that imposing the pre-packaged solution will have negative consequences - to that end he fits the data that helps tell his story. It is a pre-packaged analysis that falls woefully short. 

Bringing Change

N and I are working really hard to get our common friend B to start taking care of her physical and mental health which have both been suffering for the last few years. B is as stubborn as they get and refuses to listen to us even though she knows we care for her deeply and want nothing but the best. It is not enough to trigger the change that is needed and at our age, people do get set in their ways. If roles were reversed and two of my close friends saw a problem in my situation that I was oblivious to, not sure how much they would have been able to influence my thinking. Reading this Kakfa quote put into words our struggles with B

One has either to take people as they are, or leave them as they are. One cannot change them, one can merely disturb their balance. A human being, after all, is not made up of single pieces, from which a single piece can be taken out and replaced by something else. Rather he is a whole, and if you pull one end, the other, whether you like it or not, begins to twitch

We are proposing to change B and deeply disturbing her balance so it is no surprise that she is resisting so hard. We are tryin to impact one small piece of her - ignoring what is driving that piece to behave the way it does. We have no idea when the desired change happens how it will impact the equilibrium of the remaining pieces that make up B. What the resulting twitch will entail for her. The words made me pause and thinking about our well-intentioned efforts and I am far from certain this will serve B well. Our best hope is she will find a way to rebalance the pieces on her own, in her own way.

Starry Nights

Watching stars in the sky has been an activity people around the world have enjoyed largely unfretted for all long as there have been people. That will likely change soon with a man-made shiny object crowding out smaller things like stars. It is an allegory for what is wrong with the world - a few very rich and influential people decide which way society moves and what our priorities must be. I doubt anyone mentioned in the cast of characters who have the means to pin shiny things in the sky and cause global vision pollution, have the education, enlightenment or edification of the poor huddled masses. 

They are interested in commerce facilitated by connectivity and access. All the buyer has to do is see a picture of the thing they want and push a button - nothing beyond a 3rd grade education is needed to accomplish, By then most children can count to as much as they need to understand what something costs. Infact, its best that stay around that level so they can become buying bots. Why bother to educate them to the point they start worrying about the consumption footprint, sustainability and such other nonsense that can come in the way of them hitting the buy button. 

These satellites are an appropriation of a public good. Space doesn’t belong to anyone; it belongs to everyone. And it has been that way as long as we’ve existed.

Allowing Musk, Bezos, AST, and the rest of these companies to literally invade our only view of the universe with tens of thousands of satellites and giant antennas ignores a source of pollution that blinds our view of the cosmos.

Drinking Water

Recently, I thought I would have a 5 gallon jar of spring water at home as a way to make drinking water as easy as it used to be in my childhood out a simple terracotta surahi wrapped in a piece of wet cloth during the summer months. It sat on the kitchen platform and the water was always at the perfect temperature.

I am not sure of the source of the water but would guess it was the nearby river. The town did have a water filtration plant so it was not quite natural water but the taste was very pleasant. At the time, I was not aware water could taste any other way. But when we traveled out of town, I noticed the water did not taste quite the same. Since we would be back home in a few days anyway, that was not such a big deal. 

Since leaving what used to be my home in India, the taste of drinking water has always been problematic. To workaround the issue and stay hydrated, I took drinking tea. By the third or fourth round in the same pot the output become more hot water and less tea. That's been my process for decades. One day, it occurred to me there may be a way to re-create the childhood surahi experience atleast in part and thus the big spring water jar. 

As it turns out there is no easy way to go pick up such jar from the grocery store. There is one one brand of water in the market where I live at that size - it is highly processed with added minerals, a very far cry from spring water I was looking for. It took visiting  half a dozen grocery stores over several days before a solution was found. This is as close to the taste of water I grew up with. 

Different Lens

Coming from a family of Indian partition victims who had to flee Bangladesh to become refugees in Kolkata, I am not a fan of the British royals. As with any peoples who are colonized and abused by a foreign nation, we have in some part atleast our own people to blame for our troubles. That being said, the atrocities of the colonizer does not become less heinous because they had help from the natives. To that end, I very much appreciate Kadyan's sentiments: 

Numerous observers noted how the British Empire plundered around $45 trillion from India over two centuries of colonialism that resulted in millions of deaths, and how the Kohinoor—one of the largest cut diamonds in the world, with an estimated value of $200 million—was stolen from India to be set in the queen mother’s crown.

“Why are Indians mourning the death of Queen Elizabeth II?” asked Indian economist Manisha Kadyan on Twitter. “Her legacy is colonialism, slavery, racism, loot, and plundering. Despite having chances, she never apologized for [the] bloody history of her family. She reduced everything to a ‘difficult past episode’ on her visit to India. Evil.”

Did some good come about for India as a result of British colonization - maybe it did but no one knows what our fortunes might have been if we were never colonized. That is the fork of the road that was never taken. As it turns out, the Irish are not fans of this lady either. 

Learning Joy

 Interesting read about how our brains tag experiences as good or bad. It would be great to extend the study to see what interventions a person could make in their lives such that they tag fewer things as bad and consequently have a sunnier disposition, better mental health, Serving others in whatever way possible seems to be one way to get there - it expands a person's world view seeing others tagging things very differently from them. For me personally, one particular experience stands out as a recalibration trigger in my brain. The guy was a fish-monger in the small town I grew up in. He had very little going for him - sat in the corner of the market for the smaller vendors who could not afford to hold big fish in their inventory. He was maybe ten years older than me and supporting his family who lived in a nearby village. My father would chat with him every time we bought fish - I was frequently there with him. K was one of the most cheerful people I had seen.

Never saw the brightness of his smile diminish as he struggled to eke out a living. By the time I left to college he had moved to the stalls where the bigger fish-mongers sat. He would tell my father about how he was slowly improving his village home and when we was done adding the extra room he would get married. He also talked about troubles which seemed endless but he had a way of finding the silver lining which I clearly could not see. His brain was clearly set up to tag most things as good and just about nothing as entirely bad. I was in awe of how K did this and in times of trouble tried to recall those conversations between him and my father, how he processed information and came to conclusions I would not have been able to. I am nowhere close to his abilities but to this day, I use his example as inspiration on how to deal with adversity. 

Of Fairytale

Learned about this fascinating cooperation between man and bird in Dan Saladino's book Eating to Extinction. He talks of the process of gathering Hazda honey:

Somehow, over hundreds of thousands of years, the two species, humans and honeyguides, found a way of sharing their different skills. The bird can find the bees’ nests but can’t get to the wax it wants to eat without being stung to death. Humans, meanwhile, struggle to find the nests, but armed with smoke can pacify the bees. Theirs is the most complex and productive of any partnership between humans and wild animals.

This sounds like the stuff of fairytale and mythology. Makes you wonder if it might be possible to build translators that facilitate communication between man and creatures of the wild. How many new dimensions that might open up in our thinking. 

Offering Rescue

Reading these words in Rafia Zakaria's book warmed my heart immensely. Here sister who has spoken the unadorned truth:

There is a division within feminism that is not spoken of but that has remained seething beneath the surface for years. It is the division between the women who write and speak feminism and the women who live it, the women who have voice versus the women who have experience, the ones who make the theories and policies and the ones who bear scars and sutures from the fight.

I could be deeply biased because I am a woman from the sub-continent, have had to escape from marriage and raise a child alone in America. But Zakaria speaks the truth and I would argue speaks for many of us when she describes her experience being invited to speak at a multi-cultural event on her subject matter- what does feminism mean in Pakistan.

This was a “global bazaar,” where the “natives” from various countries could raise money for some noteworthy cause, orphanages, malnutrition, girls’ schooling, or even microloans. Like extensions of the merchandise, the women who had been invited to “speak” would stand obediently by the tchotchkes that commodified their culture.

Like Zakaria, I have learned to retell my "story" into a short pitch that does not offend, confound, confuse or depress my local audiences. Every year of my adult life until J left to college a few years ago have been filled with complicated events many of which require understanding of my cultural background. To compress all that into a few minutes of social chatter with relative strangers is an impossible undertaking. 

The perfect elevator pitch does not exist but I have few very quick versions of the "story" that I can tell based on who is hearing. Not one of them speaks to who I am. That said, I have a few friends who are very unlike the white feminists Zakaria is describing. They recognize the limits of their understanding of India and what it is to have grown up there as a woman. They are willing to accept their view of the world is partial at best and are curious to learn what they can from others like me. They know that people that look  like me are not always in need of a rescue - infact we are quite capable of rescuing others. 

Adding Twos

Sobering read on the future of western democracy. The ending captures the essence of what ails us:

..in the future, as we cease to relate to each other according to the grand narratives that once held society together, we may be unable to share a “common reality”.

“That may well be when democracy dies,” according to Zuckerman. “If we have a sufficiently divergent fact pattern that we can’t agree on a single reality to try to collectively govern.”

What applies to society at large scale is manifesting itself in smaller scale units like family, school, workplace and so on. Not everyone in your family sees the same version of political reality and at some point that divergence seeps into other areas of your life leaving you feeling disconnected from each other. The same is true for larger units of people who traditionally shared common ties. 

You now have to to seek out those who are wearing the same style of blinders as you are so you at least see the same things and have some common foundation. The more long-tail the choices grow the fewer people one can hope to find with the same answer to what is two plus two. It is no longer an expectation that it will be universally four. If I am three kind of person, I want to be around other three-ers not six-ers and five-ers. There can be infinity of lies and with it as many problems. 

Stunted Growth

Reading this article made me think about how things don't change all that much after decades across countries far apart in many ways. College was on the most terrifying periods of my life and I have little if any recollection anything positive or affirming that came out of those four years. The only goal was to get a degree out there and get employed (or go to grad school abroad). The rest was doing time until the bell of freedom rang. My level of fear for my safety was at a level where it was impossible to function normally - most things were in the cannot be done list, including going to the library. When you live like that for four years in the most formative part of your adult life, you become a warped human being with stunted potential. It takes decades to start feeling comfortable in your own skin and truly understand what you might have been able to become. 

Women of my generation who went to comparable schools in India have very similar stories - some were less cynical than I was and came away a lot less jaded. Yet others were able to eke out something good out of those years as well - specially those who found love there. The rest of us had it rough. One of J's very close friends in high-school had an experience a lot like the woman in the story, here in a well-known American university. She too went to the college authorities to complain and very quickly realized there could be no winning scenario for her no matter what the outcome. 

L decided to drop out of college to move in with her ailing grandmother to help her out and work part-time. The manager of the department store she works at, saw that L was wasting her amazing potential and decided he had to help. He arranged with corporate to pay for her to complete college. Two years later, L is somewhat back on the saddle thanks to a man very unlike the one who had abused her. Hers is a story with a relatively happy ending. No one can undo the harm and the hurt that was caused to her, make whole the dreams that were dashed but there will be some redemption in the end. Not everyone's story ends this way. This is that much sadder when I think in the context of the book I have been reading recently Against White Feminism by Rafia Zakaria, where she writes in a different context: From the 1890s onward Indian women were graduating from Indian colleges and universities and agitating for increased educational opportunities.

Fetal Curl

Good essay on forces that are driving the great worldwide regression to childhood. In times of crisis, we as individuals curl into the fetal position and hope for someone, something to save us from our troubles. This desire to return to the womb manifests itself metaphorically all the time. It makes sense that if these are the experiences of an entire generation happening every day, all the time - the fetal curl will become a visible cultural artifact - a collective cry for help that is absolutely not forthcoming

The entire planet may be experiencing its own lost decades now – young and old are suffering. But, as the Japanese experience shows us, embracing our inner child isn’t necessarily a denial of reality. It can pave the way to an entirely new one. The Great Regression isn’t really a regression at all. It’s a sign of resilience in the face of profound adversity. When a child is born, it’s impossible to predict what they might become. Who can say what will emerge from our second childhoods?

In this second childhood, the adults realize that no one is coming to save them and they must uncurl, find a way to deal with the mess that they have been landed into, work out a co-operative model out of the cesspool. Maybe that is the best benefit that can come from a world of kidaults.

Lacking Ambition

 My friend S shared this randomly with us - Women who seek to be equal with men lack ambition —Marilyn Monroe and it lead to some spirited discussion among the ladies. No surprise most agreed with Marilyn but their reasons varied a fair bit. Among women of my vintage there was some cohesion of opinion. We don't see men and women as being equal. Each has specific advantages over the other and where there the complementary forces come together without pointless power struggles, amazing things happen for both. Where the woman could have otherwise been at relative disadvantage to man much like her, such partnership could tilt the balance in her favor.

In each of those situations neither side was focused on equality or parity - just focused on adding to the mix what they uniquely suited to with the goal of making the unit stronger. We had all seen instances of exemplary team work in our lives. Single parents raising children of the opposite gender, couples in strong personal and professional relationships, mentors and mentees - across the spectrum of relationships between men and women. Equality is a low and anemic bar - the better goal is to focus on partnerships with men that bring out the best in the woman, amplifies her impact in the world.

Fleeting Moment

I was on my way to the pharmacy when my favorite Fleetwood Mac song came up on the radio. It made for a driveway moment pulling into parking lot. The store would close in a few minutes and if I wanted to linger on enjoy the music, it would make the next morning's schedule quite messy with traveling out of town. What was meant to be a quick stop at the pharmacy took a lot longer than I expected. That magic spell that song created for me on a nice summer afternoon had long melted away. We were dealing with rules around refills and insurance co-pays and the young pharmacist struggled to complete the order. He looked ready to head home for the night and I was not yet his last customer. 

On the way back home, I did not tune back to the radio - that moment had slid by. Thoughts turned to when I had first heard that song and why some music has this effect of making you want to pause and listen no matter what. Ironically this one used to be on my road-trip CD from the times J was a baby along with 99 Miles from LA. No two people have the same vision of what makes for a road trip song - much depends on where the person hopes to arrive metaphorically, the baggage they are bringing to the ride and who they are on that journey with. 

Clearing Ground

My home used to have a tree line of pines one side when we first moved in. In the years that have gone by life had been too busy and chaotic to notice that some invasive brush had taken over that patch of land and that the pines trunks are obscured from view entirely. A few months ago, while staring in that direction while having my morning tea, I remembered the old owner used to have a bird feeder nailed on the trunk of the pine visible from the kitchen window. That feeder was nowhere to be seen with the wild brush covering everything. My neighbor P who also happens to be a master gardener had told me the name of this invasive bush which I can no longer recall but the best plan was to get rid of them she said. That would be a slow and painstaking process. 

We got started a few weeks ago and each weekend as time permits, we clear the ground around a pine tree, give it some air and light to grow. And the process takes several hours and I am bit by mosquitoes and other insects to the point of soreness and oblivion despite my best efforts to protect myself. The past weekend after we had "liberated" the fifth pine a thought crossed by mind - giving anyone - human, animal or plant a shot at a better life once things have gone truly south (as it had for these trees with over a decade of neglect) is back-breaking work and the rewards are not nearly as spectacular as one would like for the degree of task difficulty. You just have to grin and bear the pain hoping that somewhere, somehow your effort will have act as a force multiplier of good.

Talking Balut

I met a few old friends for dinner while passing through their town recently. They all still live and work there and I don't anymore. We used to be work friends - a concept that is fading out these days with hybrid and remote work being more norm than exception for many. H has brought her mentee along - a young woman only a few years out of college. C had recently become a homeowner and we celebrated her. Conversation at some point turned to foods in a person's culture that the rest of the world would consider weird. It started with relatively innocuous things like eating fish head and goat brains but once folks had warmed up to the idea of sharing stories, it got a lot more interesting. 

C was hesitant to open up at first being so much younger than the rest of us but at some point she had embolden herself enough to talk about one of her favorite foods - balut. She was pleasantly surprised everyone took it in stride and it was not so scary after all. C was way more relaxed around us for the rest of the evening and seemed to have a fun time in company of strange older women with whom she had very little in common. My thoughts turned to my baby and I wished she would have such experiences too - of going a bit out of her comfort zone and experiencing a safe and comforting world and strangers who will some day become her friends.

Over Engineered

Sounds like a rather silly device based on a created need for some niche customer segment - a clothes dryer monitoring system that is an add-on and depends on a cloud-based service. So many things are wrong about this picture. Why is it not good enough to listen to the sound of the dryer beep when it finishes it cycle. 

If its too far away for you to hear, there is always an alarm that can go off on your phone. The reason the company did not survive is that it did not address any durable or universal customer need. Could have seen some early adoption driven by novelty but that does not drive mainstream adoption. 

So the real innovative opportunity lies in creating more resilient systems that can still function even if the manufacturer collapses. Enter the open source Matter platform, which is expected to launch this fall, and not only unify the fractured standards in the smart home space, but let all of your smart home devices communicate on a local network, without without the need for a controlling gateway and hub. 

It seems like people should just move around more and use manual or mechanical solutions over digital ones. That would help physical and mental well-being. 

Novel Trouble

AI getting entangled in the porn business is cause for all kinds of concern. Novel means of content content production in this instance makes for as many novel ways to hurt innocent people. Beyond that it is the ability to clearly (and quickly) separate fact from fiction. Where being able to do that has impact of a person's life and livelihood, the consequences can be irreparable. 

Would be more interesting to see AI being put to other creative use. Being able to imagine what a conversation might have been long deceased friend of relative, how one's great grand-parent might have reacted to news of the day - there could be elements of entertainment and education in being able create those experiences. Maybe it will teach us to look at our world with new eyes.

Whimsical Spaces

Ran into this post about a cute and whimsical house with rather unique flourishes. The pictures made me wonder if any home could be imbued with some mystery and magic. Add a trompe de l'oeil where its completely unexpected and gives pause. What is inside our home reflects on who we are as people - there is a psychology to it. “The concept of personal space and how we dress it is not this whimsical idea about where you live. It has a profound effect on you.”. I have a couple of personal spaces - one is my home office where I spend the workday and the other is the couch near windows that overlook greenery in the yard. The couch is functional but comfortable.

My workspace is full of things that have to do with J - artwork from earliest childhood to when she left to college and books I gathered over the years. And I am very much about being clutter-free which it turns out has to with conscientiousness - I suppose that would describe me. I would like more whimsical touches around my space (in theory at least) but it is unlikely to make me feel comfortable and at home. So while I feel attracted to the idea, it may not represent who I am.

Active Silence

Great essay on climate change and how silence about it is the worst thing about the problem. The powers that be continue to maintain silence:

Never has a silence been so loud or so resonant. This is not a passive silence. It is an active silence, a fierce commitment to distraction and irrelevance in the face of an existential crisis. It is a void assiduously filled with trivia and amusement, gossip and spectacle. Talk about anything, but not about this. But while the people who dominate the means of communication frantically avoid the subject, the planet speaks, in a roar becoming impossible to ignore. These days of atmospheric rage, these heatshocks and wildfires ignore the angry shushing and burst rudely into our silent retreat.

The average person feels there is little they can do. This is how the world is shaping up to be and so they have little choice. In the backdrop of what the author describes as "active silence" this makes sense. Climate change is not the only topic where this applies. When the problem is too vast and too hard to solve, those in power choose not to talk about it because it would clearly demonstrate their inability and unwillingness to do what is needed to bring about change. By filling the space with amusement, distraction and nonsensical prattle, they change the topic to things they can speak to. None of those topics matter to the average person. It just keeps them pre-occupied and unable to focus on what really does. 

One Theme

In his book The Road to Character, author David Brook's writes: 

Of the twenty-three men and women who served in Dwight Eisenhower’s cabinets, only one, the secretary of agriculture, published a memoir afterward, and it was so discreet as to be soporific. By the time the Reagan administration rolled around, twelve of his thirty cabinet members published memoirs, almost all of them self-advertising.

And things have gotten only worse since then. No matter your performance at a highly visible job such as it for a cabinet member, there is always a book deal. There are any number of such books today written by anyone who was remotely close to power. They are aimed at given you an insider's view of what was really going on, promising that you will learn something you did not already know. 

In reality, it is just meant to pad the writer's resume and if the effort is successful they will get a talk-show or some such out of it if not a movie deal. It is still all about their job - the pinnacle of their life and its a crash to the bottom with no hope or redemption if they fall. So they cling with everything they have to the only thing they ever had. Reminds me of another line from a David Brook's book The Second Mountain, where he says:

"When you have nothing but your identity and job title to rest on, then you find yourself constantly comparing yourself to others. You are haunted by your conception of yourself." 

Teaching Money

Never read the book the author mentions in her essay about parenting but have seen the Ginzburg quote before

 “As far as the education of children is concerned, I think they should be taught not the little virtues but the great ones. Not thrift but generosity and an indifference to money; not caution but courage and a contempt for danger; not shrewdness but frankness and a love of truth; not tact but a love of ones neighbor and self-denial; not a desire for success but a desire to be and to know.” 

On her views about how to teach kids about money, the author says:

She posits that when we encourage kids to save for something they really want, a special and expensive toy, for example, they often become disappointed once they buy the toy, which invariably “seems dull and plain and ordinary after so much waiting and so much money.” They don’t blame the money, she says, but the object—they miss the money, and the alluring project of saving: “It is not bad that they have suffered a disappointment; it is bad that they feel lonely without the company of money.”

Better, she says, to raise them with an indifference to money, to let them spend it—and share it—freely and without regret, to teach them to seek work that they love, a vocation, rather than work that pays well. 

It's been my experience that you can teach whatever you want about money to your kids - take an idealist view such as Ginzburg proposes. In reality thought, kids learn from the examples they see. Sometimes the closest example is that of parents and their relationship with money but it could be someone else who has an influential position in the child's life. From that experience and observation comes a set of habits and propensities - things they would habitually do and things they would never do. The talk has relatively little value - the walk is what truly matters. 

Consuming Passive

On my recent trip to meet my parents in Kolkata, I was alarmed to see my father's TV habits. When I left home to go to college, he would tune into Doordarshan for a hour after he had dinner, spent time with me to go over any math or science I needed help with. This was his unwinding time after a long day and he generally dozed off while watching and finally retired for the day. There was nothing alarming or unusual about his habit. My mother joined him off and on but she was always busy doing her own thing and could not sit still for long. The situation now is considerably more dire. He turns on the TV mid-afternoon to watch some Bangla channel where people are screaming hysterically all the time and that is meant to be news reporting. 

Then the soaps come on later in the evening that are of remarkably bad quality. Then there is more hysterical screaming in the late evening news until he has dinner. His TV watching is solitary and he reads the newspapers while the thing blares along. My mother never comes there and there are no conversations happening about the content. It does not help that he his hard of hearing and refuses to wear a hearing aid. Reading this story on Ars about sedentary and passive consumption of content makes me think of folks like my dad who at some point in their life lose touch with things that occupied their time and minds and regress to the most non-productive habit to fill a huge amount of vacated space. 

Feeding Spree

Interesting and somewhat gruesome story about how priceless books are kept intact in libraries. The end is suitably dramatic but the full essay is worth a read:

On January 1, 1933, a photo of the librarian landed on the pages of the New York Times. There is no article accompanying the photo, only a short caption that credits Iiams with devising a “Gas Chamber in Which All Volumes Are Submitted Periodically to a De-Worming Process.” The headline lethal gas chamber for bookworms runs above the image of Iiams standing before a fumigation tank, a book held open in one hand as he examines it through a magnifying glass held in the other, a nearby truck of priceless books already loaded in the tank, their spines sparkling faintly as they await sterilization.

The oldest thing we have in my family is the handwritten family expenses maintained by my great-grandmother in the 1800s. The paper is brown and falling apart. The penmanship is absolutely beautiful. She writes with pen and quill and those few lists we have are a like a precious work of art. My mother has then laminated and my parents take great pride showing them to friends and family. I am glad we were able to save something so valuable for our family without needing the fumigation. 

Random Act

 In his book The Drunkard's Walk, the author Lenard Mlodinow says this of this own existence: 

It struck me then that I have Hitler to thank for my existence, for the Germans had killed my father’s wife and two young children, erasing his prior life. And so were it not for the war, my father would never have emigrated to New York, never have met my mother, also a refugee, and never have produced me and my two brothers.

While few would share his origin story but the birth of a human comes as the culmination of a string of random events. Along the line of forbears on both sides, people met and mated by random chance to produce progeny would in turn act just as randomly - so it has been from the beginning of times, The fact of any one's existence is as random as anything can be. 

Blessing with a beginning however random its nature, at some point we begin to have some ability to make choices. I for one am always amazed at people to share that they have three or more compelling offers (such as a job) to choose from and will take a month off to mull it over and make a decision. I have been on the job market many times over the years and it's never been the case that I had more than one road open in the end. 

When the one that would prevail in the end would emerge all other opportunities just died off. The choice was always made for me. If I decided it was not the right time for change, I could certainly sit it out but there were no further options from there. I can't tell then if what ever has happened along the way for me in terms of "career" was by choice of many random acts. 

Making Easy

These days everyone is "doing AIML" and not nearly doing enough commonsense. Having been in this business for a long time, the desire to seize this shiny object is hardly new. There must be an use case out there that AIML can blow out of the water - is the general thinking of the financial buyer of such solutions specially when they are data literate. 

Reality often fails to match up to the hype unless the problem being solved is has a long established track record. Spam classification and fraud detection for example are going to yield results but these are not novel or "innovative" problems to solve. People have been there done that so you will not excite the exec who is looking to make her mark in her new role. AIML is an overused and abused sales tool from what I have seen and the results can be quite questionable at times. In the words of one PhD student : 

Kapoor says that many researchers are rushing to use machine learning without a comprehensive understanding of its techniques and their limitations. Dabbling with the technology has become much easier, in part because the tech industry has rushed to offer AI tools and tutorials designed to lure newcomers, often with the goal of promoting cloud platforms and services. “The idea that you can take a four-hour online course and then use machine learning in your scientific research has become so overblown,” Kapoor says. “People have not stopped to think about where things can potentially go wrong.”

These folks with the four hours of online training are being promised that they will becomes masters of the universe never mind that they have high school level mathematics and no research background whatsoever. That would all fall into the category of "undifferentiated heavy lifting" that the technology will do for you. 

Thinking Pancakes

Gathering the berries inspired me to make crepes -  experience the joy of turning them out flawless and super-thin. There are a couple of very happy memories tied to crepes. One when J was had just started school and we visited a creperie in Las Vegas. A random choice that turned out to be a memorable experience. Neither of us at the time was a particular fan of the crepe but we thought it would be interesting to make a dinner of it - savory and sweet. They connect to happy childhood associations - from dosa to patishapta pitha. The world loves pancakes and every part has one or more type of pancakes. While making the crepe batter that was inspired by recipe I found in Martha Holmberg's book. 

The book was rather tedious to read - it seems like more and more recipe books are following the pattern established by Samin Nosrat's award winning book which was as much a joy to read as was watching her show. Sadly, that formula does not carry over for everyone else who knows a few things about cooking. Nosrat has a deep passion for her subject and and sees cooking in the more abstract idea where the coming together of the four concepts - salt, fat, acid and heat to creates an assortment of magic. Not everyone has a compelling higher level idea like that that they care about so deeply. In summary, what worked for Nosrat did not for Holmberg. I skimmed the pages until I found a recipe that looked workable (and it was). 

Gathering Food

Went on a long hike this past weekend on a trial full of wild raspberry bushes. Gathering them as I found out was not so easy. The bush is thorny to begin with and the undergrowth is predominantly nettles. Between the two, a forager has their work cut out for them. For the three hours of our hike, we found many over-ripe berries which we ate right away. The firmer ones came home with us and it was a decent quantity - enough to get us thinking if making a jam would be the best way to go. Foraging in the wild is a meditative experience for me. 

For a few hours, I am paying very close attention to my environment to see if there are edible things I could gather. If hiking it slows down my pace to where the we might take double the time to cover the same distance. The conversations often turn to memories of childhood and running around in the rural India with my friends, finding leaves and berries to eat along the way. It makes me think about the most basic needs of life.

 Spending four hours to gather enough to last a couple of meals puts many things in perspective. The gift of freed time in our lives and what we choose do with it. The value of observing life around us closely, the shape of a leaf, the color and texture of a berry, a patch of earth mushrooms are growing with exuberance. These things can be overlooked or serve as a way to connect to the earth as we were meant to.