Hari grew up in west and central India and studied production engineering his native state, Tamilnadu. In August 2000, he started graduate school in industrial engineering at Arizona State University. While in Arizona, he traveled the beautiful landscapes of the American Southwest at every opportunity; these travels also led him to many American Indian reservations. After a two year healthcare engineering research position at Mayo Clinic in Minnesota – a place as cold as Arizona was hot – he joined the engineering faculty at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. His academic website is here. He blogs on themes related to the humanities – travel, nature, literature, history – at Thirty Letters in My Name. Email: hari [dot] balasubramanian [at] gmail [dot] com
by Hari Balasubramanian This piece is framed as a 'conversation' but it is really a conversation or debate between two voices/perspectives in my own head (here's a similar piece from last year). __ “There's a lot of talk these days about 'staying in the present moment', 'being mindful', etc. I find it all quite puzzling.…
by Hari Balasubramanian I finished reading War and Peace recently. It took me three years but I did try to read it carefully. Tolstoy defined art “as that human activity which consists in one person's consciously conveying to others, by certain external signs, the feelings he or she has experienced, and in others being infected…
by Hari Balasubramanian Decisions under demand uncertainty – the so called newsvendor problem. In October 2007, my father and I took a day train from Bangalore to Chennai. About halfway into the 7-hour journey is a station called Jolarpet, where the train stops for ten minutes. As at other stations, there were dozens of vendors…
by Hari Balasubramanian A selection of facts, research and personal impressions. In February this year, I traveled to the small town of Angangueo in Central Mexico. A 4-hour bus trip from Mexico City, Angangueo is in a rural part of the state of Michoacan, in the mountainous trans-volcanic belt. Here, in a few select high…
by Hari Balasubramanian Exploring the Memoryless property of the Exponential Distribution. Waiting For the Next Customer Suppose you run a small business, a barber shop or a small restaurant that takes walk-ins only. A customer has just left, your place is empty, and you are waiting for the next customer to come in. You've figured…
by Hari Balasubramanian A selection of facts, research and personal encounters involving beavers and their habitat. In October 2007, an 835-meter long beaver dam was discovered on Google Earth. It remains the longest one found so far. The dam was in the “thick wildness of Northern Alberta”, in Wood Buffalo National Park. In July 2014…
by Hari Balasubramanian Observations and pictures from a visit in October 2014 to the Andean town of Cuenca and the surrounding area. 1. Surgeries in an Isuzu Truck Since 1994, a small team of clinicians has been bringing elective surgeries to Ecuador's remotest towns or villages, places that have do not have hospitals in close…
by Hari Balasubramanian It's hard to spot new birds during Massachusetts winters (I don't own a house with a yard or a bird feeder, which makes it doubly hard). The hundreds of species that make their home or pass through here are more easily observed in spring, summer and early fall. But last Tuesday –…
by Hari Balasubramanian On Oscar Martinez's “The Beast: Riding the Rails and Dodging Narcos on the Migrant Trail” — the English translation of “Los Migrantes Que No Importan” (The Migrants Who Do Not Matter). Translation by Daniela Maria Ugaz and John Washington. —- From 2000-2006, I was a graduate student at Arizona State University in…
by Hari Balasubramanian You might wonder who is conversing with whom. The best description I have is that these are two voices or perspectives in my head debating each other. “This thing called the sense of self, the ego or the ‘I'. There are many claims floating around these days that confidently say that the…
by Hari Balasubramanian The Shortest Path How does Google Maps figure out the best route between two addresses? The exact algorithm is known only to Google, but probably some variation of what is called the shortest path problem has to be solved [1]. Here is the simplified version. Suppose we have a network of nodes…
by Hari Balasubramanian One late summer afternoon two years ago, I saw a monarch butterfly casually fly across my office window in Amherst, Massachusetts. If I had not known what monarchs do, I would have only admired its beauty and then forgotten all about it. But since I'd seen a documentary on these butterflies the…
by Hari Balasubramanian After the road trip to the Turkey-Georgia border (see Part 1), I returned along with my friend Serhat to Erzurum on the third day. Serhat flew back to Istanbul that same evening. My plan was to travel solo to the town of Kars next morning by bus, spend two full days there…
by Hari Balasubramanian I visited Turkey in July 2013; this was 2-3 weeks after the protests and riots that rocked Taksim Square in Istanbul. Ramazan began on July 08, the day I arrived. After 3 days in Istanbul I flew to Erzurum, a city in Northeast Turkey. From there I hoped to visit villages and…
by Hari Balasubramanian In January this year, I visited Hospitalito Atitlán, a health care center for the Tz'utujil Maya in the town of Santiago Atitlán, Guatemala. There were two reasons for this visit. First, much of my healthcare work has been limited to the US system; I wanted to get a sense of what was…
by Hari Balasubramanian In my first piece for 3QD, I discussed some aspects of the science of queueing. In this essay, I'd like to ground that discussion in the context of delays that patients routinely experience in American hospitals. In 2010, there were around 130 million visits to the emergency departments (EDs) of hospitals around…
by Hari Balasubramanian I came to the United States from India in August 2000 to start graduate school in engineering. I had just finished a college degree and had no idea of the history of any place, including India. I did not, for example, know that Judaism referred to a religion, let alone the religion…
by Hari Balasubramanian In Spring 2003, as a first year doctoral student at Arizona State University, I took a class on queuing theory. This refers to the science that has its focus on reducing delays, irrespective of where they may be experienced: at a traffic signal; over the phone to speak to a representative (music…