Viswanathan K's Thoughts

The MH 370 flight story continues to be a joke...actually, it would have been a joke if it wasn't so tragic. A flight makes a U-turn, flies over a country's airspace and hey, the military radars don't notice anything. If that's how good these south east Asian countries' radar capabilities are, I am not sure why China doesn't just take what it wants in the disputed seas...I am sure these countries wouldn't even notice...until the Americans start screaming! Oh wait, maybe the US won't...like their deafening silence about Crimea. Geopolitics aside, it was a bit surprising and scary that in the US, 35 landings and 115 approaches or aborted landing attempts at wrong airports have happened over the last two decades! What's even more scary is that this list doesn't include every such event. A common reason is, as per this article , what Michael Barr, a former Air Force pilot says: “You've got these runway lights, and you are looking at them,...

“In God we trust. All others (must) have data.” -           Dr.Bernard Fisher In the Internet Age, it was only a matter of time before someone decided to try data journalism. Data what? Nate Silver, founder of FiveThirtyEight (that's the number of seats in the electoral college of the US; and Silver got all 50 states right during the election, hence the name) explained the concept in his site manifesto : “These include statistical analysis, but also data visualization, computer programming and data-literate reporting. So in addition to written stories, we’ll have interactive graphics and features...We’ll share data and code on Github.” So where would data journalism be different that “traditional” journalism? “While the first two steps of the process (collecting and organizing information in the form of news stories) are thought to fall within the province of “objective” journalism, explanatory journalism is sometimes pl...

God said, “Let there be light!” Then scientists like Newton, Faraday and Young started studying light. And finally came Maxwell, who proved that light is not limited to what we can see...it extends far beyond in the electromagnetic spectrum. And that is the starting point for Philip Ball's article titled provocatively, Why Physicists Make Up Stories in the Dark . He starts by saying Maxwell's discovery shifted “the whole focus of physics...from the visible to the invisible”! Physics today has “not only unseen force fields and insensible rays but particles too small to see even with the most advanced microscopes”. While that may sound like a belief or something based on faith, it is supported by the facts: telescopes today use “radio waves, infrared radiation, and X-rays”. And it was kind of funny that X-rays “not only were invisible but revealed the invisible (bones under the flesh)”! Then came quantum mechanics. While the maths behind it was unquestionable, it le...

Chartbeat is a company that analyzes web statistics to help content generators maximize revenue. Its CEO, Tony Haile, wrote an article explaining how some of the standard metrics used by most companies don't convey anything at all. Conventional wisdom says the number of times a page is visited indicates popularity. This is wrong, says Haile, since on the web we go “click, click, click”. It is a myth that “we read what we’ve clicked on” when in reality, “a stunning 55% spent fewer than 15 seconds actively on a page”! The next myth that Haile dispels is the value ad companies pay to sharing articles via Facebook or Twitter. This actually sounds logical: when someone shares an article, the feeling is that he “has not only read the content but is actively recommending it to other people”. Except it turns out that “there were only one tweet and eight Facebook likes for every 100 visitors”. Worse, “there is no relationship whatsoever between the amount a piece of content is sh...

I saw this pic of a cello tape that Etsy seller Light Life sells “for sealing up your boxes and making them look like they're libraries for tiny flatlanders”, as Boing Boing put it and I just had to share it: And while we are on books, when the teacher at my daughter’s school introduced the word “library” to the class, my two and a half year old responded with “It has a lot of books”. Here’s hoping she stays interested in books for the rest of her life, and in the short term, in school books!

On the flight back home, I read this column in a Chinese newspaper about free speech. Before you roll your eyes, this wasn’t about the right to voice political dissent; rather, it was about the right to say whatever you wanted to in general. The column asked how far free speech could go, especially on the Internet where the audience for any rant was so much bigger than in the good, old physical world. The article got me thinking. Other than America which places its First Amendment on a pedestal (it basically states that free speech is sacrosanct and only actions can be prosecuted, not speech), how many other countries really allow free speech? Take India. Remember those girls who got arrested for posting something derogatory on Facebook when Bal Thackerey died? Ok, that might have been political. But as a culture, few Indians believe in free speech, especially when it involves criticizing or spewing hatred. Europe? Better than India, but worse than the US. This came as a ...

The Chinese growth story is often questioned by outsiders, sometimes due to envy, at others, because they are so secretive and who knows what they might be hiding? Are they over-constructing without any demand, some wonder? (The construction spending shows up as GDP growth) I got a glimpse of this when I saw empty high rises all along the Shanghai-Wuxi highway; and then more of them, around Wuxi. Unlike the ones in India, where the reason they are empty is because they are still under construction, in China, they are complete and yet they are empty! But empty buildings are nothing: it turns out there are entire cities that are constructed and lie practically empty! There is even a term for them: ghost cities. 20 such cities came up in 2013 alone. I asked my American counterpart why anyone would construct entire cities without a corresponding demand? Why would they take such a big financial risk? His answer: you are thinking like a capitalist, this is a communist country. I re...

In an era, where old media is either unwilling or unable to adapt to the Age of the Internet, Getty, the world’s largest photo agency, made a refreshing (and sensible) change. They just made over 35 million of their photos free for use on the Net, subject to some terms that show that we finally have a media company that “gets” the Internet! You might be wondering what’s the big deal with that? Weren’t we already doing what Megan Garber describes anyway: “If you find a photo, via Google Image Search or some such, that you want to publish on your blog (or tweet out to your followers, or use as your Instagram profile pic, or what have you), there is an extremely simple way to accomplish this: Download or screencap the image. Upload it. Boom. The Internet has shared its riches with you once again.” Except that it has always been illegal (depending on which image you used): “If you have engaged in this process with an image that happens to be from Getty, the massive digital p...

Wuxi, the place I went in China, is around 225 km from Shanghai. It took us around 2.5 hours by taxi to get there; an average speed of 90 kmph. The 6-lane highway (at least that entire 225 km stretch) was awesome: even US highways felt bumpier by comparison! The exit ramps had clearly visible signs (in Chinese, of course); and you never got blinded by the lights of oncoming traffic on the highway. And there was a lot of highway/road construction going on everywhere; but none of it was blocking existing roads. Even more unbelievably, everyone, including trucks, followed lane discipline; horns were almost never heard. If I didn’t know I was in China, I would have sworn that I was in a Western country. We visited Shanghai over the weekend: it was a 45 minute ride in the train at 300 kmph! (It takes me about the same time to go from office in Bangalore for a measly 11 km distance). Shanghai has European style open double-decker buses for tourists; the skyline looks like Manhattan; an...

Until I visited China recently, I never paid any attention to their script. I assumed the basic approach would be similar to either any Indian or European language. You know, vowels, consonants, put together to form words. I could not have been more wrong. My first sign was when I noticed that all white guys at office are given Chinese names for use on their nameplates. No, this isn't a cultural curiosity; it is a necessity! A white guy called Don Beduhn was “renamed” Da Ba Du! But why is a name change even necessary? To answer that, you first need to understand that Chinese characters are of many types : 1) Pictogram: the symbol denotes an entire object; 2) Ideogram: the symbol represents a concept, like “up”; 3) Radical-radical compound: each element of the character (called radical) hints at the meaning; 4) Radical-phonetic compounds: one component indicates the general meaning of the character, and the other hints at the pronunciation; 5) A few other types t...

Gregg Knauss wrote this iPhone app called Romantimatic to, hold your breath, “remind the distracted or forgetful to text nice things to their significant other”! As you might suspect, the app attracted a fair amount of criticism, wrote Knauss , “often in the language of the Web, by which I mean the most hyperbolic terms possible”. Knauss wondered why there was any reaction at all? “It’s not evil, by any sane definition of the word. It’s not hurtful. It does not do damage to the user or to others. Everyone who has argued so vehemently against it could have just as easily quietly noted its existence, decided it wasn’t for them, and moved on, without moral obligation or qualm.” He also felt that a similar reaction would have never have come if he had written an app that advised people to eat less. And so he asks: “Why is one type of self-improvement aid worse than the other?” And concludes that: “Those people who don’t need the help feel free to judge those who do. Th...

Nicholas Carr stated why he thinks paper will survive for a long time in his article titled Paper Versus Pixel . He points out something that never occurred to me, that the PC did not reduce the use of paper: “The initial arrival of the personal computer and its companion printer had us tearing through more reams than ever before” But once the pixel could be exchanged is when it became a true threat to paper: “The rise of the Internet as a universal communication system seems to be having the opposite effect. As more and more information comes to be stored and exchanged electronically, we’re writing fewer checks, sending fewer letters, circulating fewer reports, and in general committing fewer thoughts to paper.” The rest of Carr’s article is his belief that just because a medium becomes popular does not mean the end of paper. And while his data on the share of e-books seeming to stagnate must be correct, I think the reason for that isn’t only due to the fact that pages in...

Photo-sharing apps are, well, insanely popular. But I never thought of them the way Ali Eteraz described them in his article titled The War on Wordsmiths : “I submit that Instagram and its cousins represent an undeclared war on writing. On words.” How’s that? “(They give the) user the ability to speak in the most important language of our so-called post-literate society. The image.” So much so that: “The image is the new word. Don’t send a message expressing your emotion, send an image representing the idea.” So who is unhappy with this trend? “We are the wordsmiths. The poets. The short story writers. The memoirists. The novelists. The journalists. Call us anachronistic. Call us conservative. Call us backward.” Yup, those folks are definitely swimming against the tide. Even text itself is increasingly getting truncated to tweet sized chunks! “Most realists among the wordsmiths already know that short of some massive cataclysm that lays to waste the electronic grid ...