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Krish Ashok

@krishashok

5 Jan

If you have wondered how electric rice cookers know when to stop cooking, the engineering behind that is some of the most minimalist brilliance I’ve seen, brilliance that keeps the cost of these appliances down to ridiculously cheap levels.

So 2 high school physics concepts to revise before we understand this
1. Latent heat of water - you can raise the temp of water pretty quickly to close to 100C but then it takes extra heat to actually get past 100 cos of the energy required to actually turn water into vapour

So you can observe this by bringing some water to a boil and checking its temperature. It will rise to 95-96 at a reasonable pace and then slow down because as long as there is liquid water left in the vessel, the temp can’t go above 100C

Read 7 tweets

Krish Ashok

@krishashok

27 Dec 20

A short thread on how I approach learning a new skill

Important caveat: how people learn is a deeply personal thing (in much the same way nutrition is) and barring some recent breakthroughs in neuroscience, most “how to hack your brain” advice is usually dubious. What works for me may not work for anyone else

And almost all post-facto “analysis” is fraught with hindsight biases. Learning is almost always never neat and organized. It’s messy and more random than people make it out to be.

Read 22 tweets

Krish Ashok

@krishashok

25 Nov 20

As Cyclone Nivar bears down towards the TN coast, we were treated to some spectacular rolling thunder overnight. The kind that starts off as a low rumble and builds up like a dubstep drop into a ear-shattering final crack.

And since it woke all of us up, it was an opportunity to do an #ELI5 on thunder with the son. But to explain thunder, one has to understand lightning, because a thunder is essentially the sonic boom that accompanies lightning

Lightning happens when a massive difference in electrical charge happens between clouds or between cloud and ground. When this difference in voltage becomes too high, things are settled by electrons moving en masse from one point to another to equalise the situation.

Read 8 tweets

Krish Ashok

@krishashok

12 Oct 20

@Mint_Lounge

I've started writing a column on food science for @Mint_Lounge and the first one is about the science of gluten and how to reliably make soft chapathi and fluffy poori

PS: It also features illustrations drawn by me lifestyle.livemint.com/food/cook/the-…

@Mint_Lounge

Episode 2 of my Masala Lab column for @Mint_Lounge explores the versatility of the much maligned refined wheat flour - Maida (and because it’s so versatile, it gets 2 illustrations) lifestyle.livemint.com/food/discover/…

Since the illustrations don't seem to be visible on mobile browsers for many, here they are

Read 13 tweets

Krish Ashok

@krishashok

4 Oct 20

What connects ancient Mesopotamia, Rosetta Stone, your liver, mayonnaise, the last letter of the Greek alphabet, dark chocolate, fake meat and heart disease? The answer is sesame. A thread

Rather than randomly connect multiple facts, this thread will attempt to use why and how questions to rabbit-hole from one fact to another. And try and keep the science at an #ELI5 level.

It turns out that we know that the ancient Akkadian word for sesame was "Ellu", and the Sumerian word for it was “Illu”, both of which are rather surprising because the Tamil word for it is…"Ellu"

Read 70 tweets

Krish Ashok

@krishashok

29 Sep 20

I've been thinking about the relationship between truth and relevance, and while it's reasonably obvious that what is relevant is more often than not truthful, what is true is not always relevant.

A common recent critique of a lot of mainstream journalism is its perceived failure in presenting the objective truth, thus the "fake news" label. But I think it's the failure of relevance that is a far bigger problem

Tech has looked at an editor's job over the last decade and challenged it with - "Why does he get to decide what is true?. But we need to look at tech and ask - "Why does an algorithm get to decide what is relevant?"

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