unc∞rdinated

This is my second year in Montréal. What I learned from my last winter here was that woodwork or  whittling were not viable options for me. Winters are largely indoors here. The dust and the chips- that doesn't work for me in my living space. So I think its going to be fabrics and leathers for the next little while. This has increasingly dawned on me as Aditi and I worked on The Doggo Coat. This is a coat for Jasper, my sister in law Pragna's  blue heeler . He lives in Calgary and likes the outdoors. So we want something that is warm, waterproof, and doesnt get in the way of his running around. I used a pattern from Wholefully  as a reference, and to help me get measurements from Pragna over in Calgary.  I decided to go with a waxed canvas and leather outer coat and a detachable inner flannel layer, with webbing  and metal quick release buckles.  I started with 10 oz duck canvas. Washed so it gets a chance to shrink. Cut it to rough shape. I doubled up the ...

Its no coincidence that I started this blog around the same time as I started fieldwork this fall.  There's a profound meditative quality to developing a thought through iterations of text. I'm referring to memo writing, an important aspect of qualitative research methods. I am quite good at maintaining discipline among my numbers. All my quantitative data, be it from a research project or personal logs, are well organized. My folder structure is orderly, my paths consistent, my code annotated and clean. Read JP Ferguson's post on this for inspiration if you want to do this as well. However, the idea of discipline among my words is new to me. Which is why I so glad Samer insists on disciplined memoing to accompany fieldwork. For each observation session, I take field notes, always by hand (delike alpha with a fude nib with iroshizuku shin ryoku ink on 80gsm paper notebooks). I then type out my field notes into a word doc in a secure cloud drive to which Samer has access. T...

Coffee is an important part of my life, and my daily coffee ritual changes every few months. My current method for preparing coffee is espresso. The Bean This week, I'm doing a 50/50 blend. I'm working with a Tanzanian peaberry and my usual base bean, the South Indian Malabar " monsooned " or age cured bean. Both are arabica. I bought both beans, unroasted, from Green Beanery . I have hand roasted both beans, each separately in my coffee cast irons to around  City+  this past weekend, so its now 3 days post roast. With African beans, perhaps because of the coffee processing practices in the region, I find that small bits of skin remain on the bean during the roast, which then fall off when I roll the beans in the skillet. With Indian beans, I have found that the whole skin slides off from the bean as a single "husk". This peaberry is quite dense and takes longer to roast than the lighter yet bigger monsooned bean, however the former rolls quite well in the s...

Smart Scheduling needs to be a thing. And by that I mean - AI-based (or: machine-learning-based) semi-automated scheduling assistants. It requires some giving in to the notion of letting an algorithm control a dimension of your life. But what you out of it is relief from the stress of scheduling. It would work best in a context where the transactions of scheduling (the negotiation of time, the creation of some textual artifact of agreement, etc.) are conducted between algorithms at both ends. That said, the alternative where the transactions are conducted between human and algorithm can be supported by an interactive virtual agent (IVA) beefed up with some conversational, possibly verbal, capabilitiies. Hello, this is Anand Bhardwaj's digital assistant speaking. Is this is a good time to talk? And the scheduling assistant can be plugged into other aspects of your lives. I have a pretty neatly organized calendar, organized into work (school, in my case), family, my wife's work c...

 I'm going to forget what is happening now.  A memory removal of a mundane moment when nothing happend.

It was in the closing seconds of the 2020 movie Greyhound , as we pan out to a shot of the wide ocean and the battle-weary remnants of a convoy of Allied destroyers, that I wondered for the first time in roughly an hour and a half, "was this shot on a boat or a set?" And that's because Greyhound is one of those movies that makes you forget you're watching a movie for a while. With its meticulous realism, and a whole bunch of close-ups of an underplayed and very effective performance by Tom Hanks, this movie reminds me of some of the more intense war scenes from Band of Brothers and Saving Private Ryan . Except, the whole movie is the intense war scene.  Paradoxically given it's expansive ocean setting, this movie unfolds in a very small space- with a few small exceptions, the human perfomances in this movie take place in the chart house, the plotting room and the pilot house (and the decks to its port and starboard) of a Fletcher-class WW2 destroyer. Three opera...

I've been working on a few parallel projects that involve topic modeling abstracts of managment research publications (See Topics in Management Research , for example). My method of choice at the moment is Latent Dirichlet Allocation .  I'm finding that this class of methods is useful in ways I hadn't quite expected when I started this exercise about a year ago in order to be able to test some hypotheses about management research in a causal inference/regression context. Since then I have been exploring the use of topic modeling for qualitative analysis. This sort of use of topic modeling is well represented in modern management research (See Hannigan et al., 2019 , a tremendous, encyclopedic review of the subject).  Sidebar: I'm still grappling with the distinction between quantitative and qualitative research. The terminology is deployed, at least in the circles I'm in, in a way that implies an eqivalence between qualitative and inductive research, and quantitativ...

I purchased a batch of unroasted from greenbeanery.ca  a couple weeks ago. This is the second time I'm buying this variety of bean from the greenbeanery. They've done an OK job keeping the bean out of the elements, but I'm seeing a somewhat uneven roast, likely because of moisture from the moonsooning process. This is my big problem with monsoon malabar- they're almost as hard as robusta to roast evenly.  If only they weren't delicious. This batch was roasted until a tiny bit of surface oil shows up at the beginning of second crack.  Monsoon malabar can be a good espresso bean as well, producing loads of crema. However,  my brew method of late is pourover with a stainless steel micromesh, which makes for a lightly oily, fully bodied cup.  Stepping away from an espresso-heavy COVID summer to the more mellow flavors of pourover is a good fall move. I may pair a more aromatic Brazilian beans with the full body of an Asian bean for next week's roast.

Hear me out, please.  Chicken wings, marinated overnight in garam masala and sour cream, baked in an oven until falling off the bone. Oven-baked brined potato wedges. Fresh cheese curd. Jar o Butter chicken masala gravy from Costco. All in a big cast iron skillet. The Tandoori Butter Chicken Wing Poutine (Pizza) (If you line the cast iron skillet with pizza dough)

One of which is co-writing. And by that I mean these long sessions where I get on skype with my co-authors for 5-6 hours at a stretch and work on a google doc together. It's pretty exhausting, and I dont think this way of writing (simultaneously, line by line, by consensus) would have been possible if I hadn't been locked in, without an office to go to during the day. And thus begins year 2 of graduate school. I think its a bit trite to be yet another one of those grad students who waxes on about how their mind was blown by reading an impressive and challenging paper. I do think something like this is a useful exercise in writing, however.  During my previous life as a data science consultant, I didn't have much occasion for long form writing, nor did I need to engage in much rhetorical gymnastics to convince people of the value of what I was doing. I was there, therefore they needed my help. So that's a muscle I need to exercise. And I am now in the social sciences, wh...