Viswanathan K's Thoughts

C14 dating, as mentioned in my last blog , is based on carbon. Which means, as we learnt at school, it can only be used for dating organic materials. How then are does one find the age of inorganic (non-Carbon) materials? Like the age of the earth, for example? That makes for an interesting tale. One always associates radioactivity with terrible things like cancer, nuclear bombs and Chernobyl. And yet, it was the principle of radioactivity that helped figure out the age of the earth! Radioactivity is the decay of one element into another, along with the emission of the catastrophic radiation. The rate of decay for different radioactive materials is fixed. That property means radioactive materials can be used like clocks. The idea was simple: uranium decays into lead. So if you found the ratio of uranium to lead in really, really old rocks, you could derive the age of the earth. The devil lay in the execution of the idea. How do you find uncontaminated really, really old ...

At school, you’re told about C14 dating and how it is used to date ancient humans and their tools. So it came as surprise to learn about all the questions and criticism that surround the accuracy of this dating technique. But first, one needs to understand a bit more about the background of C14 than what’s usually taught. And the first step in that path is to learn how C14 is produced in the first place. The short version is that cosmic rays bombard the atmosphere with enough force to produce C14. And this is also where the first criticism of C14 dating starts: the earth’s magnetic field influences how many cosmic rays are deflected away from earth. Which in turn influences the amount of C14 that is produced. And here’s the kicker: the earth’s magnetic field changes over time ! In other words, the amount of C14 at different periods of time varies. So how do you know the amount of C14 that was there in a sample that’s 20,000 years old v/s 3,000 years old? When an item is...

If you look at most of the things that we do via the Internet (checking mails, accessing information, downloading freeware, sharing stuff), they have one thing in common: it’s all Free! Dig a bit deeper, and you’ll realize that companies have found (Google) or are trying to find (Facebook) ways to make money on the Net. But the rest, specially the stuff put out there by individuals, is mostly free. With no intent (or ability) to make money of it at any point . Almost sounds like socialism! But unlike, the pre-21 st century version, Socialism 2.0 is neither enforced nor an act of governments. “Digital socialism is socialism without the state”, to quote Kevin Kelly . Socialism 2.0 even does revolutions better than the Marxist version of socialism. You have no clue who is behind the revolutions in the Arab countries or the occupy Wall Street movements or the UK riots. Things are so decentralized that it makes it impossible for any government to respond. There is no face of th...

When I was a kid, we once went to a town in Algeria to see the dunes and the desert. We’d gone on top of a minaret to see the view of the place and my dad had started taking photos with his camera. A couple of French tourists were also doing the same. Suddenly, a couple of cops came up and were screaming that photography was prohibited. Turned out there was a sign but since it was in Arabic, nobody could read it. When my dad explained that to the cop, he let us off with a warning. But he was harsh with the French tourists. Much later, I understood that Algeria had been a French colony and unlike India, the Algerian struggle for independence was very violent and brutal. And so, the Algerians’ dislike for the French was extremely high. That’s in sharp contrast to the British who were both smart as well as willing to forge long term relations with almost all their former colonies. As Seth Godin wrote in his blog : “Or consider the excellent relationship that the UK has with bo...

Yeduyarappa is out on bail, so are the Satyam scamsters. Imagine that: Ramalinga Raju defrauded investors and cost so many employees their jobs, and yet he walks out. So do all politicians and rich guys get bail always? The simpletons who still believe that’s not the case cite Kanimozhi as the counter-example. Sure, when Kanimozhi was denied bail, there was lots of news channel coverage on whether the courts had (finally) decided to do the right thing. But the fact remains that most of the people who cheered the denial of bail to Kanimozhi did so because they have such low faith in the judicial system that they felt eventually she’ll walk out free with a not guilty verdict, so whatever time she spends in jail is an unexpected bonus. So is there any politician who might not get the Get Out of Jail Free card? It seems to depend on geography. If a politician is ever imprisoned in the state where he wields influence, he’ll be out in no time. Kanimozhi must be wishing she’d been h...

When Mamata Banerjee started yelling against the petrol price hike, I thought, “God! Is this woman insane or what?!”. As a sort of challenge, I decided I’d try and find something positive to say about her by the end of the blog. Even though she’s part of the ruling coalition, she didn’t attend the EGoM meeting where it was decided to deregulate petrol prices. I am guessing her attendance record at EGoM meetings must be similar to most MPs’ attendance in Parliament! If she didn’t understand what the word “deregulation” means, she should have asked. She had plenty time to learn what the term meant: after all, the decision to deregulate petrol prices wasn’t made recently (it was made in June last year). Didi apparently decided that ignorance is bliss. Typical. I guess it’s too much to ask this genius CM of Bengal to look at some figures of the extent of losses on the still-regulated fuels like diesel, kerosene and LPG (she could ask the center or search the Internet, but I...

I saw this caption to an article on the Net about the floods in Thailand: “Thailand is 20% underwater, and is second-biggest hard drive producer after China. Now do you care about the floods?” Provocative caption indeed. Do we always need to be told how something affects us before we care? The answer’s not that simple. Sometimes, there are too many other tragedies and accidents closer home for us to care about something far away. At other times, the news we see is too vague: we don’t know how many died. Or how many are stranded without food or medicines. And sometimes, it’s just too tiring and draining to feel or care about everybody’s problems. Dan Ariely wrote about a county in the US where firefighters are not available on-call to everyone . Instead, the right to firefighters is only for those who an annual “premium”. So when a house (whose owner hadn’t paid the fee) caught fire, the firefighters refused to come douse the fire. They finally came only when the neighbour’s ...

It seems to be the general trend in everything. The microprocessor-software combo seems to do most things that was done by humans much faster and way better. Except language. That’s one area that still resists the tech juggernaut. Items related to language, like translations and speech, seem too tough to crack. Let’s start with translation. Word Lens , an app developed for the iPhone, became very famous due to videos like this: Point your phone, take a picture and voila! The translated text appears. Awesome, isn’t it (even if it only worked between English and Spanish)? People certainly thought so and shelled out money to buy the app. Which is when the complaints started: the translations weren’t always right. Nor were they context sensitive. Google Translate creates and scans (massive) databases, and then applies algorithms to decide (guess?) which words mean the same thing in different languages. Now Google’s taken it to the next level by combing translations with speech recognition:...

Academics and even science seem to place a great deal of weightage on opinions of the big names. Like, in the 1920’s, when Ralph Kronig proposed an interpretation of quantum spin, he ran his paper by 2 big-shots, Neils Bohr and Pauli. Both dismissed the idea. And so Kronig did not publish his paper. A couple of other scientists did publish the same idea and walked away with the glory. Kronig was furious and cursed physicists “who are always so damned sure of, and inflated with, the correctness of their opinion”. In private, Bohr said that Kronig “was a fool”, who should have published if he had been that sure. Easier said than done. In the academic and scientific worlds, a nod from a bigwig is necessary to get published. Kronig wouldn’t have stood a chance of getting published once it was known that both Pauli and Bohr had rejected his paper. Fast forward to today. Were things any different nowadays, I wondered? Has the Internet changed the way scientific papers are published...