Heartcrossings

Reading about the CES roundup gets to be less and less interesting over the years. The proliferation of vacuum cleaners including one to pick up stray socks is both silly and wasteful. Sorting stuff from landfills to create piles of reusable things is infinitely more valuable but too hard a problem for these toy robot efforts to undertake. Pricing and availability are not published for these vacuums yet, but each is likely to set you back the equivalent of at least one new MacBook. They are also rather big devices to stash in your home (it's hard to hide an arm or an air purifier). Each is an early adopter device, and getting replacement consumable parts for them long-term is an uncertain bet. I'm not sure who they are for, but that has not stopped this apparently fertile field from growing many new products. Some investor somewhere must have prophesized a big payday for the vacuum that gets it right with the consumer. Its unclear who is the target here. People who can't b...

Watched Inland Empire recently and none of it made sense to me. The only other Lynch movies I've ever watched at Blue Velvet and Mulholland Drive both of which I found unique and memorable. But this one was quite impossible to comprehend. Yet, it is the kind of experience that you don't forget. I read about how the movie was made after watching it, in hopes of better understanding what I had seen but that did not help. There wasn't a plan so the movie is like a collage that each viewer will see as a different thing. For some it may be the scene with three folks in rabbit masks - maybe it speaks to them. For others, the movie in movie scene with the girl crying on a couch. For me it was the scene where the the character Nikki (sometimes referred to as Sue) lies dying on the pavement from being stabbed by a screwdriver while the Japanese girl who lives there tells the story of her friend in Pomona whose monkey shits everywhere. The impending death of the woman has not made a...

 Now that we are showing up to the office more often than not, I find that chromophobia is back in force as well. The women around me are dressed exclusively in neutral colors and there is a complete absence of patterns of any kind. A floral printed top is unthinkable. I am that point of my life where I no longer care to blend in and become part of the scenery. It is not as relevant anymore.  When I was younger, I cared about "looking the part" and that included washing off my accent a bit, slowing my speech until my speech pattern fit into the range of "acceptable" patterns. I am very much about wearing colorful clothes even if that makes me stand out. Some of what I wear are my personal favorites - they were not in fashion when I bought them and are not trending now. They are clothes that look right on me and that's all that matters. Almost always they have colors. It was mentally much harder for me to stick out when I was younger, now I don't care if I d...

Good analysis on the perils of grade inflation in college. Back when J was in elementary and middle school the problem of grade inflation was manifested in the honor roll. The schools are intent on making all kids feeling like academic winners so the entry criteria for the honor roll got increasingly relaxed over time. From all As to mostly As and some B to finally a random C was not a deal breaker either. So in the end just about everyone made honor roll. I thought it was a silly business to begin with - honor roll, so none of this felt material in any way. I was focused on J getting a real education. But I started to see where things turned problematic by the end of middle school where kids felt the need to start doing more to stand out from classrooms full of "winners". That problem grew much worse in high school and college as this author describes Now that A’s are given out like candy corn in the world’s worst Halloween party, they don’t provide much signal, first becau...

On a recent metro ride, I was seated behind what appeared to be a mother and son pair. The son about my age. For the few stops that we rode together until I got off the train, they spoke animatedly about an upcoming baking project at home. She wanted to make sure there was enough Kerrygold unsalted butter in his fridge for her to get to work. I could not tell if they were headed to his place directly from the train but baking and butter were top of mind things for her. She extolled the virtues of that particular brand of butter (which I happen to love as well though I am not a baker) over others and why she never bakes with anything else. The man assured her that there were enough supplies and she sounded happy.  Their conversation took my mind off everything else that had gone on in my day. I could imagine this woman, my mother's age, going to her son's home later that evening and getting started with her baking. It was the middle of the week and so people would likely be at w...

Reading this article about Gen Z women living in same kind of situationship as Joan Baez did back in the day made me think how some things never change. While looking for an old document in my online archives recently, I chanced upon a folder with some eighteen year old photographs of me taken by J. Looking through them filled me with a mix of concern and sadness for that version of myself. This is a woman that was not quite prepared to be single and a mother to boot and yet she was both and putting on a brave front. It is not at all surprising that I got myself into some very sub-optimal relationships back then. Could they be called situationships? In a sense, yes. I needed to see signs of life, light at the end of the tunnel - that my family would turn whole from being fractured and that I would not need to do it all alone, carry all the weight all the time.  That is exactly the state of mind that leads to bad outcomes. That was me then, I see it in many young women I know. Only...

It was fun to read through worst technology flops of 2024 , some of which I had already forgotten about. But more is to come this year I am sure - specially AI slop with Meta leading the charge AI slop is often entertaining. AI slop is usually a waste of your time. AI slop is not fact-checked. AI slop exists mostly to get clicks. AI slop is that blue-check account on X posting 10-part threads on how great AI is—threads that were written by AI Once the corpus of content the system is feeding off of become tainted with AI slop then it does not matter if the bots that generated the garbage are subsequently removed. That stuff will slosh around and have all manner of bad consequences. Meta it seems did the seeding already and primed the online world for peak stupidity The AI apocalypse is here and it’s far stupider and more depressing than we were promised. Instead of being hunted down by a gleaming metal skeleton in a post-apocalyptic wasteland, we are surrounded by zombies endlessly rep...

Have been reading about the demise of corporate DEI programs but with so much else going on (and not in a good way) in the corporate world, this did not strike me as the worst. Then read this news about the end of a women's only night at college and wondered how board the interpretation of DEI could be and what kinds of losses women and minorities will suffer consequently.  Maybe requiring new moms to show up to office all days of the week if they want to keep their jobs is aided by the the end of DEI mandates. Wage disparities could continue to grow and can be explained away somehow. Meta's memo which supplied the rationale for ending DEI programs. Once you get past the fluffy, CYA stuff, there is this:  The term “DEI” has also become charged, in part because it is understood by some as a practice that suggests preferential treatment of some groups over others. In time to come, the consequences will become more evident. A lot of the DEI programs were hand-wavy to begin so n...

The birth of novel side-hustles is a great way observe broken systems. Finding a job has been very tough: In a job market where searches for work are lengthening and it can seem like resumes are being thrown into a black hole, weary applicants are looking for any edge they can get. Having a referral is no guarantee of a job offer, but it can substantially improve the odds. According to hiring platform Greenhouse, while external applicants have a 1 in 200 chance of being hired, those with referrals have a 1 in 25 chance. (Internal applicants — the ultimate known quantity — have a 1 in 5 chance of getting hired, though they typically only make up some 0.1% of candidates, according to Greenhouse.) My own attempts to get introduced to second degree connections have been abortive so far. People are wary of chatting with yet another person who wants to understand how to get in. They may have mixed feelings about where they work to begin with and even be on their way out. That makes it harde...

I watched The Taste of Things in-flight and it left me in a mood for thinking about food in an indulgent, non-utilitarian way. While traveling for work, I focus on making sure I don't overeat or eat outside my meal times. Just that is enough effort so my food options tend to be very practical. One afternoon, I was was with a group of folks who wanted to try a restaurant that was all the rage in the neighborhood. That was where I tried the Sayur Lodeh for the first time and loved it.  This is something I would definitely try at home. Eugenie's dishes in the movie were a feast for the eyes to watch but did not make me want to try - there is a degree of finesse and perfection that is implied in such cooking that I simply cannot achieve. But this vegetable soup was warm, comforting and very far from intimidating. Even the pot-au-feu billed as a simple dish in the movie, did not strike me as something I could give a shot. There are any number of shows and movies about cooking but...

 I came across this post on my LinkedIn feed recently and had a pretty strong reaction to it. The advice on how to properly frame a cold email to get the recipient's attention is never-ending. Many folks who are inundated with such requests take it upon themselves to write up a list of do's and don'ts as a an act of community service to put these hapless cold-emailers out of their misery. Now this particular post goes a step further. The author expects to be treated like a royalty almost - the person contacting her (an overzealous 21 year old) needs to have put in 10x the time into understanding what would make the author want to reply to her request for a 30 minute chat which may or may not yield any results.  When the recipient sees the effort and the results meet the bar of her expectations, she might respond. There are many such overzealous folks around and if they were to now all follow the playbook, this lady will get hundreds of such requests and need to raise the b...

Winter weather got my flight delayed and I arrived close to midnight at the hotel I am familiar with from previous trips. The woman at the desk was very friendly and that felt particularly welcome after such a long day. She had the most interesting eye glasses frame - very novel and artsy. I complimented her on it and she said thanks smiling broadly. I am sure that was not the first time she had heard praise for her excellent taste. I noticed that she had some very tasteful jewelry on as well. This is a woman who had an eye for unique things and she knew how to make it all work together. We chatted about my flight, the bad weather and how I had to wake up early for work. I wish the conversation had leaned more towards her - where those frames came from, the story behind the striking tiger eye and lapis lazuli bracelet. I am sure that would have been far more interesting and I could have learned something.  It is ironic because earlier in the plane, I had been reading a book that w...

To wear a Birkin bag casually, its price should probably be a single digit percent of your monthly income. In that scenario, a person would be relaxed about their $300,000 bag as they went about their day. In any other scenario the bag and the wearer are a very uncomfortable fit for each other. For everyone else who aspires for that look  and be comfortable, the bag will need to be a fake of some sort. They may not be able to afford one that  cannot be distinguished from the real thing . Walmart seems to have responded to a demand in the market for a Birkin "replica" to be loud and proud of its origins while being very budget friendly. The person wearing it is no longer a wannabe, target of disdain from those who can smell the obvious fake from a mile.  “We are now at the point where the fakes are almost identical to the real … where they are almost 99 percent identical.” That was the central theme of a recent video posted by Antonio Linares on his Instagram account, Fak...

Using crime novels to teach critical thinking sounds like a fun idea - something that can be even done before college. There are games and puzzles in this genre but bringing it into formal curriculum is a different level.  I was talking with a high schooler recently about electives he enjoys at school and is often the case, kids want to try things that are not obvious choices for them - an element of surprise is fun when they tell the adults about what they find interesting. This kid was no different - we saw him in new light. He had demonstrated that he had interests that went a very different direction from playing sports - something he is very focused on.  Imagine a course like this was being taught at high school as an elective by a retired police detective. I am going to guess that class will be sold out. Generally finding a way to get the student's attention on a topic and making the lesson durable are the goals a teacher would strive for. This course fits the bill well...

Have been reading about Intel's likely demise and many opinions of how that happened. It was completely unthinkable when I went to college for example and the 8086 was the processor we cut our assembly language programming teeth on. Many of my peers dreamed of working at Intel and several went on to fulfill that dream. That was then and this is now - even Intel needed to have a moat and came a time when they did not have one anymore.  I am sure a lot of books and case studies will be written on this subject that will dissect it all. These days the conversations around moats ( or the lack thereof ) tend to center around the rash of AI startups that are very reminiscent of the dotcom boom times where everyone and their grandmother had an idea for a something dotcom that went belly-up in the end. Particularly loved the cake, baking and oven analogy by this author to explain what is going on the in AI startup space In almost all cases, the solution to getting the desired output from th...

I enjoyed reading Marie Kondo's book back in the day and still have a copy someone gave me as a gift. It was not with the goal of achieving some level of perfection which  the author describes as impossible but more to understand how to get rid of (and ideally not even acquire) what does not "spark joy". Since then, I have found the sparking joy standard as an effective way to sort things out as still needed or not. The process gave me some other things to think about.  An item of clothing that is over two decades old and still looks as good a new was not a mistake when it was bought. It still looks nice and even fits well. But I am not the same person anymore so it does not look right. For reasons I cannot fully describe, when I wear such a thing, I feel like I am not in the place and time I am supposed to be - something feels off and uncomfortable. It calls to mind the habits of my parents' generation back in India. There were items of clothing - saris in particula...

Read The Answer is No and found it as perfectly enjoyable as a light weekend brunch. I could not help feeling the translation turned the writing a bit sophomoric but no way to know as English is the only language I have reading fluency in. I had to force myself to focus on how the story was written but enjoy the elements of satire. Organizations run by bloated middle management and committee was a prime target. Having worked at (and consulted for) pretty large organizations, some of the decision-making leading to the formation of the Pile Committee in the book and the designation of its remit definitely struck a chord.  When you are young, naive and somewhat socially awkward (I speak from experience as I have been all of that), you like to believe that people are intent on solving the problem specially when the solution is plainly obvious. It does not occur to you that the problem does not exist to be solved. It may have been manufactured to create consensus on insolvability. Thos...

The 55+ crowd is now being called the problem generation because they are acting young and reckless. This article explores the ways in which they are out of control. fortified with many numbers and statistics. While all of that may be true, the story does not delve much into what might be driving such behavior in this population segment. I have a problem with how the author concludes their piece:  For most of the post-war period crime, alcoholism, drugs and pregnancy were all rising among the young. And then at some point it stopped. The generations now ageing disgracefully were disgraceful in youth, and in middle age. If they’re behaving badly now, there is really not much to be done about it. If they choose to frolic at toga parties, no one will stop them. Except, ultimately, time There are a lot of folks in that problematic age bracket who had to work incredibly hard to stay employed in a whimsical and capricious labor market, provide for their kids, get them to college all whi...

Almost every year, despite my best efforts I end up having a run-in with poison-ivy and its hardly fun. One of the worse years, I had a pretty severe rash on my right wrist and had to show up to work properly bandaged so I would not freak anyone out. This was in the winding days of the pandemic and people were very wary of anything that looked contagious and this thing was not pretty. Reading about the most pain inflicting plant in the world makes my poison-ivy issues seem like child's play The hairs of the gympie-gympie cause immediate pain. The first sensation has been described as feeling like 30 wasp stings. After that, one’s lymph nodes will begin to swell, which creates a sensation of immense pressure. Then, the pain only intensifies until it peaks around 30 minutes later. Unfortunately, the hairs don’t have to come into contact with your skin for the plant to inflict damage. Just being near the plant for too long will begin to wreak havoc on the respiratory system. Overexpo...

 The idea of direct admission to college is an interesting one. In the crazy job market of our times, I wonder if a direct job offer might similarly work out. The situations are complete unlike each other but the level of stress might be comparable. When a college sends a direct admission offer to a student they consider the parameters that make this kid the right one to make an offer to. In similar vein, an employer might seek out the signals they need to decide if someone is worth making a job offer to. Lets imagine Company A is looking to hire and they have narrowed the pool of companies and teams within those companies they would like to hire from.  If the job search system was no longer about resumes and interviews and instead relied on collecting peer and manager signals on the prospective hires, then Company A would see the top talent from the their target set of companies that are a good fit for the role. Since the person is vetted all that remains to be seen is if th...

 At my first yoga class of the new year. the studio was packed to capacity and the crowd was much younger than I am used to seeing in this class. The instructor noted that this was three times as many folks she expected. While everyone was there to improve something about their physical or mental health, some might have had an epiphany over the holidays about taking action. The fitness trends of 2024 are interesting in that more people want to take care of themselves even if they can't stay committed. The magic number is the 6 month mark - if a person is able to cross that chasm then chances are that the habit will remain with them.  Years ago a personal trainer at a gym I was a member of (and much like the statistic left within 6 months) gave me a piece of wisdom that finally help settle my fitness routine. I was telling her how I can't predict my travel schedule so breaks happen not by my own choice and I just have not been able to persist long enough to form the habit. Thi...

The idea of effective mental age is something I continued to mull to see if it helped explain some of the challenges I have experienced being the mother of J as an adult. In my specific situation, J grew up to be a calm, composed and mature young lady - nothing like the toddler or child version of who she was. Though to be fair she was never a difficult kid. I might have mellowed some with age but can't be sure the change in me is commensurate or proportional to the change in her. So when we get together on occasion, the family unit seeks the previously established mental age setting at first. We both discover, that does not work for either of us. At that point there might be some automatic recalibration that happens and we come to the age that is now closer to the the midpoint - not skewed her way or mine. For some reason, this particular age that now are as a unit is not comfortable for either of us and expectations are not met. The way we seemed to have dealt with it thus far is...

It was particularly heart-warming to read about a company that has been around for 400 years in light of a conversation with someone I met recently who is close to retirement age and has been with the same company since he graduated college. There were several folks at the table who were completely astounded to hear that and commented how unique and expectational that was - what did it take to have such an outcome this day and age expect for it be total happenstance. L's company kept his role in the original company despite that company being sold, acquired, merged and resold many times through his career - he remained the thing that never changed, the fixture that everyone else came to rely upon. Would that work for most people - maybe not we concluded. So no surprise, no one else had such a career trajectory and none of us knew of anyone else who did Zildjian, the world's oldest cymbal manufacturer, has been crafting cymbals for over 400 years using a secret process1. Founde...

Interesting concept that the brain creates religion and the religious experience whatever form it takes boosts serotonin levels which is a state a person will want to return to. My friend R is one of those moms that likes to use religion as a framework to raise her kid- nothing unusual about it. It can be argued that is one of the most practical uses of religion - to give a young person guardrails to protect themselves when they are out in the world, tempted to do things that will harm them and have long-term if not irreversible consequences. The parent will not always be there to help the child decisions many of which are made in real-time.  The idea is to have the boundaries so well defined that they would naturally stop when they bump into them and disaster is averted even when the parent was not available for consultation. This is the approach my mother took with me and is not at all uncommon for parents in India. From personal experience it served me well in many instances bu...

Watched Riding in Cars with Boys recently and found more than a few epiphanies there. The one thought that stayed with me for several days was one about the effective mental age of a household. This is not a standard concept but something that the movie got me thinking about. There was this scene where Bev and her son Jason have an argument about who has it worse - he has his litany of issues and she has hers.  They each try to outdo the other until Bev tells Jason that they are team and he contradicts her by saying he is the kid and she is the mother - so infact they are not a team. While my circumstances were nowhere as dire as Bev's but I was single mom and this notion of pulling in the same direction as a team was very much my operating model. I did not hesitate to explain this to J when she was a kid - we work together so things go well for us. I each do our part and do it well.  Unlike Jason, J did not loudly protest the idea and demand her right to be a kid because she...

The place where J was born is the place I became myself I think. By Pico Iyer's definition is this would my home though I was born in Kolkata. I met someone I knew from there recently who has been there the whole time while I have moved around and called several other places "home". By measuring the length of time I have been anywhere, it could call where I live now my home - twenty years is the longest I have lived anywhere, so that should qualify for home status. What that also means that leaving what one calls home is difficult in ways that cannot be explained rationally. Its like my friend from Kolkata who is the third generation in the city from the time her grandfather came there in the 1930s from present-day Bangladesh.  They have a lovely ancestral home in central Kolkata complete with a little pond for ducks minus the ducks. The place is well-maintained with her generation of siblings and cousins sharing responsibility of the upkeep of the place. Leaving that ho...

 I have never been to Japan but like many am very fascinated by the country. Things I want to see and do when I visit some day is an ever-growing list. This story about how auto logistics is adapting to their population collapse is interesting and something to learn from  Japan's well-known population collapse issues foretell severe labor squeezes in the coming years, and one specific issue this project aims to curtail is the continuing rise in online shopping, with a forecast decline in the numbers of delivery drivers that can move goods around. The country is expecting some 30% of parcels simply won't make it from A to B by 2030, because there'll be nobody to move them. For countries that will not have the same problem and there are going to be people to move goods, there is still the issue of emissions, congestion and road safety. Removing a large number of trucks from the road has clear benefits no matter which country. The population decline issue is also not unique t...

Enjoyed reading this Neruda poem which felt perfectly timed after the holidays and a lot of cooking. Though no tuna large or small featured in the menu, reading this brought to mind picking up the last duck in the store a few days ago. I wanted to do something different but not overly complicated and a roasted duck fits the bill very nicely.  Nothing like a majestic tuna surrounded by humble vegetables, it sat alone in the freezer, cleaned, dressed and shrink-wrapped in plastic. Its identity on remained on the label. In China it had been an interesting experience to see roasted ducks lined up in restaurant windows, every detail preserved. The presentation was quite specific as well. For an outsider to the culture, it rendered the duck with lifelike qualities that were impossible to overlook - I never once wanted to try it.  The frozen grocery store duck elevated the dinner at home that one evening. It came out of the oven looking how I have come to expect the dish to look. To...

When primary content disappears, there is no longer a source of truth. There is no way to validate the citations or references to that content have come to the right conclusions. It used to be that we were concerned about being on the internet for ever but now if you care to remain visible, you have the opposite concern - that of disappearing without notice . Somehow, there came to be an expectation that content was forever if it was digital, that the rules that applied to content in pre-digital times no longer applied The loss of content is not a new phenomenon. It’s endemic to human societies, marked as we are by an ephemerality that can be hard to contextualize from a distance. For every Shakespeare, hundreds of other playwrights lived, wrote, and died, and we remember neither their names nor their words. (There is also, of course, a Marlowe, for the girlies who know.) For every Dickens, uncountable penny dreadfuls on cheap newsprint didn’t withstand the test of decades. For every i...

I met up with a friend from a long time ago over the holidays. She is a few years younger than me and grew up in a similar social and cultural milieu. Sitting in my living room drinking tea and chatting about times left far behind, a home we can no longer recognize felt comforting. Her immediate family has immigrated a long time ago so there is really nothing left to return to except for the desire to help her child understand his roots. We got talking about things that were common in our childhood but don't exist anymore - the things that such roots are made of. We did not miss these things in our lives but when recalled they seemed to be imbued with special meaning. The shampoo that used to be advertised in every commercial break on national television. The model with her long and lustrous hair that the said shampoo had everything to do with or so we thought. Adjusted for age, M still has beautiful hair of her youth when I first met her, she was definitely shampoo model grade bac...

Right after Christmas in 2004, I was making a big move halfway across the country with my parents and J. What little stuff I had was packed in boxes and shipped with UPS to my employer's office. They would forward the boxes on once I had found my apartment. J's belongings were all in the trunk of my car and we we had enough supplies to survive the first few days in an empty apartment until my boxes arrived. I can't recall how mattresses had fit into car but somehow we must have done that so there would be something to sleep on. The boxes did arrive in a few days and we were able to make a home out of the apartment. This was before I started writing this blog so I have no specific accounting of those days. J had not fussed during the long road-trip. She napped through the most of it. We stopped by for meals at local restaurants along the way and that was a bit of entertainment. There was a lot of snow all the way until our destination. A memory that I recalled over the holid...