Shivam Vij

Good morning from the world’s most polluted city.

We don’t hear much about air pollution in Punjab, Haryana and Uttar Pradesh because these states don’t have enough air pollution meters and the ones that are there seem to present a rather optimistic picture.

Name a single politician who you think has shown genuine concern about air pollution in Delhi and north India. Name one.

Post a photo you took (no description) to bring some Zen to the timeline

Dibakar Banerjee: ‘I'm an Indian; an Indian can be everything, I can be Hindu & Muslim, Bengali & Kashmiri'

www.moneycontrol.com/entertainmen...

How to listen to politicians. (And others.)

From TS Eliot’s play, The Cocktail Party.

Did Elon Musk tweak the algorithm of X to help Donald Trump win the 2024 US Presidential election? Discuss.

Shocking how many schools in Delhi don’t have air purifiers, both public and private schools.

#LetMeBreathe #AirPollution #AirPollutionDelhi #Delhi

UN Special Committee finds Israel’s warfare methods in Gaza consistent with genocide, including use of starvation as weapon of war NEW YORK (14 November 2024) – Israel’s warfare in Gaza is consistent with the characteristics of genocide, with mass civilian casualties and life-threatening conditions intentionally imposed on Palest...

The UN has now formally found Israel's genocide "consistent with genocide", including the use of weaponized starvation.

www.ohchr.org/en/press-rel...

CAUTION High Crash Roadway

“No way to prevent this,” says only roadway where this regularly happens

Indian family froze to death crossing the Canada-U.S. border Tragic tale of Indian family's fatal journey across U.S.-Canada border exposes harsh realities of human smuggling.

Incredible how common this has become

Indian family froze to death crossing the Canada-U.S. border, a perilous trip becoming more common - www.thehindu.com/news/interna...

Fat people are paid less for the same job as thin people. The least talked about form of discrimination. Fatphobia and fat shaming is considered part of for the course in India.

www.economist.com/finance-and-...

Barred Owl poised on a low branch with back toward the camera and face turned over the shoulder to look at the photographer. When I first stopped the car, the owl was looking away from me, but I waited until I was rewarded with this quick glance. The round head of the owl looks a bit wet and unkempt and features large black eyes and a yellow beak. If you zoom in, you can see raindrops and beads of water on the feathers. The bird is called a barred owl because of the streaks on its front, but we can only see the back in this photo which features rich brown feathers with white tips. The background is dismal with gray skies and bare branches. The owl might not have felt miserable, but s/he looked it.

On Wednesday, I found a window of drier weather that would allow me to at least do a tiny bit of birding, but the rain came back unexpectedly. Defeated, I was leaving the reserve and almost missed this cold, wet Barred Owl. #originalcontent #birds #photography 📷 (more in alt-text)

A barn owl resting in a tree with yellow leaves.

I hadn't seen any barn owls since summer, so I was very happy to spot this cutie the other day.

#birds #owls 📷 🪶

it appears a lot of people are enjoying the experience of microblogging without getting angry replies from a racist robot

Virtually all cybersecurity breaches both by volume and by severity are via trivially preventable problems (reused passwords, failing to update, failure to use minimum standards), not anything particularly sophisticated

♥️

Unfortunately there is a broad consensus among most political parties, bureaucrats, technocrats and even economists that infrastructure only means highways, airports, ports, and some more airports. Education and health are seen as wasteful expenditure, not investment.

What is common between the rape and murder of a woman doctor in a Kolkata hospital and a fire in a Jhansi hospital that killed ten new born babies? It’s the lack of investment in health infrastructure. Infra to create safe spaces for women doctors or check fire safety.

Attempt to shoot him fails, TMC councillor says: ‘Will not spare anyone’ TMC councillor Sushanta Ghosh was sitting outside his house in Kolkata when a man walked up to him and tried to shoot him. The gun malfunctioned and the man was caught while trying to escape.

TMC councillor Sushanta Ghosh was sitting outside his house in Kolkata when a man walked up to him and tried to shoot him. The gun malfunctioned and the man was caught while trying to escape.

Something very Bengali about this :)

indianexpress.com/article/citi...

Oops

Look who showed up to party at Mar-a-Lago.

Update: His health guy doesn't believe in medical science. His law guy is a sex trafficker. His intelligence gal is a Russian asset.

You're all caught up.

Readers prefer ChatGPT poems over Shakespeare and Sylvia Plath In a new study, participants with no expert knowledge in poetry were also unable to distinguish whether the verses were created by a person or a machine

The end is nigh: readers prefer poems written by ChatGPT over those by Shakespeare, T.S. Eliot, Sylvia Plath, and Emily Dickinson.

english.elpais.com/technology/2...

In my view, one reason for the success of Twitter with the name. It rolled of your tongue and evoke curiosity. More importantly, you could say you tweeted. Makes no sense to see you X-ed, or that you Mastodonned, or Threaded, or BlueSkied.

Twitter became a verb, like Googled.

X must go to hell.