The Sunday after

 I sit here today as I try to ponder on the inner workings of my mind on this silent afternoon, the Sunday after my escapades. It is something I often do after a long bout of extroverted-ness, my chronic condition of expanding more energy than I would care to on various musings of life. So much has happened in the past three weeks, but most of it too private to tell-tale on a public blog.  But know this: there's a bitter coffee to my right, just within reach, and then the ever pervasive sound of the ceiling fan running as my mind tries to count its rotations with accuracy. I sit donning a jade shalwar kameez, buttons of the sleeves in place, back straight as it soothes the pain, I am back in the confines of sunny equatorial Lahore, the city of gardens, home to guardrails of the Punjab.  I am reminded, suddenly and somberly of my grandfather, typing as I typed, with both hands on his keyboard, fingers pushing buttons, the learnings of his typewriter days being translated to the memo
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Patents, Patience and Polymaths



A friend recently filed for a couple of Patents after completing their PHD in Deep Learning in Medical imaging, I was trying to understand their thought process to finding solutions to complex problems and they said simply "I try to ask why a lot, why are people doing it this way, why not that way, and what happens if I try it some other way"

Asking why recursively seems to be an great way to break down and analyze problems, and if you have an interdisciplinary view of the world, you might be able to come across a revolutionary novel way of solving the problem which could be simpler and faster than what was being done before

At face value it seems to be a simple approach, I mean all you have to do is dive into your existing pool of knowledge and try to connect as many different disciplines as you have knowledge of, NASAs famous James Web Telescope needed to be folded and deployed in space and unfolded, the solution was inspired by the art of Oragami

But what troubles me is that this skill of cross referencing and developing a multi-solution mindset, needs to be practiced for hours on end to yield mastery and produce any benefit. My friend has arguably spent three decades doing just this, and now it bears fruit

But even though this multi solution approach maybe valued and lead to major impact in society, it is not encouraged or prescribed in our current educational systems. When was the last time you were given a math problem and asked to find as many solutions to the problem as possible? probably never.

The book below is one I'm in the process of finishing, but in it, Peter Hollins seems to describe the art of being a Polymath as mastering different disciplines and integrating them into each other to find solutions, exactly what we are talking about above. So this seemed like a good resource to tag here, though it does contain some fluff so be warned.

Patience, Practice, Persistence, Polymaths and Patents

Theres always more than one way to solve problems we have in life, that is my learning for today. More to come




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