2025 – TechieTonics

Book Review: Meditations by Marcus Aurelius

September 8, 2025September 8, 2025 Pooja Kashyap

This week I decided to re-visit Marcus Aurelius’s Meditations. Philosophy is something that I dive in every now and then as it grounds me amidst the noise of daily life, reminding me that clarity often comes not from adding more, but from subtracting what is unnecessary. This book is not a regular self help book, in fact it wasn’t written to publish in the first place, it’s more towards Aurelius’s personal manual or notes scribbled in a tent between battles.

Artificial Neurons That Learn Like the Brain: The DRAM–MoS₂ Breakthrough

September 3, 2025September 3, 2025 Pooja Kashyap

I came across some research from Fudan University recently that really caught my attention – Artificial neuron merges DRAM with MoS₂. As the headline suggests, they’ve built an artificial neuron that doesn’t just copy the way brain cells connect to each other, but also how they adjust their own internal behavior.

Book Review: Thinking in Systems by Donella H. Meadows

August 29, 2025August 30, 2025 Pooja Kashyap

A couple of months ago, I gave this book a quick skim and realized it talks about the idea of systems thinking. That instantly caught my interest and made me want to explore it in more depth. I was actually about to order a copy when, luckily, I came across the PDF edition provided by Florida Tech. A huge thanks to them for making this resource accessible.

Book Review: The Rigor of Angels by William Egginton

August 15, 2025August 15, 2025 Pooja Kashyap

I’ve always been drawn to the meeting points between literature, science, and philosophy, and to the big ideas that shape how we understand the world. Egginton’s work centers on literature, intellectual history, and the intersections between literature, science, and philosophy. Those are areas I’m drawn to as well, which is probably why I decided to read, The Rigor of Angels. The book, written by William Egginton was first published in 2023.

The ‘Eye of Sauron’: Blazar That Looks Straight at Earth

August 13, 2025August 13, 2025 Pooja Kashyap

A group of scientists from different countries found something that will help explain how a distant and seemingly slow object in space, called PKS 1424+240, can be one of the brightest sources of very energetic light (gamma rays) and tiny particles called neutrinos. Even though it appears to move slowly, it produces a lot of these powerful signals.

Spring-Block Model: A Mechanical Analogy for How Deep Neural Networks Learn and Separate Data

August 12, 2025August 12, 2025 Pooja Kashyap

I’ve been thinking a lot about how deep neural networks actually learn. I mean, those complex stacks of layers, how do they figure out the mechanics to recognize images or understand speech? These layers must be working together to make sense of raw data, but how?

Book Review: Alias Grace by Margaret Atwood

August 11, 2025August 11, 2025 Pooja Kashyap

Alias Grace is a historical fiction book by Canadian author Margaret Atwood. It was first published in 1996. I like the storytelling technique of Atwood, the flashbacks and the narration takes the reader to contemporary times. The story of Alias Grace is based on a real woman named Grace Marks, who was from Ireland and moved to Canada in the 1800s. She was found guilty of helping to kill her boss, Thomas Kinnear, and his housekeeper, Nancy Montgomery. These murders were very violent and shocking. Grace was sentenced to death,…

Meet the Chip That Could Change How Your Devices Use Power

August 10, 2025August 10, 2025 Pooja Kashyap

Wireless communication seems easy because it happens without us noticing, but inside, devices have to carefully balance sending data quickly, keeping the signal clear, and using as little power as possible. When devices send signals through the air, the signals aren’t always perfect, and using more power to make the signals stronger costs more battery life. That’s why a new transmitter chip from MIT and a few partner universities is turning heads.

Why Energy Spreads: Rethinking Entropy from Rockets to Language Models

August 7, 2025 Pooja Kashyap

Whenever we read or understand entropy, we tend to generalize it as a tendency towards disorder or chaos. Although the idea in itself is not entirely wrong, one of the (other) most insightful ways of looking at it is, as the tendency of energy to spread out over time. This fundamental concept governs nearly everything, right from tiny molecular collisions to vast cosmic events, from the beginning of the universe to its eventual end. Btw, here is an engaging video on youtube if you want to explore it further –…

The Stories from Space You’ll Never See in a Documentary

August 7, 2025August 7, 2025 Pooja Kashyap

I was looking for some interesting space missions but outside the usual Apollo and Hubble highlights. And then I came across this Reddit thread – interesting space missions – it pulls together a long list of probes that are genuinely fascinating but rarely talked about. The entire post has its roots in this thread.

Book Review: Shadows of the Mind by Roger Penrose

July 25, 2025July 25, 2025 Pooja Kashyap

Exactly a year ago, I closed The Emperor’s New Mind by Sir Roger Penrose, slid it onto my bookshelf, and just stood there for a second….The book didn’t just earn a spot on my shelf, it earned a permanent place in my head.

Boom in Rocket Launches Could Set Back Ozone Gains

July 20, 2025July 20, 2025 Pooja Kashyap

Lately, we’ve all been marveling at the growing number of rockets blasting into the sky. Companies like SpaceX launch rockets so often that it feels normal, and many of us celebrate when small satellites go into orbit around the Earth.

Book Review: What If? by Randall Munroe

July 19, 2025July 19, 2025 Pooja Kashyap

Let me start by confessing something, even after reading a lot about the science behind it, I probably couldn’t explain how entropy works in thermodynamics without sneaking a quick peek at Wikipedia. But I am, without apology, obsessed with questions – the weirder, the better.

What Happens When Equally Good Algorithms Disagree?

July 17, 2025July 17, 2025 Pooja Kashyap

You’d expect the same input to get the same answer, right? But in machine learning, that’s not always the case.

Book Review: City of Illusions by Ursula K. Le Guin

July 13, 2025July 13, 2025 Pooja Kashyap

I just finished City of Illusions, and it’s one of those books that quietly works its way under your skin. It’s the third in Le Guin’s Ekumen series, but you can read it on its own too, as a standalone novel. It was first published in 1967.