Viswanathan K's Thoughts

David Grimes came up with an equation to evaluate “how long alleged conspiracies could "survive" before being revealed - deliberately or unwittingly”. How did he come up with the model? “The mathematical methods used in this paper were broadly similar to the mathematics I have used before in my academic research on radiation physics.” The gist of it was a predictable conclusion, as one guy summarized it: “A conspiracy's success is diminished inversely proportionate to the number of its' participants and the time of execution.” As you might have expected, the Internet had a nice discussion on this! From a Slashdot forum , here are some of the better comments. One guy pointed out: “One problem with this analysis is that it doesn't take into account *successful* conspiracies...If we are using past performance to predict future trends, shouldn't those conspiracies be counted? There's no realistic way to account for or even detect them.” Since ...

We’ve done several homestays when we go on vacation ever since the kid arrived. Mostly because it gives access to a kitchen thereby giving a higher chance that the kid might eat something rather than nothing. But I always wondered why anyone would rent a room/home to a complete stranger without having met them? Airbnb, a software company (and site and app) answers my question, at least for the West. It puts together people who want to rent a room (or house) with someone seeking said room (or house) for a short while. Like when you visit a new place or go on a short work trip. That’s somewhat similar to Uber putting riders and drivers in touch. It’s supposed to be a win-win: the sublessor makes some money; the sublessee gets a home like environment or cheaper than hotel stay. As you might expect, hotels aren’t exactly thrilled with Airbnb. Others complain that people prefer putting their houses on Airbnb rather than renting them out the old fashioned way since short term rents...

Almost every democracy is “representative”. Let Glyn Moody describe it : “Yes, elections take place, but after that, politicians just seem to do what they want, with little concern for what the public really thinks about the laws that they push through.” Except if you are a Swiss citizen. There it’s easy to call for a popular vote: “If 50,000 signatures are collected from Swiss voters or eight cantons [Swiss states] demand a referendum within 100 days, then a popular vote is held.” Keeping Switzerland’s size and population in mind, 50,000 is not as trivially small a number as it might be in other countries; but nor is it an impossibly big number to get either. If you think India needs such a system, join the queue: Germany needs it before us! Why? Because Chancellor Angela Merkel, an otherwise cautious politician who knew the pulse of the voters, has changed. As George Soros said : “In the case of the (Syrian) migration issue, she did act on principle.” Now keep in Ge...

Immortality. Who wants that? And yet that’s exactly what all the demons of mythology asked for when granted a wish by the gods. Funnily though, the gods never granted them the wish. But whyever not? Why not let them grow older and older, weaker and weaker, but never let them die? Then the gods could have turned around and mocked them: “Be careful what you wish for…it might come true.” The opening lines of Bryan Adams’ hit song, 18 Till I Die , say what most people really want: “Wanna be young - the rest of my life.” Who wouldn’t that, right? To be young until they die? Monica Lewinsky, for one, wouldn’t (In case you’re wondering, she was the White House intern who nearly took down Bill Clinton’s presidency). In her TED talk on public shaming , she talked about this time when, as a 41 year old, she was hit upon by a 27 year old guy: “He was charming and I was flattered, and I declined. You know what his unsuccessful pickup line was? He could make me feel ...

In 1943, Abraham Maslow proposed a hierarchy of what motivates humans . Though Maslow himself never represented it as a pyramid, that’s how it is most famous today: physiological needs at the bottom (food, water etc); safety next; love and belonging after that; esteem (self-worth) and finally self-actualization (the chance to fulfil one’s potential). In the age of the smartphone, the joke is that the Maslow pyramid needs to be updated to include, what else, WiFi! And if WiFi is here, can the battery or charger be far behind? Thus, we have the updated pyramid: The new additions to the Maslow pyramid incidentally also impact how much time one can spend in the toilet, as this pic demonstrates: You could almost say that today’s poison of choice for all, alcoholics and teetotalers alike, is WiFi. Or as Alex Balk puts it in his usual caustic style: “We cannot get enough of the poison that is killing us every day.”

In an earlier blog , I talked about some techniques on how not to be drawn in by the siren call of the Internet when on vacation. It must be even tougher for journalists where even regular surfing can cause you to stumble onto something related to work! So Melody Kramer, a journalist, asked her colleagues how they handled that temptation (expectation?) during their vacations. One guy tried reading by not responding to stuff. How did that work out? “This has, in practice, turned out to be the worst of both worlds. I’m still glued to my phone and my mind is clearly occupied by things other than the people around me, perhaps even more so than if I just took the time to respond, because I’m seething about what I’m going to do or say when I get back.” Can you even separate work from non-work sources anymore, asked another: “Having work email on my phone, as well as work social accounts, has blurred the lines considerably.” Others try slowing down the inevitable succumbin...

When actor Alan Rickman died, there was a lot of praise for the outstanding villainous role he had played: Hans Gruber in the first Die Hard movie. And that reminded me of the other box office villains who have developed a cult following. Even moralistic India has its fascination with Gabbar Singh and Mogambo! But the best onscreen villains aren’t the ones who are just powerful or cruel or sadistic (sorry, Darth Vader). Rather, they are the guys who have the best dialogues (and dialogue delivery). Remember the awesome monologue by the smooth talking Jew hunter, Colonel Landa in Inglorious Bastards ? Or the panache of John Travolta in Broken Arrow and Face Off ? We love to understand the plot of the evil one. The villain Joker tosses that out when he tells Batman: “Do I really look like a guy with a plan? You know what I am? I’m a dog chasing cars. I wouldn’t know what to do with one if I caught it. You know, I just… do things.” Other villains rarely do or say...

A few years back, author Ann Patchett complained that “this technology thing, the ever-encroaching creep of communications” was making it hard to write fiction: “I just don’t know how to write a novel in which the characters can get in touch with all the other characters at any moment…I don’t know how to write a novel in the world of Google, in which all factual information is available to all characters.” Turns out many authors share Patchett’s “problem”. Steve Himmer says many solve this problem by using “settings close to the present, but far enough back to avoid such inconvenience”. Author Jared Yates Sexton calls this setting the “nostalgic present”. Himmer himself doesn’t approve of this technique. Instead, he recommends embracing the new world so that the disrupter of art becomes part of the art. After all, he says: “The more we expect to always have a signal, the harder it is to conceive a convincing situation in which a character does not.” He recomm...

Merriam Webster defines “nerd” as: : a person who behaves awkwardly around other people and usually has unstylish clothes, hair, etc. : a person who is very interested in technical subjects, computers, etc. Often, the nerd meets both definitions. You’d assume that in Western cultures, where arranged marriages are almost unheard of, nerds would stand no chance at “getting the girl”. And you’d be right, most of the time. 3 famous physicists, however, were the exceptions: Wolfgang Pauli, Erwin Schrodinger and Richard Feynman didn’t just find a girl: they were successful womanizers! (Well, Feynman did both: first, he got the girl and then, after she died, became a womanizer). Today, as software takes over the world, nerds are actually considered cool! So much so that on Facebook, a grandmother told her granddaughters to “date the nerd at school” because he might turn out to be the next Mark Zuckerburg. Zuckerburg decided to reply to her post: “Even better would be to enc...

Particle accelerators (like the famous Large Hadron Collider that found the even more famous Higgs particle a couple of years back) are ridiculously expensive. The Large Hadron Collider cost a jaw-dropping $9 billion (no, that’s not a typo)! How does anyone justify spending such huge amounts to learn more and more about even more obscure topics of physics that (let’s face it) most people neither understand nor care about? After all, what are the odds of ever discovering a new principle due to these detectors that would have any commercial application that would recover the money spent? Kate Scholberg, a scientist, has a partial answer. Talking of detectors built to check out particles emitted by a supernova (that’s when a star blows up, literally): “Your detector has to have a day job while it awaits a supernova.” In other words, do something besides what it was built for. Far removed from aims like understanding the universe, we have detectors to check far more earthly c...

Is Donald Trump a temporary aberration of the (apparent) voting preference of America? Or is he a sign of a more fundamental change, the rise of a “solidly right-wing ethno-nationalist voting bloc”, asks Danielle Allen . Now because America has a two-party system, such a shift is perceived as sweeping the country, argues Allen. But what if it were more a case of a good number but nowhere near 50% of the country that feels the “Trumpist” way? After all, says Allen, both France and UK have such anti-immigrant, nationalist parties that get a decent but nowhere near a majority vote share. In any country which didn’t have a two-party system, would Trump have been told to get out of the Republican Party and go form a new party, wonders Allen. Trump aside, Allen points to the fact that the non-whites in the US are increasing to a point whereby within a generation, they may be the new majority. At that point, would the US end up with more parties, simply because the goals of a divers...

Most of us know the impact our smartphones and tablets have on our vacations: checking mails (personal and office) is the most obvious one. You start reading a book on your iPad and ooh, there are messages on Facebook, Twitter and WhatsApp. The beauty of the place demands a selfie be taken and posted; and then the narcissistic you wants to keep checking the number of “likes” your photo got. This problem is so bad that we now need tips on how to live like we used to before we became “dead-eyed, slack-jawed phone zombies who only manage to feed ourselves because an app reminds us to”, says Alex Balk. Nick Bilton points out that the obvious solution (not taking our gadgets with us on vacations) is not really an option because: “That ignores the fact that our devices have replaced some vacation essentials, including physical books, magazines, music player, cameras, maps and in-flight entertainment.” Of course, after a tremendous exercise of will power, you can choose to ca...

A while back, I had written a blog explaining what 3D printing is . That blog focused on how 3D printing works; and what it can (and cannot) be used to print. What the blog did not do was to go into the potential impact of such a technology. I had assumed that it was just going to be a way to allow individuals to print one-off products and niche objects. But what if 3D printing is going to be far more transformative than that, wonders Clive Thompson . What if it increases how well we understand things simply because we can put a 3D model in front of us that helps us visualize, and thereby understand? In other words, would 3D printing help the way 3D models help architects? “When the visualization is physical, it has a haptic impact that screens do not. You learn new things. That’s why architects build scale models of their buildings: Only by peering around a structure do you “get” what’s going on. “You see these spatial relations and depth of field that aren’t possible onscreen...

A few months back, RBI governor Raghuram Rajan, made very accurate points about “jugaad” (make-do solutions) that many Indians are so very proud of: “Jugaad or “working around” difficulties by hook or by crook is a thoroughly Indian way of coping but it is predicated on a difficult or impossible business environment. And it encourages an attitude of short-cuts and evasions, none of which help final product quality or sustainable economic growth.” Therefore, he said: “We have to have the discipline to stick to our strategy of building the necessary institutions and creating a new path of sustainable growth where jugaad is no longer needed.” I couldn’t agree more with Rajan. The other end of the spectrum consists of start-ups. And boy, has start-up culture picked up in the country. Today, India is 4 th largest on the start-ups list, after the US, UK and China. Remember the term “Unicorn” from an earliest post ? It refers to software companies founded after 2003 that are v...