Viswanathan K's Thoughts

Phone numbers. Remember those 7, 8 or 10 digit numbers we used to memorize or note somewhere? Life got a lot easier with the advent of cellphones where we could save numbers against names. But can we get rid of phone numbers altogether? That’s the question Darren Murph asks . No, he’s not just cursing the pain of remembering those numbers. He points out how outdated the whole concept sounds, when you step back a bit: “For starters, dialing any number outside of your own country involves fees—fees which seem thoroughly absurd in an age where the internet has enabled limitless communication without borders. The cost of making a simplistic voice call has been driven to zero by the likes of Google Voice, Skype, Apple’s FaceTime Audio, Facebook, Viber, and countless others.” Why not switch to a user ID based system instead of a phone number? Murph agrees that not all voice calls today can be routed over VoIP. But shouldn’t carriers start moving in that direction, he asks? “W...

TLDR or TL;DR is the Internet abbreviation for “too long; didn't read”. Keep it short or we won’t read it! So what does a Net surfer do about Wikipedia articles? They’re quite long by Internet standards, but you need the info…quite the conundrum. What does one do? Ta da! Enter the TLDR Wikipedia , sort of Ambrose Bierce meets the Internet meets brevity. A few samples from the site should tell you what to expect: I loved these 2 in particular: And rubbing it in for the encyclopedia that Wikipedia ran out of business: Education and a wicked humor, all in a crisp sound bite…welcome to the Internet, baby!

Google succeeded in its mission of organizing the information of the world. So it's now our move: how do we consume more of that information? Speed reading apps claim to help do that, at least on our phones. Many criticize such apps saying that promote reading without any comprehension. But were we really reading and comprehending much even before these apps, asks Alex Balk : “Basically nobody reads anything, the few people who do read things don't read all of it, and the two people who do read all of it are basically the ones tasked with checking for typos, so they are not actually retaining anything anyway.” Harsh, you say? Balk rubs it in further: “You might as well be lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipisicing elit, sed do eiusmod tempor incididunt ut labore et dolore magna for all the actual comprehension and retention going on.” Don't bother Googling the Latin sounding parts of the lines above. The phrase has the appearance of an intelligent Lat...

Sometimes, evil geniuses can be impressive. Very impressive. Like Lord Voldemort. A great (albeit evil) wizard, the man wasn’t just brute force. He could manipulate others into doing his work, he could improvise, he could use guile and cunning…And now I found a real life guy for that role: Vladimir Putin. For starters, just see why the man is even Russia’s President today. The Russian constitution (yes, they have one) says nobody can be President for more than 2 successive terms. Putin realized the keyword there was “successive”: so he served 2 successive terms, then made Medvedev his proxy for the next term, and now is back in power! How’s that for exploiting a loophole? And just see how Putin has handled the Ukraine/Crimean crisis. The EU had been wooing an in-dire-economic-straits Ukraine for some time to come into their orbit. Just when it looked Ukraine would say Yes (and Russia would lose access to the Crimean naval bases), Putin got the Ukrainian President, Viktor Yanu...

I saw an episode of The Magic of Science on TV, a show where they use science for some of their tricks. I’ve never enjoyed learning how a trick is done; but to know when science is behind the trick…boring! On the other hand, I did enjoy Alex Stone’s book, Fooling Houdini . Stone is a physicist who starts dabbling in magic, and his comments on the parallels between the two fields were highly entertaining. For starters, he says: “There’s something deeply liberating about letting go of the reins that couple cause and effect, the X and Y axes.” Or as Stone’s guru, Wes James puts it: “Magic is not about selling your prowess. It’s about the effect you create – a profound violation of the natural laws of the universe.” There’s a trick in magic called the Ambitious Card trick that goes like this: Someone in the audience picks a card, signs it and inserts it into the middle of the deck. The magician then makes the card come to the top of the deck. I loved Stone’s analogy f...

When we went to vote today, there was no clear information as to where one was supposed to go. We went back and forth before finding our place, then stood in a queue for almost an hour to actually cast the vote. All of which made me wonder whether someday it might be possible to cast one’s vote via, what else, the Internet, to avoid all this hassle. The risks with that approach are obvious: what if voting accounts get hacked? Turns out Scott Adams had already responded to that risk by first acknowledging the inevitable: “There’s a 100% chance that (an electronic system)…will get hacked and all future elections will be rigged.” In India’s case, aren’t elections rigged in any case? So any objection to what I proposed is just opposition to a different form of rigging! Adams refers to the average (American) voters as “snake-dancing simpletons”. In India’s case, don’t most people vote their caste (or religion) or for whoever gave them a TV or liquor or a bicycle, if not hard ...

Perry Anderson calls it “a truly distinguishing feature of Indian democracy”: “In India alone, the poor form not just the overwhelming majority of the electorate, but vote in larger numbers than the better-off. Everywhere else, without exception, the ratio of electoral participation is the reverse.” But shouldn’t that be the case in all poor countries? I guess it isn’t so because most poor countries aren’t democracies! Kimuli Kasara and Pavithra Suryanarayan in their paper titled, “When do the Rich Vote Less than the Poor and Why? Explaining Turnout Inequality across the World” concluded that: “Using survey data from a wide range of developed and developing countries, we demonstrate that the rich turn out to vote at higher rates than the poor where the state has the bureaucratic capacity to tax the rich and where the political preferences of the rich and poor diverge.” I think the finding is only partially correct. If the paper’s conclusion was right, consider this: In ...

Heard of Amazon Dash ? It’s supposed to work like this: you are walking around the house, notice you are running out of cereal or whatever, point the Dash at the carton and bingo! The item just got added to your shopping list. Of course, some items don’t have bar codes or maybe you threw away the carton, in which case, you speak to the Dash to add the item. Right now, it’s a (very) limited edition gadget only available in 2 or 3 American cities. I remember reading this article that said: “Amazon doesn’t innovate by crafting new product categories, like Apple does. It also doesn’t make much money selling its hardware. Instead, it takes all the data it gathers as the world’s biggest online retailer, breaks down exactly what’s available and what consumers want, then produces a piece of hardware that it can sell cheaply in order to bring consumers into its ecosystem.” That’s Big Data in action! Google too has a huge amount of information about us and uses it to make money vi...

Dong Nguyen is the guy who wrote Flappy Birds , the mobile video game that became so popular that it was netting him $50,000 a day via in-game ads! Then, while Flappymania was still at its peak, Nguyen tweeted: “I am sorry 'Flappy Bird' users. 22 hours from now, I will take 'Flappy Bird' down. I cannot take this anymore.” Which obviously led to the question that Rolling Stone magazine asked : “Who was this dude, and WTF had he done?...How could someone who hit the online jackpot suddenly pull the plug?” His answer was that his new found, sudden fame was suffocating; the paparazzi were besieging his home; there were relentless accusations for having created an addictive game that ruined people’s lives; and the criticism of having copied the theme from an older Nintendo game. Rami Ismail who came up with another popular game, Ridiculous Fishing , felt guilty about the money : “Ever since I was a kid I’ve watched my mom wake up at six in the morning, wor...

When Microsoft released its Office suite for the iPad (and Android phones), the comments on the Net were scathing: - Ben Evans titled the event, “Hell freezes over”! After all, that's what Microsoft software on an Apple device sounds like. - Others said it was too little, too late. That the world has moved onto other editors on their phones and tablets and nobody even wants Office anymore. And it is fashionable to call Steve Ballmer, Microsoft's ex-CEO, an idiot. But when it came to coming up with a mobile OS, Microsoft didn't really miss the opportunity (Windows Mobile came up in 2000); rather, as Ben Thompson wrote , they just got “out-executed” by Apple first and then by Google. Then again, Ballmer is (in)famous for having laughed at the iPhone when it was launched saying a phone without a physical keyboard would never succeed. He could not have been more wrong about anything in his life. By 2012, as Forbes said : “One Apple product (iPhone), something th...

In his book, Zibaldone , Giacomo Leopardi describes how reason can be the enemy of greatness. The one line reason? “Few can be great unless they are governed by illusions.” The illusion often is (needs to be?) borderline delusional to achieve greatness. Can you actually land a man on the moon? Can you overthrow Newton's theories? You get the idea. Of course, there is a very thin line between that and arrogance. Reason can be a dampner too. If nobody else could do it, what makes you think you can? How could everyone, including so many smart guys, not have cracked it but somehow you can? These are sometimes humility driven reasons; but they are also perfectly logical questions that can kill the illusion. Vikram Bhat had this to say about the need for irrational optimism as a necessary condition for greatness : “A strict rationalist might start ten companies each with only a 20% probability of success but promising a 10x return on investment. But most of us can’t put o...

In his blog titled “On Demand History” , Scott Adams says: “I have a hypothesis that the past doesn't exist until an observation in the present makes it necessary. That seems the simplest form of a universe. And nature likes simplicity, right?” Sure enough, one of his readers pointed him to this New York Times article titled “Is the Universe a Simulation?” Edward Frenkel starts with the “unreasonable effectiveness of maths” in describing our universe and says: “One fanciful possibility is that we live in a computer simulation based on the laws of mathematics — not in what we commonly take to be the real world. According to this theory, some highly advanced computer programmer of the future has devised this simulation, and we are unknowingly part of it.” But can this ever be tested? Professor Beane and his colleagues have found that that physicists’ own simulations of the universe tend to generate “certain kinds of asymmetries”. And the universe too has its own set of a...