Sreejith's Blog

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...

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...

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 ...

" 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...

Been a long time since my last blog post, miss me?

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...