So, Netflix wants to run ads on a paid streaming service. The idea might seem completely bonkers to most of us. Maybe, just maybe, that's only because all streaming services we pay for promise to "remove ads". Consider any from Spotify to YouTube. I know many people who will just listen/watch an ad for free service. However, if you look at video streaming services like HBO, Disney+ or Netflix, they don't have ads at all. "Pay to remove ads" idea is only present in services where one can access content without paying as well.

There are many articles out there saying: if you remember cable TV, we were pretty much watching ads on a paid service. Right? I disagree. We were paying to a service provider who maintained the cable connection to our house, and not directly to the channels. We were unaware of the dealings among these infrastructure providers and TV channels.

We do watch ads in the beginning at a movie theatre. In which case, we are watching ads for a paid service. But is it really the same as Netflix showing individually targeted ads? Netflix, to some of their credit, said that it will not be using its data to build user profiles that lead to targeted ads outside the platform. That's highly specific. They may build user profiles. They may use targeted ads. They may even use a combination of both within the platform. Not yet, anyway.

For convenience, Netflix also said:

“What we do at launch will not be representative of the long term opportunity of what the product will be.”

- Netflix

And if we don't see anything wrong with that: Every product we liked going into the direction of ads, data collection, eventually surveillance and then third-party ads trying to (eventually succeeding in) change our opinions bit-by-bit.

I believe in the open equal internet. I'd rather pay for a service with money than data. I am aware that not everyone can do that, but please if you are able, do.

All pursuit of knowledge used to be one thing: Philosophy. All hypotheses, theories, experiments, observations, discussions of Socrates, Aristotle, Marcus Aurelius, Adi Shankara, Aryabhatta, Confucius, Tao, Ptolemy or anyone fell under one umbrella: Philosophy. Everyone who could read was to some extent religious. In a way, that's how religions were born. They were an effort to formalize the way one should lead their lives, with a sprinkle of practical knowledge here and there in the books.

To a great extent, pursuit of knowledge was for the elite. People who could read. In many cultures, not everyone was even allowed to educate themselves or their kids. To look at it another way, not everyone even had the time for it, there were more pressing things to work on like food and shelter. But that, is a discussion for another time.

Philosophers wondered, talked, discussed about mathematics, stars, weaponry, psychology and many more things. By the renaissance period, they were all given a different name: polymaths. Regardless of what words we used, curious people were always curious about more than one 'field'. They were just curious about learning new things irrespective of their 'expertise'.

Gradually the world became progressively democratic, the innovations to make our lives easier became accessible to the civilians. All of us could get educated, learn about things we were interested in. The universities became more than just cults (schools of thought). Somehow, we decided to break the ocean of knowledge into smaller seas. The islands within each sea representing the knowledge we have already discovered.

The students/professors could choose their interests and become experts at that. Diving deeper into the ocean of knowledge and discovering new things, expanding the island(s) they learned from. Everyone was free to sail in the ocean and gain the knowledge they sought, dive wherever they preferred without the risk of getting lost because they could always sail back into the island they started at.

However, today, we are in the situation where sailing from one sea to the other has become harder. A psychologist, for example, would find it hard to pursue their interest in archaeology. They seem to be quite different routes on the knowledge navigational map. It's not impossible, but harder than it has ever been.

The industry finds it extremely hard to reward people who have expertise across more than one fields. I am a computer engineer, and an information designer. Every interview I have with any company asks me the same question: "Do you see yourself as a designer or an engineer?". They have built departments over the years of operations with respective criteria to segregate people into those departments. They get confused about where to place someone like me.

I am not an engineer with a deep knowledge of every web development tool there is. I haven't worked a lot with GCP or AWS, for example. I have worked with them enough to be confident that I can make them do things that are required. I am not a designer with full-blown expertise with numerous projects under my belt. That doesn't mean that I have not designed good things, as my portfolio suggests. I have worked enough to know each field closely enough that I am a bridge between both departments.

Should I be punished for being multi-disciplinary?

A designer who knows how to program computers.

There aren't many people in the world, who can say that. There definitely are people who are great designers (better than me) with a programming knowledge and vice-versa. But only a few who enjoy doing both the things. The confusion I see on many people's faces with that is, probably, also present in some of the reader's minds.

To feed more into that confusion, I am interested in astronomy, medicine, preventative healthcare, information freedom, psychology, archeology, history, cultural significance, photography, architecture and other things. Go figure. I love learning about different things. I am just a curious person who likes to learn about new things that I find fascinating.

In today's world (maybe in olden days as well), we like to label things with one thing. I am asked what is your area of expertise? I am not really sure what to say. I am not a philosopher in modern terms, in any way. Philosophy is a field of study now, a sea by itself, which excludes sciences.

This blog is also something I started to write about the things I am interested in. Any marketing course/video on YouTube will tell you to find your niche before you start a blog. How can I find one? Every week I am reading about different things, One week, I study something about psychology of productivity, the next one about the galaxy that James Webb Telescope found and so on. I can blog about productivity or science every now and then, but not every week. Most importantly, I don't want my life to revolve around writing blogs and focusing my interests for that.

So, the question remains, what am I? A Computer Engineer or a Designer or just someone directionless? Well, the way I see it, I am an enthusiast who likes to learn. This is the reason that data visualization suits me, because every project can be about different fields and deal with different data and challenges. They keep me amused and curious.

What do I bring to the table?

This section is for the people in the industry who are hiring. The question in the title of this section is something we are supposed to ask ourselves before interviewing; and be able to articulate the answer to the interviewer. Writing this section is my effort to learn articulating those thoughts, and hopefully, finding a way to say it concisely in an interview.

I am a designer who knows programming. Yes, that's my skill-set.

Can one find a better programmer than I am? Most likely, yes.
Can one find a better designer than I am? Most likely, yes.

Can one find someone who knows both design and programming closely? Well, there are only a countable number of people in the world doing that.

Along with that, who is curious about learning new things? Additionally, has entreprenuerial inclinations? with teaching experience? Now, you are looking at a set of a few thousands, at most, people in the world.

According to some theories of creativity comes from knowledge of fields applied across different one(s)[source]. With my multitude of interests and knowledge, I believe my Self is good for any team. The combination will be reflected in the quality of my work, process, engagement with the team and the resulting output. Hence, you should hire me. :D But if you ask me, which department (engineering or design)… my answer is: both.

Feel free to subscribe to this blog, where I write about thoughts, learnings, experiences and such during that week. If you are someone like me, let's talk. Tweet @Navarjun.
(I don't tweet a lot, but I will respond)

Since the beginning of the pandemic, most people who work from home have struggled with being productive at some point in the pandemic. The way we worked completely changed, and many had difficulty finding the new 'balance' (for the lack of a better word). Although I can't talk about the general experience with my limited knowledge, I can totally talk about my own, on which I am the expert.

For some context, I was working remotely even before the pandemic. However, the remote work experience before the pandemic was quite different as compared to the one during the pandemic. Foremost, I had just moved to Canada in February of 2020. Moving countries is always a challenge, but during the pandemic it was incredibly hard. Secondly, I lost my job and almost no-one was hiring during the time. Being skilled with software engineering, I had to do food deliveries to sustain myself. Most importantly however, before the pandemic, one could still be social, travelling, living in hostels, meeting new people, doing fun stuff together. The pandemic forced us to be isolated.

After the dust settled, I found a software engineering job where I was not "allowed" to work-from-home, I was required to. I couldn't go anywhere, except for short walks around the block. Staying away from people was considered polite. Sorry, it was called staying in your bubble. My productivity suffered a lot. I didn't like the daily scrum meetings ever, but with this new team/job I had to deal with emotional distress every morning. Mostly because, not everyday would I have done something.

There are days for everyone when we can't get much done. Daily scrum meetings want you to realize that. I had to take certain amount of therapy to get out of the distress and deal with it. I am glad I could do it, and I did it in time. I wonder about the people who don't have the resources or access for such luxuries. Now, coming back from the digression, to the productivity. I think a lot of it is about knowing what to do.

We procrastinate on things that we believe are difficult, or hard to do, or not exciting. Procrastination is an avoidance behaviour. In today's world, we don't really get bored if we avoid doing something. Most of us have access to instant gratification tools in our pockets. It's easy to get distracted than ever before.

If you are struggling with that, here are some tools you try out, which helped me. (try to follow as you go through them)

1 - Setup notification schedule(s) on your phones

Setup your phone notifications to be blocked from 9am – 6pm (feel free to choose your own time, you can even start with as short as 4 hours). Do not, I repeat DO NOT, keep your phone close to you during these times. This is to stop you from picking up your phone mindlessly… just so it becomes intentional when you have to.

There are excuses to pick your phone, like needing a code to sign-into some multi-factor authenticated platform. But go to the phone, remember the code and walk back to the desk.

2 - Write your to-dos

Don't use an app. Get a small notebook with a pen. You can clip the pen to a bunch of pages so they both stay together. Now, write 3-6 things you need to get done today. If you think you don't know how to do something out of them, it needs to be broken down into smaller tasks. You can even write: "Learn about xyz" or "Figure out abc".

You must do this everyday, at the beginning of notification-free slot in your day. The beginning of the notification-free time has to be sacred for you. Don't let it slip.

3 - Pick a task from the to-do list

This step is important. Drink water, go to the toilet, relieve yourself and get some food before you begin. This is just to get rid of excuses you can give yourself to move away from your desk. Then make sure your first task is the one that will take the shortest time to complete.

4 - Do the task

By the time you get here, you have already done at least 3 tasks: put your phone away, written your to-dos for the day and chosen a task. Don't underestimate the importance of the utility of those 3.

Now, do the task. Initially, you might feel like you are forcing yourself to do it, partly because that's what it is. Focus on the task for 3-5 minutes, you will develop momentum to accomplish it.

If you don't feel the momentum, you shouldn't allow yourself the carelessness of doing-something-else. Be bored for a bit, your brain will come back to it as it needs to do something. [read paper]

Once you do that, pick the next one. As you complete one, two, three in a short time, you will develop the feeling of the day used well. The more you do, the more productive you were.

Seems simple, but isn't. Quite frankly, self-control is the key. It is like getting off of an addiction. You need to practice self-awareness and control. The above steps are just tools that could help you.

There are always ways one can distract themselves. Reading random blogs, youtube on computer if not on phone, finding out your desk needs cleaning before the work can be done, nails need trimming, let me budget something and a million more ways. But…

I trust you can do it. believe in yourself.

If you haven't seen this image, but reached this post, written by me… First of all, thanks for the honour. Secondly, this image symbolizes numerous achievements of the human civilization.

Of course, you must have seen this image before now. However, most people I talked to about this seems to underestimate the magnitude of the success of the Event horizon Telescope team (EHT team). The image itself is a data visualization, created using a plethora of data collected by the EHT collaboration. It is fascinating how such an incredible accomplishment is being shared using a photograph.

Let me walk you through a whole lot that is behind this image, and how we got here. I will just summarize the sections, because they can each be a book by themselves, and I am no expert on physics.

Knowing that the blackholes exist

It can be considered common knowledge that Einstein's Theory of Relativity hypothesized blackholes. However to reach Einstein, science had to go through Newton. In classical Newtonian physics, we couldn't estimate a blackhole. Space-time were thought to be two separate entities. But Newton's equations helped us get to the point of verifying theories with observations, and improving them. Scientists were forced to look for a new theory because Mercury's orbit was too close and fast for it to be stable as per classical equations.

Blackholes are a possibility in Einstien's General Theory of Relativity. However, not every mathematical solution is a physical one, for example, it is mathematically totally possible a magnetic monopole to exist, but it hasn't been found in our physical world. Considering this, Einstien himself never believed in the existence of Blackholes.[1] Later, we could see their effects once the telescopes got powerful enough.

How do we know what we see in the image is a blackhole?

It has been suspected since the 1980s that there might be a blackhole at the galactic centre. However, it wasn't until 2008 that all the doubts were cleared.[2] The left image below shows a composite video of the galactic centre captured over 26 years.[3] And the right one, depicting estimated orbits of stars around the blackhole[4], is a more obvious data visualization.

It is worth bringing the attention to the fact that blackholes are a perfect black. They reflect/create no signals, and one can think of them as regions of space rather than objects in space. We can never see a blackhole using light (the whole electromagnetic spectrum is totally absorbed by the blackholes).

One of the stars was observed to be going 24 million meters per second, that's 8% the speed of light. The only thing that could keep a star in orbit at the distance observed could be a blackhole. So, in a way, we fallback to the process of elimination from all the objects that can cause this effect. Additionally, the observations show us nothing observable at the orbital centre. This would all have been surprising (and causing more 'physics broke!' youtube videos) if we didn't have any theory to back it up. But we did, and the observations matched up.

At that point, it was confirmed that a blackhole existed at the galactic center, and we can observe it on a particular point in sky. Pointing our telescopes to that point, should yield us a "picture" of a blackhole.

But wait, what to observe?

The next challenge was to understand what to observe. It is well understood that different objects in the universe emit different part(s) of the electromagnetic spectrum. The Hubble Telescope, for instance, can only observe the visible light spectrum. The James-Webb Telescope is built to observe the infrared spectrum. So the question is what part of the full spectrum should we try to observe?

When waves escape the gravity of a blackhole, their wavelengths they are elongated. In other words, their wavelengths become longer. Additionally to observe a wave, we need to have a sensor that is at least that length. Fun fact: That is why an FM radio antenna is a long one. About a decade ago, phones could use the wire of plugged-in head/earphones as an FM radio receiver. But, I digress.

Radio waves are the longest wavelength that we can observe. Hence, we needed a radio telescope. That is not to say that there are no wavelength longer than radio (so called long waves)… there most definitely are, but we don't have the technology to observe them. So, let's point our radio telescope to a blackhole and see it.

Not quite yet

Stars (or any other celestial objects) are effectively point sized objects in our night skies, except the sun and the moon ofcourse. A telescope zooms-in by a lot, A LOT, to be able to observe them. The aperture of the telescope, meaning the size of the primary mirror, defines how small of a section of sky can it observe. In other words, it decides the resolution of a telescope.

By the time all of the above, plus more, was figured out. Numerous blackholes were located in the universe. Another big question that was posed was: Which blackhole to look at (photograph)? The largest blackhole known is not the "largest-visible" from our planet.

Apparent size

Everything in our skies has an absolute size and an apparent size. For instance, the moon in the above picture has a large apparent size as compared to Jupiter in the bottom-right corner of the image. While Jupiter's absolute size is bigger. Consequently, it is easier to photograph the moon than Jupiter.

The blackhole with the largest apparent size is what we should be looking at to photograph. It just so happens, that there are 2 blackholes with similar apparent size that are also visibly the largest. M87 which is 1,000 times bigger than Sagittarius A* but almost as far. Sagittarius A* is the blackhole in the center of our galaxy 26,000 light year away, while M87 is 535,000,000 light years away. Both of the blackholes have a similar apparent size.[5, 6]

Size of the telescope

To make observations of the apparent size of any of these black holes, the size of the telescope we need is huge. This is determined by a formula for its resolving power. Resolving power is directly propotional to the wavelength (which is not in our control), and inversely propotional to the diameter of the telescope.

So, larger the telescope, the smaller objects it can observe. Unfortunately, to observe the apparent sizes of the blackhole(s) we need a telescope the size of the Earth, which is impossible to build. (at least for now) So EHT fallbacks to the next best thing, using the radio telescopes all around the Earth to mimic a telescope as large as the Earth. EHT uses the rotation of the planet to get more data points within this virtual planet-sized telescope.

Other challenges

Initially, the EHT team decided to photograph Sagittarius A* first. Soon realizing that M87 should be attempted before Sagittarius A*. There were 2 major reasons. First, the line of sight from our planet to the galactic center has a lot of objects and gas clouds interupting our vision. Second, the smaller size of Sagittarius A* makes something moving at high speeds orbit it faster causing too many changes (imagine a long exposure photograph) in a short period of time. M87 is large so something moving at the light speed also takes longer to complete an orbit. This leads to more consistent overtime observations for M87.

Veritasium explains is better:

Photographing with Machine Learning

It might be surprising that it would have been impossible to photograph any blackhole without so many inventions coming together. To name a few in a short list:

• Kepler: Laws of planetary motions (1609–1619)

• Newton: Classical gravitational mechanics (1680s)

• Newcomb & Hall: Orbital observations of Mercury (1894)

• Einstein: Theory of relativity (1905–1915)

• Schwarzschild: Solution of relativity predicting blackholes (1916)

• Eddington & Crommelin: Total solar eclipse experiment to test relativity

• Telescope technologies since Galileo

• Electromagnetic wave equations and spectrum understanding since Maxwell

• Computers, simulation technologies and artificial intelligence

To create a whole image with the limited number of pixels available is a computational problem. But to do that we need to train our machines on numerous number of images and improve our image quality. This is the same technology used in our cellphones these days. All phones have a trained AI model to generate images from the small sensor (little data) and improve the quality of what the sensor observed.

That being said, there are other clever techniques like radio interferometry and computer simulations from the theory of relativity that contribute to the level of computational photography that the EHT team has used to create the images of these blackholes.

Why does it matter?

With all of the achievement and its celebration, the underlying question however is why does it even matter? Humans have always wondered about their place in the universe, and how, why do we even exist? Our religions are most likely an effort to explain our existence. We like to add meaning to our lives, and we are always on the search. The direct blackhole observation is moving further along that train of thought.

We do science, to understand ourselves. It eventually leads to improving our lives, for instance, understanding electricity and magnetic fields have put microwaves in our homes. We have built cars, satellites, unfathomable infrastructures like the grid, under-ocean cable network and so on… Science works!

By understanding and observing our universe, we take steps, however little they may be, to improve our understanding and add value to our lives.

Thanks for reading!

This is not a physics question. This is a moral one. The answer depends on who you ask. Information age has brought about the need to the questions of data, its ownership, control and utility. Classically, you were in complete control of your own data, for instance, you shared your photos with people physically. More importantly, only if you wanted. You could totally decide to send the copies to specific people or hide even the photo frames at home if someone else visited.

In the 21st century, our engagement with data, especially to collect, store and process them has reached another level. It is integrated in our daily lives to a great extent. If one looks into it, it seems like every activity you do on the internet is recorded somewhere. The data about every individual on the internet is being used by for-profit companies for their business/financial goals. Is this the right thing to do?

Some argue that there are good things that are a consequence of this access to the data by the companies. That somehow there is a relationship between data collected and "good things". A example generally brought up is the recommendation engines. The case goes somewhat like this: If Netflix or YouTube doesn't know what you like, and recommend things accordingly, it will be incredibly hard to find things suitable for you.

My point is not generally about the data collection though. I would like to clarify that it is about identifiable surveillance systems that these corporations have setup across the internet. Netflix's recommendation system, although still an echo chamber, isn't that big of a deal as a the Facebook feed curation algorithm. Facebook is an ad company, all their algorithms are aimed at making users spend more time on the platform, so they can generate more revenue through ads. This model has been proven to able to control your emotions (read more) by Facebook themselves.

Polarization of opinions is another side effect of such systems. Youtube, for instance, nudges its users to watch more of the content that they already watch. Our information sources these days are compromised. They only reflect what we are, there's nothing that challenges our thoughts other than other people… And somehow, we have started losing friends because they have a different political opinion from us. Information sources, if compromised, can influence your thoughts… this is discussed in the narrative of George Orwell's 1984.

Another thing that people say a lot, when they find out how companies monitor them across internet, is "I am not  a celebrity or influential figure, how does my data matter?" Well, it probably doesn't in the pool of billions of people. But our thoughts do matter to us, and affect people around us. The way we think, is highly affected by our knowledge. The knowledge we have comes from the information we have learnt, and experiences we have had. Our surveillance gives the corporations (even governments, in some cases) the power to influence us to a greater degree than we know.

Our data must belong to us.