Kiran Jonnalagadda

Hello to everyone following my tweets today! I retweet things that upset me, so I'm sorry for the grief it fills your timeline with. If you have other things to bring into my timeline, please do! Some background to today's article in the Deccan Herald:

One interesting observation is that people are getting their posts withheld bcoz the top leadership is feeling the heat. The IT cell has become totally ineffective, they no longer control the narrative, as the cavalry of anons has breached their fort. The redpill has now reached the masses from the trenches of twitter. On top of that, community notes was the 9/11 moment for the IT celliyas, so the only option left for them is to nvke posts.

When I was on the ISS for my nearly year long mission, there was a telomere experiment comparing my telomeres to my earth baseline and my twin brother as a control. Hypothesis was they would get damaged and worse due to the environment. Turns out they got better. Initially NASA thought maybe it was due to exercise and diet. After I returned we learned JAXA had a telomere experiment on some small worms the same time I was there. Their telomeres got better too. Never saw the worms doing any exercise. After further study determined it was the radiation.

The reason we know dinosaurs existed, and were wiped out by an asteroid, is that no matter where you dig in the world, you’ll find a distinct layer of clay. All dinosaur fossils are found below this layer, and never above it! This layer has iridium that is very rare on earth but found in asteroids. It is called K-T (Short for Cretaceous-Tertiary) boundary

Got the wife evacuated, so have time to drink a tea and think about the Strait of Hormuz. I've sailed through the it a few times years ago and done antipiracy operations in the Strait of Malacca. Maps can be deceiving. The best way to think about the Strait of Hormuz is a four lane highway, with two lanes per direction for the largest ships like crude carriers, cargo vessels, and warships in the center of the channel where it is deepest and free of obstacles. Then on the outside of those lanes, you have medium sized ships, going Jebel Ali to other regional ports like Sohar, since a lot of international cargo goes direct to Jebel Ali then is cross loaded across the region. On the outside of those lanes, along both coasts, are dhow fishing boats and all manner of local, smaller craft. Maritime trade crisscrossing this region goes back hundreds of years. The Portugese wrote how disappointing it was to find a tight network of trade already established in the region when they arrived in the 15th century. It is hard to describe how crowded these waters are. You sometimes wonder if you could walk to Iran across the decks of ships and not get your feet wet. The amount of traffic makes distinguishing between normal traffic and a threat incredibly difficult. Is that dhow fishing, transiting between coasts, laying mines, gathering intelligence, or a tender for surface drones? Hard to discern while sailing ducks in a row escorting a lumbering tanker or cargo ship. Operation Prosperity Guardian in the Red Sea proved to be a Houthi victory when a land power with no navy to speak of fought the most powerful navy on earth to an agreement. The Hormuz problem is harder now the Iranians have proved they have the will to fight, no matter how much pain is leveled at them from afar. The shipping lanes in the Strait of Hormuz go around the Musandam penninsula. This turn exposes ships to 270 degree of fire control in layered systems from Qeshm, the surrounding high ground, to further inland, with surface drones now added to the mix. Iran doesn't need to mine the entire strait. Iran just needs to turn that main shipping lanes around Musandam into a kill box and divert approved ships past Qeshm, out of the main shipping lanes like a watery weigh station. It has started doing this. The U.S. has created a hard problem for itself. NATO understandably wants nothing to do with this. If the most powerful navy in the world can't solve this, what difference does European navies make. With the watery weigh station past Qeshm, Iran isn't closing the strait to global commerce. It is simply doing what the U.S. does with the dollar, exerting power over the chokepoint it controls. Understandably the U.S. doesn't like this, so why can't the U.S. just send warships to escort ships through? Well, when you escort a ship through a strait, you tend to stay ducks in a row. So if warships are sent to escort tankers, they are now just another target in the strait. Even if the warships could maneuver through local traffic to screen ships, lets go back to the 270 degree turn around the penninsula. The warships would be receiving layered waves of fire likely worse than they faced off with in the Red Sea against the Houthis from essentially three directions while having the longer route to run to protect the tankers around the peninsula. As the Hormuz Crisis drags on, anything less than breaking Iran's control of the strait will be seen as a loss for the U.S., much like the Battle of the Red Sea was against the Houthis.

It's voluntary and mandatory at the same time.

This animated globe by @tylermorganwall gives us a rather immersive view of global population. I particularly love how clear the "empty hemisphere" appears.

I don't use net banking apps on my phone because the mandatory permissions they ask for make no sense. Why does a banking app need access to my SMS, phone, contacts, etc., in the name of security, when not seeking invasive device permissions is, in fact, the global benchmark for cybersecurity. This is called the Principle of Least Privilege (PoLP). “Don't do unto others what you don't want done unto you” has been at the heart of the Zerodha philosophy. This is exactly why we've built Zerodha the way we have. Kite asks for ZERO permissions on mobile, for instance, and this is one of the big reasons why millions of people trust us. What has enabled us is SEBI's mandatory strong two-factor authentication framework strike the right balance between security and privacy.

Shit.

Rs 7 egg & Rs 22 egg are nutritionally almost identical. Most of what you're paying extra for is... marketing. Egg industry has turned a simple food into a quiz. Brown /white? Orange/yellow yolk? Omega-3? @anushkantala & I dug into what actually matters. Link in next tweet.

People who still own domains in this era of platforms: how's the RoI? People who bought NFTs: 💇. Renting a tree? Congratulations, you're stuck with whatever low grade fruit it produces, at whatever cost of transport. Source: I bought the tree and the land under it.

A city has slums. Two options: bulldoze and move residents to new housing, or upgrade the slum where it stands. New housing sounds better. Chile tested both for 20 years. It wasn't even close.

been feeling kinda stressed lately so I made a little prototype is this anything

First, the Omani FM came out and revealed that there was a deal on the table that met Trump's demands, but that he instead chose war. And now, it is revealed that the British National Security Advisor was also part of the talks, and he too attests to the fact that A) there was no imminent threat from Iran, B) Trump could have gotten a surprisingly good deal if he stuck to diplomacy. But the perhaps most damning quote in the story comes at the end, attributed to an unnamed diplomat: “We regarded Witkoff and Kushner as Israeli assets that dragged a president into a war he wants to get out of.” theguardian.com/world/2026/mar…

for a while i've had a slight fear that the bluetooth from my airpods could be frying my brain this weekend i pulled the raw data from a $30m government study of 1,679 mice blasted with cell phone radiation and reanalyzed it what i found was...not what I expected? 🧵

so what happened in the study? THE RADIATED MICE LIVED SIGNIFICANTLY LONGER they had a 53% LOWER risk of death (HR=.475, p=0.003) than the mice dosed with no radiation!!!

@NDTVProfitIndia is not record low is actually the calibrated repositioning of the exchange rate towards a proximate level that achieves what govt has intended to bring about so that look cheetah

In light of Proton recently handing over user payment data (and backup emails) to Swiss authorities in response to FBI request, this is your friendly reminder Proton is privacy larping and evidence hilariously suggests giving them any money actually makes you less private 1/n

Sahyog (noun): Cooperation The Sahyog Portal is the platform where the government cooperates with itself to decide YOUR satire is "harmful" and deletes it without a court ever seeing it. Comic by @aaaaadvik

Just Kolkata things 😂😂😂😂