Rungta’s Webmarks

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Wednesday, 29 July 2015

The Fermi Paradox

Sometimes the scale of the internet boggles the mind — the reach of a single tweet, the repercussions of a Wikipedia edit, the disruption caused by a buggy piece of software — but internet scale doesn’t even come close when you compare it to space. The scale of things in the universe is mostly unfathomable. Take the recent Pluto flyby for instance:

People don’t fully appreciate how incredible this is. Pluto is 7.5 billion km away. New Horizon speed is 50,000km/hr

The human mind cannot comprehend such numbers properly. We have absolutely no points of reference from our daily lives.

— Siddharth Singh (@siddharth3) 4:47pm and 4:48pm, 14 July 2015

7.5 billion kilometres. Spend some time with the fantastic If the Moon Was Only 1 Pixel model of the solar system to get a crude feel of what that can be like (because no human knows what it actually is like). But we’re still talking about just our solar system here. Things get really crazy when you go interstellar.

Now add to this the eternal question — are we alone in the universe? Go on, go read about the Fermi Paradox.

Saturday, 25 July 2015

Himalaya One: The Four Passes Trek

Friends and avid trekkers Sriparna & Rohit (of Tiffinbox and Travelling Teadom fame):

We flagged off our secret ‘Himalaya One’ project in the summer of 2013. The first trek started in Naggar (Kullu Valley) and ended in Kafnu (Kinnaur Valley). The walk in between spanned 200 kilometres, 19 days and a little over 100 hours of walking. We have tried to compile the best of the footage captured in 6 minutes.

It’s hard showering praise on these Himalayan treks and not ending up sounding repetitive, but what the hell, this looks absolutely incredible. The exercise sequence in the beginning was such a clever way to exploit the GoPro. And secret ‘Himalaya One’ project? Hmm…

Thursday, 23 July 2015

Why I Hate Writing

What better than a lament on the virtuous and therapeutic yet constantly avoided act of writing, by Natasha Badhwar, to revisit this forgotten and abandoned website.

Why did I stop writing? I could find many excuses — lack of time while trying to run a company, or wanting to distance myself from digital screens after staring at them throughout the workday, or getting slowly dispassionate with age, or a long-overdue design overhaul to improve the reading experience. They’re all true to some extent, but probably secondary. Ultimately the act of writing is the act of gaining clarity, of facing your demons, of covering the distance between hearing and listening.

That is what I’ve been running away from all this while.

— ∞ —