Yashodhara

Love science, technology, plants and animals. Energy industry professional. I also draw animal illustrations. Dog person. Suffer from apophenia.

[Greg Egan @gregeganSF]

While the Fields Medal celebrates the under-40s, the mathematician Joan Birman has, at the age of 99, solved a major open problem in representations of the Braid groups, a topic she has worked on for more than 60 years.

[Christian Keil @pronounced_kyle]

Successful maiden launch for Vikram-1!

Think of it as the Indian Electron. Roughly equivalent in size to the RocketLab rocket, also non-reusable.

[Caleb @caleb_friesen]

When I first came to India, the space industry was closed to private players.

The most well-known "startup" at that time was TeamIndus. Skyroot didn't exist.

A year later, in 2018, Skyroot was founded. Private companies in India couldn't launch rockets yet, but Pawan and Bharath forged ahead regardless, optimistic that liberalisation would happen someday.

Then, in 2020, it did. Indian companies were finally free to compete with American, Russian, European, and Chinese startups. They could build their own launch vehicles. And satellites. At an undisclosed location in the United States, Elon swallowed hard.

I was publishing videos about Indian companies on YouTube at this point. I remember thinking, "Making content about these spacetech developments is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity."

Now, ~6 years later, Skyroot has gifted India with the biggest white pill of all time. While the world watched, a team of ~1,000+ Indian optimists (with an average age of 28) flawlessly executed an orbital rocket launch.

No private space company IN THE WORLD has ever done this on their first try. As I write this, I have goosebumps. I feel incredibly privileged to have been able to witness this firsthand. I also feel inspired by the resilience, ingenuity, and wherewithal of the entire Skyroot team.

The next chapter of India's space journey has officially begun.

[Jay Anderson @TheProjectUnity]

Holy shit...

The bacterial flagellar motor is a reversible, nanoscale rotary engine that powers bacterial motility. Driven by an electrochemical ion gradient, it converts chemical energy into mechanical rotation.

Are these Indian temple pillars... is this... 🤯

[Historic Vids @historyinmemes]

Nearly 2,000 years ago, Rome ran a trade deficit with India. Roman writers complained that vast amounts of gold were flowing east as wealthy Romans eagerly imported Indian spices, gemstones, silk, and other luxury goods, making it one of history’s earliest recorded concerns about a trade imbalance.

“India takes 50 million sesterces from our Empire every year.” — Pliny the Elder, writing in Natural History, complained that Rome’s appetite for Indian luxury goods was draining the empire’s wealth.

Nearly 2,000 years ago, the Roman Empire maintained a thriving maritime trade network with India through the Red Sea and across the Indian Ocean. After sailors learned to harness the seasonal monsoon winds, direct voyages became faster, safer, and more reliable, greatly expanding trade.

Roman merchants imported black pepper, pearls, ivory, gemstones, fine cotton textiles, and other luxury goods from India, while exporting wine, glassware, coral, metals, and silverware. Because Roman exports did not match the value of these imports, merchants often paid the difference in gold and silver.

Archaeologists have uncovered thousands of Roman coins, amphorae, and other artifacts at ancient trading sites across India, highlighting the scale of Indo-Roman commerce. Pliny’s complaint is one of the earliest surviving written criticisms of a persistent trade deficit and the outflow of precious metals to pay for imported luxury goods.

[Morgan Housel @morganhousel]

A Russian saying on nostalgia: "The past is more unpredictable than the future."

[Pyrate @CEOLandshark]

One hack to understand what you're naturally good at - look at places where your standards are way higher than average, just naturally.

[🎩Laird of the Manor🎩 @LairdOfThManor]

Torpenhow Hill, England

When the Saxons arrived and asked the locals what that hill was called, the Welsh replied, “Pen,” which simply means hill in Welsh.

The Saxons, apparently not spotting they’d already been given the full answer, added their own word for hill: tor. So it became Torpen - literally Hill Hill.

A few centuries later, the Norse turned up and repeated the exercise, adding haugr, their word for hill. Now it was effectively Torpenhaugr - Hill Hill Hill.

Then the English arrived, looked at the whole thing, shrugged, and added “Hill” on the end for good measure.

Thus we ended up with Torpenhow Hill:
Hill Hill Hill Hill.

It’s comforting to know that for over a thousand years, successive generations have been independently deciding that the previous lot hadn’t made it quite clear enough that it was, in fact, a hill.

Language is magnificent.
Humans… less so.🤷🏻‍♂️🤣

[Bastien Fachan @BastienFachan]

It's 9pm local time in London, everyone in the Royal Box has left the building, and the camera pans to the one person who stayed to watch the last match of the day...

Roger Federer, the winningest men's champion in Wimbledon history.

Cinema.

[Aakash Gupta @aakashgupta]

Taiwan solved tax evasion in 1951 with a trick so cheap it should embarrass every tax authority on the planet.

The problem was an all-cash economy full of small shops. A merchant pockets the cash, skips the receipt, and the sale never existed. Auditors can't catch what was never recorded, and hiring enough of them to watch every noodle stand costs more than the missing tax.

So finance chief Ren Xianqun flipped the incentive. Print a lottery number on every receipt. Draw winners every two months on live TV. Top prize today: NT$10 million, about $310K.

Suddenly the customer and the shopkeeper want opposite things. The merchant wants the sale off the books. The customer wants the ticket. And there are millions more customers than merchants. Every transaction now carries a built-in witness demanding the paper trail.

Year one, reported tax revenue jumped 75%, from NT$29 million to NT$51 million. Seventy-five years later, roughly 70% of Taiwanese still play. Convenience stores redeem the smallest NT$200 prizes at the register, so even a coffee receipt feels like a scratch card.

The elegant part is what the audit force costs. The prize pool runs about NT$7 billion a year, roughly $20 million. In exchange, the government gets 23 million unpaid auditors working every checkout line in the country, forever. No inspector general on earth delivers that coverage at that price.

Greece, Italy, Portugal, and Slovakia all copied it. The most effective compliance tool ever built looks like a game, and that's exactly why it works.

[Science Postcard @Sciencepostcard]

The human eye contains no mechanism for detecting color. Photoreceptor cells detect electromagnetic wavelengths and
convert them into electrical signals. The visual cortex then constructs the experience of color from those colorless frequency inputs. Every color perceived
by any human being in history was built inside the brain. The external world contains no color. Only wavelength.

Hubel, D.H. & Wiesel, T.N. Nobel
Prize in Physiology or Medicine. 1981.

[The Math Flow @TheMathFlow]

Sine and Cosine waves are...nothing but the shadows of a spinning circle.

[Dylan O'Sullivan @DylanoA4]

How does C. S. Lewis do that, every paragraph is a book

[Shashank Mattoo @MattooShashank]

Journalist: If I ask you who are your two greatest leaders in the world, who would they be? I assume one is Xi. Who is the other?

Trump: Modi is very good. India has had some very good numbers. Modi stays out of wars which is smart. India is the biggest

[Nick Collins @nickcollins1953]

For four thousand years, the Indian subcontinent was the centre of world trade. Sumerian tablets record Indian ships reaching Mesopotamia in the third millennium BC. Rome ran a permanent trade deficit with India. By 1600, Surat was the richest port on earth.

Then, within a single lifetime, India lost its maritime supremacy almost entirely.

The conventional explanation is that Europe arrived with superior ships and weapons. It is a comforting story and it is largely wrong. The deeper cause was internal.

Indian commerce was extraordinarily sophisticated. Surat's leading merchant, the Jain financier Virji Vora, was reputedly the richest man in the world; the East India Company borrowed from him. Merchants of every religion and origin traded together because the system rested on two foundations: religious toleration, established by Akbar, and predictable, low-tariffs. Customs duties were around five per cent. Contracts were honoured. Trust was the real currency.

There was one structural weakness. In Venice, Amsterdam and London, the state and the merchant class shared an interest in trade and invested in it together. In Mughal India, the ruling elite was indifferent to commerce. Merchants financed the state; the state never encouraged merchants.

When Aurangzeb became hostile, merchants had no protection. Religious toleration was abandoned. Temples were destroyed, punitive taxes on non-Muslims reimposed, the Sikh Guru executed. Forty years of war followed. East India Company imports from India fell ninety per cent in seven years. Eight thousand merchants abandoned Surat in a single exodus.

They relocated, many of them to an insignificant island Britain had received as a royal wedding dowry, because it offered the security and toleration the Mughal state had destroyed. It also offered English Common Law. Within a generation Bombay was the commercial capital of India. The Wadia family built the Royal Navy's finest ships there. The Tata dynasty traces its origins to this migration.

Europe did not defeat Indian commerce. It inherited it, by providing the conditions Indian merchants needed and their own rulers had thrown away.

This is not an argument about colonialism. It is an argument about something more fundamental, and it is the thread running through all three of my books on maritime trade. The second ‘The Millennium Maritime Trade Revolution’ is subtitled ‘How Asia Lost Maritime Supremacy.’ It is hardly ever lost to a stronger rival but when a society stops valuing the openness, toleration and commercial purpose that made it great. Portugal did it. The Dutch Republic did it. Britain, in the 20th century, did it too.

The conditions of prosperity are always a choice. And they can be unmade by a single generation that comes to value something else more.

Link to the full Substack essay with sources is below.

[Epic Maps 🗺️ @theepicmap]

Friendly reminder of how big the Pacific Ocean is

[Nick Collins @nickcollins1953]

40 years in shipping gave me one unusual qualification as a historian: I had no academic orthodoxies to protect.

When I began researching the history of maritime trade, I followed the sea lanes backwards into deep antiquity. Without exception, they converged on the Indian subcontinent. This was not the book I had intended to write.

I must give credit to my editor, who gave an unknown author with a controversial approach, an opportunity. His first attempts to find peer reviewers encountered significant resistance. The argument that India sat at the centre of ancient world trade, not its periphery, was considered, to put it gently, inconvenient.

What I found, and what I could not stop finding, is that placing India at the centre of world history does not simply revise one chapter. It cascades. Correct the starting assumption and you are forced to reconsider the origins of mathematics, medicine, philosophy, linguistics, religion. Each conclusion leads to another. I came to call these the collateral heresies.

My three books explain the architecture of how they connect.

If you work in a field where received wisdom is protected by institutional interest rather than evidence, you will recognise the pattern. The question is whether the evidence eventually wins.

[Fermat's Library @fermatslibrary]

On this day 382 years ago Evangelista Torricelli described an experiment in a letter to a friend. Fill a meter-long glass tube with mercury, close it, flip it into a basin of mercury. The column falls to 76 cm. Always 76 cm. The gap above the mercury was the first vacuum ever made, something Aristotle had called impossible. Torricelli explained what holds the column up:

"We live submerged at the bottom of an ocean of the element air, which by unquestioned experiments is known to have weight."

The mercury is not pulled from above. It is pushed from below by the weight of the atmosphere on the basin. One page, two revolutions: vacuums exist, and air is an ocean with us at the bottom. Four years later Pascal had a barometer carried up a mountain and watched the column drop.

[Sergey Alexashenko @SAlexashenko]

Google equity raises

[Interesting things @awkwardgoogle]

The tongue of a woodpecker wraps around its skull to protect its brain while pecking