Mind Tavern Edition #7
Welcome to the 7th edition of Mind Tavern. Thank you for subscribing to this free newsletter, I don't intend to capture any data, but do consider sharing it on your social networks if you like it!
Life and Death in Siachen
We start this edition with a long weekend read. In this deeply personal account of life at the third pole for the soldiers of the Indian Army, Raghu Raman writes about one of many stories that get lost in the snow and miles of nothingness. The details of the daily affairs make for an enlightening reading, from using a rope to prevent falling through endless crevasses to having slim windows of rescue when you sink through the icicled voids. Read here.
Between each man, there is generally a slack of eight to ten feet. That way if ever one or more were to discover the existence of a crevasse the hard way, they still stood a chance of staying alive. A group of men traveling this way is called a ‘rope’.
The rope used in the glacier, if it had a mind of its own, would probably be offended by the generalized nomenclature it is referred to. This is a specially constructed piece of equipment. Designed using a complex combination of fibers, its slender proportions belie the fact, that it is one of the strongest materials created by man, And yet when the heft on it exceeds a limit it begins to stretch, admitting that the strain on it is beyond what it could handle.
AI has now ventured into dubbing now
As the entertainment universe moves beyond English and forays into languages like Korean, Spanish and even Indian languages, the demand for dubbing is increasing at a breakneck speed and the costs are increasing for the production houses and OTT platforms. This has paved way for automation in this as well. Read here.
Traditional dubbing often works like this. A studio or local distributor, having decided it wants a local-language release, pays to translate a script, hire a set of voice actors to play the characters, rent out engineering equipment, put the actors through numerous voice takes, record them and then splice their readings back into the original video — a mighty grapple to achieve a smooth final product. The whole process can take months.
Auto-dubbing can work like this. The original actor records five minutes of random text in their own language. Then the machines take over: A neural network learns the actor’s voice, a program digests that vocal information and applies it to a digital translation of the script, then the AI spits out perfectly timed lines from the film in the foreign language and drops them into the action. The whole process could take weeks.
Ever wondered what is common between the fandom of Twilight, Justin Bieber and BTS
We all like to deride and invalidate things liked by girls, especially teenage girls, calling them fake, not authentic or talentless creations. This is society’s conceited way of saying that the opinion of young girls doesn’t matter, even though these artists have garnered billions of views on various channels. A few decades back, even the Beatles were written off because in the early days for the same reason. Read here.
Maura Johnston for The New York Times accurately summarized most of the criticism, saying: “They inspire a familiar litany of complaints: they’re “manufactured”; they skate by on looks, not talent; their music is annoying. Many of these complaints come from people who consider themselves fans of ‘authentic’ music.”
It perpetuates the idea that capturing the attention of a young girl is “easy” and therefore anyone who makes something for them isn’t deserving of their popularity and acclaim. This “trend” of shaming and belittling the interests of teenage girls reinforces a subconscious ideology from a very young age that their opinions aren’t good enough or valid enough.
A short yet fascinating history of how we shop
Fast company is a brilliant publication if you want to read about business, technology and the context that drives them. In this story, they take us through the journey from street peddlers to modern supermarkets, touching upon various milestones like customised deliveries, mail order shopping, and self-service stores during WW 2. It also takes us through the transition from the impersonal nature of shopping with zero to minimal choices, to the modern personalised experiential nature of the activity. I especially loved the part where Virginia Woolf made an oraclesque reference to online shopping. Read here.
Virginia Woolf’s last novel, Between the Acts, offers a nice illustration of this. It is set at the end of the 1930s, when the installation of domestic telephones was beginning to make it possible for affluent customers to ring up the shop and order their meat or groceries for delivery without having to leave the house or send a servant.
One scene in the novel has a country lady distractedly ordering fish “in time for lunch” while she brushes her hair in front of the mirror and murmurs lines of poetry to herself. A few pages later, just as she requested, “The fish had been delivered. Mitchell’s boy, holding them in a crook of his arm, jumped off his motorbike.”
Obsession with fancy water
This short post goes into the history of industrial bottled water, the psychology behind our consumption and, of course, the consistently compelling logic behind brands and emotional associations. The strong PR campaigns have taken advantage of the health halo effect, peddling words like alkalinity and PH level. Read it here.
Water from a well in Malvern came to be known as the Holy Well, namely for the rumor that drinking that water specifically was therapeutic. Bottled water quickly became a status symbol amongst the early wealthy elites of the 17th and 18th centuries - people would claim that natural springs and spas carried water could cure many common diseases of the time.
Perrier is another great example of somatic markers at work. Michael Bellas, chairman of the Beverage Marketing Corporation, mentions how Perrier almost became a badge of sorts. “When you held a Perrier bottle up, it said something about yourself, it said you were sophisticated, you … understood what was happening in the world."
Coffin Cubicles of Hong Kong
In the fantastic photo series Boxed In, photographer Benny Lam documents the suffocating living conditions in Hong Kong’s subdivided flats and in particular so-called ‘coffin cubicles’. He has photographed the claustrophobic living conditions of the country’s subdivided flats, documenting the lives of these secret communities.
Something Fascinating: Show me the Money
Another cool visual masterpiece by our friends at Pudding. Here they inquired into 38 countries from all 22 sub and sub-subregions of the world, based on the United Nations’ Statistics Department geoscheme. Their data set analyses 236 unique banknotes and shows some interesting insights into the type of people who make it onto our currency notes. Check it out here.
19% of people featured on banknotes are Writers (45 people from 23 countries).Some notable figures in this category include Colombia’s first Nobel Prize of Literature winner Gabriel García Márquez, the pioneer of Japanese modern literature Ichiyo Higuchi and Turkish writer Fatma Aliye Topuz, who is known as the first female author in the Islamic world.
A book you should check out: The Old Man and the Sea
This age-old classic by Ernest Hemingway is one of my favourite books. In only 100 odd pages, the author manages to reel you into the story of an ageing sailor, who is on the quest for a prized catch and goes through a whirlwind adventure. The simple yet beautiful prose of Hemingway gives the readers lesson in perseverance, relentless pursuit of the goals and gracefully accepting defeats when you lose. The companionship and the deep friendship the old man has with the boy make for one of the most memorable parts of the book. Highly recommended.
“Man is not made for defeat... a man can be destroyed but not defeated.”
“Every day is a new day. It is better to be lucky. But I would rather be exact. Then when luck comes you are ready.”
“Most people were heartless about turtles because a turtle’s heart will beat for hours after it has been cut up and butchered. But the old man thought, I have such a heart too.”
Thread(s) of the week:
Skin colours and heat
This particular ELI5 thread has plenty of neat easy to understand explanations as to why darker skin develops in hotter areas and lighter skin in colder areas when darker colours absorb more heat.
Busting Survival Myths
After the overload of survival shows on Discovery and NG channel following Bear Grylls, it makes sense to know what works and what is just for TV.
Internet is Beautiful
Fun stuff for you to discover
The Wordle clones just keep getting better. This one, called Explordle, drops you in a random place and gives you 4 options to guess where you are.
Ready for your daily dose of AI craziness? Check out "DALL·E 2" — another AI system that can create mind-blowing images from simple text prompts. It was created by Open AI, who created this newest system by training a neural network on images and their text descriptions.
A nice explainer on how the canned food lasts for so long.
L'Oréal has now started using EEG headsets to recommend fragrances based on customers’ emotions. So much for privacy.
After 5 years, we saw the return of r/places on April 1. Check out the final image and this story on how over the course of four days, Redditors battled across an open canvas. Pixel by pixel, until the void came for them all.
Trivia Corner: Carrots and World war
We all have heard our parents saying, eat your carrots, they are good for your eyes. And, I think most of us believed the same without any reservations. What if I told you this is one of the many popular medical myths that has been propagated through the popular over the decades from the 1940s.
The myth finds its roots in a World War II propaganda campaign, where the British Royal Air Force developed a new type of radar technology that helped pilots shoot down German enemy planes at night. But in order to keep the new technology a secret, the government said carrots were behind the pilots' success. Advertisements during the war touted the benefits of carrots for nighttime vision, including one that read "Carrots keep you healthy and help you see in the blackout," Smithsonian Magazine says.
Carrots are a good source of vitamin A, which helps maintain eyesight. But carrots do not actually improve vision or help you see in the dark, as some parents may tell their children in the hopes of persuading the little ones to eat their veggies.
A great compilation of interesting stuff from the internet. Great read. Keep it up Vikas