Read

Focusing on the ‘Why’ rather than the ‘Who’ when doing a postmortem of an incident - Such a nuanced yet pivotal shift!

Over the last month, I seem to have switched into a better reading rhythm. I’d probably attribute it to having a bit more time and mind-space for myself. Also, I figured I needed a better system to keep track of the books I had in queue. While Wallabag has been a terrific tool to assimilate, read and archive articles that I’ve come across online; I badly needed one for books too. Last month, I set a bare-bones system in my note-taking tool and this seems to do the trick for now! ...

An interesting point on M1 and M2 [Measures of money]. With the signing of the 1.9T$ bill today in the US, we’ve essentially created 6T$ over the last 10 months. Just like that… Covid19 has brought unprecedented suffering to many. Deaths, Unemployment, Medical complications, lifestyle changes, Social unrest and several other ramifications which we are yet to experience. If anything, it has taught us highlighted how abysmally poor we are in collectively addressing pressing issues. It has also shown us that when disaster strikes, we only take care of our own and we are selectively biased even at that. Nature gave us yet another opportunity to show how we could better ourselves and elevate us to the next stage of evolution and we miserably failed. With our myopic non-collaborative actions, pushing politics and power over general good, we’ve defined a new low. Mileage on isolated or individual efforts unfortunately does not carry the ripple effect that can scale. Nothing surprising there - Humans are selfish creatures. We of course needed something to balance all the intelligence and cognitive advances we supposedly have over other living things. Humanity rests is constant chaos and Covid19 was continues to fuel that chaos. ...

#CSE Just read: How an Environmental Activist Became a Pioneer for Climate Justice in India Sunita Narain, 56, is perhaps India’s most well-known environmental activist. The director of a small but influential Delhi-based NGO called the Centre for Science and Environment (CSE), she has been included on Time’s list of 100 Most Influential People; last year, Leonardo DiCaprio chose to interview her for his climate change-themed documentary Before the Flood. Srikanth Perinkulam ...

Weathering disasters Just read: Flamingos In The Men’s Room: How Zoos And Aquariums Handle Hurricanes When you’re building a zoo disaster plan, there’s one thing to keep in mind: Murphy’s law. Anything that could go wrong, will. Just ask the flock of flamingos that weathered Hurricane Andrew in a public restroom at Zoo Miami in 1992. Srikanth Perinkulam

Adding Night of the Grizzlies to my reading list! Just read: The Deadly Grizzly Bear Attacks That Changed the National Park Service Forever Glacier National Park’s busiest season came to an abrupt halt in the summer of 1967. In a matter of hours, two grizzly bears had acted as they never had before in the park’s 57-year history. Several miles apart, each bear had mauled a young woman on the same day, in the dark, early hours of August 13. ...

Let’s talk spill-overs and biological malware! Just read: Scientists Hack a Computer Using DNA In what appears to be the first successful hack of a software program using DNA, researchers say malware they incorporated into a genetic molecule allowed them to take control of a computer used to analyze it. Srikanth Perinkulam

Makes me wonder if we as humans, were engineered by another intelligent form as a version of an AI, to create a smarter generation of AI. And if this really is a cascading iteration, which neural node are we in? Drawing a parallel, the current ‘generation’ of AI isn’t probably ‘aware’ of the existence of us humans and are currently evolving in a ‘universe’ of their own and self engineering themselves based on their own feedback loops. We probably will never truly understand how and what they’ll evolve to. Or as Dennett says, unless a system can explain its actions better than we humans, it should not be trusted. ...

Just read: Bacteria Are Masters of Tai Chi When I began studying how animals swim, I didn’t feel much like a physicist. I’d just finished my bachelor’s in physics during which time I’d been taught that physicists work on one of a handful of buzzwords: quantum mechanics, cosmology, gauge theory, and so on. Srikanth Perinkulam

Just read: The hunt for Twitter alternatives: Mastodon Let’s get this out of the way right at the start: Mastodon is not a Twitter killer. It’s more like Twitter crossed with Reddit, plus it’s open source. But while Mastodon is not going to take over the world, it does have promise as a community platform. <div class="p-author h-card" style="display: none;"> <img class="u-photo" alt="" src="https://srikanthperinkulam.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/03/cropped-cropped-SP01-550afdebv1_site_icon.png"/> <a class="u-url" rel="me" href="https://srikanthperinkulam.com">Srikanth Perinkulam</a> </div>