Signore Galilei

Inkhaven 2 is awesome, but notably different than Inkhaven 1. Everyone’s louder and a bit less rationalist and posting closer to the deadline. Also there are too many meta posts. (And now there’s one more. Whoops.) Mingyuan (from cohort 1, like me) has a good post about the differences between the Inkhavens and their causes.…

I get 3 new years every year. It’s one of my go-to perks of having a mixed background. Each of them feels very different to me. Chinese New Year is the big production: it’s cooking and cleaning and feasting with friends and family. Rosh Hashanah is the most sacred: I’ve been to services a handful…

Content warning: medical-related trauma I need to write this post, because I caught myself trying to avoid it. Inkhaven cohort 2 seems to be heavily invested in posting about their trauma. This is something I admire; it shows vulnerability and trust, and it’s probably cathartic or at least can help share a lesson. I wanted…

I’ve written three posts in the past judging geometric shapes. For this post, I’m going back to that series, this time for irrational numbers. As per the conditions of the series, we are judging them as fine, lame, awesome, overrated (not as awesome as they seem), and underrated (more awesome than they seem). Fine: π…

No matter what I do, I always find myself back at the Mongol Invasion of the Khwarazmian Empire. Every time I go on a Wikipedia rabbit hole for long enough, I go back to reading about this specific war from the early 13th century. It’s some sort of attractor state for my brain, along with…

Artemis II is awesome and exciting. Basically none of that excitement is from the firsts it achieved or the records it set. It’s exciting because “oh my gosh look at those pictures!” and “Space! Rockets! Whoooosh! Nyooomm!”

This past weekend, I went to a reunion for the Harvard Glee Club, and it was nostalgic in all the best ways. For an introvert like me, there’s no entirely non-awkward way to tell someone you went to Harvard. The best trick I’ve found is to immediately shift the topic of conversation to something related.…

This week, I will be heading back to Inkhaven, the place where I started this blog. This time, as an alum, I have two new privileges compared to last time. First, I’m allowed to book one week at a time, rather than an entire month. As much as I loved Inkhaven the first time around,…

Hyderabad is a South Asian city with about ten million residents. Its name means “Lion City”, named for caliph Ali, one of the prophet Muhammad’s successors: Ali gained the epithet “Lion” after his lion-like valor in battle. Hyderabad was founded by the sultan Muhammad Quli Qutb Shah in 1591 to serve as his capital. It…