Viswanathan K's Thoughts

Video games are often reviled for their violence. And their addictiveness. And how they are a bad influence on kids. So what would you say if a video game, Minecraft , allows the player to experiment with quantum mechanics?! I kid you not. Minecraft is a game that supports something called “ mods ”: Short for modifications, mods “add content to the game to alter gameplay, change the creative feel, or give the player more options in how they interact with the  Minecraft  world”. Google’s Quantum AI Lab Team created a mod called qCraft that adds blocks that exhibit quantum entanglement, superposition, and observer-dependency properties! Thus, some of the new blocks can be “activated” simply by looking at them, while others are prone to disappear at any moment. But why add this in a video game of all places? Google’s answer : “Where will future quantum computer scientists come from? Our best guess: Minecraft.” And oh, also to make learning fun: “qCraft isn...

There’s been an increasing call in the US that everyone learn how to code (write computer programs). This call comes even from Obama. Part of the reason is to improve the employability of people as software continues to step into more and more fields. A software engineer, Chase Felker, argued against this call . He correctly points out that there is a world of difference between knowing the basics of programming v/s being a good, employable programmer: “Without knowing more of the bigger picture, you’re forced to hack away at a problem, which can take you pretty far until you run into one that is better solved by more careful design.” Then there’s the problem of identifying who you would learn from? Because software expertise is not tied to degrees: “Your credentials are primarily the programs you have written, not the stature of the professor whose lab you cleaned.” Unfortunately, you can’t see the programs anyone else wrote (they’d be owned by the company that guy wo...

“Literature is the opposite of data,” wrote the novelist Stephen Marche. Such a statement made sense even a few decades back, but today? Let’s take a look. Today, Dana Mackenzie’s article says, “the scientific method is tiptoeing into the English department”. Huge amounts of literature have been digitized, and once digitized, surely somebody will start hurling algorithms to find…well, something. In 2011, Google’s N-gram server allowed you to search Google Books for frequency of words or word combinations in the books in its database. There are, of course, obvious limitations to the significance of such raw counts (other than perhaps trending when words caught on or died). Enter topic modeling: “A topic-modeling algorithm infers, for each word in a document, what topic that word refers to.” Does the word “black” mean color? Race? Something bad? The algorithm “produces “bags” of words that belong together”, and leaves it to the human reader to decide the meaning from the c...

I’ve always held that economics is not a science. I don’t mean that in a derogatory way. I say that only in an apples-are-not-oranges kind of way. The latest Nobel prize for economics just proved that (let’s set aside the stupidity of the Nobel committee at times, that’s a topic for another day). This year’s winners for Economics are Eugene Fama and Robert Shiller. In case you haven’t heard of either (and so don’t get the absurdity), let John Kay explain the ridiculousness of giving them the prize jointly: “Prof Fama made his name by developing the efficient market hypothesis, long the cornerstone of finance theory. Prof Shiller is the most prominent critic of that hypothesis. It is like awarding the physics prize jointly to Ptolemy for his theory that the Earth is the centre of the universe, and to Copernicus for showing it is not.” Kay says that people are neither hyper-rational (as Fama says) nor “slaves to our psychological weaknesses” (the Shiller model). Rather, he...

Paul Sawers thought what the future of libraries would be and made some interesting points. Before you switch off, no, Sawers isn’t a Luddite who hates technology. He starts by pointing out though that most of us think of a library as a “bricks-and-mortar building filled with paper books”, yet “at a more abstract level, it’s really just a repository of information”. And yes, digital format counts as information. By this definition, Wikipedia and the entire Internet is a library and Google is the new Dewey Decimal system to find what you want! Having acknowledged that the library of the future is indeed digital, Sawers comes to the biggest issue with the new format of information. While a digital library doesn’t run the risk of loss of data (like what happened to the Library of Alexandria), Vint Cerf, one of the founders of the Internet, said it does run the risk of “bit rot”: “This means, you have a bag of bits that you saved for a thousand years, but you don’t know what t...

I liked the way Mental Floss magazine described the achievement of one of their reporters: “Jake Rossen managed to do something we thought was impossible—he snagged an interview with the legendary Bill Watterson!” I loved the first question to the author of Calvin and Hobbes: “You had an idea, executed it, then moved on. And you ignored the clamor for more. Why is it so hard for readers to let go?” The answer was equally interesting: “Well, coming at a new work requires a certain amount of patience and energy, and there’s always the risk of disappointment. You can’t really blame people for preferring more of what they already know and like.” The guy doesn’t ever brag, does he? So unlike Calvin! Asked if he would consider animating his creation today, he replied: “If you’ve ever compared a film to a novel it’s based on, you know the novel gets bludgeoned. It’s inevitable, because different media have different strengths and needs.” Amen to that. Watterson is not...

We love our touch based devices, from the iPad to the smartphone to the Kindle. But are there better interfaces than touch that could be created? Bret Victor certainly thinks so . He points out that almost every real world object offers some feedback to our hands (“texture, pliability, temperature; their distribution of weight; their edges, curves, and ridges; and how they respond in your hand as you use them.”). Now contrast that with what you feel when you interact via touchscreens (“Did it feel glassy? Did it have no connection whatsoever with the task you were performing?”). That is why Victor terms current touch tech as “ Pictures Under Glass ”: “It's obviously a transitional technology. And the sooner we transition, the better.” So what is the future then? As per Victor: “Despite how it appears to the culture at large, technology doesn't just happen. Revolutionary technology comes out of long research, and research is performed and funded by inspired people...

When we find someone being dishonest or unscrupulous, we wonder how they can be that way? How do they sleep at night? Is their conscience dead? I never could think of an answer that made sense. Most answers just seem to be phrased to make you feel morally superior! Which is why I found a couple of passages from Dan Ariely’s book, The (Honest) Truth About Dishonesty: How We Lie to Everyone—Especially Ourselves ) more believable. But let’s start with what Nassim Taleb called the narrative fallacy: the human tendency to build a story around events so they “make sense”. Ariely extended this tendency to describe how most of us think: “We’re storytelling creatures by nature, and we tell ourselves story after story until we come up with an explanation that we like and that sounds reasonable enough to believe. And when the story portrays us in a more glowing and positive light, so much the better.” Ariely goes on to argue that a creative person is better than others at coming u...

“Your content and identity are being used as ads.” -          Josh Constine Advertising has come a long way due to the Internet. From same-ads-for-everyone (what TV and radio still do), we moved to ads based on what’s relevant at that instant (think Google search), and then to companies mining our data as we surfed to know what we might be interested in. More recently, in 2011, Facebook started the concept of “sponsored” and “promoted” posts …from our friends! “If you Like a brand’s Page or post, check in at a business, download or use an app, or share a link, advertisers can pay to boost that action’s visibility in the feed (of your friends).” Twitter shows you ads based on what the people you follow like. Pinterest and Instagram are doing the same. And now Google has jumped on the bandwagon. Oh, in case you didn’t realize, these ads show up with your friends’ names and faces alongside them as people who liked/ bought/used th...

With the collapse of Nokia, it’s easy to imagine that they just missed spotting a trend tidal wave of the future (smartphones for non-corporate users). And to also feel sympathetic since, after all, things are obvious only with hindsight. Except that isn’t how things happened, as per this Finnish journalist, Lauri Malkavaara. He wrote a letter to Nokia about how Nokia’s ease of use had deteriorated. He pointed out that his first two Nokia’s from 1996 and 2001 were easy to use (“To call, press the green handset symbol, and to hang up, press the red one. ”) but the E 51 he got in 2008 was impossibly difficult: “At first I did not even know how to make calls without consulting the manual, and I still understand very little of it.” What had happened? The one word answer: iPod. It had changed expectations of usability! “I ordered my own iPod touch, turned it on, and knew immediately how to use it. I have been using the device on a daily basis for over six months now, without...

Friction: a word with negative connotations. Associated with strife, fights and reduced fuel efficiency. Of course, it has its positive effects too: try walking on ice to see what I mean. Or imagine a world where meteors and asteroids didn’t burn up in the atmosphere. But did you know of the positives of friction in the fields of economics or privacy? Huh? Consider what Brett Scott meant when he wrote : “We’re used to thinking that absence of friction must be a virtue in any transaction, but a local economy thrives on inconvenience.” ATM’s made it possible to access your money anytime, anywhere. Guess what it did to the bank teller’s job? Or consider how the Internet, by making communication so fast and cheap, played a role in speeding up outsourcing. Ben Thomson wrote something similar in his blog : “Friction was the foundation of sustainability, and now friction is gone.” In the pre-Internet world, it was extremely hard for a new guy/company to make themselves known...

Scott Adams puts this disclaimer at the top of some of his blogs: “This blog is written for a rational audience that likes to have fun wrestling with unique or controversial points of view. It is written in a style that can easily be confused as advocacy for one sort of unpleasantness or another.” Consider the same to be applicable to this blog before you read on… The Internet currency, Bitcoins, that I wrote about a couple of months back, was the currency of choice on The Silk Road : a black market web site for “illegal narcotics, fake documents, hackers-for-hire and other illicit goods”. So how did it work? Like eBay! Users logged in, searched a catalog, checked out the ratings by previous buyers, paid in Bitcoins and the stuff would get mailed to their address while the money was held in an escrow account.  The FBI recently shut down the site and arrested its mastermind, Ross William Ulbricht. Which should be a good thing, right? Except you should check out Co...

I’d seen plenty of paintings of the Renaissance period but I always preferred Norman Rockwell: his paintings “extract great pictorial drama”. Even better, they made sense (unlike modern art). It was while reading Deborah Solomon’s article on Rockwell that I learnt that the man was “driving in the opposite direction—he was putting stuff into art” in an era where abstract painting “jettisoned the accumulated clutter of 500 years of subject matter in an attempt to reduce art to pure form”! Also, in that era, there was “an invisible red velvet rope separates museum art from illustration” (Rockwell was an illustrator: he drew for magazines, and even worse, got paid). His theme was the American life’s “homelier version steeped in the we-the-people, communitarian ideals of America’s founding in the 18th century”. Yet, when President Roosevelt set a competition for the Four Freedoms series (depiction of America stood for) for use during World War II, Rockwell’s submission was reject...

There are people who are addicted to social media (Facebook and Twitter). Others couldn’t care less about it. And then there are those who hold it responsible for every problem in India! idiot420 posted this hilarious article on Faking News on the havoc social media wreaks on society, from lack of economic growth to dowry and dandruff! The sample below should give you an idea of the tone of the article: There is a competition among the people to buy new cars and upload its pictures on Facebook…Such desires have pushed them to amass wealth through unethical ways and are giving rise to corruption. I am guessing Facebook-haters would be very happy to hear this analysis of why Facebook might be doomed. The short answer would be what Ben Thompson wrote in his blog: “Whereas Google is valuable because it knows what I want, when I want to get it, Facebook knows who I am, and who I know. Ideally, they also know who and what I like, but it’s a much weaker signal.” In the real ...

I’ve heard complaints from the non-IT folks in Bangalore about the problems that we IT folks bring to the city: higher rents and too many cars leading to congestion, to name just a few. Kitty Morgan’s article is about how the non-IT folks of Silicon Valley feel. Some of the feelings are similar: “Annoyance, resentment, paranoia, even something like hate.” But she acknowledges that there are other feelings too (but those would only apply to Silicon Valley, not Bangalore). When she sees the IT folks getting into their office buses (Yeah, you heard that right: bus services in America!), she wonders: “What if it’s envy? The ballad of the left behind…There is nothing like a shining white chariot sailing through the streets to remind us on the sidewalk that we are not the anointed.” Silicon Valley is “an industry built on accelerating obsolescence”, as Fred Turner puts it. Tablets are doing that to the PC, and smartphones did that to…well, that list is just too long, isn’t it?...

When a new season of that TV serial you like comes just once a week, isn’t it frustrating? You want to see the next episode, but it’s 7 days away, and by then, you lose the flow… That is why Netflix, the company that streams movies to your device, tried an interesting experiment: they released the entire season of its original programming serial all at once. Reed Hastings, Netflix’s CEO, pointed out that the same thing happened 200 years back, with, hold your breath, books! Back then, fiction was written for magazines, one chapter per issue. But once it became economically viable to print books, you got all the chapters at one shot! Hastings feels TV content is headed the same way: the “serialized release model” may be nearing its end. Another advantage Hastings sees with the new model is, again, what happened with books: variable sized chunks. After all, chapters in a book are of variable size, so why can’t episode lengths in the new system, “depending on the natural rhy...

A few days back, Vatican cardinal Gianfranco Ravasi called Jesus Christ the first user of Twitter . Huh? Ravasi says Christ: “used tweets before everyone else, with elementary phrases made up of fewer than 45 characters like ‘Love one another’”. Embracing the Internet seems to be the signature of Pope Francis. This reminded me of Bruce Handy’s analysis as to how much wisdom can be squeezed into the 140 character limit that Twitter enforces. His answer? It was enough for not only Jesus but also Descartes, Shakespeare, Emily Dickinson and Martin Luther King! A few samples from Handy’s list : I think, therefore I am. (24) Neither a borrower nor a lender be. (35) Let he who is without sin cast the first stone. (47) What’s in a name? That which we call a rose by any other name would smell as sweet. (83) I look to a day when people will not be judged by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character. (113) But are these just soundbites? Surely you lose...

The Americans are obsessed with stats, especially when it comes to sports. So it isn’t a surprise that when they hosted the football (soccer) World Cup in 1994, they showed (what seemed to me) ridiculous stats like how much time each team had possession of the ball, or how many fouls each team committed, or how many shots at goal were on-target. Who cared, I thought? After all, what mattered was whether your side won or not. Except that today, such stats are shown in football matches all over the world. But does any of these sport stats have any practical use, I wondered? The Brad Pitt starrer about a true story, Moneyball , answered my question : “The general manager of the Oakland Athletics baseball team, Billy Beane, used statistical analysis to find undervalued players according to one or two key metrics. It worked: the Athletics went on a record-breaking 20-game winning streak in 2002.” But isn’t baseball a totally different kind of game than football? The Economist ar...