Viswanathan K's Thoughts

A lake in Turkey went biblical: it turned blood red. But fear not, says Danny Gallagher , it happens every summer! “The apocalypse isn't coming to fruition…(Toz Golu lake) turns bright red due to an interesting anomaly that occurs every summer.” (In case you’re curious, it happens because as the lake dries up in summers, the salt level increases; the rising salt level kills off the plankton that eat the algae; and the uncontrolled algae have this color changing ability). Nature red in tooth and claw, said Lord Tennyson. Just how red it can be was exemplified by a recent discovery of how the boa constrictor (a snake) kills its prey. It was thought that they squeeze the life out of their prey (literally), i.e., they squeeze and squeeze until the prey suffocates. Turns out the modus operandi is even more lethal : “Death by suffocation is nightmarish enough, but boa constrictors do something even more sinister: They cut off your blood supply…Many animals (humans included) ...

Todd Humphreys gave this TED talk where he said that something happened on May 2 nd , 2000 that changed the world dramatically. No, not overnight; but within a decade as smartphones took over the world. So what was that event? “On that morning, U.S. President Bill Clinton ordered that a special switch be thrown in the orbiting satellites of the Global Positioning System. Instantaneously, every civilian GPS receiver around the globe went from errors the size of a football field to errors the size of a small room.” Pretty soon, GPS accuracy got even better: “With more base stations, more ground stations, better receivers and better algorithms, GPS can now not only tell you what street you are on, but what part of the street.” Fast forward to present day when GPS and Big Data come together. Recently, Google launched a new feature called Your Timeline . If you use Google Maps, the feature lets you “view the places you’ve been on a given day, month or year”. O...

This blog is based on a mathematical equation that took down a multi-billion dollar industry. But fear not, I won’t bore you with the equation. But I still hope to help explain how that equation did that. Sound impossible? But hey, didn’t Richard Feynman introduce his QED theory to the public by saying: “It is my task to convince you not to turn away because you don’t understand it.” So, at the risk of sounding (very) arrogant, I’ll attempt what Feynman said. The equation in question is called the Fourier transform. Jamie Condliffe wrote this awesome article explaining it. His one line non-technical description of it: “Complicated signals could be represented by simply adding up a series of far simpler ones.” That’s it. That’s all the maths we need to know for this blog! Really. That maths is the heart of the MP3 format used for music files in the digital age. Simply put, MP3 applies the Fourier transform on a music file to break the “complicated signal” (aka the son...

In November, 2013, Aileen Lee  coined the term “Unicorn” to describe a certain type of company: “U.S.-based software companies started since 2003 and valued at over $1 billion by public or private market investors.” By that definition, Lee called Facebook the super-Unicorn! Today, just a year and a half after the term was coined, Fortune says we live in the “Age of the Unicorns” ! And the top companies on that list aren’t even all American anymore: Xiaomi, the Chinese smartphone manufacturer, tops the list and India’s Flipkart is number 7 with a valuation of $11 billion. At number 2 on the list is Uber ($41 billion), the ride sharing company that was in the news when one of its drivers raped a passenger in Delhi. What does “ride sharing” even mean? Here’s what it means: 1)       When someone wants to go somewhere, they ask for a ride via the Uber app on their phone; 2)      Uber finds a driver (someone who installed t...

In the US, you can’t be President for more than two terms. And so, towards the end of the second term, every US President starts focusing on his “legacy”, or what posterity will remember him for (if at all). Thus, they try and do something grand, and something visible globally. Obama, of course, won the Nobel Peace Prize right after becoming President simply because for not being George W. Bush. Obama knew how ridiculous that prize was and so rightly doesn’t that count that as his legacy. Instead, his attempt at leaving a legacy seems to be to change the US’s equation with its long term enemies. First Cuba, and now Iran. And in Iran’s case, if he has indeed succeeded in setting a system in place to prevent them from going nuclear, that would be a huge bonus (at least from an American perspective). Such attempts at creating a legacy makes sense for a US President. After all, it’s not like he will do much else after his second term, right? Except if he is Jimmy Carter. Carter ...

Everybody loves to preach. People who live in glass houses love to throw stones at others. Either that, or the term “moral hazard” is impossibly hard to live up to in the world of finance. Wait, moral what? Put simply, it means if you take a chance with money, it may not pay off. You might lose money, you should know that and so don’t start crying and bawling if things don’t work. Steve Waldman tears into the EU for behaving as if they’d never heard of the concept when dealing with Greece: “Lending to a corrupt, client list Greek state that squanders resources on activities unlikely to yield growth from which the debt could be serviced? That is precisely, exactly, what the term “moral hazard” exists to discourage. You did that. Yes, the Greek state was an unworthy and sometimes unscrupulous debtor. Newsflash: The world is full of unworthy and unscrupulous entities willing to take your money and call the transaction a “loan”. It always will be.” Waldman’s right. But the sam...

Some months back, two sets of refugees who were not exactly being welcomed where they landed (or tried to land) was making headlines. Europe started turning its back on the Libyans who were trying to get to Europe to flee poverty or violence in their own countries. Remember that Europe, based on its history of turning its back on the Jews during World War II, has a policy that every refugee has the right to apply for asylum. But that collapses when there is a stampede (over 170,000 refugees in Italy alone in 2014), which is what has been happening over the last year or so. Who will foot the bill? How many should each country absorb? What if those migrants don’t integrate? What about the resentment they create domestically when jobs are so few already? The other set were the Rohingyas, a Muslim minority fleeing Burma/Myanmar due to violence and lack of even the most basic rights. Around 140,000 have fled since 2012. Malaysia and Indonesia turned their backs on the refugees saying ...

My mom has frequently wondered if the non-science/maths jobs would start paying more in today’s economy as the nature and number of jobs increases. But with “software eating the world” (see my earlier blog ), I feel the opposite will happen: the demand for software knowledge will increase and the software industry will continue to disrupt most other parts of the economy. And by extension, jobs in those parts of the economy. Now, don’t get me wrong: software development rarely needs great science or maths knowledge, but companies still hire only engineers as software developers. (My guess as to why that happens is that companies feel that if you’re an engineer, you must have had the discipline to slog your way through school and college; and discipline and hard-work are welcome in all industries). Allen Pike writes that writing software used to be a job, not an art: “Programming hasn’t traditionally been thought of as a medium of creative expression…Software has historicall...

Thomas Piketty became a very famous economist with his book, Capital . You can imagine how popular that book was by the fact he even gave a TED talk on it. Recently he gave an interview on the German led demand that the Greeks must pay their debts. What’s wrong about that, I wondered. Piketty’s answer: “Germany is really the single best example of a country that, throughout its history, has never repaid its external debt. Neither after the First nor the Second World War. However, it has frequently made other nations pay up, such as after the Franco-Prussian War of 1870, when it demanded massive reparations from France and indeed received them…The history of public debt is full of irony. It rarely follows our ideas of order and justice.” Wait a minute: aren’t we taught that the punitive Treaty of Versailles on Germany was one of the root causes of the Second World War? Piketty points out that the Germans just stopped paying after a point! And after the Second World War ended,...

Marc Andreessen famously said that “software is eating the world” . By that, he meant: “We are in the middle of a dramatic and broad technological and economic shift in which software companies are poised to take over large swathes of the economy.” Apart from the impact on journalism and what Google did to the map industry, he cites streaming video (like Netflix) wiping out the video rental industry; online music stores wiping out traditional music stores; digital photography; and companies like Skype hitting telecom companies. And then there’s Amazon. It was selling “virtually everything online” thus impacting retail stores; and with the Kindle: “Now even the books themselves are software.” Over time, Amazon has continued to transform other parts of the book world (Whether for better or for worse, time will tell). First, it launched the Kindle Single, or “Compelling Ideas Expressed At Their Natural Length” as Amazon likes to describe it. What does that even mean, you ask...

Online, people rate everything, from restaurants to movies to books. Given how freely we rate our purchases and experiences, would it feel odd to be the one getting rated? To be the ratee, not the rater? Uber, the ride sharing app (company), allows for just that! The person getting the ride rates the driver via Uber’s app. But also, as Adam Greenfield says : “What riders are not told by Uber — though, in this age of ubiquitous peer-to- peer media, it is becoming evident to many that this has in fact been the case for some time — is that they too are rated by drivers, on a similar five-point scale. This rating, too, is not without consequence. Drivers have a certain degree of discretion in choosing to accept or deny ride requests, and to judge from publicly-accessible online conversations, many simply refuse to pick up riders with scores below a certain threshold, typically in the high 3’s. ” How did that make you feel? Most of us curse our politicians for not being willin...

June 21 is the longest day of the year. Except this year, when it might be the day that just passed, June 30. That’s because atomic clocks world over added the extra “leap second” to that day : “It's a measure that's required to keep the ultra-precise devices attuned to the Earth's actual rotation.” The leap second addition in 2012 crashed the servers of several sites like Reddit, Foursquare and LinkedIn! So is this a milder version of the Y2K problem? More importantly, is the world better prepared this time around? Google is using the “leap smear” technique: split the extra second into millisecond chunks and sprinkle it through the whole day. The New York Stock Exchange just decided to shut down earlier! Software, software. It can be used to create things bordering on the ridiculous like Microsoft’s still under development tool to make you come across as a funny guy in online chats ! Or software can provide practical and useful services like Google’s additi...