Brain Ticklers Ed. 13
Links for February/March 2021 with a bunch of what else but brain ticklers. Happy Reading. Or glancing. Or Skimming.
Hujambo
Hope you are doing good. So yeah, it is late this month. And thanks for those kind souls (thankfully I need two hands to count) who checked why. It's just that I got busy last weekend.
January was a pretty quiet month for me. Google Maps timeline shows I never ventured beyond 10 Kms radius of my house. Which means - you can expect more links here. Did not write as much as I wanted to. By the way, on the reading part, did some Marie-Kondoing on my Feedly/Newsletters etc. over the past week so link counts should reduce from the next month (well, given it is late, that would be April). Apart from reading, I guess I spent more time with friends in the month (virtually, that is). Lots of interesting conversations around a wide variety of topics, some of which will turn into posts. Particularly, look out for a post on "Valueless Values". Just putting it out here so I really write it.
Btw, I have removed the section on Product Management / UX from this. As my own backup for links, I have another newsletter where I share those. And no one in this newsletter reads it for those (as seen from clicks). So why bother?
Without further ado, links:
What I wrote
Status is about the future: As certified status seeking monkeys, our focus is about the future and not so much about the past or the current status
430 hours alter ego:. Notes on the guy in the brain who troubles you from falling asleep. + Tips on making him melt away. But it is a catch and mouse game. (Btw Discover Mag says this may be because the wiring itself is different)
Notes from How to Fail: My notes and interpretations from “How to Fail in almost everything & still win” by Scott Adams, with personal anecdotes thrown in.
Cloud Mice Conundrums: In the barrier-broken world, is it easy for the truly, really, genuinely, add-other-adjectives good person to be discovered? I say No.
Books I interested* me recently (and other recommendations)
10% Human: Most problems in our life is due to the balance (or the lack of it) of gut bacteria. This is a fav topic of mine (as you would have seen in some earlier editions) and I will likely read this in full.
Three Body Problem: Started reading this on recommendation from a friend (and reader of this newsletter hehe) - Like all fiction reading, I keep moving back and forth. Guess I will finish at least one part.
Origin: Yet another friend cum reader recommendation. After reading its Wiki page, I am tempted to wonder if surface level knowledge of this is enough.
Unlocking emotional brain: Yet another friend/reader recommendation. (I said I had lots of conversations this month) First read this great Summary.
This short story (Four Fists) appeared in my Instapaper from I forgot where. It was a good read. Looks like it is a classic and has even been converted into a book.
I think I have finally found a proper service for bookmarking (after delicious was killed 10 years back). I was stuck with Google Bookmarks for too long because I could not find anything else good (and free haha). Now there is Raindrop.
One more nifty service to get all Kindle notes to Evernote - Clippings.
* Given I only sample some, read only a fraction of others, and rarely complete whole books, I chose to write "interested" than "read". Commentary will indicate if I really read the whole.
Oh-Really
Chinese migrants to the US are finding innovative ways to quit the Chinese Communist Party so their citizenship chances in the US are not impacted.
The word "dude" comes from Yankee Doodle song. Learn about a bunch more words and their origins in the link.
Another English thing: What is the plural of Octupus? Octupuses, Octopi or Octopodes? Learn about hypercorrection in grammar.
There seems to be a new job profile called "Productivity Nannies". I would love to be one.
A pigeon travelled (not flew) from the US to Australia and was about to get killed. Thankfully, it turned out to be fake (that he was from the US) and he is let to live. It was very interesting to follow this news about animal quarantine restrictions in countries like Australia. I have heard about there being no snakes in New Zealand and it is not allowed that anyone brings them there too. For some reason, this also reminded me of Mao's culling of sparrows because they stole grains.
On the topic of animals, did you know that we sent an unsuspecting chimpanzee to space first? Well, we are species that doesn’t even let animals dream at peace.
Extending on the one species wiping out others story (and also explaining why Australia may have such rules), see this New Yorker longform on CRISPR. Very interesting.
As someone endowed with less hair (scalp, facial, and body), I have long wondered the purpose hair served in our evolution. During my teenage years, when people who are well endowed with bodily hair claimed (and taunted people like me) that it is more manly, I used to retort that it is a sign of how evolved one is from their primate ancestors. My personal history aside, there seems to be lots of research on this topic - Beard's function in handling punches, Reason for having no hair in palm; etc. Well, may be it was men who did all the fighting or had quarrelsome spouses then. But definitely, my ancestor was not fighting. He was chiseling out newsletters in the caves, I suspect.
If you liked the show 'The Office' and Venkatesh Rao's spin on it (superimposing The Organization Man on it), here is a superimposition of that superimposition into the society which you will like. Even if nothing made sense to you, just read the last link here and you may like it. Reading this led me to another fascinating article on the 3 ladder social system in the US. Hey someone write a similar one for India or inspire me to do.
Modern buildings create loneliness because the designers of the era suffered from mental disorders that they preferred loneliness.
If you've ever wondered
How the loos of dictators and wannabes looked like
If UV kills viruses (specifically COVID)
Who invented Durex condoms (btw, nothing NSFW in this link. So don't click or not click for that reason. It is a story of an inventor's name hidden from history)
Why walking helps with thinking (if you are skeptical, try it. I have done and agree)
Interesting-Perspectives
Meta Rationality has a detailed analysis on what all "map is not the territory" aphorism could mean. It is a long one and gets tedious in the second half. Read till what interests you.
Note on how experts (accepted by the mainstream) versus independent voices. You can read it for the hilarious mention of how any search in WedMD leads to a conclusion that you have cancer.
A different take on the Reddit fulled stock market frenzy in the US, posed as a pirate problem.
Business Travel will come back post COVID
Good mental model to classify psychiatric conditions. It is not like flu (have or not have). It is like rich vs non-rich, where there is a whole spectrum in between.
History, Culture. Society
Confucianism in South Korea being the reason for its success and its ills at the same time.
Why did early humans leave Africa? Climate change, going behind where migratory animals led them. neighborly encroachment etc. Extending the climate change related aspect, your understanding of what ice-age likely is wrong. Learn about it here.
A medieval era manual on pandemics and ways to control. Apart from killing turkeys and cats as rituals to appease super powers, we did most of it now too.
Slate Star Codex blog is back in a new avatar. We now know who the person behind it is - Not that it was important anyway. Not for me.
A short history of PDF file format.
Interesting story of how cyber crime unit in Kerala catches pedophiles. Related: Germany uses deep-fakes of children to pursue criminals.
Was Cleopatra a whore-queen as she is made out to be? Discover magazine explores in detail. Well, the story interested me because of a personal ignominy I suffered when I was young - I joined an extempore competition (where a topic you are supposed to speak about is given just one minute before your time) and the topic that was given to me was "Cleopatra's Nose". This was pre-Smartphone, pre-Google (obviously) so there is nothing I could do to find out anything about the relevance of the topic. Naturally, I opted out from speaking at all.
Nothing new here but a short note on how the modern numerals came to be. Interesting they call it Hindu-Arabic numerals now. It used to be only Arabic a few years back.
I was reminded of buses from Chennai blocked near Hosur circa 1990 to find who can read Kannada, when I read about European countries designing language tests for providing citizenship to its migrants.
I am a big proponent of the theory of tacit knowledge. After wondering for many years on how countries in Europe (specifically France, Spain) were more productive while people in Asia slog for more hours, I came across this piece in Project Syndicate when I learnt about tacit knowledge playing a role. Recently, a new paper has been published on its effects in science, with the backdrop of some scientific measurement done by Russia 20 years ago just being done in the West. Believe me, once you see this, you see it everywhere. I would say even the Rich-Dad/Poor-Dad phenomenon is a variety of tacit knowledge.
A scary story of a lady building elaborate lies to defame people she did not like.
Discover Magazine writes an article about the cosmic vibrations of Om and all that. I am a fan of chanting Om and it is actually fun. But this part about cosmic vibrations and oneness with the sounds of universe etc are humbug no? If Discover magazine says this, how do I trust anything else it says? Unfortunately, without suffering from Gell-Mann amnesia (or its cousin Carnivas Amnesia), I guess we cannot read anything.
There is apparently a specific way to make it big in right wing America. It should be right wing anywhere IMO.
Science
Okay, this is important. Platypus looks like an organism that my 5-year old self created with his left hand because it has a mix of genes that are usually found in reptiles, birds, and mammals.
Six space missions to look forward to in 2021. Includes Artemis and Chandraayan. But who would have thought UAE was going to be a player in this space!
Do you know someone has framed the new laws of robotics for the ML driven world?
Zoopharmacognosy: A term for animals that self-medicate. Well, it is likely just an evolutionary trait that the animals learnt (if not from parents that is) that works like a phenotype. Fascinating, nonetheless.
On that topic of learning from parents, a longish article about how monkeys learn and what that teaches us about our evolution. Well, it is about monkey-see monkey-do but very nuanced.
Monkeys and apes can understand the value of objects (rather, value that humans have for those) and appropriately steal and barter for their food needs.
Roots of Progress will usually carry articles on what great things we have achieved but this time they wrote one about the stagnation in technology
It has been proving quite a bit that smoking and lung cancer don't share a causal relationship and it is only co-relation. Even that seems to be shaking now - A growing share of lung cancer is apparently appearing in never smokers.
Gentrification gone extreme - Apparently, vacationers want the smell/sounds of rural France to go away. And the locals are resisting.
An interesting write-up on how much time does Earth take to rotate (no it is not 24 hours and it isn't the same always too). Learn about sidereal time
How learning to drive helps you do accounting or draw floor plans
Plastic in deep ocean serves as colonies for living things. So in the short term, let us keep throwing plastic. In the long term, other organisms will evolve and we will be wiped out
Technology
I was happy to see a realistic appraisal of what this newest social network Clubhouse is. I was skeptical of it becoming mainstream from the first time I heard about it (never used - Am an Android user and whoever is going to give me an invite for it anyways). This article confirms my bias so to speak.
If you were recently in market for a television and were confused about the alphabet soup of technologies involved, this article may be of some help.
The coming dystopian future when data from all surveillance cameras are integrated.
Spotify can map your MBTI personality type and decide what music you will like.
Machines are inventing new math formulations (and they are called Ramanujan machines)
Beginners guide to non-fungible tokens (in the crypto world)
A mini-series exploring if Software is actually Engineering. In the 1980s/90s, "engineering" was considered a "professional" degree in India, like medicine or law, where you could set up your own "practice" (without a license in most cases). Software changed all of that so we are really not "engineers" in that sense. But, I like and agree with this part from the essay: There’s a much smaller gap between “software development” and “software engineering” than there is between “electrician” and “electrical engineer”, or between “trade” and “engineering” in all other fields. Most people can go between “software craft” and “software engineering” without significant retraining.
Great article on strategy since it discusses the end of Moore's law and how hardware is going to evolve with software in tandem. A slightly related article: Should the hardware capabilities be restricted to native apps or should they be extended to the browsers (i.e. websites)? Provides perspectives from both camps.
Extending the strategy-type article binge, a long note on what technology might do in 2020 - Will it be roaring or boring? (Reminder: Tech does not mean Info-Tech always though software is eating everything.)
Perso-Dev
I found a name for the bias (my family members think) I suffer from: Introspection Illusion. Oh well, what do they know 😉 Also: If I introspect about introspection illusion, is that an illusion too?
Good thoughts on why we skip habits, even ones we thought we liked.
A good article on the concept of "Time Confetti". Nothing groundbreaking there but gives a simple mental model to look at small chunks of time through the day.
Given the new year and resolutions etc., an article on Technology Shabbat. I am trying it this year. No resolution blah. Just trying. So far, it has not been going that well. Succeeded only three times. Wonder if I should set up a beeminder to actually donate to the ruling party if I don't.
Some boilerplate advice from Venkatesh Rao for different stages of life. A simple table to ponder. Depending on the time of the day, day of the week etc., I can think of myself having lived through the light side or the dark side. (Too many Venkatesh Rao links this time?)
If you are stuck with the habit of endlessly scrolling through your social feeds, here is a tool for you. It inserts your ToDos into your feed, haha. No, I am not going to use it because I know I will ignore them anyways.
Ivy Lee method of productivity. Doesn't work for me.
Secrets of successful listening. "Too much is made of body language. It is much easier to understand someone if you can hear them but not see them, than if you can see but not hear them", it says.
I was a huge fan of Steve Pavlina in the mid-2000s before he moved into conscious growth and stuff (guess I have said this before). He recently moved his website host, which means a lot of his recent articles appeared all of a sudden in my Feedly. I should say I enjoyed several of those - Here are some: Identifying your relationship to your goals; Overcoming digital FOMO (no I don't agree to the no-caffeine rule) - pair this with digital cobwebs thing I wrote; and finally the growth heartset - like growth mindset but different (may be I suffer from a fixed heartset).
Venkatesh Rao advises gig economy folks on the need to "keep themselves enchanted". In his table where he applies transaction analysis and freudian analysis, I am obviously a "Parent". But even in that mode, I guess things like the blog and this ticklers are my own way to keep myself a child enchanted with the world.
What learning to juggle does to your brain? Excerpt from a book on brain-body connections when we learn something new. And apparently it helps in showcasing one as a super-dad to daughter's friends. Worth a try, no? Related: New Yorker review/perspective on this topic and the book.
If too many open tabs in the browser is not your thing, you will like this. I know the writer at Nintil is probably 100 times more productive than me but at least the tools and processes we use are the same. So, happy about it.
How to be a Good Employee and a Great Boss (Avinash Kaushik)
Epilogue and Share Request
If you liked anything here, reply to me, comment/heart here, or share with others. Or Don't. I am not your boss.