1,986 karma · joined January 21, 2017
https://github.com/dilawar
Lordgivemeplentymybellyisemptysixinchesbelowthetablelorsbepraisedmybellyisraisedsixinchesabovethetable
ChatGPT 3.5 segments it perfectly
"Lord give me plenty, My belly is empty, Six inches below the table. Lord be praised, My belly is raised, Six inches above the table."
Love plantuml as my goto for diagram-aa-code.Yesterday I learnt about d2lang. It looks better as a language. Nothing beats TiKZ when it comes to look of diagram.
Human judgment is often flawed due to various psychological biases and tendencies hardwired in our brains through evolution, such as incentive-caused bias, consistency and commitment bias, and deprivation super reaction syndrome.
Figures like B.F. Skinner and Ivan Pavlov conducted important experiments demonstrating how reinforcement and conditioning shape human and animal behavior.
Marketing, advertising, and product design frequently exploit psychological tendencies like contrast effects, reciprocity bias, and social proof to influence consumer choices.
Board of directors are often ineffective at reining in CEOs due to psychological factors like commitment to prior decisions and not wanting to undermine authority figures.
Understanding psychological tendencies can help avoid being manipulated and make better decisions by considering disconfirming evidence and alternatives objectively.
Applying insights from psychology and economics together gives a more holistic view of human decision-making than either field alone.
Education should teach about these psychological tendencies so people can recognize their own biases and make more informed judgments.
Case studies of companies like Coca-Cola and mistakes of leaders like John Gutfreund demonstrate impacts of psychological factors consequentially.
Figures like Charles Darwin and Sam Walton applied self-awareness of psychological tendencies to achieve remarkable success and wisdom.
Secretive conventions and forcing priority on difficult tasks can help overcome natural human biases revealed through experiments.Some of their apps are very good like Books, Expense, Sign, Drive and Write, most are good enough and a few need more work (calendar, booking, and meet). When you need help there is always a person to talk to and they are pretty fast in support.
In dollar pricing, they are very cheap, but in India, they are still on pricey side. But worth every rupee we spend on them. Zoho CEO is bit of a character!
But nonetheless there should be controls on such nonsense. The ease with which many academics get away with all this will make even a seasoned politician jealous.
During my Ph.D., my PI wanted to do some work on signalling pathway analysis. He was interested in knowing when and why sometimes body starts assuming that the sick state is the right state and start acting against drugs given to patients. This making treatment very hard.
I don't know what is status of that but one insight I got from him that most (all?) Pharma companies do not trust acdemic data. I didn't ask reasons but I'd assume because of replication issue (crisis). Knowing how data is gathered and published in signalling domain, I'd not blame them for having low trust in academic data.
Before that: comparing brain with hydraulic machines. There has been tendency to compare brain with most complex machine known to us at that particular time.
"Descartes was impressed by the hydraulic figures in the royal gardens, and developed a hydraulic theory of the action of the brain. We have since had telephone theories, electrical field theories, and now theories based on computing machines… . We are more likely to find out how the brain works by studying the brain itself, and the phenomenon of behavior, than by indulging in far-fetched physical analogies." -- Karl Lashley 1951
Is racial segregation was by design (100% non Whiltes) or just happed due to economic factors (majority of non whites happens to be in this category)?
In Indian rural side, "desi" (native) is almost always synonyms with bad quality, not cheap which is implied, but bad quality. I heard that desi in many foreign country means Indian?!
Desi or swadesi (home made) had a special emotional appeal to urban upper middle class leadership during freedom struggle. I don't know how they feel about it.
Chandrayaan from ISRO was a very significant moment in this regard. Done by desi engineers educated in desi schools. I am one of those.
I am more worried about people keeping insecticides in husked and unhusked rice. Trace amounts of insecticides is very common in grains here. I hope this improves soon since epigenetic changes due to insecticides are very significant.
Update: I looked at wiki after one more comment pointed out toxic nature of kmno4. It wasn’t purple in colour but white. I am definitely recalling the name wrong.
In my village (Ganges plain, North India), making achaar was a significant seasonal community event. When mangoes were small, we used to wait for heavy winds during early monsoon. A lot of raw mangoes would fall on the ground, and the next day they would be sold at a much cheaper price.
There were two broad classes of mango varieties: one for eating ripe, and the other one for making achaar, which were usually very small, had large seeds, and were extremely sour when raw (and extremely sweet and full of fibers when ripe). The whole process would take a week or two: cutting raw mangoes, drying them, salting them, preparing masala, and putting them in a special jar.
The last process requires special hands if you wanted your pickle to last a few years. There were a few women who were experts in putting pickle in jar and were highly sought after. Whoever had pickle that could last at least two years in the village without growing fungus belonged to this group. Some members of this famous group were from lower castes, and obviously, they were not allowed to physically touch the pickle. Instead, they would supervise from a very close distance.
They would take a few pieces of mango mixed with masala and push them down the jar as hard as possible to remove all air. The slower and harder you push, the better. Once the jar was almost filled, it would be filled with mustard oil and crystal salt and then kept for at least 6 months. The older the pickle, the better it is! The achaar jar used to be the costliest pot in a house, usually a china pot.
My contribution to this was introducing potassium permanganate as an extra layer to fight fungus. It is still known as "achaar powder" in the village. Things are very different now. The moisture content in new brick-concrete houses is not as high as it used to be in traditionally made houses. And much better quality jars are available, especially the airtight ones. I don't think many people now push the achaar as hard as they used to.
When first tractor arrived in my village, when grandfather joked that all the landless labourers will dies of hunger now since there won't be work for them. Manual ploughing reduced but a number of other work became routine. These days it's hard to find labour in my village (western UP).