Aneesh Sathe

On the recent season of the show Clarkson’s farm, J.C. goes through great lengths to buy the right pub. As with any sensible buyer, the team does a thorough tear down followed by a big build up before the place is open for business. They survey how the place is built, located, and accessed. In their refresh they ensure that each part of the pub is built with purpose. Even the tractor on the ceiling. The art is in answering the question: How was this place put together?

The wave towered over me. Then the sound filled my ears. Not the calm breath of the waves; but it was surf music. I was maybe 3. Song names and artist names were beyond me. There was only the blue-green wave and the twang of the guitar. I have chased music all my life. Just had to figure out the tools. The record player and the giant speakers taught my first lesson: pressing buttons was joy. In my pursuit I learned in about records, tapes, CDs, mp3, flac, streaming, Napster, torrents, Winamp, VLC, blanks, CD-R/RWs, compression, bit rates, conversion, transfer, backups, VPN, networking, …

I got told off by The Paris Review today. Maybe it wasn’t necessarily directed at me, but as they say in the, now old, new lingo, I felt attacked. You see, recently, drawing on the well of inspiration that is history I succeeded in writing a poem, but not just any poem. I wrote a ghazal. Those who know me for any amount of time are made aware of my taste for writing poetry. It’s usually pretty bad but I persist, cause why not. The OG is long gone anyway. The ghazal is an especially ambitious type of poetry to be taken up my someone with my modest talents. To make matters worse, as I learned …

When printing was invented, Europe suddenly had access to all the books that had existed until that point in history. This included everything from mystical texts to astronomical observations. Having no guides to judge quality, some people went off on the deep end. Giordano Bruno is sometimes referred to as the forefather of modern cosmology. He was not. An extreme case, he took mystical click-bait, mixed it with the then-contemporary Copernican theories, and, without any data, invented the infinite universe. Eventually, culture adapted and people started to compare and organize all the data. …

This post continues the series on Socratic Thinking, turning the space-and-place lens inward to examine the mind itself. Human minds can be thought of as an imperfect place with the ability to create their own insta-places to navigate ambiguity. Exploration in any real or conceptual space needs navigational markers with sufficient meaning. Humans are biologically predisposed to seek out and use navigational markers. This tendency is rooted in our neural architecture, emerges early in life, and is shared with other animals, reflecting its deep evolutionary origins 1,2 . Even the simplest of …