Parallel Spirals

Standing on the shores of space-time…

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  • Activa called Jupiter

    We bought Jupiter home yesterday on December 2, 2019.

    Pradeep taking delivery of the Activa
    Pradeep taking delivery of the Activa

    The Contenders

    We were thinking of buying a scooter for Dhanya to help her get our daughter to school, do errands locally and give her some independent mobility. The scooters we considered were the TVS Jupiter and Honda Activa.

    Shopping Experience

    I really enjoyed the shopping experience I was offered at TVS Century showroom on Alandi Road, Pune. The salesperson showed us the available alternatives, answered queries patiently and made useful suggestions as per our requirement. Only then did he take us through the cost and financing options. Dhanya also enjoyed her test drive of the vehicle and after the showroom visit, we were quite keen on owning a Jupiter.

    The experience at the Shanti Honda showroom was the polar opposite. The salesperson asked us what we were looking for. He brought his cost sheet and began explaining what we would be paying for the two wheeler. He then explained financing options. He lost interest when we said we would be self financing the vehicle. We asked for a test drive which he offered reluctantly.

    The Verdict

    We asked friends and our parents for feedback on both vehicles. As we kept hearing the feedback, we were disheartened that we might not be able to choose a Jupiter. It seems to come with a history of niggling problems and sub-par after sales service that takes the years off the vehicle. Although many people felt the Jupiter was a better riding experience not everyone agreed on whether it was a good vehicle to own. As I was buying this with my own hard earned money, I went with the safer option of buying a Honda Activa.

    The Delivery

    As I said above, we took delivery of the Honda Activa yesterday on December 2, 2019. The Jupiter has us so captivated, that in our conversations with each other we were never able to say Activa. We kept referring to it as Jupiter. Hence, we decided to name her Jupiter so that it fixes what we call it.

    We took her to the Ayyappa Temple at Dhanori. We got a Vahana Pooja done and took her home.

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  • Share: How Social Media Hacked Civic Conversation

    I’ve written here earlier about Cal Newport and his book, Digital Minimalism. The book calls for lower if not zero use of social media. In the post, he shares an article published in The Atlantic, titled, “The Dark Psychology of Social Networks.” by Jonathan Haidt and Tobias Rose-Stockwell.

    Whereas Newport suggests zero to no social media use, Haidt and Rose-Stockwell call for regulation on the part of social media companies. Newport thinks this is highly unlikely as this implies a direct hit at their bottom line.

    I love this particular paragraph from Newport’s blog post that succintly summarises Digital Minalism on how social media design changed and how it affects our response:

    In Digital Minimalism, I argued that our relationship with social media was transformed when the major platforms updated their designs to make these services less about checking on other peoples’ status, and more about checking incoming “social approval indicators,” which arrive in the form of likes, retweets, shares, hearts, streaks and tags.

    Cal Newport, How Social Media Hacked Civic Conversation

    Read the blog post and follow his blog if #nosurf is something you enjoy reading about and then go ahead and read the article by Jonathan Haidt and Tobias Rose-Stockwell on The Atlantic.

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  • Quote: Emotional Education

    The knack of our species lies in our capacity to transmit our accumulated knowledge down the generations. The slowest among us can, in a few hours, pick up ideas that it took a few rare geniuses a lifetime to acquire.

    Yet what is distinctive is just how selective we are about the topics we deem it possible to educate ourselves in. Our energies are overwhelmingly directed toward material, scientific, and technical subjects and away from psychological and emotional ones. Much anxiety surrounds the question of how good the next generation will be at math; very little around their abilities at marriage or kindness. We devote inordinate hours to learning about tectonic plates and cloud formations, and relatively few fathoming shame and rage.

    The assumption is that emotional insight might be either unnecessary or in essence unteachable, lying beyond reason or method, an unreproducible phenomenon best abandoned to individual instinct and intuition. We are left to find our own path around our unfeasibly complicated minds — a move as striking (and as wise) as suggesting that each generation should rediscover the laws of physics by themselves.

    – Alain de Botton, The Book of Life, An Emotional Education

    HT

  • Remote sensing in India

    I wrote an article for The Wire on India’s remote sensing programme, that got published today.

    While writing the article I discovered the orphaned Wikipedia page that was once updated with launches of Indian remote sensing satellites. The article had not been updated for a very long time. The focus now seems to be on the List of Indian satellites launched by the decade. Working on the article helped me get back into Wikipedia editing and helped me discover one of the points that I raised in the article.

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  • Shared: The enemy of the Free Market

    Seth Godin had an interesting podcast on the enemy of the free market. He says that capitalism is the enemy of the free market. He discusses how he comes to that conclusion, provides examples and discusses how Free Market can escape from it’s enemy.

    This has been an important learning for my own economic learning that has gone from supporting communism at age 17 to now the free markets at age 33.

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  • Share: Reliance Jio Tariffs Seem Stupid

    Karthik S writes about Jio’s intention of charging it’s customers for a call to another network. I agree with Karthik’s solution that there are better ways to charge the customer. The hassle may have me move operators.

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  • Share: Review: ‘Salam – The First ****** Nobel Laureate’ (2018)

    VM has been prolifically blogging the past few days. In this piece, he reviews the book about Pakistan’s first Nobel laureate and physicist, Abdus Salam. The book traces his work as he fumbles to make a mark in Pakistan’s history and is denied it because of his religious identity. I love VM’s observation on how he could have been Pakistan’s Abdul Kalam.

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  • Share: Marc Benioff on Why We Need New Capitalism

    Om Malik links to an editorial in The New York Times by Marc Benioff calling for a more fair, equal and sustainable capitalism. He also cites pieces by Ray Dalio and Kazuo Ishiguro.

  • Cansats

    Today, we see many engineering colleges that are keen to work on a cubesat or a micro satellite project. However, what happens practically is that components are obtained Commercial off the shelf (COTS). This means that when working on the project, you get exposure to the project at a systems level and understanding how things work with each other but not really working too much on testing the limits of the payload.

    Image: Internal mechanism of a cansat

    The payload is the heart of any project. Everything else is just effort taken to take the payload to a destination. If you want to develop your skills regarding developing payloads in very cramped environments, cansats may give you much more challenging problems. In this post, I am exploring the world of cansats.

    Cansats carry payloads inside a Coca-Cola can. It can be a can of any other soft drink too. Today, we get cans of varying types and I think it would be more interesting to test these before or while working on your project. A cansat lets you think outside the box, no can. It also lets you work within restrictions.

    Most of the payloads for cansats look at measuring temperature, altitude, attitude, pressure or a combination of these. You could also check for more complex things like chemical composition as well but the complexity of the payload goes up. These deliver scientific data from your payload. These payloads make sense if you belong to a science department.

    There are engineering experiments you can do with cansats as well. You could carry payloads that work on attitude control as well. These try to keep the can pointed straight up as they descend. You could design ways to store and deploy parachutes to slow down the cansat as it comes down. This increases the time for which the payload remains active and collects data. At the end, you could devise ways on how to find the cansat on the ground using things like light or radio beacons. These make sense if you belong to an engineering college or department.

    The question is – how do you launch cansats? It could be using a model rocket, trace a parabolic path and land somewhere. There could be other innovative launching methods as well, within the boundaries of safety. You could drop them from the top of a skyscraper or just a building. If you can get your hands on a drone, maybe launch it from the top of a drone. If you have access to a small airplane, maybe drop them from the window of a small airplane. You could drop one down from the top of a telephone tower. TIFR in Hyderabad has a balloon facility that you could use or piggyback on. In launches safety is an important consideration. Alert people about what you are going to do. Better safe than sorry.

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  • The God Who Loved Motorbikes (2019)

    Cover of The God Who Loved Motorbikes

    I picked up the book written by Murali K Menon after seeing that the book was launched by John Abraham on September 25. The book is a Juggernaut publication and I saw that the book was available at a low cost on the day of the launch. Hence, I picked it up without giving a second thought.

    The book takes on a usual motorcycle enthusiast story and stretches it into the realm beyond time and space. The enthusiast in this case is one of the small shrine gods that dot the landscape of Kollengode in Kerala. The story revolves around how the god, KK Swamy, follows his dreams of riding several motorcycles. The premise makes sense at some level. However, things get a little hazy here while considering the plot.

    The story then hops several steps and we enter another story. The storyline begins quite naturally but then gets stranger and weirder as time passes. Then, things get so weird that I paused reading to think that the story has gone from a motorcycle story to a sci-fi genre. There are a few plot twists but none that surprise you too much. There is a lot going on, action wise but they are mostly just moving things forward.

    When the story ends, there are many things left hanging. The plot fails to tie things up at the end. There are many loose ends. The story takes off in so many directions that I wonder what the author was thinking about while developing the plot of the story.

    You could consider picking up the book to give it a read if you love this genre of motorcycle storytelling and sci-fi. It was a good way to while away time but at the end you are left asking if reading through it was a worthy investment of your time or not.

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