Rural solar electrification leveraging a confluence of factors!

 Couple of years ago I was trying to come up with a small framework I can use to analyze & understand anything that comes my way, be it world policy, family issues, work projects, politics or anything else. Eventually settled on two simple questions:

1. Is the picture being presented complete? (This is to help us get past arguments that focus too much on small slivers of data and/or anecdotal evidence.)

2. Whatever solution being proposed, will it scale? (This is to ensure that we are not beguiled by very nice-sounding solutions that cost too much or too complicated to implement and so won't work when scaled up.)

You can find the full post titled Simple Questions here. 

There can always be exceptions. Perhaps in some situations it is impossible to get the full picture OR scaling is not that important OR we need to do small scale solutions now and focus on big scale solutions later, etc. But asking these two questions should help us cut through clutter on any domain we are interested in learning about. 

Many articles, substack posts, papers I have been reading recently, with these two framework questions in mind, seems to point to solar power evolving into a comprehensive solution for power delivery in many remote parts of the world. As you may know, if we can somehow harvest all the energy that reaches planet earth from sun for one hour, it is adequate to cover all our power needs for a whole year! Though this is not practical, it goes to show that there is enough energy available if we can make use of it efficiently. This means the solution will scale if needed. This is getting demonstrated in parts of Africa really well!

- Solar panel costs (measured as $/watt) have plummeted more than 99% over the past 50 years. In other words, if you'd have spent $10,000 in 1975 to buy panels to power a home, panels providing same amount of power cost much less than $100 now! 

- Pay as you go models that allow people who are not wealthy to get solar power, paying monthly installments. After 5, 6 years, they do get full ownership.

- Mpesa (in Kenya) and other money exchange models that work via feature phones and SMS text messages, make it easy for customers in remote locations to make payments. 

- Solar panels installed in remote locations now come with microchips embedded that allows the service provider to turn off the service remotely if the monthly payments are not coming in, obviating the need for a truck roll. If payment resumes, service can be turned on again easily and remotely. 

- Mobile phone adoption skyrocketed in India couple of decades ago, since there was huge void that required filling as landlines were not easy to get and didn't work well. Similarly, solar adoption is taking off in Africa since "building power plants & running wires to individual homes miles and miles away" model wasn't working for decades, leaving a big void. 

- Western companies trying to buy green credits and even PE (Private Equity) companies trying to turn a profit, are investing in this area now, reducing the costs further!

Model seems to be replicable in most parts of the world and so can scale. This understanding appears correct since I see writeups explaining how renewable energy creation costs are now equal to or even below traditional power production and so are starting to compete on cost, powerful big countries like China, India as well as smaller countries around the world are leveraging these trends to implement solar projects in massive scales, and so on. China's manufacturing prowess cratering panel costs alone is a significant contribution towards green energy adoption around the world! 

I did read an odd article in the Financial Express. It discussed how the Pakistani power grid is not supplying power reliably, that is pushing anyone who can afford to buy solar panels to switch to solar for their electricity needs. This leaves only the poor who couldn't afford on the grid. They don't pay their dues properly that puts the grid in death spiral! While this is sad, even that article talked about customers buying panels fully first. Instead, if this "pay as you go" model gets implemented in Pakistan, it will work even for the poor. It may play the death knell for their power grid but will at least provide reliable power to everyone. Hopefully the resulting improvement in the economy, will eventually help the grid as well. 

Just to be clear, the overall share of power generation using solar is still too small compared to the role of fossil fuels as seen in this chart below. You can visit the https://ourworldindata.org/ site that has a lot of interesting data that is easy to explore in many domains, including this one. Still, it is good to see this uptick at least in the rural electrification projects, particularly since this model will scale. 

If you'd like to read a more detailed analysis, check-out this link and this one. 

Book Review: Poverty, by America by Matthew Desmond

For the past few months, I have been working on my next book titled "Oil & Water - How energy shapes societies, countries and the world" that is expected to come out early next year. It starts with my personal stories from the years I was working as an offshore oil platform maintenance engineer in the late 80's and then discusses global energy policies, geopolitics including Russia weaponizing natural gas export, fracking, nuclear fusion and so on. Though these widely different topics may make me sound like a boring policy wonk, I have tried my best to keep the flow interesting, short, and crisp. Since there is always more to discuss, I have setup a companion website for the print edition at https://oilwaterbook.blogspot.com where I intend to post additional/updated links, videos and other reference material for interested readers. Though the site is WIP, check out the short audio intros I have posted there in multiple languages. These were generated using Notebook LM. I was tickled to be able to do this for free and have posted 15 min long audio intros in English, Chinese, Spanish, Korean, Tamil, Hindi, Kannada and so on. Each version is unique and is NOT a translation though there are overlaps. Try out the languages you like and let me know if there are errors or anything goofy that I should correct.  

Because of that diversion, reading has taken a hit! To catch up, picked up Poverty, By America by Matthew Desmond. I have been hearing about it from friends and media. Very easy read, as it is a short book (less than 200 pages) written in simple language. The main argument is that USA, despite being a rich & industrially advanced country, still leaves many of its citizenry in poverty. It proceeds to discuss possible remedies. While I may be fiscally conservative, when it comes to social issues, I tend to be progressive/liberal. Thus, the book is preaching to the choir. The chapter titles of the book, such as How we undercut workers, How we force the poor to pay more, How we rely on welfare, clearly convey what is being discussed. 

Book starts with anecdotes of a 55-year-old father pulling double shifts and taking whatever pill that is available to stay awake at the end of his graveyard shift, only to realize that the back ally pill he took has all kinds of drugs mixed in that shows up in his toxicology report, making him ineligible to keep his children with him. He is certainly not a junkie but is betrayed by the system is the takeaway. Left with no choice, he is happy to keep at least one child with him, while agreeing to let his stepmother take care of his other child. Another lady named Crystal, abused when she was a child, shorn by biological parents, bouncing around foster homes, not able to understand why her social security support stopped when she turned 18 (as she is an adult now), becomes homeless. A roommate of the author named Kimbell, who steps on a nail in a run-down apartment, ignores medical treatment since he can't afford it as he didn't have health insurance, ends up losing one leg. In each one of these cases, you'd think there will be mechanisms in a rich country to help them, since these are all people working one or more jobs to survive, not drug addicts or lazy bums just hanging around. But in reality, they all get advice about how they need to pull themselves up by their bootstraps but often not much else. I know of such stories myself through volunteering work I do. Though things are far worse in many other parts of the world, point here is that US, a country that can potentially eliminate poverty and provide a good baseline quality of life to everyone, in reality doesn't. 

Author discusses how in many areas laws in place are anti-poor. For example, tipping your waiter 15 to 20% when you eat in restaurants is a common practice in the US. While we think we are giving this tip to the staff in appreciation of their good service, restaurant industry has managed to get laws passed that allows them to pay less than minimum wage to their staff as long as the tips make up the difference! For example, if I hire a maid at home, I have to pay a minimum of say $10 per hour. But a waitress getting a $3 tip can be paid just $7 by the restaurant owner. Thus, the tip is actually going to the restaurant owner and not the staff. Book discusses many other areas such as how US corporations prevent labor unions, townships prevent low cost homes being built in their neighborhood thinking it will pull down the real estate value when poor people move in, etc. 

Mitigation ideas suggested are, supporting corporations that pay a fair wage, allowing labor unions, supporting low-cost home building in your neighborhood (research shows that unless the implementation is horrendous, real estate values don't go down when low-cost homes are built in a high-income neighborhood) and so on. While I am in support of these ideas, I wasn't impressed much by this book. I was quite aware of these issues, and the solutions proposed aren't anything new. They are not even anything too precise that will quickly address the underlying issues but are highlevel ones that will take decades to show any meaningful impact. 

Personal stories and anecdotes are powerful in helping us form our opinions. But it is a double-edged sword and so anyone who has experiences that fall in the opposite end, will have a strong negative reaction to the discussed problems and proposed solutions. For example, I personally know of people (i.e. not big faceless corporations) who have one or two condominiums they rent out to get some investment income. These are not the heartless slumlords discussed in the book but friends of mine who are generous, kind, good at heart middle-class individuals. They have horror stories of tenants who are coached not to pay rent and ways of avoiding eviction that have been living rent-free for years with court cases on going. These friends are realizing that they are not cut out to be landlords and are trying to sell the property and place the proceeds in mutual funds. I can tell many labor union stories where the impossible demands by the unions have run the whole company aground. Book doesn't even acknowledge such things happen, focusing only on one side of the narrative. We certainly don't want to be swayed by one anecdote or the other and will be better off following my Simple Questions framework to get the full picture and correct solutions that will scale. 

If you are interested in this topic, this might be a quick easy read. Perhaps Ezra Klein's Abundance book (which I haven't read yet) that deals with this domain might be a more interesting read, providing lot more to chew on. 

Right to Repair Movement

I consider myself handy, probably a trait my younger brother and I imbibed from our father. While many men of my (and previous) generation pride themselves in being able to fix broken equipment around the house and/or being able to jerry rig things to get little projects going, I generally notice a decline in this aptitude amongst people of younger generation. This trend is accelerated by companies intentionally designing products that can't be serviced by owners, so that we will depend on the company's "certified technicians" that charge an arm and a leg to fix even simple things. There are few other reasons as well that exacerbates this trend. 

- More than 15 years ago, Wired published an article titled The Good Enough Revolution, that is still worth reading. It talked about companies intentionally choosing cheap materials to manufacture their products focusing on convenience and reduced cost. This of course made the products cheaper, rendering them affordable to lot more people. 

- The rapid product obsolescence that is becoming the norm in many domains (think electronics, fast fashion clothing) adds to this phenomenon. If you are not going to use a product for more than 2 years, why spend the time/money/energy to design it to last 20 years?

- To prevent competitors from copying their products, manufacturers often paint circuit boards with black paint (so that others can't find out the component details), glue pieces together (instead of using screws or other fasteners that can be taken apart and put back together) that will break when you take them apart, declare warranties void if you open the product and so on.  

- Manufacturers would like you to keep buying the same product again and again, when it breaks, rather than fix the product as increases the revenue for them. So, they have a clear incentive to make it as difficult and expensive as possible to fix broken products, making buying another new unit the easier choice. 

But for people like me, this trend is quite annoying, since we believe once you buy a product, you totally own it, should be able to service and keep it running for a long time as long as it is functioning well. One simple example of when this gets really irritating. My wife and I drink a cup of fruit smoothie for breakfast daily. The Nutribullet brand blender I use to make the smoothie, comes with a blade seen in this picture. It broke within a year of daily use. 

It was making a weird screeching noise and was heating up a lot when I was trying to use it. After digging around and searching online a bit, understood that the two small ball bearing (what is beneath the blue ring in the second photo) needed to get the blade spindle spin tends to go down quickly if you use it daily. 

I tried replacing it and ended up damaging the blade as it wasn't designed to be fixed by end user. Bought a replacement blade. It broke again within 2 months! Bought a 3rd blade that broke again in couple of months! Throwing out the whole blender or buying another blender just for making smoothie type ideas sounded silly. So, this time really sat down, figured out the way to remove the two small ball bearing carefully and replaced them with new ones. While the replacement blade costs $20 even for non-brand (i.e compatible but not made by Nutribullet) and lot more for "original", I could get 10 units of the ball bearing for $10 or so! (Third photo shows the blade and the remaining 8 ball bearings.)  

In addition to cost saving, not throwing a fully working electrical item that is not biodegradable into a landfill feels really good! It is the same joy one gets when completing a software debug to see a fix you coded fully resolves the issue. But Nutribullet is certainly not making it easy. I can immediately think of small tweaks they can do to resolve this issue, making the product last a lot longer. (Alternately the Roomba robotic vacuum cleaner has a nice design that has many components that can be replaced by end user fairly easily.)

While I can write a lot more about dishwashers, coffee makers, washing machines and lawn mowers that I have fixed over the years and the trials and tribulations involved, will cut that short to say, I am really glad to see the "Right to Repair" movement gaining some traction in the US. It is sad that this has to become a "movement" for people to be able to use products longer. But at least it is a trend in the right direction that also seems to include older repair enthusiasts holding Saturday sessions in local community centers where anyone can walk-in with a broken appliance and get guidance on how to get it working again. You can read about the movement at https://www.repair.org/stand-up. The notion appears to be more popular in Europe, while in Asia people do tend to repair & use products as per tradition more often. You can also watch this short video, read this write up. There are articles/research like this one that suggest it is a lose-lose-lose movement as well! 

Couple of quick questions:

- Do you consider yourself handy? Any interesting repair story that made you proud of yourself? 

- What is the oldest product you own? Not asking about jewelry or a book that is a family heirloom, but something that "works"? 

Next photo shows a Casio fx-350 scientific calculator I bought during my first year of engineering in 1982 that I still have and continues to work well, after 43 years! I usually take good care of things and so they don't breakdown quickly. Still four decades is awesome for a calculator! I have used this calculator for some 100+ exams, though off late don't use it at all, since using the ones available on the PC or browser is easier. Not sure when I replaced its button cell last time, but it still comes on and works normally. 

P.S. When I sent this post out as an email, it resonated with a lot of friends, who are men of my age! Got responses from many in the US, India and Europe! It was gratifying to learn that the weekend repair gathering is active in UK as well:

Crowthorne Repair Café – Crowthorne Reduce Our Waste

Modern constructs sans electronics!

I read an article circa 2001 that talked about the "Perishability of Digital Content", discussing how something written on a stone tablet a millennium ago is still readable, while something written into a floppy disk a decade before may no longer be readable. Unless you kept transferring the content to Zip disks, USB drives and cloud storage obsessively, the contents may be lost. In fact, I have a set of Tamil language documents I still have, created using a software called Murasu Anjal around that time. Now those files won't open anymore. Knowing that this may happen, I took the precaution of saving the Murasu Anjal program installer as well in my archives, thinking I can always install the program to be able to open the documents. But that program won't install in Windows-11 machines! If you have a Windows-98 machine lying around, PLMK. Perhaps I can use your help to retrieve those documents, some of which include poetry written by an uncle of mine who passed away a decade ago. We can debate about how stone tablets and electronic documents are different, how efficient digital storage is and so on, but can't deny the underlying point related to perishability! 

I have spent my career working in the semiconductor industry, and I am truly fascinated by how far we have come in our own lifetime and what a transformation it has been to the human civilization as a whole. But I find complicated, beautiful non-electronic constructions equally fascinating and almost mesmerizing. While there is so much to discuss, and one can easily write a book on this topic, will sample just four items and stop. Please click through each link, without which this post is useless

I was talking to two of my cousins over the weekend, who are literally lot more qualified than I am on these topics. My cousin Sundar Narasimhan pointed me to this video, which is a bit dated (and so audio quality is not that great), related to passive dynamic bipedal walking. Pretty neat when you realize the bipedal construct is walking down the bench, simply due to incline using gravity! This led to my other cousin Ravi Sundaram to point us to this Veritasium video discussing the Stranderbeest. I came to know about it few years ago via a Simpsons TV show reference, that is mentioned in the Veritasium video as well. There are tons of videos online that discuss the construction details. But the Veritasium video nicely summarizes the project for someone with passing interest. 

That made me remember a project I was involved in few years ago, as a coach for a middle school Science Olympiad team. Here are the rules and starting point for that project called "Battery Buggy". Basic goal is to build a small battery powered vehicle, that travel a set distance and stops on its own, without any electronics/remote control involved. Unlike other projects discussed, this one involves batteries and electric motor, but still no electronics. Please read through the rules carefully as it may be difficult to fully understand all the details in one quick reading. Then see how you'd design the vehicle. Most difficult parts are 

- Making the vehicle stop on its own (i.e. no electronics/remote control allowed) after it traverses a set distance. This distance can be anywhere between 9 and 12 meters, specified by the judges on the day of the competition. 

- For bonus points making the vehicle travel in an arc to reach the same point. 

After you have thought through and have come up with some ideas, you can look at this link which has lot more details of our design. It would be good to watch through each video in chronological order so that you can see the progress we made slowly week after week. If you simply see the final version/run, lot of pain we went through will all be lost, which is what is important for learning. For example, you can see the initial photos/videos to understand how the vehicle stops on its own; how we achieved the arc comes much later. I have included some pictures of the competition, my daughter and her teammate winning medals. This is just to show you the number of competitions we have to attend to get to the state final, where we finished at number 2, missing first place just by couple of points. Since the teams finishing in third place was way behind, we practically tied for the state first finish! 

The three cases above (bipedal walker, Stranderbeest, and battery buggy) were interesting in slightly differing ways from science/construction points of view. But the most artistically beautiful construct is the evolution of mechanical sculptures designed over the years by a single engineer named David Roy. Blending his engineering skills with his sublime artistic skills, he has created a series of kinetic sculptures using no electricity or motors that can be hung on the wall as mesmerizing art pieces! This video put together by Wired very nicely summarizes all I'd like to explain! 

As I wrote in the beginning, there are many more projects of similar kind we can talk about. But PLMK if you were personally involved, designed, developed any such moving/dynamic constructs that did not use electronics. 

Catheter based Atrial Ablation

You may remember me talking about about A-Fib and A-Flutter episodes I have been having few years ago. Though it is fairly common (prevalence is about 10% of the population), once you have this cardiac issue, it normally tends to occur more often as you age. I had it only about 4 times over the last 7 years. Though my sample size is small, it did look like the frequency is increasing. So, after some deliberation and discussions with multiple cardiologists, I went through the Atrial Ablation procedure on April 15, 2025. Since this is a catheter-based (i.e. not an open-heart surgery) outpatient procedure (i.e. no need to stay overnight in the hospital), it is generally tolerated well, and the recovery time is shorter. I am sending out this email in the hope that it will nudge you to learn about this disorder and this technically sophisticated procedure being used more and more to address it.

I am including a lot of links that I found interesting. Please consider looking through them all, as each one will take only few mins of your time. 

If you have never heard of A-Fib, A-Flutter or SVT (Supra Ventricular Tachycardia), you can take a quick look at this Mayo Clinic explanation. This CDC site has a simple animation explaining A-Fib. It boils down to electrical signals that regulate our heart rhythm finding alternate paths and misfiring that results in heart quivering without periodicity instead of beating regularly.  The Atrial Flutter condition occurs when for no apparent reason, heart starts beating really fast while you are just sitting around (i.e. instead of 50 to 60bpm, it starts racing at 140-180bpm). Both are bad for the body since this may result in stroke, heart just stopping and other serious conditions. Some people do have A-Fib that results in occasional beats just missing but otherwise everything working normally, and they live many decades without the need for any intervention. 

If these unacceptable A-Fib or A-Flutter condition occur frequently and the heart doesn't reset itself back to sinus rhythm after a while, there are increasing levels of interventions suggested. 

- Initially you can take medications (pills) that are called Beta Blockers that will slow down the heart and make sure it never beats too fast. Downside is, since its effect is always on, you blood pressure, heart rate may remain perpetually low, making you feeling tired, slowing down your metabolism resulting in weight gain, etc. 

- If the heart doesn't return to normal rhythm for a long time, you can shock it back into rhythm. But that doesn't guarantee that you won't get into that state again in the next hour or tomorrow or next year.

- If this keeps occurring, pace maker installation is one solution. But that is invasive, need to be maintained and monitored regularly. 

Atrial Ablation is a newer answer to this issue. Ablation in medicine means removing or deactivating some tissue/part. In other ablation procedures, the ablated tissue may be excised. But in atrial ablation, since the amount of tissue ablated is so small, the killed tissue cells are just left to scar and heal. 

You can take a look at this short video to get more background information about the issue and procedure. 

Couple of weeks before the procedure, you are asked to go through a CT scan to make sure you are fit to undergo this treatment, your veins are in good shape, and there is nothing unusual about your heart chambers & access pathways that may prevent a successful procedure. This is followed by a blood test. If everything looks good, you check-in to the hospital one day morning (shouldn't eat or drink during the previous 12 hours), prepped (lot of shaving chest hair that still itches!), given IV, monitored for a while and then moved to the operation theater. There were 7, 8 people in the room working on me, that included the anesthesiologist, OR nurses, cardiologist and even a nurse representing the equipment company that marks different parts of the body to create a 3-D image of the torso. Since the procedure is performed under General Anesthesia, once I had the oxygen mask on me, remember taking couple of deep breaths as instructed and in the next instant waking up in the recovery room after 3 hours! BTW, I was under the impression that just one or two drugs are administered to anesthetize you during the procedure. Actually, a cocktail of 7, 8 drugs calibrated for you is administered and documented minute by min. During the process, I was intubated (to keep the airways open so that I will keep breathing while being unconscious). You can see the actual procedure done on some patient shown in this video, though with all the plastic covering in place, it is not very educational but for understanding how the catheters look on the monitor to the operating team during the procedure. 

Procedure itself involves pasting a lot of markers on you, to be able to get a consolidated 3-D image of your torso on the monitor, then making an incision (more of a small puncture) on the left and right sides of your groin area to access the femoral vein. This vein is big enough and is close to the skin surface and so you can think of this process more like the procedure used to draw blood from your elbow when you go in for blood test, just a little bigger (say the size of a punch hole size opening). A sheath is inserted into this hole that prevents blood flowing through the vein coming out. Then the catheter is inserted into this vein through the sheath. While the sheath provides a nice tight opening, the catheter is slowly pushed all the way through your body until it reaches the inside of your heart. Since I have had both A-Fib and A-Flutter, cardiologist told me that the procedure has to be done on both atrial chambers of the heart. I initially thought this is why we need access from both left and right sides of the groin, using two different catheters. Subsequently when I read the procedure report, saw a line that said, "Left heart catheterization by transseptal puncture through intact septum" that I didn't know was part of the procedure before! 🙂 So, only one catheter is used for ablation that starts from right groin and first reaches the right atrial chamber. The cardiologist then pierces the heart wall (septum) that separates left and right atrial chambers to make a hole, to push the catheter to the left side, repeat the procedure on that side and pull it back out. You can see this process explained in this short video. They then apply Heparin and let the hole heal! Realized the procedure is more invasive than I originally thought! The other catheter inserted is used for multiple purposes such as mapping the chamber, measuring electrical activity as well as possible ablation steps. 

The process of ablation was previously done using extreme heat (e.g. radio frequency rays triggered from the tip of the catheter) or cold (Nitrogen gas) that kills the cells. I was explaining this process as more like heating/cooling the vessel to cook what is inside, where the vessel and adjacent area also gets heated/cooled unnecessarily. Since last year PFA (Pulse Field Ablation) model has become common. Here the catheter emits pulses for very short duration (about 2.5 seconds for each firing) that is repeated about 8 times in two different configurations (called basket and flower) that affects only needed tissue without affecting adjacent cells much. This is more like induction cooking that heats up only the content of the vessel and not the vessel itself. Click on the PFA link to see a very short video that explains the two configurations and the counts. This CT scan picture below shows one of my own heart chambers that went through the procedure. 

Once the process is over (about 2 hours total in the OR), all the catheters are removed in the OR itself, entry point sutured (just couple of stitches) before you are wheeled back into the recovery room. Though the procedure itself is only 2 hours long, there is a 4-hour protocol that is administered during recovery that involves monitoring suture site every 30 mins to make sure there is no bleeding, making you walk for 1 min after 2 hours, walk for 3, 4 mins after 3 hours, then remove the sutures, monitor your heart/pulse/BP, etc. If all goes well, the incision areas do NOT become hard, don't bleed, then you are discharged out of the hospital the same day. Though I was clearly very conscious by the time I was discharged, since the effects of general anesthesia can take up to 24 hours to wear off, Maya had to drive me home. 

I was told not to lift anything that weighs more than 10lbs for couple of weeks. I thought by next day morning I will be back to normal. But had fever, headache for couple of days, sore throat (caused by intubation) for a week, and a lingering muscle ache & tiredness for almost two weeks! Made me realize that the procedure was a big trauma for the body since multiple catheters went in and out, heart chambers were touched, septum pierced and what not, and so it has to take its time to heal and recoup normalcy. Now I am back to normal baseline, except for having to take blood thinner for a month. Since catheters were used a lot, Eliquis is prescribed to ensure that there is no blood clot formation that may result in stroke. My wife suggested I don't cook/shave so that I won't nick myself resulting in non-stop bleeding. Used the opportunity to grow a beard (you can see pictures of bearded Sundar from 1985 to 2025 here! ). I am grateful that I have good health insurance, since I saw videos that said the procedure may cost as much as or even more than $300,000, that stunned me! 

I am really intrigued and impressed by the process & the procedure. Usually, the cardiologists who do the procedure get most of the credit and patient gratitude. Though they do deserve credit, to me, they appear more like skilled technicians executing precise steps they were taught to them. What I am more impressed by is the cumulative domain knowledge that has been developed by the researchers and equipment makers, that makes such a procedure to be executed via catheters even possible! Do check-out the details of the steps, how same catheter tube is used to do multiple steps, how the extremely sharp needle at the tip of the wire that pierces the wall (septum) that separates right and left atriums is designed to immediately bend so as not to accidentally cause any other unintended damage (explained in the video), the flower and basket formations formed by the same PFA catheter and so on! 

The procedure reports I saw does say that electrical conductance tests done after the procedure show electrical isolation that is in place now. Unfortunately, (unlike a clot for which a stent is installed, that very clearly addressing the root cause,) in this procedure, the cause/fix is not very clear. We just hope that this procedure takes care of the issue. That's all. In some cases, the issue returns, and they even do a second procedure. Hopefully in my case, this completed procedure will prevent all future episodes of A-Fib or A-Flutter, allowing me and my wife/family to live worry free! I am hoping to travel, stay alone without worrying much in the future. Wish me luck! 

If you search the web, you will find lot more information such as Watchman implants that are quite interesting to learn about. If you'd like any clarification or need any specific details, please let me know via comments or email. 

Fun with biology for weekend entertainment!

 We are often caught up in clips/news/forwards that are pushed by social as well as mainstream media that are mostly one or two minutes/pages long about things that are not going to matter much after a week or two To make sure our attention span is not monotonically getting atrophied, I nudge next gen youngsters in my circle to regularly read/listen/watch/focus on material related to ideas/research that span time & space, since that is what is going to have significant impact on societies in the longer term. I'd list the concepts behind mRNA vaccine or how High NA-EUV Lithography system works, as couple of such examples that took more than a decade to develop, with work spanning across a dozen countries/companies. 

To pull us back from the non-stop "Breaking News" cycle that mostly pumps out trivial stuff that is not going to matter next week, one approach suggests imagining a newspaper that gets published only once in 50 years. If you are the editor of that newspaper, what will you put out as the headlines (both good & bad) for the new issue going out next week?

Thinking along such slow lines, wanted to provide few good pointers I came across in the realm of biology.

Within the human body, we know blood flows all around, providing the needed nourishment for different body parts to function. Still there is a serious barrier at the brain that doesn't allow most things to get through. Here is an interesting article that nicely explains the blood-brain barrier.

Similarly, when a foreign body (e.g. a germ) enters our body, we know there is serious defense mechanism in place to fight it off. But when an expectant mother is carrying the baby, the fetus should normally be treated as a foreign body, as it has different blood type, DNA, etc. and so should be fought off by the mother's body. This doesn't happen. Why? It is because of the placenta, which is now understood to be a much more complicated organ than it was previously thought of. This Radiolab podcast does an excellent job of discussing this topic. A closely related article discusses discusses possibility of microbiome existing in human brain. 

On a somewhat related note, saw a nice video titled Post Human that talked about using our skin cells to create stem cells that can then be goaded to become egg & sperm cells, so that one can potentially have one's own baby without the need for another partner's sperm or egg. While this is one form of cloning, the documentary is not about cloning at all but about developments in biology (e.g. growing a baby outside the womb, developing a digital model that can be used to experiment drug or surgical procedures to see what will work for the real patient) in multiple areas that could be around the corner. https://youtu.be/88DPXE1thw4

If such things are possible, will it be possible to grow the human baby totally outside a woman's womb? That is the "What if?" question being explored in this Netflix movie, where in the near future, babies go through gestational development in a pod, provided by a private company. You can rent the pod, choose various options by paying for them, and use a crypto key to unlock the pod during the birthing process. While the concept is nicely explored, ending is just meh. https://youtu.be/rGMx_7oAeUM

Going back in time, Netflix also has a new movie titled Joy, that presents the development of IVF tech in the 1970's.

https://youtu.be/Ix8Hzwc81XA

Robert Edwards & Patrick Steptoe, the pioneers that brought Louisa Brown (the first test tube baby) to this world, have written a book titled "A Matter of Life". It is one of the first non-fiction book I read in English, way back in the 1980's and so vividly remember, which is what this movie is about. Just like the way we are worried about the unknown repercussions of CRISPR based editing of human genome today, in the 1970s, there was massive opposition to IVF, since church, public and even the scientific community (including James Watson of DNA fame) were all worried that this is going against nature, that may produce Frankenstein monsters! 

Let me know how many of these pointers you were able to explore and what you found interesting or if you have pointers for me. 

Not so well disguised Book Reviews!

A while back I heard an interview of Nina Kraus on the radio discussing her book titled "Of Sound Mind - How our brain constructs a meaningful sonic world" that emphasized the importance of the sense of hearing, that we don't take as seriously as vision. The pun in the main title was amusing, making the book name stick to my mind. As I age, there has been some age based deterioration in my own hearing as shown in the chart below, and so I wanted to dig into this area a bit more to see if there is anything for me to do/practice to slow down or reverse the trend before I am forced to go for hearing aids, etc. in the future (very similar to what I was doing with CGM - Continuous Glucose Monitoring). 

In a totally different context came across the old Pulitzer Prize winner "The Soul of a New Machine" (when straplines for book titles were not in vogue!) by Tracy Kidder that came out in 1981. Though I have heard of it, never picked it up, though it was considered a classic in computer science world. Decided to order a copy. Since I read these two books back-to-back, my usual triggers, comparing the authors' writing style, their background and how the material was presented were all swirling around in my mind. 

Just for fun, I first asked ChatGPT to write a book review in my style for the Soul of the machine book. I could do that by pointing it to my blogsite that has archives of my previous reviews so that it can learn. Here is the exact prompt I gave, and the review it wrote. This is to see how close its writeup is compared to how I felt. 

My prompt to ChatGPT: Write a book review for "The soul of a new machine" by Tracy Kidder in the style of Sundar Vedantham using book reviews posted at https://sundarvedantham.blogspot.com 

Here is what it came up with:

I was expecting it to write a review exactly like what I'd have written (i.e. if I copy/paste and send it out as my review, no one will know the difference). But it interpreted the prompt to mean that it should mimic someone else writing the review, referring to my style (hence the "as Vedantham would ask" lines). While it did manage to write prose that is similar to how I may write, actual takeaways were quite the opposite to what I felt reading the book! I have read couple of other books in the past, with major expectations that turned out to be duds for me. Along those lines, despite this one being a Pulitzer Prize winner, I didn't find it very engaging. Being a 4 decade old book, perhaps it hasn't aged well. It is written by the author Tracy Kidder who is a writer (i.e. not computer scientist). He was invited to hang around the design team of a computer company called Data General, as they were designing a new Mini-Computer (similar to DEC's PDP-11) called Eclipse. 

Data General was a badass computer company in the 70's. It was known for aggressive sales techniques, bold advertisements (look up "They Say IBM’s Entry Into Minicomputers Will Legitimize The Market. The Bastards Say, Welcome." advertisement that never actually went out) and so forth. While the DG's efforts & style were unique and heroic compared to IBM type companies at that time, to me Kidder kept sounding like a total outsider (perhaps because I am an insider) who was trying to sound like an insider, explaining geeky technical details of computer design in not so easy to understand prose for common audience. Author who is not a techie trying to sound like he is very tightly integrated as part of the tech team, describing how he was in the lab, went fishing with the tech leads, ate dinner with them, describing everything in first person singular (I did this, I asked him, my wife said) sounded odd. Reminded me of Carly Fiorina, when she became CEO of HP, putting up her picture next to Hewlett & Packard in their corporate office. It made HP engineers giggle since they didn't see her as an equivalent techie that deserved to have her portrait next to the founders, both of whom had passed away! Kidder certainly didn't go that far. But more of an observer style reporting in third person might have come across better. Perhaps it is just me. If you have read it and consider it a classic, educate me as to what I am missing and what impressed you so much.  

OTOH, Kraus is a Prof. at Northwestern University, running a lab called Brainvolts for decades, guided about 30 PhD students and has written just this one book that captures her lifelong work spanning decades. While this profile matches that of some very good books I have read in the past, I found Kraus' prose unnecessarily technical for a mass audience book. Here is an example, "Their hearing threshold did not change, but the way the auditory cortex responded to sound changed, reflecting a disorganized tonotopic pitch-processing mechanism". Takes a while to get used to her discussing the differences between afferent (moving upstream from ear towards brain) and efferent (moving downstream) in such language elaborately. I often complain that books usually contain walls and walls of text but instead should sprinkle around many more figures & pictures to help illustrate the discussion. While I was delighted to see Kraus using a lot of pictures, I found many pictures that didn't add much value. They felt so unnecessary, perhaps only helping to increase page count nudging it towards the 300-page mark, which is typical for books of this kind (this one is only 267 pages long). In addition, there were several pictures reused with permission from somewhere else. Probably the originals were color pictures that were meant to be seen in larger format. Rendered in B&W, small format portrayal in this book, things written inside those images by hand were hard to read and so again were annoying. 

But once we get past those annoyances, this book nicely covers the importance of good auditory capacity we should strive to retain for our mental health. Kraus writes in first person, talking often about her family, children, husband, mother, and students. In this case, since it is all her research, it does sound appropriate, at least to my ears. She covers the subject from multiple angles, the ear-brain functionality that enables us to hear & comprehend sound, bird songs, poverty are just few angles she takes up. Often when you dig into any specific areas of research, you unearth very interesting facts and nuances that are not intuitive. Kraus does a lot of research by measuring midbrain electrical signals that can be measured from our scalp (FFR - Frequency Following Response), that she uses as a point of departure to study the effects of sound on autism, aging, and so on. Here are some such findings Kraus talks about:

- Both musicians and athletes are better at hearing & understanding speech under noisy conditions. But the brains of the musicians amplify the signal (i.e. speech) to understand what is being said better, while athletes suppress the noise to reach the same level of understanding. 

- Plants are able to "hear" or are sensitive to sound. Her team demonstrates it using a pot that has two diverging legs at the bottom. Since plants grow their roots towards the area where water is found, without really providing water, but by creating the sound of water, they are able to observe the root growing towards that leg of the pot!

- Marine lives thrive near coral reefs that have a lot of activity reflected by the level of sound. By playing marine sounds through speakers near dead coral, we are able to attract more fish and other marine beings to settle down in that area, helping the area revive!

- Being a practicing bilingual and performing music of any kind are two areas that really help. 

- I have attached a 7 min long radio interview she gave. Near minute 6:30 see how by measuring the electric signals on the scalp as our brain listens to a piece of audio (few seconds of music, in this case) we can even recreate the audio back. 

I went for an audiology exam recently. The plot below shows my left/right (blue/red respectively) hearing thresholds. This is typical age-related hearing deterioration at different frequencies. 

I did do well on speech audiometry, word recognition tympanometry, and other such tests. Bur from previous test results completed couple of years ago, I can see a 5db drop in most frequencies. Kraus points out how if we see bleary road signs, we won't blame the highway department for installing fuzzy signs but get our eyes checked but when we don't hear well, we blame the noise around us and don't rush to get our ears tested! As we lose hearing slowly, as almost all of us will as we age, conversations become difficult. We slowly become apprehensive and hesitant about annoying others by asking them to repeat what they said. We then start to avoid interactions and tend to become more and more isolated leading to depression. We may also see this behavior in our own family elders. Simple fixes are getting tested by an audiologist to track any deterioration over time, learning a new language, playing music, avoiding excessive noise that can damage our ears, getting the right kind of hearing aids, and so on. I am planning to put these ideas into practice in my life. Do check out the Brainvolts lab website that has interesting short videos, papers, tests. If you won't pick up this book, you can search for her name online and listen to interviews/talks.