Viswanathan K's Thoughts

Sir Isaac Newton, he of the falling apple fame (and oh yeah, gravity too), is supposed to have said these famous lines as a sign of humility: “If I have seen farther it is by standing on the shoulders of giants.” Mario Livio pointed out in his book, Is God a Mathematician? , that those lines may just have been Newton’s way of saying that he owed absolutely nothing to one of his rivals, Robert Hooke, since Hooke was quite short! Then there’s Nick Selby, an upperclassman at Georgia Tech who told incoming freshmen during a memorable welcome speech recently (it’s gone viral on YouTube): “Our mission as students is NOT to follow in the footsteps of the astronauts, Nobel Prize Laureates, and president who graduated before us, but to EXCEED their footsteps, CRUSH the shoulders of the giants upon whom we stand!” Continuing in the Obama vein of “Yes, we can”, Selby thundered: “If you want to change the world, you're at Georgia Tech, you can do that! If you want to build th...

In one of his blogs, Ben Thompson listed 10 social apps he had used in the last two days (in no particular order): “ Twitter , for keeping up on news and commenting on tech and stratechery Facebook , for posting personal status updates and checking in LINE , for text messaging with my wife and friends in Taiwan Snapchat , for exchanging photos with my wife Skype , for instant messaging with my colleagues Facetime , for talking with my wife and kids Instagram , for posting cool photos Email , for all types of content, both work and personal Photostream , for sharing photos with my family WordPress , for posting to this blog” Why so many apps? Thompson’s answer: “Social is about communication, and communication is, and always has been, conducted through multiple mediums... There are three primary means of communication: text, photo, and video/voice.” He even drew a map of the different apps and the purpose they serve (1-to-1 or 1-to-many? Permanent or eph...

This line by Lord Palmerston is very famous: “England has no eternal friends, England has no perpetual enemies, England has only eternal and perpetual interests.” Those lines, of course, hold true for all other nations too. While cynical, it would seem to be the basic concept of every nation’s foreign policy. That is why Michael Totten’s line provoked such ridicule on the Net: “Foreign Policy 101 dictates that you reward your friends and punish your enemies.” Andrew Sullivan tore into it, and for good measure dragged George W. Bush’s administration into it! “It’s a spectacularly dumb statement, reflective of neoconservative tribalism rather than sensible foreign policy. You can tell it’s of neocon provenance because if its crudeness and simplicity. It’s the kind of idiotic thinking that (Bush’s vice-president) Cheney holds to.” The Saudis seem to have forgotten this basic principle and assumed that the US was their BFF (Best Friends Forever). No wonder they were so ...

When Oxford dictionary recently announced that ‘selfie’ as their new Word of the Year (“photograph that one has taken of oneself, typically one taken with a smartphone or webcam and uploaded to a social media website”), I was reminded of Chris Gayomali’s article asking different people why they took selfies. Apparently, he wasn’t satisfied with the obvious answer: “The familiar if dull refrain is that selfies reflect the narcissism of our age, spurred by the easy sharing capabilities of smartphones and the cameras they house. Facebook, Instagram, and Tumblr provide potentially far-reaching platforms to broadcast close-ups of our faces, particularly the ones we deem fit for consumption by others.” Amy Rose Spiegel from BuzzFeed’s answer did have a point: “Selfies … are a way of taking ownership of my body and deciding how I want to be seen. Relatedly, we're all documented online so relentlessly as it is that why wouldn't you want to control the narrative of your own i...

During his keynote address at the University of the Arts, Neil Gaiman said, “I didn't have a career. I just did the next thing on the list.” Not having goals is almost unimaginable to most people. Peer/societal pressure aside, without goals, what would they work towards, personal or otherwise? As Ben Thompson asked about Microsoft : “One of the greatest corporate mission statements of all time: A computer on every desk and in every home, running Microsoft software. ... And that, right there, is what is wrong with Microsoft. It’s not they don’t have talent – they do. It’s not that they don’t have great technology – they do. In fact, it’s not even that they lack a CEO. Rather, it’s that they achieved their goal. There IS a computer on every desk and in very home, and nearly all of them run Microsoft software. So now what?” Goals are the answer to the “now what?” question. Or so it seems. But do goals really make sense for most of us, asks Scott Adams: “For most...

That ship has sailed. I missed the bus. We all know that sinking feeling when we miss that Big Opportunity. So it’s kind of interesting to see two examples from the tech world of guys who went on to catch the ship that had sailed. The first one is Kevin Systrom, an intern at the company that went on to become Twitter. After he left the internship . As if that wasn’t bad enough, he then went on to work for a bit more than a year at a travel-tip site, Nextstop. After he left, Nextstop was bought by Facebook. As Systrom thought back then: “Great, I missed the Twitter boat. I missed the Facebook boat.” Then Systrom went on to co-found a company that developed an app to apply filters on photos on your phone. The app became so popular on the iPhone that Facebook, wanting a piece of the mobile pie, and sensing that the focus was shifting from text to photos, bought Instagram for a whopping billion dollars. And that’s how Systrom caught up with his sailed ship! The second insta...

Most of us can see patterns pretty much anywhere. Among the stars, in the clouds, in stock market fluctuations…the list is endless. We also tend to see faces…on the moon, on Mars and in the clouds. As with pretty much everything else, why we tend to be such pattern seekers is answered by evolutionary theory. Dr. Sinha from MIT explains: “The information faces convey is so rich — not just regarding another person’s identity, but also their mental state, health and other factors. It’s extremely beneficial for the brain to become good at the task of face recognition and not to be very strict in its inclusion criteria. The cost of missing a face is higher than the cost of declaring a nonface to be a face.” Shinseungback Kimyonghun, a Seoul-based tech art collective, developed Cloud Face, a software designed to spot faces in whatever the camera recorded. They pointed it at clouds for fun and sure enough, the software spotted faces just like we humans do! About 1 face per 150 clou...

Archimedes had his eureka moment in the bath tub. Kekule came up with the structure of benzene in a dream. Schrodinger (he of the cat fame) discovered wave mechanics when he took his mistress to a ski resort. And for the rest of us, inspiration (sometimes) strikes in the bathroom. Why is it we often come up with solutions and ideas when we are not thinking about the problem? Here’s Art Markman’s take: “When you walk away from a problem and think about something else, your memory resets. The ideas that dominated your thinking recede from your thoughts. The memories that were inhibited before gradually become more accessible. If your thoughts return to the problem after a pause, those other memories now have a chance to influence your thinking.” Of course, a lot of ideas do come when we are working on the problem. But if you want to increase your chances, then aim for the Goldilocks zone of ambient noise (not too noisy; but not too quiet either). David Burkus explains: “A ...

Balaji Srinivasan, from Stanford, gave this talk (I don’t know the word for it) , where he asked this provocative question: “Is the USA the Microsoft of nations?” That’s Microsoft as in obsolete, a dinosaur. Back in 1998, Bill Gates feared that Microsoft’s rule would end not due to the likes of Oracle but due to “some guys in a garage”. Those guys turned out to be Larry and Sergey (Google’s founders). And now, says Srinivasan, Silicon Valley is becoming the garage guys to the entire US! Pointing out that the post-war US was run by 4 cities (Boston: education; New York: Madison Avenue and Wall Street; Los Angeles: music and Hollywood; and Washington DC: laws), he next says that Silicon Valley is “putting a horse head in all of their beds”: that’s a declaration of war, Godfather style. If you’re wondering how, consider how the Valley’s outputs are taking on the traditional bastions of those 4 cities. Online courses, Khan Academy, and Udacity are the Valley’s assault on...

Once India launched its Mars mission, many Western journalists started criticizing the attempt. No, this was “not coming from cheap tabloids, but reputed media houses”, as Balaji Viswanathan points out . So what is their problem? Wrong priorities, they say. Why spend on space exploration instead of addressing poverty and providing toilets, they thunder? Viswanathan counters by pointing out: “Apparently the other countries engaging in scientific research face no poverty... India doesn’t have more toilets, not because we don’t have extra 450 crores, but because of our poor execution of things.” Why the hypocrisy? After all, when NASA or the Europeans go to space, Western news doesn’t ever read: “NASA begins its moon mission despite failing to manage hurricane relief” or “European Space Agency launches a satellite despite the inability to control religious riots in Paris and Tottenham, London” Perhaps it is racism: when the Aussies launch, it apparently makes sense. Bu...

It’s the question we often agonize about: do we wait and perfect things or do we ship it as it is? Perfection might take too long…but ship too early and it might crash and burn. Getting it absolutely right would increase costs…worse, the guy who shipped as is might grab the market. Seth Godin advocates shipping. He believes in a practical definition of perfection : “Perfect doesn't mean flawless. Perfect means it does exactly what I need it to do.” If you are focusing on perfection on aspects other than what the product needs to do, then you are wasting your effort: “Polished perfect isn't better than perfect, it's merely shinier. And late.” Then there’s the Steve Jobs view on perfection. Today it is hard to imagine a phone without apps. Yet Jobs actually hated the idea of letting unknown people write software that would run on his beloved iPhone! Luke Dormehl explains why: “The way he (Steve Jobs) viewed it, loosening his grip on the perfect Zen aura tha...

“Chess has problems at the grandmaster level...They're not getting a great game”, wrote Christian Donlan . Amen to that: Anand and his challenger, Magnus Carlsen drew their first game in just 16 moves. It gets worse: games between the top 20 end in draws 60% of the time. And Donlan adds that “games often end in resignation when an actual victory starts to loom on the distant horizon.” That often means that the average player (or fan) often has no clue why one guy won (since he can’t see that far ahead)! Then there’s all that memorization (of openings, of end games and everything in between). All that memorization is sort of against the spirit of the game, says Zachary Burns, “We want it to be a game of creativity and positional play.” Many have tried to change the rules of the game in the past for these exact reasons, including Bobby Fischer with his Chess960 variant. More recently, David Sirlin tried to make things interesting via his variant, Chess 2. So what are his c...

I saw this entertaining post by Adam Clark Estes that asked the question: “Should a Skyscraper's Spire Count Towards Its Total Height?” The background to this was the height of the Freedom Tower being built by the US in memory of 9/11. Its height would be 1,776-feet, if spire height is included (in case you didn’t notice, that particular number, 1776, is the year the US got its independence). But are towers using spires to just bloat their heights, all over the world? “Spires make up an average of 30 percent of the tallest skyscrapers' heights.” The 30% group includes the Burj Khalifa, Zifeng Tower, and the Bank of America Tower among many, many others. One reader, UniversalCode, commented on that article: “Question: How tall is Marge Simpson? Would she be the same person without the hair?” To which another reader, Etchasketchist, responded with this pic: I guess, sometimes spires can indeed fit into the building’s architecture!

Some get there through hard work. Others via raw talent. We tend to admire the gifted guy (he makes it look easy). Even envy him (he didn’t have to slog). Until I read this passage from Haruki Murakami’s book, Norwegian Wood , I didn’t realize that the gifted guy is often incapable of hard work. Here’s why: “You see them do it, and you’re overwhelmed. You think, ‘I could never do that in a million years.’ But that’s as far as they go. They can’t take it any further. And why not? Because they won’t put in the effort. Because they haven’t had the discipline pounded into them…They’ll take some piece another kid has to work on for three weeks and polish it off in half the time, so the teacher figures they’ve put enough into it and lets them go to the next thing. And they do that in half the time and go on to the next piece. They never find out what it means to be hammered by the teacher; they lose out on a certain element required for character building.” Wow! I never thought of ...

It's just a game: that's something nobody ever feels when playing chess. Not even Viswanathan Anand , one of the nicest guys in the game: “When you lose, you really feel a sense of self...You actually feel that you are being taken apart, rather than just your pieces.” Anand acknowledges the other guy feels the same way too: “I understand that if I win, I’m probably crushing my opponent’s ego” But unlike Bobby Fischer or Garry Kasparov, Anand says that: “It’s not like I do that with great satisfaction.” You can see why Anand has the nice guy image when you realize he even finds a reason as to why Kasparov felt that chess “required the domination and demoralisation of their opponents”: “It’s true that someone like Kasparov has this sense of history, and I’m talking world history rather than chess history. He has a sense of himself being in it, which, for me, is very hard to understand or even relate to in any way.” But beyond not relating to that feeling, “The...

I somehow never imagined that Bill Watterson would give a commencement address . After all, the guy is so anti-publicity. But he did, at his alma mater , Kenyon College, way back in 1990. Watterson talked about his fondest college memories, “where things were done out of some inexplicable inner imperative, rather than because the work was demanded”. Like the time he painted Michelangelo's “Creation of Adam” on the ceiling of his dorm room! Was it good? Nope, but “what the work lacked in color sense and technical flourish, it gained in the incongruity of having a High Renaissance masterpiece in a college dorm that had the unmistakable odor of old beer cans and older laundry.” Which led him to this Great Truth: “It's surprising how hard we'll work when the work is done just for ourselves.” Watterson advocated keeping the mind active because “the mind is like a car battery -- it recharges by running”. He points this is tough once out of school/college because: “A...