Viswanathan K's Thoughts

“Those who don’t learn from history are doomed to repeat it.” Don’t think too many would argue with the quote above. But what exactly does one learn from history? Surely not the dates of battles and the names of emperors that are rammed down the throats of school kids! And that’s when you realize it’s a surprisingly hard question to answer. If you learn a very specific answer, it often proves to be useless because the situation never repeats itself. Or when it does recur, your learning is too specific and fails to address Version 2.0 of the event. Like when the French built the Maginot Line as their defense against a German invasion after World War I. While the French were indeed prepared to prevent a recurrence of what the Germans did the first time, their preparation proved to be of no use ultimately since the Germans just went around the Maginot Line in World War II! The French had only learnt a very specific lesson from history. You can see the same pattern today. Every time a Eur...

What does it mean to know something? More specifically, what does a person mean when he says that he has knowledge of something? In science, the answer to that question involves 3 parts (the Tripartite Account ): 1) Belief : You should believe what you claim to know. After all, if you don’t even believe it yourself, how can you say you know it? 2) Justification : You should have valid reasons for your belief. 3) Truth : What you claim to know should, in fact, be true. This seems very tame and oh-so-obvious at first. Until you consider cases that violate one or more of the items of this Tripartite Account: So the Tripartite Account sounds like a good way of defining knowledge, right? Unfortunately, no. There is a whole class of counter-examples called Gettier counter-examples that shows the inadequacy of these 3 conditions. Here’s an example: it’s afternoon, you look at your watch and it says 3 o’clock. So you believe it is 3 with valid reason (your watch says so) and let’s say it is i...

Stuxnet is a computer worm (a malicious computer program that spreads by self-replication). So what’s so special about one more computer worm/virus? Well, for starters, unlike normal viruses and worms that spread indiscriminately and don’t care who they hit or hurt, Stuxnet only targeted systems that met certain specific configurations. And those specific configurations mapped to the controls systems used to monitor Iran’s nuclear centrifuges. And it seems to have succeeded: in November, Iran acknowledged the hit to its nuclear program due to problems with its centrifuges. So what did the worm do? It sent Iran’s nuclear centrifuges spinning out of control. But wouldn’t a reactor shut down or give some other feedback to indicate something was wrong? Normally, yes. But this worm got around that problem very ingeniously: “The computer program also secretly recorded what normal operations at the nuclear plant looked like, then played those readings back to plant operators, like a pre-rec...

With all the hype around smart phones (iPhones and Blackberry’s and Android based phones), it’s easy to miss the fact that the world's most popular phone, by many miles, is the humble Nokia 1100! It has no speakerphone, no camera, no radio. It monochrome (did you even know they still make such phones?). So what does it do? This pic tells the answer: And yet, it outsells every other phone in the world. Because it sells in the populous regions of South Asia and Africa. Foreign Policy magazine said , “the Nokia 1100 will remain the telecommunications version of the AK-47 -- humanity's most rugged, efficient calling machine”. Nice analogy that! It reminded me of Nicolas Cage’s dialog in the movie, Lord of War, on AK-47’s: "Of all the weapons in the vast Soviet arsenal, nothing was more profitable than Avtomat Kalashnikova model of 1947. More commonly known as the AK-47, or Kalashnikov. It's the world's most popular assault rifle. A weapon all fighters love. An elegant...

Most companies run into the Not-Invented-Here (NIH) bias among their employees. NIH refers to the tendency of people to ignore or undervalue ideas that come from outside, simply because it’s not their idea. In academia, the same tendency is known by another name: the “toothbrush theory”. It means everyone wants a toothbrush, everyone (usually) has one, but nobody would ever use someone else’s toothbrush! A gross analogy for sure, but it does convey the point. Scientists encounter the same tendencies in their field. Max Planck, the founder of quantum theory, put it well when he said: “A new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die, and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it.” I read somewhere that one way to overcome this bias when you want your idea to be accepted is to make it sound like it’s (at least partially) the other guy’s idea! Lead them along until they get to where ...

Facebook was in the news because Goldman Sachs’ investment in it valued the company at $50 billion. That’s $50 billion for a company that makes $2 billion a year in revenues ( not profit). So why pay so much for it? One of my friends said people are willing to pay so much because they expect (hope?) Facebook will figure out a way to generate money via advertising. Or they’ll find a completely new way of making money directly or indirectly from their 500 million members. After all, who can predict the ways of the “brave new world”, my friend asked. And that’s capitalism: creating new ways to make money. Capitalism, of course, can also destroy existing ways of making money. Like when Google started offering free navigation services on its Android OS for cell phones in late 2009, Nokia had to follow suit and stop charging for its Ovi Maps (Who’d pay for Nokia’s navigation service if they could get it free from Google?). And with both Google and Nokia making navigation directions free...

Can the act of deliberately wasting anything ever be a good thing? We all know of examples to the contrary: cutting down too many trees, excessive use of plastics, not turning off that tap etc etc etc. Sure, we all know of items to add to that list. All of them result in unpleasant and disastrous results. And yet, there is that one spectacular example where wasting one particular item resulted has produced spectacular results. In a good way. That item is the transistor, the ingredient of every electronic chip we see in everything from PC’s and cellphones to microwave ovens. But where’s the connection to wasting anything? As the cost of manufacturing transistors fell rapidly in the late 1970’s, a Caltech professor, Carver Mead started telling programmers to waste transistors. But what does it mean to “waste” a transistor? It sounds like a Zen question! Alan Kay, an engineer working at Xerox’s Palo Alto Research Center in the 1970s figured the answer. He started doing playful...