El Niño, 2026
A daily-updating map of the 2026 El Niño built from NOAA satellite data, and a plain explainer of how a record ocean is measured and forecast: anomalies, grids, the Niño index, seasonal models, and RONI.
Vatsal Bakshi
Software engineer writing about cryptography and distributed systems.
Latest posts
Painting with Gaussians
A visual, interactive derivation of 3D Gaussian Splatting: radiance fields, the volume rendering integral, NeRF, and how splatting renders photoreal scenes in real time.
The Shape of Gravity
The Schwarzschild solution explained visually: how mass curves spacetime, why gravity is the curvature of time, and how orbits and bending light are geodesics of general relativity.
Pushing Past Plausible
An AI's first answer is shaped like the right answer before it has the substance. The night before a USGA qualifier, I asked Claude for a pin sheet — and learned where the bluff actually lives.
The Mistake of Continuing to Think About It
A question that started with selfies and somehow ended with mortality, meaning, and the realization that some of the smartest people who ever lived didn't arrive at an answer either.
Can You Trust an AI Endpoint?
Trusted execution environments promise cryptographic proof that an AI model hasn't been tampered with. Here's how they work, with a live simulation you can verify yourself.
Quantum Gates as Rotations: The Hadamard
If a qubit state is a point on the Bloch sphere, a quantum gate is a rotation. Unitarity tells us which rotations are allowed. The Hadamard is the most important one.
The Geometry of Curved Spaces
An introduction to Riemannian geometry and the mathematics of curved space: manifolds, metric tensors, curvature, geodesics, and covariant derivatives.
Benford's Law: The Strange Law That Catches Financial Fraudsters
Classical probability says every digit should appear equally often. It is spectacularly wrong. The digit 1 leads roughly 30% of all real-world numbers — and the same law that explains why is also what catches financial fraud.
Bits, Amplitudes, and the Bloch Sphere
A qubit is not 'both 0 and 1 at once.' It is a precise mathematical object, and its geometry fits on the surface of a sphere.
The 9 Windows: Golf's Ball Flight Laws Explained
The golf ball flight laws explained: how face angle and swing path combine to produce all nine ball flights, and what Tiger's 9-window drill teaches about controlling them.