R.P. Aditya

Pascal, the programming language he created in the early days of personal computing, offered a simpler alternative to other languages in use at the time.

N.I.H. researchers found notable differences between the immune systems and other physiological functions of patients with ME/CFS and those of healthy patients.

Compelled by stories he’d heard as a child, the photographer Showkat Nanda traveled to the high Himalayas to see Gurez, a valley long off-limits to most travelers.

His mouth always tasted like metal and he vomited several times a week. Nothing seemed to help. Then his sister got him the help he needed.

In an unlikely act of altruism observed two years ago, a male elephant seal prevented a younger animal from drowning.

Article URL: https://philosophygeek.medium.com/why-g%C3%B6del-escher-bach-is-the-most-influential-book-in-my-life-49d785a4e428

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39253099

Points: 380

# Comments: 307

Mental health practitioners are hiking, camping and braving the elements with their clients — all in an effort to help them connect with the Earth, and with themselves.

A globalized art market has brought attention to Ghanaian artists like Ibrahim Mahama. On an arts-focused trip to the West African country, a writer finds a thriving scene following its own agenda.

The molecules that silence a woman’s second X chromosome can confuse the immune system, a new study suggests.

I walked into a tattoo shop down the street to get my first tattoo. It was going to say memento mori. In latin: “Remember you will die.” It’d be a permanent reminder that time is precious.

Nobody working in the shop says anything to me. I sit down and start leafing through those books of ready-made tattoos.

Tattoo machines are buzzing away in the background, laying down lines of permanent ink, and...

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His 1964 discovery with Robert W. Wilson settled a debate over the origin and evolution of the universe.

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C. Parvati was born and raised in Bangalore, but she never had the opportunity to visit the temples and tourist sites because she could not afford to spend money on such recreational activities. “Now, I am able to take my children and show them these places even within my budget when school has holidays,” says Parvati. 

What changed? She’s been able to save money since the Karnataka state government made public transportation free for women in June. 

Karnataka is one of several Indian states that have recently implemented a free bus pass for women. The initiative is called Shakti, which in Hindi means “strength.” In 2019, Delhi was the first place in the country to provide women with complimentary tickets printed on pink paper, and earlier this year, the state administration reported that more than one billion have been used thus far. Other states that have launched similar programs include Tamil Nadu, Punjab and Telangana.

The purpose of such policies is to bring more women into the workforce by lowering the cost and simplifying the process of working and traveling. According to the World Bank, India has one of the lowest rates of female labor participation in the world, with less than 25 percent of women over the age of 15 employed as of 2022, a decrease from 27 percent in 2012. In India, men frequently restrict the financial options available to women. And although these same men may object to their wives working outside the home, free travel gives women a choice that they did not have previously. Though women are free to work, if their commute is too expensive or unpredictable, they frequently choose not to. The governments that have put the program into place say that it has been successful and they intend to extend it.

Often, marginalized women are those who have to work every day to feed their families, and are pressed for time with cooking, household chores and helping with elderly family members. Taking the bus helps them to save time and be efficient in their work. Without the bus, these women would walk on average three to five kilometers a day, which can cut down their annual earnings by up to a quarter. 

“The convenience of the free bus saves them time and helps them in earning a double income,” says Tara Krishnaswamy, the co-founder of the non-governmental organization Political Shakti. Apart from saving money on their travel, the women are also able to take up extra work in the time they save, allowing them to earn more. According to Krishnaswamy, most of the marginalized women across the country depend on rations, a subsidized food program providing mostly rice and few necessities. The money the free bus rides save these women helps them buy nutritious food — like fruits, eggs or milk for their children — that is otherwise out of their reach.

Vinay Sreenivasa, a member of the Bangalore Bus Commuters’ Forum, says the group has been pushing for the free bus ride program for two years. “We believe that employment and educational opportunities for women are hurt because of the unavailability of affordable transport, doing this will also put more women in the public life in the economy,” says Sreenivasa. 

The number of people utilizing public transport has increased, as has the revenue of all four road transport corporations (RTCs) in Karnataka, thanks to the Shakti project. Ridership and the transport department’s revenue both increased following the introduction of this system. In the six months after the program’s launch, 6.2 million women in Karnataka — which includes the city of Bangalore — have taken advantage of it and saved a significant sum of money. By allowing women to achieve goals that were previously unattainable, the free bus fares boost the economy, contributing to spending that helps local businesses and even the tax system.

The initiatives in Telangana and Karnataka, which encourage women to apply for smart cards, could serve as a way to gather important data and could eventually develop into a national common mobility card. But since getting a smart card requires paperwork, this excludes marginalized women who may not be documented. Another state, Tamil Nadu, has eliminated this obstacle. Its plan involves no paperwork, and is straightforward and simple to apply, making it accessible to all women.

P. Yashoda, who works with the domestic workers union in Bangalore, feels that though the program there is helping them save on money and time, it has its limitations. “I have faced many situations when the conductor is rude to me and my male co-passengers question me about why this scheme is applicable only to women, when they’re also paying taxes,” says Yashoda. “This sort of disrespect and behavior is very unfortunate.” At the same time the program is drawing criticism from taxi and auto drivers, who have gone on strike in some cases over their fear of losing passengers.

Freedom of mobility is a fundamental right in India, and this initiative enables women to exercise that right. “The biggest and most important takeaway from this scheme for women is dignity, which earlier they didn’t have and were forced to ask their husbands for money to travel by bus. This initiative is helping them build their self-confidence and give them the dignity that they deserve,” says Krishnaswamy. Several sectors of society, including women’s advocacy organizations, transportation specialists and regular people, have applauded the initiative. It represents a forward-thinking move toward the creation of a more equal and inclusive society where women can use public services without restriction. 

This initiative is giving women the economic empowerment to do things for themselves that they always wanted to do but never did, as they always gave priority to others’ needs over their own. “Earlier when I had to travel to my village Narsampeta, in Telangana, it cost me Rs.1400 [about $17 US] per trip,” says Pallekonda Saroja, a domestic worker from Hyderabad. “Now I can buy something for myself by saving this amount.” Saroja’s daughter-in-law, Usha Rani, who works as a nurse in Hyderabad, commutes by bus daily, so she is happy about the introduction of this initiative in Hyderabad. “I can put aside the money I save for my kid’s higher education,” says a smiling Rani.

In addition to its material advantages, the Shakti plan has had a significant social influence. It opposes conventional gender norms and advances gender equality as well as women’s engagement in public life. Women’s growing visibility on public transportation is an important step towards normalizing women’s presence in all sectors of society. Many women say that the program gives them a sense of security when they travel. The program’s goal of increasing the number of women on buses fosters a safe atmosphere that lowers the risk of harassment. And in a patriarchal society like India, it’s giving women the financial ability to dream for their children’s bright future and to actually do something for their own benefit.

“I took the bus along with my friend today to run some errands. I was so happy, as this saved me Rs.100 and this means a lot to me,” says Uma Maheshwari, a housewife from Hyderabad, Telangana. “Now I can save more and buy something for my home.”

The post Free Bus Passes Are Giving Indian Women More Financial Freedom appeared first on Reasons to be Cheerful.

1. I made a graph of polling data in Finland on support for joining NATO from 1998 up through Finland joining NATO in April 2023.

   

   (Insert witticism about correlation and causation.)

2. In September 1893, Churchill was admitted, on his third attempt, to the Sandhurst military college. He wrote to his father, “I was so glad to be able to send you the good news on Thursday.” His father, a former Chancellor of the Exchequer and leader of the House of Commons, wrote back a week later. The full text the reply doesn’t seem to be available, but we have these glimpses:

   You should be ashamed of your slovenly, happy-go-lucky, harum, scarum style of work. […] Never have I received a really good report of your conduct from any headmaster or tutor. […] Always behind, incessant complaints of a total want of application to your work. […] You have failed to get into the 60th Rifles, the finest regiment in the army. […] You have imposed on me an extra charge of some 200 pounds a year.

   […]

   Do not think that I am going to take the trouble of writing you long letters after every failure you commit and undergo. […] I no longer attach the slightest weight to anything you may say. […] If you cannot prevent yourself from leading the idle, useless, unprofitable life you have had during your school days, […] you will become a mere social wastrel, one of the hundreds of public school failures, and you will degenerate into a shabby, unhappy and futile existence. […] You will have to bear all the blame for such misfortunes.

   […]

   Your mother sends her love.

   Churchill was 19.

3. In May 1968, far-left student protests in Paris sparked a period of civil unrest across France. The recorded graffiti (also in French) is like a glimpse into a secret 1968 proto-Twitter. Some favorites:

   I suspect God of being a leftist intellectual.

   The student’s susceptibility to recruitment as a militant for any cause is a sufficient demonstration of his real impotence.

   You will end up dying of comfort.

   SEX: It’s okay, says Mao, as long as you don’t do it too often.

   People who work get bored when they don’t work. People who don’t work never get bored.

   Down with the abstract, long live the ephemeral.

   Art is dead, don’t consume its corpse.

   When the last sociologist has been hung with the guts of the last bureaucrat, will we still have “problems”?

   A cop sleeps inside each one of us. We must kill him.

   Please leave the Communist Party as clean on leaving it as you would like to find it on entering.

4. Apparently, these students were greatly influenced by Situationism:

   In their expanded interpretation of Marxist theory, the situationists asserted that the misery of social alienation and commodity fetishism were no longer limited to the fundamental components of capitalist society, but had now in advanced capitalism spread themselves to every aspect of life and culture. They rejected the idea that advanced capitalism’s apparent successes—such as technological advancement, increased productive capacity, and a raised general quality of life when compared to previous systems, such as feudalism—could ever outweigh the social dysfunction and degradation of everyday life that it simultaneously inflicted.

5. You might have read my attempt (Asterisk magazine version) to reconstruct how the NIH started a $100 million randomized trial on the health impact of moderate drinking and then cancelled it after coordination with the alcohol industry was revealed. Since we aren’t getting that trial any time soon, Congress recently asked the National Academies to get a group of experts together to summarize the imperfect evidence we do have. That group included… the lead investigator of the cancelled trial, the same guy that spent years planning the trail with the alcohol industry and then claimed he had no idea that the alcohol industry was involved at all. After the New York Times reported on his “provisional appointment”, he was removed from the group within an hour.

6. Here are the number of spite houses in different countries that are mentioned on the spite house Wikipedia page:

   Country	# spite houses
   Iraq	1
   England	1
   Canada	1
   Bosnia	1
   Argentina	1
   Lebanon	1
   United States	19

   And inside the US:

   State	# spite houses
   Connecticut	1
   Maine	1
   Maryland	1
   Nevada	1
   Virginia	1
   Washington	1
   California	2
   Kansas	2
   New York	4
   Massachusetts	5

7. The American Department of Defense recently did an analysis of 17-24 year olds and found that 77 percent were unqualified to serve in the military, due mostly to obesity, drug abuse, physical health, or mental health. Almost half were disqualified for more than one of those reasons:

   

   So that seems concerning, for multiple reasons. But looking into it, maybe it’s not as bad as it seems?

   • 35% were disqualified for being overweight. But the limit for the army (for men) is 20% body fat which is reasonably strict.

   • 24% were disqualified for “drug abuse”. But that—in theory—includes anyone who has ever used marijuana.

8. Also, the Department of Defense combines these criteria with a network of military recruiters. If you want to join the army, your recruiter will help you diet and maybe dehydrate yourself to meet the weight limit. They will also, by all accounts, give you an off-the-books drug test and if you fail, will give you some tips and tell you to come back later. They will also make it very obvious that when you’re asked if you’ve ever used marijuana, you are expected to lie. It’s cute when the government has little battles with itself like this.

9. If you haven’t seen it before, the 2008 Pepsi BREATHTAKING Design Strategy is really something.

   

   That’s page 6. There are 21 more. Savor them. After each page, ask yourself if things could become more ridiculous. (They can.) It’s beyond parody.

   Really, it’s too good—I thought it had to be some kind of stunt. But I can’t find any evidence, and the company responsible went out of business in 2013.

10. I recently had a visionary idea: (1) bad air is bad for you (2) so we should monitor local air quality (3) but that’s mildly annoying (4) so we don’t do it (5) so why not make a service where you enter your location and get an email if PM_2.5 goes above some threshold and thereby add some free DALYs to the universe?

    The answer, in the US at least, is that this is a free service the government already provides. Consider signing up, it’s easy.

    

11. Here’s a cautionary tale from someone who caught my obsession with air quality and built a Cuboid.

    I built the cuboid and used it for about a year. I just replaced the filters. It worked well. Life was good.

    Then the horrendous air quality hit Milwaukee a couple weeks ago. It was some of the worst in the world. Even with cuboid going plus two small Levoit filters, our PMI 2.5 levels in our one bedroom apartment stayed in the unhealthy range indoors. (I use this device for measurements)

    The thing that instantly knocked the levels down to “moderate” (a PMI 2.5 level of around 25 if I recall) was turning on our 2 year old Coway Airmega AP-1512HH, one of the fancy brand name air filters that Scott2 mentioned above. It’s the type of machine that Dynomight would probably scoff at me for owning.

    The filters in the Coway were over a year old, so I wasn’t sure how effective it would be. We hadn’t used it up to that point because DW thought it had been giving off a weird odor. But we were desperate, so I cleaned the filters and let it rip. Then I watched in amazement as the air quality rapidly improved. This thing worked like a beast. If my measuring device is to be trusted, it was more effective than my all my other air filters combined.

    I feel kind of silly for going all in on the cuboid, and for telling many people about how great it was. Don’t get me wrong, it definitely works. It’s just not in the same league as the fancy unit we owned. Sometimes the giant corporations with their R&D departments, their decades of experience, and their highly paid engineers really can make a better product than an overconfident outsider with no domain expertise. Who would have thunk it.

    This is a good story, but a couple notes: (1) If you go by the listed clean air delivery rates, the Coway purifier should do more than all the other purifiers combined (at higher cost). (2) There’s nothing wrong with commercial air purifiers! I just think it’s weird that manufacturers don’t provide more evidence that their products actually work, given that they’re borderline unregulated and tests suggest some don’t work as advertised. (Also I don’t scoff that much.)

12. The Tunnel of Eupalinos: Around 2500 years ago, the Greek city-state of Samos wanted a water source that couldn’t be cut off by invading armies. So they dug a 1 km aqueduct from a spring through a mountain and hid it so no one would know it was there. It worked for 1100 years before filling up with silt, and eventually was forgotten and lost. Then, in the 1800s, people noticed this passage in Herodotus:

    The Samians […] are responsible for […] a tunnel nearly a mile long, eight feet wide and eight feet high, driven clean through the base of a hill nine hundred feet in height. The whole length of it carries a second cutting thirty feet deep and three broad, along which water from an abundant source is led through pipes into the town.

    And they thought, “Huh. Maybe that’s real? Maybe we can find it?” So they looked, and found the spring in 1853. They started clearing the tunnel in 1882 with the idea of bringing it back into use (!) but eventually decided that wasn’t practical. The tunnel was finally excavated in 1973.

13. So how do you build a 1 km tunnel through solid rock 2500 years ago when no one else has ever done that before? Seemingly like this:

    • The spring is 52 m above sea level on the other side of a mountain. Excavate a large underground reservoir next to it and cover it with large stone slabs supported by stone pillars.

    • Physically mark out a straight line over the top of the mountain. Using sightings, locate two starting points on opposite sides of the mountain. Make sure they are at the same elevation by creating a level path between them around the side of the mountain.

    • Dig a single-man sided hole on each side of the mountain by forcing prisoners to remove 12-15 cm of rock per day. Again use sightings to make sure the tunnels are headed towards each other in the horizontal plane and use gravity to keep both tunnels level. Where necessary, jam stone slabs into each other over the tunnel to protect from rockfall. This takes around 8 years.

    • When the tunnels are nearby, cleverly bend the paths to make sure they meet in the horizontal plane and expand them vertically to make sure they meet in the vertical plane. When you’re within 12 m or so, locate the other tunnel by banging on the rock.

    • Oops, the water now comes out of the spring at a lower level. Dig a second smaller tunnel beneath the first one.

    • Dig a 890 m channel from the reservoir to the first starting point, around 0.7 m wide and 5 m deep.

    • Install thousands of open terra-cotta pipes to carry the water all the way from the spring to the city.

    • Cover the spring, the reservoir, the channel, and the entrance to the tunnel with dirt and let plants grow on top so that no one will know they are there.

14. Speaking of ancient Greece, here’s a 3.4 cm bronze seal that was made in around 1450 BC and discovered in 2017.

    

    Every day you don’t have to engage in hand-to-hand combat and get stabbed in the neck is a good day.

Article URL: https://twitter.com/Bertrand_Meyer/status/1742613897675178347

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38858012

Points: 1889

# Comments: 396

Article URL: https://solvingprocrastination.com/perfectionism/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38831446

Points: 673

# Comments: 215

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Earlier this year, George and Roxanne Miller relocated the world’s largest collection of mechanical puzzles from their home in Florida. But first they took a road trip.

It’s fashionable to look down on the famous Honolulu beach as touristy and inauthentic. But you can still find the tropical paradise that inspired dreams of the islands, if you know where to look.

The pledge is unprecedented for Big Tech and makes it easier for roughly 100,000 workers to unionize.

Wyoming’s professional pollinator whisperer didn’t always like bugs very much.

He’s a common sight these days among the scrubby plants retaking former oil and gas well pads. But until he was about 20 years old, Michael Curran figured — as most people did — that insects were pests. “You’d think of termites and bees,” he says. “A bee was something that stung you.”

Then, when he was an undergraduate student at the University of Delaware, Curran took a class taught by a now-famous entomologist that would change the course of his life. He hadn’t intended to enroll. Everything else was full, and Behavioral Ecology of Insects ended up being the only option left that would fulfill a requirement for his biology degree.

“I wasn’t happy about being in an insect class,” he says. “And then it turned out that it was one of the most interesting classes I ever took.” Thanks to that class, and to the years he then spent working with that professor, Curran came to see insects as the overlooked linchpin of the ecosystems he studied.

Even then, he didn’t plan on devoting much of his life to insects. His love of native plants was what led him to enroll in an ecological restoration program at the University of Wyoming in 2010. It was his knowledge of insects, however, that helped keep him there for a decade as he worked toward his PhD.

Soon after he began his graduate program, Curran found himself in the middle of an unfolding crisis. The sagebrush sea, a fragile ecosystem stretching from Arizona to Montana and from California to Colorado, was disappearing. And the greater sage grouse, a chicken-sized bird loosely resembling the turkey collages that young children make around Thanksgiving, was on the brink of being added to the endangered species list.

State officials and private energy companies were scrambling to find a way to reverse the species’ decline without the federal government having to intervene. Aided by researchers, they came up with a conservation strategy that hinged on designating core sage grouse habitat and limiting human activity there.

Curran was the one who realized how crucial insects would be in achieving it. A decade later, he’s still adding new pieces to the puzzle.

Wyoming is home to more than a third of the world’s surviving greater sage grouse. The imperiled sagebrush ecosystem — the only place where the species is found — stretches across most of the state. It has fared better in Wyoming than in most other places: Nationally, an estimated 2,000 square miles of the iconic landscape have succumbed each year of the past two decades to human incursions, invasive species and the ever-intensifying droughts and wildfires brought on by climate change.

But sage grouse populations tend to fluctuate with the health of the ecosystem as a whole, and even Wyoming has struggled to improve its sage grouse numbers.

Article URL: https://www.epa.gov/mold/mold-course-introduction

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38543229

Points: 399

# Comments: 170

Shortly after he retired, the man’s health began to fail him. An accidental finding on a CT scan revealed the true culprit.

People with chronic problems after falls and car crashes scored better on cognition tests after getting a brain implant, a new study found.

Article URL: https://milan.cvitkovic.net/writing/things_youre_allowed_to_do/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38399740

Points: 393

# Comments: 209

The trial involved only 10 patients, but it suggests cholesterol can be permanently reduced with a single treatment for patients at risk of heart disease.

The birds are widely reviled for their carrion-eating ways. But an evolutionary history of scavenging has forged a creative, cunning and wide-ranging mind.

Article URL: https://linear.axler.net

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38060159

Points: 618

# Comments: 289

Article URL: https://sre.google/resources/practices-and-processes/twenty-years-of-sre-lessons-learned/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38037141

Points: 584

# Comments: 121