NagarjunaG

@planemad This is the state of most Indian cities. We have seen several reports from Pune where two wheelers use footpaths every day. Priority for those who burn oil, two wheelers and for wheelers. Two legged creatures don't exist. Vehicle drivers honk "why are you walking on my way?".

Bid Rs80 for a 1.5km ride on Rapido and Ola and still no takers. Decided to just walk it with all my luggage because how bad could it be.. #peakbengaluru

Truth to trust: negotiating objectivity through calibrated instruments, media & institutions. After a long gap I wrote a paper in philosophy of science. Those interested in scientific realism/antireallism debates may find it interesting. Preprint at philsci-archive.pitt.edu/28910/

Drop everything you are doing and watch and share this "zabardast" original documentary on Ayush and Ayurveda in India. youtube.com/watch?v=YYajir… Featuring the narration by Ravish Kumar And on-ground report by Basant Kumar #MustWatch Basant met me at my workplace in Kochi and we had a very long talk and recording session (in Hindi!) on my experiences with treating and publishing on the largest numbers of cases of Ayush-liver injury in the country at our referral center. I wish I could have given him more time, but clinical work was damning at the time. But I am happy how this turned out. He has also interviewed my patients (and many such patients across India), especially my young-girl patient who turned out to have severe alcohol-related liver injury and arsenic poisoning from Ayurvedic treatment for seizure disorder (that segment will make your feel really sad). #MustSee It is the most important video you will watch this year and please share it maximum. This is a huge effort from Basant and the NL team, and I am proud to be part of this. PS: Ayurveda practitioners feature time and again in the video. That's your loo break or comic relief - whichever way you want to see it. Listen to their incompetence and ignorance. And the Govt. is hell bent on creating more such incompetent fools.

@DrTomFroese @mokriegleder This is a brilliant schematic to see the two sides of the coin. Where shall we place the schematic (representational) and stochastic (enactive) aspects of embodiment? Another possibility is to add an orthogonal plane to this, to include the transactional (normative) plane.

How do we define the embodied mind? New publication out with @mokriegleder! 🎉 I'm excited by this formalization, inspired by irruption theory and Pitti et al.'s review on "informational embodiment". We propose that the embodied mind is distinct from embodied intelligence.

@DrTomFroese Bravo! It is time to reconcile the blind spots: of LLMs, of 4E cognition, of cognitivism. To acknowledge the blind spots of each theoretical framework is intellectual modesty. This is the right time to bridge the gap between stochastic and schematic frameworks!

Accepted for publication! 🎉

And the epic journey begins again in all its glory. Three new travellers, Apapang (adult male) orange track, Alang (young female) Yellow track, and Ahu (adult female) Red Track, were satellite-tagged on 11th November 2025 as part of the Manipur Amur Falcon Tracking Project (Phase 2) by @wii_india . In just days, Apapang has stunned trackers with an extraordinary non-stop flight, already cutting across central India and now skimming the Arabian Sea, poised for a 3,000 km oceanic crossing to Somalia,one of the most demanding journeys undertaken by any raptor on the planet. From the forests of Manipur to the vast African landscapes that await them, these tiny birds barely 150 grams continue to remind us of the sheer wonder of migration, and why India’s protection of stopover sites has become a global conservation story. What a wonder ! Credits @sureshwii #AmurFalcons #BirdMigration

PARI’s Jaideep Hardikar has won the Ramoji Excellence award in the journalism category in its inaugural year – on National Press Day. No one deserves it more than he. For nearly three decades, this unassuming journalist from Nagpur has consistently done some of the finest reporting on the everyday lives of everyday people. I do believe his book Ramrao: The story of India's farm crisis, looking at the agrarian crisis through the life of a single farmer who attempted suicide in April 2014 (and who Jaideep monitored thereafter for 7 years), is to date the best and most powerful book on the subject. Over those three decades, and always based out of Nagpur, Jaideep has worked at The Lokmat Times, The Hitvad, DNA and The Telegraph. Jaideep’s article A fateful triangle: tigers, humans and development published in the People’s Archive of Rural India in August this year is just one example of his recent field reporting. He brought to the story a deep understanding of all three angles of that triangle. I should also mention that I’ve had the opportunity to watch him work with enormous energy and diligence, and grow in the field – he and I have travelled countless thousands of kilometres together in the countryside, mainly in the Vidarbha region of Maharashtra, but also in Marathwada. I believe both of us learned a lot on of those trips. At Rs. 10 lakh, the Ramoji Excellence award is the biggest in Indian journalism. It comes from the Eenadu group of publications in Andhra Pradesh and Telangana and has been established in the name of their founder the late Shri Ramoji Rao garu. I knew enough about him to know he’d have been very happy to see Jaideep Hardikar get the prize in his name today.

Everyone tells Indians to walk 10,000 steps, but no one tells us “Where should we walk?” Try stepping out to walk in any Indian city. Chances are: -There are no footpaths. -If there is one, it’s broken. -If it’s not broken, it’s occupied by hawkers, scooters, garbage, or parked cars. I’ve lived in countries where walking is therapy. In India, walking is a punishment. You dodge potholes, pray you don’t get hit by a car, and come home covered in dust. We talk about building smart cities, but what’s the point of smart cities if we can’t even walk safely in them? Our cities were never designed for people. They were designed for traffic. Somewhere along the way, we forgot that walking is not a privilege, it is a basic human right. Let’s stop designing cities for cars. Let’s start designing them for people. Let’s Make India Walkable Again!

Wordpress site is up - thoughtforms.life. Register to be notified of book progress, specific events, news, and new posts with photography, essays, interviews, & more. Unlike at drmichaellevin.org, here I will post ideas not fully baked yet, & academic-adjacent content.

From my appearance on 60 Minutes: Me: Research works. If you want to freeze society where it is, then cripple the research enterprise. Bill Whitaker of 60 Minutes: Is that whole idea being lost in the harsh rhetoric by the administration? Me: The attack on universities is a tragic blunder. For all the foibles of universities, and there are many, and I pointed them out, universities' research makes life better, massively so. Why would you want to cripple it? It's something that the United States does really, really well.

We had a special local guest surprise us at last night’s ECogS 2025 welcome ceremony! 🫢 A few participants were lucky to get their heads and limbs nibbled! 💫

The idea of defining the cognitive domain of an agent in terms of the reach of its biggest goal makes for an interesting contrast with the notion of Umwelt defined in terms of sensorimotor loops!

@DrTomFroese @JRBneuropsiq Dynamical systems are omnipresent, e.g. homeostasis. Such systems do have distinguishable states, and they come in multiple flavors. If we hold them as the source of value-laden semantics, then we do have content. Cf. Damasio.

@JRBneuropsiq @gnowgi The problem is that there is no straightforward way of going from the purely statistical definition of information to a semantic or contentful one.

SESP professor Uri Wilensky, a preeminent scholar in computer modeling and simulations, has been awarded the 2025 Yidan Prize for Education Research, the world’s largest prize in education. 💜 🎉 🤸 📰 spr.ly/6016A5CBy 📸 Stephen J. Lewis

In 2010, Aaron Swartz downloaded 70GBs of articles from JSTOR. He faced $1 million fine and 35 years in jail. He took his life in 2013. Meta illegaly downloaded 80+ terabytes of books from LibGen, Anna's Archive, and Z-library to train their AI models without any punishment.

Mula-Mutha Riverfront Development (RFD) Project is a recipe for disaster. Its ecological implications are adverse. Please join me in opposing this project and saving thousands of trees. It will increase Pune’s risk of flooding and heatwaves. action.jhatkaa.org/QoYNZ

#SynTalk_ATL: #TDAG (The Dead And Gone) with Prof. G. Nagarjuna (@gnowgi), Swami Narasimhananda (@sudhavedanta), & Prof. Binay Panda (@ganitlabs)

Are there any economists out there who can assess the costs incurred by the invention of the wheel?

Even on planets where there are no roads, #ISRO and #NASA sent robotic vehicles with wheels. It made no sense to me. When can we expect robotic horses or donkeys for transport? We are senselessly building wider and faster roads for wheeled vehicles, destroying the planet.

Wheels caused the climate crisis. We often think of non-renewable resources as the sole cause of the crisis. Can we expect the next tech revolution of vehicles moving on legs? How most animals can give any 4WD a run for its money indianexpress.com/article/expres… via @IndianExpress