Deep Reflections

I recently saw the movie The Father (2020) by Florian Zeller. It’s a poignant movie on the themes of aging and senility. Anthony Hopkins acts as the father who is losing memory, and along with it, a sense of what’s happening around him. To his family and us, it is abundantly clear, but the old man lives in a world of denial. What results is continuously escalating conflict, culminating in a moving climax. In this heartbreaking scene, the old father cries like a baby, and starts wailing “Mother! O Mother!” to the nurse who is caring for him. The nurse, instinctively, comforts him like a child.

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Homebound in the pandemic, I purchased a bird-feeder last December. I’ve had a lot to observe since then. What follows are notes, photographs, and video clips. I conclude with tips and advice if you’d like to try it as well.

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I am an engineer by profession but I like to read about psychology and psychotherapy out of interest. As I have become familiar with it, I’ve found it to be highly logical.

I will specify the system first, and then use it to make some suggestions for our improvement.

I originally started writing this in July 2021 but it took several revisions before I felt it was polished enough to post.

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Hailstorms can pose a problem, if you’re installing solar panels. Large hailstones, those that are 2 inches wide or larger, can damage solar panels.

If you are solar panel provider, you typically want to play it safe and install where there has been no hailstorms, historically.

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Sorry about that jargon soup, but this post is technical and is intended for such audiences.

I recently had an opportunity to speed things up by 10X:

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I recently read Futureproof by Kevin Roose. Kevin is a technology writer for The New York Times. The book has two parts to it; I skimmed through the first part but found the second part interesting. It is a list of nine rules designed to help us, humans, navigate a world increasingly run by machines.

I want to call out four of them that struck me as very insightful.

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I’ve previously talked about detecting irrigated croplands in this blog. I used classical machine learning techniques in it, i.e. we decide what features to use, we fit a model or an ensemble of models, we predict. Modern machine learning, or what the press calls “Artificial Intelligence”, has gone way beyond it. In this post, I want to talk about a different approach to detect irrigated croplands. This method gave 95% test-set accuracy on a random sample of 2000 pictures from California. [Read More]

Back in 2004, when I was in Bangalore and still fresh out of college, I was mesmerized by a book with a title that asked you to kill the Buddha if you met him. The murderous Zen title notwithstanding, the book was written by a psychotherapist who drew parallels between literary characters and his patients. I wanted to read more such books, but as I said, I was in India and it was 2004. Only in the last year have I delved deep again into the realm of psychotherapy.

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I built a mechanical Lego piano. It very much looks like a real piano, both on the outside and inside. It has keys, gears, hammers… its designers are piano teachers. The music comes from a companion Bluetooth app, but the piano makes convincing movements. I’m very impressed. This is my first Lego project, and the fact that I could do something this complex tells you how mature and professional Lego’s assembly instructions pictures are. [Read More]

I’ve previously posted on this blog about a machine-learning model we built to detect irrigation globally.

I’m happy to report that our work is now published as a paper in the journal Advances in Water Resources.

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