Musings on the Human Condition

Caption: Zebra Finch My daughter bought me a Birdbuddy for Christmas 2025. We aren't Christians, but any excuse to celebrate and get the family together, right? The Birdbuddy is an excellent idea. It's a bird feeder with a solar panel and a built in camera that takes up to 2k resolution videos (of up to 60 seconds at a time) when it detects that a bird has landed on the feeder.  Over the years, I've had other less ambitious feeders. Prior to installing feeders I did a lot of birding and have photographed many of the species that visit New England. I've also tried to pursue the hobby when I've traveled, e.g. to Orlando, Florida and Provo, Utah. The first feeder I installed was unabatedly ransacked by Gray Squirrels. After many failed attempts I finally hung it between two tree trunks that were about 10-12 feet apart. So the midpoint was about 5-6 feet from either side. And I have video of the squirrels jumping 5-6 feet from tree trunks onto the feeder. So, that idea...

  Andrej Karpathy, during his podcast interview with Dwarkesh Patel. October 17, 2025. Hype. In the midst of all the hype around how AI is going to take all our jobs and Elon Musk telling us to give up on the idea of humans producing code in 2027, it's refreshing to hear saner voices making more nuanced statements and predictions about AI and our future.  Andrej (pronounced Andre) Karpathy is one such voice. I will talk more about him a bit later in this post. While AI has produced some incredible results, there have also been plenty of failed predictions. Geoffrey Hinton (considered the godfather of AI)  predicted  in 2016 that AI will completely replace radiologists by 2021. Here we are in 2026 and radiologists are flourishing like never before! We live in a world that is undergoing disruption by AI just as it was once turned topsy-turvy by the inventions of printing, electricity, personal computers, the internet, smartphones, and CRISPR. Each time hype-mongers to...

Modern School Vasant Vihar (MSVV), New Delhi, 1983-1984 The picture above is me , likely in grade 11 . Or, as Americans would say, during my high school junior year. Not only do I not remember posing for this picture, I also don't recall looking like this. This picture was taken on  school  premises, as evidenced by the red brick half wall. But the occasion escapes me. Most likely someone brought in a camera (a rarity in those days) and offered to take a picture. I had just acquired an Agfa Click III (or similar) camera in those days (probably as a birthday present) but I doubt my parents would have let me take it to school without making a huge fuss. It took me a while to believe that it was indeed me. I know I occasionally wore glasses . I despised wearing them but did so because my mom's incessant warnings had sunk deep into my psyche, "Your eyesight will get worse if you strain your eyes trying to read without your glasses!" But I definitely don't remember hav...

  Photo by yours truly in front of our house garage. A bounding track describes the gait (how the animal moves), not the foot. In a bound , the animal moves in little “launch and land” jumps: It pushes off with its back legs. The front feet land first . Then the hind feet swing forward and land ahead of the front feet (often side-by-side). That landing order makes the classic “bounding” track pattern seen in the photograph above: two prints in front (hind feet) and one or two behind (front feet, often overlapping). Animals that commonly leave bounding tracks: rabbits/hares, squirrels, weasels/stoats, mink, otter —basically critters that hop or lope rather than walk with evenly spaced alternating footsteps. The above picture, taken today while shoveling fresh snow in front of my garage, is most likely that of a rabbit. What you’re seeing: The two longer prints side-by-side in front = the hind feet landing ahead of the body. The single rounder print behind ...

Most of us grew up reading some samples of what was considered good literature as part of our prescribed syllabus at school. Tom Brown's School Days was one of the books I recall from that list. I believe Charles Dickens was also on the list. Thankfully Shakespeare was not. At the time, I despised history because it seemed like an exercise in memorizing weird names and meaningless dates. But that changed later in life. During weekends and summer holidays, I occasionally had the option to choose what to read. I mostly dabbled in what I could grab from my father's bookshelves. I was primarily attracted to non-fiction. For example, books on chess and The Way Things Work , which I would endlessly page through and must have read many times over. No teenager can resist going through raunchy titles like Tropic of Cancer , which I borrowed from father's bookshelves for the sole purpose of finding hot passages. When I actually read the book la...

  My dadiji (paternal grandma) moved from Peshawar to Dehradun in 1947 during the Partition of British India. She used to make sukki (dry) sevviyaan, thus named to distinguish them from the milk drenched version that I did not like as much due to my aversion to milk developed after moving from Canada to India (a story for another time). This was one of my favorite desserts growing up, so I have to write about it. Knead atta (flour) or sooji (semolina) for extra bite into a sturdier variety of firm, non-sticky dough (oddly, there's really no word for dough in Punjabi). Pinch off large-marble-sized pieces from the main dough and roll them between your palms to make 1-2 mm thick imperfect sevviyaan (noodles or vermicelli) about 6-8 inches long.  Break off 1-1.5 inch pieces from each sevviyaan to create these mini-sevviyaan and place them onto a tray to dry. Make a sugar and cardamon chashni (syrup) and boil it until it's thick Drop the sevviyaan into the chashni on medium heat an...