Useless Objects

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 be bothered to pick up their socks will unlikely invest in a robot to do the work for them - this is not a problem they are aware of. Parents in a household of multiple disorganized kids - maybe. But the kids room when it gets to peak chaos is not less complex than landfill. The standard that I had heard of is the floor is still visible under the mess so its not so bad yet. So chances are that the sock vacuum would fail once put to work in a real environment. 

Lost Time

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 any noticeable impression on her or the other homeless people around. 

Life goes on, sometimes it ends - these things are natural and likely experienced more viscerally on the streets once the safety net of society has been ripped away. While the scene is bizarre there is a deeper truth there - death becomes trivial when a person lives very close to encountering it all the times. Nikki talks about not being able to tell the past, present and future apart - that forms the foundation of many scenes in the movie. It got me thinking about how the orderly passage of time is essential for us to keep our sanity and losing one's mind is to get out of sync with the clock. My friend A lost his father recently. The old man had been struggling with memory loss for years. Towards the end he could no longer tell day and night apart, seasons were all mixed up. He would dress for summer in the dead of winter and wonder if a year had passed without his awareness. A told me that it was a sad and painful sight to see his father's sense of time crumble and fall apart. He was relieved at his passing because his pain of not knowing his place relative to time had ended. 

Color Phobia

 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 do. The reasons why color is such anathema in the west are interesting:

..in Europe, bright colors were seen as a sign of degeneracy and inferiority, and a love of bright color marked one as uncivilized, lacking taste, and "foreign." In England, contemporaries referred to Indian textiles as "rags" or "trash" and scorned their bright colors. As Goethe famously stated, "Men in a state of nature, uncivilized nations, and children have a great fondness for colors in their utmost brightness."

Prejudice against color masks a fear of contamination and corruption by something unknown or unknowable, according to Batchelor. This prejudice continued into the early 20th century. Frank Parsons claimed in 1912 that "Many Latin races, still somewhat primitive in taste, need [red] to meet their temperaments," while J.C.F. Grumbine, a color psychologist in 1921, stressed that "The primary colors of red, yellow, and blue appealed to the elemental and simple minds of the savage."

This belief was often supported by pseudoscientific claims that "savage" people needed stronger stimulation because they had duller senses, which was also used to justify slavery.

I am so glad that I have the simple mind of a savage that responds to the strong stimulation of colors. Gladder yet that I was blessed with the skin-tone that can wear a very wide range of colors comfortably. It would be a shame to waste what nature given me and millions of others like me and try to act classy by giving up color in our daily lives. We don't need to wait for Holi and Diwali to look right.

Next Level

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 because, as Woit says, non-unusually-talented students can also get strings of A’s on their transcripts, and also because if you’re competing on grades, the occasional slip can be so costly. Either way, ambitious students have to distinguish themselves in other ways—for example, by publishing articles in journals and conferences. This propagation of “publish or perish” down to the high school level just exacerbates the explosion of publications—apparently, zillions of medical students are kinda required to publish research too, and if publication is a requirement, then the quality is not gonna matter so much, and these papers just get stirred in with whatever remaining legitimate literature is being produced.

In J's case, she responded to all of this by breaking away from the tried and true as early as high school and by the time she was in college, she was going entirely her own way. The process from what I have observed is very much harder because she was choosing to swim against the tide to be in the minority - be visible for being markedly different. To her that was the only way to stand out because whatever the next frontier of winning, everyone is rushing towards it. Publishing papers I am sure will not be good enough in the next few years. 

Baking Lesson

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 work so she'd be alone in that kitchen and baking. Maybe it was a big birthday for someone in the family. She was not carrying any luggage so its likely she did not live too far away. As I walked out the station towards my destination, I could not help wondering if this is what happiness looked like for someone my mother's age - if indeed coming to J's home in the middle of a workweek to cook for the family on a special occasion could be my concept of happy when I am that age. I love cooking and feeding people so maybe that will warm my heart as much as this lady who cannot bake without Kerrygold butter. 

Unchanged Lives

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 a select few are able to stand their ground, stay happily single until they meet the person who brings something magical and special to her life. Such a woman does not need a man to fill a vacancy in her life, she is able to live a full and meaningful life on her own, she does not get her inner peace drowned by the sound of her biological clock ticking, she does not feel less than women who are partnered and have families. She has the inner resources and wisdom to see the single state as an opportunity to accelerate in many areas of life and a not a problem to resolve urgently. I was most certainly not that woman. The biggest favor a parent can do for their daughter is to teach her how to be happily and confidently single for an undetermined period of time. Since  I had no clue about that, there was nothing I could have taught her. I hope being as different as she is from me, will serve her well in this regard too.

Worst Hits

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 repeating our own posts back to us.

And the worst is yet to come. Remember that to power these nightmares Big Tech is going to revive the nuclear power industry. That’s our future. A barren mall kept alight with nuclear power, filled with the dead and the never-born.

In 2025 we may all become scavengers in online landfills full of AI generated garbage. If we are lucky and put in enough work, we might find a few useful things there. 

End Stage

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 not much will be missed. But attacking what woeful little did exist as "preferential treatment" seems deeply wrong. Every time I am an airport or an office building that has a mother's room, I notice it and it warms my heart. Someone gave this important need due consideration. But it also crosses my mind that the instances are so rare that one notices, its not something to be taken for granted. 

Side Hustle

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 harder to summon up the enthusiasm to chat with a friend of a friend. In turn, I have been guilty of declining invitations to connect because the person indicated they were interested in a role where I work. The truth is I don't believe I can do very much for them - if I don't know the person, the referral is of little to no value. Where I have gone out of my way to vouch for someone I do know very well, the hiring manager will more likely than not ghost me. 

On the off chance they write me back, that does not at all mean that person will get an interview, never mind get hired. Yet, when we've had open roles with our org to fill, we have talked to the most random and less than qualified candidates because someone send them our way. None of these folks ended up getting hired either. So the times are indeed strange, teams in need of talent are simply not encountering candidates who would be the perfect fit. Conversely, candidates who have a solid resume cannot find anyone who will so much as chat with them. Everyone flounders, the market remains in a permanent stuck state and turns ripe for referrals as a service gigs.

Food and Love

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 this one is in a league of its own - it is shown as an art form and the ways artists show love for each other. Eugenie being served by Dodin during her convalescence was one of the best moments in the movie for me. 

Thirty Minutes

 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 bar some more. I get the point that the person being asked for time has limited time in their lives and to that end filter criteria are needed - this woman is describing hers.

 It made me think of the time when she and people like her would be in their 80s and 90s, no longer in a position where they can help advance someone's career. They too will come to the age of irrelevance. They will spend their days alone or with seniors like them with an assortment of end of life challenges. It would be their turn to ask someone, anyone for thirty minutes of their time to break up the endless monotony of just being. I had to wonder when people write such things if they ever play their lives forward to that point where they have become irrelevant to the world. I am surrounded by a several elderly people in my life and am able to see how the story ends and believe that perspective is very powerful.

Small Talk

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 was exactly on this topic - making better small talk. Most of the ideas, I have tried at some point or the other because they are fairly commonsense but success can be mixed. One person given an opening will run with it, make your job a breeze. Another will not do anything with it or turn it a direction where nothing fun happens - like this woman and her wonderful accessories. I was friendly, chatty and admired her glasses but that did not prompt her to share much more. In large part it was the place and time - I was obviously pretty tired and needed rest. She was being polite but decided against wasting my time. It was a valid reason. But exactly the same outcome could have happened in a social environment as well. The person who decides to pass on an opening to share a fun story or interesting fact does that for some good reason. In the least it is a logical reason for them. 

I did not see the woman again for the rest of my stay so have no way of knowing if in a more opportune moment the conversation would have gone differently. 

Main Street

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, Fake Education. The message echoes a markedly controversial one put forth a couple of years ago by Alibaba founder and chairman Jack Ma, who said, “The problem is the fake products today are of better quality and better price than the real names.”

Speaking to state of counterfeit goods – those that utilize a trademark that is “identical with, or substantially indistinguishable from” a genuine registered trademark and that is used on the same class of goods as the registered mark – Ma elaborated, saying, “They are made in exactly the same factories, with exactly the same raw materials [as authentic goods], but they do not use the names.”

I think it would be nicer if the product remained high quality and reasonably priced without the premium for the brand. If the bag in question was copied faithfully but remained sans brand maybe it would not be such a terrible thing. Once could accuse it of plagiarism but that's about it.

Dream Course

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. I recall being taught how to make mousse the right way in my high school cooking class by a pastry chef from a top hotel in Mumbai. The guy was visiting family in our town and his mother who taught in our school decided it would be great of us kids to learn from him. While making the perfect mousse ended up being too difficult for me, I did learn that being really good at something and wanting to do it every day is what it takes to be really happy at work. This young man was clearly living his dream.

Baking Metaphors

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 the LLM is to fix the input by making the prompt and context data more precise, more targeted, or transformed in a way that makes it more likely to get the desired output from the LLM.

In a sense, this is not unlike baking: the AI is an appliance — the most fantastical and amazing appliance man has made, but yet still an appliance — and the artistry and science all happens before the ingredients go into the oven and we hit “bake”.

Indeed, there are many “AI startups” that quickly fizzled because having an oven does not a baker make and many startups were just content putting supermarket box mix cake batter into the oven and calling it a day.

I am the kind of baker that does infact puts a supermarket box mix cake batter into the oven and calls it a day The likes of me are known to love watching baking shows completely mesmerized by what real bakers can do with the same core ingredients and appliance. There are only a handful of bakers that will win competitors. My tier of bakers is the lowest rung and there is a ton of us judging by the number of cake mix batter boxes in the baking aisles. There is no hope for us and we are well aware. The real purgatory is the infinitely large mid-tier where people no longer need readymade mixes but they are very far away from winning any competition - AI startups with no moat fit right there.

Needling Less

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 particular because they are forever - that were worn for decades and transferred across generations. 

As time passed, the item looked less and less right for whoever was wearing it but culturally it was acceptable and normal. My aunt wearing a silk sari that had belonged to her mother in a her youth is an example that comes to mind. There is a picture of grandma wearing this sari at my grandfather's office holiday party - she is in her early 20s and looks wonderful. Then there is my aunt wearing it at around the same age - still a lovely sari and looks nice on her but something is off. 

She looks like she may be in a costume rather than a piece of clothing that is her own. I experience that same feeling wearing my older clothes but some of them have stories that I want to recall, they spark happiness yet it is not something I will wear. The only way to make a decision on such items we come to own is to downsize one's living space where much has to go away to make room for what is currently usable. 

Left Alone

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. Those who agree with this premise are "in". Those who unwisely and to their own detriment (as the protagonist in this story) want to fix it and destroy the tool of social cohesion, are in the "out" group. 

As someone who greatly values their solitude, I can appreciate a person's need to be left alone. To outside observers who are not the kind that want alone time as a priority, this may not be comprehensible. They may not even recognize it as a thing that they should be aware of - there are sounds in nature that are inaudible to the human ear and we are not expected to be aware of such sounds. So this person's burning desire to be left alone can be trampled upon with no malice intended - as we see happening here with Lucas.

Becoming Problem

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 while being trapped in loveless marriage with a partner who was similarly trying to do their best. They dug in and completed the job - the house is paid off, there is a retirement nest egg, the kids are college-educated and on their way to independence and gainful employment. It should be noted that most of the said kids don't have a plan as far as starting their own families and becoming parents themselves - they have chosen to extend adulting into their 40s to avoid any serious decision making. One could argue that is a far more problematic situation for society at large. 

Under the circumstances, 55+ couple has no strong binding force left to keep their difficult, fractious union together - no common goals or responsibilities, nothing to pull together for. It is not surprising that they want to get another (and possibly the last) shot at living life in whatever "irresponsible" way that they see fit. To call them a disgraceful bunch from start to end is quite shallow.

High Pain

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. Overexposure has caused nosebleeds, respiratory damage, and intense sneezing. This is most likely due to the airborne hairs that the gympie-gympie sheds.

There is no known antidote to the torturous stinging hairy leaf.

Direct Offer

 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 they want the new job - if yes, they can receive the offer directly. Just like GPA or test scores are not the final word on the suitability of the student and mistakes will be made, it is possible the vetting signals for the new hire could be inaccurate and they will need to be fired. But if the process works for a significant proportion of job-seekers, it would have solved what appears to be an intractable problem these days.

Starting Fresh

 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. Things just fall apart.

She smiled at me and said you know walking is very underrated and takes no effort at all. Just make it a habit to walk an hour the days that you can't come in. If you drop the membership just go for a walk everyday - wherever you are. I did exactly that and it worked like magic over the years. Once the walking habit settled, we wanted to have some variation in our fitness routine and so other things were added to the mix so that we had a choice of activities. 

I wondered that morning in yoga class if some of the folks needed that same piece of wisdom - walk when all else fails and just don't quit. For some it may be running but about the same idea just that the barrier to taking a walk is even lower - it can be done even without specific clothing and shoes. Running takes a bit more preparation.

Seeking Optimum

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 to take some time apart, continue to communicate and try meeting again after a while to see if anything changes. If my understanding of the effective mental age is anywhere near accurate, then this process will not yield the results we expect atleast not quickly. One of the two sides would need to go through a transformative life experience that resets the effective mental age of the unit at a level very far away from where it is right now. Some transformation can be self-directed, specially if there are things about me that are not serving the relationship well and needs change. Reading Mother Hunger offered me some insights into that question - so much left to learn about being a mother and my child has been an adult for a few years already

Long Lasting

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. Founded in 1623 in Constantinople (now Istanbul), the company now operates from Norwell, Massachusetts, producing at least a million cymbals annually. They have been doing one thing and doing is well enough to make it 400 years. Maybe there is a lesson there to learn on longevity of purpose. 

Creating Frameworks

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 but sometimes it was a great disservice - there is no perfect framework. I decided to allow J come to religion in her own time in her own way and limited my efforts to living a life by moral standards I was raised on. I hoped that would serve her better than me "preaching" how to be. I made many adaptations to give her the opportunity to think for herself instead of providing a prescription. The challenge is the child is often too young to do the level of thinking needed and have no life experience to pull from. So the outcomes are not what you would want or expect.

As in my case, the results have been mixed for her - approach is not ideal either. Fabrication of the brain or not, there is a use for religion but to use it optimally for the circumstances is no easy feat, specially that each parent-child combination is different and there is no universal solution that works in all contexts. 

Effective Age

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 had for the most part the privilege of being one. However, it was far from the experience of a kid growing up in a stable, two parent household where the parental unit does not need the kid to pull their weight as part of the team effort. In Bev and Jason's household, the effective age was lower than it might have been in demographically comparable household where there were two parents. 

In a mentally "immature" household the conversations are different - the parent is expecting the child to act more responsible because they are at the wits end and can't go the distance alone. The child is resentful because the parent is not acting mature enough, asking for teamwork when there is no team. This is not the conversation that would be needed where the parental unit has the resources to do the job and therefore does not need the kid to pitch in.

Seeking Home

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 house to go live anywhere else in the world would be an impossibility. S is rooted there and as such must find work in the city instead of going elsewhere in India or abroad. She married someone who was comfortable joining the extended family and living in her section of the house - its takes a certain kind of man to be willing to do that and for it to work well. For S all that has come true. 

When we first met in the early 90s, people in IT were leaving India in droves to go solve Y2K for the world. S had any number of opportunities to join their ranks but she did not. For her the home she was born was also the home where the big events of her life happened - first job, marriage, children. At that point it is no longer possible to rehome. My two decades in my current home is a blip on the radar compared to S's timescale and even that makes rehoming feel hard. 

Novel Delivery

 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 to Japan, so this solution might be needed elsewhere for the same reasons that Japan needs it. 

Sitting Duck

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 my eyes it looked like a meal and not like something suspended between life and death. The tuna in Neruda's poem might have inspired similar feelings - so "unflawed, undefiled" that it would give a person pause. Maybe they would walk past it not able to see that tuna becoming a meal for their family. 

Disappearing Acts

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 iconic cuneiform tablet bemoaning poor customer service, countless more have been destroyed over the millennia. 

The author's reference to AI generated content trash brings to mind the excesses of fast fashion and the how the surplus of clothes that have nowhere to go are washing up on the shores of Ghana. The two are thematically alike. A book written in the 18th century is comparable to a piece of vintage clothing that has been handed down several generations because it is timeless, beautiful, unique and expensive. It is a piece you want to have around forever if possible. The blouse picked up at the final sale discount rack at the end of season is akin to content produced by AI that is masquerading as the real thing. It is easy to get, cheap and completely forgettable. 

Missing Shampoo

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 back in the day. For a moment, I wanted to recall that smell of that product I have not used in many decades. It is not possible to find something that is a close enough match to trigger the memory - I have tried. It was its own thing, bright yellow with a metallic sheen and a smell that I really loved. You knew if someone had shampooed because the bathroom would smell of it after. 

As a young person, you believed that was the smell you wanted to linger behind you to signal clean, healthy, wholesome and someone with magnificent hair. The reality was the product was just a regular shampoo, it did no better or worse for a person's hair than any other product out there but the woman in the ad for this one was who made all the difference - she signaled something to the kids and youth of the day, something aspirational and a bit out of reach. That product disappeared from the market likely around the time I left India. By then, there were plenty of competitors with bold claims and comparably lush ads. All of this had faded out of memory until we shared stories from childhood in my living room.

Warm Tea

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 holidays was meeting a neighbor right before we left - she had heard me coughing a lot and knew I had a move coming up. She invited me over to give me a couple of herbal remedies that had worked well for her and a calendar for the new year wishing me joy and prosperity in what would be my new home.  Something about that gesture made me sad to leave though I had looked forward to this move and was even excited for it. That sense of losing someone who cared enough even though they were neighbors in an apartment - they were looking to buy a home so they would move out in a few months anyway. The transience of the relationship made it feel special. 

We had met each other in the passing, established a warm connection and would miss each other. I wondered how long before we would fade from each other's memory. It's twenty years and I still remember that gesture. I lost touch with her a long time ago but like to believe wherever they are, they are well. They likely have kids who are just a few years younger than J and they know their mother to be a person who cares about others, even relative strangers and does what good she can do for them.