And now I see with eye serene / The very pulse of the machine;
I have just wrapped up my third year dissertation, a harrowing experience that deeply affirmed my desire to pursue a PhD. In an effort to milk some value out of the numerous mistakes I made along the way, I have collated below what I wish I knew before I started. Start writing within the first month of your project. Everyone says this, few do it. But I really really hope that I’ll pull it off next…
First, a verbose screed. If you just want the solution, skip to here . In 2018, Jaron Lanier wrote a book called Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now . It's precise and compelling but eight years later, it feels a bit redundant. His prescience was such that you no longer really need to make a case for why social media is bad: it seems to be near-universally regarded as…
Hammerspoon is a free, open-source program that gives you deep access to macOS APIs via Lua scripting. In the Before Times, the barrier to entry would be your ability/willingness to write Lua, but now we have Claude Code as a non-deterministic compiler that turns English into functioning code (h/t yomismoaqui ) so a quick read of the docs is sufficient to do whatever you'd like, even if you are…
I don’t really care much for cricket, but my dad does. He told me once about how Pakistan produced some of the greatest fast-bowlers in the world. I looked it up and I’m pretty sure it’s apocryphal, but it’s a good story. Fast bowlers tend to bowl right at the start of the match, because this is when the ball is newest. The new ball is unmarred by pitch and play – its prominent seam and smooth…
It’s just insane that language models actually work. How is it possible. The world is enchanted. Do you still feel it? A kind of feverish awe? My computer can talk to me, it can teach me, yet it possesses no greater essence than its transistors… Except I don’t really feel like that. Not often, certainly not constantly. I think the most beautiful thing about it all to me is how one is forced to…
I dissected the thigh today. Unexpectedly, it was my favourite dissection so far in medical school. Beautiful, intricately structured layers. The fascia here is not disorganised like it is in other areas of the body; it is a cohesive sheath which blankets and envelops the underlying muscle, save for a small, palpable port-hole through which emerges the singular great saphenous vein, running down…
I really cannot emphasise enough how important realising this was for me. Nothing is more powerful, addictive, anti-depressive—I daresay spiritual—than the feeling of motion, the rhythm of progress. The true sin and misfortune of being stuck is that you forget this, you forget what it feels like to be moving, so you cannot really price it in correctly. Instead, you try to get moving for some sort…
I came across this poem in the New Yorker and it made me despair somewhat. This is my retaliation. A Shropshire Lad, XL A.E. Housman Into my heart an air that kills From yon far country blows: What are those blue remembered hills, What spires, what farms are those? That is the land of lost content, I see it shining plain, The happy highways where I went And cannot come again. Moonlight Night R.M.…
This essay was originally published in Vol VI Issue 2 of the RUMS Review magazine. You can read the full issue here Modern medicine has put health back into the hands of the individual. A slew of evidence over the past few decades has established exercise, mindful eating, and other such lifestyle interventions as necessities for the maintenance of good health. This evidence base has spawned public…
I’ve come to believe that for each respective QoL enhancement there is an optimal level of engagement at which you reap pretty much all of the benefit, and any further cognitive energy and money you funnel into it is just chasing a non-existent white whale. In an effort to make hundreds of hours of forum-trawling worth something, below is a list of the various niches I’ve become obsessed with over…
A Post-Mortem Analysis This piece was written in collaboration with Aryan Arora and originally published in Vol XI Issue 1 of the RUMS Review Magazine. The full issue is available here . Major depressive disorder, commonly referred to as depression, lies in the unfortunate realm of conditions which are simultaneously widespread, debilitating, stigmatised, and poorly understood. It is one of…
I was left with some reflections (and doubts) after the psychiatry lectures I received over my first year in medical school. I have been putting off writing them up, but in the interest of populating this blog with something, below lie some disorganised impressions on the topic. Take seriously at your own caution. The word “biopsychosocial” comes up a lot in lectures, which is directionally good,…
N.B. If the term 'Static Site Generator' is unfamiliar to you, I recommend reading this blogpost as a primer. Though it may look the same, the backend of this blog has been drastically simplified. Previously, I was using the static site generator Jekyll to build this site, but I have now migrated to a newer, flashier, and much easier to use SSG called Eleventy . My requirements for a SSG are…