You got to love it when your AI chatbot has a sense of humour. This was me asking Gemini for a gist of Nassim Taleb’s ‘The Black Swan’, when she started the explanation with this quip. I was reminded of the movie Interstellar, where McConaughey’s character reduces the incredible robot TARS’ humour setting, and later…
One of my favourite fictional characters is Poirot. In the 2023 film A Haunting in Venice, when explaining his method, he says: “When a crime has been committed, I can, by application of order and method and the slow extinguishing of my own soul, find without fail or doubt, whodunit.” The slow extinguishing of my…
Image: source Since plastic is pretty much an inescapable part of our diets now, and since we humans are inclined to prefer selling/buying a solution rather than inconveniencing ourselves with rollbacks or preventive efforts, my prediction for big pharma is that their next big offering will be pills (or some other form) of supplements to…
A humorous take on the paradox that exists between the views of us common humans, versus that of psychologists, who take a slightly more empathetic view, and those behavioural science practitioners who try to leverage knowledge of human biases and drivers to grow business without it always being beneficial to customers themselves.
Image: link I had shared this forward on social media a few years ago, and it popped back up today. Apart from the innocence, simplicity and being purely hilarious, it is a nice example of the recognition stage of ’empathy’, a term we behaviour and design thinking folk throw around a lot. Situations we accept…
Do you use hyperboles often? I do. Mostly with close friends and family, but when necessary, with clients or my students. Helps convey the meaning or gravity of an idea or situation. Like when Gordon Murray says something like, “Why did the chicken cross the road? Because you didn’t fucking cook it!” However, when you’re…
The challenge of finding the names of Books Recommended in Books.
If you were to randomly consider invasions in the past few hundred years, I wonder if crappy weather might have been a big reason for people to invade other countries in the hope of better weather.
Navigating airport security… A cartoon strip..
Vulnerability of Tech Processes and Human Decisions Here are two interesting incidents I came across online in the last week. One, about a seemingly harmless vulnerability in an online service’s process. The other, a possible vulnerability in human decisions in a human-dependent, traditional business. First of, a French literary buff, conducted an interesting experiment. It…
Ghost Rider India has seen a meteoric rise in the number of vehicles on its roads. And with it, driving sense and etiquette have disappeared into oblivion. I’ll agree I’m not too great a driver myself. But few things anger me as much as bikers riding on the wrong side of the road. And it’s still ok if a rider…
Hope you don’t have a Rolled Model? We all have role models? Well, at least most of us do. And can we ever admire them enough? While it’s great if you have idols or role models, something I suggest to friends and acquaintances is that you should not be amazed by your role models. Instead, find out what it is about…
Dark Knight Rising, Batpod Skidding You know how we sometimes have a tendency to give our ‘expert’ views on something that already seems perfect, and how, according to us, it could have still been better? Experts will agree that in areas of personal strengths and weaknesses, it is always better to focus on our strengths rather than our weaknesses. But in some other…