- David Perell writes a mid-year review. It is worth reading in full, and there were multiple excerpts that I wanted to include here.
Writing is nature’s way of showing you how sloppy your thinking usually is. My mind tends to skip between topics, and the quarantine has made it worse because my Twitter usage has increased. At its worst, I develop BuzzFeed Brain where I find myself skimming instead of reading, secretly hoping my next intellectual breakthrough is just a thumb-scroll away. Long-form writing, however, re-activates my focus muscle and that’s why I do it.
https://www.perell.com/blog/mid-year-review
2. Scroll on what Mumbai’s coastal road will look like. Next week’s episode on urbanization with Binoy will have this as a primary focus – keep an eye out for that one! The pictures are worth going through – full screen on a laptop/desktop recommended.
But the proposal reflects one of the many flaws that urban planners have found with the Mumbai coastal road project: it is expensive, beyond the city’s means and capacity and is likely to congest the city even further.
https://amp.scroll.in/article/876929/what-will-mumbais-coastal-road-actually-look-like-an-eyesore-say-these-architectural-projections
A group of architects and urban planners in Mumbai have attempted to highlight these problems through visual representations of the planned coastal road. Since 2016, the group – named the Bandra Collective – has created several animated GIFs that superimpose artists’ impressions of the coastal road on actual photographs of Mumbai’s landmark coastline.
3. Varun Grover raises some interesting questions in an article about caste in the Indian Express:
There are two main arguments against reservations — one, they bypass merit and two, they should be given on the basis of economic status alone because otherwise “rich Dalits are taking undue advantage of the policy”.
https://indianexpress.com/article/opinion/columns/reservation-vinod-kambli-dalits-varun-grover-6501257/lite/
The broad logical observation here is that one can’t offer both these arguments together. If we are okay with poverty-based reservations then merit is not a genuine concern. That means we hate its bypassing only when a ‘lower-caste’ person gets ahead and not when a poor from our own caste does. That’s casteism 101.
4. If you have kids at home, this is worth it – I and my daughter are working through it, and it is genuinely fun, and educational!
Welcome to Camp Google. Two engaging weeks of interactive activities and assignments which will make this extended summer memorable for kids at home.
https://events.withgoogle.com/summercamp2020/#content
Starting 1st July, 2020, we will share exciting and innovative assignments with your kids to help them explore skills such as painting, writing, storytelling, arts & crafts, coding and cooking. These assignments will also include internet safety tips which will teach you how to be responsible digital citizens while being safe online.
5. I haven’t read this just yet (I’m writing this on the 15th of July), but it was recommended by Grant Sanderson – and that’s good enough for me!
But Gödel’s shocking incompleteness theorems, published when he was just 25, crushed that dream. He proved that any set of axioms you could posit as a possible foundation for math will inevitably be incomplete; there will always be true facts about numbers that cannot be proved by those axioms. He also showed that no candidate set of axioms can ever prove its own consistency.
https://www.quantamagazine.org/how-godels-incompleteness-theorems-work-20200714
EconForEverybody 