Miniature Calendar is Tatsuya Tanaka’s website where they make daily posts of everyday things reimagined in a miniaturized form. When I see these post in my RSS feed, it makes me pause and smile. It is a small joy that reminds me of the good in the world, the creativity around us, and the warmth of people sharing their talents with the world.
I hope it makes you smile, too.
I like Star Wars. A lot. There is just something exciting about watching a world that could be. The space travel, the various galaxies, the different cultures, the numerous species, and yet the same people and tendencies.
Andor is the furthest from a classic ‘Star Wars’ universe. There are no jedi, no lightsabers, no Yoda, no Skywalker. It is just a marvelous story taking place somewhere in the grand universe. The deep story-telling keeps you focused on the people: there’s heroes, anti-heroes, complications, love, pain, suffering, battles, preludes to war, and most of all, hope.
There’s quiet a few beautiful lines sprinkled through the show, but Nemik’s manifesto has stayed with me:
Freedom is a pure idea. It occurs spontaneously and without instruction. Random acts of insurrection are occurring constantly throughout the galaxy. […] Tyranny requires constant effort. It breaks. It leaks. Authority is brittle. Oppression is the mask of fear.
It is a show that I think you should watch, regardless of how you feel about ‘Star Wars’.
Seth Godin, in ‘How to win an argument with a toddler’:
An argument, though, is an exchange of ideas that ought to surface insight and lead to a conclusion.
If you’re regularly having arguments with well-informed people of goodwill, you will probably ‘lose’ half of them–changing your mind based on what you’ve learned. If you’re not changing your mind, it’s likely you’re not actually having an argument (or you’re hanging out with the wrong people.) While it can be fun to change someone else’s position, it’s also a gift to learn enough to change ours.
Indeed.
I have always had strongly held beliefs, but over time I have also realized the need to change them as more information is presented to me.
The Backfire Effect, a comic strip from The Oatmeal, describes why we should all keep doing that rather illustratively.
I’m just here to tell you that it’s okay to stop. To listen. To change.
It is okay.
I first learnt about marathons when I went to watch the inaugural Standard Chartered Mumbai Marathon in 2004 with dad. I took the Mumbai local to Churchgate early that morning and walked to the finish line near CST to watch atheles cross the finish line.
I was mind-blown when I saw the route in the Times of India the day before. It took the runners through some of my favorite parts of Bombay: the Bandra-Worli Sea Link, the Worli Seaface, the Queen’s necklace. The 10-year-old me could barely understand what the race was or the distance meant, but I could feel that it was a lot. “They run all the way to Bandra from Churchgate? The one I would only travel by train? And back?! How? People could run that distance across Bombay?” I wondered then. I still do.
It has been 17 years since that Sunday morning, and I have passively followed the 42km race. It has always felt like a humbling challenge for the human mind and body. And I have serious respect for the people that can run it.
A few years ago, I learnt about Eliud Kipchoge, his achievements and how he was transforming the sport. And ever since, he has been a huge inspiration. It is astounding what he has achieved so far, as a marathoner, yes, but also as an athelete. To me, he is one among the greatest atheletes of their sports of all-time. You know, right there with the likes of Sachin Tendulkar, Roger Federer, Michael Schumacher, Magnus Carlsen…
One of the (I’d argue the) greatest moments of Kipchoge’s marathon career was him running a sub-2 hour marathon (albeit in a controlled setting) in Vienna in 2019. Take 4 minutes, watch the final kilometer of his run.
I just read this profile on Kipchoge by Cathal Dennehy, and thought it was a beautiful look at his personality, training regime, and principles. It gave me a new perspective on some things, but also let me appreciate him more as a person and admire his achievements a little more. My favorite part from the profile was on the peace he exudes while running (which one can even see in the video):
It’s difficult to find a sportsperson so impossibly suited to his craft, as if his entire reason for being is to coast over the ground at 4:40 per mile, a pace that for most would feel like a sprint.
But when Kipchoge does it, his head has virtually no vertical motion, his face so relaxed that he looks bored. His arms hang loose, swinging casually, his fingers in a gentle tuck, as if holding an invisible stick. His feet don’t so much hit the ground as stroke it, his toes pushing off the road with the elegant, balletic grace of a dancer.
I think Kipchoge will break the world record and run a 2-hour marathon before he retires. I’m rooting for him.
For all that has happened over the last year, the pace at which science (and more specifically, biomedical science) has progressed has been awe inducing.
It wasn’t always right, it wasn’t always simple. But it was always backed in data, observations and rigor. It has been a humbling, perseverance-filled, ground-breaking year for science. And this article highlights just how the global scientific community came together, measured as a factor of publications about COVID-19 in various journals. Fascinating.
The challenges that we need science to help overcome over this lifetime are far from over. But the progress that I’ve seen as a bystander over the last year fills me with hope for what’s to come.
Now that I think about it, it is not at all surprising that I picked up and read this book.
‘The Three Languages of Politics’ is a short book that I got through in under 2 hours. However, it is an insightful book. Within the first few pages, Arnold King introduces a rather simple framework for interpreting any political argument around you, and boiling it down to a probable set of bases that the person making it is coming from.
In the couple days between when I read the first half and the second half, I started breaking down opinions I saw floating on Twitter, in email newsletters, on blogs and in articles, into not just the ideologies of the person, but in a way that helped me make better sense of what was being conveyed.
Buy it, read it. There isn’t much to lose, but a lot to gain. I’ll leave you with a precious quote:
The only person you are qualified to pronounce unreasonable is yourself. You are qualified to tell other people that they are wrong. You are just not qualified to tell other people that they are unreasonable.
P.S.: I listen to Amit Varma’s The Seen and the Unseen voraciously and this has been recommended across multiple episodes.
If you ask me my favorite Beatles song, I’m going to choke. But I do know ‘Hey Jude’ is in my top 3. It has to be.
I just read this story in the Rolling Stone by Rob Sheffield from a couple years ago, describing the background in which ‘Hey Jude’ came to be, and how it became a signature Beatles song. It truly is one of their greatest.
“Hey Jude” remains a source of sustenance in difficult times — a moment when four longtime comrades, clear-eyed adults by now, take a look around at everything that’s broken around them. Yet they still join together to take a sad song and make it better.
Indeed. Now more than ever, let’s take a sad song and make it better.
Over the last few months, I have been thinking a lot about learning, especially in this last year when there was so much time to just think.
I really liked this piece in The Guardian by Tom Vanderbilt. As I read through it, it hits the right notes for me about (adult) psychology, human behavior, the desire to learn and overcoming inhibitions.
Like the author, I have wanted to learn how to play chess well for a really long time, but haven’t gotten around to it. Similarly, I struggle to follow through on learning Mandarin, despite having made a few attempts over the years. Most recently, I have realized I want to learn how to ski.
This excerpt will stay with me for a long time:
Learning new skills also changes the way you think, or the way you see the world. Learning to sing changes the way you listen to music, while learning to draw is a striking tutorial on the human visual system. Learning to weld is a crash course in physics and metallurgy. You learn to surf and suddenly you find yourself interested in tide tables and storm systems and the hydrodynamics of waves. Your world got bigger because you did.
I’ll be a student for life, yes.
I read Daring Fireball often and one of the things I strongly agree with Gruber on is privacy. I think privacy ought to be a fundamental right and I loathe the practices of tech companies that are formulated on invading it. That is also why I use DuckDuckGo as my default search engine.
John Gruber wrote this post following Apple’s new iPhone ad (watch it, it is a great one) about companies act as privacy thieves by tracking people across the internet. I agree with it in its entirety.
They have zero right, none, to the tracking they’ve been getting away with. We, as a society, have implicitly accepted it because we never really noticed it. You, the user, have no way of seeing it happen. Our brains are naturally attuned to detect and viscerally reject, with outrage and alarm, real-world intrusions into our privacy. Real-world marketers could never get away with tracking us like online marketers do.
We definitely wouldn’t accept this type of behavior in the real world!
The tracking industry is correct that iOS 14 users are going to overwhelmingly deny permission to track them. That’s not because Apple’s permission dialog is unnecessarily scaring them — it’s because Apple’s permission dialog is accurately explaining what is going on in plain language, and it is repulsive. Apple’s tracking permission dialog is something no sane person would agree to because this sort of tracking is something no sane person would agree to.
Yes.
The privacy thieves have, unsurprisingly, come out against these expected changes coming in iOS 14, and tried to defend their entitlement. They should have none. And they would have none if their business models were based on asking users for permission (as Apple’s system is expected to).
More privacy for one and all.
