Vivishek Sudhir
LightNews LightNews
banner
vivishek.bsky.social
Vivishek Sudhir
@vivishek.bsky.social
22 followers 54 following 24 posts
quantum physicist, curious human
Posts Media Videos Starter Packs
vivishek.bsky.social
Vivishek Sudhir @vivishek.bsky.social · 28d
“Every insight is partial blindness.”
Eat Pray Western Civ | National Review
The teaching life of Michael Sugrue, 1957–2024.
www.nationalreview.com
vivishek.bsky.social
Vivishek Sudhir @vivishek.bsky.social · Jul 7
"This was the French habit that the Normans brought to England: the use of extra letters to spell sounds that the alphabet didn’t have special letters for."
Why English doesn’t use accents
And why French is full of them
www.deadlanguagesociety.com
1
Reposted by Vivishek Sudhir
physicsmagazine.bsky.social
Physics Magazine @physicsmagazine.bsky.social · Jun 13
If you’ve seen Romeo and Juliet, you likely can summarize the plot in a single sentence that appears nowhere in the play. A new physics-inspired theory aims to explain our story-recalling ability by modeling the memory of a story as a hierarchical tree.
How We Remember Stories
The memory of a story appears to have a tree-like structure, with abstract summaries branching out into more specific details.
physics.aps.org
8 16
vivishek.bsky.social
Vivishek Sudhir @vivishek.bsky.social · Jun 3
"And just like that, the college would be rid of two nuisances at once. Administrators could do what administrators do — hold meetings, codify rules, debate policy, give and attend workshops, and organize social events — without having to deal with whiny students and grumpy professors."
Opinion | How to fix college finances? Eliminate faculty, then students.
Two existential threats to colleges and universities, one solution.
www.washingtonpost.com
1
vivishek.bsky.social
Vivishek Sudhir @vivishek.bsky.social · May 4
"accepting we are vulnerable, each of us, should mean we rely on one another more, not less, that individualism and isolationism are not the path forward"
Opinion | Spain in the Dark Is Safer Than Elsewhere With Power
The Iberian blackout showed us how much community matters.
www.nytimes.com
1
vivishek.bsky.social
Vivishek Sudhir @vivishek.bsky.social · Apr 22
"his colleague Harish-Chandra announced that he was switching from physics to mathematics because ‘physics is such a mess’. Dyson responded that he was switching from mathematics to physics ‘for the same reason’ "

royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/...
vivishek.bsky.social
Vivishek Sudhir @vivishek.bsky.social · Apr 22
"The insecure writer—a.k.a. every writer—worries that their ideas won’t come across clearly, so they overcompensate. The editor’s job is to push back."
A Civil War Over Semicolons
The biographer Robert Caro and his editor, Robert Gottlieb, have been arguing with each other for 50 years.
www.theatlantic.com
vivishek.bsky.social
Vivishek Sudhir @vivishek.bsky.social · Apr 22
"They show grotesqueries of ugliness that, in retrospect, become almost diabolical. One cannot imagine mere human beings concocting such dreadful things, and one can scarcely imagine human beings bearing life in them."
A Classic Essay by H.L. Mencken: 'The Libido for the Ugly'
H.L. Mencken is at his irreverent best in his attack on American architecture in "The Libido for the Ugly."
www.thoughtco.com
vivishek.bsky.social
Vivishek Sudhir @vivishek.bsky.social · Apr 22
"to have ‘the right to have rights’ a person must belong to a political community, the surest proof of which is having the proper papers"
Adam Shatz · Beyond Borders: Adolfo Kaminsky’s Forgeries
Kaminsky bought chemistry books from bouquinistes along the Seine and taught himself to make explosives. But when a man...
www.lrb.co.uk
vivishek.bsky.social
Vivishek Sudhir @vivishek.bsky.social · Apr 15
"The drafts lasted hours, the relationships lasted years."
Remembering Daniel Kahneman: A Mosaic of Memories and Lessons - By Evan Nesterak - Behavioral Scientist
A collection of memories and lessons from Daniel Kahneman's close collaborators and colleagues. Learn more about Kahneman the thinker, the coauthor, the writer, as well as Kahneman the partner, mentor...
behavioralscientist.org
Reposted by Vivishek Sudhir
michaelnielsen.bsky.social
Michael Nielsen @michaelnielsen.bsky.social · Apr 4
"overcome your inner resistance; it is always a mistake to try to do things too cleverly" - Einstein in a letter to Leo Szilard
1 5 23
Reposted by Vivishek Sudhir
joshuasweitz.bsky.social
Joshua Weitz @joshuasweitz.bsky.social · Mar 28
Working with an interdisciplinary team, we have developed a website to communicate how the White House's proposed cuts to health research would cause losses of $16B and 68,500 jobs.

Find out how your community may be impacted.

Explore more at SCIMaP: scienceimpacts.org

a 🧵
US map via scienceimpacts.org visualization of economic loss due to IDC cuts to 15% as part of Feb 7, 2025 executive order, with shading denoting intensity of cuts.
200 3.6K 6.5K
vivishek.bsky.social
Vivishek Sudhir @vivishek.bsky.social · Mar 17
...as McCulloch put it, “an idea wrenched out of time.” In other words, a memory.
The Man Who Tried to Redeem the World with Logic
Walter Pitts rose from the streets to MIT, but couldn’t escape himself.
nautil.us
Reposted by Vivishek Sudhir
astrokatie.com
Katie Mack @astrokatie.com · Mar 6
‘“Nature has its way of taking out the weak and the not so well and the injured. The eagle likely thought it would be able to take it out quite easily,” Sequeira [the Ontario-based photographer] said. “But, it wasn’t.””
Canada goose fights off bald eagle in rare, symbolism-laden battle on ice
Photographer captures 20-minute clash between birds emblematic of Canada and US amid high trade tensions
www.theguardian.com
85 740 3.5K
vivishek.bsky.social
Vivishek Sudhir @vivishek.bsky.social · Feb 27
"The dream behind decipherment is that it will lead to the discovery of whole histories."
Tom Stevenson · Beyond Mesopotamia: Linear Elamite Deciphered
Decipherment has attracted more than its fair share of formidable scholars, enthusiastic amateurs and crackpots, all...
www.lrb.co.uk
vivishek.bsky.social
Vivishek Sudhir @vivishek.bsky.social · Feb 14
"From that moment forward, Grothendieck thought of himself as a mathematician."

Few today seem to have the opportunity to discover what they truly are...
The Mysterious Disappearance of a Revolutionary Mathematician
Alexander Grothendieck was revered for revealing connections between seemingly unrelated realms. Then he dropped out of society.
www.newyorker.com
vivishek.bsky.social
Vivishek Sudhir @vivishek.bsky.social · Feb 14
“Freedom and liberation are an unending task”
Ur-Fascism | Umberto Eco
I think it is possible to outline a list of features that are typical of what I would like to call Ur-Fascism, or Eternal Fascism. These features cannot be organized into a system; many of them contra...
www.nybooks.com
vivishek.bsky.social
Vivishek Sudhir @vivishek.bsky.social · Feb 14
Who’s McKinsey?
It’s a consulting firm.

Are they funny?
No.

Then I don’t need them. If you’re efficient, you’re doing it the wrong way.
Life’s Work: An Interview with Jerry Seinfeld
The comedian on innovation, sustaining popularity, and humor as a leadership tool
hbr.org
vivishek.bsky.social
Vivishek Sudhir @vivishek.bsky.social · Feb 14
"As you say, it is nice to know that given the choice there really is no choice."
Freeman Dyson and Me
Jeremy Bernstein recounts his half-century friendship with the renowned scientist and visionary.
thereader.mitpress.mit.edu
vivishek.bsky.social
Vivishek Sudhir @vivishek.bsky.social · Feb 14
"The imagined color of life under communism, gray has revealed itself to be the actual hue of globalized capital."
Why Is Everything So Ugly? | The Editors
Dodging huge grilles we walk on, pulled by ugliness toward a gentrified retail strip. Here the violence of the new ugliness comes more fully into focus. The ruling class seized cities and chose to tur...
www.nplusonemag.com
vivishek.bsky.social
Vivishek Sudhir @vivishek.bsky.social · Feb 10
The Lawrence of Arabia quote “For some men, nothing is done till they do it themselves”, always reminded me of Jeff Kimble
vivishek.bsky.social
Vivishek Sudhir @vivishek.bsky.social · Jan 28
Merry warned Washington that the radical reformers deserved to lose the December 1993 elections, “lost it badly, and lost it fair and square.” After all, “the only way to know what the people want, and don’t want, is to ask them.”
The Long Telegram of the 1990s: “Whose Russia Is It Anyway? Toward a Policy of Benign Respect”
Washington, D.C., December 18, 2024 – A now-legendary but long-secret 70-paragraph telegram written by the top political analyst at the U.S. Embassy in Moscow in March 1994, E. Wayne Merry, criticizin...
nsarchive.gwu.edu
vivishek.bsky.social
Vivishek Sudhir @vivishek.bsky.social · Jan 20
This Just In: Chopstick Sleeves as Emissaries of Japanese Typography and Culture
Designer and educator Angie Wang deciphers a collection of over 500 sleeves recently donated to the Archive.
letterformarchive.org
vivishek.bsky.social
Vivishek Sudhir @vivishek.bsky.social · Jan 20
"Lost here is the gentle pursuit of a modest competence, the doing of something just because you enjoy it"

www.nytimes.com/2018/09/29/o...
Opinion | In Praise of Mediocrity (Published 2018)
The pursuit of excellence has infiltrated and corrupted the world of leisure.
www.nytimes.com
vivishek.bsky.social
Vivishek Sudhir @vivishek.bsky.social · Jan 19
computerhistory.org/blog/discove...
Discovering Dennis Ritchie’s Lost Dissertation
Until recently, across a half-century perhaps fewer than a dozen people had ever had the opportunity to read Dennis Ritchie’s dissertation—the intellectual and biographical fork-in-the-road separating...
computerhistory.org