Mind Tavern Edition #5
Humanitarian crisis in Sri Lanka
Our neighbours have finally reached a tipping point with their economy crashing due to years of economic and political mismanagement. There are riots at petrol stations, severe food shortages and inflation—and the first economic refugees are beginning to trickle into Tamil Nadu. For a primer, check out this detailed Splainer article (Sign up Paywall). This thread is pretty good TL DR as well.
One of the key lessons from the food crisis for everyone is to be wary of the unplanned blanket move toward organic farming experiments. FP has a really detailed piece on the same. Read here.
The result was brutal and swift. Against claims that organic methods can produce comparable yields to conventional farming, domestic rice production fell 20 percent in just the first six months. Sri Lanka, long self-sufficient in rice production, has been forced to import $450 million worth of rice even as domestic prices for this staple of the national diet surged by around 50 percent. The ban also devastated the nation’s tea crop, its primary export and source of foreign exchange.
At the other end of the spectrum are the world’s richest people, mostly in the West, for whom consuming organic food is a lifestyle choice tied up with notions about personal health and environmental benefits as well as romanticized ideas about agriculture and the natural world. Almost none of these consumers of organic foods grow the food themselves. Organic agriculture for these groups is a niche market—albeit, a lucrative one for many producers—accounting for less than 1 percent of global agricultural production.
Apple: The big trademark bully
Ian Bogost with an excellent piece about the financialisation of not just the internet, but also our immediate, real-world environment. Viewed through this lens of financialisation, Web3 sees investment assets everywhere: whether it’s songs, parks, stars or even colours. Read here.
Between 2019 and last year, Apple, the world’s most valuable public company, worth $2.6 trillion, filed 215 trademark oppositions to defend its logo, name or product titles, according to the Tech Transparency Project, a nonprofit watchdog. That’s more than the estimated 136 trademark oppositions that Microsoft, Amazon, Facebook and Google collectively filed in the same period, the group said.
Stephanie Carlisi, an independent singer-songwriter, said she was shocked when Apple took issue with the trademark of her stage name, Franki Pineapple, in 2020. In filings, Apple acknowledged that an apple and pineapple were different, but said they were “both the names of fruits, and thus convey a similar commercial impression.” The company also considered objecting to Ms. Carlisi’s logo, an exploding pineapple grenade, according to documents.
A Primer on Poll Forecasting and Sampling
Samarth Bansal in his brilliant fortnightly newsletter, The Interval, takes a deep dive into how poll forecasting works. A good read for everyone, especially marketers looking to find the perfect sample out of the target market. Read here.
A short biography of our beloved Chai
A drink ubiquitous in every household of the country has fairly snobbish origins. 90 per cent of all the tea crop produced in India was marked for exports and only the upper echelons of the society had the pleasure of having a cuppa. After the Great Depression of the 1930s, in search of alternate markets for tea, one of the largest marketing campaigns was launched to get us addicted. And they succeeded. Read here.
A veritable army of ‘tea propagandists’ descended upon Indian, charged with the task of getting them addiction to tea. They travelled in vans serving millions of ‘pice packets’ and sample teacups. Often, ‘Demonstration’ teams would invade festivals and bazaars to teach the ‘correct’ method of preparing tea. All-female squads were also employed to take British tea into orthodox, purdah-observing homes.
There is also a veritable Milk Tea alliance in Hong Kong, which is made up of activists against the authoritarianism of China, where tea is drunk without any milk. It blends discontent in various other Asian countries fighting for similar causes from Thailand, Myanmar to Indonesia. Read more about this here.
Tea is drunk across East and South-East Asia in many different ways. In China, it’s drunk without milk. In Taiwan, bubble tea, or “boba” tea, is deliciously milky and comes with chewy tapioca balls or bubbles. Thai tea is sweetened with condensed milk and a cuppa in Hong Kong is drunk with milk the English way, a cherished hangover of British colonial days.
And so, the Milk Tea Alliance was born. “It was totally random, really a very strange story at the beginning,” explained Dorain Malkovic, author of several books on China and Asia editor of French daily, La Croix, who covered the story last year. “It started with Thailand, spread to Taiwan, then Hong Kong, where different types of milk tea are drunk and now it has spread to Burma,” said Malkovic using the country name still used by the US government and Myanmar insiders.
Magnificence of the James Webb Telescope
After a long wait, engineers have now managed to fully focus the $10 bn observatory on a test star. "We now have achieved what's called 'diffraction limited alignment' of the telescope: The images are focused together as finely as the laws of physics allow," said Marshall Perrin who works on Webb at the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore, Maryland.
Check out the insane engineering behind the telescope in this video.
A fascinating deep dive into Truecaller’s India ops
In this fantastic Rest of World feature, they explain how True Caller built their company by exploiting the poor legal framework surrounding data protection in India. There is a reason why Stockholm based company’s over 70% MAUs across 175 countries are from India. Read here.
Something Beautiful
Last month LUO Studios completed an intricate wooden bridge in a Chinese water village. Despite the shape of the bridge, very few of its components are curved. Apart from the three-arched beams that form the underside, the structure is almost entirely made from small, regular lengths of pine. Metal plates are slotted into the wooden framework, which creates shelter and provides natural rainwater drainage.
A book you should check out: A Very Punchable Face
One of my favourite books from last year, I don’t remember any book that has made me laugh out loud so often. This memoir written by SNL’s Colin Jost talks about his childhood in Staten Island, working for the Lampoon at Harvard and his very memorable journey at Saturday Night Live. It is filled with hilarious anecdotes, written with honesty and self-awareness. His narration of the book on Audible makes it even more enjoyable. Fantastic read.
Harvard is like Professor X’s School for Mutants, except their mutant powers are playing cello or computer programming or being a Saudi prince. It’s a quarter athletes and legacies, a quarter geniuses, and then the remaining half are fairly smart kids who suddenly realize they aren’t geniuses.
I would wander the streets alone at 2 or 3 A.M., then return to my dorm and write poetry, with titles such as "A Blurred Vision," "The Artist's Flaw," "The Life of a Man," and "The Stranger You Love to Meet." So yeah, it was pretty bleak. And that was before I wrote a poem called "Shall I Flee Her Gripping Curse?" (Holy shit.) If my computer ever gets hacked, I pray they go for the photos and not the poems.
As someone who was bullied growing up, I realized that it’s way easier to play into the bullying rather than fight it. If you’re better at making fun of yourself than a bully is, then the bully has no room to operate. (Except punches. They still have punches. Oh god, do they have punches.)
Thread(s) of the week
Usage of tear gas is prohibited in warfare but not in riot control
Intriguing Askhistorians thread on Reddit, where historians go into the nuances of these rules set in the Chemical Weapon Convention (1993). The first comment quite beautifully explains the rationale in somewhat beautiful narration.
EV and Battery Chemistry
A very detailed and informative thread on the underlying science behind the buzzwords of EV. This thread starts by giving a historical context from the age of Volta and lead-acid batteries to the modern-day lithium-ion ones introduced by Sony in 1991. A good read for the investors in this area as well.
Internet is Beautiful
Fun stuff for you to click on
In the latest bid to do the impossible, Red bull plans to have two pilots jump out of the single-seater planes at 14000ft and exchange seats.
Check out this week’s Exponential View charts. This one captures Russian influence on global natural resources.
Fascinating new discoveries of transparent frogs in Ecuador. Did you know there are 159 species of them?
Check out this year’s Pritzker prize winner African architect Diébédo Francis Kéré's sustainable buildings for marginalised communities.
Male birth control pills are here, human trials are to begin this year.
Divorce rates are dropping fast in the US, courtesy of Millenials.
Check out this mind-blowing NASA image of giant 1.5-mile-high dunes of frozen methane particles on Pluto.
Trivia Corner: Baker’s Dozen
We often see that phrase as a title for Bakeries and even some startups dealing with oven-fresh goods. The origin of the phrase is quite interesting, and not really based on the generosity of the bakers. The name dates back to mediaeval England when bakers made 13 loaves of bread instead of the normal 12 to avoid jail time.
According to Encyclopedia Britannica and Mental Floss, some bakeries in 13th century England were known for cutting corners on the size of their baked delicacies while charging full price to their clients. This "cheating" prompted King Henry III to enact stringent legislation requiring you to be roughed up or thrown in a jail cell if you sold bread below the standard weight and size and were overcharged for it. Many bakers didn’t want to risk it, so to reduce any margin of error, they often included an additional loaf of bread in their normal dozen, just to be safe.