Sreejith's Blog

Thinking about complex issues using first principles and frameworks is something I have been trying to hone for a long time. This stems from the success I have had in using these principles in my research.It is also a concept I have heard repeated over by a lot of people I look up-to like  Amit Varma  ,  Pranay Kotasthane  , Feynman etc. There is also a really good video of Elon Musk  espousing this strategy for life . Through this blog post I will try to explain my ideas and thoughts on following this principle.

Erwin Schrodinger  was the first one to describe the characteristics of the genetic material in his seminal book " What is life? " (Which is an excellent pop sci read). He describes that an aperiodic crystal is necessary to store the complexity of the human footprint in a single molecule( The information required to make the entire body is within the first cell, from which all of us are born from "The fertilized human egg"). A periodic crystal, which physicist are so happy with, since it's easier to solve, does not store a whole lot of information. I started thinking of an analogue of this idea with cultures. Coming to America, has given me the opportunity to interact with people from different cultures. A specific culture is like a periodic crystal to me, it encompasses minimum information and is highly comprehensible and fits in nicely to our understanding of the world. There is a lot of priors that go into building up a particular culture and the point of max...

  Disclaimer: There will be constant updating/ edits made to this blog as I get along the book.

I am always suspicious of lists like " Top 10 movies of 2000's , Top 100 Greatest songs of all time etc" where they try to pit artistic creations against each other. The only you thing you can say about a piece of art is what you felt with it. What anyone else feels about a piece of art is anyones guess.  There could be some general principles that could act as good guidelines ( method to the madness)   Use music that evokes a particular emotion as in the frame in a movie, coherence of plot, relatability of characters etc, but anything beyond that is beholder dependent. I was faced with truth very starkly when I started suggesting songs that I was hyped about to my friends who I had the same tastes in music but boy was I wrong. It's very interesting to see the different metrics that different people use to evaluate music, some people associate with the lyrics, some people emphasize relatability, some people emphasize music, vocal gymnastics, innovativeness of product...

What are vaccines? Our body has a self defense mechanism called the immune system which protects the integrity of our body from bacterial infection, viral infection, spreading of cancerous cells, destroying damaged cells etc.( Good brief of immune system ) The immune system already has a huge database of things it knows it needs to correct for. So if a particular pathogen matches with one of the "undesirables" in the database the immune system responds to it using the "response" that is already encoded in. One key example is of your body temperature rising when you have a viral fever- it is a part of the bodies strategy to kill off the pathogen. If the body does not know how to effectively respond to certain pathogens, the result is that the strategies taken up by the immune system does not amount to anything in stopping its spread in our body. It might not even be able to detect the viral particles early on ( Tricking Immune Cells ). There's a part of the Immun...

  This is a piece I wrote in my previous blog during my internship at RWTH Aachen 2019. Re-published.

  This is a blog post, I wrote during Winter 2020-21. I had written it for my previous blog, which I am re-publishing here.