APOORVA BHIDE
Designer, hacker, investor, nomad. Never satisfied. Deeply flawed.
Apr 10, 2020
The ticking time bomb beneath our feet
Millions of years ago, the land to the South of the Rocky Mountains, known today as the ‘High Plains’, was a land of low hills and shallow valleys. Over time, the streams that cut through the Rocky mountains deposited silt and sediment, burying the earlier channels and valleys until the land became as flat as […]
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Feb 10, 2020
Chinese Whispers: A case study on representation of science in the media
In September 2013, a team of researchers at the University of Rochester published a study titled Is skills training necessary for the primary prevention of marital distress and dissolution?A 3-year experimental study of three interventions. They were trying to look at how effective different approaches on training couples relationship skills were for a lasting marriage. […]
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Jan 30, 2020
Twenty-One Book Reviews
I’ve always thought of myself as a voracious reader. I think of myself as someone who loves reading books, who will sit down and get engrossed in a book and forget eating and drinking and sleeping till he’s put it down. It’s a part of my identity at this point. And that’s why it hit […]
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Nov 24, 2019
Brexshit! – an analysis of the EU Referendum
When I heard about the results of the EU referendum in 2016, I thought the world was losing its mind. (Then Trump was elected, and I knew for sure.) 40 months have passed since. Britain is still in the EU. They still can’t figure out how or when or why to leave, or whether they […]
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Jul 15, 2019
Plain tales of great privilege
For newcomers like Edwin Pratt, joining the Calcutta branch of the Army and Navy, the extremes of Calcutta began at Howrah Railway Station, which ‘was smothered with human forms all in very primitive attire, sitting and standing and wandering about, some eating, some cooking and some just sleeping.’ ….On the other side of the Hoogly […]
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Nov 25, 2018
Gender (Mis)Representation in the Indian Parliament, Explained in 4 charts
I’m going to keep this short and sweet. If you’re interested in the code and how I did any of this (Spoiler Alert: It was a lot of work), you can head to the Jupyter Notebook on GitHub, here. Though I have overall gender representation numbers for both houses, for ease of representation and messaging, […]
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Jul 09, 2018
The Hoysala Trail: Part Two
Far away into the rocky heart of Andhra, near a small town and a centuries-old fort called Gandikota, the Penna river cuts gorgeously through the sandstone to carve out a majestic canyon. I didn’t go there this time, though. I woke up late and missed the bus. So I did something arguably much more fun: […]
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Jun 15, 2018
The Outfielder Problem
On the 14th of April, in the 9th match of IPL 11, the Delhi Daredevils were chasing 195 for their first win. Glenn Maxwell looked in ominous form, having hit 13 runs off the first 5 balls he had faced. On his sixth, he saw Krunal Pandya toss the ball up and decided to go […]
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May 28, 2018
The importance of rituals
I originally wrote this as an answer on Quora. TL;DR: In the words of the great philosopher Abed Nadir, Chaos already dominates enough of our lives. The universe is an endless raging sea of randomness. Our job isn’t to fight it, but to weather it together, on the raft of life. A raft held together […]
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May 07, 2018
What dogs can tell us about Foreign Policy: Part Two
This, in case you didn’t read the title, is the second part. (It’s kinda difficult to miss.) You can read Part One here. Honeybees have remarkable division of labour. There are three kinds of honeybees in any given hive: There are the worker bees, whose primary function is, wait for it, basically doing all the […]
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May 07, 2018
What Dogs Can Tell Us About Foreign Policy: Part One
In 1959, a Russian scientist named Dmitry Belyaev started an experiment to domesticate an entire population of wild red foxes. It continues to this day. The experiment was fairly simple. He raised foxes on a farm. They were bred by for human approachability, for letting the humans touch them, for not biting, hissing or showing […]
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Apr 08, 2018
Our Slot Machine Overlords
You may not have played an actual slot machine, but the mechanism that drives people to play slot machines is everywhere.
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Apr 01, 2018
A lotto money
Lotteries are interesting. In a rational world, they wouldn’t exist, because no one would buy them. Why do people still buy them in our world? And what can they tell us about happiness?
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Mar 25, 2018
The Australian line
After all the talk of knowing where it is and headbutting it and other fantasies, here it is: the famous line. The line where you stop letting the ball weave ferocious magic in Starc’s hands and resort to defiling it along with the game you so desperately want to win.
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Mar 04, 2018
A journey in red
I traveled through the footsteps of a 6th century empire, footsteps etched in red sandstone.
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Feb 11, 2018
Conflicts of Interest
Conflicts of interest are literally everywhere. I try to take a look at how they work, and especially their effect on politics.
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Feb 05, 2018
Society, reflected in a bowl
… yeah, I mean the other bowl. The gross one.
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Jan 22, 2018
How viral is ‘viral’?
If you think about ideas and information as viruses, information spreads exactly the same through social networks as diseases do. Are they the same though? I tried to find out.
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Jan 15, 2018
Echo Chambers
Any group of people, online or offline, tends to curdle into smaller groups of similar people. Is this just a human tendency? I investigate, if investigation means googling.
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