Heartcrossings

 Nearing the end of Reza Alsan's book is a great read. He says this of religious fundamentalism:  Fundamentalism, in all religious traditions, is impervious to suppression. The more one tries to squelch it, the stronger it becomes. Counter it with cruelty, and it gains adherents. Kill its leaders, and they become martyrs. Respond with despotism, and it becomes the sole voice of opposition. Try to control it, and it will turn against you. Try to appease it, and it will take control. The same is true for other forms of fundamentalism too - not just religion. I tried to apply this construct to businesses that are extremely hopped up on their cultural kool-aid or the principles espoused by the founder maybe a century ago. In internet years, the century mark is achieved in a fourth or seventh of the time depending on how you are counting.  So the cultural tenets and prescriptions stop working as do most of the truths held as unassailable by the founder. Yet it is impossible to break bad

Amusing article about the latest on generative AI and tools that purportedly detect it. The rationale for the detection was the best part of it: When asked if he was surprised by the results, Raschka said “Yes and no — they are not sharing the paper so I can’t say 100% how it works, but based on the short description they have on the website, it sounds like they’re training a classifier to predict whether something is human generated or AI generated.” The problem, he explained, is that there are false negatives and false positives based on what dataset the tool was trained on. With Macbeth, for example, Raschka said he thinks the tool was not trained on Old English. “It’s not normal spoken English, it’s almost like a foreign language.” It would be great to see this backed up by fake historical facts that demonstrate that the author of Macbeth was an alien and/or Shakespeare was the name of the AI that wrote a lot of stuff. The arc of crazy needs to be completed here. 

Reading this story about Punjabi dhabas along US highways was heart-warming. The idea that you can get desi comfort food in the middle of nowhere in Wyoming is particularly wonderful. The element of unexpected and surprise is the best part. It would be not nearly the same thing to find such an establishment in Edison, NJ. There have been long road-trips where I have been hungry and yet none of the food options along the way really appealed to me.  So we drove some more in hopes of having better choices and ultimately settled for something that far from comforting. Imagine running into a place that served sabzi, roti and hot chai. I can't think of a better outcome for one such as myself. Though truth be told, Punjabi food holds universal appeal  - you don't have to be from the sub-continent to love it. The set of spices, the degree of warmth and color along with the variation is taste is just right. Everything in balance, nothing too overwhelming but always comforting. I am roo

Have been catching up on my fiction reading lately. This time it's Middlesex and I am enjoying it at a time in my life when I have the gift of time for myself. Back in 2002 when it published and all the rage for a good while, times were exceptionally tough. J was a baby and I had plunged head-first into being a single mom running away from a marriage that was had no hope of resuscitation. The assessment on the health and prospects for the marriage were accurate and the decision to cut my losses early was a good one too.  Notwithstanding the level of complexity my life got mired in was not something I was prepared for. Not that anything would have changed had I known - that was a stubborn and defiant age. I would have done the same sorts of things, maybe watched over my shoulder more and been apprehensive of what is to come. So maybe it was for the best that I proceeded with great naivete combined with lack of prescience. Tactically, it meant almost no time to read fiction - somethi

Long article on shoplifting , the cast of characters involved and why it works. No surprise there - consumers love a good deal and stolen good sold online could give them what they want. Given a robust demand for good deals, it is no surprise that shoplifting is rampant. Discovered that there is such a thing as the Retail Theft Barometer . If the theft is happening by intimidating staff with weapons and law enforcement does not view shoplifting as a priority, there seems little retailers can do to stem the tide. It boils down to the management team and how they approach the business from a day-to-day perspective. Retailers in some countries tend to think further out and proactively manage their business from loss prevention in-store to the entire value chain. They’re monitoring shrink outside the store, such as vendor fraud and diversion. They also have a tendency to be more informed about the upcoming behavioral trends so they can limit their loss exposure. So, it’s not just about the

Zadie Smith was twenty-five when White Teeth was published. But the wisdom about bad marriages could have come from a much older soul. As with many such marriages, the end comes in ways never anticipated and is harder to deal with than if the union had once been warm and loving Archie’s marriage felt like buying a pair of shoes, taking them home, and finding they don’t fit. For the sake of appearances, he put up with them. And then, all of a sudden and after thirty years, the shoes picked themselves up and walked out of the house. She left. Thirty years. Soon thereafter she has the most apropos definition of what comes at the end of such unsatisfactory union This is what divorce is: taking things you no longer want from people you no longer love. This is one of those books that I have meant to read since it was published but am only a couple of decades too late. And it is only for the better I think - the hubbub around it has died down a while back though it still features in the list

Several months ago, while on our walk on a weekend, we stopped by a tea shop because whatever they were brewing smelt amazing. That was the tea we tasted but did not end up buying given the variety of teas they had in the store. Most were mixes but there were some single variety ones too. The one we bought and end up liking a lot was some black tea mixed with verbena and lavender. It is one of our go-to teas during the days and is that perfect middle ground between bright and relaxing - the taste and smell of a workday that goes well, in which things get done and leave you feeling satisfied.  As we started to run low on our now favorite tea, I decided to try making something close at home. My mix combines a low-quality Darjeeling tea with Earl Gray - both loose leaf, as the base. Then I add dried lavender and lemon grass. It took some iterations until the mix in the bowl started to smell like tea and not potpourri. It takes boiling hot water and a five minute steep like a regular black

Using books are décor is hardly a new idea but the brazenness this essay describes is next level and a more recent phenomenon. It is no longer enough to signal rich, well-traveled, having taste and what not. We need to have a bookshelf that signal's intellectual vigor as well. Never mind that we don't recognize most of those books and have no intent or mental capacity of ever reading them.  You can order books online like floorboards, measured in any color, size, or condition. Wonder Book’s offerings include: Distressed Modern Hardbacks, Basic Black, Soft Neutrals, Arctic Blues, Burgundy Wine, Granite Greys, Fairly Distressed Vintage Leather, and Coverless Antique. For a summer home, there’s Driftwood, Seaglass, Cape Cod, and Main Cottage—four different color-scapes nearly identical, all recalling a house with an ocean view. The Autumn Hue bundle includes books in a variety of reds, oranges, and yellows. Starry Night includes mostly blue and black books with silver and gold le

Having tech to create eye-contact where none exists is yet another example of doing things that will no doubt have a lot of unintended consequences. The point of eye contact is for two humans to connect and build trust and a level of comfort with each other. That said, we don't make eye contact all the time and for good reason - you don't want to drown in the truth serum. If the eye contact is tech enabled in a video conference for instance, the person now has no obligation to even try.  They could as well be staring into space or the ceiling. The very point of the eye contact - to gauge the level of engagement and authenticity will go out the window. The identity of the person along with their intent will be over-ridden by technology. On the other side the eye contact is likely fake as well. So two people are having a conversation with their eyes locked on one another while in reality both sides are checked out. Depending on a person chooses to process this interaction, the o

This sounds like a fun social experiment - to see if you relationship can survive building Ikea furniture together . I would say the couple's mileage will vary based on the complexity of the job, their patience with themselves and each other. If atleast one of the two is a DIY enthusiast, then this would be a breeze and a fun way to collect $1000. Such pairs should almost be disqualified from participating for this experiment to yield results on the strength of the relationship stress-tested against an Ikea project.  My personal experience has been that I am too eager to skip Rule #1 - read the manual and underestimate the level of complexity. When you get started on the assembly project, it seems like all you need to do is apply commonsense and the pieces will come together. This is a big mistake and a person like me misremembers the depth of troubles this leads to not to mention time wasted. People are not assembling Ikea furniture on the regular. We forget the errors of our way

I work with a lot of UX people and that is probably the best part of my job. It was interesting to read this article on the role of hope in UX . The connection was not obvious to me immediately but it brought to mind some conversations where the UX designer was frustrated with the rest of us and it was hard come up with a compromise that would satisfy everyone's interests. One of the themes felt relatable: Belonging: You’re designing the onboarding experience to a product that helps people understand their fitness lifestyles by customizing a program to help them become healthier. When the experience requires the user to identify their current fitness routines, you ensure that the options consider folks coming from all economic demographics and not just those who can afford attending Pure Barre or CrossFit classes. A person's current fitness routine might be just a dream given their life circumstances, lack of discretionary time or money to indulge in such a routine. Catering to

After I discovered this web-site, I can't wait to give someone a card that will turn into flowers . Such a beautiful idea but not a novel one as it turns out. You can have your cards turn into herbs and vegetables too. The core product is seed paper . I read this right after attending a musical performance where my both kids of my friend T were participating. This was their first time on a big stage and I wanted to share in their mother's excitement.  It was a great time for everyone - the kids have known me for years and it was fun to see them in their new avatar. The evening was perfect but like all such things fade out quickly, It made me think about how one might capture memories more durably - a thought that crosses my mind more often these days. The pace of my life is a lot slower than that of people just starting out in their lives. Age and life experience make it possible for me to see the perfection in a moment that a younger person would never notice - their life is

 Always a fan of Cory Doctorow's writing, no surprise that I loved this one as well about enshittification  which he describes thusly: Here is how platforms die: first, they are good to their users; then they abuse their users to make things better for their business customers; finally, they abuse those business customers to claw back all the value for themselves. Then, they die.I call this enshittification, He proceeds to unpack how each of the major platforms have gone from good to enshittified based on the the inevitable lifecycle trajectory such platforms much follow to maximize value extracted from the system. What Doctorow outlines is a problem that has existed in the world well before there was internet or any of these platforms. I find this not so different (except for scale) wherever a broker/dealer layer between the buyer and seller of goods or services.  A handloom weaver in India, holding on to centuries old sari weaving traditions does not have direct access to the aff

Thoughtful article on why we struggle so much to share our salary information with others . I do believe people will be comfortable sharing the data if anonymity was guaranteed and if the goal was to empower everyone to do better in their salary negotiations. But this is unlikely to be a 100% solution. There will always be the outliers on either side who will not like what they see. Those who are being grossly underpaid may feel too resentful to share. If being over-compensated, there will the desire to hide that fact.  But salary is not a one-dimensional thing. Context is everything. The same salary can give two people completely different life-styles and buying power. A sole-earner in a family with two school age kids will end up having very different outcomes than a single person with no responsibilities. So the jealously is not based on the number itself - it is the same job earning same pay. It is based on what that number can do for one person versus the other. The author tries t

Sad story about how the meek don't infact inherit the world even if they have done pathbreaking work that sets the not to meek up for a guaranteed Nobel Prize . I have no idea how scientific research works and the institutional politics that come with that territory. But what I read here is very relatable to what I have seen happening in business over and over again The bright but demure analyst has a great insight and steps forward to share it. The way they go about it is too boring, steeped in technical or engineering detail and fails to capture the imagination of the audience which often is not at the big decision-making level anyway. People tell the analyst they did fantastic work and everyone is on their way. If they are very lucky they may even get a raise or promotion for their efforts But someone there in that group, takes an interest in the analyst's work and works up a business case around it to sell to the powers that be. All at once this person goes from being a nob

 The arc completes this month this day  Twenty two years measured at full moons. The bedroom window that year overlooked Shiny snow under a streetlight. His arms left like the forever harbor for me and the one who was to be ours. No snow this year  this time only the soft thrum of cold rain  We sleep through the night dreams scudding in and out. His arms are the forever harbor There is no one that is or will be ours.  I know this on the twenty second day.  

Beautiful essay on the Red Wheelbarrow and other poems that use words that are are so ferociously alive that they may almost bite. They dare you to make sense of them, mock the reader as if they would ever understand what the poet intended. You are left with words like so many pieces of hot coal - do with them what you may but they will leave their mark. You don't forget a poem like Red Wheelbarrow and you likely don't come much closer to understanding what they poet meant in any number of readings of it. Even so, it wan fun to read another poet's view of this poem “The Red Wheelbarrow,” like so many Williams poems, is experimental. It lacks punctuation, relies on erratic or unusual lineation, and generally dissolves the traditional boundaries between one thing, or idea, and another. He had a famous maxim, “No ideas but in things,” which I take to mean that to speak about ideas, emotions, and abstractions, we must ground them firmly in the things of the world. All but the

Interesting read about the forces transforming food culture in Italy . Climate change plays a big role but so to immigrants “from the Pakistani and Moroccan butchers preparing prosciutto in Parma, to Sikhs raising and milking cattle in the Val Padana, to Romanians and Albanians herding sheep in the Abruzzo and Sardinia,” Made me wonder how long it will be before one of those immigrant butchers decide to be creative and start their own line of prosciutto with a touch of Ras el Honout, Zatar or Garam Masala. Chefs are already doing this with their fusion recipes .  Jollof Risotto is a path that takes one of the most loved Nigerian (West-African) dishes into the lane of Risotto, a classic Italian favourite. This "path" is not going to be popular with everyone. Food is about roots and comfort that comes from drawing through those roots. There are days when nothing but basic and traditional dishes will soothe the soul - that is true even for those who like being bold, creative and

Read this wonderful essay on the social life and communication among bees. While we can marvel at the level of sophistication that a creature so small can achieve, there is some cold comfort in knowing our problems are not dissimilar:  A dark side of bee social life has also been uncovered: While honeybees are generally collaborative, accurate and efficient, they are also capable of error, robbery, cheating and social parasitism. They might even have emotions, exhibiting both pessimism and dopamine-induced mood swings that are analogous to human highs and lows.  That is each bee being its own separate entity but they also operate in hive mode. A bee swarm, in other words, is a remarkably effective democratic decision-making body in motion, which bears resemblance to some processes in the human brain and human society. Seeley went so far as to claim that the collective interactions of individual bees were strikingly similar to the interactions between our individual neurons when collec

Some interesting comments on this article related to AI understanding context and being able to connect infinite number of dots. It could enable outcomes that are not currently possible or undesired. The AI connecting the wife with a divorce lawyer upon finding out the husband is cheating is a telling example.  This presumes that the AI is operating on a moral code and a value system. It knows that infidelity is bad and therefore intervention is needed. The problem is many such situations, the reality is a lot more nuanced and if a marriage is falling apart, in most instances both sides have contributed to it even if unequally. In infidelity was detected by the AI, who is to tell if the wife had not been cold, distant, verbally abusive, demeaning, demanding, neglectful and much more. What if she had alienated the husband for years and decades, what if this was not the death by thousand cuts of his self-esteem and manhood.  A man living in such a hell would be a prime target for the aff

These lines in David Mamet's Recessional gave me food for though. The book reads like a rambling rant of an older, disgruntled relative at family dinner. He is just unhappy about everyone and everything, dishes out edgy opinions to get a rise out of others and mostly gets yawns.  ..Imagine an individual taught it is unnecessary to work, to pray, to study, to marry. Expand the notion to three generations, and we see the results in our civilization that we would expect in the individual: terror. The terror has been ascribed to impending global catastrophe—that is, the revenge of the sun, winds, and tides—or to an influenza epidemic.. Taught by words to this effect or leading by example - both would result in the same outcomes perhaps. If a child grows up seeing their parents not having any work ethic or stable employment, no baseline education or desire for self-improvement through learning, disengaged from faith and not in a committed relationship, then they have no foundation at a

Right before the New Year, J and I had a long conversation about kindness to oneself. Comes a time in a person's life when they no longer need to perform for the happiness of other - it could be argued when a child does well at school and is generally well-behaved, they are doing so to make their parent happy. They may not care much for either their grades or their pleasant manners.  If anything they might wish to take it easy with school work and be a rabble-rousing trouble-maker outside. They do neither so their parent maybe happy with them. But that age passes at some point and then the person lives their own life, tries to achieve happiness and fulfillment by their own measures. At least, such is what I hope with be the case with J. She did not disagree but posed a challenge for me by asking what have I ever done for myself that was solely for my pleasure.  I cited a few things but in each example, others were an integral part. Her next question was what is the most expensive t

Any project done well and over time can become worthy of a show and tell. This one is about slices of pizza eaten over time and lessons learned along the way. Anyone could do that but they did not. The take-away is upfront and immediately informative Starting in 2014, I logged every slice of pizza I ate in New York City on the Instagram account  NYC Slice . The results shown below are collected from 464 slices. Over an eight-year period the average price of a plain slice increased from $2.52 to $3.00. This calculation excludes dollar slices. For anyone who loves data and looking at things over a period of time, they have to wonder why they did not keep records like this and have a story to tell. A price of a bag of chips, a bottle of water, toothpaste - just about anything tracked over a decade will reveal interesting things. Takes tenacity and vision to see the wonderful end state product to start such a thing and keep at it diligently. 

For those who have seen their social circle shrink over time because of a variety of reasons including the pandemic will find this interview useful reading. I have known E for about seventeen years now and she has been single the whole time. Speaking to her recently, I could not help marvel at how she has managed to keep her social life more vibrant and steady than most other people I know - partnered or single. It is still the group of five women, most of them well into their retirement like E. It is still the same semi remote island close to nothing they gather together for a week in summer. Fortunately for this set, no one is seriously ill or disabled and everyone is alive.  But what is remarkable is that they have kept this tradition going for close to forty years now. That is the remarkable power of ritual. E tells me that they communication over the rest of the years is pretty sparse but there is the time of year when the group activates and starts planning for the off-the-grid

My local desi grocery store does not carry sohan halwa anymore and I have been craving it specially because of that I have craving this sweet that has been a favorite since childhood. Reading th is essay on the topic was a wonderful way to indulge in nostalgia and unsatisfied craving at the same time. The author traces the history of the sweet across time, cultures and countries along with the different origin stories. I tasted it for the first time when I was around five years old and a sweet shop in Malleswaram, Bangalore - very far from anywhere this treat originated. That was also the most idyllic time of my life that I have any recollection of.  When you are that young, you lack the ability to understand and savor perfection as it occurs in your life - in the form of a loving home, peace and tranquility, having a best friend that you feeling so close that you could burst and then on a weekend you get to go out to the store with your parents and get a treat. That period of my life

Reading these lines in Reza Aslan's book No god but God , I wished I had read them when I was raising J. The way the difference between faith and religion is explained is beautiful, elegant and simple enough for a curious kid to mull over even if they don't get it right away. Many years too later, but I had to share this with J.  Religion, it must be understood, is not faith. Religion is the story of faith. It is an institutionalized system of symbols and metaphors (read rituals and myths) that provides a common language with which a community of faith can share with each other their numinous encounter with the Divine Presence. Religion is concerned not with genuine history, but with sacred history, which does not course through time like a river. Rather, sacred history is like a hallowed tree whose roots dig deep into primordial time and whose branches weave in and out of genuine history with little concern for the boundaries of space and time. Indeed, it is precisely at those

Love the idea of earrings that are wireless earbuds . Might not have made all the best of CES 2023 lists but a cool gadget all the same. A dressier fitness tracker , a pedant that doubles up a woman's safety alert system have been out there. The only issue is that the items are branded become easy to recognize which somewhat defeats their purpose - specially if it is a safety device.  The bionic exoskeleton while designed for commercial use could be very useful for the disabled or frail and elderly who want to stay independent Designed for commercial use, the  Apogee  exosuit helps workers complete physical tasks without inflicting as much strain on their bodies. The suit can offset up to 66 pounds of load to the lower back per lifting motion, plus it helps reduce fatigue overall with walking assistance. Not a bad idea for road-tripper, back-backer and hikers either. Specially if you are not young anymore but still dream of going places that are physically demanding. Even a pair

Have been playing around with Chat GPT for personal and work based needs and am excited and also intimidated to see what it is able to do. The first thought that comes to mind is does this make my job replaceable  by creating the perception it can do some parts of it, and the slightly correlated one is do I bring anything to the party that this thing cannot (yet). These questions apply to every knowledge based profession.  For example, this thing can make a big dent in the legal business if say its knowledge graph  covered all of Westlaw and every court filing ever made in America. That is only a start, there is no end of additional data points that could be used to enrich that graph. That should in theory give the bot enough ground truth to help a pro-se litigant file their pleadings and prepare their arguments - no need to waste endless time and money on lawyers. Arguably it will have access to data and processing power that far outstrips what any legal professional can match.  Whil