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Showing posts from March, 2020

A New Year Theme (instead of a resolution)

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tl; dr - My New Year Theme for 2020 is Financial Literacy. See CGP Grey's video to understand what I mean by a New Year Theme. I was going through the list of channels I subscribe to on Youtube as part of an effort to highlight creators who I admire - creators on Youtube, Instagram and the internet as a whole. I rediscovered CGP Grey's channel. I say rediscovered because I obsessively watched all of this videos a while back. I subscribed to get updates from the channel but given my viewing habits and the recommendation algorithm changes in Youtube, I haven't seen his videos popup on my home page on Youtube these past few months. Coming to the video, it is an interesting take on the common idea of New Year Resolutions. He advocates for defining a Theme instead of Resolutions. He defines themes are broad areas of interest in which I can make progress instead of having a specific resolution which I work towards. For example, I am thinking of setting my

A weekend spent in trance (reading Leadership by Doris Kearns Goodwin)

I just spent my weekend reading. I was in a trance. It was amazing! It's been a while since I picked up a lengthy non-fiction book. I usually stick to graphic novels. It doesn't take too long to read them. I can easily chew through a 200 page graphic novel in 2-3 hours. On the other hand, I have been trying to read Chaos by James Gleick and I am still stuck at around page 70. The most recent non-graphic novel that I read was "Bad Astronomy", which wasn't too big and the recent lengthy non-fiction that I read was "Creativity Inc.", which was almost an year ago. I was pretty intimidated when I came across Leadership. A work colleague of mine (Joris) lent me a few books from his personal library, which have been sitting in my room almost untouched for the last three months. This weekend, I finally dared to read again. Instead of trying to restart Chaos or start "The signal and the noise" by Nate Silver, I chose Leadership instead. And it

Will Eisner's The Plot and today's political climate

I just finished reading Will Eisner's "The Plot : The secret story of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion" . I am a big fan of Eisner's work and this particular stood out in the current political climate around the world. If you don't know, "The Protocols of the Elders of Zion" is a fabricated text, produced in the 19th century Russia. It is an antisemitic text, used to influence the Czar at the time. It spread like wildfire in Europe in the early 20th century and it was highly influential in antisemitic movements. Sadly, even though it was proven to be fabricated, it is still popular to this day, translated into numerous languages. The use of fabricated material to turn people against one another feels highly relevant in this day and age of fake news and social media. I highly recommend that you find yourselves a copy of the book (among others by Will Eisner).

Information about the pancreas - where it is and what it does.

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Where is the pancreas? The pancreas sits behind the stomach and above the small intestine. The head of the pancreas sits next to the deodenum on the right side of the human body and the tail of the pancreas lies close to the spleen. (The deodenum is a part of the digestive system that sits between the stomach and the small intestine.) It lies beneath the liver and the gall bladder. Image source - Mayo Clinic What does the pancreas do? The pancreas serves two functions in the human body - aid in digestion (referred to as exocrine function) and maintain blood sugar levels (endocrine function). The pancreas aids in digestion by producing the pancreatic juice. The juice is collected in the pancreatic duct which spans the length of the pancreas. The duct. joined by the common bile duct from the gall bladder, empties into the deodenum. The juice contains chemicals which neutralize the stomach acids, preventing them from damaging the small intestine. During embryonic developme

Almost back to Inbox Zero

I don't remember when I started hearing about it but I started earnestly trying to keep my GMail Inbox tidy starting 2016, when I started working full time at Enthought. I vaguely remember spending a full weekend going through my Inbox and archiving or deleting all emails. I remember running into a lot of nostalgia as I was going through emails from when I was in college, which is when I started using GMail seriously. Mails about coursework, mails with photos and videos my and friends of mine took when we went out to eat. I let myself go over the last few months and emails started piling up in my Inbox. Mainly because I periodically go through a cycle of subscribing to more newsletters and email groups than I can possibly keep up with and then culling them to reduce clutter in my Inbox. After many months, I finally spent this weekend cleaning up my Inbox - reading through a lot of finshots ( https://finshots.in/ ), labelling and archiving financial information, deleting