Dear L, Our general notion of human intelligence is a fairly narrow one. It’s not very different from the off-the-shelf variant of intelligence that Oxford describes as the ability to acquire and apply knowledge and skills. It disregards one deeply rooted aspect of human intelligence; most of our intelligence…
Dear L, During college, I used to occupy a corner room in our house which was ostensibly my workshop & lab. I used to build things there, mostly electronics, sometimes run experiments etc. I liked this place much more than the workshops in our college. It was my fun little…
Dear L, Once, on a walk with my Father, he mused about a question that I never managed to forget. How high a kilometre is, he had asked. The question wasn’t meant to poke at the international body of standards and measurements — what had struck me the most was…
Dear L, On one hot summer day, back when I was in school, a teacher told us about a — at that time peculiar — a habit of a famous Bengali poet, Rabindranath Tagore [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rabindranath_Tagore] who wouldn’t just publish his work. He would have a…
Dear L, Among very few of my pet peeves, one of my most long-standing ones is my mild repulsion towards scientific descriptions being boiled down to words, devoid of any underlying mathematical strata. In a world full of contradictions and misinterpretations, I was and still am to a degree, a…