Seeing a ton of (warranted) criticism re Dems on impeachment — but like where was everyone? We know politicians don’t act boldly if we’re not in the streets to make them. But multi million dollar “movement” orgs are writing petitions & posting graphics instead of organizing

1/ Today is #BlackHoleFriday, an annual science outreach event that, by complete coincidence I’m sure, is done on #BlackFriday. You’ll read lots of cool stuff about black holes on the hashtag. Here’s mine.

2/ Black holes are weird. Duh. People like to think of them as something like incredibly dense nuggets of stuff that sucks other stuff in. But they’re not like that.

3/ If you squeeze enough mass into a small enough volume, the gravity gets so intense that it’s impossible to escape them *if you get too close*. From far away, though, gravitationally they more or less act like anything with that much mass.

4/ So if the Sun turns into a black hole we wouldn’t get drawn in. In fact, we’d orbit it almost exactly the same way as we do now, though we’d freeze to death pretty rapidly, which, in the end, would still kinda suck.

5/ Black holes get weird *when you get close*. Anything with mass warps space — we feel that warp as gravity! — but black holes stretch space to its limit.

THE IMPORTANCE OF DEVI BEEJ / BIJA MANTRA.

Once Suutji in his discourse with King Janmajeya repeated the words of Vyasji regarding the pronounciation of the word ऐ. Vyasji had heard the importance of this word in a meeting of all important saints at Naimisharanya.

There this story was discussed.

In that gathering of such great sages, Rishi Jamdagni asked a question to all the eminent luminaries. He wanted to know which diety is the most revered and gets satisfied easily with our prayers. So Lomash rishi replied that Devi

Bhagwati was one such diety. She will be satisfied and is ready to grant you a boon even if you just say the first letter of her beej mantra. In this context he narrated the story of Satyavrat. The story is as follows.

There lived a Brahmin named Devdutt in Kosal.

He was childless. He arranged for an elaborate yagya for a intelligent son to be born. He invited all the eminent rishi's to conduct this Yagya. Rishi Suhotra, Pael, Brahaspati Yagyavalka were assigned different tasks. Rishi Gobhil was asked to sing the Saamved.

He sang the verses very well, but he had to take respite in order to breathe between two verses. This angered devdutt. He spoke his thoughts to Gobhil rishi.

The rishi got very angry as devdutt did not realise the practicalities of singing. He cursed devdutt that

Okay look - I didn’t grow up with comic books. But I read stacks of science fiction digests and I kit-bashed model cars into fantasy rods, and just tried to maintain a low profile until I could get out of the house. So you could say I’m a distant cousin of the comic book fan. /1

And sometimes one’s childhood passion follows them into adulthood, sometimes not, sometimes as an adult one finds a passion they never had as a child and embraces it. For me, that must include getting involved with a puppet show at the age of thirty. /2

So who’s to say whose passion’s legitimate and whose is bogus? Nobody. Someone might indict your passion but they have no ground to stand on and should be dismissed out of hand. /3

Maybe they’re envious that you have a passion, maybe they think that their passion is cooler than yours, or maybe they’re just insecure, who knows. Doesn’t matter. /4

What matters is that if something gives you joy, and in the process doesn’t hurt others, then by all means follow it. It’s how we explore our secret hopes, our shadow sides, our inner character. /5

For the record: that's not a "strong work ethic."
That's exploiting young unattached engineers and spinning it as "team culture."

Toxic 💀💀

That's not something to aspire to. That's not good management. If you're working sustained 70+ hrweeks, somebody is taking advantage of you.

We have fetishized the overworked engineer. It's toxic but so pervasive that Mr. Ng (and others) feel it's ok to advertise as a positive.

Having this as "culture" breeds a monoculture of unattached, young engineers. Not good for them & not good for your company long term.

It's not good for them because their first job burns them out and physically wears them down. This happened to me and many of my coworkers.