Heartcrossings

The Hot Zone is a great read and I am glad I got to it. During the pandemic and after, I have wondered like many others why Ebola was able to be contained and Covid was not. For the layperson the answer is not obvious: In any case, the Ebola Sudan virus destroyed a few hundred people in central Africa the way a fire consumes a pile of straw—until the blaze burns out at the center and ends in a heap of ash—rather than smoldering around the planet, as AIDS has done, like a fire in a coal mine, impossible to put out. The Ebola virus, in its Sudan incarnation, retreated to the heart of the bush, where undoubtedly it lives to this day, cycling and cycling in some unknown host, able to shift its shape, able to mutate and become become a new thing, with the potential to enter the human species in a new form. There apparently no such thing as a virus sensor. So if there is something deadly, species-threatening level even, we would never know. We could breathe it, come into contact through a m...

Ofcourse there is no such thing as free will. It just so happened that was reading Robert Sapolsky's Determined when I also tuned into this podcast while driving. I had not particularly sought out the book or the podcast. The later was quite entertaining and it kept be company for the entire trip. The book I found fairly tedious reading. It reads like Sapolsky's notes and rants collated over time processed rather hastily into a book. The number of pages is definitely not warranted.  The point he is trying to make was clear quite early. The reader will choose to agree or disagree as is their right. So what should an author who is intent on proving free will is a myth do at that point? Cite authorities who share his point of view, dismantle the arguments of those that disagree. He does all that but that is where tedium begins. There is a point to the book, in the pile of raw notes there is content that could have been shaped to make that point with more elan. Maybe Sapolsky lump...

I remember Khushwant Singh from With Malice Towards One and All and that I always looked forward to reading his column. The Company of Women is not the Singh I had been familiar with but it was a book that I read to the end - something that is not often the case with me the last several years. The plot points are uncomplicated, the prose style extremely plain and after a few chapters you see a predictable way the protagonist Mohan Kumar engages with women. He needs them to fill the void in his life - sex is pivotal but there is companionship as well, his need to be the man who makes dreams come true for the the woman in his life, no matter now temporal and transactional the relationship. It is no work of art, literature or hallmark of erudition, this particular book. It is a lazy read at best.  Yet, there is something to be said for it. What got my attention was his depiction of women as eager, willing and enthusiastic sexual partners. They are diverse in background, culture, and ...

The RedBox machines were fun when they first came into existence - a novel and budget entertainment concept that many loved. Times have changed and the machines are now being sold as scarp metal . That is one way to end it for the machines that have serve now purpose as the company is bankrupt. But there could be other options - bring them into maker-spaces or house them with folks who have the time and imagination to repurpose them.  There is a lot going on inside the machine that would be fun for those who love to tinker to play with. The question to ask is what is the most creative thing anyone could do with a RedBox machine and not what is the cheapest way to dispose of it. Schools could pick them up to give kids a change to take it apart and understand how the whole system works - so many ways this could have ended instead of what is actually going on:  Taylor, the Alabama mover, said that so far he has been hired to move 44 of the machines from retailers’ sites—outdoor m...

 A kid I know was telling me recently that he is running out of time to make friends in his life. In his opinion beyond mid-20s people do not make friendships that are real and last a lifetime. You could have any number of social connections and friendly acquaintances but not that kind of friend. This kid's friends go back to his elementary school but college and beyond they are all dispersing. He has not been able to find his people outside this group that is becoming increasingly disconnected from his life.  The mid-20s part rung true for me but I had been through multiple upheavals in my life since that point - which is what I attributed my inability to make new friends. But maybe the kid was onto something here - maybe that is the magic number when your friendship luck runs out. If you are wise, you will find your friends before that happens. Reading about rentable friends in Tokyo brought to mind the sparsity of friends in my life - maybe there is a world-wide market for...

Read this interesting story about roadkill cook-offs . It is like a cooking competition like any other but has a specificity which makes it unlike others, maybe puts it in a league of its own The Roadkill Cook-Off is Marlinton’s Coachella. Its Mardi Gras or Super Bowl. And Marlinton tries to have its snake and eat it, too: by leaning in to West Virginia’s stereotypes while trying to show there’s something more to the state than hillbilly caricature. I watched The Menu sometime ago and reading this brought that movie to mind and what it made to caricaturize. The rat dropping themed ratatouille at the Roadkill Cook-off is at the opposite end of the kind of food featured in The Menu .  There is a level of absurdity in both but ways that maybe the path to reconciliation in these difficult and divisive times. Maybe the two could look at the zaniness of what are each doing and find humor in the other's effort to be special. It may turn out things are not as far apart and impossible to br...

We definitely live in interesting times. This post was shared by a friend about someone getting interviewed by an AI . I have previously written about candidates who I have interviewed that had AI assist them and how bizarre that experience was for me. In the workplace we have people these days that have managed to bamboozle their leadership who are not nearly as fluent in the use of AI as a productivity tool. So we have people producing tons of content that is purportedly a work deliverable but as you start to read through and god forbid try to take any action, you find yourself in an impossible situation.  An engineering manager friend of mine who works for a large tech company shared his experience in this regard which is quite telling. P has been managing engineering teams for a good twenty years now and has a well-established track record of success. He is fully capable of rolling up his sleeves and diving into thorny issues his developers are struggling with and they all resp...

 I would love to see tree-climbing classes for all ages and skill levels at one of the parks in my town. We have several lovely ones and they all have climbable trees - not ones I would attempt at my age but someone younger can easily do it. Recently, I was out to lunch with a former co-worker and one of the dishes features guava jam.  It immediately triggered memories of the lovely guava tree on our side of the fence with branches going well into our neighbor's garden. This was my favorite tree to climb as a kid and the single greatest attraction for my friends to come over to my place. When guavas were in season there would be a half a dozen of us up on different branches feasting on the fruit until we had had our fill and ready to descend. There are few memories from childhood that can beat the brightness and perfection of those sunny afternoons when I was up on that tree, stuffing myself with guavas. This is not quite like the tree-climbing described in this article but I...

T was my boss in my second job out of college. I was as green as they come but teachable and T was unfailing patient with me. In about six months, I started being useful and reliable for the team but T continued to shepherd me along until he left to America as many did. We stayed in touch off and on over the years. As luck would have we found ourselves working in another company twenty some years later. T had been there over twelve years by then and I had started recently. I noticed that he had been at the same level the whole time and knowing his abilities he was severely underemployed.  I asked him about that when we connected and he just smiled. I would need to attach myself to the outcomes of my job to get promoted in this company and that will come at a cost I am not willing to pay. T has two boys - one of whom is a rising star in some hot startup. The younger one, still in college, is on track to a great start as well. T tells me that he spent a ton of time with his sons when...

Recently, it seems the portion size of lunch meals has grown larger - and these are the healthy options like soup, salad and grain bowls. It used to be that a meal like that was just enough or maybe it left you a smidge hungry. It was not common for folks to have a lot of left-overs from eating out at lunch. At first, I thought it might just be me - aging and proportionately reduced appetite.  But I see that with folks would are a decade or two younger than me as well. All of them are likely not on AOMs. Reading about how the food industry needs to adapt to Ozempic style drugs that successfully make a person feel full and not think about food makes me wonder if this is one of those strategies even if counter-intuitive. A smaller portion size would make better sense if the customer is satiated with less.  Maybe the idea is that the food was well-prepared even though the customer is on a medication that killed their desire to enjoy food. So if they took it home and there was a ...

It was a Monday evening and I was walking from work to my hotel in mid-town Manhattan. I don't come to this office often enough to remember all the quirks of how to get into the building from door marked with a different number than the actual address of the location where Google Maps navigates me to. So every time I am here, I circle the block a few times before I remember that there is a salad bar right next to the door I am looking for. It had been that kind of morning when I arrived and had felt ridiculous dragging my carryon bag around the streets, trying to find the mystery door.  But in New York people can be and feel invisible no matter how personally significant their attire or actions might be. It is also common knowledge that by my age women turn invisible though I would argue that is even more true for men of my age but its not talked about as much because women in their youth can often be too visible - even uncomfortably so. So as I walked to the hotel, I paid more tha...

I have been reading recently that websites are being penalized for backlinks if they are deemed "unnatural" by Google. As always, its the small businesses that get hid hardest by the capriciousness of the algorithm. They don't have the resources to even discover what they are doing wrong let alone pay for those wrongdoings to be corrected. Then I ran into this article about the broader problem of backlinks not being the backbone of the internet anymore - a far more problematic thing. If you degrade hyperlinks, and you degrade this idea of the internet as something that refers you to other things, you instead have this stationary internet where a generative AI agent will hoover up and summarize all the information that’s out there, and place it right in front of you so that you never have to leave the portal Lot of folks say they never go beyond the AI generated response to their search query because the organic search results in Google are garbage anyway (and finally th...

Love the idea of shoes that can grow as kids do but also accommodates variations in adult feet. This sounds all around sensible:  ..the sneakers are a smart footwear solution for people who know the pains of inconsistent shoe sizing. They’re also a forgiving solution for short in-store try-on sessions, which might have you convinced that your new pair of shoes fits well—until you spend an hour in them at home and realize they’re tight around the toes. Adjustable shoes accommodate growing feet as well as feet that are slightly different sizes, and they’re more forgiving if you pick the wrong size. Shoes and innovation have come together before - get them to vacuum the floor . Sounds interesting but not nearly as useful as a shoe that can adjust a bit to fit better The shoe is a concept product that emerged from an internal company contest that is held every other year. Started in 1991, the Denso contest lets employees pitch new ideas to "foster their creative and innovative design...

When J was in college, it was hard for me to resist the urge to jump in and rescue her from her little troubles. Fortunately for both of us, she was too far away for me to actually act on such urges. I definitely recognize that feeling but if a parent actually helps every time the kid hits a speed bump, it likely won't be a good idea:  Nicki Jenkins, president of AHEPPP, and director of parent and family engagement at the University of Kentucky, described this as a “cultural shift.” Parents are “becoming friends with their students,” she says, and are inclined to do things for them instead of teaching them how to be independent. “So worried for my child,” a mother posted recently on another parent-support Facebook group with 24,000 members. Her kid had texted from college about a humid room, broken laundry card and other small inconveniences.  J learned to sort things out on her own. In time, the number of issues that needed my input reduced quite dramatically. I wonder if th...

A long time ago, I worked for a company much like this one that is now going out of business . When I was hired, they sold me a vision of a leadership team that was chomping at the bit to become a modern company and go toe to toe with the competition. That too was a family-owned business with many tenured folks. A lovely place to be as far as how comfortable they made me feel as a new hire but that is where the loveliness ended. There were a couple of IT leaders who had built the systems that ran the business they had today - these were systems that had served them well decades ago and were long in need of complete overhaul if not outright replacement.  That was exactly the recommendation that had heard from the consulting firm they had hired to help them create a modernization strategy. It was the recommendation I wholeheartedly agreed with. As it turned out it was impossible to execute in that environment. The old guard refused to let go of what they had built and refused to what...

My friend T shared a short video of her performing Bharat Natyam on stage for some big celebration at her work. The last time I have seen her dressed for dance and on stage was in college. Other than being physically a bit slower than she was then, it was all the same - like time had not moved at all.  T had a decade of training before college and continued to learn once she started working for maybe another decade. A very large part of her life has been about dance and other things came to exist around it.  I remember being in awe of her ability to express herself so wonderfully. She was one of those that innately loved dance, had a lot of natural talent which the training helped perfect. It was not hard for her find time to practice for an hour each day - she looked forward to it. It was T's time to escape into her zone. I love dance but have absolutely no talent for it. For people like T, they have that gift and can create a world with it they can escape to. For me, that ha...

 Reading this article made me wonder if the next step would be to scan your loved ones brains to check if they love you as much you love them. Maybe grandma is just faking her affection and really can't stand the clingy grandkid and wishes to be left alone to enjoy her retirement. Maybe the boyfriend is going through the motions in the relationship and will even propose but his heart is not in it.  ..brain scans of close friends doing the same activities are actually much more similar than those of less connected people. You literally are on the same wavelength as your besties.  All of which means that when it comes to human-to-human connection, you can gauge the extent of a pair's attachment by looking at a brain scan. Can the same be said of human-dog pairs?  A trust but verify love idea is fraught with dangers. Sometimes, you have to make peace with whatever love you can get from a person you care about - specially if that relationship is immutable. If you have a...

 Read this great essay in Wired about climate change involving a waterfall deep down in the ocean: When a system approaches a tipping point, though, the character of the fluctuations changes. With the AMOC, you might see the flow rate increasingly struggle to regain its equilibrium. The rate might wander farther and farther away from the comfy baseline. And the system might take longer to settle back into its routine state. These features— the greater meandering, the slower return to home base—are an obsession of tipping-point mathematicians. If you were to plot the data for a system that’s about to tip, you’d see the data points first follow a nice, predictable path; then the path gets jittery, and then it goes off on wide, whiplashing swings. The system is becoming less stable, taking longer to recover. You can almost feel sorry for it. You can sense a sort of sickness As the story goes, the brother and sister team published a paper on this patient's sickness and predicted the t...

I am definitely not in the company of teenage girls driving the future of language. I thought middle-schoolers said Ick and Lit was still in circulation - wrong on both counts . Not sure if staying current with the trends will actually help me other than being able to understand conversations between young women that I am not a part of The discovery that young women drive linguistic change is not new. More than two decades ago, William Labov, the founder of modern sociolinguistics studies, observed that women lead 90 per cent of linguistic change. Then in 2003, linguists surveyed 6,000 letters, written between 1417 to 1681.  The study found there was a quicker uptake of new language contained within the letters written by women compared to those written by men. By the time it becomes acceptable for someone my age to use the vocabulary invented by such young trailblazers, that is old, dated and unfashionable language anyway. Speaking like kids would only make everyone feel awkward a...

Wonderful essay about how information was gathered and shared in the 1980s. Having such access to information would be completely magical for me back in that time. My local library was small and limited and yet offered me access to the world for which I was grateful.  From 1984 to 1988, I worked in the Telephone Reference Division of the Brooklyn Public Library. My seven or eight colleagues and I spent the days (and nights) answering exactly such questions. Our callers were as various as New York City itself: copyeditors, fact checkers, game show aspirants, journalists, bill collectors, bet settlers, police detectives, students and teachers, the idly curious, the lonely and loquacious, the park bench crazies, the nervously apprehensive. (This last category comprised many anxious patients about to undergo surgery who called us for background checks on their doctors.) There were telephone reference divisions in libraries all over the country, but this being New York City, we were an...

I had deeply emotional response to this essay even though I never played tennis in my life and have only a passing interest in the sport. The purgatory of having potential but never reaching it is extremely relatable. Conor Niland speaks eloquently to what that feels like for a professional tennis player who can't quite float up to the top hundred. It seems ludicrously unfair that players with the caliber to rank in the top thousand in the world would be treated with as much regard as someone who plays "great" tennis at their small-town tennis club tournament.  There is a universe that separates the ability and accomplishments of the two but they are lumped in the same category of unremarkable tennis players. I am definitely one of those that never achieved my potential academically or professionally for any number of reasons. Had it not been for the things in my personal life I was so very fortunate to receive, I would feel a lot like Niland did.  A lot of futile toiling...

 There is a logic in children suing governments for their climate rights   though many of their other rights are being lost too. There used to be an expectation that a hard-working young person could hope to settle down and start their own family by their mid-20s.  That is now a dream far out of reach for many people that age. They work hard enough and often have the education that was supposed to lead them to the road to financial stability if not prosperity but reality is that many are joining the the NEET ranks instead. Governments are culpable to this turn of events too as much as they are are responsible for climate crisis and borrowing from future generations.  Around the world, both innovative and old-school legal arguments are being used to go after companies and governments to seek redress or forestall future harms. At the same time, the fossil fuel industry and its allies have powerful new legal grounds at their disposal to challenge climate rules. A ...

Tracking the cost per wear of every article of clothing for several months sounds like a great way to understand if you are spending wisely and getting value. Most things I own have been around in my closet for a very long time. They speak to a significant evolution in my taste and also how I view age-appropriate attire. The clothes that are a good two decades old were great for that time in my life but they do not make sense now. Even if they fit me physically, they bear no relationship to the person I am now and if I put them on, I appear to be wearing clothes that were loaned to me by someone who I have little in common with.  With shoes, the situation is much worse because I don't wear anything that is remotely uncomfortable. Most of the older shoes that look as good as new are more fashionable than sensible - that phase of my life is long gone. The are a couple of shoes I have worn only three or four times so there is a long way to go before I achieve single-digit cost per we...

Sometimes you come across a quote that seems like God was sending wisdom your way because how badly you need it. For me a few days ago it was  “Supreme excellence consists in breaking the enemy’s resistance without fighting — Sun Tzu While I am neither dealing with a specific enemy's resistance nor seeking to achieve supreme excellence, these are the words that I still needed to process. The equivalent of the enemy in my situation are a set of circumstances I have going on - some of my own choice and making, others not as much. Since they make me quite restless and uncomfortable, they could be construed as adversarial or inimical.  My initial instinct is to run away from things that make me feel this way and when that is not an option the situation becomes hard to tolerate - much like if were an enemy putting up a strong resistance and thwarting my desired action. So there is the question of how to cope instead of what my natural tendencies dictate. That is where the idea of s...

A few months ago. I was new entrant in this group and a woman, F was assigned to on-board me. We started off on a bad note. My efforts to be friendly were rebuffed - she made it clear she was doing her job and not interested in anything further. I learn things by asking questions and have always been fearless about it. This was simply not the right plan with F. She made it a point to be outright rude if I asked anything at all with answers ranging from I don't know, I don't care to that should be no concern of yours. I was absolutely gob-smacked by the level of unprofessionalism.  This is a person with multiple degrees from top universities in America. The first meeting I chalked it up to F was having a bad day, she had a couple of kids returning to school after summer break and things were off to a rough start as they tend to be. In our second meeting, I asked her a clarifying question on something she had started to explain was promptly accused of being litigious. I don't...

This job posting for an IT support technician made me wonder if it would matter at all that the person would a tech support for a Champagne company - presumably not. Imagine a person always dreamed of working at Lego but their qualifications land them several degrees removed from the action - where the dream came from. Then it matters little Lego or small, boring, and old-fashioned insurance company. To that person both jobs are just about the same. It made me think about the most interesting clients I have worked for. When those very interesting consulting opportunities came about, I was eager to learn all I could about their business, the market, and the competitors. There would be a few charismatic people who had history with the company and represented the culture.  Beyond that once the discussions turned to problems that needed a technology solution, it was more of the same. The wonderful novelty of the experience faded out pretty quickly - it was just business as usual. When...

The first timed I dined alone at a restaurant would be over twenty years ago now and it felt a bit awkward. The waitress had graciously seated me in a booth - it was a not a busy time but also a thoughtful gesture on her part. Since that first time, eating out alone specially while traveling for work has become easier to the point of effortless now. I used to think it was a matter of practice over time that made the experience less fraught. It turns out that eating solo is becoming more common and I am just a happy beneficiary of the trend. Many factors have contributed to this:  “The social norms have changed. People don’t look at solo diners anymore and think, ‘You must be a loner,'” Mattila said. The growth comes as more people are living alone. In 2019, the Pew Research Center found that 38% of U.S. adults ages 25 to 54 were living without a partner, up from 29% in 1990. In Japan, single households now make up one-third of the total; that’s expected to climb to 40% by 2040, ac...

Houdsen in his book Ten Poems to Change Your Life Again and Again says "A friend just told me that he has known for the last two weeks that he has prostate cancer. These two weeks, he said, have been the most alive in his life. Far from feeling fear or grief (perhaps these are still to come), every moment has had a clarity and sharpness he has hardly ever known. It’s as if some deeper vision has been switched on, which enables him to see with great intensity the fullness of each moment.". This made me wonder about how culture and social conditioning play into a person's response to knowing they are dying. Not in an abstract way but more concretely because the life remaining can be counted in weeks and months only. Does it matter what others expect of the dying person - are they supposed to act fearless and ready to live what is left of their life, pretending what they know about imminent death is irrelevant. What if those close to them were inclined to feel sorry and act...

It was amusing to read this interview on happiness - the old variety that needs to be tossed and the new one embraced. The central thesis hinges on this: Due to Old Happy, Americans are struggling with unprecedented levels of unhappiness, illness, burnout, and loneliness, with no idea what’s wrong or what they need to do to feel better again. The evidence I’ve amassed about the harms of Old Happy is astounding.  I am not so sure people have  no idea what’s wrong or what they need to do to feel better again. S ometimes those things they need to do to feel better are not attainable. A parent who is running on fumes because they have school-age kids, a demanding job that is needed to pay the bills, a marriage fraying from lack of care and attention and lack of mobility due to family being rooted to their current place of work.  This person knows exactly what would make them feel better - if they could have the gift of time without being stressed about how the bills will ge...

A lot of schools are implementing no homework policies and while some of the reasoning it valid. implementation of such policy feels like bathwaterism. There is completely pointless, aggravating and tedious homework that frustrates student and parent alike - it make sense to root those out entirely.  But homework which encourages a kid to step outside their comfort zone, try things they wouldn't on their own, read books and work on interesting projects are very far from useless. They can make or break the kid's school experience and outcomes from there on.  Preparing at home to have a good debate and discussion on a topic in the classroom is also one of those things that should stay. That said, all recommendations on how to restore childhood for kids, make very good sense Let children spend time with their families. The single strongest predictor of academic success and fewer behavioral problems for a child, 3-12 years old, is eating as a family. Make planned time during the ...