Light Years Ideas Of The Week #007 — A Year In Review 2024
A Recap Of The Top Ideas Shared On Light Years In 2024
It’s another year around the sun as 2024 comes to an end with 2025 fleetingly just a few days away that you can almost touch it & feel the positivity & opportunities, adventures & achievements that are to come in the new year.
If you’ve followed my publication/newsletter Light Years, I hope I’ve managed to do a good job of bringing you the most intriguing & compelling “ideas that shape the universe” & I hope you’ve found value in my articles published here.
It’s been a rather eventful year, so to end the year 2024, my first year of running this newsletter, here’s a list of the top 10 articles I shared here on Light Years & on my Medium over the course of this year plus some music to add that finishing touch ;)
The year started from an economic perspective, as I explored Greek finance minister Yannis Varoufakis’ interview about his book on what he called ‘techno-feudalism’. I guess the term has now broadened to ‘neo-feudalism’ but if you want to understand what it means, have a quick read of my article explaining it.
In what is probably the most popular article on my Substack, I dove into the finer details of the Spotify Premium vs YouTube Premium debate suggesting why YouTube Premium & YouTube Music is better value for your buck. With YouTube Premium you get ad-free YouTube, yes any video whatever length without ad interruptions & you get YouTube Music’s diverse, rich & extensive catalogue as well. It serves me well & is far better than Spotify in my opinion. So if you’re contemplating switching from Spotify give this a read…
We’re living in faster times, and our attention spans are reducing y-o-y but if you like to read books or want to read more books, here are some alternatives which I listed out of ways to consume books in the 2020s. You can either listen to them in audiobooks or try book summary apps. Here’s a brief about both & how you can consume books on the go using both these apps.
I’m a huge science buff, I was always great at science as a schoolboy & I do have a degree in engineering, so perspectives from the world of science always urge a sense of intrigue. In this article, I explored ‘The Butterfly Effect’ & analysed it based on the principles of Chaos Theory. It’s a slightly heavier read, but one that’s pretty interesting.
Whether you’re a musician, music fan or not, the process of living is just like playing an instrument in that there’s no reward other than to just play. We have our goals & responsibilities but in the end, there’s no greater reward than immersing ourselves in the act of living. Sure we have goals, targets, setbacks & lulls etc., just like the seemingly frustrating aspects of practising an instrument or coming to the end of a song, but the reward is to be immersed in the process of playing/living. This article was a gentle reminder of the same ending with a performance/documentary of a song by Foo Fighters lead singer & guitarist Dave Grohl along with inputs from budding young musicians across the world.
In another short post, I recounted & recommended visiting Gokarna, which is arguably my favourite beach destination in India. I wrote about the story of my first trip there & why I visited the place frequently again after. It’s no detailed travel guide or is slightly, but it’s a tiny reminiscent piece on my love of the beach destination & why you should make it a point to go there.
In the second half of the year, I delved into some of the burgeoning mysteries of the universe that still remain unsolved. These are Dark Energy, Dark Matter & Anti-Matter. Here’s an exploration of what they are & how close we are to uncovering them.
Quantum Computers are coming. It’s the future & the next iteration of computing in the history of humankind. Here are a couple of articles about the topic, which are basically a rundown of everything you need to know about Quantum Computing & the global Quantum Tech Race & also how the music of the future will sound like using Quantum Computers in two separate articles (linked & highlighted above).
As a throwback to this series of articles on my newsletter i.e. Ideas Of The Week, here are some installments of the series linked here. You can check them out & revisit the links of ideas I shared over the second half of the year. Here’s Ideas Of The Week #001, followed by Ideas Of The Week #002 & Ideas Of The Week #003 & Ideas Of The Week #005. (I hope you like the series & find it engaging, drop a comment below this post if you do, and perhaps what kind of articles/content you’d like me to link in future Ideas Of The Week posts).
10. Finally, I encapsulated most of the music I listened to this year in a post on my Medium. You can find all the best stuff I listened to over the course of 2024 in the article. It’s a non-paywalled article on my Medium so dive right in!
What I Listened To This Year (2024):
https://medium.com/the-music-magnet/what-i-listened-to-this-year-to-end-the-year-2024-9fea8b83ed63
Thanks for reading & checking out the links! As always, stay tuned for this series called ‘Ideas Of The Week’ on my publication Light Years!
Happy New Year & here’s wishing you all a brilliant 2025!
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