Gautam Pradhan

Co-founder, Earthmetry | data, models, decision-making | climate change, energy transition | history, geopolitics, nature

[Gautam Pradhan @gautamnpradhan]

Flood risk map for Greater Bengaluru 🌧️

The impact of floods depends on amount of rainfall, the shape of the land (topology), the drainage capacity and the affected people/assets.

The following plots are simple ones based only on topology.

Darker blue = greater risk

1/n

[Gautam Pradhan @gautamnpradhan]

@sidin A typical human overthinks and writes badly. This is AGI.

[Gautam Pradhan @gautamnpradhan]

@prasannavishy This can fund 500+ electric AC buses.

[Gautam Pradhan @gautamnpradhan]

@thevirdas This is me

[Gautam Pradhan @gautamnpradhan]

@sidin The kids usually completely ignore it. If you stick on till the end you can carry home a week’s worth!

[Gautam Pradhan @gautamnpradhan]

@sidin There is more to BDSM than slapping though!

[Gautam Pradhan @gautamnpradhan]

@ku1deep Govt needs to first fix basics like procurement and contracting for its spending. Allocating risk capital needs a skill level and ecosystem that is way higher than that.

[Gautam Pradhan @gautamnpradhan]

@rohitsabu_ @paulg At a minimum your redistribution process should not destroy wealth. For this, they need an understanding of how wealth is created, nurtured and maintained in the first place. Otherwise they risk making things worse. Many many such examples exist.

[shreshth mohan @shreshthmohan]

i’ve documented 30-odd spots within 2 hours or 80 km from bangalore

https://t.co/yIgPhBAxp3

[jss @jsensarma]

Analysis on countries (or firms) that credits one factor (human capital here) for success is by definition off.

Market + Talent + Capital = Outcome

(Talent substitutable by Natural Resources as well)

Questions & Counter-Points: 🧵

[Gautam Pradhan @gautamnpradhan]

@ku1deep @championswimmer The other way to look at this is as productivity goes up, companies are paying more for the optionality of having people on the bench, nominally engaged in some work. Can be thrown into priorities if they come up.

Probably more true for the biggest tech companies.

[Gautam Pradhan @gautamnpradhan]

@ku1deep If you have a lot of darker trousers, start with the cream one I guess. It’ll also reflect radiation in summer better. If pants are light then a darker grey or navy looks better.

[Gautam Pradhan @gautamnpradhan]

@ku1deep @sowmyarao_ I did it for a while (200g). As an alternative for GOMAD during my initial days of trying Starting Strength.

Was palatable if the paneer was soft and just warmed up. It’s not good for overall calories though.

[Sann @san_x_m]

Her name was Lini Puthussery.

She was 31 years old. A nurse at the Perambra Taluk Hospital in Kozhikode Kerala. She had been working there for six years.

She had two sons. Ritul was five years old. Sidharth was two years old.

In May 2018 the Nipah virus arrived in Kerala. Two brothers and a relative were brought to the hospital with symptoms nobody had seen before.

Lini was on night duty when they arrived. She cared for them through the night.

They died soon after. Confirmed Nipah positive.

By Friday Lini herself had fallen ill.

She was shifted to the ICU at Kozhikode Medical College Hospital.

When she learned she had contracted the Nipah virus she asked the hospital not to allow her two sisters to visit. She did not want them exposed.

From the ICU she wrote a note to her husband Sajeesh.

“Sajeesh I am almost on my way. I don’t think I will be able to see you. Sorry. Please look after our little ones and take them to the Gulf. They should not be alone like our father. Lots of love.”

She died on May 21, 2018.

Her body was cremated quickly to prevent the spread of infection. Her family could not say a proper goodbye.

She did not hesitate when the patients arrived.

She did not ask who would care for her sons if she fell ill.

She showed up for her shift and did her job.

Today is International Nurses Day.

Her name was Lini Puthussery. She deserves to be remembered.

[Gautam Pradhan @gautamnpradhan]

@is_rajvardhan @ku1deep Please share link! Have DMed.

[Niraj Rai @NirajRai3]

Genome India Project is out. 59 of 83 populations show higher inbreeding than Ashkenazi Jew- signals that we are only seeing the tip of the iceberg; scaling this to over 4,900 communities has the power to fundamentally redefine global clinical genetics.
https://t.co/u7hetSLrXF

[Aakash Gupta @aakashgupta]

The signal strength hitting Earth from Voyager 1 is less than one trillionth of a watt.

To put that in perspective, your phone’s WiFi signal is roughly 100 billion times stronger, and it drops a connection walking between rooms.

NASA picks up Voyager’s whisper using arrays of 70-meter antennas, then reconstructs coherent data from it at 160 bits per second. That’s slower than a 1990s modem. Downloading a single photograph at that rate would take weeks.

The spacecraft itself runs on 8.8 kg of decaying plutonium-238 that generated 470 watts at launch in 1977. Today it produces roughly 200 watts, losing about 4 watts per year. NASA has been shutting down instruments one by one since the 1980s to keep the math working. They turned off the cosmic ray sensor just this year.

And here’s the part nobody’s talking about: there is exactly one antenna on Earth that can send commands to Voyager. Deep Space Station 43 in Canberra. It went offline for major upgrades from May 2025 through early 2026. During that window, if Voyager had a critical fault, the team would have had to wait months to respond.

A 48-year-old spacecraft built on 1970s computing, running on a plutonium battery that’s lost 60% of its output, transmitting at a power level that barely qualifies as existing, from a distance where light itself takes 23 hours to arrive. And a German observatory just casually picked up its carrier signal on a live stream.

The engineering margin NASA built into this mission was designed for 4 years to Saturn. Everything after that is borrowed time the engineers keep extending by doing math with 200 watts.

[Snigdha Sur @snigdhasur]

A cautionary tale for fellow startup founders: @namecheap just sued me personally 🧵

[Gautam Pradhan @gautamnpradhan]

@RobRoyce_ @awjuliani @MTabarrok @MichaelNStruwig Yea, I concede on this one.

[Gautam Pradhan @gautamnpradhan]

In a clock you don’t have to understand how far the 3 is from the centre vs the 9. You just need to know the angles that are being swept and so it’s intuitive.

It’s hard to keep 12 different distances from the centre in your head (which is what a polar plot will require you to do).

[Gautam Pradhan @gautamnpradhan]

@awjuliani @MTabarrok @MichaelNStruwig This is 2D data best plotted as a simple line chart which can be understood at a passing glance.

Both 2D polar and 3D plots will be slower to interpret.