Viswanathan K's Thoughts

“The hands are the instruments of man’s intelligence.” -          Maria Montessori, developer of the Montessori educational system Maria Montessori was born in 1870 and died in 1952. Keep those dates in mind and re-read the quote at the top of the blog. Done? Ok. Now answer this: do you think Montessori would be turning in her grave to learn that developers who write baby and toddler apps for smartphones and iPads quote her lines to ennoble the touchscreen age?!  (I realized my 20 month young daughter expects everything to be touch enabled when she swiped PC monitors and expected a response!). So many apps on the iPad that my daughter plays with are interactive: fairy tales have options to dress the princess...with matching shoes and a tiara to boot (not that she understands any of it). She could paint the scenery (which she can’t, so my wife and I do it…happily) or do puzzles as she goes through the fairy tale. Welcome to the ...

A young writer presented his first work to Philip Roth and this was how the conversation went: “he (Roth) told the guy to quit writing. Here’s the exact quote: “I would quit while you’re ahead. Really. It’s an awful field. Just torture. Awful. You write and you write, and you have to throw almost all of it away because it’s not any good. I would say just stop now. You don’t want to do this to yourself. That’s my advice to you.” Elizabeth Gilbert argued against Roth’s advice: “Now, listen. While it is certainly not historically unheard of for famous authors to complain about their torturous lives (Balzac: “I am a galley slave to pen and ink”; Styron: “Let’s face it. Writing is hell”; Mailer: “Every one of my books killed me a little more”) this statement — by one of America’s most lauded living novelists — struck me as particularly cranky. Because, seriously — is writing really all that difficult? Yes, of course, it is; I know this personally — but is it that much more...

Even if you don’t own (or care about) a smartphone, you should still read this blog. Substitute the smartphone platform references in the rest of this blog with the names of religions, sportsmen or club names and it would still be just as meaningful! Mat Honan wrote an article titled “ Please Stop Fighting About Your Smartphone ” where he made these points: “People love to fight and fight about phone platforms; to toss around the term fanboi and other insults and invective.  … Nobody cares what kind of smartphone you believe in. It’s not a religion. It’s not your local sports team even. Stop being a soldier. You are not a soldier. You are just wrong. Shut up. … “But, but, but,” I hear you stammering like some sort of horrible person who has mistaken a code base for a system of moral beliefs.” …No. You’re wrong. … And he (and it will almost certainly be a he) will be right to love that hunk of metal and glass. Completely and totally right. All the way up until ...

My dad has this habit of reading non-fiction in, well, random order. He will read a passage here; skip to a totally different part of the book, read a piece there and so on. That approach never made any sense to me; and I assumed he did that because the topic or style of writing of most books didn’t appeal enough for him to want to read all of it. Recently I heard of this proposal by Linda Holliday, the CEO of a digital publishing company called Semi-Linear with her “a book is not a straight line” philosophy : “Holliday threw up her hands, wishing to dispel “the myth that a book is a straight line, or a string of pages,” as publishers see it. “Nonfiction is a constellation of ideas that you have to string into a straight line,” she said. Holliday envisions a Pinterest-type board, where readers could post their favorite cards. “They might read pieces of hundreds of thousands of books, and not one whole book,” she said. “Is that so bad?” Against which Alan Jacobs argued : ...

On the Net, and especially since the advent of Facebook, the question of privacy is often responded to with the following statement that almost makes you feel ashamed to demand privacy: “If you have done nothing wrong, you have nothing to hide.” That line always felt wrong to me. But I never could say what exactly I found wrong about it. Until I saw the Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal comic explain it : “Everyone has something to hide and usually no one cares. By surveilling everyone, you catch the benign breaches of law and taboo. If the public are all guilty, the executive part of the government can selectively enforce laws.” The lines above from that comic hits the nail right on the head about what’s wrong with the “If you have done nothing wrong, you have nothing to hide” argument. Who says comics aren’t educational?!

Benoit Mandelbrot (mathematician and the guy behind fractal geometry) was the kind of guy who didn’t stick to one topic; he liked to flit across subjects. Before you think of him as a rolling stone, check out how Mandelbrot saw himself in his memoir: “In Dante’s Divine Comedy , the deceased sentenced to eternal searching are pushed to the deepest level of the Inferno. But for me, an eternal search across countless scientific fields beyond obvious connection managed to add up to a happy life. A rolling stone perhaps, but not an unresponsive one.” If “eternal search” is what hell is all about, I don’t think it’s such a bad place at all! Unless, of course, the search is an impossible one (like finding the last digit of pi or something like that). But most of the time, finding new questions to ask, the pursuit of those answers and then finding those answers is what makes life (and work) interesting. It is icing on the cake if along the way you get to draw parallels and join th...

I remember this article by Jon Dick a year back whose theme is captured in these lines:  “Imagine a person who’s underwhelmed by everything you tell him. You ran the mile in five minutes? Big deal. He doesn’t raise an eyebrow for anything over four. You scored a scholarship to Yale? Meh. Was Harvard full? You designed a new car that gets 100 miles to the gallon? Cool, but does it fly?             …. That’s how Apple must feel when it takes the stage to show off a new product. If that gadget does anything less than carve out a new niche, or at least revolutionize an existing one, and simultaneously cure cancer, the company’s criticized by throngs of media and consumers who can’t believe they wasted their time on such uninspired crap.” And now, a few days back, when Samsung launched its flagship smartphone, the S4, the response was pretty much the same: people were underwhelmed! I guess that is yet another sign t...

Given how dissimilar we humans appear to be from each other, I was surprised to learn that all living humans descend from a small “founding population” of about 5,000 men and 5,000 women! If it didn’t hit you, consider what this means: all 7 billion of us; the blonde and the uh, black hair; the blue eye and the brown eye; white guy and black guy; the pygmy and the Nordic giant all coming from such a small base. It’s very counter intuitive to believe that we come from such a common stock (at least for me, it was easier to imagine parallel evolution of humans in different places starting with different gene pools to explain the diversity we see). Until I saw this strip from Hagar the Horrible : Asian me feels exactly the same as the Viking, Hagar, when the wife does housework. Helping out is never an option for men. The only options we see are: -          Option 1 : Look away (it makes us feel guilty) or -    ...

Photos of space always blew me away. They looked awesome! And they got even better when telescopes like Hubble were placed in space thereby avoiding the dust and the atmospheric distortions that earth-bound telescopes suffer from. Take a look at these pics below to see what I mean: But after a while, such pics lose a bit of their charm because there are so many of them on the Net and also because you start to remember that the colours on the pics are computer generated ones. Which is when I started appreciating the informative pics. Like take supernovas. When they explode, they are said to emit the light comparable to the entire galaxy they are a part of. That’s a bit hard to believe, isn’t it? Surely they are exaggerating. And then I saw this pic: See that light at the center of the pic? That’s the light of about ten billion stars at the center of the galaxy. Now see that light at the bottom left corner? That’s a supernova! As bright as ten billion stars,...

I used to think of Machiavelli as a manipulator, a man without scruples, a guy who did whatever it took to get ahead. I certainly never thought of him as the man who took apart “ one of the foundations of the central Western philosophical tradition ”! I got that only after reading this very interesting analysis of Machiavelli by Isaiah Berlin. Berlin says Machiavelli called the bluff on “ the belief in the ultimate compatibility of all genuine values ”. Machiavelli realized “ that entire systems of value may come into collision without possibility of rational arbitration ”. (Take 2 such ideals: always speak the truth; and defend the wrongly oppressed. Now imagine the mob of 1984 hunting down Sikhs to kill. You see this terror stricken Sikh run down a lane. The mob asks if you saw where the Sikh ran? Do you tell them where he is (speak the truth) and sign his death sentence? Or do you lie?). If that was all there was to it, you could just shrug and dismiss the scenario as a ...

I read this extract from Plato’s Phaedrus about a discussion that the impact of the invention of writing would have on the future: Inventor : “My discovery provides a recipe for memory and wisdom”. King : “You know, Phaedrus, that is the strange thing about writing, which makes it truly correspond to painting. The painter’s products stand before us as though they were alive. But if you question them, they maintain a most majestic silence. It is the same with written words. They seem to talk to you as though they were intelligent, but if you ask them anything about what they say from a desire to be instructed they go on telling just the same thing forever. ” What the king says is partially true: you can’t have a conversation with written text the way you can with a person. But here’s the thing about writing: you can read, pause, think about it and then continue reading. Or go back, re-read and continue. No prizes for guessing which way we learn more: listening or reading...

Watson, the artificial intelligence computer, is old news: but in case you didn’t know, it was developed by IBM and can answer questions posed in natural language (aka human speak). Watson shot to fame back in 2011, when it competed on the US game show, Jeopardy , against 2 former winners and won. That should give you an idea of how good it is. Obviously, Watson has a massive repository of both structured and unstructured content that it refers to. The IBM team then attempted to teach Watson the Urban Dictionary, an online dictionary meant for “slang or ethnic culture words, phrases, and phenomena not found in standard dictionaries.” Soon the researchers discovered that Watson couldn’t distinguish polite language v/s profanity! So they decided to delete the Urban Dictionary from its memory. Nicholas Carr didn’t approve the decision to delete items from memory and wrote the following lines : “I know that God takes a lot of heat for giving us the capacity for sin, but I give...

There are plenty of people who didn’t quit while they are still at the top (look no further than Tendulkar); instead they keep hanging in there until they become a joke and then are forced out. One guy who bucked that trend was Bill Watterson, author of the awesome Calvin and Hobbes who quit while he was still at his peak. Given the power of all those photo editing tools we have today, if only Watterson was willing to photoshop his famous characters onto photos that seem to the exact backdrop that we imagined when we saw those strips. But Watterson being Watterson is unlikely to oblige. So it is left to others like photographer Michael S. Den Beste to do that instead. And thanks to the Internet, we can sit back, open the popcorn and go down memory lane … Take the first one below… one can almost hear their philosophical discussions as they get ready to plunge down the cliff on their sledge: I always loved that Duplicator series where Calvin made copies of hims...

“It is one thing to accept something in practice, another to justify it rationally.” -          Isaiah Berlin It’s no secret that rationality can’t always give you reasons for deciding what’s right and what’s wrong (Though rationality can help you decide whether or not to follow what is termed by the majority as right or wrong). In most cases, that doesn’t matter. Is stealing ok? You don’t need rationality to provide an answer to accept that it’s not ok. Morality, social norms, jail time are acceptable reasons (well ok, jail time would be a rational cost-benefit analysis based reason, but even the others are acceptable reasons to not steal). But what about something like athletes taking steroids to win? Lance Armstrong is the poster boy for drugs in sports these days. He is getting stripped of his many wins and the runner up declared the new winner (As an aside, that “solution” made me wonder: in sports like cycling or shot-put, ever...

When David Cameron apologized for Jallianwala Bagh almost a century after the event, it hardly created a ripple. About the only thing it did was to make people realize the Brit PM was in town! So I found this Guardian article on the apology interesting: it said such a late apology hardly helps anyone. In fact, the article said, the timing of the apology seems suspect given that Cameron came as part of a trade delegation to one of the fastest growing economies of the world. Instead, if Britain was truly apologetic, the article recommended making the teaching of both the good (Indian civil services, educational reforms, the railways) and the bad of British colonialism (other massacres, the looting etc and not just in India) a part of the British education system. Because: “For we must never forget that whatever its achievements, the British empire, like every empire before or since, was both gained and maintained by military might, and built over a mountain of skulls of those i...