Recent Posts #
I had an amazing opportunity to attend a book signing for 10,000 Memories in Berkeley along with my wife.
10,000 Memories is a non-profit, volunteering and crowdsourcing project that has collected 10k witness accounts about the Partition across South Asia. There was an insightful panel discussion with the editors, and story telling sessions along with a curated exhibit.
The Partition has touched countless people across South Asia, and research puts numbers at 2-3M killed and 14-18M displaced. But what’s missing in mere numbers are the qualitative stories of people who were impacted, which is where such a systematic archival of witness accounts is so invaluable.
Reading Kim Stanley Robinson’s Ministry for the Future, I got curious about Chapter 8’s numbers, which essentially break down some of the main driving forces of the climate crisis better than most other things I’ve come across.
KSR describes how much fossil carbon we’re consuming, how much is left, how much should not be extracted if we want to stay below 2C, who owns what’s left, and what problems that suggests.
Last week, I visited a couple of my professors from Northwestern to chat and help out with an interesting engineering “bootcamp” class they are teaching. Beyond the nostalgia, those interactions brought me back to my days in college, when I regularly felt this mixture of lighthearted fun and simultaneously an overwhelming awe at learning new things I didn’t even have the cognitive machinery to imagine before.
Maybe I’m blocking out the midterm anxiety, but still.
About #
This is Gursimran Singh’s website where he writes about reading, thinking, learning, programming, and his projects.
He’s also written some short stories.
He’s in San Francisco and you can find him on LinkedIn, as @kilotau on Blue Sky, or as @gnarmis on Github.
He also sometimes writes as @kilotau on Medium.