Category: Meta

  • Update – Using my Bullet Journal as my Zettelkasten

    I had written on this blog about the practice of using my Bullet Journal as my zettelkasten on 19 May 2020. I had forgotten about it in the haze of the pandemic. I re-discovered the post as I was linking my thinking (h/t Nick Milo) in the past week or so.

    In the Spirals section of my weekly notes last week, I mention the Antinet and the zettelkasten videos I had been watching on YouTube.

    So, after binging on many videos in the last two to three weeks, I seem to have gotten exactly at the point I was at when I wrote my post on 19 May 2020. Before I forget the lessons I learnt, let me summarize the points I made in that blog post again.

    • I use many digital tools and hence my data is stuck on many different platforms (like Evernote, Roam Research, etc.)
    • Moving a zettelkasten into a bullet journal reduces the clutter of index cards.
    • Threading in zettelkasten reminded me about a video about threading in the bullet journal.
      • Index in a bullet journal is the master collection. Similar to an index card in the zettelkasten.
      • Collection threading is done by writing the reference of the page number next to the page number in the next collection.
      • Notebook threading is done by using book number + page number next to the page number.
      • A Tiny Ray of Sunshine has a detailed post on threading.

    I have been writing my notes about podcasts, YouTube videos, books, articles, etc. in my bullet journal since I started keeping one. These can be considered as bibliography notes or quick notes.

    What would make my bullet journal into my zettelkasten would be to introduce progressive summarization that Tiago Forte talks about in his book, Building a Second Brain.

    Another thing needed is to introduce a way to review the content in the bullet journal in a periodic manner and link my thinking.

    A thing I noticed that the spirals I go down are naturally linked to each other. This focus reduces the need of too much categorization naturally. I can look through instances by using the index without the need to opening or delving too deep into any particular notebook.

  • Notes: Raghuram Rajan’s essays

    Raghuram Rajan and Rohit Lamba wrote a couple of pieces for the Times of India. He shared these pieces on LinkedIn.

    1. The End of Free Lunch Economics
    2. An Alternate Vision for India’s Growth

    He also spoke about the idea behind these articles with Karan Thapar for The Wire.

    Video Interview embed

    The following are my notes from the second essay:

    • It provides an alternative path to India’s Growth Path than following the Manufacturing and Infrastructure development path we have chosen now.
    • What has worked for India?
      • Clear Economic Vision
      • Roll-out of well-thought-through frameworks that harness the energy of our people.
    • The vision in the 1990s was to separate the government from the economy.
      • Allow more private entry
      • Competition
      • Innovation
      • Opening up to the world through trade and investment.
    • Government would
      • Provide regulatory frameworks
      • Infrastructure
      • Safety Nets
    • Civil Society’s role in governance was enhanced through RTI.
    • India seeks to copy China’s plan to become a manufacturing export powerhouse.
    • India is a democracy, unlike China. We will not be able to do the things China did like suppress worker wages.
    • Alternative Vision
      • Draws on India’s people, their minds, and their creativity.
      • We should continue to build out infrastructure and encourage our manufacturers to seek out new global markets.
      • We should particularly increase our presence in global services by strengthening our human capital.
    • To pursue services-led growth:
      • Recognize and remedy the damage done to children’s schooling by the pandemic.
      • Build on India’s democracy:
        • Protect data privacy
        • Limit the government’s ability to intrude on privacy.
        • Be respectful towards its minorities.
      • This makes the world want to trade with and invest in us without hesitation.
      • People everywhere will want to visit, study or work in India.

  • An Exit Door from a Dark Place

    Ryan Holiday wrote this for his thirty fifth birthday. In the email version of this blog, he left in the photo of a sign he runs at in Austin, Texas, USA about leaving the place a little better than you found it.

    Screenshot of the email which has the photo of the sign that reads: Leave this place a little better than you found it.

    I believe that everything that is in the world gets destroyed. Death is the only constant. On a large scale, destruction of the cosmos. On a small scale, the death of the second that went by. In between, there are multiple complications of death that affect us at a very personal level or does not affect us directly.

    Hindu myths believe that there is a rebirth that happens, Creation after Destruction. I have no input on this aspect.

    How does this help me now? If everything dies, then why live? That line of thinking leaves me in a dark place.

    Reading Ryan above is one inkling of what I can do while I think about this. Make this a better place than it was before. If you ask why at this juncture, you are left back at the dark place. So, this is one of those exit doors.

  • From a Radically Networked Society to an Evo-Devo Universe

    During the time I spent in Takshashila, I heard a lot about Radically Networked Societies. It is a framework to think about societies structured in the Information Age. In a paper/book by Nitin Pai and Sneha Shankar, they define it thus:

    A networked society is flat, its demands are diverse and often inchoate, decision-making processes are amorphous, and leadership diffuse.

    – Nitin Pai and Sneha Shankar, Networked Societies and Hierarchical States: The Emerging Challenge to Political Order

    Nitin had a TEDx Bangalore talk on similarly organizing government at the level of cities (to begin with) to better respond to citizen’s demands in the information age.

    Yesterday, I read a blog post titled, The Goodness of the Universe on the excellent, Centauri Dreams blog. The paragraph that caught my eye in the blog post was this:

    At its core, life has never been about either individual or group success. Instead, life’s processes have self-organized, under selection, to advance network success. Well-built networks, not individuals or even groups, always progress. As a network, life is immortal, increasingly diverse and complex, and always improving its stability, resiliency, and intelligence.

    John Smart, The Goodness of the Universe

    There it was again. The mention of networks. This is networks at the level of the planetary scale. He believes that both evolutionary and developmental processes are work in the Universe. He calls this the Evo-Devo Universe. In this paradigm, he believes that we are more likely to head to a non-dystopian, post-biological future.

    I am also convinced we are rapidly and mostly unconsciously creating a civilization that will be ever more organized around our increasingly life-like machines. We can already see that these machines will be far smarter, faster, more capable, more miniaturized, more resource-independent, and more sustainable than our biology.

    John Smart, The Goodness of the Universe

    The author goes on to say that at this level, the ethics and empathy in the network grows. The longer we live in this post-biological future, the more good we get. His conclusion also was interesting to me, when he says:

    Also, far too many of us still believe we are headed for the stars, when our history to date shows that the most complex networks are always headed inward, into zones of ever-greater locality, miniaturization, complexity, consciousness, ethics, empathy, and adaptiveness. As I say in my books, it seems that our destiny is density, and dematerialization.

    John Smart, The Goodness of the Universe

    We see this in part in the growth of our cities, to some extent. I think the Evo-Devo Universe is the end point for which a Radically Networked Society is the starting point. As always, it is the middle that is interesting.

  • Revati

    Revati is Zeta Piscium. It is the “star” under which my daughter was born. So, I seem to have a mental filter that catches that phrase in Twitter’s flowing timeline. Emily Lakdawalla of the Planetary Society had posted there on the International Astronomical Union (IAU) naming a few surface features on Charon, Pluto’s moon. She had also linked to the IAU press release on the same.

    They had named a crater on Charon, Revati. The press release mentioned that the feature Revati was named after a character in the epic, Mahabharata where she was a time traveller. The excerpt is below:

    Revati Crater

    I immediately searched on Google for the story of Revati. Emily, meanwhile, emailed one of the contacts mentioned in the press release to ask the source story of the name. My Google search led to the interesting story of Revati.

    The story of Revati seems to be straight out of science fiction. She is the daughter of Kakudmi who seems to have ruled a kingdom half under the sea. Her father travels to meet Brahma to seek advice on a suitable husband for his daughter. While there, they listen to a small musical performance. At the end as Kakudmi asks Brahma to choose from a list Brahma states that most of the people suggested would be dead as as they waited there, 27 mahayugas have passed and suggested that she marry Balarama, Krishna’s brother when they return. Does this reference time dilation? When they return, humans are much smaller than them. Does this reference the evolutionary process?

    I found the best narrative of the same on another blog, along with an interesting after comment. The comment is below:

    Revati Time Traveller

    In the meanwhile, Emily got the references and this is more fascinating reading. The book is Vedic Cosmography and Astronomy by Richard L Thompson.

    I am a skeptic of the reinterpretations of past treatises using modern astronomy but am equally fascinated by these comparative studies of astronomical treatises of the present and the past and enriched by myths with science fiction elements involved.

  • Hello

    My name is Pradeep Mohandas. I currently work in a public sector bank. I am a mechanical engineer by education and am interested in reading books, making maps, contributing to Wikimedia, making stuff, walking, keeping myself updated with events in the worlds of high energy physics and aerospace engineering.

    I hope to write here occasionally about the interests that I have mentioned above. While this is a short blurb, my posts here will be mostly long form writing.

  • Hello World!

    We met for the first time at the traditional pennukannal ceremony on April 25, 2014. The ceremony offers the chance for the boy to see the girl and for the prospective couple to talk to each other to gauge their interests, likes and dislikes. Ours is an arranged marriage.

    That day evening, my family got a call from hers, giving their approval to go ahead with the proposal. We gave our consent as well. From there, it was a roller coaster ride. We are to be engaged on July 5, 2014 and get married on December 7, 2014.

    This is an online home of our journey that begins on this day.