Indranil Roy replied on X to my blog post suggesting that I watch this talk given by Dr P V Venkitakrishnan to IIT Madras in 2020 to understand India’s manufacturing capability and limitations.
As usual, the ISRO sub-Reddit has a good cliff notes version but it is worth watching that whole interview in full.
I missed posting Weekly Notes 17, 18, and 19. I had daughter’s birthday, and parents visiting in these weeks. I did not read or write much.
Operation Sindoor also happened in the interim. X turned out to be the place to get most information during this period and I relapsed to browsing it continuously in this period.
I also got back on Instagram to try and get some solutions for things around the house.
I have a huge backlog of things to read (especially blog posts) and watch. I am hoping to get off social media and get back to the old web, as planned in the beginning of the year.
In short, we will get back to normal programming and perhaps more blog posts here from this week.
I missed writing the weekly notes last week because I was not well. Sorry. 2171 weeks left.
I gave a talk last night on OpenTakshashila on the trends in space technology and policy. The talk was brief and I did get lost while talking in the middle. I wrote a brief X thread on what my main talking points were. I will also write a more detailed blog post based on these talking points soon.
I reduced the time that I spent on X, BlueSky, and Mastodon this week. It was more than the time I spent on these websites in the week before this.
I wrote the two newsletters:
I am also following along with Brandon Sanderson’s Writing Course on YouTube. I am planning to use it to improve the story I started writing on thinkdeli for NaNoWriMo 2024.
I finished reading S Hareesh’s Moustache. I am yet to write a review of the book. I am presently reading two books:
I watched these over the last two weeks on Netflix:
I watched these over the last two weeks on Prime Video:
I watched this video on YouTube that I really liked, besides the Sanderson lecture.
I had once read a book on this that I wrote about here. This one by Vikas Divyakirti is in Hindi and much more crisper and clearer. I also saw the video on Charwak by him and I was left wondering why we can’t bring this philosophy to the twenty first century.
The illness last week means that several blog posts are pending on here. I will get to work on those shortly.
This morning was strangely cold. My upper body felt warm while my lower body felt chilly. I thought about why that might be but could eliminate several reasons. Then I remembered my bottle of Dhuradhurapatradi.
The bottle of Dhuradhurapatradi tells me how seriously I should take the cold I feel in my bones.
| State of oil | How I should feel? |
| Fluid | Not Cold |
| Semi-solid | Somewhat Cold |
| Frozen Over | Very cold |
The above table illustrates how I use the scale. Dhuradhurapatradi is a brand of coconut oil manufactured by Kottakkal Arya Vaidya Sala in Kerala.
I have used the oil since my childhood. I developed the scale when I felt that people’s (ahem, my wife’s) experience of temperature was different than my own. I needed a neutral way to tell me how I experienced temperature.
The weird weather this morning was a good example of my use of this scale. Today morning, the oil was semi-solid. So, I knew it was somewhat cold. This allowed me to fearlessly express my opinion about the weather to people who asked me about it.
I thought of expressing this opinion on social media – where this post would not have been this long. However, reading Jatan’s post yesterday made me yearn for those days of the long blog posts. Hence, I wrote a long blog post instead of a short social media post.
Also, a look at my Dhuradhurapatradi scale this winter, also makes me confident to opine that the number of days we experienced cold weather in Pune this winter were lesser than the number of days we experienced cold weather last winter.
I think of these last few weeks as standing on the cusp of 2024, waiting for the calendar to turn, so that you can then jump over to 2025. To stretch that metaphor, I am anxious about that jump.
In a previous post, in a section I titled “Internet is Broken” had spoken about how I was participating in various parts of the Internet because the information that I sought was found in these multiple broken parts of the Internet.
I went to reading for a couple of days uninstalling most of these social apps. I reinstalled them yesterday.
As the year winds down, many things are coming to an end and I am seeing new shoots appear.
I am listening to Haruki Murakami’s latest book, The City and its Uncertain Walls on Audible. I love the slow descriptive narrative style. I am yet to finish the book or to understand where the story is headed. But, I love his keen sense of observation.
I am reading Rolland Allen’s book The Notebook: A History of Thinking on Paper. It begins with the story of the Moleskine.
I also picked up a book from the PMC Library at Vidya Nagar. This was a book called The Ikigai Journey.
I wrote the fourth edition of Towards Eternity, a newsletter I am writing on healthtech.
I have started re-writing the novel.
Most of the week was spent in the hospital with my 7 m.o. who had a lower abdominal infection. I got little to no writing or reading done this week and all of my focus had been on my 7 m.o.
Last week, everything was going smoothly at home and work. However, this week has been quite challenging due to the hospitalization. As a result, a lot of tasks have been left unfinished. Today, we focused on catching up with the undone tasks at home, and I’ll soon do the same at work.
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I missed writing the thirtieth Weekly Notes last week. Thejesh had shared in his Weekly Notes yesterday that he writes his notes throughout the week. This does not work for me. I complete a week and then look back at the long threads I worked on. I like to think in terms of spirals.
I am currently reading/listening to:
I wrote a few things this week
On this blog:
On Tumblr:
The question my wife had was how do the planets that are on either side of the Earth are seen together in the night sky.
When we see from Earth, Jupiter must be on the other side of the Sun. Whereas, Venus could be between the Sun and Earth or between the Sun and Jupiter.
This is the first time that I tried to capture a celestial event with a mobile phone camera and edited it.
I wrote a blog post a few days back about having an urge to leave WordPress. In the early days of my blogging (circa 2007), I used to jump blogging platforms frequently.
I was exploring platforms like write.as and blot.im to write in plain text and in markdown. This got exacerbated after reading Derek Sivers blog post on the advantages of writing in plain text. Reading his source code (Ctrl + U on many browsers) was also a joy.
It took reading a blog post by Mukunth to get my breathing back to normal. Every time I feel the urge to try out a new web platform, I must read this.
I wrote about this mission for the last edition of my newsletter, Pradeep’s Space Newsletter #18.
Parallel Spirals 