Extracts from a Diary

The nuclear age left radioactive traces in all modern steel. The LLM age is doing the same to digital content. Some analogies and lessons from that. Radioactive Signature on Steel From around 1945 onwards, in specialised niches and applications, there came up a need for specialised steel — steel that was made from before 1945. You see, after the nuclear tests and detonations, there exists a certain level of diffused background radiation in atmosphere. While these detonations happened in US and Japan, initially, followed by USSR and elsewhere, the radiation spread quickly and to somewhat uniform levels, throughout the world. The typical steel-making process uses atmospheric oxygen. And this background radiation in atmosphere leaks into the steel-making process. All steel made after 1945 has a certain level of radioactive traces (or its radioactive signature) slightly and measurably higher than for steel made before that cut-off. There are a set of highly sensitive, niche applications, w...

Last week of August, I was fortunate to have travelled to Vietnam. I say fortunate because I loved every bit of it, and hope to be able to travel there again. We visited Ho Chi Minh City (also called Saigon or HCMC), Da Nang, and Hanoi — the three major cities across South, Central, and North Vietnam respectively. Each of those had a different flavour across the many dimensions — food, culture, traffic, road infrastructure, markets, coffee, among other things. Our trip was for about 8 days, and we definitely felt that was too short to fully soak in the things the country had on offer. But, it’s better to leave with an incomplete appetite and a desire to return, than otherwise. It was an excellent trip in absolute sense and in terms of value for money. History While Vietnam has had a continuous history of about 3000 years, in the modern era, it’s been a theatre of the different world powers. Under French colonial rule until World War II, control shifted to Japan after France fell to Naz...