Viswanathan K's Thoughts

My dad and I disagree on whether things are ever wrong. Nope, the topic isn’t moral wrongs or nonsensical beliefs based on no justification. Rather the topic was about views or theories built upon available data which later proved to be…well, not correct. To me, such views or theories are wrong. (Just to be clear, I don’t mean the people who came up with those ideas were idiots). My dad disagrees: to him, if the view or theory was based on all available data of the time, then it isn’t right to call it wrong just because you got more data later on. I suspect that my dad believes that my stance is, to quote Issac Asimov: “Everything that isn’t perfectly and completely right is totally and equally wrong.” But I don’t believe that all wrongs are “equally wrong”. In fact, I fully agree with Isasac Asimov’s point about the relativity of wrong: “When people thought the earth was flat, they were wrong. When people thought the earth was spherical, they were wrong. But if you thi...

I’ve never cared about critics, whether of books, art or movies. It’s just that (one) guy’s view, isn’t it? Who cares what he thinks? To be fair, well known critics (by that, I mean the ones whose names get published in the papers) run a risk: criticize an SRK movie and the poor guy may be out of a job. And would any well known critic ever call Dan Brown’s next novel crap knowing that it will sell a few million copies anyway? Ok then, how about anonymous critics? Like the ones on the Internet. Are they any better? Well sure, they could be more honest than well known critics. But it turns out that an analysis by Google shows that after the first few reviewers, the next set either conform to what the first set said or end up responding to the first reviews rather than voicing their own view. Which sort of skews the whole collective opinion rating we see online (puts that 4.5 out of 5 rating in a whole new light, doesn’t it?). Was Seth Godin right when he wrote: “For me, the o...

In case you don’t know what hashtags (symbol: #) are used for on Twitter, read this paragraph; but if you know what they are, move on to the next paragraph. Hashtags were created by Chris Messina in 2007 as a way to “tag” a tweet as being about a particular topic or event. Tagging this way then makes search easy. It is left to users to use the hashtag appropriately because indiscriminate usage would just garble everything up. An example of hashtags are used is: “The growth of #socialmedia has been exponential”. Ok, so now onto the topic of this blog. When we talk about the old meeting the new, I don’t think anyone had in mind the Vatican combining indulgences (an indulgence is what the Church sold granted to Catholics to reduce the time they spent in purgatory; or in Monopoly lingo, a Get Out Of Hell Free card) with Twitter. So how does it work? The Vatican announced that one of the ways to get an indulgence now includes following the Pope on Twitter! Imagine that: this is ...

Forming or holding an opinion is easy. Doing the analysis to form that opinion is…well, a lot of work. Which is why most people don’t bother. Ok, you knew that already. After all, who hasn’t gone into a meeting where nobody has read that doc/memo that is going to be discussed? Meetings where people just go along with the flow. Of course, they will come up with that odd statement that makes it look that they did give it some thought. It’s frustrating to go to such meetings: if you don’t prepare, you know it is a waste of time. If you do prepare but others don’t, it is again a waste of time. Damned if you, damned if you don’t. Is there a way out? Perhaps, this Farnam Street blog found the solution : “If you push too far you won’t be at the next meeting because everyone knows you’ll do the work and that means they know that by inviting you they’ll be forced to think about things a little more, to anticipate arguments, etc. In short, inviting you means more work for them.” ...

I am a big fan of Seth Godin’s blogs . The man is smart and has the ability to articulate things very well in crisp, short sentences. Almost as if the guy was made for the Twitter age of 140 character messages! Some of his blogs are too marketing oriented for my liking, but mostly I like them. In a recent blog , Godin wrote about the flop movie starring Johnny Depp, The Lone Ranger . I agree that the movie was horrible, though Johnny Depp was funny as usual. That said, Godin’s point below is only partially correct: “thousands of people touched this project…Each of these people got handed a turkey, and some money, along with instructions on how to somehow improve it, promote it or otherwise dress it up. Alas, no one had the guts and the leverage to say, “stop.’” I agree with Godin to the extent that none of those “thousands of people” increased Johnny Depp’s role in the movie. Then again, they were basing this on a book, so their hands were tied (beyond a point). So wh...

I never thought that there could be humour associated with the story behind any element in the periodic table. Until I read the story behind one of the rarest elements . So no matter how much you disliked chemistry at school, this is a story you should still know. And as a bonus, have fun reading about it. The element with such a story is so rare that you would only find one ounce of it on the entire earth! Add to that, it is extremely radioactive (half-life of 8 hours; its nickname could well be “Now you see me, now you don’t.”).  I am sure you don’t have the first clue which element I am talking about, so I will spare you the embarrassment of trying to guess: it’s astatine (At). Ok, if it’s that rare and that short lived, how do we even know it exists? Because the periodic table says so! Scientists knew of elements with atomic numbers 84 and 86, so they “knew” that there had to be one with atomic number 85! But since they couldn’t find it, they started trying to create...

I loved this this xkcd cartoon : In case you didn’t get the logic of that, read it again and take a few seconds to let it sink in. Now take into account that the percentage of smartphone users is very high in Europe and Japan too. In India and China, the number of smartphone users is very high (they are the 3 rd and 2 nd largest users in absolute numbers, after the US). Combine all those stats, and we can similarly “prove” that there are no Loch Ness monsters, yetis, flying carpets or godzillas either! Who’d have thought the ubiquitous smartphone, thanks to its camera, could become a tool to debunk a whole lot of myths? Of course, if one is totally logical about it, then one has to concede that absence of proof is not proof of absence (which is why courts rule people as “Not Guilty”, but never as “Innocent”). Then again, didn’t the great Sherlock Holmes crack the case of Silver Blaze based on the dog that did not bark? If absence of something is good ...

Google Glass is in the news a lot: it’s what they call “wearable” computing. Computing on things you wear, like glasses or watches. Like the smartphone, the Glass has a camera, GPS, Internet connectivity and understands voice commands. Glass (like spectacles) is always pointed at whatever it is you are looking at. Which is why you can give it instructions like “Glass, take a photo”. Or ask for info or ask for directions. With Glass, Google even managed to project info/directions on your, er, glasses without blocking your vision! Ok, so that’s the gist of the device itself. Only 8,000 units in circulation (to handpicked applicants) and yet there have been strong reactions. The reaction about Glass’s impact on knowledge/education was: “The idea is that we will all be better off if we’re always connected to the web, always on, and have uninterrupted and instantaneous access to it and humanity’s “knowledge.”…I think, though, that is a terribly deluded and shallow understanding of ...

Ever heard of fan fiction or fan fic? Wikipedia defines it as:  “ a broadly-defined fan labor term for stories about characters or settings written by fans of the original work, rather than by the original creator. Works of fan fiction are rarely commissioned or authorized by the original work's owner, creator, or publisher; also, they are almost never professionally published.” So why do they do it? Lev Grossman in TIME magazine: “Fanfiction is what literature might look like if it were reinvented from scratch after a nuclear apocalypse by a band of brilliant pop-culture junkies trapped in a sealed bunker. They don't do it for money. That's not what it's about. The writers write it and put it up online just for the satisfaction. They're fans, but they're not silent, couchbound consumers of media. The culture talks to them, and they talk back to the culture in its own language.” Amazon recently changed fan fiction a bit through their “Kindle Worlds” ...

In my last blog, “ Only Fools Charge In ”, I talked about how the guy who didn’t think it through, didn’t analyze things as much, was too arrogant or ignorant than to know better is often the guy who comes up with the creative idea, the Next Big Thing…because he is forced to be creative after he charged in and got stuck. As someone who lies at the other end of the spectrum (I like to plan, to analyze, to consider the odds of success before I start something), that seems a bit unfair. The don’t look before you leap guy, the ignorant and the arrogant are more likely to have that creative spark? And then it got worse. I read this piece about writers and creativity : “Choose your drug: alcohol, marijuana, mushrooms… Any one of these will make your writing better, especially if you’re writing something personal. Writing is only interesting to other people if it is deeply revealing. Your brain has a self defense mechanism which prevents you from divulging too much of yourse...

“We have vision, delusion and hallucination and I want to know which one this is.” -          Anonymous It’s amusing that most creative ideas come from outside of planned work. On a related note, why do ground breaking ideas come from college kid run companies (Yahoo!, Google, Facebook…), not well established companies? The surprising answer is one word: Ignorance! They didn’t know better. Malcolm Gladwell from his article titled “ The Gift of Doubt ”: “The entrepreneur takes risks but does not see himself as a risk-taker, because he operates under the useful delusion that what he’s attempting is not risky. Then, trapped in mid-mountain, people discover the truth—and, because it is too late to turn back, they’re forced to finish the job.” Or take what Albert O. Hirschman, an economist, has to say: “Creativity always comes as a surprise to us; therefore we can never count on it and we dare not believe in it until it has happened....

Edward Snowden, the guy who let everyone know about the snooping that the US government was doing, had at one stage tried to negotiate a return to the US. It doesn’t look like the US responded (obviously). But the possible why’s behind that non-negotiation make for interesting reading. Take Scott Adams’ take on how messy this whole situation must be for the US government. First off, if and when Snowden is brought back to the US, he would stand trial. A jury trial, to be specific. And therein, argues Adams , lies the problem: “I'm wondering how you find a jury that would convict Snowden. On the first day of the trial his lawyer will explain to all twelve jurors how the government spied on them personally. Every potential juror is also a victim. Good luck getting the victims to side with the perpetrator, which in this case is the government.” Further, Adams feels that the jurors may feel the law is an ass: “Jury nullification is when jurors agree that the accused broke th...

Alice had her rabbit hole. We in the 21 st century have to content ourselves with books as our portholes to a whole new world: Of course, the porthole experience can only be had if one takes the Peter Birkenhead approach to choosing which books to read: “If a book can’t disorient me just a little bit, if it can’t get me some kind of lost, I won’t stay with it for very long.” As an example, he cites books by “(Richard) Feynman, (Stephen) Hawking, (Brian) Greene, and their ilk”: “Their books may be my least favorite to read, but as I do, and the universe they describe grows curiouser and curiouser, I become more intrigued.” As someone who has read all 3 authors, I would say amen to that. Of course, this porthole experience isn’t limited to physics alone. Birkenhead again: “Literature provides passage toward the self, not away from it, promising escape only from the temptations of escapism. It makes visible a world that exists in the spaces between things: book a...

With all the noise and outrage over the US government’s tapping into all the major Internet companies to gather data, it was interesting to see the reaction in Germany . Yup, in Germany, not the US. And this was before they discovered that the US had spied on EU consulates! Wolfgang Schmidt, a former lieutenant colonel in the erstwhile Stasi, spoke wistfully about the kind of surveillance the Americans got caught doing: “You know, for us, this would have been a dream come true…So much information, on so many people.” Now you might think, sure, the Internet allows for so much more data to be collected, no wonder the Stasi would have loved it. But you would only be partially correct. Because even the technology to surveil (is that even a word? But you get the meaning, right?) back then was primitive. How primitive? Well, the equipment only allowed Schmidt’s department to tap 40 phone lines at a time. If he wanted a new guy tapped, he would have to drop an existing guy! That’...

If vehicles could “talk” to each other, would driving be better and safer? That question isn’t in the realm of sci-fi anymore. Turns out we (as in mankind) have already been collecting data on this topic. For the past 10 months, about 2,800 volunteers in Michigan have been driving vehicles fitted with this vehicles-to-vehicles communication technology. But until now, it’s been (mostly) just been transmitting data, not processing or acting upon it. The intent was to check how effective this data exchange is in the real world street. But now we are ready to move to Step 2: the US Department of Transportation will be evaluating a demo to be organized this week by the University of Michigan. This demo will have the software process all that incoming data and then act on it, like issuing warnings to the driver and making choices. If it gets the green light (pun intended), the eventual plan is to extend this communication beyond just vehicles to include traffic lights and toll boo...