Ashish

geek | history buff | Lived in 7 countries | Returned to India. RTs are not endorsements!

[Elon Musk @elonmusk]

Next year, I will give one of my SpaceX shares to every kid in America.

This will be the first of many.

[Omar Abbas Hyat | ഒമർ അബ്ബാസ് @OmarAbbasHyat]

Pakistanis should be eternally thanking their lucky stars, that India’s Pakistan policy is mostly dictated by culturally empathetic North Indian Babus, otherwise, every time a South Indian realist (with nothing in common with Pakistan - language or culture) got a chance, he took Pakistan to cleaners: S. Jaishankar (Tamil, suspended Indus Waters Treaty, called Pakistan a bad neighbour using terror as policy, enforced no talks with terror), G. Parthasarathy (Tamil, High Commissioner during Kargil, argued terrorism and dialogue cannot coexist), Parvathaneni Harish (Telugu, called Pakistan a global epicentre of terrorism, defended IWT suspension), Syed Akbaruddin (Hyderabad, isolated Pakistan at UN post-Article 370), K. Nagaraj Naidu (Hyderabad, affirmed J&K as integral at UN), Sibi George (Kerala, Political Counsellor in Islamabad under terror-first framework), V. Ravichandran (Tamil Nadu cadre, Deputy NSA involved in kinetic counter-terror responses), N. Parthasarathi (Karnataka, served in Pakistan, framed its identity as non-Indian under Army control), VK Krishna Menon (Kerala, marathon UN speech defending Kashmir position), Gopalaswami Parthasarathy (Tamil, High Commissioner managing Kashmir diplomacy ruling out plebiscite), Sandeep Kumar Bayyapu (Telangana, UN mission team defending Kashmir and countering Pakistani narratives), P. Kumaran (Counsellor in Islamabad during tensions, later senior role in terror-first approach).

[Minhaz Merchant @MinhazMerchant]

Washington & Beijing worry that if India can grow at nearly 8% a year amid global wars, $100 oil, trade tariffs & El Niño drought, what might its growth rate be when the clouds clear? My @firstpost column https://t.co/NTmVsqAxB7

[Sensei Kraken Zero @YearOfTheKraken]

There are only two permanent solutions to the Bangladesh problem:
1. They give us all of their Hindu population and the land necessary to settle them
2. An independent nation for Bengali Hindus carved out from the existing Bangladesh Territory

There is no other way.

[Parimal @Fintech03]

This is a fantastic story about an East India Company mathematician claiming the Hindus understood the Binomial theorem in whole numbers.

Unfortunately, we hardly were taught all of this...

Year was 1790 and the city was Calcutta. Reuben Burrow, a Company surveyor, dropped a Sanskrit puzzle into Asiatic Researches.

The puzzle goes like this: A raja's palace has 8 doors. Open them one at a time, two at a time, three, on up to all eight together. How many ways are possible?

The Sanskrit rule goes 8, 28, 56, 70, 56, 28, 8, 1. Add it up, and we get 255. Look closely and you find those are binomial coefficients. Europe called the same pattern Pascal's triangle.

Burrow was a tenant farmer's son from Leeds. Walked four days to London at 18, taught himself Sanskrit once he got to India. He worked the rule through and wrote that the Hindoos (his words) understood it in whole numbers "to the full as well as Briggs, and much better than Pascal".

The paper never named the book but the puzzle matches Bhaskara's Lilavati, written around 1150 CE.

Source: Asiatic Researches vol 2, Calcutta 1790, pp 487-497.

Photo 1: p 494, the "much better than Pascal" line..

Photo 2: p 495, the palace puzzle and the rule setup

Photo 2: p 496, the total 255 and Burrow's proof. All are 1790 print, public domain.

[Statvora 📊 @statvora]

95% of world history btw

[Chenthil @jcrajan00]

256 GW. That was India's peak demand on August 27, a new record, and almost nobody wrote about it. Which is the whole problem with how we read this number.

Five years ago 200 GW would have meant rolling blackouts across three or four states. What changed isn't luck. 20 GW of solar went in this year alone, the gas peakers are finally earning their keep, and interstate transmission has roughly doubled, so a surplus in one corner actually reaches a deficit in another.

Here's what worries me though. We keep treating 256 as the ceiling, the thing to be proud of. It isn't the ceiling. It's the floor. Data centres are crossing 2 GW and climbing, EV charging load is just starting, and the new fabs pull power like small towns. Put it together and the demand curve bends sharply upward well before 2030, far past where we sit today.

The grid caught up to yesterday's India. The real test is whether it's being built for the India that shows up in four years. That's the story nobody's writing.

[Yadu @Yaduvam]

The World as Known to Ancient India

Ancient Sanskrit names for world regions are incredibly goated. We should honestly bring some of them back into use.

[Nassim Nicholas Taleb @nntaleb]

Another way the current administration is trapped in the ZERO-SUM FALLACY: The H-1B visa situation.
+ You are NOT taking a job from a citizen, rather creating jobs by increasing overal economic output. Plus these people (even vegetarians) SPEND locally.
+ The US has long been benefiting from other countries' brain drain; without it its edge wd collapse. Tesla, Von Braun, von Neumann, Fermi & Einstein did NOT each take the job of a citizen.
+ It the problem is anti-Indian racism, say it, don't play games.

[chimera @chimeraxmachina]

corruption in the West is so rampant they had to rebrand it as “lobbying“ so maps like this can maintain their propagandistic value

[HinduACTion @HinduACT]

There are anti-Hindu racists on social media that are mapping locations of Hindu temples and where American Hindus live.
What could go wrong? @FBIDirectorKash

[Rep. Dave Min @CongressMin]

Sad but not surprised to hear of the mass shooting plot against the Hindu community in Aurora, IL. The Trump administration and its MAGA allies have continued to encourage white nationalism and anti-Asian hate over the past two years, whether it was DHS’s ad campaign calling on “Mr. Singh” to stop driving trucks and deport himself (which led to the stabbing death of a Sikh truck driver a few days later), a MAGA Texas state legislator calling out South Asian UT Austin football fans as “foreigners” trying to displace real Americans, or so much more.

The decent people of this country must continue to work together to stamp out hate and racism. Thankful to the suspect’s coworkers who reported the threat and to Aurora police who acted swiftly to prevent a tragedy.

[Journalist V @OnTheNewsBeat]

this demon drove 50 miles and had researched the specific temple for 2 months
he was certainly motivated.

Things could have been very bad

[Balaji @balajis]

Yes, AI is rapidly advancing mathematics (and theoretical physics problems that are essentially mathematical). Like Ramanujan’s notebooks, human mathematicians will spend months (years?) poring over the stream of papers that AI effortlessly generates, hoping to verify and understand them, probably until math itself (via Lean) becomes a branch of computer science like almost everything else.

However, after math and physics, there is still a next scientific frontier: chemistry, and especially biology and medicine.

I mean, it was already the frontier, but it’s the next one too. AI can crush deterministic math problems on the computer, but biomedicine is a highly empirical, noisy, multivariate, and yet often predictable domain.

Thus, AI radically increases our ambitions in biomedicine. All the omics data, all the messy literature, it can all be synthesized and analyzed in a flash. This is what the labs mean when they talk about curing all diseases. The tooling is available to take cracks at biomedical problems previously thought impossible.

Midjourney is doing this, Chan Zuckerberg is doing this, Anthropic is doing this, but there will be so much more.

[Noah Smith 🐇🇺🇸🇺🇦🇹🇼 @Noahpinion]

Who could have predicted that anti-Indian hate would turn violent??

Who could have seen this coming???

[FBI Chicago @FBIChicago]

🚨#ARREST: Thanks to a coordinated investigation led by the @PalatineIL Police Department, @MountProspectPD, and #FBIChicago, Alexandros Paporakis was taken into custody after local law enforcement received information about a potential mass shooting. To read more about this case, please visit: https://t.co/PtFsgAHv4Y.

Special Agent in Charge Ryan Whalen released this statement following the charging announcement by the Cook County State's Attorney's Office: “The FBI aggressively works alongside our local and state law enforcement partners to identify, investigate, and dismantle any threats of violence driven by radical ideologies. Thanks to the swift action by the Palatine and Mount Prospect Police Departments, the subject was taken into custody without harm to our community. The FBI values these strong partnerships and will continue to use every law enforcement and prosecutorial resource available to bring any offender using fear or violence to justice.”

The FBI takes all threats of violence seriously. The public is reminded to immediately report this criminal activity to law enforcement by calling 9-1-1. Non-urgent incidents can also be securely reported to the FBI by calling 1-800-CALL-FBI (225-5324) or online at https://t.co/YsyApSvbbb. Tips can remain anonymous.

[Congressman Raja Krishnamoorthi @CongressmanRaja]

I am horrified that a white supremacist allegedly attempted to massacre Indian Americans at a Hindu temple in Aurora. This is where the poison of anti-Indian hatred and white supremacy can lead, and we cannot wait until innocent people are killed to take it seriously. I am grateful to the coworkers who sounded the alarm and the law enforcement officers who intervened. Every American deserves to live and worship without fear, and we must stand together against hatred in all its forms. https://t.co/HbMleO2XPL

[David Vance @DavidVance]

Facts matter

[Nirmalya Kajuri @Kaju_Nut]

The premise is false. When Einstein was solving general relativity, there was zero contact with experiment. He was motivated by the incompatibility between two theories---special relativity and Newton's theory of gravity. The only real-world constraint guiding him was that the theory should make the same predictions as Newtonian gravity when it comes to our solar system.

The match with something observed---the perihelion shift of Mercury---came only after he had written down the whole theory.

That's an example of an impactful breakthrough where the bottleneck was intelligence/imagination/perseverance. The absence of sensory input did not make Einstein hallucinate!

String theory is likewise motivated between the incompatibility of two theories: quantum theory and general relativity. It is similarly guided by the demand that it reproduce general relativity at low energies, and it remains the only approach to quantum gravity that does so.