Heartcrossings

Like many I have clothes in my closet that look like new because they were worn so infrequently but are not in style anymore. Since I did not buy them because they were in style at the time but because I liked how they looked on me (at the time), this does not pose and impediment for me. But out in the world, I could stick out as someone who lacks awareness of what women should wear this day and age.  Reading news like this makes me strongly inclined not to buy any new items of clothing for the next several years. I am very sure I will manage quite comfortably and will never look "fashionable" by the influencer driven standards of the day. For me and other who shop based on what they like and what works for them, this is a great opportunity to create unique expression that depends on what we already have. A constrained problem gets people to become creative in ways that they might not have been before.  ..tariffs will ultimately impact women more than men because women spend...

 At a routine check up, the nurse measured my pulse and as is the case when things are as they should be, she said nothing about. It got me thinking about how we came to agree on a certain pulse rate being normal and if that number had anything at all to do with the earth's pulse rate of once in 26 seconds . It turns out there is some connection but not so directly - that would be way too simplistic for nature 238 measurements from 184 individuals over a 3.5 year period “demonstrated unexpected similarities in the spectral patterns and strengths of electromagnetic fields generated by the human brain and the earth-ionospheric cavity.” A few weeks after the check-up I was at a guided meditation practice with a group of people I had never met before. We were all there to learn how to make meditation integral to our lives. Most folks had attempted or already had some form of meditation practice in their lives, but it felt insufficient in some way. This was a first time experience for ...

My friend H is in her mid 60s and she had worked for a well-known SaaS company for over a decade. Things had been going great for her the last five years, the team she was on really appreciated the value of her skill and experience. Her manager, a couple of decades younger than her took on a reverse mentoring role with her. H needed no help with doing her job well and scaling so others could become like her, but she did appreciate the mentoring on topics that she found harder to grasp given the generation gap. A few months ago, the company went through a major restructuring and H no longer had the job she had worked on so hard to come to love. The first few weeks were rough and she went through all stages of grief.  Now she's back to being herself, not quite ready to retire but close enough. While she is not excited about not working (or that is what she tells herself and her friends), she looks happier than I have ever seen her in her pictures. She's around the house doing mun...

Learned about the origin story of Snakes and Ladders randomly and was amazed at how long it is possible to remain ignorant. Such a clever way to impart moral instruction to children - something I could have greatly benefitted from as a mother when I was raising J.  The snakes and ladders in gyan chaupar function as karmic devices, either thwarting or aiding a player’s efforts to reach moksha. To emphasise this, the squares from which the tokens either ascend or descend were labelled with names of various virtues or flaws. The positive attributes listed were dependability, asceticism, faithfulness, generosity and knowledge, while the negative attributes and crimes included rebelliousness, vanity, crudeness, theft, lust, debt and violence It was interesting to see the modern take on the game aimed at teaching kids. This is a more secular spin on the original intent, informed by the concerns and moral dilemmas of our time.  Ancient Living snakes & ladders board game is hand...

There is a gloomy way to read this story about scientists fleeing America and then a more hopeful one along the lines of a rising tide lifts all ships. If there were great options for research all around the world, science might come out ahead. The talent from America would be fused with the local talent that may have ideas that could not have come without them being a product of that society and culture - things that did not get exported by just remained there.  One hopes most if not all of the research will be published and accessible around the world. In that scenario, the world benefits from the mashup of talent and intelligence at a scale that had not happened before. Who know how reality will unfold in years to come but I like imagining the better, more hopeful outcome anyway. It is great to see that there are harboring arms for our best and brightest around the world.  Last month, France's CentraleSupélec announced a $3.2 million grant to help finance American research...

It had been almost I year since I last saw L and this meeting was on the brink of not happening. But we did get coffee at the place we both love and as always there was much that I learned in the couple of hours. She mentioned working with an engineering team that has veered between being hostile and rejective about using AI to ramp their productivity to being in public denial but using it surreptitiously. The later almost did not make sense because in her company there is a push for AI adoption all the way from the top. So it would only help rank and file SDEs to toe the line. Recently after a minor release was pushed out, over half the users were locked out of the system causing a terrific amount of chaos, fire-fighting and blamestorming. L was in the thick of it all, trying to assess root cause, implementing checks to prevent it and non-stop damage control. That was the week leading up to our coffee chat. She look completely exhausted. It turns out that the culprit was some AI gener...

Read these lines on my LinkedIn feed and it was reconfirmation of all that ails the platform and a reminder that no true alternative exists. The person was claiming they rose to the level of X and company Y because they have the executive presence to command a room. Having known many execs from said company in the past, I am well-aware of the what that entails. It is about an aggressive diminishment of others who are way better qualified than the person at level X, more articulate and thoughtful than the person with the vaunted presence is but they are at level X-N which is their undoing. Also to their detriment, these folks are more human, relatable and therefore vulnerable to the passive-aggressive tactics used to undermine everything they say or do. But ofcourse this guy will not admit to any of that but it is unlikely he is not aware of what he does to maintain command of the room. I have also seen in folks who are deeply trusted advisors to their client's executive leadership ...

Sleeping in a strange hotel room with a trash compactor working past 2 am is unpleasant. Then you realize there is a reason there are earplugs on the bedside table. This place always churns the guts of downtown at that ungodly time. I have been here before and forgot all about it. This is the amnesia that takes hold between my trips to this city where I feel mildly out of place no matter how many times I return. Something is off from the time I board the plane to here and see people carrying the backpacks with company logos on them. That is the majority of the travelers. I am one of them but I am trying to bury all signs of my provenance. I don't dress in the way that is the norm for my type - comfortable, casual and repeatable. The person does not have to have a uniform like the infamous black turtleneck but there are strong elements of uniform in concept - they would look much the same every time you saw them. There is one look and they are settled in it. So imagine my surprise I...

I had the chance to watch a very well-known Bharatnatyam dancer while on a work trip. It just so happened she was performing the night I was there and there was plenty of time to get to the theatre after work. This was the first time I had seen her perform but was familiar with her reputation. To say that she was dazzling is an understatement but what left me feel unsatisfied in the end was her choice to breathe new life into a very traditional art form. For someone whose first introduction to the dance came from watching friends perform at their Arangetrams , my expectations were quite different from the modern show that unfolded on stage.  There were passages there were her brilliance shone and yet before you could fully immerse in it, she would have moved on to more modern interpretive moves that broke the spell. I understand that western audiences might prefer they way she choreographed the dance but folks like me missed out. On the way out of the auditorium a couple of young l...

My former co-worker C is an  Excel artist too just that he uses it in more conventional ways as a data scientist. When I first started in that team, I was introduced to C as the one with all the answers and the reasons for those answers. It sounded cryptic at the time but I understood why that was said of him within a couple of months. If you did not understand a number and asked C for help, you would get a deep-dive that would leave you deeply impressed. He knew so many layers of detail about every cell of the summary tab of his fabled spreadsheet, that you would leave dazzled.  And there was always more to add if you came back with another question another time. It was if we were looking at the spreadsheet in completely different ways. He probably saw shape, form, color, and texture in each cell where someone like me only saw numbers. That was the only way to explain how he explained things. When C moved on to bigger, better things, he was replaced by someone more "traditio...

I started to read this opinion piece with interest given the context the author cited he had but ended up a bit disappointed when he described the aftermath of demonetization in India. This is something I have been in the midst of quite directly having retired parents living in Kolkata for the longest time. As it happens, I have been to the UK several times before and after Brexit. May not have lived in either place at the time these events were unfolding but close enough.  Covering the demonetization experiment in India as a journalist, we spent a day basically trying to get someone to break the equivalent of $50. It took all day and after a couple hours I actually started to feel like a unique form of dread. Like what if your money just suddenly didn't work anymore. Roll forward a couple years, nothing has radically changed about India. I was there in 2014 before this happened and again in 2018. If I compare my experience of India in these two trips separated by four years with ...

Reading this story about the author's experience with Tinder's Game Game reminded me of the article on Therabot . They seem to somewhat related. Not everyone who is single is good at flirting but it is a skill they need to be successful - hence the AI coach to help them improve their game. It is awkward to enlist a friend to help hone flirting skills and for some seeing a live therapist may be both awkward and expensive. Also, there is no guarantee that the therapist will be useful even if they are skilled and have helped others - they might just not be a fit for you. Finding the right one could take time and cause a lot of frustration along the way. There is enough disincentive for a person to not even embark on this journey.  An AI therapy bot has a lower bar - they should not cause any harm. Even if they are entirely useless they cost very little, are available on demand and you can always try another one. Somewhere along the way, the bots might communicate some nuggets of ...

Fascinating read about the accomplishments of a woman I had never heard about. Her accomplishments are remarkable no doubt but what struck me the level of adversities she had to face in her life which brought equal measures of famine and fast. Losing two members of her immediate family before attaining adulthood is tough enough. But she went on to marry someone who had lifelong mental health issues. She gave up her dream of becoming a doctor on account of this marriage. Yet she was incredibly rich and had access to opportunities other did not and she maximized it all. I can think of so many stories of people accomplishing extraordinary things in their lives and just about all of them had some terrible set of circumstances that defined them. If a person was so lucky as to not have endured any serious calamity in their lives, they will likely not achieve significant greatness either.  Even on a much more reduced and local scale this seems to hold true from what I have observed in li...

Reading this story about fancy housing options for rich students attending elite schools brought N to mind. She was a stay at home mom with two kinds. The husband was help run the family business in Rajasthan so he needed to be away in India a lot. N lived like a single mom and found a kindred spirit in me though our circumstances were very different. N came old money and while she was not flashy, it was hard not to notice the wealth, it sat simply and casually on her. At the time, I was working hard to keep J and I afloat in circumstances that I very little control of. I learned a lot about how rich people think about the future as I got to know N.  She was hyper-focused on her two kids and that was not any different from me. But beyond that we were not alike at all. N was scouting for cheap properties near our local university that had rental potential after some minimal improvements. She ended up buying one, hiring contractors to do the work and then renting it out. That was th...

This seems to be a sensible way to measure the wealth of a nation - net domestic product  specially if it incentivizes behavior that secures the prosperity of future generations. One key difference, which could support climate action, is that NDP includes the depletion of non-renewable natural resources like coal, oil and gas as a cost of production, shrinking their value in the calculation. Bram Edens, a statistician with the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), explained that accounting for how reserves of fossil fuels are used up will reduce their value in the same way that the value of buildings or machinery falls due to the wear and tear they suffer over time Ironically, this is the kind of measure we would apply in our personal lives. Are the actions we are taking result in short term gain at the cost of long term pain. If so, those actions are unwise. You don't tell off your boss or neighbor in a moment of upset because you know the moment of vindic...

One of my nieces seems set on marrying a guy her parents and grandparents don't really approve of. The "calamity" has stirred a level of turbulence for this rather private family to the point they need and want to share. This kid is a few years older than J so I find the situation understandable. M loves the guy. has a lot in common with him. They are both at a stage in their career where marriage is no longer financially scary. Most importantly they've known each other for years. I chatted with M's granddad recently and this issue came up. He was not seeking any advice or guidance - only unburdening himself. I provided some unsolicited wisdom anyway in hopes that it would help them all. I told him that M is a very smart and capable woman. If she has come to this conclusion after knowing the man for nearly a decade, chances are that their protests will on deaf ears at best or at worst alienate them from her. They would need to accept her decision and be there for ...

Reading this Wired story about IRS close to the tax filing deadline left me feeling breathless with fear of unknown unknows. Thirty days to create a Mega API in a hackathon that will essentially replace all current functionality is the the claim being made.  The only way that is possible to drastically simplify the business logic. In this case expressed by byzantine maze of forms and schedules that are involved in filing taxes. It takes genius to know what applies when and why. If the rules were stupid simple then I can see this API being possible to deliver in the said amount of time.  Absent that, it will end up being some cruel joke that will likely hurt some unknown set of taxpayers in unknowable ways. So the question is who all will unluckily and unwittingly fall into that bucket and how bad and ugly will it get for them.  Conversely, what would it take to be in the other pile where all goes smoothly and well. We only have to wait until next year to find out assumin...

Nice essay about scents and places . When I come home after having been away for a while, I really savor the smell in the air when I walk in the door. There is a certain staleness in it, but it still carries in it the remnants of incense that I burn in the living room. That is the recognizable part of the "home" smell. There are other components that are not easily described but belong to this home. Reading this essay got me thinking if I would recognize my home by smell no matter where I was, if it was really that unique. Conversely, if that smell in some other place could make it home instantly. Maybe there is value in homing a fragrance first and taking it along in a travel diffuser. There is no universal smell of rain on dry earth - something I had never paid attention to before but will now The airy scent that follows rain is known as petrichor, and there are many forms. The petrichor in Singapore, for example, will be quite different from that of Reykjavik. The desert s...

I thought of my aging parents when I read this article and wondered if verbal fluency could be a skill they could retrain in  The most striking result was that only verbal fluency—specifically, the ability to quickly list animals and words beginning with the letter “s”—predicted how long participants lived. People who performed better on these tasks tended to live longer, regardless of how they performed on other tasks like memory or vocabulary. The effect was sizable. On average, participants who could name many animals or words lived up to nine years longer than those who struggled with these tasks. To put it simply, naming more animals in 90 seconds was associated with living longer. That would be an interesting to try and slow the clock by trying to improve the list making speed over time. Two words to begin and graduating to twenty or more in ninety seconds. I tried to recall a game I found useful when I got my first smartphone. It was meant to help with keeping your brain fr...

Being sedentary is bad for you and will likely shorten your lifespan. I guess we all know this but the remedies proposed here are not that great. A doctor told me this a few years ago when I described my typical workday. She said all the benefits from my diet and fitness habits were being washed out by how long I sat in place. Her recommendation was to spread out the exercise throughout the day - not have a dedicated hour for it at the end of day but try to intersperse it throughout. This used to be a breeze when I worked from home unless meeting clients. That has changed a bit. It is no longer feasible to take a brisk walk, work in the yard, do a ten minute yoga routine when there was an opening between meetings. I am sure it helped my physical health as the doctor said but the mental health benefits were remarkable as well. Those short breaks helped me feel better about the day no matter how it went. A good day felt great and a bad one not as much. It also left me with the sense of ...

This Atlantic essay warning us about the end of college as we know it, touches on a lot of reasons why this is imminent but does not spend enough time discussing the culpability of the institutions themselves in their potential upending The college experience could very soon be one that bears little semblance to the classic picture. Your kid could end up on a campus with reduced student services and activities, aging rec centers, shrunken-down humanities departments, less prestigious faculty, and a class cohort that has been stripped of foreign students, and also thinned of anyone who happens not to be well-off. It could be a dreary and degraded version of the life at school that you may have once enjoyed yourself. That process was well on its way before any of the recent developments the essay cites. The ROI of college education has been questioned for the longest time - it is hardly affordable and many may argue better options should exist for students who do not want to go the coll...

Did not realize there were so many use cases for the typewriter that are unrelated to nostalgia. This one sounds pretty obvious once explained but I would not have thought of it:  a real estate agency called Jarvis Realty, owned and run by Woody Jarvis. "I'm real old school," he says. Jarvis, too, regularly uses a typewriter for office work. He gives the example of putting together an offer of purchase for a client. It'll start on the computer but he'll then print the document out and, should he need to make any modifications, he prefers to use correction fluid and his typewriter rather than re-printing the contract and wasting a lot of paper. "Our contracts are very legible and easy to understand," he says. He'll also occasionally type up a name and address on an envelope for a colleague. "For me, it works because I know how to make it all work." There is something warm and reassuring to know that there is room in the modern world for typ...

I never had any location sharing with J set up even when she was a teen and a novice driver. If she left somewhere while I was not home, the expectation was for her to text me upon departure from home and again upon arrival at location and the same on the way back. More often that not I would be back before she returned anyway. Any further sharing seemed demeaning and I wanted there to be trust and not compliance by surveillance. I would always let J know where I was if not at home and by when I would be back. It felt like that was a reasonable standard for her as well. Once she moved out, such information sharing has stopped - we live too far apart for any of this to have meaning or value. Interesting reading about location sharing habits folks have grown up with it and how that transfers over in relationships ..many others who have grown up sharing their location with parents and friends, being on others’ radar screens—or maps, rather—seems perfectly normal. Location-sharing has als...

We were out to lunch and one person in our group knew some folks at an other table that also had just the number of open seats we needed. So we joined them and I found myself seated next to a software developer whose just under seven years at his first and only job after college. We got chatting and I learned that he had recently become a homeowner and he was proud to share how expensive the home was and how close it was to his office.  To be able to pay for that house, he had to absolutely keep the job he had. From his description of what he did, he is a commodity full stack developer undistinguishable from the legions of others just like him. He had lucked into a very good gig and thanks to the humungous mortgage was extremely motivated to keep his paycheck. He had made the conscious decision to get into a team in his company where the work was predictable and uncomplicated.  Instead of worrying about being viable as a professional for a very long time, he focused on home bu...

M was a design consultant at the company where I worked a few years ago. He did a good job, got along with everyone and was well-liked. He had three kids all under 6 years old and they way he described the life he and his wife led, it seemed as if they worked as hard as they could to earn enough for child care of their three kids. The numbers were staggering even back then. They always wanted a second kid and ended up having twins and that had life altering consequences for M and his wife. Her job required her to travel for multiple weeks at a time but the pay was too good to pass up but not enough for M to stay at home. He picked contract work to have flexibility (and better money) but it came with a huge dose of uncertainty as well.  The family was together some weekends and they made the most of it. M used to joke the unit of measure was 7 days for him as the days were a daze. He really got to spend some good quality time with his kids once a week. A lot could have changed from...

It was spellbinding to see what the Hubble saw on birthdates of people who I care about. On my own it saw the Andromeda and on J's the Arches cluster. It was ironic that earlier that afternoon I found myself thinking about how J and I are so different that as adults the ties that bind us feel incredibly tenuous sometimes - Arches and Andromeda is so fitting. Maye that is the way it is meant to be between parent and adult child, asking for different is preparing for disappointment. Behind the thick tree-line in my backyard, is the driveway of our neighbors The K's.  Sometimes when I am looking through the kitchen window, I see old Mr. K on his John Deere, his son (now in his thirties) with a leaf blower working in the yard. Sometimes they play pickleball on the driveway, the two sons and the parents. Mrs. K told me once that she has spent years waiting for the time her sons would finally take off. They are both married and had their first kids in the last couple of years but th...

I feel a sense of gratitude when I have the time to be bothered by really minor annoyances. I arrive after a long and somewhat delayed flight at a hotel that is a block away from the office, a place I have stayed many times in the past. The best way to describe this establishment is - goofy. It would not the first choice for anyone's business trip but I took a shine to it. I like their minor quirks and how they can bring a mini fridge to my room if I say I'd like one. How its generally one welcome cookie for the trip but they look the other way if I get a couple of extra. The cookies are amazing and they don't look the part. A more discerning customer may completely avoid a cookie that looks so tacky but that is their overall vibe. Being here makes me feel at home and at ease. I can't imagine what better purpose a hotel can serve on a business trip. As usual my freshly applied nail polish was chipped all over from moving luggage up and down so I had to take some time to...

 In this Guardian article technofossil is a one word, but it feels like in need of two. There is a very high level of arrogance combined with uncertainty around technology these days. Once day all humans are going to displaced by AI and robots, the next day a contrary opinion about the AI will get dumb to the point of self-destruction because the average intelligence it depends on is getting lowered by the day. Between these wide swings, people in technology are getting by day to day.  Some are much more concerned than others but such is always the case not matter what the issue at hand. But at no point is there talk of fossils we will create and perpetuate and how chicken bones and plastic grocery bags are not hitting the high notes for the persistent markers of a civilization. It may be quite fitting though that our collective hubris about so-called achievements dies a forgotten death and the all that remains are relics of our reckless and mindless consumer culture Computer ...

Once a year in spring I clean up the thick carpet of pine needles under the line of pine trees in my yard. They suffocate the earth until nothing but the most tenacious weeds can grow there. Cleaning the pine needles is hard work and at the end of many hours there is nothing much to see other than the ground being visible once again. I walk away tired and somewhat satisfied and the pine cones continue to fall, the trees have mostly greened by now.  This annual ritual reminds of the changes that this part of my yard has gone through over the years and how each phase of its existence was deeply entwined with my own life's ebb and tide. J's middle school years left me with absolutely no discretionary time. There was a guy who cut the grass to keep the place from turning completely wild. Every once in a great while I would trim some bushes. The line of pine trees had been overcome by some invasive brush that grew furiously all around the trees, giving them no room to breathe. High ...

Stealing time is one thing but money a bit different but there could be a logic to say that they are one and the same. What is interesting about the stories is that all the thievery is going on in the office not away working from home though showing up at noon could go one way or the other. While its easy and tempting to blame a whole generation as lazy, the real problem lies elsewhere.  There are no competent or inspiring people managers or leaders of any sort that these young folks work for. So no surprise they feel no desire to perform at work. If a person was able to read 74 ebooks a year pretending they were reading their email, that person should not have been hired to begin because they have no measurable job to do. Every account in the article points to the same problem - one of over-hiring and not having a well-defined job where performance can be tangibly measured. That and no sense of team, shared vision, common purpose and the like. These folks are sleep-walking throug...