Linkteresting #3: Reading, writing, webmarks, and life notes
Hello again webmates!
Below are some notable things I’ve read, written, and consumed lately. Click links you’re curious about—that’s what the Web is for. ☕️
Reading
- The colors of my heart by Faiz Ahmed Faiz: A collection so good I can neither comprehend nor soak its intensity in a single reading. With revolutionary spirit, Faiz expresses discontent of both the heart and mind. His verses introspectively reflect on the innate nature of the human condition, both as individuals and as collectives. The expressions feel timeless because they are. I will have to return to the collection again for a deeper dive. P.S. The book has English translations by Baran Farooqi as well as the original poetry in Hindustani as English transliterations.
Speak, for your lips are free
Speak, for your tongue is still yours
Your upright body belongs to you
Speak, for your soul still is yours
Look, how in the blacksmith’s shop
The embers are hot, the iron glows
The mouths of the locks are being opened
Chains lengthen their reach
Speak, for the little time that you have is sufficient
Before the death of body and tongue
Speak, for the truth still lives
Speak, say all that is to be said
- Orbital by Samantha Harvey: Her prose throughout the book is almost poetic, as remarked by Alexandra when she first suggested Orbital to me. The words are also rightfully poignant in many places. At first it seemed to me that the book has a plot but that confusingly wasn’t the case. My friend Anik, who kindly lent me the book without asking and thereby recommended it, characterized Orbital’s writing as a stream of consciousness, which is true. It took me a while to get into the groove, which is when I realized and relished its true plot: Earth itself. If you want to visualize our dazzling Earth as experienced by astronauts in dizzying pace, including what the complex maps of orbital ground tracks humanly translate into, Orbital is for you.
They look down and they understand why it’s called Mother Earth. They all feel it from time to time. They all make an association between the earth and a mother, and this in turn makes them feel like children. In their clean-shaven androgynous bobbing, their regulation shorts and spoonable food, the juice drunk through straws, the birthday bunting, the early nights, the enforced innocence of dutiful days, they all have moments up here of a sudden obliteration of their astronaut selves and a powerful sense of childhood and smallness. Their towering parent ever-present through the dome of glass.
Writing
- Exploring the marvel that are mountains on the Moon ⛰
- The fiery origin of our Moon tied to Earth, as unraveled by scientists through Apollo and now modern missions 🌖
A titanic collision took place 4.5 billion years ago, when the planets had just formed in a still-chaotic Solar System. A young Mars-sized planet, named Theia, slammed into the newly born Earth. The blistering impact ejected a colossal amount of material. While some of this material escaped to space, the rest stayed in orbit around Earth and coalesced to form our Moon.
- Rocket equation 101: Revealing our Moon’s value as a launchpad
- Poem: On the edge
- A garden does not save the forest: Skyroot Vikram-1, the least worst case scenario for India’s launch crisis
Both for this decade and the next, India’s manifest leans squarely on the heavy-lift side in terms of mass. Even ISRO’s medium-lift PSLV rocket, with its six to seven times greater lift capacity than Vikram-1, can only cater to a smaller fraction of these mass-heavy launches. In the age of literal Moonshots and satellite constellations, the need for Vikram-1-class rockets is largely on the margins for achieving sovereign space prowess.
Webmarks
- Watched Foundation. Unlike the screen adaption of amazing The Three-Body Problem novels, I did not find Foundation to be terrible. And the graphics are great, bringing some of Asimov’s ideas to the screen. It’s not a replacement for the books but a worthy watch in itself if you’re into classic Sci-Fi.
- Calm technologies that excite me, by Abhigyan. Me too, brother.
I believe that technology should be an enabler, not a subjugator. The tinkerers that love messing with dials and diving into code should continue to do so. But otherwise, technology should help you do a thing and then stand back as you hold the reins of your human experience.
If we thought that some activity was unique to humans, or to living beings, and we manage to get a machine to replicate that activity, we should revise our view of the activity—not our view of the machine. Creative breakthroughs in chess are not “a thing that requires a human mind,” they’re “things that can be done by human minds and by machines.”
Life notes
- A microblog is reborn: Jatan the human (My life slices go here now; follow if of interest somehow)
- Life ki chore-y
- Gallery of signs in public washrooms
- Not hiding the ugly sides of space from the future workforce
Did you read a book or article lately that intrigued you? Message me:
