Mud bath, blood bath

Vienna by the day Graz by midnight We got off the train And took the bus We got off the bus And started walking On that opportune Narrow footpath Soon came the gray car Hurtling at sound speed Too fast to prepare those Not inside that metal cage Passing within a meter of me On that generous puddle Of black and muddy water A great many mugs of which Came splashing on my face And as a bonus, torso and legs In a flash of a moment Decorating my dignity In glorious muddy water Car culture in a nutshell Defiling and murdering Untold beings all around An unrelenting daily ritual Of mud bath and blood bath But it's supposed to be okay Because they didn't mean it

Working against hard

Bee against the glass pane
Striving towards the light
Wearing herself down unaware
Of the open window beside

As she nears the pane's edge
Darkness befalls her over
Pull of the light and push of the dark
Keeps the bee struggling forever 

A brief distraction away from the window
She circles aimlessly around the room
To finally return at the opportune window
Of freedom in the sunny world of bloom

Painted Red Chillies 🌶️

On my brittle white porcelain plate
There are four painted red chillies
Sometimes they look bright and pretty 
But most times just permanent scars

They lay today on my breakfast table
And on them I pour some maple syrup
So that albeit for only a few minutes 
I draw some sweetness from the burn

A heroic slow down

In a world obsessed 
With more and more
An act of resistance 
Is to say 'enough'
To resign from the demands 
Of peers and pop culture 

Call it sustainability 
Or plain old sanity
A delicious senility
Climate action
Social justice or
Just self care

Away from bright rectangles
Of all possible sizes
No bombardment 
Of senseless ads
No gasping and drowning 
In the information overload 

Some lazy weekends 
Doing nothing cool
No meat, no car
Fly less, buy less
Read, write, run
Plenty of naps
Fruits and veggies 
Wee bit of schnapps

Books and bikes
Walks and hikes
Trains and trams
Local vacations
Flaneuring about
On small city streets
And untrodden trails

Not just consuming 
Art and music
But yeah creating
Art and music 

Back to the present

I try and I fail
Again and again
As I drag myself
Now from the grudges of the past
Then from the checklists of the future

When will I at last
Arrive at the present
To behold the beauty
That I've gotten used to

They say ignorance is bliss
I say knowing too well is a curse
Wrest yourself from its shackles
Lean into this very moment
With the curiosity of an empty cup

"One way to open your eyes to unnoticed beauty is to ask yourself, 'What if I had never seen this before? What if I knew I would never see it again?" ~Rachel Carson

Reading in the age of social media

Image attribution: Charles James Lewis, CC0, via Wikimedia Commons
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/e/e2/Charles-james-lewis-reading-by-the-window.jpg

"Frederick Douglass taught that literacy is the path from slavery to freedom. There are many kinds of slavery and many kinds of freedom. But reading is still the path." ~Carl Sagan, The Demon Haunted World (1996)

 

Walk into a waiting room or a train compartment and you see people glued to their phones, almost everyone is hypnotized by their screen. Every now and then you get a refreshing break, there is something disarming in a stranger reading a book in public. Intentionally or unintentionally they are encouraging others to be readers too.

Social media platforms and their addiction-inducing algorithms are playing with human brains in an ongoing world-wide uncontrolled experiment. They are habituating hordes of humans to (very) short-form content, flitting again and again from one sensational post to another, from one trending topic to another, goading us to outrage as we doom-scroll. Tweets, photos, gifs, and video clips have become currencies for exchanging ideas and experiences. In this milieu, what is the place of long-form reading—essays, articles, and books—mediums that allow you to stick to a given train of thought, building one idea upon another, one event after another?

The long-form is where you have a better chance to reach the truth of things, because it lets you dwell on an idea, play with it, look at it from multiple perspectives, appreciate nuances, see the full story, and construct a deeper and coherent understanding of something. A physical book affords natural safeguards from digression by not letting you click on links and opening a hundred tabs. Video streaming platforms keep the long-form alive in their own way albeit without giving you the freedom to construct your own mental images. I will keep this essay limited to long-form reading. I don't know for sure if long-form reading is declining worldwide, but it does seem to be the case in the USA (see charts from Statista and Washington Post) and possibly in other countries. Reading is definitely something that we need more of.

In Part 11 'The Persistence of Memory' of the Cosmos TV series, Carl Sagan conjures the following timeless words in praise of books, "What an astonishing thing a book is. It’s a flat object made from a tree with flexible parts on which are imprinted lots of funny dark squiggles. But one glance at it and you’re inside the mind of another person, maybe somebody dead for thousands of years. Across the millennia, an author is speaking clearly and silently inside your head, directly to you. Writing is perhaps the greatest of human inventions, binding together people who never knew each other, citizens of distant epochs. Books break the shackles of time. A book is proof that humans are capable of working magic."

Humans have a propensity to tribalism and to categorize people as 'us' and 'them'. The antidote to such xenophobia is made up of enchanting stories from faraway lands, often mediated through (translated) books, to be able to see our shared humanity across borders. Good listening is mostly about listening with an intention to understand, and without an intention to respond. Reading is perhaps the best way of listening without an intention to respond.

With respect to reading it is easy to think, "What's the point. I will forget all of what I read, within a matter of few weeks." American writer David Perell lays out the paradox of reading, "The books you read will profoundly change you even though you’ll forget the vast majority of what you read." Y Combinator cofounder Paul Graham elaborates this same claim in the language of computer programming, "Reading and experience train your model of the world. And even if you forget the experience or what you read, its effect on your model of the world persists. Your mind is like a compiled program you've lost the source [code] of. It works, but you don't know why."

Besides such implicit gains, to keep more concrete proofs of your toil, you can leverage your reading by taking notes as you read or shortly after you read. Then of course it is up to you how you guard this treasure trove of your prized collections, and make it easily accessible to your future self. I use TiddlyWiki and Google Keep for note taking. But irrespective of the tool you use, the collection comes in handy whenever you sit down to write anything. There is this symbiotic relation between reading and writing. Reading more helps your writing. Writing more helps your reading. But don't limit your take-aways to seldom opened files. If you are a reader, your designated job is to excavate the hidden pearls and release them in the real world, in your conversations with your family, friends, and colleagues.

Let me leave aside this utilitarian view of reading, and come to the very joy of reading. You could read not for any future benefit but for the pleasure you experience in the present. One of the singular joys of reading a book lies in those pauses when you let your own ideas and experiences resonate with the lines you just read. Reading makes pauses easy and involuntary, giving you moments to savour a particular thought. You can feel your horizons expanding in real time. Reading provides solace in the darkest of times. As American author James Baldwin says, "You think your pain and your heartbreak are unprecedented in the history of the world, but then you read." English writer W. Somerset Maugham concurs, "To acquire the habit of reading is to construct for yourself a refuge from almost all the miseries of life."

So here is a call for action. Read more, in private and in public. Promote and encourage long-form reading. Recommend, lend, and gift books to others. Talk about books you've read, how they made you feel, and what you learned from them. Visit, support, and use libraries, be it your city library, university library, community library, or an online library. Build libraries, be it your office library, lab library, workshop library, or home library.

In December 2019, blissfully unaware of the impending pandemic, I was strolling through an exhibition titled 'Photography of Chim' at the Museum of The Jewish People, Tel Aviv, Israel. I stood alone and perplexed in front of a poignant photograph (1948) by Polish photojournalist David 'Chim' Seymour titled "Blind boy who lost his arms during the war has learned to read [a Braille book] with his lips, Rome". Let this boy remind you of your privilege to be able to read. 

The Falling Stick Problem

Here's a little problem for physics teachers, mechanics enthusiasts, slo-mo videographers, science communicators, and other curious onlookers. Let a straight and rigid stick stand vertically on a flat horizontal surface. Then, without imparting any initial velocity, release the stick and let it fall from standstill. As it falls, the angle it makes with the vertical keeps increasing. Let's call this the fall angle (ϕ). At what fall angle does the bottom of the stick move away from where it was originally placed? In other words, what is the take-off angle (ϕm)?

In this IOP Bioinspiration and Biomimetics paper from 2015, we were looking at this problem as part of a modeling exercise on human walking, with a simplistic view considering the human as a 2D inverted pendulum, like the falling stick above. In that model, using some basic mechanics equations (no rocket science involved), we predict that the take-off angle is about 48°, cos^-1(2/3) to be exact. This result holds irrespective of the mass and length of the stick or even which planet you're doing this activity on, a heart-warming general result. The figure below shows the take-off angle for four different leg lengths (0.4m, 0.6m, 0.8m, 1.0m). The x-axis (vo) denotes the initial velocity of the bob of the inverted pendulum. Ping me if you are interested to read the paper but cannot access it in the above IOP link.

 Here is a snippet from the paper.

"As the inverted pendulum falls, the compression in the stance leg keeps reducing. At the instant the compression becomes zero, the ground will need to start pulling on the rod. This is not possible (unless the foot is stuck on the ground due to some adhesive or suction pads) and hence the inverted pendulum takes off." ~L Patnaik and L Umanand

Without slo-mo videography―and with more important fires to put out in order to finish a PhD―we never really verified the 48° claim experimentally. I would be happy to know if someone has, or can capture, slo-mo video footage of this mundane phenomenon, to help find the answer. The underlying message is to showcase the amazing fact that simple mathematical models can often make reasonably accurate predictions about the world around us.