Viswanathan K's Thoughts

It’s that time of the year, when people ( not TV channels) look back at the year gone by and, well, have regrets. At the bad choices made. About the road not taken. On missed opportunities. Countries like the US, however, never have regrets about actions taken. Or so my friend said (note we’re talking about US, the country, not individuals). Sure, they do look back but only to learn what to do differently the next time. Or for political mudslinging. But neither of that is what we call “regret”. Thus, post-World War II, they didn’t impose a harsh Versailles style peace treaty on the losers. They might have changed their usage of nukes policy but they don’t have any regrets about Hiroshima or Nagasaki. That’s a done deal. Contrast that with how Germany continues to behave about its Nazi past. Sometimes (note I say sometimes, not always) not having regrets can be a good thing for individuals too. After all, most things cannot be undone, so what good comes from beating your...

A lot of those pics we see on our Facebook and Instagram feeds are what Thai photographer Chompoo Baritone calls “artistic-looking photos”. And yet it only pretends to create art, what Jonathan Jones blasted : “We are turning into a world of bad artists, cosily congratulating one another on every new slice of sheer kitsch.” Baritone says pretty much the same thing; that most pics just seek to show off trendy aspects of life “with the end goal of getting praise” (a phrase from Baritone’s Facebook album on the same topic). As Annalisa Merelli said : “Such nicely framed images, pretty filters, witty captions and hashtags break no boundaries, but rather strengthen a pre-defined taxonomy of what’s trendy.” So what’s the way to avoid that? Eugene Wei talks about the simplest tip to improve one’s photography : “Take photos where your subjects aren't looking directly into the lens.” Why not? And why would that make any difference to the shot? First, let’s understand th...

Facebook had teamed up with Reliance Communications to provide Free Basics, a Facebook initiative to provide free Internet access to certain web sites. That sounds like a good thing, right? Poor people, who might otherwise be unable to afford access Internet access would get, well, free access. So what did the Indian government find wrong that? The key part of contention is that Free Basics only applies to certain web sites , not the entire Internet. So what, you wonder. Isn’t some access for the poor better than no access? And that’s the argument that Facebook takes on the topic, not just in India but worldwide where they have similar initiatives. Ah, but that’s where things get tricky. There is an Internet principle called Net Neutrality: simply put, just like we don’t provide better roads for BMW owners as opposed to 2-wheelers, the Internet providers are supposed to provide the same connectivity speeds regardless of which web site is being connected to. The idea here is ...

So much is our addiction for Wi-fi that Alex Balk isn’t exaggerating too much when he writes : “The other day, I overheard someone say, ‘If trees gave off Wi-Fi they’d be everywhere. Too bad they only give off oxygen.’” Perhaps that’s what they should have decided in Paris during the climate change discussions: plant a tree and get free Wi-fi! Talking of Wi-fi reminded me of certain Russian cemeteries that will be offering free Wi-fi starting 2016. Wait a minute, wouldn’t you be mourning at the cemetery, not in a mood to post selfies? Ah, but these aren’t just any cemeteries: they host (is that the right word?) famous people’s graves. Like Boris Yeltsin. So the reasoning goes : “Since these particular cemeteries are steeped in history, they're now treated much "like open-air museums." Moscow's city-run funeral service spokesperson Lilya Lvovskaya told AFP that a lot of people "come and find themselves standing in front of a grave and want to know more...

There used to be a time when making money in the stock market only needed expertise in finance and looking at long term prospects of companies and industries. But in the last decade or so, the finance industry employed lots of mathematicians, quantum physicists, electrical engineers and of course, software programmers. Put together, that seemingly weird set of people help come up with AI (artificial intelligence) algorithms that buy and sell stocks at insane speeds and are in fact now the norm in the Western world! Other industries like journalism seem to be unable (or unwilling) to react to an age where “many people start their day reading news on a phone or tablet”, as Cindy Krum, chief executive at MobileMoxie puts it. Thomas Urbain wrote : “News organizations have to decide whether to go after digital readers on their own or to team up with tech firms. In these new apps, the publishers appear to have chosen the latter.” Apps like Apple News, Facebook’s Instant Articles an...

In his awesome book, The Story of Philosophy , Will Durant describes Plato’s concept of the “philosopher king”: 1)       First learn the Doctrine of Ideas, the “art of perceiving significant forms and causal sequences and ideal potentialities amid the welter and hazard of sensation”; 2)      Then follows “five years of training in the application of this principle to the behavior of men and the conduct of states”; 3)      Next come the practicals because “generalizations and abstractions are worthless except they be tested by this concrete world”; 4)      And finally, “shorn of scholastic vanity by the merciless friction of life, and armed now with all the wisdom that tradition and experience, culture and conflict”, he is ready to the ruler of the state. Now you know why Arvind Kejriwal has failed so miserably: all theory, no practical experience. I am guessing Plato would approve of Naren...

Barry Schwartz gave a great TED talk on the “paradox of choice”: beyond a point, the number of choices is overwhelming to many. Many thought that the problem was the lack of information on the choices. But that wasn’t the issue. After all, isn’t Eugene Wei right when he writes: “The internet has intensified this curse, no one can make a purchase decision without reading a bunch of reviews online, or Googling “what is the best [X]” and trying to sift through a bunch of spammy websites to find some authoritative-sounding article. After all, the internet has democratized information and put it at our fingertips, isn't it our own fault if we don't own the best SLR or printer or kitchen blender, or if we don't go to the best ramen house in Tokyo on our one visit there?” Then again, if all you get is only “raw” information with no recommendations, it creates a new problem; what Dan Ariely calls the “burden of knowledge” : “If a doctor tells you that you have to make a dec...

Finally. A few Western public figures are saying what many feel privately but dared not say publicly. Ex-Aussie PM Tony Abbott declared: “(The West) can't remain in denial about the massive problem within Islam…Cultures are not all equal. We should be ready to proclaim the clear superiority of our culture to one that justifies killing people in the name of God.” Now compare that with what Donald Trump said and it sounds almost tame! All he said was that the US stop allowing Muslim non - citizens into the US until lawmakers find a solution to this terrorism problem. Oh, in case you forgot, the US Congress already voted to disallow Syrian refugees from entering America! Scott Adams writes a series of blogs on Trump’s persuasive skills. While Adams doesn’t always agree with Trump, he is quite impressed with the techniques employed. For example, he says that sooner or later another ISIS attack will happen. At that point, Adams says : “You probably don’t know of any other...

I have these ongoing debates with my dad on Narendra Modi. And that got me thinking of the parallels with Donald Trump. No matter what they did or said, they are extremely popular during election campaigns. And even win. But how can that be? How can such things happen in countries with a free press, with freedom of speech? How can it happen in a growing country and a rich country? Howard Kurtz points out how aggravating Trump is to his detractors: “They struggle to understand why he pays no penalty when they blow the whistle. What they don’t quite grasp is that their attacks only make him stronger. This is not to let him off the hook for mistakes, just to recognize that Trump has completely rewritten the rule book, infuriating those who thought they enforced the rules.” Those lines would apply equally to how many feel about Modi. But why doesn’t all this “blowing the whistle” work? Matt Taibbi talks of an increasingly common approach these days: “(A common approach is...

Apple is loved; Google is admired more than it is loved; and Facebook? Though used almost as universally as Google, yet it is criticized by almost everyone. No matter what Facebook or Mark Zuckerburg do, people will find a way to find fault. They’ll hate it and still use the site… Take Safety Check, a Facebook feature that is activated in specific areas at specific times when disaster strikes. It allows users to flag themselves as safe after a disaster for friends and family to see. It was activated after the Nepal earthquake and after the Paris attacks and now during the Chennai flooding. But it didn’t activate the same after a recent terrorist attack in Beirut. So why Paris and why not Beirut? Two reasons , said Facebook VP, Alex Shultz: 1)       There was lot of activity on Facebook as events unfolded in Paris (“Facebook became a place where people were sharing information and looking to understand the condition of their loved ones. ”). 2)  ...

I remember reading Atul Gawande’s The Checklist Manifesto and coming away very surprised. Surely having checklists couldn’t possibly be making such a big difference in areas like surgery and aviation, I scoffed. Wouldn’t surgeons and pilots with years of experience have internalized such checks already: why would noting it down make such a big difference? And yet, such checklists have been found to be effective: studies listed in Gawande’s book proved just that. Ironically, it may be the very effectiveness of these checklists which is making airline accidents more and more bizarre: the Malaysian Airlines flight that zigzagged over the Indian Ocean before vanishing and the German pilot who deliberately flew a plane into the mountainside are prime exhibits. The easy and obvious causes have all been addressed already, argues Steve Coast ; which only leaves us with the weird scenarios! As Coast says, sometimes even the best intentioned rules end up creating new loopholes: “We ...

The Aamir Khan controversy should never have happened. I feel Shobhaa De nailed it when she wrote that it got triggered off simply “because of a private  miya-bibi  conversation that was made public by the hubby”. In any case, says De: “Aamir gets massacred for making a provocative comment. But wait a minute. Was it his comment? Nope. It was his wife's. Did he say he agreed with her? Not that we know…Aamir revealed it was Kiran who thought of moving to another country. Kiran. Not him.” Having said that, what exactly is this backlash against Aamir that some are so quick to condemn? Almost all the backlash has been statements and tweets by others who feel Aamir was exaggerating things beyond all reason; while others uninstalled the Snapdeal app that Aamir endorses from their smartphones. Clowns in AAP like Ashutosh are outraged by this perceived attempt “to put pressure on Snapdeal for its association with Aamir is a new twist in the tale. This is a part of larger ...

Many ask if it is fair to ask Muslims to condemn the terrorist acts of ISIS. No, says Dalia Mogahed : “Condoning the killing of civilians is, to me, about the most monstrous thing you can to do. And to be suspected of doing something so monstrous, simply because of your faith, seems very unfair....(But when white, male Christians carry out terrorist attacks in the US) we don't suspect other people who share their faith and ethnicity of condoning them. We assume that these things outrage them just as much as they do anyone else. And we have to afford this same assumption of innocence to Muslims.” But every other terrorist doesn’t cite his religion as the reason for his act. Therein lies the difference. Do the likes of Mogahed really not get that?! Now that New York, London, Barcelona and Paris have joined the list of India and Israel as victims of terrorism, it’s harder for most people to pretend not to see the common denominator everywhere. If the “non-terrorist majority”...

Many say that ISIS is not Islamic. Dalia Mogahed, for example, tries to “prove” that by suggesting a thought experiment : “If Islam did not exist … would a group like ISIS, with all the other realities as they are, exist today and do the same things?” She feels the answer to that hypothetical question is a “resounding yes”. In essence, she says: “We start at the violence we want to conduct, and we convince ourselves that this is the correct way to interpret the texts.” I am sure there are many out there who would agree with Mogahed’s reasoning. Next, consider why ISIS seems to have very few Indians. The reason cited in a report created by MI6, CIA and a few Arab countries is that ISIS considers Indians (and those from neighbouring countries) “inferior to Arab fighters” and less motivated; pays them less and uses them mostly as cannon fodder who are “forced to fight in the frontline”. Most people who agree with Mogahed’s line of thought are unlikely to believe the rea...

Capitalism is associated with what is famously called “creative destruction”: something new comes up and makes an industry that may have existed for decades or even centuries obsolete. Such things happened gradually in earlier times; but the Internet accelerated the speed of such changes; and now the smartphone makes it happen at warp speed. Surprisingly, creative destruction doesn’t always move money from an old way to a new one. Sometimes, the need remains and yet capitalism eliminates any way to make any money from it at all! Surprised? Isn’t capitalism all about finding ways to make money, not eliminate them? An example would help. Venture capitalists call the Free model of the Internet as “creating a zero billion dollar business”. Remember the encyclopedia Britannica? Wikipedia replaced it; was free; and now the encyclopedia industry cannot make money! Google Maps did the same thing to the map industry. The Internet/smartphone combo creates ways for even individual...

Many Indians look at Narendra Modi and say: sure, there’s enormous hype around the man, he gets rock star receptions every time he goes abroad, the corporate world loves him, he is a great orator and knows how to use social media extremely well, but where are the results ? That’s a fair question. Of course, the same question could be asked about the man known as the People’s Pope, the current Pope Francis. Extremely social media savvy, a man who talks frankly, sounds empathetic, and makes all the right noises about gays, abortion and the use of birth control. But as Gerald Posner wrote in God’s Bankers : “Francis’s words were carefully crafted. He never promised to make any substantive reforms or alter long-crafted doctrine.” Indeed, if you look carefully, no changes have been made to the church’s policies on any major (controversial) topic. So why are Modi and Pope Francis still so popular? Why does Modi get a rock star reception at Wembley Stadium right after the Bi...

Kashmir, New York, London and now Paris: the list of terrific places worth visiting made unsafe by that scourge called Islamic terrorism. As suspected, ISIS was indeed sneaking militants in the sea of refugees that Germany was forcing Europe to absorb. France can seal its borders all it likes; Angela Merkel will get them in anyway. ISIS should send Merkel a big Thank You. Remember the photo of the washed up kid who had drowned trying to cross into Europe? Almost every newspaper in the world splashed that pic at the time. Wonder why they don’t show blood stained photos of corpses from Paris? So it’s ok to publish pics of Muslim victims but not those of others? Some commentators on BBC and CNN ask if ISIS, being an ideology, can/should be fought with guns and bombs. I remember this awesome YouTube video where an American lady responded to just that question a year back by asking: Nazism too was an ideology, so was it wrong to have fought that with guns and weapons? George S...

In response to a recent blog on (even) Russia being better than Islam, my dad asked me why I disliked Russia. Was it because I associated it with communism? But wasn’t that incorrect, he continued: communism was what the former USSR was about; but surely not present day Russia? If that was all he’d asked, my answer would have been simple (and not worth a blog!): no, I don’t dislike present day Russia because of an error in associating it with communism. And that would have been that. But he also asked: if I dislike Russia because of its muscle flexing, then how is that any different from any other country? That’s when I realize a detailed answer is warranted. Ask yourself these questions: Is Russia a free country? How does it treat its own citizens? Does it allow freedom of speech and expression? Is dissent and criticism of the government tolerated? Is it democratic? Do common people have any say in who rules? Or to put it very simply, I ask myself this: would I like...

I never thought I’d ever write a blog praising anything about Russia’s rulers, but I’d forgotten about Islamic fundamentalism. And no, you can’t dismiss what I am going to describe as an instance of comparing apples and oranges. It is exactly the same scenario; so it’s an apples and apples comparison. Remember Charlie Hebdo, the French publication that published cartoons mocking Mohammed and was rewarded with an Islamist who came into their office and killed some of them? If nothing else, Hebdo proved they are an equal opportunity offender recently. Following the downing/crash of the Russian airliner over Egypt, they published this cartoon: If you don’t understand French, let the Guardian translate it for you: “One shows debris and body parts falling on Islamic State fighters, with the caption: “IS: Russian aviation is intensifying bombardments” –, a reference to its airstrikes in Syria.” Russians were outraged. Putin’s spokesman condemned the cartoon. That’s it. No eq...

This blog, while part of the “MU” (Mathematical Universe) series, is far more narrow in scope: it’s about humans and their behavioral patterns. And the maths connection to all that, of course. Have you heard of Bayes Theorem? Probably not. Here’s what the theorem does: let’s say you’ve assigned a certain probability to the occurrence of some event (let’s call it the “original event”). Later, you learn of some new piece of information related to the above. By how much should you adjust your probability of the original event based on this new information? That’s the question that Bayes Theorem answers, via equations, of course. (We need such equations because the adjustment we should be making is very unintuitive). Kareem Amin makes the amusing point that the maths of Bayes Theorem explains why it is pointless to argue with fundamentalists : “By definition, fundamentalists have an initial confidence in their beliefs (or their hypotheses about certain aspects of the world) tha...

The word “intellectual”, as used in India, never came across as a positive term to me. It never seemed to mean people who think, analyze, look at historical successes and failures of different approaches and the why’s behind different actions. It just seemed to mean a left-leaning world-view, not necessarily communist, but definitely socialist and never capitalist. Here is Julian Sanchez’s take as to why that might be the case world-wide: “One thing to bear in mind is that even informed and intelligent people do not typically arrive at their political views by an in-depth review of the evidence in each particular policy area. Most of us can only be really expert in one or two spheres, and in others must rely heavily on those who possess greater expertise and seem to share our basic values.” Or perhaps, as Sanchez says, intellectuals are people who genuinely believe in the power of words and advice as guidance to governments: “If the best solutions to social problems are ge...

In May, 1997, the IBM supercomputer Deep Blue defeated then world chess champion, Garry Kasparov, and it made headlines everywhere. Maybe you are thinking: Ok, so computers got very smart or somebody wrote a great chess program, so what? It was bound to happen at some point. Big deal. Except that’s not what had happened. Kasparov blamed the defeat on a single move by the computer. What was so special about that move? Yasser Seirawan described both the move and far more importantly, the impact it had on Kasparov: “It was an incredibly refined move, of defending while ahead to cut out any hint of countermoves, and it sent Garry into a tizzy.” In other words, that one move had messed with Kasparov’s mind . Ironically, that move with such devastating consequence was “the result of a bug in Deep Blue’s software” ! Even worse (at least from Kasparov’s perspective), one of the developers of the software said that “the machine was unable to select a move and simply picked one at ...

Just a few years back, we lived in simpler times when what Dan Moren wrote still held true: “Most automakers aren’t exactly consumed with a passion for developing software.” Not anymore. Today’s cars have a lot of software in them. Further, that software has started connecting to the Internet. Does all that open up cars to security/ virus/ hacking risks to cars? Absolutely, as these recent hacks proved. In two different cases, the hackers managed to shut down the engine and got the ability to open and start the car . Sound scary? So why connect cars to the internet at all? Are the risks worth the benefits? Russell Brandom tries to answer these questions : “Given the choice between two nearly identical minivans, buyers are apt to choose the one that can be unlocked from an app on your phone or remotely started on a cold day.” And customers now expect everything to be like (what else?) their precious smartphones! “Your phone might grow more useful every year, as you ins...

Recently, the grading of this answer sheet went viral on the Net.  The issue? For the question, what is “5 x 3”, the kid had solved it by calculating “5 + 5 + 5” but the teacher marked it Wrong indicating the correct way to solve it was by calculating “3 + 3 + 3 + 3 + 3”. What’s the difference, the Internet screamed. I agreed. In fact, I had written a blog on a similar topic a year back based on Richard Feynman’s comment in The Pleasure of Finding Things Out : “The whole idea was to find out what x was and it didn’t make any difference how you did it–there’s no such thing as, you know, you do it by arithmetic, you do it by algebra.” Of course, this being the Net, you can find a counter argument (if you choose to look). Sure enough, I found a good one by Brett Berry as to why the teacher may be right after all: “In the above problem 5 x 3 is equal to 5 + 5 + 5, but they’re not necessarily equivalent.” Huh? Another example from Berry makes the difference between...