Viswanathan K's Thoughts

Have you heard of the Fermi paradox? Here’s how Wikipedia describes it : “The apparent contradiction between high estimates of the probability of the existence of extraterrestrial civilization and humanity’s lack of contact with, or evidence for, such civilizations.” Or to put it in layman’s terms: Where are the ET’s? If you are interested, check out this article for detailed stats of why scientists believe that intelligent species should be abundant in the universe, even if we assume that life is very, very rare. I found a couple of articles that point out that while the universe is the domain of physics, the resolution to the Fermi paradox may lie in biology! But first, is it really necessary that a sufficiently advanced species would always explore the universe and/or want to “colonize new habitats”? As Alan Jacobs asks is it necessary that: “Superior alien civilizations will be to us as Victorian explorers were to the tribes of Darkest Africa. Higher intellige...

Most of my friends will talk about their kids being extremely comfortable with smartphones and iPads. Few of us are worried about that though; at most, we are irritated that kids monopolize those gadgets to the extent that we don’t get to use them! Apart from the obvious benefit of letting kids play with gadgets (the parents get some time off), does Ben Popper’s argument below even make giving the gadgets to kids a good thing? “We’re born with about 2,500 synapses per neuron, but by age three we’ll have around 15,000. From that point the number of neural connections actually begins to decrease...For me, that’s an argument in favor of giving my son access to technology at an early age. If the paradigm for his budding mind is swiping through apps and playing interactive games, he will be geared to build great digital tools. Why would I emphasize spending time with books when they will likely be dusty artifacts by the time he’s a teenager, relics of another age like the telegraph...

As Iraq continues to fall into the hands of the group called Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIS), in the US, one set blames it on the original Bush-Blair invasion while the other set blames it on the subsequent withdrawal of US troops. Regardless of their internal politics, the US cannot and will not walk away from this entirely because of, duh, the oil. So with hindsight, was Saddam a necessary evil who, if nothing else, held the country together? Even Feisal Istrabadi, Iraq’s deputy ambassador to the United Nations from 2004-2007, who bristles at the question seems to agree that things have spun totally out of control after Saddam’s fall: “Let me first address the first part of your remark about, ‘well, [Saddam] may have been unpleasant, but …’ This is a man who is guilty of the deaths of no less than one million Iraqis over a period of 35 years. So there is no ‘he may have been a brutal tyrant’ … there is no ‘but’ after that, there’s no comma after that phrase. It’s ...

The company so many love to hate, Facebook, recently announced that it would ignore the Do-not-track setting on your browser . It’s easy to see why Facebook would do something that could potentially invite a lot of ire: More tracking -> more knowledge about you -> more relevant ads -> more money from advertisers. Facebook justified the move by pointing out that “currently there is no industry consensus” on this topic (Twitter and Pinterest honor the setting; while Google and Yahoo do not). To which John Gruber retorted : ““Google does it” is not exactly a badge of honor, privacy-wise.” It sounded strange to me when Facebook simultaneously said that it will honor the settings to limit ad tracking on iOS and Android devices. Until Gruber pointed out that Facebook is just making a virtue out of necessity: “On iOS, they have no choice. Apple’s privacy controls are in the hands of the user, not the developer or advertiser. That’s why the whole “Do Not Track” thing for...

Why are higher ups so grossly overpaid? Pretty much everyone agrees that they are (even the higher ups feel the even more higher ups are overpaid!); but why are things that way? Tim Harford analyzed just that question in his book, The Logic of Life . His answer is both interesting and depressing. The higher up you go, luck plays an increasingly important role in the outcome of your work. The General Manager may allocate funds for a new product: whether or not it succeeds is a function of so many uncontrollable variables. Like a recession. Or the best brains quitting halfway into the project. Or a new game changer launched by a competitor. You get the idea. As luck’s role increases, the career risk for the guy higher up increases. When Microsoft’s tablets bombed, the engineers who worked on it will easily get other jobs. But the CEO (is rumoured to have) lost his job (it cost $900 million). The CEO’s job may be an extreme example, but the principle applies for middle and upper...

Nicholas Carr wrote this very sarcastic blog (and yet not too far from reality) on the “central challenge of modern parenting”: how do you raise a kid who is well adjusted to the realtime environment? Note that realtime is just a subset of the Internet: it refers only to those parts of the digital world in which we “live, work, love, and compete for the small bits of attention that, in the aggregate, define the success, or failure, of our days”. In other words, the status updates on sites/apps like Facebook, Twitter and WhatsApp. As Carr says: “If maladapted to realtime existence, these parents understand, their progeny will end up socially ostracized, with few friends and even fewer followers.” An agitated young mother wrote to Carr asking: “Can we even be said to be alive if our status updates go unread?” Time for an update to Descartes famous proof of existence! Carr points out that a newborn, in any case, is “immersed entirely in the “stream” of realtime alerts...

I read this post by a maths school teacher, Brooke Powers titled “Who or What Broke My Kids?” . After teaching the basics of probability, she went into a school book prescribed exercise where probabilities were expressed as decimals, fractions, percentages and words (“likely”, “improbable”) and the students had to sort them in ascending order of probability. So what happened? “It turned into a ten minute nightmare where I was asked no less than 52 times if their answers were “right”.” And why did that happen? “My students truly believe for some reason that math is about combining whatever numbers you can in whatever method that seems about right to get one “answer” and then call it a day…Today they were given a task with no real correct answer and they lost it.” Highly irritated, Powers called for a break: “We talked about the need for them to stop worrying about if I think their answer is right and to start worrying about whether or not they thought their answer was righ...

In response to my blog on the three generations of the Internet , my dad had commented: “Are we all stuffing ourselves with data and information, with very little time and inclination left for sharpening our innate, marvelous tool that evolution has led us to - the ability for digging meaning out of abundant data?...Will we have humankind reduced its ability to mind's ability for keen insights, failing to appropriately sharpening our grand mind potential?” Such questions have been asked and debated for years (ironically) on the Internet! Is correlation good enough? For example, Big Data would allow algorithms to tell you where the planet would be without ever discovering Kepler’s laws of planetary motion; but is that the same as knowledge? On the other hand, can laws only be found for the inanimate universe? And is Big Data the (only) way to go when it comes to predicting humans? Is George Box’s statement (“All models are wrong, but some are useful.” ) so true for humans th...

Some talk about the Internet as being as revolutionary as electricity. Whether or not you agree with that, the Internet evolves at a speed unheard of for something, er, that revolutionary. You get used to how it works; next thing you know, it’s evolved. Or mutated, depending on your point of view. John Herrmann calls what we have now as the third Internet. Though he doesn’t describe the three explicitly, this is what I thought he meant: 1)       First one, aka Before Google: You had to know the name of the site to go to because, well, search engines sucked. 2)      Second one, the Google Era: nobody knew any site, they just searched for whatever they wanted and Google pointed them to the articles to look at. 3)      Third one, the smartphone/app version. The third one is what Hermmann does talk about in detail . Since typing is (still) not exactly convenient on the phone, most people surf by clicking links ...

My soon-to-be-3 started school yesterday. She had been to play school for a year, but one never knows how a kid will react, so we weren’t sure what was going to happen. To our relief, she didn’t cry at all. In fact, the teacher told my wife that this one even told a few other kids who were crying, “Don’t cry. Mamma’s waiting outside”! A line she learnt from her play school days, no doubt. I was reminded of what my cousin’s wife said about kids starting at school: “They’ve just entered a very lo..ooong tunnel, one they will exit only when they are 18.” Of course, most kids grow to hate school. And teachers. And the education system. And soon enough they can fully relate to Pink Floyd’s lines: “We don't need no education. We don’t need no thought control… Hey! Teachers! Leave them kids alone! ” And pretty soon they feel that they are not being treated as individuals, and the schooling system’s belief seems to be: “All in all you're just another brick in the wal...

Ever since the financial crisis of 2008 broke out, bankers became the hated lot who (nearly) brought the system down with their greed. But even more than their greed, the point that gets most people riled up is the fact that they had no skin in the game. When things were doing well, they got their commissions and bonuses; but when things went horribly wrong, the losses went to the suckers who bought their products (And don’t even get people started on the bailouts that followed). As Alan Shore said in Boston Legal , the common feeling is: “If Shakespeare were alive today he might say, “First thing. Let’s kill all the bankers.” The knee jerk reaction might be to go medieval with the rule book, a la Hammurabi’s Code: “If a builder builds a house for a man and does not make its construction firm, and the house which he has built collapses and causes the death of the owner of the house, that builder shall be put to death.” But that would be like turning the clock back a fe...