Life

Posts about life, growth, and general advice

Apr

2022

A Life Update

I was speaking to a friend the other day, and they mentioned that they had no idea what I was up to these days. I found it strange, how could they not know what I was up to?

Then I realized, I hadn’t really told anyone what I’ve been up to. So, I’m going to remedy that today:

The past couple years have been pretty busy for me. That drive to keep busy came out of a less than ideal situation. I was pretty lonely at Georgia Tech. There weren’t many people who understood my religious background or who were interested in dreaming up big visions with me. So I took all that energy and put it towards doing cool stuff.

I started off as a physics major, which turned into a minor as I realized that physics is really hard. Yet, some of the few classes I genuinely enjoyed in college were in the physics department, among them: Thermodynamics, Quantum Mechanics I, and the Physics of Small Systems. My first year, I also started reaching out to a random professor every week, a tradition that ended up being one of my highlights of college. I managed to get coffee with dozens of really interesting people from every department allowing me to explore a bunch of different fields in a very short amount of time.

My second year, I switched my major to Biomedical Engineering. With that switch, my class attendance dropped precipitously as I thoroughly hated most of the classes. In fact, I only enjoyed a single class throughout my entire time in BME. By my third year, I only went to classes that graded participation, and even those I rarely attended. For project-based classes, I was the worst teammate you could ask for. My only goal was to keep my scholarship which required a GPA of 3.3, and that is what I did. I mostly got Cs and Bs, with a couple Ds sprinkled in. Yet, I found a hack:

Whenever you do academic research, you can get your research mentor to grade your research. And that letter grade can influence your official GPA. So to counteract my course grades, I did a ton of research allowing me to keep my GPA above a 3.3. I started off doing research in data science, working on removing bias from the graduate admissions teams in a couple departments at GT. I also worked on making a digital Talmud, which eventually connected me with some of the great people at Sefaria.

In my second year, I moved from data science to bioinformatics. That is where I spent the vast majority of my time and got some papers published. I worked on cell-based meat, tissue-on-a-chip technologies, and population genomics. I worked in 2 or 3 labs at the same time to increase the number of hours I was doing research. It was fascinating, but I saw that the field was seriously underdeveloped. In fact, it was so underdeveloped that they let me (a 21 year old) make bioinformatic pipelines because no one else was doing it. So, as I was getting ready to graduate, I decided to take a break from bioinformatics to start a company.

My thinking was that I eventually want to make a company that can help people engineer and program cells, yet in order to make that company, I need a lot of investment and advancement in the field. So in the meantime, I will prove myself with another start-up and then make my way back over the next two decades.

Before I started the company, I actually tried to apply to a bunch of internships. I got rejected from all of them. So with no better options, I decided to take the leap and start a company during my last semester at GT.

That is what I am up to now: building a startup called 402. I raised some VC money (which was a whole journey in itself) and now we are a team of about 9 people working on making the internet a better place. I am going to leave it pretty vague for now, but reach out if you are interested and I can tell you a bit more. I am raising our next round in July to grow the team and expand the product, so I will release more details publicly then.

Shaun and Destin — I get to meet some cool people because of it!

It has been pretty amazing to build a company. It is extremely stressful, but I find it rewarding and challenging. I get to work every day alongside really cool people on important things. It is the first time in my life where I feel that the work I am putting in has the chance to directly impact others’ lives. I take that responsibility very seriously and want to prove to myself, my investors, and my family that when I put my mind to something, I can do big things.

Yet, a feeling of disbelief always looms over me. What place does a 22 year old have hiring people older than him? What right do I have to be managing the amount of money that I am? I seemingly haven’t worked hard enough for this opportunity, yet here I am. I have to occasionally pinch myself to bring my attention back to reality because my head can often wander down this path of self-doubt. This is not even considering the ever present threat of failure. People have put their faith in me. Our investors trusted me with their money. Our employees trusted me with their careers. I plan on succeeding, but what happens if I don’t?

Luckily, I am a pretty resilient guy and these thoughts don’t bother me too much. Sometimes they keep me up at night, but more often than not they keep pushing me forward. I have come to terms with the possibility of failure. I have built a high tolerance of risk, and am OK with failing. It doesn’t define who I am, and I have surrounded myself with people who are aware of the risks.

On top of all that, I am making Aliyah in July. I am looking forward to starting my life in Israel. I haven’t been surrounded by people my own age for quite a while, so I am hoping to improve my social life there. Between now and July, I am traveling around. I am going to be in Israel, Europe, NY/Miami, Atlanta, and Kenya. I plan on doing a lot of hiking, rock climbing, and socializing. I am particularly excited about hiking Kilimanjaro in June.

I have big plans for the future. I want to be a part of the biological revolution that is coming over the next two decades. Advancements like nanopore sequencing, CRISPR, AlphaFold, and IPSCs have enabled us to learn so much about what is possible. Cells can do so much more than we thought. They are a mechanism that fights entropy like no other. While everything else in life degrades over time, cells grow and collaborate using amazingly clever tricks to fight an environment trying to kill them.

I fully believe that one day we will largely find cures for most genetic diseases. We will be making cell-based roads and buildings that easily last for hundreds of years. We will be designing microorganisms to break down plastics in the ocean and absorb greenhouse gasses from the atmosphere. We will make meat without killing animals, leather without cows, and have an abundance of food for next to nothing. We will eventually be able to program cells to do what we want. This is a future that I am obsessed with and I know is possible because I have seen the ingenuity of people first-hand.

Regardless of where life takes me, I am excited to work with amazing people every day on things that will make life a little bit better for all of us.

Mar

2021

The Future of Drugs Pt.1

This is going to be the first of a series of three articles to explain my recently published paper. The first article will be about the future of testing drugs, the second will be about how we can get rid of side-effects in the medication, and the third will be about the future of healthcare.

A paper that I co-authored (over a year ago) , was recently featured on the cover of Science Translational Medicine. It goes by the title Mechanism and Reversal of Drug-Induced Nephrotoxicity on a Chip¹, which sounds complicated, and in this case really is complicated. Yet, to understand what this paper is about and why you should care, we have to understand the problems it seeks to solve. This means learning a little bit about how we make drugs, the FDA, and the drug-approval process.

Let’s say that you wanted to make a drug. There are a number of reasons you may want to do this: to save millions of lives, to get rid of the every-day headache, or even to save your loved one from a rare genetic disease. Yet, it is much simpler said than done. The average development of a drug takes 13.5 years and costs around 2.5 billion dollars². It takes so long because most of the things we are trying to fix are not well-understood. The brain is a mystery, our organs are black-boxes, and our nervous system might as well exist on the spiritual realm.

That is not to say we don’t understand the parts; we have analyzed and classified every last bit of meat in our bodies, but those labels don’t actually help us understand the mechanisms. You can label every animal in a jungle, but that doesn’t help you understand the ecosystem as a whole. Therefore, it can take a really long time to even get a vague understanding of the details of the disease you are trying to cure.

Even once you get the details, you still cannot just rely on your understanding to make the drug. Science in general is not designed to predict the outcomes of an experiment, its designed to set up experiments. So, in your efforts to make a drug, you have to first try thousands of compounds at a time to see which ones have the desired effect. This is called drug discovery, and it is really inefficient. Trial and error is not usually the ideal method of solving a problem, it is more of a last resort.

Beyond that, it also costs a large fortune because all that research and experimentation can’t be done in a garage. It requires the brightest minds (with the highest wages) and the most complicated machines the world has ever made.

Beyond that, it also costs a large fortune because the all that research and experimentation can’t be done in a garage. It requires the brightest minds (with the highest wages) and the most complicated machines the world has ever made.

But, let’s say you put in the time and the money: you have finally come up with a drug that, for example, kills cancer. Now, the drug worked in the lab, but you have to start testing it outside the lab. So, you set aside a couple years to test it on animals. First you try it on mice and rats, then on dogs and monkeys. These tests can take years and are quite expensive. But, you’ve already done so much work, so, you’re willing to do whatever it takes. You keep on testing it and testing it until you are confident that it both works on animals and won’t harm humans.

Eventually, you reach out to the your local government drug administration and ask permission to test it on people. You have to prove that you’ve done the work and that you are confident it won’t hurt anyone. Filling out the paperwork itself can take a year if you’re new to the whole process. But, if you’re papers are in order and your research is solid, the FDA will give you permission to test it on a small group of people. And finally, after you have sunk a decade of time and billions of dollars, you have now reached the point where 92% of drugs die a quiet death. You heard me right, 92% of drugs fail in human clinical trials ³. After the billions of dollars you have spent, and a decade of your life, your drug has less than a 1 in 10 chance of actually becoming a product. This isn’t because of bureaucracy or overly strict testing, rather because of one of two issues:

Most drugs developed in a lab simply don’t work on humans. Even if your drug worked on animals and was backed up by science, there is just no guarantee that the human body won’t simply process it in a way where it ends up doing absolutely nothing. The body is complicated, and we don’t understand it as well as we claim to. So, sometimes you just have to make the drug and hope it’ll work.
Even if a drug does do what it claims to, i.e. kill cancer, that doesn’t mean that it won’t also cause kidney failure or a heart attack. When you watch drug commercials, there is a reason that they always say “side effects may include death,” its because side effects are often deadly. The truth is, a lot of drugs do more harm than help and the FDA is very careful to make sure they don’t approve a drug that will end up killing more people than it will save.

And this is the problem with current drug development, a whole lot of time and money is wasted on drugs that either don’t work or are extremely dangerous. You may be wondering how this process could be so inefficient? Well, there are literally thousands of research groups around the world trying to tackle this exact question. Some of them are trying to make the research step itself more efficient through better techniques and experimentation. Others are trying to do more basic research into how the body works so that we can make more informed guesses before we even start. Each of these areas alone suck up hundreds of billions of dollars of funding and while there have been promising results, these groups have mostly failed to improve the development process. This leads us to the third way people are trying to solve the problem: making testing better.

Why do we test drugs on animals? PETA, and many other organizations argue that animal experimentation is cruel ⁴. They’re not wrong, we literally make animals sick, while holding them in small cages, in order to ensure the validity of our experiments. It is hard to watch, but in the end of the day its better than testing on humans. Would you rather kill a monkey or a person with your untested cancer drug? I really hope you answered the monkey.

Yet, this is starting to change due to a number of recent breakthroughs in tissue engineering. In other words, we have gotten really good at making cells. What do I mean by this? Well, you may have heard of stem cells. These are cells that are a blank slate, they can be transformed into whatever you want if you feed them the right things, and take care of them in the right way. They are like babies, their personalities and physical features aren’t formed yet, so they’re easily moldable. And in 2006, Shinya Yamanaka figured out a way to make human stem cells very easily (we call them IPSCs in the biz)⁵. If you want, you can now buy gallons of human stem cells for a couple hundred bucks.

So, this prompted many to seriously look at the following question: why don’t we just test medications on human cells instead of animals? Now, people have been asking this question for decades, but only recently have we finally gotten to the point where our technology makes it possible.

It is also important to note that the history of tissue engineering is both fascinating and scary. It reaches into issues from racism to identity. In the early days, we would collect samples from patients without their permission. Henrietta Lacks was a young black mother in the 1940s, whose cells are reproduced by the millions today, despite her never having given permission⁶. Beyond that, we are entering into an age where we want to treat people based on their genetic ethnicity, but is it ethical to change our approach to treatment based on whether someone is black, Latino, Jewish, or white ⁷? If our history can tell us anything, its that we are not very good with keeping our biases in check when it comes to medicine. We truly are in a uncharted territory, and I encourage everyone to develop their own opinions on these matters before they enter the realm of public opinion and politics.

But, returning to our question: why don’t we just use human cells? Sadly, its not as simple as that. If you try take some cells from a body, the cells will die within an hour or two, even if kept in ideal conditions. That is just not long enough to test medications, so people have had to figure out ways to make cells live longer. The best way to make a cell live longer is to make it cancerous (as many cancer cells can live forever), but as you may have guessed this is not an ideal solution. Beyond that, you can’t actually start from a human cell, you have to build the cell from scratch. So the first step in making human cells that you can test medications on is to grow the cell you want from a stem cell. The second step is finding a balance between making that cell too cancerous and not cancerous enough.

This leads us to our third problem: one cell is not enough to test medications on, you need a lot of cells. In the early days, researchers would just stick a whole bunch of cells into a flat petri dish and let them grow, but as it turns out this doesn’t really imitate human cells in the body so well. Cells don’t exist in a 2D flat world, they exist in a vibrant 3D world. It took a long time for researchers to make 3D scaffolds that cells could grow around such that they worked even remotely as well as they would have in the body. This is still an active area of research today.

Even once you have a whole bunch of slightly cancerous cells all organized in a 3D structure, you still can’t just test medications on them. When you give a cancer medication to a monkey with cancer, its pretty easy to see if the medicine worked, but how can you tell if a cancer medication worked on a slightly cancerous clump of cells? It is easy to see if a monkey died, but its much harder to see if cells died. This leads use to our fourth problem: monitoring the health of cells.

There are two primary ways of seeing if cells are happy and healthy:

Looking at general measurements like glucose metabolism and oxygen consumption.
Looking at a cell’s RNA.

These are both very hard to to do. The first method involves using physical sensors such as spectrometers, fancy chemical oxide probes, and much more to get a general indication on whether the cells are eating, breathing, pooping, and communicating. The second method is even more complicated. In order to look at a cell’s RNA, you have to throw a bunch of special chemicals and tools at it. Then you have have to convert the resulting goop into digital data. If you do that all right you will end up with mountains of unsorted data. You then have to process that data by matching it to some reference DNA. After that you have to match that data to databases that contain decades of unformatted research into protein structures. Imagine trying to finish the world’s hardest jigsaw puzzle without the picture on the box. You then solve the puzzle only to find that the pictures is just a collection of random lines and shapes which you have to interpret in a meaningful way. Both of these methods are active areas of research today.

So, once you have slightly cancerous cells in a 3D matrix with probes and sensors sticking out of it alongside gigabytes of processed data, you can then determine whether a cell is dying from the drug you gave it. And that is exactly the first idea that our paper demonstrates: the ability to create a system where you can test a medication on a kidney cell that is more accurate than animal testing would ever be.

Now we (as humans) are in the early stages of this method, and this paper only talks about the efficacy of testing one medication on a single type of kidney cell, but it is a promising start to making more reliable medications at a fraction of the cost and in a portion of the time.

In the next article I will explore how this paper promises to make side-effects a thing of the past, so stay tuned if you are interested!

[1] My paper on Science!

[2] I don’t like Elsevier, but here is a link.

[3] A Chapter of a book on Organ on Chip Technologies

[4] Peta on Animal Experimentation

[5] The original paper

[6] A nice background on Henrietta Lacks

[7] Population Stratification

Feb

2021

Baruch Dayan Emet

Baruch Dayan Emet.
Baruch Dayan Emet?
He gives and He takes away.
Shall The Judge not do justice?

Words cannot describe,
Tears cannot cleanse,
Memories cannot replace,
Prayers cannot heal.

If The Judge takes away, to whom do we go with our sorrows?
If The King slays, to whom do we complain?
If The Friend betrays, to whom do we rely?
If a parent turns another way, to whom do we cry?

You claimed to be devoted forever, to betroth in justice.
Your anger was for a moment, but its consequences? Forever.
You ask for us to return, but Who pushed us away?
Your hand extends out, but in mercy or to maim?

My strength fails, and my bones wither.
I am forgotten,
A broken vessel littered.
How can I possibly hold back the deep, the waters below?

How can I claim Elokai Atah, if it is so?
I am in throes.
These eyes waste away with sobs.
And no cloth can possibly stem such a flow.

How great are You!
How great are You?
How long have I to live, that I should be patient?
You call me, so I say: Here I Am!

Teach me, and I shall be silent, tell me where I have been wrong.
Take something else as if it were of my own!
Is there injustice on my tongue?
I only ask once more, do not show anger.

They hoped perhaps God will be kind, so as to not perish.
By what account has this calamity been brought about us?
For I am of Your people, is that reason enough?
For fear of Your justice, I have been thrown under?

Do You require sacrifice, Yonah to the sea?
Do You require offerings, Eliyahu to the sky?
Do You require our souls, Nadav and Avihu?
Do You require our hopes, Moshe and Yirmiyahu?

You have brought us into the wilderness just to perish?
Cursed is the day that I was born. Let me die!
If this is the way in which You deal with me, kill me now!
Stand over me and take my life, for I writhe in pain!

Do You require tests, Iyov and his flock?
Do You require deafness, Achitophel and his advice?
Do You require might, Shimshon and his chains?
Do You require loyalty, Shaul and his aid?

Take my life, I would rather die than live.
Loose your hand, and cut me off!
Take your sword and run me through.
Enough! Take my life, for I am no good!

The pain burns inside.
It comes from within, to wreak demise.
It burns the flesh, and scars the bones
It crushes the chest, and rakes the eyes.

Oh, how can we look forward and say Baruch Dayan Emet?
Is there justice or truth in such a lie?
Akiva saw and laughed,
But was he a hero? More likely despised.

Saying words can create no justice.
No learning nor wishes can replace what has been broken.
Time can neither heal nor fix.
The future is just a moment past what has happened.

The world lives on, as if nothing matters.
Hevel Hevelim, can the wind be caught?
No understanding will remove such sadness.
Knowledge only grinds what has already been naught.

Baruch Dayan Emet?
Don’t we seek good, and avoid evil?
Haven’t we always set justice at our gates?
Were You not the one telling us to testify?

“What wrong have I done against you?”
“What hardship have I caused?”
“Answer Me!”
Here we stand and here we answer.

You have taken away that which is precious.
You have removed the cornerstone upon which we all lean.
We had found goodness and pursued justice.
But now its all gone, so what does it mean?

We’ve been told that we sow and do not reap.
That we trust no friend and rejoice with fiends.
But why have the pious vanished from the land?
The righteous perished without any demands?

You ask where were we when You closed the sea behind its doors?
When You clothed the sky and swaddled the clouds?
Were we not next to You?
Were we not there the whole time?

No, we have not walked the recesses of the depths,
Nor have we found the gates of a deep shade.
So we may not know which path leads to light or darkness.
But, have we not experienced the day and night?

We may not know to where the light leads, nor the way home from the reefs.
For everything there is a time, even adversity, a day of war and peace.
Who put this wisdom into hiding, and Who gave understanding to the mind?
We may not understand, but Your silence is a crime.

We have spoken once, and we will not reply,
Twice we have questioned, and no more shall we add.
We do not know the laws above, so we do not try to drag them below.
I had heard You with my ears, even seen You with my eyes, but now I feel You deep inside.

So I step back and admit defeat.
I am nothing but ashes and dust.
From whence I come I shall eventually return.
And there, beaten and crushed, I shall remain.

I was thrown overboard, into the treacherous sea,
In my trouble I called out, and eventually He answered me,
Into the lion’s den I was thrown, I waited and waited,
Until the morning came, and I was lifted out, exonerated.

Life can be a very sad story.
Sometimes we call out saying its too much,
This burden is not meant for me,
But we have no choice, a heavy yoke is our lot.

We have been told only one answer, that none can be found.
But we were right, silence is a punishment too harsh and cruel.
We may not hear the thunder and quakes, the rumblings and shakes,
But neither can a fool, we can only hope to hear the quiet voice.

It is found in those that love us,
It is found in the most dire of moments,
We expect to find it amongst family and friends,
But sometimes it comes even from our foes.

We do not know the path of life,
So, let us not claim that we have been led astray, left or right.
The spheres above are far away, and that distance makes them a ruthless enemy.
But, maybe just maybe, a voice can trickle its way down and find the ear that cries.

Baruch Dayan Emet?
It’s a hard statement to swallow.
We see no justice nor truth in what has been dealt.
Yet, perhaps we are not saying it as fact, as truth itself.

Baruch Dayan Emet?
Maybe it is the voice from far far away.
The silent whisper that attempts to break away.
Perhaps this is the statement that pierces the mountains.
That allows justice and righteous to flow freely through.
A small small glimmer that allows the sun to rise again.
The beginning of something that grows into a guide.
A small spark that if kindled can bring us through the valley of death.
A sputtering but living flame that shows us the despair left long ago behind,
That calls to travelers thrown to the side, beckoning them forward, past the large divides.

We do not know the paths of life,
Moshe and Eliyahu, Yirmiyahu and Yonah,
They may have looked to non-existence in desperation,
But there is one clear message, that life is nothing if not a tiring fight.
So we are left with only one option,
To walk and walk in the dark night,
Listening carefully for the smallest of cries,
To move and move, with nothing in sight,
To understand that we are those who do not know,
That we may object and testify,
But the courts above do not rectify,
The wrongs committed here and now.

A blind traveler can make a journey in the blink of an eye,
A mute can sit through an orchestra with one note.
A fool can sit along the watchtower and forget about the wall.
A human can live without having lived at all.
So, we just trudge along without insight
A weary soul on the lookout,

Life is the cruelest thing to ever have been made,
But if we lift the bindings that have been laid,
Perhaps we can begin to appreciate the journey,
A path called life that is both treacherous and bright
Towards a destination that we had not dreamt,
But we still move forward on this path not set,
Saying,
Baruch Dayan Emet.

Jan

2021

The Hump

Please note that I am about to give you exceptionally bad advice, so please do not follow it:

I think every student should make every effort to skip their introductory courses.

Why? Well, it starts with a TV show:

In Season 5 of Silicon Valley, the CEO, named Richard, of a fictional company embarrasses himself during his first company-wide speech. He stumbles his words, almost poops his pants, and then continues to throw himself into a glass wall in front of all his employees. After the incident, he decides to not give an orientation week to everyone for fear of future embarrassment. This lack of orientation wreaks havoc amongst the company as people are confused as to what they should be doing. All of this culminates in Richard working for days on end trying to do everyone else’s jobs. As people start to notice his crazy work ethic, they start to paradoxically respect him and start to figure out their own jobs in an effort to help out.

Eventually the exhausted Richard ends up in hospital after running into another glass wall. When he wakes up and returns to the office, he finds that everyone is united and working together, inspired by his efforts.

While the whole episode is a hoot, I often find myself returning to one specific line:

“I mean, sure, a three-day orientation might’ve been just as effective and less bloody, but it wasn’t you.”

I find this comedic parable to be inspiring because it somewhat encapsulates my entire philosophy of learning. There have been many times in life where it would have been both easier and less bloody to just go to orientation or sit through an introductory class, yet I have found that putting myself in a position where I have no idea what I am doing is actually where I am most comfortable.

To explain myself better, I present to you the curve of learning:

I think that the beginning of most problems people face can be approximately mapped to the curve above. The y-axis is effort, and the x-axis is progress. At the beginning of any problem, you exert a lot of effort for (seemingly) very little progress. Yet, as you go further, you continue to get more ‘bang for your buck’.

Most people (including myself) see that big hump and get very scared, and for good reason. The hump is where we risk wasting most of our time. It has been known to cause panic attacks and decimate self-confidence. The reason we have orientations and introductory classes is solely to make going over the hump as easy as possible.

Yet, I have found the gut-wrenching solo climb up the hump to be an almost enjoyable experience. At first, I did not understand why I liked it; the hump is always painful and humiliating. In fact, the hump is often where I am most unhappy. The days I spend in the hump are filled with self-loathing, but somehow, I always end up on the other side, a little wiser and a lot humbler. Over time, I finally started to understand why I liked the hump. It’s not because I’m a masochist, but rather because my goal when approaching problems was not actually to solve the problem, but to understand the problem.

This realization changed my whole perspective. I enjoy the hump because it is an exciting journey that makes the world around me smaller and simpler. The journey over the hump allows me to explore what went through the minds of the people who were the first to ever encounter a particular problem.

You see, when you learn introductory maths or sciences, you are taught an overbearing amount of concepts, equations, and laws. They are presented as if these truths were self-evident. They aren’t. Every law, equation, and idea in your textbook took a number of people their entire lives to figure out, yet your teachers expect you to master it in 2 weeks. By forsaking introductory classes, I gained an appreciation for just how difficult seemingly basic concepts are.

The hump also is not a singular hill. It is but one peak in a landscape of related problems. By exploring the hump on your own you have the time to look around you and see what problems are related to the one you are tackling now. In this way, you start to develop connections between different fields, connections that you would have otherwise missed.

Again, I do not recommend climbing the hump on your own. Skipping class is bad advice. You will get worse grades, your teachers will be annoyed, and you will look like a fool asking redundant questions. Exploring the hump on your own is always more bloody and often less effective than simply going to orientation.

Yet, if you are okay with a little blood and a lot of frustration, then I can tell you that my way is way more exciting. By ignoring the beaten path, you will come out the other side a lot humbler and perhaps a little wiser. You won’t learn the material as fast, but you will be more intimate with what you do know. Soloing the hump is hard, but as far as bad advice goes, its not the worst advice I could give you.

Apr

2020

The Sea of Web-Dev

A little over a year ago I delved into the sea of web development. And yes, it is a sea, for it is tumultuous. It is unpredictable and confusing, and if you are not careful you can easily get lost. Spending too much time in it will make you seasick, and the even most seaworthy programmers will throw up in a vicious storm.

I could go on with the analogy, because the tools are a ship that can break in this sea, and the wind will come and set any journey astray, no matter how well it was planned. And especially because there is something magical about reaching your destination despite the chaos of the journey.

Yet, an analogy can only take you so far. The story goes like this: Dan Jutan and I have been building a framework for an online Talmud. Why have we been doing this? Because, although the Talmud exists online, it was never built to be online. We wanted to change this, to make learning Talmud online a native experience. We proposed this idea to the LMC department at Georgia Tech, and we got funding. Now we call ourselves the Georgia Tech Jewish Digital Humanities Lab, and we are building a new online Talmud.

It’s all great and wonderful that the university gave two undergraduates money to fund their project, but there was one problem: I didn’t know the first or last thing about web development. And it turns out, making an online Talmud requires web development. So, I learned quickly. HTML was pretty easy to pick up. CSS looked simple, but the more I got to know it, the more I realized it was the devil’s incarnate. And JavaScript, well it’s a love-hate relationship.

I wont go into all the details, but I will point out some of the things I learned:

Never use w3school

Whenever you search for anything related to CSS, you will encounter this website. No matter how good it looks, never go to it. It is a trap, a trap filled with snakes and scorpions. It is inconsistent, outdated, and often wrong. Stick to mozilla. And if you are really looking for something out of the box, csstricks is amazing.

Either start dreaming in rectangles, or let someone else handle the CSS

CSS and HTML works on the principle of rectangles (the box model). Rectangles pushing against each other, stacking on top of each other, swallowing each other, overlapping with each other, or doing whatever else rectangles do (which is a lot more than you think they can do). If you cant fit it together with squares, it wont work with CSS. Letters are not letters, they are small boxes. Round pictures are not round, they are squares with some parts cut out. A monitor is not a screen, it is just a rectangle to hold other rectangles. Everything is rectangular in CSS.

You have to be careful when letting a non-programmer program

This whole project would not be possible without Dan Jutan, and in order to understand this you need to understand our lab’s workflow.

We have a problem we need to solve.
I come up with a janky solution that seems to work 90% of the time.
Dan is not able to read my code because it came out of the dark recesses of my mind.
I rewrite my code to make it readable and now it works 99% of the time.
Dan still cant read my code, but somehow still manages to refactor it.
The problem is now fixed and anyone can read how we did it.

I am not a programmer, nor will I ever be one. I program to solve problems, not to build packages, and I dont expect people to ever read what I write, and if they do, I truly feel sorry for them. So, when it comes to making open source software, it’s usually a smart idea to stick to real programmers, or at the very least have a ‘Dan’ on the team.

Never work on a problem for more than 12 hours in a row

When it comes to a problem, it may seem like one more line of code will fix everything, but we all know it’s not true. Bugs and errors in web-dev fall into two categories: quick fixes, and long torturous roller coasters. If you have spent more than a couple hours on one problem, it’s better to walk away for a little bit and come back with a fresh mind. The alternative is hacking away at the problem for 12 hours, and then not being able to sleep that night because all you can dream about is semicolons and JS documentation.

There are two versions of your website: One for Microsoft, the other for everything else

Microsoft likes being difficult. They implement features that noone wants and leave out features that everyone needs. Don’t even get me started on IE. So, you are going to need to build two versions of your site: one that is the normal one, and one on IE/Edge that just has a link to download chrome.

I could go on and on about my discoveries in the sea of web-dev, and I may write more about my journey. I have navigated the maze of CSS, encountered the most obscure tags in HTML, and have done some pretty wacky things in JS. But, for now this is what I will leave you with:

Web-dev is not a path for the feint of heart, but if you are going to jump in, you have to jump in all the way.

May

2018

Protected: The Year

Nov

2017

Why?

I have noticed a peculiar question that constantly comes up in my daily schedule. It is asked by my rabbis, peers, friends, and even the very books that I immerse myself in every day. That question is: why? Every time a statement is made, a question proposed, an answer supplied, a support provided, or an explanation expounded upon, we always ask why. Why was it given? Why in this way? Why at this time? Why here and not there? Why, why, why do we use this little word so much?

Well, I think, because it is the most powerful question you can ask.

It leads not to an understanding of the topic at hand, but to the underlying environment. It allows you to paint a bigger picture. Euclid said “A point has no existence by itself. It exists only as a part of the pattern of relationships which constitute the geometry” (Infinite in All Directions, “Butterflies and Superstrings”) when defining a point. To understand a part you need to question the whole, as the question provides the motivation behind a topic, which is immensely more important than the topic itself. To understand why something exists, includes how it exists, what it is, where it is, and when it came into being.

I have been drilled to ask why. And I didn’t even realize until now. True knowledge does not exist in the quantity of information known. Anyone can learn anything, it just requires the right explanation, but not everyone can connect ideas. “The totality is not, as it were, a mere heap, but the whole is something besides the parts” (Aristotle on Elements, Book I, Notion 5). To be able to create a tree of knowledge and a web of ideas is the sign of true genius, and the question ‘why’ is the engine to the making of connections. That little word shows the relationship between ideas, and that is why it is so powerful.

Today a lot of people fail to ask themselves this question. Take any given moment of your day and ask yourself why you are doing whatever activity you are engaged in. Can you give an honest answer that is both meaningful and purposeful? Can you do so for every moment of your day, every moment of your life? Freidrich Neitzche said in Die Götzen-Dämmerung (Twilight of the Idols) that “He who has a why to live for can bear almost any how.” If you never ask why then you have room for improvement. Yet, this is not meant to be a critique of how people live their lives, so there is no need to provide a ‘why’. This is simply an investigation into the value of our little question.

The greatest people I have ever met have been the ones who have asked the most questions. In fact, the people I have learned the most from have not taught me, they have questioned me. While I sit in my morning shiur (lecture) delivered by Rabbi Chaim Sabato, I often hear more questions than answers. The class does not end when I leave the room, I am often left thinking for hours after. It is no secret that the greatest opportunities for learning begin with a question. The most profound insights are prompted by great questions. The universal truths are responses to unanswerable questions. Every exploration is a product of our curiosities. So what prevents us from utilizing the most critical question of all?

I believe there are two reasons above all else. The first is that we are afraid that we will find no answer to our question.

The general trend seems to show that we would rather appear smarter than we are, than be smarter than we are. It is a sin more grave than any other. Our ignorance stifles our curiosity. It blocks our ability to learn and impedes the path to a greater understanding. This fear plagues every corner of society. In schools across the world, kids achieve only a superficial understanding of the material they cover, while teachers often don’t provide the tools for delving deeper into the topics at hand as they themselves are too scared to teach students beyond the scope of what they know. This is a failure on the part of the teachers as “spoon feeding in the long run teaches us nothing but the shape of the spoon.” (A Room with a View, E.M. Forster)

Any kid can probably recite handful of physics or mathematical formulas such as the Pythagorean theorem, but can they derive them from simpler ideas? Can they use them to solve a problem they have never encountered?

The question ‘why’ takes a collection of numbers and letters found in a textbook and turns them into powerful tools that can fix problems or aid in the understanding of the universe! Yet, we always stop short, the tools of engineers and mathematicians remain a jumbled alphabet mixed with a gracious dollop of numbers to everyone but the intellectual elite. The fear of our limitations prevent us from asking ‘why’ in the first place. Yet, this is only half the picture.

The second reason is that we are apprehensive about investing the work involved with finding an answer to our question.

Developing true knowledge is a task harder than any other. It involves comprehensive exploration of a given topic, its roots, and the surrounding subjects. It involves repetition and recitation despite what many say. It involves immense willpower to buckle down and dive into the ‘water’. There is a reason that getting a graduate’s degree takes such a long time; because there is a lot of work involved with mastering something.

Learning is no easy thing, it is more akin to exploring treacherous unknown terrain than the average image of someone sticking their nose in a book. There is so much to know that is can be quite scary to even start the process, and in fact it gets even scarier as you continue learning. For every lake you traverse, another ocean of information presents itself. In the Memoirs of the Life, Writings, and Discoveries of Sir Isaac Newton we find an amazing statement:

“I do not know what I may appear to the world, but to myself I seem to have been only like a boy playing on the sea-shore, and diverting myself in now and then finding a smoother pebble or a prettier shell than ordinary, whilst the great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered before me.”
(Volume II Chapter 27)

Even the master of classical physics was overcome with awe by how much there is to learn. So what right do we have to use our ignorance as an excuse? These two obstacles need to be overcome by every individual who hopes for any sense of familiarity in our complex and confusing world. The father of quantum physics, Albert Einstein himself, had a similar sentiment to his predecessor (Newton) and a way to cope:

“Don’t think about why you question, simply don’t stop questioning. Don’t worry about what you can’t answer, and don’t try to explain what you can’t know. Curiosity is its own reason. Aren’t you in awe when you contemplate the mysteries of eternity, of life, of the marvelous structure behind reality? And this is the miracle of the human mind—to use its constructions, concepts, and formulas as tools to explain what man sees, feels and touches. Try to comprehend a little more each day. Have holy curiosity.”

(Einstein and the Poet, Page 138)

What more can be said about the value of questioning? We know what question to ask, and how to overcome the obstacles that prevent us from asking. With a single question your entire life can be changed. It is like a key breaking the lock of monotony that holds us in our daily grind, like a surgery giving us back the gift of our sight. We can no longer ask why we cannot ask ‘why’, rather we must ask why are we not asking ‘why’?

Sep

2017

Two Months In

Today, I went to a museum that showcased the life of Menachem Begin. It was all fascinating, but one idea stuck in my mind. He claimed that it was good to struggle in your youth. There is a problem though: this sentiment goes against a massive philosophy that is seemingly apparent to me in my western upbringing. We aim for a good life without struggle. We hope to make our children’s childhood better than our own. We work in order to save for vacations, we spend all week looking forward to the weekend. Work is a means to an end. This sentiment is repeated in many of the mantras that guide the way of life for many Americans. Yet, Menachem Begin tells us we are wrong.

Continue reading →

Aug

2017

Protected: First Month

May

2017

Graduation Speech

This is the speech I gave at my high school graduation, which you can watch here:

Continue reading →