Viswanathan K's Thoughts

Voltaire is well known as one of France’s greatest writers and thinkers during the Enlightenment period. But did you know the following aspect of his life? Long before he became famous, Voltaire met a brilliant mathematician, Charles Marie de la Condamine, who suggested a scheme to get insanely rich by exploiting an opportunity that the French government had inadvertently created. What was that opportunity? Well, the French government of the day could offer only low rates of interest on bonds they wanted to sell. This, of course, made the bonds unattractive. So the Deputy Finance Minister came up with an idea to make the bonds more attractive: -           Anyone who bought a bond would be eligible to buy a lottery ticket linked to the price of the bond (1/1000 of the bond value). -           The winner of the lottery would get the value of his bond plus 500,000 livres . This was a hug...

The company so many people love to hate, Facebook, is synonymous with the Internet in some parts of the world! “Indonesians surveyed by Galpaya told her that they didn’t use the internet. But in focus groups, they would talk enthusiastically about how much time they spent on Facebook…“It seemed that in their minds, the Internet did not exist; only Facebook,” he concluded.” Ben Thompson states what the Facebook haters don’t like to admit: “The reality is the company is part of the fabric of the Internet: you may not like email, but you have an email address, and you could say a similar thing about Facebook. If anything the fact some don’t like the product yet use it anyway is a testament to just how strong it is.” Thompson then points to the usual counter-point that detractors make: “Sure, Facebook looks unstoppable today, but then again, Google looked unstoppable ten years ago when social seemingly came out of nowhere: surely the Facebook killer is imminent!” Sure, ...

Monopolies are evil. Or at least that’s the common belief. The obvious fear with monopolies is that a company with monopoly status can raise prices and we’d have no alternatives but to cough up. Another less commonly known reason (until you hear it) is that a monopoly kills competition and thus kills innovation, something that is bad in the long run. And monopolies inevitably use their monopoly status in one segment to promote their products in another segment. Remember how Microsoft used its Windows OS monopoly status to force Internet Explorer down our throats a little over a decade back? As with everything else, monopolies get complicated in the age of the Internet. Google argues that while it is a monopoly in search, people can switch to competitors like Yahoo or Bing in a jiffy (if they want to). And if users can switch so easily, what is the danger of Google’s monopoly status, they ask? Then there’s the flipped version of monopoly: monopsony (“a dominant buyer with the...

My 4 year old is now being taught to read at school. Soon enough, the tyranny of spelling will follow. English is so crazy in its spellings: When does one use a “c” instead of a “k”? Indian languages are so much more logical in their spellings (sigh)… But should spellings even matter? Om Malik pointed out that we skim rather than read anyway. Its title was deliberately mis-spelled: “Olny srmat poelpe can raed this”. And yet, you could read it without effort, couldn’t you? Ok, even if you couldn’t, it’s probably because you weren’t prepared for it. Let’s try reading a longer sample where practically every single word is misspelled: If you’re even reasonably comfortable at English, that passage would have been a breeze. Wait a minute: would it have been possible to read it if the letters in the middle were completely different from the letters in the correct spelling? Obviously not. So does that mean we still need to learn the spelling, if not exact, at least close e...

It’s easy to see the connection between money and obesity. You get richer; you drive to work and everywhere else; you gore yourself on tasty but unhealthy food and voila! You’re obese! Actually, you don’t even need to be rich to get obese. Even getting to middle class will do the trick. Ironically, today you need to be better off to be able to fight obesity! As Matt Ridley points out : “The ultra-rich have already solved it. Most of them are very thin these days, quite unlike in ancient times. That's because they can afford the solutions that work for them, from low-carb diets to personal trainers.” When he read that, Eugene Wei mused over how times have changed : “In places of food scarcity, obesity can be a sign of wealth. However, in the U.S. today, it's the reverse: the wealthy can afford to hack the diet and lifestyle issues that lead to obesity in poorer socioeconomic groups.” So yes, money is a necessary (but not sufficient) condition for obesity. Some...

It is the biggest news in physics science since the discovery of the Higgs Boson a couple of years back: the confirmation of the existence of gravitational waves. What the hell is that? And why is it a big deal? This blog is based entirely on Nicolo Twilley’s awesome article on the topic. So here we go… So what are gravitational waves? An analogy will help: “When two black holes orbit each other, they stretch and squeeze space-time like children running in circles on a trampoline, creating vibrations that travel to the very edge; these vibrations are gravitational waves.” Actually, any two objects can (and do?) generate these waves; but unless the objects are as massive as black holes, those waves are too tiny to detect. To understand how tiny these waves are, just look at how much energy had to be generated for the waves to be (finally) detectable: “In the fraction of a second that it took for the black holes to finally merge, they radiated a hundred times more energ...

In August, 2013, R Kay Green described the “real self” and “ideal self” : “Your "real self" is what you are - your attributes, your characteristics, and your personality. Your "ideal self" is what you feel you should be; much of it due to societal and environmental influences. ” It used to be that we aspired to be our “ideal self”. Some of us even put effort to make that transformation. Those were simpler times. With the advent of social media, we found an easy way to project ourselves as being our ideal selves: “As the use of social media continues to evolve; the concept of presenting our ideal selves versus our real selves has become more and more prevalent on social media platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Google+, Pinterest, and even LinkedIn.” Joseph Goebbels once said: “If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it.” And so it is. Today, many assume our “ideal selves” as projecte...

How many people would it take to connect any two people on the planet? Via a friend of a friend…of a friend chain? In 1929, the answer was called out to be “ six degrees of separation ”. Recently they tested that via (what else?) Facebook! Laugh all you like, but Facebook’s sample size is 1.59 billion users which I am pretty sure is way bigger than whatever sample size they used in 1929. The answer ? In 2011, Facebook analysis yielded an average of 3.74. Today, when even more people are on Facebook, the answer has shrunk to 3.57. This isn’t the first time Facebook has been used to analyze social theories. The dataset that Facebook has is unparalleled for such analysis. On the other hand, that raises privacy concerns…. Talking of tech companies, they sure do weird things. Often out of paranoia. Like when Google got into mobile long before the iPhone based on their fear of Microsoft dominating mobile and locking Google out. Today, with the dominance of Android and iOS, that see...

In 1884, Edwin Abbot wrote a book called Flatland about a 2D world whose inhabitants are geometric figures. Like squares and circles. One day, the square is visited by someone from the 3D world called Spaceland, a sphere. The sphere tries to explain the concept of a third dimension to the 2D square. And fails. In desperation, the sphere yanks the square out of Flatland and into the third dimension. The square is totally confused by what he now sees and says: “Either this is madness or it is Hell.” Eventually though, he comes around and tries to preach the “Gospel of Three Dimensions” to his fellow Flatlanders. But in vain. Plato’s Cave is a famous allegory on the same topic: the cave’s inhabitants are chained inside a cave such that they can only see shadows cast by the world outside the cave. So they interpret the outside world as being a certain way. When one of them makes his out of the cave, he behaves like the square of Flatland: confused and wanting to go back initiall...

In school, I hated biology. And yet, years later, I absolutely loved The Selfish Gene , Richard Dawkins’ masterpiece. I realized the ultimate proof of how well someone explains things is if, after hearing the explanation, you come away feeling, “How could I have missed that? It’s so obvious!” What I hadn’t realized was that Dawkins’ book wasn’t just appreciated by laymen like me. As Matt Ridley put it : “Books that achieve both — changing science and reaching the public — are rare. Charles Darwin's  On the Origin of Species  (1859) was one.  The Selfish Gene  by Richard Dawkins is another.” And here I had thought that most of the book was just explaining the theories that had already been accepted! But no, points out Ridley. In the third chapter, Dawkins mentioned the then unexplained “problem” of excess DNA: most species had way too much DNA then they needed. Dawkins’ hypothesis for that? “From the point of view of the selfish genes themselves there i...