Viswanathan K's Thoughts

When I saw the news about how Saudi Arabia now sends text messages to the “male guardians” of women when they cross the border , I was very sure that Slashdot would have a fun trail on it…I could almost imagine the comments below it. And sure enough, there was . Now since the countries who pretend to care about human rights, the feminists who should care (by definition), and the secular folks whose tongues get tied when any evil is driven by religious edicts will, as expect, respond to such news with a deafening silence, we might as well laugh at it. After all, isn’t humour supposed the best medicine? The ball was set rolling with this comment/comparison: “When South Africa did this (to black people, rather than women), under Apartheid, the civilised world rightly condemned it, and imposed trade sanctions.” Which prompted the Steven Weinberg’ian response (he was the guy who said, “With or without religion, you would have good people doing good things and evil people doing ev...

I read this Scott Adams blog where he talked about how he kept forgetting to take his 5 items to the gym. Stuff like keys, iPod and so on. He wondered why his brain can’t seem to remember a simple list of 5 items? He never got around to answering that question because his blog focused on finding a way to remember, not why he couldn’t remember in the first place. So I will give it a shot instead: why is it that most of us can’t seem to remember such short lists when we can, at the same time, remember much more complex things? I feel the answer is that a checklist activity really has 2 parts to it: first, remembering the list; and secondly, finding and carrying each item on that list. I feel it is the time gap between the 2 parts which makes us forget. I am guessing we get bored by the time we perform the 3 rd part of the activity. Or maybe we don’t allocate time to do so many pairs of actions at the last minute! Oh, if you are interested, Adams’ solution to remembering suc...

Arrogance: a word with a negative connotation. Humility: the opposite of arrogance, ergo a positive thing. Or so they would have you believe. I have never understood why people expect humility and make it sound like a good thing. Don’t get me wrong: I am not advocating arrogance. Rather, I am saying that sometimes the opposite of a bad thing is not necessarily a good thing either. After all, both are extremes (boastful and self-deprecation), so why don’t people advocate the middle ground instead? Surely a guy who is very good at something or did something great does not need to go around belittling his own achievements. And yet society almost demands humility from its members. No wonder Arthur Schopenhauer asked: “What is modesty but hypocritical humility, by means of which, in a world swelling with envy, a man seeks to obtain pardon for excellences and merits from those who have none?” Schopenhauer then went further and attributed a reason for why this is the case: “N...

All of us know of people who can’t seem to accept reality. People who deny the facts. People who cling on to their delusions despite all the evidence. Usually when we think of such people, we mean the kind of people who still believe in creationism. But denial is not always that simple: it’s not always because people are dumb or crazy or religious. Sure, that’s mostly the reason but sometimes, just sometimes, it’s because the alternative is very scary. Even a vacuum at times. Or we feel the alternative puts us on a slippery slope to everything that we detest. These lines from Grey’s Anatomy give one such example from the world of surgeons: “Disappearances happen in science. Disease can suddenly fade away. Tumors go missing. We open someone up to discover the cancer is gone. It’s unexplained, it’s rare, but it happens. We call it misdiagnosis, say we never saw it in the first place, any explanation but the truth.” Of course, the smarter you are and the less yo...

For the last so many 007 movies, I have felt that the movies were sucking all the fun out of the central character: if there were openings at Azkaban for dementors, the makers of the last few Bond movies would qualify automatically! The movies started frowning upon 007’s sexist nature: hello, that was part of the fun. Then they started including chicks with brains (think of Denise Richards as a nuclear scientist…or was it a rocket scientist?): c'mon, this is James Bond, you really want women's equality here? Then they started making the movies with a tragic undercurrent: Bond abandoned and left to suffer at the hand of the North Koreans; M authorizing taking a shot at the bad guy and hitting Bond instead; the one girl Bond cared about dies… And what the film makers couldn’t spoil, the collapse of the Soviet Union did: suddenly, the West could no longer call their enemies by that word (it was all complicated by the need for oil). And so we had to watch North Korean vi...

Forgive and forget. We’ve all heard that advice/saying. I think part of the trouble with that advice is that it is conveyed in a manner which suggests that you are being the bigger person by forgiving and forgetting. But when you feel wronged about something or by someone, do you really give a damn about being the bigger person? If you are honest about it, retribution is what you truly seek. Or if it makes you feel better, you could use euphemisms like “justice”. These lines from the serial, Revenge , capture what most people feel perfectly: “For the truly wronged, real satisfaction can only be found in one of two places: absolute forgiveness or mortal vindication.” But even though most people feel that way, they never go down the Vendetta Highway for different reasons: first, there is no Monte Cristo fortune to free someone up to act without caring. In fact the opposite is almost always true: the person most probably still has to interact with the “enemy” because they share the...

Ever heard of Jérôme Kerviel? He is the world’s indebted man: he owes, hold your breath, $6.3 billion. Nope, not a typo: that is indeed billion with a “b”. Wonder how someone can run up so much debt? Well, the guy was a trader for the French bank, Société Générale. Through a series of frauds, including hacked trading accounts, he bet way more of the bank’s money than they had ever authorized. And when his  bets went wrong, the bank lost $6.3 billion. And so the judge ruled that, after completing his 3 year jail term, Kerviel has to pay $6.3 billion to the bank as fines. What I found interesting was that the fine is so ridiculously unpayable that it effectively might as well have never been imposed. So why then did the judge impose it? Is the law really an ass? Not so, says Frank Partnoy, a former investment banker and current law professor. He explained the fine has two intents. First: “They'll likely reach some kind of agreement where a significant percentage of any money...

This quote based on research by Dr.Carol Dweck got me thinking: “Children who are “entity theorists” … are prone to use language like ‘I am smart at this.’ And to attribute their success or failure to an ingrained and unalterable level of ability. They see their overall intelligence or skill level at a certain discipline to be a fixed entity, a thing that cannot evolve. Incremental theorists, who have picked up a different modality of learning, are more prone to describe their results with sentences like ‘I got it because I worked very hard at it’ or ‘I should have tried harder.’ A child with a learning theory of intelligence tends to sense that with hard work, difficult material can be grasped- step-by-step, incrementally, the novice can become the master.” Many of us think (or like to think) that smart people are born that way. That it is a gift. Guess what? Even the Beatles practiced for more than 10,000 hours at night clubs (as per the book, Outliers: The Story of Success );...

Before I start, let me state that this blog isn’t to justify or encourage lieing. That said, let me proceed. When disgusted with the repeated deception and lies of certain people, many people often wonder whether that bunch totally lacks any sense of right and wrong. But let’s face it: most people aren’t that amoral or immoral. So why then do they still lie? Part of the answer is in these lines from Grey’s Anatomy : “No matter how hard we try to ignore or deny it, eventually the lies fall away, whether we like it or not. But here’s the truth about the truth: It hurts. So we lie.” That’s certainly true: faced with the choice between doing what’s right and what’s easy, people often take the easy way. Now step back and you’ll notice that the phrase doesn’t say “what’s right and what’s wrong ”, instead it says “what’s right and what’s easy ”. And that is the key: very few say to themselves, “I am going to lie”. Usually, they’re taking the easy way out when they lie. So...