Bengali daughter Asmita Dey has created record by becoming first Indian Judoka to win Gold in CWG. Asmita receives support under TOPS development programme from Ministry of Sports. UP Yogi Govt recruited her as SI just months ago. The real Gen Z are bringing laurels to India🇮🇳

Heartbroken & so inspired 💔💔🙏🏽 The Commonwealth Games is becoming a daily roll-call of young Indians who have emerged from unimaginable hardship & horrors to win gold. Look at 23-year-old judoka Asmita Dey, who is now the first Indian to win Commonwealth Games gold in the women’s 48kg category. 7 months ago, she lost her father to a brain stroke. A bicycle mechanic who earned barely ₹300 a day, he raised his family in a mud house in a small village in Tripura. When a knee injury threatened Asmita’s career, he found the money to take her to Delhi for treatment. Even as the family mourned, Asmita’s mother urged her daughter to return to training, believing that abandoning the dream would betray everything her father had sacrificed for. She now stands on top of the Commonwealth Games podium with a gold medal around her neck.

Mr. Harada, we know you aren’t a film producer, but why doesn’t Japan have any martial arts movie stars? We know the Chinese have amazing actors like Bruce Lee, Jackie Chan, Jet Li, Donnie Yen, Sammo Hung, Chow Yun-fat, Tiger Chen, and many others whereas Japan doesn't seem to have any, at least not in Hollywood or on the international stage. Yet, you have great martial arts traditions such as Karate, Judo, Aikido, and Ninjutsu, as well as traditional weaponry like the katana, sai, shuriken, kunai, nunchaku, and many other ancestral weapons. Many people around the world wonder why you don't have martial arts stars; it’s a question a lot of people have asked, and I think many would appreciate some insight into this topic.

I recently went through a translation of Musashi’s Book of Five Rings. The introduction chronicled the evolution of swordsmanship and martial arts in general from pragmatic battlefield necessities to sports, historical curiosities, and hobbies. It was interesting to hear how in the post-WW2 occupation when martial arts were banned, Judo was represented as equivalent to western wrestling, and Kendo later to western fencing. The poignant undercurrent for me is that I can see many programming skills following that path. There are probably dozens of people reading this that remember hand assembling opcodes to hex and still have some magic numbers burned into their memory, but even the small group of people still programming in assembly today (hey, @FFmpeg !) don’t work at that primitive level now. AI is making many other programming skills much less critical. We aren’t there yet, but carefully writing code completely by hand is moving from a -jitsu to a -do. Code-do? Codo? That’s ok! The retro computing scene is delightful, full of people building and exercising old skills for the love of it. But don’t be the out of touch Kung Fu master, heir to lifetimes of tradition, that gets mauled by an amateur MMA fighter. Musashi would probably have been pretty enthusiastic about assault rifles.

I finished @MorlockP ‘s Red State Mars last week, and I thought the afterword offered a really interesting insight into the creative process behind the book. Travis is a tech guy (and state representative) that writes “Good Old Fashioned Science Fiction”, and I have enjoyed his work. If you are inclined that way, go ahead and read the book. If you are put off by the implied political bias, maybe read the afterword and see if the themes sound interesting. I wound up being briefly referenced in the context of zero-G combat, since Russ Blink and I did try a little bit of judo on a parabolic airplane flight long ago. Sixty seconds of experience puts us ahead of at least 99.999999% of the population, but I bet there are some Russian cosmonauts that have done some more serious and extended tussling, which would be fun to hear about in an interview sometime.

Olympians and world champions have been making the most of their time away from competition, sharing special moments, big announcements, and memorable adventures this week! 🌟 ⛳ Alpine skiing stars Mikaela Shiffrin and Aleksander Kilde enjoyed some time on the golf course. 😮 Then Kilde ventured into a cave! 💒 Figure skater Kaori Sakamoto announced her marriage at a retirement press conference. ⚽ Team GB skeleton Olympic champions Matt Weston and Tabitha Stoecker showed off their gold medals at a Manchester City game. 👪 Italian speed skater Francesca Lollobrigida spent quality time with her family in Copenhagen. 🏅 Olympic judoka Fabio Basile shared a special moment with his son and his medal. 🚴 Double Olympic cycling champion Katie Archibald announced her retirement after a sparkling career. ⛰️ Dutch cycling star Demi Vollering trained at altitude camp in Sierra Nevada. 🎨 Olympic swimming champion Cam McEvoy showed off an incredible portrait painted by Hayden Bone Studio. #Olympics#