Viswanathan K's Thoughts

Point a camera at my one and a half year old niece and she will drop whatever she’s doing and give a smile. Or what she thinks is a smile anyway! Makes for good photos, so who’s complaining? Contrast that with the way most Indians, at least the older ones, pose for photos. (If you don’t believe me, go look at the albums your parents have). They will either refuse to smile at all, or if they do, it looks very put on. Well actually, it even looks like a constipated expression at times. Hardly the recipe for fond memories or what? So why is that? Were times tough back then? Was there so little to smile about that people had forgotten how to smile, I wondered? I used to think so until I saw these portraits of some Indians kings and queens: Notice what’s common? None of them has even the hint of a smile. Surely these guys had plenty of reasons to smile. After all, they led, well, a king’s life! Surely, the king who killed the tiger could have smiled? So is the reason that most Indians...

Scott Adams asked this hypothetical question in his blog: “ Suppose you could snap your fingers and instantly reduce the huge disparity in income distribution across the globe. Would you do it? Many of you will probably say yes. You'd take some of the "extra" money from the rich and use it to help the needy. But suppose I put one condition on this magic power of yours. Suppose the only thing you can do by magic is reduce by half the wealth of the top 1% while knowing the money would be transferred to no one. The money would simply cease to exist. The rich would have half as much, while everyone else remained the same. Would you use your powers then?” If you said Yes, I am guessing you must either be a communist or a socialist. After all, isn’t that what communism did? Oh wait, communism did even more: it didn’t just halve the wealth of the Top 1%: it reduced everyone to the same grinding level of poverty and, I am guessing, misery. Which just goes to show that just h...

I was amused that someone actually plotted this student’s electrodermal activity (see pic above) during various parts of the day, and to no surprise, the electrodermal activity nearly flatlined during classes! Contrast that with how the graph looks at homework time. Quite a lot of activity, right? Maybe that’s why schools used to (and continue to) give so much homework: looks like that’s the only time students actually exercised their brains! I’d have loved them to add a chart of the activity when kids play computer games. What if the chart showed a fair amount of activity while gaming? Would have created a strong case on why gaming is good! On a related note, I wondered whether the best job in the world would be for a kid to test a computer game and get paid for it? Well, maybe not. Once it is their job, those kids would be expected to retest the same sequence time and again. Or to bang the keyboard or joystick or gaming console for no reason than to test its resilience or respon...

We continue to be a nation that takes offence at everything. And as usual, freedom of speech is what suffers. The latest instance is the decision to remove a cartoon of BR Ambedkar from all school books. The cartoon was drawn in 1949. It took our take-offence-at-everything brigade 63 years to take offence! And what was this cartoon that was so offensive? It shows Ambedkar sitting on a snail and holding a whip. The caption on the snail reads “Constitution”. Behind the snail stands Nehru holding another whip. Any normal person would interpret the cartoon as an indicator of the pace at which the constitution was being drafted. But not to the representatives of the downtrodden. They have now woken up and demanded that all NCERT books be purged of all such offensive material. And of course, the Congress government has caved in. Well done, Congress! A cartoon should be higher priority than, I don’t know, combating inflation or corruption or terrorism. In any case, suppressing freedom of ...

Mohit Satyanand asked this interesting question in Outlook Money as to why the same government that considers it necessary (and even desirable) to subsidize diesel and LPG in the name of protecting the poor wants to, on the other hand, charge the “correct” (read higher) price for telecom spectrum. After all, he argued, the cellphone revolution has benefited the poor just as much as everyone else, so any increase in spectrum price will impact the poor too (the telecom companies would pass on the increased cost of spectrum to the consumers by hiking telecom tariffs). I guess the answer is that the 2G scandal has forced the government to switch to market economics in case of telecom. The day we have an equivalent scandal in the fuel segment, maybe we’ll see fuel prices being determined by market forces too. Then again, as Greece now threatens, countries often prefer populism over paying the bills, prefer to default on their loans than to pay their creditors. You could explain what the...

Most people who are very good at their job are driven up a wall by co-workers who are not that good. They usually have two options: either shut up and fret; or call a spade a spade and risk getting termed arrogant (To avoid confusion, let me clarify: I am not talking about people who have delusions about their abilities; rather I am talking of people who really are exceptionally good at their job). Steve Jobs pointed a not so obvious risk of hiring not-the-cream employees way back in the ‘80’s: “A-players hire A-players, B-players hire C-players”. Apart from the obvious benefit of having A-players (they do their job very well), A-players don’t settle for good, they want great. Which opens the door to a whole world of new opportunities. In many cases (but not all), the self-confidence that comes up with knowing they are that good also allows A-players to be willing to ask others for help in areas they don’t know. They don’t view asking for help as a sign of weakness. Okay then, so wh...

I used to associate the US with crazy lawsuits, like people suing fast food chains because they spilt hot coffee on themselves! Turns out the French are just as mad. The latest such case of French insanity is where a French anti-discrimination organization, SOS Racisme, sued Google for its, hold your breath, autocomplete feature. So what about autocomplete is so offensive to the French? Turns out if you type the names of certain celebrities on Google’s page, autocomplete shows the word “Jew”. The French, of course, are too dumb to know how Google autocomplete (or anything else for that matter) works: -          Autocomplete is an algorithm that shows suggestions based on search phrases that the majority of people typed in the past. -          Further, autocomplete does localization, i.e., the suggested phrases shown vary from place to place to reflect the popular choice in that region . Now that you under...

Two murder cases in two different countries that got a lot of publicity in recent times got “sorted out” in the same way. The first was the Pakistani case where an American (supposed CIA agent) killed 2 Pakistanis in a crowded market. The second was the case of the Italian marines who killed fishermen from Kerala. The common resolution in both cases? Pay off the victims. With that, the case was over in both countries. Is paying money to the victims such a bad thing? Forget your sense of morality for a minute and instead look at the future from the point of the fishermen’s surviving relatives (the Pakistani case is more complicated because, as per the US, the guys killed were trying to kidnap the American when they were shot). -          Suppose India prosecuted the Italians, what were the odds we’d have convicted them any time in the next billion years? Zero, given what our case against Kasab has shown. Justice or closure (or whatever fancy term...

When it comes to acts of charity or compassion, most people will give to that one individual in need rather than a huge number in distress. So produce a picture or details of one particular person who needs help, and you are more likely to get aid, help, whatever. Ask for money for thousands of faceless, nameless victims of an a genocide somewhere remote and you'll get little or nothing (most of the time). Agencies like CRY know this phenomenon which is why many of their schemes try to associate your contribution with one particular child, to give you status reports, to maintain that connection. It's for a good cause, so I guess we shouldn't mind being played this way. It also turns out that the more analytical mood that you are in when asked to donate, the less likely you are to give. Which makes sense when you think of it: giving without any expectation of returns is an emotional act, not a rational one. So I guess that a planet like earth will have more donations than...

One of the comments I listed in my last blog raises an interesting point. The comment I refer to was this: “There is a common ancient horridly flawed assumption often afoot that if something is written in a book, it must be true or will become so. There is zero basis for that assumption. The first book supposedly ever mass-printed was a bible. Enough said. Books were originally designed to spread words, period. They could be fact, fiction, opinions or folklore.” Both points are true: most people do trust the printed word. Even though printed does not equal truth. Now consider the other source of truth that most people trust: Wikipedia. Though we don’t realize it most of the time, even Wikipedia relies on other sources of truth, though not necessarily only printed books. In case you didn’t know it already, this is the Wikipedia philosophy: “Wikipedia is not ‘truth’, Wikipedia is ‘verifiability’ of reliable sources . Hence, if most secondary sources which are taken as reliable happen ...

Mathew Ingram asked if there was a contradiction in decrying social media for making people lonely while simultaneously celebrating the value of the solitary experience of reading books. In response, Mike Masnick said he felt the reasons for the difference in stances on the two were: -          A generational thing : what Doughlas Adams called the “anything that gets invented after you're thirty is against the natural order of things and the beginning of the end of civilization as we know it” stance. -          Snobbishness : social media is idle chatter whereas reading is educative. Masnick then threw the question open to the (Internet) audience. Here are the comments I liked from that forum. One guy said it was “ because the intelligence level of books can pretty much always be appropriate to the person, social networking however almost always devolves into the lowest common denominator which is almost u...