Rahul gives unsolicited advice

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 ...

I just read 300. Yes. Read, not watched. The movie 300 is based on the graphic novel 300, by Frank Miller. If you are interested in comic books and graphic novels, you would've heard of Frank Miller. You would be familiar with his work if you are fan of Batman. Now, coming to the actual book, it was beautifully drawn and interesting to read. I kept comparing it to the movie, in the back of my head. I no doubt prefer the book to the movie. The book felt more visually appealing than the movie. It was also better at grabbing and holding on to my attention better than the movie. I don't know why but I very much prefer reading the story than watching the story, even if the movie had followed the story exactly. Coming to deviations between the book and the movie, the story arc is probably the most prominent, atleast in the beginning of the book. The book takes a non-linear arc where we see the 300 prepare for war as we learn about how Leonidas became king and how the war started...

The Ukrainian Hacker Who Became the FBI’s Best Weapon—And Worst Nightmare - What I find most amazing about this article is what the hacker says about his fellow mates, that all they want is a job and if they found one that paid well and was stable, they wouldn't have much need to hack and make money the illegal way. This is, in my opinion, in general true for a sizable human population that defaults to stealing and cheating to make their livelihood, because they didn't have the option to work towards a legal/stable livelihood and now they're having to make ends meet one way or another. Canada’s $6.9 Billion Wildfire Is the Size of Delaware—and Still Out of Control - Just another reminder that Nature is a force out of our control. After settling down in every remote corner or the Earth, moving to the top of any and every food chain, we humans might feel invincible. But events like this remind us that nature around us is very fragile and can be disturbed beyond the poin...

Before I say anything, Priceonomics people are awesome and some of the things that they write about are just mind-blowing! Coming to the point, Diamonds. While I was familiar with the fact that diamonds aren't actually all that precious or all that rare, I didn't know the whole story. After reading the following two articles, one more recent than the other - Have You Ever Tried to Sell a Diamond? and Diamonds Are Bullshit , I truly believe in the power of advertising. That's all there is to it. Advertising. In fact, after reading these two articles, I am convinced that Inception is in fact possible. It's a long con. A very very long con, spanning half-a-decade advertising campaigns, which made people believe that 1. A diamond ring is a must when a man asks a woman's hand for marriage. An addendum to this is the fact that a month's salary must be spent on said diamond ring. - The size of diamonds used in an engagement ring and the amount of money spent b...

Sexy beasts  : I don't know why I hadn't asked the questions that were being answered in this article earlier. There are male birds out there with bright and extremely beautiful feathers, feathers that are primarily used to attract their female counterparts. And I should've asked the question "How does the bright and beautiful feathers help the female understand which male is stronger/fitter/better to reproduce with?", which this article answers. And there are things involved that came as a surprise to me. How Seattle Gave Up on Busing and Allowed Its Public Schools to Become Alarmingly Resegregated  : Apparently Seattle schools in the 70s and 80s enforced racial uniformity in schools in the area, by providing bus service to students if they needed to travel to a school a little further away, in the hopes of achieving racial uniformity. But now, the current administration and ignorant/biased/elite/pretentious/dumb parents are apparently resegregating the school...

On spaghetti sauce - Malcolm Gladwell  : There's a lot to learn from how products are priced and the is a lot of science behind why the product lineup is what it is. Apparently, when companies approached a consultant to help them revive their product, conduct customer surveys and help defeating their rivals. What the consultant suggested was revolutionary, for the time. This is a story of what the consultant understood from his understanding of the human condition. The Arctic Suicides: It's Not The Dark That Kills You  : Urbanisation, in many parts of the world, is on full swing, and it's moving at an especially fast and frighteningly pace in some parts of the world! This account tells us what can go wrong if this urbanisation, and it's effect on the native population, isn't handled with care. It's surprising, shocking and sad that the deaths of so many natives isn't receiving a broader public attention. Why the S.E.C. Didn’t Hit Goldman Sachs Harder  :...

How We Found the Dinosaur Doomsday Site  : Please tell me that I wasn't the only person who didn't know that scientists were fairly convinced of the location of the asteroid that supposedly killed off the dinosaurs! And the scientists are now conducting an expedition to drill and extract tons of rock from the location on the sea floor to study the rock and understand the event that even toddlers know about! You have no idea where camels really come from  : Science is an amazing thing! It's surprising how every day there's something new to learn. Today, you'll learn that the erstwhile camels that are ubiquitous in the deserts might actually be from the arctic! Hooves thought to have evolved to help them move in the slippery sand could have actually evolved to help them walk on snow! Humps that were supposed to have evolved to help them store water and energy in the desert could have actually evolved to do the same in a frozen arctic! Mind-Blowing Magic Magnets...

Study Finds Jack Shit  : This story just might hit close to home for a lot of people in science/academia/research. Although it is a satirical piece by the Onion on how a study ended without producing any meaningful results and what the opinions and mood of the researchers involved are, a lot of what's written actually happens. A lot of the time research, addressing a question simply leads to another. Money goes down the drain. Years spent analysing data or conducting the survey turn to dust. People are driven into depression. So, the next time you come across that scientist friend of yours, hug him and tell him that it'll be alright! “Moon Hoax Not”: Short Film Explains Why It Was Impossible to Fake the Moon Landing  : I strongly believe in the fact that NASA landed man on the moon. Multiple times. It's not even belief at this moment. It's blind faith, much like religious faith of a large portion of my family. I've argued with people who don't believe in the...

These Astronomical Glass Plates Made History  : For those of you who are old enough, you will remember that before there were digital cameras, photos were recorded on films and there was a studio where the films had to be taken to have them developed into pictures. Before CCDs (the chips inside digital cameras that made the films obsolete) revolutionised astronomy, astronomers used to use films, rather plates, to record images of astronomical objects and their spectra. This is an account of such plates that made history, that record some of the biggest and paradigm-shifting discoveries in astronomy. The fall… and rise and rise and rise of chat networks  : The first chat network that I ever used was google chat, which is now google hangout, and yahoo messenger. I don't know why but I wasn't into MSN Messenger. But there was a time before mine when chat networks were smaller, less technologically advanced and more geeky, so to say. This is a brilliant account of how chat net...

Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter Camera  : More awesome images were sent back to Earth by the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter which was orbiting, duh, the Moon! This image is especially awesome because instead of looking straight down at the surface of the Moon, the orbiting satellite was pivoted to the side to capture altitude information better! Terriers Were Once The Greatest Dogs In The World  : I love everything that FiveThirtyEight publishes. Well, most everything. And this one is on dog breeds that've won competitions over the last century! Why I think Tesla is building throwaway cars  : I've read a lot of article by a lot of people praising how awesome Tesla's cars are and how they are the future because they aren't diesel or petrol powered! While that is true, another important thing that should be considered when making or buying a car is how easy it is to use and maintain the car, how cheap it is to refurbish the car is it is totaled and how long the car is ...

Why Pluto is a frigid prison for nitrogen ice  : I don't know if you guys know this but a while back, a tiny satellite sent by humans a long time back reached Pluto and sent back some amazing pics (again, the images lead to some very interesting science but let's take one things at a moment). It takes a while to interpret the images and produce meaningful science from them, after which peer review needs to happen. A bunch of papers were finally submitted by the team a couple of days back. This is a commentary on one such. " Science Papers Reveal New Aspects of Pluto and its Moons " is another. Inside the wild—and wildly successful—early years of Mission Control  : I have been amazed by space and spaceflight for a while now and this is an account of the lives of a few people who were behind the scenes, handling the operations of some of America's most successful space missions. Flint’s children and the burden of betrayal  : This article freaked me out. If you ...

10 Years Over the Red Planet  : Space images never cease to amaze me. And the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter has been sending back amazing images for about 10 years apparently. I mean, they're not just pretty images, there's some awesome science underneath as well but hey, let's start somewhere. This is article by the Bad Astronomer concise overview of what all the MRO has seen over the last 10 years. VLA Shows Earliest Stages of Planet Formation  : One more astronomy news until the next time. One of the theories of solar system formation is that the proto-planetary disk (a dusty disk of material) that surrounds a young star will start forming clumps which will eventually condense enough to form planets. And the Very Large Array (a lot of telescopes which work together to form one very big telescope) observed something like what I described earlier. Read on if you want to know more about where we come from. Stack Overflow Developer Survey 2016 Results  : If you have wri...

How a $2.7 billion air-defense system became a 'zombie' program  : In the context of the USA, government agencies spread out their work contacts across various states to provide for jobs. Said jobs sometimes have to be put on the axe because they have been revised or are not obsolete. Representatives from said states force the agency to pay for the project through it's nose, making the construction of said obsolete object complete. This story just fills in the specific details. Exxon Confirmed Global Warming Consensus in 1982 with In-House Climate Models  : Firstly, it was interesting to know that Exxon, the petrochemical giant, had a team of scientists who were trying to understand climate change. Secondly, it's interesting to know that the team published results talking about climate change and how drastic it will be if we don't cut back soon on our emissions, therefore publishing results that seemingly go against the company funding them. Lastly, it was sad to...

Minorities exploited by Warren Buffett’s mobile-home empire  : Predatory lending is something I've heard a lot about but never really understood. This article shines some light on what I understand about the topic. Poor and illiterate people are deceived and are taken advantage of by this mobile housing industry, making them pay extra to buy the house by adding bogus fees and making them sign agreements they don't fully understand. The Missing 11th of the Month  : There is popular XKCD comic that shows how frequently a date was referred to in English language books published after the year 2000. Weirdly, in the comic, the 11th of the month shows up less frequently than any other day of the month. This article talks about what the reason behind this weird outcome is and how it's a result of the process used to estimate the frequency of various dates found in literature. Publishers Gave Away 122,951,031 Books During World War II  : During the second world war, publi...

When U.S. air force discovered the flaw of averages  : Humans come in a wide variety of sizes, shapes, colours and so on. So, for the sake of simplicity, designers and manufactures would like to know what the average human looks like, in order to tailor their design around those dimensions. It so happens that no human will tick all the boxes an average human is defined by. This fact is recounted in two instances, one in which the air force needed to modify it's cockpit dimensions to fit its pilots and the other in which the female body was being compared and commented upon against a hypothetical *average* woman. The Wildly Misunderstood Aeronautics Event Captured in This Photograph  : Most of us have seen this picture at some point or the other, especially if we are in and around the engineering discipline and people's perception of what caused this phenomenon is, apparently, wrong. This is an account of what really is happening in the picture. The Golden Age of Weird Pap...

The Strangest, Most Spectacular Bridge Collapse (And How We Got It Wrong)  : Most of us in college have heard of this story at some point or another, that winds were moving a bridge up and down at the resonant frequency of the structure and it oscillated so drastically that it broke apart. The bridge was nicknamed 'The Galloping Gertie' because it had moved about in strong winds before. Anyway, most of us were told that the reason the bridge fell apart was because of resonance, which, as this article points out, isnt the right answer. Stumbling to Inflation  : The theory of inflation was proposed to solve some of the drawbacks of the Hot Big Bang model of the universe. You know, The Big Bang theory. Alan Guth proposed a theory of Inflation and this is the story of how the idea came about to him. The Big Fish - The story of suck.com  : suck.com is a very real magazine/website, made by two people at HotWired.com to tell the management how the internet works and how the...

Why Copenhagen Has Almost Perfect Water  : Water bodies in urban places are pretty disgusting. They aren't usually maintained by City Works, garbage is dumped in them willynilly and the city sewage flows into it untreated. Apparently Copenhagen did something about it, that worked. Clean water bodies are something that cities should seriously consider, not just for their appearance but because the ground water reserves are directly affected by them. Inside the Sony Hack  : I don't know if you've heard but the hack on the Sony corporation was one of the biggest last year. Hacks on corporations apparently happen regularly, it's just that they aren't publicly reported, unless the hackers decide the release the information to the public, which is what happened in this case. Personal information on thousands of Sony workers was released to the public. Not worrying about that for the moment, the hack disrupted the internal networks of Sony and it made day-to-day work ne...

The missing 11th of the month  : For those of you who read xkcd religiously, you would've come across this comic  on the calendar of meaningful dates. (Those of you who don't read xkcd religiously should and those of you who dont read xkcd should start!). The article on the other hand does a brilliant job at understanding one peculiar feature of the xkcd comic - the fact that the 11th of any month seems to be less common in the literature than any of the other dates of the month! And the reason behind it is pretty interesting! Minorities exploited by Warren Buffett’s mobile-home empire  : So, apparently blacks and minorities are exploited in the United States. While this might not be news for most of you, this is just another example of how the mobile-home industry in certain parts of the US takes advantage of language difference or through hostile behavior lends blacks and minorities loans at higher-than-normal rate of interest. The Lawyer Who Became DuPont’s Worst ...

Using the same Python code I used to look at my bookmarks, I looked at my reading habits using Pocket and here are the results. I installed the app in 2014 and therefore, the number of articles I read in 2014 are fewer in number than those I read in 2015. The 2015 numbers should probably be my benchmark from this point on. These are monthly reading habits. Apparently, I didn't read as much in Feb and March as I did in the following months. Well, I dug myself deep into two of my courses, General Relativity and Ultrafast lasers at that time, which could be the reason. And I might have read less in September/October than in August or November because I was apping those months. Maybe. Now we come to days of the month. I can't write anything meaningful about this. It'll be better if I get weekly behavior i.e Monday through Sunday and, if I'm correct, see that I read a lot more on Friday/Saturday/Sunday than on the other days of the week. And we finally...