Quick notes: Battery fires | Renewable power...

• Why are electric two-wheelers in India catching fire? Still blaming "inflammable Lithium" when the rest of the world mastered battery/thermal management.. "short circuits and fuses malfunctioning". . Sarkaar bleating



• Coal comes at a "massive, massive cost to the Indian people": While power from domestic coal is being sold at 4-5 rupees/kwh, that goes up to 5-8 rupees/kwh for power from imported coal (and went up to as high as 12 rupees/kwh on the spot market one day last week). Power from wind and solar, in the meanwhile, is at 3 rupees and 2.5 rupees, respectively.
  
  “50-degree heat shows that infrastructure doesn’t work. Coal power plants can’t run above 50 degrees. They break just when you need them.”



• India's savage heat exacts heaviest toll on those working outdoors: “More than 20,000 people have died in last 20 years because of heat stroke and over half of them are men aged between 30 to 60 who are working outdoors. This is not just exhaustion or discomfort. It is actually killing people.”



• Bengaluru couple living the Amish lifestyle:




• Obesity spreading rapidly in India: Phoren diet and bingeing on Netflix.



• Opposite of what Gadkari is doing: Paris plans to remove two beltway lanes to cut pollution. It would transform the highway “from a grey belt to a green belt,” by reserving one lane in each direction for taxis, buses, car-pooling and emergency access. Overall, the highway would shrink to three fully accessible lanes in each direction, from a current norm of four.



• Huge blow for Visa, MasterCard:

Apple drops card payments, switches to @UPI_NPCI payments for subscriptions and App Store purchases in India! pic.twitter.com/ABWGYQU1o3

— Rajeev Mantri (@RMantri) May 19, 2022




• How about practising what you preach? Europe admits it'll have to burn more coal as it tries to wean itself off Russian energy



• Western propaganda: America "intervenes", Russia "invades".

Quick notes: Tibet policy | Battle tank...

• India's Tibet policy: It is not that India did not have excellent strategic thinkers at the time, but Nehru decided not to use their competence. Tibet would never be discussed as a result. Today, one priority for Delhi is to have an in-depth discussion with Dharamsala as soon as possible.



• Russian weaponry: This war has revealed a major design flaw, for instance, in the T-72 main battle tank -- the wrong placement of the ammo storage compartment under the crew cupola, which tends to blow up with the first guided anti-tank munition hit midship.
  
  It is a matter of grave concern to the Indian armoured forces featuring the T-72. Maybe, this will finally convince the army headquarters to take ownership of the indigenous Arjun MBT (which handily beat the Russian T-90 and T-72 tanks in test trials). If the Ukraine crisis proves anything it is for the Indian military to 'Buy Indian'.



• Farm machinery exacting heavy toll on soil: In soil that has been squashed by heavy weight of farm machinery, air is forced out and the soil becomes compacted, leading to flooding and poor harvests. "Compaction can happen within a few seconds when we drive on the soil, but it can take decades for that soil to recover".



• Machine learning for farming applications: John Deere's autonomous tractor will usher in a new era of farming. Farmers are losing control of their machines and accuse John Deere of creating a monopoly in farm equipment manufacturing.



• Netflix losing its grip: Cancellations rise among long-standing subscribers



• Raag Nayaki Kanada (Alap): Shashwati Mandal




• When Shiva appears, Chandala disappears: The disappearance of the Chandala therefore marks the disappearance of the whole ideas he represented. The ‘meaningful nonsense’ of the Chandala of the local myth is thus changed — while the former questions the caste system, the changed version makes such an illusion, but behind it, it in fact seeks to revitalise and legitimise caste.



• Recipe for disaster: English-medium in rural primary = recipe for complete destruction of Indian talent.

Absolutely. And this policy is being pushed when the data clearly shows that Telugu medium students outperform English-medium students at primary level, *despite* Engish apartheid set against them.

English-medium in rural primary=recipe for complete destruction of Indian talent. https://t.co/cfaYxsg7pK

— Sankrant Sanu सानु संक्रान्त ਸੰਕ੍ਰਾਂਤ ਸਾਨੁ (@sankrant) May 16, 2022




• Cities markedly warmer than the countryside: "Heat islands" in and near Delhi, with nighttime temps up to 102° (40°F hotter than nearby fields).


Cities are often markedly warmer than the countryside, and that's critical in a heat wave. This image, taken by @NASA's ECOSTRESS instrument on the @Space_Station, shows "heat islands" in and near Delhi, India, with nighttime temps up to 102° F (40° hotter than nearby fields). pic.twitter.com/yjzkdjDYev

— NASA JPL (@NASAJPL) May 12, 2022




• But wait, there's a solution: Shade from street trees reduced surface temperatures by an average of 12°C. Concrete surfaces shaded permanently by a bank of trees were cooled by up to 20°C in the summer.

What if I told you there was a single intervention we could deliver in our cities that would cool them during heatwaves, reduce flooding, scrub pollutants from the air, boost biodiversity, improve public health, and even reduce crime? You wouldn't believe me. But it's true. pic.twitter.com/W1KWm6RHFk

— Jon Burke FRSA 🌍 (@jonburkeUK) May 28, 2021

Quick notes: Google translate | Turboprop...

• Google Translate adds 24 new languages: Sanskrit, Assamese, Konkani, Manipuri, Maithili, Bhojpuri, Dogri...



• India among potential partners for Embraer turboprop: New turboprop aircraft would seek to penetrate a market dominated by Franco-Italian ATR



• Forest bathing: In 1982, the Japanese Ministry of Agriculture, Forestry, and Fisheries created the term shinrin-yoku, which translates to “forest bathing” or “absorbing the forest atmosphere.”
  
  The practice encourages people to simply spend time in nature — no actual bathing required. It’s also very low impact, which means you don’t have to go for intense trail runs or hikes. The goal of forest bathing is to live in the present moment while immersing your senses in the sights and sounds of a natural setting.



• Intermittent Fasting May Have Cognitive Benefits: Eating less often can improve focus and brain health



• Rules: How to play Pickleball




• From MIPS to RISC-V: MIPS Technologies pivots to RISC-V ISA. Upcoming chips to have up to 512 cores & 1024 threads



• Open Source EDA Software - Democratizing Hardware Design: In 2018, DARPA announced that the United States will invest $100 million in new open source tools and silicon blocks to create SOCs and circuit boards.
  
  The OpenROAD initiative seeks to make it easy to go from RTL to a final manufacturable layout for SoCs and circuit boards in 24 hours. Since the 2018 launch, the project has progressed quickly - with the 1.0 integrating some twenty tools into a single app. . . . . this can be a boon for India



• Google’s Surveillance Capitalism: Each time you open an app on your phone or browse the web, an auction for your eyeballs is taking place behind the scenes thanks to a thriving market for personal data. Ad platforms transmit the location data and browsing habits of Americans and Europeans about 178 trillion times each year.
  
  By way of online activity and location, a person in the U.S. is exposed 747 times each day to real-time bidding. (The figure doesn’t include personal data transmitted by Meta Platform Inc.’s Facebook or Amazon.com Inc.’s ad networks, meaning the true measure of all broadcast data is probably much larger.) Google’s parent, Alphabet Inc. made $68 billion in revenue from the quarter ending March 31, 2022. Out of this, about $54 billion came from advertising.



• Early Christians were the original groomers: Isolate the child from their parents and guardians, make tempting promises and exploit their fear of parental authority/punishment.

Early christians were the original groomers. Isolate the child from their parents and guardians, make tempting promises and exploit their fear of parental authority/punishment. pic.twitter.com/hCK4qiN6SV

— Heliotroph (@Heliotrophy) April 27, 2022

Quick notes: ONDC | EV power suit...

• Open Network for Digital Commerce: ONDC plans to level the playing field between small retailers and e-commerce behemoths such as Amazon and Flipkart.



• Dr Jayan Thomas: Spearheading research on 'EV power suit'-- body shells with built-in super-capacitors for storing energy



• Selling EVs without batteries: The draft battery-swapping policy spoke about the Battery-as-a-Service (BaaS) model that will allow users to buy EVs without batteries and then sign up for battery subscription services. This will reduce EV costs as batteries account for 40-50 per cent of their price tags.



• Does time really exist? Investigations on 'time' yield lots of surprising and counterintuitive lessons. Time is relative, not absolute. Time always marches forward, not backward, but we still lack an explanation for the arrow of time.



• Regional, official and national: There is a persistent push from the Centre to steer a pro-Hindi course in non-Hindi states. Karnataka is more prone to this problem than many other states, because it is -- and has been -- governed mostly by national parties.



• Millets for global food security: Millets require little by way of synthetic fertilizers and pesticides, and can boost soil quality through intercropping with other plants. State intervention currently favors rice and wheat.



• Subhashita 5: Factors behind the real prosperity of nations.




• Brain drain to China: Taiwan cracks down on China poaching tech talent. Targets Chinese investing and hiring.
  
  “There is a very big fear that if top engineers are being lured away to China, they will take some trade secrets with them and that could damage the competitiveness of the Taiwanese economy.”



• Atmanirbhar China: China orders government, state firms to dump foreign PCs



• ‘30% tax on the Internet’: Elon Musk compares Apple's App Store tax to having a 30% fee for using the internet, 'definitely not ok'.

Literally 10 times higher than it should be

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) May 3, 2022




• How to Tell Google to Forget Your Data: Simply follow this link and click on the button stating “Start removal request.”



• Organizational behavior: