A few days back, one of my colleagues wrote about Edward Snowden's appearance on the JRE. In his post, he talked about how freely Snowden was able to communicate his motivation for the actions he took in 2013. In another post, he wrote about the various changes that have taken place in the internet space since those revelations. In both cases, the posts have been from the perspective, or at least with the assumption, that in an aggregate, those revelations were positive. I think it is important to...

Like all questions in life, the answer is "it depends". It depends at which point in their respective orbits you measure. Furthermore, as CGP Grey points out, the diameter of a planet's orbit has a huge impact on its relative distance to other planets. And for this reason one should ask not which plant is closest to Earth, rather which planet is on average most closest to Earth.

This coming weekend, the F1 circus will visit Austin for the US Grand Prix. On the same weekend, NASCAR will be visiting the Texas Speedway. The events are about 3 hours away, but you'd never know it from the views expressed by a concerned citizen. There’s very little competition between NASCAR and Formula 1, but there is some, and I think it’s an absolute insult, lack of respect, lack of professionalism on the part of Formula 1 to schedule a race on the very same dayEddie Gossage -...

Time travel is the stuff of fiction, of dreams. We all want to be able to either travel into the past to fix a wrong, or into the future to see what things would be. It comes as no surprise that scientists have also wondered if traveling through time is indeed possible according to our current understanding of the laws of physics. In this video from PBS spacetime, host Matt O'Dowd, explains the various ways in which theory allows us to travel through time. The most intuitive is...

Today, there are more ways to keep our data safe and private than ever before. From password managers, to multi-factor authentication, to encryption everywhere, to bio-metrics authentication, to VPNs, to encrypted DNS. And yet, as the ways to keep your data safe increase or become more easily accessible, so do the ways in which we more freely give that very data away. Though voice assistants are nothing new, their popularity has grown exponentially in the past couple of years. It makes sense. As the world becomes ever more...

Not long ago, I wrote about the changes that have taken place since Edward Snowden revealed the extremes the US government had reached in order to "keep us safe". Today, on the Joe Rogan podcast, Snowden gave one of the best interviews I've heard from him. During the interview, he was able to talk about his childhood, his enthusiasm for technology since a young age, his various jobs in the intelligence community and finally, the catalysts that led him to share the bulk of documents confirming the US...

One has to love the awesome power of our economy. The US economy is great. Where else can you buy a car and a TV with little to no credit? But at the same time, in such an economy you get tricky offers. Take a look at this offer from Chase. Not bad, right? We're all coffee lovers and most people go to Starbucks. So getting a 10% money-back on your coffee is a deal, no? Right, all the way to a grand total of $3.00. Chase is...

Feminists and general female-rights activists tend to drive this point home a lot; men and women are equal. I get it, women have suffered through much unfairness throughout life. In relative terms, at least in the US, only recently could women vote. Even more recently, could women work, and these days, 100 years after our voting battle was won, there are still fights for equal pay. However, the reality is that women and men are not equal, not the same. Women, physically and emotionally are different than men....

A few days ago, I wrote about Malcolm Gladwell's new book, Talking to Strangers, and the sad story about our default reaction in trying to make sense of the world and its dire consequences. Today I read a chapter on coupling and how strongly "coupled" (get it), our actions are to context or circumstances. One of the most stark examples was suicide in England in the middle of the last century. Gladwell explains that at its peak, the number of annual suicides due to gas inhalation reached around...

When I was younger, I knew my family and I were different. I didn't exactly know what was it was that was different, but I could feel it. As I have gotten older I have gotten to know myself better and thus have also come to realize how I am different. I grew up in middle-class neighborhood and I was the only Asian in my block. My friends were Caucasian and we got along great. I can honestly say I never felt any type of racism. I was...