Newsletter for friends #03: Stuff from August & September

Hello friends,

Here’s another web letter of notable things I’ve been up to or enjoyed recently. A lot has happened over the last two months, and below are slices from both the spacey and non-spacey parts of my life.

Reading

• Why research paper DOIs don’t work sometimes
• One paragraph a day
• “Every email that lands in my inbox is like a little mini Turing test”
• China’s Great Wall of Villages
• Voter apathy in the US
• “I don’t want to bastardize the art of storytelling to mask sales copy as stories, narratives, and articles.”

Writing deep dives on Chandrayaan

• On the importance of the Chandrayaan 3 rover and its contribution to learning about our Moon’s origin
• Chandrayaan 4, India’s plan to bring samples from the Moon
• On (not) celebrating Chandrayaan 3’s Moon landing, or that of Apollo

More space writing

• When your writing is so niche that your entire article is about a cave on the Moon
• First look at samples from the Moon’s farside brought by China
• How China repurposes Moon missions to enable deep space exploration
• Continued covering NASA’s VIPER rover cancellation: Moon Monday #188 and #192
• The next Moon missions by Intuitive Machines: Mission 2 and 3, and Mission 4
• Europe’s new test facility brings the Moon vibes on Earth
• On India’s newest rocket

More videos based on Moon Monday!

• India’s increasingly complex upcoming Chandrayaan Moon missions
• The next Moon landing missions by Intuitive Machines for NASA CLPS

Space, personally

• I’m conducting a study on Indo-US lunar exploration as an Adjunct Scholar at the Takshashila Institution. Our aim is to identify specific collaborative avenues that will elevate lunar science & technology capabilities of both countries in line with their independent goals. 🇮🇳🌗🇺🇸
• Sometimes when people ask me which company I represent, and don’t understand that I’m an independent writer, I’m tempted to say that I’m a bootstrapped one-person startup that’s revenue positive from day one.

Thoughts

• LinkedIn Newsletters are spam and a scam
• Screw shortform. Live longform. Go slowcial media.
• If you’re too obsessed with context, you’ll end up wanting to become a cosmologist.
• All I’m asking for is a bluetooth watch with an e-ink display for excellent sunlight legibility and long battery life, a flat-strip just thick enough to house a USB-C port, solar cells or little dynamos on its band, call notifications, and basic fitness tracking. Instead of whatever bulky power hungry non sense these modern smart watches are. ⌚︎

Life

• Moved houses within Bangalore and dealt with some personal things
• A focused phone experience with Archaic Intelligence
• My medu wada guy in Mumbai remembered my chutney-sambhar preference and simply handed over a plate to me after a quick head confirmation despite seeing me after four months. This is what local niceties look like. ^_^
• A daylong train ride is a one-day vacation with the self if you want it to be. Immerse yourself in reading something new, and it might as well be a trip.

Pictures

I’d love to hear what you’ve been up to.

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Let’s not live an internet without intent.