Friday, March 31, 2023

Quick notes: Campa cola | Gurtej Sandhu...

  • Cola battle: Ambani challenging Pepsi, Coke in major Indian market... To relaunch iconic 1970s Indian soda that once rivaled Coca-Cola


  • Ditching Dollar : China and Brazil to settle trade in yuan, real.
    - India, Malaysia can now trade in Indian Rupee.


  • Goldman Sachs: AI could replace equivalent of 300 million jobs.. Uberization and lower wages to ensue.


  • Gurtej Sandhu: How America's top inventor (over 1300 patents) gives back to students


  • Design Automation: Huawei makes breakthroughs in design tools for 14nm chips. . Chiplet design: China develops domestic chiplet interface. . . . Japan officially restricts sales of chipmaking equipment to China


  • Nature of the Self: You are as old as time itself.



  • Socializing without alcohol: Workplace drinking culture is fading fast. “Co-workers are second only to friends as the main source of pressure to drink.”


  • Precious water: Intel and TSMC face a new kind of competition. This time, it’s over water.


  • Project Tiger: "There is the enormous pressure of the economic transformation of India – the building of highways, roads and mines that are cutting off access to what once used to be wildlife corridors along which tigers moved unhindered".


  • Himalayas: The climate time bomb threatening India. in addition to being located in a seismic zone, Uttarakhand is threatened by accelerated melting of its glaciers.


  • Ustad Bade Ghulam Ali Khan: Dev Maheshwar Mahadev | Raag Bhupali



  • Unreadable diarrhea: The real tragedy of NYTimes is that their propaganda isn’t even interesting
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Tuesday, March 14, 2023

Quick notes: Reverse engineering | Offshore wind...

  • Reverse-engineering: Russia has been sending US weapons captured in Ukraine to Iran. “Iran has demonstrated the capability to reverse-engineer US weapons in the past. A reverse-engineered Javelin could be used by Hamas or Hezbollah to threaten an Israeli Merkava tank.”

    Iran reverse-engineered the TOW anti-tank guided missile, creating a near-perfect replica they called the Toophan. The Iranians also intercepted a US-made drone in 2011, a Lockheed Martin RQ-170 “Sentinel”, and reverse-engineered it to create a new drone that crossed into Israeli airspace in 2018 before being shot down.

    Russian fighter jet crashing into U.S drone over Black Sea:



  • Our banks are well-secured: Silicon Valley Bank committed one of the most elementary errors in banking -- handling interest rate risk -- a core function of banking business.The RBI's stringent norms, which saved the Indian banking system during the 2008 crisis, were further fine-tuned following the 2014 bad loans bout. And unlike the US, RBI's regulations on capital, provisions, and reserves apply uniformly to all commercial banks, big or small.


  • Credit rating corruption: Moody's had a 'Grade A' rating on Silicon Valley Bank — right before it collapsed.


  • Unlike Indian universities: Chinese Academy of Sciences is doing some very impressive stuff. I've yet to see any other university as forward looking in modeling and simulating process technologies. 3nm CFET Nanosheets, OCD analysis, overlay analysis, isotropic etch simulation, CVD deposition modeling


  • Professional texts in Indian languages: Indian languages finally in Tech?



  • Are Offshore Wind farms Killing the Whales? For all the finger-pointing, everyone does agree that a lot of whales are dying. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration says an “unusual mortality event” for humpback whales along the Atlantic coast has been ongoing since 2016. Critics say that the activities associated with offshore wind development, such as the driving of supports into the sea floor, can harm marine life.


  • Brahmapuram Disaster: Imagine the media reaction had Kochi fire happened in a BJP state.


  • Twitter's India Rival Integrates chatGPT: Koo will allow users to use chatGPT directly within the app to create posts about any trending event. Initially, the feature will be made available exclusively to Koo’s verified accounts.


  • Tibet Is Less Free than North Korea: Tibetan children have been separated from their parents and forced to attend state-run boarding schools, where Mandarin is the sole language of instruction and where students are subject to intense political indoctrination”.

    “No country can match the scale and sophistication of China’s surveillance state, in which residents’ activities are invasively monitored by public security cameras, urban grid managers, and automated systems that detect suspicious and banned behavior, including innocuous expressions of ethnic and religious identity.


  • Car-dependency is a burden on everyone: Why City Design is Important (and Why I Hate Houston)



  • Gen Z embracing sobriety: A growing number of young people in the UK are choosing to drink less or stay sober, rejecting the country’s boozy traditions for a healthier — and more affordable — way of life. It’s not always easy to do in a country where so much socializing, networking and deal-making revolves around alcohol.



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Wednesday, March 8, 2023

Quick notes: Trash mountains | De-dollarization...

  • Kodagu forests filling up with waste from Kerala: Kodagu is a district in Karnataka known for its green expanses and fertile agricultural grounds. These lands are now under serious threat due to the illegal dumping of truckloads of waste from Kerala.


  • Kochi city covered in toxic haze from waste dump fire: The towering Brahmapuram landfill in Kerala is the country’s latest trash mountain to catch fire, causing dangerous heat and methane emissions. India creates more methane from landfill sites than any other country


  • De-dollarization: A flood of nations is trying to cut dependance on the dollar, fearing ‘weaponization’ by the US. From India to Argentina, Brazil to South Africa and the Middle East to Southeast Asia, nations and regions have accelerated efforts in recent months towards arrangements aimed at reducing their dependence on the dollar.

    At the heart of these de-dollarization initiatives is the fear in many capitals that the US could someday use the power of its currency to target them the way it has sanctioned Russia, according to political economists and sanctions experts.


  • Dalits allege casteism at Trichy church: Only families belonging to the dominant community are considered members of the parish


  • Turkey being Turkey:


  • China Filed More Chip Patents Than US in 2022: Last year, Chinese companies filed over half of all semiconductor-related patents globally


  • Stealing crown-jewels of tech: ASML says ex-employee in China stole chipmaking tool info. What is unclear is whether this can be used by China to build its own advanced deep ultraviolet (DUV) or extreme ultraviolet (EUV) lithography scanners.


  • Why Silence is Power: Priceless Benefits of Being Silent



  • Nalanda: The university that changed the world. The library's nine million handwritten, palm-leaf manuscripts was the richest repository of Buddhist wisdom in the world, and one of its three library buildings was described by Tibetan Buddhist scholar Taranatha as a nine-storey building "soaring into the clouds".

    Only a handful of those palm-leaf volumes and painted wooden folios survived the fire – carried away by fleeing monks. They can now can be found at Los Angeles County Museum of Art in the US and Yarlung Museum in Tibet.


  • China's ChatGPT response: Baidu, Alibaba, JD.com and NetEase, some of China's biggest tech firms, have in the last week announced their plans for ChatGPT rivals.


  • LFP, a different kind of Lithium ion: LFP cells use lithium iron phosphate as the cathode and graphite as the electrode. LFP cells aren’t dependent on nickel and cobalt, two materials that are expensive and supply-constrained. The technology, led by China’s BYD a decade ago, has advanced in its latest form in the BYD Blade battery, while CATL is also a leading producer.

    While less energy dense than Lithium ion, LFP cells are far less prone to the thermal runaway that might cause fires or degradation from overheating; a range of sources now also suggest they last significantly longer.


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Wednesday, February 8, 2023

Quick notes: Mountain deities | Tiger culling...

  • Fragile Himalayan ecology: Respecting religious sentiments doesn't mean constructing 6-Lane highways. Let us not anger the deities that reside in the sacred mountains and protect us from harm. Tourism must take the form of homestead tourism, rather than the building of luxury eco-lodges.


  • Tiger culling: Kerala padres occupy tiger habitats, Marxists want them culled


  • Abrahamic mercilessness: "Shoot wild jumbos on forehead if they enter human habitations": Kerala Congress leader C P Mathew


  • Budget 2023: Centrally sponsored environment schemes have witnessed a cut in allocation in this budget.


  • Escalation: Russia and Ukraine have incentives to negotiate. The U.S. has other plans. It is replacing Ukraine as Russia’s main battlefield adversary.


  • Here's Why: Prediabetes and Diabetes are the same thing. It's just where you draw the line.



  • Capitalism does *not* work in healthcare:


  • Language = New Caste System: Are English speakers the Oppressors and native language speakers the Oppressed?


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Thursday, January 19, 2023

Quick notes: Minority status | Best engineers...

  • Minority status for Hindus: Delhi was the only govt that openly backed granting minority status to Hindus in any form at the state or UT level.

    Delhi said, "The central govt may declare the 'migrated minority status to the followers of Hinduism who are the religious minority in their origin state (i.e. J&K, Laddakh etc) and residing in Delhi after migration from their home state." . . . Why are BJP states opposing this?


  • U.S. vs. China: The race to develop the most advanced chips. After working for years to catch up on U.S. technology, China has developed a chip that can rival Nvidia’s powerful A100.



  • 12 Countries That Produce the Best Engineers in the World:
     12. Singapore
     11. Israel
     10. France
     9. Sweden
     8. South Korea
     7. The Netherlands
     6. Japan
     5. Switzerland
     4. United Kingdom
     3. Germany
     2. China
     1. United States

    China has quickly emerged as one of the best producers of some of the top engineers in the world. It spent 2.40% of its huge GDP in 2020 for the purposes of R&D. Its Chinese Academy of Sciences and Tsinghua University are two of the top go-to universities in terms of quality engineering education. 


  • Industrial espionage: How China sneaks out America's technology secrets


  • TSMC Might Cut 3nm Prices to Lure AMD, Nvidia: N3 is an expensive technology to use. N3 extensively uses extreme ultraviolet (EUV) lithography for up to 25 layers and each EUV scanner now costs $150 million - $200 million, depending on configuration. Increased costs mean lower profits for companies such as AMD, Broadcom, MediaTek, Nvidia, and Qualcomm. . . . TSMC's 3nm Journey: Slow Ramp, Huge Investments, Big Future


  • India joins lithium hunt: Not only Argentina, India is also eyeing lithium reserves in Chile and Bolivia. The Andean Plains straddling Argentina, Chile and Bolivia – collectively called ‘Lithium Triangle’ – have about 56 per cent of the world’s total identified reserve of Lithium.


  • Dr. Jason Fung: Author of The Cancer Code: A Revolutionary New Understanding of a Medical Mystery.



  • Why is alcohol so harmful? The main way alcohol causes health problems is by damaging DNA. When you drink alcohol, your body metabolizes it into acetaldehyde, a chemical that is toxic to cells. Acetaldehyde both “damages your DNA and prevents your body from repairing the damage. Once your DNA is damaged, then a cell can grow out of control and create a cancer tumor.”

    Even a little alcohol can harm your health, research shows. Alcohol also creates oxidative stress, another form of DNA damage that can be particularly harmful to the cells that line blood vessels. Oxidative stress can lead to stiffened arteries, resulting in higher blood pressure and coronary artery disease. “It fundamentally affects DNA, and that’s why it affects so many organ systems.”


  • Nepo (nepotism) babies: Those who use their parents' wealth and popularity to build their own careers. "I don't know anybody who becomes anything if they're just handed money".

    Warren Buffett wrote in 2021 that "after much observation of super-wealthy families, here's my recommendation: Leave the children enough so that they can do anything but not enough that they can do nothing".


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Tuesday, January 10, 2023

Quick notes: Foreign universities | Himalayan loot...

  • Foreign university campus: Foreign universities will presumably not have reservations. Those seeking quota benefits, therefore, will be confined to state-funded universities.


    - Foreign university campus: First level the playing field.


    - Foreign university campus: Will “superior” western education bring wokeism, minoritarianism, gender issues, racist polarisation etc?


    - Foreign university campus: Go swadeshi to avert peril.


  • 'Joshimath can't be saved': Not just Joshimath, homes have developed major cracks in Nainital, Uttarkashi, Bhatwari, Gopeshwar, Guptkashi, Karnprayag, Mussorie and a host of villages. Villagers blame the tunneling work being done on the Rishikesh-Karnprayag rail project and the dynamiting taking place for the extension of the Char Dham road for these cracks.


  • Joshimath: The neglected warning from 46 years ago: During the ramping up of the infrastructure, including the building of roads and houses, for the so-called development of Joshimath, enormous quantities of earth and boulders were removed using dynamite. Forests had also been cleared for timber used for construction in the seventies


  • How green was my valley by Madhav Gadgil: The Himalayan loot that triggered the Joshimath disaster.

    Chandiprasad's organisation took up ecodevelopment work such as soil and water conservation, erection of a stone wall to protect the forest, or tree planting. The tasks were executed by everybody working in unison. The discussions were led by a physics professor from Gopeshwar college, but stonemasons who fabricated the water mills also provided their inputs.

    Unfortunately, the govt had a monopoly on the water resources and their only interest was to construct giant projects like Tehri to supply electricity for the capital city of Delhi. This tragic diversion of all resources of Himalayas in the service of the powers that be, in fact, had begun when the British govt leased forests from the Tehri maharaja.



  • Android on RISC-V: Google is planning to bring full support for RISC-V chips to Android in the coming years, which could pave the way for RISC-V phones, tablets, smartwatches, set-top-boxes, or automotive systems, among other things.


  • Bye bye: Dell plans to phase out Chinese chips from PCs by next year


  • Taiwan-Invasion war game sees China quickly flopping: Huge cost to US, Chinese and Taiwanese militaries. At the end of the conflict, at least two US aircraft carriers would lie at the bottom of the Pacific and China’s modern navy, which is the largest in the world, would be in “shambles.”

    Those are among the conclusions the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), made after running what it claims is one of the most extensive war-game simulations ever conducted on a possible conflict over Taiwan.


  • A dud? Why is India's single-use plastic ban failing? Adequate investments have not been made to make the transition. "The might of the plastics industry, really needs a tsunami to shake it up". . . . . Single-use plastic cutlery and plates to be banned in England.


  • Hydra: The Greek island that banned wheels. A growing number of places around the world are looking to reduce reliance on cars.


  • Madhup Mudgal: Haman hai ishq mastana - Kabir Bhajan



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