Suramya's Blog : Welcome to my crazy life…

The Justice League Snyder’s cut came out earlier this week, I was initially on the fence about watching the movie as I had really disliked the original Justice League, but then the reviews came out and I saw that most people really liked the movie, so I decided to give the movie a shot. When I started watching I wasn’t aware that the new movie was over 4 hours long which is ridiculously long for a movie, even Hindi movies are shorter and usually max out at 3 hours long.

However, in this case the 4 hours was worth it and I loved the movie. It felt more like an extended mini-series than a movie, especially with the chapters in the movie. The new movie made a lot more sense watching it and the scenes flowed into each other rather than stand alone shots that were stuck together for some reason. Each of the characters was given a proper storyline in this version and that made a whole lot of difference in how the movie played out. I still don’t like the Flash in the movies as opposed to the TV series but he was less annoying this time around than the previous version.

Zack Snyder’s Justice League

There are a lot of changes, cut scenes, new scenes in this version and you can check out The 45 biggest differences between ‘Zack Snyder’s Justice League’ and the 2017 theatrical version, if you are interested (There are spoilers here. Obviously. )

The one downside of the 4 hour movie was that I couldn’t see the full movie in one sitting. I mean I could have, but I needed to study for my exams so that forced me to take breaks. That also contributed in making the movie seem like an mini-series rather than a feature film.

The epilogue of the movie was a bit confusing, but I feel that might have been setting up the stage for future movies. Let’s see… After this release I can honestly say that I am looking forward to the next iteration in this universe which wasn’t the case so far. I mean Aquaman and the Wonder Woman movies were good, but then we had Wonder Woman 1984 which was pretty bad. So I wasn’t that excited about the next movie in the series, but that has changed a bit after this movie.

– Suramya

Scientists from Weizmann Institute of Science in Israel,have achieved a major milestone in the research on pregnancy and how it works. For the first time, they were able to take fertilized eggs from the oviducts of female mice just after fertilization (Day 0 of development) and had grown them in the artificial uterus for 11 days. The gestation period of mice is 20 days so in human terms it would be about 5 months of pregnancy.

The mouse embryos looked perfectly normal. All their organs were developing as expected, along with their limbs and circulatory and nervous systems. Their tiny hearts were beating at a normal 170 beats per minute.

The major problem the scientists are now facing is how to get enough nutrients to the embryo so that they can survive post the 11 day mark. As by then the embryo has a placenta and a yolk sack, but the nutrient solution that fed them through diffusion is no longer sufficient without a blood supply.

This is a really cool break through, and once the problem of getting nutrients post 11 days is solved we can expect similar experiments with mammal and then human embryo’s. The medical advantages of this technique are vast, it will allow doctors to monitor the fetus for abnormalities and correct them if required. Another advantage would be to allow couples to have a child without having to bear the child naturally which would enable folks with busy lives or those who work in dangerous environments (think armed forces) to have kids without going through a surrogate mother. Transgender couples or same-sex couples will also benefit from this technology as they would be able to have a child which wasn’t physically possible for them before.

Finally, coming to the Sci-Fi angle.. we have long talked about spaceships and it is a common trope that frozen embryo’s are sent into space to populate a distant planet with a limited no of adults to pilot the ship. Having a human gestate all the embryo’s would not be feasible but a mechanical womb would solve this problem and give us a way to travel to the stars. A few days ago I was reading about this push to have a vault established on the moon with frozen sperm and eggs to be used in case of a global catastrophe to repopulate the planet. Till now it would not work without human wombs but if we can get the mechanical womb to work with a reasonable success rate then having a seed vault on the moon suddenly becomes feasible.

Obviously, there is a lot more work required before we are at a stage where humans are born from a mechanical womb but this is an important step in that journey.

Check out the paper published in Nature for more technical details on the achievement.

Thanks to Slashdot.org: Scientists Grow Mouse Embryos In a Mechanical Womb for the initial story.

– Suramya

I saw this article over on Lifehacker.com, that talked about how You should Text Before Calling someone. According to the article:

That’s why—barring some exceptions—you should try sending a text prior to calling someone on the phone. Even if it seems like an indirect route for getting someone to pay attention, it’ll likely help your relationship with them over the long run.

Nothing screams “I demand you dedicate time to me” like an impromptu phone call. Even in this time of isolation, people are still busy, with a constant stream of digital notifications and Zoom meeting reminders vying for their attention. A phone call insinuates an immediate demand for another person’s time; a text message nudges the ball along just a little bit, using a polite suggestion to talk more when you get the chance.

I thought about this for a while, and for the most part I disagree with this. There are certain scenario’s where I would text someone before calling but those are usually when I know the person is super busy and I need to make sure I am not interrupting anything. (Think calling my manager for a question or someone senior who is very busy). Another scenario when I almost always text before calling is when the other person has a young child. Believe me, you don’t want to be the one who woke up a toddler who finally went to sleep after ages of effort.

Other than that, I just call people when I need to get in touch with them. If they are busy or unable to take a call then they can (and do) reject the call or don’t answer and then I just wait for them to call back. I follow the same pattern for when people call me. One rule that I do follow is that I rarely call people after 8pm unless it is urgent or we agreed to have a call post 8pm. This is because I was taught that it is not nice to disturb people after that time unless it is an emergency. Jani makes fun of me sometimes about this but I still find it hard to call folks after 8. I rarely call them before 10am either, but that is mostly because I am sleeping and don’t wake up before that time ;).

For me Text messages are good when I need an answer that can wait, however if I need to talk to someone I will call them without first prefacing with a text message. That is just wasted effort. I know there are a lot of people who don’t feel the same and maybe it is a generational thing as I see my parents generation and most folks in my age-group calling without texting first. Some of the younger folks I work with have the tendency of only texting, or texting and then calling.

There is no right or wrong way of looking at this, but I personally am comfortable with how I approach it and so far no one has complained about it so I am good :).

What do you think?

– Suramya

In the past I have often posted about bad service or problems I have had with various companies so I thought I should also post about companies when I am happy with their services. This is because not everyone does it and then only the negative news is posted. Today I will talk about ACT Fibernet who I have been using as my primary internet provider for almost 3 years now. I have been very happy with their services and for the most part their network has been stable and I get the speeds that I am supposed to get. (I frequently check this because that wasn’t the case with Airtel).

What really wow’d me and prompted this post is that they frequently upgrade your plan to a faster speed without charging extra and without you asking for it. I got an email recently telling me that my plan had been auto upgraded to a 400Mbps plan with an Unlimited monthly FUP from the existing 300Mbps plan. All I had to do was log out from the portal and log back in (or just restart the router). I did that and immediately I had the faster speed available. This is the second time in the past year that I have been upgraded (last one was from 250Mbps to 300).

Another thing I really like about them is their support (once you get through to them) are perfectly willing to have their technical team call you if you have questions they can’t answer. I recently wanted details about their static IP option and the guy on support didn’t have the answer, within 4 hours I got a call from their technical team who answered all the questions I had and then helped me register a static IP. There have been multiple such cases when I have reached out with technical questions. The same is not the case with my other connection (and I will post about it in another blog post) where I have had people insist to me that the information I am asking for does not exist and they refuse to connect me to their technical team.

One slight quibble I have is that they don’t have a 24×7 support line but other than that things are great and I highly recommend them to others.

– Suramya

As some of you know, I don’t usually check Facebook very often. I recently logged in to FB after a while and while I was browsing, I got a little pop up on the bottom left corner of the screen telling me that someone had shared a photo in a group that I follow 6 mins ago. So I clicked on the pop-up and it took me to the group. There I immediately noticed that the post that Facebook had told me about had actually been made 5 hours ago. I had noticed this in the past in my notifications but never had a pop-up about it before.

This basically shows how much Facebook’s algorithms and UX trick you into engaging more on the site and stay there, by showing a message about a new post 6 mins ago they made me click over to check it out. However, this was posted over 5 hours ago and I might have already seen it. This is not a one time event, looking at my notifications, I see this happening very frequently…

Screen shot of the notification and the actual post. Note the time in each.

Are others seeing this as well? At least with Twitter, I don’t see a message that someone has just tweeted something and then find out that that was sent hours ago. This along with all the other nonsense that Facebook is doing is why I don’t use it very often. I am on it mostly because others are there and they share pics etc from our trips & travels on it. I am planning to do a full download of my entire Facebook account activity so that I have a record of it. I don’t think I will delete my account as of yet, but this is bordering on pushing me into deactivating the account.

– Suramya