Brain Ticklers Ed. 18
Links for July 2021 with Q-Rated ticklers including eating insects, grammar rules, racist medical devices, intelligent slimes, lip reading tech, marriage advice and many more ticklers! Enjoy.
Salve!
Hope you are doing good. While I didn't have much time to write anything this month, I did have time to read, and I think I did that a lot. Thanks to a friend (& a forced subscriber of this), I got a free Blinkist subscription for a month, so some reading time went there as well. While I haven't really gotten to summarizing book reviews here, you have a cracking edition here (I guess) with just web links. Enjoy! And as has become a custom at my home, we celebrate the cultural hegemon's independence weekend with a masala movie from the 90s. We watched Independence Day last year. And Terminator-2 this year (which was released 30 years back). After watching things like Tenet, the time travel in it appears 'baby' to my daughter.
Btw, Some of you suggested (hehe, just kidding) that I sell my first newsletter of 50 trapped fans as an NFT. And I didn't because I don't subscribe to this meme makes money theory and sell my soul. (This is attempted humor btw).
Oh-Really
Story of camel trading in Somalia - I've seen (in movies) people doing the same in rural Tamil Nadu, holding hands, putting a towel over them and negotiating within. Someone research this man, where this started, and how it spread.
The Southern Ocean (or 'Antarctic Ocean' if that is how it was taught to you) is finally recognized as one. I didn't even know it wasn't recognized so far.
They have this interesting investing option in France (pied-a-terre) where you bet on a person's death. i.e. you pay them for their house to be owned by you after they die. I remember a reverse mortgage thing being spoken in India a while back which was of similar nature, but it never took off.
Future of food is all insects, whether you like it or not. Looking forward to it.
Human evolution influenced our thirst for water. Very interesting article on heat dissipation techniques, sweat glands, and other traits made us so reliant on a regular supply of water.
Want an instant cure for hiccups? Buy this straw.
Like "phishing", there is something called "brushing" now. If you get free packages from your favorite online retailer, ask why.
A gigantic comet is coming towards the sun, in the next 10 years.
Mental work (like playing chess) does not burn as many calories as physical activities (like running), though I would like to believe it to be the case. (With no physical activity, I wonder where else the calories from the food I eat go!)
What if a deadly heat wave hits India in 2041? Hyderabad escapes but Chennai suffers, says this "imagined scenario".
Like everything else in the past 18 months, psychics have also moved online. I suggest someone build an ML model that learns from all their speech and automatically provides those in the future. We can claim software has eaten the spirit world also.
There is a "Joy Generator" by NPR. I just saw a bunch of puppy videos and my blood pressure, anxiety etc. should have apparently dropped. Are you able to feel it?
There is this whole movement towards food-porn - literally porn - not just a word play!
Interesting-Perspectives
An introduction to pleasure: Pleasures of the mind (like this newsletter. No? OK) Vs pleasures of the body.
Making sense of big numbers. I like a couple of examples here, like 1 million seconds being 12 days, while 1 billion seconds is 32 years.
Review of the book "Why Children Fail". Fascinating piece. Do read. This book has been lying in my Kindle for a while. Glad I could at least read a good review of it.
Now if you are interested in other reviews in that book-review contest, I found this one very good: Humans and micro-parasite (Plagues and People) since the earliest days up to Covid 19. Comparisons with Guns, Germs, and Steel were interesting too.
Robin Hanson keeps writing about UFOs being plausible once every few days. And recently, he wrote a summary of sorts: They are our panspermia siblings, here to enforce their rule against aggressive expansion, hopefully by sitting at the top of our status ladder where we come to emulate them
The myth of lone genius is itself a myth - It is just a politically correct idea
On the limits of idealized values (longish). Pair it with my writing on this.
The whole human cultural and societal evolution explained purely through our status-seeking behavior. (More on this)
Grammar rules that are meant to be broken. Pair it with: Write like you code.
The uselessness of things like Affordable Housing. Reminded me of the RTE (Right to Education) in India. It is not just about a low-income person getting admission in a high-end school without having to pay tuition fees. There are more things one should be able to afford as a general lifestyle? (This is an area the author doesn't go to though - the lifestyle changes one needs to go through to "fit-in".)
Why do you have lesser friends than most of your friends? (Friendship paradox explained)
An insightful post on digital memories - not just photographs and stuff; even bookmarks, browser histories, blog posts, everything. I do fear the digital cobwebs but honestly, I think it is more of my laziness to not clear them up than they being inherently bad, just as in physical spaces.
History, Culture, Society
A deep-dive on how inequalities rose up in societies in the past few thousand years after about 290,000 years of 'sharing culture'. Well, the solutions offered aren't practical IMO.
Medical devices that are racist. IMO, as society sheds racism and there is more equality in general, these items will get identified one by one and get removed. It will take decades, that is all. No point outraging.
If you've wondered why this font called Wingdings exists in Windows, here is your answer. It has a history from the early days of printing presses.
Story of scatterplots and pie-charts, and graphs in general.
A brief history of the calorie - Well it started with usage in efficient management of nutrition for prisons, schools, and armies.
Scary article in Bloomberg on pandemic induced myopia. Nothing newer than what I have covered earlier though. I wish they had gone deeper.
A bunch of people are apparently missing their commute. Not me, except to the hearing podcasts part. As we start going back to office, a guide to picking the best day to work from home. Tue/Thu sounds right to me. And when you do work from home, here are ergonomic ways to keep yourself injury-free so Zoom doesn't break your body. Also, remember that you may need some time to adjust to social un-distancing.
To the eternal haunting question of "If you are so smart, why aren't you so rich", the eternal answer is corroborated by algorithms too: It is luck.
Move over Neanderthals, a skull found in China (Homo Longi or Dragon Man) is our nearest ancestor. (Unrelated question: Do we need such things to become a super power?)
Research: Does having pets really make us healthier? (Answer: No)
Young men in South Korea are feeling victimized. Kind of funny. But such movements are clearly coming soon to countries like New Zealand, Canada etc. Hey, don't judge me. This is only a prediction here and I am not revealing my preference or anything 🙂
If you are overworked and that is expected at your workplace, blame this Soviet man Alexei Stakanov who showed a 1400% increase in productivity.
American schools teach "reading" all wrong. It seems Mississippi proves phonics works best. My own thoughts are mixed.
Wonderful write-up on an anthropologist who wrote about nature/nurture and gender differences in an often contradictory (to others) way.
Science
Scientists are working on a superbug that can fight all known and new virus that may come. Read it if you want to learn about amino acids, CRISPR, and mRNAs just enough for you to speak confidently to an unsuspecting crowd at a friendly party
An organism frozen for 24,000 years didn't die. It has started living once the conditions were right. Fascinating.
Why scientists tweak lab 🦠 , particularly make them more contagious
Even a slime has intelligence without all those elements in your central nervous system
Your food is being engineered, even if it is all organic.
One general fear I have is about bacteria developing resistance to antibiotics. But looks like they can't remember as much. When they develop resistance to one, they forget others. And so on. [Okay, that is a pretty layman-ish understanding I have of a newspaper's interpretation. Go read the original for more.]
Fascinating stuff about lucid dreams and characters in them.
Technology
Four misconceptions with non-tech companies wanting to become software companies. Some charts on revenue % were surprising to me. Specifically, that IT services is only 9% of the whole revenue pie.
Lip reading tech. Looks like a great use of AI, forgetting the bad things that may happen. (In a lighter vein, it made me wonder if it can find what Vijay Sethupathi really meant in this Tamil movie scene.)
One of the greatest ideas of 2005-2015 was to build the Indian model of tech innovations to other parts of the world (Southern hemisphere if you will), like how old economy companies like Tata, iFlex did in other sectors. I was part of some of those attempts too. While many of them withered away, who knew the success of it would come in the form of Koo, for reasons like Government scrutiny and other countries (their Governments) not wanting Twitter. Ha. (Btw, the flow happens in the reverse direction also, like this NeoBank from Nigeria making a splash in India)
A helmet that aims to understand the functioning of mind. Not as crazy as it sounds. Founded by the founder a Braintree, which could have actually been Stripe. (Here's an old interview of him)
Perso-Dev
A memo on "writing for movies". Well, it was meant to be for movies but some aspects apply even to business writing I believe. May be, even the dramatize it part. Why not?
The 20-20-20 rule for screen time is pretty old. It is time for 20-5-3 rule for life in general, to spend outdoors. 20 mins a day of walk in your neighborhood park; 5 hours a month of a visit to a forest-y semi-wild area; and 3 days a year of being off-the-grid in the wild. Nice!
Good interview with Marc Andreessen, without the PR-ish stuff that comes usually. I particularly like the advise about not chasing passion but "seek to contribute. Find the hottest, most vibrant part of the economy you can and figure out how you can contribute best and most. Make yourself of value to the people around you, to your customers and coworkers, and try to increase that value every day". This goes into my mental model for youngsters, along with Paul Graham and Prof. Hamming.
Cleverest ways we resist career change. Been there, done that, like some ten-thousand times.
Growth mindset applied to cope with moments of micro-anxiety (aka boredom I guess)
Short & Best advice on marriage you may need - Don't get to know your own limits
How to predict the future without having to predict it? Lists down things I try to do through what I read (and share in this newsletter) but can't think of any successes due to that. May be some acts of commission have been avoided.
Finally, "how to breathe" - A couple of good tips there.
I’ll be back (next month). Hasta la vista, baby! (Didn’t I say what movie I watched yesterday?)
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