Viswanathan K's Thoughts

Apple and Google. As Paul Nickinson wrote in his blog : “Apple makes a kick-ass product. Google makes killer services.” Combine the two and you get a “phenomenal Google experience on the iPhone”, as Rene Ritchie put it . And yet Apple keeps sniping at Google, especially on the data privacy front. Like the time when Apple’s CEO, Tim Cook wrote in a public letter : “We sell great products. We don’t build a profile based on your email content or web browsing habits to sell to advertisers…We don’t read your email or your messages to get information to market to you.” To which Ben Thompson says sarcastically : “You can almost hear it now: How admirable! Golly gee, Apple is such a better company than those hypocritical evil-doers at Google! Why can’t everyone treat customers so well? Apple good. Google bad. Facebook worse.” Thompson then goes on to point out: “User information of this type isn’t important to Apple’s business model, so they “choose not to retain it.” The...

You can stay on the Internet all day. The ubiquitous smartphone and tablet made it even more so. Of course, those two “culprits” also result in people playing games or watching videos all the time. Since the activities mentioned last have nothing to do with the Internet (except if you are streaming movies), there’s a different term for that too: screen addiction. Except that both terms (Internet addiction and screen addiction) always felt so wrong to me. But I couldn’t put my finger on why , until I read this article by Alan Jacobs . Citing 4 kids who spend all day playing World of Warcraft, being on Facebook, watching porn, and (gasp) learning to program using their devices, he says: “They're addicted to certain experiences that they are getting access to via their computers. That is not at all the same thing…Now, some might reply that this is a frivolous response, that such language is an easily-understood shorthand. But I would counter that it's a highly misleading s...

One aspect of Hinduism that I’ve always found questionable is the belief that humans are the pinnacle of evolution (in the climb towards God, not in the Darwinian sense). Here are my problems with that: How does one compare different species? In what way can someone say that a cat is more (or less) “evolved” than an octopus? But wait a minute. Doesn’t science do something similar, in ranking some animals as “smarter” than others? Like chimps and dolphins? Personally, I don’t agree those rankings mean anything either. After all, as Jessica Love pointed out in “Are You Smarter than My Cat?” : “A limiting factor for tool use—the smoking gun of animal intelligence—may well be physical dexterity: the dumb, lucky ability to clamp or poke or push things around with some precision.” Going a step further, Love points out that questions have been raised about applying the same IQ tests across different human cultures. Those questions resulted in “culturally neutral” tests to be devis...

As maths became the only way to talk about physics, it led to the rise of theoretical physics. After all, you could work out the maths and its implications in your armchair without doing any experiments yourself! As Walter Isaacson wrote in his book titled Einstein : “(Theoretical physics) pioneer practitioners – such as Max Planck, Hendrik Loretz and Lutwig Boltzmann - combined physics with math to suggest paths where experimentalists had yet to tread.” But of course, physics needs the experimentalists too. As Mark Jackson wrote : “Without theorists, experimentalists would not have anything to test. Without experimentalists, theorists would not have anything to explain.” Yet over the last century or so, all the rock stars of the physics world are theoretical ones, from Albert Einstein to Heisenberg and Schrodinger to Feynman to Stephen Hawking. Such is that dominance that Richard Feynman once remarked: “Theoretical physics is a human endeavour, one of the higher developm...

Ceridwen Dovey wrote an article titled “Can Reading Make You Happier?” . It all started off because she was gifted a “remote session with a bibliotherapist”. Biblio-what? “Bibliotherapy is a very broad term for the ancient practice of encouraging reading for therapeutic effect.” She’s not kidding: “Today, bibliotherapy takes many different forms, from literature courses run for prison inmates to reading circles for elderly people suffering from dementia.” Some studies claim reading increases empathy, thus making you a better person. Other studies claim that: “Reading has been shown to put our brains into a pleasurable trance-like state, similar to meditation, and it brings the same health benefits of deep relaxation and inner calm. Regular readers sleep better, have lower stress levels, higher self-esteem, and lower rates of depression than non-readers.” Even if you feel that calling books therapeutic is going too far, you’d find it hard to see how a kid reading books i...

The new channels analyzed to death the Modi government’s performance over the last year. Funnily, a couple of outcomes of the current government’s policies came to light only after that media phase had ended! Love him or hate him, Modi knows to switch his interfaces based on context. As the political campaigner, he takes shots at the likes of Mamata Banerjee. But as Prime Minister of India, he can work with her as CM of West Bengal! Publically. Like when he ratified the recent Land Boundary Agreement with Bangladesh at Dhaka with Mamata also present. The issue has been hanging since 1974! What’s in it for India? GVC Naidu wrote an excellent article explaining the benefits: 1)       The deal solves 4,000 km of land border problem. 2)      50,000 people thus move from a stateless situation to falling on one side. 3)      Indian cargo ships can now use Chittagong and Mongla ports in Bangladesh, which drastica...

Seen those “Send Error Report” dialogs that pops up when an application crashes on your computer? Like Lidia Jean Kott, have you wondered if there is any point in sending the report ? “Could there be someone, somewhere, blurry-eyed, scrolling through thousands of crashes a day?” Guess what, there are people doing exactly that. At least at Microsoft! That’s what Kott found out by talking to Kirk Glerum, the “father of Windows Error Reporting”. When the feature was introduced with Windows XP in 2001, the term Big Data had not yet entered everyone’s lingo. As Eric LeVine, the former Group Program Manager for Windows Error Reporting, put it: “In that time, [Windows Error Reporting] was totally novel and audacious.” Were such reports helpful? “LeVine says that in its first three years the feature wiped out ninety-five percent of crashes in Office Products.” So what information do such reports send out from your computer? “After a program crashes, the operating system g...

Most people never delete any photos from their phone. Ever. I’ve never been able to understand that: how do these people hope to find anything good in that dump later? Google’s Bradley Horowitz doesn’t exaggerate when he says: “You almost need a second vacation to go through the pictures of the safari on your first vacation.” Enter Google Photos . It just got launched and the reviews sound great. Remember when Gmail was launched, it caused a wave because it offered 1 GB of storage at a time when the other mail services offered a few megabytes! Déjà vu: Google Photos offers unlimited photo and video storage. The other reason Gmail was a game changer was because of what Google is synonymous with: search. Gmail let you search through your mails effortlessly. Google Photos claims to do something similar, with photos! Mario Aguilar is blown over : “It’s crazy how well this works. Creepy even…where Photos really wrecks your brain is when you start searching for random things in...

The ongoing FIFA scandal broke out due to a tax evasion investigation in the US about a man, Chuck Blazer, who just happened to be a FIFA official. A long and interesting trail followed. Richard Weber, head of the US tax agency summarizes it thus: “One thing led to another, led to another and another.” By the end, there were so many FIFA officials in the crosshairs of that tax evasion + organized crime investigation that the US decided the easiest way to arrest so many foreign officials at one shot (instead of asking a zillion different countries to extradite a couple of people each) was to wait for the FIFA elections to happen: all the eggs would be in one basket at that time! The “one thing led to another, led to another and another” comment reminded me of something Alan Jacobs wrote . He cited one of the answers to the question, “Which Contemporary Habits Will Be Most Unthinkable 100 Years From Now?”: “ Sadness . Drug companies will have developed an over-the-counter, s...

I am reading this book titled “What If?” by Randall Munroe. It’s a book on “serious, scientific answers” to “weird, hypothetical questions”. Munroe also writes a webcomic called xkcd that’s very popular among the kind of people who usually read the above mentioned book: geeks, science fans and engineers! (Personally, I believe anyone can learn from such informative yet entertaining books, but that’s a different topic…) Talking of his webcomic made me think of how comics require you to be able to write as well as to draw. Or does it? Let’s look at some popular comics over the ages to check the validity of that hypothesis (I know, I know: I am in that “What If?” frame of mind when I use words like “validity” and “hypothesis”!) Let’s evaluate in chronological order. The Asterix comics were done by a team: one guy wrote; the other drew. Awesome outcome, wasn’t it? Then there is the Tintin series: the same guy did everything. The drawings are good, the stories even better: ...

Jimmy Wales, founder of Wikipedia, had wanted it to be the “sum of all human knowledge” . Instead, it’s turned out to be the sum of all male knowledge : 91% of the people who edit Wikipedia are men! This made no sense: anyone can edit Wikipedia, so why would the numbers be so skewed? Turns out that it’s related to the fact that far more men than women write software! But wait, that doesn’t make sense either. After all, software is a very young industry and requires brain, not brawn, and involves AC work environments, not factories or oil rigs, so shouldn’t it be more gender balanced? And yet, some time back, when all the major tech companies in the US released numbers on their (lack of) gender diversity , the male employee percentages were staggering. Google, Apple, Twitter and Facebook all had 70% males; Yahoo had 62%; and eBay had 58%. But wait, it gets worse: for each of these companies, the “tech” jobs were even more skewed in male representation! Ok, but what’s that...