I would never have guessed that my research in programming languages would take me to the last remaining location of a hipster Massachusetts ice cream parlor established in the ’70s. I would never have guessed that the first dot-com domain ever registered had any relation to the invention of cookies-and-cream ice cream. If you will bear with me through tangents about MIT, Lisp, hippies, New England scoop shops, and a tech startup—here’s the story.

“I moved to a different continent, but Helvetica seems to have followed me… Rather, perhaps, I have followed it to its home country of Switzerland, a.k.a. Confoederatio Helvetica.”

Or, Shardul predicts “Spatial Audio” in Apple AirPods two years early; or, lockdown-era reflections on one of the many reasons video calls are so clunky, unsatisfying, and inhuman. Includes long technical asides on audio engineering.

What if highlighting in programming environments wasn’t syntactic, based on ‘parts of speech’, but semantic? Can we make better use of the color channel to communicate relevant information about a program and make it easier to work with?

Reflections on personal names, their meanings, translations, and flawed assumptions on the (US-/anglophone-/Western-centric) Internet.

Final project for 21M.716 Play Translation and Cultural Transmission, Fall 2020. Translated from the Marathi play कौंतेय (Kaunteya) by वि. वा. शिरवाडकर (V. V. Shirwadkar).

‘If you tell the grown-ups, “I saw a beautiful house made of pink bricks, with geraniums in its windows and doves on its roof…”, they’ll never manage to picture the house. You have to tell them: “I saw a million-dollar house.” And then they’ll exclaim, “Oh, that’s a beauty!”’

Universal love, transcendent joy, Douglas Hofstadter, and the WA state driver’s guide.

“When you know you’re faking and the audience knows you’re faking and you know the audience knows you know you’re faking because the fact that pro wrestling is fake has been documented, verified, and repeated to the point of cliché, and yet you stay in character on the walk from the locker room to your Mazda just in case someone is pointing his phone’s camera at you from a window above the alley—that’s kayfabe.”

A short missive from a summer vacation in Goa.