It’s January 31, 2021.

I’m sitting cross-legged on my couch, covered in my favorite fuzzy couch-blanket, trying to avoid acknowledging the burning desire in the back of my head to get up and search for my hoodie. The exhaust fan hums loudly from my small studio kitchen, because I forgot to turn it off after cooking three frozen chapatis for dinner earlier. I’m tired and lazy, sue me. The lights are turned on to the “Dimmed” setting on my Philips Hue app — except for the ones above my home office/living room. I’ve got eight thousand lumens dangling from a…

This is likely a “part 1”. I wanted to articulate the thought process that has enabled me to venture into the investing world — and specifically not about how I choose specific assets to invest in, etc. These thoughts helped me gain confidence in why investing (especially in the stock market) works, and why it might be better than, well, not doing it.

1. Money (currency) lets me buy things.
2. Currency is meaningful as long as I have things to buy and am immersed in the commodity market environment — being aware of how much things cost gives meaning to how…

I recently read this post on Reddit, and then specifically, a comment on the post that criticizes the frequent use in India of profanity that invokes violent sexual/gendered imagery.

I had a strong emotional reaction to this post, and I was drawn to a behavior I’d been observing in myself in the recent past: I’d started uttering words like behnchod very casually to express both defeat and triumph while playing Call of Duty: Warzone, which is in its nature violent and all about asserting dominance on other players by being the final player or team to survive as the area…

I love thinking. Hypothesizing, analyzing, defining, interpreting, questioning, criticizing, modeling. I love it. Talk to me about anything and I will engage you for as long as we hold up, finding out what it means to you and negotiating language for communicating about it.

Everything leads to philosophy: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Getting_to_Philosophy

Learning how to philosophize, to me, was about learning how to think, learning how to learn. It has enabled me to better understand some very abstract concepts pertaining to language, computer science, physics and metaphysics, and so on. And the more I’ve dived into it, the stronger I’ve become, mentally.

So…

1. Freedom is a state of being able to make choices.
2. Making choices is the only way to establish and re-affirm freedom.
3. Opportunity is necessary to make a choice.
4. After a choice is made, the opportunity no longer exists.
5. Making a choice is a transaction of opportunity.
6. Opportunity is the currency of freedom.

Over the last two years, I’ve spent countless hours thinking about existence, relativity, and quantum mechanics.

Some time in 2017, bang in the middle of my journey, I was staying over at my parents’ house. At the time, I had been reading the history of relativity and Einstein’s journey. The question I wanted to answer was “What on earth made Einstein think about this shit?”

On that night, the content I had been consuming reached an inspirational critical point, and I spent the entire night thinking and writing notes. Early the next morning, I met my parents for coffee, my…

I’ve been reading Sean Carroll’s new book and feeling inspired, so here’s a short commentary on QM from an excited amateur.

For a long time now, I’ve looked at QM as trying to answer the question “if existence were possible, how could we describe it?”

This question requires careful analysis of existence itself. That’s why it’s elegant: it starts at the fundamental distinction between something and nothing.

The interesting thing to me is that if you start doing thought experiments that start with an empty universe and then introduce “somethings” into it, you quickly realize a need for defining space…

I’ve read a LOT of aeropress recipes. A LOT of them. I’ve read about competition winners, inverted vs upright methods, bla bla bla bla.

Here’s what I’ve finally realized works for me:

1. Get good beans and grind them fresh just before brewing. Duh.
2. 14–16 grams of coffee for a cup. A couple of stops courser than the espresso setting on my grinder.
3. Water between 78-82C because my kettle isn’t precise.
4. Inverted setup. Fill the entire chamber with water except for a couple of millimeters at the top — so that it doesn’t overflow when you insert the stirrer.
5. Push the…