Dipayan Chakraborty

@AMP86793444 He has one more growth spurt in him. Will add muscle mass in the next 5 years. Has top trainers who will ensure strength and conditioning and improve his core strength and balance. He will play 100s of matches and improve game awareness. The levels he could reach are scary.

Everytime something nice is written about Vaibhav Suryavanshi, there are always these people who sour the occasion by saying that he is not fifteen and has done age fudging and all that. Guys, the guy has gone through bone densitometry studies and his age has been medically proven. Ok, you don’t want to believe it? That’s ok. What could he be? Sixteen or seventeen? The kid doesn’t have a hair on his face, at best he is 16 or 17 years old. How does that change anything? He is the most exciting teenager cricket has seen since Sachin almost four decades ago. The kid is dragging people to grounds and putting many others in-front of TV screens. Like a true entertainer. All this as a teenager. So, for once, you all sour people, both in India and abroad, pipe down your negativity and enjoy what is one the most exciting sporting talents around. #VaibhavSuryavanshi

The tokyo metropolitan train system is the best in the world I have ever seen. Part of the reason why explained here

The lead article in #LePoint from #France (“The Great Heist”)is an extensive investigation into the intersection of Trump’s second term and his and family’s private business interests. The report argues that the White House under Trump has shockingly been transformed into a "cash machine" for the #Trump family and their associates. Key themes of the article include: 1. The "Crypto-President": The report examines how the administration’s shift toward pro-crypto policies coincided with the launch of Trump-branded digital assets and "World Liberty Financial," alleging that regulatory decisions are being influenced by the President's personal holdings. 2. Insider Trading Allegations: Le Point investigates "troubling" market fluctuations that occur immediately following the President's social media posts or policy announcements. It suggests that a small circle of "insiders" may be profiting from prior knowledge of these shifts. 3. Real Estate & Private Clubs: The article details how foreign delegations and lobbyists continue to frequent Trump-owned properties (like Mar-a-Lago), creating a system where access to the Commander-in-Chief is effectively a commercial transaction. 4. The "Trumpification" of Washington: Beyond the money, the article describes an "aesthetic of power," where the President’s personal brand—symbolized by the gold coin shown on the cover—is being merged with the official symbols of the American state as the country approaches its 250th anniversary. The tone of the piece is highly critical, framing these actions not just as ethical lapses, but as a systematic "heist" of democratic norms for private gain.

"Man won't fly for a million years" – NYT 1903

BREAKING: Details of special forces rescue operation to save American Pilot deep into Iranian territory: -Downed airmen after being shot down lands near Talkhuncheh and immediately actives emergency GPS, proceeds to hike 24 hours 5miles up a 2000 metre mountain to evade capture where he remains hidden for 12 hours. -US special forces locate him and realise Iranian convoys are closing in and begin to engage said convoys with large AirPower, meanwhile US special forces MH-6 helicopters and C-130s are disputed, and land 10 km south east of him to build a makeshift airfield. -Soon after this several MH-6s successfully fly to the top of the mountain and pick him up under small arms fire, and reach the makeshift airfield. Classically two C-130js meant to evacuate Delta and injured airmen get stuck in the mud. -US airforce begins massive suppression campaign on nearby Iranian units, whilst special forces team hunker down for three hours eventually being saved by three AFSOC Dash 8 aircraft meanwhile blowing up remaining C-13Ojs and MH6s aircraft to avoid capture. Incredible.

For as long as humans have sailed, rats have followed. They gnawed through rope and rigging, contaminated food stores, spread plague, and moved freely through the dark holds of wooden ships where no sailor wanted to reach. The solution was obvious to anyone who had ever watched a cat work. By the time the ancient Egyptians were trading across the Mediterranean, cats were already traveling with them, brought aboard not as pets but as working animals with a job to do. The practice spread from there to Greece, Rome, and eventually every seafaring civilization that followed. But somewhere along the long centuries of maritime life, the practical became mystical. Sailors were among the most superstitious people in the ancient and medieval world, and it was not difficult to believe that an animal as observant and inscrutable as a cat was doing something more than hunting. The belief system that grew around ship’s cats was elaborate and specific. A cat that approached a sailor on deck was a sign of good fortune. One that came halfway and then turned back was an omen of disaster. If a cat fell overboard, intentionally or not, it was understood that a violent storm would follow, and if the ship somehow survived, nine years of misfortune still awaited. Throwing one over was essentially considered an act of deliberate self-destruction. Cats were also believed to carry weather knowledge that humans simply lacked. If a cat licked its fur against the grain, a hailstorm was coming. If it sneezed, rain. If it became unusually restless and wild, wind was on the way. These were not random beliefs. Cats are genuinely sensitive to changes in atmospheric pressure, and sailors who observed them closely enough over years at sea may have noticed real correlations between feline behavior and shifting weather. Superstition and practical observation had quietly merged into the same tradition. Some of the most striking ship’s cat stories come from the 20th century. A cat named Simon served aboard the British warship HMS Amethyst during the 1949 Yangtze Incident, when the ship came under sustained Chinese Communist fire and was trapped for three months on a hostile river. Simon kept hunting rats throughout the siege, visited wounded sailors in the medical bay, and was credited with maintaining crew morale through one of the Royal Navy’s most harrowing postwar ordeals. He was formally awarded the Dickin Medal, the animal equivalent of the Victoria Cross. Then there was Oscar, who survived the sinking of the German battleship Bismarck, was rescued by a British destroyer, survived the sinking of that ship too, and then survived the sinking of HMS Ark Royal shortly after. He was eventually retired to shore duty in Gibraltar with six theoretical lives remaining, and spent his final years at a home for sailors in Belfast.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​ #drthehistories

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This isn’t even capitalism. It’s medieval lordship. Father starts a war. Sons sell the weapons to countries that need his protection to survive. Buyers know the purchase is tribute. Saddam Hussein would have recognised it instantly. The US isn’t a democracy right now. It’s a protection racket with a flag. Britain needs to face that fact - and build something different with Europe before it’s too late.

One year ago today, Diogo Jota scored his last goal for Liverpool 🫶 A trademark finish from our number 20 ♾️

We cricket fans will keep fighting to the death over who the best fielder in cricket is. AB de Villiers? Jadeja? Jonty Rhodes? Hold that argument. Because in 2018, three statisticians from Simon Fraser University — Perera, Davis, and Swartz — decided to end the debate with data. They built a metric called "Expected Runs Saved due to Fielding" (E(RSF)). And what they found? It will upset you. The best fielders in T20 cricket save... just 1.2 runs per match more than an ordinary fielder. That's it. While the best batters and bowlers contribute roughly 10 runs per match to their teams, the best fielder on the planet barely scrapes past a single run. But here's where it gets properly wild. The researchers didn't use GPS trackers. Didn't use hawk-eye data. Didn't even use video. They used commentary text. They parsed 160,247 balls of match commentary — from International T20s (about 750 T20 matches) and the IPL — and built a random machine learning model trained on 55 contextual keywords (words like "dive", "edge", "drop", "flat", "sharp") to predict what the batting outcome SHOULD have been on any given ball. Then they compared that prediction against what ACTUALLY happened when a specific fielder's name was mentioned. That gap — between what should have happened and what did happen — became the measure of fielding impact. Essentially a Moneyball approach. For cricket. For FIELDING. Now. The results. The best non-wicketkeeper fielder? Nathan Coulter-Nile (E(RSF) = +0.35). AB de Villiers, widely considered the greatest fielder alive? Ranked 21st. E(RSF) = -0.34. Negative. As in, on average, he cost his team runs while fielding. And the most shocking finding? MS Dhoni — the man with the fastest hands behind the stumps — was ranked the WORST wicketkeeper-fielder in the entire dataset. E(RSF) = -3.61. Dead last among 13 keepers. Behind Mark Boucher. Behind Brad Haddin. Behind everyone. How is this possible? The paper reveals a beautiful paradox: the best fielders are the ones whose names are NEVER mentioned. Think about it. When commentary says "brilliant diving catch by Kohli!", that's a notable event. But when a fielder simply... stops the ball cleanly, returns it accurately, and nothing remarkable happens — his name is never spoken. Another instance: a batsman drives a ball, but notices Jadeja standing at short cover or point and DOES NOT DARE to run a single. This does not get recorded as a fielding achievement. The study showed a clear decreasing trend: the less often a player's name appeared relative to fielding opportunities, the BETTER he was. In other words — excellence in fielding is invisible. We celebrate dramatic recoveries. Emergency interventions. The "brilliant diving catch" of a last-minute, a last ball run-out. But the real measure of good work — like good fielding — is also in what DOESN'T happen. The absence of disaster is the hardest outcome to measure. And the easiest to ignore. Perera, Davis, and Swartz tried to measure cricket's invisible skill. Their approach was not perfect, but, they opened a door that was considered closed, sealed and deemed never to be opened. This #IPL season, I will post one interesting cricket related research for fans to be amused, and get a different viewpoint on their beloved game. Enjoy! @ABsay_ek @AMP86793444 summit.sfu.ca/_flysystem/fed…

Wolves of Satara Satara’s grasslands host a unique wolf population adapted to rugged terrain. From mid-monsoon, their coats thicken and darken by winter, often with distinct color division. Along with Pune, they are among Maharashtra’s heaviest and western-most Indian grey wolves

In 2018, 3,000 Google employees signed a letter that said “we believe Google should not be in the business of war.” Google dropped a $9 million military contract to build AI for analyzing drone video. Palantir grabbed it. That rejected contract is now the foundation of a $340 billion company. I went and pulled the numbers on what happened after. The system Google refused to build is called Maven. Think of it as Google Earth for war. It takes feeds from satellites, drones, radar, and phone intercepts, then smashes them into one screen where a military operator can see a full battlefield and pick targets in real time. Three weeks ago the Pentagon made Maven their permanent, fully funded weapons-targeting system. Every branch of the U.S. military is required to run it by September. The money moved fast. First Maven contract was $480 million in 2024. A year later, bumped to $1.3 billion. Then the Army rolled 75 separate Palantir contracts into a single deal worth up to $10 billion. The UK added another £1.5 billion. NATO bought the system too. The speed comparison is what got me. Palantir’s CTO Shyam Sankar said on Bloomberg that during the Iraq War, hitting 1,000 targets took six months of planning and 50 to 100 people. In the current Iran conflict, one person handled twice that number in two weeks. One person. A Palantir engineer said at a conference last month that targeting work which used to need 2,000 intelligence analysts now gets done by 20. Palantir pulled in $4.5 billion last year. Up 56%. The U.S. government paid them $1.86 billion of that. Government contracts went from $4.4 million in 2009 to $970 million in 2025. All of it with about 4,400 employees. They cleared $1.6 billion in profit. IPO was at $10 a share in 2020. Trades around $140 now. Peter Thiel called Google’s decision to walk away from Maven “treason” in 2018. Palantir built a $340 billion company on the contract Google wouldn’t touch.

Naval HQ asked for my ETA at Mumbai when I was at Cape Horn. I wanted to tell them sailboats have destinations, not ETAs. I gave them a holiday instead. On 26 January, I was rounding the Horn, hoisting the tricolor just a mile south of that storied rock. Amidst the gale of congratulatory signals, Navy HQ sent a query only a bureaucrat could: What is your ETA? With half the globe still beneath my keel and the winds unpredictable, the salt in me wanted to write back, that sailboats had destinations, not ETAs. But my previous mails had already tested the headquarters' patience for humor and sarcasm. I decided a bold calculation was safer than a cheeky proverb. If the past was an indicator, my voyage was being steered by a celestial ledger. We had slipped moorings on Kerala Foundation Day, rounded Leeuwin on 12-12-12 (the Mayan apocalypse), passed New Zealand on Christmas, crossed the International Date Line on New Years and hit the Horn on Republic Day. By that logic, landfall had to be a holiday. I checked the charts and staked my reputation on Easter Sunday, with All Fools’ Day as the backup. The boat did not disappoint. I turned 34 years old at 34°W. The hull turned four years at 4°W. We crossed the Prime Meridian on Valentine’s Day, where a heavy swell put me in a poetic mood; remembering Pablo Neruda whose home I had once visited, I felt the ocean wanting to do to me what spring does to cherry trees. We rounded the Cape of Good Hope on Copernicus’ birthday, passed Mauritius on its National Day and crossed the Equator on the Equinox. Out of pure respect for the sun, I permitted it to cross the line ahead of me. Finally, as predicted, we made landfall on Easter Sunday. I was received by friends and naval brass in an intimate reception hosted onboard INS Delhi by the C-in-C Admiral Shekhar Sinha @shekhar19541, who shook hands in congratulations and uttered the words: You have created history out of geography. 151 days at sea had an emaciating effect on my sea-legs, so much so that two Admirals had to hoist me up the ladder of INS Delhi. By the time I stepped onto firm land, it was past midnight, All Fools’ Day. The irony was perfect. Before casting off, immigration officials at Yellow Gate had refused to stamp my passport because my destination was Mumbai. They claimed it made no sense to leave for where I already was. Yet I returned five months later, 20kg lighter, skin and hair bronzed by salt and sun. When I went to be stamped back into existence on the 1st of April, the official’s hands trembled as if seeing a resurrection. In his shock, he stamped my passport upside down. I had left Mumbai to find Mumbai, but found myself instead. I found that Melville was prescient, having foretold with the utmost clarity of a clairvoyant exactly what I would feel over a century and a half later: Here was a man some twenty thousand miles from home, by the way of Cape Horn that is... and yet he seemed entirely at his ease; preserving the utmost serenity; content with his own companionship; always equal to himself. Today, that story is exactly 13 years old. @indiannavy @CaptDKS

A broker for Pete Hegseth, the US defence secretary, attempted to make a big investment in major defence companies in the weeks leading up to the US-Israeli attack on Iran, according to three people familiar with the matter. ft.com/content/744ea8…

@sandipanthedeb Do you think the makers paid them ? To activate a Streisand Effect !!!

It's amazing how much the so-called liberals helped to make the Dhurandhar movies such monster hits. Without them shouting about "inflammatory anti-Pakistan rhetoric", "toxic masculinity", "ultra-violence" etc, the films would have possibly made reasonable money and gone quietly on to OTT. But they forced mass attention and interest in the films, including among people who rarely go to a cinema hall, and since the films were so well-made, the audience loved them and a multiplier effect swiftly set in. The more the liberals kept shrieking that anyone who liked the films was either sub-human or a psychopath, the more money they made for the films. All the promotion that the Dhurandhar could have dreamt of... these people did it for free.

This is a movie I have seen multiple times, never realized this depth of detailing though.

Newton was a brilliant man. Then he got married. As is the norm with every marriage, initial phase was extended honeymoon. Being a thinker, Newton would sit on his working desk and think and ponder about the working of the universe. “Hello my dear.” His wife would croon while bringing him tea to his desk. It was almost after eight months that she asked him to get his tea from the kitchen. “Oh yes.” He responded while deep in his thoughts. He kept sitting and thinking. It was after one hour that his wife went to the kitchen and discovered the tea still there on the shelf. Tea was cold. It made Mrs Newton hot with anger. “What is it with you?” she almost shouted. “You keep on sitting on that chair day in and day out without moving and I have to move all over the house to finish the chores.” Newton was amazed at the observation of his wife and postulated his first law. “A body that is at rest, will keep resting. And a body that is moving, will keep moving.” He had this sense of achievement. But his wife was not impressed. Things continued in the same manner for some more time. Soon Mrs Newton was fed up with the situation. More than one year after the marriage, she decided to nudge Newton and make him contribute towards household chores. She went to Newton and shook his chair. “Get up man and help me in setting up the house.” Newton looked up. He had a look at the face of Mrs. He knew he will have to postpone his brainstorming sessions and indulge in some bodily chores. He came back to his desk after finishing the list. He reviewed the whole situation and replayed the scene in his mind over and over again. He realized he moved from his desk because his wife had applied force on him. Then he came up with his second law. “Acceleration of a body depends upon the force applied to it.” Now Mrs Newton knew how to get Newton going. She had to apply some force to move from his chair and make him do odd jobs around the house. Newton made some further observations. His wife responded in a kind manner whenever he helped her. He once forgot to wish her on her birthday as he was very busy thinking about falling bodies. His wife feigned ignorance and did not wish him on his birthday. If he left laundry pending, his wife would add more dirty clothes to it. She cooked meals only if he peeled veggies. He analysed the situation and came up with his third law. “Every action has equal and opposite reaction.” These laws apply perfectly to me. And to everyone around me who is married. I am sure these laws apply to every marriage. Newton should have named them Laws of Marriage instead of Laws of Motion. 😂😃🤣

In 1970, a 23-year-old physics student at Imperial College London was deep into his doctoral research on cosmic dust when he faced an impossible choice. Brian May, a budding astrophysicist, had been studying the zodiacal dust cloud—tiny particles scattered throughout the solar system that reflect sunlight. His research was progressing, and he was on track to complete his PhD. But he also had another passion: music. May was the guitarist for Queen, a band that was beginning to gain serious attention. They had just signed a record deal, and tours were on the horizon. The opportunity was immediate and couldn't be ignored. Standing at a crossroads, May made a life-changing decision: he chose the guitar over the telescope. Queen's rise to fame was swift. By the mid-1970s, the band was a global sensation. Songs like "Bohemian Rhapsody" and "We Will Rock You" became anthems, and May's distinctive guitar tone—created with his homemade instrument, the Red Special—became iconic. Albums sold millions, and stadiums filled with fans. But May's academic work was left unfinished. His thesis remained incomplete, and his research was put on hold. However, Brian May never lost his love for science. Even as Queen dominated the rock world, May kept up with developments in astrophysics. He continued reading journals, attending lectures when he could, and staying connected to the academic community. His thesis advisor, Professor Michael Rowan-Robinson, had told him, "You can always come back and finish." In 2006, more than three decades later, May decided it was time to return. He contacted Rowan-Robinson, and they discussed the possibility of completing the research. The field had advanced, and May’s data was outdated, but his original observations remained valuable. With Rowan-Robinson's guidance, May worked to update his research. May continued his music career while revisiting his old data, incorporating modern research, and refining his analysis. In 2007, Imperial College awarded him a PhD in astrophysics, not as an honorary degree, but through genuine research and peer review. At age 60, May became Dr. Brian May. His PhD was a testament to his dedication to both music and science. He didn't need the degree for career advancement—he had already achieved rock stardom. But his pursuit of knowledge, both for its own sake and to finish what he had started, made his accomplishment remarkable. May’s story proved that it’s never too late to finish what you start, even if it takes 36 years. Passion, whether in music or science, doesn't have an expiration date.

Several years ago, engineers at a major Indian OEM wanted to add a simple valve to their own engine. They knew how to do it. The problem: the software running inside their own vehicle's ECU was locked. The key was in Germany. Three years later, the problem remained unsolved. 🧵