Andor

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’.

The Backfire Effect by The Oatmeal

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.

Following the Science of COVID-19

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.

• We went from having no tests to genome sequences shared with scientists and labs across the world to countries before the virus reached their shores.
• We watched as epidemiologists (and other experts) figured out how the spread occurs, and what can be done to contain it.
• We have followed doctors as they discovered various details about COVID-19, its effect on people, and found treatments that work and ones that don’t.
• In less than a year since WHO characterized COVID-19 as a pandemic, we have 6+ different vaccines in circulation and being shot in people’s arms! The previous fastest? 4 years.

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.

Data + Science

‘Data never lies; people do.’

Data is an amusing artefact. It exists all around us, in many forms, and unless we know exactly how to read it, we are oblivious to it. It is no wonder that most professions are based in the ability to understand one specific type of data. We spend a quarter of our lives just learning about different types of data and figuring out which one we want to spend the rest of our lives around! What are skills if not the art of interpreting data? It is in this interpretation that lies are born from. Data doesn’t write stories, interpreters do. What comes from understanding the data is the hypotheses, observations, conclusions, drawn from the data. That is not what the data tells us; that is what the interpreter understands from the data, given their abilties.

Most of science once existed as hypotheses. These hypotheses were then proven by validating observations across different types of data points, explaining the intricacies of the data and hypothesizing exceptions. Science is beautiful because it is the truth, given a set of underlying constraints, assumptions and circumstances. The same gravity that doesn’t exist beyond our atmosphere, is a defining trait of life on earth because we can observe, calculate and explain the data that we feel and observe, given the constraint of the earth’s gravity. All of science is rooted in data but data is not associated with a science.

Given my strong affinity to data and science both, in hindsight, it shouldn’t have been surprising that I ended up working as a data scientist :).