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An alpine hike up Mt.Baldy

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Certain primal fears are dominant in the human race, for example, the fear of creepy crawlies. A strong primal fear I have is cold weather. Having been born and raised in a tropical paradise in India, this is a fear I was exposed to very late in life, with very little know-how on how to tackle it. Every time I have come face to face with it, it has left me scarred. It has left such a lasting impression on me, that when I applied to grad school in the US, I specifically chose places in California just so that I need not suffer from the cold.                                   But I had a dilemma here, even though I hate the cold, I love being outdoors even more! I am the kind of person that watches trekking, camping, climbing, surfing, and snorkeling videos on YouTube all day. I grew up watching Man Vs Wild, which  defined my love for the wild and exploration. Wilderness in California consists of two parts: the oceans and the mountains. I made quick work of the ocean since I regularly go
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Ask for help, not for time.

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Nothing gets me more excited than deep thinking or a long struggle to find an answer. I picked up this habit at high school during my entrance prep days, where thinking from the fundamentals was pivotal. It served me well during those days and also through undergrad, where the problems were simple. This reinforced my belief that any problem was solvable if I put enough time into it. I tried to continue this into grad school and it has not served me well. Deadlines, the need to report weekly research updates, and time constraints took away the luxury of not being time efficient.  An incident that happened some time back helped me realize the usefulness of asking for help rather than ruminating. I working on a project where I had to cluster a set of points. I was working on that problem for a day, googling possible clustering algorithms which would work for me. The problem was that I couldn't use classical clustering algorithms such as k-Nearest neighbor regardless of the distance me
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Gave my first conferance talk!

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 Life has been pretty stressful last week, with a barrage of unproductive hours at research and a looming conference presentation on the weekend, I was in for a swell. The conference was on systems biology at UCLA and I was supposed to give a talk on my optimal crawling work. The way I registered for this talk was funny. Initially, Mattia thought he would give a talk at this conference but he applied to the student portal! after he knew that he messed up, he asked me to present in his place. The presentation was limited to a single slide and for 2 mn, Seems pretty short doesn't it? Not short enough to not mess up!  Given my particularly poor showing at the presentation I did for the open house, I decided that I would prepare very well for this conference talk. So I started making the slide on Monday and finalized it by Wednesday, by which Mattia decided that I should present my work on the chick embryo rather than the crawling work. Given that Wednesday was the deadline to submit t
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The veritasium of data.

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I came across an interesting fact from the podcast " Seen and the unseen " hosted by Amit Varma; If you search on google "My husband wants me to.." the top autocomplete suggestion in India and Bangladesh is " breastfeed-him".  A statistical answer to such a private fact captivated me and led me to follow a rabbit hole into knowing about Seth-Stephen Davidowitz, a trained economist looking at big data from tech giants to answer some difficult questions. Let's start off by complimenting the cover of the book Everybody Lies (shown below). Pictorial representation of the camouflaged elephant in the room is an apt representation for a book on lying. Some notable key insights that speak for the revolutionary nature of the book, 1. The effect of cold on depression searches: Cold places search more for depression-related terms than warmer climates. Intuitive right? It goes on further to explain that the effectiveness of warmer weather is twice the effectivenes
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'Decoupled' from the times?

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Certain shows automatically go to my "To-Watch-List" the first time you see it's promotional. One of those shows was 'Decoupled', a new Netflix series written by Manu Joesph. The promotional content was very intriguing as it went from one-truth bomb to the next, bam-bam-bam and I was hooked. There is a distinct appeal to Madhavan's delivery, kind of reminds me of 'Anbe Sivam' don't know why.  But before watching it, like any self-respecting consumer of content, I went and checked the reviews, and boy was it bad! The reviews slammed this series shut, mentioning the jokes don't land and have "politically incorrect" segments. This was quite disheartening, as I really wanted to watch the show!  Guess I am not as self-respecting as I presume :(.  So, when I got the time to just chill after a couple of days of hard work I got onto watching the entire series. Then I learned my lesson, don't believe reviews  completely . The entire show w
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Monsoon Wedding on a lazy day

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Today was a lazy day. It was cloudy and cold, and it rained the previous night. I finished my weekly meeting with my collaborator kees weijer in the morning where I presented some interesting results on the project we are working on (Will tell y'all once its out xD ). My advisor said that he was down with the flu and won't be coming into the dept. This added to my desire to be lazy the whole day. I sort of felt that I needed a break and I took it! The next step was to figure out what I would do the whole day then I thought of the movie that I heard in the podcast interviewing Abhinandan Sekhri where he talks about working on the movie called "Monsoon Weddings". This seemed very interesting and it was also available for free on YouTube!  So I got onto watching it in the morning, after I made myself a huge cup of tea. There are some things that pop out about the movie even 10 minutes in. One, there is a weird design heuristic to the opening credits which gives me kochi
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Stable system + Stabilizing effect = Instability. WTF?

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" The chemical basis for Morphogenesis " is one of the lesser known contributions of Turing but still a seminal paper in the field of mathematical biology. He tried to explain pattern formation in Morphogenesis( The process by which an organism in earlier stage of life generates shapes) using a simple model of a reaction-diffusion equation. He used this formalism to explain stripes on a tiger skin, spots in a leopards skin, pattern on a fish scales, digit formation in limbs etc (Check figure below).  One of the key mathematical/ physical insights that this paper gives rise to, is the idea of Turing instability.  I came across the idea of Turing instability very recently. Frankly I had read Turing's morphogenesis paper some time back but the counter-intuitiveness of the Turing instability was something that I glossed over. In my defense, Turing explained the instability as a long paragraph rather than writing it down in equations, which made it very off-putting for me.  Th
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