Viswanathan K's Thoughts

I remember how struck I was the first time I read these lines in Will Durant’s book, The Story of Philosophy : “All our knowledge of anything is merely our sensations of it, and the ideas derived from these sensations. A "thing" is merely a bundle of perceptions i.e., classified and interpreted sensations.” How different the same flower appears to a bee and us humans gets driven home by pics like these (Left = human vision; Right = bee vision): Ok, you say, but that’s two different species we are talking about. Then let’s take this pic which  different humans  see differently: Some see a young woman with flowing hair and a nice dress; others see an old woman with a wart on her large nose! Ashvin B. Chhabra makes an interesting observation about this pic in his book,  The Aspirational Investor : “What is interesting about this illusion is that our brains instantly decide what image we are looking at, based on our first glance. If your initial glance ...

In his awesome book, Sapiens , Yuval Noah Harari says that the “historical record makes Homo Sapiens look like an ecological serial killer”. He says that while the speed at which we drive species to extinction has gone to warp speed in recent centuries and decades, we even managed to wipe out species with just Stone Age technologies at our disposal! He says it would be a remarkable coincidence if the timing of extinction events in Siberia, the Americas and Australia just happened to overlap with humans landing in those areas. The usual other suspect in such extinction events, climate change, is probably not the culprit in those cases because it was always life on land that suffered when man landed, never life in the seas (an area in which our capabilities have built only in recent centuries). Ian Fleming one wrote: “Once is happenstance. Twice is coincidence. Three times is enemy action.” Like it or not, humans have been the enemy for other life forms, long before modern techn...

As kids, I remember how we waited for the Sunday morning cartoon and the Sunday evening movie: it was the only time of the week when either category of item came! If you missed it, it was gone forever. With the advent of cable TV, those issues went away and we got used to the age of 24x7 shows of all categories and of course, repeat’s and re-runs. If you missed it, you could always watch the repeat later. Then came the Internet; and one could find many TV shows on YouTube. With that ended the tyranny of the TV schedule: you could watch a show when you wanted to. And with the smartphone, you could watch it where you want it. My 4 year old discovered the “when” side of things recently when she found episodes of Mister Maker on YouTube even after the show had stopped coming on TV. Sooner or later, she’ll be asking for some other TV serial and we’ll tell her not everything is available on YouTube. I wonder how long it will be before she learns about streaming video content ...

Shiv Visvanathan wrote this article saying that the killing of the writer, MM Kalburgi, and the lynching in Dadri strike at the “very idea of India”. He describes Nayantara Sahgal’s returns of her Sahitya Akademi award thus: “The idea of India is threatened when an innocent man can be lynched with impunity merely on the suspicion of cooking beef. ” Really? Is India so fragile an idea? He means that the “idea of India” could withstand the assaults of the Ghazni’s and the Aurungzeb’s, the savagery of Partition, the countless riots since Independence and the butchering of 3,000 Sikhs in 1984 but not the lynching of one man today? Really? Next, says Visvanathan: “The India of ideas is threatened when writers lose the right to creativity. ” I don’t remember such outpouring when Salman Rushdie’s Satanic Verses was banned. He goes on to say: “One sees a fascism that uses food, sexuality and books as targets of a philistine government. ” Fascism? What does he have...

Until recently, social media sites sometimes drove traffic to news sites (via links posted by their users). But now social media sites are displaying news content within their own apps. This changes the dynamics totally. Is news media becoming like wire services, wonders Ezra Klein : “Reporters will write their articles, and their content management system will smoothly hand them to Facebook, Snapchat, or Apple News…The publishers of tomorrow will become like the wire services of today, pushing their content across a large number of platforms they don’t control and didn’t design.” This transformation is just a reflection of the ground reality: “Twitter and Instagram and Vine and Snapchat and especially Facebook are larger concentrations of people than virtually any conceivable publication, and these people are clicking, tapping, scrolling and sharing more vigorously than people ever did on websites.” John Herrman points out that news companies that can “work out adve...

Some time back, I had described Uber’s working (It’s a cab ride sharing company). In Silicon Valley, change is the only constant. And so, recently, Uber announced that if you were willing to walk a bit to the nearest Smart Routes location (shown on your Uber app, of course), they’d give a $1 discount on the fare. A bit before that, they’d announced that they would suggest nearby points from where your pickup would happen earlier than wherever you were currently located. A few months before that, Uber mentioned something they called “Perpetual Trip”  that would “allow drivers to pick up and drop off passengers continuously along the way”. Join all these dots together, says Matt Buchanan, and a pattern begins to emerge : “If you put all of these Uber innovations together—pre-determined routes with fixed pickup points and continuous passenger pickups—it sounds remarkably like a gently optimized version of currently existing mass transit.” Ha ha! The wheel has com...

Sanskrit is a language with very precise rules on grammar and syntax. If it had become the lingua franca of the world, the whole topic of “natural language processing” in the field of computer science would have been trivially easy! You can almost see the tech companies drooling about that imaginary world…just imagine the opportunities for a Facebook or a Google to see why. Of course, making all humans worldwide learn Sanskrit is not an option. So Nick Carr wonders : “The best solution, if you have a need to get computers to “understand” human communication, may to be avoid the problem altogether. Instead of figuring out how to get computers to understand natural language, you get people to speak artificial language, the language of computers.” What rubbish, you say. All of mankind will learn to speak in 1’s and 0’s? C’mon. Except it’s already happening! Do you know the “fastest growing form of language in history, based on its incredible adoption rate and speed of evolu...

Volkswagen’s “diesel dupe” scandal has been in the news for some time now. 11 million cars worldwide have a “defeat device” that could detect when the car was being tested and then change its performance to improve results. The difference? “The engines emitted nitrogen oxide pollutants up to 40 times above what is allowed in the US.” The CEO has resigned; and the company has set aside $7.3 billion to deal with the problem. Marcelo Rinesi wrote this very interesting article wondering whether the cheating technique used by VW (write intelligent software to behave differently under different conditions) is the ticking time bomb that awaits us in the brave new world of the Internet of Things (In case you are wondering, the Internet of Things refers to the network of objects with sensors and software that can collect and exchange data. So yes, basically that covers almost everything in the future). Rinesi points out the fundamental difference between objects and the new soft...

I am told that great literature is something that can be interpreted differently at different times, often by the same person. Does that mean great literature has to be ambiguous? Or does it mean that the characters are complex enough to make it possible for the reader to ponder what William Empson describes in his book, Seven Types of Ambiguity : “People, often, cannot have done both of two things, but they must have been in some way prepared to have done either; whichever they did, they will have still lingering in their minds the way they would have preserved their self-respect if they had acted differently; they are only to be understood by bearing both possibilities in mind.” Tim Parks wonders if this complexity is a good thing because it makes us think: “Ambiguity, uncertainty, multiplicity are positive in literature in so far as they act as a corrective against a dominant and potentially harmful manipulative hubris.” Keats called this “negative capability”: “When ...

The other day, we bought a toy camera for my daughter. What she did with it and the things she said took me down memory lane. Within a short time, she was talking selfies with it! I was contrasting that with how much effort and planning it took my dad to get into the family pic he was taking: he’d put the camera on a tripod; add a timer device to the camera; and then rush to be in the pic before the timer expired. It took her a while to understand that there is such a thing as a standalone camera. Isn’t a camera always a part of a phone, she wondered? We had to show her my old, analog camera to convince her that such things actually exist! It made me realize that separating a camera from a phone must have seemed like the splitting of the atom to her! As this pic below shows, the smartphone is the atom for today’s generation. While showing her that analog camera, I was telling her this is how cameras used to be in the old days. How old, she asked? Was this used when the ...

All companies want to hire the best talent. But how does a company even know if you are looking for a job? What, if like most, you didn’t even apply to a particular company because you felt you weren’t good enough? Even worse, for both you and that company, what if you were wrong in assuming you weren’t good enough? Max Rosett described Google’s solution to this problem. He stumbled upon it as he was learning computer science via an online program and still lacking the confidence to apply for a full-time software job: “One morning, while working on a project, I Googled “python lambda function list comprehension.” The familiar blue links appeared, and I started to look for the most relevant one. But then something unusual happened. The search results split and folded back to reveal a box that said “You’re speaking our language. Up for a challenge?” Rosett took the challenge and went on to get the job. Google had identified and hired someone based on his queries! John ...