Viswanathan K's Thoughts

Do you curse our politicians for not having the will to frame laws to prevent and handle rape cases? Call me cynical, but at least that can be understood: our politicians know it’s a slippery slope. Make the system work against rape, and who knows? Maybe the system will start working against corruption next. Why risk all that? But that can’t be why the UK government is huffing and puffing against Google, Starbucks and Amazon. The Brits feel that those companies pay very little tax in the UK even though they make a considerable sum there. The best part? None of this is illegal; these companies just use (perfectly legal) ways to minimize taxes. And so the Brit government has gone crazy: they are demanding that such corporations pay more taxes than they are legally obligated to! Because that would be the “moral” thing to do! That is dumb at so many levels: -          Firstly, taxes are legal obligations (on all of us, not just corporations), not moral obligations. -       

I’ve always been happy that we engineers don’t have to get additional degrees beyond the B.E. or B.Tech., and that we don’t need to recertify ourselves periodically. 4 years of college and we are done. At the same time, I’ve felt sorry for doctors who (at least in the West) need to get themselves recertified periodically. My mom felt everyone does update themselves, even if it’s not always via a new degree. Surely, she said, all professionals read up new stuff and stay upto date, especially when their job demands it. Don’t engineers learn new programming languages and ways to speed up constructions, she asked? I think I found the answer when I read this Farnam Street analysis about the book, “ The Half-life of Facts: Why Everything We Know Has an Expiration Date ”, by Samuel Arbesman. Here’s the theme of that book: “Knowledge is like radioactivity. If you look at a single atom of uranium, whether it’s going to decay — breaking down and unleashing its energy — is highly unpre

Years back, I remember my dad asking why there are so many different tax rates and so many different exemption categories. (Yup, he was calculating his tax returns at that time; hence the frustration). I had gone into the standard reasons about why it is often a good thing to have those exemptions: after all, such exemptions often encourage investment in activities like infrastructure development. He had countered that it is equally often because of corporate pressure to provide loopholes to reduce their taxation. Which, of course, is true. But corporate driven tax reductions is not always a bad thing, as Ireland can tell you. Ireland’s corporate tax rate is lower than anywhere else in Europe. No wonder than that Google’s European headquarters is in Ireland! And it’s not just Google that Ireland attracted: plenty of other MNC’s go to Ireland for the same reason. That in turn translates to more investments in Ireland. And more jobs. That’s what Ireland calls a win-win. Then t

In moments of idealism, we often find ourselves wishing for a simpler/better/less-evil’er world. Or hear others say something similar and smirk. While in some cases, it is definitely a possibility, in others, it is good to step back and think of the practicality of what is being hoped for. The first kind is worth wishing for: If you wish for a cleaner alternative to, say, fossil fuels, it could happen. While difficult, no law of physics prevents such a technology from being developed. Even being cheaper than existing fuels eventually. It could happen. If not today, maybe tomorrow. Or the day after. But not impossible. The other kind of wishful thinking is what does deserve a smirk. The kind where people hope for things that would violate the laws of physics: like hoping for a perpetual motion machine to “fix” the energy problem. Or the kind, and this is more common among idealists, wishing for things like world peace. These are cases where hope is based on human nature chan

I read this article on something called “deliberate practice” and it was an eye-opener. Deliberate practice is very different from plain old practice. So what is plain old practice? Most people have been doing whatever they do for years or even decades. Yet most of them are not experts at their field, are they? So obviously, experience and repetition alone does not equal expertise. Ok, what then is deliberate practice? It has the following components: -          Activity is designed specifically to improve performance : the key word is “designed”. That means breaking the task into subparts and focusing on the subparts that you are not so good at. If you don’t focus on your weaknesses, you are unlikely to improve no matter how much you practice. On the other side, aim too high and you are likely to get frustrated and give up. The aim is to identify something beyond your reach, but only just. -          Feedback on results : This can be self-determined or by a peer, mentor or

My dad is hugely interested in physics. (He keeps telling me that he used to be interested, but not anymore. But that’s another story…). Unlike Rutherford who called other fields “stamp collecting”, my dad doesn’t have contempt for other fields. But I wonder whether even with his non-Rutherfordian worldview, my dad knew how totally unrelated fields drove physics even in the last century. Everyone can imagine how somewhat similar fields like chemistry could influence physics, but geology? Or paleontology (remember Ross from Friends ? The field of fossils and dinosaurs)? How could they possibly have pushed the boundaries of physics? But influence they did. It all started when people tried to compute the age of the earth a couple of centuries ago. As geologists started analyzing layers of rocks, they could not assign values to the ages of any of these layers since there was no known method to do so at that time. Then a renowned physicist got involved in the effort: Lord Kelvin