Viswanathan K's Thoughts

3D printing is supposed to be so revolutionary that it will move us away from the mass production lines to customizable, one-off production. But what is 3D printing really? What can it really print? How much of it is just hype? To answer those questions, let’s first see how it works . Just as good old 2D printing requires something like a Word doc, 3D printing requires a 3D file called a Computer Aided Design (CAD) file. You can create a CAD file from scratch or you could scan an existing object using a 3D scanner and then edit the file to suit your needs or you can just get 3D files as-is from the Net for free. As you might have guessed, there are several free tools on the Net for editing such files. Ok, so you have the 3D file ready. The way it gets printed is called “additive manufacturing”. Huh? Let’s first understand the opposite of that. When Michelangelo was asked how he sculpted David, his response was: “You just chip away the stone that doesn’t look like David.” ...

Recently, my smartphone conked out. So, while the new one was ordered but not yet delivered, I went back to an old Nokia feature phone. Boy, does it feel weird! A phone only meant for calling? No apps? No Internet? However did we live like this before the iPhone was launched? I remembered Thomas Ricker’s article : “We're no longer in the age of flip phones and candy bars that shipped with dedicated start and end call buttons. Their raison d'être was voice calling.” Sure, as Scott Adams says, smartphones have rewired us to a point where we always have a cloud hanging over us , the “mental distraction of simply knowing you might have a message if only you looked”. Not just from good old SMS’s, but Facebook, Twitter, WhatsApp and Email. And yet, without the smartphone, I feel like I’ve gone “full-caveman”, as Adams put it. Of course, you could argue that Distraction is a multi-billion dollar industry: “Our largest and most important tech companies are literally in th...

Given how corrupt, incompetent and self-serving our politicians are, I’ve been a fan of judicial activism. And then the Supreme Court ruled in September, 2013 that “no person should suffer for not getting the Aadhaar card, inspite of the fact that some authority had issued a circular making it mandatory”. I had assumed that the reason for the SC ruling was that not everyone had been issued one yet; so I felt it was really a comment on the timing. But as it turns out, the SC ruling was against the whole concept of Aadhar. Because the court reiterated the 2013 ruling recently when 750 million Aadhar cards have been issued! So what are the problems exactly? Security risks, claims the lawyer who argued against it: “On the surface it (Aadhaar) is a simple document of identity, but it has linkages by means of iris scans and biometric details. God forbid if identities are exchanged or mistaken. The Executive's scheme involves private partners. Who are these private partners?”...

Governments suck at running pretty much everything. On some fronts though, we have no real choices but to let the government continue to be in charge: like the military and police. On everything else, a choice does exist: privatize things and let (hope?) the market forces improve things. But if you’re Greece, the choice to privatize is no longer an option: it becomes a necessity. Worse, that choice is imposed by foreigners. And so Greece has its Hellenic Republic Asset Development Fund (TAIPED) to sell off assets to foreigners. Something similar was done with East Germany at time of German unification; and that worked out decently enough. Another reason for such a privatization drive is that, well, Greece owes money. Lots of it. The creditors feel the Greeks haven’t been able to set things in order for years; so it’s high time another approach is tried. $50 billion worth of Greek assets are up for sale, says Nick Dearden, in his article titled “Greece is for Sale” . So wh...

For its last quarter, Microsoft wrote off its Nokia acquisition as a $7.5 billion loss. Within a year of buying it! New CEO’s are known to do such things: they take a hit to profits right after taking over since they can blame it on their predecessor! In Satya Nadella’s case, he has the added advantage that it is true: it was not his decision to buy Nokia and, even better (for Nadella, at least), he had opposed the deal when it was proposed. Horace Dediu points out that the speed at which things didn’t work out for Microsoft was just too fast to anticipate: “Most people didn’t believe that such a catastrophe could occur this fast…(Microsoft) just couldn’t imagine that a company that was once as strong and dominant as Nokia could have virtually no value.” Further, he says that with the launch of the iPhone, Apple took a heavy toll on Microsoft’s Windows/Office empire but it also wiped out other established companies like Nokia and BlackBerry: “When it happens to everyone, it...

The Internet is like the Wild Wild West. The rules of the game aren’t (can’t be?) defined upfront. Rather, we evolve them as we go along because it’s impossible to know what opportunities, situations and loopholes may come up on this frontier. There’s this site called Ashley Madison whose by-line is “Life is short. Have an affair.” The site facilitates exactly that: “Have an Affair today on Ashley Madison. Thousands of cheating wives and cheating husbands signup everyday looking for an affair…. With Our affair guarantee package we guarantee you will find the perfect affair partner.” No, this isn’t a joke. It’s for real! The site has 40 million registered users. And then the site got hacked. The hackers, who call themselves the Impact Team, demanded that the site be taken down. Or else? “We will release all customer records, including profiles with all the customers’ secret sexual fantasies and matching credit card transactions, real names and addresses, and employee do...

Until very recently, several German publishers were at war with Google News. Why? Because they said Google News had become a news hub with links to articles that were created by others who were not getting enough credit (read “money”). Jeff Jarvis was contemptuous about their stance : “(They) stomp their feet like pouty kindergartners missing a turn at kickball, whining “that’s not fair” and yelling that everything wrong on this playground is the fault of another kid, then running to hide behind the skirt of the teacher.” The reality, as per Jarvis, was that they “cannot compete in the marketplace”. In his book, Adapt , Tim Harford talks about the “fitness landscape”: “The fitness landscape is a jumble of cliffs and chasms, plateaus and jagged summits. Valleys represent bad solutions; mountain tops are good.” As if finding/creating peak wasn’t hard enough: “The peaks keep moving - sometimes slowly, sometimes quickly.” And then Harford makes a very interesting observat...

When Japanese PM, Shinzo Abe, recently said that this generation should be the last one to apologize for Japan’s World War II related atrocities, I could see why: how long could future generations keep apologizing? I went on to wonder why the Germans don't ever feel the same way. But it turns out that German and Japanese perceptions of their roles during World War II are significantly different. One very important difference was that the German defeat ended up with the removal from power of Hitler and his Nazi regime. Whereas in case of defeated Japan, the ruling Emperor Hirohito under whose command Japan had marched, was not prosecuted because General Douglas MacArthur felt that “a crushed people would be more biddable with their emperor still in place”.  That difference meant the Germans could distance themselves from Nazism (to some extent) and look at their crimes a bit more objectively than the Japanese could. Further, many Japanese have always questioned why Japan...

When NASA discovered Earth 2.0 , it was big news: “(The planet named) Kepler 452b orbits a star similar to our sun, and at about the same distances as Earth orbits the sun, meaning it has a similar length year and exists in the “habitable zone” where liquid water can exist on a planet.” We’ve now found more than 1,900 exoplanets (planets outside our solar system) and SETI has been scanning the skies for so long, but hey, where are the aliens? This contradiction (expected probability of finding life in a universe this big v/s never having found signs of alien life) is called the Fermi Paradox. There are many explanations that are given (all involving probabilities; so I won’t bore you with the details), but I found this one by Karl Schroeder interesting: “Either advanced alien civilizations don’t exist, or we can’t see them because they are indistinguishable from natural systems. I vote for the latter.” And so he says: “If the Fermi Paradox is a profound question, then...

Microsoft was a very successful one-trick pony (Windows/Office) for decades. But being a one-trick pony is exactly what every big tech company today seeks to avoid! If you thought this just meant having multiple products/brands ( a la P&G), think again. Tech companies today almost think cannibalistically! Steve Jobs, in fact, explicitly said just that: “If you don't cannibalize yourself, someone else will.” That mindset was exactly why Apple launched the iPhone even though it would cannibalize their iPods; and why they launched the iPad even though it would cannibalize their Macs. Facebook has its Little Red Book whose mantra is: “If we don't create the thing that kills Facebook, someone else will.” Amazon operates the same way, says Arjun Sethi : “Consider the Kindle: a device that became home to the world’s biggest bookstore, and lured people away from buying physical books. If Amazon didn't do it, someone else would have.” Google has always t...

The following tweet by Byron Clark went viral: “I set up my web browser to automatically change "political correctness" to "treating people with respect.” Political correctness means “treating people with respect”? Katie Mack tweeted: “If "political correctness" means that instead of speaking what's in your heart & mind you feel forced to treat me with dignity, I'll take it.” “Instead of speaking what's in your heart & mind” is called kindness. Or keeping the peace. Clark and Mack: tweet less, visit Dictionary.com a lot more! I so agree with Donald Trump who recently said, “I think the big problem this country has is being politically correct.” He was talking of the US but the statement applies to pretty much every democratic country. Especially India. I know, I know. If I say Donald Trump, you think of all the misogynist remarks he has made. Recently, after the US Presidential candidates’ debate, he had this this to say a...

Kicking someone when they are down is cruel. Mocking them in that situation is slightly better. What follows is neither, even though it is about Greece and the mess it is in. One guy started an online campaign to collect money to pay a teeny, tiny fraction of Greece’s debt! It didn’t collect much. I could have told him that: the Internet only donates to shady Nigerian scams! Greece’s GDP is $250 billion; Apple alone has $280 billion in cash . Hence the jokes about Apple buying Greece and renaming things to iAcropolis and iOlives. It could then be the company sponsored vacation spot for Apple employees, they joke: Greece would be for geeks! Greece’s stock exchanges recently reopened after being closed for 5 weeks and the banking stocks crashed because nobody has any faith in them anymore. But how little faith is best articulated by a comparison: Uber, the cab ride sharing company, alone is worth over 5 times more than all of Greece’s listed banks put together ! The l...

In the beginning of this year, triggered by the terrorist attack on Charlie Hebdo in Paris, I wrote a lot about freedom of speech. Here , here and here . I also criticized India’s stance on freedom of speech . So you can imagine how happy I am to find that the government lifted its ban on (most of) the 850 web sites that had been banned just a short while back because they were classified as porn. This site made a snide remark on the retraction : “Politicians learn the hard way that you can't get between the voters and their preferred recreational activity.” But that’s simply not true for India: it’s mostly urban folks who surf the Net in India and no politician in India cares about them and no decisions are ever made based on such people or their views. No, I am happy not because I get to watch porn but because of the reasons due to which so many Indians protested against the ban. I fully agree with the reasons cited in this Deccan Herald editorial : “Issues o...

Towards the end of last year, Apple and Google had announced that the latest versions of iOS and Android (iOS8 and Android L at that point) would be designed such that even Apple and Google themselves couldn’t decrypt the data on your device . This was done to convince the public that law enforcement agencies couldn’t snoop on your data (No, this wasn’t just a claim: it is the way the maths of encryption and decryption works). If you are wondering whether to trust a claim based on maths you don’t know or understand, well, at least you’re honest about your lack of understanding of the topic. That honesty makes you better than the Washington Post editorial board! The Washington Post editorial (WaPo for short) starts with a legitimate concern: if nobody but the device owner can decrypt the data, wouldn’t this be a boon for terrorists and criminals? They then acknowledge a valid counter-argument: “But there are legitimate and valid counter arguments…They say that a compromis...

The recent hanging of Yakub Memon for the Mumbai terrorist triggered questions from different quarters. Some questions made some degree of sense, others made none whatsoever. Why now ? Why did the otherwise snail paced judiciary agree to work midnight hours to push this execution through? Isn’t the death penalty barbaric (not just in this case), asked others? Another set threw the usual “everything is communal about India, even more so when the BJP is in power” line asking why not execute LTTE/ Khalistani/ terrorists as well? Without getting into the merits (or lack of them) of each question, isn’t it sad that the pic below is a very accurate description of how (most) Indians behave? Ironically, the same set never bring religion into the discussion when a Salman Khan is released on bail after being found guilty! Then they only blame corruption/ rich/ powerful in general…

Ever since Satya Nadella took over Microsoft, the company’s changed course. Because Nadella accepted the (obvious) reality that “mobile is replacing the PC as the dominant computing platform” , as Ben Evans put it. So Nadella ditched his predecessor’s approach of trying to use the weight/power of Windows and Office in the PC world to gain a hold of the mobile world. Instead, he started making all of Microsoft’s applications (Office etc) work on the mobile OS’s that rule the world: iOS and Android. But here’s the billion dollar question: given that most apps on the phone/tablet are free (include Office), how does Microsoft hope to make money? Nobody seems to know the answer to that… Rahul Gandhi, after the 2014 election slaughter, went to reflect/meditate/hide in Myanmar for 57 days. After he returned, he is a different politician. He wants to interact with people on issues that bother them: the land acquisition bill, construction laws that favour builders…basically, any g...