Wonder is the heaviest element on the periodic table. Even a tiny fleck of it stops time.~ Diane Ackerman.
Mumbai, India
Joined April 2020
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It is not the amount of knowledge that makes a brain. It is not even the distribution of knowledge. It is the interconnectedness.
~ James Gleick,
Many treatments are now extending lives but the measure of progress should not end with a scan or a survival curve
theguardian.com/australia-ne…
Ten years ago, I read Nuland’s “How We Die, Reflection on Life’s Final Chapter”. If you haven’t read it, I recommend it. It isn’t a philosophical reflection on life & death but rather a clinical analysis of the dying process, which boils down to a rather chaotic mess that punctuates with the loss of oxygen to key organs.
He went through the many ways in which he as a surgeon has witnessed thousands of deaths. What is it we should learn from such a book? First, we all sort of die the same way, whether it is via violently stabbed or a disease. It is really just a breakdown of our system.
Anyway, in thinking of death as an eventual process for all of us, and the cause is usually a disease, we fear it less when it comes for us or our beloved and in many ways find meaning in how we live & perhaps our legacy when it is all over.
Happy November! This month Voyager 1 will become the first spacecraft to reach 1 light day from Earth.
One light-day is equal to approximately 16.1 billion miles or 25.9 billion kilometers.
It represents the exact distance that a particle of light (or a radio signal) travels through a vacuum in a 24-hour period.
@curiouswavefn @imacuriosguy
Ajay Zaveri retweeted
1 in 7 rupees in India did not exist a year ago.
M3 money supply grew 16% this year. Inflation, on paper, is 5.5%.
This is the most under-discussed, persistent problem in the Indian economy. This 16% “hidden tax” is starting to show up everywhere:
1. Gold is up 17% in INR - almost exactly the M3 money supply increase. Interesting, right?
2. Domestic GST collections are up 15.8%. Also almost exactly the growth in money supply. The “record GST” is just taxing more money being printed.
3. GST on imports is up 42%, because the rupee fell 7.6%, on top of increased costs. We shouldn’t celebrate paying more tax on the same iPhone.
4. The most egregious one: 7.8% real GDP growth assumes prices across the whole economy rose just 2.3%. (Nominal GDP grew 10.3%. Use the 5.5% CPI instead and real growth is closer to 4.5%.) Does your lived experience validate a laughable 2.3% inflation?
5. The one thing that did NOT keep up is your portfolio. Since 1997, money supply is up 44x and the Sensex is up 20x. Put every INR you had into Indian stocks for 30 years and the money printer beat you by 2X.
Taxes keep going up. Capital controls keep tightening. Inflation keeps going up. The structural problems, courts, land, labour and the cost of capital, stay exactly where they were, hidden under a nominal GDP number. We are printing like there’s no tomorrow and pretending nothing is wrong.
Ludwig von Mises called inflation “the true opium of the people administered to them by anti-capitalist governments and parties.”
Printing is the easiest way to keep welfare flowing and the headlines green without fixing a single structural problem. Inflation is the most immoral tax that we pay, without knowing we’re paying it.
Ajay Zaveri retweeted
We can disagree on Andy approach, but we have lost a generation or two to complexities that could be built and implemented. We went by a coders easy life, and sorry to borrow a crude term, techno-coolies. It was good for the schools, the workplaces and even the kids to have this dream… the elusive Amrikan dream now in every major city and the elusive Indian dream of having a white collar job in every syllabi.
Where we missed the original clusters that was getting built. Instead of clusters, we started promoting MLAs, MPs and their constituencies to keep winning votes. Even those knew it has nothing to do with the goals
Of the nation and only to do with them winning the next term.
And here, in this glorious mess of comparing ourselves with everyone, and technically have become a large consuming class of desires.
Ajay Zaveri retweeted
Akash Prakash has invested in Indian equities for over 30 years. In today's Business Standard he writes that, for the first time, global allocators are asking him whether India needs a dedicated allocation at all.
India's weight in the MSCI Emerging Markets index has fallen from 21% in September 2024 to about 10%. TSMC alone now carries a weight 50% larger than the whole of India.
Since that peak, he puts Indian equities down about 25% in dollar terms while EM indices are up about 50%.
He still reads this as a contrarian signal and expects the tide to turn.
Global funds are asking whether India deserves its own bucket.
Most Indian investors have never asked that question the other way. For them, India is the whole portfolio.
This paper answers why can’t you remember being a baby?
For over a century, science said you can't remember being a baby because your infant brain was just too "immature" to record anything. researchers assumed your hard drive was basically turned off for the first two years of life.
But this wild paper from Yale completely rewrites how we understand human memory..
Researchers literally put awake babies (between 4 and 25 months old) into an fMRI scanner to watch their brains process new visual experiences in real-time.
and what they found is mindblowing..
the infant hippocampus isn't turned off at all. it is actively firing, capturing, and encoding episodic memories. they proved that babies with higher hippocampal activity during a new experience formed a highly stable memory trace.
the babies are recording the data. the memory of your first birthday, your first steps, the exact layout of the room you slept in.. it was all successfully saved to your brain.
so why can't you remember it?
the paper concludes that infantile amnesia isn't an "encoding" problem.. it is a "retrieval" problem.
your brain recorded everything perfectly. but as you grew, your brain underwent massive developmental shifts, like explosive neurogenesis (the rapid birth of new neurons), which completely restructured your neural networks. the pathways to access those early files got buried or locked away.
you didn't fail to make the memories.. you just lost the encryption key to open them.
somewhere deep in your hippocampus, the exact first-person memory of being a 1-year-old might still be sitting there. you just can't access the file anymore..
@imacuriosguy
Critical Thinking In Age Of Artificial Intelligence
livelaw.in/articles/critical…
