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Revisiting Rama: A lament about the decline of reading

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Revisiting Rama A lament about the decline of reading   Apologies to folks who landed on this page, seeking religious salvation of some sort. I remain resolutely areligious, and I am sorry to say, not in imminent danger of any awakening, religious or otherwise. The title simply refers to an old book, and of course, my affinity for alliteration. Anyway, I should get back to the topic on hand, which ironically has something to do with our declining attention spans!   I recently came across an ebook copy of the Arthur C Clarke classic, Rendezvous with Rama . For those unaware of the book, it’s about an unidentified object detected in our solar system: a story of first contact. The unusual name given to the object, Clarke explains, was because, having exhausted Roman and Greek mythological figures, astronauts were “going through the Hindu pantheon”. The book took me back over 30 years, to Sunday mornings spent waiting patiently, for a blue-green public library bus. As y...
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How to win at Wordl: Or how to suck the fun out of word games

  How to win at Wordl Or how to suck the fun out of word games   I could have gone with “ How to solve Wordl ”, but that would have been disingenuous of me. Just look at the number of tweets, WhatsApp posts and statuses sharing the solved emoji grid! Don’t tell me people don’t consider it a minor accomplishment every morning! Though the creator Josh Wardle intended it to be “..just a game that’s fun”, people often brandish the solved grid as a sort of badge of honour. If you are the kind who thinks that solving the puzzle doesn’t matter, and it’s the playing that counts, then this one’s not for you! I for one think that we shouldn’t begrudge people their harmless daily dopamine hit, particularly after a miserable 2 years.   A couple of clarifications before I proceed. What I am going to tell you here aren’t some unfathomable set of rules. These are just little devices that help solve a puzzle with greater certainty, which I am sure have become obvious to many ot...
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Eastern promises redux

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Eastern promises redux East Asians do seem to have more protection from SARS-CoV-2   I debated with myself if I should start off the New Year with this post. As you can guess from the title, this piece falls under the scientific category “I told you so”. But I am going to go ahead and pretend that this is all for the greater scientific good.   To jog your memory, a year and a half ago, during the middle of the second wave, I had suggested that death rates due to COVID-19 were lowest in the South-East Asian region perhaps because people living in the region were already exposed to close cousins of SARS-CoV-2 from the bat population in the region. I had also, whimsically, attempted to show a correlation of the deaths per million population by the distance from Hanoi. ( http://randomramblings2018.blogspot.com/2020/07/eastern-promises-are-asians-relatively.html ) The figure is reproduced below. (Figure 1) At that time, the counting of deaths was incomplete, and there was...
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WhatsApp, Instagram or Facebook?

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  WhatsApp, Instagram or Facebook? Which is the most popular of them all?   The last couple of months have been quiet and uninteresting. At least, there was nothing that I could get myself to write about. All that changed 36 hours ago when I realised that I couldn’t reply to a WhatsApp message. You all know the rest of the story. I have to admit that I briefly delighted in the irony that a tech giant had been felled by something as trivial as a DNS error , that most annoying of issues ordinary folks like us face all the time. Once I shook off the schadenfreude , it struck me that I had the opportunity here to study the revealed preferences of three and a half billion people worldwide, for the 3 most used social media services on earth (other than YouTube)! The largest imaginable research project! And all funded by Facebook! (At least 6 billion dollars, I am told). So, I hurriedly finished some pending (real) work, and here I am.   Insights from an outage The first...
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What’s so sacrosanct about the 10,000-step goal?

  What’s so sacrosanct about the 10,000-step goal?   Of late, I have been thinking about this popular exhortation to achieve the 10,000 step daily goal. Maybe it is the coming together of multiple sporting events (the Olympic Games begin today), or maybe it’s just my idle mind, deprived of social stimuli. In any case, what bothers me most is the apparent precision of the goal. Why not 7,500 (which in any case is well beyond an average person’s activity level), or 8,000? Is it our collective preference for round numbers? (10,000 is considered more “round” than 8,000). Is it okay to take a few steps below this magic number? What about a few thousand steps more? The lay press, citing reputed researchers, would have us believe that between 7,000 and 8,000 steps a day lies the proverbial “sweet spot”. The implication being that anything more or less than this, can cause you harm. And conveniently, this also plays nicely into that popular trope, of “moderation” being the best th...
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Is Euro 2020 a super spreader event?

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  Is Euro 2020 a super spreader event? The difference between the two ongoing football fests couldn’t be starker. While the players in the Copa America play their hearts out in echoing empty stadia, the Euro 2020 games are just as festive as ever, playing out in front of die-hard, (seems like an inappropriate word to use here, but I am going with it anyway) ostensibly Covid-free fans. As I watch the matches with a mixture of hope and envy, there’s this niggling feeling in the back of my mind that’s becoming increasingly difficult to ignore. Now, just to be clear, I am as eager as the next guy to be seduced by the allure of a Covid-free world. But are we really there yet? Is Europe going to see a new wave of infections? I know that precautions are being taken, but the sight of the Puskas Arena, packed to the brim, is deeply unsettling! So I thought I’d take a closer look.   A tale of eleven cities One unintended consequence of Covid-19 is that it has democratised the ...
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