Prajakta Mulay

Software engineer, parent. Interests include science, technology, computers, music, environment, culture, politics, India.

[Prajakta Mulay @Prajakta_Mulay]

@godbole_shilpa Koregaon Park has old trees and grand bungalows way way larger than in Karve Nagar. But only Pune 52 with certain surnames seem to catch the author's attention. Unresolved issues colouring their perspective. Genius!

[Anish Moonka @anishmoonka]

When a computer tracks the Indian classical dancer in this video, it picks up perfect circles, triangles, and curves in every movement. There are exactly 108 of them. All 108 were written into a manual over 2,000 years ago.

That manual is the Natya Shastra. Six thousand verses, written somewhere around 200 BCE. It describes 108 specific dance movements for Bharatanatyam, one of the oldest dance forms in India. Each movement spells out three things: where your hands go, what angle your body holds, and the exact path your legs trace. Roughly 150 step combinations grow out of those 108 base movements. A trained dancer spends years learning 70 to 80 of them.

Watch the dancer's legs in the video. The bent-knee squat creates a diamond shape. Palms together make a triangle. When researchers plotted these positions in three dimensions this year, they found the moving body carves out twisted spirals and bowl-shaped curves, the kind of shapes you see in an engineering textbook, not a dance studio. Every limb holds a specific angle and moves a measured distance.

The rhythm is math too. A 7-beat song gets filled with dance steps of 3 and 4. Scale that to 35 beats and the groups of 3 and 4 repeat five times. Choreographers work out these splits in their heads while performing live. All 108 movements are also carved into the stone walls of a 12th-century temple in Tamil Nadu called Chidambaram, many panels still carrying the original Sanskrit description next to them. A choreography textbook in granite, still legible after 900 years.

A 2013 study put 25 people on a walkway rigged with motion-capture cameras. Every human stride has two parts: when your foot is on the ground and when it swings forward. The ratio between those two parts came out to 1.620. The golden ratio is 1.618. Your foot lifts off at 61.8% of every step you take, and it has done this your entire life. A Bharatanatyam dancer takes that same built-in proportion and amplifies it across 108 movements, each one tracing shapes that were set down in writing over 2,000 years before the tracking software in this video existed.

[Dr. Vineet Kumar @vineet_mausam]

Pune Shivajinagar: 65mm
This is the highest single-day rain ever recorded in April history (going back to 1896).
Previous record was 51.1mm on 4 April 1896.
Data: IMD
Khadakwasla 107mm
Ambegaon 86.4mm
NDA 84mm
Hadapsar 42.5mm
Pashan 36.3mm
Dapodi 29mm
Garware: 84.4mm
#punerains

[Jennifer 🟥🔴🧙‍♀️🦉🐈‍⬛ 🦖 @babybeginner]

Some days you can’t love social media enough. This is one of those days. It began like this. Someone stole 12 tons of KitKats.

And then the replies started coming in. Scroll down.

[Aakash Gupta @aakashgupta]

The 1950s moment for our brains is happening right now, and Cal Newport might be the first person to name it correctly.

In the 1950s, doctors smoked. Jogging was considered eccentric. The idea that you needed to exercise for health was fringe science. Then a handful of researchers started publishing data on heart disease and sedentary lifestyles, and within 30 years the entire country built a $100B fitness industry from scratch.

Newport's NYT argument: seven hours of daily screen time is the cognitive equivalent of smoking two packs a day, and we're treating it with the same shrug the '50s gave cigarettes. Normal. Maybe even productive.

The reading number is the one that should stop people cold. The average American reads 15 minutes a day. Down from 23 minutes in 2003. The average TikTok session is 95 minutes. We replaced the single activity most correlated with sustained cognitive ability with the single activity most correlated with fractured attention, and we did it in less than a decade.

Newport wants a few dozen book pages a day to become the new 10,000 steps. Baseline cognitive maintenance. The problem: steps are easy to gamify. Your watch buzzes, the ring closes, you get the dopamine hit of completion. Reading has no built-in feedback loop. No streak counter guilt-tripping you at 9pm.

The fitness revolution worked because the economics aligned. Gyms made money. Nike made money. Fitbit made money. A cognitive fitness revolution has the opposite economics. Every company profiting from your attention has a direct financial incentive to make sure you never sit quietly with a book.

That's why this one will be harder than getting America to jog.

[Nitin A. Gokhale @nitingokhale]

An ode to India’s eight states that normally remain away from rest of India’s consciousness. Copyright unknown to me but since forwarded by a friend, putting it out

[Aakash Gupta @aakashgupta]

Your prefrontal cortex has two modes. Planning mode and execution mode. You can’t run both simultaneously. And that explains why “not caring” actually works.

Overthinking is planning mode stuck in a loop. Your brain simulates a future scenario, finds a threat in that simulation, which triggers another simulation. Huberman calls this rumination cycling. Your default mode network fires continuously, burning glucose on fictional scenarios while you sit paralyzed.

The moment you stop treating a decision as consequential, you starve the loop. No perceived threat means no new simulation. Your prefrontal cortex drops into execution mode by default.

Anxiety runs the same circuit. Your amygdala flags uncertainty as danger. Your cortex models outcomes to resolve it. More models means more uncertainty means more amygdala activation. The loop compounds on itself.

People who seem fearless aren’t less intelligent. They have a higher threshold for what triggers the simulation loop. Their amygdala requires a bigger signal before it hijacks prefrontal resources.

You can train that threshold. Cold exposure, controlled breathing, voluntary discomfort. All of these teach your nervous system that activation doesn’t require a response. That’s Huberman’s entire stress inoculation framework.

This tweet accidentally described a real neuroscience protocol in the worst possible packaging.

[Aakash Gupta @aakashgupta]

The neuroscience here is more damning than the advice.

Killingsworth and Gilbert tracked 5,000 people across 83 countries using real-time iPhone sampling. They pinged participants at random moments throughout the day, asked what they were doing, whether their mind was wandering, and how happy they felt.

The finding that should change how you think about your own brain: mind wandering explained 10.8% of the variance in happiness. The actual activity you were doing explained 4.6%. What you’re thinking about matters 2.3x more than what you’re doing.

And here’s the part nobody talks about. People’s minds wandered to pleasant topics 42.5% of the time. Neutral topics 31%. Unpleasant topics 26.5%. Even when wandering to pleasant topics, they were no happier than when focused on the present. The only state that reliably produced happiness was attention locked onto the current activity.

This is a prefrontal cortex problem. Your default mode network activates the moment you disengage from a task. It runs simulations of the future, replays the past, and generates the anxiety you interpret as “I’m lost.” Dr. Fabiano is pointing at the right paper. The mechanism is your brain literally cannot generate satisfaction in default mode. It can only generate rumination.

The 2,250 adults in this study averaged 46.9% of their waking hours in mind wandering. Almost half their conscious life spent in a state the data shows makes them unhappy. Training sustained attention on whatever is in front of you right now is the intervention, because the research says that’s the only configuration your brain produces wellbeing in.

Your attention is the quest.

[Amit Varma @amitvarma]

She’s straddled the worlds of Hindustani classical & popular music, & is a legend in both spaces.

Shubha Mudgal (@smudgal) joins me in episode 426 of The Seen and the Unseen to discuss her life, her music & this changing world: https://t.co/QzzIw52M9D

It's a classic. Listen!🙂

[Prajakta Mulay @Prajakta_Mulay]

@rightwingchora This is Mantra Pushpanjali. Said before offering flowers to deities. Is it Saptarishi Aarti? I doubt it is.

[🌞 Christian Van Camp 🌞 @cvcwellness]

🌞 Eye Exercises: Primal Rehab

Here’s your daily stack:
• Clockwise/counter eye circles (30 secs each)
• Figure 8 tracing (30 secs)
• Focus shift: finger to far tree
• Palming & breathwork

Eyes are muscles. Flex ’em.

[Prajakta Mulay @Prajakta_Mulay]

Sincere gratitude for taking the time to share your knowledge to educate others about our history. And consistently for years. @GodboleSandeep giving back to history with each such walk _/\_

[Sandeep @GodboleSandeep]

@sujitkolke @DeshpandeAmogh1 @AnandDandekar01 @AtoolT @maneeshbhandari @Prajakta_Mulay @VanashreeSandip @OmkarInnov @vatsala @ParthNakil2910 Thanks, glad you enjoyed.

[K S Hosalikar @Hosalikar_KS]

31 July, हवामान खात्याने महाराष्ट्रासाठी पुढील 5 दिवस मुसळधार पावसाचा इशारा जारी केला आहे. गुरुवारपासून कोकण, मध्य महाराष्ट्र आणि विदर्भात पावसाचा जोर वाढण्याची शक्यता आहे.
IMD

[Dr. Vineet Kumar @vineet_mausam]

Please note, if possible avoid pune nashik satara ghat travel on 13,14 july. #punerains
Very heavy rain warning is continuously in place for ghats. The water levels in streams , waterfalls will rise dramatically.

[Shubha Mudgal @smudgal]

Is this for real ? @TheOfficialSBI what kind of salute is this ? Are you not aware of the terrible gaffe ? And there is more than one !

[Prajakta Mulay @Prajakta_Mulay]

Is there some new trick by Zomato delivery folks or businesses to gain some points or something? Twice recently had incompletely delivered orders! @zomatocare @zomato

[पञ्चतन्त्रम् @PunchTantrum]

Jackal Gīta
—————
#Mahabharata includes a simple short Gīta told by, yes, a jackal.

This Gīta is very relevant to career, success & money chimeras of our times.

It talks about value of human life, avoiding a rat-race and how to make best of what we have.

1/7

[Prajakta Mulay @Prajakta_Mulay]

@docbhooshan If only one task - listening to whatever he has to say.
But also, feeding his meals, bathing him and getting him dressed. Always only done by parents or grandparents for my son.

[ameet singh @ameetgsingh]

Ganeshkhind

Once a beautiful tree lined avenue with a huge fountain at one end and a town square at the other.

2000 they planned to destroy the fountain and widen the road to 36 metres.

It meant, felling of several hundreds old growth banyan trees.

They did that and also initiated a series of flyover projects.

They never considered investing in world class public transportation and preserving the huge tree lined avenue.

2007 the one way flyover with three legs, one to pashan, two to Baner & three to Bremen chowk was thrown open. Another one overriding FC road chowk was also implemented.

FC road through JM road was restructured into a one way loop of traffic and the trees which were slaughtered earlier a decade ago in the late 90’s to widen both roads to keep them two way were forgotten.

Be that as it may.

Traffic pooled up at Shimla office or Shivajinagar & at COEP chowk,

A new flyover was conceived as also,

Grade separators & underpasses were conceived.

2016 all three pieces of infrastructure were fully commissioned.

The underpasses flood for 30 days out of 360 that’s 10% of the time. Annually. But, people are used to being held up for miles and miles of traffic during the climate oops rain events in pune.

All this while, public transportation and building a world class road continued to get the short shrift.

2020, a special lockdown was called in July and the three legged one way flyover at university chowk was razed to the ground.

The people were told that building the flyover was a mistake and we will build a metro and look at the chowk differently.

The metro project has been at the root cause of serious traffic jams throughout pune, but people grin and bear it. It is a cure looking for a disease. Not a single study has been released with its impact on Pune’s traffic. Nobody has any clue as to if it has been of any help at all but we keep on trucking.

No focus yet on making roads world class and public transportation too.

Since the flyover was razed, the traffic in the sky landed on the ground and hour long bottlenecks compounded by the metro construction became commonplace.

Was it so important to raze the flyover when for 3 years the metro construction and building the new flyover never began ?

Looking for a solution and desperate to show they were performing politicians and officials commenced on felling trees arbitrarily all along Ganeshkhind road.

They didn’t realise that metro station pillars at 36 metre widths were serving as 3 additional choke points for their broadened 45 metre road.

What we have now on Ganeshkhind road is 6 lanes merging into 3 demerging into 6 merging into 3 and demerging again into 6 and so on on both sides.

This is a huge practical joke being played out on Pune’s public.

It’s 2024
With the metro nowhere in sight.
Razed bridges that do not exist.
Their replacement a double decker flyover nowhere to be seen.
Footpaths destroyed.
Trees desecrated.

The bureaucrats & politicians took the theatre of the absurd further. They’ve announced yet another underpass along the same route from SB road to bypass University circle.

Yet no focus, on building world class roads or sustainable high quality public transportation.

Recently another politician sent the traffic on a one way trip a 12 kilometre loop via old Mumbai-Pune road through Ganeshkhind road through Bremen chowk via spicer college and back again…

Just cause they can’t resolve a 3.2 kilometres stretch called Ganeshkhind road.

How long will the joke be on Punekars

Your guess is as good as mine..

This is the case of everything & everyplace now.

Our nation is about the blind leading the blind.

Guarantee.

Don’t believe it, visit us at Ganeshkhind road. 25 years and counting.

@memeghnad

@bwfpune
@renukasuryavan3 @kbchsa
@FITEMaharashtra
@AreaSabha @NRCF_
@WagholiTimes
@ProblemSolver_V

@PuneTimesOnline
@punekarnews
@PuneCityLife
@PuneriSpeaks @pulse_pune @mhemachari

[Prajakta Mulay @Prajakta_Mulay]

Longer than 30 minutes wait time at University signal when controlled manually by police.

[Prajakta Mulay @Prajakta_Mulay]

@aparanjape @SidShirole

[Prajakta Mulay @Prajakta_Mulay]

@PuneCityPolice University chowk signal ला बाणेर रस्त्यावरून येणारी वाहतूक जास्त वेळ थांबवली जात आहे. शहराकडून बाणेरला येणारी वाहतूक त्या मानाने कमी असते. तरी बाणेरकडची वाहतूक थोडी लवकर लवकर सोडावी. रस्त्याच्या यशदा बाजूला गाड्यांची फार मोठी रांग होते व पलीकडचा रस्ता रिकामा राहतो