On Reading News, Remembering, and Why We Write

This post was first sent to my newsletter on November 7th, 2021. You really ought to subscribe :) A few days late, but Happy Diwali, folks! :) A small ask of you, to begin with. Like I wrote in the past, I don’t have any sort of tracking in these mails. There are no ads, nothing to push. Just a labour of love. So I have no idea whether these posts resonate or I’m just howling into the storm that is your inbox. If you like it, hate it, agree/disagree, write me :) All I get to see are a couple of folk leaving, every once in a while, and my list, my tribe in fact is really tiny and it feels a bit discouraging.1 ...

November 14, 2021 · Mario Jason Braganza

On Planetary Atmospheres, Cloud Infrastructure and the Undead!

This post was first sent to my newsletter on October 22nd, 2021 You really ought to subscribe :) via NASA Johnson on Flickr Welcome to the October work letter! :) As usual, click the headers to wander off to the orginal articles. Over at Ars Technica, Researchers think a planet lost its original atmosphere, and built a new one In general, we don’t currently have the technology to image exoplanets unless they’re very large, very young, and a considerable distance from the star they orbit. Yet we can still get some sense of what’s in their atmosphere. To do that, we need to observe a planet that transits across the line of sight between Earth and its star. During a transit, a small percentage of the star’s light will travel through the planet’s atmosphere on its way to Earth, interacting with the molecules present there. ...

October 29, 2021 · Mario Jason Braganza

Starting Emacs From the Command Line, and Getting Back to the Prompt

I want to leave VS Code behind me and move to using Emacs for mostly everything I write in the long haul. Emacs is the editor I use to putter around for any text editing I need to do, but most of my long form writing and coding were done in VS Code. And the more I use it (VS Code, not Emacs), the more uncomfortable I get, no matter how nice and shiny it is. ...

October 27, 2021 · Mario Jason Braganza

To my Teachers, With Gratitude

Shoutouts of Gratitude to the teachers who I learnt programming from over the past couple of years … Kushal Das, for bringing me in, teaching me the ropes and assuring me there was a place for me here Reuven Lerner, who unravelled Python for me and made me realise that languages were small, and the reason I was struggling was not Python, but because I wanted to understand all of computer science in too short a time frame.1 ...

October 27, 2021 · Mario Jason Braganza

On the Weight of Repetitive Tasks, Forming Habits and the Pursuit of Knowledge

This post was first sent to my newsletter on October 3rd, 2021. You really ought to subscribe :) *A long leisurely ride, in a shikara amongst the lakes of Shrinagar* It’s October! Time to play catchup with Jason’s letters! :) As usual, click the headers to wander off to the originals. ...

October 10, 2021 · Mario Jason Braganza

List of Books to Read Before You Die

Read and Be Merry, over on Tumblr, has this perfect list of books to read, before you die. It’s pretty short, so I’m cribbing it here in its entirety. Any book you want Don’t read books you don’t want to read That’s it Congratulations you did it! This shall be my advice to all folk interested in there next book, henceforth! P.S. Subscribe to my mailing list! Forward these posts and letters to your friends and get them to subscribe! P.P.S. Feed my insatiable reading habit. ...

October 2, 2021 · Mario Jason Braganza