Rahul gives unsolicited advice

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 ...

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 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).

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...

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...

I have watched more movies in a movie theater over the last two weeks that I have in the last two four  six months combined. I watched the new Star Wars movie on the 21st. It was okay. It was fun. I wouldn't watch it a second time though. I just needed to get out of the house and the movie was how I decided to get myself out that weekend. I'm going to watch "Knives Out" tomorrow and "Jojo Rabbit" and "The Gentleman" the day after. "Knives Out" seems to have good reviews so I am looking forward to it. I have been waiting eagerly for "Jojo Rabbit". It's by Taika Waititi - the guy who directed "What we do in the shadows", "The hunt for the wilderpeople" and "Thor : Ragnarok" - all favorites of mine. I especially loved the first two movies. They are all funny and wilderpeople was really beautiful. I am very excited for this movie. (If you didn't know, shadows is both a movie and a TV s...

TL;DR - Learning is a continuous process, I hadn't learnt a new thing in a while (outside of work-specific stuff) and I enrolled to the "Engineering the Space Shuttle" course of edX. This is a meta post - which means that it will list all of the other blogposts that I am going to write about this course. Learning is a continuous process and I started fully appreciting a college/classroom education a little too late (towards the end of my college education). There are things that one can learn by themselves and there are things that have to be taught in a classroom. There are also a lot of things in between but let's ignore them for now. Also, there's a difference in what l learn from a classroom course when compared to what I learn in the classroom. I might learn things that I need or things that are relevant when I learn something by myself but I get a better sense of how everything fits together in the classroom. The best way to get a classroom experience o...

I recently got some good headphones ( Anker SoundCore Q20 ) so I've been listening to podcasts as I bike to and from work. I was introduced to the world of podcasts on one of my trips to the Enthought Austin office and I got hooked. I used to listen to 99 % invisible earlier and now i'm listening to a lot of NPR's Planet Money . A few episodes that listened to recently are - The working tapes of Studs Terkel - Stud Turkel toured the United States in the 70s recording people's descriptions of their jobs and their lives. This reminded me of P. Sainath's book "Everyone loves a good draught" which is a collection of stories about rural India. I wonder if someone is doing something similar now. The Chicao Boys - Part I and Part II - The story of Chicago trained Chilean economics and the role they had in a Chilean revolution. In the story, there is a mention of how the United States/CIA sponsored Chilean newspapers/weekly magazines to influence the ...

I realised on Friday, as I was cycling back from work, that I had just spent a month living in Cambridge. That was pretty much all I spent thinking about on my way back home. It has been a very interesting month. I stayed at an AirBnB for a week and a half before I leased a place. I'm not too picky but I also got lucky. It's apparently common for people to spend 2+ weeks, if not a full month, searching and moving into a place. The next thing, and the last thing, to complete my move to Cambridge was to buy a bicycle, which happened about two weeks back. A colleague at work thankfully lent me a spare bicycle he had until I had bought my own (Thanks Peter!). It feels a little weird. Living in Cambridge. Don't get me wrong, the town itself is lovely, I love my coworkers. It's a little cold for my liking but hey, I saw that coming. What else could I have expected moving from Chennai, India. It feels weird because I know that there is no end in sight. Well, none ...

I studied at the Indian Institute of Technology at Chennai (Previously Madras). It was a 5 year program on a campus that was lush green. 600 acres, filled with trees, a lake which we weren't allowed to go near for fear of injuring ourselves. And deers. Ohh, and monkeys. Lots and lots of monkeys. Now, in Cambridge, I am reminded of my days at IITM. Not because there are monkeys or deers in Cambridge. Not because of the trees either. There are definitely a lot of trees in Cambridge but it's not the same as IITM. It's because of the people I see around here. It's also because how I was behaving the first couple of days. The first few days here (even now a few times), I was walking about the city center taking pictures of everything, in awe of the beauty, the architecture and overall serenity. And then I noticed others passing next to me, others who might be students in Cambridge, who have gotten used to this city and it's beauty. That's what reminded me ...