Viswanathan K's Thoughts

On Christmas day, Neil deGrasse Tyson, the popular astrophysicist, tweeted birthday wishes to Isaac Newton: “On this day long ago, a child was born who, by age 30, would transform the world. Happy Birthday Isaac Newton b. Dec 25, 1642” It became his most popular tweet…and also the most contested one. Big surprise! The objections were on two grounds: 1)       The obvious set who felt he was taking a shot at baby Jesus; 2)      Ancient calendars are so misaligned with present day ones that the dates wouldn’t match at all. Tyson responded to the backlash. The short version (aka another tweet): “Imagine a world in which we are all enlightened by objective truths rather than offended by them.” The longer version of his response came on, where else, Facebook ! I loved this line from his response: “If a person actually wanted to express anti-Christian sentiment, my guess is that alerting people of Isaac Newton’s birthday woul...

“Confusion about culture was just part of the culture this year.” -         -   Joshua Rothman Guess which word Merriam-Webster declared as 2014 Word of the Year? The surprising answer: “culture”! Why that word? Joshua Rothman explains : “The word “culture,” they explain, was simply the word that saw the biggest spike in look-ups on their Web site.” Raymond Williams, Rothman points out, talks of 3 divergent meanings of the term: 1)       “There’s culture as a process of individual enrichment”; 2)      “Culture as a group’s “particular way of life”” (e.g. French culture); and 3)      “Culture as an activity, pursued by means of the museums, concerts, books, and movies that might be encouraged by a Ministry of Culture”. Worse, says Williams, these meanings often compete with each other. Ok, so the word has multiple, divergent meanings. But why the sharp spike in lookups on the...

My 3 year old loves dinos. So do most kids and many adults. That’s why so many movies have them from the Jurassic Park trilogy (with part four in the offing) to Godzilla . Hell, the remake of King Kong had a scene where the eponymous gorilla/ape/whatever fights, who else, dinos on the island! And all this interest then translates into shows on Discovery and National Geographic that are watched by kids and adults alike. The animation is so real that the younger kids actually believe that dinos still exist. My 3 year old is one of them. Ask where we can find dinos and she’ll say, “Jurassic Park”. I’m guessing that in her head that’s like a zoo for dinos! Way back in 1897, an 8 year old girl named Virginia O’Hanlon was crushed to learn from her friends that Santa was imaginary. So she wrote to the New York Sun asking “Is there a Santa Claus?” The Sun’s editorial writer Francis Pharcellus Church penned the response that went on to make history! Huh? That’s because Church ...

The Sony hack is proving to be the most interesting story of the year, not just because of the original event (which is scary because of how much the hackers got access to) but also due to all its fallouts. Here’s a quick summary of how it all started: “A hacker group that identifies as the Guardians of Peace (GOP) broke into the internal network at Sony Pictures (a US based subsidiary of the Japan-based parent company, Sony) and stole everything they could find. Everything . The GOP claims to have 100TB of data of emails, movies, passwords, payroll info, what have you.” Next, the group started leaking some of the more damning emails written by Sony executives. In one of those mails, Sony Picture’s co-chairman, Amy Pascal, had made multiple (sort of, kind of) racist remarks about Obama. Salaries too were exposed: turns out Sony’s top boss makes less than several people below him! Another email showed a Hollywood producer of the Denzel Washington starrer The Equalizer wr...

One of the students of an English professor, Alan Jacobs, once asked him: “You mean that the stuff we learned last semester applies in this course, too?” Isn’t that exactly how most of us went through college, semester by semester, never feeling there was any connection between any two things, never seeing any big picture to all the courses? Even if we set aside a 3 or 4 years course as too long and having way too much content to come together, can individual college courses at least be taught better? Harvard art history professor, Jennifer L. Roberts, thinks this is one way to go about it : “During the past few years, I have begun to feel that I need to take a more active role in shaping the temporal experiences of the students in my courses; that in the process of designing a syllabus I need not only to select readings, choose topics, and organize the sequence of material, but also to engineer, in a conscientious and explicit way, the pace and tempo of the lear...

After graduating from college, when I joined the IT sector, it came as a culture shock to find that everyone called everyone else by first name. No Sir’s or M’am’s. Not only that, they disliked it if you didn’t do the same! Contrast that with how school and college life had been. It took me a while to get why that was the practice: can you really disagree with someone or have a no holds barred debate with someone you have to address as Sir or M’am? (Sir, you missed that aspect altogether. M’am, your plan didn’t have any buffers at all.) Now I notice that the same habit is being inculcated in many kids. Many neighbours ask kids to call them by name, not as Uncle or Aunty. Of course, the reasons there are entirely different: being called Uncle and Aunty makes them feel so old! When I was telling this to one of my friends at work, he said the problem with kids being that way is that they may get into the habit of calling all elders by name, including the ones who don’t subs...

It’s that time of the year when everyone publishes Top 10 or Top 25 kind of lists. It’s no different with book lists “coming soon to a friend’s Facebook wall near you ”, as Michelle Dean puts it . In case of book lists, Dean is horrified to see the number of books being mentioned: NPR had 250, the New York Times Book Review had 100! As Dean says: “The hugeness of these lists betrays something: their uselessness. ” Who even scrolls past the Top 25 (at most), she asks? And so: “It feels like the work of marketers, not of people who care about identifying good books. ” I agree with Dean but wonder, how many of us really read books on topics outside our normal area of interest anyways? Well ok, even if you’re the exception, I’m betting that is still a very tiny fraction of what you read. In the age of Amazon and Goodreads, who even looks up these lists anyway? Aren’t we far more likely to read the “People who bought/liked this book also bought/read…” recommendations sin...

Rumaan Alam talks about what he terms the “ firehose of certainty ”: “Everyone on Twitter—everyone on the Internet—seems so damn certain.” That led him to wonder: “Is deciding what you like an instinct, a sense that arrives as swiftly as my autoimmune response to cat dander? Or is it the result of reasoned consideration, the way wine tasters swish pinot noir around in their mouths, spit it out, and reach for complex metaphors about chocolate and tobacco?” Alam himself can’t always make up his mind. That characteristic sticks out like a sore thumb on the Internet: “I am surrounded by confidence and all I feel is ambivalence. I am so cowed by how everyone else seems to know their own mind that it’s hard for me to exercise my own.” I think Alam need not worry. After all, isn’t Arthur Schopenhauer right when he wrote this on why just reading isn’t enough unless one reflects as well: “When we read, another person thinks for us: we merely repeat his mental process. It is th...

When Mahindra started its Rise challenge, my dad was interested in submitting his idea to the contest. He couldn’t seem to find the site to submit and when I googled it, my feeling was that the contest was not about awarding the best idea(s). Rather it felt to me like the winner of the contest would be funded by Mahindra to execute his idea. Scott Adams, author of Dilbert, once said : “There's a general misconception that ideas have some sort of market value, if only one can find a buyer. Sadly, that is not the case. Everyone reading this blog is full of great ideas. But usually we don't have the time, talent, resources, or risk tolerance to pursue them.” Before you object, Adams accepts that patents are the exception. But then again, all ideas aren’t patentable, are they? So most of the time, Adams is right. So is there no way for someone (like my dad, maybe) who has an idea but doesn’t have the time/inclination/money/desire to execute the idea to still get his...

Lisa Rosenbaum wrote in the New Yorker about the unintended (and obviously unexpected) consequence of putting limits on the length of shifts for resident doctors at hospitals. The intent was obvious: fewer hours would mean fewer sleep deprived residents, which would then translate into better decisions, fewer errors and better quality of care. But what really happened? “The number of times a patient was passed from one doctor to another increased; residents started to focus on the clock; learning opportunities decreased; and quality of care, despite intentions, decreased.” In Antifragile , Nassim Taleb described the term, “iatrogenics”: “In the case of tonsillectomies, the harm to the children undergoing unnecessary treatment is coupled with the trumpeted gain for some others. The name for such net loss, the (usually bitten or delayed) damage from treatment in excess of the benefits, is iatrogenics, literally, “caused by the healer,” intros being a healer in Greek.” Of c...

Remember James Watson? One half of the duo who discovered the famous double helix structure of the DNA molecule? Well, the scientist recently announced that he plans to sell his Nobel prize medal . Why? Is he disenchanted with the Nobel or prizes in general? Nope. He says that following accusations of racism in 2007, “no one really wants to admit I exist”. And so his income has fallen (because, you know, fewer talks and guest appearances). Oh, the medal just sold for $4.75 million, but that’s not what this blog is about. Adam Rutherford writes a scathing description of what he thinks is the real problem here, and not just about Watson. He starts off with the reaction one might have on hearing of Watson’s decision: “This sounds awful: an 86-year-old hero ostracised for his views, shooed from public life by the people who walk in his scientific shadow. ” But what exactly did Watson say to invoke the racism charges? He said that while people may want to believe that all races a...